In this article, Otto Laske emphasizes the lack of a social ontology in present managerial and consultative thinking. Such a discipline helps social and cultural actors understand the antecedent social and cultural structures their concerns and projects are embedded in, as well as strengthen the likelihood that executing their projects will come as close as… [Read More]
Workshops
Steps Toward Developing a Dialectical Thinking Practice: The Structure of the IDM Dialectics Practicum
The way we encounter the world is anchored in our ways of attending to it. They not only change the relationship we have to the world we unceasingly construct; they also fundamentally determine the world we encounter. Thinking in language when untutored in dialectical linking puts us under the control of left-hemisphere, logical, thinking, —… [Read More]
From “Organizational Development” to Self-Development: An Insiders’ View of the IDM Dialectical Thinking Practicum
Self-development, in capitalistic society a mere appendix of professional education for the sake of playing an organizational role, is increasingly making a comeback as a personal goal. This come-back seemed out of the question until recently, being an outcome of attempts to consciously reverse the demise of liberal education by which universities reduced themselves to… [Read More]
An Intense Five-Month Practicum in Dialectical Thinking
Increasingly, the issues on which the survival of our civilization depends are ‘wicked’ in the sense of being more complex than logical thinking alone can make sense of and deal with. Needed is not only systemic and holistic but dialectical thinking to achieve critical realism. Dialectical thinking has a long tradition both in Western and… [Read More]
Applying Bhaskar’s Four Moments of Dialectic to Reshaping Cognitive Development as a Social Practice using Laske’s Dialectical Thought Form Framework (DTF)
In this chapter for volume 2 of Meta-Theory dedicated to the memory of Bhaskar, delayed in its publication since 2014 and forthcoming at Routledge at the end of 2020, I outline a dialectical epistemology and CDF teaching method for absorbing Bhaskar’s legacy into integral thinking. I do so since both are presently absent from the… [Read More]
Laske Social Science Archive, Section VI: German Writings (2004-2019), Texts and Slides
The Laske Social Science Archive gathers Otto Laske’s writings on organizations written between 1999 and 2019, many of which have retained their value vis a vis new fashions of management thinking. Its sections are numbered chronologically. The Archive makes available both texts and slides, the latter for pedagogical purposes. The articles gathered are bundled according… [Read More]