Foundational Assumptions Research Articles

Foucault and the origins of the disciplined subject: Post-subjectivity as a condition for transformation in education

Background: The need for transforming South African education can ultimately be traced to a form of Western subjectivity which dominated Europe since the classical age (1600–1750). The notions of ‘discipline’ and ‘subjectivity’ suggest distinct associations with repressive regimes like apartheid, and the present article will argue that the assumptions behind apartheid education cannot be understood without understanding the still more foundational assumptions – taken as axiom – underlying Western subjectivity. This conception of subjectivity underlies the ‘disciplined society’ and its concomitant ethos of expansion, ranging from its colonial projects to the rise of the human sciences. As a result, it is of considerable value for the South African educational environment to consider Michel Foucault’s unmasking of the interplay between subjectivity, truth and power, and to explore the possibilities offered by Foucault’s own ethic of transgression. Aim: Drawing on Michel Foucault’s genealogy of the modern subject and archaeologies of modern knowledge, it will be demonstrated that the process of transformation of higher education in South Africa not only provides the opportunity to tend to a grave historical injustice, but also to develop a critique of modernist educational practices of the West and thus to cultivate its own educational ethos as a more just and authentic South African alternative. Setting: South African Higher Education in the 21st century. Methods: Foucauldian–Nietzschean genealogy, in the spirit of Foucault’s own use of Nietzsche: ‘The only valid tribute to thought such as Nietzsche’s is precisely to use it, to deform it, to make it groan and protest’. Result: A re-considered and reconfigured notion of educational identity beyond the confines of modernist Western subjectivity. Conclusion: While full justice can never be done to the full horrors of the past, the process of transformation in education may provide an opportunity to not only address injustices in the past, but also to create a new African educational ethic which may contribute something truly new to the world’s educational heritage.

Ambiguous authority and hidden hierarchy: Collective leadership in an elite professional service firm

This study represents a detailed analysis of collective leadership in an elite professional service firm, examining the distinctive power dynamics revealed among professional peers as they attempt to act decisively in response to an acute organizational crisis. It identifies how professional peers deliberately construct and amplify ambiguity in both the composition and authority of their collective leadership group, and examines how that ambiguity can serve a functional purpose for group members. Intuitive mutual adjustment is the prevailing pattern of interaction, but this changes to a more managed form of mutual adjustment as a hidden hierarchy is revealed in response to the crisis. The study identifies the micro interactions which constitute both intuitive and managed mutual adjustment, and shows how members of a collective leadership group can maintain cohesion and act decisively, in spite of lacking the formal authority to do so. The findings challenge some foundational assumptions of collective leadership theory and extend our understanding of leadership power dynamics more generally by demonstrating how leaders can exercise considerable informal power under the cloak of ambiguity, highlighting the hidden hierarchy that can exist within a collective, and emphasizing the significance of individual ‘heroic’ leader within collective leadership.

Studying policy diffusion at the individual level: Experiments on nationalistic biases in information seeking

The foundational assumptions of policy diffusion relate to the behavior of individual policymakers. However, empirical tests of policy diffusion often focus on the behavior of governments as a whole (and not individuals). We provide a template for how to study the behavioral decisions of policymakers related to policy diffusion. Our particular field experiments test whether there is a bias toward seeking out information on the policy experiences of local governments in one’s own country as opposed to governments outside of the country. The experimental evidence shows that local officials do not exhibit this bias. Further, they do not exhibit a bias against information about policies that have received an EU endorsement. Our results are a positive sign that nationalistic forces are not diminishing inter-country, policy diffusion within Europe, and our design provides a template for future experiments on policy diffusion.

Towards a Theory of Schooling for Good Life in Postcolonial Societies

Schools often aim at creating opportunities for good life and at promoting a good society. Liberal theorization on schooling is premised on a functioning liberal democracy with a capitalist economy. However, postcolonial societies are characterized by poverty and inequality, cultural diversity, and an ongoing project of state and nation building. This challenges some of the foundational assumptions of liberal conceptions of schooling aimed at promoting good life and good society in postcolonial societies. Realization of good life through schools is shaped both by shaping of ‘consciousness, identities, and desires’ [Bernstein (2000, Pedagogy, symbolic control, and identity: Theory, research, critique, Lanhan, MD: Rowman & Littlefield)] and through imparting knowledge and skills that help realize these desires in particular contexts. These schooling practices have different influences on opportunities for good life in short, medium, and long terms in these societies. A conceptual model of schooling that addresses these complexities is key to understanding the processes that influence the opportunities for a pursuit of good life through schooling in postcolonial societies. Such a model could draw upon the existing theories of liberal schooling but would have to adapt them to respond to the contexts of postcolonial societies.

The Bayh-Dole Act Revisited: The Impact of Intellectual Property Rights on Commercialization of University Research

One of the foundational assumptions of patent law is that imbuing inventions with intellectual property rights (IPR) is necessary to bring forth innovation. We test this foundational assumption by examining the impact of IPR on commercialization of university research. Using the full set of US public firms who patented and conducted research over the period 1976 to 2007, we find little evidence that university research protected by IPR had higher commercialization relative to university research in the public domain. Indeed, if anything, university research in the public domain appears to have slightly greater commercialization.

Posthuman Phenomenologies: Performance Philosophy, Non-Human Animals, and the Landscape

Western philosophical traditions have been haunted by an intellectualist thesis supported by two foundational assumptions: first, that humans can be defined in virtue of their minds, and second, that having a mind separates humans from non-human animals. Many phenomenologists have complicated this thesis, but there is nevertheless a tendency in phenomenology to remain fully within a human-centric research paradigm. This article will explore the possibilities of a posthuman phenomenology for unsettling this human-centeredness and suggest that certain forms of performance philosophy are the most effective methods for investigating this new terrain.

The Limits of Critique and the Affordances of Form: Literary Studies after the Hermeneutics of Suspicion

AbstractHow are we going to read literature in the future? What is the direction literary studies should take? The question has gained urgency in view of a growing dissatisfaction with the mode of reading that has dominated the field over the last decades, a method of critical unmasking that is based, in one way or another, on a hermeneutics of suspicion and its key premise of the all-determining power of an absent cause. Concepts like reparative reading, surface reading, distant reading, new formalism and postcritique signal a search for alternatives. This essay focuses on two books that have been especially influential in this search, Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015), seen by many as a wake-up call to move beyond a stifling routine of suspicious readings, and Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015), an original reconsideration of the matter of form and its possible political functions. Both of these books want to escape narratives of determination in which singularity and difference are lost, but both approach the challenge in strikingly different ways. Both tell stories of a liberation from determinations that are based on very different founding assumptions. This suggests to discuss them in the larger context of other narratives of liberation in literary studies, as this essay does in its conclusion.

A STUDY OF STUDENTS’ SENSE OF LEARNING COMMUNITY IN ONLINE ENVIRONMENTS

This paper looks first at some of the often unspoken epistemological, philosophical, and theoretical assumptions that are foundational to student-centered, interactive online pedagogical models. It is argued that these foundational assumptions point to the importance of learning community in the effectiveness of online learning environments. Next, a recent study of 2314 online students across thirty-two college campuses is presented. This study reports on learners’ sense of community and it is concluded through factor and regression analysis that elements of the Community of Inquiry model —specifically learners’ recognition of effective “directed facilitation” and effective instructional design and organization on the part of their instructor contributes to their sense of shared purpose, trust, connectedness, and learning—core elements of a community of learners. Gender also appears to play a small role in students’ sense of learning community with female students reporting higher levels than their male classmates. Implications for online learning environments design are discussed.

Modeling and Analytical Solution of Near-Field Entrainment in Suddenly Started Turbulent Jets

The evolution of the shear-layer flowfield of a round transient turbulent jet is analytically investigated within the near-field of the jet over which the velocity potential core decays. The model results are verified and expanded by performing a large-eddy simulation of the suddenly started jet. Unlike quasi-steady approaches, the present work aims at solving the momentum conservation while preserving the time-dependent term. The governing equation is integrated with a mixing-length model to account for the turbulent mixing in the shear layer. The solution is asymptotically applicable to the shear layer of the circular jet and excludes the head vortex mixing. A reasoned calibration of the model parameters for moderate Reynolds numbers results in acceptable agreement for the streamwise entrainment both with experimental data and with large-eddy simulations. The validity limit of the present model is examined by outlining the characteristic length of the velocity potential core as well as the restricting effects of the jet dynamics on the founding assumptions of the model. The study will be instrumental in developing a hot-jet ignition model in which the rate of mass entrainment into the jet influences the prediction of ignition based on the temperature and species distribution.

Linking Hypothesis and Number of Response Options Modulate Inferred Scalar Implicature Rate.

The past 15 years have seen increasing experimental investigations of core pragmatic questions in the ever more active and lively field of experimental pragmatics. Within experimental pragmatics, many of the core questions have relied on the operationalization of the theoretical notion of “implicature rate.” Implicature rate based results have informed the work on acquisition, online processing, and scalar diversity, inter alia. Implicature rate has typically been quantified as the proportion of “pragmatic” judgments in two-alternative forced choice truth value judgment tasks. Despite its theoretical importance, this linking hypothesis from implicature rate to behavioral responses has never been extensively tested. Here we show that two factors dramatically affect the “implicature rate” inferred from truth value judgment tasks: (a) the number of responses provided to participants; and (b) the linking hypothesis about what constitutes a “pragmatic” judgment. We argue that it is time for the field of experimental pragmatics to engage more seriously with its foundational assumptions about how theoretical notions map onto behaviorally measurable quantities, and present a sketch of an alternative linking hypothesis that derives behavior in truth value judgment tasks from probabilistic utterance expectations.

Perceptions on self-regulation and transaction friendliness relevant to smart contracting

PurposeThis paper aims to report on signs of public awareness and empowerment among the general public that are presumed to determine the viability of the smart contracting (SC) approach and identifies prevailing concerns regarding individual transactional experiences.Design/methodology/approachA mixed approach was followed to explore perceptions of self-regulation and transaction friendliness by using an interpretative multiple case study method and by presenting a descriptive summative analysis of the data.FindingsOn self-regulation, the study reveals spread awareness, empowerment, contractual competences and responsibility. Regarding transaction friendliness, subject matter influences transaction experiences the most, and trust and engagement are the most problematic factors. The findings support the viability of SC, endorsing the application of proactive perspectives in legal and managerial practice.Research limitations/implicationsThe study confirms the foundational assumptions of SC, identifies key transactional issues that should be further addressed to improve the functionality of digital trade environments and contributes to the consolidation of the legal design research field on transaction usability.Practical implicationsThe findings point to the viability of SC. Organizations and practitioners are given indications on transaction upgrade priorities and invited to adopt and help disseminate the proposal.Social implicationsThe expansion of a collaborative transactional culture can reduce legal disputes, improving the legal environment of business and strengthening private governance regulatory models.Originality/valueThis is the first empirical study on the viability conditions of the SC-approach, identifying transactional usability testing and intervention priorities.

Spatializing food: Signs, spaces, and the legal (dis-)composition of what we eat

Abstract What does it mean to spatialize food? Why combine such an analysis with law, or with signs and spaces? Leveraging Peircean-inspired legal semiotic theory, the spatialized nature of food will serve as a porthole through which a semiotic view of the spatial dimensions of legal experience can be discerned and elaborated. Specifically, case studies of the simultaneously material and immaterial aspects of food will support an analysis that seeks to open avenues of conceptualization regarding categories. The semiotic nature of both food and law will drive a discussion of the “dis-composition” of categories. Though such an effort may appear overly scholarly and far from pragmatic, exactly the opposite claim will be made. Case studies such as that of the “Meatball Wars” will illustrate in plain terms how subject position struggles for space cannot be adequately addressed within traditional disciplinary boundaries. The essay will conclude with a demonstration of how a “discomposing” semiotic approach has the potential to serve as a means of enabling conflict resolution on a broader scale. The overall investigation is motivated by the struggle within academia – seen across the humanities – to rethink traditional foundational assumptions and dichotomies. The argument seeks to ground itself in the interconnectedness increasingly advanced, joining scholars who insist on the importance of anthro-historical context, local particulars, and the impossibility of assuming an objective position that can coolly observe phenomena from “outside.”

Decolonising Indian classical dance? Projects of reform, classical to contemporary

ABSTRACTNow contained under the rubric ‘classical’, several dance practices in India underwent significant ‘reconstruction’ in the heyday of twentieth-century anti-colonial politics reliant upon the nationalist claim of a cohesive cultural identity. Such restoration of prestige to a supposedly denigrated cultural practice offered a positive ‘artistic’ counterpoint to alleviate nationalist anxieties regarding the purity of the nation and the uniqueness of its identity. Within a few decades of this nationalist reconstruction, Indian classical dance forms were regarded as emblematic of Indian culture and tradition. This article builds on important critiques of the nationalist reconstruction of Indian classical dance in India to examine how this project is enacted in the transnational present. It argues that both diasporic and non-diasporic (British) dancers uphold the foundational assumptions of the reconstructive Indian nationalist movement even as they are located within, and identify with, a very different national and political context, namely multicultural Britain.

Translator's Introduction: Jacques Rancière, "Autonomy and Historicism: The False Alternative"

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION: JACQUES RANCIÈRE, “AUTONOMY AND HISTORICISM: THE FALSE ALTERNATIVE” PATRICK NICKLESON A discipline . . . is not first of all the definition of a set of methods appropriate to a certain domain or a certain type of object. It is first the very constitution of this object as an object of thought, the demonstration of a certain idea of knowledge. —Jacques Rancière1 HE FRENCH PHILOSOPHER JACQUES RANCIÈRE has recently gained much notice in Anglo-American scholarship for bringing an egalitarian theory of politics and historiography to bear on the aesthetics of literature, poetry, film, sculpture, and painting. That Rancière has little to say about music has been noted in many sources.2 The rare essay on music historical literature translated below was written as a contribution to a 2003–04 seminar called Penser l’oeuvre musicale au XXe siècle: avec, sans ou contre histoire? at l’École Normale supérieure,3 organized by François Nicolas and Gilles Dulong. As such, many of Rancière’s lines of argument are specifically responses to the proceedings, and in T 326 Perspectives of New Music particular to Nicolas’s formalist insistence on an autonomous “world of music.”4 Because this contribution is atypical of Rancière’s writing, and it may be a first introduction to his thought for some readers, I offer a brief overview of his thought as a means of tying this essay into his broader writing. Rancière’s egalitarian philosophy is founded on a premise, as much political and pedagogic as methodological, that “the same intelligence is at work in all acts of the human mind.”5 From this foundational axiom he challenges what he calls “allegories of inequality”—between teacher and student, performer and listener, subject and object, even cause and effect.6 This has led to a particularly pointed critique of mastery and expertise, as well as the Althusserian scientism in which he was trained, which places the opening sentences of this essay—in which he confesses he is neither a musician nor a historian of music, and that the specific power of music has always evaded him—particularly pointed. While the reference to musicians and music literature found here distinguish “Autonomy and Historicism: The False Alternative” from his other writing, the essay also reveals close parallels to ideas presented elsewhere more prominently. Readers familiar with Aesthetics and Its Discontents will recognize an early version of his commentary on Adorno’s reading of Beethoven’s diminished-seventh chords, and the ideas presented here on artistic autonomy and heteronomy are more prominently laid out in articles like “The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes: Emplotments of Autonomy and Heteronomy.”7 While the latter article makes its case through reference to those whom Davide Panagia calls Rancière’s “writerly figures”—Mallarmé, Flaubert, Schelling, and so on8—here we find him referring to the Ars Nova, Bach, Rameau, the Second Viennese School, Lachenmann, and Sciarrino. Rancière is not introducing the reader to new work, new ideas, or new concepts in music; his approach is that of a philosopher of historiography , set out to “dissonate” our foundational assumptions about the teleological underpinnings of modernism in music and elsewhere.9 These musical figures shift the discussion of Rancière’s well-known regimes of art in light of the regimes of historicity that he borrows here from François Hartog,10 such that the representative regime is described as “the pairing of history-as-example and of history-as-agency” and the aesthetic regime as a form of history-as-coexistence. In this sense, it is a unique introduction to his often misinterpreted (or at least oversimplified ) ideas of the regimes of the arts, of interest to both Rancière scholars and newcomers. Further, in his opening discussion of Rameau’s Treatise, Socrates’s dreamed injunction to “make music,” and the relationships between the Conservatory classroom and the popular Translator’s Introduction: Autonomy and Historicism 327 radio audience, we get a clear sense of the broad method of equality through which Rancière’s thought comes into contact with a discipline like music—that is, in forming itself around the constitution of a particular...

Trans-modernism and a Legon tradition of African philosophy

Philosophic strands certainly underlie the characteristic claims of modernism, the creed whose foundational assumptions postmodern philosophy repudiates. This paper defends the thesis that three Ghanaian philosophers, who have been affiliated to the University of Ghana, Legon, have successfully created and defended a systematic and humanistic approach to philosophy in the African context that merits the status of a tradition of philosophy; and that these pioneers of a Legon tradition of philosophy espouse an eclectic, “trans-modernist” outlook that appropriates aspects of modernism and rejects some post-modernist features.

Quantum Discontents, or What Is Wrong with Our Science Practice

For more than eighty years, quantum theory (QT) has dominated physical science. This domination remains unchallenged to this day. Some physicists celebrate this remarkable stability. Others lament this fact and argue that QT inhibits our understanding of physical reality. They feel that numerous problems that have accumulated in physical science require stepping beyond the horizon outlined by QT. The article offers a critical examination of the foundational assumptions of QT that shape its practice. It uses two interpretations of QT as case studies—Copenhagen interpretation and the theoretical perspective advanced by American physicist David Bohm—to explain one major problem that continues to plague our study of physics. The article sketches a path to a possible solution and outlines a new science practice that this solution will require.

Bayesian updating to estimate extinction from sequential observation data

Several new approaches to estimating the probability that a species is extinct have emerged recently. Different foundational assumptions can lead to different interpretations of data and potentially to different conclusions. To explore the implications of alternative formulations, here we develop and illustrate a Bayesian Updating method for inferring extinction based on records of observations and surveys. We illustrate how it combines incidental sightings and surveys with a data set for the Alaotra Grebe, showing how estimates of extinction may be updated as new data arise, providing a means for managers to reassess priorities for survey and management dynamically.

Killing Kaplanism: Flawed methodologies, the standard of proof and modernity

Attempts to establish a quantitative framework for policy-making in the criminal justice system in recent decades have coalesced around the problem of the standard of proof and Kaplan’s influential 1968 paper. The central thread of work continues to use an equation he put forward while abandoning some of his foundational assumptions, an approach I call ‘Kaplanism’. Despite a growing awareness of deficiencies, elements of this school of thought, such as the parsing of concerns into the two categories of ‘error reduction’ and ‘error distribution’, have entered the general jurisprudential discourse. Here I launch a methodological attack and claim to kill this approach. This allows me to refute Laudan and other ‘consequentialist’ approaches to the standard identified by Walen, Walen’s own approach and an important part of Stein’s underpinnings. The same tools allow me to also refute Laudan’s earlier m/n meta-epistemology, Lippke’s ‘adage’, Stewart’s formalisation of Dworkin, Dahlman’s Bayesian work and (at least in criminal law) Kaplow’s law and economics approach. I also refute Hamer’s ‘conventional rationale’ for the current standard, Lillquist’s approach to the same and what Epps reports as ‘the Blackstone principle’. The law is left with no epistemic basis for policies, which, I argue, leaves it struggling for public trust in the modern era.

Cryptography, Capitalism, and National Security

I call into question a line of thinking about the societal consequences of distributed network architectures. Empirically, this work centers its explanation on aberrant historical conditions, most notably the early Arpanet-centered Internet. Conceptually, despite an effort to identify a new order, it replicates foundational assumptions of exchange in (classical) markets. Drawing on recent talks and my upcoming book, I argue that metaphors (better yet, theories) for understanding network-based societies must incorporate cryptography and either celebrate or transcend neo-Smithian foundations.

Understanding New Era Workplace Relationships: Insights From Employee Engagement Research

In their focal article, Chernyak-Hai and Rabenu (2018) argue that the foundational assumptions of social exchange theory (SET) should be revisited and revised because of recent changes in the workplace and the workforce. Using employee engagement data from recent research projects conducted in applied settings, we investigated a series of questions based on Chernyak-Hai and Rabenu's working hypotheses.