Early Inquiry Research Articles

Allegorical Analogies: Henry More’s Poetical Cosmology

As a young fellow at Cambridge, Henry More wrote a collection of long allegorical poems that were first published in 1642. More’s poems are “Philosophicall Poems” in title and content; they are also Spenserian allegories. This article explores the ways in which More turns to the allegorical mode to express his key philosophical theory of “Vital Congruity,” the act of union between body and soul he knew “not better how to term.” I will argue that, in these experimental early works, when every material substance and action is considered analogous to its perfect divine source, the life of the soul between the terrestrial and celestial realms begins to assume an allegorical form. The isolated embodiment of allegorical images, the gap they inhabit between physical form and spiritual moral, makes the mode fittingly analogous to the limitations More places upon mortal enquiry. Contrary to critical assumptions, More’s poems demonstrate how allegory continued to be methodologically productive within early modern philosophical enquiry.

This Bud's for Who? The Battle for Anheuser-Busch

The Anheuser-Busch InBev case represents a major cross-border M&A transaction. Because the material covers a large, well-known transaction involving food and beverage companies, students can focus on both the strategic rationale behind the transaction as well as understand the various valuation issues associated with any M&A deal—including some specific to cross-border M&A, such as currency conversion of foreign sales. The material includes both student and instructor spreadsheets. Excerpt UVA-F-1717 Rev. Feb. 23, 2015 This Bud's for Who? The Battle for Anheuser-Busch August Busch IV, chief executive officer of Anheuser-Busch, sat at his desk in his St. Louis, Missouri, office, and considered the implications of InBev's hostile bid to buy his company. The Belgium-based InBev had recently displaced Anheuser-Busch to become the largest brewery in the world, and Carlos Brito, InBev's CEO, had made some early inquiries about buying Anheuser-Busch. After Busch IV rebuffed any idea of a merger of the two companies, Brito responded by making a public bid at $ 65 per share ($ 46.3 billion) on June 11, 2008. The Budweiser brand and the company's dominance of the U.S. market were second to none, but these facts were not reflected in the share price, which had been stagnant for several years. As Busch IV considered possible responses to the bid, he needed to determine a fair value for the company. What he really needed was time, but with the threat of a hostile takeover looming, it was one luxury he did not have. Although he wasn't quite sure how to fend off InBev and preserve his family's legacy, his first order of business was simple: right now, he could really use a Bud. Growth of a Beer Economy . . .

Developing Tacit Knowledge of Complex Systems: The Value of Early Empirical Inquiry in Healthcare Design

Developing Tacit Knowledge of Complex Systems: The Value of Early Empirical Inquiry in Healthcare Design

AMERICA’S LARGEST BLACK-OWNED COMPANIES: A 40-YEAR LONGITUDINAL ANALYSIS

This longitudinal analysis of the largest black-owned businesses in the United States covers the period from 1974 through 2014, a time-span of forty years, and is a follow-up to an earlier inquiry published ten years ago in the Journal of Developmental Entrepreneurship. This current study focuses on similarities and differences from the earlier analysis. This investigation probes the overall evolution of these companies, as well as various trends, patterns and other characteristics within the general data of both growth and decline; and provides data, information, analysis and resultant conclusions and implications, which should be both of interest and of value to: (a) black and other minority active and aspiring businesspeople, (b) researchers in the area of minority business, (c) consultants and advisors to such businesses and (d) those involved in related business development policy.

Future resource: Ph.D. student collaboration

ABSTRACTFuture Reflections Research Group (FR) was a collaboration of three Ph.D. student researchers that developed in parallel with their doctoral studies at Chelsea College of Arts (London, UK) between 2007 and 2010. The group's performative presentations, critical/creative writing and relational art addressed the interplay of theory and practice in art research as an emerging field of enquiry. Taking the art research conference as a main site of investigation, FR questioned the relevance of this largely academic format for valorising practice-based research. What emerged over the group's eight projects can be described as the beginnings of a shared sensibility that used reflective and reflexive techniques to interrogate the relationship between ‘art’ as an extradisciplinary creative practice and ‘research’ as a knowledge enterprise subject to university-based conventions. Written as a dialogue, this paper discusses how FR as a student-led collaboration ‘practised theory’ reflexively, with this understood as a particular kind of reflective work, operating towards a shared praxis of art research within the group. While the respective Ph.D. projects of FR's members informed their shared research, this collaboration developed aspects of both form and method that were not anticipated at the outset. The paper explores ways of resourcing collaborative Ph.D. student research in post-doctoral work and beyond. This reflexive potential suggests a means of making practice-based research more sustainable, with earlier enquiry providing a resource for later investigation.

Cross-country growth-oriented entrepreneurship: When is a performance-based culture effective?

Early inquiries into the contribution of performance-based cultural norms to growth-oriented entrepreneurship render their influence not significant. In a similar effort to explain cross-country differences in growth-oriented entrepreneurship, we propose and test a midrange, contingency-based model receiving strong support in analysis of 267 country-year observations from 66 countries. Results show economic development complements performance-based cultural norms to increase the extent of a country’s growth-oriented entrepreneurship; and this complementary effect appears only among those countries with high levels of regulatory simplicity. For policymakers targeting economic growth, our research suggests that policies should create a fertile environment for growth-oriented entrepreneurship to thrive on the established norms within their particular society; rather than benchmark possible approaches against other countries with high levels of growth-oriented entrepreneurship but very different established n...

Recognizing Eli Ginzberg and Human Resources: The Wealth of a Nation (1958): where are the seeds of (national) HRD?

This paper introduces Eli Ginzberg’s work, titled Human Resources: The Wealth of a Nation. In particular, in this paper I posit that Ginzberg’s publication, which appears to be ‘undiscovered’ in the Academy of HRD, deserves recognition as one of the earliest inquiries into National HRD, preceding a well known book by Harbison and Myers published in 1964. The paper sheds light on the history of the manuscript creation, provides an overview of the book’s content, and discusses how Ginzberg’s perspective relates to contemporary National HRD scholarship and strengthens its foundations.

Engraftment of nonintegrating neural stem cells differentially perturbs cortical activity in a dose-dependent manner

Neural stem cell (NSC) therapy represents a potentially powerful approach for gene transfer in the diseased central nervous system. However, transplanted primary, embryonic stem cell- and induced pluripotent stem cell-derived NSCs generate largely undifferentiated progeny. Understanding how physiologically immature cells influence host activity is critical to evaluating the therapeutic utility of NSCs. Earlier inquiries were limited to single-cell recordings and did not address the emergent properties of neuronal ensembles. To interrogate cortical networks post-transplant, we used voltage sensitive dye imaging in mouse neocortical brain slices, which permits high temporal resolution analysis of neural activity. Although moderate NSC engraftment largely preserved host physiology, subtle defects in the activation properties of synaptic inputs were induced. High-density engraftment severely dampened cortical excitability, markedly reducing the amplitude, spatial extent, and velocity of propagating synaptic potentials in layers 2-6. These global effects may be mediated by specific disruptions in excitatory network structure in deep layers. We propose that depletion of endogenous cells in engrafted neocortex contributes to circuit alterations. Our data provide the first evidence that nonintegrating cells cause differential host impairment as a function of engrafted load. Moreover, they emphasize the necessity for efficient differentiation methods and proper controls for engraftment effects that interfere with the benefits of NSC therapy.

The Aroma of Righteousness: Scent and Seduction in Rabbinic Life and Literature by Deborah A. Green (review)

Reviewed by: The Aroma of Righteousness: Scent and Seduction in Rabbinic Life and Literature by Deborah A. Green Yaron Z. Eliav The Aroma of Righteousness: Scent and Seduction in Rabbinic Life and Literature Deborah A. Green. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011. 286 pp. The current trend in historical scholarship to include the five senses as worthy research categories, ones that may shed light on the human experience of far away civilizations, has not passed over Judaic Studies. During the last century, interest has gradually shifted from political and military events on one hand, and textually based investigations on the other, to the social and cultural dimensions of people’s life; the lower strata as well as peripheral social groups, together with the full spectrum of human emotions, mundane daily activities, and the interactions of people with the physical landscape that engulfed them, all have proved worthy of inspection and capable of enriching our understanding of the ancient world. Then came the senses, first with a series of studies unpacking the processes involved in viewing, and more recently studies about smelling (one can only extrapolate that the future may bring about works on hearing and listening habits, and perhaps even touching and tasting). Deborah Green strides into these still uncharted territories with elegance and confidence. Her book exhibits wide learning in rabbinics, especially midrash, and biblical studies, as well as sharp eye for those details minute yet significant, which creep up in our sources and tend to be overlooked by those who study them. She sets out to tell us the story of fragrance as it is depicted and perceived by the rabbis. The book consists of five chapters and a short concluding statement. In her first, introductory chapter, Green surveys the theoretical and methodological issues involved in her research. She correctly points out the contribution of psychology to this area of study since much of the impact of smell registers in the intangible realms of human experience, in the mind and in the imagination. Good and bad odors are very much a matter of psyche; consider, for example the horrible, disgusting stench encountered by visitors to the Jerusalem Temple precinct—the blood, the meat rotting in the Mediterranean heat with no refrigerators, the flies—a reality well portrayed by Green (69). But Jews inhaled such smells with the greatest joy, as it symbolized for them the open communication lines with their God, who accepted their animal offerings. They called the place the Mountain of God’s perfume (har ha-moriah). [End Page 185] Green’s assertion, on the other hand, that scholarly work on scent developed with the rise of women and feminism in the academy (13) seems puzzling (perhaps requiring psychology as well), especially in Judaic Studies where the early inquiries into the intricate world of perfumes and smelling date back to the first decade of the twentieth century, a time when, as far as our records show, there was not even one woman in this discipline in the academy. Samuel Krauss devoted an entire section in his magisterial book— Talmudische Archäologie—to kosmetik (vol. 1, 233–52), dissecting “feminist” topics such as ointments, perfumes, and the ideal of beauty (Schönheitsideal). Krauss’s book is not used even once in Green’s work (other than a general reference in ch. 1n36), one of very few glaring lacunas. The next four chapters are divided thematically. Chapter 2 deals with the physical environment, discussing the entities that made perfumes available to people (merchants, markets), the various places that consumed them (such as bathhouses with their wide expenditure of oil, used as both soap and ointment), and some tools that were used in the consumption of these products. The next chapter studies scent in biblical language. It goes back in time to the biblical world, that is, the Iron Age, a chronological leap of some 750 years that may irritate some historically oriented readers, especially since the rich Jewish literature of the Second Temple is completely ignored (other than a short reference to the Book of Enoch on 119), but which Green justifies due to the ontological fusion of the rabbis with the imagery and terminology of the...

An Aging Workforce: A Manitoba Perspective

This paper reports on the results of an online survey that asked Manitoba employers about the employment of older workers. The survey attempted to gain insight into benefits of and challenges to engaging older workers; strategies to recruit, retain, and engage older workers; and the role of education and training for older workers. This research was informed by an earlier inquiry about age, work, retirement, and lifelong learning where focus groups were conducted with senior management and selected human resources (HR) managers in a public sector organization. Those results were reported at the Canadian Association of University Continuing Education (CAUCE) Conference in 2010. The results of this survey provide a look at practices for retention, recruitment, and engagement of older workers, and they outline organizational conditions that allow those practices to be successfully implemented.

Becoming aware of taken for granted attitudes and prejudices: A pilot study of Information, Advice and Guidance Practitioners

This article reports on the early stages of my empirical research. It explores how the enquiry developed through doubts in my own practice as an Information, Advice and Guidance (IAG) practitioner working outreach in East Lancashire. My early enquiry has developed out of emerging critical insights on my own ‘whiteness’ and further my ‘taken for granted’ attitudes. This resulted in the discovery of my ‘own reflexive voice’ which was captured in narrative, an example of which is included within this article. The research has been informed by theories on ‘whiteness’ and ‘taken for grantedness’. The research also considers possible limitations of some current careers guidance training, which could mean that some practitioners never reflect critically on their own taken for grantedness. It is suggested that if they were to engage in this deeper level of critical reflection, then they may develop a better understanding of the different world-views of their clients.

The Landscape of War

Lewin’s essay is an early inquiry into the perception and phenomenology of the battlefield or the landscape. Lewin distinguishes between geographical (physical) and behavioral space, and investigates such categories as boundary, zone, and position in order to understand what he came to label life space made up by movements, duration, perceptions of objects, and directedness. Lewin, who had been a soldier during World War I, was associated with the Berlin school of Gestalt psychology in the 1920s. His concept of topological psychology made a contribution to the field of environmental psychology and approaches to urban and architectural spaces.

Guest Editors' Introduction: Online Health Communication

Early scholarly inquiries into online health information focused primarily on questions of accuracy and credibility. In recent research, however, we are seeing an expansion in this initial focus, to include issues such as the usability, design, and ethics of online health information. This special issue contains five articles that contribute to scholarly inquiry in these emerging areas of interest.

At home in the world: bharata natyam on the global stage

This book fills a gap in South Asian and dance studies as it provides a critical study of the bharata natyam revival and its implications for late twentieth century and present day dance practice. The only other monograph that examines the bharata natyam revival is Gaston (1996). My book differs from this one by considering the following research issues: 1) attending not only to the politics of representation articulated in dance training and performance, 2) examining how these politics articulated themselves in specific choreographic examples, and 3) situating these changes within a global context by considering present-day bharata natyam as engaging with discourses of modernism, the ballet revival, and the transnational circulation of Indian dance forms upon the classical dance practice. This project relies upon earlier inquiries that dealt with the bharata natyam revival (Allen 1998, Coorlawala 1996, Meduri 1996, Srinivasan 1983, 1985). However, most of these studies focused on the impact of large-scale political discourses, especially nationalism and gendered reform on the demographics of performance and on discursive representations of the form. I have extended these inquiries by looking not only at national and gender identities but also the impact of regional affiliations, urbanisation and local identities, and diasporic migration. In order to contend with such a complex subject matter, this project relied upon research methods from ethnography, history, and choreographic analysis, drawing on interviews with dancers in India, the UK, and North America, archival research, my own practice of the dance form, and the analysis of live performance.

Royal Commissions, planning reform and Sydney improvement 1908–1909

The rise of modern urban planning in the early twentieth century was marked by experimentation in the investigatory mechanisms of urban government. The Royal Commission model had proved successful in Victorian era inquiries in Britain into public health and associated matters. It proved an influential precedent in other parts of the Empire. Several important Royal Commission hearings were held in the early 1900s in Australia as the state sought to explore in a systematic way for the first time the dysfunctional results and strategic correctives arising from capitalist processes of urban growth and development. Against the background of the Royal Commission model of public inquiry, the origins, operations and outcomes of a crucial early twentieth century inquiry are discussed: the Royal Commission into the Improvement of Sydney and its Suburbs in 1908–9.

Parents' inquiries about homework: The first mention

Drawing from a corpus of naturally occurring parent–child interactions, this paper documents a common verbal practice used by US dual-earner parents to issue an early inquiry into children's homework. This practice is analyzed as a first discursive move to get homework accomplished. The analysis of this practice shows that parents' topicalizations of homework most often occur early in the afternoon and function to gauge the amount of homework that needs to be done and then allow the parent to initiate a sequence that plans for the doing of the homework into the rest of the day's activities. This practice starts a sequence of talk that illustrates the often difficult path that parents negotiate between retaining parent control and responsibility for the completion of homework, and socializing child autonomy. I also argue that this verbal practice is an indication of the degree to which parents orient to homework as an organizer of family activity on afternoons. Finally, this practice has implications for documenting the ways in which directives are not isolated utterances, but can in parent–child interaction be situated within a larger sequence of sequences in order to initiate activity.

The Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture (review)

Reviewed by: The Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture Yiyan Wang (bio) Song Geng . The Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004. x, 256 pp. Hardcover $39.50, ISBN 962-209-620-4. The study of gender relations and forms of sexuality is an established field in Chinese studies, and van Gulik's pioneering Sexual Life in Ancient China (Leiden: Brill, 1974) was among the earliest inquiries in this regard. However, for decades most of the publications in the field have focused primarily on the gender identity and living conditions of women. It was not until the mid-1990s that an investigation of masculine roles began, with a focus on literary representation. In premodern Chinese literary studies, there are Louise Edwards' Men and Women in Qing China: Gender in the Red Chamber Dream (Leiden: Brill, 1994) and Keith McMahon's Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists: Sexuality and Male-Female Relations in Eighteenth-Century Chinese Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). In contemporary Chinese literature there are Lu Tonglin's Misogyny, Cultural Nihilism, and Oppositional Politics: Contemporary Chinese Experimental Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) and Zhong Xueping's Masculinity Besieged? Issues of Modernity and Male Subjectivity in Chinese Literature of the Late Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). More recently, Kam Louie and Morris Low's edited volume, Asian Masculinities: The Meaning and Practice of Manhood in China and Japan (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), offers a number of chapters on the literary representation of masculinity, and Ding Naifei explores sexual practice and sexuality in detail with her monograph Obscene Things: Sexual Politics in Jin Ping Mei (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). Kam Louie's Theorising Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) also devotes a considerable amount of space to Chinese masculinity as manifested in fictional characters. The historical study on Chinese masculinity is a recent event, most noticeably beginning with the forum "Gender and Manhood in Chinese History" in American Historical Review (vol. 105, no. 5 [2000]) and Susan Brownell and Jeffrey Wasserstrom's edited volume, Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Song Geng's The Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture is devoted to the study of effeminate male characters and their cultural connotations in premodern Chinese literature. He claims that his book is a "postcolonial reading of Chinese masculinity" (pp. 8-9), and his emphasis is on the differences in masculinity between China and the West in the time before colonialism and Westernization. Song considers the outstanding features of the premodern Chinese gender discourse to include the absence of male and female polarity, [End Page 554] the absence of mind-body duality, the presence of ungendered figures in Confucian classics, the presence of desexualized military heroes in popular fiction and drama, and the presence of the correlative "yin/yang" and wen/wu dichotomies (pp. 10-11). Noticeably, Song disagrees with Kam Louie on the significance of the notions of wen/wu in Chinese gender configuration. While Kam Louie considers wen/wu as fundamental in shaping Chinese masculinity, Song places strong emphasis on yin/yang, asserting that only when one acknowledges the essential role played by yin/yang in the Chinese perception of gender relations can one explain the effeminacy of men in Chinese literature and culture and understand the reasons why the fragile scholar has been held as an embodiment of the ideal male in Chinese culture (pp. 15-16). Song's study of Chinese masculinity is framed in the gender theories of Western thinkers, in particular those of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. He employs Foucaultian concepts of history, power, and sexuality in his reading of premodern Chinese texts. He positions his investigation in the postcolonial context and pays special attention to the distinctive quality of Chinese masculinity as a cultural practice with very different origins from that of the West. It is important to note that Song's reading of the yin/yang discourse is primarily Foucaultian in the sense that his study is centered on power politics and its subsequent determination of gender role by the positioning of the...

Analogical reasoning as a tool of epidemiological investigation

Few, if any, scientific inquiries are conducted against a background of complete knowledge, a background in which inquirers are in possession of the ‘full facts’ that relate to a particular question or issue. More often than not, scientists are compelled to conduct their deliberations in contexts of epistemic uncertainty, in which partial knowledge or even a total absence of knowledge characterise inquiry. Nowhere is this epistemic uncertainty more evident, or indeed more successfully controlled, than in the branch of scientific inquiry called epidemiology. In this paper, I examine how epidemiologists overcome the unique challenges to inquiry that are posed by epistemic uncertainty. In specific terms, I contend that epidemiologists employ analogical reasoning strategies in an attempt to advance their inquiries in situations that are epistemically uncertain. The context for my claims will be the early inquiries that were conducted into the emergence of HIV/AIDS in the United States. I argue that early scientific work in relation to HIV/AIDS was directly premised upon epidemiological investigations in which analogical reasoning with hepatitis B had featured significantly. I conclude that epidemiological investigations of AIDS exemplify the capacity of analogical reasoning to advance inquiry under conditions of epistemic uncertainty. To this extent, analogical reasoning should be a concern both to those who address practical problems of uncertainty management and to those who pursue theoretical debates within argumentation studies and epistemology.

Complex early design inquiries via generative design agents

Complex early design inquiries via generative design agents

Complex early design inquiries via generative design agents

It is important to provide building performance feedback to the designer as early as possible in the design process. However, many aspects of building performance are significantly affected by the design of the building’s technical systems (e.g., heating, airconditioning), which are typically configured in detail only in the later stages of design. The challenge is thus to find a method to use detailed simulation tools even during the early stages of design when values for many of the variables for the building’s technical systems are not yet available. In this paper, we demonstrate how this problem can be partially solved by use of differential representation for building and technical system, homology‐based automatic mapping of relevant information from the building to the technical system representation, and generative design agents which, with a minimal user‐input, can design and model the technical system. We conclude the paper with illustrative examples of detailed performance analysis of complex buildings and their heating, ventilation, and air‐conditioning systems, performed in early stages of design.