ABSTRACT
Often there is the feeling of holding it together despite some sense of pressure to blow apart. Where Plato, Hobbes and Spinoza helped think about keeping it together under the rule, power and authority of, for example, some incarnating body such as the king, the divine being, the people, state or reason, the sheer act of an individual employing reason to challenge taken-for-granted, traditional orthodoxies concerning religion and the natural and social worlds has the power to disturb. In the different stories that can be told about keeping it together or blowing it apart, a dramatis personae and the imaginary, symbolic and physical structures that hold them together becomes a fundamental research issue. In a rapidly globalising world inaugurated by industrialisation, communications technologies and multinational corporations exploiting global marketplaces, an ‘outside’ becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. The stakes are increased. What is undesirable, dangerous, dirty cannot just be excluded to another scene. As professionals, as managers, as workers, as citizens, as individuals, there is the need to know that something can be done to improve things, that a good way of life is achievable. But how?
