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David Korten
Dr. David C. Korten is an author and leader in the global resistance against corporate globalization. He is probably best known as the author of the book When Corporations Rule the World. His most recent book is The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, which places corporate globalization within the context of 5,000 years of "Empire," used as a generic term for organizing human relationships by dominator hierarchy. Korten argues that the human system has now reached the limits of domination that social and environmental systems will tolerate. To secure its future, the human species must turn away from the dominator way of Empire to the partnership way of Earth Community, as defined by the principles of the Earth Charter.
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Education and early career[edit]
Korten received a M.B.A. and Ph. D. from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. He served in the Vietnam War as a captain in the United States Air Force.
Kortens Models[edit]
Korten also used two models to describe man's relationship with Earth — the "Cowboy" and "Spaceship" models. According to the cowboy model, most people view the Earth having plenty of resources to support the human race and believe that these resources are constantly being renewed. In reality, says Korten, the earth is more like a space capsule in that resources are much more limited and steps must be taken to renew them actively.
Career and main body of work[edit]
He served as the Harvard Business School advisor to the Nicaragua-based Central American Management Institute.He subsequently joined the staff of the Harvard Institute for International Development, where he headed a Ford Foundation-funded project to strengthen the organization and management of national family planning programs.
In the late 1970s, Korten left U.S. academia and moved to Southeast Asia, where he lived for nearly fifteen years, serving first as a Ford Foundation project specialist, and later as Asia regional advisor on development management to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
His work there won him international recognition for his contributions to pioneering the development of powerful strategies for transforming public bureaucracies into responsive support systems dedicated to strengthening community control and management of land, water, and forestry resources.
Disillusioned by the evident inability of USAID and other large official aid donors to apply the approaches that had been proven effective by the nongovernmental Ford Foundation, Korten broke with the official aid system. His last five years in Asia were devoted to working with leaders of Asian nongovernmental organizations on identifying the root causes of development failure in the region and building the capacity of civil society organizations to function as strategic catalysts of national- and global-level change.
Korten came to realize that the crisis of deepening poverty, growing inequality, environmental devastation, and social disintegration he was observing in Asia was also being experienced in nearly every country in the world -- including the United States and other "developed" countries. Furthermore he came to the conclusion that the United States was actively promoting -- both at home and abroad -- the very policies that were deepening the resulting global crisis. For the world to survive, the United States must change.
He returned to the United States in 1992 to help advance that change. He has since had a leading role in raising public consciousness of the political and institutional consequences of economic globalization and the expansion of corporate power at the expense of democracy, equity, and enviornmental health.
Dr. Korten is also co-founder and board chair of Positive Futures Network, which publishes YES! A Journal of Positive Futures, a quarterly magazine, a board member of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, and an associate of the International Forum on Globalization.
His publications are required reading in university courses around the world. He is also a popular international speaker and a regular guest on talk radio and television.
Bibliography[edit]
- Getting to the 21st Century: Voluntary Action and the Global Agenda (1990)
- When Corporations Rule the World (1995 / Second Edition 2001)
- The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism
- Globalizing Civil Society: Reclaiming Our Right to Power
- (2006-04-28) The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, Berrett-Koehler. ISBN 1-887208-07-0.
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See also[edit]
External links[edit]
- David Korten website
- People-Centered Development Forum
- YES! A Journal of Positive Futures
- Conscious Choice - The end of Business as Usual 2007 article on Korten, his work, and an assessment of the significance of "The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community
- "What Can We Learn from the Antiglobalists?" - 5,000-word discussion and critique of Korten's book The Great Turning
- "The Betrayal of Adam Smith" by David C. Korten
