Failure and Strategic Projects: Australias Asia-Pacific Vision

This paper uses Australia’s 1980s shift to a new accumulation strategy of ‘international competitiveness’ to examine the role of failure in shaping state strategic projects. The paper argues that the Australian strategy’s gradual shift from an interventionist to a market-led orientation played out in competing representations of failure. Whether particular policies were perceived as failures depended not only on their material effects, but also on the ways in which failure was defined and on the values underpinning those definitions. As representations of failure establish the boundaries between the incremental adaptations that stabilise an accumulation strategy and the more radical failures characteristic of crisis, they illuminate how processes of discursive selectivity ‘fix’ state projects’ temporal, scalar and spatial dimension

Developing Human Functioning and Rehabilitation Research from the comprehensive perspective.

With the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) the World Health Organization (WHO) has prepared the ground for a comprehensive understanding of Human Functioning and Rehabilitation Research, integrating the biomedical perspective on impairment with the social model of disability. This poses a number of old and new challenges regarding the enhancement of adequate research capacity. Here we will summarize approaches to address these challenges with respect to 3 areas: the organization of Human Functioning and Rehabilitation Research into distinct scientific fields, the development of suitable academic training programmes and the building of university centres and collaboration networks

Determinants of economic growth: the experts’ view

DYNREG

Regional development: contribution of evolutionary biology

This paper tries to set out a potential of application of some evolutionary biology concepts to the issue of regional development. The objective is to show that employment of these concepts or at least inspiration by them may enrich some theories of regional development and enhance the explanatory framework of regional evolution.First, the views of institutional economics and geography on evolutionary biology contribution are summarised, then some evolutionary concepts are applied to the path dependence concept e. g., in effort to find a possible way of classification of this phenomenon. However, we discuss some other evolutionary concepts, as coevolution, adaptation, preadaption, general approach to comprehension of evolution, etc. in connexion with some chosen theories and problems of regional development.Regional development ; evolutionary biology ; path dependence ; theories of regional development

Institutional Legitimacy

Political legitimacy is best understood as one type of a broader notion, which I call institutional legitimacy. An institution is legitimate in my sense when it has the right to function. The right to function correlates to a duty of non-interference. Understanding legitimacy in this way favorably contrasts with legitimacy understood in the traditional way, as the right to rule correlating to a duty of obedience. It helps unify our discourses of legitimacy across a wider range of practices, especially including the many evaluations we increasingly make of international institutions of various sorts, but also including domestic institutions

Strategy in sub-saharan Africa: defining a research agenda for Mauritius

Do African firms differ in their approach to strategy making? Are they any different to firms from other emerging or developed economies? Despite the proliferations of strategy and international business textbooks over the last decade, there has been very little on Africa. The answer probably lies in the predominant perception of Africa as a difficult place to do business. The region is often seen as a corporate graveyard of small, impossibly difficult markets, where war, famine, AIDS and disaster are part of a series of other intractable problems. Such image has not only widened existing divide between Africa and the rest of the world, but also tarnished much of the scope and potential of African businesses globally; and also hindered much progress in the study and understanding of strategic management practices of African business organisations. This paper proposes an agenda for strategy research in that context. Extending on the generic theoretical framework for ‘strategy in emerging economies’ proposed by Hoskisson et al (2000) and Wright et al. (2005), this agenda raises a number of questions and challenges relevant to theory and practice of strategy in the context of Mauritius. It is believed that there is growing scope for exploratory and empirical research that addresses the needs of businesses relevant to that part of the world. Indeed, the rapid pace of development of some parts of Africa is providing new testing and refining grounds of extant strategy theories, even with possibilities to develop new ones

Fostering Creative Thinking and Reflexive Evaluation in Searching: Instructional Scaffolding and the Zone of Proximal Development in Information Literacy Acquisition

Searching for information, which is not as easy as many students believe, requires creativity, formative evaluation, and persistence. Cultivating proficient and expert searches requires more than the vicarious and enactive experiences described by Bandura1 that are frequently employed in traditional library instruction: students need to be supported and coached in working in their Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), which stimulates learning.