Culture is an overarching phenomenon that helps individuals make sense of their world. However, culture is not an unchanging “given.” Members of a society actively create culture and, through their activities and interactions, sustain or change this culture. In an organizational setting, culture gives meaning to each person’s membership in the social stage that is the workplace. In the process of cultural creation and sustenance, the past is often used as a harbinger of things to come. How an organization effectively uses the past to shape its present culture is a major focus of this study. This article is an ethnographic study of how culture is fabricated, sustained, and renewed in a small advertising firm. The authors propose three interpretive themes – nightmare avoidance, “Richardism,” and dream building – and develop these into a framework using Drucker’s three entrepreneurial strategies. A fourth strategy, creative divergence, emerges from our in‐depth analysis of EMC.

While ''philosophy'' is a Western term, philosophy is not something exclusively Western. In this increasingly globalized world, the importance of non-Western philosophy is becoming more and more obvious. Among all the non-Western traditions, Chinese philosophy is certainly one of the richest. In a history of more than 2500 years, many extremely important classics, philosophers, and schools have emerged. As China is becoming an economic power today, it is only natural that more and more people are interested in learning about the cultural traditions, including the philosophical tradition, of China.The Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy series aims to provide the most comprehensive and most up-to-date introduction to various aspects of Chinese philosophy as well as philosophical traditions heavily influenced by it. Each volume in this series focuses on an individual school, text, or person.

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This article presents the Confucian teaching of self-transcendence and its modern implications for interreligious dialogue. It first points out that most scholars in the field of interreligious dialogue share a common tendency to rely very heavily on Western concepts and/or Christian theological approaches. My discussion of self-transcendence is based on the classical teaching of Confucius and Mencius and its leading interpretation by two eminent Neo-Confucian thinkers, Chu Hsi (1130—1200) and Yi T’oegye (1501—1570). I present this core textual tradition while consulting its modern interpreters and some key examples of Confucian practice. Human beings have the potential to work toward perfection (sagehood), and embedded in this doctrine is a religious belief in the oneness of Heaven and human nature. We need to explore a new approach to the interreligious discussion of ‘‘ultimate reality’’ by considering Neo-Confucianism. A dialogue between the Neo-Confucian vision of self-transcendence and the converging heart of world religions will enhance the global enterprise of comparative religion.