Each of the following views differs substantially in the "reality filters"
or mental models its participants use. These differences include sharp variants in
the following: how reality is defined or assumed, what is the primary purpose of
human existence, how are humans and their relationships defined, how are time and
space viewed, what are characteristic modes of communication, and what are the assumed
ways of categorizing and depicting information stuctures. A source of disturbing
and disruptive aspects of contemporary culture is the simultaneous existence of these
discontinuous views in daily lived experiences. The impact of these simultaneous
views on international business is especially evident. This template is derived from
the instructors research. Several versions of it have been published. Some of these
publications will form a basis for class discussion.
CONTEMPORARY VIEW ONE:MYSTERIA
Living Traditions, Present and Past Symbolic and Material Culture Outside Western
Enlightenment Tradition:
CONTEMPORARY VIEW TWO: SCIENCIA
Modern Western Enlightenment Tradition: (Roots in Greek Rationalism and Realism,
Development in Renaissance, Fruition in Enlightenment Era) Unity and Absolutes Stressed
CONTEMPORARY VIEW THREE:DISSENTIA
Late Modern or Post Modern: Questioning the Absolutes, Universals and Metanarratives
of View Two
CONTEMPORARY VIEW FOUR:AUTOPOESIS
New Paradigm: New or Ancient? Simultaneous Unity and Variety made possible in one
dynamic construct.
CONTEMPORARY VIEW TWO (return to Top)
Modern Western Enlightenment Tradition: (Roots in Greek Rationalism and Realism,
Development in Renaissance, Fruition in Enlightenment Era) Unity and Absolutes Stressed
Rational Predictable Clockwork World (World as Manageable Information)
Known through Observation and Logic
Purpose: Description, Generalization, Prediction and Control
Mechanistic Human as Separate Discrete Entity
Generalization, Averages, Statistical Prediction Sought,
Subjectivity Devalued
Emphasis on Universality, Generalization, Absolutes,
Variability, particularly irregular variability, viewed as problematic
Linear Time
Time divided into regular increments
Increments grouped by style, period, etc.
Myth of Progress
Communication: Linear Text, Recorded Sounds and Visual Images
Categorization and Imagistic Constructs:
Cartesian Grid-Implied Hierarchy, Mutual Exclusivity
Realist Assumptions of one-to-one correspondence of model with objective reality.
Reductionism:
Examination of Smallest Parts Assumed to Reveal Information Necessary to Understand
the Whole
This perspective is the dominant information organizer in everyday experience within
Western Industrialized Cultures.
Underlying this view is an assumption that a model can match in an objective one
to one manner the real. It is this assumption that characterizes much of our symbolic
culture, including paper based information systems.
Consider the grid as underlying the following: clock and calender time, mapped coordinates
(space), xy and xyz coordinates of graphic pictorial representation, the outline
format that underlies standard
textual prose, the design of library referencing systems, biological taxonomies,
division and subdivisions of disciplines in universities, organizational pattern
ofcorporate and public staffing and the design of conventional digital computing
systems. The terms componentiality, replicability, uniformity, universality, objectivity
and reductionism are frequently associated with this view.
Known through Observation of Breakdowns in Modern Paradigm
Purpose: Liberation from Universalized World View and Concomitant Human Consequences of Questioning Expert Authority, Dominant Cultural Traditions, Realist Assumptions
Human Unique, Alienated, No Generalization or Universality Possible
Fractured and Reassembled Grid of Time and Space
Communication: Multimedia, Electronic Pastiche, Appropriated Sounds and Images, Networks,
Cyberspace
Categorization & Imagistic Constructs: Free Key Words, Random Access, Relative
Logical Construction (Boolean), Non-Hierarchical Network
This perspective is known for its questioning of all cultural absolutes and metanarratives.
Focus is on representation, legitimation and reproduction of information. Examples
of a postmodern postcolonial perspective follow
What we tend label as mythological constructs representing alternative reality structures
outside our normal way of categorization also characterize other time periods as
well as other cultures. Young in White Mythology: Writing History (p.7)and the West
cites Derrida as stating:
Metaphysics - the white mythology which reassembles and reflects the culture of the
West: the white man takes his own mythology, Indo-European mythology, his own
logos, that is, the mythos of his idiom for the universal form of that
he must still wish to call Reason. (Jacques Derrida, White Mythology (1971), in
Margins-of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicaco: Chicago University Prss, 1982,
p.213)
Toynbee assumed that paradoxically the globalization ofWestern civilization was being
accompanied by a self-consciousness of its own cultural relativism. White writes
of Toynbee,
he recounts that his history was written ëagainst a current Late Modern Western convention
of identifying a parvenue and provincial WAestern Societyís history with ëHistoryí,
writ large,sans phrase. In the writers viewa this convention was the preposterous
off-spring of a distorting egocentric illusion to which the children of a Western
Civilization had succombed like the children of all other known civilizatins and
known primitive societies.í
Postmodernism, therefore, becomes a certain self consciousness about a cultureís
own historical relativity - which begins to explain why, as its critics complain,
it also involves the loss of he sense of an absoluteness of any Western account of
History.
In Of Grammatology Derrida focuses on logocentrismís ethnocentrism which he
suggests is ìnothing but the most original and powerful ethnocentrism in the process
of imposing itself upon the world.î(Derrida, White p.18)
From this perspectives all forms of symbolic and material culture may be interrogated
as expressions of reality constructs. For example, maps, graphic and pictorial representations,
categorization schemes, social organizations and many other aspects of symbolic and
material culture design reflect underlying reality constructs.
Known through Observation & Creation of Systemic Models and Simulations
Purpose: Generation of Organic Process-Oriented View of Natural World with Human as Integral Part
Human Phenomena may be Modeled but not Predicted
Time and Space Indivisible (Bell's Nonlocality)
Simultaneous Unity and Diversity, Simplicity and Complexity
Communication: Networks, Cyberspace, Cooperative Group Systems,
Unmediated many to many communication possible.
Intelligent agents evolving and participating.
Categorization & Imagistic Construct: Dynamic Computer Graphic Information Systems,
Simultaneously Regular and Undetermined,
Fractals, Chaos, Strange Attractors