Global Strategy - blog

After watching the London School of Economics and Gaddafi family case (see e.g. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/lse-embroiled-in-row-over-authorship-of-gaddafis-sons-phd-thesis-and-a-15m-gift-to-universitys-coffers-2226894.html) someone may question the objectiveness and scientific independence of universities at more general level too. And for good reasons.

Ended up viewing this during my weekend hassle.

Auguste Comte memorial lecture was given today by Prof. Philippe Van Parijs. The topic was interestingly ‘European Democracy and the Language Question'. Despite democracy being interesting and all, what appeared to me to be the most striking insight of his talk was the whole discussion around European Union, unified (political) decision-making bodies and the apparent question of lingua franca. Van Parijs is also originally from Belgium, a country struggling with severe problems of identity, language and governance, so he also has some additional weight in his words.

The academic world is often considered to be isolated from the real world. However, now that the world is struggling with an unprecedented financial crisis, one must (at last) pay attention to the role that academic theories may have in the real-world developments.

You do not have to spend much time in the USA to note how effortful companies (and sometimes also authorities, parties, and media) are in using academic research results in their political activities. Since political strategies of corporations are a topic of major research interest in GloStra (see e.g. the research area on Corporate Strategy & Society as well as Lamberg et al.'s article, and Mantere et al.'s article) let me present an illustration, an example which I ran into tonight.