This article intrigued me. In the psycoology department where I study, the prevailing theoretical position is that humans are, by nature, essentially social creatures. Now, this is somewhat different from the claims made in the article. There, the emphasis was on collaboration as a more effective mode of work. The theoretical claims about humans essentially social nature instead argue that the higher thought processes characteristic of human beings are social, or communicative in nature. This view is derived primaril from Vygotskian theory which holds that thought is an inverted version of language. Children first learn to communicate with others, and then they turn these communicative skills inwardly on themselves, engaging with themselves as a subject. Vygotsky also claims that thought processes that occur within individuals are not essentially different from interpersonal communication (e.g., having a conversation).
Much of this can be related harmoniously to the (claimed) prevailing zeitgeist that stresses collaborative, social activity as the site of the most productive work. As revealed in the Times article, businesses are setting up their offices to maximize collaboration. This involves knocking down walls and creating areas for joint activity.
What the article (as well as its claimed zeitgeist) as well as Vygotskian social psychology are missing is the distinction between different types of social/collaborative activity. The result of people working together is not a single type of human activity, but can instead be broken down into two broad categories. The first is simple interpersonal dialogue, i.e., formal or informal interactions with others in which thought processes occur between two people. This is surely what Vygotsky had in mind when he talked about interpersonal psychological processes, and it seems to be what many businesses are trying to foster by redesigning their workspaces. Vygotsky is very accurate in claiming that this type of interaction is very similar to individual thought processes. When we bounce ideas off of others and get their reactions, we are doing much the same thing we do when we consider ideas alone in solitude. In both cases, there is a dialogical structure.
This type of social interaction is not the only result of collaborative activity. There is another way in which humans collaborate which, while considered in many fields (particularly sociology), is often grouped in or ignored in the individual-group debate. This second form of interaction is that which occurs when groups of collaborating individuals work together to form a group that is an agent with properties not found in its individual members. Individual people carry out the actions that comprise the activity of the grounp, but a logic emerges from the whole with a purpose that is not necessarily held by any individual member. These "higher purposes" should be distinguished from the unintentional side effects of action which are a feature of any type of action (In doing things for a purpose, there are bound to be side effects that we did not anticipate and which may or may not conform to our motives in performing the action in the first place).
The emergent actions that I'm talking about don't represent the goals of any individual members of a collaborative group. They are the product of the combined actions of the members. Furthermore, the group may be structured in such a way as to ensure the continued carrying out of the component actions which comprise the whole, meaning that the whole becomes something of an adaptive, "living" system. This type of activity is beautifully illustrated by the bank in The Grapes of Wrath, which Steinbeck describes as a monster that eats money:
“Sure, cried the tenant men, but it's our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it's no good, it's still ours. That's what makes it ours—being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.
We're sorry. It's not us. It's the monster. The bank isn't like a man.
Yes, but the bank is only made of men.
No, you're wrong there—quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.”
The bank in this instance is in many ways the outcome of collaboration, but it is so qualitatively different from other forms of interpersonal activity that it makes no sense to group it in with them. Collaboration between two people does not necessarily result in a level of organization that has demands and interests that are separate from the individual people. With an organization such as a corporation, we begin to see such a level of organization.
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