scholarly journals Repositioning Organizational Failure Through Active Acceptance

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 263178772110548
Author(s):  
Gavin M. Schwarz ◽  
Dave Bouckenooghe
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Effectiveness ◽  
Organizational Failure ◽  
Is Success ◽  
Alternative Path ◽  
Course Of Action ◽  
As If ◽  
The Way ◽  
Active Acceptance

This paper considers the way organizations respond to failure by actively repositioning the failed outcome as success. When an organization fails to meet planned goals, they do not necessarily learn from the experience, automatically terminate the plan, or persist with the failing course of action. Instead, another response is to shift original aspirations by recasting what was achieved, acting as if the ensuing failure is positive, despite indicators suggesting otherwise. As a mode of organizational interpretation, this repositioning reformats the criteria for what is success in order to move forward, enabling organizations to continue failed outcomes and their tasks that are well past their use-by date. After detailing this adjustment, we model an active-acceptance protocol on failure, discussing whether organizational effectiveness is predictable from how firms respond to failure in this way. The paper fills a gap in dialogue specific to failing by opening an alternative path to understand how organizations frame failure differently.

Institutions, uncertainty, and entrepreneurial judgment

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Claus Wiemann Frølund
Keyword(s):  
Human Interaction ◽  
Knightian Uncertainty ◽  
Entrepreneurial Process ◽  
Course Of Action ◽  
Judgment Process ◽  
Entrepreneurial Action ◽  
The Way

Abstract Entrepreneurial action takes place in a context of Knightian uncertainty. In order to overcome this uncertainty, entrepreneurs engage in a process of judgment resulting in a decision about the course of action. Institutions arise mainly to reduce economic friction by providing structure to human interaction and thus reducing uncertainty. However, institutions may also introduce further uncertainty and thus disrupt the judgment process preceding entrepreneurial action. The present paper builds upon recent efforts to integrate the concepts of uncertainty and institutions within the entrepreneurial context. Drawing on Frank H. Knight's seminal insight, the judgment-based view of entrepreneurship, and relevant concepts of entrepreneurial outcomes, the main contribution of the paper lies in the development of a model offering a coherent description of the way institutions affect uncertainty and the entrepreneurial process.

Is God Really in History?

1979 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-390
Author(s):  
Frederick Sontag
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
As If ◽  
The Way

For some time it seemed as if Christianity itself required us to say that ‘God is in history’. Of course, even to speak of ‘history’ is to reveal a bias for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forms of thought. But the justification for talking about the Christian God in this way is the doctrine of the incarnation. The centre of the Christian claim is that Jesus is God's representation in history, although we need not go all the way to a full trinitarian interpretation of the relationship between God and Jesus. Thus, the issue is not so much whether God can appear or has appeared within, or entered into, human life as it is a question of what categories we use to represent this. To what degree is God related to the sphere of human events? Whatever our answer, we need periodically to re-examine the way we speak about God to be sure the forms we use have not become misleading.

scholarly journals Plane Sailing or Horizontal Navigation

1956 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 454-462
Author(s):  
D. W. Waters
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Horizontal Plane ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Course Of Action ◽  
Plane Area ◽  
As If

Professor Taylor contends that the expression used to describe a course of action so simple as to leave no room for mistakes is plain sailing; that this is nautical in origin in that it derives from a simple or plain system of navigation based upon the use of a simple or plain (manifestly foolproof) chart; that this system of navigation was known originally as plain (simple) sailing—which expression she traces back to Richard Norwood's Doctrine of Plaine and Sphericall Triangles of 1631, and that it was sophisticated into plane sailing in the eighteenth century in the belief—which she holds to be erroneous—that the expression described a form of navigation based upon the use of a plane or flat chart on which the Earth was drawn as if the Earth and oceans lay in one horizontal plane area and not upon the surface of a sphere or, more accurately, ellipsoid; and, finally, that the Admiralty Navigation Manual is in error in teaching mariners that ‘to regard certain small triangles as plane… gives rise to the expression plane sailing, which is popularly referred to as if plane were spelt plain and the sailing free from difficulty’.

Heart disease and gender in mass print media

2008 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-20
Author(s):  
Juanne Clarke
Keyword(s):  
Heart Disease ◽  
Cause Of Death ◽  
Heart Attack ◽  
Print Media ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
High Achieving ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Developed World ◽  
As If ◽  
The Way

Heart disease is a major cause of death, disease and disability in the developed world for both men and women. Nevertheless, the evidence suggests that women are under-diagnosed both because they fail to visit the doctor with relevant symptoms and because doctors tend to dismiss the seriousness of women's symptoms of heart disease. This study examines the way that popular mass print media present the possible links between gender and heart disease. The findings suggest that the ‘usual candidates’ for heart disease are considered to be high achieving and active men for whom the ‘heart attack’ is sometimes seen as a ‘badge of honour’ and a symbol of their success. In contrast, women are less often seen as likely to succumb, but they are portrayed as if they are and ought to be worried about their husbands. Women's own bodies are described as so problematic as to be perhaps useless to diagnose, because they are so difficult to understand and treat.

scholarly journals Terminology: Aboutness, Representation, and Metasemantics

2021 ◽  
pp. 51-58
Author(s):  
Herman Cappelen ◽  
Josh Dever
Keyword(s):  
Language Use ◽  
Complex Nature ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
As If ◽  
The Way

This short chapter does two things. First, it shows that in fact workers in AI frequently talk as if AI systems express contents. We present the argument that the complex nature of the actions and communications of AI systems, even if they are very different from the complex behaviours of human beings, and the way they have ‘aboutness’, strongly suggest a contentful interpretation of those actions and communications. It then introduces some philosophical terminology that captures various aspects of language use, such as the ones in the title, to better make clear what one is saying—philosophically speaking—when one claims AI systems communicate, and to provide a vocabulary for the next few chapters.

Academic Reputation, or Voluntary Epistemic Servitude

Reputation ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 216-240
Author(s):  
Gloria Origgi
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Economic Interest ◽  
Academic Reputation ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The University ◽  
As If ◽  
The Way

This chapter presents case studies of the way reputations are built at the university. If there is an institution that feeds on reputation, it is the academy. Prestige, notoriety, standing, and reputation reign supreme within its halls. Professors and scholars are not only more motivated by symbolic rewards than by economic interest. They also spend a great deal of time designing institutions whose primary purpose is the creation, maintenance, and evaluation of each other's reputation and eminence. Such rankings are sometimes even treated as if they were the most dependable hallmarks of the truth itself. The chapter shows how the very idea of an academic reputation changed radically after new systems for calibrating reputations came into their own.

“Things in Themselves”

2020 ◽  
pp. 341-364
Author(s):  
Rita McAllister
Keyword(s):  
Early Stage ◽  
As If ◽  
The Way ◽  
Music Manuscript

Hidden in the composer’s archives is a series of little music-manuscript notebooks, a bit battered, as if they had been in and out of Prokofiev’s pockets. These he carried around with him, jotting down musical ideas as and when they occurred to him. The contents of such notebooks can reveal quite special aspects of their creator, exposing facets of the imagination which may well lie below the threshold of even that creator’s consciousness. Are the themes notated boldly in ink or tentatively in pencil? How important are indications of tempo or dynamics in comparison with pitches, meters, rhythms, or key signatures? What kind of second thoughts appeared at this early stage? Above all, what are the characteristics that make these themes so distinctively, unmistakably Prokofiev? This study of his thematic sketches opens up entirely new insights into the way he thought, what his compositional priorities were, and how he expressed himself to himself.

The (Mis)Fortunes of Ordinary Men

2019 ◽  
pp. 194-212
Author(s):  
Patrick Inglis
Keyword(s):  
Financial Support ◽  
Work Ethic ◽  
The Other ◽  
Middle Ground ◽  
Is Success ◽  
Religious Bias ◽  
The Way

Rarely is there a middle ground in the way poor golf caddies in Bangalore analyze their situation and the plight of others similarly disadvantaged in the society. If there is success—measured in the ability of some caddies to win consistent financial support from members—then it is a matter of their remarkable work ethic and high morals. If they fail at this effort, then it is owing to bad luck or fate. Club members and the clubs where they play golf, along with structural forms of caste and religious bias in the society at large, are rarely implicated, one way or the other. Ultimately, disadvantaged golf caddies carry forward the rhetoric and ideology of individualism, while unwittingly justifying the inequality between caddies and club members, and between a select few up-and-coming caddies and the rest.

Structural Doubleness and Repetition

2021 ◽  
pp. 65-92
Author(s):  
Kent Cartwright
Keyword(s):  
Closed Circuit ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
John Lyly ◽  
Sympathetic Influence ◽  
As If ◽  
The Way

Chapter 2, treating comic doubleness as a structural matter, explores the way scenes, actions, and plot lines reflect each other, as if to create an uncanny closed circuit or dream-world. Those reflections call up a long-standing critical recognition of ‘magical parallelisms,’ such as between the story lines of Viola and Sebastian, that express the Renaissance fascination with analogy and with occult theories of sympathetic influence. Within the play, structural doublings create affects ranging from enervation and frustrated desires, to a premonition of fatedness and converging destinies, to the agitation of manically accelerated action, to the liberating recognition of differences with in repetitions. Focusing on Twelfth Night, this chapter considers how the play creates the sense of a numinous but opaque providentialism, features that it also finds in other Shakespearean, Italian, and Tudor plays, including those of John Lyly.

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