Convincing Ourselves

Below is an abstract of the paper I wrote for " Telling the story of business: story-driven research in entrepreneurship, business, and marketing",  held at the University of South Wales in January 2020.  ================================================================= A Narrative Inquiry into the role of psychological factors in helping a Pakistani Family Business owner-manager, navigate turbulent market conditions   By Umair Usman, Usman Carpet House, Lahore, Pakistan Abstract This is an ethnographic narrative inquiry to identify the psychological factors that helped my father, a Pakistan family business owner-manager, through the great recession of 2006/2007. The study is retrospective in nature where I discuss my time, as a part of the family business during this period we experienced. I recall what I observed, and experienced, were psychological and mental factors that were inherent in my father and supported him through this...

The Article reviews the paper "Mindfulness meditation as an intervention for binge eating, emotional eating, and weight loss: A systematic review" published in the Journal "Eating Behaviours" in 2014 by Katterman et al. The paper itself takes a meta-study approach and examines 14 different studies where Mindfulness Meditation has been used as the primary method to influence emotional eating, binge eating as well as weight. One of the reasons why the authors may have looked at mindfulness meditation as the primary, rather than the only intervention, is probably because in real-life clinical settings, it is difficult to find practitioners using only one method alone. At the very least interventions are accompanied by some form of counseling or psychoeducation. It must be kept in mind that traditionally, it would be common to find practitioners using such mind-body approaches adjunct to another mainstream approach such as CBT. The authors looked at emotional...

Introduction Influencing the general public is a hotly debated topic in the policy. In any form of government reforms and agendas have to be 'sold' to the public. The government has traditionally been done through information dissemination through the media and done so quite effectively. An example can be of course selling wars or military interventions to the public. When the intent, however, is misinformation on a large scale, it becomes 'propaganda'. Despite its negative connotations, it is surely been present in democracies, as much as in dictatorships. A few years ago we have seen a move towards 'Nudging' individuals also called the Nudge Theory. This was popularized by Book by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler in their book ' Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness '. An example of this could be the wording on a referendum to discourage a certain outcome or perhaps limiting choices for the consumers on the type o...

It seems that popular topics find their way into academic circles more often these days. I came across a great example of Harvard Business Review by Reiken et al called “ How Mindfulness Can Help Engineers Solve Problems”. The article has been re-posted several times across a variety of academic sites and it is surely worth a review. To begin with, mindfulness is essentially about living in the moment and paying attention to simply what is. The authors compare linear, or convergent thinking with divergent thinking, where several options are explored on top of the starting point, to generate a number of ideas and hence favours creativity and innovation. The article makes the claim that most engineers are trained to be liner, convergent thinkers and even though it's important, for the best solutions one requires both convergent and divergent thinking. The authors performed two studies to look at the impact of mindfulness meditation, which is an exercise known to...