Breaking the Shackles of Time Claremont Graduate University

In this episode, Bernard Jaworski, the Drucker Chair in Management and the Liberal Arts at CGU, visits the podcast to discuss the discipline of management as well as some of the key ideas of Peter Drucker. We discuss what makes the Drucker School of Management unique in its approach to business education and the role of business in social change, amongst other topics.
Episode Transctipt:
Marcus Weakley:
Welcome to Episode Six of Breaking the Shackles of Time. I’m Marcus Weakley, the host of the podcast. I’m joined today by Bernie Jaworski, the Drucker Chair in Management and the Liberal Arts at the Drucker School of Management at Claremont Graduate University. This position, this chair is named in honor of Peter Drucker, the founder of modern management. It is awarded to an internationally recognized scholar who carries on the Drucker legacy of tempering sound business practices with a commitment to social responsibility.
Marcus Weakley:
Jaworski comes to the Drucker School from the Switzerland-based IMD. Prior to that, he spent a decade as a senior partner of the Monitor Group, a global management consulting firm. During his Monitor career, he co-founded and co-lead two of the global practice areas, the e-commerce practice and the executive education unit. In addition, he served as a tenured full professor of marketing at the University of Southern California, faculty at the University of Arizona and a visiting professor at Harvard Business. Thank you so much for joining us. I’m very happy that you’ve agreed to jump into the podcast and talk about management with us here today.
Bernie Jaworski:
Very excited to be here, Marcus. Thank you very much for the invite. I’m always happy to talk about the work of Peter Drucker, right? I’ve consumed the Kool-Aid, if you will. So, I’m very happy to be the vessel that explain some of his basic ideas to a broader audience. So, thank you for my inviting me.
Marcus Weakley:
Nice. Great. Well, let’s start even one step further back and then we’ll hone in on Peter Drucker, but what I’m interested in is for folks who don’t really have an idea about why you would go to school to study management, instead of just maybe just running a business type of thing, what exactly does it mean to study management? What are some of the major methods and approaches of the field? Why does one get an MBA?
Bernie Jaworski:
Yeah, that’s a great question. As I thought about that question, there’s two ways to answer. One is around a philosophy. The second is around tools and methods. So, from a philosophy perspective, I tend to think of management as having three different orientations, three different schools of thought, much like you’d find a school of thought in psychology or sociology. So, the schools of thought that I think exists near management are one is taking a shareholder-only perspective that it’s all about profit. It’s all about economics. It’s all about supply and demand, let free markets operate. That’s coming from what’s called the Chicago School of Economics, and Milton Friedman being probably the most important person in that space.
Bernie Jaworski:
The second school of thought is purpose-, values-led companies. You see a lot of this in the last 20 years with people, particularly young folks in their 20s, want to join a company that has a purpose that has values as orientation. They’re buying into the overall mission and purpose of that company. Now, they obviously want to make money. They want to make good economic returns, but in addition, they think their mission is broader than that.
Bernie Jaworski:
And then this third school of thought, which is the Drucker school of thought is that all the reason we’re doing all of this management is not simply to allow your organization to function well and produce economic returns. You want to have an impact on society in general

In this episode, Dr. Nadine Chan, Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies at Claremont Graduate University, joins the podcast to discuss some of the key elements and methods of Cultural Studies. We also discuss her own projects on film as a colonial and counter-colonial object in Malaysia and Singapore, and the various ways of documenting environmental degradation in contemporary Southeast Asia.
Marcus Weakley:
Hello. Welcome to Breaking the Shackles of Time, a podcast about writing and other topics. We are continuing our new trend here with episode five. I have a wonderful guest with me today. I have Dr. Nadine Chan with me today. Welcome. Thank you so much for being here.
Nadine Chan:
Thank you for having me.
Marcus Weakley:
Yeah. I appreciate you coming and visiting and having a conversation. For a little bit of background about Dr. Chan, she’s a assistant professor of cultural studies at Claremont Graduate University. Her areas of research and teaching include media historiography and theory, post-colonial and new empire studies, environmental humanities media, and the Anthropocene, visual studies, global Asia, South East Asian film and media, amongst others. She received her PhD in cinema and media studies from USC, University of Southern California, and is a former Harper Schmidt fellow through the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago, and a Global Asia postdoctoral fellow from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
Marcus Weakley:
From what I know, she has two main projects right now. One is a project that’s conceptualizing film as an object that is animated by both colonial and counter colonial energies. And hopefully we’ll have a chance to talk a bit more about that, as well as another project that’s focusing more on the visualizations of the Anthropocene, particularly through questions of archive information and effect. And I think both of those studies will be great examples of the uniqueness of cultural studies as a field.
Marcus Weakley:
Just a bit more. Her research has been supported by a Social Science Research Council, Andrew W. Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship, Global Asia Postdoctoral Fellowship amongst others. And we are welcoming her here today to discuss the unique qualities of the field of cultural studies, as well as her specific work within that. So once again, thank you so much for joining me. And I would like to start as I typically do at a more general level, and then we’ll narrow in to your specific research. My sense is the audience might not fully understand what cultural studies is uniquely as a field or an academic discipline, so if you had to describe it to someone who doesn’t know anything about it, how would you do that?
Nadine Chan:
Yeah. So first of all, thank you for having me Marcus and for that intro. Well, cultural studies, it’s a lot of things. I mean, you could ask anyone in the field what the discipline is and they might all well give you different answers. But I think one thing we would all agree on is that as a discipline, it’s fundamentally interested in unearthing infrastructures of inequality, oppression, thinking about networks of power and politics an the production and circulation and use of cultural objects or at particular cultural moments. So, yeah, I mean the concerns of cultural studies, as I say, will always be fundamentally about the interrogation of power and the structures of power in whatever forms. So I think in the nutshell, that is what it would really be. Yeah, I guess I’d say it’s a discipline that’s built around an ethos, the ethos of always doing scholarship that in some way intervenes into questions of power, hegemony and ideology.
Marcus Weakley:
Yeah. So that’s really interesting. I mean, it seems to me that then it has kind of that social justice critical paradigm, and then it’s also very pragmatic, it seems like are very practical. Like

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk, associate professor of Psychology at Claremont Graduate University joins the podcast to discuss the unique approach Psychology and Positive Psychology take to research as well as some of the great work she is doing through her Adolescent Moral Development Lab on understanding and developing purpose in youths.
TRANSCRIPT
Marcus Weakley:
Hello, this is breaking the shackles of time. My name is Marcus Weakley, we are beginning a new chapter today in reimagining the podcast with a broader focus than just writing. And I couldn’t be happier than to welcome Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk, to this inaugural new reimagining episode. In terms of a brief introduction, Dr. Bronk, is an associate professor of psychology in the division of behavioral and social sciences at Claremont Graduate University. She’s a developmental psychologist interested in understanding and supporting the positive development and moral growth of young people.
Marcus Weakley:
To this end, she leads the Adolescent Moral Development Lab, which focuses on addressing primary questions around purpose and youth. Her work has been funded by the Spencer Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation. We’re going to go more in-depth about her specific research focus in terms of purpose in youth. But in addition to her substantive interest, she has also helped define and outline the parameters of something called the exemplar methodology, which we’ll talk about more. And of course, teaches masters in doctoral classes on a range of topics at Claremont Graduate University. Thank you so much for joining me.
Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
Thanks for having me, Marcus. I’m glad to be here.
Marcus Weakley:
Great, awesome. Before we jump in, I just wanted to give our listeners a bit of a background into this shift in the podcast. What I’m thinking of doing now, moving away from just talking about topics around writing, the last episode on transdisciplinary thinking, which was supposed to be an integration of transdisciplinary thinking and writing, kind of inspired me, I’m really interested in different epistemologies, ways of approaching knowledge and building knowledge and how those transfer into the tools of academic study, right? Or even professional studies.
Marcus Weakley:
How those transfers into theories, practices, assumptions, methods and definitely different standards of reliability, verification, the things that when we learn how to research the world, or a phenomenon through a discipline, we might learn in practice and take for granted. I’m interested in looking at those, in folks that are doing work in different areas of academic research, and having some good discussions around that and what interesting elements we can bring to light in honing and focusing in on the background, the theories behind pursuits of knowledge and understanding.
Marcus Weakley:
For our episode today, that means we’re going to look at psychology and positive psychology more specifically. I would like to start general and then move more specific, if that’s okay. The first question Dr. Bronk is, psychology is a science or often considered a social science. What does typical psychological research do to study phenomenon?
Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
That’s a good question. Psychologists we’re really interested in understanding human behavior, and in order to do that, we tend to use a mix of quantitative and qualitative research methods. We also use experimental research and quasi experimental research. So just a little bit about each of those, quantitative research methods often employ surveys, you might go and administer a bunch of surveys to people to get a sense of how many people across the country, how many young people have a sense of purpose in their lives.
Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
Qualitative research more often relies on things like interviews, or focus groups, or observations. If

In response to complex contemporary problems & the limitations of siloed specializations in solving them, a new boundary-crossing approach is actively being developed by researchers.
Episode transcript:
Marcus Weakley:
This is Breaking the Shackles of Time. I have two wonderful guests with me. I am Marcus Weakley. The first guest, who has already introduced himself, is Dr. Andy Vosko. Would you like to say something about yourself?
Dr. Andy Vosko:
Sure. I am an associate provost, and I direct the transdisciplinary studies program at Claremont Graduate University. I come from a lot of different academic backgrounds, but I’d say that I studied East Asian language and literature and then went on to become a neuroscientist. So I liked to mix and match a lot of different perspectives into what I’m doing.
Marcus Weakley:
Great, welcome.
Dr. Andy Vosko:
Thank you.
Marcus Weakley:
And the other guest has been a guest before. Will you re-introduce yourself?
Troy:
Yeah, I’m Troy [McKanovich 00:00:46]. I’m a PhD student studying religion in American politics. Before that I was doing religion and social theory, and before that astrophysics.
Marcus Weakley:
Great. So we have two transdisciplinary folks in personal experience with us today.
Marcus Weakley:
One of the things that I wanted to do to kind of set a lay of the land for the audience a bit was to try to see if we could talk a bit and maybe figure out some of the problems and agreed-upon areas of what transdisciplinary is or how it’s defined let’s say, more specifically. So I jumped on Google. I Googled transdisciplinarity definition. I clicked on the top three results, and I’m going to read them okay for our audience.
Marcus Weakley:
Number one, our good friend, Wikipedia, transdisciplinarity, connotes, connotes, a research strategy that crosses many disciplinary boundaries to create a holistic approach. It applies to research efforts focused on problems that cross the boundaries of two or more disciplines, such as research on effective information systems for biomedical research, and can refer to concepts or methods that were originally developed by one discipline but are now used by several others, such as ethnography, a field, research method, originally for anthropology now widely used.
Marcus Weakley:
Okay. So we have crosses disciplinary boundaries towards a holistic approach, focuses on problems across two or more disciplines, are taking something from one discipline and applying it to others.
Marcus Weakley:
Second was from Purdue university. It’s a blog. What is transdisciplinarity? I had to dig a bit on the second page. We’ve got, quoting someone named Petrie, “The notion of transdisciplinarity exemplifies one of the historically important driving forces in the area of interdisciplinarity, namely, the idea of the desirability of the integration of knowledge into some meaningful whole. The best example, perhaps, of the drive to transdisciplinarity might be the early discussions of general systems theory when it was being held forward as a grand synthesis of knowledge. Marxism, structuralism, and feminist theory,” as well other examples. “Essentially, this kind of interdisciplinarity represents the impetus to integrate knowledge, and, hence, is often characterized by a denigration and repudiation of the disciplines and disciplinary work as essentially fragmented and incomplete.”
Marcus Weakley:
So again, we have integration of knowledge into a meaningful whole, so that vibes off the holistic approach of the last one. But we have a strong definition here of it being a force, an impetus, of a desire or a push, right? It’s historical, and it’s a kind of interdisciplinarity.
Marcus Weakley:
And finally, we have the Harvard Transdisciplinary Research in Energetics and Cancer Center. Their definition is more straightforward. Transdisciplinary research, so it’s not transdisciplinarity, b

The individuality and singular creativity of authors are closely guarded in many cultures today, and this translates into how we approach the act of writing itself. Is this the right framework to have, and should we be asking different questions about authorship?
For a transcript of this episode, email cgupodcasts at gmail.com and include the episode title.

A deeper understanding of the form of writing contexts can lead to a transformation in how we view the written word, both from the perspectives of a reader and a writer.
For a transcript of this episode, email cgupodcasts at gmail.com and include the episode title.