heterodox organization: Do you know PEKEA?

["Lee, Frederic" <leefs@xxxxxxxx>]

Dear Colleague,

I would like to drive your attention to PEKEA project to build a Political and Ethical Knowledge on Economic Activities.

I do think that up to now and perhaps still for long, the really feasible thing is to try to permit beyond the maistream , the pluralistic expression, side to side with people working along their own different tracks..

However with a significant number of colleagues (500 from 45 countries and 15 disciplines) we have already tried to engage towards an attempt of building a post pluralistic, even a post disciplinary knowledge.
In the past, academics as Weber can be seen as pre-disciplinary : historian, economist, socilogist, philosopher... idem for Marx
I f economic activities are really embedded in social life and if behaviours of individuals and groups are not schizophrenic, economic behaviours cannot be analysed separetely. Therefore we do have to participate in the task to build a social science.

Thus I would like to invite you all to think about this idea; more information is available on our website http://www.pekea.org
And to join us; we will have an international seminar in December in Rennes (Brittany) and a world conference in early Novembre 2004.

I look forward to reading your comments

Marc Humbert

See below some elements:

PEKEA, Political and Ethical Knowledge on Economic Activities, is an ambitious attempt to produce and disseminate an alternative knowledge about economic activities and to bring coherent and effective propositions to overcome the failures of world governance and individual behaviour that led to the present state of our planet: failures to give each human being access to food, shelter, healthcare, education, employment, freedom. In terms of solidarity among human beings, we are still in a prehistoric stage of humanity.

PEKEA started with the observation, or the hypothesis, that past recipes, mainly based on mainstream economics, are faulty for the following reason: economists striving to develop a rigorous science have separated themselves from other social sciences and thus elaborated models ignoring the social, political and ethical dimensions of human behaviour as well as the finality of economic activities. For this reason, critics or small changes are not sufficient; the time has come to gather and elaborate building blocks for a sustainable, human centred development.

PEKEA emerged from intense discussions during the year 2002 among many intellectuals and academics who shared a common will to contribute to build such a planet. Then its basic principles and methodology were designed during its launching Conference in Santiago de Chile in the CEPALC premises, from 10 to 13 September 2002. Altogether they constitute a new framework backed by a Network of more than 500 scholars and researchers coming from 45 different countries and from various disciplines of human and social sciences. All PEKEA backers agree with a general framework as described in  our website  http://www.pekea.org


If you too, you agree with this argument, you are invited to join PEKEA network by sending your details to pekea@xxxxxxxxx or directly to myself.