Contextualizing Sustainable Development Metric Standards: Imagining New Entrepreneurial Possibilities

William P. Fisher

doi:10.3390/su12229661

Abstract

Imagination is more important than knowledge, but if intellect does not provide the needed logical structures, capacities for envisioning new possibilities are overly constrained. The sustainability problems we face today cannot be solved with the same kind of thinking that created them, but clarity on what counts as a new kind of thinking is sorely lacking. This article proposes methodical, model-based ways of heeding Bateson’s warning about the negative consequences for the ecology of mind that follow from ignoring the contexts of relationships. Informed by S. L. Star’s sense of boundary objects, a sequence of increasingly complex logical types distinguishes and interconnects qualitatively different kinds of thinking in ways that liberate imaginative new possibilities for life. The economy of thought instantiated at each level of complexity is only as meaningful, useful, beautiful, ethical, and efficient as the standards informing local adaptive improvisations. Standards mediating the general and specific, global and local, universally transcendent and embodied particulars enable meaningful negotiations, agreements, and communications. Attending to the differences between levels of discourse sets up new possibilities for creative and imaginative entrepreneurial approaches to viable, feasible, and desirable goals for measuring and managing sustainable development.

Highlights

Einstein made a number of often-repeated remarks that provoke thoughtful responses [1]. He [2] famously spoke to the higher value imagination has relative to knowledge, referring to himself as enough of an artist to draw freely from a visionary wealth of possibilities
Difficulties in communication posed by the simultaneous presence of multiple levels of meaning in language have been a perennial topic of investigation for philosophers, logicians, anthropologists, and, more recently, theorists in the areas of complex adaptive systems, autopoiesis, organizational research, and knowledge infrastructures
Boundary objects of this kind will be essential to creating capacities for coherent communications across domains and complexity levels in new areas relating to sustainable development

Summary

Introduction

Einstein made a number of often-repeated remarks that provoke thoughtful responses [1] He [2] famously spoke to the higher value imagination has relative to knowledge, referring to himself as enough of an artist to draw freely from a visionary wealth of possibilities. Laininen and Sterling assume, contrary to the recommendation from Bateson they espouse, the kind of methodological perspective characterized by Hegel as “external reflection” [9,10]. This presupposition of an outside-in, top-down, command-and-control, Sustainability 2020, 12, 9661 subject–object dualism is at the heart of the complex problems of sustainability. Edwards aims higher, articulating aspirations of a fuller integration of thinking and being, of mind and the relationships it is involved in, but does not specify a tangible methodology

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Conclusion