12 research outputs found

    The ‘Aboriginal’ Australian brain in the scientific imagination, c. 1820–1880

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    Over the past two decades, historians of colonial Australia have greatly enriched our understanding of how Aboriginality was racially constructed in nineteenth and early twentieth settler discourses. However, there is arguably much that is yet to be understood about how racialist perceptions of Aboriginal people owed their cultural suasiveness to medico-scientific investigation of the Aboriginal body. This essay attempts to go some way towards answering this question by exploring in contextualised detail how anatomists and anthropologists, in the century or so after 1820, construed the morphology of the ‘Aboriginal brain’ and its significance in the evolutionary history of humankind. The essay particularly focuses on explicating the goals of these investigators of the ‘Aboriginal’ brain as they themselves saw them evolving through their uses of evidence and modes of reasoning and argument. Fine grained exploration of how the scientific facticity of the ‘Aboriginal’ brain was constructed is arguably essential if we are to understand how in obvious, but also in many subtle ways, the outcomes of this research figured in the construal of the biological and psychic dimensions of Aboriginality within settler culture, and on the development of policies for governing Aboriginal people. Moreover, it also offers us a useful source of vicarious knowledge for assessing contemporary scientific interest in the ‘Aboriginal’ brain

    Managerial challenges of Industry 4.0: an empirically backed research agenda for a nascent field

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    The increasing intelligence of products and systems, their intra-company cross-linking and their cross-company integration into value creation networks is referred to as Industry 4.0. Academics and practitioners, largely agreeing on the global importance of this proclaimed industrial revolution, have published many contributions on the topic. Research, however, is rather focused on investigating single technologies in quite specific application domains and largely neglects the profound managerial challenges underlying Industry 4.0. Given the recent plea for a more active contribution from the management science community, we strive to establish Industry 4.0 as a challenging but promising field for management research, and aim to assist scholars in engaging with the topic. Therefore, we first gather and analyze extant contributions by means of a systematic literature review and synthesize the information gained into 18 managerial challenges of Industry 4.0 falling into six interrelated clusters: (1) strategy and analysis, (2) planning and implementation, (3) cooperation and networks, (4) business models, (5) human resources and (6) change and leadership. Considering that Industry 4.0 is still an emerging topic and publications may therefore not always be found in highly ranked journals, we aimed to increase the confidence in our findings and triangulated our data by conducting an online survey of industry experts and academics that allows us to qualify the identified challenges in terms of importance and future research need. On this basis, we present an empirically backed research agenda and suggest fruitful avenues for future research in three basic categories: practice-enhancing research, knowledge-enhancing research, and high-impact research
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