Being While Doing: An Inductive Model of Mindfulness at Work

Mindfulness at work has drawn growing interest as empirical evidence increasingly supports its positive workplace impacts. Yet theory also suggests that mindfulness is a cognitive mode of “Being” that may be incompatible with the cognitive mode of “Doing” that undergirds workplace functioning. Therefore, mindfulness at work has been theorized as “being while doing,” but little is known regarding how people experience these two modes in combination, nor the influences or outcomes of this interaction. Drawing on a sample of 39 semi-structured interviews, this study explores how professionals experience being mindful at work. The relationship between Being and Doing modes demonstrated changing compatibility across individuals and experience, with two basic types of experiences and three types of transitions. We labeled experiences when informants were unable to activate Being mode while engaging Doing mode as Entanglement, and those when informants reported simultaneous co-activation of Being and Doing modes as Disentanglement. This combination was a valuable resource for offsetting important limitations of the typical reliance on the Doing cognitive mode. Overall our results have yielded an inductive model of mindfulness at work, with the core experience, outcomes, and antecedent factors unified into one system that may inform future research and practice. We did a full hour … of [mindfulness] training… My pager went off like three times. … He\u27s telling us to meditate, and everyone\u27s pager was just beeping. It was not very conducive to meditating. –medical residen

Learning facet-specific entity embeddings

An entity embedding is a vector space representation of entities in which similar entities have similar representations. However, similarity is a multi-faceted notion; for example, a person may be similar to one group of people because they graduated from the same university and similar to another group through having the same nationality or playing the same sport. Our hypothesis in this thesis is that learning a single entity embedding is a sub-optimal way to faithfully capture these different facets of similarity. Therefore, this thesis aims to learn facet-specific entity embeddings that capture different facets of similarity, taking inspiration from a framework widely known in cognitive science called conceptual spaces framework. Conceptual spaces [48] are vector space models designed to represent entities of a given kind (e.g. movies), together with their associated properties (e.g. scary), and concepts (e.g. thrillers). As such, they are similar in spirit to the vector space models that have been proposed in natural language processing, but there are also notable differences. First, the dimensions of conceptual spaces, referred to as quality dimensions, are interpretable, as they correspond to semantically meaningful features. Second, conceptual spaces are organized into sets of semantic domains or facets (e.g. genre, language), which are formed by grouping the quality dimensions. Each facet is associated with its own low-dimensional vector space, which intuitively captures similarity with respect to the corresponding facet. For instance, the vector space for the budget facet would only capture whether two movies had similar budgets. From an application point of view, the fact that conceptual spaces are structured into facets is appealing because this allows us to model the different facets of similarity in a more flexible and cognitively more plausible way. Based on this, we hypothesize that learning facet-specific entity embeddings that are similar in spirit to conceptual spaces will allow us to predict the properties and categories of entities more reliably than from standard single space representations. Learning data-driven conceptual spaces, especially in an unsupervised way, has received very limited attention to date. Therefore, in this thesis, we will learn facet-specific entity embeddings that is similar in spirit to conceptual spaces. This includes learning quality dimensions and then grouping them into facets. In particular, in this thesis, we propose three unsupervised models to learn this type of vector space representations for a set of entities using their textual descriptions. In two of these models, we convert traditional vector space embeddings into facet-specific entity embeddings, using quality dimensions-like features. In these cases, we rely on an existing method to learn these features. In our first proposed model, we structured the vector space representations implicitly into meaningful facets by identifying the quality dimensions in a two-level hierarchy: The first level corresponds to the facets, and the second level corresponds to the facet-specific features. In our second developed model, using the quality dimensions and pre-trained word embeddings, we decompose the vector space representations into low-dimensional facets in an incremental way. In both of these models, we depend on clustering algorithms to find facet-specific features. In contrast, our third proposed model uses a mixture-of experts formulation to find the features that describe each facet and it simultaneously learns the facet-specific embeddings directly from the bag-of-words. We evaluate our models on several datasets, each of which contains a set of entities with their textual descriptions and a number of classification tasks, using a range of different classifiers. The experimental results support our hypothesis that, by capturing different facets of similarity, facet-specific vector space representations improve a model’s ability to predict the categories and properties of entities

Unfolding practices with unfolding objects: standardization work in global branding

Although significant efforts have focused on the question how the standardization of global branding works, very little research concerns standardization work i.e. how actors, objects and practices come together in the development and control of standards (see Chabowski et al. 2013). Yet, the development and control of standards involves power relations, negotiation and conflicts between competing visions and outcomes (Lyytinen and King 2006; Nickerson and Muehlen 2006). The complex standardization practice revolves around objects (D'Adderio 2011). Surprisingly, tools and are technologies of standardization are also absent from marketing literature. The current study focuses on the entanglement of global branding and digital artifacts. The project explores how digital objects are co-instituted and co-implicated in the generation, stabilization and control of international marketing practice. Our specific focus is on brand standards; we examine how digital affordances mesh with practices to enable and constrain standardization work

Antonio Gramsci’s impact on critical pedagogy

This paper provides an account of Antonio Gramsci’s impact on the area of critical pedagogy. It indicates the Gramscian influence on the thinking of major exponents of the field. It foregrounds Gramsci's ideas and then indicates how they have been taken up by a selection of critical pedagogy exponents who were chosen on the strength of their identification and engagement with Gramsci's ideas, some of them even having written entire essays on Gramsci. The essay concludes with a discussion concerning an aspect of Gramsci's concerns, the question of powerful knowledge, which, in the present author's view, provides a formidable challenge to critical pedagogues.peer-reviewe

Re-thinking the “thing”: Sociomaterial approaches to understanding and researching learning in work

Purpose: This article compares theoretical conceptions that reclaim and re-think material practice – ‘the thing’ in the social and personal mix – specifically in terms of work activity and what is construed to be learning in that activity. Approach: The article is theory-based. Three perspectives have been selected for discussion: cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), actor-network theory (ANT), and complexity theory. A comparative approach is used to examine these three conceptual framings in context of their uptake in learning research to explore their diverse contributions and limitations on questions of agency, power, difference, and the presence of the ‘thing’. Findings: The three perspectives bear some similarities in their conceptualization of knowledge and capabilities as emerging - simultaneously with identities, policies, practices and environment - in webs of interconnections between heterogeneous things, human and nonhuman. Yet each illuminates very different facets of the sociomaterial in work-learning that can afford important understandings: about how subjectivities are produced in work, how knowledge circulates and sediments into formations of power, and how practices are configured and re-configured. Each also signals, in different ways, what generative possibilities may exist for counter-configurations and alternate identities in spaces and places of work. Value: While some dialogue has occurred among ANT and CHAT, this has not been developed to compare more broadly the metaphysics and approaches of these perspectives, along with complexity theory which is receiving growing attention in organizational research contexts. This article purports to introduce the nature of these debates to work-learning researchers and point to their implications for opening useful question

A Live Wire : Machismo of a Distant Surface

The scientific study of socio-cultural phenomenon requires a translocation of topics elaborated from the social perspective of the individual to a rationally ordered rendition of processes suitable for comprehension from a scientific perspective. Scholarly curiosity seeded from exposure in the natural setting to economic, political, socio-cultural, evolutionary, processes dictates that study of the self, should be a science with a necessary place in the body of world literatures; yet it has proven difficult to find a perspective to contain discussions of topics in a coherent manner for scientific approach: for example, anthropology, the study of mankind, finds difficulty elaborating definition for the orientation of study; it is a member of the same set that contains it. In this presentation, based on features indigenous to a supposed distant perspective that is exposed employing experiences of history and criteria of common sensory perception, it is conjectured that a civilization lifetime pathology is contemporarily active. Example is taken from philosophical and sociological discourses, modern science theory, medicine in pursuit of international health issues, to capture conceptually a role of motions of external agents occurred within the interval of observation, elaboration of concepts, choice of directions, as a source of paradox and confusion. In supposition that does not escape simple logic, ubiquitously appealing to the experience bound senses for understanding, hidden motions, common to both observer and observed, are hypothesized to render from a sense of familiarity, a continued frustration in attaining an understanding of the self and nature. A psychical seduction is proposed to exist, related to historical behaviors associated with centrism and asceticism, produces eccentric interpretations that are bound modernly to logical circular, centric geometrical reasonings; world conceptualizations are conjectured to acquire an avoidance of a state of ‘motionless’ rather than death within selection processes. Projection by the imagination upon the unknown is conjectured to result in a seduction by an active ‘live-wire” embodied to motions occurred to a distant surface

Unfolding practices with unfolding objects: standardization work in global branding

Although significant efforts have focused on the question how the standardization of global branding works, very little research concerns standardization work i.e. how actors, objects and practices come together in the development and control of standards (see Chabowski et al. 2013). Yet, the development and control of standards involves power relations, negotiation and conflicts between competing visions and outcomes (Lyytinen and King 2006; Nickerson and Muehlen 2006). The complex standardization practice revolves around objects (D'Adderio 2011). Surprisingly, tools and are technologies of standardization are also absent from marketing literature. The current study focuses on the entanglement of global branding and digital artifacts. The project explores how digital objects are co-instituted and co-implicated in the generation, stabilization and control of international marketing practice. Our specific focus is on brand standards; we examine how digital affordances mesh with practices to enable and constrain standardization work