The Drucker Daily: January 26 – A Social Ecologist

For me the tension between the need for the continuity and the need for innovation and change was central to society and civilization.

I consider myself a “social ecologist,” concerned with man’s man-made environment the way the natural ecologist studies the biological environment.  The term “social ecology” is my own coinage.  But the discipline itself boasts an old and distinguished lineage.  Its greatest document is Alexis deTocqueville’s Democracy in America.  But no one is as close to me in temperament, concepts, and approach as the mid-Victorian Englishman Walter Bagehot.  Living (as I have) in an age of great social change, Bagehot first saw the emergence of new institutions: civil service and cabinet government, as core of a functioning democracy, and banking as the centre of a functioning economy.

A hundred years after Bagehot, I was the first to identify management as the new social institution of the emerging society of organizations and, a little later. to spot the emergence of knowledge as the new central resource, and knowledge workers as the new ruling class of a social that is not only “post-industrial” but post-socialist and, increasingly, post-capitalist.  As it has been for Bagehot, for me too the tension between the need for continuity and the need for innovation and change was central to society and civilization.  Thus, I know what Bagehot meant when he said that he saw himself sometimes as a liberal Conservative and sometimes a conservative Liberal but never as a “conservative Conservative” or a “liberal Liberal.”

ACTION POINT:   Are you and your organization change agents?  What steps can you take to both change and balance change with stability?

Quoted from The Daily Drucker, January 26 , Page 28