Academic Affiliation
Introduction
Nowadays, academic institutions and businesses alike have been competing for human capital, referring to superior cognitive ability and creative faculty that might be of relevance across a variety of setups. Colleges may for one be seen as the venue that is particularly good at screening or selecting and raising talent, whereas companies provide some of the more rewarding application or utilising environment for whatever ability has been developed. However, this division or specialisation is not that straightforward, with the two profiles trading their roles and complementing each other along the lines of fostering self-actualisation and the build-up of human capital. The present report seeks to apply the Gestalt-theoretic approaches to rendering the formation and allocation of cognitive behaviour as more controllable.
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Discussion
Areas & Rationale
Many academic disciplines as well as professional jobs feature well-defined sets of tasks to be mastered or delivered on. Simply put, the detail-oriented mindset would count most heavily whenever minor gaps might make the entire difference, and minute intricacies define the very nature of subject matter. For instance, the mathematics major will have to put a theorems proof to utter scrutiny, whenever a well-defined problem is in sight. The same goes for the public accountant, with cash flows to be decomposed so as to arrive at the exact same cash-and-equivalents balance at year end that actually shows up in the books.
However, many a discipline would call for an integrated approach or a well-rounded background in order to appreciate the big picture of what would otherwise have been littered by narrowly restricted efforts that may either never carry over or otherwise yield an altogether botched solution. For instance, the selfsame mathematics major might end up better off seeing an analogy between two or more formal representations, as one way of choosing the easier field to embark on. Likewise, the corporate executive might have to infer the best possible strategy the environment has to offer with the resources at hand, then see whether the organisational structure as a whole accommodates it, or proves coherent and congruent within itself with an eye towards its select units. This would pay off all the sooner, compared to spotting unit-specific shortcomings or slacks.
Definitions & Theory
In other words, one can think of a variety of areas where the Gestalt theory could provide a most natural explanatory approach, likely to be turned into a workable solution yet to be evaluated. This discipline proposes that individuals tend to perceive holistic patterns or shapes (gestalt) beyond the apparent complexity or overwhelming detail. Whether or not this is due to the brain architecture or at any rate can lend itself to similarly integrated definitions of the mind (with identity crises or loss of integral self-consciousness being more of a disorder than a natural propensity) remains to be seen. However, this is clearly at odds with the structuralist paradigm arguing for a decomposition of mind into tractable elements that might have stand-alone importance (possibly beyond weak behavioural linkage or strong-form functional voluntarism).
Overall, it is believed that the human mind secures best cognitive outcomes (along pragmatic lines not least) whenever it centres on praegnanz, or salient simplicity. However, this is not to suggest that any such simplifying bias will usher in genuinely superior solutions or accurate depictions of reality. For one thing, the laws of similarity, proximity, closure, and symmetry (referring to how perceived sets are shaped or inter-related in a parsimonious manner) might fill cognitive gaps in worst possible yet least-cost ways, and would in any case depend on the particular individuals cognitive ability. By the same token, the law of common fate might posit illusory patterns or misguided trends, amid the law of continuity showing arbitrary ways in which the scatter-plots or data aggregates could be reshuffled.
However, much the same could be blamed on the more rigorous methods, such as statistical inference or econometric regressions. While the linear models might be a questionable thing to assume in the first placeas most real-world patterns may be either non-linear or not smooth enough,--they would in any event fail to reveal anything beyond whatever has been conjectured. In other words, rigorous methods may not be able to induce theories or patterns any better than the naive or unaided mind can when drawing on gestalts. As long as these could be used as either interim metaphors or a first hunch prior to arriving at more careful iterative depictions, this perspective is second to none.
Although it cannot be directly reduced to the competing approaches, e.g. behavioural or even structural, still these might turn out to be fully compatible as supplementary tools in loosely entangled areas, e.g. music and mathematics. Among other things, career or actualisational outcomes could in a sense be seen as indirect or cumulative reinforcers or environmental perceptssomewhat in line with Sayim, Westheimer, and Herzog. That said, of course, one would have to be able to embark on gestalts to perceive those outcomes as stimuli.
Tentative Solution
Insofar as Gestalt theory could prove to be reliable as well as applicable, it will have to affect major attainment outcomes of cross-discipline merit. In particular, the afore-mentioned two setups, academic versus corporate, will be tested as to whether capstone courses or cross-training programmes do indeed boost empathy, morale, and area-specific performance while amounting to a changeable inter-disciplinary capacity. Again, this latent ability to have a birds-eye vision may not reduce to any specificitybe it in line with the principle of synergy or the gestalt premise of the whole being other than the aggregate of parts.
More specifically, exposure to capstone courses will be posited to augment any course-specific or area-specific (intra-silo) performance and awareness. It has yet to be seen if the actual number of such courses or their frequency (e.g. that of intra-course workshop participation and team projects) maps into an implicit gestalt capability which eventually secures the observable inter- as well as intra-discipline performance or payoffs. It is to be assumed that this latent ability is unobservable and could be thought of as an instrumental variable. On second thought, it need not be formalised as a proxy, cognate, or any other modelling tool subject to Cronbach alpha tests of instrumental reliability (or objective correlation of subjectively similar constructs), as it is the ultimate and readily measurable performance that counts at the end of the day.
The experimental design will be compared against a control group (low to no capstone exposure), with the core explanatory variables backed up with a set of control or confounded ones. Among other things, the independent variables will comprise the number of capstone courses (X) and their qualitative nature (frequent workshop participation and team projects versus less so) to be represented by a dummy variable (D). Moreover, an interactive variable capturing the product of the above two will be supplied to trace the mixed or combined effect, if any.
As per the dependent or performance variable, it comes in two or more dimensionscourse or unit-specific performance versus overall cognitive abilityto be tested separately or as a system of structural equations run on the same set of independent variables). The OLS (ordinary least squared) regression could look as follows:
Evaluation
Although performance will be measured over time, it could best be seen in terms of a moving average or change (differentials) rather than time-specific states (levels). This is to capture the cumulative effect, which is easier to control for exogenous impacts of the confounding variables like initial background (or unit profile), cognitive score, etc.
The advantage of this approach would be about how it gets around the critique of gestalt designsallegedly not making much use of quantitative measurementin just how the dummy variable setup amounts to a generalisation of ANOVA while readily transforming the qualitative observation into rigorous measurables.
On the downside, however, the longitudinal setting as above may inevitably have to back the cross-sectional comparison, with the implied pooled-data model either lacking the degrees of freedom to secure overall significance or simultaneously embarking on fixed and random effects referring to excessive time or individual specificitywhich makes little sense for large-sized groups.
Conclusion
The proposed approach could be deployed to extend (and possibly bridge) areas as diverse and seemingly remote as, organisational learning and design (e.g. with organisation matrix or cube being [legitimately or fallaciously] perceived in line with the invariance versus multi-stability principles), inter-disciplinary research and curricula, and behaviour modification or analysis to inform job-creation policy making, to name a few. Select emerging areas looking into entrepreneurial knack and human capital pertain to shared value and blue ocean strategy as a matter of shifting the frontiers of customer education as well as electoral nudging. Overall, it can be judged that the gestalt approach may have to be rethought in ways that straddle a variety of trade-offs as an acid test for its own cross-disciplinary potential.
