"Ignorance was bliss, now I'm ignorant and that is far more difficult":transdisciplinary learning and reflexivity in responsible management education

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.

Neo-Nazism in West Germany

The oharaoter of right-wing extremism in the Federal Republic has undergone extensive transformations in the seventies. As electoral support for the extreme Right declined, a whole range of new groupings emerged pursuing a militant extra-parliamentary strategy. Essential charaoteristics are an increasing tendency to use violence and a close ideological affinity to the NSDAP. They attract a growing number of young people. The increasing susceptibility of young people to rightist ideologies coincides with an economic recession of which young people especially are the victims. Widespread ignorance about Nazism and the prevalence of anti-democratic political attitudes constitute important contributary factors and point to a considerable potential for right-extremism in the Federal Republic., This potential can be attributed. to the negative effects of much of the material dealing with the NS past, to serious deficiencies in the area of historical-political education in schools and, above all, to the absence of any :real process of "coming to terms with the past" in the postwar period. Neo-Nazism is not completely isolated from other trends in West German society. Rightist elements within the established party system and broad sections of the population hold similar views and attitudes. This similarity, linked with an over-exaggerated concern with a perceived threat from the extreme Left may explain the absence of any concerted effort to deal with nee-Nazi tendencies. The response of the courts exemplifies a widespread tendency to under-estimate the significance of the extreme Right. Opposition to the Right is restricted primarily to those circles which suffered most under the Nazi regime. The analysis suggests that one must reject the simplistic view that at the present time the Right does not constitute a serious threat to West German democracy. The study evaluates the wide range of views to be found in secondary sources on the subject of neo-Nazism and is :intended, to contribute to the ongoing discussion conceming the potential for right-extremism in West Germany.

Business as usual is not an option

It’s just not an option Sustainability literacy should by now be woven into the fabric of our educational culture. Our present ignorance and lack of engagement is nothing short of shameful, says John Blewitt.

An analysis of users' reactions to an expert advisory system

Ignorance of user factors can be seen as one of the nontechnical issues contributing to expert system failure. An expert advisory system is built for nonexpert users; the users' acceptance is a very important factor for its successful implementation. If an expert advisory system satisfactorily represents the expertise in the domain, there still remains the question: "Will the end-users use the system?" This paper aims to address users' issues by analysing their reactions towards an expert advisory system called ADGAME, developed to help its users make better decisions in playing a competitive business game. Two experiments with ADGAME have been carried out. The research results show that, when the use of the expert advisory system is optional, there is considerable reluctance to use it, particularly amongst the "worst" potential users. Users also doubt the potential benefits in terms of improved learning and confidence in decisions made. Strangely, the one positive expectation that users had, that the system would save them time, proved not to be the case in practice; ADGAME appears to improve the users' effectiveness rather than their efficiency. © 1995.

Comparison between conventional and stochastic pinning control

Theoretical developments on pinning control of complex dynamical networks have mainly focused on the deterministic versions of the model dynamics. However, the dynamical behavior of most real networks is often affected by stochastic noise components. In this paper the pinning control of a stochastic version of the coupled map lattice network with spatiotemporal characteristics is studied. The control of these complex dynamical networks have functional uncertainty which should be considered when calculating stabilizing control signals. Two feedback control methods are considered: the conventional feedback control and modified stochastic feedback control. It is shown that the typically-used conventional control method suffers from the ignorance of model uncertainty leading to a reduction and potentially a collapse in the control efficiency. Numerical verification of the main result is provided for a chaotic coupled map lattice network. © 2011 IEEE.

Informational institutions in the agrifood sector:meta-information and meta-governance of environmental sustainability

In the agrifood sector, the explosive increase in information about environmental sustainability, often in uncoordinated information systems, has created a new form of ignorance ('meta-ignorance') that diminishes the effectiveness of information on decision-makers. Flows of information are governed by informal and formal social arrangements that we can collectively call Informational Institutions. In this paper, we have reviewed the recent literature on such institutions. From the perspectives of information theory and new institutional economics, current informational institutions are increasing the information entropy of communications concerning environmental sustainability and stakeholders' transaction costs of using relevant information. In our view this reduces the effectiveness of informational governance. Future research on informational governance should explicitly address these aspects.