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

Preface Hello! I will start this primer with a brief note about its presenta on style. Essen ally, I’ll write an “open leter” to anyone who cares about the current state of our planetary home—and its human popula ons!—and finds themselves personally commited to effec ng posi ve change. The advantage o...

Preface Hello! I will start this primer with a brief note about its presenta on style. Essen ally, I’ll write an “open leter” to anyone who cares about the current state of our planetary home—and its human popula ons!—and finds themselves personally commited to effec ng posi ve 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 substan ve issues. First, a founda onal and indisputable truth: Human well-being is inescapably rela onal. This is not to say that human well-being is en rely rela onal. However, it is to say that human rela onships, based on sociality and culture, are founda onal to the prosperity of our species. Recognizing the importance of this, secondly, we can further claim that applying a biographically oriented sociological imagina on (based on understanding the actual social and cultural rela onships between people’s lives and stories and their social surroundings) can bring about sorely needed posi ve 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 socie es. I focus on personal and small group biography in dynamic rela on to historical and contextual social factors as the star ng point for understanding and enac ng social change. I do so because understanding biography in rela on to the social leads us to ques ons of personal authen city—who are we, really?— and that demands our most ac ve curiosity. This will be especially relevant to social and ecoentrepreneurship. More on this later. But, more pragma cally, I maintain this focus because there is no other way to achieve urgently needed social change. Large ins tu ons such as modern governments and major corpora ons are necessarily heavily ra onalized, legalized, and therefore bureaucra zed—entrenched in their ways and slow to adapt to our mes’ local and urgent challenges. Equally entrenched are tradi onal, irra onal forms of authority, such as patriarchy, which has dominated human socie es for thousands of years. The way forward does not start with the "top-down" authori es just men oned. Yes, we must admit (following Max Weber) that ra onal-legal bureaucracy plays a vital part in firming up needed changes when and if they start to happen. If you value an innova on, you must ra onalize around it to preserve it. However, the way forward in these urgently challenging mes is through visionary, agile, resourceful, and innova ve “botom-up” and “grassroots” local versions of authority, understood as socially elected “charisma c” 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 transforma onal leadership. This niche within economic sociology—social and ecoentrepreneurship and the transforma onal leadership underlying it—will drive a great deal of our discussion here.