Pursuit Of Advantage Research Articles

A fundamental re-conceputalization of intelligence: cognitive activity and the pursuit of advantage

ABSTRACT This paper argues that human intelligence is the fundamental form of intelligence, and that cognitive activity is the premier component of the intelligence process. As practiced in the national security paradigm, intelligence is essentially humankind’s attempt to replicate human intelligence in purposeful social groups. Further analysis suggests that the pursuit of advantage is the central focus of true intelligence. Accordingly, a new universal definition defines intelligence as the capacity for reasoned foresight that enables advantageous action. The traditional cycle is subsequently re-conceptualized as a cognition-centric Intelligence Enterprise Model (IEM) that provides a more useful framework for future intelligence enterprise development.

Dilemmas around the Energy Transition in the Perspective of Peter Blau’s Social Exchange Theory

The aim of the article is to present the complexity of social mechanisms related to the systemic energy transformation from the perspective of the classical social exchange theory. Considering the direction of actions taken to reduce carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere as obvious, the author of the article analyses the issue through the prism of social and economic dilemmas of the process, focusing on the mechanisms of energy transition in relation to Peter Blau’s exchange theory. The dilemmas of the systemic energy transition are presented in relation to the diverse games of interest that mark the social playing field around the analysed issue. The article outlines the social playing field of energy transition using the example of an economically strong country seeking to strengthen its position and a developing country interested in gaining energy independence. The analysis of the systemic conditions and the political activities carried out made it possible to define possible strategies of action for both countries with reference to the constitutive conditions of power defined by Peter Blau. Contrary to programme declarations of a “just transition”, the analysis made it possible to define the privileged position of economically powerful players and to point to the mechanisms blocking the implementation of the strategy of a developing country. Reference to the classical exchange theory, on the other hand, made it possible to identify the mechanisms indicating the presence in the energy transformation project of both overt and covert projects related to the pursuit of advantage in influencing the shape of the global energy economy.

THE THEORETICAL AND EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF THE RELATIONS BETWEEN HUBRISTIC MOTIVATION AND EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE AT ELDERLY PEOPLE

The article presents the study results concerning the relations between elder people’s hubristic motivation and emotional intelligence. This age group was chosen by us because it is little studied and elderly people are vulnerable in the modern conditions. The concept of hubristic motivation and its main forms - the pursuit of perfection and the pursuit of advantage - are analyzed. The views of classical psychologists on the pursuit of self-affirmation and achievement of perfection are presented. The recent studies of emotional intelligence, its structural elements - the ability to understand and control emotions, empathy - and the role they play in human life are analyzed. The performed theoretical analysis show that aspiration for realization of hubristic needs to perfection and advantage in old age is both natural and important personal desire as it provides consolidation of self-assessment and stabilization of well-being of this vulnerable age group. The results of the performed empirical study indicate the statistically significant correlations between emotional intelligence and the aspiration for perfection as a form of hubristic motivation manifestation at elderly people, which suggests an important impact that emotions have for consolidation of self-esteem and self-realization. Based on the study results, we can talk about the importance of emotional intelligence developing for people who wish to achieve perfection and increase their self-esteem. At the same time, self-improvement requires of a person to develop empathy, the ability to understand the emotions of others and control them. A person who wishes to achieve perfection by working on his/her talents begins to develop the ability to understand the nature of emotions and features of their manifestation; empathizes with others; predicts the further emotional reaction of those around his/her. The results suggest existence of complex relations between these phenomena and an important role of emotional intelligence and hubristic motivation in people lives. The development of these two phenomena will provide a person with the ability to show their skills and self-assert in society.

Three Texts and the Moral Economy of Race in South Africa, c.1890–1910

In the years since the Second World War, most attempts at explaining manifestations of racism have hinged on the trope of displacement intrinsic to the concept of “ideology.” What is posited is a historical process in which social groups rationalize their pursuit of advantage by displacing it onto contiguous, justificatory discourses. While gesturing towards the origins of racism in pre-modern, rigidly stratified forms of social organization, such a narrative emphasizes the modernity of the phenomenon as it is generally understood today by construing it as a product of the competition for advantage – power, status, authority, material well-being – in a (world) system which is based on such competition, capitalism.

Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution (review)

Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution. By Michal Jan Rozbicki. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011). Pp. 304. Cloth, $35.00.)Reviewed by Sarah KnottLiberty is a social relation and, as such, signifies an asymmetry of social conditions. This is the well-known insight of sociologist and cultural critic Zygmunt Bauman. Armed with an organic and hierarchical view of society, early moderns also knew this. Inequality did not just precede ideas about freedom; it was the very basis of eighteenth-century notions of liberty. The coexistence of inequality and freedom, and the insight that liberty is inherently a privilege that comes at the expense of others, challenges fond beliefs in universal human rights.In Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution, Michal Jan Rozbicki seeks to apply the understandings of Bauman, and of eighteenth-century commentators, to the American Revolution. Historiography has been hampered, he suggests, by importing purist notions of liberty into a premodern past. Elite-centered and hagiographie accounts of the Revolution, such as those of Gordon Wood, just like the people-centered and prosecutorial (231) accounts of Gary Nash and Howard Zinn, presume that modern liberty was foundational. AU have followed too naively the universalist intonations of all men are created equal and unalienable of the Declaration of Independence. Interpreters of both celebrated and forgotten Founders, Rozbicki argues, have indulged in a pious and fundamentally ahistorical accounting of the national founding, falsely celebrating the Founders' courageous prescience, or wrongly chastising leaders for the rank betrayal of women, slaves and ordinary people. Interpretations that point more gently to inconsistencies or to the paradox of freedom and slavery, he suggests, are just as wrong-headed.The ambitious task Rozbicki sets is marked by a welcome openness to theory and a determined historicization. He seeks nothing less than to shuck off modern-minded delusions and to retell the history of liberty and the American Revolution from scratch. The grounding for such a history is culture: [sjetting our sights on culture - the space where shared meanings were formed, identities were negotiated, beliefs were expressed, values were reproduced, and symbolic representations of reality and order were fashioned - would bring Revolutionary liberty down to earth, where it actually resided (234). On that ground, the evolution of American liberty depended primarily on the pursuit of advantage over others and on social aspiration.The resulting account begins with British legacies. The British political classes' belief in an unequal society and in the social order underlay their understandings of liberty; they apprehended freedom as distributed in rank-specific shares. Indeed, it was entirely possible for an Enlightenment thinker such as Frances Hutcheson to advocate the enslavement of the idle poor. Such ideas transferred to the colonial gentry, among whom a hierarchical vision of society and liberty was entirely engrained. Set on independence, the American ruling elite cleverly made an imperial conflict about taxes into a struggle for universal rights, their overblown rhetoric signaling absolute confidence in their right to rule and in the political impotence of nonelites. Meanwhile, the claim to be the natural guardians of a free people's liberty enabled a grounding of political authority even more powerful than that of heredity. But from the 1 780s, other groups adopted similar tactics, taking up universal claims in order to forward particular rights and enfranchisements, and forcing a backlash among their privilege-loving rulers. Unexpected party factionalism only sped up this dynamic, with elite Federalists and Antifederalists alike appealing to ordinary people and unintentionally raising political consciousness. Ultimately, even if they won independence and succeeded in political revolution, the American elite's universalist notions of liberty proved something of an own goal. …

Rolling Back Radical Islam

You cannot win a war if you do not fight, and you cannot win a peace through inattention. In peace and war, the American response to the violent extremism that so damages the Islamic world has been as halting and reactive as it has been reluctant. We simply do not want to get involved more deeply than necessary. But Muslim extremists are determined to remain involved with us. We are not at war with Islam. But the most radical elements within the Muslim world are convinced that they are at war with us. Our fight is with the few, but our struggle must be with the many. For decades we have downplayed--or simply ignored--the hate-filled speech directed toward us, the monstrous lessons taught by extremists to children, and the duplicity of so many states we insisted were our friends. But nations do not have friends--at best, they have allies with a confluence of interests. We imagine a will to support our endeavors where there is only a pursuit of advantage. And we deal with cynical, corrupt old men who know which words to say to soothe our diplomats, while the future lies with the discontented young, to whom the poison of blame is always delicious. Hatred taught to the young seems an ineradicable cancer of the human condition. And the accusations leveled against us by terrified, embittered men fall upon the ears of those anxious for someone to blame for the ruin of their societies, for the local extermination of opportunity, and for the poverty guaranteed by the brute corruption of their compatriots and the selfish choices of their own leaders. Above all, those futureless masses yearn to excuse their profound individual inadequacies and to explain away the prison walls their beliefs have made of their lives. In late spring 2002, headlines claimed that intelligence leads should have alerted President Bush to impending terrorist attacks prior to 11 September 2001. But a few tips from FBI field offices are easily lost in the colossal noise of government, their value clear only--ruefully so--in retrospect. Though important tactically, those memos were as nothing compared to the countless warnings we had been given as a strategic drama played out openly before us--while we willfully shut our eyes--for the last quarter of a century. Islamic extremists never made a secret of their general intent and often were specific in their threats. The tragedies of 9/11 were not so much the result of an intelligence failure as of a collective failure to face the reality confronting us. Throughout much of the 1990s, intelligence personnel were not quite forbidden to consider religion as a strategic factor, but the issue was considered soft and nebulous--as well as potentially embarrassing in those years of epidemic political correctness. Now, of course, religion may be discussed in intelligence circles, if bracketed with careful disclaimers noting that all religions have problems and that we are not bigoted toward any one religion. But what if a great world religion is bigoted toward us? Might we, even now, just wish the hatred and prejudice away? The time has come for a modest degree of honesty. The good news is that the Islamic world, on its populous, decisive frontiers, is far more hopeful than we might suspect in the wake of recent events. While we must deal with fanatical, soulless killers in the present, Islam's future is undecided. The door to a brighter tomorrow has not closed-far from it-and millions of Muslims are willing to keep that door open, despite the threats of a legion of fanatics. A struggle of immense proportions and immeasurable importance is under way for the soul of Islam, a mighty contest to decide between a humane, tolerant, and progressive faith, and a hangman's vision of a punitive God and a humankind defined by prohibitions. And we have not even noticed. We have been looking in the wrong direction, because that is where we have been conditioned to look. …

Foreign and Domestic Factors in the Transformation of Frelimo

Thisarticle examines the trajectory of theFrente de Libertação de Moçambique(Frelimo), currently the ruling party in Mozambique, focusing on the complex interplay between various factors which contributed to the metamorphoses it has undergone since its founding in 1962. Recent work in the field of international relations and historical sociology has thrown light on the rôle of the state as an administrative-coercive entity constantly cross-pressured by domestic and foreign forces, and acting simultaneously on both fronts in pursuit of advantage. While this scholarship has not focused on ruling partiesper se, it is arguable that the standard government versus state dichotomy is of limited analytical value in cases such as Mozambique, where the distinction between party and state remained in practice, until recently, a constitutional nicety. When the ruling party has been institutionalised to the extent of Frelimo, and where the state has become almost an extension of the party, it is the latter that is the key variable in any explanation of political and economic change within society.