Solving the economic crisis with (requisitely) holistic approach and (ethics of) interdependence

The usual enterprises tend to be governed by specialists of single professions, whose education for interdisciplinary creative cooperation is very rare, rather than by persons with knowledge of systems theory. Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1978: VII) explicitly stated that he had created his General Systems Theory against over-specialization, i.e. to support interdisciplinary creative cooperation as the best way toward the necessary holism of approach and wholeness of outcomes of human activity. But he did not support his intention methodologically a lot. Mulej did it with his Dialectical Systems Theory (DST). Narrow specialization is still necessary, but equally so is the other specialists’ capacity: cooperation helps humans prevent oversights and resulting failures, because it enables more holistic thinking/behavior. The role of the narrow specializations is so strong that people hardly see that holistic thinking/behavior – enabled by interdisciplinary creative cooperation, backed by (ethics of) interdependence – makes specialization of any profession much more beneficial than any operation inside a specialization alone. Nobody, whatever their profession, can live well without co-operation with people of other professions. De Bono’s ‘6 Thinking Hats’ support it, so does DST from the same period of time. Both of them have been fruitfully applied all four decades since. A new support was recently offered: social responsibility (SR) with its all-linking concepts of (1) interdependence and (2) holistic approach is close to DST and (liberal rather than neo-liberal) economics, as authors understand the essence of the recently published ISO 26000 on social responsibility and European Union’s (2011) support to it. Here, the authors aim to address use of DST (via SR) in solving the current crisis; owners, managers and staff are supposed to be interested in social responsibility as a source of their benefit, but need knowledge and values to work on implementation of SR, perhaps with a specialized professional team support. Government and other influential entities should support them with the model suggested here. The suggested findings should help humans find their way out from the current crisis, but in synergy; this crisis results from obsolete management and governance style, in which the (dialectical) systemic behavior/thinking is neglected.