Description

Argues that human beings are at their best not when they are engaged in abstract reflection, but when they are intensely involved in changing the taken-for-granted, everyday practices in some domain of their culture—that is, when they are making history.

Disclosing New Worlds calls for a recovery of a way of being that has always characterized human life at its best. The book argues that human beings are at their best not when they are engaged in abstract reflection, but when they are intensely involved in changing the taken-for-granted, everyday practices in some domain of their culture—that is, when they are making history. History-making, in this account, refers not to wars and transfers of political power, but to changes in the way we understand and deal with ourselves. The authors identify entrepreneurship, democratic action, and the creation of solidarity as the three major arenas in which people make history, and they focus on three prime methods of history-making—reconfiguration, cross-appropriation, and articulation.

Praise

A brave attempt to reformulate the relationship between democratic rights and economic progress in an age when the triumphalism of technological advance masks an unconfident vision of the future.

~Peter Aspden, Financial Times

Disclosing New Worlds represents an extraordinarily fruitful response to the radically changed social and intellectual conditions of the late twentieth century. It breaks with the theoretical bias of modern scholarship and, attending to practice, provides for a deeper understanding and appreciation of economics, politics, and culture. Disclosing New Worlds constitutes an important advance in social theory, one that is particularly impressive and encouraging to philosophers who have deplored the academic seclusion of their discipline. Here philosophy has given the decisive impetus to a rich and illuminating interdisciplinary effort and helped to produce a thick theory of practice.

~Albert Borgmann, Regents Professor of Philosophy, The University of Montana, author of Crossing the Postmodern Divide

Spinosa, Flores, and Dreyfus explore disclosure, a function of language that cannot be understood as the communication of information. They offer rich, practical new interpretations of entrepreneurship in business, solidarity in communities, and citizen action in democracy—reaching the surprising conclusion that these are all the same skill. Information is not the way to understand the Information Age! This is truly a seminal work.

~Peter J. Denning, Director, Center for the New Engineer, George Mason University

Disclosing New Worlds gets to the heart of corporate entrepreneurship. To do this, it combines rigorous philosophical thinking with rich descriptions of everyday corporate, democratic, and social life. The result is a book that accurately portrays a set of important skills, not yet taught in our schools. These skills produce entrepreneurs, politically engaged citizens, and those culture figures who dedicate cultures to their deepest concerns.

~Lorenzo H. Zambrano, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Cemex, S.A.

Spinosa, Flores, and Dreyfus have written a rich, ambitious book on the free enterprise system and the sort of democratic community it presupposes. Disclosing New Worlds also represents a new way of doing philosophy, a new way of looking at business and a new way of looking at democracy. The underlying style and spirit of the book is unabashedly Heideggerian, although it is written much more clearly and down to earth than that might suggest. Their discussion of search divers practical topics as the rise of feminism, the founding of the personal computer business and the success of Mother Against Drunk Driving is both insightful and profound, 'practical' philosophy at its very best.

~Robert C. Solomon, Qunicy Lee Centennial Professor of Philosophy and Business, University of Texas

Excerpts/quotes:

Introduction:

"…this book… aims to show how the history-making produced by reconfiguration, cross-appropriation, and articulation still play important roles in our lives and in our polities…"

2. Entrepreneurship: The Skill of Cultural Innovation

This entrepreneur, however, did not simply inure himself to the fact that what he was doing differed a good deal from what he thought ought to be done. Rather he retained this oddity in his life as an anomaly.25

Holding on to an anomaly as an anomaly is not an easy process to describe. It is a matter of constantly being sensitive to the anomaly as happening in one's life. In our case, the entrepreneur remained sensitive to the fact that his work was not producing any concrete or abstract thing but that he was working nonetheless.26 Because he was sensitive to the anomaly, it eventually led him to take a course on the theory of speech acts, and in that course he found a key to the anomaly. He came to realize that this anomalous aspect of his work was actually its central feature. He saw that work no longer made sense as the craftsmanship of writing this or that sentence or the skilled labor of banging this or that widget into shape but that currently work was becoming a matter of coordinating human activity-opening up conversations about one thing or another to produce a binding promise to perform an act.

It has long been the case that producing things that are not part of an implicit or explicit promise to satisfy some request is seen as wasting time or engaging in a hobby. Work never occurs in isolation but always in a context created by conversation. Passing over the conversation and focusing on things may further the production of standard things by businesses and highly detailed things by hobbyists, but only when conversation becomes the center of attention can highly differentiated business products and activities emerge. In Western culture, which has always emphasized the production of things, this insight appears as a startling innovation.

The innovation of a new understanding of work, like many other innovations, does not, however, make an entrepreneur. It makes only an inventor. In the case of our composite entrepreneur it resulted in an academic degree and presumably could have led to an academic career. But instead our entrepreneur formed an enterprise for marketing his new conception. How can a new conception be marketed? Answering this question is in fact an essential part of forming a new enterprise. We tend to think that the innovator produces something for an already existing market and then establishes a more or less traditional company with traditional departments to produce and market the new thing. But entrepreneurs time and again tell us that this is not the case. The market is always being developed along with the product. Alexander Graham Bell, for example, thought at first that the telephone would be used only in business offices. Even when the product is in its prototype stage and exists only as a subject of contemplation, the entrepreneur will be contemplating the sort of company that will be needed to market it. Listening to the inventors of the Apple Computer—Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak—one notices that they were forming a company even before they fully understood how human beings were supposed to interact with the box they were making; the keyboard and screen came even later. We are claiming, then, that an entrepreneurial enterprise grows at first not to produce and market an already understood widget but to aid in the development of the market for an intuition or new conception.

later this chapter:

Having described our composite entrepreneur, we can enumerate the aspects of his entrepreneurial skills that we think important: (1) the entrepreneur innovates by holding on to some anomaly; (2) he brings the anomaly to bear on his tasks; (3) he is clear about the relation of the anomaly to the rest of what he does, and once he has a sense of a world in which the anomaly is central, such as the world of work, he embodies, produces, and markets his new understanding; (4) to do this, he preserves and tests his new understanding—for instance, by leading workshops or other kinds of discussions—to see how it fits with wider experiences than his own; (5) as we have claimed but have yet to argue, he must take his new conception and embody it in a way that preserves its sensibleness and the strangeness of the change it produces, seeing to it that his new understanding retains for others the authority that it has for him and reconfiguring the way things happen in a particular domain; (6) finally, he focuses all dimensions of entrepreneurial activity into a styled coordination with each other and brings them into tune with his embodied conception, so that the critical distinctions involved in appreciating the product become manifest in the company's way of life.

the entrepreneur requires a maximizing of strangeness and sensibleness in the way she instantiates her innovation

The successful entrepreneur builds an enterprise around her new thinking, and a successful enterprise perpetuates itself by continuing along the lines of the founding entrepreneur or along the lines of a new entrepreneur who takes over the enterprise. We have also seen that the kind of thinking that leads to innovation requires an openness to anomalies in life. It requires an interest in holding on to these anomalies in one's daily activities and in seeing clearly how the anomalies look under different conditions. If people are to do this in an enterprise—and the more they do it, the more entrepreneurial the enterprise will be—then they cannot see their lives and the disclosive space in which they work as settled. Being settled, seeing things as settled, acting as though the way we do things is the natural way of doing things are the greatest enemies of seeing anomalies in the first place and of holding on to them in the second. If one is living in the natural settled way, then things happen as they should. The unordinary will appear as unnatural and monstrous, not as a truth worthy of preservation or a focus for reorganizing one's life. A company whose employees are complaisant about their work lives is a company headed for disaster. Indeed, it was one of the paradoxes of IBM's total-pastoral-care style that it produced the false belief that IBM and IBMers were invulnerable. The computers produced at IBM may at first have embodied something of the way the world looked before centralized processing made obvious sense, but neither the products nor the company culture was able to retain this strangeness, and this failure, in turn, prevented IBMers from seeing and holding on to the anomalies in their work lives and continuing to come up with innovations. Thus, maximizing both uncanniness and sensibleness serves not only a marketing function but provides for a company culture that promotes meaningful, historical innovations.

4. Solidarity: The Ground of Meaningful Community

Both objectivist critics and moral theorists focus our attention on standards or procedures that are supposed to be universal and withdraw our attention from our customary life and the anomalies we encounter within it. We are consequently drawn to abstract reasoning, applying objective standards to particular situations or developing and adapting ourselves to universal procedures. Since these activities are not tied to the way of life we share in our communities, they involve us not in practices that we share but in building autonomous moral principles or institutions. When we make our values or institutions autonomous, we lose the concrete way of experiencing concerns that holds us together. Hence, when these values or institutions are called on to resolve rifts in the community, they can only provide abstract solutions in the name of a technical sounding value or principled form of justice. At best, such a solution can stop the two sides of a rift from pulling apart, but a nation full of such rifts is ripe for the forgetting of difference that drives what we call skill-based solidarity. Hence, societies that try to order themselves on moral theories end up with the nihilism of skill-based solidarity and forgetfulness.

Conclusion:

We would now like to summarize as simply as possible our view of entrepreneurship, virtuous citizenship, and the cultivation of solidarity. In a customary situation, a businessperson thinks that her job is to stay ahead of the competition. She therefore tries to maximize output while minimizing input and to outdo competitors in predicting the future. As social and technological change accelerates, this sort of activity becomes increasingly frustrating. As her previously successful coping skills become increasingly disturbed, the businessperson is forced to reflect on what she is doing and to seek a better way of proceeding. She might focus on specific indicators of success and plan strategies for improving those indicators. One strategy might be to devise new ways to game the system, such as creating hedges and trusts. If she finds that this gaming increases her stress but fails to help her outdistance the competition, she may move further toward detachment and rationality. The final stage in this withdrawal from the involved deployment of concrete skills is the attempt to discover and use a generalized theory of business or competition. For a time business schools supplied such game-theoretical models and produced, it is now generally acknowledged, only a further decline in competitiveness.

According to our view, the true entrepreneur is not primarily engaged in competition (although it is, of course, free market competition that makes entrepreneurial activity possible). The true entrepreneur is involved in holding on to an anomaly and producing something that reduces a disharmony by changing the style of a disclosive space. As long as she remains innovative in this way, she will have no competitors. She will instead be engaged in the rewarding and meaningful activity of developing a new enterprise. Her main competition will be not other businesses but the old style of life she is changing.