Hard times call for hard words. If it is true that Total Quality Management represents a sophisticated integrated apparel that has effectively construed a mechanism of transference of operational rationality from industrial to post-industrial times, across the last two centuries, then it is possible to imagine that TQM can also occupy the role of helping to foster transition to a future yet being drawn. That is, within a dystopian world, utopias are forged that denounce silences, blockages and equivoques and consequently unavoidably open the way to new possible futures. The inspiration of societies like Japan is crucial. When ten years ago, in 2015, its government presented the society 5.0 plan, which helps to capture the complexity of the human-technology tandem of models such as industry 4.0 and 5.0, then the attention is shifted to the human transformation that is being designed. Design here is understood as a practical, pragmatic and effective process that captures ipseité, how humans hold their experience of existence, in existential and metaphysical terms. In this process, social change and disruptive innovation are crucial. In other words, societies represent the synergic association of a succession of generations, where each new layer either repeats and reinforces or else rejects and repels its heritage thus generating novelty and change. Metamodernity captures this authenticity, the role of affect and of affective engagement, of paradox and conflict, and of hypocrisy and sarcasm. Trust and openness represent the counter-role of a self-destructive command and control hypervigilant society, where regulation and control has acquired sadistic fascination for alienation at individual and collective levels.

--

affective engagement,disruptive innovation,ipseité,Metamodernity

This publication is associated with the following record:

• Quality 4.0 vs 5.0 and beyond? - “between the world and me” and the role of trust and openness