(Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore) The Passion for Knowing

What are we talking about when we merge knowledge, organizations and passion together? Although this may seem a somewhat eccentric question, it in fact highlights a very simple and everyday relation. We are talking about the importance of the expressive relation and attachment to the world and the limit of a purely instrumental and economic view of human activity: the idea that people do what they do for the love of what they do and not for the money. This relation requires brief historical contextualization. The oppositional and hierarchical relationship between emotion and rationality, with the latter term predominating over the former, is a relatively recent phenomenon. As noted by Elias (1994), the individual control and the public regulation of emotions are a central part of the process of modernization. The removal or deferral of emotions and passions from the public and organizational sphere can thus be fully identifi ed as one of the main features of the project of modernity. Things, however, used to be different. Many of the 17th-century writers were concerned with the passions as a source of self-knowledge, self-control, and power over others; and they were moving away from the treatment of passions embedded in discussion of vice and virtue. Most of these works are not well-known today, even if they contributed to an early philosophy of mind (James, 1997). The 17th century was marked by a growing spirit of inquiry ‘that moved from experience to generalization