Towards an Integral Meta-Studies
Describing and transcending boundaries in a global holarchy of sense-making
We are entering a period in human civilisation when we will either act globally to establish a sustainable and sustaining network of world societies or be enmired, for the foreseeable long-term future, in a regressive cycle of ever-deepening global crises. If we are to take the former pathway then we must develop, as a matter of some urgency, more integrative forms of sense-making than we currently possess. This form of sense making will be multilevel in that it will have the capacity to take a reflexive perspective on current scientific and philosophical theory building and testing. We will need to develop a global form of big picture science that possesses an institutionalised meta-level capacity for building, critiquing, validating and utilising integrative visions. In this paper I propose a general schema for situating this metalevel science within current activities. I call this approach – integral meta-studies. There are many precursors and formative examples for developing this model (both modern and postmodern) and what I want to do here is present something of a synthesis that can help to situate metalevel scientific and philosophical studies within the current landscape of knowledge quests. Integrative metatheorising is an ambitious project. It is based on the premise that the appreciation of diverse theoretical perspectives offers a new way forward in the development of science. It seeks to find insights through the connection of knowledge rather than the specialisation of knowledge. It takes an appreciative rather than a deprecative view towards systems of knowledge, irrespective of their place within mainstream or the periphery of view. The Big Pictures that emerge from this process stand in contrast to the goals of mainstream social science which are almost exclusively concerned with the building and testing of middle-range theory. Given the disastrous outcomes of some of the totalising theories of the nineteenth century, the subsequent focus on ideas of the middle-range is entirely understandable. But middle-range theory will not resolve global problems. A more reflexive and wider conceptual vision is required. Global problems of the scale that we currently face require a response that can navigate through theoretical pluralism and not be swallowed up by it. In saying that, twenty-first-century metatheories will need to be different from the monistic, grand theories of the past. They will have to be integrative rather than totalising, pluralistic rather than monistic, based on science and not only on philosophy, methodical rather than idiosyncratic, find inspiration in theories, methods and interpretive frameworks from the edge more than from the centre and provide means for inventing new ways of understanding as much as new technologies. Integrative meta-studies describes an open system of knowledge acquisition that has a place for all forms of inquiry and their respective theories, methods, techniques of analysis and interpretive frameworks. We have, in fact, been developing these meta-level capacities and models for a very long time and the time is now ripe for a more overt description and institutionalisation of meta-level perspectives and practices.
