Risk-specific search for risk-defusing operators

According to the concept of “active risk-defusing behavior”, decision makers in risky situations look for additional actions that reduce risk and allow them to favor the more risky alternative. Our study demonstrates that risk-defusing behavior depends on the type of risk (normal, medium, catastrophic or global) as well as on the domain (health, economy or ecology). In total, 12 scenarios (four risk types from three risk domains each) were constructed. Using the interview techniques of active information search and thinking-aloud, 120 interviews about decision-making processes with these scenarios were conducted. They showed that the active search for different risk-defusing operators depends on the type of risk, but even more on the domain of the scenario. Results suggest a need for further research about a typology of risk situations in which, besides formal classification criteria, content issues are also explored

Review of CCAFS Scaling Activities

This review was commissioned by CCAFS Learning Platform for Partnerships and Capacity Building for Scaling Climate Smart Agriculture, with the aim to reflect on CCAFS project portfolio to highlight good practices and gaps in implementation of CCAFS Scaling Activities. The review was undertaken with a systemic approach, using the concepts of design thinking and system thinking throughout its methodology and analysis. 21 practitioners throughout CCAFS regional, flagship and learning platform portfolios were interviewed between March and May 2019. The results are presented in a way that allows CCAFS to identify areas to deepen systematically upon; areas for CCAFS’s further strategic or conceptual support, and areas that require more research by CCAFS. The systemic analysis shows that CCAFS has the potential to consciously transform into a learning organization and an innovation environment, thereby fostering and increasing its performance, relevance and overall impact in changing and challenging circumstances. The results were discussed and validated with the CCAFS Core Team (CT) in the frame of a CCAFS CT Workshop on Scaling on 15th May in Madrid. In open learning formats, the CT prioritized its next step. The review report further contains a set of recommendations, derived from both the review and the CT Workshop on Scaling, which shall help CCAFS to transform into both a learning organization and an innovation environment

"Things that stay":feminist theory, duration and the future

Taking up Grosz's proposal for the `complexities of time and becoming' to be considered seriously, this article explores the status of time and the future within feminist theory through empirical research in which teenage girls describe things `staying'. Focusing on these `things that stay' and drawing on Bergson's concepts of duration and the virtual, the article argues that time is dynamic and heterogeneous; things endure through divergence and transformation. It argues that if the relations of temporality are understood as both continuous and discontinuous, enduring and changing, feminist theory orients to the future in `novel' ways

What can managers do for creativity? : brokering creativity in the creative industries

'Creativity' has become a fashionable term in the contemporary managerial and political lexicon, signalling generalised approval in education, business and the arts. In Britain, 'creative industries' has replaced 'cultural industries' as the umbrella term for artistic and cultural production and distribution, and 'creativity' has been incorporated into the national tourism brand . In business, managers and academics use 'creativity' to indicate an organisation's capacity for innovation, flexibility and autonomy; these 'creative' values are seen to have replaced operational efficiency and strategic planning as the primary source of 'competitive advantage' in business. In education, creativity has spread beyond its original context of arts based subjects and is used to refer to a generalised ability to solve problems and generate new concepts across the entire curriculum. The term creativity has become so all-embracing as to lose any clearly defined meaning and value. Ask any organisation, industry or individual whether they would ever admit to being 'uncreative' and the corruption of meaning is only too apparent. It seems that we are all creative now. Creativity has become both the language and currency of today's knowledge economy

Public Innovations in the Future

Taking off the past, the future always starts today. The capacity to harness intellectual and social capital and to convert it into novel and useful things has become the critical organizational requirement of the age. Organizations must frame tools, methods, and approaches that boost creativity and innovation, particularly in the public sector. The agenda for change is great: we need future solutions now

A "superstorm": When moral panic and new risk discourses converge in the media

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Health, Risk and Society, 15(6), 681-698, 2013, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13698575.2013.851180.There has been a proliferation of risk discourses in recent decades but studies of these have been polarised, drawing either on moral panic or new risk frameworks to analyse journalistic discourses. This article opens the theoretical possibility that the two may co-exist and converge in the same scare. I do this by bringing together more recent developments in moral panic thesis, with new risk theory and the concept of media logic. I then apply this theoretical approach to an empirical analysis of how and with what consequences moral panic and new risk type discourses converged in the editorials of four newspaper campaigns against GM food policy in Britain in the late 1990s. The article analyses 112 editorials published between January 1998 and December 2000, supplemented with news stories where these were needed for contextual clarity. This analysis shows that not only did this novel food generate intense media and public reactions; these developed in the absence of the type of concrete details journalists usually look for in risk stories. Media logic is important in understanding how journalists were able to engage and hence how a major scare could be constructed around convergent moral panic and new risk type discourses. The result was a media ‘superstorm’ of sustained coverage in which both types of discourse converged in highly emotive mutually reinforcing ways that resonated in a highly sensitised context. The consequence was acute anxiety, social volatility and the potential for the disruption of policy and social change