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“The unexamined life is not worth living” (Socrates). That is, without critically inquiring into the knowledge of life which is well-being and valuable, life is not worth living. Critical thinking questions existing theories and their unexamined and obsessive assumptions and generalizations, constraints, and “best” practices of the prevailing system of management and tries to replace them with more valid assumptions and generalizations that uphold the dignity, uniqueness, and inalienable rights of the individual person and the community. Better outcomes result from asking the right questions than from having the right answers. In the diverse, pluralist cultural environment of today, the promise of a truly generative dialog among Occidental (Western) and Oriental (Eastern) cultures and civilizations holds great hope for the future. Critical thinking (CT) is an “inclusive” thinking system that can facilitate this dialog such that all of us have a meaningful space and place in this universe. After defining CT and arguing its importance for executives, this chapter introduces CT in two parts: Part 1: Various Approaches to Critical Thinking; Part 2: Major Theories of Critical Thinking. Several contemporary business cases will be invoked to illustrate the need, nature, and scope of corporate CT.

This chapter outlines the potential of phenomenology to illuminate how individuals experience the emotions replete within organizations. It employs one particular type of phenomenological approach known as Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). The chapter considers how the hermeneutic and phenomenological foundations of this approach lend themselves to the study of affect. The chapter then clarifies and develops established IPA guidelines to render them more appropriate for research on emotions. In doing so, the chapter demonstrates how IPA can produce contextualized accounts that explore the role of emotions in individuals’ experiences of organizational events and processes.

This chapter discusses the experiences of black men who encounter the phenomena of a mental health diagnosis, detention and death in a forensic setting in England. Although there are black women with mental health issues who have also died in forensic settings, the occurrence is significantly higher for men who become demonised as ‘Big, Black, Bad and dangerous’. The author discusses the historical over representation of mental ill health amongst black people in the general community and the plethora or reasons attributed to this. The author then discusses the various points of entry into the criminal justice system, where black men with mental health issues are over represented. The author explores some inquiries into the deaths of black men in custody and the recommendations that were subsequently made, which successive governments have failed to act upon. The author argues that the term ‘Institutional Racism’ is insufficient to explain this phenomenon; and offers her own theoretical interpretation which is a combination of systemic racism influenced by post-colonial conceptualisation

The rejuvenation of waterways, including rivers and canals as well as riverbanks, has led to an almost explosive increase in the touristic colonization of these fluvial landscapes. In Europe, navigable rivers once used to transport freight have undergone a tourism inspired renaissance as river cruise routes. A similar renaissance has occurred in many of Europe's canal systems. This paper identifies four key elements that form the core of waterway tourism: the structural elements of waterways; the on-land experience; the on-water experience, and; the onboard experience. Structural elements include waterway capacity and use profile, the on-land experience refers to the use of riverbanks for recreation and tourism, the on-water experience refers to activities including swimming, fishing and recreational boating and, the onboard experience refers to the lived experiences of passengers on overnight waterway cruising. The discussion in this paper addresses two research issues related to the core elements of waterway tourism, testing of the canal lifecycle model and exploration of the lived experiences of river cruising in Europe.

Superior leadership in higher education makes the difference between institutions that merely survive and those that can truly thrive in today's complex environment. At this time of significant transformation in higher education, academic leaders face intensifying institutional, environmental, and societal challenges, yet colleges and universities often devote limited attention to integrating their approaches to the selection, development, evaluation, and recognition of leaders. Moreover, traditional approaches and criteria used in the selection of academic leaders are often inadequate for predicting their success. Through the process of organizational and leader profiling, as described in this chapter, institutions can better understand the landscape in which the leader will be functioning, providing a more contextualized and useful approach to leader selection, development, evaluation, and recognition.

This piece is a review of the animal selfhood literature in sociology, organized into four main parts. First, I review the sociological literature of human–animal interactions, in which sociologists claim that animals possess selves. Second, I review how sociologists have referred to the self, from which I construct five criteria of selfhood, including self as attribution, self-awareness, intersubjectivity, self-concept/reflexivity, and narration. Third, I address how animals have selves using these criteria, drawing on sociological and ethological evidence. Fourth, I critique the animal interaction sociologists’ specific claims of animal selfhood, including their epistemological failure to distinguish between human accounts of animal subjectivities and animal subjectivities, and their empirical failure to show how animals act toward themselves. Ultimately, I conclude that animal selves, particularly in an elemental Meadian sense, are potentially real, but in most cases are unobservable or unverifiable phenomena.