Chapter 1 starts with a challenge that we seem to approach the current conditions of the world in which there is a simultaneously receding interest in issues of The Good, and an intensification in commitments to The Good. To move beyond the impasse of what could be characterised as a thoughtless relativism and a suffocating foundationalism, the author outlines the rationale for relational ethics. In this case, the ultimate value is placed on the nourishment of relational processes, the original source of moral value. However, in the contemporary world of conflicting traditions, recognition, awareness, and talents are required for encouraging and sustaining this process. Herein lies the major challenge for education. Sweeping reform may not meet this demand, as ethically consequential education can and should be integrated into the daily practices of school life. The chapter concludes that educational ethos, curriculum design, pedagogies, and evaluative practices are not simply techniques of knowledge transmission. When ethically informed, they hold the potential for life-giving transformation of global communities.

Abstract

From a social constructionist perspective, conceptions of aging emerge from participation in relationships. Thus, there is reason to counter the Western stereotype of aging as decline with a more robust and positive vision. In the same way, resilience in everyday life may be achieved by engaging creatively and collaboratively in coordinating the flow of circumstances and interpretations making up daily life. We illustrate the potentials of resilience in terms of collaborative attempts to generate positive reconstructions of what are often defined as debilitating circumstances: reduced income, diminished attractiveness in physical appearance, declining physical and mental abilities, physical handicaps, the “empty nest,” the loss of loved ones and approaching death. As we propose, sustaining a resilient orientation requires continuous improvization, as one's life conditions continue to change. By drawing on the resources accumulated over a lifetime, and collaborating with one's contemporaries, culturally defined losses may be reconstructed and a positive confluence re-established.

As we look back at our lives, we both agree that when we were in our twenties and thirties, we had not looked forward to “growing old.” We never wanted to be identified as “old folks” and we did not look forward to “retiring.” Later we viewed with some distress the emergence of wrinkles and gray hair, and we hoped that every forgotten name was not a sign of dementia. It was not so much the signaling of oncoming death that was important in our age anxiety.

One may detect a slow but profound shift in both the concept and practice of the contemporary organization. To be sure, the metaphor of the organization as pyramid continues to dominate, along with the familiar practices of command and control. However, as was once said of cultural modernism, it is dominant but dead. In the present context it is to say that we inherit organizational practices from the past, while simultaneously realizing that they are becoming increasingly ineffectual. And, because there is so little understanding of viable alternatives, a death-like atmosphere prevails. In the present work, Alexandra Michel and Stanton Wortham not only illuminate the problems with the traditional, modernist organization but also judiciously demonstrate the possibility for a viable field of alternatives through a powerful combination of theoretical reasoning and careful observation.

How are we to characterize this field of alternatives? Broadly put, the authors characterize the new organizational form as organization-centered. This is in contrast to the modernist organization in which the individual is the basic unit within the organizational machinery. In the organization-centered orientation, participants view each other not as isolated competitors but as resources. The stress on over-arching rules of action is replaced by a more situated or contingent view of what may be effective. The definition of the person as singular is replaced by an emphasis on multiplicity and plasticity. Any person may, at some point, be able to substitute for any other. The ethos of competition and conflict is replaced by an emphasis on collaboration.

The setting is a retirement home for the elderly. Wilfred enters the veranda in search of two close friends. He is in luck, they are both present. But alas, one is lost to her Walkman and the other is engrossed in his book. Neither notices Wilfred's presence. Frustrated, Wilfred is left to stare silently into space. Such is the beginning of Ronald Harwood's London play, Quartet. Young or old, we instantly identify with the scene. How often do we enter a room to find family, friends or colleagues absorbed by their computer screen, television, CDs, telephone, newspaper, or even a book? Perhaps they welcome us without hesitation; but sometimes there is a pause, accompanied even by a look of slight irritation. And at times our presence may go completely unacknowledged. We are present but simultaneously rendered absent; we have been erased by an absent presence.

It is the twentieth-century expansion of absent presence that I wish to explore in what follows. My concern is with the growing domain of diverted or divided consciousness invited by communication technology, and most particularly the mobile telephone. One is physically present but is absorbed by a technologically mediated world of elsewhere. Typically it is a world of relationships, both active and vicarious, within which domains of meaning are being created or sustained.

As a child of modernist culture, psychological science has treated historical inquiry with little more than tolerant civility. Psychology has been an enterprise struggling to develop a compelling rationale, seeking to establish productive paradigms, and desirous of the respect of more established sciences. From its vantage point, the discipline had no history worthy of extensive attention. Further, because of its newly fashioned commitment to empiricism, preceding scholarship of the mind was necessarily impaired. In an important sense the past was a shroud to be cast away. Psychologists might scan the preceding centuries in search of interesting hypotheses, but the results would most likely confirm the widely shared suspicion that contemporary research was far superior in its conclusions. To be sure, there were reasons for sustaining a small cadre of historians, but their task was ancillary to the scientific project itself. Theirs was primarily to chronicle the progress of the science, along with the deeds that would secure for posterity the contributions of the visionaries and achievers.

Although psychology as a discipline has remained robustly committed to 1930s conceptions of its nature as science, historically oriented psychologists have ceased to be content with their role as company scribes. Rather, as the conceptions of science and of history have evolved more generally in academic culture, historical psychologists – joined by psychologically oriented historians – have vitally transformed the view of their mission.

Attempts to define the emotions and elucidate their character have ornamented the intellectual landscape for over two thousand years. Two characteristics of this continuing colloquy are particularly noteworthy: first, the presumption of palpability and, second, the interminability of debate. In the former case, until the present century there has been little doubting the obdurate existence of the emotions. In the second book of the Rhetoric, Aristotle distinguished among 15 emotional states; Aquinas's Summa Theologiae enumerated 6 “affective” and 5 “spirited” emotions; Descartes distinguished among 6 primary passions of the soul; the eighteenth-century moralist, David Hartley, located 10 “general passions of human nature”; and the major contributions by recent theorists, Tomkins (1962) and Izard (1977), describe some 10 distinctive emotional states. In effect, the cultural history is one in which there is unflinching agreement regarding the palpable presence of emotional states within persons.

At the same time, these deep ontological commitments are also matched by a virtual cacophony of competing views on the character of the emotions – their distinguishing characteristics, origins, manifestations, and significance in human affairs. For Aristotle the emotions constituted “motions of the soul”; for Aquinas the emotions were experienced by the soul, but were the products of sensory appetites; Descartes isolated specific “passions of the soul,” these owing to movements of the “animal spirits” agitating the brain.