Contradictory Implications Research Articles

Going Native/Viral in Russian Popular Music: Aesthetic Populism, Patriotic Anti-racism, and the Quest for Hip-Hop Authenticity in Timati’s Teymuraz Music Video Trilogy

This paper critically analyzes the 2010s’ viral music video trilogy featuring Teymuraz, a stage and video persona of the Russian/Tatar/Jewish hip-hop artist Timati. Using hyperbolized stereotypes of a racialized taxi driver from the Caucasus/Central Asia, the hybrid aesthetics of Teymuraz fuses the elements of New East style, post-Soviet cultural recycling, social critique, and appropriates the voices of the subaltern. Contextualizing Teymuraz as a strategy of racial translation of US hip-hop and as a part of the Russian cultural trend of aesthetic populism, I analyze the work of racial signification in the trilogy that relies on multimodal racial metonymy. I read the trilogy as a peculiar Russian patriotic anti-racist project with contradictory implications. Having been haunted by the accusations of ‘copying’ US rappers throughout his career, Timati negotiates the stigma of imitation, transgressing it in Teymuraz, exploiting his own ethnoracial ambiguity, chronic hip-hop inauthenticity, and the aesthetic populism trend.

Singing songs for a secular society? The elusive politics of cultural activism in contemporary Bangladesh

Abstract In Bangladesh, many secularists pursue their political goals through cultural activism. While committed to achieving a secular, progressive, and non-communal society, they often refrain from explicitly articulating their politics due to the sensitivity of their goals. Instead, cultural performances allow them to instantiate and embody a secular ethos with transformative potential, expressed through distinct cultural genres that become recognized as secular aesthetics. While activists consider culture to be a morally superior and ‘purer’ way to promote their political aims than party politics, which they perceive as ‘dirty’ and corrupt, cultural traditions are hardly neutral ground from which to enact secular aspirations. This article explores the ethical struggles that emerge from this position to illuminate what it means to act politically while trying to avoid politics, and why people might choose comparatively elusive forms of political engagement despite their strong commitment to a cause. Attending to less tangible forms of politics encourages us to rethink the role of political messages and visibility in social movements by highlighting the significant role, as well as contradictory implications, of aesthetics, embodiment, and gestures in political action. Conversely, the elusive politics of cultural activism underlines the need to go beyond analysing national discourses to understand the contested nature of secularism in Bangladesh.

The contradictions of unconventional monetary policy as a post-2008 thwarting mechanism: financial dominance, shadow banking, and inequality

The global financial crisis (GFC) of 2008 has triggered profound changes in the macro-financial regulatory architecture. Ever since, the interplay between political, institutional, and macroeconomic developments has received increasing attention in political economy, as in the evolutionary macro-financial approach of institutional super-cycles with its concept of thwarting mechanisms. While these institutional structures aim to stabilise the macro-financial system, they may also contradict each other due to unintended side effects. This paper argues that the understanding of thwarting mechanisms can be enriched by further integrating it with political economy literature on finance within the post-GFC institutional setup. It conceptualises unconventional monetary policy as a novel thwarting mechanism and analyses the contradictory implications for overall macro-financial stability with a particular focus on aggregate demand. It suggests three reasons why this thwarting mechanism failed to restore sustained economic growth in the post-crisis decade: First, sustained large-scale asset purchases perpetuate the structural drivers of financial dominance in political power relations, entrenching the role of the shadow banking system within the macro-financial order and impairing the development of other thwarting mechanisms. Second, unconventional monetary policy maintains the tenets of the inflation targeting regime and thereby sustains neoliberal macroeconomic governance with restrained fiscal policy. Third, it exacerbates preexisting wealth and income inequality by redistributing wealth towards asset owners, undermines consumer demand, and thus contributes to stagnation tendencies. Thus, this paper suggests that the contradictions of this novel post-GFC thwarting mechanism contribute to weaken economic growth and thus fail to restore macro-financial stability.

From Industry 4.0 Digital Manufacturing to Industry 5.0 Digital Society: a Roadmap Toward Human-Centric, Sustainable, and Resilient Production

AbstractThe present study addresses two critical controversies surrounding the emerging Industry 5.0 agenda. Firstly, it seeks to elucidate the driving forces behind the accelerated momentum of the Industry 5.0 agenda amidst the ongoing digital industrial transformation. Secondly, it explores how the agenda’s sustainability values can be effectively realised. The study conducted a comprehensive content-centric literature synthesis and identified how Industry 4.0 shortcomings adversely impacted sustainability values. Furthermore, the study implements a novel approach that determines how and in what order the sustainability functions of Industry 4.0 should be leveraged to promote the sustainability objectives of Industry 5.0. Results reveal that Industry 4.0 has benefited economic and environmental sustainability values most at the organisational and supply chain levels. Nonetheless, most micro and meso-social sustainability values have been adversely impacted by Industry 4.0. Similarly, Industry 4.0 has been worryingly detrimental to macro sustainability values like social or economic growth equality. These contradictory implications of Industry 4.0 have pulled the Industry 5.0 agenda. However, the results identified nine sustainability functions of Industry 4.0 that, when leveraged appropriately and in the correct order, can offer important implications for realising the economic and socio-environmental goals of Industry 5.0. For example, under extreme unpredictability of business world uncertainties, the business should first leverage the automation and integration capabilities of Industry 4.0 to gain the necessary cost-saving, resource efficiency, risk management capability, and business antifragility that allow them to introduce sustainable innovation into their business model without jeopardising their survival. Various scenarios for empowering Industry 5.0 sustainability values identified in the present study offer important implications for knowledge and practice.

Business, power, and private regulatory governance: Shaping subjectivities and limiting possibilities in the gold supply chain

AbstractTo examine how private regulatory governance reproduces a market logic that always already circumscribes possibilities for radical change, we tarry with Michel Foucault's notion of governmentality and his writings on power. We focus on two major initiatives created to regulate gold supply chains, subjecting their publicly released documents to a discourse analysis. This reveals subtle but tangible examples of how these initiatives discursively shape business preferences and possibilities for engaging with a social change agenda. Through a focus on how power circulating through these initiatives works to shape the identities and interests of business actors themselves, we contribute a new perspective to the literature on business, power, and private regulatory governance, one that highlights the ways through which these discourses both expand and limit business actors' engagement in setting social agendas and the mixed and sometimes seemingly contradictory implications for the public interest.

Public Sector Projectification – A Systematic Review of the Literature


 
 
 “Projectification” is an emerging subdomain of project management research which argues that proliferation of projects is one of the most important current trends in the public sector. As an emerging sub-field within projectification research, “public sector projectification” has been given increasing attention in the past few years. This article presents a structured literature review (SLR) on “public sector projectification”, with the aim of systematising the existing empirical knowledge guided by the research question: “What are the empirical implications of public sector projectification at the personal, organisational and societal levels in journal articles?” The SLR search detects 53 articles published between 2009 and 2021. Articles were detected by a literature search in three selected scholarly research databases and by reviewing cited references in the articles detected. By analysing researched empirical implications from the projectification literature at the three levels of personal, organisational, and societal, the SLR demonstrates that public sector projectification is a multilevel phenomenon with contradictory implications and interesting dynamics between the levels, which should gain increased attention in both research and practice to release the potential for organising projects in the public sector context.
 
 

E-formality and data justice: the individualization of street trade in Recife, Brazil

ABSTRACT Informal street trade has historically been seen by local authorities as backward, inefficient, and detrimental to urban areas and thus, has been subject to formalization policies. This paper reports on an ethnographic study of a project that sought to formalize street trade in Recife (Brazil). Street trade was presented by the City Council as hindering urban mobility, unhygienic and detrimental to the development of the city. A spreadsheet was developed to record, license and enforce the formalization of street trade. The spreadsheet and its classification scheme expanded the possibilities of control over individual street vendors. We will argue that formalization requires street traders to be rendered objects and subjects of knowledge. What this does is to individualize and discipline street trade. More substantially, we argue that the regulations and classification scheme shaped understandings of street trade as becoming individualized and this led to some contradictory implications for urban street trade.

Methodological decisions and their impacts on the perceived relations between school funding and educational achievement

Use of quantile regression, analysis at different levels of aggregation, and inclusion of covariates were used to assess how different methodologies produced varying results with contradictory implications for policy interventions regarding the relation between school funding and achievement. Results indicated that significantly different relations existed at various quantiles of the distribution of achievement, both for student and school-level outcomes. Further, significant differences were found when outcomes at the school-level were compared to outcomes for individual students. Finally, the inclusion of SES drastically altered the results of every analysis in this study, indicating the importance of controlling for confounds. Taking all of these findings into account, we find that higher levels of funding at the student-level were associated with smaller gaps in growth in achievement by SES for lower achieving students. The opposite finding was found at the school level, with higher levels of funding at the school level being associated with larger gaps in growth in achievement based on SES. We compare our findings to results of existing studies, framing our results and interpretations thereof in weighted-student funding literature. Discussion on how these findings can be translated into quasi-experimental research designs are also included.

Re-Embedding and Disembedding in Post-Socialist Hungary: An Analysis of Orbanism from a Polanyian Perspective

The rise of populist authoritarianism is a substantial reversal of the liberal democratic path in Central and Eastern Europe, including Hungary. What explains Hungary’s authoritarian turn toward Orbánism and what are the components of Orbánism that consolidate its claim to power? This paper uses a Polányian perspective and argues that the populist authoritarian turn occurred in the context of the social dislocation of the post-socialist transition period in the 1990s and 2000s. Viktor Orbán and Fidesz’ populist authoritarianism filled a political vacuum by offering a new re-embedding strategy for the population, which included material (full employment, family policy, remittances) and ideological (ethnic nationalism, xenophobia, Christian conservatism) policies. However, Orbánism has contradictory implications, because (1) material embedding takes the form of a punitive and highly conditional workfare regime, and (2) the regime simultaneously advances “disembedding” features including pro-oligarchic, pro-foreign investor, pro-rich, anti-union and anti-welfare policies. As a result, Orbán’s power consolidation is premised on political authoritarianism to prevent any expected discontent from threatening the regime.

“So Far to Leeward”: Eliza Moore’s Fugitive Cosmopolitan Routes to Freedom in the Nineteenth-Century Caribbean

Eliza Moore, an enslaved domestic born in British Antigua in the late 1700s, petitioned for her freedom in 1836 and 1838, using Britain’s 1834 abolition of slavery to facilitate her emancipation from the Danish Caribbean. The article frames Moore’s liberation efforts as “fugitive cosmopolitanism,” a concept emphasizing that enslaved people’s subjectivity within the Black Atlantic was marked by travels across great distances and a hard-won savvy—derived from licit and illicit movements in service of freedom—but also by constant uncertainty and an unguaranteed liberty. The unlikely ways that mid-nineteenth-century enslaved people in the Caribbean learned that their bondage was unlawful reflected the cosmopolitan knowledge they acquired through dangerous acts of fugitivity. Moore’s ultimately successful attempt to assert British subjecthood also depended on the support of her kinswomen in Antigua, as well as the broader and contradictory implications of British abolitionism in an era of continued imperial competition and enslavement elsewhere in the Caribbean. Additionally, her trajectory reveals the multilayered exploitation at work in women’s enslavement, as the risk of rape and sexual servitude remained ever-present in the Danish domestic slavery that Moore endured. The uncertainty that overshadowed Moore’s efforts to self-emancipate made her eventual freedom bittersweet at best, as her return to Antigua as a British subject disrupted her ties to a son who remained enslaved in Saint Thomas.

The demons haunting thermodynamics

The contradictory implications of statistical mechanics have worried physicists and philosophers for centuries. Does our present-day knowledge allow us to exorcize those philosophical demons?

Bits and Pieces

Covid19-pandemic has had a profound impact on the way we live and on the social reality in the world around us. Except for the enormous strain on public and health of individuals, it has affected social functioning to great extent, at least temporarily. It has sped up digitalization and forced social activities to transfer to the digital realm to an unprecedented level. It has simultaenously confined social actors to their geographical localities. In all of this, it has offered an opportunity of different observational point of human being in the world in the context of late modernity. It is possible to assume that this kind of social situation has the potential to affect the sense of ontological security of social actors, as well as their experience of space. The contradictory implications of the transfer of the social activitiy to the digital communicative spaces to current extent are also discussed.

Vehicle-to-Grid in the UK fleet market: An analysis of upscaling potential in a changing environment

Vehicle fleets are considered an important context for the deployment of innovations such as electric vehicles and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology. Fleet vehicles constitute a significant share of vehicle registrations, yet little research has been conducted into how the make-up of the changing fleet market could influence upscaling of innovations. This paper presents an in-depth study of the fleet market in the United Kingdom and assesses synergies between V2G and vehicle fleets by analysing socio-technical trends. The approach taken allows for analysing the role of users and markets in upscaling socio-technical transitions. The paper provides a system-level account of the fleet market, and shows how changing user characteristics, the rise of telematics, Low Emission Zones and changes to business operations and labour relations present specific drivers and challenges for V2G. It is concluded that user-related changes in the market environment are highly influential in shaping the upscaling trajectory of sustainable innovations such as V2G. • User-centered analysis of market dynamics in socio-technical transition. • Fleets are a potential domain for the application of V2G. • Fleet market trends have contradictory implications for V2G uptake. • Changes in fleet management practices and vehicle use patterns are influential. • Labour relations with drivers could impact V2G potential.

Investigating minimum income condition orders on European power exchanges: Controversial properties and enhancement proposals

One of the most difficult challenges of deregulated electricity markets is the proper management and operation planning of economically non-convex generators. The origin of economic non-convexity is twofold. Firstly, generators generally have non-zero minimum output power (MOP) levels, below which they cannot sustain operation. Secondly, they might have substantial fixed costs. The direct consideration of these characteristics leads to very hard non-convex mathematical problems with the increased probability of computational difficulties and long solution time for the market clearing process.Complex orders with explicit Minimum Income Conditions (MICs) have been invented to provide a method to represent non-convex generators on European day-ahead power exchanges. The rationale is that a MIC can be attached to a set of simple supply bids, which means that these bids can be accepted only if their acquired incomes surpass bidder-specified minimal values.The present research is conducted to investigate several controversial issues concerning the current use of MICs from the viewpoint of market participants. Firstly, no direct mechanism is provided to handle the MOP of generators. Secondly, simple bid price constraints and simultaneously attached income criteria can have contradictory implications that lead to sub-optimal clearing results. Thirdly, the current use of MICs contributes to cheating opportunities, because it entails distortions in the social welfare calculation. The paper defines new ways of MIC attachment to circumvent the revealed hindrances. For this purpose, several modification techniques are considered such as the discretization of bid quantities, the relaxation of elementary bid pricing rules and the revision of social welfare calculation. Two novel order types are proposed, supported by comparative numerical simulations using realistic market data.

Interplay between labour dynamics, accounting and accountability practices during the rise of a political logic: an Egyptian case study

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to provide a political explanation of management, accounting and control (MAC) practices in a traditional and unstable African setting. This was done by exploring the influence of latest revolutionary politics in Egypt along with labour dynamics in the context.Design/methodology/approachTheoretically, the study uses the institutional logics perspective to understand the effects of higher order institutions on corporate management and workers at the micro level. Methodologically, the study adopts an interpretative case study approach. Data were collected using a triangulation of interviews, documents and observations.FindingsThe study finds that volatile political settings can have different contradictory implications for MAC practices. It also concludes that revolutionary events play a central role not only in the configuration of MAC practices but also in the mobilisation of labour resistance to these practices.Originality/valueThe study contributes to the literature by investigating the different appearances of MAC practices in a volatile, political or revolutionary context, in contrast to highly investigated stabilised Western contexts. This broadens the definition of the social in the area of accounting and control.

On the reliability of highly magnified micrographs for structural analysis in materials science

Highly magnified micrographs are part of the majority of publications in materials science and related fields. They are often the basis for discussions and far-reaching conclusions on the nature of the specimen. In many cases, reviewers demand and researchers deliver only the bare minimum of micrographs to substantiate the research hypothesis at hand. In this work, we use heterogeneous poly(acrylonitrile) nanofiber nonwovens with embedded nanoparticles to demonstrate how an insufficient or biased micrograph selection may lead to erroneous conclusions. Different micrographs taken by transmission electron microscopy and helium ion microscopy with sometimes contradictory implications were analyzed and used as a basis for micromagnetic simulations. With this, we try to raise awareness for the possible consequences of cherry-picking for the reliability of scientific literature.

The GHSZ Argument: A Gedankenexperiment Requiring More Denken.

I reassess the gedankenexperiment of Greenberger, Horne, Shimony, and Zeilinger after twenty-five years, finding their influential claim to the discovery of an inconsistency inherent in high dimensional formulations of local realism to arise from a fundamental error of logic. They manage this by presuming contradictory premises: that a specific linear combination of four angles involved in their proposed parallel experiments on two pairs of electrons equals both and 0 at the same time. Ignoring this while presuming the contradictory implications of these two conditions, they introduce the contradiction themselves. The notation they use in their “derivation” is not sufficiently ornate to represent the entanglement in the double electron spin pair problem they design, confounding their error. The situation they propose actually motivates only an understanding of the full array of symmetries involved in their problem. In tandem with the error now recognised in the supposed defiance of Bell’s inequality by quantum probabilities, my reassessment of their work should motivate a reevaluation of the current consensus outlook regarding the principle of local realism and the proposition of hidden variables.

Genetic profiling and TCR repertoire feature of synchronous multiple primary lung carcinomas.

e21031 Background: The incidence and detection rates of multiple primary lung cancer are increasing, as a result of the advances in lung cancer screening techniques. However, the molecular and immune mechanisms of their carcinogenesis were little known, which may have important diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic implications. Methods: We retrospective analyzed 10 patients (pts) with clinically designated synchronous multiple primary lung cancers (sMPLC). 28 different tumor lesions were included and mutation profiles were analyzed using 1021 genes panel based next-generation sequencing (NGS). Meanwhile, the T-cell receptor (TCR) β repertoire of 28 tumor lesions and peripheral blood were analyzed by amplifying and sequencing the CDR3 region. T-cell clonality was defined as 1-normalized Shannon entropy, which was normalized by dividing Shannon entropy by the natural logarithm of the number of unique productive TCR sequences. Results: 8 of 10 pts were female and only one pts was smoker. The genetic profiles of 28 tissues were analyzed and almost no common mutations were detected between different tumors of one patient. The most common mutation was EGFR and it was detected in 11 tissues belonging to 7 pts. KRAS mutations were detected in 6 tissues belonging to 4 pts and only one patient detected both EGFR and KRAS mutation in different lesions. TP53 mutations were found in 6 tissues, which 5 co-existed with EGFR. Unlike the mutually exclusive between KRAS and EGFR, 4 pts were detected BRAF mutation whose other tissue aslo carried EGFR mutation. Next, we studied T-cell clonality, which ranges from 0 to 1 and describes the shape of T-cell frequency distribution. Analysis of TCR clonality revealed that this metric ranged from 0.092 in Pts T8 to 0.192 in Pts T5. Furthermore, heterogeneity of different lesions of pts was observed, with differences as large as 78% in T-cell clonality across different tumor lesions in Pts T2, which is bigger than difference of between patients. Beside, EGFR mutation lesions showed lower clonality but no significant differences (0.105 vs 0.130,p = 0.245). There no difference of number of non-synonymous mutation (NNSM) between EGFR-mutant and EGFR-wt group (3 vs 2, p = 0.748), and same in KRAS (3.5 vs 2, p = 0.410). However, frequency of share TCR of tissue and blood was positive correlated with NNSM (spearman r = 0.384,p = 0.048), which might means local immune microenvironment was related with regions mutation. Conclusions: Our results reveals independent molecular and immune feature of sMPLC pts, which may have contradictory therapeutic implications.

Discriminatory price auctions with resale and optimal quantity caps

We present a model of a discriminatory price auction in which a large bidder competes against many small bidders, followed by a post‐auction resale stage in which the large bidder is endogenously determined to be a buyer or a seller. We extend results on first‐price auctions with resale to this setting and use these results to give a tractable characterization of equilibrium behavior. We use this characterization to study the policy of capping the amount that may be won by large bidders in the auction, a policy that has received little attention in the auction literature. Our analysis shows that the trade‐offs involved when adjusting these quantity caps can be understood in terms familiar to students of asymmetric first‐price single‐unit auctions. Furthermore, whether one seeks to maximize welfare or revenue can have contradictory implications for the choice of cap.

The Future of Housework: The Similarities and Differences Between Making Kin and Making Babies

ABSTRACTThis article critiques Donna Haraway’s slogan ‘make kin not babies’ via a reading of her SF tale ‘The Camille Stories’. It does so by considering the relationship between the care labour practices involved in making both kin and babies. The article has two central operations. It is an explicitly eco-social feminist argument against the use of making kin as an uncomplicated theoretical standpoint in the environmental humanities. At the same time, it deconstructs the iconic feminist ambit to be liberated from housework. These parallel operations emerge by characterising making kin as a kind of housework, which is a deeply ironic evaluation of Haraway’s slogan. Overall the article is a response to the question: how is the work involved in making kin both the same as and different to the labour of making babies? The answer is constructed through the method of literary close reading, paying attention to genre and plot of ‘The Camille Stories’ alongside Fiona McGregor’s novel Indelible Ink [2010. Melbourne: Scribe Publications] and Quinn Eades’s all the beginnings: a queer autobiography of the body [2015. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing]. These comparative readings enable a reckoning with the gnarly and contradictory implications of ‘making kin’ across contemporary environmental humanities and feminisms.