Since I am still in the relatively early stages of my research (I am still waiting for feedback on my MBA dissertation, the underpinnings of which I am trying to distil here into several articles in the hope of getting feedback from the community), I still have much to read.

Right now, I lean towards Ralph Stacey‘s underlying assumption of transformative causality, where the nature of the movement in such causality is “iterated interaction perpetually constructing the future in the present in order to express continuity and potential transformation in identity at the same time”, and the cause of the movement is “responsive processes of local interaction between entities in the present” (p 301).

I hope to write a bit about how I understand Stacey’s responsive process theory next week sometime, which seems to be the overlap between symbolic interactionist philosophy (Mead’s work) and complexity theory.

Stacey’s quoted definition of causality is quite broad, and seems to me to be amenable to Bohm’s process-oriented view of reality. It also seems to contain within it the possibility for both non-repeatable and repeatable causality – something quite possible in Bohm’s understanding of reality – which unfortunately does not bode well for predictability and practical application in any context.

Bohm is of the opinion that we need to continually “re-levate” (a purposefully hyphenated neologism introduced in the second chapter of “Wholeness and the Implicate Order”) the content of our thought to our context.

Not everyone uses the term the same way. Keynes argued that economic depressions are emergent properties of the classical ideas about economies, but there is a qualitatively different kind of causality from rafts and traffic-jams. Much of the more recent research has been on ‘repeatable causality’. This is important if business is to get a positive benefit. The other kind is also important, both to avoid a crisis and to get out of a novel hole.