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Wisdom is a very difficult construct to work with in research and practice. One reason for this is that wise people can deal with metaphysical questions and experience spiritual phenomena, both of which are hard to measure meaningfully. Although metaphysical and spiritual matters are not imponderable, they have significant measurement problems that are also part of the shortcomings of standard social science statistical frameworks. A second reason is that for many wisdom theorists, wisdom is context-dependent because wisdom is defined by and responds to what its context presents to it. We can therefore argue that wisdom is essentially context, which in quantum physics is theorised as a superposition of random variables that interact. This chapter, therefore, ponders the ‘immeasurable’ from the perspective of quantum-like social science and quantum theory to render wisdom, including its spirituality component, in formal mathematical models. The mathematical formalism of quantum physics allows for the presence of metaphysical phenomena in its ontological foundations and its mathematical models. This chapter, therefore, also presents an argument for understanding wisdom from the superposition perspective and, in particular, the internal interactions between random variables contained within it. If the challenge of measuring wisdom as a nondeterministic system is met, we may finally have an opportunity to measure wisdom in ways that embrace wisdom's complex ontology. A third reason is that wisdom depends on people making first-person subjective judgements. Subjectivity is central to many interpretations of quantum theory, and we can borrow the analytical formalism used in quantum physics for wisdom research. Finally, the chapter discusses future approaches to empirical wisdom research that adopt quantum-like social science methods.

This chapter reviews different ontological positions and uses modernism, postmodernism, structuralism, and poststructuralism to illustrate how each changes the nature of research when attempting to decolonize the research method.

This chapter offers a critique of the affirmative forms of thought that attempt to ground the ontology of social being through subjective-idealist terms. Some recent examples came in the form of notion of truth grounded in subjects' experience and in rationality of language and discourse. The first part of the chapter demonstrates the perilous implications of such an approach for social theory tasked with ontology and for the conception of truth necessary for its task. The second part scrutinizes the paradigm of society that stems from this subjective-idealist notion of truth and social ontology that adopts discourse, language, and literary metaphors to comprehend social being. As an alternative, the final part of the chapter offers a preliminary sketch of the relation of ontology, normativity, and mediation, as well as the notion of critique necessary for social theory tasked with ontology.

This paper aims to analyse the character and strength of the claims made in an emerging literature offering a sociology of financial reporting principles.

The analysis evaluates exemplary works in the literature against the characteristics of the paranoid style first identified by Richard Hofstadter: overheated claims of a far-reaching, malign and collusive machinery of influence; a reductive, rationalistic and dualistic reading of events; weak empirics; and weak theorisation.

A significant stream within the literature is coming to be constructed in the paranoid style. Paranoid stylistics, used as a diagnostic tool, alerts us here to distorted judgement.

Alternative ways of avoiding the dangers of paranoid-style readings are suggested, ranging from resisting the temptations towards such readings to a radical re-working of the epistemics of “socio-accounting”.

The danger of allowing the conclusions advanced in the literature to go unchallenged is that they may influence society’s attitude to accounting, public policy-making and scholars’ willingness to contribute to the crafting of reporting principles and standards.

Although paranoid style analysis has been widely used to examine narratives in other academic fields, to the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to apply it to scholarly accounting.

Our purpose is to reconnect memetics to information, a persistent and unclear association. Information can contribute across a span of memetic research. Its obscurity restricts conversations about “information flow,” the connections between “form” and “content,” as well as many other topics. As information is involved in cultural activity, its clarification could focus memetic theories and applications.

Our design captures theoretical nuance in memetics by considering a long standing conceptual issue in memetics: information. A systematic review of memetics is provided by making use of the term information across literature. We additionally provide a citation analysis and close readings of what “information” means within the corpus.

Our initial corpus is narrowed to 128 pivotal memetic publications. From these publications, we provide a citation analysis of memetic studies. Theoretical directions of memetics in the informational context are outlined and developed. We outline two main discussion spaces, survey theoretical interests and describe where and when information is important to memetic discussion. We also find that there are continuities in goals which connect Dawkins’s meme with internet meme studies.

To our knowledge, this is the broadest, most inclusive review of memetics conducted, making use of a unique approach to studying information-oriented discourse across a corpus. In doing so, we provide information researchers areas in which they might contribute theoretical clarity in diverse memetic approaches. Additionally, we borrow the notion of “conceptual troublemakers” to contribute a corpus collection strategy which might be valuable for future literature reviews with conceptual difficulties arising from interdisciplinary study.

I suggest that the search for Adam Smith’s theodicy is likely to be in vain. The paper begins with a brief history of approaches to evil, emphasizing the context in which they arose, and the questions authors were addressing. Approaches most relevant to Adam Smith include those of Augustine and Calvin, and the early modern theodicies of Leibniz, Samuel Clarke and William King, as well as the attacks on them by Bayle and Voltaire. Scottish Enlightenment writers were not terribly interested in theodicy, though Hutcheson and Kames did devote space to their versions of problems of evil. David Hume’s Dialogues on Natural Religion are often taken to be classic statement of the problem of theodicy and argument against religious belief, but his concern was to demolish rationalistic theodicies rather than religious belief or practice. The paper then turns to Smith’s writings, considering similarities and differences to these approaches to evil. Smith emphasizes the wisdom and beneficence of God, and that evils we observe are part of a larger providential plan. He makes no attempt to justify the God in the face of evil, and in this respect Smith shares more with Augustine and Calvin than he does with the early modern theodicists. Smith’s approach to evil is simple and ameliorative. Smith’s approach contrasts with early nineteenth century English political economists, from Malthus onwards, for whom theodicy was important. Whatever view we take of the theodicists project of justifying an all-powerful and good God in the face of evil may, we still struggle to make sense of economic suffering and evil.

This piece explores the philosophical origins of sense-making as defined in Brenda Dervin’s methodology.

This conceptual paper locates the origins of sense-making's rich ontological, epistemological and etymological heritage to the Classical Greece and the Pre-Socratic period. The Greek origins of sense-making‘s philosophical undercurrents surface again in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit before the idea is picked up again in twentieth century philosophy and library science.

This is a conceptual paper and no empirical findings are presented.

This paper makes an original contribution to the study of information seeking and to sense making theory and methodology.