In Search of Meaning: Managing for the Health of Our Organizations, Our Communities, and the Natural World

From a historical perspective, what makes a book like In Search of Meaning possible is the change in the Weltanschauung of the Western world that seems to have taken place over the course of the present century. Accordingly, I propose to inaugurate this review with a brief look at this change in the topography of the occidental world view. Let me begin by recalling that, for the West, the 20th century opened on a note of unparalleled power, privilege, and hegemony. By the early decades of this century, the cruel age of empires was at its peak, and the colonial sway of the West extended over close to eighty-five percent of the earth (Said, 1979). Accompanying this brutal politico-economic stranglehold on the world was the West's supreme faith in its own moral right and obligation to bring light and civilization to the non-West. However, as the century draws toward its end, those naive days of the certainty of everlasting Western political and, more important, moral hegemony are gone for ever. As the 20th century winds down, not only has the West forfeited almost all of its colonies, but even the control that the Western world seemed to wield over large parts of the globe during the 1950s and the 1960s has been significantly eroded. Auschwitz and Dachau, Hiroshima and Nagasaki; repeated defeats in the colonial wars fought in India, Indonesia, Algeria, Vietnam, and scores of other countries; the OPEC revolution and the energy crisis; the unstoppable rise of Asia; these and other events mark the moral, political, and economic decline of the West from its former position of global preeminence. And this is not the whole story. For if in the West the 20th century began on a note of unsurpassed faith in the Eurocentric notion of ceaseless progress driven by science and technology, the end of the century stands like a stark monument to the terrible failures of the myth of progress and technological utopia. For the West, this century has been the technological century par excellence. But when the ozone layer is fast depleting, when industrially produced factory meats and milk are saturated with the evil brew of growth hormones and antibiotics, and when the countryside is full of toxic waste dumps slowly leaking their lethal merchandise into the ground water, it is difficult to remain sanguine about the mythology of technological progress. Combine this ecological crisis with the ever-shrinking welfare state in several Western countries, appalling poverty and human degradation, escalating social violence, and an overall loss of community, and the result is an angst-laden atmosphere in which the certainty with which the West could see itself as the vanguard of the world has dissolved into thin air. For the West, the end of the century is a period of extreme self-doubt (Lyotard, 1984). In Search of Meaning may be seen as an expression of this very self-doubt. The book expresses this millennial doubt by declaring, in its very opening sentence, that "(t)he field of management is in crisis" (p. xiii). In addition to being responsible for growing unemployment, ecological pollution and so on, the crisis of management has created hollow organizations that have caused a "pollution of the soul" and a "loss of meaning" such that "one cannot any longer find meaning in one's activities" (p. xiv). This "pollution of the soul" and "loss of meaning" are traceable to an ideology that single-mindedly stresses "the utilitarian and economic functions of . organizations and work" and ignores the important fact that "organizations are also places where individuals work, dream, suffer, and live and where they should be able to grow, learn, and actualize themselves" (p. xv). The book declares that "the deep issues confronting . managers and . employees today must be addressed in terms of the existential tradition" and aims to offer "a deeper understanding of the sources of the loss of meaning" and to help "discover concrete avenues for seriously addressing these issues" (p. …