‘Are they out to get us?’ Power and the ‘recognition’ of the subject through a ‘lean’ work regime

Critical studies of ‘lean’ work regimes have tended to focus on the factory shop floor or public and healthcare sectors, despite its recent revival and wider deployment in neoliberal service economies. This paper investigates the politics of the workplace in a United Kingdom automotive dealership group subject to an intervention inspired by lean methods. We develop Foucauldian studies of governmentality by addressing lean as a technology of power deployed to act on the conduct of workers, examining how they debunk, distance themselves from and enact its imperatives. Our findings support critiques of lean work regimes that raise concerns about work intensification and poor worker health. Discourses of professional autonomy allow workers to distance themselves from lean prescriptions, yet they are reaffirmed in their actions. More significantly, we illustrate the exercise of a more encompassing form of power, showing how lean harnesses the inherently exploitable desire for recognition among hitherto marginalised workers, and its role as a form of ‘human capital’. The paper contributes to critical studies of lean by illustrating its subtle, deleterious and persistent effects within the analytical frame of neoliberal governmentality. We also demonstrate how studies of governmentality can be advanced through the analysis of contested social relations on the ground, highlighting the ethico-political potential of Foucauldian work

Semantics-Empowered Big Data Processing with Applications

We discuss the nature of Big Data and address the role of semantics in analyzing and processing Big Data that arises in the context of Physical-Cyber-Social Systems. We organize our research around the Five Vs of Big Data, where four of the Vs are harnessed to produce the fifth V - value. To handle the challenge of Volume, we advocate semantic perception that can convert low-level observational data to higher-level abstractions more suitable for decision-making. To handle the challenge of Variety, we resort to the use of semantic models and annotations of data so that much of the intelligent processing can be done at a level independent of heterogeneity of data formats and media. To handle the challenge of Velocity, we seek to use continuous semantics capability to dynamically create event or situation specific models and recognize relevant new concepts, entities and facts. To handle Veracity, we explore the formalization of trust models and approaches to glean trustworthiness. The above four Vs of Big Data are harnessed by the semantics-empowered analytics to derive value for supporting practical applications transcending physical-cyber-social continuum

Logic-based Technologies for Intelligent Systems: State of the Art and Perspectives

Together with the disruptive development of modern sub-symbolic approaches to artificial intelligence (AI), symbolic approaches to classical AI are re-gaining momentum, as more and more researchers exploit their potential to make AI more comprehensible, explainable, and therefore trustworthy. Since logic-based approaches lay at the core of symbolic AI, summarizing their state of the art is of paramount importance now more than ever, in order to identify trends, benefits, key features, gaps, and limitations of the techniques proposed so far, as well as to identify promising research perspectives. Along this line, this paper provides an overview of logic-based approaches and technologies by sketching their evolution and pointing out their main application areas. Future perspectives for exploitation of logic-based technologies are discussed as well, in order to identify those research fields that deserve more attention, considering the areas that already exploit logic-based approaches as well as those that are more likely to adopt logic-based approaches in the future

Context Map Analysis of Fake News in Social Media: A Contextualized Visualization Approach

Visualization tools in text analytics are typically based on content analysis, using $n$-gram frequencies or topic models which output commonly used words, phrases, or topics in a text corpus. However, the interpretation of these visual output and summary labels can be incomplete or misleading when words or phrases are taken out of context. We use a novel Context Map approach to create a connected network of $n$-grams by considering the frequency in which they are used together in the same context. We combine network optimization techniques with embedded representation models to generate an visualization interface with clearer and more accurate interpretation potential. In this paper, we apply our Context Map method to analyze fake news in social media. We compare news article veracity (true versus false news) with orientation (left, mainstream, or right). Our approach provides a rich context analysis of the language used in true versus fake news

Families in front of the screen : everyday contexts of television use : a dissertation presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology at Massey University

Although the experience of watching television has assumed a position of prime importance, not only in the lives of families, but also as a central component of the advertising industry, we know very little about what people actually do when they are infront of the screen. Using innovative technology which allowed the researcher to record eight selected families watching television, this thesis argues that our conceptions of families closely scrutinising the texts of television programmes are misplaced. Following the work of Lull and Morley, who emphasise the importance of the social context over the predominance of the text, the evidence presented in this qualitative study suggests that instead of a 'spectorial' medium in which audiences sit captured by programmes, television acts rather as a kind of 'moving wallpaper' against which the everyday events of family life are played out. This means that our understandings of television watching must therefore be based on the social relations of the family as they use television in their spatio-temporal domestic contexts. Significant shifts are therefore necessary in media research agendas

‘Europeanity’, the ‘other’ and the discourse of fear: the centrality of the forced migrant as 'global alien' to an emerging European national identity

The forced migrant, driven into the global circuits of ‘survival migration’, and subject to an increasingly securitised European asylum and immigration system, is fashioned at the Europe Union’s distended and de-territorialised external borders as a figure of fear. This thesis seeks to demonstrate how this operation goes far beyond the quotidian social production of marginal and excluded figures: it argues that the forced migrant has become a key ideological resource in the attempt to de-historicise, universalise and naturalise the neoliberal system of global capitalism. Based on secondary literature, but using primary sources where necessary to validate its arguments, the thesis investigates the way Europe’s core nation-states attempt to displace their contradictions and conflicts – inherent in their nature as centres of and conduits for global capitalism – through the manipulation of deeply embedded nationalist narratives of inclusion/exclusion. The national border is key to the discursive definition of the forced migrant as a threatening ‘global illegal’. The thesis argues, however, that the concept of the European border has expanded from its everyday construct into a normative global instrument that not only assigns identity, but is summoned into being by the supposed inherent qualities of the individual who attempts to cross it, wherever they may be. The creation of racial stereotypes has become one of the foremost tools of this form of identity management: the research reveals that the racialisation of the figure of the ‘absolute alien’ plays a fundamental role in the construction of an overarching sense of ‘European-ness’. The war on terror, by summoning up the racialised figure of the ‘global jihadi’, which is discursively linked to the image of the forced migrant as a threatening global ‘illegal alien’, has enabled the creation of a European asylumsecurity nexus. The way the figure of the forced migrant has been fashioned into the natural subject of a politics of (in)security has become an essential component in the construction of a hyper-national ‘European identity’. The thesis concludes that the forced migrant, fashioned out of national materials as the ultimate ‘global alien’, is the ideological pivot for the normalisation of a global system of exploitation as manifest in its national form, and gains an even more exaggerated importance when economic and political crisis presents an overwhelming need to promote the idea of ‘European-ness’

What now?: a New Zealand children’s television production case study

This case study provides a snapshot of cultural agency within the production of a publicly funded magazine programme strand for children in New Zealand. What Now? considered by cohorts of children since 1981 to be a New Zealand children’s television institution, was scheduled in a commercial zone after school, and on non-commercial Sunday mornings, during the last years of the twentieth century. The thesis is framed by discussion of the complex global forces that shaped children’s audio-visual flows in the late 1990s. This discussion moves between analysis of parental concerns about diminishing public media spaces for local children and commercial and post structuralist celebration of children’s pleasures in consumption, and how this tension has seen children’s media rights become highly politicised during the 1990s. It takes a critical stance, analysing the unequal command over material resources and power for different agents, and the consequences of such inequality for the nature of the symbolic environment for children. It follows this frame with analysis of stakeholder struggles over shaping the text of What Now? The discussion concentrates on one year of production - from annual public funding round in 1997 to reformating of the strand in 1999. The author is interested in competing cultural, economic and political discourses in production talk. She analyses the interplay and negotiations between programme stakeholders, as revealed within the discursive battles of production talk, and their consequences for content and style of a television text. Micro-production moments illustrate how producers and other adult stakeholders imagine their child audiences, and how reified and reductive constructs of the child audience become instrumental in decisions made over commissioning, scheduling, creating and judging children’s programmes. The thesis sets itself a sequence of tasks: to articulate between global and local conditions of production, to complete a fine-grained study of children’s television producers as they imagine the role of their programme in children’s lives, to explore how those creative visions for children are delimited by other powerful stakeholders’ contrary constructs of children’s audiences, and to speculate about how the eventual text serves as a symbolic resource for New Zealand children. It draws on cross-disciplinary theorizing of culture, power and media agency to enable analysis of who has the power to delimit symbolic resources available to children in their ‘serious play’ of learning and identity formation. Certain conclusions can be drawn from the data, but the data also suggests many more questions for subsequent research

Semantic multimedia modelling & interpretation for annotation

The emergence of multimedia enabled devices, particularly the incorporation of cameras in mobile phones, and the accelerated revolutions in the low cost storage devices, boosts the multimedia data production rate drastically. Witnessing such an iniquitousness of digital images and videos, the research community has been projecting the issue of its significant utilization and management. Stored in monumental multimedia corpora, digital data need to be retrieved and organized in an intelligent way, leaning on the rich semantics involved. The utilization of these image and video collections demands proficient image and video annotation and retrieval techniques. Recently, the multimedia research community is progressively veering its emphasis to the personalization of these media. The main impediment in the image and video analysis is the semantic gap, which is the discrepancy among a user’s high-level interpretation of an image and the video and the low level computational interpretation of it. Content-based image and video annotation systems are remarkably susceptible to the semantic gap due to their reliance on low-level visual features for delineating semantically rich image and video contents. However, the fact is that the visual similarity is not semantic similarity, so there is a demand to break through this dilemma through an alternative way. The semantic gap can be narrowed by counting high-level and user-generated information in the annotation. High-level descriptions of images and or videos are more proficient of capturing the semantic meaning of multimedia content, but it is not always applicable to collect this information. It is commonly agreed that the problem of high level semantic annotation of multimedia is still far from being answered. This dissertation puts forward approaches for intelligent multimedia semantic extraction for high level annotation. This dissertation intends to bridge the gap between the visual features and semantics. It proposes a framework for annotation enhancement and refinement for the object/concept annotated images and videos datasets. The entire theme is to first purify the datasets from noisy keyword and then expand the concepts lexically and commonsensical to fill the vocabulary and lexical gap to achieve high level semantics for the corpus. This dissertation also explored a novel approach for high level semantic (HLS) propagation through the images corpora. The HLS propagation takes the advantages of the semantic intensity (SI), which is the concept dominancy factor in the image and annotation based semantic similarity of the images. As we are aware of the fact that the image is the combination of various concepts and among the list of concepts some of them are more dominant then the other, while semantic similarity of the images are based on the SI and concept semantic similarity among the pair of images. Moreover, the HLS exploits the clustering techniques to group similar images, where a single effort of the human experts to assign high level semantic to a randomly selected image and propagate to other images through clustering. The investigation has been made on the LabelMe image and LabelMe video dataset. Experiments exhibit that the proposed approaches perform a noticeable improvement towards bridging the semantic gap and reveal that our proposed system outperforms the traditional systems

Narrating Impact Assessment in the European Union

This paper is based on research carried out with the support of the European Research Council grant on Analysis of Learning in Regulatory Governance, ALREG http://centres.exeter.ac.uk/ceg/research/ALREG/index.php. Previous versions of this paper were presented at the UK Political Studies Association (PSA) annual conference, Belfast 3-5 April 2012 and the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change conference, Berlin 5-6 October 2012. We are grateful to Mathias Delori and Anna Durnova for extensive comments on an early draft.publication-status: AcceptedSince 2003, the European Commission has produced analytical documents to appraise and support its policy proposals. These so-called impact assessments (IAs) are now quite common in the preparation of legislation in the member states of the European Union. Previous research has been concerned with the quality of the IAs in terms of evidence-based policy, especially in terms of economic analysis and other standards of smart regulation. In this article, we move from a different perspective. We draw on the narrative policy framework to explore impact assessment as text and discursive instrument. We consider a sample of IAs that differ by originating DGs, legal instrument, and level of saliency. The findings show that the narrative components of the IA are quite prominent in the sample. The Commission may use IA to produce evidence-based policy, but it also engages with IA to provide a presentation of self, to establish EU norms and values, and to create consensus around policy proposals by using causal plots, doomsday scenarios, and narrative dramatization