Today’s dominant discourses, both mainstream and oppositional, are direct byproducts of the North Atlantic knowledge practice that smuggles 500 years worth of premises, assumptions, and logics into our strategies and narratives—limiting the territory in which we think. Left implicit, we inevitably reinforce the systems we seek to change. Made explicit, we may just create space for better questions, and with them, the possibility to open new discursive spaces.
Discourse and respons-ability
With remarkably little exception, this working-class born Gen X-er has heard nothing but the same old stories being told and sold in professional and managerial circles—the same language and metaphors, the same dominant and oppositional mainstream narratives—for over four decades.
I’ve come to see these folks as something like an “interpretariat”—manning the frontlines of interpreting the world around us, packaging what they see into stories, testing out “meanings” in the interests of themselves, their clients, and their institutions—tentatively at first, then doubling down on whatever sticks (conceptually and commercially) until what emerges, emerges.
In the process, they’ve grown to exert an outsized influence on how society understands, narrates, and shapes its own reality. All too quickly, exacerbated by the spiralling commercialisation of knowledge, the stories they broker become the narratives we live and work by (Fisher, 1987).
Far too often, talking one-on-one with these folks has left me feeling like I’m trapped in some kind of Lynchian loop. Questioning the script is taboo. You’re either for or against. Right or left. Now pick a side.
The plot twist? It doesn’t really matter which side you pick. Both sides reinforce the same dynamic—and lead to the same outcome.
If we’re serious about shifting the systemic status quo then we somehow need to write ourselves out of this loop.
To do that, we first need to reckon with how our dominant knowledge practice has already shaped, and keeps on shaping, the stories that we tell to ourselves, and to the world, each and every day (Bruner, 1991).
Second, we should be on the active lookout for the voices, words and worlds we’re (dis)missing in the process. We need much bigger ears.
Neglecting either of these things severely stunts our collective respons-ability — our capacity to ethically and appropriately engage within this complex, damaged world that we are constitutive of (Haraway, 2016).
You already know this. You feel the dissonance in the way we talk about leadership, strategy, sustainability, society, the planet and so much more.
Yes, it is hard to break out of. But it is also entirely possible.
Breaking the North Atlantic frame is not as an intellectual exercise, but an ethical one.
Ethical leadership begins upstream of skills, behaviours, and competencies — by expanding the knowledge practices that shape what leaders can notice, question, and take responsibility for in the first place.
Without this expansion, leadership development will not challenge the status quo; it will quietly reinforce the very systems it claims to reform.
Let’s take a look.
What is a knowledge practice?
“It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories”
— Donna Haraway (2016)
The idea of a knowledge practice has been around since the 1970s at least. Though they didn’t name it explicitly as a knowledge practice, you can feel it in the thoughts of Franz Fanon, Michiel Foucault, Edward Said, Aníbal Quijano and others.
We can think of a knowledge practice as the way a group, culture, or society produces, validates, shares, and applies knowledge. It’s not just about what we know, but how we come to know it—and whose knowledge is legitimised, obscured, or dismissed in the process.
It is the lived cultural expression—the habits, rituals, norms and conventions—through which knowledge is generated and applied in everyday life.
To make such a thing visible we might look at:
- Purposes and ends: why knowledge is sought out.
- Power and legitimacy: who gets to pursue it, define it, and circulate it.
- Norms and values: what criteria are used to decide how knowledge is legitimised.
- Methods: how it’s gathered, tested, sustained and shaped
- Tools and language: the media/forms in which it is expressed.
- Transmission and inheritance: how it’s carried forward over time.
In a ‘North Atlantic’ knowledge practice (dominant in this part of the world), that might look a little like this:
- Purposes and ends: mastery, efficiency, growth; to predict and control
- Power and legitimacy: institutionally educated classes
- Norms and values: rational argument as the main filter
- Methods: written documentation, didactic teaching
- Tools and language: codified metrics and benchmarks embedded in curricula
- Transmission and inheritance: individual expertise
An indigenous knowledge practice—the automatic binary default for the professional managerial class under the North Atlantic tradition—might look like this:
- Purposes and ends: continuity, reciprocity, regeneration; to maintain balance
- Power and legitimacy: relationships with land and community
- Norms and values: relational accountability, responsibility, and ethics
- Methods: story, ceremony, lived experience
- Tools and language: spiritual and ecological coherence
- Transmission and inheritance: intergenerational memory
And a working-class knowledge practice might look like this:
- Purposes and ends: survival, dignity, incremental improvement; to get by
- Power and legitimacy: collective experience and peer learning (pubs, shop floors, break rooms)
- Norms and values: narrative realism and pragmatic judgment
- Methods: embodied skill and practical know-how (trades, crafts, caregiving)
- Tools and language: tacit rules of thumb (“what works”)
- Transmission and inheritance: resourcefulness under constraint; inherited street-smarts and “nous” (as we say where I’m from in North West England) passed through families, peers, and communities
Thinking in terms of a knowledge practice helps reveal that what feels intuitive to us—like an entirely normal, neutral, and credible thing that we just know—is often anything but. Instead, it is shaped by deep cultural habits, historical forces, and power structures. It is a “situated” knowledge (Haraway, 1988).
Once we start to become more a bit more aware of that, we can also start to take a little more responsibility for what we think we know, but also for what we speak, put into action, and manifest every day.
In the process, we can become more response-able.
What the North Atlantic knowledge practice is and is not
The term North Atlantic knowledge practice was coined by the rather splendid and prolific Dutch intercultural anthropologist Wim van Binsbergen. Drawing on decades of African fieldwork and cross-cultural analysis, he pioneered the fields of both intercultural anthropology and intercultural philosophy.
Although he used the term earlier, van Binsbergen more fully laid out the term ‘North Atlantic knowledge practice’ in his 2003 book Intercultural Encounters: African and Anthropological Lessons toward a Philosophy of Interculturality.
It refers to the dominant assumptions that underpin Western academic and institutional approaches to knowledge.
Nowadays, the term is most often used as a substitute for ‘Western’, and as a pejorative.
When used lazily (which is often) it’s used to argue that ‘North Atlantic’ thinking is ‘bad’, ‘indigenous’ thinking is ‘good’, and, “We need to decolonise thinking immediately”.
This needs quite some unpacking, which we’ll do another time. For now, suffice it to say that van Binsbergen himself (beautifully and successfully) wrestled with this thinking and found a way to inhabit both worlds of senior North Atlantic academic and sangoma—a trained spirit medium in the Southern African tradition—without compromising either.
A few more caveats before we move on.
As with other knowledge practices, the North Atlantic knowledge practice is best understood not as a model or a framework in the formal sense:
- It is not a model. It does not aim to ‘represent reality’. It does not predict, simulate or offer formal variables for testing. There is no formal system logic, ‘root cause’ (ahem) or meta-level operating system involved.
- It is not a formal framework. It isn’t a defined schema with fixed components such as “Input > Process > Output”. It also doesn’t propose a new structure for generating knowledge or conducting analysis.
It is, however, a good enough map with a good enough fit with its territory to:
- Help us diagnose epistemic dominance, i.e. it can help reveal how specific Euro-American knowledge systems naturalise their authority, globally.
- Lend us a critical eye. It can help make our implicit cultural assumptions to rationalise and analyse, command and control, dominate and subjugate, more explicit.
- Reveal exclusions. It can help highlight how myriad other ways of knowing are marginalised.
The implications for our work on the ground being:
- Leaders. We have an ethical responsibility to shift our language, metaphors, stories, and strategic narratives: perhaps from controlling to cultivating, from defending to exploring, from directing to co-authoring.
- Strategy. When we become conscious of the logics and assumptions smuggled into our current strategies (and they are many), we can step outside their blind spots and widen our field of possible action.
- Change. When we better understand how our actions reproduce the very dynamics we set out to resist, our interventions become more systemic and resilient.
- Activism. Introducing myriad other ways of knowing avoids antagonistic dualisms, creates stronger ground for solidarity, and connects struggles across more traditions.
Unless we make our existing logics, principles, and practices visible, my fear is that we will keep reproducing the very systems we seek to transform.
With my next post we’ll take a look at three of the most significant threads of the North Atlantic knowledge practice: scientific rationalism, epistemic imperialism, and institutionalism and markets.
It’s gonna be a trip, I promise you.
Until then…
Be splendid.
— Steve
The one thing you should read
- Donna Haraway’s essay, Situated Knowledges (1988) (Pdf here). But it comes with caveats:
- First read our quick introduction to her main concepts.
- Read her essay. It is 25 pages. Don’t stress over every line — it’s dense, 1980s feminist theory.
- Skim first to catch the big metaphors. Look out for “objectivity,” “the God trick,” and “situatedness.”
- Then re-read, slower, and focus on what clicks.
References
- van Binsbergen, W. M. J. (2003). Intercultural encounters: African and anthropological lessons towards a philosophy of interculturality. Münster: LIT Verlag. https://lit-verlag.de/isbn/978-3-8258-6783-8/
- Haraway, D. J. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066
- Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://www.dukeupress.edu/staying-with-the-trouble
- Fisher, W. R. (1987). Human communication as narration: Toward a philosophy of reason, value, and action. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. https://archive.org/details/humancommunicati0000fish
- Bruner, J. (1991). The narrative construction of reality. Critical Inquiry, 18(1), 1–21. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1343711
- Quijano, A. (2000). Coloniality of power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America. Nepantla: Views from South, 1(3), 533–580. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/23906
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