Newness Against the Grain: Democratic emergence in organisational and professional practice

What is the nature of democratic innovation in a performative culture? The purpose of this chapter is to help answer this question by giving conceptual substance to the notion of democratic emergence as a specific kind of innovation in the context of contemporary governance trends. It is argued that the performative governance which is the product of these trends is not invulnerable to challenge because of deficiencies in the capacity of managerialism and performative governance to improve services, and the creative spaces for agency and initiative created by the valuing of entrepreneurialism and innovation. The chapter draws on existing conceptual work on democratic approaches to school organisation and innovation, relevant literature on entrepreneurialism, and offers a brief insight into an example of democratic innovation in practice

Creating Inclusive Organizations: Aligning Systems with Diversity

[Excerpt] Diversity and inclusion are often used interchangeably. However, for the purpose of this inquiry, diversity denotes the spectrum of human similarities and differences. Diversity is about people. Inclusion, on the other and, is about organization. It\u27s about operationalizing diversity. Inclusion describes the way an organization configures opportunity, interaction, communication and decision-making to utilize the potential of its diversity

Intrinsic universality and the computational power of self-assembly

This short survey of recent work in tile self-assembly discusses the use of simulation to classify and separate the computational and expressive power of self-assembly models. The journey begins with the result that there is a single universal tile set that, with proper initialization and scaling, simulates any tile assembly system. This universal tile set exhibits something stronger than Turing universality: it captures the geometry and dynamics of any simulated system. From there we find that there is no such tile set in the noncooperative, or temperature 1, model, proving it weaker than the full tile assembly model. In the two-handed or hierarchal model, where large assemblies can bind together on one step, we encounter an infinite set, of infinite hierarchies, each with strictly increasing simulation power. Towards the end of our trip, we find one tile to rule them all: a single rotatable flipable polygonal tile that can simulate any tile assembly system. It seems this could be the beginning of a much longer journey, so directions for future work are suggested.Comment: In Proceedings MCU 2013, arXiv:1309.104

Men's Words in Women's Mouths: Why Misogynous Stereotypes are Humorous in the Old French Fabliaux

While many scholars have examined the subject of misogyny in Old French fabliaux in a number of contexts, no consensus has yet been reached on how the fabliaux can be considered humorous in the light of the stereotypes found therein. By conducting a close contextualised study of three fabliaux, this paper asserts that the humour of the fabliaux is created out of misogynous stereotypes by investing female characters with the ability to appropriate and subvert masculinist rhetoric and discourse styles. This subversive portrayal of women enjoys a circular relationship with humour; the creation of a clearly defined 'joke-world' within the fabliaux licenses socially outrageous portrayals of female protagonists, which in turn create humour through their incongruity with the realities faced by medieval women of all social classes

The syntax of orientation shifting: Evidence from English high adverbs

This paper reviews new data supporting the inclusion of a Speech Act Phrase in the left periphery. Illocutionary and evidential adverbs in English shift orientation from speakers in declarative sentences to addressees in yes-no interrogative sentences. This orientation shift falls out of independently motivated principles: the adverbs contain a logophorically-sensitive PRO subject which is controlled by a syntactic representation of the discourse participants contained in a Speech Act Phrase high in the CP layer. It will be suggested that clause type modulates which discourse participants are available; only speakers are available in declaratives whereas addressees are also available in interrogatives

Animals as Neighbours: The Past and Present of Commensal Animals by Terry O\u27Connor

Review of Terry O\u27Connor\u27s Animals as Neighbours: The Past and Present of Commensal Animals