Management

A growing interest in spirituality in higher education has been accompanied by a range of responses to the challenge of defining the term. These responses include avoiding the problem by leaving it undefined; stipulating a particular and often context-specific definition of spirituality; and practising a kind of ad hoc eclecticism. This article promotes the project of creating a conceptual framework that would serve as a ‘public language’ of spirituality for scholar-practitioners who may not share a common religious, philosophical, political, and/or cultural tradition. In the first section, we present and account for the criteria we believe a conceptual framework must meet to serve as a public language of spirituality. In the second section, we draw from Ken Wilber’s integral theory to bring forth distinctions that we believe will be useful in facilitating this project. We conclude with suggestions for further work to advance this project within higher education.

The objective of this paper is to explore how the various stages of consciousness development of top managers can influence, in practical terms, their abilities in and commitment to environmental leadership in different types of SMEs. A case study based on 63 interviews carried out in 15 industrial SMEs showed that the organizations that displayed the most environmental management practices were mostly run by managers at a post-conventional stage of consciousness development. Conversely, the SMEs that displayed less sustainable environmental management practices were all run by managers at conventional stages of development. Drawing upon diverse examples of environmental leadership, this paper analyzes the reasons why the stages of post-conventional consciousness development of top managers seem to foster corporate greening in SMEs. The study also sheds light on the key values and abilities associated with both environmental leadership and the upper-stages of consciousness developme...

This chapter addresses how a leader’s attention and awareness are prone to becoming insular and disconnected in organizational crisis situations. It makes a case for deep presencing leadership coaching as a process for leaders to learn to embody an emergent self-sense that allows for more flexibility, ingenuity, and courage to sense, articulate, and bring forth creative change within their organizations during such periods.

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 36.0px; text-align: justify; font: 10.0px Palatino} This article outlines preliminary criteria for establishing a complexity perspective of presencing, a process-method of generative conversation that involves sensing, seeing into and apprehending complex emergent ways of knowing and inquiry within collective contexts of learning and inquiry.

It is mid-morning in a college classroom with a view of the surrounding hills refl ecting soft light into the otherwise stark room. The professor is aiming to help his students fi nd their way through the various theories they have been exposed to over the last four weeks of this course. One young woman raises her hand and asks in earnest seriousness, “But which is the best theory?” He is stopped short in that moment. He realizes that he has projected a variety of assumptions about what these graduate students know and how they know it. Her question invites him to refl ect on what is needed in order to help her learn, rather than simply teach what he knows. He proceeds to convey the benefi ts of relating to the strengths and limits of various theories rather than simply adopting any one of them. Even then he recognizes that there is so much implicit in what and how he is teaching. In particular, he is faintly aware of the range of worldviews that exist within the students in this cl...

In the face of myriad local and global challenges that humanity is currently facing, it is becoming clear that the future of leadership depends increasingly on a leader’s capacity to make effective discernments and interventions that confront these deeper complex issues at their very root source. To advance progress towards this aim, this article makes the case for cultivating presencing leadership which involves connecting with, and leading from, the hidden source of optimal and sustainable forms of action.

While a noted enthusiasm for the "we-space" has developed within the integral com- munity in recent years, there is a need for practices and methods for directly working with inter - subjective field dynamics in groups. This article presents a post-personal practice, surrendering into witnessing, for evolutionary groups to more effectively discern and engage complex emergent collective-intelligence processes. Surrendering into witnessing is a five-phase practice designed to co-create optimal conditions for the emergence of collective intelligence and wisdom.

Abstract: Four accounts of intersubjective theory are explored as a means for providing distinctions that support the development of second-person approaches to the emerging field of contemplative education. I examine Martin Buber’s conception of the interhuman, Thich Nhat Hahn’s interbeing, Christian De Quincey’s three modes of intersubjective engagements, in addition to Wilber’s five categories of intersubjectivity with consideration for how each will contribute to further outlining second-person dimensions of contemplative education. I then locate intersubjectivity in a broader epistemological terrain and propose the notion of critical second-person contemplative education as a type of pedagogy and approach to learning within contemplative education.

We are interested in the transformative potentials of intersubjectivity as it is enacted through second-person contemplative approaches. Our work here focuses on contemplative practice as a pedagogy that reveals and enacts intersubjectivity within postsecondary education. How might contemplative higher education practice as a pedagogy enable students to access these underlying intersubjective dimensions, thus creating conditions for a shift in the forms of transformative learning that affect the nature of the learner’s consciousness as well as their overall journey of transformation through the course of their studies? We review the theoretical and research literature on postsecondary contemplative education, particularly in its intersubjective dimensions, and then offer data from a qualitative study involving students enrolled in a graduate program in contemplative inquiry that offers evidence of the transformative potentials of these intersubjective, contemplative approaches to le...

In this chapter, I will offer both an appreciative and critical examination of David Bohm’s vision and practice of dialogue and how it relates to the field of dialogue studies. Bohm’s conception of dialogue was ground-breaking in its time due to its emphasis on consciousness and unfolding a fundamentally different order of communication mediated by collective awareness and insight into the nature of thought and the dialogue process as a whole. Bohm’s conception and process aspired to bring the human project of sharing meaning, values and learning forward by introducing practices or ways of being with the dialogue process that interrupted conventional practice at that time. In this paper, I examine key contributions of Bohm’s work as well as a number of critiques and limitations of the practice. Finally, I comment briefly on the feasibility of Bohm’s practice as a transformative approach to dialogue.