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The purpose of this paper is to adopt a critical relational dialectics framework to identify and explore gender discursive struggles about social inclusion observed in an online gaming community, in South Africa.

The paper uses a technique called contrapuntal analysis to identify and explore competing discourses in over 200 messages on gender struggles about social inclusion posted in the local community’s gamer discussion board, based on seven threads initiated by women gamer activists.

The findings show how four interrelated gender discursive struggles about social inclusion and social exclusion animated the meanings of online gamer relations: dominance vs equality, stereotyping vs diversity, competitiveness vs cooperativeness and privilege vs empowerment.

Game designers should reinforce more accurate and positive stereotypes to cater for the rapidly growing female gamer segment joining the online gaming market and to develop a less chauvinistic and more diversely representative online gaming community. Enlightened gamers should exercise greater solidarity in fighting for gender equality in online gaming communities.

The critical relational dialectics analysis adopted in this study offers a promising avenue to understand and critique the discursive struggles that arise when online gamers from the different gender groups relate. The findings highlight the unequal discursive power and privilege of many white male gamers when discussing social inclusion. Advancing our understanding of these discursive struggles creates the possibilities for improving social inclusion in online gaming communities.

The purpose of this paper is to invite further consideration of how people experience documents. By offering a model from Reader Response theory – Louise Rosenblatt's Transactional Theory of Reading – as well as examples from research on numinous experiences with museum objects, the author hopes to open further avenues of information behavior studies about people and documents. The goal is to incorporate more aspects of lived experience and the aesthetic into practice with and research of documents.

Theoretical scope includes Louise Rosenblatt's Transactional Theory of Reading, John Dewey's concepts of transaction and experience and lived experience concepts/methods derived from phenomenology.

Rosenblatt's Transactional Theory explicates the continuum of reader response, from the efferent to the aesthetic, stating that the act of “reading” (experience) involves a transaction between the reader (person) and the text (document). Each transaction is a unique experience in which the reader and text continuously act and are acted upon by each other. This theory of reading translates well into the realm of investigating the lived experience of documents and in that context, a concrete example and suggested strategies for future study are provided.

This paper provides a holistic approach to understanding lived experience with documents and introduces the concept of person-document transaction. It inserts the wider notion of document into a more specific theory of reading, expanding its use beyond the borders of text, print and literature. By providing an example of real document experiences and applying Rosenblatt's continuum, the value of this paper is in opening new avenues for information behavior inquiries.

Using the concept of knowing-in-practice (KinP), and drawing from current understandings of aesthetic and sensible knowledge within organization studies, this study explores how the entrepreneurial learning (EL) process unfolds over time, throughout the lives of startup founders, well before entrepreneurial action takes place.

Using a life histories approach, 25 interviews were conducted with the founders of 18 startups. Additional 14 semi-structured interviews were conducted with other startups' founders, focusing on thematic stories. Data were analyzed using abduction and narrative analysis.

Although each entrepreneur's history is unique, the authors show that entrepreneurs' lives are generally a texture of practices, resulting in aesthetic–sensible knowledge that is developed as entrepreneurs participate in various social practices. This includes KinP episodes where perceptive-sensorial faculties are fundamental for entrepreneurs to perceive the world, recognize/create opportunities and launch a business.

The historical approach did not allow the authors to witness firsthand the practices and KinP episodes that participants verbalized. Regardless, the results show that aesthetic and sensible knowledge provide a fruitful lens for investigating EL while highlighting the indissoluble relationship between practice and learning.

Although the senses have been recognized as fundamental for learning in organizations, entrepreneurship scholars have yet to explore the aesthetic and sensory processes involved in EL. The primary contribution of this paper is to develop a new understanding of the situated nature of EL as a process that starts well before entrepreneurial action occurs, stemming from entrepreneurs' experiencing of certain practices and the aesthetic and sensible knowledge they build over their life trajectory.

The aim of this paper is to contribute to making higher education, particularly online education, more relevant and inspiring by orienting it toward the pragmatics and aesthetics of knowing. This paper also demonstrates the relevance of cybernetics and cybernetic thinking in education today.

The author's general strategy is to connect processes of knowing to the purpose of education, thus providing an organizing principle for the design and practice of online education. Nontrivial conversation and aesthetic experience are combined in a cybernetic complementarity, conceptualized as the processes that foster understanding. This serves the purpose of education, defined here as developing an understanding of how knowledge is constructed and fostering ways of knowing that are creative and complex.

Because the world has become increasingly complex, ambiguous, and pluralistic, the type of thinking needed to act and interact in the world must also be complex, e.g. creative, adaptive, relational, and empathetic. Research shows that this type of thinking is brought forth by aesthetic experience and nontrivial conversation. Combining these as processes of knowing provides a non-dogmatic way of orienting education toward student-centered constructivist learning.

Connecting nontrivial conversation and aesthetic experience as processes of knowing is an original contribution to education literature. This is also an exemplar of generating a cybernetic complementarity for conceptual modelling in education design. Anyone interested in how online education can extend efforts to transform higher education so it may better facilitate thinking in ways that are creative and complex will find this paper valuable.

Marx's analysis of alienated labor still explains much about how the capitalist labor process shapes the thoughts and feelings of direct producers. But Marx's analysis fares less well in explaining how the work people actually do with their hands and minds leads to specific psychological consequences. This weakness stems from an inadequate social psychology. The purpose of this article is to provide Marx with this needed social psychology by drawing on the work of G.H. Mead. Specifically, Mead's philosophy of the act and his concept of aesthetic experience will be used to show how alienated labor leads to a reified mode of consciousness and a dislike of work itself. This synthesis of Marx and Mead makes good theoretical sense when we consider, first, the remarkable similarity of their respective philosophical anthropologies.

The purpose of this paper is to go beyond the leader-centric approach to highlight the shared leadership phenomena happening in organizations where there is no head leader. Seeing interactions between the orchestra members through the lens of aesthetics is a useful way of understanding leadership phenomena.

The different approaches used are interviews, participant observation, analysis of video, photo materials and journalist review.

The managerial evidence says that without a head leader nothing is possible in organizations with a high level of complexity is not proved in a conductorless orchestra. The orchestra without a conductor shows that leadership is an aesthetic phenomenon. The conductorless orchestra is enhancing the sensitivity of organizational practices in a situation where beauty is a common goal to achieve. Studying leadership through the aesthetic lens is very relevant to understand this phenomenon, and shows that leadership is a co-construction between leaders and followers (and therefore negotiated).

It has to be compared to a non “amateur” orchestra where power struggles are maybe more visible.

No study has been done on aesthetics and the no-conductor orchestra.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on reflective practice as a qualitative methodology, and reflection-in-action as a modus operandi to engage with the artistry of cross-language qualitative research.

The author draws on the doctoral research, a cross-language multiple case study aimed at investigating the author’s evolving understanding, as a reflective practitioner, of drama-based pedagogy for teaching Italian as a second language.

A reflective analysis of the author’s tacit decision making during drama improvisation unveiled a clash between covert beliefs and overt attitudes in the author’s practice. In this paper, the author examine this process and highlight the value of translingual writing (writing in two languages) as a method of enquiry that allowed me to become aware of this clash.

A limitation of this research is that the nature of this clash of beliefs is confined to the idiosyncrasy of one practitioner. However, the methodological implications are relevant to cross-language qualitative researchers fluent in two (or more) languages. Frequently, translingual researchers focus all writing efforts in one language only, because of the absence of methodological guidelines bridging cross-language research, reflective practice and translingual studies.

Strategies to investigate awareness of tacit beliefs in educational practice may help other second language/drama reflective practitioners to better understand their knowing in-action.

This paper represents a first step in disseminating knowledge about translingual writing as method, and is of value to all those translingual researchers who are interested in reflective methodologies.

In recent years, a new view of man has begun to emerge. This view, inspired by the concepts of cybernetics, holds that man's behavior and experience can be accounted for by feedback‐control processes and that these processes are hierarchically organized. In this paper, the ideas of three authors who have best expressed this new view, Arthur Koestler, Ervin Laszlo and William Powers, are summarized and compared. The conclusion is reached that, despite differences in detail, the three authors articulate remarkably consistent theories of the nature of man.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a critique of Sen’s utilisation of aspects of Marx’s thought that inform his idea of justice. Marx’s ideas appear in four main areas of discussion: Sen’s positioning of Marx in relation to the other thinkers in his approach to justice; Marx’s fluid notion of identity and its relation to social choice; the problem of going beyond a subjective perspective to consider objective concerns by considering the impact of what Sen calls “objective illusion”; and the issue of just redistribution.

The author utilises a Marxian framework of analysis that engages in immanent critique of Sen’s use of Marx in relation to his theory of justice. This is accomplished through textual analysis and by critical assessment of the analytical Marxist tradition that Sen can be seen as using in his own theories with all their inherent weaknesses.

Sen’s attempt to use Marx’s ideas to inform his theory of justice founder because: he groups Marx with thinkers that would not accept his desire for the abolition of capitalism and a more just society beyond it. He reduces Marx to the analytical tradition with all its inherent weaknesses. He resorts to a methodological individualist approach of choice that Marx rejects. His search for positional objectivity is undermined by the power of capitalist ideology and ruling class interest. His discussion of just redistribution ignores how Marx’s approach can overcome the arbitrariness that Sen thinks is inevitable when making just decisions.

Theoretically, the paper suggests that, based on immanent critique and textual analysis, Sen’s use of Marx’s idea of justice is problematic most notably because Sen keeps his analysis within the framework of capitalism that Marx would reject. The implication for further research is the development of Marx’s own arguments on what constitutes a just society.

Practically, the paper raises questions about the capacity for justice to be achieved within the capitalist system for the reasons discussed in relation to Sen.

Socially, the paper implies that far greater measures to tackle the injustices of the world are necessary than seem to be admitted to by justice theorists such as Sen.

The author shows that the use of Marx’s theories to inform Sen’s notion of justice, while to be welcomed, lose their efficacious power to expose the full injustice of capitalism and the need for its transcendence.

This article contributes to the debate by arguing that addressing the core concept underpinning accelerationism and helps to unpack a number of key assumptions on the nature of capitalism, identifying areas offering new and productive insights into organisation and organisations. The scope of the article will be to examine the accelerationist literature, in particular, the core principles first emerging in the prehistory of accelerationism and further developed through the various waves and iterations of the concept.

The paper offers a conceptual approach to accelerationism. It develops a critical literature review and uses a process of exemplification to highlight insights for organisation and organisations.

The paper concludes that the underpinnings of accelerationism are not well understood and thus much of the critique misses the more intriguing and interesting insights from the cluster of ideas at its core.

The scope of the paper is to provide a coherent and accessible way to navigate through a complex and demanding series of concepts. The value of the paper is that it helps to identify potential insights relevant to management, marketing and organisational scholars.