Can Yin-Yang Guide Chinese Indigenous Management Research?

2014 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xin Li

In this article, I argue that it is misleading to dichotomize the West as being either/or and the East as being both/and. The West has thought dialectically since ancient Greece. I offer a typology to compare and contrast three dialectical or non-either/or logical systems or ways of thinking: Chinese Yin-Yang philosophy, Hegel's dialectic, and Niels Bohr's complementarity principle, as well as Aristotle's formal (either/or) logic. I show that the four logical systems have differences and similarities and show that Westerners can and do think dialectically. I also argue that Chinese Yin-Yang philosophy, while useful and powerful in some situations, is not always superior to the other logical systems and philosophies. My purpose is to alert Chinese management scholars to the dangers of overconfidence and to stimulate discussion and debate on the true value of Yin-Yang in particular and the promotion of Chinese indigenous management research in general. To that end, I present my opinion on the merits and drawbacks of Yin-Yang and posit that it may inspire but cannot guide Chinese indigenous management research because Chinese philosophy lacks a well-defined methodology and operationalizable methods.

2021 ◽  
pp. 016555152110141
Author(s):  
Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi ◽  
Yuanye Ma ◽  
Cami Goray

We present a model of information that integrates two competing perspectives of information by emulating the Chinese philosophy of yin-yang. The model embraces the two key dimensions of information that exist harmoniously: information as (1) objective and veridical representations in the world (information as object) and (2) socially constructed interpretations that are a result of contextual influences (information as subject). We argue that these two facets of information cocreate information as a unified system and complement one another through two processes, which we denote as forming and informing. While the information literature has historically treated these objective and subjective identities of information as incompatible, we argue that they are mutually relevant and that our understanding of one actually enhances our understanding of the other.


2014 ◽  
Vol 10 (02) ◽  
pp. 321-332 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Ping Li

I welcome any well-informed debate over the unique value of Yin-Yang as a cognitive frame in the development of Chinese indigenous management research. The commentary by Xin Li to engage in a debate is timely. Xin Li and I share the same premise that ‘we need indigenous Chinese management research to offer new insights and contribute to the development of truly universal theories’ (Li, X., 2014: 8). That is the common ground upon which we can debate over how best to engage in indigenous research with confidence in balance so as to avoid both overconfidence and under-confidence.Where we depart from the above common ground is our different perspectives about the value of the Yin-Yang frame. Xin Li challenges my positive perspective on the unique value of the Yin-Yang frame on several dimensions. First, he characterizes my perspective as ‘both/and’ in sharp contrast to Aristotle’s ‘either/or’ logic. Second, he characterizes my perspective as arguing that ‘Yin-Yang thinking is superior to other logical systems and philosophies’ (Li, X., 2014: 8). Third, he implies that my perspective on the Yin-Yang frame is essentially a claim that ‘Westerners cannot think in a non-either/or way’ (Li, X., 2014: 8). Fourth, the above challenges are based upon his basic claim that the Yin-Yang frame is just one form of dialectical framing (Li, X., 2014). Based on these claims, Xin Li warns against the ‘danger of overconfidence’ among Chinese management scholars (Li, X., 2014: 8).


2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 78
Author(s):  
Aysel KAMAL ◽  
Sinem ATIS

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar (1901-1962) is one of the most controversial authors in the 20th century Turkish literature. Literature critics find it difficult to place him in a school of literature and thought. There are many reasons that they have caused Tanpinar to give the impression of ambiguity in his thoughts through his literary works. One of them is that he is always open to (even admires) the "other" thought to a certain age, and he considers synthesis thinking at later ages. Tanpinar states in the letter that he wrote to a young lady from Antalya that he composed the foundations of his first period aesthetics due to the contributions from western (French) writers. The influence of the western writers on him has also inspired his interest in the materialist culture of the West. In 1953 and 1959 he organized two tours to Europe in order to see places where Western thought and culture were produced. He shared his impressions that he gained in European countries in his literary works. In the literary works of Tanpinar, Europe comes out as an aesthetic object. The most dominant facts of this aesthetic are music, painting, etc. In this work, in the writings of Tanpinar about the countries that he travelled in Europe, some factors were detected like European culture, lifestyle, socio-cultural relations, art and architecture, political and social history and so on. And the effects of European countries were compared with Tanpinar’s thought and aesthetics. Keywords: Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, Europe, poetry, music, painting, culture, life


Public Voices ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 89
Author(s):  
Amy Probsdorfer Kelley ◽  
John C. Morris

The process to win approval to build a national memorial on the National Mall inWashington, DC is both long and complex. Many memorials are proposed, but few are chosen to inhabit the increasingly scarce space available on the Mall. Through the use of network analysis we compare and contrast two memorial proposals, with an eye toward understanding why one proposal was successful while the other seems to have failed. We conclude that the success of a specific memorial has less to do with the perceived popularity of the person or event to be memorialized, and more to do with how the sponsors use the network of people and resources available to advocate for a given proposal.


Author(s):  
Celine Parreñas Shimizu

Transnational films representing intimacy and inequality disrupt and disgust Western spectators. When wounded bodies within poverty entangle with healthy wealthy bodies in sex, romance and care, fear and hatred combine with desire and fetishism. Works from the Philippines, South Korea, and independents from the United States and France may not be made for the West and may not make use of Hollywood traditions. Rather, they demand recognition for the knowledge they produce beyond our existing frames. They challenge us to go beyond passive consumption, or introspection of ourselves as spectators, for they represent new ways of world-making we cannot unsee, unhear, or unfeel. The spectator is redirected to go beyond the rapture of consuming the other to the rupture that arises from witnessing pain and suffering. Self-displacement is what proximity to intimate inequality in cinema ultimately compels and demands so as to establish an ethical way of relating to others. In undoing the spectator, the voice of the transnational filmmaker emerges. Not only do we need to listen to filmmakers from outside Hollywood who unflinchingly engage the inexpressibility of difference, we need to make room for critics and theorists who prioritize the subjectivities of others. When the demographics of filmmakers and film scholars are not as diverse as its spectators, films narrow our worldviews. To recognize our culpability in the denigration of others unleashes the power of cinema. The unbearability of stories we don’t want to watch and don’t want to feel must be borne.


1973 ◽  
Vol 93 ◽  
pp. 74-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Gould

To Professor E. R. Dodds, through his edition of Euripides'Bacchaeand again inThe Greeks and the Irrational, we owe an awareness of new possibilities in our understanding of Greek literature and of the world that produced it. No small part of that awareness was due to Professor Dodds' masterly and tactful use of comparative ethnographic material to throw light on the relation between literature and social institutions in ancient Greece. It is in the hope that something of my own debt to him may be conveyed that this paper is offered here, equally in gratitude, admiration and affection.The working out of the anger of Achilles in theIliadbegins with a great scene of divine supplication in which Thetis prevails upon Zeus to change the course of things before Troy in order to restore honour to Achilles; it ends with another, human act in which Priam supplicates Achilles to abandon his vengeful treatment of the dead body of Hector and restore it for a ransom. The first half of theOdysseyhinges about another supplication scene of crucial significance, Odysseus' supplication of Arete and Alkinoos on Scherie. Aeschylus and Euripides both wrote plays called simplySuppliants, and two cases of a breach of the rights of suppliants, the cases of the coup of Kylon and that of Pausanias, the one dating from the mid-sixth century, the other from around 470 B.C. or soon after, played a dominant role in the diplomatic propaganda of the Spartans and Athenians on the eve of the Peloponnesian War.


2020 ◽  
Vol 145 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-505
Author(s):  
EIRINI DIAMANTOULI

Ideologically motivated attempts to elucidate Shostakovich’s political views and to determine whether and how they may be coded into his compositions have come to characterize the Western reception of the composer’s works since his death in 1975. Fuelled by the political oppositions of the cold war, Shostakovich’s posthumous reputation in the West has been largely shaped by two conflicting perspectives. These have positioned him on the one hand as a secret dissident, bent and broken under the unbearable strain of totalitarianism, made heroic through his veiled musical resistance to Communism; and on the other hand as a composer compromised by his capitulation to the regime – represented in an anachronistic musical style. Both perspectives surrender Shostakovich and his music to a crude oversimplification driven by vested political interests. Western listeners thus conditioned are primed to hear either the coded dissidence of a tragic victim of Communist brutality or the sinister submission of a ‘loyal son of the Communist Party’.1 For those prepared to accept Shostakovich as a ‘tragic victim’, the publication of his purported memoirs in 1979, ‘as related to and edited by’ the author Solomon Volkov, presents a tantalizing conclusion: bitterly yet discreetly scornful of the Stalinist regime, Shostakovich was indeed a secret dissident and this dissidence was made tangible in his music.


Matatu ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chantal Zabus

The essay shows how Ezenwa–Ohaeto's poetry in pidgin, particularly in his collection (1988), emblematizes a linguistic interface between, on the one hand, the pseudo-pidgin of Onitsha Market pamphleteers of the 1950s and 1960s (including in its gendered guise as in Cyprian Ekwensi) and, on the other, its quasicreolized form in contemporary news and television and radio dramas as well as a potential first language. While locating Nigerian Pidgin or EnPi in the wider context of the emergence of pidgins on the West African Coast, the essay also draws on examples from Joyce Cary, Frank Aig–Imoukhuede, Ogali A. Ogali, Ola Rotimi, Wole Soyinka, and Tunde Fatunde among others. It is not by default but out of choice and with their 'informed consent' that EnPi writers such as Ezenwa–Ohaeto contributed to the unfinished plot of the pidgin–creole continuum.


2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 558-562 ◽  
Author(s):  
Runtian Jing ◽  
Andrew H. Van de Ven

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to discuss the theoretical contribution of Li’s (2016) “Yin-Yang balancing” approach of paradox management, as well as its future development to guide paradox management research across the east and west contexts. Design/methodology/approach It begins by recognizing the importance of paradox management research, especially the indigenous epistemological approach as Li (2016) has followed. The authors take “being” and “becoming” ontology toward social reality as the basic premise in this commentary, and summarize the knowledge that the study has contributed to existing literature. Findings The “Yin-Yang balancing” approach can extend the knowledge about paradox management phenomena at least from four aspects: the “either/and” frame to view a paradox system, the importance of “seed” or “threshold” in defining moderate rather than extreme groups, duality map as a novel tool for paradox management, and comparison of being and becoming ontology. Originality/value Based on the comparison of “being” and “becoming” ontological view, the authors suggest to further develop this “Yin-Yang balancing” approach by emphasizing the following issues: eastern culture does not have exclusive ownership of the “becoming” ontology toward the world, elaboration of alternative theoretical explanation to win out the identity approach about organizational existence, the linkage between the “Yin-Yang balancing” epistemological system and process research method, and boundary condition of the “Yin-Yang balancing” approach.


1956 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. A. C. Parker

ON March 7, 1936, German troops entered the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland. Germany thus violated Articles 42 and 43 of the Treaty of Versailles and Articles 1 and 2 of the Treaty of Locarno of 1925. Remilitarization moved forward for about one hundred miles the areas of concentration for any German armed attack in the west and advanced the defensive line that could be held by the German army. It severely weakened France and, in consequence, all the other powers concerned to maintain the Paris peace settlements and to preserve the peace of Europe.


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