After retrotopia? The future of organizing and the thought of Zygmunt Bauman

The main body of work of Zygmunt Bauman concerns his home discipline of sociology, but his insights have been influential also in the field of organization studies. In this text, we provide an overview of the extent of this influence, providing some additional context for positioning the other contributions to this special section. Afterwards, we explore in more detail two notions central for Bauman’s late thought: that of liquidity and retrotopia. The former constitutes the root metaphor for theorizing the current global predicament. In this text, we analyse how two modes of interpreting it, using the assumptions behind Kurt Lewin’s CATS model and the alchemical tradition underpinning Carl Gustav Jung’s conception of archetypes respectively, can help us theorize the alternative modes of organizing and managing encountered in a study of contemporary alternative organizations.These insights form the starting point for our second goal: to explore Bauman’s notion of retrotopia as a potentially fruitful starting point for discussing both the deficiencies of current visions of our future society, and the possibilities and vicissitudes of developing new forms of organizing and managing. Such new forms, both as practice and as theoretical constructs, are urgently needed if we are to face the numerous, and potentially catastrophic global challenges facing our society today.     

Tourism at Khajuraho an Indian enigma?

The Hindu temple complex at Khajuraho in central India has become a major tourist site for Indians and international tourists only in the past twenty years. Built as a court nearly a thousand years ago, but abandoned two centuries later, Khajuraho remained a minor pilgrimage site into the present century. The distinctive features of Khajuraho include thousands of explicitly sexual relief carvings, much publicized throughout India. Westerners are direct in their examination of these features, which remain problematic to the majority of Indian tourists. In contemporary puritanical India, where journals and movies are highly censored, Khajuraho offers an opportunity for the loosening of such rules with highly philosophical efforts to “explain away” such “obscenities.” Yet communitas is incomplete: women are discouraged from close examination of the depictions, and men fail to communicate with their families about their content.     

媒介素养教育对人的现代化的影响及途径分析

社会现代化是一个不可逆转的趋势，而美国社会学家英克尔斯认为社会现代化的核心是人的现代化。人的现代化要求具备很高的综合素养，而在媒介不断发展并对人们的生活学习产生日趋重要影响的时代，媒介素养的高低对人的现代化也起到了非常重要的作用。通过提升媒介素养来促进人的现代化，不失为有效之举。文章针对传媒从业人员和受众分别提出了媒介素养教育的内容与方法。     

Volunteer tourism and “The White Man’s Burden”: globalization of suffering,white savior complex,religion and modernity

While many volunteer tourism studies have acknowledged the significance of volunteer tourism and challenged conventional understandings of socio-economic change in the Global South, the ways in which ideas about globalization of suffering and religion and modernity flow through volunteer tourism and development discourses are rarely spoken about. Utilizing postcolonialism and whiteness studies theoretical framework, this study intends to take volunteer tourism research into a different trajectory by arguing that much like imperialism is operationalized through different kinds of institutional power (agencies such as the IMF and the World Bank), similarly volunteer tourism exerts power and exploits the Orient as the West’s pleasure periphery. Taking the case of Mother Teresa, this study also argues that Christian ideologies, which were so dominant during the colonial days, continue to pervade the structures and institutions in society with similar hegemonic connotations of privilege based on religion and race. Future tourism scholars should investigate these remarkable yet somewhat ignored issues in contemporary volunteer tourism practices.     

慈善伦理现代性呶构建与路径选择——兼析中国红十字会的系列困境

中国红会系列困境并不是孤立的现象，其背后折射出我国慈善制度和传统伦理观念所面临的尴尬。在观念层面构建慈善伦理的现代性，塑造中国慈善事业的公信力，是引导我国慈善事业健康发展的基础性工作。当代中国慈善伦理现代性的构建，需要实现从偏袒无序向公正有序、从模糊操作向机制透明、从人际信任向制度信任三个层面的转变，需要在实践探索与理论创新上下功夫。     

Ontological security as an unconscious motive of social media users

ABSTRACT

Reactions to nostalgia-evoking content on social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube suggest an unconscious motive of ontological security, defined as a ‘sense of presence in the world as a real, alive, whole, and in a temporal sense, a continuous person’. In addition to the unprecedented access to the past provided by social media, additional factors such as increasing human longevity, the acceleration of technological and social change, the expanded size and greater interconnectedness of social networks, the proliferation of directly and vicariously experienced places and the secularisation of society have contributed to a growing need for ontological security. Engagement with nostalgia-evoking social media content fulfils the need for ontological security by reintegrating memories of the past into an ongoing, self-affirming narrative or ‘life story’, while the digital archiving of photos and videos offers the possibility of ‘digital immortality’ for a virtual self that can be projected into the future.     

媒介素养教育对人的现代化的影响及途径分析

社会现代化是一个不可逆转的趋势,而美国社会学家英克尔斯认为社会现代化的核心是人的现代化。人的现代化要求具备很高的综合素养,而在媒介不断发展并对人们的生活学习产生日趋重要影响的时代,媒介素养的高低对人的现代化也起到了非常重要的作用。通过提升媒介素养来促进人的现代化,不失为有效之举。文章针对传媒从业人员和受众分别提出了媒介素养教育的内容与方法。     

陕甘宁边区的“学用一致”思想及其现代性价值

为了边区克服教育基础薄弱,人民思想观念落后,学与用严重脱节的问题,陕甘宁边区政府自成立后,便着力将教育事业与抗战实际、边区建设及人民生活紧密结合起来,积极贯彻教学合一、学用一致的教育思想,指导边区各类教学实践,不断把边区教育事业推向前进。这不但改变了边区当时的教育现状,解放了人民的思想,支援了抗战与边区的生产建设,而且边区学用一致的思想和实践对当前我国的教育改革有重大的启示作用,其现代性价值更是不容忽视。     

农民主体性发展的五个阶段

传统农民主体性发展到现代主体性经历了近代起点以前的阶段、以传统为主但却有了发展可能的阶段、以传统为主而转向现实性阶段、现代主体性为主但仍受传统影响阶段以及现代主体性完全确立五个阶段。至此,开拓、创新和以未来为导向的全新农民开始诞生,依附、内倾和怀旧的传统农民终结。