Abstract
Obviously, we face an economic crisis that dominates the headlines of daily newspapers, academic journals and features as the title of TV-and-radio casts alike. And, not withstanding political differences, there is widespread consensus that the economic crisis is only the tip of an iceberg. However, there is little readiness to go beyond the inherited fundamental assumptions of a “modern industrial capitalist market society†. The article argues that all the categories are increasingly under threat. The social quality, the quality of life and the noosphere paradigm of global social development offer space for considerations that question societal developments not only on the phenomenological level. Instead, the authors ventilate gnoseological, ontological and axiological prerequisites of sustainable global social development. The noosphere paradigm is enriched with the theories of social quality and the quality of life, thus contributing to the wider and diverse debates on what can be called people's humanistic socialism. In view of the complexity of the impending transition from the present to a future global society with people’s humanistic socialism, it is necessary to plan it thoroughly, beginning with the support of the processes and institutions that currently provide a seedbed; developing new transformational forms of the future features of global society has to go hand in hand with this. It makes sense to carry on with the conceptualization of questions bearing on the formation of nooshpheric social quality and its design.
Highlights
Experts have broadly examined the matter of social quality and organize their work in the European Foundation on Social Quality (EFSQ), the Asian Consortium for Social Quality (ACSQ) and since recently the International Association of Social Quality (IASQ)
As one of the ways to assess social quality the following has been suggested [5]: — socio-economic security — a range of adequate means related to financial resources, housing and the environment, health, education, and employment; — social inclusion — the opportunity to participate in social, cultural, and economic life; — social cohesion — the degree to which social relations, norms, and values are shared in a domain of trust, integrative norms and values, and social networks and identities;social empowerment — the extent to which social structures enhance the capability to interact in daily life This is very much a summarising reflection of large-scale indicator research that had been undertaken under the aegis of the European Foundation of Social Quality between 2001 and 2005 1
The assertion that there should be an alternative to GDP indicators is paired with a critique of the individualistic conception of quality of life that the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission took as the foundation of their indicators to measure social progress and is accompanied by an argument for different indicators for social quality
Summary
Experts have broadly examined the matter of social quality and organize their work in the European Foundation on Social Quality (EFSQ), the Asian Consortium for Social Quality (ACSQ) and since recently the International Association of Social Quality (IASQ). Widespread sustainable development in their view results from the integration of at least four aspects: the economic, the socio-political (which differs from the vague “social aspect” considerations that are dominating in UN-debates), the cultural (cognitively and emotionally underlying positions in life), and the environmental In this context, the theory of social quality brings up the issue of a “society with sustainable well-being”. They have proposed analyzing this complex of problems in terms of a duality of components for social quality, which means considering the positive along with the negative opportunities for development of the individual and the social This led to the concept of the “square of social quality” and investigation of a series of other issues related to this category. This approach was aimed not at demoting “quality of life” from scientific consideration, but rather at supplementing it with fresh content that would overcome the inadequacies of individualistic and subjective attributes of social and personal agency
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