the central issue in strategy formulation and implementation process, or strategy-making, is the identification of environmental forces and the preparation of a plan of action to deal with them. this necessitates scanning the environment for gathering information. environmental scanning should enable the firm to identify these forces. doing this not only calls for information gathering, but als...

Personality psychology is the broadest of all psychological subdisciplines in that it seeks a conceptually integrated understanding of both human nature and important individual differences. Cultural differences pose a unique set of problems for any comprehensive theory of personality-how can they be reconciled with universals of human nature on the one hand and within-cultural variation on the...

Categories are not invariant. This paper attempts to explore the dynamic nature of semantic category, in particular, that of fashion language, based on the cognitive theory of Dawkins’ memetics, a new theory of cultural evolution. Semantic attributes of linguistic memes decrease or proliferate in replication and spreading, which involves a dynamic development of semantic category. More specific...

This article describes cross-cultural research on the relation between how people conceptualize nature and how they act in it. Mental models of nature differ dramatically among populations living in the same area and engaged in similar activities. This has novel implications for environmental decision making and management, including common problems. The research offers a distinct perspective o...

Language is systematically structured at all levels of description, arguably setting it apart from all other instances of communication in nature. In this article, I survey work over the last 20 years that emphasises the contributions of individual learning, cultural transmission, and biological evolution to explaining the structural design features of language. These 3 complex adaptive systems...

SUMMARY If culture is defined as variation acquired and maintained by social learning, then culture is common in nature. However, cumulative cultural evolution resulting in behaviors that no individual could invent on their own is limited to humans, song birds, and perhaps chimpanzees. Circumstantial evidence suggests that cumulative cultural evolution requires the capacity for observational le...

Contemporary reality presents the paradoxical world of information at its most extensive against the subsequent global spread of the individual's isolation. Isolation presented from the perspective of Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki. His film The Match Factory Girl is a story about human frailty, which brings us to recognize some of the weaknesses of our time and at the same time allows us to ...

This chapter proposes to the discussion a set of principles for a design-oriented analysis of technico-organisational systems as dynamic, living, social and cultural systems, through eleven questions. After developing an ontological notion of complexity adequate to technico-organisational systems, these questions deal with the different theoretical, epistemological and methodological (data coll...