“The reckless whims of the will, without the guidance of reason”
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11
Periods of crisis or uncertainty are always fertile ground for outlandish fears, as information becomes distorted. In July 1789, following the storming of the Bastille, the “Great Fear” of an aristocratic conspiracy, brigands, and even the Anglois (English) caused the social system of the ancien régime to collapse in less than three weeks. This particular false information therefore had fortunate effects, as the aristocracy’s privileges were abolished later that year. Therein lies the difficulty of the subject, especially in a society where emotion has replaced knowledge and logic almost everywhere. This being the case, which experts can be trusted? Should we follow the pessimism of the Quebec philosopher Alain Deneault, who thinks that “expertise increasingly consists of selling your brain to those who can profit from it?” Received ideas, that is to say “the reckless whims of the will,” as Pascal puts it so well, also operate “without the guidance of reasoning” within our democracies. Management sciences as a field of study therefore has good reason to take interest in understanding how human beings respond to cognitive and emotional stimuli. The second part of this second issue of 2022 focuses on marketing and consists of four articles. It’s theme is “consumption, consumers, and social utility.” As in the previous issue, we take the world as our scope. Three authors from France and Quebec take an almost neurological perspective and introduce the “meta-need molecule,” which may allow entrepreneurs to better respond to the complex needs of consumers (page…). We would like to honor the memory of one of the authors of this piece, Professor Gabriel Mircea Chirita, who has passed away. The remaining articles tackle the performance of financial services in Burkina Faso (page…); identity, values, and transmission among owners of cars manufactured by German brands Volkswagen and Porsche (page…); and, offering extra analysis of the subject of an article in the previous issue (313), green spending in Cameroonian SMEs. All of these topics, however, tie back into our central theme of marketing. We have mentioned in the past that the arrival of new technologies is often seen as an expansion of the means of manipulation. As elections approach in France as well as Slovenia and other countries, it is worth reflecting on the opportunity that the internet presents to fight against opacity in public organizations (page…). The first part of this issue, with the theme of “information at the service of organizations,” also examines the implementation of market orientation by means of the orientation of information technologies, applied this time to manufacturing SMEs in France and Quebec (page…) and the effect of perceived quality of service on learners’ reactions to a virtual learning platform (page…). So, is the brain the organ which is “offered up to Coca-Cola” or “to the needs of companies,” as Guy Breton, rector of the University of Montreal, likes to say it is? This is a major philosophical, political, and anthropological question—and one that certainly concerns management sciences. Yes, the brain does indeed fall into the scope of our work! The OECD’s Center for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) launched a project entitled “Learning Sciences and Brain Research” in 1999. The primary aim of this innovative project was to encourage collaboration between learning sciences and brain research on the one hand and researchers and policymakers on the other. As always, by examining the facts and case studies, we hope to have selected a set of contributions which provide some modest, incremental answers from the perspective of management science.
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