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Explores the relevance of structuralism and post‐structuralism to the field of library and information science (LIS).

The paper is a literature‐based conceptual analysis of the two philosophical movements, structuralism and post‐structuralism, as represented by the seminal figures of Ferdinand de Saussure and Michel Foucault.

The principles of structuralism and post‐structuralism have significant implications for how the role of the modern library can and should be viewed.

Provides insights into LIS by drawing on philosophical perspectives that are beyond the LIS literature.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the application of post‐structuralist theory to understanding hypertext and the World Wide Web, and the challenge posed by digital information technology to the practices of the information profession.

The method adopted is that of a critical study.

The paper argues for the importance of post‐structuralism for an understanding of the implications of digital information for the information management profession.

Focuses on an epistemological gap between the traditional practices of the information profession, and the structure of the World Wide Web.

Field emergence poses an intriguing problem for institutional theorists. New issue fields often arise at the intersection of different sectors, amidst extant structures of meanings and actors. Such nascent fields are fragmented and lack clear guides for action; making it unclear how they ever coalesce. The authors propose that provisional social structures provide actors with macrosocial presuppositions that shape ongoing field-configuration; bootstrapping the field. The authors explore this empirically in the context of social impact investing in the UK, 2000–2013, a period in which this field moved from clear fragmentation to relative alignment. The authors combine different computational text analysis methods, and data from an extensive field-level study, to uncover meaningful patterns of interaction and structuration. Our results show that across various periods, different types of actors were linked together in discourse through “actor–meaning couplets.” These emergent couplings of actors and meanings provided actors with social cues, or macrofoundations, which guided their local activities. The authors thus theorize a recursive, co-constitutive process: as punctuated moments of interaction generate provisional structures of actor–meaning couplets, which then cue actors as they navigate and constitute the emerging field. Our model re-energizes the core tenets of new structuralism and contributes to current debates about institutional emergence and change.

Research of artificial intelligence (AI), has aimed at making machines intelligent via the simulation of natural intelligence, particularly human intelligence. During the past decades, there have been three major approaches aimed at achieving this goal, namely structuralism, functionalism and behaviorism. Unfortunately, they work separately and contradictorily to a large extent. The purpose of this paper is to present a better and more unified approach.

The paper analyses each of the three major approaches to AI, describing their advantages and disadvantages. There then follows an attempt to explore a new and more reasonable approach to AI. The new approach should be able to solve all the problems that the existing approaches can solve on one hand and can solve the problems that the existing approaches cannot solve on the other hand.

It was found that the more reasonable and more powerful approach is the one that directly touches the common and core mechanism of intelligence formation. This is due to the fact that the mechanism of intelligence formation is much more essential than other windows of an intelligent system, such as structure, function, or behavior. It was also found that the common and core mechanism of intelligence formation can be implemented through the information‐knowledge‐intelligence transformation. The third finding is that the three existing approaches are special cases of the mechanism approach under different conditions and can thus be harmoniously unified within the frame of the mechanism approach.

The three findings in the paper: the mechanism approach, the implementation of the mechanism approach, and the unification of the existed three major approaches, are important laws never found before in the literature. The breakthrough of the mechanism approach to AI will be of great significance to both theoretical and practical research in AI in the years to come.

This chapter undertakes one re-evaluation of Louis Althusser’s philosophical legacy for modern Marxism. While Althusser self-consciously undertook to defend the scientific character of Marxism and so permanently establish it on a firm footing, many of his closest followers eventually exited the Marxian paradigm for a post-structuralism post-Marxism. We will argue that this development was rooted in Althusser’s initial procedure as he attempted to ground Marxism’s scientificity in an epistemological argument whose main referent was Marxism itself. This initiated a circularity which was ultimately to prove fatal to Althusser’s project. Less remarked upon, however, is a further legacy of the Althusserian oeuvre, the critical realist conception of Marxism initiated by Roy Bhaskar. Bhaskar found part of his inspiration in Althusser’s successful posing of the question of Marx’s science. On the one hand, Althusser’s work can legitimately be seen as a bridge into the post-modern challenge to Marxism. On the other hand, it can be seen as clearing the ground and establishing some of the foundation for critical realism’s successful recuperation of the scientific character of Marxism.

The premise for this volume is that there is “a need to develop a Handbook that takes scholars and practitioners through the paradigm change going on in the field of management and organizational inquiry.” In their invitation to contributors, the editors suggested we should comment on this transition and inform readers of theoretical and philosophical changes that have occurred in recent times. In this chapter, we attempt to do this by revisiting the influential concept of paradigm from the philosophy of science (Kuhn, 1962, 1970) and explore its relation to recent contributions to postmodern social theory in organizational analysis. In particular, the influential paradigm model of Burrell and Morgan (1979) is revisited through meta-theoretical analysis of the major intellectual movement to emerge in organization theory in recent decades, post-structuralism and more broadly postmodernism. Proposing a retrospective paradigm for this movement we suggest that its research can be characterized as ontologically relativist, epistemologically relationist, and methodologically reflexive; this also represents research that can be termed deconstructionist in its view of human nature. Consequently we demonstrate not only that organizational knowledge stands on meta-theoretical grounds, but also how recent intellectual developments rest on a qualitatively different set of meta-theoretical assumptions than established traditions of agency and structure.

This paper adopts a literary theory perspective to depict accounting reports and information as texts rather than as economic commodities and so available for analysis from the vantage point of semiotic linguistic theory. In doing so it takes the literary turn followed by many of the social sciences and humanities in recent decades. It compares and contrasts four dominant genres of literary theory – expressive realism, the new criticism, structuralism, and deconstructionism – to developments in accounting. The paper illustrates these and other ideas in the context of the controversies surrounding the oil and gas accounting crisis and practices circa 1961 to 1990. The paper concludes by outlining a new way of preparing accounting reports based on Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the heteroglossic novel. This approach calls for making accounting for an enterprise an ongoing conversation rather than a monologic process of closing down on a single meaning.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the resistance in management accounting practices (MAPs) in a developing economy in the manufacturing and service sectors in Vietnam.

Data collection was carried out using survey questionnaires in Vietnamese language. The questionnaires were distributed to selected respondents from the manufacturing and service organisations in Vietnam. Textual structuralism was used to analyse different categories of data, i.e. survey questionnaires, photos and qualitative texts obtained from the literature.

The findings indicate that the usage of MAPs is more prevalent in the manufacturing sector than in the service sector. In addition, various traditional and contemporary MAPs are being used concurrently in Vietnam, which challenges the classical twofold dichotomy between mere socialism and mere neoliberalism.

The textual and photographic structuralism is used in this study to analyse primary data (geography and society and time) in a static setting. Hence, it does not analyse the research phenomena in a dynamic equilibrium setting to view the development of the research phenomena over time. Further research could expand data collection to include longitudinal and dynamic settings.

MAPs can be implemented in economic systems ranging from command to capitalist systems. Although most countries in the world follow a mixed economic system, specific MAPs could be designed for a transitional economic system such as that of Vietnam. This affects both theorists and practitioners in Vietnam applying sustainable MAPs to boost a country's competitiveness during transition.

This study expands understanding of the conformity of MAPs in relation to economic systems under the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) – the ruling party of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Understanding the differences in the way these MAPs are utilised constitutes an essential area of the accounting discipline to advance MAPs in Vietnamese enterprises and progress theoretical development of sustainable MAPs.

Development economics is a new sub-discipline in modern economics. The first generation of development economics is structuralism. The second generation of development economics is neoliberalism. Most developing countries followed the above two generations of development economics and failed to achieve industrialization and modernization. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the third generation of development economics, called new structural economics, which advises governments in developing countries to play a facilitating role in the development of industries in a market economy according to the country’s comparative advantages. The paper also discusses how the government may use industrial policies to play this facilitating role and some new theoretical insights from new structural economics.

The paper draws on the experiences of success and failure in developing countries to generate new understanding about the nature and causes of economic development in developing countries.

The structuralism failed because it ignored the endogeneity of economic structure in a country. The neoliberalism failed because it neglected the endogeneity of distortions in the transition economies.

The paper proposes new policy and theoretical framework for developing countries.