Handbook of Practical Wisdom

The current financial and on-going ecological crises have taught us that without practical wisdom, business, organisations and leadership cannot be sustainable. In response to this situation, the Handbook of Practical Wisdom presents a critically informed understanding of wise practices, contributing to more integrative organizational and leadership studies and practices. The focus on integration emphasises the interdependencies of practical wisdom in relation to members, groups and cultures of organisations in their socio-cultural spheres.Wisdom has slipped from the scholarly map for a long time, so this handbook provides revived and new mappings for today and the future. Seeking to actualize creative potentials of practical wisdom, this book aspires to contribute to the contemporary odysseys and quests for orientation in organisation and management research and practice. Wisdom research, as it presented in this book, provides various bridges to underestimated, neglected or forgotten knowledge and offers transformative passages between Scylla - the rocks of dogmatic modernity - and Charybdis - the whirlpool of dispersed post-modernity. Practical wisdom allows for a better equipped and more experiential and reflexive journey and fosters the art of mindful travelling, beyond a reactive, moralizing sentimentalism. Accordingly, this handbook serves as a medium for reassessing and rearticulating more responsible ways of 'praxis' in the field of organization and management. In this spirit, the chapters in this book open a space for dialogue and debate. Rather than offering closure and final answers, we expect this book to invite further inquiries, conversations and explorations by and among its readers: students, academics and practitioners.