Engaging New Forms of Social Inquiry and Social Action

Abstract

During the twentieth century, the scientific enterprise, enshrined primarily within the world’s great research universities, has increasingly come to be viewed as the central hero of modernity. The university itself has become, in Robert Pirsig’s (1974) phrase, the church of modernity. With the advent in the 1990s of global capitalism, along with the Internet and the World Wide Web, scientific inquiry has paradoxically become the primary source of economic creativity and growth. We say this is paradoxical because the most authoritative paradigm of modern science— empirical positivism—attempts to divorce “value-free” scientific observing and theorizing from “value-driven” social action (see Torbert, ). We are transitioning from national industrial economies to a global information economy, and at the same time our urban centers are concentrations of poverty, marginalization, and despair (Fleming, 1999). Ignoring this context, our dominant paradigms for research, thought, and action are still based on mechanistic, technological, unidirectional causation and unilateral power.