Deep Transitions

What does a British sailor have to do with the EU directives supporting the circular economy? How likely are we to move away from linear production, and what role will international organisations play in this shift? Find out with Florian Kern in our final podcast this series: Why we need visionaries and intermediaries: The case of the EU, Circular Economy and Ellen MacArthur. At present, only an estimated 9% of the global economic system works under the circular economy. Learn more about how the European Commission has intended to change this, within the EU and beyond, and how youth movements and businesses can both help reach the 100% circular economy.

It’s often tempting to see technology and humanity as two separate domains. In this week’s podcast, A good day at the office? The role of IT and the central office in Deep Transitions, Ed Steinmueller tells the unexpectedly compelling story of the intertwined development of workers and the technological aids they developed for record keeping across the 20th century. As a science-fiction aficionado with an deep academic interest in technology, Ed is the perfect teacher to explain how our deep co-constitution with technology, and the choices our businesses and societies make now, will determine whether our future relationship with these tools we produce will diminish or enhance humanity.

What can over 3.5 million pages of the New York Times, and 2000 issues of Scientific American, tell us about the social changes witnessed from 1850 to the present day? In this week’s episode, Diving in Deep to the Data: Text Mining and Deep Transitions, Frederique Bone and Daniele Rotolo tell us how they converted these gigantic archives of American publications into a usable database. These records of public discourse offer a new understanding of the emergence and evolution of technologies and industrial processes, and their closely linked socio-technical rules, as they materialised. Listen to this episode and find out what they uncovered, the challenges they faced, and how technology could have led us a very unfamiliar version of the X Factor.

“We always forget about pipelines”. Let Phil Johnstone and Caitriona McLeish change that in this week’s podcast, with their memorable account of how the World Wars’ incredible feats of mass mobilisation led us to the unsustainable age of abundant energy and militarised nations we know today. Do we need to declare war on climate change? After all, total wars are popular examples of the momentous change and societal purpose needed to reorient civilisation towards a sustainable direction.  This research project explains why aggressive rhetoric is not the answer, but looks deeper at the mechanisms employed in the World Wars, which underlooked aspects can be replicated in the present day, which parts of their legacy need re-examination, and how this understanding can help to answer the question: what kind of low carbon world do you want?  

What can the worlds of finance and academia learn from each other? Will technological innovations like electric vehicles be enough to avert climate catastrophe, or will we need to reinvent social norms like the very concept of personal vehicle ownership entirely? Should those concentrating on electrification, like TESLA, diversify into ‘mobility-as-a-service’ rather than just the car? What would Elon Musk have to say about that? In this week’s episode, Investing in the era of the Second Deep Transition, project lead Johan Schot and Baillie Gifford, investor James Anderson develop the ideas discussed in our last episode, and delve into how they strive to see deeper than the surface ebb and flow of market movements. Instead, they favour a long-term understanding of the undercurrents driving the trajectory of society and industry. They cover the underlying trends of capital investment and systemic transitions, how they intersect, and the integral understanding these perspectives can offer each other.

What links Victorians riding penny farthings on the streets of London to Indian commuters on public transport in 21st century megacities, like Kolkata? Why does your new computer need to be faster? Your new television bigger and sharper? Laur Kanger and Research Fellow Bipashyee Ghosh answer these questions and more on their whistle-stop tour of the Deep Transitions theory. They address the beliefs and assumptions propagated by industrial society, the powerful rules guiding the “regimes” we all live in, and discuss how the Deep Transitions framework combines Transition Studies and History to understand and help overcome the unsustainable behaviours and norms established in the First Deep Transition. They explain the terms and ideas behind the idea of the ‘Second Deep Transition’, and discuss with the host, Geraldine Bloomfield, why and if its coming…