Strategy and Entrepreneurship

This paper explores the spectrum of inquiry lines pertaining to the theory of higher education arising from the joint and separate consideration of Bhaskar’s Critical Realism, Morin’s Complex Thought, and Wilber’s Integral Theory. It reviews the major interests of these educational discourses, and explores connections between the three meta-discourses in order to identify a transversal conceptual map in which the three may be adequately positioned without undue reductionism. This process reveals the ways in which these approaches complement one another by responding to each other’s perceived weaknesses while exposing possible theoretical lacunae that exist in the spaces between these perspectives.

The worldview from which climate change continues to occur can be identified as late modernism. There is a clear requirement for a radical transformation of this worldview toward one substantively more able to meet the challenges that climate change presents, as well as an understanding of the processes which facilitate such a transformation. This paper foregrounds transformative learning as a generic process that might well be key to this transformation. The paper addresses transformative learning both as an active process and as a feature of a regenerated worldview. “Worldview” is heuristically unpacked with respect to perspectives, principles, and practice. Perspectives are linked to transforming competencies and capacities; principles to transforming science; and practice to the regeneration of two major societal domains, namely, higher education and economics. The general orientation is framed using the “depth” methodologies of Scharmer’s U Theory and Inayatullah’s Causal Layered Analysis. From these, Mezirow’s seminal conception of transformative learning is brought into relationship with a range of like-minded (and like-hearted) understandings. The paper identifies a critique of late modernism as being unduly economistic, reductive, mechanistic, and atomistic; conversely, it indicates the prospective adequacy of a reconstructive postmodern worldview involving a creative, normative, complex, integrative paradigm, one which synergies with ecological economics. Discussion of this macro-orientation is complemented by detailed descriptions of transformative learning in practice – in various higher education and societal (e.g. cross-sectoral) contexts. This big picture mode of engagement aims to connect the incisiveness of transformative theory to the “messy” details of transformative practice.

This paper explores the role of strategic foresight on the African continent through an examination of the Southern African Node of the Millennium Project Foresight for Development website. The paper begins with a critical examination of the site as it presently exists through seeking to understand the systems, worldviews, and images which underlie its design; thereafter we will explore possible alternative futures for this website stemming from an integrative transformative vision for a renewed Africa. As such, the narrative we will weave here has a fractal quality, the FFD platform serves as a focal point, but when we zoom in we can tap into a broader narrative surrounding Africa and the world's understandings of the roles of Africa in the present and future. This is a bold statement to make. It seems that we have taken on a big task in this paper: attempting to understand the present and future of the FFD platform entails -in many senses -recounting the foundations (ontological, epistemological, and axiological) which underpin core narratives about Africa. Telling this story requires an incredible breadth of inquiry, but how can this be achieved with sufficient detail and precision to satisfy the apparent requirements of academic convention and the analytical mind? Our answer has been to provide allowance for layered expression that playfully engages the dialectic of precision vagueness in service of narrative expression which is initiatory, exploratory, indicatory, and integrative in character. Our approach, which is deeply rooted in the scholarship of integration (Boyer, 1990) and a transdisciplinary approach , intentionally invites the reader to engage with the subject in deep translational ways, as a result loose clustering of ideas and a certain degree of fuzzy logic (Kosko, 1994) seem appropriate.