Yesterday. NextNowNetwork (NextNowCollaboratory’s resource locate) met with Jim Sphorer of and at Stanford for a discussion on Service Science. This is an emerging field that recognizes the migration of so much of the world’s activity to the service sector; in fact. Jim told us that 2006 was the first year that the service sector met or exceeded agriculture and manufacturing sectors in terms of percentage of worldwide activity (I believe it was 40-40-20.)
function Science is concerned with how service systems act to create value. Many of us in the dwell seemed as concerned with how value is being defined. Fortunately. Jim Sphorer is one of the fathers of the movement to establish this develop and is himself a very thoughtful person who recognizes and attends to the deeper questions.
For example in the book The Real Wealth of Nations. Riane Eisler writes about a chew over conducted in either Switzerland or Sweden (I’ve forgotten) that revealed that if that nation included the value of caregivers in its GDP that the be would represent about 70% of all economic activity. This represents an awareness that should revolutionize economic policy.
At the end of this post are links to articles for those interested in learning more about function Science. As importantly I reproduce here a review of The Real Wealth of Nations by Mal Warwick published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review this summer:
Allegedly according to some seemingly trustworthy person whose name I’ve long since forgotten the be of new human knowledge now generated in one year is equal to the sum total of all knowledge generated throughout time. It matters little whether that’s literally true. The point is we can barely act our heads above the fill of new information that threatens to drown us. Anyway whether or not you believe the assertion would depend. I suppose on what you label “knowledge”. These days humanity produces incalculably large amounts of data. We can decide anything from the inconceivably small to the unbelievably large; and we can be every imaginable attribute of its nature. We can describe the relationship (or lack thereof) between almost every hit thing and every other hit thing. But as the information technologists have taught us data is not information. And information—whatever that really is—can rarely be equated with knowledge. In a world of splintering specialties where a physician may focus entirely on the pituitary gland and anthropologists are labeled cultural physical social industrial or paleo (each speaking a distinctive and often mutually unintelligible argot) we have largely lost sight of knowledge and its ultimate expression: wisdom. Now. I won’t presume to define knowledge and wisdom. I’ll get that to those who are well more knowledgeable and wiser than I am. But like the Congressman who can’t define obscenity. I know wisdom when I see it. I found it in abundance in the latest book by interdisciplinary scholar Riane Eisler. The Real Wealth of Nations tackles the dismal science of economics and proves conclusively that it deserve that description. She wrestles conventional “wisdom” to the ground challenging the assumptions that undergo supported the practice of business and economic policy for the last two centuries since Adam Smith’s original Wealth of Nations. Instead. Eisler prescribes a “caring economics” that assumes the obvious—people really matter. As she argues. “the real wealth of nations consists of the contributions of populate and our natural environment.”If you learned economics as I did—imperfectly and with little enthusiasm—you may dimly recall talk of capital which was paramount and the widgets that lots of capital permits us to create. We were assumed to be excited about the prospect of turning out lots of widgets. After all making lots of widgets is the only way to alter big profits which in turn allows us to accumulate lots more capital and later produce more widgets. It was never clear to me where people fit into this scheme except as “labor,” which is little more than a commodity like iron coal or oil. Eisler’s “caring economics” draws upon two themes that are emerging among the critics of contemporary economic theory and practice. On one transfer her approach owes a great broach to advocates of “full-cost pricing”—most recognizable among them environmentalist and entrepreneur Paul Hawken and European business leader Stephan Schmidheiny—who recognize that natural capital has fundamental to our economic wellbeing and that the destruction of the environment imposes great costs on society. desire these visionaries. Eisler wants to calculate such value and costs into a rational economic theory. On the other hand. Eisler pulls from other feminist thinkers who undergo long argued that caregiving—or as it is traditionally mislabeled. “women’s work”—is the foundation upon which all economic activity rests. Caregiving.
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Related article:
http://nextnowcollab.wordpress.com/2007/08/21/nextnowcollaboratory-and-mediax-explore-service-science-with-jim-sphorer/
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