Integral Dynamics

Political Economy, Cultural Dynamics and the Future of the University

Ronnie Lessem, Alexander Schieffer, Samuel D. Rima

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409451037
• eBook ISBN: 9781317115595
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The theory of integral dynamics is based on the view that the development of individual leaders or entrepreneurs requires the simultaneous development of institutions and societies. It seeks a specific way forward for each society, fundamentally different from, but drawing on, its past. Nearly every natural science has been transformed from an analytically-based approach to a dynamic one: now it is time for society and culture to follow suit locally and globally. Each culture, discipline and person is incomplete and is in need of others in order to develop and evolve. This book sets out a curriculum for a new integral, trans-cultural and trans-disciplinary area of study, inclusive of, but extending beyond, economics and enterprise. It embraces a trans-personal perspective, linking self with community, enterprise and society, and focusing on the vital relationship between local identity and global integrity. For the government policy maker, the enlightened business practitioner, and the student and researcher into economics and enterprise, the new discipline is set out here in complete detail by a multi-national team of Gower's Transformation and Innovation Series authors. Illuminated with examples relating the conceptual to the practical, this is a text, not for a pre-modern, modern, or even post-modern era, but for what has been called our trans-modern age.

PART I
Orientation: Local Identity to Global Integrity

Prologue
Cultural Dynamics, Political Economy and the Future University

One becomes rich by taking advantage of the many canals that irrigate and diversify knowledge and wisdom, and stimulate mutual discoveries and recognition. People themselves are the main means for making this synergy work: hence the importance of supporting dynamic processes that rehabilitate people in all their dimensions, and that also rehabilitate relationships between themselves and their surroundings.

Emmanuel N’Donne, Reinventing the Present: The Chodak in Senegal

1 Introduction: Transformational and Trans-personal

THE NATURE AND SCOPE OF INTEGRAL DYNAMICS

Starting with the integral in the foreground and the dynamic as background

As we listen to today’s news (December 2011), hearing that the Fitch credit rating agency is about to downgrade six European countries, we wonder what on earth the world is coming to. For we have reached a state where the state of the economy, of a particular society, or at least how it is perceived by such “rating agencies”, drives all else: nature, community, culture, spirituality, science, technology. No matter that Greece or Italy, for example, are the respective birthplaces of European civilization, both are now up for sale. The time has now come for us to reinvent ourselves, locally and globally, if the whole world is not to suffer the same fate. For such a process of reinvention, we need both a whole new field of activity, and a new kind of agency, or institution, to promote such.

Our new discipline, and prospective area of practice, Integral Dynamics, is forged out of Political Economy, Business Administration and, most distinctively, Cultural Dynamics. These are all geared towards the identification and development of a particular individual and community, enterprise and society. While such an Integral approach transcends a previously so-called “Westernized” one, in each individual, enterprise and societal case, the Dynamic orientation serves to recognize and release both individual and also collective genius. Integral Dynamics, a new discipline and a new agency as such, is premised on the belief that the development of individual leaders, or entrepreneurs, without the simultaneous development of particular institutions and societies, in both theory and practice, is a futile exercise, analogous to fiddling while Rome or Rwanda or Russia burns! Why and for whom, more specifically, is this new academic discipline and institution, on both integral and also dynamic counts, being developed at this particular time?

We start with our practical intent, and focus on the need that Integral Dynamics – as opposed to, say, affirmative action (cultural dynamics), economic growth (political economy), leadership or entrepreneurship (business administration) – intends to fulfil. For, as of the time of writing, and in the wake of the endemic financial and economic, social and environmental crises facing us locally and globally, we seek a specific way forward for each society in turn. For the seriously concerned citizen then, in each, for the government policy maker, for the enlightened practitioner, for the university administrator as well as for the committed student and researcher into economics and enterprise, all of whom may sense that the way forward, into the future, needs to be fundamentally different from – even while drawing upon – the past, our individual and collective focus is on Integral Dynamics.

Most specifically, and in the final analysis, we are establishing a newly integral, and dynamic, academic discipline and institution for those who feel, individually and communally, organizationally and societally, that they have something unique and particular to contribute to the world, and that the world as a whole will benefit, integrally and dynamically, from such.

On the one hand, integrally then, it is becoming ever more apparent that business, and indeed economics, cannot be insulated from nature, technology or culture. After all, firstly, energy and the environment are becoming ever more pressing issues today. There is a vast and growing literature on such. Secondly, the interface between business and economics, and science and technology, is there for all to see, especially in the case of energy and communications technology. Cultural issues, finally, underlying development in Europe (North and South, East and West), in Africa, in the Arab world, in India or in China, come ever more to the fore. Yet, except for generally superficial analyses, ranging from the German “well-oiled machine” to Chinese “guanxi” (as if that is all these two great European and Asian civilizations have to contribute), the interaction between culture, economy and enterprise, especially from a dynamic and developmental perspective, receives short shrift.

At the same time, over the course of the last century, as a result of research in anthropology, archaeology, macro-history, philosophy and areas studies – Aboriginal, African, Latin American, Egyptian, Arab, Indian, Chinese and Japanese, European and American – and many other diverse cultures have been uncovered, through intense intellectual scholarship and also prolonged physical exploration. Yet such rich diversity has seldom been in evidence either in business administration, in economic analysis, or indeed in the establishment of academia as a whole. The one recent exception, business-wise, was Japan, but now, as its economic miracle has faded, a predominantly Anglo-Saxon academic orientation to economics and enterprise once more rules the roost. It is with all this in mind that we perceive, on the one hand, the need for integral, that is trans-cultural and trans-disciplinary, studies, inclusive of, but extending beyond, economics and enterprise.

Aligned with the dynamic in the foreground with integral as background

On the other, dynamic, hand, secondly, in the last 150 years, nearly every natural, if not also social, science, has been transformed from an analytically based approach to the phenomena under investigation to a dynamic one. This occurred in astronomy with Laplace, in physics with Heisenberg, in chemistry with Prigogine, in logic with Hegel, in biology with Darwin, in psychology with Jung, and indeed in economics with Marx. Interestingly enough, such a dynamic approach has by and large not been incorporated into business studies, and as such business or public administration, the very term administration (business or public) being antithetical to such.

Moreover, in economics Marx is the overwhelming exception to the otherwise generally analytical rule. However, much to the world’s cost, as we shall reveal, the dynamic economic baby, Marx’s “dialectical materialism”, and his unique understanding of capital flows, has been thrown out with the allegedly “Marxist” bathwater. In effect his alleged “socialism” has been deemed antithetical, ironically, to the prevailing “capitalist” establishment. The fact that Marx, by the way, brought with him a German historicist and holistic-rational, dynamic impulse, linked to bildung (cultivation), whereas Adam Smith had, comparatively, a more analytical-pragmatic British orientation, linked to efficient markets, seems to have passed conventional wisdom unwittingly by.

That having been said, without some recognition of the particularities of kultur, to use the German word, and the bildung dynamic that goes with it, there is no transformative substance – our cultural dynamics as we shall see – with which to work. We are left with nothing other than the will of the individual entrepreneur, with all its positive and negative attributes, to provide such. Integral Dynamics, thereby, sets out with the intention of recognizing and releasing individual, organizational and societal substance, in a specific local context – naturally, culturally, technologically and economically – in close association with global others (in all of the above), over an extended period of time. Moreover, e-ducere, in our bildung terms here, can be applied, in its developmental sense, to individual, organization and society.

Indeed, and to put all this into current perspective, as a close colleague and graduate of one of our transformation programmes, Karen Michael, who is a social worker, financial services coordinator, and now union activist in the UK, mentioned in an e-mail to us, after a recent visit to Italy, towards the end of 2011:

I was just in Italy: it was gorgeous as ever, and showed a rather lovely pattern of economic activity in the “real” sense. Of course as the benighted “austerity” cuts begin, this will all change, and they will start spiraling into the maelstrom of demand failure and destruction of living standards.

In other words, as the markets and the politicians hover over Italy, this “country” today means in essence “its economy”. As such, the particular natural and cultural heritage of this glorious birthplace of the European Renaissance, not to mention that of its ancient neighbour, today’s modern Greece, are now both considered bonded slaves to the market. Economic and financial analysis, yes that matters a lot in the Eurozone, but dynamic culture, or nature, or even science, that’s another matter. And indeed there is no particular agency, or set of agencies, that can serve to release a society’s genius, not to mention an individual’s or organization’s.

In response, integrally to begin with, we extend economics and enterprise to include, within and alongside it, underlying nature and community, science and technology, culture and spirituality. To that extent, Integral Dynamics aligns itself more closely with the Swedish interpretation of “business”, as naringslav, meaning the nourishment of life, than with the English meaning of “busy-ness”! Subsequently, dynamically, as per the African term Ntu, meaning “vital force”, it seeks to recognize and release the vitality of each particular entity with which it is vitally concerned. To that extent, overall moreover, we draw on the German concept of bildung – education, development, cultivation – both individually and collectively. Ultimately, and institutionally moreover, we extend Foucault’s notion of genealogy to reflect a new kind of integral dynamic institution, as well as an alternative approach to history and philosophy.

At the same time, as per Italy or Greece, the new discipline and activity, field and prospective agency, fully takes account of the fact that each culture, like each discipline, or indeed each person, is incomplete in itself, and therefore is in need, continually and reciprocally, of the other, if it is to develop and evolve, dynamically (transformatively) and integrally (analytically). That is where we are focused.

Political economy, Integral Dynamics and the future of the university

Ironically, as we shall soon see, the grounds for a more integral approach to enterprise and economics, encompassing many disciplines if not also, implicitly at least, diverse cultures, was laid out by Adam Smith and Karl Marx two and a half centuries ago, but, alas, that trans-disciplinary and trans-cultural impulse has been largely missed. In fact, taking culture seriously, altogether, has been all too often hoist by the “essentialist” petard, especially in the wake of racism if not also fascism, and the horrendous negative stereotyping that has gone with both.

While Adam Smith, as we shall discover, allegedly had the moral sentiment to reach out integrally and inclusively to the other, alongside his desire to advance the wealth of nations, the other formidable co-founder, so to speak, of political economy, Karl Marx, had an innate feel for the dynamic flow of capital. In fact the integral-dynamic complementarity between the two of them, not to mention their respectively Protestant/Western European, and Jewish/Eastern European heritages, has since been torn asunder, over two centuries, by mutually destructive ideological divides. Moreover, the fact that Marx established what we might call a social laboratory, apart from any particular university, is seldom acknowledged.

Before we pursue the argument further, underlying the specific nature and scope of our proposed new academic discipline and institutional activity, that is Integral Dynamics as a composite discipline and “genealogical” – see the final chapter for a detailed exposition on this – institution, let us say something about, firstly, how and why a new discipline, generally, is born? As such, and as we will now see, we build successively on the transformational and the trans-personal, the trans-cultural and the trans-disciplinary, altogether set within, not a pre-modern, modern or post-modern, but what has been called our trans-modern age, and indeed a trans-modern alternative to the modern university, which encompasses them all. The integral dynamic institution, as we shall see, will be a composite of community (Grounding), sanctuary (Emerging), university (Navigating) and laboratory (Effecting), with a view to thereby releasing GENE-IUS.

TRANSFORMATIONAL TO TRANS-PERSONAL

Why and how is a new discipline born: for example, chemistry out of alchemy, political economy out of moral philosophy, or indeed biotechnology out of biology and mechanical engineering? Gen...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• PART I ORIENTATION: LOCAL IDENTITY TO GLOBAL INTEGRITY
• PART II INTEGRAL DYNAMICS: TRANSFORMATIONAL/TRANSPERSONAL
• PART III INTEGRAL DYNAMICS: TRANS-CULTURAL/TRANS-DISCIPLINARY
• PART IV INTEGRAL DYNAMICS: ECONOMICS AND ENTERPRISE OVER-ARCHING EFFECT
• PART V CONCLUSION: INTEGRAL DYNAMICS IN PRACTICE
• Epilogue: Integral Dynamic Genealogy: Community – Sanctuary – University – Laboratory
• Index