I had already decided that I was going to write a post about Albert Bandura and social learning. Time to do it now, since @jclarey asks  “Were Bandura and Vygotsky full of shit?” I really don’t know about Vygotsky (I don’t know his work) but I have been a fan of Albert Bandura since I stumbled on his stuff on self-efficacy fifteen years ago. Makes sense to me; what he says rings true in my experience of helping executives do what they do better or differently.

The following is an exerpt from a draft chapter from the book I am writing just now. It is not blog-friendly prose but it will do to show why I think Bandura is not full of shit. What he says is linked to Karl Weick, who is other of my favourite theorists.

Social and Complex

“Organisations are essentially dynamic networks of relationships. Weick (1979) provides strong thought leadership in understanding how complex social interactions among people play out. He speaks about organising as flows of behaviour and describes the basic building blocks of organising in terms of “individual behaviours interlocked among two or more people, who change each other’s behaviour”. When two people engage, he calls the act of one person responding to another an interact. If the person who instigated the exchange then further responds, this is a double interact. Weick tells us that the double interact is the stable component in organisational growth and decay, and that inter‐locked behaviours are the elements that make up dynamic processes.

We are all individually complicated to begin with and we constantly change; our moods fluctuate, we feel more or less at ease in different places and with different people, we have sensitivities, agendas, positions to defend, cultural biases and personal values that influence how we communicate, how we react and so on. Add to this fluctuating and fluid personal change the influence we are able, or unable, to exert on each other and it is not difficult to see what happens when complex individuals try to communicate with and manipulate other equally complicated individuals.

Weick was far from alone in focusing on the highly‐dynamic and social nature of human systems. Argyris and Schon (1978) for example recognised organising as active and cognitive, and Schoderbeck et al (1978) described groups interacting within ‘organised complexities’, which they describe as:

“phenomena composed of a very large number of parts that interact in a non‐simple way”.

In Bandura’s social cognitive view of human activity, events are the outcome of continuously interacting behavioural, cognitive and environmental influences, which are inter‐locked and mutually shaped (Bandura, 1978). This ‘reciprocal determinism’ is a core feature of Bandura’s work. His stance is very much in opposition to behaviourist theorists, who believe that behavior is causally determined by what is happening in the environment, so that the environment “becomes an autonomous force that automatically orchestrates and controls behaviour”. Bandura disputes this. Although the environment does influence behaviour, people choose, through cognition, what they want to see and how they perceive their environment. They learn in four ways:

• Enactively ‐ by doing and experimenting

• Vicariously ‐ by watching other people’s experiences

• Socially – through conversation and by listening to the judgements of others

• Logically – by developing rules of inference and deriving new knowledge from reasoning.

As Bandura says:

“By their actions, people play a role in creating the social milieu and other circumstances that arise in their daily transactions”.

Self‐regulating, self‐organising and self-reflecting are core concepts in Bandura’s accounts of the constantly shifting, mutually adapting and dynamic engagements of people with each other and their environments. Bandura points out that complex interactions among behaviour, cognition and environment lead to probabilistic outcomes rather than predictability.”

Talking Shit?

Talking sense more like!