Talents and Interests: A Hegelian Moral Psychology

One of the reasons why there is no Hegelian school in contemporary ethics in the way that there are Kantian, Humean and Aristotelian schools is because Hegelians have been unable to clearly articulate the Hegelian alternative to those schools’ moral psychologies, i.e., to present a Hegelian model of the motivation to, perception of, and responsibility for moral action. Here it is argued that in its most basic terms Hegel's model can be understood as follows: the agent acts in a responsible and thus paradigmatic sense when she identifies as reasons those motivations which are grounded in his or her talents and support actions that are likely to develop those talents in ways suggested by his or her interests

Superhydrophobicity on hairy surfaces

We investigate the wetting properties of surfaces patterned with fine elastic hairs, with an emphasis on identifying superhydrophobic states on hydrophilic hairs. We formulate a two dimensional model of a large drop in contact with a row of equispaced elastic hairs and, by minimising the free energy of the model, identify the stable and metastable states. In particular we concentrate on "partially suspended" states, where the hairs bend to support the drop -- singlet states where all hairs bend in the same direction, and doublet states where neighbouring hairs bend in opposite directions -- and find the limits of stability of these configurations in terms of material contact angle, hair flexibility, and system geometry. The drop can remain suspended in a singlet state at hydrophilic contact angles, but doublets exist only when the hairs are hydrophobic. The system is more likely to evolve into a singlet state if the hairs are inclined at the root. We discuss how, under limited circumstances, the results can be modified to describe an array of hairs in three dimensions. We find that now both singlets and doublets can exhibit superhydrophobic behaviour on hydrophilic hairs. We discuss the limitations of our approach and the directions for future work

Emotion management strategies in PR firms: senior level perspectives of professional relationships (working paper)

Much of the PR literature tends to focus on engagement in building relationships between organisations and publics or stakeholders. However, less is known about everyday interpersonal engagement, especially in regard to the professional context of the PR consulting firm (Sissons, 2015). This paper asks what it means to engage with clients and journalists, from the perspectives of managing directors and owners of London-based public relations agencies. What are the “feeling rules” (Hochschild, 1983) that govern these relationships and importantly, how and when are emotional/relational strategies passed on to PR executives and PR teams? Engagement is an elusive concept. It has been referred to as an “ideograph” which is something that is “concrete, vague, and evanescent all at the same time” (Taylor and Kent, 2014, p. 385). Nevertheless the concept of engagement is widespread and used in various contexts to refer to the building of social capital through interactions between groups. Five types of engagement have been identified in public relations: social media, employee, CSR, civic and dialogic (Taylor and Kent, 2014). Engagement using dialogue is considered to be the most ethical approach since many types of engagement are of a one-way nature, whereas dialogue, it is argued, is relational and engages the emotions through “underlying principles” including mutuality and empathy (Taylor and Kent, 2014, p. 387). This paper reports on a study approached from a socio-cultural perspective that aims to explore the emotional dimension of professional relationships in public relations consulting firms. It aims to provide a nuanced understanding of public relations emotional/relational work, drawing on the sociology of emotion (e.g. Hochschild, 1983; Scheff, 1994; Clark, 1997; Burkitt, 2015; Flam and Kleres, 2015) and emotion in organisations (e.g. Fineman, 2010; Bloch, 2012; Gabriel and Ulus, 2015). The methodology adopted is social phenomenology which is concerned with analysing the meaning structures of everyday life (Aspers, 2009). Few scholars have published empirical approaches in social phenomenology; however, Yeomans (2013) developed an approach to explore how junior and middle-level PR executives experience, practise and understand their professional relationships. Data gathered in Spring/Summer 2016 adopted a social phenomenological approach which is concerned with analysing the meaning structures of everyday interactions (Aspers, 2009) drawing on the subjective experiences and perceptions of an homogenous sample. Eight in-depth semi-structured interviews of up to 1.5 hours in length were conducted with a sample of participants comprising directors, partners or owners of PR firms identified for this study as “emotional experts” (Kleres, 2015) who set the emotional tone of their enterprises. Five participants worked in London and 3 were based in northern cities, and comprised 6 women and 2 men with a median age of 40. Interviews were complemented by observational data drawn from 4 London agencies and the researcher’s self-reflexive account based on diary notes. As adopted in a previous study (Yeomans, 2013), key themes were re-constructed as an anonymised ‘account of practice’ and sent to all participants as part of a member checking/validation process (Creswell, 2007). This descriptive account of practice provided the basis of further feedback/dialogue with participants, as well as theorising. From a preliminary thematic analysis several themes were identified which typified an emotional ‘logic of practice’ of managing relationships within the PR firm (Voronov and Vince, 2012). The key relationships that participants struggled to balance concerned their employees and clients. While on the one hand, participants sought to recruit employees with a positive attitude (at entry level, personal attributes were strongly emphasised over skills), well-suited employees brought with them high expectations of the workplace; valuing enjoyment, hard work and job satisfaction but also work-life balance. Some participants attributed such expectations to the values of the ‘millennial generation’; experiencing the demands of younger employees as often challenging. Interestingly, some participants’ expressed concern for their own work-life balance and especially the need to consider their caring responsibilities away from the workplace. A shared requirement for work-life balance, together with the issue of good PR staff being in short supply, especially in London, meant that participants sometimes went to great lengths to get the ‘right fit’ with clients and to manage clients’ expectations of what the PR/Communications firm could deliver. Fewer but better (i.e. easier to manage) clients was a prevailing theme for the MDs of small PR firms, thereby reducing emotional risk to client relationships, and a means of retaining good staff. Several participants related their previous experience of working for agencies with high staff turnovers and dissatisfied clients; a situation they strove to avoid in running their own businesses. While participants typically had fairly remote personal relationships with journalists, these relationships were still important for account teams to build and foster, while an increasing emotional investment was encouraged with bloggers as their status grew as influencers in some markets. The growth of technology, however, meant that some account executives tended to “hide” behind emails rather than engage with journalists face to face or over the phone. When questioned about how they felt about being leaders in the PR industry, there was a strong ambivalence towards a wider leadership role and only one participant perceived herself as a leader and mentor within the industry. The main focus, for most participants, was on running a successful business, servicing their clients and maintaining a happy workforce. Finally, for two participants, being a senior PR woman meant that maintaining authority and respect was sometimes a struggle with male staff, male colleagues and male clients. Strategies for dealing with relationship issues could mean exploiting the status of male colleagues; while four out of the six women were involved, to varying degrees, in formal women’s networks to enable them to gain support and share ideas. This study will contribute to public relations knowledge in at least two possible ways. First it will offer insights into senior level emotional/relational strategies within the PR firm and thus how a specific aspect of “PRP culture” is produced and re-produced (Hodges and Edwards, 2014); second, the study can be viewed from the perspective of new institutional theory (PR consulting as an institution), contributing an emotional dimension to the notion of “institutional logics” – field-level practices: theories, frames and narratives (Fredriksson, Pallas and Wehmeier, 2013, p. 189)

Biphasic, Lyotropic, Active Nematics

We perform dynamical simulations of a two-dimensional active nematic fluid in coexistence with an isotropic fluid. Drops of active nematic become elongated, and an effective anchoring develops at the nematic-isotropic interface. The activity also causes an undulatory instability of the interface. This results in defects of positive topological charge being ejected into the nematic, leaving the interface with a diffuse negative charge. Quenching the active lyotropic fluid results in a steady state in which phase-separating domains are elongated and then torn apart by active stirring.Comment: 7 pages, 8 figure

Engagement and Empathy Discourses in Corporate Communication

This paper analyzes engagement and empathy discourse in a corporate document The Science of Engagement published online by a leading UK PR agency. The method used was a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the document, and the findings reveal that the engagement discourse in this document positions the consumer as a passive, compulsive purchaser, while the empathy discourse largely frames the consumer as young and more empathic than previous generations, and thus an easily accessible target for brands to appeal to, using emotional communication on social media. The conclusion of the paper is that in contrast to conceptual understandings of engagement as two-way and empathy as other-oriented, the Agency relies on early understanding of engagement as a cognitive process based on instincts and persuasive communication, and not as a concept of social communication that will be dependent on cultural and social differences, individual approach, and trust. This practice goes against the already acknowledged view of engagement and empathy as more than just cognitive responses by consumers, and presents an outdated understanding of these increasingly debated concepts

Expansion of the known distribution of Asiatic mouflon (Ovis orientalis) in the Late Pleistocene of the Southern Levant

Wild sheep (Ovis orientalis) bones recovered from the Natufian site of Shubayqa 1 demonstrate a wider distribution of mouflon in the Late Pleistocene of the Southern Levant than previously known. Early Epipalaeolithic sites are common in the limestone steppe region of eastern Jordan but have yielded only a handful of caprine bones that cannot be identified to species level and few faunal remains from excavated Late Epipalaeolithic sites have been reported. Analysis of animal bone from Shubayqa 1 suggests a significant population of wild sheep could be found concentrated in the basalt desert environment of eastern Jordan during the Late Pleistocene, especially where higher rainfall over the Jebel Druze provided more water. A population of wild sheep was still present in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A when the nearby site of Shubayqa 6 was occupied. Hunting of diverse, locally available resources including wild sheep at the end of the Pleistocene illustrates the flexible and adaptive exploitation strategies that hunter-forager groups engaged in. This provides further evidence to the increasing body of data showing the creative and opportunistic approach of terminal Pleistocene groups allowing continued occupation even in more marginal environments in a period of environmental change

Different Lenses: Women's Feminist and Postfeminist Perspectives in Public Relations

Gender inequalities in public relations (PR) persist. Industry research within the UK reveals a gender pay-gap, which shows significant disparities in pay between men and women (CIPR, 2015; PRCA, 2016). Feminist research, mostly undertaken in the US over the past twenty years and adopting a liberal feminist perspective, has identified some of the factors that influence inequality for women, such as balancing career and family; while other studies examine the social processes that perpetuate inequalities, such as gender stereotyping, the ‘glass ceiling’ effect and the ‘friendliness trap’. Liberal feminism is critiqued for not recognizing gender regimes. This has led to calls for critical research to examine the underlying social processes in the PR field that influence position opportunities, roles, the pay-gap and discrimination. Three theoretical positions – liberal feminist, radical feminist and postfeminist - were selected to address the following research questions, ‘How does gender influence everyday practice in public relations?’ ‘Which feminist perspective(s) are suggested by practitioner narratives?’ Postfeminism, used as a critical lens, potentially enables ‘multiple feminisms and femininities’ (Lewis, 2014) to be expressed. For this paper, an exploratory, qualitative pilot study involved semi-structured interviews with four female PR practitioners in northern England. Transcripts were analyzed using narrative analysis and reflexivity. The narratives revealed complex and sometimes contradictory interpretations. Therefore while three out of the four narratives showed strong liberal feminist inclinations, including a belief that women are able to compete alongside men, two also expressed radical feminist orientations;although in line with previous research, not a desire to change the system, except on an individual level. A fourth narrative expressed ideas consistent with postfeminism, demonstrating an apparent acceptance of gender role segregation in PR, and therefore no inclination to change the status quo. Finally, we offer further ways of advancing critical feminist studies in public relations, through research and education

Overdamped van Hove function of atomic liquids

Using the generalized Langevin equation formalism and the process of contraction of the description we derive a general memory function equation for the thermal fluctuations of the local density of a simple atomic liquid. From the analysis of the long-time limit of this equation, a striking equivalence is suggested between the long-time dynamics of the atomic liquid and the dynamics of the corresponding \emph{Brownian} liquid. This dynamic equivalence is confirmed here by comparing molecular and Brownian dynamics simulations of the self-intermediate scattering function and the long-time self-diffusion coefficient for the hard-sphere liquid.Comment: 4 Figures, 23 page

Dynamics of individual Brownian rods in a microchannel flow

We study the orientational dynamics of heavy silica microrods flowing through a microfluidic channel. Comparing experiments and Brownian dynamics simulations we identify different particle orbits, in particular in-plane tumbling behavior, which cannot be explained by classical Jeffery theory, and we relate this behavior to the rotational diffusion of the rods. By constructing the full, three-dimensional, orientation distribution, we describe the rod trajectories and quantify the persistence of Jeffery orbits using temporal correlation functions of the Jeffery constant. We find that our colloidal rods lose memory of their initial configuration in about a second, corresponding to half a Jeffery period.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure