1989 as a mimetic revolution: Russia and the challenge of post-communism

Various terms have been used to describe the momentous events of 1989, including Jürgen Habermas’s ‘rectifying revolution,’ and my own notion of 1989 as a type of ‘anti-revolution’: repudiating not only what had come before, but also denying the political logic of communist power, as well as the emancipatory potential of revolutionary socialism in its entirety. In the event, while the negative agenda of 1989 has been fulfilled, it failed in the end to transcend the political logic of the systems that collapsed at that time. This paper explores the unfulfilled potential of 1989. Finally, 1989 became more of a counter- rather than an anti-revolution, replicating in an inverted form the practices of the mature state socialist regimes. The paucity of institutional and intellectual innovation arising from 1989 is striking. The dominant motif was ‘returnism,’ the attempt to join an established enterprise rather than transforming it. Thus, 1989 can be seen as mimetic revolution, in the sense that it emulated systems that were not organically developed in the societies in which they were implanted. For Eastern Europe ‘returning’ to Europe appeared natural, but for Russia the civilizational challenge of post-communism was of an entirely different order. There could be no return, and instead of a linear transition outlined by the classic transitological literature, Russia’s post-communism demonstrated that the history of others could not be mechanically transplanted from one society to another

Conceiving “personality”: Psychologist’s challenges and basic fundamentals of the Transdisciplinary Philosophy-of-Science Paradigm for Research on Individuals

Scientists exploring individuals, as such scientists are individuals themselves and thus not independent from their objects of research, encounter profound challenges; in particular, high risks for anthropo-, ethno- and ego-centric biases and various fallacies in reasoning. The Transdisciplinary Philosophy-of-Science Paradigm for Research on Individuals (TPS-Paradigm) aims to tackle these challenges by exploring and making explicit the philosophical presuppositions that are being made and the metatheories and methodologies that are used in the field. This article introduces basic fundamentals of the TPS-Paradigm including the epistemological principle of complementarity and metatheoretical concepts for exploring individuals as living organisms. Centrally, the TPS-Paradigm considers three metatheoretical properties (spatial location in relation to individuals’ bodies, temporal extension, and physicality versus “non-physicality”) that can be conceived in different forms for various kinds of phenomena explored in individuals (morphology, physiology, behaviour, the psyche, semiotic representations, artificially modified outer appearances and contexts). These properties, as they determine the phenomena’s accessibility in everyday life and research, are used to elaborate philosophy-of-science foundations and to derive general methodological implications for the elementary problem of phenomenon-methodology matching and for scientific quantification of the various kinds of phenomena studied. On the basis of these foundations, the article explores the metatheories and methodologies that are used or needed to empirically study each given kind of phenomenon in individuals in general. Building on these general implications, the article derives special implications for exploring individuals’ “personality”, which the TPS-Paradigm conceives of as individual-specificity in all of the various kinds of phenomena studied in individuals

A dialogue worth having: Vocational competence, career identity and a learning environment for 21th century success at work

The cultivation of intrinsic motivation is key in the 21th century, but most students in Dutch vocational education lack this quality. To foster intrinsic motivation, a strong career-learning environment is needed that enables students to develop career competencies and a career identity. However such an environment is absent in much of vocational education in The Netherlands. Research shows that the desired learning must be practice based (real life experiences are key), enable a dialogue (in order to attach personal meaning to real life experiences) and give students more autonomy in making choices in their school careers. Although there has been an increase in the use of portfolios and personal-development plans, these instruments are used mainly for improving success at school but are not in career and work. In addition research on the conversations between student and teachers/work-place mentors shows that the latter talk primarily to (65%), and about (21%), but rarely with (9%) students. The culture in schools is still predominately monological. Most teachers feel uncertain about their abilities to help students in developing career competencies and a career identity, though a growing number of teachers want to be trained in initiating meaningful career dialogues. In order to make such training successful in terms of promoting new guidance behaviours, it is essential that school managers create a strong career-learning environment for teachers. The Standards Era policies (Gatto, 2009) that dominate Dutch vocational education at the moment, however, leaves managers little space to do so. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50734-7_7 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reinekke-lengelle-phd-767a4322