Inside processes: Transitory understandings, action guiding anticipations, and withness thinking

Abstract: "To talk and to think, not about process, but in relation to it, is not easy. Many brilliant writers and thinkers in the recent past have helped us to think about process from the outside, about processes that we merely observe as happening ‘over there’, but few have helped us to think in terms of our own, spontaneously responsive involvement in ongoing processes from the inside. Yet practitioners need a style of thought and talk that allows them uniquely to affect the flow of processes from within their own unique living involvements with them. Crucially, I will argue, this kind of responsive action and understanding only becomes available to us in our relations with living forms if we enter into dialogically-structured relations with them. It remains utterly unavailable to us as external observers. I will call this kind of thinking, thinking-from-within or “withnessthinking,” to contrast it with the “aboutness-thinking” that is more familiar to us. In articulating its nature, I w

Object Details

• Location: Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Frankfurt am Main
• Extent: Online-Ressource
• Language: Englisch
• Notes: Veröffentlichungsversion ; begutachtet (peer reviewed) ; In: International Journal of Action Research ; 1 (2005) 2 ; 157-189

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (where): Mannheim
• (when): 2005
• Creator: Shotter, John

Further information

• URN: urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-383036
• Rights: Open Access unbekannt; Open Access; Der Zugriff auf das Objekt ist unbeschränkt möglich.
• Last update: 15.08.2025, 7:35 AM CEST