Agents, audiences and peers: why international organizations diversify their legitimation discourse

In the face of public contestation, international organizations (IOs) invoke norms in their public communication to enhance relevant audiences' legitimacy beliefs. This article offers the first comprehensive analysis of what we term normative diversity in IOs' discursive legitimation by drawing on a novel dataset on norm-based justifications in more than 32,000 paragraphs of text published by 28 regional IOs between 1980 and 2019. We show that IOs vary strikingly in this respect: whereas some IOs invoke a narrow set of norms, often focused on economic welfare and functional capability, others engage a wide variety that includes security, national sovereignty, democracy or human rights. To explain this variance, we specify and test an explanatory framework that emphasizes IO audiences, agents and peer organizations as distinct origins. Our statistical analysis reveals that IOs diversify their discursive legitimation to 1) address heterogeneous audiences, 2) reconcile competing beliefs amongst agents themselves, and 3) integrate the legitimation of peer IOs. These findings indicate that IOs respond to the growing complexity of international cooperation in their discursive legitimation and may raise policy-makers' awareness of the difficulties in contemporary legitimation efforts

Expanding or defending legitimacy? : why international organizations intensify self-legitimation

Published online: 24 July 2023Recent decades have seen an intensifcation of international organizations’ (IOs) attempts to justify their authority. The existing research suggests that IO representatives have scaled up self-legitimation to defend their organizations’ legitimacy in light of public criticism. In contrast, this article demonstrates that IOs intensify self-legitimation to mobilize additional support from relevant audiences when their authority increases. We argue that self-legitimation aims primarily to achieve proactive legitimacy expansion instead of reactive legitimacy protection. We develop this argument in three steps. First, we draw on organizational sociology and management studies to theorize the connection between self-legitimation and an organization’s life stages. Second, we introduce a novel dataset on the self-legitimation of 28 regional IOs between 1980 and 2019 and show that the intensity of self-legitimation evolves in phases. Third, we provide a multivariate statistical analysis and a brief vignette on the African Union, both of which indicate that IOs that shift from unanimity or consensus to majority voting tend to intensify self-legitimation

WLAN-Based Pedestrian Tracking Using Particle Filters and Low-Cost MEMS Sensors

Indoor positioning systems based on Wireless LAN (WLAN) are being widely investigated in academia and industry. Meanwhile, the emerging low-cost MEMS sensors can also be used as another independent positioning source. In this paper, we propose a pedestrian tracking framework based on particle filters, which extends the typical WLAN-based indoor positioning systems by integrating low-cost MEMS accelerometer and map information. Our simulation and real world experiments indicate a remarkable performance improvement by using this fusion framework

Enhancing the map usage for indoor location-aware systems

Location-aware systems are receiving more and more interest in both academia and industry due to their promising prospective in a broad category of so-called Location-Based-Services (LBS). The map interface plays a crucial role in the location-aware systems, especially for indoor scenarios. This paper addresses the usage of map information in a Wireless LAN (WLAN)-based indoor navigation system. We describe the benefit of using maNMp information in multiple algorithms of the system, including radio-map generation, tracking, semantic positioning and navigation. Then we discuss how to represent or model the indoor map to fulfill the requirements of intelligent algorithms. We believe that a vector-based multi-layer representation is the best choice for indoor location-aware system

Calpain-mediated cleavage of collapsin response mediator protein-2 drives acute axonal degeneration

Axonal degeneration is a key initiating event in many neurological diseases. Focal lesions to axons result in a rapid disintegration of the perilesional axon by acute axonal degeneration (AAD) within several hours. However, the underlying molecular mechanisms of AAD are only incompletely understood. Here, we studied AAD in vivo through live-imaging of the rat optic nerve and in vitro in primary rat cortical neurons in microfluidic chambers. We found that calpain is activated early during AAD of the optic nerve and that calpain inhibition completely inhibits axonal fragmentation on the proximal side of the crush while it attenuates AAD on the distal side. A screening of calpain targets revealed that collapsin response mediator protein-2 (CRMP2) is a main downstream target of calpain activation in AAD. CRMP2-overexpression delayed bulb formation and rescued impairment of axonal mitochondrial transport after axotomy in vitro. In vivo, CRMP2-overexpression effectively protected the proximal axon from fragmentation within 6 hours after crush. Finally, a proteomic analysis of the optic nerve was performed at 6 hours after crush, which identified further proteins regulated during AAD, including several interactors of CRMP2. These findings reveal CRMP2 as an important mediator of AAD and define it as a putative therapeutic target

Exact Conservation Laws of the Gradient Expanded Kadanoff-Baym Equations

It is shown that the Kadanoff-Baym equations at consistent first-order gradient approximation reveal exact rather than approximate conservation laws related to global symmetries of the system. The conserved currents and energy-momentum tensor coincide with corresponding Noether quantities in the local approximation. These exact conservations are valid, provided a Phi-derivable approximation is used to describe the system, and possible memory effects in the collision term are also consistently evaluated up to first-order gradients.Comment: 26 pages, feynman.package for diagrams, submitted to Annals of Physic

Self-Consistent Approximations to Non-Equilibrium Many-Body Theory

Within the non-equilibrium Green's function technique on the real time contour, the Phi-functional method of Baym is reviewed and generalized to arbitrary non-equilibrium many-particle systems. The scheme may be closed at any desired order in the number of loops or vertices of the generating functional. It defines effective theories, which provide a closed set of coupled classical field and Dyson equations, which are self-consistent, conserving and thermodynamically consistent. The approach permits to include unstable particles and therefore unifies the description of resonances with all other particles, which obtain a mass width by collisions, decays or creation processes in dense matter. The inclusion of classical fields enables the treatment of soft modes and phase instabilities. The method can be taken as a starting point for adequate and consistent quantum improvements of the in-medium rates in transport theories.Comment: 31 pages, Latex elsart-styl

Transcriptomic analysis reveals that mTOR pathway can be modulated in macrophage cells by the presence of cryptococcal cells

Cryptococcus neoformans and Cryptococcus gattii are the etiological agents of cryptococcosis, a high mortality disease. The development of such disease depends on the interaction of fungal cells with macrophages, in which they can reside and replicate. In order to dissect the molecular mechanisms by which cryptococcal cells modulate the activity of macrophages, a genome-scale comparative analysis of transcriptional changes in macrophages exposed to Cryptococcus spp. was conducted. Altered expression of nearly 40 genes was detected in macrophages exposed to cryptococcal cells. The major processes were associated with the mTOR pathway, whose associated genes exhibited decreased expression in macrophages incubated with cryptococcal cells. Phosphorylation of p70S6K and GSK-3β was also decreased in macrophages incubated with fungal cells. In this way, Cryptococci presence could drive the modulation of mTOR pathway in macrophages possibly to increase the survival of the pathogen