The Change Laboratory in Higher Education:research-intervention using activity theory

In this chapter we discuss the Change Laboratory as an intervention-research methodology in higher education. We trace its theoretical origins in dialectical-materialism and activity theory, consider the recommendations made by its main proponents, and discuss its use in a range of higher education settings. We suggest that the Change Laboratory offers considerable potential for higher education research, though tensions between Change Laboratory design recommendations and typical higher education contexts require consideration

Drivers and outcomes of work alienation: reviving a concept

This article sheds new light on an understudied construct in mainstream management theory, namely, work alienation. This is an important area of study because previous research indicates that work alienation is associated with important individual and organizational outcomes. We tested four antecedents of work alienation: decision-making autonomy, task variety, task identity, and social support. Moreover, we examined two outcomes of alienation: deviance and performance, the former measured 1 year after the independent variables were measured, and the latter as rated by supervisors. We present evidence from a sample of 283 employees employed at a construction and consultancy organization in the United Kingdom. The results supported the majority of our hypotheses, indicating that alienation is a worthy concept of exploration in the management sciences

Dialectics and difference: against Harvey's dialectical post-Marxism

David Harvey`s recent book, Justice, nature and the geography of difference (JNGD), engages with a central philosophical debate that continues to dominate human geography: the tension between the radical Marxist project of recent decades and the apparently disempowering relativism and `play of difference' of postmodern thought. In this book, Harvey continues to argue for a revised `post-Marxist' approach in human geography which remains based on Hegelian-Marxian principles of dialectical thought. This article develops a critique of that stance, drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. I argue that dialectical thinking, as well as Harvey's version of `post-Marxism', has been undermined by the wide-ranging `post-' critique. I suggest that Harvey has failed to appreciate the full force of this critique and the implications it has for `post-Marxist' ontology and epistemology. I argue that `post-Marxism', along with much contemporary human geography, is constrained by an inflexible ontology which excessively prioritizes space in the theory produced, and which implements inflexible concepts. Instead, using the insights of several `post-' writers, I contend there is a need to develop an ontology of `context' leading to the production of `contextual theories'. Such theories utilize flexible concepts in a multilayered understanding of ontology and epistemology. I compare how an approach which produces a `contextual theory' might lead to more politically empowering theory than `post-Marxism' with reference to one of Harvey's case studies in JNGD

The halfway house: democracy, complexity, and the limits to markets in green political economy

The argument of the Austrian school of economists that markets are indispensable in the face of social and economic complexity is of defining importance for the modern day case for markets. The dominant paradigm in green political economy accepts this view, whilst proposing that markets be combined with a thick layer of democratic, non-market institutions to ensure environmental sustainability. Closer attention to the relationship between the Austrian and green arguments reveals important implications for both. The Austrian thesis raises significant challenges for the 'halfway house' combination of market and non-market that greens propose. Also, potential responses to the Austrians emerge from green thought. New light is shed upon the problem of complexity and the how it might be addressed by non-market political institutions

Baltic labour in the crucible of capitalist exploitation: reassessing 'post-communist' transformation

Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this article re-assesses ‘post-communist’ transformation in the Baltic countries from the perspective of labour. The argument is based on a historical materialist approach focusing on the social relations of production as a starting point. It is contended that the uneven and combined unfolding of ‘post-communist’ transformation has subjected Baltic labour to doubly constituted exploitation processes. First, workers in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have suffered from extreme neoliberal restructuring of economic and employment relations at home. Second, migrant workers from Central and Eastern Europe in general, trying to escape exploitation at home, have faced another set of exploitative dynamics in host countries in Western Europe such as the UK. Nevertheless, workers have continued to challenge exploitation in Central and Eastern Europe and also in Western Europe, and have been active in extending networks of transnational solidarity across the continent

On the Dialectics of Global Governance in the Twenty-first Century : A Polanyian Double Movement?

Following decades of economic globalisation and market-oriented reforms across the world, Karl Polanyi’s double movement has been invoked not only to explain what is happening but also to give reasons for being hopeful about a different future. Some have suggested a pendulum model of history: a swing from markets to society leading, in the next phase, to a swing from society to markets, and so on. The double movement can also be understood dialectically as a description of an irreversible historical development following its own inner laws or schemes of development. Going beyond a thesis – antithesis – synthesis pattern, I maintain that conceptions and schemes drawn from dialectics, and especially dialectical critical realism, can provide better geo-historical hypotheses for explaining past changes and for building scenarios about possible future changes. I analyse political economy contradictions and tendencies, and focus on normative rationality, to assess substantial claims about rational tendential directionality of world history. I argue that democratic global Keynesianism would enable processes of decommodification and new syntheses concerning the market/social nexus. A learning process towards qualitatively higher levels of reflexivity can help develop global transformative agency. Existing contradictions can be resolved by means of rational collective actions and building more adequate common institutions. These collective actions are likely to involve new forms of political agency such as world political parties.Peer reviewe

The quantified self: what counts in the neoliberal workplace

Implementation of quantified self technologies in workplaces relies on the ontological premise of Cartesian dualism with mind dominant over body. Contributing to debates in new materialism, we demonstrate that workers are now being asked to measure our own productivity and health and wellbeing in art-houses and warehouses alike in both the global north and south. Workers experience intensified precarity, austerity, intense competition for jobs, and anxieties about the replacement of labour-power with robots and other machines as well as, ourselves replaceable, other humans. Workers have internalized the imperative to perform, a subjectification process as we become observing, entrepreneurial subjects and observed, objectified labouring bodies. Thinking through the implications of the use of wearable technologies in workplaces, this article shows that these technologies introduce a heightened Taylorist influence on precarious working bodies within neoliberal workplaces

Temporal properties of human information processing: Tests of discrete versus continuous models,

Cognitive psychologists have characterized the temporal properties of human information processing in terms of discrete and continuous models. Discrete models postulate that component mental processes transmit a finite number of intermittent outputs (quanta) of information over time, whereas continuous models postulate that information is transmitted in a gradual fashion. These postulates may be tested by using an adaptive response-priming procedure and analysis of reaction-time mixture distributions. Three experiments based on this procedure and analysis are reported. The experiments involved varying the temporal interval between the onsets of a prime stimulus and a subsequent test stimulus to which a response had to be made. Reaction time was measured as a function of the duration of the priming interval and the type of prime stimulus. Discrete models predict that manipulations of the priming interval should yield a family of reaction-time mixture distributions formed from a finite number of underlying basis distributions, corresponding to distinct preparatory states. Continuous models make a different prediction. Goodness-of-fit tests between these predictions and the data supported either the discrete or the continuous models, depending on the nature of the stimuli and responses being used. When there were only two alternative responses and the stimulus-response mapping was a compatible one, discrete models with two or three states of preparation fit the results best. For larger response sets with an incompatible stimulus-response mapping, a continuous model fit some of the data better. These results are relevant to the interpretation of reaction-time data in a variety of contexts and to the analysis of speed-accuracy trade-offs in mental processes.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/25558/1/0000100.pd

Analysing Change: Complex Rather than Dialectical?

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.This article offers a discussion of dialectics from a complexity perspective. Dialectics is a term much utilized but infrequently defined. This article suggests that a spectrum of ideas exist concerning understandings of dialectics. We are particularly critical of Hegelian dialectics, which we see as anthropocentric and teleological. While Marxist approaches to dialectics, in the form of historical materialism, marked a break from the idealist elements of Hegelian dialectics, they retained traces of this approach. The article offers a partial discussion of essential elements of dialectics, which we consider to be the analysis of change, the centrality of contradiction, and the methodology of abstraction. Points of overlap with complexity thinking are highlighted, together with those points where complexity thinking and dialectical approaches diverge. We conclude with some suggestions as to how complexity thinking might contribute to a development of dialectical approaches