Philosophy within corporations: an interesting perspective. Fernando Salvetti, LKN-Logos Knowledge Network
Why philosophy in business? Speed, interconnection, immateriality, net-economy, the global world and local worlds. Increasingly local and localised diversifications join together with increasingly global interconnections: differences in consumer styles, tastes, fashions and style codes, just as in models of behaviour and social action. We look at things from angles and scales that perhaps almost touch but which belong to different worlds. In our organisational contexts we live on different plains of reality as if we were inside the famous lithograph of Escher’s stairs: each occupied with climbing or going down their own staircase as if it were the only one in the correct perspective. But there are numerous perspectives and the levels do not always intersect in an intelligible way. In the office we are part of work groups in which the conceptions of service, team-work, hierarchy, time and product quality are the most different. Every day we find ourselves having to bring into account cognitive paradigms, relational models and reference values that are often extremely variable. Out of the office, looking at our worlds in general (both global and local at the same time), we live within societies of ‘multiplicity’, often very different among themselves but with some converging trends: the junctions of communication and transport or shopping centres as ‘non-place places’ that tend to be everywhere (starting from the ‘fringes’ of poverty right up to the centres of the metropolis), the rejection of the ‘sense horizons’ centred on stability and duration, the river of time dried up into a sporadic multiplicity of puddles, the absolute fungibility of ‘goods’, health trendily transformed into ‘fitness’, the progressive ‘fluidisation’ of socio-productive processes (just as consumer goods, increasingly ‘experiential’, not lasting and immaterial lose the typical characteristics of ‘Fordism’ – rigidity, standardisation, mass production – to take on the fundamental traits of ‘postFordism’, or rather flexibility, innovation, personalisation). We live in a universe of sense (perhaps not always so sensible…) that is rather shaky, inhabited by emblematic figures such as the player (in the exchange or the lottery), the tourist, the rootless person, the sensations-collector and, above all, the ‘foreigner’. A universe in which it is difficult for people to orientate themselves and, for this very reason, a universe where it is important to have the courage to be enlighteners, to bring a little ‘logos’ for categorisation and to light up the ‘chaos’ of complexity. What is enlightenment? “Having the courage to use your cosmopolite glance, or rather to adhere to your multiple identities, uniting to the life-forms linked to language, skin colour, nationality or religion the knowledge that in the world’s radical insecurity we are all equal and each is different”. This is the cosmopolite perspective of Ulrich Bech, who I find particularly interesting for our lives of today, given that an entire conceptual universe, based on some strong constitutive factors such as the ‘national glance’, is disillusioned, that is de-ontologicalised, historicised, stripped of its intrinsic necessity. The national state is increasingly besieged by a planetary interdependence, by ecological, economic and terrorist risks that link the separate worlds of underdeveloped and developed countries. And in the measure in which this situation is