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Good Business_ Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi [173]

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of the areas of knowledge to which laypersons continue to contribute is that concerning health. One keeps hearing how people (often mothers) will notice some peculiarities in the health patterns of members of their family, which when communicated to health experts turn out to have beneficial consequences. For example Berton Roueché (1988) reports how a woman in New England, struck by the fact that her son and many of his friends were suffering from arthritic pains in the knee, alerted doctors of this suspicious coincidence, and as a result of her information researchers “discovered” Lyme disease, a potentially serious affliction transmitted by ticks.

It may be presumptuous to present a “reading list” of the great philosophers, but to simply name them without a reference would also offend professional scruples. So here goes. A few of the most seminal works in each area might include the following. As to ontology, there are Christian von Wolff’s Vernunftige Gedanken, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Husserl’s Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, and Heidegger’s Being and Time (1962); for these last two, it might be a good idea to start with the introductions to Husserl by Kohak (1978) and by Kolakowski (1987), and to Heidegger by George Steiner (1978 [1987]). In terms of ethics, one would certainly wish to tackle Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics; Aquinas’s treatises on Human Acts, on Habits, and on the Active and Contemplative Life in the Summa Theologica; Benedict Spinoza’s Ethics; and from Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil and Genealogy of Morals. In aesthetics, Alexander Baumgarten’s “Reflections on Poetry,” Benedetto Croce’s Aesthetics, Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty, and Collingwood’s The Principles of Art. The 54-volume series of the Great Books of the Western World, now edited by Mortimer Adler and published by the Encyclopaedia Britannica, is a good introduction to the most influential thinkers of our culture—the first two Syntopicon volumes, which contain a summary of the main ideas of the books that follow, could be especially useful to the amateur philosopher.

Medvedev (1971) provides an informed account of how the agricultural policies of Lysenko, based on Leninist dogma, resulted in food shortages in Soviet Russia. See also Lecourt (1977).


CHAPTER 7

For the time budget allocated to work by preliterate people, see the excellent volume by Marshall Sahlins (1972) and the estimates of Lee (1975). Some glimpses of the working patterns of medieval Europe are to be found in Le Goff (1980) and Le Roy Ladurie (1979). The pattern of the working day of typical English workers before and after the advent of the Industrial Revolution is reconstructed by E. P. Thompson (1963). The changing role of women as workers in the public sector is discussed by, among others, Clark (1919) and Howell (1986).

Serafina Vinon is one of the respondents in the groups studied by Delle Fave and Massimini (1988). Her quote “It gives me great satisfaction…” is from p. 203.

The quote “I am free…” is from ibid.

Development and complexity. While most developmental psychology has remained determinedly value-free (at least in its rhetoric, if not in its substance), the psychology department at Clark University has maintained a relatively strong value orientation in its approach to human development, based on the notion that complexity is the goal of human growth (e.g., Kaplan 1983, Werner 1957, Werner & Kaplan 1956). For recent attempts in the same direction see Robinson (1988) and Freeman & Robinson (in press).

“Ting was cutting up…” is in Watson (1964, p. 46), who translated Chuang Tzu’s Inner Chapters.

Some critics. The criticism that flow describes an exclusively Western state of mind was one of the first to be leveled at the flow concept. The specific contrast between flow and Yu was brought out by Sun (1987). It is to be hoped that the ample cross-cultural evidence presented in Csikszentmihalyi & Csikszentmihalyi (1988) will reassure skeptics that the flow experience is reported in almost exactly the same terms in vastly different

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