1929 such a crisis had never been seen before...
1973 such a crisis had never been seen before...
1991 such a crisis had never been seen before...
2008 such a crisis had never been seen before...
2020 such a crisis had never been seen before...
Expressions of common sense, given conventional asymptotic intervals between a major crisis and the subsequent crisis have become perhaps even bigger, sometimes longer.
The current crisis runs through all economies, likely taking over structural traits. Nothing to do with the traditional idea of the economic cycle alternating periods of expansion and recession. Since puntOorg crisis's concept is that embedded in every landform of contemporaneity, synonymous of restlessness, of that odd that generates innovation.
Go figure whether the last crise is either symmetric or asymmetric ones. Either culture or nature crisis. Maybe a bit for each. I could answer, maybe in two hundred years.
This crisis has many faces. That of families who limit or squeeze their consumption. That of companies that need to rethink whether and how to grow. Or whether not to grow at all. Then there is the dark side, which is behind all this. It is the internal crisis of the production of thought, ideas and models at the base of the possible ways that are actually never predictable and certain, of being together.
puntOorg deals with the three faces of crisis, starting from the third one in order to get down to the root, the less visible, the matter underscoring the praxis of everyday life, with the belief that theories are a crucial step towards the daily practices that affect all of us.
And, in particular, with the belief that the mainstream theories, considered valid in the good old days, no longer work. Especially in times of crisis, when things do not go as planned, or, at least, as we had been told. We must then, first of all, re-think. And then take action in a different way.
Rethink and act differently, because the crisis takes away the usefulness of forecasting.
With the proliferation of computational capabilities and its direct correlation with the erosion of the ability to describe and interpret the actual living conditions within a sensible reality, we need to find alternative ways to read and write, narrate and build. But what? Subjectivity and civilization, trust, networking, entrepreneurship, innovation, symbol, artifact, text and textuality, archetype. Also science, nature, culture, technique and technology, and environment, sound and resonance: change or resistance. These are our keywords, critical declinations of the etimology of org, a matrix for us in puntOorg.
Rethinking, therefore, for us in puntOorg, means looking for other sources. Other sources but not necessarily new ones, because sometimes old is still beautiful. We think that we should give up the fantasies associated with recipes that are young at all costs in order to invest instead in solid tools and languages, which are not rusty ones but those still in good health despite of their age: we believe in music as being a source of knowledge together with philosophy, the so-called hard sciences, functional to the rethinking of the sources of organizational knowledge, as well as economic and managerial practices. Because some (and not others) forms of knowledge, tools and languages can be a useful medicine to those who are in crisis. And a good medicine to bring us together.
Luigi Maria Sicca
Naples, University "Federico II"