Our global, highly networked industrial society is confronting the limits to growth in materials and energy use.
This site highlights my participation in long-term entrepreneurial projects, short-term experiments, and ongoing research into adaptive, life-affirming alternatives to productivist ideology and culture. - James Magnus-Johnston
This site highlights my participation in long-term entrepreneurial projects, short-term experiments, and ongoing research into adaptive, life-affirming alternatives to productivist ideology and culture. - James Magnus-Johnston
Projects + ExperimentsPhD Research
We live in a period during which housing affordability, inequality, and the ecological crisis motivate social entrepreneurs to disrupt homeownership and land development patterns. This study seeks to trace the journey of socially-motivated and institutionally-embedded entrepreneurs, documenting both their investigation into novel housing models as well as the ways they address context-specific institutional problems.
As a hypercommodified, debt-backed housing market endures contemporary shocks and disturbances, how can social entrepreneurs conceive of a home-as-habitat rather than a home-as-hypercommodity? The ideation and prototyping of a new home model takes place in one of Canada’s major urban centres—Winnipeg—leveraging experience in Asian, European, and North American contexts. The entrepreneurs draw from knowledge in a variety of professional fields—from finance and law to business, architecture and public policy. The experiential diversity of the group, including a wide geographical, cultural, and professional scope, provides an opportunity to study what Garud et al (2007) refer to as a “theoretical puzzle” in institutional entrepreneurship: how are embedded agents able to envision new practices and get others to adopt them? |
Courses + Knowledge |
Online commentaryJames writes online commentary on a range of topics related to post growth economics and political thought for The Post Carbon Institute (resilience.org) and CASSE (steadystate.org). Here are some favourites:
New Zealand Deprioritizes Growth to Improve Health & Wellbeing Social Solidarity Requires a Universal Basic Income Outbreaks in the Anthropocene: Growth Isn't the Cure Ecological Existential Dread Distinguishing Capitalism From Growth Guess What Trudeau Said About Growth? What Kind of Future Does Your Degree Prepare You For? What About Innovating Beyond the Growth Trap? Peace, Love, and the Gift Hedonism, Survivalism, and the Burden of Knowledge Are We Hard-Wired to Think We Can Grow Forever? Piketty Acknowledges a Limit to Inequality–What About Limits to Growth? Do We Need a Steady State Economy? One Politician’s Surprising Answer |
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