‘And if I don’t want to work like an artist...?’ How the study of artistic resistance enriches organizational studies

An increasing number of artists, from theatre makers to painters, critique recent aesthetic developments in organizational life.* One of their topics is the relation between work and freedom, as employees, like artists, are required to bring fully into work their subjectivity and emotional motivation. This paper presents several contemporary examples and a case of the theatre maker Ren� Pollesch whose plays show the dark side of these role models, leaving the audience to draw its own, bitter conclusions. It is proposed in this paper that organizational studies should consider these forms of ?artistic resistance? more systematically. Artistic resistance goes beyond extant critical intellectual approaches to organization studies: Its presentational form provides an aesthetic experience, and conveys both embodied and tacit forms of knowing in fuller, richer and stimulating ways. The paper discusses implications for organizational theory building (for example with regard to work models and the use of arts for organizational development), and research methods (scholarly applications of arts-based methods for the generation and presentation of research findings)

Improvisational Theatre in Management Education: Exploring arts-based approaches to enhance student learning

For enabling a creative and interactive learning-experience, MBA students in the School of Management and Business, Aberystwyth University have been involved in a teaching project based on improvisational theatre. This is a response to calls for active student involvement in teaching situations in order to vary and enhance their learning experience. The use of arts-based approaches in particular has been adopted in management education because there are overlaps between artistic, theatrical skills and generic management skills which involve improvisation, spontaneous action, the creative use of available resources and the ability to listen to others. This paper describes how the improvisational theatre exercise contributes to these skills and evaluates how it helped students to better understand theoretical concepts by providing them with the opportunity to elaborate creatively on different aspects of theory. Details of the exercise are provided in the paper. Difficulties in preparing and conducting the action are outlined and general implications for professional practice are addressed

An efficient genetic algorithm for structural RNA pairwise alignment and its application to non-coding RNA discovery in yeast

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Aligning RNA sequences with low sequence identity has been a challenging problem since such a computation essentially needs an algorithm with high complexities for taking structural conservation into account. Although many sophisticated algorithms for the purpose have been proposed to date, further improvement in efficiency is necessary to accelerate its large-scale applications including non-coding RNA (ncRNA) discovery.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We developed a new genetic algorithm, Cofolga2, for simultaneously computing pairwise RNA sequence alignment and consensus folding, and benchmarked it using BRAliBase 2.1. The benchmark results showed that our new algorithm is accurate and efficient in both time and memory usage. Then, combining with the originally trained SVM, we applied the new algorithm to novel ncRNA discovery where we compared <it>S. cerevisiae </it>genome with six related genomes in a pairwise manner. By focusing our search to the relatively short regions (50 bp to 2,000 bp) sandwiched by conserved sequences, we successfully predict 714 intergenic and 1,311 sense or antisense ncRNA candidates, which were found in the pairwise alignments with stable consensus secondary structure and low sequence identity (≤ 50%). By comparing with the previous predictions, we found that > 92% of the candidates is novel candidates. The estimated rate of false positives in the predicted candidates is 51%. Twenty-five percent of the intergenic candidates has supports for expression in cell, i.e. their genomic positions overlap those of the experimentally determined transcripts in literature. By manual inspection of the results, moreover, we obtained four multiple alignments with low sequence identity which reveal consensus structures shared by three species/sequences.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The present method gives an efficient tool complementary to sequence-alignment-based ncRNA finders.</p

Conserved Secondary Structures in Aspergillus

Background: Recent evidence suggests that the number and variety of functional RNAs (ncRNAs as well as cis-acting RNA elements within mRNAs) is much higher than previously thought; thus, the ability to computationally predict and analyze RNAs has taken on new importance. We have computationally studied the secondary structures in an alignment of six Aspergillus genomes. Little is known about the RNAs present in this set of fungi, and this diverse set of genomes has an optimal level of sequence conservation for observing the correlated evolution of base-pairs seen in RNAs. Methodology/Principal Findings: We report the results of a whole-genome search for evolutionarily conserved secondary structures, as well as the results of clustering these predicted secondary structures by structural similarity. We find a total of 7450 predicted secondary structures, including a new predicted,60 bp long hairpin motif found primarily inside introns. We find no evidence for microRNAs. Different types of genomic regions are over-represented in different classes of predicted secondary structures. Exons contain the longest motifs (primarily long, branched hairpins), 59 UTRs primarily contain groupings of short hairpins located near the start codon, and 39 UTRs contain very little secondary structure compared to other regions. There is a large concentration of short hairpins just inside the boundaries of exons. The density of predicted intronic RNAs increases with the length of introns, and the density of predicted secondary structures within mRNA coding regions increases with the number of introns in a gene