ایجاد تجربه تغییرات اجتماعی

This paper discusses how the social change theory of P.R. Sarkar is introduced to students of the Australian Foresight Institute's Masters in Strategic Foresight program through an action learning process. Through action learning, the student can come to appreciate the qualitative difference in understanding that can be obtained through taking an ‘integral’ or meta-perspective on social change processes. Such a perspective increases the efficacy and scope of all social interventions.

In the Australian Foresight Institute's Master of Science in Strategic Foresight program, the first year of a student's study is concluded with the subject ‘Dimensions of Global Change’. After studying the history, the methods and the use of futures methods, students are then exposed to the idea of the ‘constructedness’ of theories of social change. An outcome of this subject is for students to become aware of the deep macrohistorical processes that shape and contour both ‘presents’ and ‘futures’. P.R. Sarkar's ‘Social Cycle’ elegantly demonstrates how easily ‘social roles’ are adopted and how these roles bring forth partial and limited understandings of change and change processes. Both as a macrohistorical model of social change and the embodiment the process of social construction it is a pivotal learning element in the subject. Ken Wilber suggests that developing an ‘integral’ or ‘meta’-perspective allows the individual to honour all participants' perspectives and can generate interventions and behaviours that can act with greater effectiveness and sustainability on a social system. Here, too, Sarkar is relevant, as the role of the ‘sadvipran’ in the social cycle is both theory and action that embodies ‘integrality’.

The Sarkar game experience taps into the ‘deep’ scripts that we all have; scripts that cover role, power and relationship. Our societal processes have programmed those scripts into us and they continue to operate unconsciously until an experience draws them into consciousness thereby making them accessible to inquiry and examination. The student experience of those traditional roles of managing and driving social change clearly demonstrates the one-sidedness of contemporary Western culture. The game dynamics clearly showed how our programmed selves are comfortable with external forms of managing social change (Warrior or Merchant). In this ‘world’, guns or butter make you a player. Yet Sarkar clearly demonstrates that this is only half of what is available for managing social change. The ideational realm is equally powerful in creating and managing change, yet the observation of the game is that we appear to have forgotten how to do this.