42,900 research outputs found
Metacognition and Reflection by Interdisciplinary Experts: Insights from Cognitive Science and Philosophy
Interdisciplinary understanding requires integration of insights from
different perspectives, yet it appears questionable whether disciplinary experts
are well prepared for this. Indeed, psychological and cognitive scientific studies
suggest that expertise can be disadvantageous because experts are often more biased
than non-experts, for example, or fixed on certain approaches, and less flexible in
novel situations or situations outside their domain of expertise. An explanation is
that expertsâ conscious and unconscious cognition and behavior depend upon their
learning and acquisition of a set of mental representations or knowledge structures.
Compared to beginners in a field, experts have assembled a much larger set of
representations that are also more complex, facilitating fast and adequate perception
in responding to relevant situations. This article argues how metacognition should be
employed in order to mitigate such disadvantages of expertise: By metacognitively
monitoring and regulating their own cognitive processes and representations,
experts can prepare themselves for interdisciplinary understanding. Interdisciplinary
collaboration is further facilitated by team metacognition about the team, tasks,
process, goals, and representations developed in the team. Drawing attention to
the need for metacognition, the article explains how philosophical reflection on the
assumptions involved in different disciplinary perspectives must also be considered
in a process complementary to metacognition and not completely overlapping with
it. (Disciplinary assumptions are here understood as determining and constraining
how the complex mental representations of experts are chunked and structured.) The
article concludes with a brief reflection on how the process of Reflective Equilibrium
should be added to the processes of metacognition and philosophical reflection in
order for experts involved in interdisciplinary collaboration to reach a justifiable
and coherent form of interdisciplinary integration. An Appendix of âPrompts or
Questions for Metacognitionâ that can elicit metacognitive knowledge, monitoring,
or regulation in individuals or teams is included at the end of the article
Governmental Learning as a Determinant of Economic Growth
Systemic economic transition is a process of determined radical institutional change, a process of building new institutions required by a market economy. Nowadays, the experience of transition countries with the implementation of new institutions could be reviewed as a method of economic development that despite similar singular steps has different effects on the domestic economic performance. The process of institutional change towards a market economy is determined by political will, thus the government plays an important role in carrying out the economic reforms. Among the variety of outcomes and effects the attention is drawn especially to economic growth that diverges significantly in different post-transition countries. The paper attempts to shed light upon the problem on the basis of institutional economics, of economics of innovation and partially of political economy of growth using an evolutionary, process-oriented perspective. In this context the issue central to the promotion of economic growth is the successful implementation of new institutions through governmental activities. The paper shows that under the conditions of bounded rationality and radical uncertainty economic growth is determined, inter alia, by the capacity for governmental learning.economic transition, institutional change, governmental learning, economic growth
An integrated core competence evaluation framework for portfolio management in the oil industry
Drawing upon resource-based theory, this paper presents a core competence evaluation framework for managing the competence portfolio of an oil company. It introduces a network typology to illustrate how to form different types of strategic alliance relations with partnering firms to manage and grow the competence portfolio. A framework is tested using a case study approach involving face-to-face structured interviews. We identified purchasing, refining and sales and marketing as strong candidates to be the core competencies. However, despite the company's core business of refining oil, the core competencies were identified to be their research and development and performance management (PM) capabilities. We further provide a procedure to determine different kinds of physical, intellectual and cultural resources making a dominant impact on company's competence portfolio. In addition, we provide a comprehensive set of guidelines on how to develop core competence further by forging a partnership alliance choosing an appropriate network topology
Cognitive Constraints and Reversibility of International Economic Institutions. The Case of the European Monetary System
This paper builds on the case study of the birth and death of the fixed exchange rate system in Western Europe, prior to the launch of the Euro. The analysis of this case aims to highlight how "new" international economic institutions may suffer the processes of "preference reversals" and thereby implode. De facto, the paper focuses on the cognitive factors that are deemed to have played an important role in determining the originating decision-making processes in favour of a system of fixed exchange rates and, then, in determining the abandonment of that system. After briefly explaining events such as the "currency snake" and the "European Monetary System" (EMS), the paper highlights how processes of this nature are conditional on the extent of the limits of rationality of the decision-making agents, with the consequence of producing cognitive imbalances. These imbalances are determined by the "fuzziness" with which agents evaluate not only opposing objectives, in particular those of employment and the balance of payments, but especially objectives achievable in an intertemporal dimension (Walliser, 2008: ch. 4). In fact, we illustrate how the actual inflationary differentials between the countries concerned determine the imbalances in the balances of payments. We also highlight how the policies to bring inflation under control can determine changes in the electorate in the preferences defined in the area of economic policies. The collapse of the monetary snake and the European Monetary System is representative of such a change in preferences. The conceptual framework of analysis used is that of temporary equilibria.
An analysis of schema change intervention
Successful organizational transformation relies on being able to achieve paradigm or collective schema change, and more particularly, the ability to manage the interplay between pre-existing schemas and alternative schemas required for new environments. This conceptual paper presents an analysis and critique of collective schema change dynamics. Two schema change pathways are reflected in the literature: frame-juxtapose-transition and frame-disengage-learning. Research findings in each pathway are limited and/or contradictory. Moreover, research on schema change focuses primarily on social dynamics and less on the relationship between social schema change dynamics and individual schema change dynamics. One implication of this lack of focus on individual schema change dynamics is the masking of the high level of cognitive processing and cognitive effort required by individuals to effect schema change. The capacity to achieve organizational transformation requires that more attention is given to managing these dynamics, which, in turn, requires significant investment in developing the change leadership capabilities of managers and the organizations they manage
Chainspace: A Sharded Smart Contracts Platform
Chainspace is a decentralized infrastructure, known as a distributed ledger,
that supports user defined smart contracts and executes user-supplied
transactions on their objects. The correct execution of smart contract
transactions is verifiable by all. The system is scalable, by sharding state
and the execution of transactions, and using S-BAC, a distributed commit
protocol, to guarantee consistency. Chainspace is secure against subsets of
nodes trying to compromise its integrity or availability properties through
Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT), and extremely high-auditability,
non-repudiation and `blockchain' techniques. Even when BFT fails, auditing
mechanisms are in place to trace malicious participants. We present the design,
rationale, and details of Chainspace; we argue through evaluating an
implementation of the system about its scaling and other features; we
illustrate a number of privacy-friendly smart contracts for smart metering,
polling and banking and measure their performance
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