Mortuary Workers, the Church, and the Funeral Trade in Late Antiquity

Within the city of Constantinople, Constantine organized numerous funeral workers into associations overseen by a bishop, as part of a scheme meant to provide burials for all who needed them within the city. The funeral workers were given special exemptions and clerical status in return for their services. Constantine\u27s model was imitated in other cities within the eastern Mediterranean and, as a result, established new urban patronage networks. The newly elevated funeral professionals were liminal men, between the commercial and clerical worlds and dependent on bishops for their employment and status. Some bishops exploited this dependency by using funeral workers as personal militias. Inscriptions and legal evidence also point to the increasing influence of the church in the funeral trade. Although Constantine envisioned a city that exemplified the Christian belief in provision of burial to all, his scheme had numerous unintended consequences. Investigation of these funeral associations reveals the role of the bishop as a patron, funeral director, and businessman during the Late Roman Empire and better defines the involvement of the church in the funeral trade in Late Antiquity

Strategic I/O Psychology and the Role of Utility Analysis Models

In the 1990’s, the significance of human capital in organizations has been increasing,and measurement issues in human resource management have achieved significant prominence. Yet, I/O psychology research on utility analysis and measurement has actually declined. In this chapter we propose a decision-based framework to review developments in utility analysis research since 1991, and show that through lens of this framework there are many fertile avenues for research. We then show that both I/O psychology and strategic HRM research and practice can be enhanced by greater collaboration and integration, particularly regarding the link between human capital and organizational success. We present an integrative framework as the basis for that integration, and illustrate its implications for future research

Persuasive Technology for Learning in Business Context

"Persuasive Design is a relatively new concept which employs general principles of persuasion that can be implemented in persuasive technology. This concept has been introduced by BJ Fogg in 1998, who since then has further extended it to use computers for changing attitudes and behaviour. Such principles can be applied very well in learning and teaching: in traditional human-led learning, teachers always have employed persuasion as one of the elements of teaching. Persuasive technology moves these principles into the digital domain, by focusing on technology that inherently stimulates learners to learn more quickly and effectively. This is very relevant for the area of Business Management in several aspects: Consumer Behavior, Communications, Human Resource, Marketing & Advertising, Organisational Behavior & Leadership. The persuasive principles identified by BJ Fogg are: reduction, tunnelling, tailoring, suggestion, self-monitoring, surveillance, conditioning, simulation, social signals. Also relevant is the concept of KAIROS, which means the just-in-time, at the right place provision of information/stimulus. In the EuroPLOT project (2010-2013) we have developed persuasive learning objects and tools (PLOTs) in which we have applied persuasive designs and principles. In this context, we have developed a pedagogical framework for active engagement, based on persuasive design in which the principles of persuasive learning have been formalised in a 6-step guide for persuasive learning. These principles have been embedded in two tools – PLOTmaker and PLOTLearner – which have been developed for creating persuasive learning objects. The tools provide specific capability for implementing persuasive principles at the very beginning of the design of learning objects. The feasibility of employing persuasive learning concepts with these tools has been investigated in four different case studies with groups of teachers and learners from realms with distinctly different teaching and learning practices: Business Computing, language learning, museum learning, and chemical substance handling. These case studies have involved the following learner target groups: school children, university students, tertiary students, vocational learners and adult learners. With regards to the learning context, they address archive-based learning, industrial training, and academic teaching. Alltogether, these case studies include participants from Sweden, Africa (Madagascar), Denmark, Czech Republic, and UK. One of the outcomes of this investigation was that one cannot apply a common set of persuasive designs that would be valid for general use in all situations: on the contrary, the persuasive principles are very specific to learning contexts and therefore must be specifically tailored for each situation. Two of these case studies have a direct relevance to education in the realm of Business Management: Business Computing and language learning (for International Business). In this paper we will present the first results from the evaluation of persuasive technology driven learning in these two relevant areas.

Talking the Talk: The Effect of Vocalics in an Interview

Our voices carry more than just content. People continuously make assumptions of one’s intelligence, credibility, personality, and other characteristics merely based on the way we talk. As the diversity of individuals in the workplace increases, so too do the differences in how those individuals talk. It is important that we understand how these different ways of speaking are being perceived in the workplace. More specifically, how are individuals being perceived prior to being hired via the interview process? This Honors Capstone project aims to understand the impact that vocal characteristics in an individual have on the interviewer’s perception of the interviewee, and how that impacts the hiring process. This project will offer professionals of all ages tangible advice on ways to increase one’s chances of receiving a job just by altering aspects of one’s voice

Rhetoric of Persuasion: A Critical Look at Intertextuality and Interdiscursivity as Persuasive Discursive Practices in Robert Bolt's "A Man for All Seasons"

Rhetoric of persuasion, as a discursive practice, is a pivotal tool in obtaining consensus and establishing hegemony. On this basis, the present research seeks to study the exploitation of intertextuality and interdiscursivity, as two important tools of persuasion, in acquiring consensus for legitimating political affairs. To this end, Robert Bolt's "A man for all seasons" is analyzed based on the principals of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Fairclough's 3D approach to find out the historical and discoursal elements that are enacted to construct intertextuality and interdiscursivity, and also the orders of discourse which may have been transformed as a result of enacting given persuasive discursive practice in the body of the society. Regarding the intertextuality, the historical events and religious issues like Tudors, Yorkist war, Leviticus and Deuteronomy are used to persuade Sir Thomas More. In connection with interdiscursivity, too, the king and Cromwell used mixed discourses to have the maximum of effect. Specifically concerned with the transformation of orders of discourse, it is to say that the King's new orders of discourse transform the pre-defined forms of administrative discourse, but keep its content and spirit untouched. This formal transformation adapts itself with the upcoming ever new needs of administration. Keywords: rhetoric of persuasion, intertextuality, interdiscursivity, consensus, hegemon

Norms, strategies and political change: explaining the establishment of the convention on the future of Europe

Norms affect political outcomes by shaping the strategies that political actors use to advance their interests. Norms do so by shaping the terms of the debates that underpin political decision making. Unlike existing literature that highlights the importance of persuasion, this article demonstrates that through the mechanism of rhetorical action, norms induce self-interested political actors to adapt their strategy and accept political change that they would normally oppose. The case of the advent of the Convention on the Future of Europe examined here shows that by considering the impact of norms on the behaviour of the opponents of change, ideational analyses can incorporate agency in the explanation of political change

Linguistic Markers of Influence in Informal Interactions

There has been a long standing interest in understanding `Social Influence' both in Social Sciences and in Computational Linguistics. In this paper, we present a novel approach to study and measure interpersonal influence in daily interactions. Motivated by the basic principles of influence, we attempt to identify indicative linguistic features of the posts in an online knitting community. We present the scheme used to operationalize and label the posts with indicator features. Experiments with the identified features show an improvement in the classification accuracy of influence by 3.15%. Our results illustrate the important correlation between the characteristics of the language and its potential to influence others.Comment: 10 pages, Accepted in NLP+CSS workshop for ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics) 201