Global Strategy - blog

In recent times, there has been a lot of discussion about the questionable practices of scholars, universities and publishers. In a related fashion, the economist Ronald Coase once said that "if you torture the data long enough, Nature will confess." He referred to a common research practice of flexibly changing one's model, collecting more data and using different measures until you find interesting and publishable results; it is likely that at some point you will find statistically significant results purely by chance. For a qualitative researcher, flexibility is a good thing. In fact, going back and forth between data and theory is the primary mode of doing qualitative research. However, in quantitative research, flexibility is somewhat counter-intuitively considered a bad thing. Let me explain.

Ended up viewing this during my weekend hassle.

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...

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).

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.

An interesting question to GloStra is how firms can or should adapt their strategies according to the societies in which they operate.

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.

The presentation was given by Prof. Robert Shiller the other day. Chaired by the director of the LSE, Howard Davies, this very topical and interesting public lecture may have practical consequences as well.