From Creative Destruction to Intelligent Design

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-30
Author(s):  
Jonatan Jelen
Keyword(s):  
Information Technology ◽  
Intelligent Design ◽  
Environmental Turbulence ◽  
Economic Rationality ◽  
Business Logic ◽  
Complex Information ◽  
Social Positioning ◽  
The Social ◽  
Steve Jobs ◽  
Inside Out

When the late Steve Jobs prominently adopted Wayne Gretzky’s slogan wanting to “skate where the puck will go, not to where it has been”, it sounded simply as a pragmatic response to the limitations of chasing the elusive ‘environmental fit’ (for the notion of strategy as a fit with the environment, see Porter, 1996, 1998). Yet, it prefigured a truly paradigmatic leap. With information technology becoming the dominant technology of the day, firms are no longer confined to either being simply part of the problem, part of the solution or part of the landscape. They now can quickly capture and move the entire landscape; but even more importantly, they can become an entire landscape in their own right. Firms need no longer be mired in perpetual reform efforts, endlessly defining, designing, and developing themselves form the inside out as transactional systems, configuring dimensions of strategy, structure, scale, and scope hopelessly imperfectly given environmental turbulence, technological transience, and socio-politico-economic complexity, and perpetually, almost wastefully tuning their internal synergies to merely becoming incrementally agile and increasingly nimble. The commonality among the recently quickly emerging complex information technology-intensive firms that are breaking the mold, especially represented by the social-media movement, is their deliberate and explicit social positioning. These firms are demonstrating a level of creative intelligence that allows them to aspire to, design, and construct, in their entirety, the very environments into which they want to project themselves. To enable and to leverage this new transformational nature they cultivate and nurture two additional dimensions that define such social positioning: scheme and soul. Scheme represents their agenda for social stance, positioning, action, and change. And soul is their intentionality to go beyond economic rationality and business logic in order to create logos from chaos. But while people may have overcome the controversy of creating social outcomes with economic means, one now has the mandate to design and govern how one creates economic outcomes with social means.

The Social Cost of Social Value Creation

2010 ◽  
pp. 371-380
Author(s):  
Jonatan Jelen ◽  
Marko Kolakovic
Keyword(s):  
Information Technology ◽  
Value Creation ◽  
Social Cost ◽  
Social Value ◽  
Regulatory Capture ◽  
Regulatory Arbitrage ◽  
Complex Information ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Value Creation ◽  
Nature Of Information

Google, eBay, Amazon, Facebook, Myspace, Craig’s List and their foreign equivalents, such as the Chinese QQ and Baidu, for example, are ostensibly complex, and – more troublesome - their attitudes are becoming increasingly contradictory, controversial, and conflicted: For one, Tom Malone’s decade-old predictions of a decentralized network of a multitude of small, cooperating firms did not materialize; to the contrary and counter to the spirit of the democratic nature of information and information technology, these e-giants are defining their own industries and defying regulation, submitting the participants in their respective markets to proprietary rules via three central tenets: regulatory capture, regulatory arbitrage, and regulatory opportunism. In the present critical chapter the authors explore these traits of the Complex Information Technology-Intensive firms and formulate elements of a framework for their ambiguous nature that may lead to social cost exceeding their initially glorified social value creation.

The New Frontier

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marilyn Fernandez
Keyword(s):  
Information Technology ◽  
Equal Opportunity ◽  
Disadvantaged Groups ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Frontier ◽  
Equal Opportunity Employer

Does the burgeoning Indian Information Technology (IT) sector represent a deviation from the historical arc of caste inequality or has it become yet another site of discrimination? Those who claim that the sector is caste-free believe that IT is an equal opportunity employer, and that the small Dalit footprint is due to the want of merit. But they fail to consider how caste inequality sneaks in by being layered on socially constructed ‘pure merit’, which favours upper castes and other privileged segments, but handicaps Dalits and other disadvantaged groups. In this book, Fernandez describes how the practice of pure and holistic merit are deeply embedded in the social, cultural, and economic privileges of the dominant castes and classes, and how caste filtering has led to the reproduction of caste hierarchies and consequently the small Dalit footprint in Indian IT.

THE EARLY MODERN ORIGINS OF BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-54
Author(s):  
Richard Boyd
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cognitive Biases ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Economic Rationality ◽  
Homo Economicus ◽  
Behavioral Psychology ◽  
Human Conduct ◽  
The Social

AbstractFor all the recent discoveries of behavioral psychology and experimental economics, the spirit of homo economicus still dominates the contemporary disciplines of economics, political science, and sociology. Turning back to the earliest chapters of political economy, however, reveals that pioneering figures such as Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and Adam Smith were hardly apostles of economic rationality as they are often portrayed in influential narratives of the development of the social sciences. As we will see, while all three of these thinkers can plausibly be read as endorsing “rationality,” they were also well aware of the systematic irrationality of human conduct, including a remarkable number of the cognitive biases later “discovered” by contemporary behavioral economists. Building on these insights I offer modest suggestions for how these thinkers, properly understood, might carry the behavioral revolution in different directions than those heretofore suggested.

The relatable entrepreneur: Combating stereotypes in entrepreneurship education

2021 ◽  
pp. 095042222110174
Author(s):  
Stephanie E Raible ◽  
Karen Williams-Middleton
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Identity Management ◽  
Entrepreneurship Education ◽  
Identity Work ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Raising Awareness ◽  
The Social ◽  
Steve Jobs ◽  
Entrepreneurial Careers

Despite an estimated 582 million entrepreneurs globally, stereotypes plague the social cognitive concept of “the entrepreneur,” shaping assumptions of what entrepreneurship is while being far from representative of possible entrepreneurial identities. “Heroic” stereotypes of entrepreneurs (e.g., Steve Jobs or Elon Musk) stemming from the popular media shape the assumptions of students entering entrepreneurship classrooms. These stereotypes are strong and limiting, framing entrepreneurship as attainable only through exceptional skill and talent, and are often characterized by exclusively masculine qualities. Involving identity work in entrepreneurship education can expose the limitations that stereotypes impose on students aspiring to be entrepreneurs and introduce more heterogeneity. The use of narrative cases allows educators to facilitate a threefold approach: (1) raising awareness of stereotypes, (2) creating a structure for more realistic examples and socialization through narrative comparisons and (3) teaching students the basics of identity management for sustaining their entrepreneurial careers. The approach encourages direct conversations about what is—and who can become—an entrepreneur and reveals the limiting beliefs that students may bring with them into the classroom. Such discussion informs the educator on how to foster students’ entrepreneurial identity and empower their identity management.

Koranlektüre-Kurse für „Intellektuelle“ in Dakar, Senegal: religiöse Erwachsenenbildung in frankophonen Mittelschichtsmilieus

Sociologus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-179
Author(s):  
Nadine Sieveking
Keyword(s):  
Adult Education ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Time Management ◽  
Specific Method ◽  
Effective Time ◽  
Secular Education ◽  
Social Positioning ◽  
The Social ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Arabic Speaking

Seit 2015 werden in Dakar Koranlektürekurse von einer Organisation angeboten, die verspricht, mittels einfacher und effizienter Methoden die Fähigkeiten zum eigenständigen Lesen des Korans innerhalb von drei Monaten zu vermitteln. Diese kostenpflichtigen Kurse sind auf eine spezielle Zielgruppe in frankophonen urbanen Bildungsmilieus zugeschnitten, die als „Intellektuelle“ bezeichnet wird. Der Artikel untersucht den Erfolg der Kurse und die soziale Positionierung der Beteiligten, die sich aus arabophonen (Lehrende) und frankophonen (Lernende) Bildungsgruppen rekrutieren. Letzteren wurde nach der Unabhängigkeit ein exklusiver Status als nationale Bildungselite zugeschrieben, der durch anhaltende Islamisierungsprozesse ‚von unten‘ zunehmend in Frage gestellt wird. Die Analyse zeigt, dass die Kurse dazu beitragen, die symbolischen Grenzen zwischen francisants und arabisants abzubauen und den frankophonen Teilnehmenden helfen, einen sozialen Status aufrecht zu erhalten, der respektable Modernität verkörpert. Eine wichtige Rolle für den Erfolg der Kurse spielen außerdem das effektive Zeitmanagement, die pädagogischen Methoden sowie die bürokratischen, räumlichen und materiellen Organisationsstrukturen, die dem Habitus der in säkularen, modernen Bildungssystemen sozialisierten Zielgruppe entsprechen. Qur’an Reading Courses for “Intellectuals” in Dakar, Senegal: Religious Adult Education in Francophone Middle Class Milieus Since 2015, a certain type of Quran reading course has been offered in Dakar. With their simple but efficient methods, these courses promise attendees the ability to read the Quran within three months. They are subject to fees and target a specific social group, identified as “intellectuals” and located within francophone educated urban milieus. The article examines the success of these courses and the social positioning of its participants, who are drawn from Arabic-speaking (teachers) and francophone (students) educated groups. Since Senegal’s independence, the latter have been ascribed an exclusive status as the national educated elite – a status that is increasingly questioned in ongoing Islamization processes ‘from below’. The analysis shows that the courses contribute to a weakening of the symbolic boundaries between francisants and arabisants and help the participants to reinforce a social status that embodies notions of respectable modernity. The specific method and pedagogy of the courses also play an important role in their success, as do their effective time management, their bureaucratic structures, and their spatial and material conditions, since these all correspond to the habitus of the target group whose members have been socialized within modern secular education systems.

From the Inside/Out

2011 ◽  
Vol 56 (7) ◽  
pp. 1037-1062 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aida Y. Hass ◽  
Caryn E. Saxon
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Restorative Justice ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Prisoner Reentry ◽  
Comprehensive Approach ◽  
The Social ◽  
Attitudes And Perceptions ◽  
Rehabilitative Measures ◽  
Alternative Processes ◽  
Inside Out

The application of criminal justice sanctions is often misguided by a failure to recognize the need for a comprehensive approach in the transformation of offenders into law-abiding citizens. Restorative justice is a growing movement within criminal justice that recognizes the disconnect between offender rehabilitative measures and the social dynamics within which offender reentry takes place. By using restorative approaches to justice, what one hopes of these alternative processes is that the offenders become reconnected to the community and its values, something rarely seen in retributive models in which punishment is imposed and offenders can often experience further alienation from society. In this study, the authors wish to examine factors that contribute to failed prisoner reentry and reintegration and explore how restorative reintegration processes can address these factors as well as the needs, attitudes, and perceptions that help construct and maintain many of the obstacles and barriers returning inmates face when attempting to reintegrate into society.

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