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NOT for a long time have books and libraries featured in the correspondence columns of The Times and other newspapers as regularly as they have in 1960. Earlier in the year Sir…
Abstract
NOT for a long time have books and libraries featured in the correspondence columns of The Times and other newspapers as regularly as they have in 1960. Earlier in the year Sir Alan Herbert's lending rights' scheme had a good run, and we have clearly not yet heard the last of it. Indeed, a Private Member's bill on the subject is to have its second reading in Parliament on December 9th. More recently, the Herbert proposals have had a by‐product in the shape of bound paperbacks, and a correspondence ensued which culminated in Sir Allen Lane's fifth‐of‐November firework banning hard‐covered Penguins for library use.
Mats Sundgren and Alexander Styhre
A dominating view in the literature of organizational creativity is to treat the creativity as an ex post facto construct rather than a process that may be subject to systematic…
Abstract
Purpose
A dominating view in the literature of organizational creativity is to treat the creativity as an ex post facto construct rather than a process that may be subject to systematic and thoughtful managerial practices. Drawing on Alfred North Whitehead's writing, the paper seeks to examine how creativity is conceptualized in the pharmaceutical industry.
Design/methodology/approach
This study is based on a series of interviews with managers and scientists in three pharmaceutical companies.
Findings
Although researchers and managers designate the role of organizational creativity as the most important strategic capability of the firm, there is almost no communication about it. The respondents point out a gap between understanding and action in the innovation process, i.e. what precedes it in new drug development. This gap is clearly illustrated – creativity is what makes the difference for the companies – but hardly anyone talks about it.
Practical implications
From a management perspective this paper concludes that organizational creativity in new drug development can become a more actionable concept by capturing images and narratives relevant to the organizational reality.
Originality/value
In contrast to the dominated individualistic centered view of creativity, this paper argues that creativity does not occur at a single point in time but is rather the outcome from a series of interconnected events and undertakings. A process‐based view of creativity can thus escape the misplaced concreteness that the mythology of creativity postulates. Whitehead's process philosophy may form a fruitful foundation from which organizational creativity can be understood and exploited.
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This paper seeks to demonstrate that a truly learner‐centred enterprise education programme can be developed within a traditional business school environment.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper seeks to demonstrate that a truly learner‐centred enterprise education programme can be developed within a traditional business school environment.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper unites the broad teaching philosophy of Alfred Whitehead with that of Allan Gibbs's enterprise specific teaching philosophies to consider the fitness of the recently developed hic et nunc enterprise framework. This is largely achieved by testing the framework for constructive alignment.
Findings
It is argued that the hic et nunc framework is consistent with the philosophies of both Whitehead and Gibb. Further, the framework illustrates a process through which enterprise education programmes can be developed independently of any pressures to conform to more traditional pedagogy.
Practical implications
Through careful consideration of the process of constructive alignment, an analytical approach to developing and/or refining an enterprise education program exists. Importantly, it represents an approach that is explicitly learner‐centred, and therefore free from the constraints of the environment within which the programme is delivered.
Originality/value
This paper brings to life the wonderful ideas of the great philosopher, Alfred Whitehead, combining them with the contemporary ideas of Allan Gibb. In doing so, the complementary nature of their thoughts helps to illustrate the minimal requirements of a learner‐centred approach to enterprise education.
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Cristina Neesham and Mark Dibben
In this study we consider the role of business management in delivering good in society, from the perspective of the philosophical work of Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Alfred North…
Abstract
In this study we consider the role of business management in delivering good in society, from the perspective of the philosophical work of Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Alfred North Whitehead. We find that Whitehead's process explanations of the nature of experience and consciousness articulate meaningfully with Smith's idea of ‘self-love’ and Marx's conceptualisation of ‘rich-experience’. As a result, we argue that business practice must reconnect with society in a more appropriate understanding of a good as something beyond a mere economic entity. Using principles of process thought, we make recommendations as to how this might be achieved in daily management practice.
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This chapter proposes a conceptual synthesis able to think media and mediation through affect theory. Its objective is to expand our traditional conceptual frame with a new…
Abstract
This chapter proposes a conceptual synthesis able to think media and mediation through affect theory. Its objective is to expand our traditional conceptual frame with a new concept: immediation. Through its capacity to render the power of affect’s sociality, immediation enables us to better grasp the social life of affectivities underlying every media experience. William James defines “pure experience” as the “primal stuff of material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed” (2003, p. 2). This is “relation,” understood as a passage where affective lines of creation come together as one “concrescence” (Whitehead, 1978). How does the binding of these affective variations occur, giving pure experience the power to express itself as an esthetic feeling? Alfred North Whitehead’s answer to this question revolves around his notion of “society” (1978). It points to a virtual society composed of affective forces. Considering that “pure experience” is a process, it would be reasonable to conceive of it as passing a threshold in its becoming. Clearly, this threshold is not fixed, but rather a “mobile differentiation” (Massumi, 2002, p. 34) – emerging from the internal cohesion of the event of experiencing an esthetic quality. It should thus be understood as a process of emergence (or an actualization of virtuality). Affective passages, events, processes of emergence, and intensities are pulsations of radical novelty. They consist in what qualitatively happens in experience: what emerges as an event. Consequently, what happens to the concepts of media and mediation if we think them through this conceptual lens?
Beginning with the introduction of mass compulsory schooling legislation in the 1870s, and using age and marital status as key categories of social difference, this article…
Abstract
Beginning with the introduction of mass compulsory schooling legislation in the 1870s, and using age and marital status as key categories of social difference, this article provides an overview of issues surrounding the ‘woman teacher’ through to the postwar baby boom. It shows how women teachers were increasingly differentiated according to location (country and city) and level of schooling (kindergarten, primary and secondary), and it also casts them as somewhat threatening to the gender order. Firstly, the article describes the processes by which teaching in both city and country primary schools became normalised as single women or spinsters’ work with the advent of mass compulsory schooling. Part two focuses on the turn of the twentieth century, a period in which anxieties about single women, so many of whom were teachers, coalesced around the figure of the ‘new woman’. In this context I investigate what state school teaching might have meant for single women, be they unqualified ‘girl teachers’ in country schools or mature women whose qualifications and career paths brought them into city schools. The third section shows that the expansion of state schooling in the early twentieth century produced further differentiation of the ‘teacher’ as primary, kindergarten or secondary. Furthermore, in the interwar years new meanings of singleness for women were proposed by sexologists and psychologists, and spinster teachers became more stigmatised as women. Finally, I turn to the women who taught from the late 1930s into the postwar era.
JinHyo Joseph Yun, KyungBae Park, JeongHo Yang and WooYoung Jung
The purpose of this paper is to explore the ideological foundation of open innovation strategies and the open business model, which are appearing as new industrial paradigms based…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore the ideological foundation of open innovation strategies and the open business model, which are appearing as new industrial paradigms based on information technology (IT).
Design/methodology/approach
First, this paper examined the ideological foundation of Deleuze, Whitehead, and Popper. Next, Taoism was scrutinized to discover concrete bases for open innovation.
Findings
Here, it was found that Taoism completely coincides with the logical basis of open innovation. The theory “the supreme good is like water” of Taoism means to vacate oneself and fill the space with others to create paradoxes, thereby filling oneself with a more creative method.
Originality/value
Taoism provides a way to present paradoxes through the idea of vacating and opening to reach a creative stage of leaving nature as it is.
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The virtuous character and the ethical agent represent mutually inclusive terms, neither of which independently, in the Aristotelian tradition, is considered an innate quality…
Abstract
The virtuous character and the ethical agent represent mutually inclusive terms, neither of which independently, in the Aristotelian tradition, is considered an innate quality. Virtues, if not innate, are contingent; but what makes each instantiation recognisably general? Normative ethics in this sense is a dynamic process and similarly process philosophy is based on the principle that existence is dynamic and that it should be the primary focus of any philosophical account of reality. I argue that the transformative process is equally as important as the end result of realising the virtuous dispositional traits. An important criticism of virtue ethics is the focus on character and not rules such as industry practices and codes found in the professions. The criticism however is less worrisome than usually accepted. The reasoning herein developed to overcome this criticism rests on the presupposition that no one exists in isolation and virtues are developed in a social context and not simply given. Using process philosophy as a methodological approach to examine virtue ethical agency and the transformative process involved in its realisation elicits insights that allow the conceptual development of a more robust account of virtue ethics. I extend this nuanced rendition, in ways already commenced by others, into areas of organisational, environmental and intergenerational ethics.
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