Conceptual Arguments Research Articles

Digitalization of public diplomacy: Concepts, trends, and challenges

Dr. Ilan Manor is a leading scholar in the digitalization of public diplomacy and a senior lecturer at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev. From the beginning of his academic career, Dr. Manor invested in researching the digitalized practices and strategies of the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and conceptualized the expression “the digitalization of public diplomacy” to explore how digital technologies shape the norms, values, and working routines of diplomats and diplomatic institutions. Based on the hypothesis of transparency as the core of social media technology, Dr. Manor mentioned that diplomacy has also had to become more open, especially in public diplomacy. Traditional secret diplomatic negotiations are under universal scrutiny by netizens because they are digitalized. Thus, the public wants diplomats to be more open and transparent in their professional activities. However, digitalization also brought a series of communication problems, especially in the time of geopolitical uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war. In the academic dialogue, Dr. Manor has analyzed the conceptualization, practices, and challenges of the digitalization of public diplomacy in the framework of the current geopolitical context and global crisis and reviewed the long-term conceptual debate in public diplomacy scholarship on the value of soft power in the digital age. The last part of this dialogue focused on using visual supports in the international communication arena, criticizing the omnipresent use of memes and gifs of the Russian and Ukrainian governments during the war and questioning the public(s) in the digitalization of public diplomacy.

New insights into anatomical connectivity along the anterior-posterior axis of the human hippocampus using in vivo quantitative fibre tracking.

The hippocampus supports multiple cognitive functions including episodic memory. Recent work has highlighted functional differences along the anterior-posterior axis of the human hippocampus, but the neuroanatomical underpinnings of these differences remain unclear. We leveraged track-density imaging to systematically examine anatomical connectivity between the cortical mantle and the anterior-posterior axis of the in vivo human hippocampus. We first identified the most highly connected cortical areas and detailed the degree to which they preferentially connect along the anterior-posterior axis of the hippocampus. Then, using a tractography pipeline specifically tailored to measure the location and density of streamline endpoints within the hippocampus, we characterised where these cortical areas preferentially connect within the hippocampus. Our results provide new and detailed insights into how specific regions along the anterior-posterior axis of the hippocampus are associated with different cortical inputs/outputs and provide evidence that both gradients and circumscribed areas of dense extrinsic anatomical connectivity exist within the human hippocampus. These findings inform conceptual debates in the field and emphasise the importance of considering the hippocampus as a heterogeneous structure. Overall, our results represent a major advance in our ability to map the anatomical connectivity of the human hippocampus in vivo and inform our understanding of the neural architecture of hippocampal-dependent memory systems in the human brain.

The Conceptual Politics of Democracy Promotion: The Venezuela Case

In 1970 Giovanni Sartori articulated what he saw as the greatest challenge to political science in an increasingly globalized worldconceptual stretching. Sartori was referring to the traveling of western concepts eastward and proposed the use of a conceptual ladder to help inform the decisions political scientists make regarding the concepts they wish to travel. This paper seeks to push the boundaries of Sartori’s critique beyond academia to include policy; a subject where a dynamic and informative relationship between academia and policy should exist, but are instead faced with a one-dimensional arrangement. In that vein, this paper consists of three main parts. The first employs a brief historiography of the conceptual debate between, largely, Schumpeterian and Dahlian definitions of democracy where two main schools of thought will be sketched. The second evokes Venezuela's recent political history to illustrate how the United States Government has, at different times, employed various definitions, and standards, of democracy to describe the Venezuelan regime. The third seeks to establish how American oscillation between standards erodes the value reference point of democracy and draw out the implications of this. In particular, the third part unpacks what this erosion should mean moving forward for academics engaged in the conceptual politics of democracy. In sum, the instrumentalizing of the ambiguity of the concept—democracy—by oscillating between Schumpeterian and Dahlian standards devalues the concept. And unless the academic debate regarding democratic theory begins to account for this devaluation, democracy may well be emptied of its substance.

Prefiguring buen sobrevivir: Lenca women’s (e)utopianism amid climate change

ABSTRACT Given its utopian orientation, the anti-capitalist, decolonial notion of buen vivir understates how precarious life is for those who experiment with practicing its principles. Furthermore, climate change and climate mitigation will exacerbate precarity for the foreseeable future. In response, we develop a conceptual argument that integrates concepts from post-extractivism, climate adaptation, communitarian feminism, and prefigurative politics for a more accurate and more actionable, eutopian concept we term buen sobrevivir, or surviving well. We then illustrate the concept through Lenca women’s struggles to make alternatives possible in the face of violent extractivism, patriarchy, and climate change impacts in post-coup Honduras.

Peace through the lens of human rights: Mapping spaces of peace in the advocacy of Colombian human rights defenders

What kinds of peace do human rights defenders advocate? This question has become controversial in light of heavy criticisms raised against the scholarly paradigm that peace and human rights are co-constitutive universals. In this article, I explore how Colombian human rights defenders navigate potential tensions, erasures, and vested politics in their peace advocacy during the current peace process with the FARC-EP. I follow the trend in the geographies of peace literature to study the articulation of peace with human rights as situated and constitutive practices. My analysis of published activist statements maps out the discursivity of peace advocacy, that is, how human rights defenders articulate different political demands as interconnected conditions for peace and maintain a common activist space that cuts across the uneven geographies of violence in Colombia. The visualization of my results as discursive networks shows how activist practices open social and discursive spaces that integrate multiple understandings of peace, instead of obliterating differences in a single and homogenized, ‘local’ representation of peace. I further submit that elucidating how human rights defenders address peace beyond the end of guerrilla insurgency, the ambiguous role of the state, societal discrimination, and structural transformations helps us nuancing conceptual debates. We can learn from Colombian activists to move beyond rigid conceptual juxtapositions of human rights as either panacea or liberal fuel for conflict and to pay attention to how concepts are animated in political struggles to end violence.

Conceptualizing legitimacy: What to learn from the controversies related to an “essentially contested concept”

Based on a genealogy of the concept of Legitimacy, the goal of the paper is to develop a proposal that unites normative-theoretical and empirical approaches and hence reconciles two different conceptual-theoretical camps in legitimacy research. Legitimacy is a core concept in Political Science that relates to fundamental questions of politics, polity and policy–the relation between rulers and ruled, the properties of a political system, its democratic quality, the rule of law, and its policy output. However, in academia, no consensus has evolved on the conceptual and empirical core of legitimacy, it is still essentially contested. One main reason for this is that a concept such as legitimacy is not only a tool for analysis, but can also become an object of academic controversy itself, as researchers give different answers to key questions related to conceptualizing it. This is why academic controversies on a concept highlight key issues, questions and dimensions of understanding, defining, and operationalising it—which is also the case for legitimacy. The paper therefore recollects the main controversies around the concept of legitimacy since the 1950's by tracing a genealogy of legitimacy in the Social Sciences. A genealogy is a methodological tool in intellectual and conceptual history. Different from a classical literature review, a genealogy summarizes the main lines and traditions of thinking on a concept, the key controversies, predominant understandings, and crucial issues of conceptualizing it. In the conceptual debates on legitimacy in Political Science, the core controversy is the one between normative-theoretical and empirical approaches. Based on the genealogy, we develop a proposal for conceptualizing legitimacy that enables to reconcile the normative-theoretical and empirical camps in legitimacy research.

Integrating external actors into the microfoundations of practice transfer in MNEs: a research agenda

PurposeThe transfer of organizational practices in multinational enterprises (MNEs), typically from the headquarters to foreign subsidiaries, has been a key theme in international business (IB) literature. Research on this topic increasingly acknowledges the important role of organizational actors external to the focal MNE. Furthermore, there is a growing interest in the microfoundational underpinnings of practice transfer as an important phenomenon in IB. This paper aims to bring together these two emerging research trends to outline an exciting and important avenue for further research.Design/methodology/approachThis is a conceptual paper. This paper builds on prior empirical research to theorize different types of involvement of external organizational actors in the transfer process. This study further identifies specific mechanisms that lead to transfer outcomes in terms of practice adaptation.FindingsThe authors develop conceptual arguments regarding the role of external actors in the microfoundations of transfer. The involvement of external organizational actors can be either direct or indirect, and it can occur in the initiation stage at headquarters level and/or in the implementation stage at subsidiary level. The authors theorize how the involvement of external organizational actors in the transfer process shapes practice adaptation as a key outcome. This study summarizes the theorization with the help of propositions, and this study also identifies a set of research questions that can guide future research on this increasingly important topic.Originality/valueThis paper contributes to the literature by developing a research agenda to open up the black box regarding the role of external actors in the microfoundations of practice transfer in MNEs.

Methods for calculating coexistence mechanisms: beyond scaling factors

How do species coexist? A framework known as modern coexistence theory can ‘measure coexistence' by partitioning invasion growth rates into coexistence mechanisms, terms which correspond to classes of explanations for coexistence. There are several reasonable ways to define coexistence mechanisms, each depending on exactly how a species perturbed to low density (the invader) is compared to other species that remain at their typical densities (the residents). Using conceptual arguments and two case studies, we compare five methods for calculating coexistence mechanisms: 1) scaling factors, the traditional approach which attempts to eliminate the linear effects of regulating factors; 2) the simple comparison, which gives equal weight to all resident species; 3) generation time scaling, a novel method which corrects for intrinsic differences in population-dynamical speed; 4) β scaling, where resident growth rates are scaled by a measure of relative sensitivity to competition; and 5) the invader–invader comparison, a previously obscure method in which a focal species is compared to itself at high versus low density. We find that the conventional scaling factors can lead to nonsensical results when species have strong and asymmetric niche differences; though scaling factors can be useful in certain theoretical studies, they are not recommended for explaining coexistence in real communities. Invader–invader comparisons are also problematic, as they do not effectively measure specialization or niche differentiation. The universally-applicable simple comparison often works well, but can give counterintuitive results when species have disparate generation times. The β scaling method often works well in simple models, but faces implementation problems in complex models. We tentatively recommend generation time scaling as the all-purpose method for calculating coexistence mechanisms.

Hustling in the creative industries: Narratives and work practices of female filmmakers and fashion designers

AbstractThis paper examines practices and narratives of hustling in the creative industries. We draw on two illustrative cases: independent female filmmakers in Nairobi, Kenya, and independent female fashion designers in Toronto, Canada, with a combined 69 interviews. Taking a comparative, intersectional approach, we explore both the practices and narratives that entrepreneurial creative workers construct. In doing so, we contribute to ongoing conceptual debates regarding the contemporary nature of work in creative industries. We define hustling in the creative industries as entrepreneurially navigating precarity to build and sustain creative businesses. We argue that hustling is not merely a “stage” of work and life to be moved past or overcome, but instead an ongoing, entrepreneurial creative practice. This fact has implications for how we think about success and creative work: hustling is not a deviation from the good life, but a way of making a good life in precarious circumstances.

Reluctant border agents: enlistment of transportation workers in procedures to limit refugee mobilities in Turkey

ABSTRACT This article examines the enlistment of transportation workers in the procedures of bordering internal mobilities of refugees in Turkey. Drawing primarily on conceptual debates regarding bordering, the role of citizens in enacting the state, and (non)citizenship, it explores the ways in which transportation workers, as well as refugees, in their daily lives navigate the ever-expanding borders in the control-oriented Turkish asylum context. It argues that delegation of state power to citizens opens a space for noncitizens to exercise their right to mobility despite their lack of legal entitlement. On the other hand, such delegation removes the interactions from procedural safeguards and potentially harms refugees’ right claims. As a consequence, realization of refugees’ mobility claims depends significantly on how transportation workers understand and negotiate their assigned role as internal border agents within the ambivalent political and legal context of Turkey.

Nietzsche and Contemporary Ethics

Nietzsche and Contemporary Ethics

The Factors Affecting Revenue Management towards Travel Agencies

The international tourism industry is one of the indispensable activities for the macro economies of the countries. Ensuring this contribution depends on the effective work of revenue management (RM) which is a vital part of finance management. Regarding RM, western researchers focused on the airlines and accommodation sectors and relatively ignored travel agencies. In our country except one, we did not find any article on RM in terms of travel agencies. For this reason, there is a big and important gap in the literature. To fill this gap, this study aims to develop conceptual arguments by examining and listing the factors such as implementing strategies and necessary performance metrics affecting RM in travel agencies. From the sectoral perspective, it also makes recommendations to tourism literature by conceptually clarifying the critical issues regarding general RM applications.

Effect of Attitude Towards Risk on Individual Portfolio Choice at the Nairobi Securities Exchange, Kenya

Attitude towards riskplays a major role of determining a portfolio choice of an investment portfolio composed of a single or multiple assets that an investor chooses within a certain period of time. Although there exist numerous controversial arguments of the factors that determine the level of individual portfolio choice, focus on multidimensional perceptions of investors characteristics have been given little attention. The objective of this study was to determine the effect of investor’s attitude towards risk on individual portfolio choice at the Nairobi securities exchange and to investigate the moderating effect of investor’s age on the correlation between attitude towards riskand individual portfolio choice on common stocks at the Nairobi securities exchange. The study is anchored on risk aversion theory. A correlational research design was used for collecting data for the variables under study over a period of five years from January, 2013 to December, 2017. The population consisted of individual investors estimated at 2.4 million as at 31 st December 2017 based on Central Depository and Settlement Corporation Limited (CDSC). A target population of 997,605 active retail investors who also form the accessible population at Nairobi securities exchange(NSE) were used to draw a sample size of 385 active individual retail investors. Both stratified and convenience sampling was used to select the required number of respondents. A structured questionnaire was used to collect the data whereby drop and pick approach was used by the researcher and research assistants. Pilot testing of the instruments was performed to assess its reliability. Further, multiple regression techniques were used to analyze the data obtained that was presented using frequency tables, means, standard deviations and correlation tables. The study findings revealed that attitude towards risk, have a positive and significant effect on the common stocks. As such a unit increase in a predictor variable leads to an increase in investment in common stocks. Further, the results of the study indicated that age moderate the relationship between attitude towards risk and the individual portfolio choice in respect to common stocks. The study will benefit management of investment banks and brokerage firms in policy formulation to assist individual investors in their portfolio choices and also to the academicians to advance the conceptual arguments of the moderating effect of age on the relationship between attitude towards risk and individual portfolio choice. Keywords: Attitude towards risk, Individual portfolio choice, Risk aversion,Investor’s age. DOI: 10.7176/RJFA/13-20-01 Publication date: October 31 st 2022

Metaphysical Emergence

<i>Metaphysical Emergence</i>

The Problem of the Actress in Modern German Theater and Thought by S. E. Jackson

Reviewed by: The Problem of the Actress in Modern German Theater and Thought by S. E. Jackson Ellwood Wiggins The Problem of the Actress in Modern German Theater and Thought. By S. E. Jackson. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2021. Pp. xiii + 232. Cloth $99.00. ISBN 9781640140868. S. E. Jackson's fascinating monograph opens by connecting Nietzsche's "Problem of the Actor" to his problem with women (1). This brilliant move heralds her exploration of the centrality of gender to performance and performers in fin-de-siècle Germany. Actresses are not just a side issue or specialized topic when it comes to modernist theater. The questions posed by performing women instead point to the most pressing theoretical and practical issues of the day. Jackson's book is a veritable treasure trove of materials, narratives, and perspectives from German-language sources around 1900. It should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in gender, performance, or theater history in German modernism. The Problem of the Actress successfully straddles intellectual history and theater historiography by showing how intimately related conceptual debates (about issues as seemingly disparate as femininity and temporality, for instance) were to influential stage performances in the early 1900s. In the process of this back and forth between pseudo-philosophical publications (such as the repulsive misogynist Otto Weininger's Geschlecht und Charakter) and "paratheatrical writing" (production reviews, memoirs, and metatheatrical fiction), the book unfolds a striking cultural history of Wilhelmine Germany. Especially impressive is the way Jackson has marshaled a rich collection of little-known (and never-translated) contemporary treatises on acting and reviews of performances to paint a thickly textured portrait of the age. The first two chapters lay out the conceptual oppositions that both animated theoretical debates and constricted the practical conditions of female performers. These are followed by three chapters that use close readings of texts and performances to open up explorations of wider themes. All five chapters explore the creation of identity as a site of negotiation between heteronomous subjects who must respond to the ineluctable gender expectations of others. One admirable strength of the book is the way it weaves the longer tradition of German performance history into its lively account of Wilhelmine theater. Jackson [End Page 579] clearly demonstrates her reliance on previous scholarship about women in performance in the long eighteenth century both as methodological models for her own project and to outline the powerful continuities between acting traditions. Too often studies of modernism present the era as radically new and fail to notice the prevalence of older forms of thought even in what seem to be reactions against the past. Jackson avoids this trap by tracing the transformations of established paradigms in the new age. Her frequent citations of Mary Helen Dupree's groundbreaking study of Enlightenment and Romantic actress-writers, The Mask and the Quill (Bucknell University Press, 2011), in particular, show how abiding were the paradoxical demands of naturalness and artifice constructed around performing the feminine. In many ways, Jackson's study can be read as an exciting sequel to Dupree's, carrying the same incisive and sensitive readings of women's performance and women's writing forward into the next century. It is heartbreaking to see how little had changed for women in the intervening years. Jackson sums up a 1928 novel by the actress Tilla Durieux, for instance, by saying that it "presents the obligatory performance of femininity as destructive for women" (149). This quote could easily function as a precise digest of Mary Wollstonecraft's argument in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). But Jackson's acknowledgement of continuity simultaneously allows her to showcase even more precisely the very real novelties in intellectual concepts and theatrical practice that make the early twentieth century such a momentous era in European history. This achievement of the book becomes most evident in the final chapter. By focusing on the actress Gertrud Eysolt's 1903 performance of Elektra, Jackson persuasively shows how the character and in fact the entire drama would have been inconceivable without the actress's creative contributions. In a way, the book invites a recasting of the three-way antagonism between actor, writer, and director—all...

Globalization A Conceptual Debate

Since the beginning of the 1960s the international studies have begun to give a special interest to globalization. However, the differences that have arisen about the interpretation of this phenomenon, led to many complexities and situations of confusion. This fact is further exacerbated, because globalization appears for a long period of time and then disappears or diminishes according to the prevailing international conditions and the response of different economies to the most powerful centres in the world. The views of those concerned differed as to the extent to which certain definitions of globalization could be generalized to cover all their situations in terms of space and time or to address each situation differently, since what applied to a given situation differed in its characteristics from other situations. After introducing several definitions suggested by those interested in this concept, the author tried here to present a definition that may be more comprehensive than previous. And because the characteristics of this phenomenon are of great importance in defining the concept of globalization, these characteristics, were presented in order to prepare the reader to compare different ideas to identify this phenomenon, which requires more debate.

Performing leadership: international politics through the lens of visual narrative analysis

ABSTRACT Since visuality in the (self-)representation of politicians and other influential figures has become an important part of political storytelling, we propose to use visual narrative analysis (VNA) as a systematic approach for its better understanding. VNA is particularly suited for this performative strand of interpretive analysis, as it does not study images in isolation but in the broader context of political narratives. By analysing different layers of communication (images, narratives, competing narratives) VNA enables us to identify internal contradictions that undermine political efforts of self-representation in contexts of global governance (e.g. multilateral diplomacy) and render them unstable and contestable. By analysing competing (self-)representations at a G7 meeting in 2018, we show how VNA can be applied fruitfully to the study of international politics and, second, how VNA can explain some of the reasons why one image became iconic (Angela Merkel as female leader of the liberal world), i.e. appealed to a wider audience, and others (focusing on Emmanuel Macron or Donald Trump) did not. While our article is primarily a demonstration of the methodological benefits of VNA for various research contexts in world politics, it also contributes to conceptual debates on the combination of visuality, narratives and emotions in changing practices of political storytelling.

The incoherence challenge for subject combination: an analytic assessment

ABSTRACT Panpsychism is now a bona fide potential solution to the metaphysical quandary of consciousness. Much of the debate concerning the viability of panpsychism is centered on the combination problem (CP). Intriguingly, the literature analyzing this problem displays two competing interpretations which differ in their modal force. According to the first, which we call the ‘no-necessitation view', CP consists in the absence of a priori necessitation of macro-level phenomenal facts from micro-level phenomenal facts. In contrast, the second interpretation, which we label the ‘incoherence charge’ (IC), goes further by insisting that it can be positively demonstrated that micro-experiences cannot combine to yield integral macro-experiences. While conceivability arguments are vulnerable to debates over conflicting intuitions, as well as to the claim that a more complete picture will grant the desired necessitation, IC has the advantage that, if true, it removes these concerns and approaches a more final verdict. Nevertheless, while conceivability arguments are widely discussed IC has not been equally well understood or recognized. In this paper we conduct a systematic investigation and reevaluation of IC, as it applies to constitutive micropsychism (or, micro-reductive panpsychism). We argue that the problem is real and therefore that constitutive micropsychism is a blind alley.

The Pros and Cons of Consolidating Rehabilitation Counseling Associations: A Qualitative Analysis of Views From the Field

The potential for unification of rehabilitation counseling professional associations has been a conceptual debate for the past several decades. In a previous article of this special issue, Phillips et al. (2022) provided quantitative data to capture the opinions of professionals on the issue of consolidation. The present study builds on those findings by providing a qualitative analysis of the rationale provided for each response from not only professional association members, but the broader rehabilitation counseling community. The analysis provides clarity about stakeholders’ rationale regarding their beliefs on rehabilitation counseling professional association consolidation. Responses were analyzed by group according to whether participants were in favor of, opposed to, or uncertain about consolidation. The majority of respondents supportive of consolidation felt it offered a pathway toward internal unity and external validation of the profession, while the main rationale from those opposed to consolidation centered on loss of distinctiveness of individual associations. Overwhelmingly, those who were undecided on consolidation cited lack of familiarity as a barrier to providing a decisive response. Implications for these results are presented.

The impact of teaching computer programming in Tanzanian primary schools

ABSTRACT Today computing is intricate in all aspects of our lives, beginning with communications and education to banking, information security, health, shopping, and social media. Development of the computing is proportional to the development of software which is becoming a serious part of all daily lives. This paper, therefore, assessed the impact of teaching Computer Programming Language in Tanzanian primary schools. To achieve this, a new tool for teaching and learning a computer programming language was developed. Furthermore, a two-tier approach was adopted where the training started on an algorithm first, then if, loops and case conditionals as the third concept inside the first tier. On the other hand, variables, lists, and functions are hooked on the second tier. Results indicate that students acquired together reasoning learning in a conceptual argument of view and skill performance. Students were able to accomplish the expertise to practice or apply the theories of programming knowledge in programming-connected tasks.