"Remarkable and nearly unique in its mastery and scope. There is a poetic sense behind the text that draws the reader along with pleasure."Allan Combs, Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina"An inspiring vision."Richard Tarnas, author of The Passion of the Western Mind"By the time one reaches the end of the argument, one has the sense of having undergone a kind of initiation into an ever-widening community of seekers for whom value and meaning, pattern and purpose are the real stuff of which worlds are made."Sean Kelly, Professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies "Nietzsche's Zarathustra said 'I would only believe in a god who knows how to dance'; Maxwell traces out those dance steps, which he calls the dynamics of transformation."Timothy Desmond, author of Psyche and Singularity"An important and insightful contribution to understanding the creative transition into a new paradigm of intellectual thought."Keiron Le Grice, Professor at Pacifica Graduate InstituteIn the tradition of books like William James' Pragmatism, Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos, The Dynamics of Transformation is a concise and clear presentation of a radically novel theory with the potential to transform the reader's view of the world. The book offers twelve concepts that trace the contours of an emerging world view after the postmodern. Drawing on the work of a wide range of theorists, from Hegel, Carl Jung, Henri Bergson, and Alfred North Whitehead to Jean Gebser, Richard Tarnas, Ray Kurzweil, and Terence McKenna, it provides a framework for understanding how processes change over time. Synthesizing ideas ranging from quantum discontinuity, fractals, and archetypes to qualitative time, teleology, and exponential acceleration, Maxwell shows how these concepts relate to one another in a complexly intertwined network. He suggests that these theoretical approaches are all confluent streams that have gradually been converging over the last few centuries, and that this increasingly potent conceptual flood appears primed for a dramatic entrance into the preeminent currents of academic and intellectual culture.

Giving a fascinating insight into the world of change and transition, this radical book, aimed at both organizational change practitioners and academics, tackles the fundamental question ‘what is change?’ The answers it seeks will significantly improve attempts to manage change more effectively. Innovative and absorbing, it charts a journey through a range of subjects including complexity science, nuclear physics, climatology, chemistry and chaos theory examining the change phenomena and the lessons it has to offer organizational and system thinkers. Key features include: * a review of the organisational change literature * an introduction to systems thinking * a change framework built up from key change building blocks * examples of change dynamics from the natural and physical sciences, and how they apply to our understanding of change within organisations * numerous summary tables and illustrative graphics This book, the first devoted entirely to exploring what change is as a phenomenon, has a uniquely rigorous scientific approach. It will be a valuable resource for students and professionals alike in the field of business and organizational change.

Historically, canonic studies of ritual have discussed and explained ritual organization, action, and transformation primarily as representations of broader cultural and social orders. In the present, as in the past, less attention is given to the power of ritual to organize and effect transformation through its own dynamics. Breaking with convention, the contributors to this volume were asked to discuss ritual first and foremost in relation to itself, in its own right, and only then in relation to its socio-cultural context. The results attest to the variable capacities of rites to effect transformation through themselves, and to the study of phenomena in their own right as a fertile approach to comprehending ritual dynamics.

The theory of integral dynamics is based on the view that the development of individual leaders or entrepreneurs requires the simultaneous development of institutions and societies. It seeks a specific way forward for each society, fundamentally different from, but drawing on, its past. Nearly every natural science has been transformed from an analytically-based approach to a dynamic one: now it is time for society and culture to follow suit locally and globally. Each culture, discipline and person is incomplete and is in need of others in order to develop and evolve. This book sets out a curriculum for a new integral, trans-cultural and trans-disciplinary area of study, inclusive of, but extending beyond, economics and enterprise. It embraces a trans-personal perspective, linking self with community, enterprise and society, and focusing on the vital relationship between local identity and global integrity. For the government policy maker, the enlightened business practitioner, and the student and researcher into economics and enterprise, the new discipline is set out here in complete detail by a multi-national team of Gower's Transformation and Innovation Series authors. Illuminated with examples relating the conceptual to the practical, this is a text, not for a pre-modern, modern, or even post-modern era, but for what has been called our trans-modern age.

Everyday life is defined and characterised by the rise, transformation and fall of social practices. Using terminology that is both accessible and sophisticated, this essential book guides the reader through a multi-level analysis of this dynamic. In working through core propositions about social practices and how they change the book is clear and accessible; real world examples, including the history of car driving, the emergence of frozen food, and the fate of hula hooping, bring abstract concepts to life and firmly ground them in empirical case-studies and new research. Demonstrating the relevance of social theory for public policy problems, the authors show that the everyday is the basis of social transformation addressing questions such as: how do practices emerge, exist and die? what are the elements from which practices are made? how do practices recruit practitioners? how are elements, practices and the links between them generated, renewed and reproduced? Precise, relevant and persuasive this book will inspire students and researchers from across the social sciences. Elizabeth Shove is Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University. Mika Pantzar is Research Professor at the National Consumer Research Centre, Helsinki. Matt Watson is Lecturer in Social and Cultural Geography at University of Sheffield.

These essays examine changes in Israel's political, social and economic institutions, and describe how Israeli culture and institutions are resisting convergence. They are in four categories: political institutions and organizations; political economy; ethnicity and religion; and public policy.

Promoting organizational knowledge is an important consideration for any business looking toward the future. Understanding the dynamics of knowledge-intensive organizations is a crucial first step in establishing a strong knowledge base for any organization. Organizational Knowledge Dynamics: Managing Knowledge Creation, Acquisition, Sharing, and Transformation introduces the idea that organizational knowledge is composed of three knowledge fields: cognitive knowledge, emotional knowledge, and spiritual knowledge. This book is useful for graduate students, researchers, and practitioners in knowledge management, intellectual capital, human resources management, change management, and strategic management.