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What is new about the Nuclear Age is the total incompatibility of current thinking with the increasing scope and accelerating speed of electronic technology. Hitherto sequent events now approach simultaneity, as the new nuclear embrace merges friend with foe. Once dominant concepts and ground rules yield to new percepts and process patterns by electric speedup. But the cause of the problem also provides means for its solution, by learning to use all our faculties with their technological extensions not merely as specialists, but with comprehensive awareness as human beings.

Marshall McLuhan devoted much of his life to exploring hitherto ignored psychological and social effects of technological innovation, the giant omission of Western civilization. Comprehensively aware of the power of models and metaphors, like language itself, to transform one kind of being into another, he used them playfully to organize ignorance for continuing discovery and invention rather than to categorize knowledge by establishing new concepts and theories. McLuhan demonstrated how to perceive hidden process patterns of new environments engendered by human artifacts as communication media; and he invited us to create a multi‐sensory epistemology of human experience in a new unity of thought and feeling that can anticipate the human consequences of innovation in our media ecology.

Whereas analogical relations characterized preliterate rationality, logical connections mark literate reasoning. As we enter post‐literate cultures via instant electric media, cybernetic concepts that we have increasingly used to describe human individual and social behavior can no longer keep pace with today's reality; they are now superseded by the process patterns of an ecological rationality that perceives existence directly in its own terms.

Having substituted abstract Nature for actual existence, we vainly strive to reduce percepts to concepts and the simultaneous harmonies of living to the sequential logic of thinking. Our feedback controls can only react to common denominators derived from past stabilities. When change itself becomes the new norm, the old ground‐rules and controls alike break down. Only by using all our common senses can we recognize the new process patterns of the present situation. We can then feed these patterns forward to bypass their hitherto inevitable consequences. Today, freedom is the anticipation of necessity.

The nature of communication between machines and people is contrasted and the power of words, concepts, and models as metaphors, both to help and to hinder thinking, is discussed. The article observes how every human artefact manifests its own grammar, rhetoric, and logic, and tends to resume the character of spoken natural language through electric speed‐up. It is emphasised that new acoustic‐space process patterns, created by the electric communication environment, are superseding old visual‐space ground rules of the mechanical world. The article then considers how to harmonise these conflicting, but complementary, “natural” orders by learning to anticipate the material, mental, and social effects of our artefacts as human communication media.

This chapter studies a political rationale by which colonial law forged socially assigned individuals as criminally accused persons. Focussing on archived documents of a preliminary examination that took place in 1883 in the North West Territories (now Alberta), it highlights how an accused person was moulded as a culpable individual. Arranged by a justice of the peace, and member of the North West Mounted Police, the investigation in this case reveals how colonial law unleashed an individualising force that obscured power relations behind the settlement it aimed to further. The unequal ways in which certain distinctions of person were legally recognised and individualised may be traced to long-standing western uses of social hierarchies as ‘masks’ from which law unequally recognised persons. Challenging such approaches to personhood, the analysis works off Naffine’s ‘legalistic’ ideas of persons as fictions, calling for a retelling of the fictions around accused persons. By pointing out the possibility of accusing relational rather than individual constructions, it concludes with a brief insinuation of legal forms directed at ‘collective persons’, interrupting a key political logic of colonial criminal law with allied promises of social justice beyond colonisation.

From the first PEPPER report in 1991 until this PEPPER V Report the EU has not only expanded from 12 Members States to currently 27 but also faced complex and urgent challenges. Both the financial crisis of 2008/09 and the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic 2020/21 have left their marks on “Social Europe”. Although the overall dynamic of employee financial participation (EFP) across the EU 27 is positive, EFP is declining in terms of its share of household income in the light of the concentration of capital ownership and of capital income. Along with the issue of distributive justice, other challenges, such as business succession in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that have been on the agenda for decades, and new ones like the extension of EFP to social enterprises, are calling for action.

From the comparison of the countries, the cluster analysis and the background of the importance of legal framework and fiscal incentives, two general principles can be derived: (1) establishing EFP schemes through legislation is of primary importance as countries that provide a stable and transparent regulatory framework for EFP also show a wider implementation of EFP practices; (2) when properly designed, fiscal incentives promote the spread of EFP effectively as both countries with a long tradition of tax incentives for EFP (e.g. UK, France) and those with a more recent development (e.g. Austria) confirm.

It is against this background that the following policy recommendations should be read. Tax incentives should (and in most countries they actually do) target those taxes, which constitute the heaviest burden in the national taxation system. (1) Tax incentives should be provided for both employees and the employer company. (2) Even substantial tax incentives may prove inefficient when the pre-conditions for eligibility are too restrictive, complex or inflexible. (3) Some forms of tax incentives are more suitable for certain types of plans, e.g. deferred taxation for employee share ownership (ESO), capital gains tax in lieu of personal income tax for dividends and sale of shares, or tax exemptions for matching contributions for European Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs).

In light of this need for SME action and the great potential for introducing ESO in this enterprise segment, from our recommendations we emphasise in particular: Alleviating the evaluation problem in unlisted SMEs through debt-to-equity-swaps. ESO may initially take the form of an employee loan to the company, creating corporate debt, which is subsequently converted into company shares. Facilitating share transfers in privately held limited liability companies (LLCs) by ending the requisite for notarial certification (Italy and France) or limiting it to the identity of seller and buyer. ESO in SMEs via intermediary entities, e.g. trusts, foundations, LLCs or other special purpose vehicle (SPVs) to hold and administer employee shares (AT, IE, UK, HU, FR, SI, USA).

Most people typically view Peter Drucker as the founder of management theory, or the originator of concepts such as management by objectives. Few are aware of his larger vision of a free society of functioning organizations, much less the intellectual influences that drove that vision. This paper seeks to discuss four individuals whose ideas informed Drucker's concept of a moral society of modern institutions: Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Julius Stahl, Alfred Sloan, and Joseph Schumpeter.

Drucker's own writings, as well as correspondence, interviews, and other archival sources, are analyzed to illustrate the influence of each of the four people. Specific examples of each influence are shown, as well as a case study of one organization that exemplifies Drucker's entire vision in action.

Drucker's life and work represent a struggle to achieve his vision of a moral society of functioning organizations. His larger vision is imprinted on his ideas of the self‐governing plant community, management by objectives, leadership integrity, and the morality of profit. However, Drucker's overall vision remains elusive in practice in large part because of its complex intellectual origins.

Future research into additional intellectual influences on Drucker's work is suggested.

The paper offers an in‐depth analysis of Drucker's work with respect to the influences of Kierkegaard, Stahl, Sloan, and Schumpeter, illustrating Drucker's intellectual lineage and history. It provides an important connection between the discipline of management and the liberal arts.