Classic Account Research Articles

Three by Three: Lisa Cholodenko’s Attachment Trilogy

Lisa Cholodenko’s three films High Art (US, 1998), Laurel Canyon (US, 2002), and The Kids Are All Right (US, 2010) all tell the same story: a sexual and emotional ingenue arrives in a tightly circumscribed social world that both resembles and departs from a conventional family. At its heart is an established couple whose seemingly secure erotic bond is marked by deep ambivalence. This bond is stretched beyond recognition as it bends to the presence of the sexual outsider, who is first incorporated into, then ejected from, the pseudofamilial world. Though irreparably altered, the established couple survives—and may even be strengthened by—the sexual, spatial, and professional infidelity that forms the central plot of the film. No longer disavowed, the ambivalence that has marked the couple’s formation from the outset is now under-stood to be fundamental to their ongoing attachment. Whether the relationships are straight, gay, or bisexual; maternal, paternal, or filial; motivated, situational, or opportunistic; whether the worlds they inhabit are those of art photography, popular music, or medicine; whether their compulsions are addictive, obsessive, or narcissistic; the common story is basically the same, as is the lesson that attends it: attachment is always ambivalent. That is part of its satisfaction. End of story. Or, begin again. This article invokes Stanley Cavell’s classic account of the Hollywood comedy of remarriage in order to place Cholodenko’s trilogy within a wider popular conversation about attachment and ambivalence in the era of marriage equality.

Fodder for Despair, Masquerading as Hope: Diagnosing the Postures of Hope(lessness) at the End of Life

Hope is needed for persons confronting the limits of human life, antagonised by the threats of death. It is needed also for those health and medical professionals constrained by the institution of medicine, determined by market metaphors and instrumental reasoning. Yet, despair can masquerade as hope for such persons when functional hoping for particular outcomes or aims proves futile and aimless. The following will examine such masquerades, while giving attention to particular expressions of autonomy, which persist as fodder for despair in our late modern milieu. The late classical account of Hercules and his death, as well as contemporary reasons for soliciting medical assistance in dying, will focus on the diagnostics of despair, while a Christian account practicing presence, and of hope as a concrete posture enfleshed by habits of patience, among other virtues, will point toward counter-narratives that might sustain persons in times of crisis and enable persons’ flourishing as human beings, even unto death.

Classical Consociational Theory and Recent Consociational Performance

AbstractLijphart’s classical consociational theory, developed between the 1960s and 1975, was based largely on the experience of four western European cases. He argued that the success of consociations depended on the preparedness and ability of elites to cooperate, and that the prospects for success were facilitated by the presence of certain historical and structural factors, including a tradition of accommodation and a “multiple balance of power”. In the past forty years or so, consociations have been implemented, or attempted, in a number of places quite unlike the classical cases. This article argues that a satisfactory explanation of the performance of the new consociations requires consideration of three dimensions additional to those described in Lijphart’s classical account. These are, respectively, the i) external dimension; ii) the security dimension; and iii) the self‐determination dimension.

Power at a distance: Organizational power across boundaries

AbstractOrganizational approaches can help to make sense of social phenomena, including inequality, politics, and culture. This is partly because large organizations exercise great power, both over employees and in their external environments. Revising Charles Perrow's classic account of the “society of organizations” in the 20th century, we argue that the organizational landscape has changed. There has been a dis‐embedding of individuals from organizations that contrasts with Perrow's idea of individuals being “absorbed” by organizations. Despite this hollowing out, there is a persistence of concentrated economic power or “concentration without centralization.” Organizational power in this landscape is increasingly exercised at a distance, not only geographically but also in the sense of moving across organizational boundaries and through technologies of valuation. Three bodies of research exemplify different types of power at a distance. (a) Research on global production networks shows how power travels across geographic and network distances. (b) Research on financialization and its consequences shows how power is mediated by frames and metrics. (c) Emerging research on big data and Artificial Intelligence shows how power is encoded into seemingly neutral technologies and made to seem inevitable. This work helps to update the sociology of organizations and opens up new research questions.

Debt-Equity Conflict and the Incidence of Secured Credit

Classic finance theory observes that while debt can mitigate the conflict between equity and management, its issuance creates a conflict between debt and equity. We search for evidence of this conflict in the incidence of secured debt, which can be used by financially distressed firms to finance unduly risky projects for the benefit of equity at the expense of unsecured creditors. Skeptics of the debt-equity conflict’s practical importance believe that distressed-firm management avoids secured credit, which may compel equity to relinquish control of a firm. Consistent with the classic account, our controlled study shows a significant run-up of secured credit, as a proportion of assets and of liabilities, prior to bankruptcy filings of publicly traded firms. Together with recent evidence of inefficiency as firms approach bankruptcy, our results support proposals for the subordination of secured debt to nonconsensual claims and for enhanced enforcement of covenants against the issuance of secured credit.

Slavery, Indenture and the Development of British Industrial Capitalism

Abstract The paper addresses the central issue of the relationship between slavery and industrial capitalism. It does so by re-examining Eric Williams’s classic account and recent debates related to it on the one hand, and on the other, by challenging basic assumptions about capitalism as a closed market-wage labour-capital system. Taking a long-duration approach (from the mid eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century) to three key commodities – guns, sugar and cotton – the paper argues that British industrial capitalism drove the expansion of slavery and then other regimes of exploitation in a dynamic and interdependent relationship with the transformation of the metropolitan wage economy. The analysis is based on changing configurations of production-exchange-distribution-consumption for each of these three exemplary commodities. The British industrial revolution is thus characterized by its hybridity and heterogeneity, always combining varied regimes of exploitation: metropolitan wage labour, directly-owned British Caribbean and Mauritian slavery, and US Deep South slavery, each followed by varied transitions to indentured servitude or sharecropping. New and contrasting racialized orders of hierarchy and inequality emerged and were entrenched as a central feature of this epochal change, the legacies of which are only too present today.

Metaphysics, methodology and theory in classical accounting thought

PurposeThe received wisdom on classical accounting thought is that its early stages were methodologically vacuous, while, in its “golden” age, it espoused the methods and philosophical commitments of received-view hypothetico-deductivism but actually remained methodologically incoherent. The purpose of this paper is to argue, to the contrary, that classical accounting thought possesses a coherent constitutional structure that qualifies as a methodology and unifies it as a body of argument.Design/methodology/approachThe paper draws on Cartwright’s metaphysical nomological pluralism, which holds that we should attend to the actual practices of successful inquiry and the methodologies and metaphysical presuppositions that support it.FindingsThe paper argues that accounting does achieve disciplinary success and that classical accounting thought, using the methodology of defeasible postulationism, provides the theoretical infrastructure that supports that success. The accounting domain is a world of “dappled realism”, in which theories are useful in the construction of reporting schemes and inform our understanding of the nature of the domain.Research limitations/implicationsApplying metaphysical nomological pluralism rescues classical accounting thought from the charge of methodological incoherence and metaphysical naivety.Originality/valueThe paper justifies a place for classical accounting theorising in the endeavours of modern accounting scholarship and moves the analysis of classical accounting thought within a philosophy of science framework towards an approach with a contemporary resonance.

Musil in a loop: the other condition and the extended mind

In this paper, we propose a reading of Robert Musil’s controversial notion of the “other condition” in light of the basic features of the philosophical doctrine of externalism, as formulated in the classical account of the extended mind proposed by Andy Clark and David Chalmers (1998). Our reading is not meant to exhaust the complexity and polysemy of the idea of the other condition, but merely aims to open up a possible perspective on the interpretation of a concept that is as elusive as it is central in Musil’s thinking.

Time ≠ Time ≠ Time: A Research Agenda Mental Temporal Accounting and the Opening of Contract Theory for Work-Leisure Trade-Off Attention

Time tacts life. While all human face the same natural constraints of 24-hours days, behavioral economics found individuals differing in discounting preference for immediate rewards over delayed gratification. Regarding monetary gains, individuals were also shown to hold mental accounts dependent on a reference point but also in regards as to how to allocate money to causes individuals care about. But what if individuals also differ in mental temporal accounts, hence regarding how to spend their time? Decision makers may have natural mental temporal accounts for how to spend 24 hours a day, 720 hours a month, 8760 hours a year or 700800 hours an average life? Could it be that individuals have implicit mental accounts for how much time to spend on their own, how much time to be allocated towards working and how much time to just enjoy life in leisure? If so, could individuals be susceptible to external cues that nudge them into certain mental time-frames that determine their mental time allocation preferences? Could this mental accounting also depend on reference points, such as the age of the individual and critical life events, such as becoming parents? If individuals differ in time spent on their own and social time but also vary in their choices of time spent working and leisure time, we would need to revise contract theory’s primary focus on incentivizing with monetary gains and call for attention to a natural mental temporal accounting trade-off decision between work and leisure time. By doing so we could show that the classical mental accounting theory (Thaler, 1999) actually describes similar processes as mental temporal accounting how to spend time but also dependent on the reference point of age. The paper is structured as follows: The theoretical part 2 describes the behavioral economics idea of mental accounting in the finance domain (Section 2.1) as well as hyperbolic discounting deviations from standard neoclassical discounting functions (Section 2.2.) in order to extend these concepts in the domain of time in Section 2.3. Part 3 proposes to study (1) whether mental accounting also occurs for time; (2) time allocation preferences based on economic, social and environmental contexts as well as age; (3) how individuals can be nudged into different time allocation preferences based on specific mindsets. Part 4 discusses the results and calls for an opening of (1) the behavioral economics idea of the classical mental accounting theory (Thaler, 1999) (2) connecting it to mental temporal accounting as well as (3) neoclassical contract theory for work-leisure time trade-offs alongside providing future research prospects. Elucidating how contexts and experiencing critical life stages influence temporal activity allocation choices promises to improve manifold decisions on education, health, asset management, career paths and common goods preservation throughout life.

Buddhist Constitutionalism in Thailand: When Rājadhammā Supersedes the Constitution

AbstractThis article adds nuance to the classical account depicting Thailand as a secularized country by documenting how Buddhism informs constitutional thought and practices in contemporary Thailand. Throughout the twentieth century, Buddhist discourses have been used to bypass constitutional provisions in the name of ‘dhamma’ through the reliance on the rediscovery of the doctrine of the dhammarāja (the righteous King). In the early twenty-first century, a second rebirth of the discourse of the dhammarāja led to a further devaluation of the constitution as the supreme norm. The principles of a righteous King (totsapitrājadhammā) were reconceptualized as a functional equivalent to constitutionalism – as constraining the King’s power. This article first examines how modern lawyers used Buddhism as the vehicle to import Western constitutional ideas into the Siamese polity while reconstructing them as part of a royal legacy through the doctrine of the Ten Royal Virtues. It then turns to an analysis of the ever-increasing enshrinement of Buddhism in successive Thai constitutions since 1932. It concludes with an account of the politicization of the righteous King doctrine and its impact on constitutional practices.

THE SIMPLE ARGUMENT FOR SUBCLASSICAL LOGIC

AbstractThis paper presents a simple but, by my lights, effective argument for a subclassical account of logic—an account according to which logical consequence is (properly) weaker than the standard, so‐called classical account. Alas, the vast bulk of the paper is setup. Because of the many conflicting uses of ‘logic’ the paper begins, following a disclaimer on logic and inference, by fixing the sense of ‘logic’ in question, and then proceeds to rehearse both the target subclassical account of logic and its well‐known relative (viz., classical logic). With background in place the simple argument—which takes up less than five pages—is advanced. My hope is that the minimal presentation will help to get ‘the simple argument’ plainly on the table, and that subsequent debate can move us forward.

Propositions on the cheap

According to the classical account, propositions are sui generis, abstract, intrinsically-representational entities and our cognitive attitudes, and the token states within us that realize those attitudes, represent as they do in virtue of their propositional objects. In light of a desire to explain how it could be that propositions represent, much of the recent literature on propositions has pressured various aspects of this account. In place of the classical account, revisionists have aimed to understand propositions in terms of more familiar entities such as facts, types of mental or linguistic acts, and even properties. But we think that the metaphysical story about propositions is much simpler than either the classical theorist or the revisionist would have you believe. In what follows, we argue that a proper understanding of the nature of our cognitive relations to propositions shows that the question of whether propositions themselves represent is, at best, a distraction. We will argue that once this distraction is removed, the possibility of a very pleasing, minimalist story of propositions emerges; a story that appeals only to assumptions that are (or, at least ought to be) shared by all theorists in the relevant debate.

Holy, holy, holy: divine holiness and divine perfection

AbstractDespite being emphatically ascribed to God in Scripture, holiness is little examined in the current literature on the divine attributes. This article defends a normative theory of holiness, taking as its point of departure Rudolf Otto's classic account of the phenomenology of the experience of holiness as that of a mysterium tremendum et fascinans. To be holy is to merit this dual response, that is, to merit both the overwhelming attraction and distinctive sort of repulsion that is characteristic of the experience of holiness. It is plausibly an implication of this account that a supremely holy being – one who is holy, holy, holy – must be the most perfect possible being.

Maupassant's Afloat: Why did this classic account of yacht cruising sink without trace?

Guy de Maupassant had become a well-known literary figure in England by the time his short yachting book Afloat was published (figure 1). Sur l’eau, a short text, was published in France in the sum...

Analysing the role of virtualisation and visualisation on interdisciplinary knowledge exchange in stem cell research processes

Interdisciplinary work is an increasingly frequent and important aspect of scientific research. However, successful knowledge exchange and collaboration between experts is itself a challenging activity with both technical and social components that require consideration. Here, this article analyses the cultural factors involved in interdisciplinary research, specifically in the context of a software programme designed to improve knowledge exchange. The authors undertook an ethnographic study to understand the impact of virtualisation and visualisation on an interdisciplinary research team, working together to develop novel imaging technologies for investigating stem cells. In this discovery-research environment the challenge was to determine the socio-technical effect of an in-house software tool called ProtocolNavigator, which provided a virtual laboratory environment for the team to simulate and map their ‘real-life laboratory’ activities. This display, together with activity icons and a timeline, could be visually analysed and transferred between multi-institutional researchers in a non-narrative approach. The aim of the work reported here is to provide the first detailed analysis of how software of this type is used in practice, and to analyse this through a robust social science-based perspective. Subsequently this study examines the effectiveness of this virtual laboratory environment on enhancing communication and understanding using a theoretical framework drawing upon three insights from the Sociology of Expertise and Experience: (i) interactional and contributory expertise, (ii) knowledge exchange and interpretative flexibility, and (iii) trading zones. The framework was extended by introducing the notion of material, concept and practice trade at these trading zones with a demonstration of how interactive visualisation of interconnected trading routes can empower interdisciplinary work. The addition of Foucault’s classic account of power found evidence of a panoptical effect due to the augmented visibility of each other’s work. In summary, the article offers a theoretical framework together with novel analysis to determine the influence of introducing tools and approaches designed to enhance interdisciplinary working—particularly in the context of knowledge sharing and trust.

Lamalamic Root Structure: Erosion and Expansion

This study analyses the structure of lexical roots in the Lamalamic languages of Cape York Peninsula, in the northeast of Australia. The analysis shows how Lamalamic roots are shaped diachronically by processes of erosion and expansion, leading to root forms that are unusual by Australian standards. Erosion processes include the loss of initial consonants, resulting in vowel-initial roots, and the loss of entire initial syllables, resulting in monosyllabic roots. Expansion processes include leftward expansion through the addition of meaningless VC prefixes, and rightward expansion through morphological augmentation and subsequent semantic bleaching. The analysis describes the basic processes involved for the languages, using historical-comparative and phonotactic evidence, and brings out two points of more general relevance. First, the analysis proposes an analogy-based mechanism to explain loss of initial vowels, which complements the classic account in terms of gradual initial weakening. Second, the analysis also suggests that erosion and expansion processes may be functionally related, in that there is some evidence that expansion processes could originate in a mechanism to counterbalance the development of monosyllables.

Fraud Evaluation in Public Management: Legal Aspects of Engineering

Fraud is seen as a potential element when adorning administrative and judicial processes Jarzembski [1]. However, it is only a way to achieve the wrongful act, peaceful subterfuge, a hiding place for what would be a bigger misconduct. Sometimes, however, it requires continuity of the act in order to not be caught, often exceeding its original purpose. If there are conditions, motivation and attitude Loebbeck et al. [2] it perseveres in the addiction that breaks the time, requiring bitter medicines when disfigure the ordinary character of those who are innocuous. Treating a fraud would be more of a classic law or accounting action, but here is presented a captive engineering case study of a long administrative process in The Brazilian Federal Court of Accounts, TCU, dragged for over a decade, which is why it comes as a protagonist in the academic and scientific sphere, which has no link with practice, or even affects the authority of these audit and regulatory professionals Francis [3].

How Cultural Capital Emerged in Gilded Age America: Musical Purification and Cross-Class Inclusion at the New York Philharmonic

This article uses a new database of subscribers to the New York Philharmonic to explore how high culture became a form of socially valuable capital in late-19th-century America. The authors find support for the classic account of high culture’s purification and exclusiveness, showing how over the long Gilded Age the social elite of New York attended the Philharmonic both increasingly and in more socially patterned ways. Yet they also find that the orchestra opened up to a new group of subscribers hailing from an emerging professional, managerial, and intellectual middle class. Importantly, the inclusion of this new audience was segregated: they did not mingle with elites in the concert hall. This segregated inclusion paved a specific way for the constitution of cultural capital. It meant that greater purity and greater inclusiveness happened together, enabling elite cultural participation to remain distinctive while elite tastes acquired broader social currency.

How Judges Can Think: The Use of Expert’s Knowledge as Proof in Civil Proceedings

Abstract The classic account of the role of expert in civil proceedings revolves around a crucial notion. The idea is that the role the expert plays is correlated with an evident lack of technical or scientific knowledge within the context of the judiciary. Such an approach involves several questions ranging from how to perceive the need to supplement the basic judicial knowledge to whether there is such a thing as a binding aspect in the expert evidence. For civil lawyers the expert needs to be appointed depending on judicial discretion. The appointment of expert requires judicial evaluation on a case-by-case basis. Whether or not the attorneys encourage the judge to appoint an expert, the court remains capable of recognizing that certain facts are more likely candidates to a technical or scientific assessment. If the judge is persuaded that the case can be decided regardless the opinion of an expert, the decision can be based solely on the judicial knowledge and skills. On the contrary, the common law tradition leaves the attorneys with a burden of submitting to the court the technical or scientific knowledge they deem necessary for the judgment. In this different perspective, the judge is basically called upon to evaluate the expert witnesses and select their convincing statements through the cross-examination of the parties. In both systems, the crucial question is how technical or scientific knowledge can be translated for legal decisionmaking. The judge and the expert use different languages and approach the factual questions very differently. Scientists offer empirical research studies and make general statements about natural phenomena; lawyers focus their attention on the individual decisionmaking required in the courtroom. Nonetheless, disputes involving technical or scientific issues make it inevitable that the judge and the expert face with the problem of mutual understanding. The way in which legal scholars have usually managed those differences is by adopting a structured cooperation between the judge and the expert. By construing such a relationship as a form of mutual training, they find some room for warranting an effective gatekeeping role to the judge. But such a cooperation is more a theoretical possibility than a pragmatic opportunity. Instead, reshaping the expert evidence into a lay judge can offer a concrete opportunity to entrench the scientific or technical knowledge of the court in several cases.

Structure-preserving representations, constitution, and the relative a priori

The aim of this paper is to show that a comprehensive account of the role of representations in science should reconsider some neglected theses of the classical philosophy of science proposed in the first decades of the twentieth century. More precisely, it is argued that the representational accounts of Helmholtz and Hertz, in which the concept of structure-preservation plays an essential role, still deserve attention for contemporary debates. Following Reichenbach, structure-preserving representations provide a useful device for formulating an up-to-date version of a (relativized) Kantian a priori. An essential feature of modern scientific representations is their mathematical character. That is, representations can be conceived as (partially) structure-preserving maps or functions. This observation suggests an interesting but neglected perspective on the history and philosophy of this concept, namely, that structure-preserving representations are closely related to a priori elements of scientific knowledge. Reichenbach’s early theory of a relativized constitutive but non-apodictic a priori component of scientific knowledge provides a further elaboration of Kantian aspects of scientific representation. To cope with the dynamic aspects of the evolution of scientific knowledge, Cassirer proposed a re-interpretation of the concept of representation that conceived of a particular representation as only one phase in a continuous process determined by pragmatic considerations. Pragmatic aspects of representations are further elaborated in the classical account of C.I. Lewis and the more modern of Hasok Chang who characterized in certain relativized representational a priori assumptions as pragmatically justified metaphysical arguments.