Firm Specific Knowledges: Their Critical Scrutiny

Author(s):  
Peter Clark
Keyword(s):  
2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-326
Author(s):  
Christopher Meir

Up until late 2013, RED Production was considered one of the UK's premier independent producers. In December of that year, 51 per cent of the company was sold to Studiocanal, the production and distribution arm of France's Canal+, a pay-television provider with an increasingly global orientation. Although the UK trade press has continued to label RED as an ‘indie’, this article argues that the investment by a much larger multinational corporation marks a watershed moment in RED's history. While the company's trajectory since the takeover shows many artistic continuities with the previous fifteen years – including continuing collaboration with key writers and a dedication to shooting and setting stories in the north of England – there have also been significant changes to some of the company's long-standing practices that require critical scrutiny. The article will document and analyse a number of these, taking as case studies the series created after the investment and distributed by Studiocanal as well as a number of projects reported to be in development since that point. Collectively these changes have seen RED shift from what Andrew Spicer and Steve Presence have called its ‘rooted regionalism’ to being a more globally oriented producer, a change apparent in the settings of some of its shows. It has also seen the company embrace artistic practices – such as literary adaptation and the remaking of existing series and films – that it had long eschewed. The article seeks to explore what has been gained and lost by RED as it has embarked on this global strategy, a strategy that becomes all the more urgent as the industrial landscape of British television is transformed by the importance of international export markets and the growing power of subscription video on demand (SVOD) services such as Amazon Prime and Netflix.


2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 148-167
Author(s):  
Ian James Kidd ◽  
Jennifer Chubb ◽  
Joshua Forstenzer

Contemporary epistemologists of education have raised concerns about the distorting effects of some of the processes and structures of contemporary academia on the epistemic practice and character of academic researchers. Such concerns have been articulated using the concept of epistemic corruption. In this article, we lend credibility to these theoretically motivated concerns using the example of the research impact agenda during the period 2012–2014. Interview data from UK and Australian academics confirm that the impact agenda system, at its inception, facilitated the development and exercise of epistemic vices. As well as vindicating theoretically motivated claims about epistemic corruption, inclusion of empirical methods and material can help us put the concept to work in ongoing critical scrutiny of evolving forms of the research impact agenda.


Dialogue ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard M. Gale

David Lewis has shocked the philosophical community with his original version of extreme modal realism according to which “every way that a world could possibly be is a way that some world is”. Logical Space is a plenitude of isolated physical worlds, each being the actualization of some way in which a world could be, that bear neither spatiotemporal nor causal relations to each other. Lewis has given independent, converging arguments for this. One is the argument from the indexicality of actuality, the other an elaborate cost-benefit argument of the inference-to-the-best explanation sort to the effect that a systematic analysis of a number of concepts, including modality, causality, propositions and properties, fares better under his theory than under any rival one that takes a possible world to be either a linguistic entity or an ersatz abstract entity such as a maximal compossible set of properties, propositions or states of affairs. Lewis' legion of critics have confined themselves mostly to attempts at a reductio ad absurdum of his theory or to objections to his various analyses. The indexical argument, on the other hand, has not been subject to careful critical scrutiny. It is the purpose of this paper to show that this argument cannot withstand such scrutiny. Its demise, however, leaves untouched his argument from the explanatory superiority for his extreme modal realism.


2010 ◽  
pp. 26-33
Author(s):  
Sylvia Ficher ◽  
Pedro Paulo Palazzo

By the 1950s, a shared culture spreading internationally through teaching and specialized literature became common currency in professional circles and gave rise to a repertoire of urban theories and practices. An examination of Lúcio Costa’s winning entry for the pilot plan of Brasilia attest to the existence of these paradigmatic formulae. Further more, not only was Brasilia a product of this culture, it grew to become itself archetypal. Yet, this high tide would be short-lived. In late 50s and early 60s, this veritable urban designer’s toolbox began to lose its legitimacy to become target of critical scrutiny.


1995 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 329-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Tribe

Paul Omerod's recent book, The Death of Economics, provides the background to this paper. As Omerod's book laments the state of mainstream economics it seems an appropriate time to subject economics for tourism degrees to similar critical scrutiny. There has been a rapid growth in institutions offering degrees in tourism, from none in 1985 to 40 and rising by 1995, and economics has generally been part of the package on offer to students. This paper starts by outlining three serious challenges to economics both as a discipline and as educational knowledge for tourism students. It then examines how the educational package of economics is framed, and from this concludes that economics courses may arise more from accident (or inertia) than design, or that the design may not be appropriate for current needs. It therefore suggests that there is considerable scope for the re-framing of introductory economics for tourism students. In the light of the criticisms of economics expressed in the first section, a model curriculum for tourism economics is proposed, and ways in which such a model might be promoted and developed are explored.


2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 264-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
Udo Pesch ◽  
Georgy Ishmaev

New network technologies are framed as eliminating ‘transaction costs’, a notion first developed in economic theory that now drives the design of market systems. However, the actual promise of the elimination of transaction costs seems unfeasible, because of a cyclical pattern in which network technologies that make that promise create processes of institutionalization that create new forms transaction costs. Nonetheless, the promises legitimize the exemption of innovations of network technologies from critical scrutiny.


1989 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 525-544 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen R. Judd

The classic model of Chinese kinship organization, with its complementary emphases on patrilineality, patrilocality, and patriarchy, continues as a framework for research on Chinese social organization despite accumulating evidence of alternative models or of disjunctures within the elite model. This model has come under critical scrutiny from a variety of perspectives, most notably anthropologically informed historical research (Watson 1982; Watson 1985) that has led to a questioning of the lineage model (Freedman 1965) and field-based research that has drawn attention to the prevalence of uxorilocal and “small daughter-in-law” (tongyangxi) marriage and to the nurturing of uterine families (Wolf and Huang 1980; Wolf 1972). My purpose is to contribute to this reassessment with a discussion of customary practices of postmarital dual residence for women and continuing ties between married women and their natal families. These practices and ties cannot be accounted for within the framework of the structural-functionalist model and require an adaptation of practiceoriented theory. This may illuminate the specific structuring patterns and disjunctures described below as well as suggest possibly fruitful lines of analysis for other societies in which lineages are salient. The contribution of this article is to identify and explore a significant dimension of structuring practices in informal kinship relations in rural China.


Disputatio ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (39) ◽  
pp. 199-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Corabi

Abstract The evolutionary argument is an argument against epiphenomenalism, designed to show that some mind-body theory that allows for the efficacy of qualia is true. First developed by Herbert Spencer and William James, the argument has gone through numerous incarnations and it has been criticized in a number of different ways. Yet many have found the criticisms of the argument in the literature unconvincing. Bearing this in mind, I examine two primary issues: first, whether the alleged insights employed in traditional versions of the argument have been correctly and consistently applied, and second, whether the alleged insights can withstand critical scrutiny. With respect to the first issue, I conclude that the proponents of the argument have tended to grossly oversimplify the considerations involved, incorrectly supposing that the evolutionary argument is properly conceived as a non-specific argument for the disjunction of physicalism and interactionist dualism and against epiphenomenalism. With respect to the second issue, I offer a new criticism that decisively refutes all arguments along the lines of the one I present. Finally, I draw positive lessons about the use of empirical considerations in debates over the mind-body problem.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (01) ◽  
pp. 27-54
Author(s):  
Johannes Drerup

This contribution develops a defence of a universalist conception of Global Citizenship Education (GCE) against three prominent critiques, which are, among others, put forward by postcolonial scholars. The first critique argues that GCE is essentially a project of globally minded elites and therefore expressive both of global educational injustices and of the values and lifestyles of a particular class or milieu. The second critique assumes that GCE is based on genuinely ‘Western values’ (e.g., in the form of a conception of human rights or conceptions of rationality or the self), which are neither universally accepted nor universally valid and therefore unjustly forced on members of non-Western cultures and societies. GCE, according to this critique, is assumed to be another version of the educational justification of a hegemonic and unjust global Western regime. The third critique focuses on the epistemological preconditions of GCE. It assumes that GCE relies on a particular, culturally embedded ‘Western epistemology,’ which perpetuates historically grown global educational and epistemic injustices by dominating and subjugating alternative epistemological approaches. With respect to the first critique I argue that it is to a certain extent sociologically plausible, but wrong when it is applied to the educational and political legitimacy of GCE. The second critique overestimates the consensus within the ‘Western tradition’ and underestimates the transnational dissemination of universalist ideals and values as well as its own reliance on universalist validity claims. I argue that in order to provide a plausible criticism of historically grown global educational and political injustices, it is imperative for GCE to integrate central insights provided by the postcolonial critique, without giving up on universalist ideals and values. The third critique is, according to my argumentation, based on flawed epistemological assumptions, which do not withstand critical scrutiny. Instead of identifying epistemic and scientific claims as the expressions of a particular ‘culture’ or geographical location (the ‘West’), I defend the position that philosophical and scientific research should ideally be conceived as a democratic and universalist project, whose emancipatory potential can only be realized on the basis of a universalist epistemology.


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