Edward Berge
The December edition is now online at this link. It contains a special section about measuring developmental levels. One article is entitled “Do heart and ego develop through hierarchical integration?” Michael Baseches, in “A personal counterpoint to Stein and Heikkinen,” says:
“I begin to address the more pragmatic aspects of Stein and Heikkinen’s argument, ‘If we want to see an integral and developmental worldview gain a real institutional foothold—radically reforming business, government, education, therapy, and our own sense of human potentials—we need to get serious about our quality control standards’ (p. 19). Whether or not I want to see that happen would depend on how such a world-view might gain a foothold. Because I view as dangerous the idea that any kind of empirical validation of measures could substitute for the philosophical arguments on behalf of the value of developmental phenomena, the quote above raises for me the specter of people who neither understand nor are convinced by the arguments beginning to systematically evaluate other people, even choosing who to hire or who to promote in the workplace, based on standardized measures of developmental phenomena. I find this terrifying. It suggests a tyranny of measures that replaces respectful discourse and collective adaptation as the social context in which development does or doesn’t occur. It suggests those with an integral and developmental world view becoming an elite that would use social institutions to ideologically and socio-politically dominate the ‘developmentally inferior.’”
And Theo Dawson emphasizes the need to use such testing results responsibly, as “few consumers of tests are aware of their inherent limitations.” Finally, my 2004 warning in “Giving guns to children” is perhaps finally relevant? Although I haven’t as yet seen anyone address the need to evaluate those business leaders to whom they sell these tests, the latter of which are the ones that use such measures for hiring, promotion etc. without such awareness.