There is not one single system dynamics approach. Apart from ’mainstream’ system dynamics, there are several distinctive practices in use. In this explorative paper, an attempt is made to reveal basic assumptions of different practices and to classify them in a paradigmatic classification framework on the basis of these basic assumptions. Revealing its basic assumptions might be important for i...

The digital divide is nothing else than the reflection of the social divide in the digital world. The use of ICT for human development does offer opportunities to reduce the social divide for individual beings or communities; yet there exists a series of obstacles to overcome. The very existence of an infrastructure for connectivity is only the first obstacle, although it often receives an excl...

This article maps out research in professional education with reference to a threefold typology of paradigms, i.e. the positivist, interpretivist and critical paradigms. The rationale for such an endeavour is fourfold. First, it directs attention to the neglected territory of methodology which is essential for researcher reflexivity. Second, it shows that most research in social work education ...

This article will argue that, despite customer-centric intent, marketing theory remains trapped in a firm-centric paradigm. How this apparent contradiction has endured is discussed critically with reference to what we see as four influential marketing perspectives. These perspectives are the 4Ps marketing mix, market-based assets, relationship marketing, and customer equity. Apart from the 4Ps ...

The aim of this note is to give a simple but instructive example of the forgetrestore principle, conceived by Giovanni Sambin as a discipline for a constructive development of mathematics and first appeared in print in the introduction of Sambin and Valentini 1997. The best way to explain such a philosophical position is to quote from that paper: “To build up an abstract concept from a row flow...

Arabic verbs exhibit a morphologically conditioned stem ablaut which has been attributed in the past to an apophonic scale (Guerssel and Lowenstamm 1996; Ségéral 1997). I show here that this apophonic scale is unnecessary, and that Arabic ablaut can be attributed instead to maximized contrast along the dimension of morphosyntactic aspect, employing constraints motivated by Rebrus and Törkenczy ...

Information Systems (IS) research has so far been primarily concerned with the development of new modeling languages, techniques, and methods. Also, evaluation approaches have been developed in order to assess the appropriateness of a modeling approach in a given context. Both modeling and evaluation approaches, however, lack epistemological rigor, leading to problems regarding the applicabilit...

A two-tier model for the description of morphological, syntactic and semantic variations of multi-word terms is presented. It is applied to term normalization of French and English corpora in the medical and agricultural domains. Five different sources of morphological and semantic knowledge are exploited (MULTEXT, CELEX, AGROVOC, WordNetl.6, and Microsoft Word97 thesaurus). 1 I n t r o d u c t...