Cheryl Marie Cordeiro

In the highly globalised city of Singapore, strong conservative social traditions continue to prevail when it comes to cohabitation and partnership. Here, as an example of old meets new, East meets West, the ornate roof tops of Singapore’s oldest Taoist temple, the Yueh Hai Ching Temple meet the modern glass walls of skyscrapers in Philip Street in Singapore’s Central Business District.
Text & Photo © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro 2014

“Being married is so great, it’s so fantastic, it would be such an achievement to be married.”

That line came from a young woman who sat in a café that served French baguettes and kaffe latte to brunch not just two weeks ago, in Sweden. She grew up in Asia. She was highly qualified in academic credentials and currently has an ascending career in finance. But she’s in her late twenties and it was the general vibe from all back home in Asia, that it was about time she settled down and got married. Her parents were willing to engage a matchmaker to arrange a marriage if that was what it took to get her ‘settled down’ and feeling accomplished as a woman.

This article contains reflections at the intersection of several disciplines under Management & Organization that include leadership, organizational evolution, governance systems and sustainability. The background literature broadly follows from studies in the fields of Swedish management / leadership [1, 2], human nature [3, 6] and organizational evolution [4, 5]. An unlikely comparison of societal organizational characteristics is drawn between these two highly different social systems, the Hadza and the Swedes. The ideas are in contemplation towards a search for a congruent management of social structures that bridge the levels of socio-economic and political realities.

Outlining my New Year’s resolutions of sorts.
Text & Photo © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro 2013

Through the year, I’ve looked to study and understand the complexity of social organizations and the concept of culture from a systems evolutionary perspective, which is something other than the dichotomous, dimensional construct that had been grounded in academic literature since the early 1960s. The basic assumption comes from the context of nonlinear dynamics and complexity theory, where as noted by Engels (1982), that the more complex generic type includes but cannot be reduced to an aggregation of the simpler types.

My interest in nonlinear dynamics and the theory of complexity has led me to the writings of authors with a similar perspective on the workings of life, where the common thread behind their argument is the philosophy that life’s material (physical), biological, cognitive and social dimensions all belong to a coherent, integrated system. To this extent, the key challenge for the future in research, and the agenda for the upcoming scientific paradigm is to put forth a conceptual framework that acknowledges this integrated system of phenomena.

The value of a systemic and integrated perspective on phenomena would be its contribution towards understanding the building of an autopoietic system. The term refers to a system capable of reproducing and maintaining itself. The term was introduced in 1972 by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela to define the self-maintaining chemistry of living cells. Since then the concept has been also applied to the fields of systems theory and sociology as a conceptual variation of the thermodynamic concept of self-organization.