Conceptual Context Research Articles

Does the glass elevator still work: A descriptive and cross-sectional study in the context of gender in Turkey.

To analyse the glass elevator in nursing, evaluating this concept within the conceptual context of nurse managers' perceptions of gender. Glass elevator is defined as the rapid promotion of men to upper positions in certain professions in which women comprise the majority, such as nursing. Data were collected from 134 nurse managers. Participants selected one of four resumes belonging to four virtual candidates for an open management position. They, then completed the Perception of Gender Scale. Nurse managers mostly selected men among the four candidates submitted to them for promotion to upper positions. None of the nurse managers' characteristics caused a statistically significant difference regarding the gender of the candidate they selected. No statistically significant difference was found between the perception of gender scores of those who selected female or male candidates. Men are two times more likely to be selected than women when selecting candidates for promotion with the same qualifications. This was not caused by the decision-makers' or nurse managers' personal and professional characteristics nor their perceptions on gender. The psychological mechanisms that operate the 'glass elevator' in favour of men should be analysed in greater depth.

An Unoccupied Place: Theoretical Emulations of the Subject

More than thirty years ago, Jean-Luc Nancy was urged by his American and Italian colleagues to invite several French philosophers to address “post-subjectivity” in a special issue of the journal Topoi entitled “Who comes after the subject? ” What Nancy’s colleagues provided was not in the end so much a deconstruction of the subject, but more a critique and, of course, a reflection on the conditions that make the question itself possible. The question as stated was ambiguous: it could be read in the spirit of deconstruction, and the answers made to it would then be various options for a non-subjective reconfiguration; or it could be interpreted as a forecast or even a hidden threat. In any case, “Who comes after the subject? ” is to be read as relevant to the future, an invitation to prognosticate and an opening up of perspective. What conceptual movement are we making when we think about “conditions of possibility,” that is, when we produce a critique in accordance with the precepts of the Kantian transcendental method? The “condition of possibility” is a principle of seriality, a movement in search of the conditions of conditions; hence, the critical maneuver can be performed indefinitely. But there is a logically possible alternative to a “condition of possibility” if we change the terms of the search from conditions of conditions to the possibility of possibility. To think of the “unoccupied place” of a subject means that the attempt is not working with the category itself, but instead with its conceptual context because the category itself can be interpreted as a presence. The thinking in the issue of Logos introduced by this article represents a slice of modern speculative, theoretical, hermeneutic work neither in the tradition of transcendentalism nor explicitly outside it, but alongside it. At the same time, some of the efforts being proposed are devoted to classical topics and problems of the conceptual field in question (the historical subject, capabilities, action), and some others demonstrate how the problems of the transcendental tradition are projected onto political theory, sociology and cybernetics.

Strategic Litigation in South Africa and Uganda: Shared Perspectives and Comparative Lessons

Abstract The South African Constitution, particularly its Bill of Rights, is regarded as one of the most progressive in the world. The Ugandan Constitution, adopted around the same time as its South African counterpart, also has a Bill of Rights. Lawyers and advocacy groups in both countries have taken advantage of their constitutions to challenge the government to enforce several rights ranging from health care services, education, water and sanitation, to housing and social security, albeit at a lower scale and with less impact and significance in Uganda than South Africa. The purpose of this paper is to discuss and determine the constitutional impact of strategic litigation in South Africa and Uganda. The paper begins with a conceptual context of strategic litigation. The specific reasons for the choice of the two countries are highlighted before focusing, in a comparative way, on some relevant organizations and the various court decisions that have emanated from strategic litigation in both countries. The paper identifies similarities and differences between Ugandan and South African approaches to strategic litigation. Conclusions are then made after highlighting the comparative lessons that both countries can learn from each other, but also what other African states can learn from these two countries’ experiences.

The material culture of music festival fandoms

This article aims to explore an under-researched area of the entanglements between festivals and individual/collective identities by focusing on the material culture of festival fandoms. We start by conceptualizing festival fandoms as communities of people who attend the same festival or a similar festival type on a repeated basis. Our research focuses on how these recurrent festival attendees materially express their belonging to such communities, and how they claim being a fan as part of their identity. The core of the article starts with three conceptual sections. There, we discuss the existing literature in different related areas of research, which we link together utilizing Bourdieu’s forms of capital. First, we look through the theoretical lens of social capital at how various types of festivals foster identity communities and contribute to their visibility. Second, we explore the function of festival merchandising from the perspective of both event managers and festival attendees within economic capital frameworks. And third, we explain that fans use derived products to mark their status and belonging to a community of taste as related to cultural capital conceptualizations. The following sections of the article are based on auto-ethnographic approaches. Through reminiscence and in-depth interviews with each other, we recount personal narratives of reflective practice and situate our lived experiences within the aforementioned conceptual contexts. As a conclusion, we state that investigating the material cultures of festival fandoms has the potential to contribute to future evolutions of event management.

Effect Local Direction on Balinese Traditional Settlement Layout, Case Study: Pengotan Traditional Village in Bali, Indonesia

The pattern of Pengotan Village is extended from the kaja (sacred) to the kelod (profane), which consists of three zones, namely the Utama (zone of sacred) as the space intended for shrines (temple), Madya (transition/between space) as the space for residential housing units, and the Nista zone (zone of profane) intended for the graveyard (setra). This pattern is repeated in clusters of residential housing units. The aim of this study is spatial analysis of luan (sacred) and teben (profane) orientations in Indigenous Village Pengotan through an approach: (1) history of the Traditional Village Pengotan, (2) conception of the mountain as a sacred direction, (3) conception luan (holy) and teben (profane) on settlements in the mountainous area, (4) general concepts of religious and secular space and (5) conception of signifier and signified spaces in architecture. The method used is naturalistic interpretive in studying the area in a conceptual (intangible) and concreate (tangible) context through empirical studies on sensual (observation), native's viewpoint, logic viewpoint (researcher's perspective), and intangible aspects. The results of this study are (1) spatial patterns based on luan (sacred) and teben (profane) conception; (2) the signifier and signified system in the space of on luan (holy) and teben (profane) orientation and (3) the relationship between Mount Batur and Mount Abang as luan (sacred) orientation in the Pengotan Village.

«New simplicity» as a phenomenon of modern musicin the conceptual context of novelty

The relevance of research. The music of leading contemporary composers, representing the style of «new simplicity», becomes a manifestation of a certain attitude associated with a «new» approach to the technique of musical composition, in a wide sense – to the ontological foundations of music as a specific form of art and culture. Accordingly, the concept of «new» acquires special significance, which contains the essence of the novelty of the composer's understanding of music as an object of its creative realization and a way of communication with the listener. This issue is not often discussed in native researches of contemporary music (as well as the «new simplicity» in general), it is not presented as a special subject of musicological studies. The purpose of the research is to determine the conceptual foundations of the «new simplicity» as a phenomenon of contemporary musical art in the context of the semantic content of the concept of «new music». The methodological basis of the research is the systemic method, the method of comparative studies, as well as the methods of historical musicology and genre-style analysis. The scientific novelty of the article is determined by the theoretical development of the «new simplicity» as a genre and stylistic phenomenon of musical art in the context of the artistic and aesthetic foundations of contemporary composer's creativity. Main results. The conceptual meaning of «new music» as a phenomenon of professional musical art of the 20th century had a straight influence on the development of the aesthetic idea of the «new simplicity» and its creative implementation in individual composer’s styles at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. The essence of the «new» in the «new simplicity» consists of the fundamental rejection of the need to constantly changing the norms of the musical language and its total individualization, as well as in the return to a more accessible («simple») musical style. The return of the «new simplicity» to triad and consonance as the main constructive elements of the musical language represents a fundamentally different approach of modern composers to the technique of musical composition in the context of the «ban on consonance» proclaimed by the Western European musical avant-garde. «New» in this case is the understanding of the basic function of triad and consonance: it is associated not with the functional side of tonality, but with the phonic image of music – the factor that ensures its harmony in terms of auditory perception and the possibility of an emotional response. Conclusion. Musicological development of the conceptual aspect of the «new simplicity» opens up opportunities for studying this phenomenon of contemporary musical art in a wide historical perspective and understanding it as a natural link in the evolution of European academic music.

Using behavioral science theory to enhance public health nursing.

The application of behavioral science theory is instrumental in advancing nursing research and practice. Nurses can benefit from a thorough understanding of theoretical perspectives related to health behavior change. Behavioral science theory can provide a conceptual context for understanding patient behavior, it can guide research on the determinants of health behavior and health service delivery, and it can offer alternative approaches to nursing practice that may improve the effectiveness of patient care. The aim of this paper is to provide some examples of behavioral theories that can be used in nursing research and practice, and provide an example of how one theory, Stages of Change (Transtheoretical Model), can be applied to older adult fall prevention. Given the critical role behavior plays in premature morbidity and mortality, public health nurses and researchers can benefit by broadening the use of theory in the design and implementation of interventions, using behavioral theory as their guide.

The Location of Settled Diasporas in Nova Scotian Fiction

This article offers a comparative study between two novels by Nova Scotian writers: George and Rue (2006), by George Elliott Clarke, and No Great Mischief (2000), by Alistair MacLeod. The main purpose of this analysis is to transform some of the pervasive assumptions that dominate interpretations of diasporic ontologies. Most conceptual contexts of diaspora, constructed around the idea of a homeland that is located elsewhere, can only partially be applied to historically long-established communities. Clarke’s and MacLeod’s works emphasize “native” identity, the historical presence of Africans and Scots in Nova Scotia and their ensuing attachment to the (home)land. The novels illustrate how the hostland may be transformed into a homeland after centuries of settlement. The favoring of routes over roots of many current conceptualizations of the diaspora thus contravenes the foundations on which these groups construct a “native/diasporic” identity. However, in settler colonies such as Canada, identifying these groups as unequivocally native would imply the displacement of the legitimate Indigenous populations of these territories. A direct transformation from diaspora to indigenous subjectivity would entail the obliteration of a (however distant) history of migration, on the one hand, and the disavowal of Indigenous groups, on the other. For these reasons, new vocabulary needs to be developed that accurately comes to terms with this experience, which I propose to refer to as “settled diaspora.” In settled diasporas, the notions of attachment to a local identity are reconciled with having distant points of origin. At the same time, there is conceptual room to accommodate claims of belonging that differ from those by Indigenous populations. Thus, the concept of the settled diaspora redresses critical restrictions in diaspora theory that prevent discourses of migration from being applied to spaces of settlement.

A Research On Sustainability Reports Of Business In Terms Of Corporate Social Responsibility

The increasing awareness of individuals about the environmental and social impact of the corporations’ activities has made it important for corporations to share their reports about corporate sustainability with the target audiences. The purpose of this study is to determine, how much they are committed to sustainability reports they publish by content analysis method. It presents findings from an analysis of 100 company’websites in Turkey and sustainability reports and discusses the findings within this conceptual context. The findings of the research showed that the majority of the companies that were examined did not share their sustainability-oriented efforts on their websites. Most of the companies that shared their reports try to make their commitments towards sustainability concrete with at least one initiative. It was determined that the least mentioned element in all the themes in the reports was about the results of performance measurement. As a result, companies make a commitment and support it in an initiative, while paying less attention to sharing its results for performance measures and being less willing to do so.

Cultures and Concepts of Ice: Listening for Other Narratives in the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene is marked not only by significant environmental changes massively distributed in space and time but also by a substantial proliferation of scientific data. From Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports to growing extinction lists, there is neither a shortage of environmental crises nor data to serve as official evidence of crises. As crucial as these data are, however, questions remain as to how science data-driven approaches police the boundaries of what counts as evidence and risk marginalizing other ways of encountering, knowing, and narrating environmental change. In this article, we address how certain narratives are not being told, or heard, amid European-American climate discourses. Drawing on nature–society studies, political ecology, and environmental philosophy, this article focuses on how prevailing discussions around glacier recession ignore the cultural and conceptual consequences of glacier loss. As glaciers become increasingly iconized in the Anthropocene, they become more detached from cultural and conceptual contexts. Such detachment overlooks how the fate of glaciers is not only a matter of quantifiable loss but is also implicated in everyday encounters, generational experiences, and stories spun at the nexus of ice and culture(s).

The Onward Adventure in the New Age: A Systematic Literature Review of the Outdoor Experiential Learning Meets Digital Technology

This paper discusses the teaching approaches used in the field of education in an outdoor experiential learning environment combined with digital technology. The history to this paper's thesis indicates that experiential outdoor learning is one of the teaching methods popularized since the 19th century. With technological advancement, the outdoor experiential learning, has drawn the attention of educators towards computerized technology. However, the experience of learning outdoors may either be a challenge or an advantage when computerized technology is applied to outdoor learning. This paper aims to develop a conceptual framework which can help educators to consider computerized technology embedded in an outdoor experiential learning. The methodologies for this paper include fifty peer-reviewed papers, fourteen book chapters, five conference papers, four conference proceedings, and five magazine articles. This study’s main findings suggest the discussion of three primary words in the conceptual context of DTOEL that are pedagogical factors, affordances and implications of the decision. This paper reaches the conclusion that computerized technology can lessen the experience of learning outdoor, but on the hindsight, this method of learning in the outdoors provides opportunities for learning development. With regards to the contribution to the research field, the DTOEL system serves to guide facilitators to make educated choice to utilize digital technology for outdoor experiential learning.

Research Proposal Construction for The Effects of Engagement Coaching on At-Risk Community College Students in Maryland

The construction of this proposal is modeled after Maxwell’s (2013, p. 4) components for research design that consists of identifying the purpose of the study, describing the conceptual context, posing the research questions, discussing the methodology, and asserting the validity. The researcher focuses on a qualitative method of studying students' lived experiences phenomena and uses an unstructured grounded theory approach (Charmaz, 2014) to best determine the results and contribute to society’s understanding of the effects of engagement coaching on at-risk community college students in Maryland.

Human rights education in patient care: A literature review and critical discussion.

The identification of human rights issues has become more prominent in statements from national and international nursing organisations such as the American Nurses Association and the United Kingdom's Royal College of Nursing with the International Council of Nursing asserting that human rights are fundamental to and inherent in nursing and that nurses have an obligation to promote people's health rights at all times in all places.However, concern has been expressed about this development. Human rights may be seen as the imposition of legal considerations for nurses and other healthcare workers to bear in mind, as yet more responsibilities with the consequent fear of litigation. Although a more hopeful scenario is that consideration of human rights is something that is supportive of good practice.If this more hopeful scenario is to be realised, the role of education will be crucial. As with human rights generally, human rights education is a global phenomenon, a practice-orientated expression of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the goal of human rights education is to build a culture of respect and action for human rights for all.However, the nature of human rights has long been contested. A 'mapping exercise' of the academic literature on human rights identified 'four schools' or 'ideal types' that have shaped thinking about human rights. This sets out the conceptual context in which human rights problems are defined and solutions are proposed, which is particularly important for human rights education. However, it also complicates the picture. The different approaches taken by the four 'types' would likely lead to different outcomes in terms of human rights education.It is timely to discuss the nature of human rights education and examine its potential for impact on patient care. This will involve identifying the challenges and potential benefits of this approach and analysing the implications for professional practice.

Matter Dialogues

This exposition relates Claude-Lévi Strauss' concept of bricolage with two examples of the author's artistic praxis, with the aim that the subjective case studies will contribute to highlight a more general methodological standpoint of contemporary artistic creation, namely: the artistic work as a dialogical, enactive process where the discussion with the artistic material takes a guiding role. The proposal intends to resituate a classic concept from structuralist anthropology, which I find strikingly useful for analysing contemporary intermedia artistic processes and works. The exposition discusses the philosophical implications of a practice that abandons itself to an unforeseen, dialogical relationship with the environment. The oeuvre then becomes an ecological process of using what is offered by the situation, in a constant discussion with the environment. Ideas, forms and materials are engendered, lost and transformed in a dynamic process that resembles a sort of artistic aikido. The ecological strand of the discussion on bricolage leads to Anna Tsing's "Mushroom at the End of the World" and Timothy Morton’s “Dark Ecology”, where the concept of Nature and the value of naturalness are abolished in favour of a flat relationship between human and her environment: an ecological system between different manifestations of being, where human-made phenomena are not regarded as extra-natural. An artistic practice of bricolage finds a favourable breeding-ground in such a conceptual context.

Towards a conceptual understanding of dispossession – Belo Monte and the precarization of the riverine people

The construction of the hydroelectric power plant Belo Monte in the Brazilian Amazon displaced thousands of families and caused complex impacts for the affected population. This paper argues that previous studies about dispossession in development contexts have considered both material and immaterial consequences but have not brought these dimensions into a conceptual context. In order to contribute to a deeper analytical knowledge of the mechanisms and multi-level effects of dispossession processes, the paper introduces a perspective on dispossession that focuses on its embeddedness in the symbolic order, its epistemic and ontological dimensions and its psychosocial consequences. Using the example of the affected riverine people, this paper shows that the politics of non-recognition used by the construction consortium caused a process of precarization. This comprised the epistemological dimension, and in turn led to a process of deterritorialization, heavily affecting the riverine people on a psychosocial level.

Trade-offs, Pleiotropy, and Shared Molecular Pathways: A Unified View of Constraints on Adaptation.

The concept of trade-offs permeates our thinking about adaptive evolution because they are exhibited at every level of biological organization, from molecular and cellular processes to organismal and ecological functions. Trade-offs inevitably arise because different traits do not occur in isolation, but instead are imbedded within complex, integrated systems that make up whole organisms. The genetic and mechanistic underpinning of trade-offs can be found in the pleiotropic nodes that occur in the biological pathways shared between traits. Yet, often trade-offs are only understood as statistical correlations, limiting the ability to evaluate the interplay between how selection and constraint interact during adaptive evolution. Here, we first review the classic paradigms in which physiologists and evolutionary biologists have studied trade-offs and highlight the ways in which network and molecular pathway approaches unify these paradigms. We discuss how these approaches allow researchers to evaluate why trade-offs arise and how selection can act to overcome trait correlations and evolutionary constraints. We argue that understanding how the conserved molecular pathways are shared between different traits and functions provides a conceptual framework for evolutionary biologists, physiologists, and molecular biologists to meaningfully work together toward the goal of understanding why correlations and trade-offs occur between traits. We briefly highlight the melanocortin system and the hormonal control of osmoregulation as two case studies where an understanding of shared molecular pathways reveals why trade-offs occur between seemingly unrelated traits. While we recognize that applying such approaches poses challenges and limitations particularly in the context of natural populations, we advocate for the view that focusing on the biological pathways responsible for trade-offs provides a unified conceptual context accessible to a broad range of integrative biologists.

Exploring Conceptual context for Resilience Assessment Scale for children with Renal Diseases.

Exploring Conceptual context for Resilience Assessment Scale for children with Renal Diseases.

Fewer generation constraints increase the generation effect for item and source memory through enhanced relational processing

ABSTRACTMemory is often better for information that is self-generated versus read (i.e. the generation effect). Theoretical work attributes the generation effect to two mechanisms: enhanced item-specific and relational processing (i.e. the two-factor theory). Recent work has demonstrated that the generation effect increases when generation tasks place lower, relative to higher, constraints on what participants can self-generate. This study examined whether the effects of generation constraint on memory might be attributable to either mechanism of the two-factor theory. Across three experiments, participants encoded word pairs in two generation conditions (lower- and higher-constraint) and a read control task, followed by a memory test for item memory and two context memory details (source and font color). The results of these experiments support the idea that lower-constraint generation increases the generation effect via enhanced relational processing, as measured through both recognition and cued recall tasks. Results further showed that lower-constraint generation improves context memory for conceptual context (source), but not perceptual context (color), suggesting that this enhanced relational processing may extend to conceptually related details of an item. Overall, these results provide more evidence that fewer generation constraints increase the generation effect and implicate enhanced relational processing as a mechanism for this improvement.

Improving Mentoring Program Fidelity through Ecological Consultation: A Community-University Partnership

ABSTRACT This article describes the process of ecological school consultation within a university’s place-based community engagement initiative. Within higher education, place-based initiatives are geographically specific partnerships between community organizations and a university. First, this article explains the collaboration between a middle school and a university-based consultant. Conceptual and practical contexts for the partnership, mentoring program, and consultation process are provided. Next, the article describes steps in the ecological consultation process, highlighting the consultant’s role in facilitating a problem-solving process and in advancing mentoring program implementation fidelity. The fidelity intervention increased mentor adherence to the program’s components (F(2, 531) = 16.861, p < .001), which were identified as being critical to the program’s potential to enact positive changes with students. Implications for school-based mentoring programs and recommendations for consultation are provided. Finally, strengths and limitations of this descriptive study and of the statistical methods (ANOVA) used to evaluate program adherence are discussed.

Staging Proto-Zionism. Jewish Quarter of Zemun, Serbia: Historical Evidence, Structure, Meaning

Zemun is an old Central European town on the right bank of the Danube River, today one of the boroughs of Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. There has been a small Jewish community in Zemun dating back to the mid-18th century. Some of the Jews who lived in Zemun in the 19th century contributed to the emergence of Zionism. This paper presents new archival information about Zemun’s Jewish quarter including an analysis of the Zemun synagogue as well as various hermeneutic explanations of its urban and architectural development. Previous analyses of this area of Zemun have focused on external and morphological characteristics of its religious architecture but failed to explain its conceptual, historical, socio-political and religious context. This paper will cover these new elements as well as establish a basis for understanding this part of the old urban core of Zemun in relation to the significant personalities who lived there and the important ideas they developed.