811 research outputs found
Rethinking Polanyiâs concept of tacit knowledge: From personal knowing to imagined institutions
Half a century after Michael Polanyi conceptualised âthe tacit componentâ in personal knowing, management studies has reinvented âtacit knowledgeââalbeit in ways that squander the advantages of Polanyiâs insights and ignore his faith in âspiritual realityâ. While tacit knowing challenged the absurdities of sheer objectivity, expressed in a âperfect languageâ, it fused rational knowing, based on personal experience, with mystical speculation about an un-experienced âexternal realityâ. Faith alone saved Polanyiâs model from solipsism. But Ernst von Glasersfeldâs radical constructivism provides scope to rethink personal tacit knowing with regard to âother peopleâ and the intersubjectively viable construction of âexperiential realityâ. By separating tacit knowing from Polanyiâs metaphysical realism and drawing on Benedict Andersonâs concept of âimagined communitiesâ, it is possible to conceptualise âimagined institutionsâ as the tacit dimension of power that shapes human interaction. Whereas Douglass North claimed institutions could be reduced to rules, imagined institutions are known in ways we cannot tell
From Job Strain to Employment Strain: Health Effects of Precarious Employment
This article examines the relationship between health and the organization of precarious employment. We develop the concept of "employment strain" to capture the characteristics of precarious employment. Preliminary evidence suggests that workers in precarious employment relationships report poorer overall health than working Canadians and higher levels of stress than workers in standard employment relationships. They face high levels of uncertainty regarding access to work, the terms and conditions of that work, and future earnings. They engage in additional effort searching for work and balancing the demands of multiple employers. They have low earnings, few benefits, and reside in low income households
Towards a theory of conceptual design for software
Concepts are the building blocks of software systems. They are not just subjective mental constructs, but are objective features of a system's design: increments of functionality that were consciously introduced by a designer to serve particular purposes. This essay argues for viewing the design of software in terms of concepts, with their invention (or adoption) and refinement as the central activity of software design. A family of products can be characterized by arranging concepts in a dependence graph from which coherent concept subsets can be extracted. Just as bugs can be found in the code of a function prior to testing by reviewing the programmer's argument for its correctness, so flaws can be found in a software design by reviewing an argument by the designer. This argument consists of providing, for each concept, a single compelling purpose, and demonstrating how the concept fulfills the purpose with an archetypal scenario called an 'operational principle'. Some simple conditions (primarily in the relationship between concepts and their purposes) can then be applied to reveal flaws in the conceptual design.SUTD-MIT International Design Centre (IDC
Adam Smithâs Green Thumb and Malthusâ Three Horsemen: Cautionary tales from classical political economy
This essay identifies a contradiction between the flourishing interest in the environmental economics of the classical period and a lack of critical parsing of the works of its leading representatives. Its focus is the work of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus. It offers a critical analysis of their contribution to environmental thought and surveys the work of their contemporary devotees. It scrutinizes Smith's contribution to what Karl Polanyi termed the "economistic fallacy," as well as his defenses of class hierarchy, the "growth imperative" and consumerism. It subjects to critical appraisal Malthus's enthusiasm for private property and the market system, and his opposition to market regulation. While Malthus's principal attraction to ecological economists lies in his having allegedly broadened the scope of economics, and in his narrative of scarcity, this article shows that he, in fact, narrowed the scope of the discipline and conceptualized scarcity in a reified and pseudo-scientific way
Technology and restructuring the social field of dairy farming : hybrid capitals, âstockmanshipâ and automatic milking systems
This paper draws on research exploring robotic and information technologies in livestock agriculture. Using Automatic Milking Systems (AMS) as an example we use the work of Bourdieu to illustrate how technology can be seen as restructuring the practices of dairy farming, the nature of what it is to be a dairy farmer, and the wider field of dairy farming. Approaching technology in this way and by drawing particularly upon the âthinking toolsâ (Grenfell, 2008) of Pierre Bourdieu, namely field, capital and habitus, the paper critically examines the relevance of Bourdieuâs thought to the study of technology. In the heterogeneous agricultural context of dairy farming, we expand on Bourdieuâs types of capital to define what we have called âhybridâ capital involving human-cow-technology collectives. The concept of hybrid capital expresses how the use of a new technology can shift power relations within the dairy field, affecting human-animal relations and changing the habitus of the stock person. Hybrid capital is produced through a co-investment of stock keepers, cows and technologies, and can become economically and culturally valuable within a rapidly restructuring dairying field when invested in making dairy farming more efficient and changing farmersâ social status and work-life balance. The paper shows how AMS and this emergent hybrid capital is associated with new but contested definitions of what counts as âgoodâ dairy farming practice, and with the emergence of new modes of dairy farmer habitus, within a wider dairy farming field whose contours are being redrawn through the implementation of new robotic and information technologies
Performing thinking in action: the meletÄ of live coding
Within this article, live coding is conceived as a meletÄ, an Ancient Greek term used to describe a meditative thought experiment or exercise in thought, especially understood as a preparatory practice supporting other forms of critical â even ethical â action. Underpinned by the principle of performing its thinking through 'showing the screen', live coding involves 'making visible' the process of its own unfolding through the public sharing of live decision-making within improvisatory performance practice. Live coding can also be conceived as the performing of 'thinking-in-action', a live and embodied navigation of various critical thresholds, affordances and restraints, where its thinking-knowing cannot be easily transmitted nor is it strictly a latent knowledge or 'know how' activated through action. Live coding involves the live negotiation between receptivity and spontaneity, between the embodied and intuitive, between an immersive flow experience and split-attention, between human and machine, the known and not yet known. Moreover, in performing 'thinking-in-action', live coding emerges as an experimental site for reflecting on different perceptions and possibilities of temporal experience within live performance: for attending to the threshold between the live and mediated, between present and future-present, proposing even a quality of atemporality or aliveness
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