Ed Weick quite reasonably asked:
> Am I alone in wondering where we are going?
I, for one, don't think the answer is "off into blue sky" or "around in
circles". Only a few of us are employed directly in labour, work or
economic policy making or research. The official FW title (as of last
August) is:
> FUTUREWORK: RE-DESIGNING WORK,INCOME DISTRIBUTION,EDUCATION
and that more characterizes the orientation of the discussion than it
defines narrowly the subject. For my part, I'm usually only mildly
annoyed if there are, in any one month, rather too many posts on a
single subject that seems to me tangentially related. Redesigning as
big a piece of the world as that implied by the FW title ramifies into
almost everything. If someone tells us about one of those
ramifications, even pontificates a bit or digresses a bit more, its a
temporary deviation from our vaguely defined baseline. I think the variety
helps us -- well, it helps me, anyway -- "condense fact from the
vapour of nuance".
If this discussion were to limit itself to "professional" discussion of
labour policy, "human resources" management and the like, I'd soon
sink in over my head.
I think Sally's doing ok, only rarely intervening to remonstrate with
problematic digressions.
As for a more positive answer to where we're going, I think there must
be several rather than one. Those of us who *are* directly involved
in policy or community development need to find, every day or every
year, somthing that will be accepted by politicians, produce a few
more jobs or a little less poverty or a few more literate
adults. Those of us that are trying to understand what's going on
don't have to do that. But each cross-fertilizes the other. It's a
messy problem and were we able to boil our discussion down to a pithy
one-liner or a narrow thread, it would surely be a lock too small for
the ship.
- Mike
--
Michael Spencer
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Nova Scotia, Canada
URL: http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/mspencer/home.html
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