Over coding In Disciplines and Fields (After Deleuze) a Call for ‘Dynamic Genesis’ In Tourism Studies and Related Domains

This manuscript applies a cross discilinary cum post disciplinary approach to scrutinising some of the metaphysical insights of French philosopher Deleuze on knowledge-production in the arts, film, literature, and science to like matters of authorial thinking within Tourism Studies. It seeks to translate his expansive thoughtlines on non-representational geophilosophy to the worldmaking agency of Tourism Studies (and related fields) not regarding what tourism is but what it does, notably in terms of how it generally works for institutions and interest groups, and how it specifically effects travellers and host populations, often giving them heavily-striated (i.e., densely-overcoded) visions of peoples/places/pasts/presents. The paper highlights many of the paradoxical dynamic dimensions ingrained within beyond-the-discipline Deleuzian thought, focusing upon his role as an ‘outsider philosopher’ who unsettles commonplace visions of being and identity (within disciplines and domains of 'knowledge') by encouraging both individuals and en groupe populations towards fresh stranger-to-oneself yet creative lines of flight depersonalised understandings. It thereby suggests that the quasi-virtual world of Deleuzian conceptuality (viz.: his paradoxical insights into virtual realms [which are conceivably real without being 'actual' and ideal without being 'abstract']) have much oxygenating relevance to ‘the creative encounter’ possibilities of travel and tourism. The paper thereby has tall relevance for those in other fields who feel distinctly constrained by the dogmatisms of their supposedly parent discipline or domain.

Case Studies: A Brief Introduction and Suggested Guidelines for the Field

Case studies are a common teaching and learning tool within entrepreneurship and its parent discipline, business, as a method of bringing the nuances of realism to complex theoretical problems. However, within the arts entrepreneurship field, they are used less frequently for pedagogical purposes and often with hesitation. Consequently, in this guide to the Case Study Edition, I aim to briefly: provide a rationale for using case studies in arts entrepreneurship education; illustrate what makes a good case study; highlight the mechanics of writing case studies by clearly outlining the expectations of a submission to JAEE for both traditional research cases and teaching cases; summarize the cases within this special issue and highlight why they demonstrate best practice example cases.

Connecting Art Education Learning Tasks with the Artistic Field: The Factor of Quality in Art Lessons

This theoretical study deals with interconnecting learning tasks of art education with the parent discipline of art education (that is, with the artistic field as defined by Pierre Bourdieu, 1996), while reflecting on the quality of art lessons in the Czech Republic. The authors draw on current theoretical and empirical research of quality that identifies individual quality factors. The most salient factors are the connection with the artistic field and the resulting ability of conceptual integration, together with curricular normativity, the intentional work of the teacher with educational content, characteristics of teaching such as the support of divergence, creative approaches, associativity, imagination, reflection, searching for intersections between pupils’ experience and the content of the subject, etc. The text also emphasises the fact that judgement on the quality of learning tasks should be based only on ontological-didactic and psychological-didactic aspects. The former relate to the cultural and artistic context of learning tasks, that is, the current values in the field of visual culture and the artistic field, while the latter consider the personal characteristics of each and every pupil.

The History of the Concept Adult and Research Regarding Adult Development

The history of concepts about the adult and that of research into adult constructs show progression from a simple characterization of growth to a variety of complex constructs that define the terrain. Originally, the term adult encompassed all species and events that had attained full physical maturation, a product connotation. Later, time and events (e.g., marriage, the birth of children) became proxies for adult development. The absence of considerations of adult development was augmented by the fact that, for much of the past, adults could not be seen in long-term individual evolution since lifetimes were not extensive. In the 73 years of Psychological Abstracts, adults under various headings (e.g., adulthood, middle age) was referenced in a mere .01% of citations. The first mention of “adult” in a journal title was in 1994. Into the 21st century, although the exploration of various adult constructs abounds, the use of single terms (e.g., intelligence, wisdom) to describe multidimensional attributes leads to misunderstanding and reductionism. There is scant cross-construct analysis and, along with its parent discipline of psychology, analysis of adult development remains at the nascent descriptive level. Looking at the two major constructs of adult personality and intelligence, personality has had the lion’s share of publications. An examination of trends in its analysis reveals that the constructs are defined in various ways, little in the way of socio-contextual appraisal has occurred, and, with respect to the appraisal of intelligence, motivation to perform is ill-examined.

Philosophy of Museums

Museums and their practices of collection, curation, and exhibition raise a host of philosophical questions. The philosophy of museums is a relatively new and growing subdiscipline within the academic field of philosophy. While only recently taking shape as a distinct area, this subdiscipline builds upon a tradition of interest in museums that has been taken up by prominent philosophers, such as Theodor Adorno (Prisms 1967) and Michel Foucault (Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology 1998). Philosophers active in the philosophy of museums are less concerned with intra-disciplinary differences (between, e.g., “continental philosophy” and “analytic philosophy” and their recent permutations) than they are with thinking about the museum on its own terms as a phenomenon calling for philosophical engagement. Indeed, as Beth Lord put it, the basic conviction among scholars in this area is that “philosophy can help us to think about museums, [and] . . . that museums can contribute to philosophical thinking” (Philosophy and the museum. Museum Management and Curatorship 21.2 (2006): 80). As such, the promise of the philosophy of museums is that, despite it being a subfield of a larger discipline, it will enable a fresh look at its parent discipline while also prompting the development of new perspectives on more traditional philosophical questions. Philosophical approaches will also help us to understand museums and their objects in myriad new ways, as this emerging discipline within the broad church of philosophy matures over the coming years. Although many of the philosophical questions raised by museums are ethical, the philosophy of museums goes beyond the confines of any single established area of philosophy, such as ethics, aesthetics, or metaphysics. Work within the philosophy of museums thus now ranges over themes such as philosophical museology, the epistemological and ethical dimension of humanity and social life, culture, and religion, as well as those more directly connected to issues arising from museum practices of curation, conservation, and exhibition. The philosophy of museums is not entirely independent of scholarship within the field of museum studies, therefore, this article makes reference not only to works that are philosophical in a narrow sense but also to work of philosophical interest within museum studies and more occasionally to scholarship within other disciplines such as anthropology and history.

Prodigal offspring: Organizational sociology and organization studies

Academic disciplines are defined not primarily by their object but by their (theoretical and methodological) approach to that object, and by their claim to a monopoly over it. Even where that monopoly claim has been highly successful, it remains contestable. For example, economics, perhaps in this respect the most successful social science, finds its object – the economy – contested by political economists and economic sociologists. Whereas economics has successfully marginalized potential competitors, sociology has remained a broad church. Attempts to impose theoretical and methodological order on the discipline have met with resistance, and eventually failed. Moreover, sociology has never really reached consensus on what its object is; ‘society’, ‘social facts’, ‘social action’ were the classical options, with the list growing over time (social networks, rational action, actor networks, etc.). Thus, while we can speak of ‘heterodox economics’ there is insufficient orthodoxy to speak of ‘heterodox sociology’. This has an obverse side. Precisely because of the weakness of its monopolistic claims, sociology has been very productive in spawning new disciplinary fields, which, rather than remaining within sociology’s weak gravitational pull, successfully establish themselves as separate disciplines or ‘studies’. Criminology, industrial relations, urban studies and organization studies are the most obvious examples. In light of this, this article addresses two questions: (1) What happens to these new fields when they break free of the parent discipline, and to the parent discipline when they do? (2) If one effect on the ‘offspring’ is a loss of disciplinary orientation (as the rationale for this special issue suggests) what, if anything, has contemporary sociology to offer OS as a potential source of reorientation?