Miniaturism in Sleeplessness

"To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palms of your hand and eternity in an hour”.

-William Blake, Auguries of Innocence


[I intended to be in a hiatus from blogging in view of my hectic schedule this month but since I could not sleep for no reasons, I thought I might as well be productive by writing this blog entry.]

Before I interviewed pre-screened applicants for a staff position in strategic planning in a shipping company, I usually asked them to write essays on various topics. One of the essay questions I asked was “ How would you explain William Blakes' verse based on your understanding of quantum physics?”. I know. I know. It sounds crazy. It has nothing to do with the position that the applicants were applying for and I didn’t expect them either to answer such question seriously. As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t know how to answer the question myself! What I was after of is their attitude, their sense of humor, and their thinking process. Needless to say, an answer like “I don’t give a %&#@” would have stood out positively!

One of the answers which has left an indelible mark in my mind came from a fresh graduate from a university along Katipunan Avenue. A magna cum laude, he responded something like, “William Blake’s marvelous and rhetorical verse, in a way, gives an insight about quantum physics and philosophy at the same time. Indeed, the tiniest object is a reflection of the greater whole, just as a single proton of light reflects the whole rainbow of colours. If we look at a sand, we do not merely see a particle but also the world where it comes from. It is like discovering a dinosaur bone and seeing a totally different world where it once roamed. In the same way, from the same verse, by looking a flower with all its beauty, we get an insight of how beautiful heaven is. This line of the Auguries of Innocence somehow points to a truth that we do not need to see everything to know that a certain object exists and that we do not need to live till eternity to know how things will be. By extrapolating from little things, we see a whole new world and we experience infinity in a capsule. In the same token, this verse points to Plato’s idea that there is a world of forms and a world of ideas, that the world of physical and empirical things points to the world of ideas and abstract concepts like heaven for instance”.

The message of such a cerebral response kind of resonates to the unique contribution of sociological social psychology which is the methodology called sociological miniaturism – the process of knowing and understanding broader social forces by knowing simple interpersonal situations. Or as Stolte, et al (2001) coined in their journal article, “seeing the big through the small”.

Based on my limited (small) knowledge and understanding of “social enterprises as organizations with an explicit aim to benefit the community, initiated by a group of citizens and in which the material interest of capital investors is subject to limits” and borrowing from (without the intention of bastardizing!) the sociological miniaturism tradition so to speak, would it not be cool to imagineer a big dynamic third sector teeming with social enterprises in developing countries ? If there has been an increasing acknowledgement of the third sector in Europe even with its developed economies, perhaps the more that governments of developing countries should create the necessary policy infrastructure to promote social enterprises. Social enterprises would probably thrive if:

- There is political will to formalize the Third Sector through Social
enterprise-friendly policy/legal infrastructure, among others;

- A strategic framework for the third sector is in place

- A regulatory agency for the third sector- pseudo-equivalent to
SEC,implementing sector development strategies on one hand,
and enforcing social enterprise governance standards and laws
on the other.

- Local development banks to play active roles as financial
intermediaries (or incubation of social enterprises to do
micro-finance for other social enterprises!)

- Capacity building for banks to execute M&A in the Third Sector

- Promote Social Entrepreneurship Awareness, Education, and
Research; Capability building for social entrepreneurs

- Creation of networks of social enterprises

- Other Third Sector Development mechanisms


Well, those items above do not describe nor approximate heaven in William Blake’s verse but suffice it to say they are miniature visions of wakefulness during the unholy hours of the day. Okay, I’m going to sleep now… 3:32 am