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Towards advancing African management scholarship
Get PDFThis paper addresses the main arguments put forward in Grietjie Verhoef’s article and contributes to wider debate among management scholars on the role of indigenous theories. It challenges the view of African management as illusory and points to the rising support for indigenous theories as indicative of the weakening of the unquestioned dominance of universal theories. Our paper disavows the alleged effort to impose a single ‘African management’ model or perpetuate the ‘colonial/indigenous’
binary divide, but equally cautions against effort to veto scholarly striving for a common identity, to learn from history, or refrain from collective amnesia. As examples from the USA and Europe show, diversity, even heterogeneity, needs not preclude the forging of a commonly shared identity, complemented with appropriate sub-identities. This paper further affirms Verhoef’s demand for Ubuntu, Ekpe, Igbo apprenticeship system to be more rigorously developed and theoretically coherent, and urges scholars to
intensify effort toward advancing the conceptual and empirical foundations of African management. It additionally encourages Verhoef to heed Mahatma Gandhi’s counsel by becoming part of the change she wishes to see in African management theorising
Genomic insights into recent species divergence in Nicotiana benthamiana and natural variation in Rdr1 gene controlling viral susceptibility
Get PDFOne of the most commonly encountered and frequently cited laboratory organisms worldwide is classified taxonomically as Nicotiana benthamiana (Solanaceae), an accession of which, typically referred to as LAB, is renowned for its unique susceptibility to a wide range of plant viruses and hence capacity to be transformed using a variety of methods. This susceptibility is the result of an insertion and consequent loss of function in the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase 1 (Rdr1) gene. However, the origin and age of LAB and the evolution of N. benthamiana across its wide distribution in Australia remain relatively underexplored. Here, we have used multispecies coalescent methods on genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) to assess species limits, phylogenetic relationships and divergence times within N. benthamiana. Our results show that the previous taxonomic concept of this species in fact comprises five geographically, morphologically and genetically distinct species, one of which includes LAB. We provide clear evidence that LAB is closely related to accessions collected further north in the Northern Territory; this species split much earlier, c. 1.1 million years ago, from their common ancestor than the other four in this clade and is morphologically the most distinctive. We also found that the Rdr1 gene insertion is variable among accessions from the northern portions of the Northern Territory. Furthermore, this long-isolated species typically grows in sheltered sites in subtropical/tropical monsoon areas of northern Australia, contradicting the previously advanced hypothesis that this species is an extremophile that has traded viral resistance for precocious development
Saying unsaid: law transformed in Annemarie Ní Churreáin ’s Bloodroot (2017)
No full textHow can poetry claim a ‘right’ to speak for those who cannot speak without covering over their silence? Bloodroot rejects law’s rhetoric of commonality and a discredited poetics of ‘vatic privilege.’ Ní Churreáin’s poetry subjects itself to its own ‘government of the tongue’ in order to be able to speak of others and the violence done to them. In Ní Churreáin’s lexicon, the right to poetic speech presupposes an attentiveness that allows silence to circulate amongst words; circulations that provoke transformation, re-imaginings; the possibility of a future that might be different from the past. HD’s Notes on Thought and Vision will be taken as a central text that defines a ‘love vision’ of poetry that can be traced into Ní Churreáin’s poetics. Bloodroot is an appropriations of the images used in public discourse about motherhood, family, misogynistic violence and sexual disgrace. Evoking a very dim echo of the washer women of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), Bloodroot offers sympathy rather than disdain; the unsaid echoing in the said, the correct measure of words: memorialisation and invention
Necessity, conditionals and apriority
No full textOn Goodman’s truth-conditions, a counterfactual is true if its consequent is inferrible from its antecedent and ‘relevant conditions’. I prove that ‘relevant conditions’ can be defined in such a way that Goodman’s truth-conditions are provably correct. I prove also that Goodman’s truth-conditions entail that a proposition is necessary if and only if it is a priori. I conclude that necessity is apriority
"I spy with my little eye, something that is a face ...": a brain network for illusory face detection
Get PDFThe most basic aspect of face perception is simply detecting the presence of a face, which requires the extraction of features that it has in common with other faces. Putatively, it is caused by matching high-dimensional sensory input with internal face templates, achieved through a top-down mediated coupling between prefrontal regions and brain areas in the ventral temporal cortex (“core system of face perception”). Illusory face detection tasks can be used to study these top-down influences. In the present functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we showed that illusory face perception activated just as real faces the core system, albeit with atypical left-lateralisation of the occipital face area (OFA). The core system was coupled with two distinct brain regions in the lateral prefrontal (inferior frontal gyrus, IFG) and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). A Dynamic Causal Modelling (DCM) analysis revealed that activity in the core system during illusory face detection was upregulated by a modulatory face-specific influence of the IFG, not as previously assumed by the OFC. Based on these findings, we were able to develop the most comprehensive neuroanatomical framework of illusory face detection until now
Understanding coexistence with wildlife
Get PDFAs humans and wildlife come into increasing contact under the pressures of climate change, human development, successful conservation and wildlife recovery, and zoonoses, it is urgent that we learn to facilitate coexistence with wildlife in shared multi-use landscapes, for the wellbeing of both wildlife and people. The terms “human-wildlife conflict” and “human-wildlife coexistence” are both used in work aiming to achieve this, but in both cases a variety of definitions exist. While the term “coexistence” is being increasingly mentioned, possibly linked to a preference for a positive framing of human-wildlife interactions in particular, it is not often defined (see however Pooley in this special issue), and remains understudied. This is partly because conservation scientists are less familiar and less comfortable with the kinds of questions and methodologies required to study human-wildlife coexistence. It is also easier to study things you can count (impacts, e.g., attacks, extent of damage or frequency of interactions) than coexistence, which often involves not doing things (e.g., refraining from retaliation or protesting). This collection of papers offers the most comprehensive and cross disciplinary examination of human-wildlife coexistence published so far
The Bank of England loses its mojo
No full textIn early February, when the Russian invasion of Ukraine was still an unimaginable prospect, the Governor of the Bank of England walked into a political storm by proposing that workers should refrain from pressing for substantial wage increases to compensate for the rising cost of living. Martin Sandbu of the Financial Times nailed one problem with a tweeted question: ‘why does the governor of the Bank of England encourage restraint in wage demands but not call for restraint in businesses’ attempts to protect their profit margins?’ Some earnest corrections by Bank officials followed: a tighter monetary policy would suppress demand and put pressure on profits as well as wages. But the damage had been done, and a bigger question loomed in the background. Which century is the Bank living in? Its analysis seemed old fashioned to the point of nostalgia. Governor Bailey invoked a world in which inflation expectations drove actual inflation, and a credibly independent central bank could influence expectations by adhering firmly to its inflation-targeting mandate. This was the world before the financial crisis, before central banks turned their attention to financial stability, flooding markets with liquidity, fuelling epic asset price bubbles and protecting the wealth of relatively few people while many struggled in a relentlessly competitive labour market
The everyday economy: introduction
No full textThis introduction to the Everyday Economy collection provides a brief summary of the concept as advanced by Julie Froud, Karel Williams and their collaborators at Manchester’s Centre for Research in Socio-Cultural Change, followed by an overview of articles by Anna Coote, Tess Lanning and Rachel Laurence, Alex Colás and Jason Edwards, David Edgerton, Christine Berry, Luke Raikes and Anna Killick
The response of household debt to COVID-19 using a neural networks VAR in OECD
Get PDFThis paper investigates responses of household debt to COVID-19-related data like confirmed cases and confirmed deaths within a neural networks panel VAR for OECD countries. Our model also includes a plethora of non-pharmaceutical and pharmaceutical interventions. We opt for a global neural networks panel VAR (GVAR) methodology that nests all OECD countries in the sample. Because linear factor models are unable to capture the variability in our data set, the use of an artificial neural network (ANN) method permits to capture this variability. The number of factors, as well as the number of intermediate layers, is determined using the marginal likelihood criterion and we estimate the GVAR with MCMC techniques. We also report δ-values that capture the dominance of each individual country in the network. In terms of dominant countries, the UK, the USA, and Japan dominate interconnections within the network, but also countries like Belgium, Netherlands, and Brazil. Results reveal that household debt positively responds to COVID-19 infections and deaths. Lockdown measures such as stay-at-home advice, and closing schools, all have a positive impact on household debt, though they are of transitory nature. However, vaccinations and testing appear to negatively affect household debt
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