Aristippus and Xenophon as Plato’s contemporary literary rivals and the role of gymnastikè (γυμναστική)

Plato was a Socrates’ friend and disciple, but he wasn’t the only one. No doubt, Socrates had many followers, however, the majority of their work is lost. Was there any antagonism among his followers? Who succeeded in interpreting Socrates? Who could be considered as his successor? Of course, we don’t know if these questions emerged after the death of Socrates, but the Greek doxography suggests that there was a literary rivalry. As we underlined earlier, most unfortunately, we can’t examine all of them thoroughly due to the lack of their work, but we can scrutinize Xenophon’s and Aristippus’ work. All of them, Plato, Xenophon and Aristippus, presented to a certain extent their ideas concerning education. Furthermore, they have not neglected the matter of gymnastikè, but what is exactly the role of physical education in their work? Are there any similarities or any differences between them? Since, Xenophon and Aristippus (as well as Plato) seem to be in favor of gymnastikè, it is necessary to understand its role

Striving to achieve it all: men and work-family-life balance in Sweden and the UK - implications for well-being and HRM

Our research paper investigates how men voice their experiences of the three dimensions of well-being: happiness, health and relationships (after Van de Voorde et al., 2012) in balancing their work and non-work lives. We discuss how their perceptions and practice relate to human resource management (HRM) in the workplace, and identify the key tensions in managing their engagement and well-being. This paper builds on research published in Construction Management and Economics in August 2013 (Vol. 31, No. 8: Raiden and Räisänen, pp. 899-913) where we critique the work-life balance literature for largely limiting the construct as being a female-oriented entitlement. Consequently, little attention has been paid to how men experience their work-life situations, especially the men who are keen to share the family care. We contribute to filling this gap by critically examining how male academics in construction-related departments at Universities in Sweden and the UK construct their relationships with family and work. The data consisted of the career-life stories of seven male academics from each country. These were at different phases in their career trajectories and held different university positions. A narrative analysis approach was then applied on the data. Three core narratives emerged: family connected with partner; work as key priority; and desire to pursue personal projects, which competed with each other for the narrators’ sparse time. A salient feature of all the narratives was the men’s struggle to accommodate family and (personal) life with work, which to them was the prioritised sphere. This struggle left many feeling that they had no time to do a good job in any sphere, and in Sweden in particular the combination pressure was intense. In this study, well-being emerged as a critical albeit difficult to articulate feature since it was embedded in all the three elements of the work-family-life triad, often with conflicting outcomes. The purpose here, therefore, is to revisit the data using a well-being lens

Communication in an "Officeless firm"

New technologies permit new types of organisations. This article describes and analyses one such organisation, an "officeless firm", where all employees work from their own homes and there is no central office. Drawing upon observations and interviews, the modes of communication and the nature of the interpersonal relationships that have permitted this organisation to succeed are described, along with the challenges that face this organisation in the future as it attempts to grow

Trajectory Representation in Location-Based Services: Problems and Solution

Recently, much work has been done in feasibility studies on services offered to moving objects in an environment equipped with mobile telephony, network technology and GIS. However, despite of all work on GIS and databases, the situations in which the whereabouts of objects are constantly monitored and stored for future analysis are an important class of problems that present-day database/GIS has difficulty to handle. Considering the fact that data about whereabouts of moving objects are acquired in a discrete way, providing the data when no observation is available is a must. Therefore, obtaining a "faithful representation" of trajectories with a sufficient number of discrete (though possibly erroneous) data points is the objective of this research