Holistic Transformation Research Articles

Trust after the Global Financial Meltdown

Over the last decade, and culminating in the 2008 global financial meltdown, there has been an erosion of trust and a concomitant rise of distrust in domestic companies, multinational enterprises, and political economies. In response to this attrition, this article presents three arguments. First, we suggest that trust is the “glue” of any viable political economy, and we propose that the stakes of violating public trust are particularly high in light of the asymmetry between trust and distrust. Second, we identify a constellation of key barriers to overcoming distrust that companies face in the current environment: (1) corporate mind‐sets that promote a preoccupation with quantification, hierarchical leadership models, and “blind trust” in authority; (2) the anonymity of core stakeholders; (3) the agency of the media as a driver of the political economy; and (4) firm‐centric models of stakeholder relationships. Third, we argue that, notwithstanding these challenges, these phenomena are not fatal and can be addressed through a holistic transformation in corporate culture. Such a transformation might include a shift to collaborative leadership models and replacing authority models with responsibility, a “names and faces” approach to stakeholders through cases and stories, more egalitarian communication exchanges with external stakeholders, and a reprioritization of the firm as a vital element among others within a system rather than the central core of a network. We conclude that the value of trust at the individual, institutional, national, and global levels cannot be overstated. Without a reinvigoration of trust in our political economies, at all levels, the future of an economically vibrant planet is indeed bleak.

Scrutinizing the Explicit, the Implicit and the Unsustainable: A Model for Holistic Transformation of a Course for Sustainability

Scrutinizing the Explicit, the Implicit and the Unsustainable: A Model for Holistic Transformation of a Course for SustainabilityThe purpose of this qualitative case study is to describe the development and implementation of a model for course redevelopment for education for sustainable development (ESD). The theoretical approaches to curriculum development of Ralph Tyler (1949) and Elliot Eisner (2002) were influential in the development of the model. The Tyler Rationale (Tyler, 1949) provided general scaffolding for the process and was particularly useful for the development of learning outcomes, while the philosophy of Eisner (2002), complementary to the tenets of ESD, was instrumental in designing classroom experiences to deliver the learning outcomes. Importantly, the model provides a way to empower the individual educator to integrate ESD at the course level as well as a useful mechanism to ensure the holistic application of ESD, aligning sustainability with the predilections of any discipline. This paper demonstrates the use of the model to redevelop an apparel product development course, reframing it for sustainability and sustainable development. The new course was piloted and has now been offered twice since its inception, resulting in a positive students' learning experience.

ROADS TO RECONCILIATION: AN EMERGING PARADIGM OF AFRICAN THEOLOGY

AbstractThe heart of contemporary African Christian theology is the notion of “reconciliation.” Contextualizing this movement, the article begins by surveying the three major theological paradigms—inculturation, liberation, and reconstruction—that shaped post‐colonial African theology. Drawing on the writings of Desmond Tutu, John Rucyahana and Emmanuel Katongole and three grassroots reconciliation ministries, I delineate four principles of African reconciliation theology: interdependence, prophetic advocacy, holistic transformation, and alternative Christian community. The article concludes by addressing outstanding challenges of memory, justice, brokenness, and pluralism and considers how the Catholic sacrament of reconciliation could offer further theological resources for the emerging paradigm.

Obstacles to Holistic Transformation in a Blended-Delivery Program

Obstacles to Holistic Transformation in a Blended-Delivery Program

The Language of Change: Finding Words to Define Culture Change in Long-Term Care

Many senior living organizations are working to transform their institutional character into home and community. This undertaking amounts to a virtual cultural shift, known in the industry as culture change. Culture change is receiving growing popularity in the senior living industry; however the majority of organizations have yet to begin tackling this transformation. One of the contributions to this hesitancy may be that no universal explicit definition of culture change is accepted within the industry. This article, based on an extensive literature review, examines the current definitions within the culture change literature and proposes a new definition that may be helpful in understanding and undertaking this challenging holistic transformation.

An Investigation of Blended Course Design for Holistic Transformation

An Investigation of Blended Course Design for Holistic Transformation

An Investigation of Blended Course Design for Holistic Transformation

An Investigation of Blended Course Design for Holistic Transformation

Globalization and Migratory Processes in the Socio-reli-gious, Economic and Political Context of the Malay Muslims of Malaysia

Globalization in Malaysia has introduced the Malay Muslim population to new ethno- religious dynamics at the urban-to-urban level internationally and rural-to-urban sphere nationally. At the international level, Malay Muslims who studied abroad have returned with alternate conceptions of Islam at odds with the local version as well as fostered transnational links to outsiders that later facilitated their religious influence locally. At the national level, Malay Muslim migration to an urban economy opened to global capitalism have produced reactionary discourses and attitudes by conservative Muslims desirous of countering the excesses of this economic reality. Implications for a Christian holistic transformation in light of these dynamics are proposed.

Constitutionalism, Economic Transformation and Europeanisation: the Case of Hungary

This article attempts to apply a constitutional political economy approach to a subject that has rarely if ever been analysed from this perspective. While the systemic change following the collapse of the Soviet Empire has provided social scientists with the opportunity to refer to constructivist insights on the holistic transformation of the social order, the application of related theories has been meagre. The following analysis presents an outline of how constitutional development influenced economic change in one of the new EU member states during the past two decades, and formulates suggestions on how insights from the above line of thought might be operationalised to improve the given institutions and policies.

Prophet of Dub: Dub as a heuristic for Theological Reflection

This essay is a theological reflection on the reggae concept and practice of ‘dub’. Dub is a form of deconstruction and reconstruction for the sake of embellishment. Under Rasta hegemony, dub is associated with a coded politicized genre geared towards Black conciousness and Black liberation. ‘Dubbing’ can, on one level, be read as a process of transformation. The concept of dub is challenged and reworked by comparing its trajectory with Jesus’ encounter with women in St John. Through this comparison, dub is restructured so as to offer a more holistic transformation consistent with the liberating message of the gospel. Finally, this transformed understanding is offered as a new way of doing theology amongst Black Pentecostals that is critical, engaged, situated and contemporaneous with the existential concerns of working class and working poor Black British.

Prophet of Dub: Dub as a Heuristic for Theological Reflection

This essay is a theological reflection on the reggae concept and practice of ‘dub’. Dub is a form of deconstruction and reconstruction for the sake of embellishment. Under Rasta hegemony, dub is associated with a coded politicized genre geared towards Black conciousness and Black liberation. ‘Dubbing’ can, on one level, be read as a process of transformation. The concept of dub is challenged and reworked by comparing its trajectory with Jesus’ encounter with women in St John. Through this comparison, dub is restructured so as to offer a more holistic transformation consistent with the liberating message of the gospel. Finally, this transformed understanding is offered as a new way of doing theology amongst Black Pentecostals that is critical, engaged, situated and contemporaneous with the existential concerns of working class and working poor Black British.

Learning the systematic transformation of holographic reduced representations

Holographic Reduced Representation is a representational scheme which allows for the representation of variable-sized structures in a distributed manner. It has been shown that these compositional structures can be transformed holistically. However, in order to do so, the transformation vector was constructed by hand. In this paper we present two methods of learning the holistic transformation of Holographic Reduced Representations from examples. We show that the acquired knowledge can be generalised to structures containing unseen elements and to structures more complex than the training examples. These generalisations require a degree of systematicity which to our knowledge has not yet been achieved by other comparable methods.

Mental rotation of random lined figures

The present study investigated the possible occurrence of mental rotation in judgments of whether pairs of line figures were identical. The feasibility of two discrete cognitive explanations based on holistic transformation and on feature computation was examined with varied levels of complexity controlled by the numbers of lines in a figure. In the experiment, participants were required to judge whether simultaneously presented pairs of figures were the same or different. When the participants' data were collapsed for regression analyses, evidence for mental rotation was not detected at any level of complexity, but reanalysis of the data revealed that some participants employed mental rotation in the cognition of complex figures. A monotonous increase in reaction times as a function of the number of lines was evident in identical pairs of figures but not in nonidentical pairs. It is argued that the feature computation explanation would better account for these results than would the holistic transformation explanation.