I referenced this site, Kick if Over, in my last post in the Rifkin thread. Like Rifkin it's a different way of looking at economics and a way that might well be considered an advance in developmental terms. Here's the introductory blurb. There are quite a few articles and lots of references, links. etc. And certainly food for thought and discussion here.

"Adbusters invites economics students around the world – especially PhD students – to join the fight to revamp Econ 101 curriculums and challenge the endemic myopia of their tenured neoclassical profs. Read some of the introductory articles, check out the latest dispatches on our blog, then download the Kick it Over Manifesto (and other posters) and keep pinning them up in the corridors of your department. Get a small group together and start jamming! Put your university at the forefront of the monumental mindshift now underway in the 'science' of economics."

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Here's the table of contents for a book called Integral Economics (not the Arnsperger book) by Ronnie Lessam and Alexander Shieffer. The Prologue is available at this link. An excerpt:

"In this book we build up an ‘integral’ approach to social and economic systems that we have been developing for four decades, in fact over the same time period that the neoliberal model has predominated. It enables us to jointly reframe economics in a way that accommodates nature and culture, science and enterprise, across the whole world. According to our integral approach, every social system needs to find, in order to be and stay sustainable, a dynamic balance between its four mutually reinforcing and interdependent ‘worlds’ and its ‘center’. In other words, a living social system consists of a: Center: the realm of religion and humanity; South: the realm of nature and community; East: the realm of culture and spirituality; North: the realm of science and technology; West: the realm of finance and enterprise.

"This integral perspective is applicable for all types of social systems, from the individual to the organization, from community to society. On an individual level, for example we are seeking a dynamic balance between heart, spirit, mind, body and soul; or, in other words between our ‘Southern’ being (heart), ‘Eastern’ becoming (spirit), ‘Northern’ thinking (mind), ‘Western’ doing (body) and the inspirational and integrating center (soul). A sustainable ‘integral’ society, to bring another example, would have found dynamic balance between its ‘Southern’ environmental or animate sector encompassing nature and community; its ‘Eastern’ civic sector encompassing culture and spirituality; its ‘Northern’ public sector encompassing governance, science and technology; its private sector encompassing finance and enterprise; and, finally, its moral center, encompassing religion and humanity."

Lessem & Shieffer have a short article called "The practice of transformation" at this link. An excerpt:

"Transformation, not change: Four Premises of Transformation

To summarize our approach to transformation we list the following as our premises:

Premise 1: While change is a part of the process, transformation is not change. We best perceive and address transformation as a process rather than a thing in itself. This flies against conventional change management, which comes from a dominant mechanistic paradigm of change as some­thing that can be switched on or implemented.

Premise 2: The second premise is that transformation is necessarily collabora­tive and relationship-based. No individual entity can engage in transforma­tion. Even at the level of the Self, the process of transformation must involve an engagement with the other that leads to a modification or recombina­tion of the self to produce another form. To “trans-form” is literally that: to go beyond the original form. As we progress we shall go deeper into what the “other” is and we shall be referring to it as the exogenous.

Premise 3: Transformation is a fundamental alteration of the very perspective from which we exist, think, act, and live. Literally it is the creation of a new real­ity in combination with the old one. Therefore, there needs to be a definition of the historical, natural, and cultural perspectives, as well as a process by which the Old can reach out to the politically and economically New.

Premise 4: Finally, our fourth premise is that transformation is an integrative process and follows the evolutionary pattern of moving to greater complexity. Therefore, it necessarily depends upon difference. Logically, integration needs differentiation for it to happen. If all things were the same, there would be no pattern of transformation possible."

And here is an Integral Leadership Review article about two of their books. Russ Volckmann says:

"The connection between their work an leading authors in integral theory and adult development seems to be missing. As a preliminary move I went looking in the index for a few familiar names. For example, Wilber is mentioned once—in the last chapter—where the authors indicate he is doing important work. There is no mention of Bill Torbert, Robert Kegan and other developmentalists, including Graves, Beck or Cowan. No mention of Gebser, either. No reason to keep looking for what is not there. Better to get what is."

This might be a good thing?

Lessem & Schieffer's article "Beyond social and private enterprise: towards the integrated enterprise." Abstract:

"In the past two decades we have witnessed – in conjunction with the rise of civil society – the emergence of social entrepreneurship as a new phenomenon. Such social enterprises have by now established themselves as a new force in societal development. Simultaneously, business and its engagement in society, hitherto termed Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), has become ever more important. However, such CSR and social entrepreneurship remain very separate from each other. Further, both fail to take into account the so-called “hybrid” enterprises emerging. In this article we shall briefly analyse the fertile chaos that such a changing face of enterprise represents, and will argue for the need to transcend such current notions towards a more integrated form of enterprise. We illustrate how such a newly integrated form is better equipped to address the burning issues organisations are facing today, than the old economic-and-social ones in turn."

 

More from BSPE:

"Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus (by way of his own example through his Grameen enterprises in Bangladesh) has promoted a new form of 'social' business as a 'hybrid' between conventional private and social enterprise. For him, both concepts fall short. The private entrepreneur, for Yunus, is deemed to be dedicated to one mission only – the maximization of profit. Yet the reality is very different. People are not one-dimensional. They are multi-dimensional. They have the potential to selfactualize, to realize heightened levels of consciousness. Mainstream free-market theory, for Yunus, suffers from a 'conceptualization failure,' a failure to capture the essence of what it is to be human. It actually ignores higher levels of 'world-centric' consciousness.

"Recently upcoming discourses argue for the emergence of a public form of entrepreneurship via a redefinition of 'public space.' To illustrate this, we introduce the work of Scandinavian Academics Daniel Hjorth and Bjorne Bjeerke. Starting from a conviction that entrepreneurship belongs primarily to society rather than the economy, and that we need to go after life rather than simply business to understand entrepreneurial processes, Hjorth and Bjerke suggest locating entrepreneurship in the public."

Sorry to keep posting but I am highly motivated by this stuff. If you're not interested just ignore it. Hopefully some of  you at least will find the following quite interesting, given some of our previous criticisms of integral capitalism. Continuing from BSPE:

"'Profits with Principles' is Not Enough

"The influential work of Harvard’s Ira Jackson and Jane Nelson on 'Profit with Principles”'(7) reflects the value-based expansion of traditional business towards a more intense engagement with society. There are many other authors who argue, that a new set of values would solve the problems. Consequently, for example, codes of practice (e.g. in Corporate Ethics and Corporate Governance) have emerged worldwide. However, the moral codes provided by such expanded perspectives fail to provide a new structure and functioning of enterprise, nor do they challenge the current economic functioning of society. By ratifying such codes corporations feel that they have done everything to comply with international business standards. A true evolutionary impulse is missing, one which would serve to evolve both the micro-structure and functioning and the macro economy and environment of business" (6).

A timely IL post, if you can access it: The Evolutionary Force of New World Economics

A key was when the other guy, not Salzman, asked something like "what can integral specifically offer besides vague generalities to questions like financial regulation?" Salzman replied in the broadest of generalities, something like "each side of the modern/pomo, conservative/liberal brings partial truths to the table and we must integrate them."

Again no mention of implementing specific solutions which might enact so-called integrallity like we see with Rifkin or some of the above. No real challenge to the partial wrongs of each side, no vision for a new structure. All of which  is a result of the kennilingus meme's incapacity to see more comprehensive 2nd person relations (aka P2P) in the type of intersubjectivty we've been seeing in the likes of Varela and played out in more progressive economic visions and implementations occurring right now and being ignored by kennillinguists due largely to this blind spot in its model.

I will give Salzman credit for acknowledging that universal healthcare is a right. Which of course contradicts his integral impulse to integrate liberal and conservative. Earlier he said conservatives think it's a privilege and liberals think it's a right. He didn't integrate the conservative view on this, he agreed with the liberal view it is a right. Progressive worldviews must replace at least some things from previous worldviews that are, as Harris so aptly put it, not right or left but just plain wrong.

It would be interesting to ask Salzman if he's heard of Rifkin or any of these other folks you've been discussing here, and if he has thoughts on structural change to "embody" the application of an integral economics.

Part of the problem, if not the entirety, is that metatheory is trying to do what it is not capable of doing, at least according to Mark Edwards. He notes in "Where's the method to our integral madness"* that

"Whereas theory is developed from the exploration of empirical events, experiences and 'first-order' concepts, metatheory emerges from the direct investigation of other theory, models and 'second-order' concepts.

"Integral metatheory building is based on the analysis of extant theory and does not deal with empirical data. Consequently, it cannot validly make conclusions about empirical data based on its metatheorising. If it does so, it is stepping outside its realm of authority. To put this in another way, metatheory is primarily about other theory and not about the prediction or evaluation of first-order empirical data."

It simply is not its purview to take on the specifics of empirical situations to find solutions. Hence we see that it can only deal in broad generalities about other theories and methods, how they might or might not relate, how we might or might not integrate some aspects of each. Hence when metatheory applies itself to specific problems or tries to create new methods or structures it seems completely inept. And it doesn't recognize this limitation because per Edwards it doesn't have the self-critical tools to evaluate its own metatheory, which is the ultimate purpose of this article.

* You can find the entire article in JITP 3:2 Summer 2008 at this link.

Edwards notes after the above that it is possible for metatheory and metamethodology to design unit level theory and method that can then be empirically validated, but it needs an exacting method of its own to do so which heretofore has been sorely absent.

Ray Harris had another IW article responding to Steve McIntosh's call for integral world governance. A brief excerpt related to this thread:

"We might even argue that there is a correlation between SD's value hierarchy and political-economic systems.

 

Red Feudal
Blue Stratified state
Orange Capitalist
Green Socialist
Yellow Communist
Turquoise Anarchist

 

I don't mind if this scheme turns out to be wrong. But is it? The thing is that integral philosophy has not yet fully examined the question.

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What paths lie ahead for religion and spirituality in the 21st Century? How might the insights of modernity and post-modernity impact and inform humanity's ancient wisdom traditions? How are we to enact, together, new spiritual visions – independently, or within our respective traditions – that can respond adequately to the challenges of our times?

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