The Larrikin Principle

The Larrikin Principle 

The Larrikin Principle has no official status in management, or any other brand of theory. It would be un-larrikin to pretend otherwise. It is more productive to leave the concept open, unsystematic, accumulating an inexhaustible range of dynamic, heterogeneous ideas around it. In this book, it emerges from the intersections between culture, history and chaos theory, to engage with some core issues for management and organisation studies.

Yet exploratory ways of proceeding are scientific, as good science is often done. We illustrate with a popular science book on the search for 'dark matter' by Ken Freeman, Duffield Professor of Astronomy at the Australian National University.

Freeman tracks the curious fate of astronomer Fritz Zwicky's 1930s proof of 'dark matter' in the universe. Zwicky combined good Newtonian mathematics with Einstein's theory of relativity to demonstrate that the shape and observed movements of a galaxy cluster require large amounts of 'dark matter' to be hypothesized. Zwicky's method was good science. He showed that the current model, based on luminous bodies, did not fit what was observed. His proof was ignored.

Freeman himself 'while studying something entirely different' made a key contribution in 1970 that helped to make this theory the orthodoxy it now is. He showed mathematically that observed data did not make sense unless there was 'dark matter' in the halos of galaxies to hold them together. 

Levi-Strauss saw an especially important role played by anomalous figures, relationships, places and actions. One such hero was the Trickster. There are many tricksters in ancient myths. For instance the Norse trickster god Loki was a fire god whose name is probably derived from logi, fire. In Roman and Greek society, the Trickster figure had links with commerce.

Trade happened along the dark margins of society, not incorporated within the dominant political regime. The Celtic god Lugh may have etymological links with the larrikin. Julius Caesar identified Lugh with Roman Mercury, god of commerce, another trickster god. Mercury is usually linked with the Greek Hermes, god of boundaries, and the Egyptian Thoth, god of learning.

None of these gods is identical or stable. To complicate matters, among the Scandinavian gods, Mercury is usually linked not with Loki but Woden, who became a supreme god, more like Jupiter. Within and across mytho-logical systems they form a fuzzy set that changes over time, linked by common characteristics, always with distinctive features. Each plays a part in a different set of stories.

All are ambivalent gods, often dangerous, partly outside social norms and constraints, but ingenious and creative, sources of arts and sciences. They are the soil out of which modern trickster figures have grown, including the larrikin. In myths recorded in historical times, the hero is usually a man.

But some of these myths came from early times, when the supreme deity was a woman, the mother goddess. Egyptian Thoth, for instance, was a moon goddess. Greek Hermes combined with Aphrodite, goddess of love, to form the ambiguously gendered Herm-Aphrodite. This ambiguity is well-suited to the modern age, one of whose characteristics has been the globalisation of feminism. Larrikinas may be older than larrikins.

Fuzzy logic and the Larrikin Principle 

Another larrikin/chaos thinker is Lotfi Zadeh, born in Iran and becoming a US citizen he's another nomad thinker who specialised in crossing boundaries.

Zadeh was an engineer, an expert in the cybernetics of control systems. However, he found that the crisp logic prized by engineers, scientists and managers broke down in the face of highly complex systems and conditions, including all systems involving humans.

His solution was fuzzy logic in which boundaries around concepts stay fuzzy, and statements may be only part-true. The more we push for absolute precision, he argued, the more meaningless or irrelevant our schemes become.

He captured the core hypothesis in what he termed the Principle of Incompatibility:

Stated informally, the essence of this principle is that as the complexity of a system increases, our ability to make precise and yet significant statements about its behaviour diminishes until a threshold is reached beyond which precision and significance (or relevance) become almost mutually exclusive characteristics. 

Fuzzy logic is fundamental to larrikin wisdom. It is contained in the common Aussie phrase that alarms all uptight managers: 'She'll be right'.

Everyone who deals with situations of great complexity has to cope with the fuzziness of language. Words shift and buckle in spite of the wishes of their users. In this section we try to offer guidance and help.

We illustrate fuzzy critical analysis as applied to larrikins, with the larger aim of offering analytic tools to everyone in the world of management and organisations who grapples with this kind of complexity.

Thus far we have used Zadeh's key term, fuzziness, fairly loosely and informally. This is appropriate for this term, up to a point. It is a fuzzy use of the term fuzzy. Yet the power of the term comes from the fact that it contains or tolerates so many contradictions and makes them manageable and thinkable, including a degree of formalism. Zadeh wrote:

The pervasiveness of fuzziness in human thought processes suggests that much of the logic behind human reasoning is not the traditional two-valued or even multivalued logic, but a logic with fuzzy truths, fuzzy connectives, and fuzzy rules of inference.

Two-valued logic applied to larrikinism would consist of tight definitions, strict deductions, and certain truths. All larrikins would be identical, and different to everyone else, in terms of a specific criterion. It would be possible then to make definite, certain statements: e.g. larrikins do this or that, therefore managers do not.