Play at work, learning and innovation

Suggesting a virtuous triangle constituting public service innovation of new governances, innovation and learning, the paper examines how and why a particular mode of learning occurs: that of play. Having identified an absence of research literature on play as a catalyst for new ideas in public services, the paper argues that the diversified nature of public services and disciplinary intermixing offers fertile ground for playing with new service ideas. Our conception of play avoids functional interpretations, such as Amabile or individualizing the results of play and instead draws upon Vygotsky’s social learning theory to conceptualize play as a group activity from which new ideas emerge and suggest a new framework for understanding purposive play at work and the contribution it can make to public service innovation

Marketing (as) Rhetoric: paradigms, provocations, and perspectives

In this collection of short, invited essays on the topic of marketing (as) rhetoric we deal with a variety of issues that demonstrate the centrality of rhetoric and rhetorical considerations to the pursuit of marketing scholarship, research and practice. Stephen Brown examines the enduring rhetorical power of the 4Ps; Chris Hackley argues for the critical power of rhetorical orientations in marketing scholarship but cautions us on the need to work harder in conceptually connecting rhetorical theory and modern marketing frameworks; Shelby Hunt explains how rhetorical processes are incorporated in his inductive realist model of theory generation, using one of his most successful publications as an illustration; Charles Marsh demonstrates what Isocrates’ broad rhetorical project has to teach us about the importance of reputation cultivation in modern marketing; Nicholas O’Shaughnessy uses an analysis of Trump’s discourse to argue that political marketing as it is currently conceived is ill-equipped to engage effectively with the rhetorical force of Trump’s ‘unmarketing’; Barbara Phillips uses Vygotsky’s work on imagination to investigate the important of pleasure and play in advertising rhetoric; and finally, David Tonks, who in many ways started it all, reiterates the need for marketers to recognise the strength of the relationship between marketing and persuasion

Sport, War and Democracy in Classical Athens

This article concerns the paradox of athletics in classical Athens. Democracy may have opened up politics to every class of Athenian but it had little impact on sporting participation. The city’s athletes continued to drawn predominantly from the upper class. It comes as a surprise then that lower-class Athenians actually esteemed athletes above every other group in the public eye, honoured them very generously when they won, and directed a great deal of public and private money to sporting competitions and facilities. In addition athletics escaped the otherwise persistent criticism of upper-class activities in the popular culture of the democracy. The research of social scientists on sport and aggression suggests this paradox may have been due to the cultural overlap between athletics and war under the Athenian democracy. The article concludes that the practical and ideological democratization of war by classical Athens legitimized and supported upper-class sport

Impact of SOA Adoption with regard to Business Value

In today’s rapid changing environment organisations are required to quickly adapt to the new market conditions. As a result, organisations strive to be flexible and be agile in order to cope with these conditions. Moreover, the introduction of new technologies and information systems has increased the number of middleware in IT architectures, which are considered monolithic and inflexible. SOA is an emerging architectural style that attempts to solve these problems. The concept of SOA is a relatively new concept and there is currently an increase interest in SOA, both from academic researchers and industry practitioners. It is being argued that SOA has many different interpretations which can be regarded as ambiguity and confusion. Moreover, there is little knowledge on SOA adoption and the impact of SOA adoption in an organisation. As a result this study will answer the following research question: what is the impact of SOA adoption? In order to answer the research question, this study will first explain some concepts related to SOA and present an overview of SOA adoption by conducting a literature review. The literature review results in a research framework and it is use thereafter to conduct an empirical study. Empirical data has been collected from two sources: SOA adoption project documentation and interviews with different key persons from a Large South East Asia Bank. Our preliminary findings suggest that from a business value perspective, SOA impact an organisation from two dimensions: business agility and costs. Business agility factors include: system integration, alignment between IT and business goals, response to market changes & customer demands, data flow, and customer services; while cost factors comprises: application development cost and time, reuse of existing applications and operation costs. Other factors identified during the empirical study were: increase human-resource productivity as well as increase in application reliability. This study concludes by proposing a model as a basis for future SOA adoption studies