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The purpose of this paper is to question whether the management studies is rigorous and/or relevant is a recurrent debate in the discipline. There is reason to believe that this dichotomy is simplistic as relevance is a consequence of rigor (defined in a variety of ways in the literature), whereas the epistemic value of rigor must per se be examined in more detail.

Drawing on the study of the analytical philosophy of Donald Davidson, rigor is here conceptualized as the capacity to examine how intersubjective meaning is constituted on the basis of the semantics of the everyday language.

In Davidson’s pragmatist view, individual beliefs are established through communication, and beliefs generate preferences and “pro-attitudes” that result in social action. Using Ian Hacking’s term undoing as a critique of a proposition or idea as being no contender for truth (or some other quality) at all, the paper questions the proposition that scientific rigor can be operationalized as the use of data collection and analysis methods developed in other and more authoritative disciplines, e.g. economics. On the contrary, to make accurate descriptions of beliefs, preferences and actions on the basis of the use of everyday language is the mark of scientific rigor in management studies.

The paper addresses the question of how rigorous research in management studies is essentially a matter of explanation, and that explanation, in turn, demands a more elaborate theory of action. The paper also introduces the work of Donald Davidson as an important figure when theorizing action.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the concept of agency on basis of a pragmatist philosophy framework of analysis. Agency is a key analytical concept in management studies, debated in terms of its theoretical elements and its degree of empirical substantiation. Agency is commonly either assumed to be the case, understood as some generic human capacity to act with integrity, or, alternatively, agency is considered to be derived from social structures, say professional norms or occupational identities acquired through socialization. In contrast, in an attempt to escape the agency/structure model, agency may be considered as what is generated in and through meso-level interactions, constituted as recurrent practices wherein accomplishments in the past serve as the template for new activities that further reinforce agential capacities.

Drawing on the work of pragmatist philosopher Donald Davidson and what he calls the principle of charity, this paper presents an analytical model wherein agency is generated on basis of a shared everyday language wherein beliefs and preferences are constituted and thereafter serve as the basis of agential action.

Davidson’s externalist theory of action is supportive of the theory and study of meso-level interactions and helps to overcome the question whether agency is exogenously given or the effect of social structure.

This paper reviews recent social science literature on agency and introduces pragmatist philosophy concepts to better examine under what conditions social actors can reasonably have faith in an interaction being premised on beliefs that are held on basis of rational and reasonable grounds. This adds to an integrated theory of agency, being of importance for social theory and organizational analysis more specifically.

The purpose of this paper is to present a case study about how academic librarians can contribute to the interdisciplinary research endeavors of professors and students, especially doctoral candidates, through an intellectualized approach to collection development.

In the wake of protest movements such as the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, colleges and universities have begun to develop courses about these events, and it is anticipated that there will be much research conducted about their respective histories. Academic librarians can participate in those research efforts by developing interdisciplinary collections about protest movements and by referring researchers to those collections.

Through a case‐study approach, this paper provides a narrative bibliography about Southern Agrarianism that can help professors and students interested in the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street movements to see their research endeavors from a new interdisciplinary perspective.

The value of this paper lies in presenting a concrete example of the way in which academic librarians can become active research partners through the work of building collections and recommending sources in areas that professors and students may not have previously considered.

Hypothesis tests for dominance in income distributions has received considerable attention in recent literature. See, for example, Barrett and Donald (2003a, b), Davidson and Duclos (2000) and references therein. Such tests are useful for assessing progress towards eliminating poverty and for evaluating the effectiveness of various policy initiatives directed towards welfare improvement. To date the focus in the literature has been on sampling theory tests. Such tests can be set up in various ways, with dominance as the null or alternative hypothesis, and with dominance in either direction (X dominates Y or Y dominates X). The result of a test is expressed as rejection of, or failure to reject, a null hypothesis. In this paper, we develop and apply Bayesian methods of inference to problems of Lorenz and stochastic dominance. The result from a comparison of two income distributions is reported in terms of the posterior probabilities for each of the three possible outcomes: (a) X dominates Y, (b) Y dominates X, and (c) neither X nor Y is dominant. Reporting results about uncertain outcomes in terms of probabilities has the advantage of being more informative than a simple reject/do-not-reject outcome. Whether a probability is sufficiently high or low for a policy maker to take a particular action is then a decision for that policy maker.

The methodology is applied to data for Canada from the Family Expenditure Survey for the years 1978 and 1986. We assess the likelihood of dominance from one time period to the next. Two alternative assumptions are made about the income distributions – Dagum and Singh-Maddala – and in each case the posterior probability of dominance is given by the proportion of times a relevant parameter inequality is satisfied by the posterior observations generated by Markov chain Monte Carlo.

The purpose of the paper is to provide a critical reply to Robert Lingard's close reading of a previously published paper of the present author's, “Meaning, truth, and information.”

The approach adopted in this paper is an examination of Lingard's argument and counter‐points, employing (primarily) logical and rhetorical analysis of his claims.

While some of Lingard's criticisms are legitimate and must be admitted, many have to be subjected to rebuttal on the basis of misreading, logical error, and discursive misapprehension of points made in the original article.

Since the present paper is a reply to another author's work, originality is constrained by the arguments and claims made by that author. That said, additional analysis is added to the matters of meaning, truth, and information in an effort to clarify and expand upon the essence of the original article.

Some problems have been pointed out in the literature, regarding how the various critical approaches to pedagogy have failed to properly promote autonomy of thinking and to prevent the imposition of knowledge. The criticisms include the incapacity of some approaches to highlight and question subtle or tacit forms of knowledge, and the implicit active imposition of knowledge by some others. With the possible use of critical systems thinking in pedagogy in mind, here we examine how the forms of critique used by three different approaches within this strand can deal with these criticisms. We will argue that, as presently conceived, the critical use of the system idea is susceptible of being criticised in the same way.

Nancy Maclean’s Democracy in Chains (2017) is an attempt to provide a narrative arc for the rise of free market ideas in political action during the second half of the twentieth century and into the first decades of the twenty-first century. The central character in her narrative is neither F.A. Hayek nor Milton Friedman, let alone Adam Smith or Ludwig von Mises, but James M. Buchanan, the 1986 Nobel Prize winner in economics. MacLean argues that rather than extol the virtues of the market economy as Hayek and Friedman did before him, Buchanan focused on the dysfunctions of politics. Due to a series of argumentative fallacies and failures that follow from her ideological blinders, I argue that MacLean’s attempt is a missed opportunity to seriously engage some very pressing issues in public choice and political economy and understand how James Buchanan attempted to resolve them in a democratic manner. As such, Democracy in Chains is not only a mischaracterization of Buchanan and his project but also a poignant lesson to us all about how ideological blinders can subvert even the sincerest effort to unearth truth in the social sciences and the humanities.

This chapter takes a look at the Social Web. Humanities scholars are, by and large, a fairly social group. Attend any of the Modern Language Association conferences and you will be inundated with invitations to attend events hosted by publishers, groups within MLA, universities, and alumni organizations. The way we now include apps as an inherent part of our socialization, however, is changing and evolving as a result of some of the tools that are to be associated with the digital humanities, albeit not necessarily as apparently so as some others. This chapter explores the familiar players like Facebook™, Google+™, Twitter™, and others and discusses how they are being used by those in the field, contextualizing them within a variety of disciplines in the humanities through case studies while situating the category alongside theories that make sense of their use. Not as commonly used in academic social networks are vlogging applications along with student blog sites, which are also examined in this chapter. It is in this and subsequent chapters where augmented reality enhancements will be used. Please follow the directions at the beginning of Chapter 2 to access these additions.