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In Situated Learning, Lave and Wenger rejected the traditional understanding of learning, or cognition, as something that happens inside an individual brain.
They argued, instead, that learning is 'situated' because it is largely a product of the environment in which it occurs and takes place most effectively through participation with experts and peers in a 'community of practice.' They used this insight to develop a theoretical basis for the concept...
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Culture's Consequences was the first study took and in depth look at cultural differences using data. Taking advantage of the global span of his employer, IBM, Hofstede gathered survey data in 20 languages and across 70 countries to produce a unique study of national values.
He introduced an innovative framework for analyzing his data, identifying patterns he called "dimensions." This allowed him to plot the values of different cultures to new levels...
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Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman offers a general audience access to over six decades of insight and expertise from a Nobel Laureate in an accessible and interesting way. Kahneman's work focuses largely on the problem of how we think, and warns of the dangers of trusting to intuition — which springs from "fast" but broad and emotional thinking — rather than engaging in the slower, harder, but surer thinking that stems from logical, deliberate...
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Ikujiro Nonaka's A Dynamic Theory of Organizational Knowledge Creation outlines the creation of organisational knowledge through the constant conversion of the two types of knowledge, tacit and explicit, which Nonaka believes has the potential to guide managers' knowledge creation strategies.
This argument is centred on the conviction that companies are not passive parties that simply utilise existing knowledge for providing solutions to the customers,...
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What is the past — and what can we really know about it? This is the big question Febvre explores in this 1942 text. Relying on his groundbreaking technique championing 'problem-based history,' Febvre focuses on sixteenth-century French writer François Rabelais to answer one controversial question: Was Rabelais really one of France's first atheists?
Febvre conducted thorough research on Rabelais and the times he lived in to challenge this accepted...
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Susan Sontag's 1997 text, On Photography, brought photographic theory into the university classroom with its staunch defense of the medium as art and inspired a new wave of Marxist Criticism in the field. Sontag explains the way in which we are addicted to images and depend on them for knowledge of our surroundings and the problems and challenges this causes.
Already an established academic figure, Sontag brought Walter Benjamin's theories in into...
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One of the most widely read books in the social sciences, Purity and Danger established Mary Douglas as one of the twentieth century's leading social scientists. Her career spanned fieldwork in the Congo to wartime service in the British government to teaching at Oxford and Princeton, and her work continues to influence not only the social sciences but also fields as diverse as economics, design, and environmental studies.
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The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction combats traditional art criticism's treatment of artworks as fixed, unchanging mystical objects. For Benjamin, a work of art closed off from any active visual or tactile engagement becomes an object of passive contemplation and a potential tool of oppression. He argues that technology has fundamentally altered the way art is experienced.
Open to interpretation and accessible to many, art in the...
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Widely accepted as a philosophical masterpiece, Ethics sets out to explain nothing less than the nature of God, the world, and how we should live. Rejecting some of the most deeply held presuppositions of classical and medieval thought, Spinoza makes the radical claim that God and the universe are in fact one and the same, a single substance with infinite attributes.
Ethics is famously complex, its elaborate and self-referential matrix of definitions...
10) Hanna Batatu's "The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq": A Macat Analysis
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First published in 1978, Batatu's extraordinarily detailed text is considered the definitive social history of twentieth century Iraq. The work is actually three volumes in one.
The first discusses the evolution of the social groups existing in Iraq at the beginning of the twentieth century. The second tells the story of the emerging communist movement through the 1950s. The third examines the 1958 revolution itself and the role of different social...
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Vision and Difference, published in 1988, is one of the most significant works in feminist visual culture arguing that feminist art history of is a political as well as academic endeavour.
Pollock expresses how images are key to the construction of sexual difference, both in visual culture and in broader societal experiences. Her argument places feminist theory at the centre of art history, proffering the idea that a feminist understanding of art...
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Outline of a Theory of Practice is recognized as a major theoretical text on the foundations of anthropology and sociology. Pierre Bourdieu develops a theory of practice that is simultaneously a critique of the methods and postures of social science and a general account of how human action should be understood, illustrated by his fieldwork in Algeria.
The text's rigorous, consistent, materialist approach lays the foundations for a theory of symbolic...
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Tabbaa's The Transformation of Islamic Art offers an innovative approach to understanding the profound changes undergone by Islamic art and architecture during the often neglected Medieval Islamic period.
Tabbaa argues that devices such as calligraphy, arabesque, muqarnas, and stonework were propagated during a moment of confrontation and facilitated the re-emergence of the Sunni Abbasid caliphate in a more orthodox image. Tabbaa offers a timely...
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Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998 having written Inequality Reexamined in 1992, a seminal text setting out a theory to evaluate social arrangements and inequality. By asking 'equality of what?' Sen shows that (in)equality should be assessed as human freedom. The text lays out the fundamental ideas to Sen's Capability Approach.
This approach is celebrated in diverse academic disciplines because of its specific contribution towards...
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With 1962's Centuries of Childhood, Philippe Ariès didn't just produce the first comprehensive history of childhood he also called attention to the consideration ordinary people. Ariès argues that the concept of childhood did not even exist until the 17th century; before that, children were regarded simply as small people.
When the 'discovery' of childhood came about, it was not because children had changed, but because people's mentalities had...
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Berger first examines the relationship between seeing and knowing, discussing how our assumptions affect how we see a painting.
He moves on to consider the role of women in artwork, particularly regarding the female nude. The third essay deals with oil painting looking at the relationship between subjects and ownership.
Finally, Berger addresses the idea of ownership in a consumerist society, discussing the power of imagery in advertising, with...
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Ludwig Von Mises's 1912 contribution to the theory of monetary policy and the current prevailing consensus in modern economic liberalism, The Theory of Money and Credit, was a milestone achievement. The author's familiarity with the historical literature on banking and credit allows him to present a coherent theoretical structure that links private exchange between individuals, business and banks to condition the markets affecting money and credit.
Through...
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In his highly influential best seller, first published in 1973, Burton Malkiel demolishes the idea that investment 'experts' can predict stock price changes and 'beat the market.' Since all information that could affect the value of a company's shares is known almost instantly to all investors, Malkiel argues, shares quickly find the price that reflects that information.
He recommends buying a broad range of stocks to reflect the market price level...
19) A Macat Analysis of Marcel Mauss's The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies
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In The Gift (1925), Marcel Mauss elevates a simple gift from the status of innocent object to something that has the capacity to motivate people and define social relationships. The Gift analyzes cultures across the world and across time, examining the ways gifts are given and received to understand the rules and traditions of many different societies. Gifts can be tangible, like jewelry, or intangible, like the offering of skills. But binding relationships...
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"The Core Competence of the Corporation" challenged and redefined traditional concepts of management strategy in a market that was growing increasingly global and competitive.
Business scholars C. K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel base their 1990 argument for a strategy change on a comparison of case studies. They note that some corporations are adept at inventing new markets, quickly entering emerging markets, and shifting patterns of customer choice in...