Enunciated by Jung as an integral part of his psychology in 1916 immediately after his unsettling confrontation with the unconscious, the transcendent function was seen by Jung as uniting the opposites, transforming psyche, and central to the individuation process. It also undoubtedly reflects his personal experience in coming to terms with the unconscious. Jung portrayed the transcendent function as operating through symbol and fantasy and mediating between the opposites of consciousness and the unconscious to prompt the emergence of a new, third posture that transcends the two. In exploring the details of the transcendent function and its connection to other Jungian constructs, this work has unearthed significant changes, ambiguities, and inconsistencies in Jung's writings. Further, it has identified two separate images of the transcendent function: (1) the narrow transcendent function, the function or process within Jung's pantheon of psychic structures, generally seen as the uniting of the opposites of consciousness and the unconscious from which a new attitude emerges; and (2) the expansive transcendent function, the root metaphor for psyche or being psychological that subsumes Jung's pantheon and that apprehends the most fundamental psychic activity of interacting with the unknown or other. This book has also posited that the expansive transcendent function, as the root metaphor for exchanges between conscious and the unconscious, is the wellspring from whence flows other key Jungian structures such as the archetypes and the Self, and is the core of the individuation process. The expansive transcendent function has been explored further by surveying other schools of psychology, with both depth and non-depth orientations, and evaluating the transcendent function alongside structures or processes in those other schools which play similar mediatory and/or transitional roles.

India is renowned for its diversity. Dissimilitude abounds in every sphere - from the physical elements of its land and people to the intangible workings of its beliefs and practices. Indeed, given this variety, India itself appears to be not a single entity but an amalgamation, a “constructs” arising from the conjoining of innumerable, discrete parts. Modem scholarship has, quite properly, tended to explore these elements in isolation. (In part, this trend represents the conscious reversal of the stance taken by an earlier generation of scholars whose work reified India into a monolithic entity - a critical element in the much maligned “Orientalist” enterprise.) Nonetheless, the representation of India as a singular “Whole” is not an entirely capricious enterprise; for India is an identifiable entity, united by - if not born out of - certain deep and pervasive structures. Thus, for example, the Hindu tradition has long maintained a body of mythology that weaves the disparate temples, gods, even geographic landscapes that exist throughout the subcontinent into a unified, albeit syncretic, whole.

In the realm of thought, there is no more pervasive, unifying structure than karma. It is the “doctrine” or “law” that ties actions to results and creates a determinant link between an individual's status in this life and his or her fate in future lives. Following what is considered to be its appearances in the Upanishads, the doctrine reaches into nearly every corner of Hindu thought. Indeed, its dominance is such in the Hindu world view that karma encompasses, at the same time, life-affirming and life-negating functions; for just as it defines the world in terms of the “positive” function of delineating a doctrine of rewards and punishments, so too it defines the world through its “negative” representation of action as an all but inescapable trap, an unremitting cycle of death and rebirth.

Despite - or perhaps because of - karma’s ubiquity, the doctrine is not easily defined. Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty reports of a scholarly conference devoted to the study of karma that although the participants admitted to a general sense of the doctrine's parameters, considerable time was in a “lively but ultimately vain attempt to define…karma and rebirth”. The base meaning of the term “karma” (or, more precisely, in its Sanskrit stem form, karman a neuter substantive) is “action”. As a doctrine, karma encompasses a number of quasi-independent concepts: rebirth (punarjanam), consequence (phala, literally “fruit,” a term that suggests the “ripening” of actions into consequences), and the valuation or “ethic-ization” of acts, qualifying them as either “good” (punya or sukarman) or “bad” (papam or duskarman).

In a general way, however, for at least the past two thousand years, the following (from the well known text, the Bhagavata Parana) has held true as representing the principal elements of the karma doctrine: “The same person enjoys the fruit of the same sinful or a meritorious act in the next world in the same manner and to the same extent according to the manner and extent, to which that (sinful or meritorious) act has been done by him in this world.” Nevertheless, depending on the doctrine's context, which itself ranges from its appearance in a vast number of literary sources to its usage on the popular level, not all these elements may be present (though in a general way they may be implicit).

Demography of organisations, also called population ecology is an interesting field. It proposes that organisational mortality processes depend upon the age and size of the organisation, as well as on characteristics of populations and environments. Moreover, there is evidence of an imprinting process – meaning that environmental conditions at certain early phases in an organisation’s development have longterm consequences. In particular, organisations subject to intense competition have elevated mortality hazards at all ages. A central theme is structural inertia, the tendency for organisations to respond slowly relative to the speed of environmental change. A central argument holds that the inertia derives from the very characteristics that make organizations favoured actors in modern society in terms of reliability and (formal) accountability. It follows that changes in an organisation’s core features are disruptive and increase mortality hazards, at least in the short-run. Research on this subject tends to support this view. The concept of niche provides a framework for relating environmental variations and competition to populations in terms of dimensions of social, political, and economic environments. Most research in this field builds on theories of resource partition and of density dependence. Resource-partitioning theory concerns the relationship between increasing market concentration and increasing proliferation of specialists in mature industries. The key implication of this theory concerns the effects of concentration on the viability of specialist organisations (those that seek to exploit a narrow range of resources). The theory of densitydependent organisational evolution synthesizes ecological and institutional processes. It holds that growth in the number of organisations in a population (density) drive processes of social legitimatization and competition that, in turn, shape the vital rates.