THE ECONOMIC and operational efficiency of any supersonic airliner depends on the successful reconciliation of two conflicting aerodynamic requirements: good control and handling…
Abstract
THE ECONOMIC and operational efficiency of any supersonic airliner depends on the successful reconciliation of two conflicting aerodynamic requirements: good control and handling characteristics at subsonic and transonic speeds and low trim drag at supersonic speeds. Years of aerodynamic research have established the slender delta wing as the optimum shape for mach two cruise. In the Concorde design, the basic slender delta was modified by cambering the profile and tapering the forward part of it, refining the wingtips and leading edges to give improved low speed controllability without detriment to supersonic performance. Thousands of hours in different wind tunnels have enabled optimisation of the shape of the aircraft. Some results which were not available in time for incorporation on the prototypes have already been embodied on the pre‐production and production planes. Even though some of these modifications, such as elongation, redesigned nose vizor and tail shape were not applied for aerodynamic improvements, they have nevertheless affected aerodynamics.
Carlos A. Rabasso and Javier Rabasso
The purpose of this paper is to tackle some of the concepts and ideas that the intellectual and business community can learn from Chomsky's thinking in relation with a new global…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to tackle some of the concepts and ideas that the intellectual and business community can learn from Chomsky's thinking in relation with a new global responsible management education environment. The first part of the work will present some of the key elements about Chomsky and education that the authors would like to emphasize. These are relating management education, critical thinking, and systems theory in the twenty‐first century business milieu.
Design/methodology/approach
An insight on post‐colonial theory and education will, afterwards, incorporate the hermeneutical tradition into the mainframe of critical thinking theory. The paper incorporates a decentred approach to education questioning presuppositions and moral values from “fundamentalist market theory.” Cultural studies and non‐western thinkers in this field are another important contribution to back up Chomsky's ideas on business and education.
Findings
When the paper relates social and economic performance concepts to critical thinking business education some questions arise about how to improve the responsible perception and understanding of the global environments and how the authors have to rethink education in a competitive profit‐oriented business community. The ideas of Chomsky can help them to deal with these issues departing from his political vision and his thinking on university education.
Research limitations/implications
Critical management has been questioning in the last years different management models to put forward a responsible paradigm for business organizations and educational institutions. Post‐colonial theory has been another important intellectual ground for critical thinking in the business educational environment, opening up the debate about how to reconcile performance and responsible practices.
Practical implications
Chomsky's committed political views open up the way for many educational institutions and business organizations to become responsible in a technological business environment severely damaged by greed and personal interest. Management schools will have learned from his contributions and the actions of many international organizations engaged in changing for the better attitudes and material values in favour of management for globally responsible practices and the construction of new learning objectives.
Originality/value
In business studies, comparative, critical, cross‐cultural, and diversity management many scholars have been dealing with some of the subjects of serious concern by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology leftist professor presented in this study. The paper has to take into consideration a transversal approach of business education in relation to the concept of cross‐cultural performance, already developed in the work on cross‐cultural and diversity management.
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This chapter examines the professional identities of Brazilian journalists. It does so through an analysis of the growing professional autonomy of journalism from 1950 to 1990…
Abstract
This chapter examines the professional identities of Brazilian journalists. It does so through an analysis of the growing professional autonomy of journalism from 1950 to 1990 through the life stories of 10 intellectual-journalists, individuals whose journalistic activities have crossed over into other intellectual fields.
This study applies a symbolic interactionist framework to understand how these actors managed their reputations and careers within the intellectual world. The narratives were taken from qualitative semi-structured interviews, and supported by additional research such as interviews, biographies, and articles which have been published about their lives.
The life stories were compared to the extensive structural changes affecting the world of journalism and the world of intellectuals in Brazil. This comparison revealed gaps between these two spheres of practice, within which the ambivalent form of journalists’ identities have been constructed.
This chapter offers two contributions to the study of Brazilian journalists. From a theoretical and methodological viewpoint, it advances beyond other studies that focus more on the prevailing representations of journalists’ professional identities and their role in society. From an empirical standpoint, it describes the complex negotiations between the worlds of journalism, culture and politics. This chapter also reexamines the current dominant explanation for the changes in Brazilian journalism. It shows that building careers and new levels of interpersonal cooperation for intellectuals and journalists has been a slow process. Ultimately, this development has left some behind, especially those actors stretched between multiple professional identities such as those who self-identify as intellectual-journalists.
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Sharif Mahmud Khalid, Jill Atkins and Elisabetta Barone
The purpose of this paper is to investigate why environmentally-sensitive companies still face criticism despite the extensive disclosures in their annual reports. This paper…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate why environmentally-sensitive companies still face criticism despite the extensive disclosures in their annual reports. This paper explores the extent of site-specific social, environmental and ethical (SEE) reporting by mining companies operating in Ghana.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors conduct an interpretive content analysis of the annual/integrated reports of mining companies for the years 2009–2014 to extract site-specific SEE information relating to the companies’ mining operations in Ghana. The authors also theorise these actions using the existentialist work of Jean-Paul Sartre, in particular his work on “bad faith, nothingness and authenticity”.
Findings
The findings suggest that SEE information disclosure at site-specific level remains problematic because of bad faith and inauthenticity by mining companies attempting to placate a range of stakeholders. Bad faith represents a form of self-deception or internal denial which manifests in corporate narratives. Inauthenticity is a self-awareness that culminates in the denunciation of corporate identity and the pursuit of external expectations. The effect is the production of inauthentic corporate accounts that is constrained by the assumption made on stakeholder expectation.
Originality/value
The authors apply a Sartrean lens to explore site-specific SEE. Furthermore, the authors seek to expand the social accounting research domain by drawing on Sartre’s work on “bad faith” and “nothingness”. Sartre’s work to the best of the authors’ knowledge is not explored in social accounting research.
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A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balanceeconomics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary toman′s finding the good life and society enduring…
Abstract
A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.
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Michael E. Brown's book, The Concept of the Social in Uniting the Humanities and Social Sciences, demonstrates that prominent attempts to account for the social dimension of human…
Abstract
Michael E. Brown's book, The Concept of the Social in Uniting the Humanities and Social Sciences, demonstrates that prominent attempts to account for the social dimension of human affairs rely on an unstated notion of a “course of activity,” that is diametrically opposed to the conceptualization of sociality that is presumably intended to realize it. I want to focus on the idea of a “course of activity” in order to locate his work in and clarify its importance to the development of dialectical reason from Heraclitus through Hegel and beyond. Of special importance is the bearing of his research on the critique of contemporary theories of agency and sociality, and, since considerable attention has been paid, in this regard, to the arts and humanities, some of what I will say about this refers to art and its avant-garde moments—-particularly in my work on Dada and Brown's account of two avant-garde theatrical performances.
This chapter examines what is entailed by separating agency from individuality and what it means for the idea of a “course of activity,” (going on) and its relation to the concept of sociality. This also bears on questions of ontology, as Brown's course of activity is generative and nonrepeatable. The course of activity and nonrepeatability are linked to both avant-garde practice and theoretical notions that reframe our temporal understandings. These include the avant-garde of dada and surrealism, and the reformulations of bourgeois time of Jean Duvignaud, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The question raised here is that of a teleological understanding—how we link the present course of activity with future events.
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Current OPACs show their weakness in terms of ease of use and comprehension of user requests, and more generally in man/machine dialogue. Most OPAC searches are for subjects and…
Abstract
Current OPACs show their weakness in terms of ease of use and comprehension of user requests, and more generally in man/machine dialogue. Most OPAC searches are for subjects and these give the word results. Natural language processing techniques exist to reduce these difficulties. In France, natural language processing has been used to access the yellow pages (headings) of the French phone directory and the telematics services directory; examples are included. No doubt the future library systems will use these techniques to make the new OPACs really Open, Public, Accessible and Co‐operative (user‐friendly).
Michael Brown argues that what unites the human and social sciences is their evolving character, made explicit in the concepts of “reflexivity,” “course of activity,” and…
Abstract
Michael Brown argues that what unites the human and social sciences is their evolving character, made explicit in the concepts of “reflexivity,” “course of activity,” and “theorizing.” Once the social sciences are taken as a whole, the notion of “sociality” will allow to grasp society as ever changing, as a becoming. I shall examine the notion of sociality in the literary criticism of Lukács, Goldmann, and Adorno, three authors who consider the essay as the adequate open form of critique in times of rapid social change. Originally adopted by the young Lukács, the essay tended to be abandoned by him when elaborating the concept of critical or socialist realism as a repository of timeless cultural values. In his studies in the European realist or the soviet novel, for example, on Balzac, Stendhal, Thomas Mann, or Solzhenitsyn, the dialectical concept of social totality becomes a sum of orientations, presenting the individual writer with the moral task to choose “progress” and discard “negativity.” The social is thus narrowed to individual choice. Different from Lukács, Goldmann's literary theory defines cultural production as a matter of the social group, the transindividual subject. Goldmann was deeply marked by Lukács's early writings from which he gained notably the notion of tragedy and the concept of maximum possible consciousness—the world vision of a social group which structures the work of a writer. Cultural creation is resistance to capitalist society, as evident in the literature of absence, Malraux's novels, and the nouveau roman. In the writings of Adorno the social is lodged within the avant-garde, provided that one takes its means and procedures literally, e.g., the writings of Kafka. By formal innovation—among others the adoption of the essay, the small form, the fragment—art exercises criticism of the ongoing rationalization process and preserves the possibility of change (p. 319).
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This chapter relates the Foucaultian concept of “governmentality” to the sociological body of work of Pierre Bourdieu, with particular emphasis on his reflexive sociology and…
Abstract
This chapter relates the Foucaultian concept of “governmentality” to the sociological body of work of Pierre Bourdieu, with particular emphasis on his reflexive sociology and critique of power. Although there are some natural connections between Foucault's and Bourdieu's work, there are enough differences to critically advance Foucault's studies of power from the perspective of Bourdieu's reflexive sociology, and in so doing identify areas for further discussion and research.
Bertrand Malsch, Yves Gendron and Frédérique Grazzini
Accounting researchers have frequently borrowed theories and methods from other disciplines. A noteworthy importation movement in recent decades involves the work of French…
Abstract
Purpose
Accounting researchers have frequently borrowed theories and methods from other disciplines. A noteworthy importation movement in recent decades involves the work of French intellectuals and philosophers, not least Pierre Bourdieu. This paper aims to contribute to the sociology of the accounting discipline by examining how Bourdieu's works have been translated into the domain of accounting research.
Design/methodology/approach
The investigation is articulated through three modes of analysis. First, it evaluates Bourdieu's recognition in the domain of accounting research, through an examination of the extent to which Bourdieu's writings are cited in accounting articles. Focusing on accounting articles which rely significantly on Bourdieu's thought, the paper then examines which of his publications have been mobilized, and how researchers have articulated his ideas in studying accounting phenomena. The third line of inquiry addresses the extent to which accounting researchers have used Bourdieu's core concepts holistically, that is to say in mobilizing simultaneously the concepts of field, capital and habitus.
Findings
Several of the studies which rely significantly on Bourdieu have employed his work holistically, while others have not. Moreover, about half of the studies reviewed in the paper are characterized by a gap between Bourdieu's view of academic research as a support to political and social causes debated in the public arena versus a more dispassionate approach to research. While it is difficult to be conclusive about the implications of these translational gaps, they nonetheless make one aware of some central epistemological issues: Should accounting researchers be more concerned about bringing “the achievements of science and scholarship into public debate”? What are the pros and cons of drawing upon ideas from politically‐engaged intellectuals in order to conduct research characterized by political dispassion? Does it make sense to use certain concepts excerpted from a comprehensive system of thought in a piecemeal way?
Originality/value
The paper mobilizes and develops the notion of translation in investigating an interdisciplinary movement.