PurposeTo explore how selected principles of Chinese philosophy and complexity theory can be synt... more PurposeTo explore how selected principles of Chinese philosophy and complexity theory can be synthesized into a model for human and organizational behavior that is more accurate and appropriate to global markets than either traditional eastern or western models.Design/methodology/approachThe paper presents a model of human and organizational behavior based on similarities between elements of Chinese philosophy and complexity theory.FindingsSeveral of the respective principles of Chinese philosophy and complexity theory – the Chinese transformational cycle and complexity's cycle of attractors, for instance – are strikingly similar, suggesting that their commonalities are universals of human experience resting underneath their surface differences. By playing those similar principles off against each other, one can develop a model of human and organizational behavior that transcends both east and west, a model highly valuable to business people operating in global markets.Practical implicationsThis model provides a new way for both eastern and western business people to think about their organizations and markets that seems highly accurate to current conditions.Originality/valueThis is the first paper to explore a possible synthesis of strikingly similar principles from Chinese philosophy and complexity theory and how such a synthesis could be applied as a model of human and organizational behavior.
The computer as a research instrument provides us with a new way of seeing reality, and the archi... more The computer as a research instrument provides us with a new way of seeing reality, and the architectonic of the sciences must change accordingly.-Heinz Pagels, The Dreams of Reason Process vs. mechanism The Newtonian worldview, the "master paradigm of Western civilization" 10 , and the emerging processual worldview both reflect the human need to model the world in a symbolically coherent way. 11 , 12 , 13 Such a model provides order and meaning in societies by answering a series of critical questions: What is the origin of the world? What are our responsibilities to what Hayden calls the "powerful forces that permeate things but cannot ordinarily be seen" 14-those that cause birth and death, abundance and disaster? How should we determine the meaning of events and behaviors? How should people interpret and respond to the behavior of others both in the group and outside it? In Western Europe, the Newtonian model replaced the Christian model of the Middle Ages. The older model viewed the world as illogical and unknowable, created and existing not in accordance with any regular laws but solely on God's arbitrariness; as a result, people had to rely on the authority of the Church and State. The new model replaced it with a knowable world, which people could understand with Science, a world where selforganization makes sense.
Foreword Ken Baskin offers us a wonderful opportunity: to explore the implications of living syst... more Foreword Ken Baskin offers us a wonderful opportunity: to explore the implications of living systems for the design and management of organizations in turbulent times. He presents a rich illustration of how we can learn from nature to create organizations that will adapt and evolve with ...
Life is a raucous carnival, full of "games" and "rides" whose ongoing interactions continually su... more Life is a raucous carnival, full of "games" and "rides" whose ongoing interactions continually surprise us. Yet thinkers are too often tempted to treat it as a machine that spits out linear time lines of events, one leading deterministically to another. By its interdisciplinary nature, big history is inclined to treat the world as a carnival; yet the temptation to treat it in the more linear way sometimes prevails. This essay treats one key dynamic that governs life's carnival-the principle of emergence. Emergence is the process by which a relatively simple entity interacts with its environment to become structurally complex, often in ways that seem impossible to anticipate. In this way, a seed becomes a fruit tree, a small community becomes a vast city, or a shamanic religion in a hunter-gatherer band evolves into a system of belief and practice shared by a billion people. By defining emergence and exploring religion as an extended illustration, this paper makes the case for more fully incorporating the principle of emergence into the study of big history.
A Review of Complexity in World Politics: Concepts and Methods of a New Paradigm written by Neil ... more A Review of Complexity in World Politics: Concepts and Methods of a New Paradigm written by Neil E. Harrison reviewed by Ken Baskin published by State University of New York Press ISBN 9780791468074 (2006) Back in the fall of 2000, I made a presentation at a RAND Corp. workshop, Complex Systems &. Public Analysis: New Tools for a New Millennium. About half way through the second day, during a discussion of agent-based modeling of social systems, the person sitting next to me said, "These people realize what they've got their hands on. Most of them just want to slap some complexity tools on their old way of thinking." At the time, I agreed with her. But in the years since then, I realized what a long jump incorporating complexity into one's thinking really is. (I'd call it a "jump of attractors," if I wasn't so sure some of my readers would object.) Applying complexity to social systems, it seems to me, isn't a "theory"; nor can one apply it as a turn-key system for understanding human interactions. Rather, it works best for me as a comprehensive way of thinking, very nearly an epistemology, which resembles Chinese philosophy- with its deep sense of interconnection and causality as a product of the entire system - more than the analytically accessible linear causality of traditional Western science. Intellectually speaking, that's a long journey, and I sympathize with newcomers to complexity thinking, who are still at the beginning. Even so, I sometimes miss the I-knowsomething-you-don't-know feeling I had at the RAND workshop. And I was surprised to recapture it as I began reading Complexity in World Politics: Concepts and Methods of a New Paradigm. Even the title reminded me of that workshop. By the time I put it down, however, I'd realized how much things have changed in just a few years. To my surprise, this book examines intelligently how some of the tools of complexity science can (and cannot) be used to study world politics. True, none of the contributors has internalized complexity thinking to the point where they've become conscious that it can function very nearly as an epistemology. Still, if for nothing else, the book is a fascinating study in how much the way people are thinking today has changed, and how much closer to a complexity perspective even those new to its study are getting. Editor Neil H. Harrison began from the assumption that both study and practice of "world politics has for too long been distorted by [the theory of] rational choice" and that complexity theory presents an attractive alterative. Complexity, he tells us in the book's first essay, "Thinking about the World We Make," "views politics as emerging from interactions among interdependent individual agents within evolving institutional formations." In this essay, he discusses several principles of complexity as a way of approaching the study of politics. And while I may argue with some of his points - his use of the concept of "simple rules," for instance (more about that later) -by and large, Harrison has incorporated complexity thinking to a high degree. So in discussing causality, he explains that the student of complex systems "should look to the evolution of the system, not to individual events." Impressive stuff. Not all the essays are equally impressive. For instance, in "Complexity and Conflict Resolution," Dennis J.D. Sandole seems too intent on attacking traditional Realpolitik to stay true to the principles of complexity. …
The present volume is the fifth in the series of yearbooks with the title Globalistics andGlobali... more The present volume is the fifth in the series of yearbooks with the title Globalistics andGlobalization Studies. The subtitle of the present volume is Global Transformations and GlobalFuture. We become more and more accustomed to think globally and to see global processes. Andour future can all means be global. However, is this statement justified? Indeed, in recent years,many have begun to claim that globalization has stalled, that we are rather dealing with theprocess of anti-globalization. Will not we find ourselves at some point again in an edificespanning across the globe, but divided into national apartments, separated by walls of high tariffsand mutual suspicion? Of course, some setbacks are always possible, because the process ofglobalization cannot develop smoothly. It is a process which is itself emerging fromcontradictions and is shaped by a new contradiction. They often go much further than underlyingsystemic changes allow. They break forward, as the vanguard of a victor...
According to the working definition of the International Big History Association, 'Big Histor... more According to the working definition of the International Big History Association, 'Big History seeks to understand the integrated history of the Cosmos, Earth, Life and Humanity, using the best available empirical evidence and scholarly methods'. In recent years Big History has been developing very fast indeed. Big History courses are taught in the schools and universities of several dozen countries. Hundreds of researchers are involved in studying and teaching Big History. The unique approach of Big History, the interdisciplinary genre of history that deals with the grand narrative of 13.8 billion years, has opened up a vast amount of research agendas. Big History brings together constantly updated information from the scientific disciplines and merges it with the contemplative realms of philosophy and the humanities. It also provides a connection between the past, present, and future. Big History is a colossal and extremely heterogeneous field of research encompassing all ...
A REVIEW OF THEODORE TAPTIKLIS'S Unmanaging: Opening Up The Organization To Its Own Unspoken ... more A REVIEW OF THEODORE TAPTIKLIS'S Unmanaging: Opening Up The Organization To Its Own Unspoken Knowledge 2008 Palgrave MacMillan ISBN 9780230573529A couple of years ago, David Boje and I started using the term "post-Newtonian" to refer to the worldview that has been emerging from many of the scientific breakthroughs of the 20th Century, most notably quantum mechanics, neurobiology, and complexity sciences (Boje & Baskin, 2010). Rather than the Newtonian deterministic world of distinct things, composed of "dead" matter, bumping into each other and behaving deterministically according to Universal Laws, the post-Newtonian world is one in which coherent energy storage phenomena interconnected at many levels of scale, respond to each other, causing systemic cascades of co-evolutionary change. Nobel Laureate in Physics Robert Laughlin (2005) has written about this as an "Emergent," as opposed to the Newtonian "Reductionist," worldview.What I'...
By the middle of the seventeenth century, Western Europe was exhausted from more than a century o... more By the middle of the seventeenth century, Western Europe was exhausted from more than a century of religious wars, as well as the collapse of the feudal system. As a result, this society needed a new way of understanding and experiencing the world. That need would produce the image of the universe as a machine made of passive matter that could be re-engineered by the main source of free will in the universe, the human mind. Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum would become the playbook by which Western Modernity would attack this task in order to build a stable, peaceful society. And Western Modernity would realize much of Bacon’s vision, replacing religion as the source of society’s shared way of understanding the world with science. In doing so, this society created a series of new social institutions, the most important of which are Western science, the nation-state, and capitalism. By examining how these social institutions evolved, it becomes clear that, in spite of theirs many succes...
PurposeTo explore how selected principles of Chinese philosophy and complexity theory can be synt... more PurposeTo explore how selected principles of Chinese philosophy and complexity theory can be synthesized into a model for human and organizational behavior that is more accurate and appropriate to global markets than either traditional eastern or western models.Design/methodology/approachThe paper presents a model of human and organizational behavior based on similarities between elements of Chinese philosophy and complexity theory.FindingsSeveral of the respective principles of Chinese philosophy and complexity theory – the Chinese transformational cycle and complexity's cycle of attractors, for instance – are strikingly similar, suggesting that their commonalities are universals of human experience resting underneath their surface differences. By playing those similar principles off against each other, one can develop a model of human and organizational behavior that transcends both east and west, a model highly valuable to business people operating in global markets.Practical implicationsThis model provides a new way for both eastern and western business people to think about their organizations and markets that seems highly accurate to current conditions.Originality/valueThis is the first paper to explore a possible synthesis of strikingly similar principles from Chinese philosophy and complexity theory and how such a synthesis could be applied as a model of human and organizational behavior.
The computer as a research instrument provides us with a new way of seeing reality, and the archi... more The computer as a research instrument provides us with a new way of seeing reality, and the architectonic of the sciences must change accordingly.-Heinz Pagels, The Dreams of Reason Process vs. mechanism The Newtonian worldview, the "master paradigm of Western civilization" 10 , and the emerging processual worldview both reflect the human need to model the world in a symbolically coherent way. 11 , 12 , 13 Such a model provides order and meaning in societies by answering a series of critical questions: What is the origin of the world? What are our responsibilities to what Hayden calls the "powerful forces that permeate things but cannot ordinarily be seen" 14-those that cause birth and death, abundance and disaster? How should we determine the meaning of events and behaviors? How should people interpret and respond to the behavior of others both in the group and outside it? In Western Europe, the Newtonian model replaced the Christian model of the Middle Ages. The older model viewed the world as illogical and unknowable, created and existing not in accordance with any regular laws but solely on God's arbitrariness; as a result, people had to rely on the authority of the Church and State. The new model replaced it with a knowable world, which people could understand with Science, a world where selforganization makes sense.
Foreword Ken Baskin offers us a wonderful opportunity: to explore the implications of living syst... more Foreword Ken Baskin offers us a wonderful opportunity: to explore the implications of living systems for the design and management of organizations in turbulent times. He presents a rich illustration of how we can learn from nature to create organizations that will adapt and evolve with ...
Life is a raucous carnival, full of "games" and "rides" whose ongoing interactions continually su... more Life is a raucous carnival, full of "games" and "rides" whose ongoing interactions continually surprise us. Yet thinkers are too often tempted to treat it as a machine that spits out linear time lines of events, one leading deterministically to another. By its interdisciplinary nature, big history is inclined to treat the world as a carnival; yet the temptation to treat it in the more linear way sometimes prevails. This essay treats one key dynamic that governs life's carnival-the principle of emergence. Emergence is the process by which a relatively simple entity interacts with its environment to become structurally complex, often in ways that seem impossible to anticipate. In this way, a seed becomes a fruit tree, a small community becomes a vast city, or a shamanic religion in a hunter-gatherer band evolves into a system of belief and practice shared by a billion people. By defining emergence and exploring religion as an extended illustration, this paper makes the case for more fully incorporating the principle of emergence into the study of big history.
A Review of Complexity in World Politics: Concepts and Methods of a New Paradigm written by Neil ... more A Review of Complexity in World Politics: Concepts and Methods of a New Paradigm written by Neil E. Harrison reviewed by Ken Baskin published by State University of New York Press ISBN 9780791468074 (2006) Back in the fall of 2000, I made a presentation at a RAND Corp. workshop, Complex Systems &. Public Analysis: New Tools for a New Millennium. About half way through the second day, during a discussion of agent-based modeling of social systems, the person sitting next to me said, "These people realize what they've got their hands on. Most of them just want to slap some complexity tools on their old way of thinking." At the time, I agreed with her. But in the years since then, I realized what a long jump incorporating complexity into one's thinking really is. (I'd call it a "jump of attractors," if I wasn't so sure some of my readers would object.) Applying complexity to social systems, it seems to me, isn't a "theory"; nor can one apply it as a turn-key system for understanding human interactions. Rather, it works best for me as a comprehensive way of thinking, very nearly an epistemology, which resembles Chinese philosophy- with its deep sense of interconnection and causality as a product of the entire system - more than the analytically accessible linear causality of traditional Western science. Intellectually speaking, that's a long journey, and I sympathize with newcomers to complexity thinking, who are still at the beginning. Even so, I sometimes miss the I-knowsomething-you-don't-know feeling I had at the RAND workshop. And I was surprised to recapture it as I began reading Complexity in World Politics: Concepts and Methods of a New Paradigm. Even the title reminded me of that workshop. By the time I put it down, however, I'd realized how much things have changed in just a few years. To my surprise, this book examines intelligently how some of the tools of complexity science can (and cannot) be used to study world politics. True, none of the contributors has internalized complexity thinking to the point where they've become conscious that it can function very nearly as an epistemology. Still, if for nothing else, the book is a fascinating study in how much the way people are thinking today has changed, and how much closer to a complexity perspective even those new to its study are getting. Editor Neil H. Harrison began from the assumption that both study and practice of "world politics has for too long been distorted by [the theory of] rational choice" and that complexity theory presents an attractive alterative. Complexity, he tells us in the book's first essay, "Thinking about the World We Make," "views politics as emerging from interactions among interdependent individual agents within evolving institutional formations." In this essay, he discusses several principles of complexity as a way of approaching the study of politics. And while I may argue with some of his points - his use of the concept of "simple rules," for instance (more about that later) -by and large, Harrison has incorporated complexity thinking to a high degree. So in discussing causality, he explains that the student of complex systems "should look to the evolution of the system, not to individual events." Impressive stuff. Not all the essays are equally impressive. For instance, in "Complexity and Conflict Resolution," Dennis J.D. Sandole seems too intent on attacking traditional Realpolitik to stay true to the principles of complexity. …
The present volume is the fifth in the series of yearbooks with the title Globalistics andGlobali... more The present volume is the fifth in the series of yearbooks with the title Globalistics andGlobalization Studies. The subtitle of the present volume is Global Transformations and GlobalFuture. We become more and more accustomed to think globally and to see global processes. Andour future can all means be global. However, is this statement justified? Indeed, in recent years,many have begun to claim that globalization has stalled, that we are rather dealing with theprocess of anti-globalization. Will not we find ourselves at some point again in an edificespanning across the globe, but divided into national apartments, separated by walls of high tariffsand mutual suspicion? Of course, some setbacks are always possible, because the process ofglobalization cannot develop smoothly. It is a process which is itself emerging fromcontradictions and is shaped by a new contradiction. They often go much further than underlyingsystemic changes allow. They break forward, as the vanguard of a victor...
According to the working definition of the International Big History Association, 'Big Histor... more According to the working definition of the International Big History Association, 'Big History seeks to understand the integrated history of the Cosmos, Earth, Life and Humanity, using the best available empirical evidence and scholarly methods'. In recent years Big History has been developing very fast indeed. Big History courses are taught in the schools and universities of several dozen countries. Hundreds of researchers are involved in studying and teaching Big History. The unique approach of Big History, the interdisciplinary genre of history that deals with the grand narrative of 13.8 billion years, has opened up a vast amount of research agendas. Big History brings together constantly updated information from the scientific disciplines and merges it with the contemplative realms of philosophy and the humanities. It also provides a connection between the past, present, and future. Big History is a colossal and extremely heterogeneous field of research encompassing all ...
A REVIEW OF THEODORE TAPTIKLIS'S Unmanaging: Opening Up The Organization To Its Own Unspoken ... more A REVIEW OF THEODORE TAPTIKLIS'S Unmanaging: Opening Up The Organization To Its Own Unspoken Knowledge 2008 Palgrave MacMillan ISBN 9780230573529A couple of years ago, David Boje and I started using the term "post-Newtonian" to refer to the worldview that has been emerging from many of the scientific breakthroughs of the 20th Century, most notably quantum mechanics, neurobiology, and complexity sciences (Boje & Baskin, 2010). Rather than the Newtonian deterministic world of distinct things, composed of "dead" matter, bumping into each other and behaving deterministically according to Universal Laws, the post-Newtonian world is one in which coherent energy storage phenomena interconnected at many levels of scale, respond to each other, causing systemic cascades of co-evolutionary change. Nobel Laureate in Physics Robert Laughlin (2005) has written about this as an "Emergent," as opposed to the Newtonian "Reductionist," worldview.What I'...
By the middle of the seventeenth century, Western Europe was exhausted from more than a century o... more By the middle of the seventeenth century, Western Europe was exhausted from more than a century of religious wars, as well as the collapse of the feudal system. As a result, this society needed a new way of understanding and experiencing the world. That need would produce the image of the universe as a machine made of passive matter that could be re-engineered by the main source of free will in the universe, the human mind. Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum would become the playbook by which Western Modernity would attack this task in order to build a stable, peaceful society. And Western Modernity would realize much of Bacon’s vision, replacing religion as the source of society’s shared way of understanding the world with science. In doing so, this society created a series of new social institutions, the most important of which are Western science, the nation-state, and capitalism. By examining how these social institutions evolved, it becomes clear that, in spite of theirs many succes...
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