Medical Crowdfunding, Political Marginalization, and Government Responsiveness: A Reply to Larry Temkin

Larry Temkin draws on the work of Angus Deaton to argue that countries with poor governance sometimes rely on charitable giving and foreign aid in ways that enable them to avoid relying on their own citizens; this can cause them to be unresponsive to their citizens’ needs and thus prevent the long-term alleviation of poverty and other social problems. I argue that the implications of this “lack of government responsiveness argument” (or LOGRA) are both broader and narrower than they might first appear. I explore how LOGRA applies more broadly to certain types of charitable giving in developed countries, with a focus on medical crowdfunding. I then highlight how LOGRA does not apply to charitable giving aimed at alleviating the suffering of the absolutely politically marginalized, or those especially vulnerable people to whom governments are never responsive

Reconsidering Resolutions

In Willing, Wanting, Waiting, Richard Holton lays out a detailed account of resolutions, arguing that they enable agents to resist temptation. Holton claims that temptation often leads to inappropriate shifts in judgment, and that resolutions are a special kind of first- and second-order intention pair that blocks such judgment shift. In this paper, I elaborate upon an intuitive but underdeveloped objection to Holton’s view – namely, that his view does not enable agents to successfully block the transmission of temptation in the way that he claims, because the second-order intention is as equally susceptible to temptation as the first-order intention alone would be. I appeal to independently compelling principles – principles that Holton should accept, because they help fill an important explanatory gap in his account – to demonstrate why this objection succeeds. This argument both shows us where Holton’s view goes wrong and points us to the kind of solu-tion we need. In conclusion, I sketch an alternative account of resolutions as a first-order intention paired with a second-order desire. I argue that my account is not susceptible to the same objection because a temptation that cannot be blocked by an intention can be blocked by a desire

The link (or lack thereof) among communication networks, organizational commitment, and job satisfaction: A case study

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether and to what extent one’s communication networks (both social and task) come to influence commitment to, and satisfaction with, one’s organization. Using Social Identity Theory as the theoretical framework, the main argument is that employees will have similar levels of organizational commitment and satisfaction as compared to those considered part of their socially constructed networks. After conducting a social network analysis of an organization involved in the creation, production, and distribution of foot care products, and conducting multivariate statistical tests, results indicate that neither commitment, nor satisfaction, is predicted by network membership. As such, although communication networks are predictive of certain organizational variables, this study forces one to reconsider whether social relations, manifested in network ties, result in psychological “sameness” or homophily

Why organizational identification ‘matters’ as a communication variable: A state-of-the-art review of past, present, and future trends

The purpose of this paper is to examine the area of identification from an organizational communication perspective. In so doing, the author attempts to achieve three major goals. First is an examination of the concept of organizational identification, where the author examines what this concept means, how scholars have defined this concept, how both the definition and nature of identification have changed over the past several decades, and why both scholars and practitioners should be interested in issues of identification. Second, the author examines how scholars have studied issues of identification and how, methodologically, there seems to have been a shift in how one uncovers employee identification with one or more organizational targets (e.g. profession, organization, department, team). Finally, the author concludes with a detailed analysis of several gaps in the area of organizational identification as represented within the literature, as well as suggestions for future research and how the nature of organizations has perhaps forced scholars to re-think, re-conceptualize, and re-model what it truly means for an employee to “become identified.

The social construction of organizations: Understanding the process of organizational development from a communicative perspective

No matter how one approaches and teaches organizational communication, it is likely that we all borrow the idea that communication both produces, and is produced by, organizations: an idea that was popularized as a result of Charles Redding’s foundational publication. This idea, however, is not easy to grasp, even for the advanced undergraduate student. In fact, when we think outside of the box, even for a moment, it is difficult for students to understand that when we refer to “organizations” we are reifying the very notion of “organization” and, in so doing, are dialoguing about the communication between and among different constituents. In essence, we are studying people and interactive processes that socially construct organizations. As instructors, we are always faced with the fundamental challenge of speaking about both the organizational variables in which social processes are embedded and the effect(s) of such variables. For instance, if one teaches about organizational leadership, he/she is at once responsible for dialogues dealing with the use of communication in creating leaders, but also the communicative implications of these socially constructed leaders. This, in short, is taking into consideration both process and outcome perspectives. The problem, however, is not so much about “what” we do, but rather “how” we do it. The purpose of this exercise is to help students truly understand the role of communication in the social construction of organizations: how communication is both an antecedent to, as well as a consequence of, organizing

Annotation graphs as a framework for multidimensional linguistic data analysis

In recent work we have presented a formal framework for linguistic annotation based on labeled acyclic digraphs. These `annotation graphs' offer a simple yet powerful method for representing complex annotation structures incorporating hierarchy and overlap. Here, we motivate and illustrate our approach using discourse-level annotations of text and speech data drawn from the CALLHOME, COCONUT, MUC-7, DAMSL and TRAINS annotation schemes. With the help of domain specialists, we have constructed a hybrid multi-level annotation for a fragment of the Boston University Radio Speech Corpus which includes the following levels: segment, word, breath, ToBI, Tilt, Treebank, coreference and named entity. We show how annotation graphs can represent hybrid multi-level structures which derive from a diverse set of file formats. We also show how the approach facilitates substantive comparison of multiple annotations of a single signal based on different theoretical models. The discussion shows how annotation graphs open the door to wide-ranging integration of tools, formats and corpora.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures, Towards Standards and Tools for Discourse Tagging, Proceedings of the Workshop. pp. 1-10. Association for Computational Linguistic

A Formal Framework for Linguistic Annotation

`Linguistic annotation' covers any descriptive or analytic notations applied to raw language data. The basic data may be in the form of time functions -- audio, video and/or physiological recordings -- or it may be textual. The added notations may include transcriptions of all sorts (from phonetic features to discourse structures), part-of-speech and sense tagging, syntactic analysis, `named entity' identification, co-reference annotation, and so on. While there are several ongoing efforts to provide formats and tools for such annotations and to publish annotated linguistic databases, the lack of widely accepted standards is becoming a critical problem. Proposed standards, to the extent they exist, have focussed on file formats. This paper focuses instead on the logical structure of linguistic annotations. We survey a wide variety of existing annotation formats and demonstrate a common conceptual core, the annotation graph. This provides a formal framework for constructing, maintaining and searching linguistic annotations, while remaining consistent with many alternative data structures and file formats.Comment: 49 page