Dear Organlearners,
Rol Fessenden <76234.3636@compuserve.com> writes in LO15799:
> At, you said,
>
> "A resource is anything owned such that something can be taken from it.
> This is a linguistic fact - the meaning of the word resource."
>
> Linguistically, my dictionary says it comes from the French resourdre,
> which means to arise anew or to spring up. It refers to the reality that
> a resource is anything that one can turn to in time of need or emergency.
> There is no implication of ownership.
>
> [Host's Note: So... At is saying a resource is something that is depleted
> through use. And, reading a bit between the lines of Rol's, a resource
> might be anything that can be employed to accomplish a purpose. ..Rick]
Rol, I make use of the Oxford, the Cambridge and Funk-Wagnal dictionaries.
My favourite is FW and on that day I used FW.
All three give your ethymological account. But all three also give several
meanings for the word. The common denominator is about property/ownership
and not "surging" as the ethymology will have.
I have had a number of people complaing to me in private about the length
of my contributions. So I try to keep it short. I wanted to comment on the
ethymology of "resource", but then I decided to cut it out and paste it in
a note for future usage. Here is the cut.
---------------------
The ethymology of resource [L: "re"=again, "surgo"=rise] shows us why we
so easily think of humans as resources. Again it is a case of not
articulating our tacit knowledge good enough.
Creativity is a property of all creations in the universe, ranging from a
nucleus in an atom to the human itself. Humans are not the only creating
systems - they are merely at the top end of the scale.
The two complemetary concepts in the constructive (complexifying) pathway
of creativity are emergence (far from equilbrium) and digestion (close to
equibrium). They are complementary because they work in a push-pull
fashion. The one always strengthens the other one.
Since humans are at the top end of the scale of creativity, they ought to
be richest in emergences. Unfortunately, they are not as rich in
emergences as they can be. The more complex an emergence become, the more
important the seven essentialities of creativity become. They are the
contingency requirements for an emergence to happen when the bifurcation
point has been reached. If one or more of them are impaired (which become
easier as the complexity increases), the emergence will be grotesque
without any reslience, or will not even happen. In that case an immergence
will happen, a break down of higher orders.
When we think of humans as "resources" we tacitly know that they can be
the never-ending (the "re") source (the "surgo") of a richdom of
emergences. However, this will only be the case if the organisation in
which they participate, honour the mechanics of creativity (the seven
essentialities) and the dynamics of creativity (chaos, bifurcation,
order). Unfortunately, this is seldom the case, even intuitively.
Fortunately, it will be the case when a loving harmany (metanoia, Senge)
exists in the organisation because this is the ultimate emergence to
happen - love and harmony simply cannot emerge with inferior creativity.
Consequently, in their organisations these humans experience immergences
rather than emergences and consumptions rather than digestions - the
destructive pathway of creativity. Because this destructive pathway is
much more common than the constructive pathway, I cannot subscribe to
"human resource" as an articulation of out tacit knowledge about the
"potential of human creativity".
Best wishes
--At de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre for Education University of Pretoria Pretoria, South Africa email: amdelange@gold.up.ac.za
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>