Global Strategy - blog

Ended up viewing this during my weekend hassle.

Every time you step into edge.org you find something absolutely fabulous. This time, EDGE offers two hard core presentations closely related to Glostra visions. First, the founding father of theoretical treatment of path dependence and complexity in economics, Brian Arthur offers his view on technological change. Arthur's treatment of technology is closely related to research in dominant designs yet is far more comprehensive. What is more, it offers a philosophical understanding of what technology is, and how it evolves. If Arthur's speech does not offer any insights to strategic management of technology, the fault is not his. See the video interview and text here.

Universities are (certainly) not isolated from societies. The links are, at least, two kinds. First, the number and breadth of universities (e.g. as measured by teacher per potential student ratio) is primarily a function of the size of suitable population (i.e. how many literate inhabitants between ages 18-25 exist), wealth of the society (as measured by GDP per capita), and a number of more fuzzy factors such as policy decisions and international competition. Second, university education and research have certain functions in economic growth (which is needed for a larger number of professorships, for instance). Most noteworthy, universities educate a large number of individuals for different tasks in the society. What kind of education is given / needed is mostly a random process: as the future needs can not (logically) be forecasted it makes sense to produce excess capacity which may be needed in some future situation. For example, the investment to maintain certain humanistic areas such as languages is relative low vis-à-vis a situation in which those skills would be needed but no process would exist (I guess the CIA faced this problem after the September 11th 2001). In any case, individuals with a university education percolate into various tasks in administration, business, educational sector etc.; then, somewhat mystically, higher education emerges as an antecedent for economic growth. Similarly, the research conducted at universities may result in concrete improvements of knowledge and technology; at least most research is not harmful for societal development (yet see this: Reflections on a Crisis). And if we believe in Lucas, in a century or so, all economies would be equally rich with a large-scale university system (or similar) in each.

Ok, this might be a long shot, but I'll let it go anyway. After a long weekend of homo oeconomicus -bashing at Philosophy of Management conference, I could not but read Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization with the same glasses on. Naturally, he discusses madness (which is far from economics), quoting Louis-Sébastien Mercier:

Once again a public lecture put forward a combination of views. This time the topic was: 'The Future of Picturing the World: filming and imaging in a global era'.

Associated with some themes of this blog, I just came across this video...

Gary Hamel was giving a talk at London Business School for an academic audience. Having heard how nice his Italian suits are, I had to go.

In strategic management literature, the human capital implicated in a firm's employees has already for a couple of decades been considered as an important strategic resource (or asset) for a firm. Obviously, in "knowledge economy", the value of this particular type of knowledge has become increasingly important, especially in knowledge-intensive and creative industries (such as financial services, IT, or biotechnology)

Attending a talk last week about contingency in science (held as part of CPNSS project ‘Contingency and Dissent in Science) left me rather confused. As I found it, the concept of contingency, at least at the LSE, seems to be a name (or a subset-not in a strictly set-theoretical sense!) of the nowadays quite classical realism-antirealism debate. That is, I found no references to Rorty. Although quite understandable, it still seems odd to pass the ‘practical turn' of the 1980s in one sentence, just slightly overlooking some significant parts of more recent developments in philosophy. On the other hand, the bent is quite reasonable considering the institutional traditions.

Consider LSE's slogan: rerum cognoscere causas ("to know the causes of things", ripped from Virgil, I suppose). It makes a direct claim favouring causal explanation. Another matter, however, more rooted in the Anglo-American tradition is the tendency to embrace methodological individualism (individuals matter).