Desired Identity Research Articles

Programming human cell fate: overcoming challenges and unlocking potential through technological breakthroughs.

In recent years, there have been notable advancements in the ability to programme human cell identity, enabling us to design and manipulate cell function in a Petri dish. However, current protocols for generating target cell types often lack efficiency and precision, resulting in engineered cells that do not fully replicate the desired identity or functional output. This applies to different methods of cell programming, which face similar challenges that hinder progress and delay the achievement of a more favourable outcome. However, recent technological and analytical breakthroughs have provided us with unprecedented opportunities to advance the way we programme cell fate. The Company of Biologists' 2023 workshop on 'Novel Technologies for Programming Human Cell Fate' brought together experts in human cell fate engineering and experts in single-cell genomics, manipulation and characterisation of cells on a single (sub)cellular level. Here, we summarise the main points that emerged during the workshop's themed discussions. Furthermore, we provide specific examples highlighting the current state of the field as well as its trajectory, offering insights into the potential outcomes resulting from the application of these breakthrough technologies in precisely engineering the identity and function of clinically valuable human cells.

Proactive digital workplace transformation: Unpacking identity change mechanisms in remote-first organisations

Digital transformation fundamentally changes the way individuals conduct work in organisations. In accordance with this statement, prevalent literature understands digital workplace transformation as a second-order effect of implementing new information technology to increase organisational effectiveness or reach other strategic goals. This paper, in contrast, provides empirical evidence from two remote-first organisations that undergo a proactive rather than reactive digital workplace transformation. The analysis of these cases suggests that new ways of working can be the consequence of an identity change that is a precondition for introducing new information technology rather than its outcome. The resulting process model contributes a competing argument to the existing debate in digital transformation literature. Instead of issuing digital workplace transformation as a deliverable of technological progress and strategic goals, this paper supports a notion of digital workplace transformation that serves a desired identity based on work preferences.

The Process of Implementing a Place Brand Based on a Multilevel Approach: The Case of the Municipality of Masquefa

Place branding is a discipline at the intersection of geography and communications, devoted to the process by which places become brands, understood as devices for managing a desired identity presented to the outside world, and also for internal consumption by the residents of the place. This paper intends to explain the conceptualization process of a place brand, and to present the methodological framework for building a brand that takes into account all audiences and stakeholders, thus strengthening the identity of the place. The case presented here is Masquefa, a municipality in the Barcelona province. The methodology has been structured in three phases: first, an initial diagnosis and data gathering; next, fieldwork and public participation (interviews, surveys, and discussion in focus groups); and third, construction of the story. The conclusions of this article show how a municipality without any significant tangible and intangible assets to truly identify it can build a brand story accepted by all agents, both public and private, which will help it grow sustainably in the future.

Literature citation and writer identity construction in linguistic academic discourse

This study revealed the distributional features of literature citation and writer identity in linguistic academic discourse, and further explored how writer identity is constructed through literature citation. Based on Petrić’s citation typology and Ivanič’s writer identity framework, the study investigated various types of citations and identities in thirty journal articles published in the Journal of English for Academic Purposes from 2017 to 2021. The results showed that there are a total of 1637 citation instances, among which the dominant type is attribution citation (36.59 %). Besides, the study revealed that 80.45 % of the total citations construct discoursal self only and 19.55 % reveal both discoursal self and authorial self. In terms of discoursal self, writers present themselves as a member of academic community, a contributor to a field of knowledge, a knowledgeable and professional scholar, and a reliable and credible writer. As for authorial self, they would like to position themselves to be a writer with authority and an evaluator. It is expected that the current study can help novice writers use citations strategically and establish their desired identity accordingly.

Perspectives on the Doctor of Public Health (DrPH) education among students and alumni in the United States: a cross-sectional national online survey

BackgroundThis study explored the current and desired identity of the DrPH degree, focusing on whether the competencies set by the Council on Education for Public Health (CEPH) adequately prepare DrPH graduates for effective public health practice. Additionally, the study investigated the necessity of standardization in DrPH training, referring to a consensus-driven approach that equips future public health practitioners with practical skillsets applicable in real-world scenarios.MethodsA national cross-sectional online survey titled “National DrPH leaders & practitioners needs assessment” was conducted from November 2020 to February 2021. The survey was based on a self-report by DrPH students and DrPH professionals, consisting of the following two main components: (1) how their DrPH training aligns with CEPH competencies and (2) how they perceive the identity of the DrPH degree. Convenience sampling was used to collect the data, which may have limited representation for all DrPH institutions in the United States.ResultsA total of 222 participants (140 current DrPH students and 82 alumni) completed the survey. The mean of the 10-point Likert scale for the degree to which the DrPH training aligns with 26 CEPH competencies (1: not at all – 10: absolutely) ranged from 6.3 (SD: 2.78) to 7.96 (SD: 2.16). The majority of participants (191/222, 86.04%) were satisfied with the knowledge and skills reflected in their training based on the CEPH competencies. However, more than half of the participants (117/222, 52.70%) sought additional professional development/training outside their institutions. DrPH leaders and practitioners faced barriers where the value of their work might not be fully recognized and endorsed. Participants indicated that the DrPH education should be further distinguished from the PhD education.ConclusionsThe DrPH degree holds significant value within the academic sphere of public health practice in the United States. However, its distinction from PhD programs poses a challenge for employers and organizations in the field, requiring attention from higher education programs. By solidifying the DrPH’s identity, graduates can effectively address diverse public health issues and contribute to creating a safe and healthy environment, including addressing the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

CaPTURe: Cartoon Pose Transfer Using Reverse Attention

Most of the previous pose transfer methods require additional input data such as joint keypoints of the target pose extracted by a pre-trained network in a human domain. However, in the fields where cartoon characters are used, such as animation or webtoons, the body proportions and structures of the characters often deviate from those of real-life humans. Therefore, it is not appropriate to utilize a pre-trained network designed for the human domain to extract additional data from these cartoon characters. Even if the network is newly trained in the cartoon domain, expensive data labeling is necessary. As a result, most of the previous pose transfer methods are not suitable for application in the cartoon domain. To address these issues, we propose a cartoon pose transfer network named CaPTURe that can successfully perform pose transfer in the cartoon domain with only target images and no other input data. Here, we incorporate the attention mechanism to accurately generate the desired identity. Additionally, we employ reverse attention to enhance the precision of generating the target pose. This approach eliminates the influence of identity information in the pose feature, enabling our network to focus solely on utilizing pose information. Consequently, through comparative experiments using a cartoon domain dataset, CaPTURe shows significant improvements in quantitative results over the previous state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, it achieves a 4.7% reduction in L1 Distance, a 0.1% improvement in SSIM, and a 0.8% enhancement in LPIPS. Moreover, CaPTURe exhibits superior qualitative performance than the previous state-of-the-art methods. In addition, we demonstrate that CaPTURe is capable of achieving effective pose transfer not just in the cartoon domains, but also in the human domains, as evidenced by our experiments on a human domain dataset.

A note on Rivin’s interpretation of McShane’s identity as identities for closed geodesics with one self-intersection

Rivin interpreted McShane’s identity as an identity for closed geodesics with one self-intersection on a one-cusped hyperbolic torus (cf. [I. Rivin, Geodesics with one self-intersection, and other stories, Adv. Math. 231 (2012) 2391–2412, Theorem 3.2]). In this note we point out that only those geodesics of non-hyperelliptic type are included in the interpreted identity, while those of hyperelliptic type are missing, and we give the desired identity for the closed geodesics with one self-intersection of hyperelliptic type. We also remark that the interpretation in [I. Rivin, Geodesics with one self-intersection, and other stories, Adv. Math. 231 (2012) 2391–2412, Theorem 3.7] of generalized McShane’s identity for a one-coned hyperbolic torus with cone angle [Formula: see text] is only partly valid because closed curves with one minimal self-intersection of non-hyperelliptic type are realizable as closed geodesics on the torus if and only if [Formula: see text].

Management accountants’ image, role and identity: employer branding and identity conflict

PurposeThis study aims to take a step toward integrating research regarding the image, role and identity of management accountants by understanding how employers’ perceptions of the ideal management accountant image differ from operational managers’ perceived role expectations, how management accountants perceive their identity and how those factors shape management accountants’ understanding of who they are and want to be.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative design draws upon the case company’s 100 job advertisements and 31 semi-structured interviews with management accountants and operational managers. Those data are entwined with role theory and its core concepts of expectations and identities and also early recruitment-related theoretical aspects such as image and employer branding.FindingsThe findings reveal how employers’ perceptions of the ideal image and operational managers’ role expectations shape and influence the identity of management accountants. However, management accountants distance themselves from a brand image and role expectations. They experience identity conflict between their current and desired identity, the perception of not being able to perform the currently desired role. Although this study presents some possible reasons and explanations, such as employer branding for the misalignment and discrepancy between perceptions of employer (image), expectations of operational managers (role) and management accountants’ self-conception of the role (identity), this study argues that the identity of a management accountant results from organizational aspects of image and role and individual aspects of identity.Research limitations/implicationsImage and external role expectations can challenge identity construction and also serve as a source of conflict and frustration; thus, a more comprehensive approach to studying the identity of management accountants is necessary to understand what contributes to the fragility of their identity.Practical implicationsThe results provide an understanding of the dynamics of the image, role and identity to support management accountants and employers and to further address the suggested dissonance and ambiguities.Originality/valueThis study contributes by showing how the dynamics and connections between the image, role and identity influence the identity construction of management accountants. Moreover, this study shows how overpromising as a part of employer branding might not reflect the reality experienced by management accountants but may cause frustration and threaten the management accountants’ identity.

Confronting the Contested Past: Sensemaking and Rhetorical History in the Reconstruction of Organizational Identity

This study explores how organizations experience and respond to identity challenges that arise due to conflicting interpretations of their past. Drawing on a case study of a fintech venture, we offer a process model that illuminates the unfolding of “temporal identity complexity,” a sensemaking process that involves different members developing conflicting understandings of how the past undermines the organizational identity. Our model also reveals how leaders can restore members’ beliefs in the organizational identity through “temporal synergizing,” a sensegiving process that recombines conflicting interpretations of the past to support desired identity claims in the present and future. In contrast with prior research that emphasizes the need to construe a sense of identity continuity over time, we show how organizations can instead capitalize on perceived discontinuity in their past to reaffirm identity. We discuss this and other contributions to research on organizational identity, focusing on its threads on sensemaking and rhetorical history. This includes exploring the important role that temporality and emotions play in organizational identity reconstruction.

Aesthetics, Psyche and Media: A Manifold of Mimesis in the Age of Simulation

Within a dialogue with various authors, it seems that there can’t be just one universal reflection that allows us to comprehend the rising dynamism of new media. For example, Baudrillard declared the end of the traditional way of thinking about contemporary media and showed their role in the process of the endless simulation of truth. It has been shown that the contemporary world of media can be considered in dialogue with the philosophical tradition, and be evaluated in the phenomenological psychopathology (Fuchs) evaluation horizon. In this consideration, the notion of variation (Manovich), plays a key role in replacing the traditionally understood notion of mimesis. Artistic practice is precisely the main exemplar that shows the influence of new media on identity construction (simulated versions of personal identity), as well as the relationship between the artistic original and the copy. Although new digital media allows maintenance of desired (identity) simulations, its great potential is evident in enabling subjects to express their individuality, as well as in searching for new ways to improve their quality of life. This context opens a new problem, namely the one of avatar – a selected photo or image that defines the identity of entities present in the fields of the virtual agora (Baudrillard) and private chat rooms of the social media. Avatar`s function is being problematized by asking whether they represent the reduction and closure of the width of a person's beingness within the set image, or whether they facilitate and stimulate its realization by depriving them of the stress and discomfort that is caused by physical confrontation and intercourse with other persons in the living space. The given issue inevitably points to the problem of the general narcissism of our culture (Lasch), calling upon philosophical orientation to enter the discussion.

Facial Animation with Disentangled Identity and Motion using Transformers

AbstractWe propose a 3D+time framework for modeling dynamic sequences of 3D facial shapes, representing realistic non‐rigid motion during a performance. Our work extends neural 3D morphable models by learning a motion manifold using a transformer architecture. More specifically, we derive a novel transformer‐based autoencoder that can model and synthesize 3D geometry sequences of arbitrary length. This transformer naturally determines frame‐to‐frame correlations required to represent the motion manifold, via the internal self‐attention mechanism. Furthermore, our method disentangles the constant facial identity from the time‐varying facial expressions in a performance, using two separate codes to represent neutral identity and the performance itself within separate latent subspaces. Thus, the model represents identity‐agnostic performances that can be paired with an arbitrary new identity code and fed through our new identity‐modulated performance decoder; the result is a sequence of 3D meshes for the performance with the desired identity and temporal length. We demonstrate how our disentangled motion model has natural applications in performance synthesis, performance retargeting, key‐frame interpolation and completion of missing data, performance denoising and retiming, and other potential applications that include full 3D body modeling.

On Dankwa's Gift

On Dankwa's Gift

Identification Narratives, Local Stories, and Virtual Communication

In this article the author summarizes some conclusions drawn following her field research on narration and identity. Language itself is approached language itself as a guardian of ideas, structuring society, using humor as an integrative barrier. It is introduced the term identification narrative as crucial for understanding the self in the context of the community. The author briefly describes the cases of a popular local story that changed local oral practices and of a less popular local story that preserved local oral practices. She analyzes the natural transformations of local stories compared to their translations into the “language” of virtual communication. The author research the impact of new forms of communication on local cultures and how the narrative of the desired identity comes to replace the traditional social narrative of the self.

Swiping as a Single Mom: A First Look at the Experiences of Single Mothers Who Use Tinder

Single mothers who wish to find new dating partners must contend with a lack of free time and the demands of parenting. As online dating has become a more socially acceptable way to access social, romantic, and sexual opportunities, many single mothers are now considering the use of dating apps to pursue their goals. In this article, we explored the vocabularies of motive of single mothers who used the dating app Tinder. For this purpose, we applied the foundational theory of situated action and vocabularies of motive advanced by Mills, which explains how individuals justify their questioned choices and actions in relation to their identities and social contexts. We based our analysis on seven semi-structured interviews with single mothers and seven published accounts of single mothers’ online dating experiences. We identified four vocabularies of motive: (1) freedom and liberation; (2) entertainment; (3) cultivation of eroticism, intimacy, and a desired identity; and (4) temporal justifications. Based on our results, we determined that Tinder appeals to single mothers because of its popularity, potential for experimentation, and swift temporality, which allows these women to quickly access opportunities and synchronize complicated schedules.

Students’ Entrepreneurial Identity Construction: Role and Social Identity Influences

Identity directly impacts how university students behave and make decisions in entrepreneurial practice. Therefore, it is significant to explore the factors influencing the identity construction of student-entrepreneurs to understand how processes are internalized by students, which may then affect their entrepreneurial identity. This article interrogates the formation and transition of the entrepreneurial identity of student-entrepreneurs in a Chinese research university. This paper argues that identity formation is a dynamic and nonlinear process where both role and social identities are involved in its development. Factors that would promote the desired identity formation would include, among others, a tolerant atmosphere across universities, integrating identity issues into the process of entrepreneurship education, and providing university-wide support for entrepreneurship which will be beneficial to improving and sustaining entrepreneurial identity among students.

How to keep the current flowing? factors contributing to the longevity of directed motivational currents

Directed motivational currents (DMCs) depict long-term, heightened engagement in pursuit of a highly desired future identity. While the core theoretical underpinnings of the construct are well-established and it is possible to observe a growing research interest in inducing real-time currents, especially in the foreign language (FL) context, little is known regarding the specific factors contributing to the untypical longevity of DMCs, as the currents are believed to cover timescales of months or even years. This mixed-method study is therefore an attempt to fill the void in the DMC-related research. Following the initial phase of the investigation, which sought to identify prospective DMC cases amongst 247 students of English as a foreign language (EFL) at private language schools, thematic analysis was applied to scrutinise the exact nature of DMC experiences identified. The investigation showed that the flow of motivational energy within the DMC superstructure might be occasionally obstructed by both mental and physical exhaustion and, thus, re-triggering mechanisms are required to maintain the intensity of motivational surges. Two primary factors contributing to the longevity of DMCs were identified, namely the growth of learners’ agency and the re-emergence of one’s superordinate goal.

How being rooted in the past can shape the future: The role of social identity continuity in the wish for a strong leader

Why do people support strong leaders? We examined the link between social identity continuity – the sense that a nation’s past, present, and future are interconnected – and the wish for a strong national leader. Drawing on a multi-country data set (Study 1:N = 6112) and asample from Australia (Study 2:N = 621), Studies 1 and 2 showed that identity continuity was related to increased desire for a strong leader. Studies 3a (UK sample;N = 293) and 3b (US sample;N = 294) further showed that desired (not perceived) identity continuity was related to wish for a strong leader, suggesting that the key ingredient is the desire for continuity regardless of the perceived current levels of continuity. These findings suggest that people may want to preserve their national identity as a link to the past to face present and future challenges, even if it means forgoing democratic leadership.

Professional identity reconstruction: Attempts to match people with new role expectations and environmental demands

Organizations increasingly find themselves in circumstances that generate a need for creating novel identities to deal with novel situations. Through a qualitative study of a professional education programme for military career officers, I explore the reconstruction of professional identities in light of what is perceived as a complex, demanding and changing environment. I found that the programme promoted images and worldviews of an ideal and desired professional identity, which did not match the role transitions and expectations to be enacted by the participants. In addition, the findings show how cultural and organizational dynamics constrained processes of identity reconstruction in the learning context. Implications of the study (e.g. how to theorize and learn from attempts to match people with new role expectations and environmental demands) are discussed. By building bridges across socialization theory, identity work and research on identities in context, and hereby integrating micro- and macro perspectives on professional identity reconstruction, existing theory is elaborated. The article concludes by pointing to the analytical value of exploring how professionals in later stages of their careers struggle to adopt timely and relevant identities and how we better understand the challenges stemming from this identity reconstruction work.

“We Must Protect This Peace with Our Hands”: Strategic Culture and Japan’s Use of Force in International Disputes as Depicted in Ministry of Defense Manga Promotional Materials

Japan’s national security identity and its elite strategic culture are at odds with each other, with the former moored to deep-rooted historical legacies and the latter yearning to adapt to contemporary imperatives, including the need to more actively cooperate with the United States in maintaining peace and stability in Asia. How can this tension be overcome? How do defense planners attempt to shape public perceptions of the military’s changing roles in society? And what might their efforts to do so teach us about how they view the desired identity, norms, and values of Japan’s military in relation to the use of force in international disputes?

You Taste Who You Are: The Impact of Wine Labeling on The Sensory Taste of Wine

Within a culture, individuals may have difficulty distinguishing themselves or projecting who they want to be to both themselves and others. Consumers are able to express a self-definition through the systematic appropriation of goods that represent who an individual wants to be (McCracken, 1986). This study focuses specifically on the connection that consumption culture has to the formation of identity within the conceptual framework of consumption culture theory. Within this framework, consumers are viewed as identity seekers navigating opportunities in the marketplace that provide messages that embrace who they are (Askegaard & Linnet, 2011). Specifically, this research explores how relating to the visual sensory cues on a wine label can symbolically represent a desired identity, which may influence the sensory experience of wine.Five distinct research phases were used to address the central research question: do wine label visual sensory cues influence the perceived sensory taste of wine? Two online surveys, two in-person sensory evaluation tests, and in-depth interviews were conducted to explore the individual sensory impact of constructing an identity through consumption. As people seek to author their sense of self through the visual sensory cues that provide meaning to that person, there may be a cross-modal sensory association that influences the actual taste of the wine.