Search results

G. H. Mead's social, developmental, and emergent conception of language and mind is a foundational assumption that is central to the interactionist tradition. However, the validity of this model has been challenged in recent years by theorists such as Albert Bergesen, who argues that recent advances in linguistics and cognitive psychology demonstrate that Mead's social theory of language learning and his theory of the social nature of mind are untenable. In light of these critiques, and drawing on Chomsky's debates with intellectuals such as Jean Piaget, John Searle, and Michael Tomasello, this chapter compares Chomsky's and Mead's theories of language and mind in terms of their assumptions about innateness and the nature and source of meaning. This comparison aims to address the major strengths and weaknesses in both models and shed light on how interactionists might frame these conceptual challenges in future theoretical and empirical research.

The purpose of this paper is to tackle some of the concepts and ideas that the intellectual and business community can learn from Chomsky's thinking in relation with a new global responsible management education environment. The first part of the work will present some of the key elements about Chomsky and education that the authors would like to emphasize. These are relating management education, critical thinking, and systems theory in the twenty‐first century business milieu.

An insight on post‐colonial theory and education will, afterwards, incorporate the hermeneutical tradition into the mainframe of critical thinking theory. The paper incorporates a decentred approach to education questioning presuppositions and moral values from “fundamentalist market theory.” Cultural studies and non‐western thinkers in this field are another important contribution to back up Chomsky's ideas on business and education.

When the paper relates social and economic performance concepts to critical thinking business education some questions arise about how to improve the responsible perception and understanding of the global environments and how the authors have to rethink education in a competitive profit‐oriented business community. The ideas of Chomsky can help them to deal with these issues departing from his political vision and his thinking on university education.

Critical management has been questioning in the last years different management models to put forward a responsible paradigm for business organizations and educational institutions. Post‐colonial theory has been another important intellectual ground for critical thinking in the business educational environment, opening up the debate about how to reconcile performance and responsible practices.

Chomsky's committed political views open up the way for many educational institutions and business organizations to become responsible in a technological business environment severely damaged by greed and personal interest. Management schools will have learned from his contributions and the actions of many international organizations engaged in changing for the better attitudes and material values in favour of management for globally responsible practices and the construction of new learning objectives.

In business studies, comparative, critical, cross‐cultural, and diversity management many scholars have been dealing with some of the subjects of serious concern by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology leftist professor presented in this study. The paper has to take into consideration a transversal approach of business education in relation to the concept of cross‐cultural performance, already developed in the work on cross‐cultural and diversity management.

The purpose of this paper is to use selected discussions appearing on the talk pages of the Wikipedia entry on the Vietnam War to shed light on how the wider epistemological context of this online encyclopaedia affects the nature of debate about sources and subsequently how this knowledge could be used to improve information literacy instruction.

My broad approach to the study of the Wikipedia talk pages on the Vietnam War is qualitative in nature and explores the debate over sources through a textual analysis.

Although much of the debate over sources is conducted without acrimony, the level of analysis one finds in the talk pages is rather shallow while the attention of individual contributors is not overly concentrated.

There have been few studies of individual Wikipedia entries and their talk pages, rather the focus of most of the literature has been on a broad overview of the entire encyclopaedia or a concentration on a set of entries for a particular topic area.

Computer corpus linguistics (CCL) is a scientific innovation that has facilitated the creation and analysis of large corpora in a systematic way by means of computer technology since the 1950s. This article provides an account of the CCL pioneers in general but particularly of those in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland. It is found that Germany and Sweden, due to more advantageous financing and weaker communities of generativists, had a faster adoption of CCL than the other two countries. A particular late adopter among the four was Switzerland, which did not take up CCL until foreign professors had been recruited.

The purpose of this paper is to use principles from Tzu's The Art of War to develop a conceptual framework for the exploration of brand persuasion and the manufacturing of consumer consent and consumption.

The conceptual framework is based upon formal theoretical links between Tzu's concept of engagement and the political economic aspects of Herman and Chomsky with regard to manufacturing consent and consumption engineering via use of the mass media.

Within the framework the consumer is simultaneously the enemy, the manipulated target for consumption engineering and the protected people in the sales “war”. The business culture and ethical considerations of such a position are examined and hence the paper offers a novel insight into how theoretical concepts link political, social and commercial paradigms in order to gain an insight into market interventions, consumption engineering and marketing leverage.

The paper contributes to the body of knowledge examining the relationship between Chinese and Western theoretical concepts whilst providing insight for executives seeking to leverage marketing strategy.

Algorithms for the construction of the Chomsky and Greibach normal forms for a fuzzy context‐free grammar using the algebraic approach are presented and illustrated by examples. The results obtained in this paper may have useful applications in fuzzy languages, pattern recognition, information storage and retrieval, artificial intelligence, database and pictorial information systems.

The purpose of this paper is to review proposals concerned with advice to President Obama from a cybernetics viewpoint, along with critical comments on the new administration by Noam Chomsky. Also reviewed are proposals for an international conference on the financial crisis.

The aim is to review developments on the internet, especially those of general cybernetic interest.

There is enthusiasm about introducing cybernetics principles in the new administration. Reservations by Chomsky about some aspects are mentioned, as is also a separate initiative for application of cybernetics to world problems.

The proposals relating to the Obama administration include not only giving off advice but also possible installation of a specialist on cybernetics in the White House, and founding of a new research facility. For the proposed international conference mentioned, the advice is to watch the CYBCOM list for developments.

It is hoped that this paper is a valuable periodic review.

This paper examines the nature of propaganda and its use by corporations, particularly in the USA, over a period of nearly 100 years. It emphasises the invisibility of much of this activity and propaganda’s importance for shaping acquiescence in corporate hegemony. The role played by corporate propaganda in the development of different forms of capitalism is addressed. The inculcation of accounting and finance students with values that serve corporate interests is considered: in this context propaganda is inferred in both the longstanding misrepresentation of Adam Smith, and the sustained illusion of competitive “free markets”. The role and language of the business media as a form of propaganda is considered, particularly regarding colonisation of social market economies by Anglo‐Saxon capitalism, which takes as incontestable the maximisation of shareholder value as the proper and necessary aim of corporate activity. It is argued that corporate propaganda has contributed to the accounting measure of business success being justified as an end in itself at the explicit expense of wider societal considerations.

What has come to be known as the “Faurisson Affair” has wide‐ranging implications for librarians concerned with their function as caretakers of intellectual freedom and, particularly, the generally recognized obligations of librarians to provide access to all points of view on all controversial issues. I intend here to sketch the circumstances surrounding the “Faurisson Affair,” show how this ‘affair’ impacts on librarians and intellectual freedom, and suggest how librarians might best handle issues of this nature which contemporary events indicate will be occurring with increasing frequency. The issues involve nothing less than the question of the right to distort, fabricate, and falsely revise history in a free society where, for the purposes of this paper, the librarian represents the medium through which a concerned citizenry seeks accurate information. In brief, should the librarian provide access to patently false information surrounding controversial or otherwise highly emotional issues in the name of intellectual freedom?