Kegan, R. (1994). In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life. Harvard University Press. ISBN: 978-0-674-44588-3.
Documents five orders of consciousness, with transitions between them producing qualitatively different capacities for systems thinking, perspective-taking, and holding paradox. Kegan’s central argument is that the demands of modern institutional life already exceed the developmental capacity of most adults.
The BioConomy corpus maps Kegan’s orders onto its framework: the fourth order (self-authoring mind) corresponds to the capacity for Material V2, individual intelligence applied to systems. The fifth order (self-transforming mind) corresponds to the capacity for Mycelial V2, the ability to participate in distributed intelligence without needing to control it. Kegan’s fifth order maps onto Graves’s Second Tier and Gebser’s integral structure.