Essential dynamics of intangible values -- from a psychosocial perspective

Freedom, Democracy, Justice: Isolated Nouns or Interwoven Verbs? (Part #7)

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Early suggestions (in video form) have been made with regard to a "social value cycle", notably as a feature of social networking -- as a way to understand and then more actively to manage social presence, both professional and personal. There are few references to the possibility of "social value chains" beyond those directly associated with business, possibly extended to social entrepreneurship. Under the heading Social will dominate innovation thinking in 2011 (4 January 2011), one blogger reviewing these possibilities makes the point:

Social value chains really do need to have an increased focus to understand in design, scale, the critical value-adding points, the ability or inability to scale understanding and in the service criteria. Some years ago the value chain become a focus of business with the result seeing a dramatic productivity improvement in results and we need the same amount of dedicated focus on the social value chain and what are good  and improved outcomes along it from these efforts..

Again the question here is the extent to which these understandings of "value" encompass what is valued in the case of democracy, freedom or justice -- or whether these are in fact fundamentally distorted through any lens of social entrepreneurship or corporate social responsibility associated with "social innovation". More intriguing is the question of the degree to which these values are only manifest through cycles and are individually characterized by the dynamics of cycles:

• democracy: as characterized by the alternation of authority between different configurations of stakeholders, rather than being identified with any one configuration. The emphasis is then on such dynamics of change and not on the dynamics of advocacy and argument between authority and opposition. Political science is notably attentive to the associated cycles but would be hard put to distinguish degrees of "democracy" in cyclic terms (rate of change, distinctions between coalitions, etc).
  
  
• freedom: as characterized by the ability to move in practice (whether physically or virtually) rather than in theory. Whilst incarceration may be a limit condition, effective restriction to a neighbourhood, a village or a country are merely relaxations of that constraint. An ability to travel the world (or the universe of worldviews) suggests another measure. However these measures contrast with the ability of jetsetters to move between hemispheres in response to weather conditions -- with a freedom characteristic of the annual migration of some birds (as with the "snowbird people"). Any such reference to the freedom with which the identity of certain animals is associated, highlights the distortion in comprehension reinforced by the mounting of animals for display in museums and other collections. The animal in stasis is not the entity embodied in patterns of movement, whether in local pursuit of food, a mate or in migration. Display of live animals whose movement is restricted in a zoo also obscures the identity of the animal moving freely through its natural environment. Such considerations apply equally to humans artificially restricted to urban surroundings which inhibit their capacity to express their identity. How are the cyclic patterns of such freedom to be measured?
  
  
• justice: as characterized by cycles of due process in response to a need for resolution of some form of imbalance. Again limit conditions may range from "lynch mob" action against somebody (possibly framed as a scapegoat) to forms of "poetic justice" where the imbalance is held to have been resolved by subsequent misfortune. Understood as a cyclic corrective mechanism however, "justice" is not simply a question of a particular settlement but rather of a continuing process of rebalancing or redistribution -- as is better recognized in the control of any complex process (a factory process, cooking, education, etc). The matter is further complicated by dynamic re-evaluation of "right" and "wrong" in terms of which a just outcome is sought.

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