Preface - SEEFAWOL (copy and paste from website).docx

Preface Hello! I will start this primer with a brief note about its presentation style. Essentially, I’ll write an “open letter” to anyone who cares about the current state of our planetary home—and its human populations!—and finds themselves personally committed to effecting positive change. The ad...

Preface Hello! I will start this primer with a brief note about its presentation style. Essentially, I’ll write an “open letter” to anyone who cares about the current state of our planetary home—and its human populations!—and finds themselves personally committed to effecting positive change. The advantage of such an approach may be that ideas are communicated in a more personable, relatable way. The disadvantage may be that the delivery wanders somewhat. I will do my best to maximize the advantage and minimize the disadvantage. Now, on to more substantive issues. First, a foundational and indisputable truth: Human well-being is inescapably relational. This is not to say that human well-being is entirely relational. However, it is to say that human relationships, based on sociality and culture, are foundational to the prosperity of our species. Recognizing the importance of this, secondly, we can further claim that applying a biographically oriented sociological imagination (based on understanding the actual social and cultural relationships between people’s lives and stories and their social surroundings) can bring about sorely needed positive social and environmental change. Accurately capturing one person’s story or one people's story can reveal the shared stories and fates of others, and the real workings of societies. I focus on personal and small group biography in dynamic relation to historical and contextual social factors as the starting point for understanding and enacting social change. I do so because understanding biography in relation to the social leads us to questions of personal authenticity—who are we, really?—and that demands our most active curiosity. This will be especially relevant to social and eco-entrepreneurship. More on this later. But, more pragmatically, I maintain this focus because there is no other way to achieve urgently needed social change. Large institutions such as modern governments and major corporations are necessarily heavily rationalized, legalized, and therefore bureaucratized—entrenched in their ways and slow to adapt to our times’ local and urgent challenges. Equally entrenched are traditional, irrational forms of authority, such as patriarchy, which has dominated human societies for thousands of years. The way forward does not start with the "top-down" authorities just mentioned. Yes, we must admit (following Max Weber) that rational-legal bureaucracy plays a vital part in firming up needed changes when and if they start to happen. If you value an innovation, you must rationalize around it to preserve it. However, the way forward in these urgently challenging times is through visionary, agile, resourceful, and innovative “bottom-up” and “grassroots” local versions of authority, understood as socially elected “charismatic” moral authority. Today, sociologists should seek out and support such local influence and charisma. With this type of authority, we find social and eco-entrepreneurship, and within that, the necessity of transformational leadership. This niche within economic sociology—social and eco-entrepreneurship and the transformational leadership underlying it—will drive a great deal of our discussion here.