Subject: Re: Assumptions and the Post-capitalist age (fwd)
From: [email-masked] (Larry London)
Date: 4 Jun 1994 14:40:37 -0400
Newsgroups: alt.sustainable.agriculture

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 4 Jun 1994 11:04:08 -0700
From: Tom Hodges (moderated newsgroup) <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list SUSTAG-L <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Assumptions and the Post-capitalist age (fwd)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 4 Jun 1994 11:32:19 CST
From: Greg McIsaac <[email-masked]>
To: "Tom Hodges (moderated newsgroup)" <[email-masked]>,
    [email-masked]
Subject: Re: Assumptions and the Post-capitalist age

On Friday, June 3, Steve Modena wrote:

> >
> > WWII brought many significant and irreversible changes in our social /
> > governmental / educational / research / financial / communications
> > infrastructures.  The common thread, according to Drucker (and he is
> > an acknowledged expert), was *new* ways of organizing human capital to
> > large scale goals.

And I responded:

> significant changes yes; whether they were irreversible or not is
> irrelevant; whether these changes are something that we can and
> should sustain is a relevant question,

And Steve responded:

"I think your line of argument *presumes* that living on a small
holding is *automatically* a socially sustainable economic mode...my
grandparents left Italy and Lithuania before and after the turn of the
century *precisely* because they were being devastated by a larger
scale economic system that was "by passing" them...and deserate
poverty was an irresistable impetus to "go to America."

And now I respond again:

I was raising questions, not advancing a line of arguement.  I do not
presume that anything is automatically sustainable.  I think
sustainability is more of a question about the future, and that we
can never proclaim any particular practice sustainable, because we
can't know the future (not even Peter Drucker knows the future).
Your arguement seems to presume that living on a small holding is
automatically not sustainable.  But there is a thriving Amish
community 40 miles south of where I live in Illinois that seem to
provide some evidence to the contrary.

continuing my earlier response:

> ......................and one that Drucker seems to
> have decided the answer is "No" based on my reading of "The Post
> Capitalist Society"  by the same Peter Drucker in 1993.  In this book
> Drucker argues that we are in the middle of a reoganization of
> society that is so profound that we can't know where it is heading.
> In these matters, the alleged expertise of Drucker is largely an
> irrelevant issue.

Steve Responded:

"Well, I read "Post Capitalist Society" first, and dug out the others
because he referred to them here and there....I wanted to see why
he kept making references to things written so *long ago.*  And I
discovered that he was not recanting his earlier writings.  (Drucker
has been a significant thinker and contributer in the areas of
industrial management science...coining concepts that are commonplace
today.)"

I respond again:

I did not intend to suggest that Drucker was recanting his earlier
writing which I have not read.  Rather I think Drucker was arguing
that the organizational changes that brought about a degree of
"success" in the capitalist/industrial age of say 1776-1960 (to
which Steve referred in his original post), will not likely be
appropriate for the post- capitalist, knowledge age.

Drucker writes on page 106-8:  "By 1970, information had begun  to
transform organizations... But today we have to go beyond the
information based organization to the responsibility based
organization... The old type organization assumed that the superior
knew what the subordinate was doing - for the superior, only a few
years earlier had occupied the subordinates' position.  The knowledge
based organization, by contrast, has to assume that the superiors do
not know the job of the subordiates.  They have never held it....It
requires, in other words, that all members act as responsible
decision makers.  All members have to see themselves as 'executives.'"

I think Drucker's prognostications about the future, which Steve
cites, should be viewed as speculations, not inevitibilities.  As
Drucker himself writes on page 4: "To forsee what the post-capitalist
world itself looks like is, however, risky still.  What new questions
will arise, and where the big new issues will lie, we can, I believe,
already discover with some degree of probability.... Answers to most
questions are still largely hidden in the womb of the future.  The
one thing that we can be certain of is that the world that will
emerge from the present rearrangement of values, beliefs, social and
economic structures,  of political concepts and systems, indeed of
worldviews, will be different from anything anyone today imagines."

Best Regards
Greg McIsaac

///////////////////////
Gregory McIsaac
Senior Research Specialist
Agricultural Engineering
University of Illinois
1304 West Pennsylvania Avenue
Urbana, Illinois  61801
217-333-9411
217-244-0323
[email-masked]
//////////////////////////

"To these elementary laws [of nature] there leads no logical path,
but only intuition, supported by being sympathetically in touch with
experience"

    -- Albert Einstein