Ideas in Practice

Guest post by Charles A. Cogan On September 30, Vladimir Putin gave a fiery speech about the Satanic West and Russia’s fight to overcome Evil (New York Times, September 30, 2022, “With Bluster and Threats, Putin Casts the West as the Enemy”). He also announced that the four regions of Ukraine that Russia had occupied […]

In this series of essays, I’ve been exploring how embracing the social aspect of self construction might alter our view of what it means to be an individual. In previous essays, I have introduced the “I/me” model of George H. Mead and the ningen model of Watsuji Tetsuro. In this essay, I introduce the thinking of a […]

From approximately 1203 to 1334, Japan was ruled by a family known as the Hôjô. Although Minamoto no Yoritomo founded the Kamakura shogunate, the Hôjô became the real decision-makers of the polity after his death.  In form, the Hôjô were servants of the shogun, but by the middle of the thirteenth century they exercised virtually unchallenged […]

In the early decades of the 20th century, as G. H. Mead’s former students were documenting and organizing his ideas so as to ensure they would be available to later generations, halfway around the world in Japan, Watsuji Tetsuro was articulating his own vision of what it meant to be an individual in a world […]

Whether we are talking about societies, cultures, economies, organizations or inter-personal relationships, the dynamics of social power receive a great deal of attention. Our interest in social power is not surprising. Since human existence is largely and perhaps even essentially social in nature, our power to influence each other’s behavior has significant implications for all […]

Behavioral economics research suggests that people can be divided roughly into three categories:  homo economicus, homo recipricans, and homo communicus. “Studies from behavioral economics suggest that about 20%–30% of people are purely selfish by nature, like H. economicus; about 50% are conditional cooperators (H. reciprocans); and about 20%–30% are very prosocial (H. communicus).” (p. 250 of Ecological Economics, Principles and Applications by […]

As noted in the post Individualism is also a relationship, I have long been curious about whether our common sense understanding of the individual as something fundamentally set apart from the rest of the world provides an accurate sense of our actual existence. Does the sense of being a separate entity cloak a more fundamental […]

I was sad to hear about the recent passing of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He was gracious enough to make time to chat with me about his research on flow when I made a visit to Claremont, CA in the late 2000s. At the time I was working on a suite of cultural transformation initiatives at a major IT […]

What does it mean to be an individual? The answer to this question may seem fairly straightforward. We tend to assume that to be an individual is to be one person (in some sense) set apart from the rest of the world. Starting from this assumption, we then consider how that one person set apart […]

The endless hours I’ve spent sitting in front of my computer over the past 18 months have afforded me an opportunity to reflect on the nature of human connection. Working remotely is not a new thing for me. Like many of my collaborators, I have been working remotely from my home and other locations for […]