Bowdoin Orient v.139, no.1-26 (2009-2010)

https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/bowdoinorient-2010s/1000/thumbnail.jp

Street Furniture and the Nation State: A Global Process

In the popular imagination, street furniture has traditionally been understood as evoking a sense of national or local identity. From Paris’ metro entrances, DDR lampposts in Berlin, and London’s york stone pavements, the designed environment has been able to contribute to the unique qualities of a place. In some instances this was deliberate. In postwar Britain for instance, the Council of Industrial Design – a state-funded design organization - often appeared to measure the quality of street furniture on the basis of its national characteristics. On other occasions, the relationship between such objects and identity emerged accidentally. In Britain during the 1980s, for example, the replacement of Gilbert Scott's red telephone box with an alternative BT model provoked considerable debate. For many people, this act was not just a Conservative attack on nationalization and state-ownership, but also on the very fabric of British identity. This understanding of street furniture has retained its currency for many years, and cities across the world have used street furniture to provide a sense of visual coherency for neighbourhoods in need of new identities, strengthening their character and improving the public's relationship to them. In this way, street furniture has been employed as a cipher for the narrative of regeneration, in which - as a means of altering the identity of a space - street furniture can project a new face upon the street. Increasingly however, advertising companies are able to lever themselves into the street furniture market by offering to provide the service to the local authorities for free in return for advertising space. In offering this service, global companies like JC Decaux, Wall and Clear Channel command a huge amount of commercial power within the city. The excessive homogenization of street furniture coupled with the overwhelming presence of advertising which is increasingly sanctioned by local authorities keen to reduce costs, has resulted in the perception of poorer quality streets. Thus, the irony of regeneration is that by seeking to promote the unique identity of a city, many places often end up looking more and more alike. This paper will examine recent developments in the process by which the street is furnished and the agents responsible. It will specifically look at how these changes have affected the relationship between street furniture and identity, and equally the effect this process has had on understandings of national design histories. Clearly, evaluating contemporary street furniture through the lens of the nation-state is of very little value, since the international differences between street furniture are considerably less marked than they used to be. This extraordinary aesthetic convergence is partly linked to economies of scale - after all, just how many different kinds of bus stop can Europe afford to have? Yet it also reflects some of the challenges posed by globalization and privatization of public space. This paper will reflect upon that process, and how these bigger narratives increasingly affect the landscape of the street

Assuming Data Integrity and Empirical Evidence to The Contrary

Background: Not all respondents to surveys apply their minds or understand the posed questions, and as such provide answers which lack coherence, and this threatens the integrity of the research. Casual inspection and limited research of the 10-item Big Five Inventory (BFI-10), included in the dataset of the World Values Survey (WVS), suggested that random responses may be common. Objective: To specify the percentage of cases in the BRI-10 which include incoherent or contradictory responses and to test the extent to which the removal of these cases will improve the quality of the dataset. Method: The WVS data on the BFI-10, measuring the Big Five Personality (B5P), in South Africa (N=3 531), was used. Incoherent or contradictory responses were removed. Then the cases from the cleaned-up dataset were analysed for their theoretical validity. Results: Only 1 612 (45.7%) cases were identified as not including incoherent or contradictory responses. The cleaned-up data did not mirror the B5P- structure, as was envisaged. The test for common method bias was negative. Conclusion: In most cases the responses were incoherent. Cleaning up the data did not improve the psychometric properties of the BFI-10. This raises concerns about the quality of the WVS data, the BFI-10, and the universality of B5P-theory. Given these results, it would be unwise to use the BFI-10 in South Africa. Researchers are alerted to do a proper assessment of the psychometric properties of instruments before they use it, particularly in a cross-cultural setting

Leading Towards Voice and Innovation: The Role of Psychological Contract

Background: Empirical evidence generally suggests that psychological contract breach (PCB) leads to negative outcomes. However, some literature argues that, occasionally, PCB leads to positive outcomes. Aim: To empirically determine when these positive outcomes occur, focusing on the role of psychological contract (PC) and leadership style (LS), and outcomes such as employ voice (EV) and innovative work behaviour (IWB). Method: A cross-sectional survey design was adopted, using reputable questionnaires on PC, PCB, EV, IWB, and leadership styles. Correlation analyses were used to test direct links within the model, while regression analyses were used to test for the moderation effects. Results: Data with acceptable psychometric properties were collected from 11 organisations (N=620). The results revealed that PCB does not lead to substantial changes in IWB. PCB correlated positively with prohibitive EV, but did not influence promotive EV, which was a significant driver of IWB. Leadership styles were weak predictors of EV and IWB, and LS only partially moderated the PCB-EV relationship. Conclusion: PCB did not lead to positive outcomes. Neither did LS influencing the relationships between PCB and EV or IWB. Further, LS only partially influenced the relationships between variables, and not in a manner which positively influence IWB

The Coming Age of Scarcity : Preventing Mass Death and Genocide in the Twenty-first Century

The structure of the book is simple. The first part analyzes major forces having an impact on the survivability of civilization as we know it into the twenty-first century. It outlines the challenges we face, including overpopulation, pressure upon the land, migration, ecological damage, and social instability. In part two, we present more detailed discussion of the problem of scarcity and how it relates to conflict. The authors in this section argue that the current level of human activity is unsustain­able. They demonstrate that population growth in particular affects the natural world and can affect the social order and international political systems.The authors in part three go beyond the empirical and theoretical studies of the first two parts to examine how scarcity has already led to mass death and genocide in Rwanda, Bosnia, Somalia, and Haiti and to speculate on the likelihood that scarcities could be a more decisive factor in genocide in the future.https://surface.syr.edu/books/1022/thumbnail.jp

Maritime expressions:a corpus based exploration of maritime metaphors

This study uses a purpose-built corpus to explore the linguistic legacy of Britain’s maritime history found in the form of hundreds of specialised ‘Maritime Expressions’ (MEs), such as TAKEN ABACK, ANCHOR and ALOOF, that permeate modern English. Selecting just those expressions commencing with ’A’, it analyses 61 MEs in detail and describes the processes by which these technical expressions, from a highly specialised occupational discourse community, have made their way into modern English. The Maritime Text Corpus (MTC) comprises 8.8 million words, encompassing a range of text types and registers, selected to provide a cross-section of ‘maritime’ writing. It is analysed using WordSmith analytical software (Scott, 2010), with the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) as a reference corpus. Using the MTC, a list of keywords of specific salience within the maritime discourse has been compiled and, using frequency data, concordances and collocations, these MEs are described in detail and their use and form in the MTC and the BNC is compared. The study examines the transformation from ME to figurative use in the general discourse, in terms of form and metaphoricity. MEs are classified according to their metaphorical strength and their transference from maritime usage into new registers and domains such as those of business, politics, sports and reportage etc. A revised model of metaphoricity is developed and a new category of figurative expression, the ‘resonator’, is proposed. Additionally, developing the work of Lakov and Johnson, Kovesces and others on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), a number of Maritime Conceptual Metaphors are identified and their cultural significance is discussed