95,322 research outputs found
Communicating Resilience: A Discursive Leadership Perspective
In this essay we challenge whether current conceptions of optimism, hope, and resilience are complete enough to account for the complexity and nuance of developing and maintaining these in practice. For example, a quick perusal of popular outlets (e.g., Forbes, Harvard Business Review) reveals advice to managers urging them to “be optimistic,” or “be happy” so that these types of emotions or feelings can spread to the workplace. One even finds simple advice and steps to follow on how to foster these types of things in the workplace (McKee; Tjan). We argue that this common perspective focuses narrowly on individuals and does not account for the complexity of resilience. Consequently, it denies the role of context, culture, and interactions as ways people develop shared meaning and reality.
To fill this gap in our understanding, we take a social constructionist perspective to understand resilience. In other words, we foreground communication as the primary building block to sharing meaning and creating our worlds. In so doing, we veer away from the traditional focus on the individual and instead emphasise the social and cultural elements that shape how meaning is shared by peoples in various contexts (Fairhurst, Considering Context). Drawing on a communication, discourse-centered perspective we explore hope and optimism as concepts commonly associated with resilience in a work context. At work, leaders play a vital role in communicating ways that foster resilience in the face of organisational issues and events (e.g., environmental crises, downsizing). Following this lead, discursive leadership offers a framework that positions leadership as co-created and as the management of meaning through framing (Fairhurst, Power of Framing). Thus, we propose that a discursive leadership orientation can contribute to the communicative construction of resilience that moves away from individual perspectives to an emphasis on the social.
From a discursive perspective, leadership is defined as a process of meaning management; attribution given by followers or observers; process-focused rather than leader-focused; and as shifting and distributed among several organizational members (Fairhurst Power of Framing). By switching from the individual focus and concentrating on social and cultural systems, discursive leadership is able to study concepts related to subjectivity, cultures, and identities as it relates to meaning.
Our aim is to offer leaders an alternative perspective on resilience at the individual and group level by explaining how a discursive orientation to leadership can contribute to the communicative construction of resilience. We argue that a social constructionist approach provides a perspective that can unravel the multiple layers that make up hope, optimism, and resilience. We begin with a peek into the social scientific perspective that is so commonplace in media and popular portrayals of these constructs. Then, we explain the social constructionist perspective that grounds our framework, drawing on discursive leadership. Next, we present an alternative model of resilience, one that takes resilience as communicatively constructed and socially created. We believe this more robust perspective can help individuals, groups, and cultures be more resilient in the face of challenges
The Swift-Hohenberg equation with a nonlocal nonlinearity
It is well known that aspects of the formation of localised states in a
one-dimensional Swift--Hohenberg equation can be described by
Ginzburg--Landau-type envelope equations. This paper extends these multiple
scales analyses to cases where an additional nonlinear integral term, in the
form of a convolution, is present. The presence of a kernel function introduces
a new lengthscale into the problem, and this results in additional complexity
in both the derivation of envelope equations and in the bifurcation structure.
When the kernel is short-range, weakly nonlinear analysis results in envelope
equations of standard type but whose coefficients are modified in complicated
ways by the nonlinear nonlocal term. Nevertheless, these computations can be
formulated quite generally in terms of properties of the Fourier transform of
the kernel function. When the lengthscale associated with the kernel is longer,
our method leads naturally to the derivation of two different, novel, envelope
equations that describe aspects of the dynamics in these new regimes. The first
of these contains additional bifurcations, and unexpected loops in the
bifurcation diagram. The second of these captures the stretched-out nature of
the homoclinic snaking curves that arises due to the nonlocal term.Comment: 28 pages, 14 figures. To appear in Physica
Diffusion coefficients for multi-step persistent random walks on lattices
We calculate the diffusion coefficients of persistent random walks on
lattices, where the direction of a walker at a given step depends on the memory
of a certain number of previous steps. In particular, we describe a simple
method which enables us to obtain explicit expressions for the diffusion
coefficients of walks with two-step memory on different classes of one-, two-
and higher-dimensional lattices.Comment: 27 pages, 2 figure
Efficient evaluation of decoherence rates in complex Josephson circuits
A complete analysis of the decoherence properties of a Josephson junction
qubit is presented. The qubit is of the flux type and consists of two large
loops forming a gradiometer and one small loop, and three Josephson junctions.
The contributions to relaxation (T_1) and dephasing (T_\phi) arising from two
different control circuits, one coupled to the small loop and one coupled to a
large loop, is computed. We use a complete, quantitative description of the
inductances and capacitances of the circuit. Including two stray capacitances
makes the quantum mechanical modeling of the system five dimensional. We
develop a general Born-Oppenheimer approximation to reduce the effective
dimensionality in the calculation to one. We explore T_1 and T_\phi along an
optimal line in the space of applied fluxes; along this "S line" we see
significant and rapidly varying contributions to the decoherence parameters,
primarily from the circuit coupling to the large loop.Comment: 16 pages, 20 figures; v2: minor revisio
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