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Cross-Disciplinary Scientific Foundation for Sustainability Chapter j 3 35

qualitative data are combined with quantitative economics, a comprehensive
science emerges as based on a qualitative perspective.
To get the debate focused, the Lifeworld tradition will be applied initially
herein to business economics. And to add some perspective, purpose, and
planning to it, the focus will be primarily upon the business of energy. This
particular perspective reflects one of the authors’ area of expertise and recent
experiences and also a very contemporary issue that merges both economics
and sciencedenergy is viewed as science and engineering. Moreover, the
business economics of the energy sector is placed in the context of global
warming and climate change.
We will discuss how to understand the very concept of organizations and
how organizations are constructed and developed. We need to have an un-
derstanding of what people are and what they bring to the organizational
economic context by interacting with one another and in groups.
We will also discuss how to understand organizations from a methodo-
logical viewpoint. It is no mere coincidence that qualitative methods have been
developed within a Lifeworld tradition. Furthermore, we will show how to
understand this subjective and scientific paradigm along with the theorizing
within this tradition that transforms economics into a science along the lines of
natural and physical sciences. The aim is thereforedthrough the everyday life
sociological traditiondto discuss the central issues and basic concepts put
forth by Herbert Blumer’s symbolic interactionism, phenomenology, and
Chomsky’s linguistics to understand and develop a qualitative economic
perspective.
Today there are many insightful criticisms of the objectivist paradigm or as
it is better known, neoclassical economics, which is the mainstream theory in
economics. We believe, however, that most of these critiques fall within the
same philosophical tradition or objectivist paradigm of economics and hence
are really “revisionist.” An excellent example that has gained considerable
attention is “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of
Everything” (Levitt and Dubner, 2005). In the book and several lectures, the
authors present qualitative insights but in quantitative methods. In short, they
rework neoclassical economics around qualitative ideas. Although this is a
start at being scientific, it lacks explanation and prediction hypotheses must be
made, tested, and then retested with the purpose of seeking understanding.
This chapter presents an entirely different route to understanding economic
and business phenomena. As Erik Reinert, the economic historian, put it there
are three significant issues in addressing economic theory:

One: how economic growth is ‘created’; two, the alternative mechanisms
through which growth and welfare are ‘diffused’ between and within the nation-
states, and to the individual; and three, how this alternative understanding is
based on a different philosophical basis.
Reinert (1997, p. 9).