PROFESSIONALS WAIT FOR PERMISSION TO TAKE CHARGE!

THE DILEMMA OF OUR TIMES – PROFESSIONALS WAIT FOR PERMISSION TO TAKE CHARGE!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 25, 2009

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There is a central theme to Dr. Fisher's body of work, and that is "cultural capital." What is cultural capital? It is the grand total of will, resolution and intellectual capacity to exert change and sustain the momentum and direction of that change in a positive and synergistic direction.

Dr. Fisher’s books are linchpins in building a skeletal structure of possibility in a climate of chaos, confusion, conflict and creative opportunity. The world improves one person at a time, and that improvement is predicated on the individual showing the will to prevail with the capacity and maturity to accept and deal with the inevitable challenges of an ever changing and more complex world.

"Cultural capital" is the intellectual capital and the power of the people. Dr. Fisher has studied and tracked the process or acculturation and change as intellectual capital and power has transitioned and concomitantly “changed hands” over the centuries. It is this phenomenon that always finds lagging indicators holding up and sometimes even derailing smooth transitions from one dominate group to another. He has developed The Fisher Paradigm ™ to explain and track this observable fact with three interlocking spheres of influence: Personality Profiles, Geographic Profiles, and Demographic Profiles.

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Over the ages:

(1) Explorers dominated in the fifteenth century led by such men as Vasco de Gama, Hernando Cortez, and Ferdinand Magellan.

(2) Theologians emerged from the Dark Ages of the sixteenth century to breathe new life into Western man in the persons of Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Knox, Thomas More and Desiderius Erasmus.

(3) Pilgrims in their quest for freedom of religion and expression in the seventeenth century ventured to the New World to land on Plymouth Rock in North America, while a similar group of Dutch and French Huguenots established a colony at the Cape of Good Hope in Southern Africa.

(4) Lawyers were the force of the eighteenth century as commercial expansion and capitalism were thriving and King George III of England provoked the American Revolution and the subsequent independence of the Thirteen Colonies in North America, while the antics of King Louis XVI in France precipitated the French Revolution. Constitutional law translated rebellion into the rights of man.

(5) Engineers showed the way in the nineteenth century fueling the Industrial Revolution, the building of the Suez Canal and the Eiffel Tower, while introducing the telegraph, telephone, electricity, the modern factory and city, and establishing a new way to wage war with the American Civil War, the first fully technological war.

(6) Managers dominated the twentieth century with the invention of mass production and logistical control creating a well-oiled machine in which workers were essentially interchangeable parts. Modern management was born in WWI and perfected in WWII with battlefield success the product of a well-managed military industrial complex spelling the difference. It was the management of science and technology that proved the superiority of the West over the Axis Powers of WWII.

(7) Professional workers represent the twenty-first century with the cultural capital, that is, the intellectual capital and power to integrate its predecessors in the story of man. Professionals embody the collective wisdom of explorers, theologians, pilgrims, lawgivers, engineers, and managers. They are now on center stage, reluctant inhabitants of this singular focus. They have been educated, acculturated and programmed for another time, and lack the maturity, temperament, capacity and energy to take charge, but take charge they must. It is their century. Thus far they have treated their tools as toys and have attempted to escape reality in virtual reality living on the Internet, biding their time. The world waits for them to wake up and accept their new role.


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It is the purpose of Dr. Fisher’s body of work and this blog to help them in that regard.

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