Why are nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) so successful in today’s world? How do they empower themselves? This insightful book provides important new perspectives on the strategic thinking of NGOs, the way they identify themselves, and how they behave. Raymond L. Bryant develops a novel theoretical perspective around the concept of moral capital and assesses that concept through in-depth case studies of NGOs in the Philippines. The book’s focus is on perceptions of NGOs as moral and altruistic and how such (...) perceptions can translate into social power. Bryant examines the ambiguous qualities of NGO strategizing, the ways in which the quest for moral capital is bedeviled by the need to compromise with political and economic elites, and the possibilities for NGOs to achieve political goals as moral leaders. (shrink)
The authors review the historical development of the field, explain what is distinctive about Third World political ecology, and suggest areas for future ...
Carruthers has proposed a novel and quite interesting hypothesis for the role of language in conceptual integration, but his treatment does not acknowledge work in cognitive science on metaphor and analogy that reveals how diverse knowledge structures are integrated. We claim that this body of research provides clear evidence that cross-domain conceptual connections cannot be driven by syntactic processes alone.
As is well known, dialog partners manage the uncertainty inherent in conversation by continually providing and eliciting feedback, monitoring their own comprehension and the apparent comprehension of their dialog partner, and initiating repairs as needed (see e.g., Cahn & Brennan, 1999; Clark & Brennan, 1991). Given the nature of such monitoring and repair, one might reasonably hypothesize that a good portion of the utterances involved in dialog management employ meta-language. But while there has been a great deal of work on (...) the specific topic of dialog management, and it is widely (if often tacitly) accepted that meta-language is frequently involved, there has been no work specifically investigating and quantifying the role of meta-language in dialog management. Thus, this small study investigated the correlation between meta-language and dialog management utterances in three dialog files of the British National Corpus (BNC). (shrink)
One of the more interesting counter-intuitive findings in organizational research is that success breeds failure. This counter-intuitive has been described in termsof core rigidities, core incompetencies, and even the Icarus Paradox. The literature on these topics has concluded that success yields overconfidence and myopia in firms and their managers, and this eventually causes failure. We augment this literature by suggesting that success breeds not only internal pathologies that cause firms to misuse their established resources over time, but also external pathologies (...) that cause firms to lose access to new resources. In particular, success influences stakeholders’ perceptions of firms, causing firms to lose the benefits of underdog status and gain the problems of overlord status. We term this notion that success warps images of the successful, leading to their decline over time, the Helios Paradox, and suggest that dominant firms must counter natural tendencies to succumb to both the Icarus and Helios Paradoxes if they are to remain successful over time. (shrink)
