Paradigm Articles

12. Appropriate/ Adaptive Tech-nology.

Promotion and enhancement of user-centered creativity for designing and innovating technologies appropriate to specificities of contexts for application (including respect for tradition and for scientific advances)

Promotion of popular ownership, control and enjoyment of broadly-applied technologies;

Harmony with Nature as a requirement for acceptable technologies

Respect for intellectual property rights of entire communities

Appropriate balance between 'economies of scale' and 'small is beautiful'

THE 15 EMPOWERING PARADIGMS:

1. Total Human Development and Harmony Through Synergism

2. Holistic Health Care and Medicine

3. Deep Ecology and Harmony with Nature

4. Sense of History and Sense of Mission

5. Civics and Democratic Governance

6. Culture as Community Creativity

7. Light-Seeking and Light-Sharing Education

8. Gender Sensitivity, Equality & Harmony

9. Reconstructive/Restor-ative Justice

10. Associative Economics, Social Capital and Sustainable Development

11. Synergetic Leadership and Organizations

12. Appropriate/Adaptive Technology

13. Mutual Enrichment of Families and Friendships

14. Human Dignity and Human Harmony: Human Rights and Peace

15. Aesthetics Without Boundaries: 'Art from the Heart'

Small-Within-Big is Beautiful*

By Alvin Toffler

This is excerpted from “Decoding the New Rules,” which is Chapter 19 in Toffler’s third best-seller, The Third Wave (New York: Bantam Books, 1981), pp. 261-262.

EVERYWHERE we are seeing the dawning recognition that there are limits to the much-vaunted economies of scale and that many organizations have exceeded those limits. Corporations are now actively searching for ways to reduce the size of their work units.

New technologies and the shift to services both sharply reduce the scale of operation. The traditional Second Wave factory or office, with thousands of people under a single roof, will be a rarity in the high-technology nations.

In Australia, when I asked the president of an auto company to describe the auto plant of the future, he spoke with utter conviction, “I would never, ever again build a plant like this one with seven thousand workers under the same roof. I would break it into small units – three hundred or four hundred in each. The new technologies now make this possible.” I have heard similar sentiments from the presidents or chairmen of companies producing food and many other products.

Today, we are beginning to realize that neither big nor small is beautiful, but appropriate scale, and the intelligent meshing of both big and small, is most beautiful of all. (This was something that E.S. Schumacher, author of Small is Beautiful, knew better than some of his more avid followers. He once told friends that, had he lived in a world of small organizations, he would have written a book called Big is Beautiful.)

We are also beginning to experiment with new forms of organization that combine the advantages of both. For example, the rapid spread of franchising in the United States, Britain, Holland, and other countries is often a response to capital shortage or tax quirks and can be criticized on various grounds. But it represents a method for rapidly creating small units and linking them together in larger systems, with varying degrees of centralization or decentralization, It is an attempt to mesh large- and small-scale organizations.

* The inclusion of this article in the holdings of the Lambat-Liwanag On-Line Library is an indication that we are strongly recommending this for perusal by serious students of the Empowering Paradigms. We have not been able to secure information as to whom and at what address we should write in order to request official permission for its inclusion. As soon as we receive such information, we shall seek the permission, and if such is officially denied, we are ready to remove this item in this collection, albeit reluctantly.

We can be reached via lambat_liwanag@yahoo.com.

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