In This Issue

The article, “Social Capital and the New Paradigm Thinking” is from a presentation given by Winston Nagan at the Almaty Conference, Kazakhstan last year. In this article, Nagan explains the importance of human capital seen from the perspective of the individual in the global community. The exploration of the foundations of human capital permits the exploration of human capital in terms of social capital. The central issue of social capital is that it reproduces value beyond the limiting frames of cognition of conventional economic theory. Nagan identifies nine fundamental values that are a function of human interaction and involve both the shaping and the sharing of such values in the aggregate. The critical challenge then, for a new paradigm, is the social weight and value that is attached to the nine values represented in the model that it presents.

“Value Creation: The role of values in improving organizational performance” by Leon Miller approaches the problem of social capital from a more conventional economic perspective. Miller argues that there is now an emerging perspective of value theory in economic discourse that sees an important relation between economic and social value. The insights that emerge from this development come from a sub-field, organizational theory and organizational theory stresses the idea of the co-creation of value. This brings at least, partly, a social process component although somewhat limited, to organizational behavior. Essentially, these developments seek to move economic theory from the heartless world of the market to the more empathetic dimension of human relationships. Among the issues recognized are the salience of humanistic psychology and the importance of creating shared value. These developments are highly promising and much of this should be integrated into the new paradigm thinking theory.

In “Saint Catherine and the Free Market System: The (Historic) Roots of the Current Crisis”, Gerald Gutenschwager has provided us with a creative and perhaps novel way to examine the endurance of market reification. He does this in part by looking at the historical memorial that is the legacy of St. Catherine and whether St. Catherine did or did not exist, there exist a store of reified beliefs which have sustained the myths surrounding St. Catherine’s life and death. Gutenschwager is particularly interested in the way in which humanistic impulses in human social process have tended to be divorced from the culture of capitalism. Hence, the market conspires to give a society driven by loneliness, greed and fear. To the extent that market theory is mechanistic in the Newtonian sense it represents values that undermine human capacity for a range of other values that make us truly human. Gutenschwager challenges social science to recognize that we are not only studying society as it is but our very studies are an instrumental act of recreating social process. Painful as this analysis is, it points to the important thinking barriers that undermine the cooperative capacity of human beings and the importance of cooperation in social relations.

Janani Harish has written a thoughtful and insightful piece titled “Challenges and Opportunities.” She explores the notion that the communication of bad news or unhappy events can stimulate good and innovative responses to them and this can happen in multiple spheres of human relations. The editor suspects that this is an implicit gloss on the idea promoted by John Dewey that learning begins with a problem and reflective thinking, stimulated by the problem, generates solutions to the challenge posed by the problem. In short, a crisis necessarily provokes action in the form of problem solving. The article provides useful illustrations of her perspective.

Frederico Mayor in his essay, “Urgent: A New Era, New Solutions” combines realism with an acute sense of grasping those opportunities that move humanity in a constructive direction. As in his earlier essay he is particularly concerned that every opportunity be explored for the universalization of democracy at every level of social organization. Central to the evolution of a democratic global political culture is the importance of the promotion and defense of human rights on a universal basis. Mayor strongly supports the efforts of WAAS and likeminded organizations to actively endorse the critical importance of citizen participation and by implication a recognition of the salience of human capital inherent in this. This essay by Mayor is a powerful expression of the possibilities and the necessities of a new paradigm agenda.

Naomi Klein is a deep thinker who generates profound insights and unsettling contributions to the state of well-being on a planetary basis. Her most recent book, “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate” is reviewed in “What Could Change Everything?” by Michael Marien, who himself has a masterful knowledge of the cascade of literature touching on climate change and its implications for humanity. Klein’s new book takes a frontal look at the implications of the dominant version of capitalism and its effects on climate change. Her position is far reaching and challenging, and indeed unsettling. Her approach in fact lends credence to the assumptions behind the Academy’s new paradigm thinking.