6 resultados para Transdisciplinary
em Aston University Research Archive
Resumo:
Purpose – The collapse of world economic systems brought the interconnectedness between business and global events sharply into focus. As Starkey points out: “leading business schools need to overcome their fascination with a particular form of finance and economics […] to broaden their intellectual horizons […] (and to) look at the lessons of history and other disciplines”. The purpose of this paper is to provide evidence from three years of research on the Aston MBA suggesting that an emphasis on developing capabilities within a far broader, connected and reflexive business curriculum is what business students and practitioners now recognise as an essential way forward for responsible management education. Design/methodology/approach – This research paper examines the reflective accounts of 300 MBA students undertaking a transdisciplinary Business Ethics, Responsibility and Sustainability core module. Findings – As Klein argues, transdisciplinarity is simultaneously an attitude and a form of action. The student reflections provide powerful discourses of individual learning and report a range of outcomes from finding “the vocabulary or the confidence” to raise issues to acting as “change agents” in the workplace. Originality/value – As responsibility and sustainability requires learners, researchers and educators to engage with real world complexity, uncertainty and risk, conventional disciplinary study, especially within business, often proves inadequate and partial. This paper demonstrates that creative and exploratory frames need to be developed to facilitate the development of more connected knowledge – informed by multiple stakeholders, able to contribute heterogeneous skills, perspectives and expertise.
Resumo:
This paper analyses the role of education for sustainability as enabling future sustainability practitioners to become key change agents and leaders. It is important that generic skills and understandings are married to a capability to lead beyond one's disciplinary or professional authority. 'Academic' education for future (and current) sustainability professionals should focus on transdisciplinary learning and research, new media affordances and distributed learning. This raises important questions about the nature of experiential learning and the meaning of 'living sustainability'. With reference to various developments in e-learning, including the European Union's aim to establish a virtual campus for a sustainable Europe, this paper argues that the digital environment is an integral part of our lifeworld connecting people to place, with each other and to possibilities for creative transdisciplinary inquiry. The role of new media in education for sustainability is rarely discussed, is under theorised and its potential largely ignored. © 2010 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.
Resumo:
Thus far, achieving net biodiversity gains through major urban developments has been neither common nor straightforward - despite the presence of incentives, regulatory contexts, and ubiquitous practical guidance tools. A diverse set of obstructions, occurring within different spatial, temporal and actor hierarchies, are experienced by practitioners and render the realisation of maximised biodiversity, a rarity. This research aims to illuminate why this is so, and what needs to be changed to rectify the situation. To determine meaningful findings and conclusions, capable of assisting applied contexts and accommodating a diverse range of influences, a ‘systems approach’ was adopted. This approach led to the use of a multi-strategy research methodology, to identify the key obstructions and solutions to protecting and enhancing biodiversity - incorporating the following methods: action research, a questionnaire to local government ecologists, interviews and personal communications with leading players, and literature reviews. Nevertheless, ‘case studies’ are the predominant research method, the focus being a ‘nested’ case study looking at strategic issues of the largest regeneration area in Europe ‘the Thames Gateway’, and the largest individual mixeduse mega-development in the UK (at the time of planning consent) ‘Eastern Quarry 2’ - set within the Gateway. A further key case study, focussing on the Central Riverside development in Sheffield, identifies the merits of competition and partnership. The nested cases, theories and findings show that the strategic scale - generally relating to governance and prioritisation - impacts heavily upon individual development sites. It also enables the identification of various processes, mechanisms and issues at play on the individual development sites, which primarily relate to project management, planning processes, skills and transdisciplinary working, innovative urban biodiversity design capabilities, incentives, organisational cultures, and socio-ecological resilience. From these findings a way forward is mapped, spanning aspects from strategic governance to detailed project management.
Resumo:
The United Nations has pithily defined sustainable development as progress that ‘meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. But sustainable development remains highly contested and is subject to a wide variety of interpretations, applications, and criticisms. Moreover, those seeking fully to understand this critical concept are confronted with a (sometimes dispiritingly) voluminous body of scholarly, polemical, and journalistic writing. Edited by the acclaimed author of Understanding Sustainable Development (Earthscan, 2008), this new title from Routledge’s Critical Concepts in the Environment series answers the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of the vast literature on sustainable development, and the continuing explosion in research output. Drawing on a wide variety of sources that take full cognizance of the rich background and necessary adaptability of the concept to the imperatives of time, place, and culture, and which emphasize its connected and transdisciplinary nature, the editor has brought together in four volumes the canonical and the best cutting-edge work to produce an indispensable ‘mini library’. The collection covers the history, mediation, application, and likely future orientations of sustainable development, both conceptually and as a continually emerging practice. Sustainable Development is fully indexed and includes comprehensive introductions, newly written by the editor, which place the collected materials in their historical and intellectual context. It is an essential reference collection and is certain to be valued by scholars and students—as well as serious policy-makers and practitioners—as a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.
Resumo:
Amor Technologiae: Marshall McLuhan as Philosopher of Technology – Toward a Philosophy of Human-Media Relationships, Yoni Van Den Eede (2012) Brussels, Belgium: ASP VUB Press, 517 pp., ISBN: 978-9057181870, p/bk, €29.95 Titanic Century: Media, Myth and the Making of a Cultural Icon, Paul Heyer (2012) Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 211 pp., ISBN 978-0-313-39815-5, h/bk, $48.00 Media Environments, Barry Vacker (ed.) (2010) San Diego, CA: Cognella, 546 pp., ISBN: 978-1935551348, p/bk, $142.50 Networked Reenactments: Stories Transdisciplinary Knowledges Tell, Katie King (2012) Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 392 pp., ISBN: 978-0822350729, p/bk, $25.95