← Cuttlefish Spurting Out Ink: English and the Projection of Power The Ecology of Organizing: A Management Course for the 21st Century →

Social Renewal: The Story of the Quakers and the First Industrial Revolution

Posted on March 4, 2022 by David

“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained . . . infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana

I have just published a lengthy piece in Medium about social renewal and the role of the Quakers in the First Industrial Revolution. It is an extended and enhanced revision of material that first appeared in Chapter 4 of my book, Crisis & Renewal: Meeting the Challenge of Organizational Change (Harvard Business School Press, 1995/2002). It is based on a trip I made to Iron Bridge, Shropshire in the early 1990s.

I take an ecological perspective of enterprises, political, social and commercial. They are conceived in passion, born in communities of trust and practice, grow through the application of reason and mature in power. Here they tend to get stuck, which sets them up for crisis and destruction, but with the possibility of renewal. An ecological framework does notabstract people from time, space and scale, the essential dimensions of context, but places them within the larger social and political narratives. Context matters, history matters and stories matter.

Unless we understand the context in which social renewals take place, we cannot hope to understand what we need to do today to renew our economic, social and political enterprises. The story of the Quakers, their emergence and innovativeness, growth and success, maturity and decline, is both inspirational and cautionary.

I hope that you find it thought provoking….