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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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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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Presents the scientific methodology from the enlarged cybernetical perspective that recognizes the anisotropy of time, the probabilistic character of natural laws, and the entry…
Abstract
Presents the scientific methodology from the enlarged cybernetical perspective that recognizes the anisotropy of time, the probabilistic character of natural laws, and the entry that the incomplete determinism in Nature opens to the occurrence of innovation, growth, organization, teleology communication, control, contest and freedom. The new tier to the methodological edifice that cybernetics provides stands on the earlier tiers, which go back to the Ionians (c. 500 BC). However, the new insights reveal flaws in the earlier tiers, and their removal strengthens the entire edifice. The new concepts of teleological activity and contest allow the clear demarcation of the military sciences as those whose subject matter is teleological activity involving contest. The paramount question “what ought to be done”, outside the empirical realm, is embraced by the scientific methodology. It also embraces the cognitive sciences that ask how the human mind is able to discover, and how the sequence of discoveries might converge to a true description of reality.
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Case study builds upon Kay Whitehead’s detailed empirical work with respect to South Australia. Equally pertinent is Whitehead’s and Thorpe’s analysis of historical discourses of…
Abstract
Case study builds upon Kay Whitehead’s detailed empirical work with respect to South Australia. Equally pertinent is Whitehead’s and Thorpe’s analysis of historical discourses of ‘vocation, career and character’ as constituting a ?matrix of subjectivity’ against which individuals construct their teacher‐selves. My methodological and conceptual approach is also informed by those historically‐situated ‘narrative inquiries’ collected in Weiler and Middleton’s book, Telling Women’s Lives, and Cunningham and Gardner’s ‘life histories’ of UK teachers in the years 1907‐1950.The authors use personal accounts (oral and written) as a major source for examining the ways in which twentieth‐century teachers constructed their own subjectivities within the context of dominant practices, institutions and discourses. Such studies give voice to women in education whose lives historians in the past have deemed insignificant ‐ none more so than the vast majority of ‘ordinary’ female classroom teachers with whom this article is centrally concerned. Thus I similarly use the privately‐printed teaching memoirs of Gladys E. Ward (Present, Miss: the story of a teacher’s life in the outback and in the city), reading the representations of herself as a ‘career teacher’ in the Primary Branch of the South Australian Education Department against the contemporary local discourses of women in teaching which framed her narrative.
Michael Heather and Nick Rossiter
The application of category theory to interoperability to increase understanding of the problems and to facilitate the development of practical tools for their solution.
Abstract
Purpose
The application of category theory to interoperability to increase understanding of the problems and to facilitate the development of practical tools for their solution.
Design/methodology/approach
Category theory is naturally suited to handling interoperability. The use of first order predicate logic in many information systems may be justified through its completeness. However, the work of Gödel shows that such systems are undecidable if they rely on formal systems of number and/or sets. For interoperability dyadic higher order logic is required, which is neither complete nor decidable if based on sets. However, pure category theory is still axiomatic so is also neither complete nor decidable. Applied category theory based on cartesian closed categories for process is natural and is both complete and decidable. Gödel's theorems therefore do not apply.
Findings
The paper finds that composed adjunctions appear particularly well‐suited for modelling interoperability, with composition of distinct functors for mapping across a number of levels and of endofunctors for business process interoperability. The monad/comonad category provides a powerful abstraction of the business process. The development of a tool based on categorial principles written in Haskell may be a way forward but only as an initial set model approach.
Originality/value
This paper applies categorial constructions which permit a natural formal approach to interoperability.
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You can't help but be impressed by John White‐head's resume. There's his 38‐year climb up Goldman, Sachs & Co., to the position of co‐chairman. Then there's his three‐year post as…
Abstract
You can't help but be impressed by John White‐head's resume. There's his 38‐year climb up Goldman, Sachs & Co., to the position of co‐chairman. Then there's his three‐year post as deputy secretary of state for the Reagan administration, along with his current position, chairman of AEA Investors in New York. But what's really striking about Whitehead's resume is the lengthy list of volunteer organizations on which he serves. Currently the chairman of 10 nonprofit boards—including the United Nations Association, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Asia Society, Youth for Understanding, and the Greater New York Councils/Boy Scouts of America—and a trustee of numerous others, Whitehead has been described as the consummate nonprofit board member.
Fritjof Capra and Ove Daniel Jakobsen
The purpose of this paper is to refer to ecological economics using two meanings of the term “ecological”. In the strict scientific sense, ecological economics refers to an…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to refer to ecological economics using two meanings of the term “ecological”. In the strict scientific sense, ecological economics refers to an economic system that is consistent with and honors the basic principles of ecology, which, ultimately, are identical with what the authors call the systemic principles of life. In a broader sense ecological economics refers to economic theory and practice that see the economy as operating within, rather than dominating, the spheres of nature, society, and culture.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors distill four fundamental principles for ecological economics based on systems theory of life and philosophy of organism. The four principles are; nested systems, self-generating networks, open systems, and cognitive interactions. The authors discuss how these principles can be applied to design an ecological economic system that is life-enhancing on individual, social and ecological levels.
Findings
The authors argue that ecological economics should give priority to activities that maximize well-being of human and non-human beings, as well as entire ecosystems, and that its central purpose should be to serve the life processes in social and ecological systems.
Originality/value
In this paper, the authors connect ecological economics to systems theory and come up with principles relevant for developing economic theory and practice within, rather than dominating, the spheres of nature, society, and culture.
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