The Morphology of Prometheus, Literary Geography and the Geoethical Project

This paper explores mappings, musings and ‘thought experiments’ in literary geography to consider how they may contribute to geoethical pedagogy and research. Representations of Prometheus from the fourteenth century onwards have traveled along three broad symbological roads: first, as the creator, and bringer of fire; second as a bound figure in chains, and thirdly, unbound. However, it was the harnessing of fire by our species a millennium prior that gave rise to the myth of Prometheus and set into motion the geophysical process of combustion which “facilitated the transformation of much of the terrestrial surface […] and in the process pushed the parameters of the earth system into a new geological epoch.” As the geophysicist Professor Michael Mann observes, global warming and loss of biodiversity constitutes an ethical problem. The remediation of the Prometheus myth in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or the modern Prometheus (1818), Jonathan Fetter-Vorm’s Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb (2012) and William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies (1954) provides the means to explore the geographical, historical and cultural contingencies of geoethical dilemmas contributing to the framing of the Anthropocene and Gaia heuristics. This paper argues for the necessity of scholars in the arts, humanities and geosciences to share and exchange idiographic and nomothetic perspectives in order to forge a geoethical dialectic that fuses poetic and positivistic methods into transcendent ontologies and epistemologies to address the existential questions of global warming and loss of biodiversity as we enter the age of the Anthropocene.

Budget behaviour and cultural contingencies: case study in a Tunisian company

Background Budgetary participation has a positive impact on a variety of emotional and behavioural responses. However, the review of empirical studies conducted in Tunisia reveals a low participation rate among operating managers in the budget control systems of their companies. Research aims The purpose of this study is to understand, from a contingency perspective, the practices of budgetary participation in Tunisian companies. It aims to explore forms of budgetary participation practised by Tunisian companies and examine to what extent Tunisian cultural variables explain these budgetary behaviours. Methodology A qualitative methodology based on a single case study was used. The data collected were the subject of a thematic content analysis. Findings The results show that the Tunisian companies have serious difficulties engaging in budgetary participation. Several factors hinder the implementation and operation of this budgetary practice. The primary factors include personality variables that, although interact with cultural values rooted in Tunisian society, create a psychological inconsistency between the ideal environment for the development and success of a participative approach and the environment of the Tunisian company.

Does diversity management matter in a traditionally homogeneous culture?

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate diversity management in an under-researched country by merging theoretical insights developed in the Western literature with cultural aspects of a traditionally homogeneous country, South Korea. Design/methodology/approach This study integrates theory and research on why diversity can have either a positive (i.e. the information/decision-making paradigm) or a negative (i.e. the social categorization paradigm) effect on performance with different diversity perspectives (i.e. integration-and-learning, access-and-legitimacy, and discrimination-and-fairness). This study develops a model of when and how gender diversity affects organization performance and test the model with a sample of 177 South Korean organizations. Findings This study finds that gender diversity is negatively related to organization performance in South Korea. This study also finds that the effect of gender diversity is contingent on organizational diversity perspectives. Organizations with high gender diversity perform better to the extent that they have a discrimination-fairness perspective, but not a business-oriented perspective. On the other hand, a discrimination-fairness perspective is unrelated to performance for organizations that are low in gender diversity. Originality/value Although gender diversity in the South Korean workplace continues to increase, the relationship between gender diversity and organization performance has rarely been studied in the aspect of Korea’s traditionally homogeneous culture. This study highlights the importance of cultural-contingencies in understanding the consequences of diversity.

‘Rigour’, ‘discipline’ and the ‘systematic’: The cultural construction of educational research identities?

In the present scientific era which prefers evidence-based educational research and methodological gold standards, ‘rigour’, ‘discipline’ and the ‘systematic’ serve as standardising and homogenising concepts and as powerful identifiers of ‘normal science’ in the context of historical and cultural contingencies. These concepts serve to construct disciplinary identities and, furthermore, have the power to define what counts as rigour, discipline and the systematic – and what not. The article starts with the problems of terminology and shows that rigour, discipline and the systematic are rather vague and ambivalent concepts, especially when considering their meaning in different languages and cultures. The second part uses different foci of several theoretical approaches in order to show the meaning and functions of rigour, discipline and the systematic for constructing educational research identities and to explain different notions of these concepts in different research cultures. The final part considers the future and argues for the strengthening of a transversal, (meta-)reflexive and communicative dimension which both opens and limits the forms and formats of educational research employing diversity and intercultural communication as a valuable and powerful resource of sound scholarly research, mutual understanding and intellectual delight.

CULTURAL CONTINGENCIES OF OPEN INNOVATION STRATEGIES

This study draws on a sample of 49,919 firms from 13 countries to investigate the impact of national culture on the performance of inbound open innovation strategies. The study first validates the curvilinear relationships of external search breadth and depth with innovation performance, as first established by Laursen and Salter (2006) [Laursen, K and A Salter (2006). Open for innovation: The role of openness in explaining innovation performance among U.K. manufacturing firms. Strategic Management Journal, 27(2), 131–150] controlling for a number of country-specific factors including culture and the institutional environment. The study then draws on Hofstede’s cultural framework to theoretically and empirically investigate the influence of a country’s culture on the effectiveness of firms’ search strategies. The results show that cultural factors not only directly impact innovation performance, but also interact with search breadth and depth, thereby moderating the success of inbound open innovation strategies.

The cultural evolution of fertility decline

Cultural evolutionists have long been interested in the problem of why fertility declines as populations develop. By outlining plausible mechanistic links between individual decision-making, information flow in populations and competition between groups, models of cultural evolution offer a novel and powerful approach for integrating multiple levels of explanation of fertility transitions. However, only a modest number of models have been published. Their assumptions often differ from those in other evolutionary approaches to social behaviour, but their empirical predictions are often similar. Here I offer the first overview of cultural evolutionary research on demographic transition, critically compare it with approaches taken by other evolutionary researchers, identify gaps and overlaps, and highlight parallel debates in demography. I suggest that researchers divide their labour between three distinct phases of fertility decline—the origin, spread and maintenance of low fertility—each of which may be driven by different causal processes, at different scales, requiring different theoretical and empirical tools. A comparative, multi-level and mechanistic framework is essential for elucidating both the evolved aspects of our psychology that govern reproductive decision-making, and the social, ecological and cultural contingencies that precipitate and sustain fertility decline.

Montaigne on Faith and Religion

What Montaigne’s biography tells us about his religion is confirmed partly in his Essays. He was without doubt a loyal Catholic but did not want to tell his entire life. Instead of displaying his beliefs, Montaigne chose to exercise his free judgment on all things. He did so with an assumed and conscious boldness. Concerned to preserve the unity of the kingdom by maintaining the old religion, he became equally hostile to the Protestant innovations and the reactionary measures of the Catholic League. Montaigne asserts the true faith: a pure gift from God that cannot be reduced to cultural contingencies. He had a good knowledge of current theological debates but chose not to discuss the Church dogmas. Like an anthropologist, he studied the human side of Christianity. He preferred to use a secular discourse, however “very religious,” to broach the question of faith in profane terms but without challenging its religious foundation.