27,163 research outputs found

    ‘You don't understand us!’ An inside perspective on adventure climbing

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    This paper presents a specific (insider) perspective of a small group of experienced male Scottish adventure climbers and explores through in-depth semi-structured interviews their attitudes, strategies and justifications associated with potentially high-risk climbing situations. Attention is paid to how participants feel that they are represented and viewed by others (outsiders) who do not participate in mountaineering and climbing activities. Climbers identify the significance of media, commercial and social representations of them as risk takers. The analysis explores risk as being socially constructed, with the associated assumptions being embedded in particular discourses. Climbers present themselves as rational managers of risk and provide examples of their risk-management strategies, with such characterizations being central to their identity as climbers

    Barriers to industrial energy efficiency: a literature review

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    Decision-making between rationality and intuition: effectiveness conditions and solutions to enhance decision efficacy

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    Decision-making, one process, many theories: a multidisciplinary literature review. How individual and environmental factors interact and influence the effectiveness of strategic decisions through rational and intuitive dynamics. Mentoring and the promotion of self-confidence in decision-making: the role of cognitive awareness and expertise building through the lenses of rationality and intuition

    The Value of Stimulated Dissatisfaction

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    “I’m not saying it’s a good quality to have, but my observation is that good designers are never happy, they’re never satisfied, never content” (Adrian Stokes, quoted in Spencer, 2008, p. 145). It seems self-evident that designers, whose raison d’ĂȘtre is to initiate change in man-made things (Jones, 1970), devising courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones (Simon, 1969), will be dissatisfied, at some level, with the way they experience the material world. However, recent research (Spencer, 2008) suggests that expert designers deliberately enhance the pressure and stress of the design situation – stimulating dissatisfaction. By stimulating the experience of dissatisfaction their imaginative and investigative action is given urgency, focus and purpose as they pursue excellence and attempt to unfold from their own view of the world to empathise with a broad project community. This discursive paper highlights the need for a developed understanding of the reflective practitioner model to inform the post-rationalist generation of design methods. This paper: reviews critical literature about the experience of designing; discusses the role of dissatisfaction within the practise of design; and presents a research project that aims to evaluate the value of stimulated dissatisfaction for the purpose of supporting practitioners’ empathic appreciation in early design direction generation. This paper argues that the reflective practitioner model of the designer must address the stimulation of dissatisfaction as a condition of creative and explorative design practice

    Antecedents of Effective Decision Making: A Cognitive Approach

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    Decision-making effectiveness has been associated with how well managers adapt their cognitive style to task requirements. In this paper, theories regarding decision-making under uncertainty and the use of judgment and intuition are reviewed and integrated. Cognitive Continuum Theory (CCT), positing a one-dimensional continuum of cognitive styles anchored by intuition and analysis, is extended: Four fundamental decision styles are identified and evaluated for their relative effectiveness under various task conditions. Propositions are developed with respect to the relationships between decision task characteristics and the likelihood of using two cognitive systems, and with respect to potential moderators of decision-making effectiveness. The propositions are integrated into a comprehensive theoretical model. Major contributions of the study are a conceptual clarification of the distinctions between intuition, heuristics and bounded rationality on the one hand, and the assessment of the scope of various cognitive styles as well as the identification of moderators of their effectiveness on the other. Research implications and some suggestions for managerial practice are provided.Economics ;
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