Porter’s five forces model is an authoritative management tool used in analyzing the profitability and attractiveness of industries through an outside-in viewpoint. In the past decade, dramatic and rapid changes have prompted some criticism of the model. The comparison between new and old economy analysis makes the fundamentals of the model seem weak. Moreover, the past decade has shown that strategy and entrepreneurship in China are not completely dependent on the model. This study first aims to verify the sustainability of (...) the five forces model and analyze its integration into China’s entrepreneurial economy. By conducting in-depth interviews among the upper echelons from various industries, it was found that along with the competitive factors emphasized by the model, Chinese entrepreneurs attend to cooperative factors such as Guanxi, the Chinese term for relationship, and the possibilities of technology integration with the five forces. They also tend to enlarge the strategic view to consider factors such as how the market evaluates the forces. To verify these findings, the authors carried out a large-scale survey with a modified questionnaire analyzing the data collected using exploratory factor analysis with SPSS 22. The outcome shows that Porter’s model is still valid to some extent. Companies are still working in a network of buyers, suppliers, substitutes, new entrants, and competitors. However, reinventions are necessary to include the new factors of Guanxi, technology, and marketing and branding, which have changed the structure of the industry. These factors arise from the cooperative nature of Chinese culture and may have equal or even larger significance compared with their competitive counterparts in today’s business world. (shrink)

Social movements; Iraq; foreign relations; Algeria; politics and government; history.

Fārābī and the philosophy of Arabic language; a critical and analytical treatise.

Once in a century an overview shakes the mold of preconception and makes a world model fall into shape. This is such a book—absorbing, provocative, original, skeptical, and often very funny in spite of formidable scholarship. The focus of the book is on the change in self-perception which physics might bring about if it were made in some way empathically real to non-physicists. The common man’s “existential” attitude is a product now of nineteenth-century, mechanistic models. But in pursuing this, the (...) author lays out a comprehensive survey of impending changes in the philosophy of science, and ranges through physics, biology, mathematics, Jungian psychology, and evolutionary theory, turning also to look at other, non-Western-scientific, world models. “In the task of reshaping the world model of scientists and others, only commitment to the discipline of science will do. It can be combined with enough controlled lunacy to bring conventionally self-evident ideas of reality into question , but it has to produce testable predictions.” “What we are now looking at is the prospect of ‘Jungian physics’: a physics model which also addresses the image-forming mechanism and possibly even the non-locality of mind.” “The hard-hat model of an objective reality has had to yield to a growing perception that the objective is, in form at least, a construct: what we appear to see is a function of the manner of seeing , but with the awkward complication that the cogitating I arises from the structures which it sees and orders.”. (shrink)

CONTENTS. - Is Christianity true? - The values of to-day. - Power and democracy. - The way ahead.

In a military-sponsored research project begun during the Second World War, inmates of the Stateville Penitentiary in Illinois were infected with malaria and treated with experimental drugs that sometimes had vicious side effects. They were made into reservoirs for the disease and they provided a food supply for the mosquito cultures. They acted as secretaries and technicians, recording data on one another, administering malarious mosquito bites and experimental drugs to one another, and helping decide who was admitted to the project (...) and who became eligible for early parole as a result of his participation. Thus, the prisoners were not simply research subjects; they were deeply constitutive of the research project. Because a prisoner’s time on the project was counted as part of his sentence, and because serving on the project could shorten one’s sentence, the project must be seen as simultaneously serving the functions of research and punishment. Michel Foucault wrote about such ‘mixed mechanisms’ in his Discipline and punish. His shining example of such a ‘transparent’ and subtle style of punishment was the panopticon, Jeremy Bentham’s architectural invention of prison cellblocks arrayed around a central guard tower. Stateville prison was designed on Bentham’s model; Foucault featured it in his own discussion. This paper, then, explores the power relations in this highly idiosyncratic experimental system, in which the various roles of model organism, reagent, and technician are all occupied by sentient beings who move among them fluidly. This, I argue, created an environment in the Stateville hospital wing more panoptic than that in the cellblocks. Research and punishment were completely interpenetrating, and mutually reinforcing. (shrink)

The recent debate over Intelligent Design provides an opportunity to examine the pervasiveness and the meaning of Darwinian thinking in modern culture. The latest incarnation of a century-old critique of evolution, ID infuriated critics as a disease of scientific illiteracy. However, examining the debate as cultural history of science suggests that the IDers were not ignorant or stupid, but rather shrewd and disingenuous. They wielded scientific data as a rhetorical weapon, not as truth but as text, to be bent to (...) one's moral purpose—which in their case was an attack on science itself. In contrast to the scientific critics, I view ID as a symptom, a boil on the neck of a social body infected with anxiety over cultural Darwinism. Though the courts seem to have effectively lanced ID, the infection remains. In an age of Darwinian psychiatry, Darwinian business, Darwinian literature criticism, and even Darwinian anti-Darwinism, some boundary checks on cultural Darwinism would be salutary—not for advancing a conservative political agenda as the ID folks seek to do, but simply for reconciling a faith in reason with a rejection of biological determinism. (shrink)

Total quality; commerce; economics; religious aspects; Islam; Islamic ethics.

This study examines the changing role of art and artist during the turn-of-the-century period, offering a consideration of the multiple dichotomies of art and life, aesthetics and economics, production and consumption, and centre and periphery.

Originally published in 1961. The essays in this volume focus on the awareness of science and art, evolution and Freudian psychology. Besides the chapter on Darwin and Freud, the author discusses criticism, the fantasy element in drama and popular literature, the history of the novel, the motivation of science and the function of erotic art.

“Evolvability,” writes Evelyn Fox Keller, “refers to the capacity to generate any kind of heritable phenotypic variation upon which selection can act” . Whether one considers genes or organisms, the potential to adapt and evolve, to respond flexibly to a changing environment, is now recognized by many biologists as itself a trait actively favored by natural selection. Keller correctly presents this idea as an antidote to an old notion of genetic stability. She seems not to appreciate how well it applies (...) to her own subject.The Century of the Gene is Keller's latest collection of linked essays, six tidy, intelligent shovelfuls from her ongoing effort to undermine the claims of mainstream molecular biology and to substitute from the scientific margins an alternative interpretation. This project stems from her philosophical biography of the geneticist Barbara McClintock, published in 1983. In her Nobel speech, also from 1983, McClintock wrote of the genome as a dynamic “sensitive organ of the cell,” responsive, flexible, and interacting with the environment. For half a century, McClintock had railed at biologists that genes must be studied not as autonomous, independently acting units but rather as parts of an exquisite whole, acting in concert. Keller celebrated this in McClintock's work, though many have read Keller as applying to this view of nature a gloss of feminism that McClintock rejected. More recently, among other projects, Keller has criticized the “master molecule” concept in biology, examined the use of metaphor in science, and celebrated Christiane Nüsslein‐Vollhard's studies in developmental biology. Through it all, she maintains a fascination with gender and with language as shapers of scientific thought.Here Keller explores what she sees as the divergent histories of studies of genes and use of the term “gene.” While scientists continue to talk of genes much as they have done for a century now—as stable, discrete units directing the activities of the cell and the development of the organism—the molecular biology of the last forty years has seen a breaking down of the boundaries of the gene, physically, chemically, and physiologically. Keller begins by attacking the notion of genetic stability—whence the introductory quotation about evolvability. Next she explores the idea of genetic regulation, the fact that genes do not make anything, nor do they literally control anything. The molecular biologist's version of the chicken‐and‐egg problem is: Which comes first—proteins or genes? Proteins read the DNA that provides the instructions to make more proteins. Keller argues for chickens.The most important idea in the book is Keller's distinction between a developmental program and a genetic program. The former is a sequence of ontological steps in the life of an organism; it does not presuppose that all steps in the program are encoded in genes or that all steps are determined prior to the beginning of development. Developmental programs may be derived empirically, independently of genetic analysis. In contrast, the genetic program is a more recent idea that does locate the program instructions in the nucleus in the fertilized egg. For Keller, genetic programs carry implications of determinism, a restriction of vision in our attempts to understand nature.The term “gene,” Keller concludes, has outlived its utility. Molecular biologists no longer work with anything so discrete as genes. Their own data, she argues, show that genes and genomes are flexible, modular, and interactive. Keller wishes for, but does not offer, a new term or set of terms that would better reflect current understanding of genetics and development.If biologists have shown that the gene concept is outmoded, why don't they know it? Keller's answer is that the biologists have not yet recognized the implications of their own results; their language lags behind their knowledge. Eventually, she believes, either they will drop the term “gene” or biology must suffocate in its shell. Yet the changes she describes have been under way for decades and biology shows no signs of slowing. Keller recognizes this, and in the conclusion she briefly acknowledges the obvious solution to the conundrum: that biology continues to grow because of, not despite, this linguistic flexibility. This important idea deserves fuller treatment.As with the gene in nature, so with the word “gene” in the scientific lexicon: its very evolvability is selected for, a crucial trait that ensures its survival. (shrink)

In the standard narrative of her life, Barbara McClintock discovered genetic transposition in the 1940s but no one believed her. She was ignored until molecular biologists of the 1970s "rediscovered" transposition and vindicated her heretical discovery. New archival documents, as well as interviews and close reading of published papers, belie this narrative. Transposition was accepted immediately by both maize and bacterial geneticists. Maize geneticists confirmed it repeatedly in the early 1950s and by the late 1950s it was considered a classic (...) discovery. But for McClintock, movable elements were part of an elaborate system of genetic control that she hypothesized to explain development and differentiation. This theory was highly speculative and was not widely accepted, even by those who had discovered transposition independently. When Jacob and Monod presented their alternative model for gene regulation, the operon, her controller argument was discarded as incorrect. Transposition, however, was soon discovered in microorganisms and by the late 1970s was recognized as a phenomenon of biomedical importance. For McClintock, the award of the 1983 Nobel Prize to her for the discovery of movable genetic elements, long treated as a legitimation, may well have been bittersweet. This new look at McClintock's experiments and theory has implications for the intellectual history of biology, the social history of American genetics, and McClintock's role in the historiography of women in science. (shrink)

Responses to the COVID-19 pandemic prompted people and institutions to turn to online virtual environments for a wide variety of social gatherings. In this perspectives article, we draw upon our previous work and interviews with Ghanaian Christian leaders to consider implications of this shift. Specifically, we propose that the shift from physical to virtual interactions mimics and amplifies the neoliberal individualist experience of abstraction from place associated with Eurocentric modernity. On the positive side, the shift from physical to virtual environments (...) liberates people to selectively pursue the most fulfilling interactions, free from constraints of physical distance. On the negative side, the move from physical to virtual space necessitates a shift from material care and tangible engagement with the local community to the psychologization of care and pursuit of emotional intimacy in relations of one’s choosing—a dynamic that further marginalizes people who are already on the margins. The disruptions of the pandemic provide an opportunity to re-set social relations, to design ways of being that better promote sustainable collective well-being rather than fleeting personal fulfillment. (shrink)

Interviewing offers the biographer unique opportunities for gathering data. I offer three examples. The emphatic bacterial geneticist Norton Zinder confronted me with an interpretation of Barbara McClintock's science that was as surprising as it proved to be robust. The relaxed setting of the human geneticist Walter Nance's rural summer home contributed to an unusually improvisational oral history that produced insights into his experimental and thinking style. And "embedding" myself with the biochemical geneticist Charles Scriver in his home, workplace, and city (...) enabled me to experience the social networks that drive the practical events of his career, which in turn helped me explain the theoretical basis of his science. Face-to-face interaction and multisensory experience will shape each biographer's experience uniquely. Recent developments in sensory physiology suggest that the experience of integrating sense data encourages different patterns of observation and reflection. It is reasonable, then, to think that biography based on face-to-face interviews will, for a given author, have a different character than one based entirely on documents. I reflect on how interviewing shapes my own writing and I encourage the reader to do the same. (shrink)

In this consensus report by a diverse group of academics who conduct and/or are concerned about social and behavioral genomics (SBG) research, the authors recount the often‐ugly history of scientific attempts to understand the genetic contributions to human behaviors and social outcomes. They then describe what the current science—including genomewide association studies and polygenic indexes—can and cannot tell us, as well as its risks and potential benefits. They conclude with a discussion of responsible behavior in the context of SBG research. (...) SBG research that compares individuals within a group according to a “sensitive” phenotype requires extra attention to responsible conduct and to responsible communication about the research and its findings. SBG research (1) on sensitive phenotypes that (2) compares two or more groups defined by (a) race, (b) ethnicity, or (c) genetic ancestry (where genetic ancestry could easily be misunderstood as race or ethnicity) requires a compelling justification to be conducted, funded, or published. All authors agree that this justification at least requires a convincing argument that a study's design could yield scientifically valid results; some authors would additionally require the study to have a socially favorable risk‐benefit profile. (shrink)

The presence of research integrity (RI) policies in higher education institutions is a critical tool for good research governance. Despite the increased availability and visibility of RI policies at many universities around the world, the status of RI policies in African universities is unknown. We evaluated the prevalence of six key research integrity policies in African universities. We conducted a quantitative content analysis of research integrity (RI) policies at 283 African universities, selected based on the Scimago Research and Innovation Ranking (...) 2024. University websites were searched, and policies were coded as "Yes," "Not Available," or "Not Retrievable." Using SPSS 29, and Excel functions to perform data analysis, we evaluate the prevalence and patterns of policy availability across different regions and institutions of Africa. Only 20.67% of universities had RI policies in place, while 78.86% did not have such policies. Furthermore, 0.47% of universities’ RI policies were not retrievable. Most of the available RI policies were written in English (87%), with smaller portions in Arabic (9%) and French (4%). Southern Africa universities had the highest availability of RI policies (58.64%), while Central Africa had the lowest (3.70%). Northern Africa, despite the largest sample representation (n = 149), had substantial gaps in policy availability, with a low rate of universities having RI policies in place (8.95%). There was a strong positive correlation between having a research misconduct/plagiarism policy and a research integrity and ethics policy, while a positive moderate correlation was found between having a data management, repository, sharing, and use policy and the allegation on research misconduct/whistleblowing policy. This study reveals that Research Integrity (RI) policies across African universities are notably limited, with significant gaps, particularly in Northern and Central Africa. Therefore, research administration in African universities must prioritize the development of comprehensive RI policies, accompanied by regular training programs for staff and students to ensure their effective application. Additionally, these policies should be made publicly accessible to stakeholders, thereby enhancing research governance and fostering a culture of integrity across African universities. (shrink)