Youth Bulge in a Pandemic-Stricken World

As the year 2020 dawned, the world underwent a paradigmatic shift that impacted all aspects of life. While it is axiomatic that the coronavirus pandemic left an indelible effect on all age groups, the author is especially interested in analysing the impressions that the pandemic can leave on the lives of youth. With history providing anecdotes of contagions having led to political violence and widespread massacres, this chapter will explore how the current pandemic can lead to youth radicalisation in an age of social media and in countries witnessing youth bulge. This study will be carried out at the intersection of international relations, international security, and political psychology and within the parameters of youth bulge, social-psychology, and radicalisation. In doing so, the author will propose a prognostic approach to provent youth radicalisation rather than prevent it in retrospect.

Pacioli’s Lens: Through a Glass, Darkly

It has long been argued that double-entry bookkeeping (‘DEB’) was important for enabling capitalism’s development in the West and heralded the beginning of ‘modern accounting’. However, these claims remain contested so it is important to understand the history of DEB’s emergence about 700 years ago and its underlying rationale. Sangster (2018a) [Pacioli's Lens: God, Humanism, Euclid, and the Rhetoric of Double Entry. The Accounting Review, 93(2): 299-314] argues that, in the first printed manual on DEB in 1494, Pacioli presented a novel ‘axiomatic’ approach to explaining DEB that requires a corresponding ‘paradigmatic shift’ in our appreciation of his contribution. This paper challenges Sangster’s interpretation of Pacioli’s mathematical contribution and calls for deeper understanding of the historical development of DEB in the West by comparison with accounting developments in the East.

Oneiric Fascism. The Political Economy of Fernando Pessoa

Poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), Portugal's literary glory, is also known to have penned a not inconsiderable corpus of sociological and politological reflections. This essay collates all such original material and glosses it with a view to uncovering Pessoa's religious true colours, and by so doing, goes on to argue that it is no accident, poetics aside, that western cultural intelligentsia finds it expedient to promote the literary output of personages like Pessoa who, in one form or another, preach an ultra-conservative gospel. Though he is not typically recognised as a thinker of the Right at all, the article's thesis is that Pessoa not only cuts a “fascist” figure in the conventional (Leftist) tenor of the epithet, but that the category itself of Fascism ought to be torn off its historical (pro-Liberal) contextualisation and radically reformulated as the default entomological categorisation of modern forms of society, and turned thereby into the norm against which exceptions need be counted, not the other way around. In light of this paradigmatic shift, Pessoa's considerations on selfishness, patriotism, and social dynamics afford an ulterior revelation of the anti-compassionate agenda of a type of System, ours, so keen on promoting thinkers of his ilk.

Statistics with Imprecise Probabilities—A Short Survey

This chapter aims at surveying and highlighting in an introductory way some challenges and big opportunities a paradigmatic shift to imprecise probabilities could induce in statistical modelling. Working with an informal understanding of imprecise probabilities, we discuss the concepts of model imprecision and data imprecision as the two main types of imprecision in statistical modelling. Then we provide a short survey of some major developments, methodological questions and applications of imprecise probabilistic models under model imprecision in the context of different inference schools and summarize some recent developments in the area of data imprecision.

Implementing Co-Creation as a Policy Norm in Sweden — Steering Strategies for a Robust Municipal Organisation

Building upon findings from a strategically selected case study of a pioneering Swedish municipality, Jönköping, a participant in a Horizon2020 project on co-creating public service innovations in Europe (CoSIE), this paper illustrates how local municipalities may take a systemic approach to creating the necessary conditions for sustainable co-creation and assesses whether this illustrates an ongoing paradigmatic shift in service management and culture. The strategic change management efforts in adapting a public sector organisation to a co-creation culture, are assessed against a normative theoretical framework for such a transformative change (Finansdepartementet 2018; Torfing et al, 2016;). The study employs the concept of co-creation to highlight the paradigmatic shift in the approach to citizens as service end users from passive clients to active citizens with resources and capabilities to exert an impact on service design, delivery, and value creation. Th e article offers new insights into how a robust organisation may be moving towards a new public administration paradigm that accommodates co-creation, and especially how a new approach to management based on trust may be strategically implemented as a key factor in facilitating systemic change (Torfing et al, 2016). Against the background of a significant shortage of studies exploring how conditions for such a transformative change are created at different system levels, the article examines a longitudinal real-time study and illustrates new management approaches, strategies, and tools used. The study also contributes a normative framework to explore a shift to more trust-based steering and a more nuanced explanation of an ongoing managerial shift towards a ‘co-creation’ paradigm. It argues that achieving trust-based steering has major potential to facilitate a co-creation culture but that a paradigmatic shift towards such a culture requires congruence in discourses and actions on different system levels and a major transformation of approaches, roles, and relationship dynamics between senior and first-line management.

Education of values: Marketizing the aging population in urban China

In this article, I examine some of the marketing and sales strategies at Gardenview, a newly established eldercare company that ran a few residential eldercare facilities in Nanjing, China. There, like elsewhere in urban China, the projected aging demography was mobilized to push for an industrialization (chanyehua)—marketization and professionalization—of eldercare, transforming ideas and experience of eldercare by putting forward a new set of knowledge of aging. To this end, I first ground the rising eldercare industry in the transitioning paradigm of conceptualizing China’s population from population control to demographic aging. Then I explore ethnographically how Gardenview participated in the eldercare industry in a rapidly aging China. In particular, I look at the floorplans and the marketing stories as devices of the education of values—as prices, the good and desirable, and differentiators—to understand the social, economic, and ethical dynamics instigated by a transitioning demography. These values, as I show, are crucial in linking everyday life and choices with the paradigmatic shift of China’s population. Finally, I discuss how understanding the very processes of marketing and sales as an education of values could shed further light on what anthropologist Michael Fischer calls “literacies of the future” as a socially and economically elaborated and contested world of an aging China.

Walk with the Wind

Recalling the insurrectionary violence that descended upon the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, reflecting on the baser instincts left unchecked in America by an absence of common communication and a paradigmatic shift in our media apparatuses, Justin A. Joyce introduces the seventh volume of James Baldwin Review.

Thermodynamics and Gradient Manipulation Mechanism in Entrepreneurial Actions

Entrepreneurship researches started to have traction at the start of 1980 and underwent paradigmatic shift. However despite the varied veins of exploration from opportunities to innate traits, entrepreneurship literatures have yet developed a unifying conceptualization and theory with key concepts that can clearly explain why entrepreneurs act the way they do? What inspires them to action? What seduce them to move at all? This paper intends to relate the study of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial actions and activities with references to thermodynamic and energy gradient manipulation mechanism. Studying business ventures from a process view in an attempt to reconstruct the entrepreneurial process by illustrating a range of relevant perspectives from energy gradients in naturally occurring chemicals and suspension coils, this paper hopes to pull together a unifying theory on entrepreneurship basing on the forces at work with thermodynamic concepts and expressions with gradient-manipulation mechanism to explain the entrepreneurial action-motion phenomena. The gradient-manipulating mechanism and thermodynamic expressions thus become the “nature” invisible hand that operates the motion of actions. Kirzner’s theory of entrepreneurship explains the coordination of markets and of knowledge. It is that knowledge, the recognition of the opportunities in the actual imperfect markets that triggers the gradient-manipulation mechanism. The findings of this paper suggest that entrepreneurial actions are force-driven by the lure of profits to select of best pathways and means to achieve the ends. The idea that entrepreneurial actions are the results of the play of forces with thermodynamic forces at work is a powerful suggestion in the finding of this paper.