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The aim of this article is to explain commonalities and differences in the responses of four national educational science communities to the same external stimulus, namely international comparative large scale student assessments that offered vastly improved comparability of national results from the beginning of the 1990s. The comparison shows the epistemic traditions of educational research in the four countries and properties of the data produced by the international comparative studies to be the central explanatory factors for commonalities and differences of responses to the new studies.

The aim of this article is to encourage critical scholars of international business (IB) to engage with scholarship that turns to practice and situates knowledges. The paper contends that such undertakings have the potential to constructively politicize research in the field of international business.

The paper discusses the need for future research in the field to be studied more critically so as to be able to focus attention on those subjects detrimentally impacted by the operation of IB. It further identifies possibilities for doing so.

The paper argues that turning to practice and situating knowledges represents a move towards the emancipation of subjects marginalized – and, all too often, silenced – in the ordinary functioning of IB.

Moving against the grain of positivist orientated approaches to research in the field, whilst simultaneously building on the critical traditions to the study of IB, we consider how future scholarship might account for marginalized subjects.

The purpose of this paper is to determine if the failure of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to persecute Madoff is, in fact, an ethical failure. The authors turn to the extension of Aristotelian theory of moral values, virtue epistemology, to identify specific failures. The authors generalize this study’s conclusions to an overall responsibility of regulatory agencies to exercise epistemic virtues in their decision-making process. The authors explore how behavioral biases confound the execution of epistemic duty, and how awareness of behavioral biases can alleviate epistemic failures. The authors conclude this study with recommendations to prevent future frauds of Madoff proportions.

The authors rely on recent advances in virtue epistemology and behavioral finance. The authors combine these two theoretical approaches to better understand the duty of competence inherent in being a finance professional, and even more so in being a regulator entrusted with overseeing financial industry, and psychological biases that may prevent finance professionals and regulators from performing this duty.

The paper concludes that the SEC employees failed to exercise epistemic virtues in their handling of the complaints implicating Madoff’s firm of fraud. This failure reveals a consistent pattern of behavioral biases in decision-making. The authors posit that knowledge of ethical theory, specifically virtue epistemology, as well as awareness of behavioral biases, which inhibit epistemically virtuous cognitive process, can improve the functioning of both finance industry and its overseers. The authors suggest that future finance professionals and regulators need to acquire this knowledge while pursuing their undergraduate education: it is the duty of business schools to facilitate this progress.

This paper combines the theory of virtue epistemology with the current knowledge of behavioral biases, which distort rational decision-making, to explain the failures of regulators to analyze fraud reports. The authors extend this finding to recommend the inclusion of the theory of virtue epistemology in business schools’ ethics curriculum.

The purpose of this paper is to explain, in the context of the massification and internationalisation of higher education, how Web 2.0 and its socially oriented knowledge system (episteme) has the potential to counter the current neo‐colonial disprivileging of non‐mainstream knowledge systems and discourses.

The paper, drawing on postcolonial, epistemological, and Web 2.0 learning literatures, first deconstructs the continued dominance of the traditional academic discourse in transcultural settings. It then illustrates how Web 2.0's non‐foundational approach to the nature of knowledge gives it the capacity to construct postcolonial transcultural learning zones that are inherently open to other knowledge systems and discourses.

The paper concludes that the socially oriented knowledge system or episteme of Web 2.0 enables educators to create postcolonial, meaning more epistemically inclusive, transcultural learning zones in which no one knowledge system or discourse is automatically privileged.

The paper highlights the role Web 2.0 can play in negating the colonialising impact of dominant educational practices that disprivilege non mainstream knowledge systems and discourses that have entered university learning environments through massification and internationalisation.

The paper addresses a significant gap in the literature by highlighting the pivotal but much neglected role of epistemology in Web 2.0 as well as in the internationalisation and massification of higher education. More specifically, it indicates how the respectful acceptance of different knowledge systems and discourses can create postcolonial architectures of learning and promote a more egalitarian form of cosmopolitanism.

Suggests that it is reasonable to expect researchers in the field of educational administration to establish the relative value of the knowledge they propound. Draws on the branch of philosophy devoted to the study of the nature of knowledge; epistemology. Argues for new forms of awareness, criteria and processes to help with the growth of trustworthy knowledge. Concludes that there is a need for a post‐paradigm approach that celebrates coherence and multi‐perspectivism.

This paper examines the influence of the normal science tradition, epitomized by the notion that “theory is king”, on contemporary accounting research and the epistemological tensions that may emerge as this idea is applied to particular ways of studying accounting. For illustrative purposes, the authors focus on research informed by actor-network theory (ANT) which can be seen as an “extreme case” in the sense that it is, in principle, difficult to reconcile with the normal science aspirations.

The paper offers an analysis based on a close reading of how accounting scholars, using ANT, theorize, and if they do engage in explicit theorizing, how they deal with the tensions that might emerge from the need to reconcile its epistemological underpinnings with those of the normal science tradition.

The findings of this paper show that the tensions between normal science thinking and the epistemological principles of ANT have, in a few cases, been avoided, as researchers stay relatively faithful to ANT and largely refrain from further theory development. However, in most cases, the tensions have ostensibly been ignored as researchers blend the epistemology of ANT and that of normal science without reflecting on the implications of doing so.

The paper contributes to emerging debates on the role of the normal science tradition in contemporary accounting research, and also extends recent discussions on the role of theory in accounting research inspired by ANT. The paper proposes three reasons for the observed blending of epistemologies: unawareness of tensions, epistemological eclecticism and various political considerations.

A heated debate surrounds the significance of reproducibility as an indicator for research quality and reliability, with many commentators linking a “crisis of reproducibility” to the rise of fraudulent, careless, and unreliable practices of knowledge production. Through the analysis of discourse and practices across research fields, I point out that reproducibility is not only interpreted in different ways, but also serves a variety of epistemic functions depending on the research at hand. Given such variation, I argue that the uncritical pursuit of reproducibility as an overarching epistemic value is misleading and potentially damaging to scientific advancement. Requirements for reproducibility, however they are interpreted, are one of many available means to secure reliable research outcomes. Furthermore, there are cases where the focus on enhancing reproducibility turns out not to foster high-quality research. Scientific communities and Open Science advocates should learn from inferential reasoning from irreproducible data, and promote incentives for all researchers to explicitly and publicly discuss (1) their methodological commitments, (2) the ways in which they learn from mistakes and problems in everyday practice, and (3) the strategies they use to choose which research components of any project need to be preserved in the long term, and how.

In this paper I argue that the liberal problem of religion, which defines religion in terms of dogmatism or opaque justifications based on ‘revealed truth’, needs to be rethought as part of a broader problem of dialogue, which does not define religion as uniquely problematic.

Habermas argues for religious positions to be translated into ‘generally accessible language’ to incorporate religious citizens into democratic dialogue and resist the domination of instrumental rationality by enhancing ‘solidarity’. I contrast this with Rowan Williams’ and Gadamer’s work.

Williams conceptualises religion in terms of recognising the finitude of our being, rather than dogmatism or opacity. This recognition, he argues, allows people to transcend the ‘imaginative bereavement’ of seeing others as means. Using Williams, I argue that Habermas misdefines religion, and reinforces the domination of instrumental rationality by treating religion as a means. I then use Gadamer to argue that the points Williams makes about religion can apply to secular positions too by recognising them as traditions subject to finitude.

This is original because it argues that the liberal problem of religion misdefines both religion and secular positions, by not recognising that both are traditions defined by finitude. To reach, dialogically, a ‘fusion of horizons’, where religious and secular people are understood non-instrumentally in their own terms of reference, will take time and not trade on immediately manifest – ‘generally accessible’ – meanings.

Bose-Einstein condensation is a scientific innovation in experimental physics whose realisation required considerable time and resources. Its diffusion varied considerably between and within five countries that were comparatively studied. Differences between countries can be explained by the variation in the national communities’ absorptive capacities, while within-country differences are due to the impact of authority relations on researchers’ opportunities to build protected space for their change of research practices. Beginning experimental research on Bose-Einstein condensation required simultaneous access to the university infrastructure for research and to grants. The former is largely limited to professors, while the latter made researchers vulnerable to the majority opinion and decision practices of their national scientific community.

Submergence, dislocation, rehabilitation and reform are the terms that crowd out most discussions on Adivasi/indigenous communities. They also fit in aptly with the Adivasi experiences of education and their relationship with knowledge construction, for them but not necessarily with them. Over the course of the last century, the Adivasi story has been composed and reoriented by a confluence of hegemonic regimes, institutions and epistemic traditions. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Tracing the shifts over last few decades and paying attention to the larger politics of indigeneity, schooling and knowledge production, this paper advances a critical reading of the relationship between the marginalised and formal systems of schooling.

Employing Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s (1989) “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, the paper identifies the discourses that have contributed to the construction of Adivasi communities and their relationship with the Indian state.

As schooling continues to occupy a significant place among the communities in India and it gets associated with a number of contradictory logics, the present paper highlights the historicity of the project by which marginalised communities have been defined and their schooling needs have been framed and justified.