Conceptual Development

Purpose–There is general agreement that global brands should ensure that they incorporate social responsibility. To do this properly, organisations must understand what it means to be socially responsible and how they can leverage their actions. The paper proposes consideration of three distinct areas: the range of social responsibility issues, what the organisations actually do and how to leverage those corporate social responsibility (CSR) actions. This paper seeks to conceptually develop these three areas of complexity–Issue, ...

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Abordamos diferentes teorías sobre la adquisición y desarrollo conceptual temprano, elaboramos una caracterización de conceptos genéricos (los conceptos que hacen referencia a categorías abstractas), abordamos la manera en que estos se expresan en quechua, y exponemos los resultados de una serie de investigaciones empíricas sobre la adquisición de conceptos genéricos en niños quechua hablantes. Los experimentos confirman  que durante la infancia los niños quechua-hablantes diferencian los enunciados genéricos de los específicos así como de los cuantificadores. Lo que sorprende de estos resultados es la manera en la que estos coinciden con los resultados previos obtenidos con los hablantes de inglés y de  mandarín. Podemos observar notables y fuertes coincidencias en la interpretación de los genéricos por parte de los hablantes de distintas lenguas y complejos culturales a través del mundo. Otro resultado sobresaliente es el hecho de que los hablantes de quechua atribuyen un valor genérico a los enunciados que lingüísticamente están no-marcados.  Sugerimos que la capacidad universal de conceptualizar está en correlación con contextos culturales y lingüísticos particulares en la adquisición y desarrollo de conceptos.  Las construcciones genéricas, aunque no tengan marcas morfológicas, constituyen un elemento esencial de articulación entre los procesos cognitivos universales y las especificidades de las lenguas y las culturas, la matriz del armazón y ontología específicamente quechuas.
Generic expressions—expressions that refer to a kind rather than to specific instances of the kind—play a critical role in the conceptual development of monolingual Southern Quechua children. We review different theories of concept development, characterize generic concepts, discuss how generics are expressed in Quechua, and describe the results of a set of studies examining generic concept acquisition in Quechua-speaking children.  The two experiments reported here find that during childhood, Quechua speakers differentiate generics from specific utterances as well as from quantifiers.  What is striking about all these results is how neatly they map onto prior findings with English and Mandarin speakers.  We see remarkable and powerful commonalities in the interpretation of generics across speakers of structurally distinct languages spoken in culturally distinct communities of the word. A second major result from these experiments is that Quechua speakers assign generic interpretations to linguistically unmarked utterances. We end by suggesting that universal conceptual capacities interact with particular cultural and linguistic contexts to guide conceptual development. Generic expressions—though unmarked morphologically—are one important point of contact between general cognitive processes and the particularities of languages and cultures, the matrix of a specifically Quechua conceptual framework and ontology.
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High failure rates of information systems development (ISD) projects continue to trouble organizations and information systems practices. Such a state of affairs has been of great concern for the IS discipline for decades, motivating IS researchers to focus on and extensively study ISD projects failure. However, the increasing complexity and uncertainty of ISD projects and contemporary system development processes are challenging ISD project failure scholarship. In this paper, we ask the questions: What are the contributions and weaknesses of the extant ISD project failure/success literature? What are potential avenues to move the ISD literature forward? To answer these questions, first, we present a literature review that assesses research contributions within the major perspectives on ISD failure (i.e., rationalist, process, narrative). While the extant research within all perspectives make significant contributions to knowledge, we find that researchers remain preoccupied with " project failure " as an end state of an ISD project. They pay little attention to problematic situations arising during ISD projects before they become failed projects. Based on the review and critique of the literature we then argue that there is a significant benefit in extending research focus from ISD project failure to " ISD project distress " , which we define as a harmful project condition involving dynamic and fluid constellation of critical problems that are difficult to identify, understand and resolve. While ISD project distress is an increasingly perilous and consequential phenomenon, little is known about its nature and potential responses. Drawing from the sensemaking literature, we propose a multi-level theoretical framework for understanding the nature and sources of ISD project distress that provides a foundation for exploring early detection and timely response. We demonstrate the theoretical and practical relevance of the concept of ISD project distress and propose a corresponding research agenda.