Search results

The purpose of this paper is to analyse how Vivekananda, in his quest for sustained human development, explores a new generation of humanity by combining some of the active and heroic personality elements of the West with the meditative and yogic personality skills of the East.

Because of Vivekananda’s pioneering efforts in the last decade of the 19th century, ancient India’s Vedânta philosophy of human life, along with the Yoga system, has now become a common heritage of all mankind. Vivekananda’s assertion that a human being is potentially divine – one of the major tenets of ancient India’s Vedânta philosophy – has been used as the philosophical foundation of sustained human development.

A psycho-physical human being’s initial individuality could be developed towards a psycho-social personality with its manifold existence by manifesting the aesthetic, ethical, heroic and spiritual possibilities lying hidden in an individual person.

Persons with different degrees of higher assimilative qualities create different personalities. A psycho-social personality could lead to the path of sustained human development essentially by controlling its mind.

This chapter explores the concept of ‘dharma’ (duty orientation) and ‘karma’ (action orientation) of corporate social responsibility (CSR) from Vedantic (Vedanta) viewpoints. Islam, Buddhism and Christianity have received wider attentions in the CSR literatures from philosophical and religious perspective. However, Vedanta is yet to be explored in the context of CSR. This chapter therefore is timely and fills the gap in the CSR literature.

In this chapter, the authors employ hermeneutics, a qualitative research methodology which involves the study, understanding and interpretation of religious texts of Vedanta particularly the ‘dharma’ and ‘karma’ in the context of CSR.

In a nutshell, the Vedanta provides an inside-out approach to CSR, which is development of the individual leader’s self-conscience. The leaders and the role they play in corporations are crucial in ensuring transparency, good conduct and governance towards the ultimate aim of achieving CSR.

This chapter analyses the Vedantic perspectives on communication in establishing CSR objectives. It investigates the problems and prospects of Vedantic style of communicating CSR.

To propose a conceptual paradigm for unifying concepts of material, living and spiritual nature, based on the natural philosophy of Gregory Bateson and the more formal relational theories of Robert Rosen.

The paper combines Bateson's natural philosophy with the relational meta‐theory of Robert Rosen to develop the world view we believe Bateson argued for. It shows that the assumptions of this view correspond with Vedic philosophy. An integral view of nature that can underlie mechanistic and relational science is provided.

Bateson's natural philosophy can be interpreted in terms of Rosen's relational concepts to provide a unifying view of nature based on information entailments. This is described in terms of an irreducible complementarity between abstract and material aspects of nature (corresponding to Bateson's “mind and nature”) that forms a causally effective, or “necessary” unity. Encoding and decoding relations correspond with Bateson's ideas of patterns and information. The general application of this view suggests a reality not unlike the “immortal luminous being” described in the Vedas and Upanishads of India.

The paper shows why the dualistic/mechanistic view of nature is inadequate for understanding living systems and natural complexity. It describes a more general foundation from which living and generative aspects of nature can be studied. This corresponds with the Vedic concept of intrinsic value (divinity) in nature, and lends support to deep ecology ethics. As Bateson argued, the relational view can be an ethical instrument, leading away from conflict as to understand better the roots of interconnectedness.

The Gandhian-Vedic approach to development is synonymous with the advancement of spiritual agency. It emancipates society by trying to raise people's interconnectedness with nature, mitigating capitalism's hegemony of consumerism on people's psyche and hence reducing the chances of individuals perpetuating the cycle of exploitation by adhering to capitalist norms. That is, the Gandhian-Vedic approach to discursive accountability minimises the risk of circularity in the dialectics of contradictions, which occurs when consenting behaviour replaces existing contradictions with another set of contradictions. It enables the actor to step off capitalism's treadmill of materialism and exploitation by centralising spiritual development. Its spiritual revolution involves caring for the whole whilst engaging with social structures. Here the Gandhian-Vedic logic is extended to emancipatory accounting by developing accounting as a discursive risk assessment tool that minimises the fragmentation of time and space aspects of performance. Its holistic representation of performance could change perceptions about interconnectedness between an individual's behaviour, nature and society. It is the antithesis of conventional accounting's prioritisation of private interest over responsibility for the whole.

This paper aims to define a capability-based sustained/total human development, after reviewing both the concept of “Surplus in Man” as the source for achieving the Vedântic ideal of transcendence, and the capability approach to human development.

The capability-based sustained/total human development has been defined by integrating the Vedântic concept of “Surplus in Man” and the deontological theories of morality into the basic approach to capability-based human development.

An answer to the question: “How to apply a holistic approach to our daily life?” is outlined.

An example is provided on the role of yoga and meditation as the key initial bridging forces between the Western and Eastern concept of mental health. Also, the recent trend in a morally demanding lifestyle of a section of people in the Western societies for moving towards a galloping spiritual pluralism has been exemplified.

Role of responsibility of an individual human being along with his or her right has explicitly been emphasized in the approach to capability-based sustained/total human development.

An ecologically sustainable future calls for fruitful dialogues between spirituality, modern science and policymaking at large. What could be that connects them all? We found out that ideas about holism exist across time, space, culture and thinkers – ranging from mathematics, philosophy, sociology, medicine, education, religion and quantum physics to finding its roots in ancient Indian Vedic tradition and later usage in Greek and Roman cultures.

This chapter takes a look at the history and intricacies of two seemingly distinct but interconnected fields – spirituality and modern science, particularly quantum science – with an aim to uncover what these fields can teach us about the idea of holism. This chapter, therefore, highlights one of the most fundamental and profound spiritual principles of the unity and interconnectedness of the entire universe – encapsulated in the concept of holism – and its practical applications in approaching sustainable development. We hope to ignite further research on this topic.

Though there is emerging research that induces a postulation for a Vedic–Buddhist (V–B) cultural cluster, good theory development requires not only generalizability but also strong explanation. This paper aims to address the explanation gap to strengthen emerging theory development.

Religion-derived spiritual philosophy travel is traced from historical origins in India to contemporary Japanese management practice and its underpinning values.

The enhanced explanation developed in this paper finds a clear trace of spiritual values with roots in India surfacing in contemporary Japanese management as identified in extant cross-cultural management (CCM) literature.

This paper offers important explanation to strengthen emerging theory on the novel idea of a V–B CCM cluster.

The strengthening of explanation for emerging theory adds to the case for modification of the traditional CCM meta-narrative that has positioned India and Japan in separate cultural clusters.

Strengthening the postulation of a V–B cultural cluster potentially lubricates foreign investment from Japan to India contributing to achievement of United Nations Sustainable Development Goal no. 17 that pertains to international partnerships. Additionally, the findings raise questions for public policymakers who in modern times occlude religion from the public sphere.

This paper offers novel explanatory perspectives for emerging CCM theory, potentially expanding the spiritual philosophy avenue of management research.

This paper sets out to explore the trends of social responsibility of the corporate sector in India.

The methodology being followed in the paper is exploratory in nature as data are scanty. An analysis has been done on an overall score drawn from a structured questionnaire being administered.

Trends in socially responsible initiatives are both positive and crucial in nature in India.

The vastness of the corporate activities in a big country like India, on the one hand, and the scanty data availability, on the other, lead to issues being restricted in some sectors.

This research has a tremendous effect on society with respect to the CSR approach being conceived, adopted and initiated by UN Global Compact.

The paper has touched on the cutting‐edge research initiatives in the field of CSR.

Ideas regarding the basic character of humanity assume importance wherever people interact with one another — from the family to the political state, to the business enterprise. These conceptions, ranging from pessimism to optimism, from notions that evil, predatory competition on the one hand to goodness, co‐ operation and virtue on the other characterise the intrinsic disposition of people, derive from the culture to which the individual belongs, moulding his values and conditioning his behaviour. They not only affect the quality of human relations present in any collectivity, but exercise critical influence on the theories and practices of social control. The understanding of a range of social parameters is considerably enhanced when viewed from the perspective of prevailing cultural ideas about human nature itself.

An unspoken issue of increasing priority in architectural education is the under developed differentiation between architecture and technology. Almost all of the qualifications whereby an architect is prepared for and is permitted to practice professionally are technological parameters. But architecture is not technology. Architecture is, however, both protected by and obscured thru technology being in the forefront that means it is both of benefit and a hindrance.

Architecture being undifferentiated from technology and named in terms of technology thus allows the issue to stay safely within the pragmatic assertion of professionalism that is set up during an education mainly controlled by the profession. Within that is a nascent architectural impulse that resides largely unspoken but which is nonetheless evolved and evolving and shared. The unrevealed architecture generates an aura of the mysterious and the radical which that contributes a greatly to the intensity of mundane and well known work.

This paper examines how architectural technology obviates a space of differentiation within architecture, which may be examined phenomenologically in terms of the essence of humanity, whereby architecture has an original ontological correlation with human aspiration. This will be supported with the well known — for brevity — theoretical and practical examples around the work of Heidegger, Louis I. Kahn. Along with phenomenology, we will introduce philosophies of spiritual practice collectively called rajayoga. The latter is a millennia long experiment with well documented research into human aspiration. The paper concludes with examples of architecture presencing this space of differentiation and suggests the implications on the profession of an education that scan develop the super-ordinate program that is architectural practice.