Dialectical Tension Research Articles

Exploring tensions of Industry 4.0 adoption in lean production systems from a dialectical perspective

PurposeThis paper uses dialectical inquiry to explore tensions that arise when adopting Industry 4.0 technologies in a lean production system and their reconciliation mechanisms.Design/methodology/approachWe conducted an in-depth qualitative case study over a 3-year period on an Italian division of an international electrotechnical organisation that produces electrical switches. This organisation successfully adopted Industry 4.0 technologies in a lean production system. The study is based on primary data such as observations and semi-structured interviews, along with secondary data.FindingsWe identify four empirically validated dialectic tensions arising across different Industry 4.0 adoption stages due to managers’ and workers’ contrasting interpretations of technologies. Consequently, we define the related reconciliation mechanisms that allow the effective adoption of various Industry 4.0 technologies to support a lean production system.Originality/valueThis is the first empirical investigation of tensions in the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies in a lean production system. Furthermore, the paper presents four theoretical propositions and a conceptual model describing which tensions arise during the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies in a lean production system and the reconciliation mechanisms that prevent lean production system deterioration.

About the published content on each section

About the published content on each section

Facing life: the messy bodies of enactive cognitive science

AbstractDescriptions of bodies within the literature of the enactive approach to cognitive science exhibit an interesting dialectical tension. On the one hand, a body is considered to be a unity which instantiates an identity, forming an intrinsic basis for value. On the other, a living body is in a reciprocally defining relationship with the environment, and is therefore immersed and entangled with, rather than distinct from, its environment. In this paper I examine this tension, and its implications for the enactive approach, particularly the enactive conceptions of life and bodies. Following the lead of others, I argue that enactive cognitive science can benefit from a deeper reading and integration with extant work on the complexity and multiplicity of the living body within feminist philosophy and feminist science studies.

On solidarity and generosity in supervision

In the supervisory process, dialectical tensions arise between the supervisee and the supervisor. Often, the source of these tensions is the significant difference in their perceptions of the meanings of the unfolding therapeutic reality, intensified by belonging to distinct professional generations and reconstructing therapeutic interactions in different ways. According to the Hegelian model, mutual recognition and validation as independent and autonomous professionals help the supervisory dyad overcome dialectical tensions, reach new understandings, and grow as clinicians. Supervisors who acknowledge their vulnerability and manifest generosity and solidarity with supervisees can readily recognize and validate the supervisees and minimize the dialectical tensions.

The rhetoric of democracy in United States Senate campaign debates

ABSTRACT This project analyzes the rhetoric of democracy, voting, and elections in United States Senate campaign debates during the 2022 midterm elections. Using C-SPAN video archives, we examine candidate exchanges focused on the 2020 election, ballot access, and the peaceful transfer of power. We find that while Democratic and Republican candidates used dramatically different language and arguments to describe their positions on elections, candidates in both parties laid claim to the mantle of “democracy defender.” Democracy functioned as a floating signifier deployed even by election deniers who recast election interference as election protection and positioned themselves as agents of responsive government while obfuscating President Trump’s, and in some cases their own, responsibility for spreading election conspiracies. This rhetorical analysis illuminates how political elites approach questions of democracy and electoral fairness in an era shaped by misinformation and fractured communication environments. Our study advances understanding of the dialectical tensions in conceptualizations of democracy and the role of campaign debates in a post-truth rhetorical climate.

Temporal Dislocation

This body of work navigates the dialectical tension between the destruction and renewal of our relationship with landscapes, both contemporary and historical, and the intricacies of activities evident within constructed environments. These quasi-sculptural forms serve as poignant markers of power, class, and labor embedded in the English landscape. The work probes the fragile equilibrium between stability and impermanence, highlighting the cyclicality of the natural world after human intervention. It seeks to illuminate how form naturally follows function, unveiling the innate aesthetics within ordinary "found" objects. These forms offer an enduring narrative of their utilitarian evolution, underscoring the beauty inherent in utilitarian simplicity. At its core, this work is driven by phenomenological intent, bridging the gap between the photographer's deliberate framing and the casual viewer's passive encounter with these constructed landscapes. The photograph becomes a subtle language inviting viewers to reevaluate the ostensibly banal and ubiquitous. This body of work challenges the boundaries between fact and objectivity, employing angles that prompt a deeper understanding and reflective exploration of unacknowledged memories and logics. It references scientific approaches and surveys while drawing inspiration from brutalism theories and human responses to utilitarian environments throughout their evolution. Cover image: Temporal Dislocation - Watchtower (2011)

The Dialectic of Christian Politics

This article suggests that the problem of Christianity’s involvement in the world of politics may be described as taking the form of a dialectic of Christian politics. This means that while the transcendent essence of Christianity is apolitical, the presence of the Christian message in the immanent world always brings with it political consequences and makes Christendom a part of political life. The dialectic is presented with reference to the thought of two key contemporary Christian thinkers: Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) and Jacques Maritain (1882-1973). Both recognized the dialectical tension inherent in Christianity, but each found a different solution to this problem: whereas Kierkegaard denies Christianity any possibility of political involvement, Maritain concludes that such involvement is necessary for proper Christian existence in the world. The goal of this article is to uncover, on the basis of their considerations, a third, positive solution to the dialectic of Christian politics—a model that would demonstrate how the elements of the Christian ideal (transcendence) could be transferred to the temporal world (immanence), morally improving the latter without becoming falsified in it.

Thinking Gestures. On How the Philosophical Conceptualization of Ordinary Life Can Be Shaped by Art Practices

Abstract As a speculative and abstract discipline, philosophy is traditionally considered to be in dialectical tension with physical experience and daily practice. In contrast to this conventional and idealistic perspective, and in line with aesthetics as embodied knowledge, this article attempts to show that not only do we constantly think via gestures, movements, and physical experiences but also that there is no need to disconnect a concept from practice. Passing from Wittgenstein’s idea of “form of life” to the pragmatist aesthetics initiated by Dewey’s idea of “art as experience,” I propose an analysis of the philosophical framework of postmodern dance (Yvonne Rainer) and of Happenings (Allan Kaprow), in order to underline the theoretical and conceptual research that is already at work in the field of contemporary art practice, the latter being understood as a sensorial dimension intrinsically linked to ordinary life. My general argument is that gestures, which are an inescapable and vital part of everyday life, can be foregrounded by certain artistic practices without corrupting or theatricalizing their ordinariness.

Work Characteristics Needed by Middle Managers When Leading AI-Integrated Service Teams

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a significant part of digital transformation that signifies new requirements for middle managers in AI-integrated work contexts. This is particularly evident in financial service industries. Given the significance and rapidity of this technological transition, this case study investigated how middle managers perceived the impacts of AI system integration on their work characteristics. Interview data were gathered from 25 middle managers of a company providing financial services. The data were analyzed using the Gioia method. The findings showed that the AI systems applied in the case company were perceived as technical tools (mechanical AI) or coworkers (thinking AI and feeling AI), which had different impacts on middle managers’ work characteristics and the relationship between humans and AI systems. The middle managers’ work characteristics included contextual, task, competence, social, and relationship characteristics. Regarding the relationship characteristics, this study shows theoretically distinct human–AI relationship types. The findings are organized into a conceptual framework. AI system integration in service teams is a complex phenomenon that makes middle managers’ work more demanding and requires balancing and managing multiple challenges and dialectical tensions. The findings inform the selection and training of managers according to changing work characteristics in the digital age.

A case for popular geoeconomics: Angelina Jolie, China, and the semiotic limits of the archive

AbstractPicking up where Mallin and Sidaway (2023) left off, this commentary makes a case for popular geoeconomics—as well as geoeconomics beyond the Beltway. We address the dialectical tension between geoeconomics and geopolitics as it is demonstrated through popular and geo‐dispersed renderings of the concept. Geoeconomic visionaries drive geopolitical relations not only by revaluing land, labour and resources across space but through their everyday enactments and popular expressions. We comment on how geoeconomics is enrolled into popular culture and plays out through the Hollywood icon Angelina Jolie, as well as its articulation beyond the Anglosphere in Mandarin language scholarship. The geoeconomics debate in Mandarin, as well as its mediation by celebrities, formidably contribute to the refashioning of the global geoeconomic landscape. In doing so, we expand the critical genealogy of geoeconomics as a concept, field of inquiry and everyday experience, and account for the semiotic limits of the archive.

Digital compensation: Smartphone use in the emotion socialisation of left-behind children in rural China

Through field investigations in two populous Chinese provinces, this study proposes a grounded theory of digital compensation afforded by smartphone usage in the emotion socialisation of left-behind children. Our interviews found that these children suffer from emotional deficiencies or deficits caused by the absence of parents’ emotional companionship, a lack of emotional education within the family and a decline in playmates in their rural communities. Our study also revealed the dialectical tension between the possibilities and ramifications of digital compensation. In a miniature media ecology constructed by smartphones, migrant parents provide virtual companionship and peers help build social capital, while stay-at-home grandparents perform a scaffolding or gatekeeping role, providing a symbolic sense of emotional compensation. Instead of addressing the root causes of the children’s emotional distress, the compensatory affordances of smartphone use have had concerning consequences of intense feelings of deprivation and social reversal that exacerbate their loneliness and isolation.

Reviving trace: photographic image within the treatment of pain experiences

Recognition the importance of other people’s experiences is one of the urgent philosophical problems. If by the middle of the 19th century people encountered painful experiences of others directly or through witnesses, since then after the advent of media technologies, the role of the witness was replaced by the anonymous visual. Visual images are formations whose structure avoids ambiguity and creates a field for multiple interpretations. This duality is well reflected by the nature of the photographic image. It is characterized by a dialectical tension: on the one hand, capturing someone’s painful experience the photograph represents the mental state of a person, but on the other hand, it raises the question of an unambiguous attitude towards it. The ambiguity of the photographic image yields a dilemma: either to accept what we see on faith and base our moral discussion of events on it alone, or to analyze the action of the forces hidden in the work of the photographic image. To talk about photographing suffering means to declare a certain ethical and political position. The case of the photograph problematizes the requirement of ethical involvement, because the photograph can simply be ignored. The article shows how the photographic image communicates the criteria, using which a perceiver is able to fit what he sees into the context of his own political and social world. Having performed the act of recognition, a perceiver is able to politicize human life as an irreplaceable value. In such acts, he actualizes his own subjectivity through the recognition of the photographic image as a part of common shared reality. He perceives the signs of someone else’s pain in the photo as a reason to reflect on human vulnerability. For this, the perceiver must carry out a complex procedure of image interpretation, stripping it off anonymous universal features.

How affected family members communicate about their loved one’s non-medical opioid use

Family members of people who misuse opioids frequently experience stigma due to their association with non-medical opioid use (NMOU). Stigma may affect how family members communicate about NMOU and seek social support. Guided by communication privacy management theory, this study sought to understand how affected family members (AFMs) communicate about NMOU within and outside of the immediate family. In-depth interviews were conducted with 34 adults with an immediate relative with NMOU. Qualitative analyses utilized a common iterative approach. Findings identified complex dialectical tensions that families traverse in both wanting to conceal stigmatizing information while simultaneously wanting to disclose information to engage support for themselves during stressful experiences. Strategies to resolve this tension included focusing on the good, functional updates, and moving from closed to open communication boundaries. Treatment for individuals with NMOU should engage families and assist with the resolution of communication privacy management tensions.

TRADITION AND MODERNIZATION: DIALECTICAL TENSIONS IN CREATIVE RELIGIOUS PRACTICES OF THE SUNDANESE URBAN COMMUNITIES

This study focuses on the religious construction of Sundanese urban communities in the city of Bandung, West Java, Indonesia, which is characterized by dialectical tensions between the need to preserve tradition and the desire to adapt to modernization. These tensions have led to the emergence of various forms of creative and ambiguous religious and cultural practices. The study is based on ethnographic research conducted among the Sundanese urban communities in Bandung, using literature documentation, observations, and interviews as data collection methods. The study findings reveal that the religious practices of Sundanese urban communities are shaped by the diverse elements of urban life. The religious practices are ambiguous due to the dialectical tensions between preserving tradition and adapting to modernization, rationality and irrationality, personal freedom and communal identity, and cultural wisdom values and exclusive Islamic teachings. The unique urban-cultural religious phenomena, such as urban Sufism, hijra (South Asia) movements, religious-identity politics, or the preservation of Sundanese cultural rites with Islamic content, are examples of the religious creativity that emerges as a result of the communities’ understanding of the application of faith in the midst of ideological cultural traditions and pragmatic interests. The study results offer a sociological perspective on the modern life of Sundanese urban communities, where the application of theological-traditional values of religious teachings and pragmatic-modern values of urban life leads to creative constructions.

Learning to co-teach: understanding the co- in a mentored co-teaching activity

PurposeCo-teaching is a foundational mentoring model used in teacher residency programs in urban classrooms throughout the United States of America. Beyond the basic understanding of co-teaching in categorizing classroom models, the purpose of this qualitative case study is to investigate the dialectical tensions manifested in mentored co-teaching activities through the lens of cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT).Design/methodology/approachDesigned as a qualitative case study of 17 pairs of teaching-residents and mentor-teachers, the authors used thematic analysis to scrutinize archival interview data in an urban teacher residency program located in the largest megalopolis of the USA Northeast. The authors used CHAT-based concept coding to analyze the interview narratives from participants across different secondary school placements as they reflected on their co-teaching philosophy and the relationships they built.FindingsThe authors found that for teaching-residents and mentor-teachers to co-develop as co-teachers, they jointly must learn to resolve the dialectical tensions of unbalanced classroom ownership vs added co-working responsibilities, breaking from routine so that a partnership can grow. Furthermore, the findings suggest that the prefix co- should be understood as (1) shifts in thinking that transcend the status quo and (2) the orchestration of human capital to change norms.Originality/valueThis new understanding of the prefix co- allows teacher education programs to better mediate the dialectical tensions experienced by co-teachers in a mentored co-teaching activity, from individual teacher learning (e.g. a pair/dyad comprising one teaching-resident and one mentor-teacher) to collective co-learning across activity systems (e.g. partnership-based teacher education).

Thus Speaks Mr. Nobody: Brecht's Stories of Mr. Keuner through the Lensof Classical Chinese Dialectics

Abstract: This essay presents a refreshing reading of Bertolt Brecht's Stories of Mr. Keuner through the lens of classical Chinese dialectics. Through careful analysis, I uncover not only interesting resonances between Brecht's stories and classical Chinese philosophy but also intriguing dialectic tensions between individual and clusters of stories in the collection, and between Brecht (the man, the artist, and his dramatic oeuvre) and Mr. Keuner (Mr. Nobody), his philosophical alter ego, as the titular character dialogues with his many interlocutors on momentous issues such as knowledge, power, justice, fatherland, and more.

When Twitter blocked Trump: The paradox, ambivalence and dialectic of digitalized publics

In our text, we follow the traces of a (1) paradox, (2) an ambivalence and (3) a dialectic that constitute digitalized public spheres and discuss the resulting tensions in discourse-ethical and political-theoretical perspectives using the blocking of Donald J. Trump’s Twitter account as an example. Starting from this, we determine the conditions of constitution of the digital public sphere and locate the dynamics of its development in the dialectical tension between private and public: The fact that the two other relations of autonomy and heteronomy, intensification and polarization come to such a head is based on an insufficient socialization of all those means of production that produce the current digital public sphere. Using the example of Donald J. Trump’s recently suspended Twitter account and with a view to Habermas’s discourse ethics, we illustrate the extent to which Trump’s partly racist and conspiracy-theoretical post violates discourse ethics standards and is also highly problematic with regard to the political; however, banishment from a part of the digital public sphere is certainly not an act that should be incumbent on a private company. From this, we conclude that the normative potentials of digital public spheres can only be vol.

Sustainable development of urban food tourism: A cultural globalisation approach

Using cultural globalisation as a lens, this article examines the tensions between global and local in food tourism to support urban destinations in realising their sustainability outcomes. This is achieved through investigating the supplier perspective by drawing data from a case study of the cities of York and Sheffield, England. The findings shed light on how food supply side representatives perceive these cultural globalisation tensions by revealing the intrinsic socio-cultural values of tourism promotion and observing how culture and globalisation can work mutually to support sustainable destination development. This study concludes that cultural globalisation sensitises us to the dialectic tension between homogenisation and heterogenisation, which can serve as an impetus for developing sustainable food tourism.

Managing tensions between privacy and connection in the sharing of personal information ownership on social media: overall and by gender

ABSTRACT Drawing on the premise of dialectical tensions in the management of privacy and connectivity, this study proposes a model presenting a clue to the privacy paradox: how social media users negotiate information ownership while reacting to privacy concerns. The study further examines gender differences in the perception of privacy concerns and negotiation of information ownership. The findings show that others’ sharing of information ownership influenced one’s own sharing of information ownership. While privacy concerns increased privacy rule adaptation, positive norms of shared information ownership negatively influenced privacy rule adaptation. There were gender differences found: women were more likely than men to react positively to expand shared information ownership and to regulate the degree of shared information ownership by adapting their privacy rules. Men were less likely than women to be concerned about privacy in reflection of the positive norms of sharing information ownership on social media.

Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Logic of Decadence

Abstract: This essay argues that Ralph Waldo Emerson's thinking and style are governed by a hitherto unrecognized "logic of decadence" that manifests as a fascination with the philosophical and ethical functions of negativity, decay, and destruction. It discerns in Emersonianism a peculiarly American idiolect of decadence—an "alter-decadence"—that emerges from similar sources as that of the fin de siecle Decadent movement but evolves in a divergent direction, notably by valorizing the dialectical tension between the totality of nature and its parts instead of celebrating the breakdown of holistic unities. The first section argues that although critics have long invoked tropes of decadence to describe features of Emerson's work, they have generally misunderstood their functions. The second section excavates ideas about decadence that Emerson received in his reading of historians like Montesquieu and Edward Gibbon, arguing that even in his early thinking Emerson was adapting a historical logic of decadence in order to reconcile his alternately monistic and pluralistic views of the universe. The final section explores how the logic of decadence provides an infrastructure for Emerson to develop these metaphysical concerns into an ethic of relationality and contingency that eschews belief in absolute conceptions of the good.