Charles Martineau

The impact of Karl Popper

By April this year, I will have com­pleted my Mas­ters (M.Sc.) in Inter­na­tional Busi­ness with a spe­cial­iza­tion in Finance. Hence, I must find what I want to do next. Of course I want to find work, but I have to admit that I am tempted to do a PhD. Why? First, I like research. It can be really fun when you have an intel­lec­tual curios­ity. My research has been mostly in finance but my lat­est research and Master’s the­sis also involved pol­i­tics and eco­nom­ics. Also, both my super­vi­sors and I plan to pub­lish this research in a good jour­nal. Should I con­tinue in this field of study through a PhD? Not really. In the past two years I have found the field of research that I am truly pas­sion­ate about, that is: method­ol­ogy in social sci­ence from the Karl Pop­per’s per­spec­tive which nav­i­gates around the idea of piece­meal engi­neer­ing. Apply­ing Popper’s ideas to the busi­ness field and finance would be quite intrigu­ing. Fred­erich Hayek did it (vol­un­tary and invol­un­tary) to eco­nom­ics and George Soros, a big fan and a stu­dent of Pop­per, devel­oped its finan­cial spec­u­la­tive tac­tics around Popper’s philo­soph­i­cal teaching.

Another inter­est: frac­tals and chaos theory

Every time I can put my hands on a book or read­ings on frac­tals and chaos the­ory I can’t ignore it. I am not a math­e­mati­cian and I must face the fact that to truly grasp the under­stand­ing of frac­tal and chaos, if I am not mis­taken, I have no choice but to be really good in math. Nonethe­less, I under­stand the con­cepts of both chaos and frac­tals and I would love to see how both can be imple­mented in the field of social sci­ence with a par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to busi­ness orga­ni­za­tion. If a sim­ple equa­tion with no ran­dom­ness can lead to chaos, imag­ine when a busi­ness lead­ers when it tries to order their busi­ness strate­gies and orga­ni­za­tion to achieve its goal in the sim­plest mech­a­nism to evade com­plex­ity! Chaos within a firm is always pos­si­ble. Hence, I don’t ques­tion how a busi­ness leader can avoid chaos (since we can’t put our fin­ger on the true cause of chaos) but how to limit chaotic con­se­quences and decrease its occurrence.

I guess I’ll move on…to some­thing new

Can I find some school or depart­ment that does this kind of research? I haven’t found any…yet!