Collective Mind Research Articles

The Indescribable Landscape: Water, Shade, and Land in the Bower of Bliss

We need not look past natural, but we should a sense look through it.Piet Mondrian1IN THE PROEM TO BOOK II of The Faerie Queene, Spenser describes poem as a faire mirrhour which Elizabeth might see herself, her kingdom, and her great auncestry (Proem 4.7-9).2 He explains, though, that he must cover mirror in couert vele, and wrap shadowes (5.2): a metaphor for ways which allegory both does and does not represent reality. Shadowes works two ways-shadows' light or light shadows-which suggests itself difficulty allegory presents; reader can look through veil at mirror, but is still never quite sure what shows. Spenser critics have sometimes had trouble making up their collective mind whether their role is to delineate figures mirror or to describe art with which veil is constructed. On one hand, there is some feeling that allegorized reality-that is, allegorized account of history-is what really matters, but critics have also felt that Spenser himself seems, as poem goes on, to become more interested his own elaborate construction then his original historical points, or to put another way, nonallegorical ways of representing history. ' But Spenser suggests that dichotomy cannot be so simple. The description of veiled mirror implies two different sets of eyes: Elizabeth's, which can see queen's own face mirror, and those feeble eyes which must be protected by veil, Which else could not endure those beanies bright. The veil functions differently to different viewers depending on their own inherent qualities, not necessarily on their approach. At same time, asks viewers to acknowledge someone else's perspective. If poem is not a window but a mirror showing someone else's face, then to read is to imagine seeing through someone else's eyes.The metaphor of veil, then, does not explain Spenser's art, but experience of reader. It gives reader a kind of permission to look through as well as at narratives and images of The Faerie Queene. The differing perspective suggests both a particular way of thinking about reading and a distinct account of mimesis. In Sidney's familiar definition poetry is mimetic a fairly simple way:Poesy therefore is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth m word mimesis-that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth (to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture), with this end, to teach and delight.4If mimesis is a speaking picture, then Spenser's veiled mirror is one step removed from mimesis. It is a reminder that role of reader that representing is neither passive nor static, and that task of writer relation to history is not, fact, representation. Spenser's veil is intervening layer awkward relationship between fiction and which both depend on and undermine each other. Luiz Costa Lima, his attempt to revivify concept of mimesis, has argued that evaluation of mimesis must address not what is represented but image that is ultimately created; he says that it is proper to fictional discourse, be aesthetic or other, that be perceived as an articulation of images, that be thematized by imagination.3 Even when fiction serves, some way or other, to represent history, still must be understood first relation to imagination which appears rather than history that putatively figures/' Following on Costa Lima's metaphor suggested by word revivify, we can say that looking at mimesis from perspective of imagination is necessary for mimetic representation to have life. Without we get history as the chronological ordering of facts and results, which will never, Costa Lima says with Claude Levi-Strauss background, be intellectually sufficient. Spenser, I will argue this essay, uses mechanics of looking at something deceptive to shift emphasis of mimesis from what is represented to perceived image. …

Supervision, Preoccupation With Failure, and the Cultural Shift in Patient Handover

Editor's Note: The ACGME News and Views section of JGME includes data reports, updates, and perspectives from the ACGME and its review committees. The decision to publish the article is made by the ACGME. Resident physicians are inserted into the challenging context of the inpatient unit to meet the twin aims of learning and provision of care for patients. The institution of national limits on resident hours in 2003 has focused attention on the patient handoff as a critical time when failures in information transfer may produce subsequent errors in care. Errors attributed to problems with the handoff encompass failure to relay vital information about a patient's status, including likely contingencies and recommendations for how to respond that may not be transferred to the next physician or may not be fully understood by the recipient. A consequence can be failure to rescue, defined as overlooking or failing to prevent clinical deterioration of a patient from a complication or underlying illness.1 Much of the work to improve patient handoffs has focused on enhancing communication and access to data. Yet the handoff is first and foremost a clinical task that relies on participants' ability to discern and interpret information about the patient's condition, including the likelihood that it will worsen and the warning signs that this is occurring.2 Development of clinical acumen is critical to the emergence of this aspect of handoff skills that allows residents to convey this information when they are in the role as the outgoing physician and to understand it when they are the recipient.

Strategic intent: Guiding port authorities to their new world?

Following the financial tsunami many organisations are facing greater risks to their sustainability. Strategic collaborations in logistics networks, of which ports are a significant node, reduce risks for all organisations in the network, increase an organisation's ability to access efficiencies such as economies of scale and create opportunities for learning. The knowledge learnt from collaborators is enhanced by managing the key relationships and forming a strategic intent to learn for mutual benefit. Mutual benefits may include market information or innovation. As Awad and Ghaziri (2004, p. 17) comment ‘Beyond efficiency and productivity, the real benefit of collaboration is innovation.’ The more central the port authority is in this network, the greater are the opportunities for learning. Three key factors are critical for port authorities to integrate knowledge from networks; firstly, there are levels of common knowledge that enable effective communication, including concepts, behavioural norms, language and experience. Secondly integrative efficiency requires organisational routines which foster knowledge sharing through frequent, coordinated activities that are repetitive. Thirdly efficient structures within the port authority help maintain effective and efficient communication to minimise the knowledge loss on integration. Strategising provides opportunities for port authorities to steer the critical path between maintaining their current sources of competitive advantage and developing future resilience through innovation opportunities provided by learning from their trading networks. Port authorities, by developing skills in reading the collective mind and interpreting information available in trading networks, can foster resilience into the future. Given the current risky prognosis for the short-medium term following the financial tsunami, instigating strategies that may lessen those risks may be an option for port authorities.

The Co-construction of a Local Public Environmental Discourse: Letters to the Editor, Bermuda's Royal Gazette, and the Southlands Hotel Development Controversy

As a distinct geographically situated production of public record of daily events that is often imbued with the ideals of the community it serves, the daily newspaper, and the editorial pages in particular, holds a powerful space in the collective mind as a forum and litmus for community opinion. This essay provides a case analysis of community opinion on sustainability and sustainable development in the small island nation of Bermuda through letters to the editor in the country’s daily newspaper, The Royal Gazette. These letters, published in that powerful space through invested and dynamic local media literacy sponsorship, illustrate the potential for effective discourse on environmental sustainability that, at least in Bermuda, constitutes productive community activism in its own right and also fosters additional literate social action.

Seeking for Solutions within a Project Setting

There has been increasing attention focused on the importance of ‘solution selling’ in the often very close relationships that characterize business-to-business marketing. While an extant predominantly product-centric view of solutions prevails in the literature, this has recently been juxtaposed with a more process-oriented view. We review such a process-oriented solution model briefly, and focus on the managerial challenge of how firms make this process-oriented approach work in practice. We argue that, in parallel to adopting a process-oriented approach, companies also have to focus their attention specifically on how to mobilize the different parties in order to amalgamate the perspectives and orientations between the interacting counterparts. We propose an interaction process model of how this ‘collective mind’ is achieved, using as an example a study of the United Kingdom’s Lean Aerospace Initiative (UK LAI), a large project with a specific solution in mind – improving the global competitiveness of the UK’s Aerospace industry. We use our model to show how the three main groups of actors (Government bodies, four Universities, and the aerospace companies themselves) interact in their pursuit of co-creating their collective solutions.

Enhancing Community Safety and Security Through Understanding Interagency Collaboration in Cyber-Terrorism Exercises

The threat of terrorism is at the forefront of security issues in the society. Terrorism must be dealt with through collaboration of multiple types and levels of agencies. Public sector interagency collaboration is explored through collective mind and beliefs of collaboration necessity in terrorism situations. It is found that the presence of a collective mind increases the likelihood that public sector representatives recognize and form beliefs that collaboration is necessary. It is also found that aggregates of representatives were more likely to actually collaborate with one another in addressing these cyber-terrorism threats when more shared the belief of collaboration necessity.

"Sing Out, Warning! Sing Out, Love!": The Writings of Lee Hays (review)

Reviewed by: "Sing Out, Warning! Sing Out, Love!": The Writings of Lee Hays Mark Allan Jackson "Sing Out, Warning! Sing Out, Love!": The Writings of Lee Hays. Ed. and intro. by Robert Koppelman. Fwd. by Pete Seeger. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003. Pp. xiii + 225, preface, acknowledgments, chronology, 14 black-and-white illustrations, selected bibliography, discography.) Before all else, Lee Hays stands as a singer. His bass voice underpinned such seminal groups as the Almanacs and the Weavers—achievement enough to embed him in our collective cultural mind. Others may remember that he cowrote the songs "If I Had a Hammer" and "Wasn't That a Time," efforts also worthy of a place in our shared memory. However, many familiar with this work might not know about his other writing, which included plays, short stories, essays, poems, and humorous sketches. Robert Koppelman's "Sing Out, Warning! Sing Out, Love!" strives to present Hays as the multifaceted writer that he truly was. Many of the selections included here should expand our view of Hays. Perhaps we already think of him as a man who championed causes, but when you read "Simon McKeever at Peek-skill," detailing the violence faced by him and the others attending the 1949 Labor Day Paul Robeson concert, we discover that Hays saw the unified struggle against repression and hate as a victory itself. After noting the faces of "these good-looking boys and girls with their printed signs, their screams, and the older men" who threw rocks at those leaving the concert, he writes, "If this was America it was not mine and I had no home but was alone" (p. 97). But, he realized, when those who were bloodied and battered began to sing and joke, they all had the "faith which could banish the jungle, put an end to a man's doubt, set the world to turning again, restore motion to life" (p. 99). His experiences and the prose that conveys them can inspire and move. Whether reminiscing about his union efforts in 1930s Arkansas or speculating about the importance of church songs in the labor movement, the nonfiction pieces included in this collection show Hays as a committed activist and informed member of the folksong community. Even when he moves from fact to fiction, Hays can arouse a righteous fire in his readers. His short stories "Banquet and a Half " and "Booker Tee and Me" stem from Hays's own disdain for the racism he well knew from his own experiences in the South. Although Hays's characters speak in the simple vernacular of the folk, these fictional characters also come to subtly complex realizations about their own prejudices and those of their communities. Thus, this work stands as politicized literature, rather than pure polemic. Yet Koppelman does not shy away from Hays's politics. In fact, his focus on this aspect of Hays's life brings me to my first major criticism. In his preface, Koppelman stresses, "For Hays, politics was more of an attitude, a recognition of larger forces at work, a historical perspective, and a commitment to building solutions to basic everyday problems" (p. xix). Yet in his overlong introduction, which fills a quarter of this book, he mainly focuses on how Hays was not a Communist yet was blacklisted for his involvement in leftist activities. However, the writings by Hays included in this collection seem uninterested in these subjects, and Koppelman himself admits that "Hays wrote very little about the blacklist" (p. 38). Nevertheless, the editor feels compelled to revisit Hays's 1955 encounter with the House Un-American Activities Committee, discussing it twice in his introduction (pp. 9–10, 37–8) and including a partial transcript of Hays's testimony in the chapter entitled "The 1950s" (pp. 116–20). This oral section is not the only moment that belies the book's subtitle, for excerpts from Hays's taped reminiscences also appear. Although containing interesting moments, they are fragmented, as Koppelman himself notes. Thus, they do not show Hays at his best or as a [End Page 495] writer, which is this collection's purported goal. These inclusions surprise, because other important pieces are omitted. Where...

El ser humano defensor de su propia libertad y gestor de su esclavismo en una sociedad de consumo

The individual freedom has been an imperative, for the achievement of all the aims that the human life involves. In the same way, it is the autonomy, essential piece for the correct construction of the personality of every man. Consequently, the existen ce of the man has revolved through history around the satisfaction of these valués. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze in which moment these elements of so much worth were overshadowed by illusory promises that the modernism brings and how, without being aware, we beco me part of a collective mind that found in the comfort the chains that tie it to the Slavism of not thinking by itself.

Neurocognitive Inefficacy of the Strategy Process

The most widely used (and taught) protocols for strategic analysis-Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) and Porter's (1980) Five Force Framework for industry analysis-have been found to be insufficient as stimuli for strategy creation or even as a basis for further strategy development. We approach this problem from a neurocognitive perspective. We see profound incompatibilities between the cognitive process-deductive reasoning-channeled into the collective mind of strategists within the formal planning process through its tools of strategic analysis (i.e., rational technologies) and the essentially inductive reasoning process actually needed to address ill-defined, complex strategic situations. Thus, strategic analysis protocols that may appear to be and, indeed, are entirely rational and logical are not interpretable as such at the neuronal substrate level where thinking takes place. The analytical structure (or propositional representation) of these tools results in a mental dead end, the phenomenon known in cognitive psychology as functional fixedness. The difficulty lies with the inability of the brain to make out meaningful (i.e., strategy-provoking) stimuli from the mental images (or depictive representations) generated by strategic analysis tools. We propose decreasing dependence on these tools and conducting further research employing brain imaging technology to explore complex data handling protocols with richer mental representation and greater potential for strategy creation.

Amazon Noir

Amazon Noir

Who Searches the Searchers? Community Privacy in the Age of Monolithic Search Engines

Privacy has largely been equated with every individual's right to privacy. Accordingly, current efforts to protect privacy on the Internet have sought anonymity by breaking, where possible, links with personally identifiable information (PII)—all uses of aggregated data stripped of PII are considered legitimate. This article argues that we need to use a broader concept, general or group identifying information (GII), because even aggregated data stripped of PII violate privacy at the community level. The search engine companies, or anyone else with access to their log files, can use these data to generate a moment-by-moment view of what is on the collective mind. Such a view can be used in a variety of ways, some with deep economic and even political impact. In order to frame this discussion, it is necessary to examine some of the realities of the search engine-mediated associative interface to the World Wide Web. While this interface has enormous benefits for the networked world, it also fundamentally changes a number of issues underlying various current debates about Internet governance.

Reconsidering group cognition: From conceptual confusion to a boundary area between cognitive and socio-cultural perspectives?

Various strands of research in educational, social and organizational psychology focus on structures of collectively created meaning that emerge in and coordinate activities of groups. Despite expanding, this field still lacks conceptual clarity, enhanced by the multitude of terms used, such as common ground, shared understanding, collective mind, team mental models, and distributed cognition. We conducted a review of the conceptual frameworks being used in empirical studies, focusing on the premises of the conceptualizations. Therefore, we connected these conceptualizations to either cognitive or socio-cultural perspectives on the social nature of cognition. Some studies are identified as representing initial ways of boundary crossing between these perspectives. To conclude, we explore ways for boundary crossing and cross-fertilization in future research.

Gaia, God, and the Internet: The History of Evolution and the Utopia of Community in Media Society

AbstractThe question of religious content in the media has occupied many scholars studying the relationship between media and religion. However, the study of recent religious thought offers a promising perspective for the analysis of the cultural perceptions of various media technologies. After the Internet first appeared in American households in the middle of the 1990s, a variety of religious or spiritual interpretations of the new medium emerged. The far-reaching ideas see the Internet as the first step of the realisation of a divine entity consisting of the collective human mind. In this vision, the emergence of the Internet is considered to be part of a teleological evolutionary model. Essential for the religious and evolutionary construction of the Internet is an incorporation of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's model of evolution — especially the idea of the noosphere, and its adoption in media theory by Marshall McLuhan. The connections of these ideas to James Lovelock's Gaia theory illustrate the notion of the Internet as an organic entity. The article outlines the processes of the reception of religious and evolutionary ideas which led to the recent interpretations of the Internet as a divine sphere.

Pulsa De-Nura: The Innovation of Modern Magic and Ritual

Every year as the fourth of November approaches, the majority of Israeli society and world Jewry recall one of the most devastating tragedies to take place in the history of the State of Israel. For on November 4, 1995, a Jewish zealot assassinated the then-Prime Minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin.' The scene is vividly etched in the collective mind, and the consequences are well known. Yet, what remains enigmatic is not the question of why the opposition wanted to prevent Rabin from pursuing his peace initiative, but rather the question: What motivated a fellow Jew to pick up a gun and kill the democratically elected leader of the State of Israel?2 This question takes on even greater significance when we consider that traditional Jews are obligated by Jewish law to observe an annual day of fasting called Tzom Gedaliah, which memorializes the assassination of yet another Jewish political leader, Gedaliah ben Ahikam, the Babylonian-appointed governor of Judah, over 2,500 years ago. Gedaliah's murder was the impetus for the final dispersion of the Jewish remnant in the Land of Israel and thus, Jewish spiritual leaders of the past decided to mark it annually as a day of fasting and selfreflection. Two and a half millennia later, the fast is still observed by traditional Jews, indicating how dreadful the impact of the assassination was upon the nation.: In view of the tragic consequences of Gedaliah's death, questions remain: How could such a thing happen again? What were the circumstances that created the atmosphere allowing such a tragedy to take place in our own time? As we try to uncover answers, we find ourselves involved in a multi-layered investigation. In order to understand the atmosphere leading up to the assassination, we must recognize that overall, anti-Rabin actions were undertaken by two types of political groups motivated by two distinctly different underlying principles.4 One group engaged in anti-Rabin

Cognição e organização: avaliação de programas como instância produtora de sentidos

O presente estudo apóia-se no referencial sócio-construtivista, especialmente em conceitos e idéias desenvolvidas por Karl Weick, para analisar uma experiência de avaliação de um programa de desenvolvimento de pessoas - "Cuidar-se para cuidar" - em uma instituição hospitalar da rede privada de Salvador. Todas as decisões do processo de concepção e desenvolvimento da avaliação do programa realizada por uma equipe de consultores externos e técnicos do Hospital foram registradas. Tais dados fornecem a base para as análises e interpretações que buscam ressaltar a natureza socialmente construída dos processos organizativos. Os resultados evidenciam, em primeiro lugar, que o contexto da organização e as suas políticas de Recursos Humanos favorecem processos de sensemaking posteriores e incremento de uma 'mente coletiva'. Em segundo lugar, são revelados, nas diferentes fases do processo de avaliação, os schemas que guiam todo o processo de construção de sentido e do seu compartilhamento na equipe. A análise dessa experiência aponta, de forma significativa, como o processo de avaliação de programas constituiu, na realidade, uma prática organizativa que dá estabilidade às experiências individuais e contribui para a construção de sentidos compartilhados entre as pessoas, articulando-os a valores e missão da organização.

Making Sense of Theory Construction: Metaphor and Disciplined Imagination

This article draws upon Karl Weick’s insights into the nature of theorizing, and extends and refines his conception of theory construction as ‘disciplined imagination’. An essential ingredient in Weick’s ‘disciplined imagination’involves his assertion that thought trials and theoretical representations typically involve a transfer from one epistemic sphere to another through the creative use of metaphor. The article follows up on this point and draws out how metaphor works, how processes of metaphorical imagination partake in theory construction, and how insightful metaphors and the theoretical representations that result from them can be selected. The paper also includes a discussion of metaphors-in-use (organizational improvisation as jazz and organizational behaviour as collective mind) which Weick proposed in his own writings. The whole purpose of this exercise is to theoretically augment and ground the concept of ‘disciplined imagination’, and in particular to refine the nature of thought trials and selection within it. In doing so, I also aim to provide pointers for the use of metaphorical imagination in the process of theory construction.

From extended mind to collective mind

Although the notion of collective intentionality has received considerable attention over the past decade, accounts of collective belief and intention remain individualistic. Most accounts analyze group intentional states in terms of a complex set of individual intentional states and, thus, it is individuals not groups that have intentional states. In this paper, I attempt to undermine one of the motivations for refusing to acknowledge groups as the bearers of mental states. The resistance to collective mental states is motivated by the view that mental states are located in minds and minds are in heads. Since groups do not have heads or brains, they cannot have minds or mental states. There is a significant and important thesis in cognitive science, however, which suggests that the mind is not bounded by skin and bones. If “the mind ain’t in the head”, then this removes a major barrier to the idea of collective minds.

On Collective Mind and Conversational Analysis

The authors note an important problem with Cooren’s (2004) argument that processes of representing, subordinating, and contributing, accomplished routinely in “mundane” conversations, constitute collective organizational mind as discussed by Hutchins (1995) and especially Weick and Roberts (1993). The authors show that everyday conversations can easily exhibit evidence of those three processes and yet amount to heedless, self-centered exchanges and that the lone or unvoiced activities of members can exhibit the essence of the kind of collective mind that generates high reliability organizations (HROs). Therefore, analysis of local conversations is inadequate to demonstrate the existence of collective mind and to explain the high reliability of HROs; such analysis needs supplement by evidence that the conversation contributes to a pattern of institutionalized system-level distributed heedfulness.

Transactive memory system in new product development teams

With the increasing popularity of collective memory in the group behavior literature, the transactive memory system (TMS) attracts many researchers and practitioners from different fields, in particular, small group research. Nevertheless, the application of the theory of TMS on new product development teams is surprisingly scant. We argue that the TMS leverages the notion of project-team memory, which is mostly equated with mechanistic memory or electronic documents and databases, by facilitating an interpersonal awareness of who knows what and who has appropriate and adequate skills and expertise, and then receiving information from that person. We then empirically test the effects of TMS on new product development outcomes including mediating and moderating factors, i.e., the collective mind and environmental turbulence, respectively. By investigating 79 Turkish new product development project teams, we found that: 1) the TMS has a positive impact on team learning and speed-to-market; 2) the collective mind (i.e., team members' attention to interrelating actions) mediates relations between the TMS, team learning, and speed-to-market; and 3) team learning and speed-to-market mediates relations between the TMS and new product success. Further, the moderating effect of environmental turbulence is investigated between the TMS, and team learning and speed-to-market. We found that the impact of the TMS on: 1) speed-to-market is negative when market and technology turbulence associated with the environment is high and 2) team learning changes quadratically with respect to the market and technology turbulence. Theoretical and managerial implications of the study findings are discussed.

The teacher, the learner and the collective mind

This paper deals with techniques for tapping processes of self-organisation in adult learning. It looks at systems that make use of evolution and stigmergy (communication through signs left in the environment) to generate a kind of group mind, which both influences and is influenced by the actions of its constituents. Such systems exhibit both high structure and high dialogue, constraining choice and providing freedom at the same time. This makes them very interesting educationally as theory suggests that such opposites cannot co-exist. The paper describes two such systems, exploring their strengths and weaknesses and identifying potential future avenues of research.