My work began in professional and institutional questions concerning accounting, taxation and law. Research into China increasingly demonstrated that formal legal and economic systems could not be understood independently of the societies in which they operated. This led into political economy and sociology: institutions, relationships, culture, power and historical development.
Those questions in turn required investigation at other levels. Psychology raised the biological and cognitive foundations of human sociality; linguistics the construction and transmission of meaning; history the inherited structures through which societies develop; philosophy the assumptions concerning the person, knowledge, property, freedom and the good underlying modern institutions; and theology a much older intellectual tradition concerned with human nature, relationship, moral agency and ultimate meaning.
My creative work approaches related questions from another direction. Music, visual art, literature, performance, collecting and technological creativity reveal human activities that cannot easily be reduced to material utility. They provide another means of investigating how human beings construct meaning.
These are therefore not separate interests collected together. Nor do I seek to reduce them to a single theory. They are different levels and methods for examining a recurring problem: how human beings create, inhabit and transform the social, institutional, linguistic, historical, intellectual and symbolic worlds in which they live.
