I hereby declare that this paper submitted in partial fulfilment of the DBA degree is my own work and that all contributions from any other persons or sources are properly and duly cited. I further declare that it does not constitute any previous work whether published or otherwise. In making this declaration I understand and acknowledge any breaches of the declaration constitute academic misconduct.
DefinitionsThe United Nations (UN) promotes the importance of multi-stakeholder partnerships to work towards the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. These stakeholders include governments and the private, public, & non-profit sectors to build meaningful relationships, to bring about joint action to tackle a shared interest or concern. The SDGs highlight a multitude of "wicked problems" that Rittel and Webber (1973) describe as having high complexity and requiring multiple stakeholders across sectors to work together to solve them. These types of problem situations concern many interested stakeholders with diverse worldviews; success requires forming agreement among the parties involved, many uncertainties, and the absence of reliable data (Mingers, 2011). This calls for holistic approaches -'systems thinking' offers an art to "seeing the whole" (Senge, 2006). This includes the analysis, synthesis, and understanding of interconnections, interactions, and interdependencies at multiple levels (Davidz & Nightingale, 2008). Systems-based approaches are useful in problem structuring, dealing with interrelationships, understanding multiple perspectives, making boundary judgments, but always regarding the context of use -'the way of the world' (Reynolds and Holwell, 2010). Some explicitly help agents move towards evaluating and taking purposeful action. This paper outlines seven systems-based approaches and evaluates how they can be used to address the SDGs in cross-sector partnerships. These include: 1) Systems Dynamics, 2) the Viable Systems Model (VSM), 3) Strategic Options Development and Analysis (SODA), 4) Soft Systems Methodology (SSM), 5) Critical Systems Heuristics (CSH), 6) Theory U and 7) Systemic Intervention.
In recent years, there has been a growing number of subspecialties within the context of business management, which have begun to talk seriously about a notion of religious points of view in a business context. In this paper we unpack a view from Gottfried Leibniz (1646 – 1716) and to a lesser extent Kant (1724- 1804) and Hegel (1770-1831) in relation to this perspective with a view to interpret the complexity and the role of religion in this arena. Leibniz famously argued that the universe as it currently exists, has to be “the best of all possible worlds,” since an omniscient creator would know all possibilities, and, therefore select the best available options for a starting and ending point. We argue that, although dichotically opposed to the many contemporary empirical attitudes, this perspective still has an inherent and modern-day stance, representative to both business theory and decision making via knowledge transfer mechanisms. Thus, we examine why business start- ups evolve and what effect a religious element has on the central caveat for businesses wishing to achieve success and maintain competitive advantage options, perspectives and scenarios. In this regards, we look at a significant amount of literature, in a bid to understand both the problematic nature surrounding the mechanics used to establish meaningful baselines from the many perspectives. The paper then summarises these theoretical baselines into segmented contexts for discussion
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