30 September 2018: This potent volume points to how 21st century employment of self and community is becoming transformedThis book was born in auspicious circumstances. Both Ronnie Lessem, Co-Founder of Trans4m, and Tony Bradley, Trans4m Fellow, received intensive hospital treatment, via our UK National Health Service, and were hugely impressed, indeed overawed, by the CARE we received. We realized that the nurses and doctors were not doing a job, they had a vocation, and they CARED. We could not but relate such to our own CARE – Community, Awakening, Research, Embodiment – model, and, thereby, discovered the work of the French philosopher Bernard Stigler on the Caring Economy. In fact, when Ronnie’s heart surgeon discovered him reading one of Stigler’s books in hospital he said : “If you are reading such a difficult book you must be well on the way to recovery”.

The question, then, was whether our economies and societies, around our “integral worlds”, were also on the way to recovery? The answer for us was yes and no.  No, if we waited for more jobs to be created, entrepreneurs to do their thing, SME’s to flourish, and all that conventional claptrap. Yes, if we came to realize that we were approaching the end of employment as we know it.  In its place, and drawing on examples from our own Trans4m Community, was employment of the self, with a view to realizing the kind of CAREing vocations we have recently witnessed, and employing communities, as a whole, as we had seen taking place in Chinyika in Zimbabwe, in rural communities in Nigeria, in and through Akhuwat in Pakistan.

The book takes an unusual turn, albeit one that entirely connects to the Integral Worlds GENE model.  It doesn’t, simply, narrate stories of evolving work, but, in each chapter, presents four lenses onto each of the themes that are explored.  These are: grounding in a Burning Question; emerging through a Window into Wisdom; navigating via a Social Theory commentary; and effecting through an illustrative Case Study.  Through this Ronnie and Tony develop a full work Genealogy, pointing to how 21st century employment of self and community is becoming transformed.  But, the story is yet to be completed. The story goes on, not least through each of us in the Trans4m community, and beyond ..

Check it out!

Ronnie Lessem & Tony Bradley. 2019. Evolving Work: Employing Self and Community. Abingdon: Routledge.

Comments

comments