Search results

Purpose: At a conference inspired by Hans Christian Andersen, this chapter makes the case for his shadowy American contemporary, Edgar Allan Poe.

Methodology: Employing a comparative literary analysis, it contends that consumer culture theory (CCT) can learn more from Poe’s quothful raven than Andersen’s ugly duckling.

Findings: Principally that Poe’s Ps of Perversity, Pugnacity, and Poetry are particularly pertinent to an adolescent, self-harm-prone subdiscipline that’s struggling to find itself and make its way in the world.

Originality: Poe and Andersen’s names rarely appear in the same sentence. They do now.

For some years I have been collecting the writings of that type of reviewer who, despite his pugnacity, insists on being anonymous. He is the gentleman (I use the courtesy title against my better judgment) whom we all know so devastatingly well—the scribbler on the margins of library books. The hobby of collecting such scribblings (should I call it philos‐graffitism?) has the supreme advantage of costing nothing. But it garners a rich if suppurating harvest of what one might call “literary sidelights”.

Purpose – This chapter makes sense of the volume and suggests avenues for future research.

Design/methodology/approach – This chapter reflects upon some of the challenges facing biology and politics; it offers two case studies of areas calling for more research and discussion.

Findings – Some evolutionary theorists criticize religion. In the process, they undermine the ability to reach out to religious people about the value of evolutionary theory. Two case studies – group selection and genetic bases of political behavior – are examined to illustrate ongoing issues that call for further attention

Considers the forces shaping European Business Schools. Changes in participation rates in higher education carry implications for customer power in management education. A relevant and attractive philosophy will be required in business schools enabling them to deliver the right competences in a culturally sensitive way.

Argues that the Victorian scholar, J.M. Robertson, through the approaches he took to analysis of Shakespeare’s literary style and mannerisms, contributed to the techniques of modern information science. In particular, Robertson had great skill in information retrieval, and a commitment to lifelong learning.

HITHERTO, OVER‐EMPHASIS by teachers on the skills and techniques of writing has tended to obscure the fact that communication does not take place in a vacuum, but is always to someone, about something, and in some context. The consideration of these matters is at least as important as the skills of writing and the techniques of presenting written information. Indeed, no amount of purely literary expertise will by itself make a communication effective, and there is clearly an important sense in which such expertise is secondary and incidental — so that a person who writes well but cannot effectively relate his writing to the circumstances of the communication he wishes to make is comparable to a ‘ghost writer’ who does no more than improve the presentation of what may be the interesting and important but badly expressed ideas of someone else. Many technologists who become managers find themselves, because of their poor writing ability, obliged to use their secretaries as ghost writers — a frustrating and time‐wasting method, and one which can be entirely abortive if the secretary also lacks writing skill. The matter may perhaps be summed up by saying that the skills of writing are to the technologist‐manager what applied mathematics is to him as a technologist — something which must be competently known, but which has no immediate importance apart from the uses to which it is put.