Vista University

About: Vista University is a based out in . It is known for research contribution in the topics: Boron trifluoride & Higher education. The organization has 225 authors who have published 336 publications receiving 3345 citations.

The organisational culture types of South African firms

Abstract: This article sets out to examine the organisational culture types of South African firms. A literature study revealed four common organisational culture types, namely a power, role, task and person culture. An empirical study of 3000 South African firms by means of a self-administered questionnaire, investigated which of the four organisational culture types the firms exhibit. It appears that most of the respondent firms have a task culture. This culture is one that can adapt quickly, and where influence is based on expertise rather than personal authority. This in turn indicates that most South African firms do have an organisational culture that is compatible with a changing and competitive environment.

Review: Research Design: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches:

Abstract: (1994), the authors use a Foucaultian approach to examine the historical conditions and institutional forms in which the specific types of knowledge which make up traditional social psychology can emerge. They uncover the connection between the dominant forms of social psychology and the institutions to which it is linked; the types of social engineering it serves, the marketing strategies it adopts. They are considerably more attuned to questions of power than writers of the first wave, and as a result are somewhat less surprised that the mainstream social psychology has not hastened to restructure itself on the basis oftheir critique. While the book attempts to be a 'general, introductory critical text' in social psychology, and goes far in being both lucid and lively, it is certainly not a simple text, and as a textbook is suited for an advanced undergraduate or postgraduate course. It is by its nature caught in a difficult situation. How does one write a completely new book in any discipline? Inasmuch as one offers a completely new set of conceptual tools and methods, one writes oneself out of the discipline from the outset. So it becomes necessary to laboriously argue against the existing system, showing its failings and exhaustively justifying the alternative that is being proposed. This very easily becomes a technical philosophical work for specialists in the discipline (who will in any case ignore it), rather than a practical demonstration of the usefulness of the new approach. Here the authors achieve as good a balance as any, but perhaps what we would like to see is another work that shows these methods in action, productively working on some of the pressing issues we face. In any event, this book certainly brings us one step nearer that point.

On the lattice of matric-extensible radicals

Abstract: A radical α in the universal class of associative rings is called matric-extensible if α (R n) = (α (R))n for any ring R, and natural number n, where R n denotes the nxn matrix ring with entries from R. We investigate matric-extensibility of the lower radical determined by a simple ring S. This enables us to find necessary and sufficient conditions for the lower radical determined by S to be an atom in the lattice of hereditary matric-extensible radicals. We also show that this lattice has atoms which are not of this form. We then describe all atoms of the lattice, and show that it is atomic.

Psychoanalysis, science fiction and cyborgianism

Abstract: Central to this paper is the understanding that much of crucial importance to psychoanalytic thought rests on a conception of the subject as inseparable from a history of the body a history in turn inseparable from the central tenets of Oedipus, in its turn a concept which originates in and is illustrated by literature. The paper will suggest that when recent cultural theorists, drawing on the implications of cybernetics and infoculture theory, contest the psychoanalytic notion of the subject, it is not surprising that they do so in terms of the possibility of an alternative body - a hybrid form of subjectivity between human and machine. Nor, the paper suggests, is it surprising that it should be science fiction, a genre with a long-standing concern with the possibility of such an amalgam, which supplies the key evidence for a post-oedipal theory of this "cyborg" subject. The paper concludes by speculating on the productivity of the conjunction between literature and thinking about the body, inasmuch as this conjunction attempts to establish a new anthropology of the self.