Questioning the Subject in Biographical Interviewing

This paper considers how different approaches to interviewing and styles of questioning produce different sorts of biographical subjects and accounts. It compares styles of biographical interview (chronological and narrative) and types of question (narrative and explanatory), and presents an approach, which treats the interview as a collaborative co-production primarily concerned with the present and subjectivity, rather than the past and fact. It also considers how biographical interviewing may direct and contain narratives of the self through the subject positions it creates and offers interviewees. Discussion is grounded in reflection on a recent project involving university students in interviewing young people leaving care about their care experiences and making a training video for professionals. The paper highlights the inter-subjective and emotional aspects of interviewing in this context.Life History, Narratives of Self, Subject, Subject Positions, Interviewing, Biography, Chronology

Public feeling: the entanglement of emotion and technology in the 2011 riots

This chapter is mainly concerned with the problem of how to conceptualise the entanglement of emotion and media in the 2011 riots in England. It examines the ways in which emotions and media technologies have figured in attempts to explain the motivation and momentum of the riots: in mainstream media, accounts provided by rioters and some academic analyses. It reflects on the advantages of deploying ‘affect’ and ‘assemblage’ in analysis of relations between feeling, technology and acting in the riots

A knowledge representation model to support concurrent engineering team working

This thesis demonstrates that a knowledge representation model can provide considerable support to concurrent engineering teams, by providing a sound basis for creation of necessary software applications. This is achieved by demonstrating that use of the knowledge representation model facilitates the capture, interpretation and implementation of important aspects of the multiple, diverse types of expertise which are essential to the successful working of concurrent engineering project teams. The varieties of expertise which can be modelled as instances of the knowledge representation model range from specialist applications, which support particular aspects of design, by assisting human designers with highly focused skills and knowledge sets, to applications which specialise in management or coordination of team activities. It is shown that both these types of expertise are essential for effective working of a concurrent engineering team. Examination of the requirements of concurrent engineering team working indicate that no single artificial intelligence paradigm can provide a satisfactory basis for the whole range of possible solutions which may be provided by intelligent software applications. Hence techniques, architectures and environments to support design and development of hybrid software expertise are required, and the knowledge representation model introduced in this research is such an architecture. The versatility of the knowledge representation model is demonstrated through the design and implementation of a variety of software applications

Managing corporate memory on the semantic web

Corporate memory (CM) is the total body of data, information and knowledge required to deliver the strategic aims and objectives of an organization. In the current market, the rapidly increasing volume of unstructured documents in the enterprises has brought the challenge of building an autonomic framework to acquire, represent, learn and maintain CM, and efficiently reason from it to aid in knowledge discovery and reuse. The concept of semantic web is being introduced in the enterprises to structure information in a machine readable way and enhance the understandability of the disparate information. Due to the continual popularity of the semantic web, this paper develops a framework for CM management on the semantic web. The proposed approach gleans information from the documents, converts into a semantic web resource using resource description framework (RDF) and RDF Schema and then identifies relations among them using latent semantic analysis technique. The efficacy of the proposed approach is demonstrated through empirical experiments conducted on two case studies. © 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York

Implementing collaboration moderator service to support various phases of virtual organisations

Research into moderators, which support collaborative teams by proactively making team members aware of actions or potential problems which may affect them, began in the 1990s, in the context of supporting collaborations during concurrent engineering projects. This paper provides a background to the evolution of moderators and explores their role in supporting virtual organisations. A collaboration moderator (CM) is an evolution of earlier moderators and is capable of behaving differently for different types of users and therefore caters for the varying requirements of individual users depending on the roles they have in the collaborations. This paper describes the architecture and components of a CM from an implementation perspective. Prototype CMs have been developed during the EU-funded SYNERGY project, and two use cases for which the prototype CMs were implemented as a service (a Pre-Creation use case and an Operational use case) are also discussed in this paper

An information-centric approach to enterprise modelling for product recovery

Recovery of used products and materials is becoming a field of rapidly growing importance. The scope and scale of product recovery have expanded tremendously over the past decade. Recent changes in government legislation in various countries and increasing customer awareness towards greener products have forced the manufacturers to rethink their business strategies. This has also resulted in new business opportunities in the area of remanufacturing and a large number of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have appeared in the recovery industry. These SMEs include reprocessing and recycling companies as well as freight forwarders and warehousing companies. Recovery firms have to deal with customer demands and returns that are largely dependant on the state of the art in technology. They change without any warnings and unfortunately a third party recovery firm has little control over them as compared to an original equipment manufacturer (OEM). In such situations, these companies must not only quickly adapt to the changes but also continuously evolve to survive in the market. They have to be versatile, changeable and able to quickly redesign and modify their own facilities and processes to cope with the changing situations. This paper presents an information–centred formal model for product recovery enterprises to aid the designers with modelling and evaluation tools to enable progressive design of the enterprise. The modelling exercise in this work involves description of the different views of the enterprise, namely strategic view, physical view, functional view and performance view. The analysis of the system (as part of the performance view) has been carried out using simulation

Losing our cool? Following Williams and Grossberg on emotions

Despite constituting a significant area of everyday experience, emotions have rarely been the focus of detailed investigation within cultural studies. This paper makes a case for viewing emotions as social/cultural/political, as well as individual, phenomena and reviews the contributions of cultural theorists to analyses of emotions. To this end, it critically examines Raymond Williams\u27 concept ‘structure of feeling’, which reintroduces the subjective into the social, and Larry Grossberg\u27s concept ‘economy of affect’, which seeks to explain how, through affective investments, ideologies are internalized and naturalized. Whilst both theorists provide important conceptual tools, each conceptualization has specific limitations and neither theorist offers detailed analyses of the interrelations, in practice, between individual and social aspects of emotion. The authors seek to build on and extend the insights of Williams and Grossberg and locate emotions in and across specific historical, cultural and political contexts within relations of hegemony and resistance. The authors begin to theorize how emotions are constituted and operate interactively at the level of both individual personal experience and wider social formations/power relations. This paper establishes the groundwork for working towards a genealogy of specific structures of feeling and specific emotional subjects. It is argued that theorizing relations between emotion and power is crucial to this project. The paper discusses ways of theorizing ‘emotion and power’, and outlines the authors’ approach, which, it is suggested, could be further explored in relation to concrete examples

Modelling and optimisation of a product recovery network

An appropriate logistics network is an important element of the infrastructure of any product recovery company. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) constitute a major fraction of the product recovery industry with a different business objective and scale of operation from those of original equipment manufacturers. This paper addresses the network design issues for SMEs involved in product recovery activities. A mathematical formulation is presented in an SME context and a subsequent simulation model is developed. A genetic algorithm approach is presented for optimising the network for a single product scenario

The power of feeling: Locating emotions in culture

Within cultural studies, there has been little detailed investigation of emotions as part of everyday personal, cultural and political life. In this article, we argue the need for a cultural studies approach to emotions that focuses in detail on: how emotions are constituted, experienced and managed; what is culturally permissible for specific categories of subjects to express as part of their constitution within contemporary power relations; and the techniques and contexts in and through which the emotional subject is produced. We develop an analytical framework based on a critical review of, first, Michel Foucault\u27s analyses of modern power, discourse and the formation of subjectivity (focusing on `technologies of power\u27 and `technologies of self\u27), second, Alison Jaggar\u27s conceptualization of `emotional hegemony\u27 and, third, Raymond Williams\u27s conceptualization of `structure of feeling\u27. We apply this framework to specific examples to demonstrate how emotions might participate in the reproduction of culture, subjectivity and power relations. Here, we discuss the unexpected and extensive public outpourings of grief following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and media and government responses to these. We also look at the ways in which diaries/day planners may be used to provide a structure not only for appointments, but also for feelings — registering and managing individual emotional states — and self-construction. In each of these examples, we consider how `the emotions\u27, as a category of experience, might be implicated in negotiations of the (hierarchically arranged) public/private divide