Michelle Sofo

Adaptive Decision Making and Intellectual Styles

Chapter 1:Introduction to the Role of Decision Making from Multiple Perspectives.-Chapter 2: Literature Review of Critical Thinking and Intellectual Styles.-Chapter 3: Case study - International Convergence and Divergence of Intellectual Styles and Critical Thinking Between Italy, Finland and Australia.-Chapter 4: Conclusion and Directions for Further Exploration.

Decision Making in the Social Sciences

This chapter explores four social science disciplines and their perspectives and concerns in relation to decision making. The chapter is organized into four perspectives: sociology; management; marketing and education. The key concepts covered in the sociology section include how decisions are constrained and controlled by cooperation, competition, trust, reciprocity, and social norms. The management discipline is regarded as the science of decision making and this second section explores rational decision making, risk, uncertainty, the decision school, individual, and group decision making as well as the concept of adaptive decision making. The third major section examines decision making from a marketing perspective taking a broad view of communicating information and social influences. The focus in this section centers on unlocking the black box to optimize understanding mindsets, customer behaviors, cognitive style, and market appreciation. The final section deals with adaptive decision making in education and discusses recent studies in various education sectors including compulsory schooling: mainstream, exceptional students (gifted, talented, and special), and in other sectors such as higher education, vocational education, health and medical education, and workplace learning.

The Role of Education in Breaking the Nexus between e-Marketing and Online Fraud

The world of marketing has changed through the incorporation of electronic means through which new customers and new markets can be reached. As a result, the world of trade and commerce has been revolutionized, revealing new and sometimes less scrupulous ways of dealing in an online marketplace. The article provides three Australian examples each featuring a nexus between e-marketing and fraudulent online transactions in order to gain a deeper appreciation of the darker side that exists to e-marketing. It also explores education and adult learning as means of raising awareness and skills in dealing with harmful e-marketing practices found in occurrences such as Internet fraud.

Analytical Exploration of Intellectual Style and Critical Thinking

This chapter describes, analyses, and critically explores intellectual styles of individuals living in different parts of the world. It is organized into two main sections. The first is devoted to exploring the nature of intellectual styles, as defined in the theory of reality construction (Sofo 2005); the second examines the development of critical thinking skills in a sample of university students. In both sections, the focus is on university students who represent the next generation of professionals, in all probability, the ones who will be making important decisions in the next 20 years. We think it is important to recognize differences and similarities among students to better understand their preferred ways of processing information and dealing with complex tasks. In the first section, we try to deepen our understanding how students make decisions analyzing their preferred ways of thinking about solving problems and behaving. With this aim, the first part of this section reports on explorative surveys conducted in three European regions: Northern Italy, Southern Italy, and Western Finland. The results characterize intellectual styles and verify how differences in socio-economic and cultural factors status are decisive in the conditioning intellectual style. Classical research in this area is based on the understanding of the individual intellectual style; we try to take a step forward investigating how differences in intellectual styles can influence collaboration among individuals in structured creative environments. We introduce an innovative research methodology where a sample of university students was surveyed while subjected to an intensive project-based learning (PBL) experience. Next, we conclude by reporting on a qualitative contrastive analysis among the decision makers of tomorrow (samples of university students from three European regions) and today’s leaders (samples of Chinese and Australian managers) discovering some unexpected results. Overall, the perspective of the first section is to better understand ways of thinking of our current students and the importance of raising awareness of how to maximize the effectiveness of their preferred ways of thinking to thrive in the ever complex and dynamic environments of the future. The key concepts covered in the first section include intellectual/thinking style, management, organizational learning, collaborative networks, and collaborative work. In the second section, we define, explore, and analyze the role of critical thinking, its relevance in different contexts, and its characteristics to be a fundamental part of creativity and leadership. Critical thinking is here viewed—among other things—as an individual’s ability to maximize their capacity to create improvements. The section introduces the Critical Thinking Capability Inventory (CTCI) and a study of its reliability, by means of a Cronbach alpha analysis to test internal consistency. Furthermore, a study finalized to test differences in critical thinking skills, between Australian and Italian students, is reported. The study survey sample of students was from four Italian universities and a sample from the University of Canberra (Australia). Overall, this section endeavors to deepen our understanding of the key constructs of critical thinking, creativity, leadership, innovation, and university students.

Critical Thinking and Intellectual Style

The aim of this second chapter is to present a review of literature on critical thinking and on intellectual styles in order to point out the potential intersections between critical thinking and intellect. These pages are directed toward an integration of intellectual ability, learning style, personality and achievement motivation as predictors of the decision-making process. We point out the main factors affecting decision processes in the current complex scenario recalling some concepts illustrated in “Decision Making in the Social Sciences”. Far from the normative approach, we present insights on the adaptive nature of the decision-making process in our complex society: people adapt according the age, the experience, the contexts, and the role we play.

Practical Application and the Emergence of ADM 3.0

In this book, we have focused on decision making and intellectual style from four key social science perspectives where there are distinct differences but also overlapping concerns: sociology, management, marketing, and education. These disciplines are hybrids and naturally our discussion has been drawn into other scientific disciplines such as psychology. Our focus on the four disciplines is because they are applied fields that use an accumulation of wisdom continually being advanced. In this chapter, we draw together some of the threads presented in earlier chapters and attempt a further synthesis of adaptive decision making and intellectual style. We review the contribution of these social science areas to the twin notions of decision making and intellectual style. In what follows, we first highlight and extend several aspects already discussed in the first three chapters. Second, we examine the role of decision biases and decision frameworks. Third, we survey the relevance of some recent literature on intuition and its role in decision making. Fourth, we revisit decision making and the importance of intellectual style within the new world and coin the term Adaptive Decision Making 3.0 to mean new and interactive approaches to decision making that incorporate awareness raising of intellectual style usage including deep professional learning at different levels (for example resilience, double-, and triple-loop learning) to heighten our recognition and more effective utilization of decision biases and decision frameworks as well as intuition. The chapter concludes with two case studies on ADM 3.0, one on UNESCO and the other on QF12.

Successful R&D management cooperation between China and Australia

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify from the literature the successful R&D management cooperation factors and then examine their relevance to R&D management cooperation efforts between China and Australia.Design/methodology/approach – The case study method is used to encourage a deeper appreciation of the dynamics of R&D management projects. A theoretical framework is constructed based on the literature to highlight factors of successful R&D management, and this framework is then applied to a case study involving the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).Findings – The result is a hybrid multi‐dimensional model incorporating cultural and social capital variables. Several critical success factors were found to exist: funding, government support, institutional support, complementary technology and expertise, mutual respect and strong commitment from leadership. One additional critical success factor was the bi...