Sustainable development: a developmental evaluation of logistics higher education in the Sultanate of Oman based on two innovation approaches (the triple helix of innovation and innovation competencies)

PurposeThis research seeks to identify evidence of innovation elements in the implementation of a sustainable development ecosystem in the HE environment. For the purposes of this investigation, the use of developmental evaluation has been deemed appropriate to fully explore the depths of the topic.Design/methodology/approachThe research follows a qualitative approach of inductive reasoning. For the purpose of this developmental evaluation, the collection of information from several stakeholders has been pursued in the study. Both a semi-structured interview and documents analysis were used.FindingsDifferent awareness levels among logistics faculty members, while the incentives given are minimal. Availability of grants and lack of tenure are some of the reasons raised. Industry is not cooperative in providing placements/internships restricting students of industry experience. Internationalisation is slow and international collaborations limited. Limited freedom in topical discussions and their implications to learning.Research limitations/implicationsThe research has considered possible limitations and used other methods for triangulation of the findings.Practical implicationsLow awareness on the implementation of pedagogical approaches for innovation. Not all faculty can be innovative (owing to current practice) neither they are incentivised to be so. Government spending is very low on R&D – 0.136 of the GDP in 2016. The industry is not ready for University-Business Collaborations, therefore achieving a low theory to practice ratio for students.Originality/valueIn the context in which the research has taken place (HE in Oman), there has been no evaluation (and more so developmental evaluation) previously implemented. Additionally, a longitudinal study, integrated as part of an ESD system targeted to innovation could increase the innovation capacity of the country on the international innovation index.

Power in a minor key: Rethinking anthropological accounts of power alongside London’s community organisers

Anthropological accounts of power remain characterized by an enduring tension. Social scientific theories of power allow anthropologists to situate subjects and mediate between contending perspectives. However, in doing so, such theories inevitably also end up displacing the grounded perspective of interlocutors themselves. This tension sustains a contentious debate, which positions attention to power and attention to grounded perspectives in opposition. In this article I draw on ethnography conducted with the UK’s largest community organising body, Citizens UK, to trace an alternative approach to this tension. For Citizens UK organisers this tension becomes a way of driving change by enrolling diverse actors in collective projects and by displacing hegemonic understandings from within. Good theories, for Citizens UK organisers, are characterised by the practical ability to mediate between contending positions and, in doing so, transform them. To make sense of this mode of theorisation I take up queer theorist Jack Halberstam’s notion of ‘low theory’, geographer Cindi Katz’s notion of ‘minor theory’, and I draw on the linguistic anthropology notion of ‘register’. This allows me to unpack how organisers use theory to act, but also to trouble established anthropological understandings of what theory is and what it ought to do.

Bringing Women Together, in Theory

“Bringing Women Together, in Theory” explores which theories allow feminist modernist scholars to treat as worthy subjects of study more women writers than just those representative few about whom most monographs have been written, thus levelling the playing field between so-called major and minor writers. In the late twentieth-century the historically tense relationship between feminist criticism’s roots in liberal humanism, even as it has had to argue against its definitional constraints, put it in conceptual tension with post-structuralist theory from which feminist theory stemmed. These differences created a contentious and hierarchical relationship in the late-twentieth century between feminist scholars of modernism from which we may now just be emerging. This chapter analyzes the work of May Sinclair and also explores affect theory, low theory, transvaluation, and skepticism.

Postnational Masculinities and Globalization in Junot Díaz and Juan Francisco Ferré

Vivancos-Pérez’s chapter demonstrates how the postnational position is influencing discourses on gender. By comparing Dominican American author Junot Díaz’s This is How You Lose Her (2012) with Spanish writer Juan Francisco Ferré’s Providence (2009) and Karnaval (2012), he argues that both authors display a critique of masculinity as an essential component of a postnational approach to cultural exchange. While Ferré disidentifies with narrative strategies of the fiction of displacement in Hispanic literatures, Díaz’s particular “low theory” emphasizes diasporicity. At the same time, this chapter draws a useful parallel between Díaz’s and Ferré’s explorations of masculinity, which add a new dimension to the transnational turn in Latino/Hispanic studies. Both authors do not simply reject traditional hypermasculine myths but try to explore their specificity within a greater transnational/global context, either by focusing on transculturation, colonial legacies, displacement and marginalization, or by elucidating the dynamic and elusive relationships among global capitalism, identity, and media spectacle.

Polite, instrumental, and dual liars

Lying is an interpersonal exercise that requires the intentional creation of a false belief in another’s mind. As such, children’s development of lie-telling is related to their increasing understanding of others and may reflect the acquisition of basic social skills. Although certain types of lies may support social relationships, other types of lies are considered antisocial in nature. The goal of this study was to compare several possible correlates, such as cognitive ability and children’s behavior patterns, that may be associated with children’s ( N = 133) use of lies in socially acceptable versus socially unacceptable ways. Children engaged in two lie-telling paradigms: one to measure socially accepted (polite) lies and one to measure socially unaccepted (instrumental) lies. Results indicate that instrumental liars were young with low theory of mind (ToM) scores and had high social skills. Polite liars were the oldest, had high ToM, and had similar levels of social skills as instrumental liars. Truth-tellers and dual liars had lower social skills and moderate ToM in comparison to the instrumental and polite liars. These findings suggest that children use lies selectively to achieve their social goals, and also suggest that children’s lying behavior may change from being self-motivated to being other-motivated as they age, which may reflect socialization toward socially accepted behavior.

How to Become War Machine, Or … A Low Hacktivist (Un)Methodology in Pieces

In recent years, digital media and networks have been increasingly used to deploy dissent, opposition and resistance. More frequently, beyond traditional media as communicational tools, politically-oriented hacking subjectivities like ‘Anonymous’ employ media as weapons. However, a similar material deployment of media actions cannot be studied as a static, clearly definable ‘thing’ based on a representational order. These media actions, as well as their compositional relations, and the processes through which they are originated, are mostly ephemeral. Moreover, their deployment is always actualised in emergent and unstable contexts, within which the elements at stake – involving human and non-human components – are continuously in change, acting often beyond representation. For this reason, I suggest a ‘low hacktivist methodology in pieces’ as a theoretical and practical exercise of assemblage for recognising and dealing with similar criticalities without imposing any impossible objectivity. Inspired by Wark’s ‘low theory’ and Guattarian ecosophy, such a ‘scattered’ (un)methodology is conceived as a ‘method assemblage’ capable of activating, rather than framing, the virtual ‘lines of flight’ of the (problematised) objects of research. Within such assemblages, in fact, subject and object are critically put into question, allowing new methodological strategies to deal with hacktivist media actions. Becoming ‘war machine’ is a temporary and fragmented attempt to ‘machinise’ with the forces populating hacktivist media assemblages. Here, an ontological reframing is needed: a confrontation with humanist paradigms that enables, as a critical circuit, the blossoming of theory from the same actions at stake.