Intellectual Failure Research Articles

Awesome Epic Fail: A Journey Through Various Paradigms and How to Begin Fixing the Mess Left Behind

A poem may seem an unusual response to the problematique that David Westbrook set out for this World Economics Association Conference ‘Rethinking Financial Markets’ but it seemed to me an epic failure and the epic task of renewal needed an epic-ish interdisciplinary response. In June 2012 I met David at a conference in London. I had given a paper on the bank failure in the UK and its consequences. David had been struck by how different the cultural expectations of Europeans were from Americans in terms of the European expectation that corporations and banks particularly, should behave responsibly. He invited me to consider the problematique for this Conference and respond if I wished. Problem was, I had lots to say about most of it and I was also puzzling out what has formed my European perspective on the crisis. This poem was the result of that puzzling and thinking about the problematique. Careful what you wish for as they say.The recurring theme of the poem is Keynes’s 1930 work ‘The Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.’ Keynes wife Lydia became pregnant and miscarried in 1927 and the event had a profound effect on Keynes’s work in terms of his consideration of the intergenerational future. The outcome was ‘The Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’ a hopeful text projecting a technological and social revolution for generations to come. Leisure was to be the future and it carried with it responsibility and danger. The danger being civil dissention and consumerism.This was the dominant paradigm of my early education. We were being prepared to be the modest and civically responsible leisure generation. Somehow it didn’t work out that way. In terms of what it means for the Conference the poem has a conceptual starting point drawn from the problematique that ‘the emergence of fresh thinking tends to be hampered by more or less subtle anachronisms, patterns of thought that hardly describe the world and so obstruct the achievement of collective intentions.’The poem is about how Keynes’s and other paradigms didn’t work out. In essence it’s a story of market and intellectual failure combined with civic and consumerist environmental degradation. Keynes hope for his imagined grandchildren did not come to fruition but he was right in identifying the dangers. They still lie at the heart of the issue in my view. Rethinking financial markets lies deeply in the shadow of our dysfunctional relationship with the State and Consumerism. If the Occupy movement teaches us anything it teaches us that the financial crisis is strongly connected to degraded civic institutions and rampant consumerism. Where else can you go now to effectively dissent but the streets? Rethinking financial markets hinges in my view on collective and individual civic renewal as does turning around our damaging consumer culture. Unless we get that right we will remain in a doom loop repeating our mistakes again and again.The poem itself is in the classical oral, particularly Gaelic, tradition so it’s meant to be said aloud. It contains what I think are predominantly Western and Irish (like Popeye ‘I yam what I yam’) but generally accessible references to economics, law, history, literature, TV and sports. The only genuinely obscure reference is to the Canadian ice hockey player Wayne Gretsky and for that you will have to find a Canadian and ask them. Otherwise respond as you feel appropriate.

In search of limits: Raymond Aron on ‘secular religion’ and communism

Beginning in the 1940s, Raymond Aron used the concept of ‘secular religion’ to condemn communism. This article traces the history of ‘secular religion’ within his writings. Aron’s earliest critique of communism, in his doctoral thesis of 1938, entitled Introduction to the Philosophy of History , was philosophically powerful yet did not rely on ‘secular religion.’ The concept first emerged in his wartime writings; it then became central in his famous book The Opium of the Intellectuals (1955). The ambiguities of the concept of ‘secular religion’ are discussed in this article. On the whole, the idea of ‘secular religion’ appears to be a weak spot within the corpus of a thinker who was usually very precise in defining his concepts. The article suggests that Aron is a case study in the failure of many Cold War intellectuals to wrestle productively with the concept of religion.

Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs Walter Benjamin Benjamin Handbuch. Leben-Werk-Wirkung

AbstractWe are used to classifying different thinkers according to their general orientation: progressive or conservative, revolutionary or nostalgic of the past, materialist or idealist. Walter Benjamin does not fit into these categories. He is a revolutionary critic of the ideologies of progress, a materialist theologian, and his nostalgia for the past is at the service of his Marxist dreams for the future. It is therefore not surprising that so many different and conflicting readings of his work have developed since his death, some trying to bring him back into the usual frames of thinking, others trying to recruit him for the newest philosophical fads, and many simply damning him as ridden with contradictions and therefore an intellectual failure. But there are also some happy exceptions: those who try to take into account the irreducible singularity of his intellectual and political endeavours. These three books, quite different in object and method ‐ a collection of documents from his archives, a biography, and a ‘Benjamin Handbook’ ‐ belong to these exceptions.

Why the Credit Crunch Is Good for Emerging Markets

Intellectual failures in economics and finance informed the policy and investor decisions that led to the credit crisis, but emerging markets are positioned to play a pivotal role in rebalancing foreign exchange reserves, realigning currencies, exporting inflation to the developed world, and producing the demand needed for global growth to resume.

Alberto Guerrier Ramos: the "in-betweener" as intellectual bridge builder?

At the end of a long career Alberto Guerreiro Ramos sought a reconceptualization of the science of organizations that recognized non-economic dimensions of human associated life. His efforts fell short, and we will argue that this was because his influence outside Brazil has been fairly minor. This is not, however, due to any intellectual failure on his part rather, in the North America where Alberto Guerreiro Ramos did what he thought was his most important work, the intellectual milieu was both paradigmatically narrow and culturally insular.

Introduction: A Post‐crisis Critical Reflection on Business Schools

Every cloud has a silver lining. There could be nomore opportune a time to reflect critically onbusiness schools and the education they (we)profess to provide. It is not clear that LordTurner, Chairman of the UK Financial ServicesAuthority, was directly blaming business schoolswhen he argued that prior to the crisis there hadbeen ‘a fundamental intellectual failure’, but hewas convinced that the business model thatfinance capital had created was suspect and thereis no question of an influential role for financeeconomics (BBC 1, 2009). This took the form ofprincipal–agency theorists advocating cash bo-nuses and stock options to motivate managers tofulfil their obligations to concentrate on improv-ing shareholder value. In the context of theneoliberal economic consensus that swept bothdeveloped and developing economies in the late1990s and early 2000s, this business model was arecipe for disaster, as has proven to be the case.Moreover, we are still awaiting the ‘new economicphilosophy’ that Gordon Brown was sure wouldreplace the ‘unbridled free market dogma, whichhad been discredited by the financial crisis’ (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1103662/Well-rise-challenges-year-says-Gordon-Brown.html,consulted 25 March 2009). When The Economist(2009), hardly an organ of Marxist critique, turnson business schools – ‘[t]his has been a year ofsackcloth and ashes for the world’s businessschools’ – and lambasts them for their myopia,their lack of science and their lack of ‘scepticismand cynicism’, something is clearly not right.This special issue was conceived before theeconomic crisis broke but we feel it is even moretimely now than before. Its title – Making theBusiness School More ‘Critical’ – deliberately uses‘critical’ in a broad sense, rather than thenarrower sense characterized by ‘critical manage-ment studies’ (CMS). Given that the businessschool is complicit in the current financial crisis,we feel a degree of discomfort with the anti-performative emphasis of some CMS literature(Fournier and Grey, 2000). Instead, whilstremaining critical and reflexive about our prac-tice, we feel obliged to offer some way forward.With this in mind, we selected papers that areoriented towards how we might improve matters,rather than those that merely offer a critique ofbusiness school activity. We hope we can thushelp business schools, deans and faculty, and theusers of business schools (students, clients),become more reflexive in considering how torespond to economic events that may prove atipping point in what the world expects ofbusiness schools and, indeed, business.One of the many interesting aspects of ourcurrent financial crisis is the mirror it holds up tobusiness school practice. While we wait to seehow the economic crisis unfolds, it is beholden onus to reflect more deeply and critically on thepurpose and content of business school educa-tion. Many business schools, including Harvard,are looking critically at what they teach in thelight of the crisis with calls, for example, forMBAs to sign the equivalent of the medicalprofession’s Hippocratic Oath. It is an incon-venient truth that many of those implicated inthe disasters that have beset Wall Street andthe world’s other financial centres are MBABritish Journal of Management, Vol. 21, S1–S5 (2010)DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2009.00677.x

Augusto Fauni Espiritu . Five Faces of Exile: The Nation and Filipino American Intellectuals.(Asian America.)Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press . 2005 . Pp. xix, 312. Cloth $65.00, paper $25.95.

The title of Augusto Fauni Espiritu's book, which echoes the title of Matei CĂlinescu's Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (1987), invites us to examine the five Philippine writers featured in this work as representative of different approaches to the historical transformation of the Philippines from a U.S. commonwealth to a postcolonial national republic in the middle decades of the twentieth century; even as it draws our attention to the concomitant emergence of Filipino Americans as an ethnic minority within the United States. As Espiritu demonstrates, each of the writers he studies was compelled to resist, disavow, manipulate, or adapt to the individual and collective experiences of displacement, insecurity, and perpetual transience, which derived from the colonial legacy for most Filipinos in the Philippines and those living abroad. Of course, these experiences became a central preoccupation and object of reflection in their work. In the author's words, “[T]he sense of deracination, displacement, and doubleness that characterizes [the writers'] transnational intellectual discourse derives … from the ironic failure of expatriate intellectuals to come home or feel at home, whether as a result of their rejection by the nation-state, or by their compatriots, or of their inability to meet the demands of ethnic community, kin, or nation” (p. 189).

The risk management of nothing

This essay challenges core elements of enterprise risk management (ERM) and suggests that an impoverished conception of ‘risk appetite’ is part of the ‘intellectual failure’ at the heart of the financial crisis. Regulators, senior management and boards must understand risk appetite more as the consequence of a dynamic organizational process involving values as much as metrics. In addition, ERM has operated as a boundary preserving model of risk management subject to the ‘logic of the audit trail’, rather than a boundary challenging practice which confronts and addresses the complex realities of interconnectedness. The security provided by ERM is at best limited to certain states of the world and at worst it is illusory – the risk management of nothing. In contrast, Business continuity management (BCM) may provide clues about how risk management might be reconstructed.

Fundamentalist Atheism and its Intellectual Failures

A new breed of atheism has emerged which seeks to obliterate religion: fundamentalist atheism. Differing from more mainstream atheism, fundamentalist atheism has been fueled by a rise in the power of the Religious Right in the United States, codified with the election of George Bush and his subsequent support for various government sponsored religious initiatives and the proliferation of violent organizations which often identify with a particular religious sect. In addition to seeking to bolster secularism, particularly principles of separation of church and state, appreciation of scientific truth, and respect for fundamental human rights, fundamentalist atheists have grown to perceive religion as a fundamental threat to civilization. In this paper I document fundamentalist atheism's salient characteristics, specifically its tendency to narrowly define and stereotype religion in order to bolster its claim that religion is civilization's greatest threat. I make the argument that, because its apocalyptical view of religion is based on faulty reasoning, fundamentalist atheism, although a response to fundamentalist religion, constitutes a dangerous intellectual failure within the ranks of atheism. Indeed, fundamentalist atheism results in an illogically-founded fanaticism that pits itself against pluralism and tolerance.

Developing Preventive Therapies for Chronic Diseases: Lessons Learned from Alzheimer's Disease

A remarkable rise in life expectancy during the past century has made Alzheimer's disease (AD) the most common form of progressive intellectual failure in humans. Patients with AD lose their most human qualities-reasoning, abstraction, language, and memory. The brain plaques that Alois Alzheimer first described 100 years ago have inspired the search for genetic alterations that underlie AD. Four genes have been unequivocally implicated to date in inherited forms of AD, where mutations or natural variations in these genes cause excessive accumulation of the amyloid beta-protein, the building block of amyloid plaques. This aggregation leads to subsequent neuronal degeneration in brain regions important for memory and cognition. The discovery of the genes involved in the mechanisms of amyloid beta-protein build-up in AD, coupled with cell culture and animal models of their involved pathways, has led to the development of specific pharmacological strategies to lower amyloid beta-protein levels as a way of treating or preventing all forms of the disease. While hard work lies ahead, the movement from basic research to the clinic in AD represents a triumph of reductionist biology applied to the most complex of all biological systems, the human cerebral cortex.

The Past Is Another Culture

This article addresses two questions relating to the modern Western treatment of contemporaries as belonging to the past; how has Western social thought come to treat belonging to the past as a bad thing, that is, as a kind of moral and intellectual failure; and how has it learned to assign some of our contemporaries to the world of the past. My response to the first question is in two parts. One examines the conventional modern division between past and present. The other considers the effects of Western social thought's equally conventional developmental understanding of humanity. In the section that separates these two discussions, I suggest that the answer to the question of how have we learned to assign some of our contemporaries to the past is to be found in the early history of modern imperialism.

Primary Ovarian Failure and Deletions of the Long Arm of Chromosome 3

A 14 year-old girl was found to have a deletion of the distal segment of chromosome 3 [46,XX,Del(3)(q28-29)]. The main features of this presentation were mild intellectual disability, facial dysmorphism, short stature, kypho-scoliosis, and primary ovarian failure, an association that has not been described before in association with chromosome 3 deletion. The phenotype and presentation are compared with those of previous case reports.

An editorial for the HIV infected: immune regulation. The implications for treatment of HIV infection and the potential role of T cell suppressor pathways instead of apopstasis, anergy or direct CD4 T cell deletion in AIDS pathogenesis

The AIDS crises makes for an interesting study of the interactions of activists, researchers, caregivers, the press, politicians and other groups in society. In the popular press and elsewhere there has been a growing movement since the inception of the disease to place efforts against AIDS as the highest standard of our benevolence, proficiency and determination when confronting a disease. Because of the potential benefit in understanding the interactions of groups and how research progressed and failed during the AIDS crises, differing perspectives should be recorded on this matter. The person currently in most need of an objective viewpoint on AIDS research, including an outlook on the past, as well as the present and future, is the person who is infected with HIV. While many of the AIDS related bureaucracies, scientists and celebrities have achieved consecration in the fight against HIV, a question arises whether this praise is deserved and really due to their keeping the AIDS patient as the first matter of the heart and mind; or whether they have merely achieved what bureaucracies and celebrity are best at, making society and those they should serve, think that they cannot do with out them. The following editorial chronicles a scandalous intellectual failure of immunologists in the fight against HIV. It delineates potential areas of concern for the HIV infected patient in the present and future, which may be important directions in the fight against HIV, both for treatment to evolve to the ideal and for an economically viable treatment for the Third World.

Renewing socialism: democracy, strategy, and imagination

Renewing Socialism opens with an exploration of the contemporary meaning of revolution and reform, beginning by stressing the appropriation of both terms into the rhetoric of the political right. Panitch examines the failure to realize socialisms revolutionary promise through an analysis of social democratic parties and the politics of compromise they advanced and their loss of radical vocation today. Panitch turns to an examination of the limitations of the Communist regimes and offers an account, based on personal observations in 1990, of the demise of Communism in Russia. The failure of Radical intellectuals in the West failed to take sufficient responsibility for the improvement of Marxist political theory, and especially of its theory of the state in any transition to socialism. Indeed, one of the greater ironies of the socialist experience is that the remarkable relevance of the Manifesto for developing an agenda for the renewal of socialism in our own time really became clear after the demise the Communist regimes. Panitch argues the salience of class will have to be brought more centrally back into the analysis and strategy of the left. The capacities of working people, so stunted under capitalism, must be allowed to develop to the furthest extent possible through their own organizations that incorporate both the diversity and issues represented by the new social movements. The first the challenge before any process of socialist renewal is that of getting people to think ambitiously once again. This ambition means not abandoning Marxism, but rather reviving what Bloch called its visionary warm stream alongside the cold stream of political economy. It means adding a new layer to Marxist theory to help socialists appreciate that we need to figure out how to foster the accumulation of capacities in addition to analyzing the accumulation of capital.

Do others judge us as harshly as we think? Overestimating the impact of our failures, shortcomings, and mishaps.

When people suffer an embarrassing blunder, social mishap, or public failure, they often feel that their image has been severely tarnished in the eyes of others. Four studies demonstrate that these fears are commonly exaggerated. Actors who imagined committing one of several social blunders (Study 1), who experienced a public intellectual failure (Studies 2 and 3), or who were described in an embarrassing way (Study 4) anticipated being judged more harshly by others than they actually were. These exaggerated fears were produced, in part, by the actors' tendency to be inordinately focused on their misfortunes and by their resulting failure to consider the wider range of situational factors that tend to moderate onlookers' impressions. Discussion focuses on additional mechanisms that may contribute to overly pessimistic expectations as well as the role of such expectations in producing unnecessary social anxiety.

The End(s) of African American Studies

Whether or not one is inclined to credit Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s apologia pro vita sua, the familiarity of the question and the plausibility of his response point up what has become a common way of understanding at least one facet of black-white racial inequality in the US. In this view, many of those social ills commonly tracked by racial classification (e.g., numbers of families living below the poverty line, numbers of births among unwed teenage mothers, rates of incarceration, rates of infant mortality, etc.) persist largely because of the failure of black leaders and intellectuals to fulfill their moral, political, and cultural responsibilities to the racial group as a whole. black middle classes-and the intelligentsia that they have produced-stand accused of pursuing their own selfish ends and thereby shirking their world historical mission. As Harold Cruse acerbically put the case in 1967, The middle classes of Harlem that furnish community leadership are neither sovereign nor solvent; neither independent nor autonomous. They thrive on the crumbs granted them by the power structure for keeping the unruly masses mollified (90). And having settled for crumbs, these purported leaders presumably have nothing to disburse to the impoverished black classes below them. Critiques of this sort generally remark on growing class divisions within the nation's black population, often blaming the black middle class for its own estrangement from those traditions

Remembering, Forgetting and Inventing: Attitudes to the Past in England at the End of the First Viking Age

‘Remember’, King Alfred wrote to his bishops, sending them a copy of the translation he had made of Pope Gregory the Great'sCura pastoralis, ‘remember what punishments befell us in this world when we ourselves did not cherish learning nor transmit it to other men’. To remedy the twofold disaster consequent on this intellectual and pedagogic failure – not just the ransacking of the churches throughout England and loss of their treasures and books, but, worse, the loss to the English of the wisdom the books had preserved – King Alfred arranged to have the young men among his subjects taught to read in the vernacular. Set-texts for this programme were to be supplied by the translating of ‘certain books which are the most necessary for all men to know’. Among these was Boethius’Consolation of Philosophy, generally thought to have been translated by the king himself and to include some of Alfred's own musings. Towards the end of his text in the context of a discussion of the nature of God, eternity and the place of humanity in the divine plan, Alfred had Wisdom declare: ‘we can know very little concerning what was before our time, except through memory and inquiry, and even less concerning what comes after us. Only one thing is certainly present to us, namely that which now exists. But to God all is present, what was before, what is now, and what shall be after us. The central point at issue here is the disjunction between what an omniscient deity and frail humanity can know of the past, but it usefully introduces this discussion by linking the process of obtaining information about the past with that of personal memory.

Simultaneous occurrence of various mutations and polymorphisms in cis and in trans of the galactose-1-phosphate uridyltransferase gene in a Turkish family with classical galactosemia.

Classical galactosemia, characterized clinically by acute hepatic dysfunction, sepsis, cataract, and failure to thrive, is caused by deficiency of galactose-1-phosphate uridyltransferase (GALT). Galactose restriction normalizes these acute symptoms; however, long-term complications such as intellectual deficits and ovarian failure are conspicuous in the majority of patients. Here we report two Turkish siblings with classical galactosemia. The clinical course of the two children differed markedly: only the older girl suffered from severe acute symptoms during the neonatal period, and she developed greater mental retardation than her younger affected brother. The functional activity of GALT was virtually absent in each affected children. The mother and two healthy siblings exhibited approximately 50% normal GALT activity and the father approximately 25%. Molecular analysis revealed that these two galactosemic siblings were homozygous for a stop codon mutation of E340X in GALT exon 10. Moreover, two additional mutations, a neutral polymorphism L218L and N314D, which are typical for the Duarte-I variant, were found in the same GALT allele. The two healthy siblings and the parents were heterozygous for these combinations of mutations. In addition, the father's second GALT allele revealed three intron mutations at nucleotide position 1105 (G-->C), 1323 (G-->A) and 1391 (G-->A) and the N314D mutation, which correspond to the mutations of Duarte-2 variant. Our findings indicate that in classical galactosemia several distinct mutations can be present in one allele (in cis) of the GALT gene. Therefore it seems to be necessary to examine all introns and exons of the GALT gene in galactosemic patients who do not carry the Q188R mutation or another frequent mutation in the GALT gene.

Contextualizing Violence in a Participatory Classroom

Techniques for integrating race, class, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, and other categories of socially defined identity in a student-centered participatory classroom are outlined for a survey course on women and violence. Keeping categories of socially defined identity central to every course component changes not only the content of the course, but also the questions asked and the range of possible answers. Students were given two tools with which to analyze each topic: theoretical frameworks (psychology, sociology, feminism) and the categories of socially defined identity. Difficulties with the material are interpreted as signposts of the complexity of the theoretical issues involved rather than as intellectual failures of the students or the instructor. An open and participatory classroom climate facilitates dealing with the stresses of this topic as well as with the ambiguities faced by students exploring the multidimensional space of socially defined identities.

Research in Religion and Mass Political Behavior in the United States

This article attempts to assess the extent of "scientific progress" in the study of religion and political behavior in the United States. Using three models of scientific enterprise, I find that the empirical study of religion and politics has been quite successful in an inductive, cumulative sense and has been moderately successful in providing interpretive, verstehen explanations as well. In general, research in religion and politics has not produced much in the way of "covering laws," "paradigms," or "research programs," in which religious variables are central theoretical concepts. Rather, explanations using religious phenomena are typically special cases of more general theoretical perspectives. I suggest that the last characterization does not reflect intellectual failure on the part of researchers; rather, the phenomena of religious politics appears essentially decentralized, and our best theories of religious behavior help account for the lack of parsimonious explanations in this area.