Concept Of Strength Research Articles

The role of moral disengagement in youth bullying behaviour.

Moral disengagement, a term coined by Bandura, explains how people can hurt others and behave immorally, contradicting their beliefs and values and yet live peaceably with themselves. He developed a conceptual model of moral disengagement based on the Social Cognitive Theory of moral agency. By activating moral disengagement mechanisms, people can disregard their moral standards and behave immorally without any self-censure. This paper synthesises the extensive research on moral disengagement in a youth bullying context to demonstrate the conceptual strength of moral disengagement theory for research and interventions on bullying. It advances the understanding of the contextual basis of moral disengagement by examining its diverse role in bullying episodes that includes bullying perpetration, bullying victimisation and bullying bystanders. The analysis of the different components of moral disengagement representing the loci of the disengagement mechanisms sheds light on how the disengagement processes function in the youth bullying context. Its role as both a moderator and mediator further advances its divergent functioning in the youth bullying context. Finally, implications of the review for advancing knowledge on the moral basis of youth bullying are discussed with suggestions for the development of interventions to attenuate the use of moral disengagement.

Mendelssohn and the Protestant Pedants: The Skeptical Rabbis, the Principle of Noncontradiction, and Judaism’s Spiritual Dialogue

AbstractThis study explores the extent to which Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem engages with Protestant sources in its portrayal of rabbinic tradition, which will allow further light to be shed on the pivotal role of rabbinic Judaism and its representations within the emotionally charged polemics surrounding Jewish emancipation in eighteenth-century Prussia. This examination demonstrates that Mendelssohn’s idealized perception of rabbinic thought is deeply embedded in anti-rabbinic Protestant works, whose framework aids him in shaping his own unique outlook. By analyzing Mendelssohn’s deployment of the notion of contradiction, this article shows how his argumentative strategies in Jerusalem efficaciously counter well-known Protestant patterns of critique against rabbinic Judaism. By focusing on his idiosyncratic quotations and insinuations, it recovers the Christian works that he draws on and appropriates for his apologetic objectives and establishes that he uses Johann A. Eisenmenger for his depiction of the nature of rabbinic discursive practices while speaking out against “many a pedant” for their assertion that the rabbis disregarded the principle of noncontradiction. This article argues that Mendelssohn is alluding to eighteenth-century Protestant theologians who unreservedly follow Eisenmenger’s anti-rabbinic perspective and elaborates on how Mendelssohn entirely reframes this view as a conceptual strength of Judaism’s dialogical essence, thus rendering it compatible with the Enlightenment-based Weltanschauung.

Taking the spatialization of heterodox economics to the next level. States, cities and money

In this note, I argue that the search for a better articulation between financial geography and heterodox economics can benefit from an explicit focus on the relations between states, cities and money. After illustrating some important insights derived from the cross-fertilization between financial geography and monetary heterodox economics, I discuss how the specific inclusion of cities in midlevel theories, which articulate broader economic and geographical thinking on money and space with empirical work on urban restructuring, allows this research agenda to both gain conceptual strength and potential political impact.

Agential explanations: how employee participation is enhanced in normatively controlled organizations?

PurposeThe study aims to highlight and understand, and bring the human agency into the debate on the theory of normative control. While, the previous literature has highlighted the problem of the missing subject. However, the actual human agency in terms of agential properties has not been seriously addressed. This study is an attempt to overcome this problem of the missing subject.Design/methodology/approachA two-phase design inspired by retroductive inference was adopted for this study. In the first phase, abduction was used to explore the literature on normative control to highlight the forces of attraction, which may pull the employees to participate willingly within normative control systems. In the second phase, following retroductive inference, agential explanations of the forces of attraction identified in the first phase were explored by venturing into other related fields, e.g. psychology and sociology.FindingsThe study highlights four strategies used by organizations using normative control, i.e. comfort zoning, relational bonding, moral trapping and elitist appeal. These strategies rely on attractive forces. These forces of attraction pull employees to participate in the normative control system. The attractive element in the identified strategies is due to the fact that these strategies target specific agential properties, i.e. the need for comfort, sense of belonging, moral agency and pride. Overall, the findings suggest that individuals drive their concerns from culture but in relation to their capacity as needy beings for being enculturated.Practical implicationsTheoretically, this study adds conceptual strength to the explanations of normative control. It is suggested that neglect of human agency renders explanations conceptually weak. The study fills this gap in the research. Practically, this study would be beneficial for better design and implementation of normative control. Several studies have pointed out that normative control does not yield the intended results. Out of many reasons, a lack of understanding of human agency is a major cause of unsuccessful attempts to normatively control employees. This study provides some basis to understand the human subject for better design of soft systems of control.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research study that explores agential properties with reference to normative control systems. This study is important for researchers and practitioners.

Increasing the Utility of the Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality-Lexical Rating Scale (CAPP-LRS): Instrument Adaptation and Simplification.

The Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality–Lexical Rating Scale (CAPP-LRS) is a self-report instrument designed to index psychopathy according to the CAPP psychopathy framework. Developed with the expressed goal of advancing the state of knowledge regarding the specific features of psychopathy, the CAPP model and associated instruments have garnered increasing attention and support in the field. Despite the conceptual strength of the CAPP model, the advanced lexical structure of its primary research tool (the CAPP-LRS) has led researchers to question the utility of the instrument for use with some populations of interest (e.g., forensic/correctional and adolescent/young adult samples). The aim of the present work was to address this issue by creating a lexically simplified, though functionally equivalent, version of the CAPP-LRS to increase accessibility to critically relevant populations. A set of two studies (N = 602) describes the adaptation protocol and the initial validation of the modified instrument.

The Coevolution of Routines and IT Systems in IT-enabled Organizational Transformation as an Instance of Digital Transformation:

This paper proposes a conceptual framework to study the phenomenon of IT-enabled Organizational Transformation (IT-enabled OT) as a coevolution process of organizational routines and a new IT system. The framework’s objective is to understand IT-enabled OT in a holistic and integrated manner by investigating how actors perceive, interpret, appropriate, and enact, the new IT system in their work routines as well as how they align the new system and these routines with the social order and structures of the organization. It allows the examination of the reciprocal interactions between different aspects of organizational routines and a new IT system to enhance the understanding of how change unfolds in an organization during the implementation, the adoption, use, and adaptation of a new IT system. We illustrate the scope, the analytic and conceptual strength of the framework with a number of examples from the literature and, lastly, discuss its ontological positioning. The paper concludes with a call for further research to empirically validate and refine the proposed framework.

Life Is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces, 1800–1917 by Anne Lounsbery

Reviewed by: Life Is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces, 1800–1917 by Anne Lounsbery Valeria Sobol Anne Lounsbery. Life Is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces, 1800–1917. NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Ithaca, NY: Northern Illinois University Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press, 2019. xi + 344 pp. ISBN 978-1501747922. This innovative and rich study explores the way provinces and provinciality are portrayed in Russian literature throughout its long nineteenth century in the context of Russian imaginative geography and Russia's perennial preoccupation with its authenticity and national identity. The scope of the book is impressively broad, covering a wide range of authors and texts, from well-known classics (Pushkin, Gogol, Goncharov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov) to less canonical texts produced by women writers of the society tale genre (Gan and Zhukova, for example), regionalists (Mel´nikov-Pechersky and Leskov), as well as travel writers and literary critics. The source of the book's conceptual strength, in my view, lies in the fact that it does not take for granted what might seem to be an obvious fact—the ubiquity of the province trope in Russian literature—but instead interrogates and explores its assumptions and, as a result, produces a sophisticated and nuanced analysis of this phenomenon. This fresh approach to the literary portrayals of the provinces stems at least partly from the author's comparativist perspective, which enriches and informs her examination of the Russian tradition. The contrast drawn with American regionalist writing (e.g., literature on the South), the specificity of the regions in Jane Austen's novels, and the relative concreteness of the settings of French realism (despite a similar obsession with the ultimate center, Paris, in this case) highlights the peculiarity of the generic Russian treatment of the province trope and invites a deeper look at the implications of its persistent presence in Russian literature—a task that Lounsbery performs superbly throughout the book. "Imaginative geography" is one of the key conceptual frameworks for this study. Lounsbery makes it very clear that she is not concerned with the reality of provincial life, although she does draw on important historical developments that affected, to a degree, its literary representations (e.g., Catherine II's project of standardizing the structure of the Russian Empire and eighteenth-century urban planning initiatives). Instead, this book focuses on the image, or trope, of the province, which proved remarkably stable throughout the century. The book's introduction presents a nuanced and multifaceted, if bleak, picture of what the Russian province stands for in the Russian literary imaginary. Invariably opposed to a largely imagined and almost always illusory center, the provinces [End Page 199] stand for everything the center supposedly is not: they represent a lack of meaning, illegibility; homogeneity (as expressed in the dull sameness of the generic provincial town lamented by many a Russian writer); profound inauthenticity, borrowed culture; emptiness, often paradoxically combined with thick but incoherent materiality, as is the case with Gogol's (chapter 4) and Saltykov-Shchedrin's (chapter 11) provinces—all of this along with a painful awareness that they are not the center and a no-less-painful desire to be like it. As Lounsbery continues to emphasize, moreover, the provinces trope is just as much about time as it is about space: the provinces are consistently portrayed as fundamentally opposed to modernity, lacking history, and being "stuck" in time. Due to its close association with backwardness and its constant struggle to be in step with time, the very notion of provinciality, as the book reminds us, is a quintessentially modern phenomenon. The Russian intellectuals' obsession with the provinces, as the author ultimately argues, reflects their own sense of cultural anxiety about being backward and provincial vis-à-vis the West, from which they import institutions, fashion, and, most importantly, ideas. Although much of the book's analysis is predicated on binary oppositions, such as "provinces" vs. "capital/center" or "Russia" vs. "the West," the author also critically interrogates these binaries. In an excellent chapter on Gogol, for example, Lounsbery demonstrates Gogol's tendency to endow the Russian capital with the emptiness and unintelligibility usually reserved for the...

Methodologies that lead to conceptual strength and representation in rare disease qualitative research

Methodologies that lead to conceptual strength and representation in rare disease qualitative research

Unsaturated Shear Strength of Compacted Clayey Soil via Suction-controlled Ring Shear Testing

An experimental program has been undertaken to assess both peak and residual shear strength parameters of statically compacted, moderate plasticity clayey soil under suction-controlled conditions, resulting in a defined set of suction-dependent peak and residual failure envelopes over a relatively wide range of suction states, from 0 to 300 kPa. The experimental program was accomplished in a servo/suction-controlled ring shear apparatus, which is suitable for testing unsaturated soils under large deformations via the axis-translation technique. Test results substantiate the crucial role that has been observed to be played by the imposed matric suction on the residual shear strength of compacted clayey soils. For the range of net normal stress (0-200 kPa) and matric suction (0-300 kPa) states investigated, the increase in either peak or residual shear strength, with increasing matric suction, was found to be manifestly nonlinear. Furthermore, a distinct correspondence was observed between the nonlinearity of the peak shear strength envelope, with respect to increasing matric suction, and the soil-water retention properties of the clayey soil. Results, in general, suggest that a conceptual residual shear strength framework for unsaturated soils, similar to that postulated for peak shear strength, can eventually be formulated as more experimental evidence of this kind is made available.

Alan Pauls y la “literatura expandida”

La idea de que la literatura ya habría franqueado los límites de su constitución moderna, por haber excedido su estatuto autonómico, y se habría abierto a modos inéditos de existencia cultural, a semejanza del arte contemporáneo, se ha convertido en una de las afirmaciones críticas más vigorosas y sugerentes dentro de los actuales estudios literarios. La continua aparición del sintagma “la literatura en el campo expandido del arte” como tema de investigaciones o eventos académicos da testimonio de este nuevo estado de cosas. El propósito de este trabajo es ensayar una evaluación de los alcances y los límites de algunos usos del concepto de “literatura expandida” cuando se intenta realzar la supuesta novedad postautonómica de los experimentos literarios actuales. La argumentación se centra estratégicamente en un caso paradójico, el recurso a este concepto en un celebrado ensayo de Alan Pauls, “El arte de vivir en arte” (2012). Lo paradójico del caso reside en que esa imagen de cuño postautonomista aparece entre los pliegues de un pensamiento sobre la literatura que extrae todas sus fuerzas conceptuales de los principios que individualiza el “régimen estético de las artes” (Jacques Rancière), es decir, del horizonte que la supuesta “expansión” literaria vendría a desbordar o superar.

Walking the Plank: An Experimental Paradigm to Investigate Safety Voice.

The investigation of people raising or withholding safety concerns, termed safety voice, has relied on report-based methodologies, with few experiments. Generalisable findings have been limited because: the behavioural nature of safety voice is rarely operationalised; the reliance on memory and recall has well-established biases; and determining causality requires experimentation. Across three studies, we introduce, evaluate and make available the first experimental paradigm for studying safety voice: the “Walking the plank” paradigm. This paradigm presents participants with an apparent hazard (walking across a weak wooden plank) to elicit safety voice behaviours, and it addresses the methodological shortfalls of report-based methodologies. Study 1 (n = 129) demonstrated that the paradigm can elicit observable safety voice behaviours in a safe, controlled and randomised laboratory environment. Study 2 (n = 69) indicated it is possible to elicit safety silence for a single hazard when safety concerns are assessed and alternative ways to address the hazard are absent. Study 3 (n = 75) revealed that manipulating risk perceptions results in changes to safety voice behaviours. We propose a distinction between two independent dimensions (concerned-unconcerned and voice-silence) which yields a 2 × 2 safety voice typology. Demonstrating the need for experimental investigations of safety voice, the results found a consistent mismatch between self-reported and observed safety voice. The discussion examines insights on conceptualising and operationalising safety voice behaviours in relationship to safety concerns, and suggests new areas for research: replicating empirical studies, understanding the behavioural nature of safety voice, clarifying the personal relevance of physical harm, and integrating safety voice with other harm-prevention behaviours. Our article adds to the conceptual strength of the safety voice literature and provides a methodology and typology for experimentally examining people raising safety concerns.

What is policy assemblage?

ABSTRACT Assemblage thinking has exploded in policy research, especially among scholars working in the policy mobilities field who are seeking to harness the potential of an assemblage approach to understand how policies move, mutate and manifest in increasingly transnational contexts. The ubiquity of assemblage, however, does not always render it clear, with the concept being variously defined and sometimes lacking conceptual strength and explanatory power. This paper seeks to conceptualize and defend an assemblage approach to policy analysis. By synthesizing core threads from existing literature, it identifies three theoretical and conceptual foundations central to a ‘policy assemblage’ approach: (1) relations of exteriority and emergence; (2) heterogeneity, relationality and flux; and (3) attention to power, politics and agency. Together, these foundations signal a coherency to assemblage thinking and suggest an assemblage approach has powerful potential, allowing researchers to see and explain things in ways that many established traditions in policy research do not. By identifying foundations and offering examples of how each might be mobilized, the paper provides the beginnings of a framework for policy assemblage research not previously articulated in a systematic form, thus inviting further discussion about what it means to undertake policy assemblage research.

Assembling nostalgia: devices for affective captation on the re:heritage market

This article builds on the current rethinking of nostalgia in heritage studies and an increasing amount of research that explores the formatting of customer – producer relationships in terms of ’market attachments’ to analyse how nostalgia is performative on the market for retro, vintage and second hand, what we call the re:heritage market. Based on a multi-sited study including offline and online ethnographic observations, photography and qualitative interviews with shop owners and staff at a selection of central streets in Gothenburg, Sweden, the article explores the way shop owners work with nostalgia in order to attract, or ‘captate’, the public, through engaging affective market devices. Our particular contribution is to show how the re:heritage market contribute to our understanding of an alternative of cultural heritage, through configuring exchange and value, and details how ‘affective captation’ adds conceptual strength for understanding the emotive and sensate pull of certain market-based heritage practices. Staging nostalgic encounters involves practices of selecting, collecting, displaying and preserving for the future: practices that are vital for all heritage-making. A variety of actors are involved in this unconventional of heritage at safe a distance from traditional heritage practices.

The third sector of R&D: literature review, basic analysis, and research agenda

Abstract The third sector of national innovation systems comprises non-academic, publicly owned R&D organizations that complement universities and private-sector firms and are normally called ‘research institutes’. Scholarly attention to these organizations has been scarce, partly a consequence of the theoretical imbalance in favor of conceptualizations of innovation processes as requiring mainly universities, private-sector firms, and governmental authorities to occur and succeed. Similarly, while this third sector often makes up a significant share of national innovation systems, it receives less attention in national research and innovation policy than do, say, universities. This paper argues that the role(s) and function(s) of third sector research institutes deserve to be mapped and analyzed in greater detail in order to understand how various organizational actors interact to produce innovation. From a comprehensive literature review and basic analysis of three institute groups in three Nordic countries, the paper makes a first preliminary analysis of the topic. While this analysis yields some interesting conclusions, its main function is to point the way for future studies. In these, other actors in the system should be investigated in thorough empirical studies, armed with tools from classic sociological systems theory that enhance the conceptual strength of the innovation systems framework and enable the acknowledgement of the role(s) and function(s) of several important organizational actors, not least research institutes.

Transformational resilience thinking: putting people, power and politics at the heart of urban climate resilience

Resilience is receiving substantial traction as a concept to inform climate change and development policies and programmes. At the same time, a number of critiques have emerged that question its use as a framing concept for tackling urban climate change. This paper reflects on climate resilience and its critiques through an examination of the Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCCRN) initiative in two cities in India. We illustrate aspects of the resilience critique and, using evidence of transformational aspects of the initiative, we argue that resilience thinking must be coupled with the concept of transformation in order to bring issues of people, politics and power to the fore. In the process, the conceptual strength of resilience can be combined with a more radical agenda that engages with underlying political structures and trade-offs that determine risk and vulnerability.

“New capitalism”, colonisation and the neo-philanthropic turn in social policy

Purpose – Drawing on the functional structural systems theory of Niklas Luhmann and the theory of colonisation of the social lifeworld advanced by Jurgen Habermas, it is argued that the Big Society project in the UK is about the creation of an alternative non-state welfare infrastructure by the linking of wealthy donors with opportunities to engage in venture philanthropy in the third sector. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – The paper outlines key features of Luhmann's theory relating to autopoiesis and structural coupling to illustrate its conceptual strength in making the colonisation process visible. Findings – The paper illustrates the ways in which system imperatives underpinning the colonisation process absorb and subordinate public activism to narrow market principles forcing the third sector to communicate in the language of the market rather than caritas. Social implications – The real implication of these developments for the character of the voluntary sector requires further critical examination not only because the state's enduring commitment to welfare may be in question but also for the growing significance of entrepreneurial philanthropy in shaping the character of volunteering and charitable activities and welfare relationships. Originality/value – The paper applies Luhmann's theory relating to autopoiesis and structural coupling to make key features of government colonisation of the third sector visible.

A Servo/Suction-Controlled Ring Shear Apparatus for Unsaturated Soils: Development, Performance, and Preliminary Results

Abstract In recent years, the key hypotheses of most constitutive frameworks postulated for unsaturated soils have been validated via suction-controlled oedometer, triaxial, and direct shear testing. These techniques only allow for the application of loads along limited modes and levels of soil deformation. It is well known today that a vast majority of geotechnical infrastructure made of compacted soil, or resting on unsaturated ground, involves a wide range of deformations. Calculation of foundation settlement, for instance, requires a good estimation of soil stiffness at relatively small strains. Analysis of slopes, embankments, and soil bearing capacity, on the other hand, requires good estimations of shear strength, from peak to residual. To date, however, there is limited experimental evidence of unsaturated soil behavior under large deformations while being subjected to controlled-suction states. This paper introduces a fully servo/suction-controlled ring shear apparatus that has been made suitable for testing unsaturated soils at large deformations via axis-translation technique. The paper outlines the full development of the apparatus, including details of its main components, assembling, and performance verification against the original Bromhead device. A preliminary series of suction-controlled ring shear tests was accomplished on several statically compacted samples of silty sand. Residual friction angle with respect to matric suction, i.e., residual beta angle, was found to remain virtually constant, regardless of the applied level of net normal stress. The results suggest that a conceptual residual shear strength framework for unsaturated soils, similar to that postulated for peak shear strength, could eventually be devised as more experimental evidence of this kind is made available.

Elaborations on the use of the ecosystem services concept for application in ecological risk assessment for soils

This paper describes scientific developments that have raised awareness that changes in ecological risk assessment (ERA) methods are necessary. These changes have also been triggered by developments in environmental policies. This is illustrated by examples for The Netherlands and Europe. The ecosystem services concept seems to gain a central role in developments of new ERA methods. Main reasons for this are the integrative character of the concept, making it possible to integrate over environmental compartments or over environmental assessment methods, the concept's strength as communication tool and the possibility to value ecosystem services in economic terms. A method using ecosystem services in ERA is presented here in more detail, as an example. In this method assessment endpoints are derived from structures and processes in the ecosystem that are considered indispensable for the provision of particular ecosystem services. The approach facilitates fine-tuning ERA to specific land use demands.

Politics, Economics, and Religion in the Global Age: Walter Benjamin's Critique of Violence and Capitalism as Religion

Walter Benjamin derives his primary conceptual strength from divergent commentaries on canonical texts rather than from a systematic historical standpoint. Illustrating an understanding of and a high esteem for existing texts, the dialogue with the past in the literary medium provides the German-Jewish intellectual with the categories needed to evaluate the social and political events of his own lifetime. This sets him apart from Carl Schmitt, a staunch Catholic whose notion of the sovereign arises from the vision of God's omnipotence and who transposes the political sphere into a theological context. A close reading of Benjamin's Critique of Violence and Capitalism as Religion provides valuable insights into the anthropological foundations for the political, religious and economic issues facing global economies today.

Extension of Stress and Strength Interference Theory for Conceptual Design-for-Reliability

It has been recognized that design-for-reliability (DFR) during the conceptual design stage is very challenging. There are several gaps and deficiencies hindering the DFR implementation. The first gap is due to the disconnection between the output of the conceptual design and reliability parameters needed for the reliability modeling. The second gap is between the knowledge available during the conceptual design and the information needed for reliability analysis. The state of the art design-for-reliability research and implementation are primarily based on the traditional reliability stress and strength interference theory. The research to date has mainly focused on the embodiment design-for-reliability, since they take embodiment design data as inputs and derive reliability measures of the product as results. On the other hand, the conceptual design, in general, and functional design in specific are usually nonanalytical and nonquantitative and result in little information immediately useful for a detailed reliability analysis. Our research aims to address these gaps and deficiencies and to build a bridge between the reliability research and the conceptual design research in order to realize conceptual design-for-reliability. In this paper, we first review the state of research and practice in the fields of reliability and conceptual design. Building on the previous research, we extend the traditional reliability stress and strength interference theory and develop a conceptual stress and conceptual strength interference theory (CSCSIT) that parametrizes the conceptual design space by introducing reliability related parameters into functional design. Based on CSCSIT, a practical analysis framework is proposed to support functional design-for-reliability. A functional design example is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of CSCSIT and the proposed framework.