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This paper explores the relationship between crisis and experience, concentrating on 'excentric positionality' in relation to the shared world, as presented in the work of Helmuth Plessner. A by-product of the 1920s Weimar Germany, Plessner's philosophical anthropology, it is argued, presents us with a forgotten blueprint for transitive and compositional approaches to the social world. Instead of the familiar 'crisis of experience' used to diagnose 'what has gone wrong', it allows us to re-learn how to work with 'the experience of crisis' itself. The latter holds the key to a different type of approach based on 'xeno-communication'. This type of communication utilizes the productive potential of crisis in its uncertainty and hesitation before a decision, showing a way to extend and enlarge experience itself. Cultivation of these 'excentric' dynamics in turn suggests new 'excentric methodologies' based on a more flexible fit between concepts and the worlds they are meant to describe. 'Excentric methodologies' constitute a type of experience-based, analytical response to the shared world. They work with phenomena across spaces and problems, analytically utilizing their joint emergence from the fundamental imbalance and discontinuity characteristic of the human environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we introduce Bergson's philosophy of "action, process and movement" and its relevance for social science and the study of organizational culture. Bergson's philosophy of change argues against the spatialisation of thought in which phenomena are broken down into discrete components to be numbered, sequenced and manipulated: rather he argues for a view of time as qualitative; intuition as situated within experience rather than about it; the importance of the body in social experience and the importance of morality and religion in social life - in short and embodied conception of culture. Bergson's culture is socialised time actualised in experienced duration or durée - culture is always in motion, and does not need culture clash to drive change, but cultural expression and formulations are not, which runs counter to functionalist and psychoanalytic views of culture. Creativity, or the élan vital , is the human impulse to organise, but to improvise rather than to locate, divide and control. Culture grounded in experienced time and driven by the élan vital is in ceaseless motion - it is duration because its is en-dured as a multiplicity rather than as a unity. Where heroic leaders in treatments of organizational culture invite us the change our place in the world, in Bergson's thought they invite us to change out time - our qualitative experience of duration. We examine these arguments through a review of Bergson's work, concluding that Bergson's resonates with postmodern approaches to culture which shift our attention from signification to implication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Formulating a unified theory of the built environment may require that the built environment be understood as a complex social-ecological system, where multiple-related metabolisms interact at different scales. From this broad systems perspective, the dividing line between what is considered as nature and what is considered as built environment becomes a cultural attribute that changes with the historical context. Over the past four centuries, notions of environmental accounting and material metabolism have expanded from year-to-year economic and biological exchanges to energy, material, financial, and information flows extended through time and space. At present, the necessary extension of system limits in time and space is best achieved by combining a number of methods, including flow-based models and resource-conservation-based models, and top-down and bottom-up modelling approaches. Artefacts, flows, and actors can be linked over time by means of a common framework for describing the built environment, and by life cycle-oriented product modelling techniques. Despite such advances, existing theory seems incapable of fully integrating spatial and physical relationships, and is especially challenged when dealing with concepts of time. Ecological models provide a useful basis for new timing tools that integrate different time scales, past and future, and that allow for an assessment of adaptive capacity and other aspects of system resiliency. These models can be used to understand better the impact of different managerial and social policies at both the macro- and the micro-level. The management of the long-term evolution of this social-ecological system can only be assured through appropriating ecological concepts of time, and by integrating the history of nature with the history of human culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]