Performance Management by Causal Mapping: An Application Field of Knowledge Management

As implied by the performance management (PM) concept, modern corporate management has to focus on cause-and-effect relationships underlying a firm´s financial performance generation. To determine the causes of financially desirable effects, subject-bound experiences and knowledge of employees, called tacit knowledge, should be realised. For this, knowledge management (KM) offers various elicitation techniques to reveal corporate-specific success factors (SFs) of financial performance generation from the corporate experts´ implicit knowledge. The identified factors have to be organised within a network of cause-and-effect relationships. In this framework, PM can apply the instrument of mapping to structure the individually revealed knowledge, to aggregate and visualise it for the entire company. For a valid representation of the causal relationships, the subjective bias arising within the mentioned process has to be minimised. In the literature, a variety of mapping methods can be found that differ in their approaches and their level of significance. As such a method, causal mapping will be presented in this paper. For providing intersubjectivity, the decision-making trail and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) as a multi-criteria approach will be debated in the context of mapping as a research field

Rethinking Epistemic Relativism

‘Relativism’ is often treated as a dirty word in philosophy. Showing that a view entails relativism is almost always considered tantamount to showing that it is nonsensical. However, relativistic theories are not entirely unappealing – they have features which might be tempting if they weren’t thought to be outweighed by problematic consequences. In this paper I argue that it’s possible to secure the intuitively appealing features of at least one kind of relativism – epistemic relativism – without having to accept any problematic consequences. I do this by defending what I call 'stratified relativism'

Childhood amyotrophic lateral sclerosis caused by excess sphingolipid synthesis

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a progressive, neurodegenerative disease of the lower and upper motor neurons with sporadic or hereditary occurrence. Age of onset, pattern of motor neuron degeneration and disease progression vary widely among individuals with ALS. Various cellular processes may drive ALS pathomechanisms, but a monogenic direct metabolic disturbance has not been causally linked to ALS. Here we show SPTLC1 variants that result in unrestrained sphingoid base synthesis cause a monogenic form of ALS. We identified four specific, dominantly acting SPTLC1 variants in seven families manifesting as childhood-onset ALS. These variants disrupt the normal homeostatic regulation of serine palmitoyltransferase (SPT) by ORMDL proteins, resulting in unregulated SPT activity and elevated levels of canonical SPT products. Notably, this is in contrast with SPTLC1 variants that shift SPT amino acid usage from serine to alanine, result in elevated levels of deoxysphingolipids and manifest with the alternate phenotype of hereditary sensory and autonomic neuropathy. We custom designed small interfering RNAs that selectively target the SPTLC1 ALS allele for degradation, leave the normal allele intact and normalize sphingolipid levels in vitro. The role of primary metabolic disturbances in ALS has been elusive; this study defines excess sphingolipid biosynthesis as a fundamental metabolic mechanism for motor neuron disease