The themes of technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and organizing

FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTION AND BRIEF CONCLUSION

Theoretical inquiry on environmental rationality is an open ongoing process for the construction of a sustainable future. Most important for this goal will be research on the social appropriation of the categories of environmental rationality in the building of a new economy, the dialogue of knowledges among all social factors involved and environmental education for the training of new forms of reasoning, modes of thinking and ways of being, to open the paths for a sustainable future.

Several research routes are open for further theoretical and practical reasearch regarding the concept of environmental rationality and its application for innovation in social organization oriented towards the construction of a sustain­able world order. A synthetic list of inquiries and applications can organize a research programme include the following issues:

1. Further research on the theoretical con­sistency of the category of environmental rationality following its epistemological, theoretical and ethical principles, and contrasting this “paradigm” with other in­novations in thinking - in science, philoso­phy, economy, politics and ethics oriented towards the construction of sustainability

2. Further research and action for the construc­tion and implementation of a paradigm of negentropic productivity, conceived as an alternative mode of production based on an integrated system of ecological-technolog­ical-cultural productivity. This research is not only theoretical - ie defining an heuristic concept of a negentropic society facing the entropic condition of the techno-economic order—but should focus on actual practices for territorializing environmental rationality as innovative forms of productive and social organization. This will open new research on the ecological and cultural potentials for local sustainability based on interdisciplin­ary ethno-ecological research.

3. Further research on socio-environmental movements and groups that are “innovating” their strategies for sustainability inspired by, and in dialogue with, the ideas and proposals emerging from environmental rationality.