In the book and consulting project sketched in this blog, Otto Laske shows how to facilitate societal transformations by elaborating Margaret Archer’s work on “Structure, Agency, and Internal Conversations” (2003). He thereby extends both Bhaskar’s “The Possibility of Naturalism” (1979) and Archer’s work into dialectical practice. To deepen Archer’s logical approach, Laske introduces adult-developmental and cognitive-developmental foundations of the “internal conversations” that, in Archer’s view, mediate Bhaskar’s structure/agency dialectic, introducing three interrelated dialectics:
- The ontological dialectic of Moments of the real (being) issuing in generative mechanisms as distinct from actualities and experiences (Bhaskar 1979).
- The epistemic dialectic of human thought forms (TFs) operating within individuals’ internal workplace (in contrast to their external workplace), — the mental space in which ‘work’ is done and ‘agency’ is launched (Laske 2008).
- The dialectic of generative mechanisms by which human thought forms (TFs) assume and exert causal power as determinants of needs and reasons based on which agents are in unceasing interaction with each other and thus the real world, natural and social (Laske 2021).
As time elapses, research findings get updated, consolidated, and what was originally left out or stayed unseen is clarified. An example of this historical process is CDF, the Constructive Developmental Framework created by Otto Laske between 1999 and 2000.
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, — a mode of being now rampant that constrains the quality of our life and creative work. For this reason, we are in need of re-socializing ourselves through building up in our mind new ways of listening, speaking, writing, ‘thinking’, reading, communicating, coaching, and facilitating.
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 trade schools and job preparation camps. The factors involved in the re-emergence of me-first education are many, including the pandemic’s destruction of the conventional work world and gains in the social media/AI link. While still acknowledged only half-heartedly as to their importance, these factors together form the springboard from which new self-developmental curricula will emerge. Job and role holders, whose skills’ half-life is shrinking by the day, are gradually realizing that managerially supported schemes of self-development are ploys intent on hindering taking full responsibility for one’s own development in the normative sense of adult development.