Work within a School

Origin in the Use of Language Framework

Work is required to affect reality, and its nature arises from the use of language to portray reality. The seven distinctive levels of work are summarized in the diagram below.

The «use of language» framework was discovered through a prior formulation of work in organisations-Q2. This framework was an essential tool when it came to clarifying the levels of work in societal institutions-Q4. In the case of schools-Q5, the nature of the work was less obscure. Readers can draw their own conclusions on the alignment from the explanations below.

Remember: the school does not create the doctrine...creative thinkers do as individuals. So when considering a school, the existence of a doctrine at its core is given.

L1: Realization Work

5α: Articulating and asserting specific awareness and beliefs—so as to identify the doctrine and ground the school.

The founder and the others who follow and imitate the founder must develop certain realizations that are a theory of some aspect of the world expressed as the fundamentals of the doctrine. Anyone who claims to be part of the school must be able to generate accounts, oral or written, in a credible persuasive way. The account usually includes ideas that explain or structure the illumination.

So realization of fundamentalsat this Level enables the foundation of a school. The "beliefs" are perceived as "truths" and expected to guide relevant advice and choices in personal and social life. Every self-identified adherent must be ready, willing and able:

a)  to affirm, articulate and reflect on the fundamental precepts
and
b) to accept their practical implications for everyday life.

Experiencing the truth of doctrinal fundamentals is a personal responsibility and a determinant of personal identity, as well as being the basis for claiming membership of a school.
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While there may be no control on the provision and dissemination of accounts, there are social boundaries. An account may be judged by fellow adherents as deviating in some crucial way from the accepted orthodoxy. Not only will the heretical account be rejected, but the person themselves will be rejected. In religions, this is apostasy and leads to excommunication. In ideologies, it is deviance and leads to defection or exclusion.

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The founder writes and publishes the doctrine as a discovery or new theory. As time passes, this doctrine may be enlarged or re-articulated by the founder. Others who have become part of the school may be encouraged or feel the urge to provide their own accounts of the doctrine, possibly as applied to special cases or in relation to topics not previously covered, and simple elaboration or extension is possible. Errors and minor confusions may be identified and corrected without harm to the orthodoxy.

Adherents' accounts of doctrinal fundamentals may drift into universal language and become phrased with metaphors, analogies, newly invented concepts or neologisms. However, if such accounts are allowed to proliferate with ideas used differently, disagreements will increase and may become unmanageable. So, while repeated presentation of the original doctrine never ends, any and every publication is checked for conformity to the founder's doctrine or, especially after his/her passing, to emergent guardians of the orthodoxy.

L2: Mentoring Work

5β: Accumulating and organising awareness and beliefs and appreciating their impact in use—so as to induct others into the doctrine and enable a school to flourish

The work here involves explaining the doctrine to a willing person seeking to establish their own grasp of the fundamentals. This work of "mentoring" by a mentor might be referred to with alternative Closedterms, like:

In all cases, work requires discussion and explanation in relation to example cases or situations brought either by the mentor or by the initiate (or student, trainee, &c). The work calls for appraisal, adaptation and diagnosis. To handle any situation or case effectively, details alone are insufficient, the teacher must ascertain its context and rationale, and also the personality and motivations of the student. That enables discussions to be meaningful, and relevant doctrinal explanations to be psychologically convincing.

The student’s illumination and ultimate adherence cannot be forced. Mentoring work is often done in groups so students can observe each other's difficulties and successes in grappling with new, strange and powerful ideas. The mentor’s task is to win over each student. However, students have asked for assistance based on interest or curiosity, so they are strongly disposed to be persuaded—unless they attended with a perverse determination to reject the ideas.

Successful entry to the school may have economic or status implications e.g. via work or qualifications. In such cases, the mentor has considerable power: not just the power of knowledge and experience, but also the power to recommend the student as a worthy initiate and a trusted user of the doctrine in the performance of remunerated work.

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L3: Dissemination Work

5γ: Developing a coherent system of beliefs—so as to teach the doctrine and gain more adherents to the school.

The work here involves communicating the doctrines as currently given and widely understood by adherents to larger groups in wider society. Teaching may be organised via pamphleteering, public lectures, internet videos or blogs or other means. Such promotional communications may well be ignored, doubted or mocked by authorities and the general public, but they should be unexceptional within the adherent body.

Dissemination is often a matter for small groups—cells, fellowships, missions or committees—that take it upon themselves or are set up specifically for this purpose.

The most effective communications explain actual or imagined concrete examples that audiences can easily identify with and comprehend. Abstractions and jargon must be kept to a minimum, but simplification is avoided insofar as it is likely to weaken or even violate fundamental conceptions.

The goal of dissemination is to introduce an otherwise alien and seemingly esoteric doctrine to interested persons in wider society. The optimum result is to generate appreciation and interest in the benefits with the aim of attracting new adherents and growing the school. Dissemination may be associated with valuable services like education, health care, welfare.

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L4: Membership Work

5δ: Relating and managing multiple belief systems—so as to institute a social body and organise diverse adherents to develop and protect the doctrine

At a certain point, the number of committed adherents is so large that there is a desire and need to form a social body: a membership association. The core rationale for the creation of such an association is to protect and sustain the doctrine. However, it must also function like any other membership association, which is to say, it is expected to promote the interests of members, and to enhance their status in society.

Institutionalization is complicated and generates a variety of work roles. The most prominent roles are the President, Secretary and Treasurer who oversee and shape all other membership work. The mission is to provide members with services and benefits directly or indirectly related to the doctrine and its promotion. This would typically include managing the finances, establishing a website, newsletter and periodical, creating a library, providing for education of new initiates, winning public support, and gaining official backing.

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Membership work is collegial and commonly unpaid except in the largest and wealthiest entities. Members usually fund the association by subscriptions, donations, and bequests. However, their main contribution is to provide time and effort for essential executive roles and committee work.

For more details, see Ch. 11 of Working with Values.

Because there are so many practical and political issues surrounding membership work, the executive is not necessarily composed of those with the most doctrinal expertise. Commonly power issues come into play, particularly when the doctrine has a role in wider society, there are financial implications, and members can or might wield social influence.

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L5: Guardianship Work

6α: Articulating and asserting names and their unequivocal correspondence with reality—so as to control the doctrine and prevent deviations by adherents.

The doctrine, being a valuable and enduring formulation of some aspect of the human world, requires efforts to protect and perpetuate it in a pure form.

Any idea can get subtly altered and re-interpreted as the surrounding culture evolves and language changes. To deal with this, the doctrine must be regularly asserted and re-asserted in a formal and precise fashion. This is the orthodoxy: from Greek orthos = right, true; and doxa = opinion—and it requires individuals with the influence and capability to act as its guardian.

Orthodox purity demands a careful focus on doctrinal formulations. Certain leaders may be formally entrusted by adherents to be guardians of the orthodoxy and rule on doctrinal orthodoxy. However, there are also charismatic leaders viewed as «masters», who develop informal followings and often shape consensus around aspects of the doctrine. Wherever necessary, adherents turn to these guardians to provide clarification using rational argument and logical language (L’6).

Examples: Closed

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Guardians strive to discriminate ideas carefully, remove errors and clarify misunderstandings. Essential elements with evocative names produce the doctrine's jargon. As argued forcefully in the Hub, the benefit of formal names is that they can be used in a consistent and coherent fashion to sharpen formulations.

So, at this level, the school supports the efforts of those willing and deemed capable to generate glossaries, dictionaries and similar summaries relevant to the doctrine. Various doctrinal extensions and clarifications produced as part of L1-work may be synthesized by guardians into new complete accounts taken to be authoritative.

L6: Revision Work

6β: Accumulating and organising names and appreciating their impact in use—so as to be able to fix, update and extend the doctrine.

At this level, for the first time, the doctrine must be critically understood and expanded in a significant way. This work of revision demands dedicated scholarship. It is called for because the original doctrine typically has errors or confusions that need clarification. Also as societies and cultures evolve, old explanations become less relevant and new challenges arise. Finally, there is commonly a desire to extend the doctrine to encompass additional conditions or situations.

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Psychoanalytic doctrine contained confusions in regard to Freud's formulations of key concepts like narcissism and repression, revisions of which were the bases of my own publications. The initial patients were hysterics, however, over time, patients mainly presented with personality disorders, and some like narcissistic disorder and borderline disorder led to theoretical developments. Finally, extensions were developed to treat children and psychotic patients.

Jaquesian doctrine was developed to improve management of work in organisations designed to produce tangible goods and services. However, extensions of those principles are required to cover management in social product businesses and intellectual product businesses.

Note that where a major alteration occurs at L1, a schism is likely and a new school may form. Where the alteration occurs at L6, a variant occurs and variants can co-exist more easily.

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Protestantism represented a schism with Roman Catholicism. Whereas the versions that subsequently emerged like the Baptist, Methodist, Anglican, Episcopalian and Presbyterian Churches are all variants of Protestantism.

Psychoanalysis. Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Otto Rank and Wilhelm Reich pursued ideas that led to schisms in Freudian psychoanalysis. However, there are now variants named after Freudian psychoanalysts who made particular discoveries and developed extensions to the orthodox doctrine without rejecting it: Kleinian (Melanie Klein focused on very early object-relations), Winnicottian (Donald Winnicott focused on the self and environmental facilitation), Lacanian (Jaques Lacan focused on language), Kohutian (Heinz Kohut focused on pathological narcissism and self psychology).

Revisions and new codifications form a system that enlarges and potentially changes the doctrine and its application. The membership body needs to enable debates and sometimes form study groups. The end result will be either rejection of the revisions, re-orientation of the body as a whole, or factionalization.

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Theology is the systematic study of the nature of the divine within a given religious doctrine. It is mostly used to explain, elaborate, justify and propagate rather than to revise, reform or re-orient. In that sense it represents doctrinal work at L1.

Theology can also be oriented to adapting historical scriptures to modern developments—which is about doctrine application rather than doctrinal change. The various protestant sects were developed by theologians. However theological study can blend with philosophical speculation and social goals to generate variants, as occurred in Protestantism and Hinduism.

Theology is a school-Q5 distinct from comparative religion which is a discipline-Q3 , because the former requires commitment to the underlying religious doctrine while the latter is agnostic. For that reason and as part of a rejection of spiritual realities, theology has often been vilified, criticized and denied the right to exist.

L7: Application Work

6γ: Developing a coherent system based on naming—so as to be able to apply the doctrine more generally and gain popular recognition of the school and its benefits.

All adherents wish for their doctrines to get accepted by wider society so that the ideas and values can become embedded to benefit people. The most effective way for this to occur is for the essences of a doctrine to be extracted, simplified and generalized so as to apply to situations or events of social significance. The key terms then remain in the mind of the reader even if their exact nature is soon forgotten.

Generalizers are typically masters of the doctrine, although not always leaders or even members of membership bodies. The necessary simplification of doctrinal complexities is often disputed and disliked by more orthodox adherents who may distance or dissociate themselves and their membership body.

Application (L7) has some similarities with dissemination (L3) in that both are outward looking and both present a system. However, dissemination strives to get a proper appreciation of orthodox ideas and attract new adherents, while application aims to generate benefits beyond adherents and to popularize the doctrine so as to win wider social acceptance.

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There is an alternative formulation for L7 which is explored here in the final Review section because it needs to consider all frameworks as a check on its validity.

Summary

Q5 Work to be Done Required Work Oscillation* Doctrinal Roles/Entities
t7 Application Generalize essential ideas to diverse and socially significant situations. Public Popularisers,
evangelisers.
t6 Revision Work out necessary doctrinal alterations in a scholarly way. Private Scholars, thinkers,
theorizers.
t5 Guardianship Establish and assert the orthodoxy, and enable secure transmission. Public Accredited teacher or recognized master .
t4 Membership Institute a body formally with a constitution, bye-laws, dues, projects &c to protect the doctrine. Private Executive, members, committees.
t3 Dissemination Create pamphlets, public lectures, demonstration projects, journals, social media to attract new adherents. Public Cells, fellowships, missions, workshops.
t2 Mentoring Explain the doctrine in a dialogue via its application to situations brought by an interested person. Private Guides/instructors inducting students/ initiates.
t1 Realization Become aware of certain fundamental ideas and formulate them in accounts. Public Adherents,
writers.

*See details of oscillation.

Either:

Or proceed to the TET analysis:

Originally posted: 15-Jul-2022. Last updated: 20-Mar-2024.