Foundational Assumptions Research Articles

The Nigeria–Biafra war: postcolonial conflict and the question of genocide

The Nigeria–Biafra war that raged between 1967 and 1970 made headlines around the world, above all for the major famine in the secessionist enclave of Biafra, and prompted a major international relief. It was a genuinely global event. Yet by the late 1970s, it was seldom talked about outside Nigeria. Since then, it barely features in scholarly and popular accounts of the period. The conflict is also virtually entirely absent from the field of genocide studies, which began to form in the closing decades of the twentieth century. However, in recent years, scholarly interest in the conflict is increasing. Alongside with a renewed literary interest in the war and its legacy, the international history of the war and the humanitarian operation in particular has attracted the attention of historians and academics of other disciplines. On the basis of a brief account of the conflict and the issues it raised, this contribution argues that the conflict should be considered by students of genocide, since its implications challenge some of the field's founding assumptions and premises. First, the Nigeria–Biafra war evinces the importance of conceptual history for the study of genocides. The article shows how concepts of genocide influence the perceptions and thus, in effect, the politics of conflicts, in particular in cases where representations of genocide are tied to the Holocaust, understood as a state-sponsored, ideology-driven racial hate crime. Second, and following from this point, scholars of genocide studies need to reflect on the impact of this understanding of the Holocaust on their discipline. As we argue, this model determines their (mis-)apprehension of other cases they discuss or—exactly because of this model—fail to discuss.

Limits to Economic Growth

First paragraphs: I am often asked why so few agricultural economists seem interested in sustainable agriculture or sustainable community development. Perhaps it's because unlimited growth is one of the foundational assumptions of neoclassical economics. If there are no limits to economic growth, questions of sustainability are needless or pointless. Ecological economists challenge this assumption and call for a steady-state economy, meaning one develops qualitatively without growing quantitatively... maintained at a level that is both sufficient for a good life and within the assimilative and regenerative capacities of the [natural] ecosystem (Daly, 2013). However, most economists seem to believe that human imagination and creativity is capable of finding a substitute for any natural resource we may deplete and finding a technological solution for any problem we might create — given adequate economic incentives. One argument for unlimited economic growth is limitless dematerialization, meaning an infinite ability to extract economic value from fewer natural and human resources. As ecological economists point out, this conflicts directly with the law of entropy, which is the second law of thermodynamics. Everything of any use to us, including everything of economic value, ultimately depends on the usefulness of energy. According to the law of entropy, whenever energy is used to do anything useful, some of its usefulness is lost. Accepting the law of entropy, there are physical limits to dematerialization and thus limits to economic growth. Unlimited economic growth would require ephemeralization, a term coined by Buckminster Fuller, meaning the ability of technological advancement to do more and with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing (Ephemeralization, 2013, para. 1). It doesn't seem reasonable to bet the future of humanity on this possibility....

Soviet Modernity: Stephen Kotkin and the Bolshevik Predicament

‘Modernity’ has long been a working category of historical analysis in Russian and Soviet studies. Like any established category, it bears a history of its own characterised by founding assumptions, conceptual possibilities and lasting interpretive habits. Stephen Kotkin's work has played a special role in framing the kind of scholarship this category has enabled and the kind of modernity it has assigned to twentieth-century Russia. Kotkin's 1995Magnetic Mountainintroduced the concept of ‘socialist modernity’. His continued work with the concept in his 2001Kritikaarticle ‘Modern Times’ and his 2001Armageddon Avertedmarked crucial moments in the history of the discipline and have positioned the author as a pioneering and dominant voice on the subject for nearly two decades. Given the defining nature of Kotkin's work, a critical discussion of its impact on the way the discipline conceives of Soviet modernisation and presents it to non-Russian fields is perhaps overdue. Here, I approach Kotkin's work on modernity as the field's collective property in need of a critical, deconstructive reading for its underlying assumptions, prescribed master narratives, and resultant paradoxes.

Collective performance: modeling the interaction of habit-based actions

Recurring patterns of action are essential in our efforts to explain central properties of business firms and other organizations. However, the development of systematic theory has been hampered by the difficulty of adequately specifying foundational assumptions. We address this problem by defining a concept of collective performance, which brings together a range of recurring organizational action patterns that have been studied under labels such as “routine, ”“ practice,” standard operating procedure, or “genre of action.” All these forms of organizational action are based on human habit to a significant degree. We propose a conceptual framework for such habit-based organizational action patterns. The framework is a set of core principles and desirable model properties that can serve as a guide in the development of formal models of collective performance. It provides micro-foundations for the modeling of collective performance that are aligned with contemporary developments in psychology. Finally, we present a series of examples, developed in Supplementary Materials, that shows how our framework leads to new classes of formal models that can aid the analysis of collective performance.

Neither Father nor Doctor “Knows Best”: From Tradition to Choice in the Family and on the Wards

This review article analyzes 3 developments within the world of health care that involve concomitant changes in the scope of family and the form of family relationships. The first follows from construction of the informed‐consent doctrine and its implementation, the second stems from stunning innovations in reproductive technology, and the third involves the increasing significance of genetic information for medicine. The article suggests that an analysis of changing relationships within the world of health care may offer insights about shifts in the meaning of family. As social domains, the world of family and the world of health care have undergone similar transformations during the past half century. Shifts in the foundational assumptions in each domain—that of the family and that of health care—inform shifts in the other domain. Examining the actualization of these shifts can assist scholars and practitioners in guiding discourse and in resolving disputes among family members and among those who populate the world of health care, including clinicians, patients, and patients' family members.

Pseudo-Orbit Data Assimilation. Part I: The Perfect Model Scenario

Abstract State estimation lies at the heart of many meteorological tasks. Pseudo-orbit-based data assimilation provides an attractive alternative approach to data assimilation in nonlinear systems such as weather forecasting models. In the perfect model scenario, noisy observations prevent a precise estimate of the current state. In this setting, ensemble Kalman filter approaches are hampered by their foundational assumptions of dynamical linearity, while variational approaches may fail in practice owing to local minima in their cost function. The pseudo-orbit data assimilation approach improves state estimation by enhancing the balance between the information derived from the dynamic equations and that derived from the observations. The potential use of this approach for numerical weather prediction is explored in the perfect model scenario within two deterministic chaotic systems: the two-dimensional Ikeda map and 18-dimensional Lorenz96 flow. Empirical results demonstrate improved performance over that of the two most common traditional approaches of data assimilation (ensemble Kalman filter and four-dimensional variational assimilation).

“We Brought It Upon Ourselves”: University-Based Teacher Education and the Emergence of Boot-Camp-Style Routes to Teacher Certification

The proliferation of boot-camp-style routes to teacher certification in the last two decades is seen by many university-based teacher educators as the result of the advancement of conservative interests aimed at de-professionalizing teaching. This essay argues that this view only accounts for one piece of the answer, the other one being that some of the foundational assumptions embedded in most university-based teacher education programs actually opened the doors for the boiling down of teacher preparation to the bare minimum. By situating the psychological sciences at the foundations of pedagogical knowledge and positioning them as the privileged lens to understand the learning subject, university-based teacher education has paved the way to its own disappearance. Both traditional and alternative routes to teaching can be understood, then, as part of the same system of thought, one that needs to be cracked open in order to be able to imagine other possibilities.

Scarcity and Agency

An article looking at how one might resolve the apparent contradiction between scarcity (which in its lack might be seen to shut down opportunities) and agency (which is open ended and transformative). Extract: At first sight the title of this essay might appear to be a contradiction in terms. Scarcity, defined at core as a lack, would suggest the closing down of options in an effort to reduce production and consumption. Agency, on the other hand, is increasingly associated with an opening up, a widening of activities so as to intervene in, and adjust, overarching structures. A recent research project that I have been involved in suggests, however, that scarcity not only forms a context for an activist sense of agency but actually demands it. But to get to this alliance of scarcity and agency, and with it the potential for new constitutions of architectural practice, it is first necessary to unpack some founding assumptions of scarcity...

Thinking in New Boxes: A New Paradigm for Business Creativity

Thinking in New Boxes: A New Paradigm for Business Creativity Luc de Brabandere and Alan Iny 2013, Random House $20 (softcover), 318 pagesChange is coming faster than ever before and in order for you to thrive in a world with accelerating change, then you must be creative at what you do in order to survive. Most managers and organizations tend to fail in being imaginative, which is a critical requirement for ensuring long-term success in the modern world. This book, entitled Thinking in New Boxes, written by Luc de Brabandere and Alan Iny, offers excellent suggestions for thinking creatively and creating a sustainable work culture in the department and in one's organization.As human beings and managers, we all operate and function based on certain assumptions and mental models. Sadly, at times, we are not aware of these assumptions and models which drive our behaviors. Not being aware of these foundational assumptions, according to de Brabandere and Iny, can blind people in dealing with risks and in taking advantage of the available opportunities. Of course, thinking out of the box is not a panacea for such widespread lack of awareness of the mental models which drive behavior. However, our brains need new ways to see things, new structure, and thinking boxes in order to balance selfawareness with critical thinking and brainstorming. In other words, we need a new mindset that can help employees and managers sustain their success in the modern and globally competitive workplace. The authors state that:You might think of the mind as a giant cupboard, with compartments and drawers, a place to tidy up the messiness of reality, to sort it all into a much more comprehensible and manageable set of idea. Each of us creates order by sorting; things with some shared characteristics are put together. Nobody can deal with the many complicated aspects of real life without first placing things in such boxes, the raw materials of human thinking and creativity....boxes are sketches, your mind's way of simplifying, naming, and framing things-whether it is a starving lion, a crying infant, or a popular uprising in your friend's home country-so that you can determine how best to respond to them (de Brabandere and Iny, 2013, pp. 7-8).This book offers five steps in helping managers to get to the futures, and these steps include; doubting everything, probing about the possible scenarios, diverging toward the unconventional options, converging toward those actions that will maximize the benefits, and reevaluating every decision and process on a regular basis since what works today may not be relevant tomorrow. The recommendation is to keep your eyes wide open and assess every process on a regular basis to determine if it is still producing competitive results. While explaining these steps for creating extraordinary results, the authors provide real life examples of firms from across the globe. Some of the examples presented come from firms and organizations such as NASA, Nutura, Hindustan Lever Limited, Chicago Public Schools, Generali Insurance, the postal system in France known as La Poste, Philips, etc. …

Reflections on contemporary debates in policy studies

This article offers reflections on contemporary debates in policy studies. It starts by mapping the contours of the terrain covered by Policy & Politics over the last 40 years. It does so under four headings: (1) theorising policy (2) evidence and the policy process (3) transforming structures and processes and (4) implementation and practice. It then uses these headings to draw out themes from the articles comprising this 40th anniversary special issue. We conclude by arguing for greater tolerance of diversity in theoretical and empirical enquiry and for continued reflection on the foundational assumptions of the field of policy studies.

Critical Psychology, Philosophy, and Social Therapy

This article presents critical psychology in some new light. First, it presents the history of US critical psychology in terms of the overall foundation of its critique (identity-based, ideologically-based, and epistemologically-based). Second, it broadens the population that can be called critical psychologists. The argument is made to include: (1) philosophers of language, science, and mind critical of psychology’s foundational assumptions, conceptions, and methods of inquiry; and (2) non-professional, ordinary people who live their lives critical of psychology by eschewing mainstream approaches and taking alternative routes to getting help with their emotional and physical pain, or the education of their children. Third, the article discusses ontology-based critique through the example of the practical-critical theory/practice of social therapy.

Strategy-as-practice meets neo-institutional theory

Strategy-as-practice and neo-institutionalism offer alternative approaches to studying organizations. In this essay, we examine the foundational assumptions and methods of these perspectives, unveiling different ways in which they could complement each other. In particular, we elaborate three areas of overlap: a focus on what actors actually do, their shared cognitions, and the role of language in creating shared meanings. We show how the two perspectives can inform each other and offer significant learning to organization studies more broadly.

Fertile disorder: spirit possession and its provocation of the modern

In her innovative new book, Kalpana Ram reflects on the way spirit possession unsettles some of the foundational assumptions of modernity. What is a subject under the varied conditions commonly associated with possession? What kind of subjectivity must already be in place to allow such a transformation to occur? How does it alter our understanding of memory and emotion if these assail us in the form of ghosts rather than as attributes of subjective experience? What does it mean to worship deities who are afflictive and capricious, yet bear an intimate relationship to justice? What is a human body if it can be taken over by a whole array of entities? What is agency if people can be claimed in this manner? What is gender if, while possessed, a woman is a woman no longer? Drawing on spirit possession among women and the rich traditions of subaltern religion in Tamil Nadu, South India, Ram concludes that the basis for constructing an alternative understanding of agency need not rest on the usual requirements of a fully present consciousness or on the exercise of choice and planning. Instead of relegating possession, ghosts, and demons to the domain of the exotic, Ram uses spirit possession to illuminate ordinary experiences and relationships. In doing so, she uncovers fundamental instabilities that continue to haunt modern formulations of gender, agency, and political emancipation. Fertile Disorder interrogates the modern assumptions about gender, agency, and subjectivity that underlie the social improvement projects circulating in Tamil Nadu, assumptions that directly shape people's lives. The book pays particular attention to projects of family planning, development, reform, and emancipation. Combining ethnography with philosophical argument, Ram fashions alternatives to standard post-modernist and post-structuralist formulations. Grounded in decades of fieldwork, ambitious and wide ranging, her work is conceived as a journey that makes incursions into the unfamiliar, then returns us to the familiar. She argues that magic is not a monopoly of any one culture, historical period, or social formation but inhabits modernity---not only in the places, such as cinema and sound recording, where it is commonly looked for, but in habit and in aspects of everyday life that have been largely overlooked and shunned.

Acyl-Homoserine Lactone Quorum Sensing: From Evolution to Application

Quorum sensing (QS) is a widespread process in bacteria that employs autoinducing chemical signals to coordinate diverse, often cooperative activities such as bioluminescence, biofilm formation, and exoenzyme secretion. Signaling via acyl-homoserine lactones is the paradigm for QS in Proteobacteria and is particularly well understood in the opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Despite thirty years of mechanistic research, empirical studies have only recently addressed the benefits of QS and provided support for the traditional assumptions regarding its social nature and its role in optimizing cell-density-dependent group behaviors. QS-controlled public-goods production has served to investigate principles that explain the evolution and stability of cooperation, including kin selection, pleiotropic constraints, and metabolic prudence. With respect to medical application, appreciating social dynamics is pertinent to understanding the efficacy of QS-inhibiting drugs and the evolution of resistance. Future work will provide additional insight into the foundational assumptions of QS and relate laboratory discoveries to natural ecosystems.

The development of world oceans & coasts and concepts of sustainability

The current phase of technological development and expansion in the world economy is leading to greater human activity and development offshore. Some have described this as the colonisation of the oceans, one phase in the wider history of world industrialisation. This study empirically tests notions of ‘industrialisation’ and ‘colonisation’ in the oceans for the first time. It finds that human activity in the oceans has increased by multiple factors in the most recent long term wave of economic development. The methods include the combined use of Raster and R! to overcome methodological challenges to analyse large spatial datasets which map the footprint of human activity. In response to increasing human activity in the oceans, nations and supranational institutions are developing new governance regimes. These regimes are characterised by policy integration and a commitment to sustainability. Sustainable development is a central tenet of most national and international policies for the world's oceans. An analysis of sustainable development terminology within coastal and ocean policy is provided for seven major maritime governance regimes: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, EU, South Africa, UK and the US. The results show that sustainability is highly differentiated in the context of ‘the blue planet’ (oceans and coasts). The diverse interpretations of sustainability present an impasse to measuring progress in the field. Therefore the paper concludes by offering a framework for explanation and interpretation of sustainable development, by linking it to foundational assumptions held by systems of thought or philosophical traditions.

Social ecology, sustainability, and economics

What mode of analysis might be employed, that captures the confluent action of material and social systems acting together? The framework of Social Ecology, which first emerged as a rejoinder to the Chicago School of Human Ecology of the early 1900s, evolved over subsequent decades as an attempt at such integration. We revisit social ecology's historical origins and foundational assumptions. We propose that the social ecological framework can offer useful conceptual grounding to scholars of ecological economics. We illustrate how this analytical lens affords a deeper understanding of unsustainable systems and valuation problems.

Generalizing ecological, water and carbon footprint methods and their worldview assumptions using Embedded Resource Accounting

Embedded Resource Accounting (ERA) generalizes footprint methods by accounting for the net direct and indirect impacts of processes on arbitrarily defined resource stocks. Equivalency may or may not exist between these stocks from the perspective of a specific observer and depending on the system boundaries. The assumptions made in the derivation of ecological, water, and carbon footprint methodologies from the ERA framework are explained, and the implications of variations on these assumptions discussed. The paper then discusses how the role and worldview of a resource manager determines the appropriate assumptions that should be made in the calculation of resource footprints. When its foundational assumptions are made explicit, ERA and related footprint methods can help explicate the impact of roles and worldviews in resource management in a complex systems context. This discussion directly informs the creation of appropriate footprint standards that function as sustainability metrics and provide the information needed for specific resource management applications. We conclude that different types of policymakers and resource managers need to make different assumptions to obtain the information necessary for their unique decision-making perspectives and roles.

Polanyi's Revenge

Since the beginning of the financial crisis of 2008, authors and politicians have regularly reminded us of the duality of crisis and opportunity. For policymakers, administrations, and candidates, crises represent opportunities to implement long-desired reforms, seize the public stage, and reframe old arguments in the light of today's urgency. As the books under review here suggest, crises also represent opportunities for scholars. Arguments that failed to gain traction in the past may now deserve new attention as they help us understand the roots of crisis or how to recover from it. New audiences may be receptive to established arguments, now that other policies have caused us grief and are failing to promote recovery. The public and decision makers could be open to listening to these arguments and their implications, now that crisis has revealed deep vulnerabilities.The three books that form the basis of this review essay represent trenchant critiques of neoliberal economic theory and policies, including such foundational policy assumptions as globalization, deregulation, and reliance on sophisticated financial tools. Their authors, three prominent economists, draw our attention to problems of market failure, such as rampant rent-seeking behavior and externalities. By focusing on entrenched dilemmas that include widening inequality and the compatibility of democracy and globalization, they remind us of the ways in which markets are embedded in social institutions, and how such institutions both respond to markets and shape market outcomes. All bring with them a deep commitment to understanding the functioning of society and how to maintain the benefits of global capitalism while reining in its most destructive implications.

Jean Toomer and the History of Passing

Jean Toomer and the History of Passing Matthew Pratt Guterl (bio) Jean Toomer . Cane. With a new afterword by Rudolph B. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011. 472 pp. $16.25 (paper). In 2011, Rudolph Byrd and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., issued a new Norton Critical edition of Jean Toomer's 1923 novel, Cane, a work widely seen as one of the finest expressions of black culture in the twentieth century. Both men have written on Toomer, on race, and on literature. Byrd, recently deceased, was the author of the finely wrought Jean Toomer's Years With Gurdjieff (1990). Gates is a famous scholar of African American studies. In op-eds for the Chronicle of Higher Education, in the pages of the New York Times, and on the radio stream of NPR, the editors, drumming up attention, accused Toomer of "passing" for white, a provocation rooted, they felt, in the evidence, but also sure to guarantee book sales and critical attention. "He was running away from a cultural identity that he had inherited," Gates said to Felicia Lee in one of these paratextual interviews; "He never, ever wrote anything remotely approaching the originality and genius of Cane. I believe it's because he spent so much time running away from his identity." Gates then added, "I feel sorry for him." 1 This damning conclusion that Toomer engaged in racial subterfuge is somewhat off-putting because it runs counter to just about everything written about Toomer since the 1980s. It also pushes back against the foundational assumptions of the "bi-racial" and "mixed-race" movements—both of which prioritize self-identification and self-fashioning outside of official categories— and challenges recent histories of race and passing. Still, because of the unique editorial authority of this pair, the new edition of Cane will surely become a consumer triumph. "Jean Toomer may have been a bit of a cad and a man who had a fondness for the company of white women," wrote Sharon Toomer, the author's great granddaughter, in response to an interview with Gates in the New York Times, "but to say . . . that he decidedly passed for white is an explosive accusation that demands nothing short of evidence—not interpretation." She continued: "In countless documents, Toomer said he wanted to be identified as an American. That is different from deciding to pass for white."2 But how is it different? And what is that evidence? And what, finally, is that interpretation? [End Page 113] Answering these questions brings us to the far edge of African American studies, African American history, and African American literature; indeed, it carries us across a threshold where, as Kenneth Warren recently suggested, the future of these robust and important fields is decidedly uncertain. Answering them also clarifies the purpose of this new edition of Cane, which appears designed to rewrite the past and redirect the future.3 Every American historian should be familiar with Cane because the work captures so many themes and plot points of the post-WWI era. Uniquely structured even in an era of formal experimentation, Cane was a revolutionary text when first published, and it remains an object of extraordinary debate today. The loosely organized, scattershot novella gathers up familiar plot points of post-emancipation African American history and rearranges them into discrete vignettes, capturing a race increasingly adrift in an age of traumatic transformations: from rural to urban, from the violent medieval to the depersonalized modern, from locally grounded to wandering and migratory. Each little piece was saturated with symbolic or metaphorical detail. And the book, slender and enigmatically titled, looked different, too, with cryptic arcs and half-circles appearing in no discernable sequence, marking major thematic breaks. Readers of Cane knew they held in their hands something special and exciting, even if they weren't entirely certain what to make of it. Toomer believed firmly and consistently that he was neither white nor black, but both and much more. The tall, lanky descendent of P. B. S. Pinch-back—the Reconstruction-era governor of Louisiana (a whimsical man who occasionally enjoyed playing at white)—Jean Toomer was, in the years prior to the...

The Implausibility of Secrecy

Government secrecy frequently fails. Despite the executive branch’s obsessive hoarding of certain kinds of documents and its constitutional authority to do so, recent high-profile events — among them the WikiLeaks episode, the Obama administration’s infamous leak prosecutions, and the widespread disclosure by high-level officials of flattering confidential information to sympathetic reporters — undercut the image of a state that can classify and control its information. The effort to control government information requires human, bureaucratic, technological, and textual mechanisms that regularly founder or collapse in an administrative state, sometimes immediately and sometimes after an interval. Leaks, mistakes, and open sources all constitute paths out of the government’s informational clutches. As a result, permanent, long-lasting secrecy of any sort and to any degree is costly and difficult to accomplish.This Article argues that information control is an implausible goal. It critiques some of the foundational assumptions of constitutional and statutory laws that seek to regulate information flows, while complicating and countering the extensive literature on secrecy, transparency, and leaks that rest on those assumptions. By focusing on the functional issues relating to government information and broadening its study beyond the much-examined phenomenon of leaks, the Article catalogs and then illustrates the formal and informal means by which information flows out of the state in a series of case studies. These informal means play an especially important role in limiting both the ability of state actors to keep secrets and the extent to which formal legal doctrines can control the flow of government information. The same bureaucracy and legal regime that keep open government laws from creating a transparent state also keep the executive branch from creating a perfect informational dam. The Article draws several implications from this descriptive, functional argument for legal reform and for the study of administrative and constitutional law.