Intrinsic Capability

Implementing Intrinsic Sustainable Development for an Ecological Civilisation

Frank Birkin, Thomas Polesie

• Publisher: WSPC
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9789813225596
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Comportamento organizzativo
• Index: Business

What would a new approach to tackling urgent global issues like poverty, pollution, habitat loss and climate change look like? How can each of us make the most of the opportunities already present in our rapidly changing world?

With a focus on the roles of knowledge-building and knowledge traditions — the ways we think —, we get closer to what is intrinsic in the functioning of our world and of ourselves.

Topics covered include ecological business and marketing, ecological accounting; changing values in UK businesses; new business models for sustainability in Indian agriculture; sustainability in Latin America, Russia and Vietnam; mobilising the masses through dynamic citizenship in Sweden and Sarajevo; an investigation of the role of artistic collectives for sustainability in Brazil; developing Nairobi in accordance with a Triple Top Line Approach; an examination of two theoretical cultures in Europe and Africa; the emerging Chinese Eco-civilisation; and educating for sustainability in Singapore and Tasmania.

Contents:

• Introduction (Frank Birkin and Thomas Polesie)
• Traditions:
  • Strategies for Epistemic Survival: Slave and Scholar Rebels in the Boundaries of Hispanic America (Alejandro Balanzo and Mónica Ramos-Mejía)
  • A Russian Perspective on the Limitation of Existing Account Reporting Practices for Business Development and Management (Tatiana Dyukina and Olga Cam)
• Ecocentric Business and Marketing:
  • Sustainability, Epistemology, Ecocentric Business and Marketing Strategy: Ideology, Reality and Vision (Helen Borland, Adam Lindgreen, Véronique Ambrosini and Joëlle Vanhamme)
• Towards an Ecological Accounting:
  • Towards an Ecological Accounting: Tensions and Possibilities in Social and Environmental Accounting (Rob Gray)
• Ecological Civilisation:
  • China's Emerging Ecological Civilisation (Liu Zhen, Mingyue Fan and John Margerison)
  • Can Vietnamese Traditional Values Drive 'Sustainability'? An Emic Perspective (Lien Le Monkhouse)
• African Development and Management:
  • Development in Nairobi: Three Into One Does Not GO! (Collins S Makunda)
  • A Tale of Two Theoretical Cultures: Expanding the Application of Habermas' Communicative Action and Post-colonial Theories in Management Studies and Practices in Africa (Sharif M Khalid and Adeyinka A Adewale)
• Educating for Sustainability:
  • Concepts and Meanings of Education for Sustainability (Christopher Lim Gin Swee and Kim Beasy)
• Emerging Business Values:
  • Changing Values (Nick Birkinshaw)
  • Social Entrepreneurship in the Agrifood Sector: Smallholder Farmer Co-operatives (Sanjay V Lanka)
• Mobilising Citizens:
  • Dynamic Citizenship: Participatory Democracy on Local Level (Per-Eric Ullberg-Ornell)
  • Engaging Imaginaries: The Role of Artistic Collectives for Transdisciplinary Sustainability (Andressa Schröder)
• A Reflection (Frank Birkin and Thomas Polesie)

Readership: Graduate students in sustainable business, CSR and environmental sciences; social and natural scientists; business professionals and accountants.000

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

Frank Birkin*^,‡ and Thomas Polesie^†,§

*University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN, UK
^†University of Gothenburg, 405 30 Gothenburg, Sweden
^‡[email protected]
^§[email protected]

This book is about a global experiment conducted with two aims. The first aim relates to a new approach to solving global problems such as poverty, pollution, habitat loss and climate change. The second aim is to bring about better lives for all.

The method of the experiment may be expressed figuratively as a move to another planet whilst keeping our feet placed firmly on Planet Earth. This is achieved by a change in our understanding of what makes knowledge possible — we effectively change our knowledge to live in a different world. This change is conceptually simple but what is harder to grasp is the impact of its consequences. The new possibility for knowledge is based on the most detailed and precise science about how we, our planet and the universe function and its consequences penetrate all quarters of life. Mankind has made an enormous investment to acquire this knowledge and we now need to pay it due attention.

Many people are now paying due attention, but they are diverse and unconnected. So in this experiment, we asked them what they understand by the new possibility of knowledge and what do they see as its consequences. Responses have come from all around the world and from many different fields: ecological business, ecological accounting and marketing; traditions and sustainability in Latin America, Russia and Vietnam; mobilising people through dynamic citizenship and art collectives; Developing Nairobi in accordance with a Triple Top Line Approach; the emerging Chinese Eco-civilisation; and educating for sustainability in Singapore and Tasmania. The experiment reveals diversity in thought and action that crosses disciplinary boundaries, but all are united by the one specific change in the possibility of knowledge. This book takes us closer to what is intrinsic in the functioning of our world and of ourselves.

Intrinsic Capability is a portal, a point of entry

Just to be clear, it is not the kind of portal constructed to impress. It is not for example a grand entrance to a church, cathedral, temple or mosque that imposes itself on ordinary people to engender respect and reverence in anticipation of sundry revelations about the roles and influences that supernatural powers have on our lives. But it is nonetheless a point of egress to a way to radically alter lives.

Like formal religions, Intrinsic Capability changes lives by directing us to a different way of seeing the world but this new view is based on the best knowledge we now have of how the world works. Mankind has invested enormous time and resources to find out how the world functions. Consequently, we now know a great deal about the constitution of ourselves and the world we occupy. We now know for example that from the very small to the very large, nothing stands apart, alone, separately, distinct, or discrete. From the strange quantum activities of subatomic particles, to elements, molecules, compounds, cells, blood, bones, brains, people, societies, nations, continents, planets, stars, galaxies and more, we see that all is interconnected, dynamic and ceaselessly changing. Mountains, planets, stars and galaxies come and go — on a long enough time scale. Scientists now provide detailed, testable accounts of the relations that are within and are constitutive of our interconnected world and we come across them frequently in matters of health, pollution, climate change, extinctions and more. In day-to-day life, we are having to learn how best to live and develop in accordance with how the world is, how it functions intrinsically, and how it responds to our pollution and mistreatment in both the environment and our bodies. We need to live and develop institutions that work with and not against the world as we now know it — we need intrinsic development.

So this book is about guidance derived from science for people to live well and for developing our societies. It deals with concrete matters of building a city or managing a business as well as how best to educate and engage people in this fundamental transition. But it cannot be prescriptive for it is a book as much about “beliefs” rather than the simple, prima facie “facts” that many demand from science. This is because the word “fact” represents something far too small; in reality a little reflection will reveal the origins of any particular “fact” to be running away over far horizons. Take the “fact” of your life. You are likely to know this “fact” well enough for to be otherwise may be seen as a route to mental illness. And yet whichever way you reflect upon yourself, there is nothing straightforward to grasp, nothing to clearly and simply delineate, no constant, closed concept, no amenable story that captures your life as discrete facts that are not dependent upon and related to your family, ancestors, history, friends, society, language, assumptions, species, genetics, environment, biosphere and on to the restless, interacting compounds, molecules, atoms and subatomic particles that constitute our physical selves and which in turn have their origins in our solar system, in the remote supernovae of distant galaxies, in the big bang and so on. I am no simply “fact”, and neither are you, so we necessarily handle beliefs in this book — and that requires a discerning, critical approach. Such an approach can be learned and this is one task of Intrinsic Capability.

Intrinsic Capability is necessarily a modest, reflective portal. It serves neither the establishment of enduring, fixed knowledge nor the narrow interests of power and hegemony. The best way to think of this portal is to draw from your memory, provide embellishment, and conjure in your imagination a place where you were stopped in your tracks. Where beauty, freshness, meaning, insight, hope and any other good, embracing feeling usurped your thoughts, swamped your anxieties, pummelled and pulled your rationality, took you ever-so-momentarily out of yourself, and locate there your own Intrinsic Capability portal to help access the rest of this book.

Other places where you might look to access this book include those thoughts, traditions and practices that have endured. For example, the Intrinsic Capability portal itself is nothing new:

The best explanation I can offer is that the Shinto shrine is a visible and ever-active expression of the factual kinship — in the most literal sense of the word — which exists between individual man and the whole earth, celestial bodies and deities, whatever name they be given.

When entering it, one inevitably becomes more or less conscious of that blood-relation, and the realisation of it throws into the background all feelings of anxiety, antagonism, loneliness, discouragement, as when a child comes to rest on its mother’s lap.

A feeling of almost palpable peace and security falls upon the visitor as he proceeds further into the holy enclosure, and to those unready for it, it comes as a shock. Epithets such as kogoshi (god-like) and kamisabi (divinely serene) seem fully justified.

— Jean Herbert, Shinto, At the Fountain-Head of Japan, 1967.

Indeed more of the Intrinsic content of this book may be found in those traditions and systems of thought that help us to better understand ourselves, our relations with each other and our relations with the natural world. Such traditions and systems can be seen as an aspect of science, as long-term experiments in living well on Planet Earth, for if they work — why reinvent them?

To summarise, Intrinsic Capability (IC) is based on science but not straightforward, hard, unreflecting scientific facts; this book is about engaging and working with facts with an open and critical mind. It is a route to a changing, evolving and ever-so wide-open thoughtscape that you can access no matter where you find yourself or whatever troubles your mind. It is as real as scientific discoveries and as potentially enduring and life-changing as a religion but it is neither created nor accessed for the one time by this book — once you recognise its knowledge and understanding, it is to be found everywhere.

Heraclitus effectively stepped through his own personalised IC portal around 2.5 millennia ago when getting his feet wet to declare that you never step into the same stream twice. More recently, the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead provided many ways to pass through the IC portal: “There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.” (Whitehead, 2001 [1954]).

The IC portal is a way to explore and revise freedom. Take “Free Markets” for example, the concept is widely accepted and applied with such a measure of certainty and closure, that it is adversely, perhaps irreversible, damaging the planet and its inhabitants. We urgently need to free ourselves of free-markets.

Similarly in microeconomics, the formal, detailed financial accounts provided of the activities of businesses engender stagnation. The Jesuit Order faced and overcame this problem centuries ago with the use of a financial accounting system based on a cash box requiring two different keys held by two different people. As Quattrone (2015, pp. 23–24) explains:

The existence of a material padlock operated by two keys allowed a continuous performance around the notion of rational and legitimated behaviour when cashing and spending money. This continuous mediation around and questioning of the rationale informing the opening of the box made the Jesuit rationality an unfolding one.

As with every graphical representation, the translation of cash movements into accounting inscriptions would have reduced the multifaceted nature of the Jesuit administration to a mere financial matter, leading to an incontrovertible financial theoria and to unreflective actions. This unreflective representation would have deprived the Jesuit member of that indifference that characterised the Jesuit’s self and made him able to exert wise judgment. Jesuits’ representations, whether dealing with spiritual or financial matters, were meant to manage and not reduce the ‘virtuality of the possible’ of Jesuit behaviours (Barthes, 1971). They were not aimed at producing matters of fact but matters of concern.

The IC portal does not have two keys since it is an open door: instead it has two sides. On the one side, there is a set of facts, hard, indisputable and accepted by many people without reflection. For convenience, we can label this side Modern. The IC meaning of Modern, its thoughtscape, is one aspect of the subject of this book to be explored thoroughly. But to start the exploration, as a first guide, key Modern features that have our attention include its quirky use of Rationality which is instantiated in its understanding of Capitalism, economic exchange, tradition, development, rewards and a limited lifetime of achievement.

When stepping through the IC portal, we follow the footsteps of two colleagues now deceased, Grey Beard and the Older Boy (Birkin and Polesie, 2012). These two characters recorded their encounters over several decades as they passed through the Modern thoughtscape and its derivations. They described the IC portal as an example of an episteme change after Foucault (2002 [1966]).

They passed through the portal to describe a new age, an emerging episteme, which they named Primal. They were both accountants so their view of the Primal episteme included ideas for economics and business which include a transition from economic maximisation to ecological optimisation, a Triple Top Line business appraisal method and a conceptual shift from “bulldozer” to “dinghy” companies. They also discovered the Primal thoughtscape to be rich in ecological relations and a wealth of time-tested traditions available to guide cultures and lives.

When they talked of their experiences and understanding, they found many others who were thinking the same way. In time, it became apparent to Grey Beard and the Older Boy that large number of people from all quarters were either in transition, at the cusp of changing, or had fully changed, were already truly Primal. The pair slowly came to recognise that the Primal was in a sense ever thus; ever going back to basics, changing, revising, refreshing, restating and reapplying itself. They talked, debated, sweated and struggled and came to an obvious conclusion known since the beginning of time to all that participate from philosophers to worms, from seagulls to neutrinos, that the only constant is change. Change is the way of the world.

The pair explained their observations of the epistemic transition as a movement:

From Modern abstract rational belief systems (such as neo-classical economic theory and mainstream financial accounting).

To Primal pragmatic empiricism (based on the findings of science supported by ancient traditions that have endured).

They also noted that the Modern abstract rational belief systems were very good at providing clear factual explanations of how to organise our institutions and our lives and how to get more stuff. It is the promise of more stuff that motivates many people, sometimes excessively enough to be reminiscent of the feeding frenzies of sharks. … but it is far, far more dangerous.

Although very old, Grey Beard and the Older Boy thought they had better assist the transition and help establish the emerging new age, the Primal. To this end they created an online presence, Intrinsic Earth to help people to focus and mobilize “… a social movement exploring new possibilities for knowledge, connecting healthy & vibrant human communities and supporting people, governments and businesses in the transition to a sustainable world.” (Intrinsic Earth, 2018).

They also got a publisher to promise to publish a book in which people in the transition would write about their own thoughts and observations. Eventually, posthumously, the book was published and it is now in your hands. The book’s content is very varied as it represents the reach and depth of the transition in many quarters:

•Working for better lives for all;

•What we have known for thousands of years and what we have just...