Sapienexus
This blog is dedicated to the pursuit of wisdom in the 21st Century. Historic excavation, cross-cultural meanderings, and multidisciplinary methodologies guide these inquiries.
Sunday, May 1, 2016
Liberating Contemplative Play
As the springtime warms up Seattle, ever more invitations to the outdoors have awaited my daughter. Her mother now also gets to appreciate the chances to explore, play, contemplate, and enjoy being outside and connected with the natural world. A gift of these times arises in a liberation to simply BE in existence and relationship with our humble, ordinary surroundings. With intoxicating intimacy to the front yard bushes, I clasp her to my breast as she explores the tactile sensations and floral aromas of the leaves and flowers within her reach. Or, we sit together by the simple metal fence and appreciate the tiny rosemary and sage plants just planted by her grandmother. I pet the grass and watch her small nimble fingers retrieve pieces of foliage from the ground cover. The sparseness of grass in the wilderness of diverse, well-trimmed weeds delights me and I revel in the lazy refusal of monoculture the surface of our yard expresses. I gaze into outer space intermittently sharing her inner space. These delicate moments would be impossible for me without motherhood.
Thursday, March 24, 2016
The Case Against Consumer Social Responsibility
For years prior to becoming a mother, I had advocated for consumer social responsibility. It is only just recently that I realize how duped I had been by the logic undergirding neoliberal economics. An academic puppet in the scheme to colonize the public sphere with market ethos, I argued relentlessly for multi-stakeholder responsibility for ethical lapses and injustices perpetrated under the name of business corporations.
In what follows I hereby offer my repentance.
In what follows I hereby offer my repentance.
Aphorism One
Intense caregiving sometimes feels like a sort of hazing for acceptance into this sorority/fraternity called Humanity.
Monday, February 1, 2016
Gender Construction
Becoming a mother has been doing wonders for the depth of my appreciation for the degree and mechanisms of gender construction in the societies to which I belong. Aside from clothes, dolls, toys, decor, and the usual accoutrements of early human life in advanced capitalist societies, I want to explore how the Boy/Girl bifurcation operates in the minds of caregivers. What freedoms, powers, opportunities, and circumscriptions open, close, expand or restrict our choices?
Interrogating Whiteness
White people should learn to interrogate our whiteness: not just how privilege operates, but also how whiteness masks one's own culpability in oppression. Part of the nature of constructed whiteness is to conceal itself from itself. Simultaneously, whiteness pretends to view, represent, analyze, and empathize with what is nonwhite. This subjectivity presumes to see and know its object, without making itself an object. Such is the veil of power thinly woven like a near invisible, yet taught and sticky, spider's web. This web also entraps its weaver and must be undone. But, she often fails to see it.
The idea of white tends to connote an absence of ethnicity, despite the pride so many whites take in our varied European ancestries. The obvious examples of this assumption of blankness appear in grocery stores, travel guides, and haircare departments of pharmacies. White and European do not equate. It is important to disassociate race from ethnicity before deepening any self-interrogation of one's whiteness.
The smug superiority that inhabits the consciousness of an internalized "right" to domination characterizes the psyche of entitlement. Rights discourse sometimes defines a right as an entitlement, and such justice theories would not regard the notion of entitlement as an inherently problematic status. When we complain these days about people being "entitled" the underlying indignation seems to be targeted against unjust entitlement. A similar argument may be made about the notion of privilege. When we add the adjective white to the front of entitlement or privilege, a race theory rubric surrounds these terms to expose the injustice of those positionalities. Ironically, whites still do often feel unconsciously entitled about our privileges, and resistant to acknowledging any injustice in the advantages accrued at personal levels. Our roles in the system of oppression have become internalized.
Acknowledgment of such internalization often shows up in the symptoms of resistance, denial, avoidance, belligerence, and bellicose attention mongering. For the earnest white liberal, a typical emotional response arises in the forms of fear, anxiety or dread. Thanks to the Existentialists, we have learned that such abysmal openings in conscious can shift and transform a horizon of being. Let us mine these existential opportunities for awakening.
Saturday, January 23, 2016
Toward
a New Market Ethos
It
is commonplace for large corporations to retain ethics officers, engage in
social and environmental works such as corporate philanthropy, and advertise
and publish socially responsible deeds in glossy corporate citizenship,
corporate social responsibility, and sustainability reports. Yet, it is
questionable whether and to what degree voluntarily assumed responsibilities on
the parts of businesspeople can either rectify wrongs wrought through business
or leverage business with ethical efficacy for the sake of a greater good.
Additionally, disputes about the nature, import, value, and justice of the
political-economic terrain in which business operates both influence one’s view
about if/how business is to solve problems and reveal more fundamental
questions about ethics, markets, and society. What is the essence of a market,
what must and can it include, and what is its ultimate purpose? What market
ethos fosters a good society?
Let
us begin by considering key historical trends antecedent to these questions within
the Western context primarily responsible for developing, articulating,
advocating, and disseminating the practice and ideology of a free enterprise
system. In so doing, we gain a better understanding of the origins and nature
of today’s prevailing market ethos, savor a flavor for the possible, and draw
inspiration for envisioning trajectories into the future. We will then consider
how ideologies from both the right and the left tend to view the relationship
between ethics and wealth in business. Finally, we will observe how current
trends point us toward new conceptions of markets and expand the horizons for a
political economy of the future.
Shifting
views on the purpose of markets and the role of ethics
Historically
and cross-culturally, the market has been regarded as a subset of the larger
society. For example, in Ancient Athens, economics, oikonomia, which designated the art of household management, and
all activities we would today regard as business (artisanship, trade, and
retail) occupied a low, albeit necessary, function within the broader and more
dignified sphere of the polis, or
city state.[i] Politics
encompassed economics. Today, the inverse relationship predominates globally.
The state increasingly has become subsumed by the market, and business values
animate the discourse on justice. One might even say that business or economic
considerations have co-opted other values, as when democracy gets reduced to
“voting with one’s dollars”, college students become “customers”, and the very term
value itself comes to refer strictly to monetary return. In the end, wealth and
power overtake justice, shallow consumer satisfaction trumps equity or
fairness, and efficiency preempts morality. It is within this context that we
pose questions about market ethos.
In
The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam
Smith argued that certain values were necessary to maintain a flourishing
society. Selfishness alone would not guarantee a well-functioning and desirable
society.[ii] The
19th century industrialists, most notably Andrew Carnegie, championed personal
moral character and rugged individualism as the chief moral animators of a
productive capitalism.[iii]
Personal responsibility laid the bedrock of a prosperous society. Before
business ethics became a popular discipline, ethics in business meant following
the law, refraining from fraud and deception, respecting property rights,
dealing honestly, keeping one’s promises, paying one’s debts, etc. Philanthropy
and charity were duties of the individual, whose moral convictions were
expected to remain restricted to private affairs.[iv]
In business, one bore a responsibility to work hard, steward resources wisely,
and think sagaciously toward the future.
In
time, the discourse on ethics in business grew concerned with the social and
environmental responsibilities of businesses, the role of business as a social
institution, the obligations of the corporate person, and ultimately with the
institutional agency and power of business corporations. Advocates of corporate
citizenship came to demand that business as a social institution bear
obligations to society akin to the obligations the individual citizen owes to
society. Just as human persons should be good citizens, so also should corporate
persons. This notion evolved into a conception of corporate citizenship that regards
corporations as akin to nation states[v],
critically referred to as corporate states.[vi]
Business
Ethics, once an academic trespass of philosophy into business, has now grown
into an enormous business, with its concerns and inquiries appearing
prominently in media outlets. The globalization of markets and expansion of
information, communication, and travel technologies have served as primary
drivers for the intellectual and commercial demand for business ethics, as the
weakening of state governance globally has enabled businesses to externalize
costs in the form of human rights violations, social/cultural erosion, and
environmental degradation. Meanwhile, technological innovations and their
democratizing implications have bolstered the capacity of people to expose such
misdeeds and hold these businesses accountable through courts of public
opinion. Where one stands along the political spectrum tends to influence the framing
of such issues. Poor behavior by businesses has been attributed to a variety of
problems, ranging from greed, the inevitability of markets and the necessity of
sacrifice for progress on one side to the inherent flaws of globalization,
capitalism, and corporate power on the other side. Business ethics as a field
has sought to redress all of these problems through theories, mechanisms, and
incentives for holding businesses to higher standards of comportment for the
betterment of all.
Business
ethics at the nexus of the left-right divide
Certain
intellectual lineages descending from classical economics give credence to
corporate social responsibility, citizenship, and sustainability practices. The
notion that ethics and economic prosperity mutually reinforce one another
echoes commonly in the quip that one can “do well by doing good,” implying that
good ethical behavior pays in business. However, ethical behavior does not
necessarily translate into wealth, especially in the context of a ruthlessly
competitive marketplace. Consider the bankruptcies or travails of your favorite
Main Street business devoured by big box competitors. Doing good might
sometimes, but certainly not always lead to doing well. Clearly, non-profits
that aim to do good, often struggle to stay afloat. The same challenge applies
to businesses that aim to align ethical commitments with the wealth creating
function of business. While good ethics can pay for itself over time due to the
cultivation of good will, trust, and loyalty among many stakeholders (including
regulators), such businesses must still compete in a global marketplace against
others operating with less noble aspirations.
Moreover,
there is plenty of evidence to suggest that some businesses “do well by doing
evil”. Google may have popularized such a perception of ordinary business with
its longstanding motto of “Don’t Be Evil.” Fortune ranked Apple, Exxon-Mobil,
Wells Fargo, Microsoft, J.P. Morgan Chase, Berkshire Hathaway, Chevron, Walmart
Stores, Johnson & Johnson, and General Electric as the top ten most
profitable companies of the Fortune 500 in 2014. This list presents an
interesting mix of companies in terms of how “good” they might be. Several of
these have been implicated in grave ethical offences, such as child labor and
sweatshops, bribery, gross environmental injustices, or outright propagandistic
denials about climate change. Others have enjoyed more glowing records in terms
of their moral reputations. Several fall somewhere in the middle, having done
great deeds for some stakeholders while potentially shafting others. Moreover,
pay inequity internal to these and other businesses remains an issue of heightening
public concern, with CEO compensation serving as a lightening rod for debates.
Who
does well, for how long, and to whom (and to whom not) is one doing good? It is
possible for a business to do good by a few token stakeholders through a high
profile and well-advertised philanthropy campaign, which also strategically
benefits the bottom line. Corporate social responsibility could also mask legal
violations, abuses of weak government oversight, unfair distribution of
business wealth across stakeholders, or even serve to acculturate societies to
the heightened institutional power of business corporations. It is contestable
if and how society as a whole fares from the goodness of particular, responsible
business deeds and the wealth created in the process. Furthermore, many
question the underlying motivation for business good behavior, and doubt the
authenticity of the ethics at play. The case for profitable ethics has remained
fraught with all these complications, casting doubt on the pursuit of business
ethics generally.
Neoliberal
economists, conversely, argue for “doing good by doing well”. In The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith
proposed that a more limited role for government than had existed in
mercantilism would yield greater economic prosperity for the whole, precisely
by permitting the untrustworthy business class to act in their own self-interest,
without conscious concern for the common good.[vii]
The ensuing history of corporatization along with changing perceptions of
consumer and labor rights and environmental health have led many to prefer an active
government that stringently regulates businesses and markets. Such trends have
simultaneously and ironically been countered by free market theorists who would
seek to return the global marketplace to an idealized liberal golden era
presided over by business leaders and entrepreneurs unencumbered and unfettered
by government bureaucracies. Meanwhile, in recent decades wealth inequality has
reached historical all-time highs, and the very survivability of the planet has
been jeopardized by the unsustainable globalization of industry and the negative
externalities latent in business production, distribution, and consumption.
Yet,
free marketeers advocate moral values that bear high regard. Personal
responsibility, entrepreneurialism, and efficiency incentives bolster
individual autonomy and the wealth creating function of markets. Individualism
counters the totalitarian threats implicit in collectivism, and moreover
fosters differentiation, diversity, and innovation, all of which ultimately
benefit the society as a whole.[viii]
It is plausible to suggest that a market ethos should respect individual
autonomy, encourage personal responsibility and acknowledge the importance of
wealth for social welfare. Of course, how these values are defined and described
merits considerable reflection and diverse iterations.
Nevertheless,
individually focused responsibilities still risk externalizing problems onto
third parties, and endorsing status quo
conceptions of the good. For example, indigenous peoples and communities in
poorer, “developing” countries stand to lose most from climate change and
environmental degradation wrought by advanced capitalism. Yet, these parties
did not contribute much, if at all, to generating these problems. From the
perspective of those wronged by the insatiable consumerism of the “developed”
world, climate change amounts to yet another series of catastrophes
overwhelming them in the wake of neocolonial forms of globalized capitalism. As
some groups become collateral damage of globalization, the inequities of such
“spatial injustices” expose an ugly shadow side of market-dominated systems.[ix]
Individualism
is at the root of capitalism, at least in its Euro-centric, neoliberal guise.
And it allows blind prejudice to become tyrannical once capital accumulation
permits concentration of power in the hands of the few. We can also see this
problem at work in the reinforcement of stereotypes underscored by the
one-dollar-equals-one-vote mantra and the subjection of personhood to labor
extracting productivity measures. Hypothetically, if the ideal of individualism
emerged as a strong value in a particular geographical and historical context,
say, Anglo societies in previous centuries, and that value was constructed into
ideologies forcibly propagated globally in ways that secured vastly unequal
distributions of power and wealth, then later beneficiaries of this structure
might come to justify their privilege and advantage in ways that continue to
exclude and exploit the beneficiaries of a different value set. One
instantiation of this ideological self-service is a majority white male
executive leadership team that justifies its non-diverse composition by appeals
to concern for “lack of qualified applicants in the available pool”. Even if
the prejudice merely results from a naïve sense of personal accomplishments
blind to the unjust entitlements undergirding them (rather than an
all-too-common implicit/explicit racist, sexist, or other forms of noxious bias)
this prejudice serves to further dominate others through an exclusion of other
conceptions of the good society. So, capitalism construed under an
individualistic rubric may likely conceal the group memberships of its dominant
purveyors and those most advantaged by its ideological propagation.
Keynsian,
Neo-Marxist, socialist, and “progressive” solutions to these problems insist on
a stronger role for government in managing and directing markets toward more
egalitarian and fair ends. While it is beyond the scope of this essay to decide
ultimately upon the optimal role for government vis-à-vis the market, it is
certainly within its scope to point up the necessity of confronting the
question. We face a fundamental problem of how to situate markets in the
context of social, political, and environmental spaces. Business ethics, which
can underwrite the self-regulation of business and industry, may hand the
responsibility of being ethical over to the market at the cost of abnegating
proper government oversight. Such a view tends to translate values and
principles into rules and standards inscribed by businesses rather than into
laws and regulations crafted by governments. This is not to say that a utopian
marketplace of responsible business players and civil society watchdogs should
not serve as an ideal at which to strive. In evaluating market ethos we must
take care of how and to whom we allocate the responsibility of creating,
structuring, enforcing, and disseminating that ethos.
It
is tempting to cultivate market ethos by identifying values to be infused
throughout the marketplace. A shortlist could include: honesty, trust, integrity,
charity, promise-keeping, industriousness, creativity, fairness, equity,
liberty-respecting rights (such as privacy and property rights), etc. Some of
these values are proudly written into corporate mission statements and
elaborated in ethics/compliance codes and reports. Others have remained under
the purview of governmental, educational, or other social institutions. Scholarship
in business ethics attends primarily to the former, with that in politics and
legal theory attending to the latter.
It
is also tempting to establish rules of the game by which all parties must abide
for fair and mutually beneficial outcomes. Our current era experiences a turf
war between various social institutions, with business corporations likely
emerging the stronger in the bid for power. Laws and regulations create rules
restricting business when government institutions wield authority. When
corporations gain the upper hand, they set the rules of the game, both through
influencing government laws and regulations and by engaging in forms of
self-policing, a solution made palatable by the field of business ethics. Weak
rule of law in developing countries has served to justify corporate social
responsibility for multi- and transnational enterprises operating in a
globalized market. Against this backdrop of politico-economic institutional
struggles, questions about market ethos point us toward issues of how to divvy
up control over business activities.
Notes
on the political economy of the future
Envisioning
market ethos through such a lens invites us to embark upon a journey to reframe
current discourses on business ethics and market regulation in light of
different values and conceptual parameters. Given current trends, the immediate
future may see a continued shift in the power fulcrum toward corporatized forms
of self-organization, as exist not only in business enterprises, but also in
non-profits and smaller governing bodies. Resistances to this trajectory take
many forms, perhaps the most potent of which occurring through grassroots movements,
cooperative alternatives, and collective activism. The exact form of
political-economy to be manifested through the rise of these institutions and
resistances remains elusive, but the dawning era may call for entirely new
paradigms for interpreting, analyzing, and theorizing market ethos.
It
is possible that the nature, significance, and scope of market itself will
evolve. Classically, the marketplace had been restricted to the space in which
business transactions, understood as buying, selling, and profiting, occurred. Over
time, the concept of market expanded to include all things that could possibly
be subject to purchase, sale, and gain. The marketplace in concrete goods
became a market for labor, capital, services, intellectual property, cultural
artifacts, etc. In an era strongly dominated by business enterprises, one
wonders what is not for sale, as body parts, genetic material, sexual and
reproductive labor, and indeed every aspect of social, cultural, and political
life becomes subject to market norms and framing.[x] And
while the old bastions of the left still decry these trends and romanticize
protective, caring national governments, other forces at work in civil society
interface with this expansive market in ways that counter its totalizing
tendencies toward commoditization, monetization, quantification,
capitalization, and profiteering. Civil society institutions in the form of
schools, religions, non-profits, activist organizations, social media, and
alternative communities monitor business activities, punishing and rewarding perceived
business ethos, and provide goods and services in and through market spaces
with objectives and motivations other than wealth accumulation. While these
institutions certainly are not new, their oversight and influence over
businesses, along with their insertion into markets positions them as
competitive alternatives to business as usual. Hybrids between businesses and
non-profits have surfaced as businesses increasingly incorporate social
responsibility objectives demanded by civil society, and non-profits learn
efficiency, marketing, and other business strategies and techniques from their
for-profit counterparts. The rise in cross-sector partnerships further muddies
the waters dividing traditionally separate institutions in the private space of
the so-called market. The market has ceased to inhabit a discrete zone from the
rest of society. In today’s world, the market is everywhere.
Such
an omnipresent market can no longer be identified in terms of interactions
between businesses, modeled as sale for gain operations. Instead, as the very
purpose of business has changed, through the rise in the corporate form of
enterprise, expansion of market scope, and civil society demands for ethics,
the market itself has evolved into a new terrain of contested institutional
control that also supports dynamic interactions and evolving ethical
parameters. So, as businesses become corporations, markets imbibe spaces
previously sanctified in non-market terms, the nature and purpose of these
institutions transform, as does those of other institutions. The values and
ethos of once segregated domains cross-fertilize and/or collapse, generating
new conceptions and practices of ethics in these zones of a more broadly
defined market. It is within such a complex and all-encompassing market that ethos
must be chartered. And to respect plurality, multiplicity, and creativity, such
an ethos must also expand to be neither static nor univocal, while acclimatized
to burgeoning political-economic structures.
Some
exciting possibilities for such an expanded ethos could draw from the values of
traditionally non-business institutions and marry them with old-fashioned
business values to produce offspring capable of inheriting a corporatized,
post-national, multi-institutional matrix characterizing the market of the
future. Such progeny might synthesize seemingly contradictory or incompatible
values, like gift-giving and profit, compassion and efficiency, contemplativeness
and productivity, austerity and prosperity, inclusion and independence,
unanimity and conflict, discourse and busyness, collaboration and competition,
pure abstraction and materialism, and any number of imaginings. The marriage of
diverse institutions could repopulate the global landscape with forms of human
collaborative endeavor that defy the barriers between private/public,
for-profit/not-for-profit, economy/politics, or market/state/civil society that
their contemporaries, not inhumanly, tend to regard as natural, forgetting
their social construction or historical contingency. The dissolution and
reconstruction of these barriers need not issue in an amorphous amalgam of
poorly defined intentions, although initial attempts at synthesis or synchretism
may at first appear inchoate.
Another
alternative could include a symbiosis of clearly defined elements, as currently
manifests in cross-sector partnerships between institutions in diverse sectors.
In such partnerships, governments, businesses, and non-profits could
collaborate on projects where each leverages its own special competencies to
achieve a common purpose of benefit to all parties. Arguably, environmental
problems demand such collective action, as collective problems invite
collective solutions, and complex problems may best be solved by harnessing the
synergies of diverse inputs. Cross-sector partnerships are akin to and
bolstered by interdisciplinary academic scholarship, though on a grander scale.
Multiple academic disciplines can serve as components of cross-sector partnerships
that transcend the academy.
Although
these musings on market ethos have erred on the side of accepting and
valorizing markets and corporations, the point has not been to capitulate to
those economic institutions as traditionally understood, in terms of either nature/purpose
or ethos. Rather the reader is invited to consider an historical trajectory,
with an eye to anticipating new forms of society and economy that supersede
pre-existing political-economic conflicts, as typically expressed in the effete
left-right divide. It may be that the terms market and corporation, or even
states, will disappear into oblivion, along with their attendant buzzwords like
corporate social responsibility and corporate citizenship, all swept into the
now proverbial “dustbin of history”. In their place new structures will emerge,
hopefully more useful to the emerging forms of life that generate and beckon
them, and these too will alter and transmute. So let us conclude these notes on
future political economy with a suggestion: through paradox and play, an ethos,
classically understood as the way of living of a people, may transform the
market itself, whose own destiny remains uncertain.
[i] Aristotle, Book One in Politics (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1984).
Aristotle,
The Nicomachean Ethics (Englewood
Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc.,1962).
Plato,
Book Four in The Republic (New York: Basic Books, 1968).
[ii] Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, Inc.,
1759).
[iii] Andrew Carnegie, The Gospel of Wealth and Other Writings (London:
Penguin Books, 2006).
[iv] Milton & Rose Friedman, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement (New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1980), 25-27, 36-37.
Milton
Friedman, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” The New York Times Magazine, Sept. 13,
1970.
[v] Andrew Crane, Dirk Matten, and
Jeremy Moon, Corporations and Citizenship
(New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
[vi] Ralph Nader, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right
Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State (New York, NY: Nation Books,
2014).
[vii] Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations (New
York: Random House, 1994). See especially: Book IV, Chapter II.
[viii] F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944),
37-48.
Ludvig
von Mises, Liberalism in the Classical
Tradition (San Francisco: Cobden Press, 1927).
Milton
Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1962).
[ix] JoAnn Carmin and Julian Agyeman,
eds., Environmental Inequalities Beyond
Borders: Local Perspectives on Global Injustices (Cambridge: Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, 2011), 1-11.
[x] Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of
Markets (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013).
Friday, January 22, 2016
Why Blog?
How giant has the blogosphere become? In a world of superfluous information, junk publications, and endless promotional materials, Why Blog?
I'm an academic primarily. These days, academia suffers from overspecialization and consequent disconnection from the "real world", not to mention communication difficulties between and within discipline specific departments. Academics bear a social responsibility to the public that partially subsidizes our luxurious research lifestyles to share insights in a manner that is both comprehensible and open to further discourse. We should generate ideas and foster an intellectual culture in the broader society upon which we depend.
Blogs can serve as a useful complement to news op eds and magazine pubs to this end. Popular news outlets do not always lend themselves to lengthy, sustained, or theoretical verbiage.
Blogs should also support academics in our quest to improve the quality of scholarly studies, mainly by providing a free space for play and exploration, open to feedback from varied sources.
Finally, the classic essay format of writing has fallen into disuse among many professional disciplinary specialists, partly due to norms of excessive citation and the "scientization" of many fields (including some in the humanities, such as my home field of philosophy). Rather than bemoaning these transformations, blogs allow us to seek new outlets for essay style writing, while reaching a broader audience.
For these reasons, I now commence my blog.
I'm an academic primarily. These days, academia suffers from overspecialization and consequent disconnection from the "real world", not to mention communication difficulties between and within discipline specific departments. Academics bear a social responsibility to the public that partially subsidizes our luxurious research lifestyles to share insights in a manner that is both comprehensible and open to further discourse. We should generate ideas and foster an intellectual culture in the broader society upon which we depend.
Blogs can serve as a useful complement to news op eds and magazine pubs to this end. Popular news outlets do not always lend themselves to lengthy, sustained, or theoretical verbiage.
Blogs should also support academics in our quest to improve the quality of scholarly studies, mainly by providing a free space for play and exploration, open to feedback from varied sources.
Finally, the classic essay format of writing has fallen into disuse among many professional disciplinary specialists, partly due to norms of excessive citation and the "scientization" of many fields (including some in the humanities, such as my home field of philosophy). Rather than bemoaning these transformations, blogs allow us to seek new outlets for essay style writing, while reaching a broader audience.
For these reasons, I now commence my blog.
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About Me
- Jessica Imanaka
- This bloodspot is dedicated to the pursuit of wisdom in the 21st Century. Historic excavation, cross-cultural meanderings, and multidisciplinary methodologies guide these inquiries.