Communal Harmony and Unity in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

In less than three decades, Nokia emerged from Finland to lead the mobile phone revolution. It grew to have one of the most recognizable and valuable brands in the world and then fell into decline, leading to the sale of its mobile phone business to Microsoft. This book explores and analyzes that journey and distills observations and lessons for anyone keen to understand what drove Nokia’s amazing success and sudden downfall. It is tempting to lay the blame for Nokia’s demise at the doors of Apple, Google, and Samsung, but this would be to ignore one very important fact: Nokia had begun to collapse from within well before any of these companies entered the mobile communications market, and this makes Nokia’s story all the more interesting. Observing from the position of privileged outsiders (with access to Nokia’s senior managers over the last twenty years and a more recent, concerted research agenda), this book describes and analyzes the various stages in Nokia’s journey. This is an inside story: one of leaders making strategic and organizational decisions, of their behavior and interactions, and of how they succeeded and failed to inspire and engage their employees. Perhaps most intriguingly, it is a story that opens the proverbial “black box” of why and how things actually happen at the top of organizations. Why did things fall apart? To what extent were avoidable mistakes made? Did the world around Nokia change too fast for it to adapt? Did Nokia’s success contain the seeds of its failure?

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Things Fall Apart

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195368932.013.0010 ◽

2011 ◽

Author(s):

Gina M. Rossetti

Keyword(s):

Things Fall Apart

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‘A less superficial picture’: Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe ◽

10.1017/cbo9780511554407.004 ◽

1990 ◽

pp. 21-41

Keyword(s):

Things Fall Apart

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Deconstructing Dante: How things fall apart in the Paradiso

Forum Italicum A Journal of Italian Studies ◽

10.1177/00145858211021571 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 001458582110215

Author(s):

Glenn A Steinberg

Keyword(s):

Fundamental Question ◽

Us Guidance ◽

Critical Junctures ◽

Recent Commentary ◽

Literal Truth ◽

Truth Claims ◽

Things Fall Apart ◽

The Difference

Much recent commentary on Dante’s Commedia focuses on Dante’s truth claims in the poem. Indeed, Teodolinda Barolini has proposed that “the fundamental question for all readers of Dante’s poem” is “How are we to respond to the poet’s insistence that he is telling us the truth?” I propose that the poem itself gives us guidance as to the seriousness of its claims to literal truth. It does so by actively deconstructing its own meaning at critical junctures. I look at several such moments of deconstruction, but I argue that the first few cantos of the Paradiso in particular provide a reflection on the difference between reality and fiction. Early in the Paradiso, Dante draws attention to the metaphoric nature of his poem and reminds his reader, through his character’s own actions, that metaphor is not reality. In this way, Dante implies that we should not take the narrative particulars of his poem too literally but should treat metaphor as metaphor rather than as mimesis.

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Doing Good Better: Impure Altruism in Green Apparel Advertising

Sustainability ◽

10.3390/su11205762 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 11 (20) ◽

pp. 5762 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

So Young Song ◽

Youn-Kyung Kim

Keyword(s):

Data Analysis ◽

Product Quality ◽

Discrete Model ◽

Online Survey ◽

Marketing Strategies ◽

Theoretical Development ◽

Sustainable Lifestyle ◽

Impure Altruism ◽

Sustainable Behavior ◽

Communal Harmony

In this study, we identify impure altruism as a duality of altruistic and egoistic warmth. We examine how these feelings motivate consumers to buy green apparel in response to advertisements. We test the effectiveness of the message orientation and its interactivity with a beneficiary and propose modeling impure altruism as the reason why consumers purchase green apparel. The study uses a quasi-experiment to estimate a comparison effect among advertising stimuli. We conduct an online survey among US consumers that garnered 586 responses for the main data analysis. The results indicate that egocentric appeals increase perceived uniqueness and that human beneficiary appeals lead to higher communal harmony. The findings show that communal harmony and global wellbeing prompt altruistic warmth and that uniqueness and product quality encourage egoistic warmth. Notably, altruistic warmth contributes to egoistic warmth, which indicates the existence of impurely altruistic consumers. Both altruistic and egoistic warmth lead to the intention of purchasing green apparel. We recommend “feel-good” marketing strategies to publicize the benefits of a sustainable lifestyle. The study contributes to the theoretical development of sustainability and can serve as an extension of a discrete model of altruism and egoism on consumers’ sustainable behavior.

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