9,209 research outputs found

    The place where curses are manufactured : four poets of the Vietnam War

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    The Vietnam War was unique among American wars. To pinpoint its uniqueness, it was necessary to look for a non-American voice that would enable me to articulate its distinctiveness and explore the American character as observed by an Asian. Takeshi Kaiko proved to be most helpful. From his novel, Into a Black Sun, I was able to establish a working pair of 'bookends' from which to approach the poetry of Walter McDonald, Bruce Weigl, Basil T. Paquet and Steve Mason. Chapter One is devoted to those seemingly mismatched 'bookends,' Walt Whitman and General William C. Westmoreland, and their respective anthropocentric and technocentric visions of progress and the peculiarly American concept of the "open road" as they manifest themselves in Vietnam. In Chapter, Two, I analyze the war poems of Walter McDonald. As a pilot, writing primarily about flying, his poetry manifests General Westmoreland's technocentric vision of the 'road' as determined by and manifest through technology. Chapter Three focuses on the poems of Bruce Weigl. The poems analyzed portray the literal and metaphorical descent from the technocentric, 'numbed' distance of aerial warfare to the world of ground warfare, and the initiation of a 'fucking new guy,' who discovers the contours of the self's interior through a set of experiences that lead from from aerial insertion into the jungle to the degradation of burning human feces. Chapter Four, devoted to the thirteen poems of Basil T. Paquet, focuses on the continuation of the descent begun in Chapter Two. In his capacity as a medic, Paquet's entire body of poems details his quotidian tasks which entail tending the maimed, the mortally wounded and the dead. The final chapter deals with Steve Mason's JohnnY's Song, and his depiction of the plight of Vietnam veterans back in "The World" who are still trapped inside the interior landscape of their individual "ghettoes" of the soul created by their war-time experiences

    Coloniality and the Courtroom: Understanding Pre-trial Judicial Decision Making in Brazil

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    This thesis focuses on judicial decision making during custody hearings in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The impetus for the study is that while national and international protocols mandate the use of pre-trial detention only as a last resort, judges continue to detain people pre-trial in large numbers. Custody hearings were introduced in 2015, but the initiative has not produced the reduction in pre-trial detention that was hoped. This study aims to understand what informs judicial decision making at this stage. The research is approached through a decolonial lens to foreground legacies of colonialism, overlooked in mainstream criminological scholarship. This is an interview-based study, where key court actors (judges, prosecutors, and public defenders) and subject matter specialists were asked about influences on judicial decision making. Interview data is complemented by non-participatory observation of custody hearings. The research responds directly to Aliverti et al.'s (2021) call to ‘decolonize the criminal question’ by exposing and explaining how colonialism informs criminal justice practices. Answering the call in relation to judicial decision making, findings provide evidence that colonial-era assumptions, dynamics, and hierarchies were evident in the practice of custody hearings and continue to inform judges’ decisions, thus demonstrating the coloniality of justice. This study is significant for the new empirical data presented and theoretical innovation is also offered via the introduction of the ‘anticitizen’. The concept builds on Souza’s (2007) ‘subcitizen’ to account for the active pursuit of dangerous Others by judges casting themselves as crime fighters in a modern moral crusade. The findings point to the limited utility of human rights discourse – the normative approach to influencing judicial decision making around pre-trial detention – as a plurality of conceptualisations compete for dominance. This study has important implications for all actors aiming to reduce pre-trial detention in Brazil because unless underpinning colonial logics are addressed, every innovation risks becoming the next lei para inglês ver (law [just] for the English to see)

    Innovation systems’ response to changes in the institutional impulse: Analysis of the evolution of the European energy innovation system from FP7 to H2020

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    This study addresses how the institutional impulse developed by the European Union influenced the evolution of the European energy innovation system. Considering the contributing role of innovation systems in the development of new knowledge and technology, it can be stated that the institutional impulse achieved by the European Union through the research framework programmes creates a network of relations between entities and projects. This enables the exchange of information and expertise, which is considered a key element for innovation development. Previous studies have attempted to determine whether institutional impulse is an essential element in understanding the efficiency of innovation systems and their related research policies. However, their investigations have yielded inconclusive results. Using the CORDIS database of the European Commission, this study aims to fill this gap by assessing the European energy innovation system for two periods (2007–2013 and 2014–2020) through two of its research funding programmes—FP7 and H2020—thereby contributing to the literature in the innovation systems field. Social network analysis has been conducted to examine how changes in the institutional impulse, reflected in the new objectives in the research funding programmes, are associated with changes in the structural and topological properties of the innovation systems’ underlying networks. The first contribution indicates that the innovation system responds to changes in the goals of funding programmes, as the taxonomy, topology, and structural properties of their underlying networks underwent modifications due to the newly proposed objectives. The second contribution shows that network properties (cohesion and centrality metrics) can explain the efficiency and effectiveness of innovation systems, drawing useful conclusions for policymakers and individual entities. This last contribution also has important policymaking implications, as it provides the basis for understanding how innovation policy goals can be achieved by changing the institutional impulse to direct the innovation system towards these objectives

    Studies of strategic performance management for classical organizations theory & practice

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    Nowadays, the activities of "Performance Management" have spread very broadly in actually every part of business and management. There are numerous practitioners and researchers from very different disciplines, who are involved in exploring the different contents of performance management. In this thesis, some relevant historic developments in performance management are first reviewed. This includes various theories and frameworks of performance management. Then several management science techniques are developed for assessing performance management, including new methods in Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Soft System Methodology (SSM). A theoretical framework for performance management and its practical procedures (five phases) are developed for "classic" organizations using soft system thinking, and the relationship with the existing theories are explored. Eventually these results are applied in three case studies to verify our theoretical development. One of the main contributions of this work is to point out, and to systematically explore the basic idea that the effective forms and structures of performance management for an organization are likely to depend greatly on the organizational configuration, in order to coordinate well with other management activities in the organization, which has seemingly been neglected in the existing literature of performance management research in the sense that there exists little known research that associated particular forms of performance management with the explicit assumptions of organizational configuration. By applying SSM, this thesis logically derives some main functional blocks of performance management in 'classic' organizations and clarifies the relationships between performance management and other management activities. Furthermore, it develops some new tools and procedures, which can hierarchically decompose organizational strategies and produce a practical model of specific implementation steps for "classic" organizations. Our approach integrates popular types of performance management models. Last but not least, this thesis presents findings from three major cases, which are quite different organizations in terms of management styles, ownership, and operating environment, to illustrate the fliexbility of the developed theoretical framework

    Knowledge and innovation within Chinese firms in the space sector

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    Chinese firms have made considerable progress in the space industry within recent decades; some larger state entities have joined the Fortune Global 500 list. The market liberalization, since 2014, has further attracted aspiring new entrants. This article develops a conceptual model by synthesizing business process and knowledge management among high-tech employees to understand technological accumulation within the context of the quadruple helix. We examine the case study of Zhuhai Orbita Aerospace Science and Technology in the Southern Guangdong Province of China, based on extensive primary and secondary data collection. The findings in this article suggest that technological accumulation within the firm is linked to cultural mechanisms, and therefore provides a broad perspective on knowledge management. The findings in this article also suggest that global firms that connect with China’s past are more likely to motivate talented employees in the industry

    The Influence of Quality on eWOM: A Digital Transformation in Hotel Management

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    612324There is no doubt that the use of Internet for purchasing products and services has constituted a crucial change in how people go about buying them. In the era of digital transformation, the possibility of accessing information provided by other users about their personal experiences has taken on more weight in the selection and buying processes. On these lines, traditional word-of-mouth (WOM) has given way to electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM), which constitutes a major social change. This behavior is particularly relevant in the services area, where potential users cannot in advance assess what is on offer. There is an abundant literature analyzing the effects of eWOM on different variables of interest in this sector. However, little is known about the factors that determine eWOM. Thus, the main objective of the present paper is to analyze the impact of two variables (objective quality and perceived quality) on eWOM. Both of them are crucial for potential customers in the process of finding hotel accommodations and they can motivate people to make such comments. The results demonstrate that these variables truly have a significant impact on whether or not users make comments on line. Moreover, it proved possible to observe certain differences according to the profile of the tourist involved and the destination where the hotel is located. In the current changing environment, this information is of great use for hotel managers in order to design strategies according to the type of guest they wish to attract.S

    Living with dying children: the suffering of parents

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    Although the relief of suffering and emotional support are fundamental to children's palliative care, their empirical study has been limited. The research questions for this study address three areas: the lived experience of parents of dying children; how other people's responses shape the parents' lived experience; and the place of emotion and suffering in the parents' lived experience. Implementing a qualitative strategy, a collective case study was undertaken in a children's hospice in England, with fieldwork completed between March 2008 and September 2009. Data was collected with nine parents using a range of tools including a focus group, participant observation, documentary observation and individual interviews. Within-case and cross-case modified grounded theory analysis facilitated clarification of emerging themes whilst preserving individual parent voices. The findings show that parents of dying children had existential issues put at stake through the emotional experience of parenting a dying child; these included their identity, place in society, time, and relationships. Such losses could constitute suffering, but in addition they limited the parents' interaction with society so that over time both the 'quantity' and 'quality' of intersubjectivity reduced. The parents perceived that other people tended not to legitimate their lived experience. Emotion was an important influence in this process. The parents of dying children managed their emotions, particularly those of a negative nature, in everyday life and when using hospice services. As a result they expressed somewhat inauthentic accounts of their felt experience, reframed according to perceived feeling rules. This also reduced intersubjectivity and supported the delegitimation of the parental experience. In conclusion, delegitimation of the parental experience stems from feeling rules which are derived from day to day interactions and contemporary social policy. Suffering may be prevented if individual experience is legitimated through improved intersubjectivity. A key factor for this is effective communication through which observers engage with the felt emotion of the suffering individual

    Applying cognitive electrophysiology to neural modelling of the attentional blink

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    This thesis proposes a connection between computational modelling of cognition and cognitive electrophysiology. We extend a previously published neural network model of working memory and temporal attention (Simultaneous Type Serial Token (ST2 ) model ; Bowman & Wyble, 2007) that was designed to simulate human behaviour during the attentional blink, an experimental nding that seems to illustrate the temporal limits of conscious perception in humans. Due to its neural architecture, we can utilise the ST2 model's functionality to produce so-called virtual event-related potentials (virtual ERPs) by averaging over activation proles of nodes in the network. Unlike predictions from textual models, the virtual ERPs from the ST2 model allow us to construe formal predictions concerning the EEG signal and associated cognitive processes in the human brain. The virtual ERPs are used to make predictions and propose explanations for the results of two experimental studies during which we recorded the EEG signal from the scalp of human participants. Using various analysis techniques, we investigate how target items are processed by the brain depending on whether they are presented individually or during the attentional blink. Particular emphasis is on the P3 component, which is commonly regarded as an EEG correlate of encoding items into working memory and thus seems to re ect conscious perception. Our ndings are interpreted to validate the ST2 model and competing theories of the attentional blink. Virtual ERPs also allow us to make predictions for future experiments. Hence, we show how virtual ERPs from the ST2 model provide a powerful tool for both experimental design and the validation of cognitive models

    Theatre, performance and digital culture

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    A thesis submitted to the University of Wolverhampton in partial fulfilment of the requirement of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.This thesis proposes that the theory of aesthetic agency derived from gaming in digital culture may be used as a lens through which live theatre and performance may be analysed. I argue that the aesthetics, immersion and play with identity in live theatre and performance are informed by digital culture through the behaviour and agency of the participants, be they audience or participants. Using a grounded theory methodological approach, four large-scale outdoor immersive productions and two traditional theatrical productions have been selected to provide a comparative analysis using aesthetic agency. Aesthetic agency is central to the analysis of immersion and play with identity in the productions selected. Comprising intention, perceivable consequence, narrative potential, transformation, co-presence and presence aesthetic agency is the feeling of pleasure audience and participants derive through the experience of live theatre and performance. Analysis using aesthetic agency in immersive productions examines qualities such as interaction and participation, discovery, understanding social rules, proximity to points of engagement within the performance, the use of narrative or gameplay, liminality and the suspension of disbelief and the use of physical or imaginary boundaries. Aesthetic agency in play with identity uses qualities of transportation, presence and co-presence and is analysed using themes of liminality, ritual, agency and memory which offer the opportunity of real experience within the virtual environments. The outcomes of the study highlight the opportunities to analyse and understand the meaning making process in live theatre and performance in a new manner through the lens of aesthetic agency derived from digital culture. Through examples, the outcomes show how digital culture theory may be used in live theatre and performance to examine and explain the experience for spectators and participants. The future use of aesthetic agency as a dramaturgical tool then becomes a possibility which may enhance the development process and enrich the subsequent experience of spectators and participants. Further, aesthetic agency may find utility as a dramaturgical tool when used to aid the creation of new live productions
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