From various socio-economic and cultural points of view, today’s regression of norms & values in several public domains, indeed, is high on the political agenda. This public debate, though, tends to overlook the need to distinguish between public and personal norms. Namely, as long as public norms are not being internalised into personal norms, the desired behaviour be restricted to yea-saying and/or inactivity. This is the social dilemma for the individual when, as consumer, to act for the own economic or hedonic consumption benefit at short notice; self-interest prevails at the expense of the sustainable collective as citizen; the so-called sustainability splits between consumer and citizen behaviour. This is strengthened by the deviating way whereupon business and public communications address sustainability.

To my opinion, self-interest is the means to an end for the collective self-interest, namely, nations’ operational output is being shaped by their local electorates, or, at least these electorates determine the elbowroom for social innovation. Without substantial public support the needed reforms, as stated in the special report, comes to a dead end. Thus, I set value on a bottom-up rather than a top-down approach. In this respect, I think, it should be the ultimate challenge for social sciences and humanities to take the lead in bringing the to-days conflicting worlds of business communications, directed at to appeal instrumental and hedonic motives (commercials), and those of domain specific moral motives, as addressed by governments and NGOs (socialisation), under a novel and mutually shared communication platform to stimulate the creation of knowledge democracy markets (*).

(*) Re: A new socio-economic order, as presented in session 2.5. Transdisciplinary Research as Social Learning at the international conference Towards Knowledge Democracy. Leiden August 25th – 27th 2009.

j.barzilay@alice.nl