Incorporating social practices in BDI agent systems

When agents interact with humans, either through embodied agents or because they are embedded in a robot, it would be easy if they could use fixed interaction protocols as they do with other agents. However, people do not keep fixed protocols in their day-to-day interactions and the environments are often dynamic, making it impossible to use fixed protocols. Deliberating about interactions from fundamentals is not very scalable either, because in that case all possible reactions of a user have to be considered in the plans. In this paper we argue that social practices can be used as an inspiration for designing flexible and scalable interaction mechanisms that are also robust. However, using social practices requires extending the traditional BDI deliberation cycle to monitor landmark states and perform expected actions by leveraging existing plans. We define and implement this mechanism in Jason using a periodically run meta-deliberation plan, supported by a metainterpreter, and illustrate its use in a realistic scenario.Comment: An extended abstract of this paper has been accepted for the Eighteenth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), 201

Binge flying: Behavioural addiction and climate change

Recent popular press suggests that ‘binge flying’ constitutes a new site of behavioural addiction. We theoretically appraise and empirically support this proposition through interviews with consumers in Norway and the United Kingdom conducted in 2009. Consistent findings from across two national contexts evidence a growing negative discourse towards frequent short-haul tourist air travel and illustrate strategies of guilt suppression and denial used to span a cognitive dissonance between the short-term personal benefits of tourism and the air travel’s associated long-term consequences for climate change. Tensions between tourism consumption and changing social norms towards acceptable flying practice exemplify how this social group is beginning to (re)frame what constitutes ‘excessive’ holiday flying, despite concomitantly continuing their own frequent air travels

How moving home influences appliance ownership: a Passivhaus case study

Low carbon dwellings shift the focus to electricity consumption and appliances by significantly lowering space heating energy consumption. Using a UK Passivhaus (low carbon) case study, interviews and pre/post-move-in appliance audits were employed to investigate how moving home can change the appliance requirements of appliance-using practices. Changes in appliance ownership were due to differences in how appliance-using practices (e.g. cooking, laundering, homemaking) were being performed. Existing/new appliances complemented/conflicted with a new home on the basis of whether the social meanings of specific appliance-using practices (e.g. stylishness, convenience, thermal comfort, cleanliness) could be met. This was evident, when moving home more generally, by households buying new modern appliances and managing spatial constraints. More specifically, regarding Passivhaus, hosting and homemaking practices were performed in ways that met thermal comfort expectations, in addition to appliance purchasing also being influenced by a fear that the Passivhaus technologies could fail. Whilst skills and competences were needed to perform appliance-using practices, these were less prominent in influencing appliance ownership changes. Conclusions include reflections on how the elements of appliance-using practices change when moving home, as well as what adhering to building standards could mean for the standardisation of appliance-using practices and domestic life more generally

Understanding the everyday designer in organisations

This paper builds upon the existing concept of an everyday designer as a non-expert designer who carries out design activities using available resources in a given environment. It does so by examining the design activities undertaken by non-expert, informal, designers in organisations who make use of the formal and informal technology already in use in organisations while designing to direct, influence, change or transform the practices of people in the organisation. These people represent a cohort of designers who are given little attention in the literature on information systems, despite their central role in the formation of practice and enactment of technology in organisations. The paper describes the experiences of 18 everyday designers in an academic setting using three concepts: everyday designer in an organisation, empathy through design and experiencing an awareness gap. These concepts were constructed through the analysis of in-depth interviews with the participants. The paper concludes with a call for tool support for everyday designers in organisations to enable them to better understand the audience for whom they are designing and the role technology plays in the organisation

Adorno?s Grey, Taussig?s Blue: Colour, Organization and Critical Affect

In this article we seek to open up the study of affect and organization to colour. Often simply taken for granted in organizational life and usually neglected in organizational thought, colour is an affective force by default. Deploying and interweaving the languages of affect theory, critical theory, and organization studies, we discuss colour as a primary phenomenon for the study of ?critical affect?. We then trace colour?s affect in conditioning the unfolding of organization in two particular ?colour/spaces? ? Adorno?s grey and Taussig?s blue of our title ? and discuss both its ambiguity and critical potential. Finally, we ponder what colour might do to the style of an organizational scholarship attuned to affect, where sentences blur with things and forces more than they seek to represent them

Rituals of World Politics: On (Visual) Practices Disordering Things

Rituals are customarily muted into predictable and boring routines aimed to stabilise social orders and limit conflict. As a result, their magic lure recedes into the background, and the unexpected, disruptive and disordered elements are downplayed. Our collaborative contribution counters this move by foregrounding rituals of world politics as social practices with notable disordering effects. The collective discussion recovers the disruptive work of a range of rituals designed to sustain the sovereign exercise of violence and war. We do so through engaging a series of ‘world pictures' (Mitchell 2007). We show the worlding enacted in rituals such as colonial treaty-making, state commemoration, military/service dog training, cyber-security podcasts,algorithmically generated maps, the visit of Prince Harry to a joint NATO exercise and border ceremonies in India, respectively. We do so highlighting rituals’ immanent potential for disruption of existing orders, the fissures, failures and unforeseen repercussions. Reappraising the disordering role of ritual practices sheds light on the place of rituals in rearticulating the boundaries of the political. It emphasises the role of rituals in generating dissensus and re-divisions of the sensible rather than in imposing a consensus by policing the boundaries of the political, as Rancière might phrase it. Our images are essential to the account. They help disinterring the fundamentals and ambiguities of the current worldings of security, capturing the affective atmosphere of rituals

A study of family mediation during divorce in the Pakistani Muslim community in Bradford. Some observations on the implications for the theory and practice of conflict resolution.

Conflict resolution theory and practice have been increasingly criticised for ignoring the centrality of culture in their attempts to find theories and models that are applicable universally, not only across cultures but also across levels of society. Mediation is one form of conflict resolution, which has come to occupy a central position in the resolution of disputes both at international and local levels. At the level of family disputes, family mediation has failed to engage users from different ethnic groups in England and Wales. This thesis explores the hypothesis that culture and, in particular, culturally defined concepts of gender are the important factors determining the success or failure of mediation in divorce disputes.J. A. Clark Charitable Trus

Storytelling in den Vereinten Nationen: Mahbub ul Haq und menschliche Entwicklung

Ausgehend von der Beobachtung, dass Mitarbeiter der Vereinten Nationen eine wichtige Rolle in Prozessen des ideellen Wandels auf internationaler Ebene spielen können, beschäftigt sich dieser Beitrag mit einer bestimmten Form individuellem Einflusses – dem storytelling. Mein Verständnis von storytelling als Einflusstaktik kombiniert dabei kollektive Elemente der soziologischen Praxistheorie mit den reflexiven, akteursbezogenen Überlegungen von Michel de Certeau. Ich analysiere storytelling anhand von drei analytischen Elementen: einem (chronologischen) Plot, einer Reihe von Charakteren und einem interpretativen Thema – die jeweils ihre Wirkung im Zusammenspiel mit der Subjektivität ihres storytellers entfalten. Ich illustriere diese theoretischen Überlegungen mit dem Fall von Mahbub ul Haq, dem es als Sonderberater des United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)-Administrators zu Beginn der 1990er Jahre gelungen ist, die Idee der menschlichen Entwicklung im System der Vereinten Nationen und der internationalen Entwicklungspolitik zu etablieren

Business ethics as practice

In this article we develop a conceptualization of business ethics as practice. Starting from the view that the ethics that organizations display in practice will have been forged through an ongoing process of debate and contestation over moral choices, we examine ethics in relation to the ambiguous, unpredictable, and subjective contexts of managerial action. Furthermore, we examine how discursively constituted practice relates to managerial subjectivity and the possibilities of managers being moral agents. The article concludes by discussing how the 'ethics as practice' approach that we expound provides theoretical resources for studying the different ways that ethics manifest themselves in organizations as well as providing a practical application of ethics in organizations that goes beyond moralistic and legalistic approaches. © 2006 British Academy of Management