Following some reflection after the panel meeting in Lancaster, I have a new working title for my PhD: “Pattern and metapattern in learning in post-experience Management Education: using narrative inquiry into learner’s view of relationship in career and family-of-origin to explore and illustrate the epistemology of Gregory Bateson”. I’m sure it won’t remain worded this way for long, but I like it. Will my supervisor agree?
Bateson’s epistemology is, of course, not something that is simple or easy to study, though that is more to do with limitations of our language than any flaw in the thinking. The term “metapattern” was an easy one to get interested in, much harder to work out how it would translate into a research agenda, but the reading I’m doing now (Tyler Volk) is helping to identify some ideas, and also some ways of thinking that cross disciplines such as biology and psychology.
My “unit of analysis” remains the individual, and I’m hoping that the collaborative inquiry into that individual’s turning points in life will be a route to explore pattern and metapattern of relation, which lies at the heart of the Batesonian view of both ontology and epistemology (for him, these were synonymous).
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