Revising the ‘myth’ of a ‘clean wehrmacht’: generals’ trials, public opinion, and the dynamics of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in West Germany, 1948–60

Among one of the most consistent claims made by the organizers and supporters of the ‘Wehrmacht exhibition’ has been that the ‘myth’ of a ‘clean Wehrmacht’ took root in the Federal Republic of Germany in the early 1950s, lasting well into the 1980s, only to have been finally shattered by the exhibition itself in the mid-1990s. Although this thesis has very little to do with the actual content of the exhibition — which examined the role of the Wehrmacht, and the army in particular, in co-operating with SS units in the final solution in the Soviet Union, in executions of enemy personnel, and the extermination of countless civilians through the device of declaring them to be partisans — it is has been repeated consistently by a number of historians

Matters for judgement: some thoughts on method in management history

Purpose: This paper reflects on some aspects of method in management history and the importance of the self-reflection on their world-view that must accompany authors’ endeavours, in order to be articulated in the matters they proffer for the reader’s judgement. Approach: Drawing on the insights proffered by Evans (1999:1) about how to study, research, write about and read history, this paper offers some thoughts on the importance of giving due consideration to method in management history. Research & Practical Implications: Thomas Hobbes (1660/1994:32) observed that “Out of our conception of the past, we make a future”. It behoves us then, as managers and management scholars, to be satisfied that our conceptions of the past are developed in ways that, as far as possible, avoid the problems that would make them less than useful in creating that future. This paper identifies some of the issues of which those seeking to create the future must be cognisant. Value: If knowing accurately the history of management thought is of importance to scholars and practitioners, then this paper alerts practitioners and commentators to the need for a sound method in producing, and learning from, the lessons of management history

ELKO, flagpole and flag-dipole spinor fields, and the instanton Hopf fibration

In a previous paper we explicitly constructed a mapping that leads Dirac spinor fields to the dual-helicity eigenspinors of the charge conjugation operator (ELKO spinor fields). ELKO spinor fields are prime candidates for describing dark matter, and belong to a wider class of spinor fields, the so-called flagpole spinor fields, corresponding to the class-(5), according to Lounesto spinor field classification, based on the relations and values taken by their associated bilinear covariants. Such a mapping between Dirac and ELKO spinor fields was obtained in an attempt to extend the Standard Model in order to encompass dark matter. Now we prove that such a mapping, analogous to the instanton Hopf fibration map $S^3... S^7\to S^4$, prevents ELKO to describe the instanton, giving a suitable physical interpretation to ELKO. We review ELKO spinor fields as type-(5) spinor fields under the Lounesto spinor field classification, explicitly computing the associated bilinear covariants. This paper is also devoted to investigate some formal aspects of the flag-dipole spinor fields, which correspond to the class-(4) under the Lounesto spinor field classification. In addition, we prove that type-(4) spinor fields (corresponding to flag-dipoles) and ELKO spinor fields (corresponding to flagpoles) can also be entirely described in terms of the Majorana and Weyl spinor fields. After all, by choosing a projection endomorphism of the spacetime algebra Cl(1,3) it is shown how to obtain ELKO, flagpole, Majorana and Weyl spinor fields, respectively corresponding to type-(5) and -(6) spinor fields, uniquely from limiting cases of a type-(4) (flag-dipole) spinor field, in a similar result obtained by Lounesto.Comment: 17 Pages, RevTeX, accepted for publication in Adv. Appl. Clifford Al

Treading the lines between self-interest, cultural relativism and universal principles: ethics in the global marketplace

Purpose: This paper introduces this special issue of Management Decision by exploring the themes of the issue and the contribution of each of the articles in the collection. Approach: The paper reviews notions of ethics, justice and responsibility. It then uses the framework developed through this review as the basis for an appreciation of the articles that constitute the issue. Value: This article provides an introduction to, and suggests an overarching framework for, this special issue on questions we ask about ethics in a global marketplace. It is also an important reminder to managers and employees who constitute the entities to which “responsibility” is generally attached, that responsibility, ultimately, is irreducible beyond the individual, who cannot simply “follow orders”

Information-entropic analysis of Korteweg--de Vries solitons in the quark-gluon plasma

Solitary waves propagation of baryonic density perturbations, ruled by the Korteweg--de Vries equation in a mean-field quark-gluon plasma model, are investigated from the point of view of the theory of information. A recently proposed continuous logarithmic measure of information, called configurational entropy, is used to derive the soliton width, defining the pulse, for which the informational content of the soliton spatial profile is more compressed, in the Shannon's sense.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figur