There has been a particular emphasis on knowledge and competence as increasingly important resources for successful enterprises. This notion of knowledge is based on “positive knowledge” that knowing is merely a constructive, linear and accumulative process. We will introduce the notion of “negative knowledge” that involves “giving up” or “bracketing” knowledge in certain situations. When experts encounter something that is incompatible with their knowledge, they should be sensitive enough to recognise a new situation by suspending their action. In addition to (...) exploring the idea of “unlearning”, the paper introduces three other aspects of negative knowledge: “to know what we do not know”, “to know what not to do” and the value of failures. Negative knowledge seems to be possible, useful, and even necessary in expert organisations since old ways of thinking or knowing something often prevent us to see new potentials. (shrink)

This article is a critical interrogation of how gender and power figure in Swedish child welfare policy and the discourses on violence in intimate relationships vis-à-vis children exposed to violence. Drawing on feminist violence research, critical childhood studies, and intersectional perspectives, we identify a differentiation with racialised undertones in the understanding of violence as a social problem when related to children’s exposure. While predominately gender-neutral discourses of social heredity and epidemiology run through the material for the seemingly ‘universal’ child, forms (...) of violence ascribed to the presumed cultural Others link to gender, structural power and sexuality. The article concludes that gendered articulations of violence are restricted yet pivotal if children’s exposure is to be linked to issues of inequality and power. However, when gendering interlinks with racialisation, problematic differentiations of violence, childhoods and children are produced. (shrink)

Cognitive hearing science is mainly about the study of how cognitive factors contribute to speech comprehension, but cognitive factors also partake in speech processing to infer non-linguistic information from speech signals, such as the intentions of the talker and the speaker’s age. Here, we report two experiments on age estimation by “naïve” listeners. The aim was to study how speech rate influences estimation of speaker age by comparing the speakers’ natural speech rate with increased or decreased speech rate. In Experiment (...) 1, listeners were presented with audio samples of read speech from three different speaker age groups (young, middle aged, and old adults). They estimated the speakers as younger when speech rate was faster than normal and as older when speech rate was slower than normal. This speech rate effect was slightly greater in magnitude for older (60–65 years) speakers in comparison with younger (20–25 years) speakers, suggesting that speech rate may gain greater importance as a perceptual age cue with increased speaker age. This pattern was more pronounced in Experiment 2, in which listeners estimated age from spontaneous speech. Faster speech rate was associated with lower age estimates, but only for older and middle aged (40–45 years) speakers. Taken together, speakers of all age groups were estimated as older when speech rate decreased, except for the youngest speakers in Experiment 2. The absence of a linear speech rate effect in estimates of younger speakers, for spontaneous speech, implies that listeners use different age estimation strategies or cues (possibly vocabulary) depending on the age of the speaker and the spontaneity of the speech. Potential implications for forensic investigations and other applied domains are discussed. (shrink)

In this comparative analysis of the UK and Sweden, we consider, if inherited wealth is most deserving of redistributive taxation, then what lessons, if any, may be learned from the difficult paths faced by this tax in these countries. We conclude that the political momentum behind the Swedish family business was distinct, and, possibly, capable of travel to the UK. The research for this article is part of the FairTax EU project, which is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 (...) research and innovation programme 2014-2018, grant agreement No. FairTax 649439. (shrink)