Sisyphus in Management. The Futile Search for the Optimal Organizational Structure

Kühl S. Sisyphus in Management. The Futile Search for the Optimal Organizational Structure. Challenges of New Organizational Forms. Princeton u.a.: Organizational Dialogue Press; 2020

Meeting the Absurd: Camus and the Communication Ethics of the Everyday

The metaphor of the absurd, as well as the work and thought of Albert Camus, has primarily served as a secondary resource within the communication discipline. This project contributes to the conversation about the absurd in an effort to further the study of communication ethics by placing Camus in the foreground. The metaphor of the absurd provides an opportunity to examine philosophical hermeneutics in relation to Camus\u27s insights. The work of Paul Ricoeur and Hans-Georg Gadamer, emphasizing the role of metaphor and how it connects the absurd as used by Camus to our current postmodern moment, provides the methodological framework for this project. While many differences exist between the historical moment of Camus and the contemporary postmodern moment, both represent a time in which there is no longer paradigmatic certainty. Through an exploration of Camus\u27s three cycles of work addressing absurdity, revolt, and judgment, this project firmly places Camus\u27s engagement within the context of the study of communication ethics. Through his implicit work as a philosopher of communication Camus provided an example of a person with deep ethical commitments who navigated through the chaos of a moment of metanarrative decline. In our own moment of narrative and virtue contention, Camus\u27s voice should again be heard as we seek to take communicative responsibility in an age of absurdity

The Ethics and Politics of Love in Postwar France: The Case of Beauvoir, Camus, and Sartre

The Ethics and Politics of Love focuses primarily upon Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre during the period 1935 to 1960, specifically the periods before and after the Second World War (1939 -- 1945), and the Franco-Algerian War (1954 -- 1962). I argue that inquiring into each thinker\u27s theory of love yields crucial and hitherto unexplored insights into their ethical and political theories: love thus represents my particular Ariadne\u27s thread to guide us into, and then back outside of their daunting oeuvres and singular lives. I use their documented thoughts on love as an analytical tool with which to interrogate the basic motivations for, and premises and conclusions of their ethics and politics. Their amorous theory thus essentially charts the main course of their engaged lives and works. This particular method of inquiry has been overlooked by both Anglophone and Francophone critics, and so my contribution yields new perspectives from which to critique the thought of three of the most influential authors and philosophers of twentieth-century France. The interpretive argument signposts the intellectual development of the three main protagonists alongside key historical events such as: the rise and fall of European fascism, the Occupation, the historical problematic of French colonial practices, and finally, each thinker\u27s respective interventions in the Franco-Algerian War. The results are significant, offering novel explanations of the grounds for their socio-economic policy, political solidarity, wartime interventions, and the key political changes in their lives and works generally construed

Techniques for organizational memory information systems

The KnowMore project aims at providing active support to humans working on knowledge-intensive tasks. To this end the knowledge available in the modeled business processes or their incarnations in specific workflows shall be used to improve information handling. We present a representation formalism for knowledge-intensive tasks and the specification of its object-oriented realization. An operational semantics is sketched by specifying the basic functionality of the Knowledge Agent which works on the knowledge intensive task representation. The Knowledge Agent uses a meta-level description of all information sources available in the Organizational Memory. We discuss the main dimensions that such a description scheme must be designed along, namely information content, structure, and context. On top of relational database management systems, we basically realize deductive object- oriented modeling with a comfortable annotation facility. The concrete knowledge descriptions are obtained by configuring the generic formalism with ontologies which describe the required modeling dimensions. To support the access to documents, data, and formal knowledge in an Organizational Memory an integrated domain ontology and thesaurus is proposed which can be constructed semi-automatically by combining document-analysis and knowledge engineering methods. Thereby the costs for up-front knowledge engineering and the need to consult domain experts can be considerably reduced. We present an automatic thesaurus generation tool and show how it can be applied to build and enhance an integrated ontology /thesaurus. A first evaluation shows that the proposed method does indeed facilitate knowledge acquisition and maintenance of an organizational memory

Bernard Suits' Utopia of Gameplay: A Critical Analysis

In this dissertation, I integrate the published and newly available unpublished works of Bernard Suits to arrive at an original, holistic interpretation of his corpus. I identify, analyze, and resolve inconsistencies in his position which have not been previously critiqued in depth. Centrally, I provide a critical analysis of Suits’ relatively obscure utopian thesis: his argument that the ‘ideal of existence’ for humankind is a utopia of gameplay. More specifically, I demonstrate that Suits’ utopian thesis fails on its own grounds because his utopian vision—the thought experiment upon which his utopian thesis rests for its plausibility—requires that humanity enter a post-instrumental phase of culture unimaginable from our current species-perspective. The nature of utopian gameplay is obscured behind this cultural gap, and thus we pre-utopians have no rational reason to accept Suits’ assertion that it instantiates the ideal of existence. Finally, I sympathetically rehabilitate Suits’ utopian thesis along perfectionist lines as the utopian game design thesis, and show that its main value lies in its role as a regulative ideal, offering a unique set of normative recommendations for our current gaming practices

Animatory thinking: An enquiry into tacit knowledge within animation practice

Since the invention of devices that use rapidly repeating still images to create a phenomenon of apparent motion, a tension has existed between the artistry of forming images and the mechanics of generating an illusion. In the midst of this tension is the animator, immersed inside the technology1 whilst simultaneously relying on their embodied memory of the world to guide their creative judgement. This research attempts to illustrate this liminal state of creative practice and lays out Animatory Thinking as a precondition of animation practice. Defining animation has been extensively discussed and researched (Wells 2002; Buchan 2013; Matarazzo et al . 2016; Levitt 2018; Dobson et al. 2018). A great deal of effort has been spent on segregating animation studies from film studies. Whilst my own research does not offer a new definition of animation, it does attempt to show how viewing animation practice as a design discipline can offer a new perspective to animation studies, as well as insights into tacit knowledge, temporality and embodiment as part of creative practice. Whilst personal accounts of animation practice (Williams 2009; Thomas and Johnston 1997) are well known, this thesis will argue that such accounts fail to offer a holistic embodied view, instead prioritising specific skills relating to the technology of animation. More recent work in the area of animation studies (Lamarre 2009; Torre 2017; Levitt 2018; Dobson et al. 2018) has shown how rich and complex animation practice appears when explored through academic research, but again there is only partial acknowledgement of the animator as a central node in animation practice (Ward 2018). This research approaches animation practice through the lens of design research in order to focus on the animator, with a particular focus on the tacit knowledge of animation practice. Action research methods (Lewin 1946; Kolb 1984) are used to triangulate three areas of enquiry: 1: Building experimental animation machines as an investigation into the relationship between technology and artistry in animation. 2: Exploring how theories of embodiment, tacit knowledge and design thinking can be used to describe how an animator crafts their work. 3: Observing how novice animators approach learning computer-generated imagery (CGI) animation, and how shifting focus from animation as story-telling, to animation as a means of exploring ideas of philosophy and embodiment, can reframe animation practice. Rather than following a classical research model of theory/action/reflection, I began with action, thus giving a position from which I could navigate theoretical ideas, before combining action and theory into my teaching, and then observing the effects. This research articulates a heterogeneous flow between technology and embodied memory through an animator’s tacit knowledge, defined as Animatory Thinking. Going beyond a single person making animation, this research also acknowledges the role of a wider collective community as the environment in which the animator works. Animatory Thinking lays claim to the knowledge that animators “problem-solve by synthesis” (Cross 1982: 223) through a tacitness of time existing within the animatic apparatus (Levitt 2018)

Capture and Maintenance of Constraints in Engineering Design

The thesis investigates two domains, initially the kite domain and then part of a more demanding Rolls-Royce domain (jet engine design). Four main types of refinement rules that use the associated application conditions and domain ontology to support the maintenance of constraints are proposed. The refinement rules have been implemented in ConEditor and the extended system is known as ConEditor+. With the help of ConEditor+, the thesis demonstrates that an explicit representation of application conditions together with the corresponding constraints and the domain ontology can be used to detect inconsistencies, redundancy, subsumption and fusion, reduce the number of spurious inconsistencies and prevent the identification of inappropriate refinements of redundancy, subsumption and fusion between pairs of constraints.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo