Page 65 - Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook

42 Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook

relevant. Reality is not a snapshot or still photograph. The world constantly
moves in which actors are confronted with and have various experiences in
which the process of consciousness develops or simply shifts toward different
paths (or structures), which can be transformed into further actions. In this
process, the actor uses and develops a scheme for interpretation to connect
episodes or situations of social action in a sensible and thoughtful way of
behavior. Hence situations are schemes that can be understood as active
information-seeking pictures that accept information and orient actions
continuously (Weick, 1979; Bartunek, 1984).
Knowledge is constructed by the actors in their “environmental” situations
and events. Precisely because knowledge is a relation to and an orientation
toward the “environment” through action, the environment itself can be
defined as the experiential space and as the interpretation space. The expe-
riential space is what is close and concrete, where, e.g., the actors travel and
interact. This can be seen as the consciousness of any human being in “the
natural attitude” first of all is interested in that part of his everyday of life
world that is in his reach and that in time and space are centered around him
(see also Schutz, 1973, p. 73).
Actors construct their own reality, individually and collectively, but they do
not experience it in the same way. Moreover, actors see reality as if they live in
an external world independent of themselves. Through their language,
behavior, and typifications, actors often understand events, situations, and
actions of others as being natural and that society is something “out there” that
cannot change. They are wrong. The reason for this view of stability is that
from the actor’s knowledge, human beings “know” the world and that other
actions confirm this in their given understanding of the world (Hennestad,
1986; Silverman, 1983). However, the international experiential space is not
something that exists independent of the actors, and through the actione
knowledge process, actors create their internationalization and the interna-
tional experiential space. Therefore it is problematic to talk about borders
between the firm and the environment. The norm in everyday life is change
and not stability.
Experiential space exists “inside the firm.” The experiential space is the
actors’ moving picture of events and everyday life, which is constituted by
the interaction and knowledge processes of others. On the other hand, actors
are confronted with everyday circumstances in the experiential space that one
cannot claim that they have invented and that they cannot disregard. Actors
exist in a society outside which they cannot place themselves. However, the
firm cannot be seen as a reaction to things that happen “out there.” What is
“out there” is still an item for a subjective with an intersubjective interpretation
and understanding. In other words, organizational actions influence and
change the experiential space directly.
The central point is not only the product, the marketing, or the economic
development of the firms in which actors talk and act but also the way in which