Search results

Mohammad Azharuddin's arrival in professional cricket served, to quote Karl Marx, as a reform of consciousness that awakened the sport ‘from its dream about itself’. His expertise with the bat invoked the wide expanse of human sensorium, provoking reactions of shock and admiration among observers. In this chapter, I examine Azharuddin's life in cricket and public through a dialectical probing of the relationship between shock and aesthetics. Azhar and cricket appear as a productive terrain to carry out the analysis, as it pushes the possibility of what or who can be considered as a valid subject for theoretical scrutiny. Taking cues from Walter Benjamin and CLR James, I theorise the shock effects created by a cricketer most unusual. From his wristy wizardry with the bat to his appointment as captain of the Indian men's cricket team during the rise of Hindu nationalism in the country, Azharuddin's presence and popularity extended beyond the boundaries that are often imposed on a sportsperson. Through his involvement in the match-fixing scandal that was exposed at the turn of the 21st century, Azhar (the name by which he was popularly known) challenged the mores of a game that had emphasised Victorian notions of purity on and off the field. For the purposes of this chapter, I discuss how Azhar constructed a bodily discourse that pushes us to reassess our very notions of art and aesthetics.

Our prior work has identified a trade-off that new entrants face in obtaining favorable market reception, whereby initial entrants suffer from a deficit of legitimacy whereas later entrants suffer from a deficit of authenticity. This research has also proposed that a single mechanism is responsible for this trade-off: the tendency for customers and other stakeholders to assess the entrant's claim to originality based on the visible work that it has done to legitimate the new product or organizational form. This chapter extends and deepens our understanding of such “legitimation work” by showing how it can illuminate cases that seem in the first instance to defy this trade-off. In particular, we focus on two “off-diagonal” cases: (a) when, as in the case of “patent trolls” and fraudulent innovators, early entrants are viewed as inauthentic despite having a credible claim to originality; (b) when late entrants, as in the case of Dell Computers, mechanical watches and baseball ballparks, are viewed as authentic despite obviously not being the originators. We clarify how each off-diagonal case represents an ‘exception that proves the rule’ whereby audiences attribute authenticity on the basis of legitimation work rather than on the order of entry per se. The last case also leads to an opportunity to clarify why “cultural appropriation” can sometimes project authenticity and sometimes inauthenticity, why audiences bother to make inferences about a producer's authenticity on the basis of visible legitimation work, and why legitimacy is a universal goal of early movers whereas authenticity varies in its importance.

This chapter flips innovation on its head. Instead of validating our ideas in the market, why not facilitate a market already motivated to change to do so. Theoretical and empirical evidence is presented to support this theory, along with tools and techniques enabling Innovation Leaders to deliver radical change. Three case studies are shared showing how successful innovation leaders have researched and developed opportunities for radical innovation.

This chapter focuses on data journalism, a relatively new brand of journalistic practices that take advantage of the growing availability and application of digital data and computational tools for news production. Although this brand of journalism has been on in some advanced democracies, it is still a relatively new development in Africa, especially Nigeria. Journalists still rely mostly on eyewitness reports and interviews to write their stories, thus leading to lack of depth in media reportage of critical issues. This chapter explores the nature of data journalism conceptualised as a social science pragmatic approach to news gathering and reporting, tracing its history and inherent strengths and weaknesses. It examines the windows of opportunities it provides towards guaranteeing transparency and accountability in Nigeria's nascent democracy. It concludes that, though data journalism complements the conventional investigative reporting to enhance good governance system in Nigeria, strengthening other institutions of government such as the police, judiciary, Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), and Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offences Commission (ICPC) becomes imperative in entrenching accountability and transparency in Nigeria.