Category: Culture Critique

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. Research at the Interdevelopmental Institute (IDM) since 2000, as well as the Institute's teaching practice of “develop yourself first” have made visible the deep interweaving of emotional and intellectual maturity, referred to in its Constructive Developmental Framework (CDF) as the interleaving of social-emotional and cognitive levels of adult development. That... Read More...

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 to topic. They can be downloaded free of charge. Archive IV gathers explanatory as well culture-critical papers on CDF as an empirically grounded epistemology (theory of knowledge), including Wikipedia articles on CDF in English, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese, and comprehensive introductions to CDF for diverse audiences. There are also articles on work design and shared leadership seen from a perspective of CDF, including an article on developmental listening as the crux of using CDF expertly. Learning such listening by itself leads to a revolution of thinking, not only about the social world, but about the 'real world' as well. Wikipedia Articles 2013 English Wikipedia article 2014c Spanisch Wikipedia article on CDF 2016a Italian Wikipedia article 2016n Japanese Wikipedia 構成主義的発達論のフレームワーク Culture Critique 2012 CDF - End of developmental absolutism 2013 On the ethics of process consultation 2016d Human Systems in the Anthropocene 2016j What is everybody... Read More...