Replying to LO29705 --
Jan and all,
I'm am not familiar with Rooze's essay, but Jan has included some interesting
ideas. The first concern, of course, would be to determine just what
constitutes a religion (which I'll opt not to address here).
> She notes that The Fifth Discipline contains all or most of the important
> Christian values (integrity, freedom, loyality, openness, forgiveness) but
> lacks a normative framework.
An aside, first -- the values presented here are certainly not simply
Christian values, but values in expressed in many timeless spiritual
traditions (and how much freedom is actually encouraged within many
religions is another point of debate).
> impression that she says something
> like: LO promotes uninhibited learning,
> but one can learn to supress, to stifle people as easy as learning people
> to grow, to develop. Senge assumes that the latter will be the case and
> doesn't say anything of LO as means of suppression, physic prisons and the
> like. She notes - in my words - that the ideas of the LO have a narcotic
> effect on (MBA) students: the LO is the opium of the business community.
> She invites comments.
Certainly, "learning" is not the be-all and end-all. I can learn to
become an excellent burglar, oppressor or whatnot. I've often thought
Senge focuses on learning without adequately examining what is meant by
that. What I see in LO's is an educative or developmental model for work
and people at work. In Dewey's (1930s) work, an educative environment is
one in which learning and growth occur along a certain direction
(development). Learning in and of itself is not enough. So if this is
indeed Rooze's point, I'd have to agree.
> What do you think? Are we the disciples of a new faith? Is LO great and
> Senge its prophet?
Is an LO great? Better than many options, I think, because of the wider
potential for development it contains (vs. more classical, Newtonian ways
of thinking about work, perhaps). And some people certainly attach
themselves to the LO idea as disciples of a new faith. Are we all?
Again, we run into issues of definition. I like to think of this
particular group as being more critical than that, not operating on some
type of blind faith but out of a deep curiosity and hope for our
worklives.
Terri
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