In the 1980s, philosophical, historical and social studies of science underwent a change which later evolved into a turn to practice. Analysts of science were asked to pay attention to scientific practices in meticulous detail and along multiple dimensions, including the material, social and psychological. Following this turn, the interest in scientific practices continued to increase and had an indelible influence in the various fields of science studies. No doubt, the practice turn changed our conceptions and approaches of science, but (...) what did it really teach us? What does it mean to study scientific practices? What are the general lessons, implications, and new challenges? This volume explores questions about the practice turn using both case studies and theoretical analysis. The case studies examine empirical and mathematical sciences, including the engineering sciences. The volume promotes interactions between acknowledged experts from different, often thought of as conflicting, orientations. It presents contributions in conjunction with critical commentaries that put the theses and assumptions of the former in perspective. Overall, the book offers a unique and diverse range of perspectives on the meanings, methods, lessons, and challenges associated with the practice turn. (shrink)

First published in 1984, this is a study of categorization practices: how people categorize each other and their actions; how they describe, infer, and judge. The book presents a sociological analysis and description of practical activities and makes a cogent contribution to the study of how the moral order actually works in practical communicative contexts. Among the issues dealt with are: collectivity categorizations, the organization of lists and descriptions, moral attribution and inferences, and the relationship between standards of morality and (...) standards of rationality. (shrink)

First published in 1984, this is a study of categorization practices: how people categorize each other and their actions; how they describe, infer, and judge. The book presents a sociological analysis and description of practical activities and makes a cogent contribution to the study of how the moral order actually works in practical communicative contexts. Among the issues dealt with are: collectivity categorizations, the organization of lists and descriptions, moral attribution and inferences, and the relationship between standards of morality and (...) standards of rationality. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPrevious research has examined emotion regulation and trauma in the context of psychopathology, yet little research has examined ER in posttraumatic growth, the experience of pos...

The Element reconstructs, analyses and compares different derivational routes to a grounding of the Arrow of Time in entropy. It also evaluates the link between entropy and visible disorder, and the related claim of an alignment of the Arrow of Time with a development from order to visible disorder. The Element identifies three different entropy-groundings for the Arrow of Time: (i) the Empirical Arrow of Time, (ii) the Universal Statistical Arrow of Time, and (iii) the Local Statistical Arrow of Time. (...) The Element will also demonstrate that it is unlikely that high entropy states will always coincide with visible disorder. Therefore, it will dispute that there is a strong link between the Arrow of Time and visible disorder. (shrink)

En el panorama cultural colombiano la publicación de esta nueva selección de la obra de Nicolás Gómez Dávila remedia una necesidad apremiante. Sus escolios son un precipitado final en que se resuelve, se expresa y sintetiza un largo proceso de meditación, y en que se cristaliza y codifica una vasta corriente de experiencia y de sabiduría", dijo Hernando Téllez. Durante sus años de reclusión voluntaria, entregado a la lectura y la reflexión, Gómez Dávila produjo uno de los grandes (...) aportes al pensamiento del siglo XX. No sólo en Colombia. En Europa, en especial en Italia y Alemania, su obra ha sido traducida y divulgada. Escuelas de pensadores afines han encontrado en ella la expresión más refinada de sus tesis. Entre nosotros, el autor ha sido punto indeclinable de referencia para la lucidez y la profundidad. (shrink)

The biofuel boom is placing enormous demands on existing cropping systems, with the most crucial consequences in the agri-food sector. The biofuel industry is responding by initiating private governance and certification. The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and the Cramer Commission, among others, have formulated criteria on “sustainable” biofuel production and processing. This article explores the legitimacy of private governance and certification by the biofuel industry, highlighting opportunities and challenges. It argues that the concept of output based legitimacy is (...) problematic in the case of biofuel as long as no consensus or commonly agreed “best” solution has been established on what sustainable biofuel production is. Furthermore, it shows that the private governance initiatives analyzed fail to adequately include actors from developing countries. Finally, the article argues that we need mechanisms for control and accountability in order to guarantee that the political output of biofuel certification serves the common welfare. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION My underlying concern in this work is with the sociological analysis and description of members' practical activities and their practical ...

Stakeholder engagement is central to organizations’ social impact. Engagement activities rely on mechanisms whose complexity increases for multinational corporations. This study explores the boundary conditions of our Western/Northern-based knowledge of stakeholder engagement mechanisms through the examination of such practices in multinational companies founded in Latin America. Based on previous studies on the identification of organizational stakeholders in the region, we aim to understand the specific engagement mechanisms MLs use. To this end, we analyze qualitatively 28 corporate sustainability reports by relevant (...) firms. Our findings show that the community includes silent stakeholders composed of subgroups not listed as organizational stakeholders but mentioned in the report as engaged by the company or a subsidiary. MLs in our sample use four main mechanisms to engage these subgroups: strong, visible commitments to local social organizations; continuous dialogue with members of the community; networks of volunteers to help perform the social activities of the companies; and creation of social infrastructure institutions. We end by detailing the theoretical implications for stakeholder engagement among emerging economies multinational companies and for MNCs in general. (shrink)

Emotional AI is an emerging technology used to make probabilistic predictions about the emotional states of people using data sources, such as facial (micro)-movements, body language, vocal tone or the choice of words. The performance of such systems is heavily debated and so are the underlying scientific methods that serve as the basis for many such technologies. In this article I will engage with this new technology, and with the debates and literature that surround it. Working at the intersection of (...) criminology, policing, surveillance and the study of emotional AI this paper explores and offers a framework of understanding the various issues that these technologies present particularly to liberal democracies. I argue that these technologies should not be deployed within public spaces because there is only a very weak evidence-base as to their effectiveness in a policing and security context, and even more importantly represent a major intrusion to people’s private lives and also represent a worrying extension of policing power because of the possibility that intentions and attitudes may be inferred. Further to this, the danger in the use of such invasive surveillance for the purpose of policing and crime prevention in urban spaces is that it potentially leads to a highly regulated and control-oriented society. I argue that emotion recognition has severe impacts on the right to the city by not only undertaking surveillance of existing situations but also making inferences and probabilistic predictions about future events as well as emotions and intentions. (shrink)

Describing the Seas: Writing Practices of the Masters of the Royal Navy in the Long Eighteenth Century. The masters of the Royal Navy in the long eighteenth century are usually associated more with practical knowledge and experience than with an involvement with learned or ‚book‘ knowledge. However, their professional practices were based to a high degree on the usage and production of texts. This article examines how literary practices shaped the production of hydrographic knowledge by masters, in how far these (...) practices resembled those of learned culture at the time, and how masters employed them to gain access to the scientific community. (shrink)

We conducted two eye-tracking experiments investigating the processing of the Mandarin reflexive ziji in order to tease apart structurally constrained accounts from standard cue-based accounts of memory retrieval. In both experiments, we tested whether structurally inaccessible distractors that fulfill the animacy requirement of ziji influence processing times at the reflexive. In Experiment 1, we manipulated animacy of the antecedent and a structurally inaccessible distractor intervening between the antecedent and the reflexive. In conditions where the accessible antecedent mismatched the animacy cue, (...) we found inhibitory interference whereas in antecedent-match conditions, no effect of the distractor was observed. In Experiment 2, we tested only antecedent-match configurations and manipulated locality of the reflexive-antecedent binding (Mandarin allows non-local binding). Participants were asked to hold three distractors (animate vs. inanimate nouns) in memory while reading the target sentence. We found slower reading times when animate distractors were held in memory (inhibitory interference). Moreover, we replicated the locality effect reported in previous studies. These results are incompatible with structure-based accounts. However, the cue-based ACT-R model of Lewis and Vasishth ( 2005 ) cannot explain the observed pattern either. We therefore extend the original ACT-R model and show how this model not only explains the data presented in this article, but is also able to account for previously unexplained patterns in the literature on reflexive processing. (shrink)

Is the relationship of self-moving (kinaesthesis) to itself a direct pre-reflective self-awareness, or is it mediated through an Other? This article attempts to address this question, taking the phenomenon of dance as a point of departure, since in dance, movement steps out of its everyday background function to become the principal theme. Rudolf zur Lippe extracts from a dance step of the dances of the Quattrocento, the posa, a concept of sensual reflection. Rather than a conceptual reflection, the posa can (...) be understood as an awareness of one’s own movement. In this article, in a dialogue between critical philosophy, dance science, and phenomenology, terms of a possible sensual reflection in dance will be discussed. (shrink)

У дослідженні розглянуто сучасний стан ринку юридичних послуг . Автор виокремлює проблеми функціонування та можливості розвитку регіонального ринку в умовах міжнародної інтеграції, виділяє можливі шляхи нівелювання впливу негативних чинників розвитку регіонального ринку юридичних послуг. Запропоновані комплексні заходи для формування регіональної концепції якості юридичних послуг; упровадження в програму підготовки сучасного юриста спеціальних навчальних курсів у сфері маркетингу, менеджменту, зв'язків із громадськістю; розвитку клієнтоорієнтованих технологій сервісного обслуговування, розробки регіональної програми збереження молодих юридичних кадрів.

The transnational anti-gender movement often has a strong connection to conservative religious organisations. However, even if the anti-gender movement is easy to recognise in Sweden, it is impossible for it to propagate significant opposition to gender mainstreaming and gender studies by using the Church as a reference due to white Swedish people’s established and neo-colonial image of Sweden as exceptional, secular, modern, and a gender equal and tolerant nation. The aim of this article is to analyse how a transnational anti-gender (...) discourse transforms and produces fear in a Swedish context. In focus is the editorial writer for Svenska Dagbladet, one of Sweden’s most influential newspapers, Ivar Arpi and his critical articles and expressions in social media on gender studies and gender mainstreaming. The material shows that instead of connecting to religion in order to dismiss gender studies, gender studies is understood as the religion and conspiracy of our time, governing the state and its citizens. Drawing on Sara Ahmed, I argue that it is possible to follow how words and discourses act in affective ways and how gender studies, gender ideology and gender mainstreaming become a single body that inspires fear. (shrink)

Background Healthcare leader support and facilitation for ethics work are of great importance for healthcare professionals’ handling of ethical issues, moral distress, and quality care provision. A digital tool for ethical reflection in long-term care was developed in response to the demand for appropriate tools. Research aim This study aimed to explore healthcare leaders’ expectations of using a digital tool for ethical reflection among their home nursing care staff. Research design A qualitative research design with vignettes and focus group interviews (...) was used. The data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Participants and Research Context The sample comprised ten healthcare leaders from municipal long-term care in Norway. Ethical Considerations Participation was voluntary and based on informed consent. The Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research approved this study. Findings The analysis resulted in the development of three themes representing leaders’ expectations of the tool: (i) giving staff a voice, (ii) revealing ethics in practice, and (iii) keeping the pot boiling. Discussion Leaders must be informed about the ethical issues experienced to engage in supportive measures for their staff. Digital channels can increase the democratization, safety, and efficiency of communication between employees and leaders and increase awareness of ethical aspects in daily care work. The leaders had positive expectations of employees’ activities and benefits from using the tool for ethical reflection. However, they admitted that realizing the tool’s potential to ensure continuity in ethics work requires considerable organizational and leader involvement. Conclusions This study shows that healthcare leaders are open to digital solutions for managing ethics work in home nursing care. Both opportunities and important prerequisites for successfully implementing the digital tool were identified. (shrink)

The structuralist approach, as developed by Balzer et al. (1987) in An Architectonic for Science (abbreviated as Architectonic in the following), should be combined with a holistic semantics. A significant, but widely neglected intuition about the empirical claim of a theory appears to be representable only within a holistic framework. This intuition may be called the promise of a theory. It consists of the claim that the theory will, at least in the future, be able to describe all phenomena of (...) (an interpreted version of) its T-non-theoretical conceptual frame. The argument will be outlined within the semantics developed by Holger Andreas on the basis of Carnap’s dual-level conception. (shrink)

Featuring contributions from the world’s leading experts on the subject and based partly on several detailed case studies, this volume is the first comprehensive analysis of the scientific notion of robustness as well as of the general ...

For centuries, scholars have not doubted that Macrobio Ambrogio Teodosio was pagan. Recently, prof. Alan Cameron in his The Last Pagans of Rome clamied that the late antique writer was actually a Christian. This essay seeks to refute this assumption. --Translated from back cover.

En este trabajo analizo la propuesta de Moretti según la cual las verdades lógicas tienen dos aspectos. Por un lado, las verdades lógicas son constitutivas del vínculo entre lenguaje y mundo, por ende, siempre es necesario algún sistema lógico. Por otro lado, las verdades de una teoría lógica específica son tan revisables como las verdades de cualquier otra teoría científica, sea formal o empírica. Propongo que dicha propuesta está relacionada inevitablemente con dos cuestiones cuyas posibles respuestas ponen en duda la (...) posibilidad de revisar o cambiar una lógica. La primera cuestión es acerca del rasgo que distintas nociones de consecuencia comparten, el cual les permitiría desempeñar un rol constitutivo en la relación lenguaje-mundo. La segunda cuestión apunta a la necesidad de precisar los criterios que conducen a la sustitución de una lógica. (shrink)

Two classes of account have been proposed to explain the memory processes subserving the processing of reflexive-antecedent dependencies. Structure-based accounts assume that the retrieval of the antecedent is guided by syntactic tree-configurational information without considering other kinds of information such as gender marking in the case of English reflexives. By contrast, unconstrained cue-based retrieval assumes that all available information is used for retrieving the antecedent. Similarity-based interference effects from structurally illicit distractors which match a non-structural retrieval cue have been interpreted (...) as evidence favoring the unconstrained cue-based retrieval account since cue-based retrieval interference from structurally illicit distractors is incompatible with the structure-based account. However, it has been argued that the observed effects do not necessarily reflect interference occurring at the moment of retrieval but might equally well be accounted for by interference occurring already at the stage of encoding or maintaining the antecedent in memory, in which case they cannot be taken as evidence against the structure-based account. We present three experiments (self-paced reading and eye-tracking) on German reflexives and Swedish reflexive and pronominal possessives in which we pit the predictions of encoding interference and cue-based retrieval interference against each other. We could not find any indication that encoding interference affects the processing ease of the reflexive-antecedent dependency formation. Thus, there is no evidence that encoding interference might be the explanation for the interference effects observed in previous work. We therefore conclude that invoking encoding interference may not be a plausible way to reconcile interference effects with a structure-based account of reflexive processing. (shrink)

The broad fields of ethical reflection on racialization, racial justice, black liberation theology, and queer theology of color must come to terms with the year 2016, which can be framed on one side with the Black Lives Matter movement, and on the other side with a presidential election cycle in which racism and racial justice played particularly salient roles. Against this backdrop, this book discussion looks at recent literature on racial justice asking three questions. How does historical consciousness shape contemporary (...) ethical thought on racial justice? In what ways do the intersectionalities of gender and sexuality, immigration and transnationality, class, and contemporary culture present particular challenges and new possibilities? And how do the ethical frameworks of religious traditions contribute to the development of public theology for racial justice? The conclusion considers how religious ethics concerned with racial justice does harm or contributes to religiously grounded responses to racial injustice. Reflection on these questions points to the need for ongoing engagement with the black experience—broadly construed and within the context of multiple intersections—in the United States and globally in ethical analysis. However, this in turn makes particular and critical demands on how it is that we are to both teach and read religious ethics and political theology at our institutions, as well as in the churches. (shrink)

The paper introduces precise definitions of the inevitabilist and contingentist positions. On this basis, it reveals the analytical structure and some inherent difficulties of the contingentist/inevitabilist issue. It then discusses some of these difficulties, relying on the thought-experiment of a ‘divided physics’. Along the way, it investigates the kinds of differences that two alternative physics should present, if they are to give rise to non-benign forms of contingentism.Keywords: Contingency; Inevitabilism; Incommensurability; Theory-comparison; Scientific realism; Constructivism.

This study aims to disentangle complexity from randomness and chaos, and to present a definition of complexity that emphasizes its epistemically distinct qualities. I will review existing attempts at defining complexity and argue that these suffer from two major faults: a tendency to neglect the underlying dynamics and to focus exclusively on the phenomenology of complex systems; and linguistic imprecisions in describing these phenomenologies. I will argue that the tendency to discuss phenomenology removed from the underlying dynamics is the main (...) root of the difficulties in distinguishing complex from chaotic or random systems. In my own definition, I will explicitly try to avoid these pitfalls. The theoretical contemplations in this paper will be tested on a sample of five models: the random Kac ring, the chaotic CA30, the regular CA90, the complex CA110 and the complex Bak-Sneppen model. Although these modelling studies are restricted in scope and can only be seen as preliminary, they still constitute on of the first attempts to investigate complex systems comparatively. (shrink)

This paper presents methodological reflections on power sharing and shifts of power in various interview situations. Narratives are said to be shaped by our attempts to position ourselves within social and cultural circumstances. In an interview situation, power can be seen as something that is created and that shifts between the interviewer and the interviewed. Reflexivity is involved when we as interviewers attempt to look at a situation or a concept from various perspectives. A modified form of discourse analysis inspired (...) by subject positioning was used to reflect on power relations in four different interview situations. The analyses indicate that reflection on the power relations can lead to other forms of understanding of the interviewee. The main conclusion that can be drawn from this study is that power relations are created within an interview situation and therefore it is important to be aware of dominant perspectives. Researchers and nurses face the challenge of constantly raising their level of consciousness about power relationships, and discursive reflexivity is one way of doing this. Thus, reflexivity is an important part of the qualitative research process. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Das Mittelalter Jahrgang: 19 Heft: 1 Seiten: 196-198.

This study draws upon the behavioral agency model and the concept of socioemotional wealth to investigate how family firms’ employee pension underfunding decisions differ from those of non-family firms. We explore how these differences are influenced by financial distress, generational stage, and whether the firm is eponymous. We test our hypotheses using data from 452 US firms over an eleven-year period. Our results suggest that family firms are less likely to underfund pensions, but this effect is attenuated in later generational (...) ownership stages and in non-eponymous firms. (shrink)