Michael Thompson
Michael Thompson, author and associate of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA).
Originally a professional soldier, Michael Thompson studied anthropology (UCL and Oxford) while also following a career as a Himalayan mountaineer. His early research on how something second-hand becomes an antique, or a rat-infested slum part of Our Glorious Heritage ("Rubbish Theory", Oxford University Press 1979), diverted him into teaching at the Slade School of Fine Art and at Portsmouth University's School of Architecture, and from there to the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), an East-West think-tank in Austria. There he worked on energy futures, on risk perception and on environment and development in the Himalayan Region, the key-unifying concept in all that being "plural rationality": people doing very different things and yet still behaving rationally, given their different sets of convictions as to how the world is and people are.
Michael Thompson's current interests lie in teasing out the various ideas of fairness that underpin the different rationalities and that are so seldom given adequate recognition in global-level decision-making, devising ways of clumsifying and democratising international development aid, and enquiring into how urban infrastructures can be re-engineered so as to make cities into "forces for environmental good".
His latest book is "Organising and Disorganising: A Dynamic and Non-Linear Theory of Institutional Emergence and its Implications" (Triarchy Press, 2008)
http://www.triarchypress.co.uk/pages/book16.htm
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