The ability to organize is our most valuable social technology. Organizing affects an enterprise’s efficiency, effectiveness, and ability to adapt. Modern organizations operate in increasingly complex, dynamic environments, which puts a premium on adaptation. Compared to traditional organizations, modern organizations are flatter and more open to their environment. Their processes are more generative and interactive – actors themselves generate and coordinate solutions rather than follow hierarchically devised plans and directives. Modern organizations search outside their boundaries for resources wherever they may exist. They coproduce products and services with suppliers, customers, and partners. They collaborate, both internally and externally, to learn and become more capable. In this book, leading voices in the field of organization design articulate and exemplify how a combination of agile processes, artificial intelligence, and digital platforms powers adaptive, sustainable, and healthy organizations.

The conjunction in our title requires some explanation, if not justification, in the context in which this book is published. This book aims to introduce the undergraduate, postgraduate and general reader to a literary and intellectual relationship which is richer in German than in any other European culture. That is the constant and reciprocal relationship in the German-speaking world since the Middle Ages between literary and religious practice and discourse.

In the period 1770-1830 the progressive dissolution of the antithesis between religious inwardness and Enlightenment critique gave rise to historically unparalleled creativity in German literature and thought. This is also the age in which human subjectivity was decisively redefined by critical and then post-critical Idealism in German philosophy. Between 1770 and 1830 the twin heritages of rationalism in German Idealist philosophy and Pietism in the beginnings of modern biblical criticism came together. In so doing, both decisively affected the vocabulary of German literature and its function as a mode of cultural critique in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Germany. The development in German writing from the literature of Empfindsamkeit (Sentimentality) and Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) to Romanticism reflects the evolution of a specifically literary idea of inwardness which variously expresses and challenges theological and political constructions of the subject.

‘Modern democracy’ – Schattschneider (1942: 1) wrote – ‘is unthinkable save in terms of political parties’. By contesting elections, participating in parliament and taking grievances to court rather than to the streets, parties encourage citizens to regard democratic politics as morally and procedurally legitimate. By representing constituents in the corridors of power, they render public policymaking accountable and expose instances of official malfeasance. By recruiting, training and socialising political actors, they bring fresh talent into the system and ensure that democratic ideals are imbibed at the highest levels of society. And by creating, nurturing and reproducing societal coalitions – with the capacity to secure an electoral majority – they bring together groups with conflicting interests and so facilitate social cohesion. A representative democracy without effective political parties, in other words, is akin to an engine without moving parts.

African parties, however, have a bad reputation. Far from exercising power for the common good, ruling parties are said to intimidate opponents, politicise security forces and erode the boundaries between party, government and state. Far from recruiting fresh talent, they affect an endless circulation of elites, with the discredited autocrats of yesteryear moving from party to party without ever relinquishing power. Far from building broad-based alliances capable of reconciling interests and managing conflict, they seek short-term electoral advantage by fanning the flames of ethnic hatred. And far from establishing acceptable norms of political behaviour, opposition parties attack rivals, denigrate judiciaries and cry foul over electoral defeat even when the popular will has been unambiguously expressed. Little wonder, then, that African parties are often regarded as the ‘weak link in the chain of elements that together make for a democratic state’ (Randall and Svåsand 2002: 31).

Most African parties, of course, have a constitution intended to define objectives, guarantee rights and responsibilities, establish institutions and place limits on the exercise of political power. These rules, however, tend to exist only on paper. Indeed, few African parties have a grassroots membership capable of effecting vertical accountability or influencing policy, in part because internal party organisation is sustained by the personal fortunes of ‘big men’. Fewer still have a professional bureaucracy capable of applying party statute, conducting policy research and creating checks on presidential power.