What makes a “good manager”? Positioning gender and management in students’ narratives

The purpose of this paper is to address the relationships between gender and management in the narratives of students. More specifically, the authors discuss how the discourse on management is mobilized as a discursive practice able to make some form of that activity thinkable and practicable: who can be a CEO? What kind of managerial competencies are attributed to men/women CEOs? What kind of moral order is expressed in the stories told? Design/methodology/approach – Stimulus texts have been used to elicit narratives. Students were asked to complete a short story regarding a fictive managerial character, either female or male, whose performance and attitude they were asked to evaluate. Findings – The paper discusses how the collected stories as a whole expressed a conception of what counts as a “good manager” and how management is gendered. In the analysis, the authors discuss whether and how the relationships between gender and management are changing, or the basic assumptions about “think manager-think male” are still valid. The paper illustrates a traditional positioning of gendered management along the lines of rationality vs care, and a third positioning in which the ideal of the “good manager” has both competencies. Originality/value – The authors designed an alternative research strategy focused on how gender and management are discursively constructed within a context of economic crisis that affects management reputation. Particularly, the authors discuss the surprising results concerning how the written stories evaluating male CEOs distrusted the masculine way of managing and positioned the female managing style within a trustworthy context

What makes a good journalist?: Empathy as a resource in journalistic work practice

Empathy performs a central role in regulating social relations. This applies equally to journalistic work routines. To explore the concept of empathy in the understanding of journalists, 46 interviews were conducted using a cross-cultural approach between the United Kingdom and India. It became clear that empathy occupies a central place in news production, fulfilling multiple roles. It serves to achieve a comprehensive access to information and to news protagonists at the interpersonal level. Without this “invisible” mode of communication, qualitative and ethical news journalism cannot be achieved; and the authenticity and emotionality of news packages would be diminished. Empathy varies on the individual level, but especially in sensitive journalistic work fields it represents a “naturally present” core skill for journalists. A final empathic dimension is found in the imaginary empathy towards the audience which provides essential guidance for journalistic news products. Cultural differences between India and the United Kingdom are apparent in this study, but results also indicate considerable similarities in the role of empathy in different journalism cultures

Why good people sometimes do bad things

Why do honest and decent employees sometimes overstep the mark? What makes managers with integrity go off the rails? What causes well-meaning organizations to deceive their clients, employees and shareholders? Social psychology offers surprising answers to these intriguing and timely questions. Drawing on scientific experiments and examples from business practice, Muel Kaptein discusses why good people sometimes do bad things and how they rise above this behavior. He explains why cheats wear sunglasses, why overstepping the mark could be a good thing, how a surplus of rules creates offenders and why we should be suspicious of colleagues who wash their hands after meetings

Data-Driven Segmentation of Post-mortem Iris Images

This paper presents a method for segmenting iris images obtained from the deceased subjects, by training a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) designed for the purpose of semantic segmentation. Post-mortem iris recognition has recently emerged as an alternative, or additional, method useful in forensic analysis. At the same time it poses many new challenges from the technological standpoint, one of them being the image segmentation stage, which has proven difficult to be reliably executed by conventional iris recognition methods. Our approach is based on the SegNet architecture, fine-tuned with 1,300 manually segmented post-mortem iris images taken from the Warsaw-BioBase-Post-Mortem-Iris v1.0 database. The experiments presented in this paper show that this data-driven solution is able to learn specific deformations present in post-mortem samples, which are missing from alive irises, and offers a considerable improvement over the state-of-the-art, conventional segmentation algorithm (OSIRIS): the Intersection over Union (IoU) metric was improved from 73.6% (for OSIRIS) to 83% (for DCNN-based presented in this paper) averaged over subject-disjoint, multiple splits of the data into train and test subsets. This paper offers the first known to us method of automatic processing of post-mortem iris images. We offer source codes with the trained DCNN that perform end-to-end segmentation of post-mortem iris images, as described in this paper. Also, we offer binary masks corresponding to manual segmentation of samples from Warsaw-BioBase-Post-Mortem-Iris v1.0 database to facilitate development of alternative methods for post-mortem iris segmentation

Slackwire Calliope

This collection of essays and stories strives to consider questions of belonging and estrangement, family, and the many layers of the human experience. This collection is equally interested in questions of genre, and the potential for genre to stretch its own limits. Above all, this collection endeavors to question what makes a story, and what makes a story good

‘What’s on your bucket list?’: Tourism, identity and imperative experiential discourse

The concept of the Bucket List has achieved rapid and widespread recognition. This article makes an original Critical Discourse Analysis of the Bucket List as a cultural phenomenon that provides important insights into the interrelation between identity and tourism. The Bucket List is used to communicate specific suggestions of desirable tourism experiences and uses what can be termed the experiential imperative discourse, where the language, tone and framing of the text positions the experience described as essential and obligatory. Ultimately, the Bucket List discourse serves to prescribe culturally specific ideas of what constitute ‘good’ tourism experiences and is imposed on individuals who are prompted to desire a constantly renewing range of tourism experience