Empirical Frame Research Articles

Implementing Automated Quality Management Software System through Total Quality Management and Knowledge Management Concepts to Improve the Quality of Education in the Universities

Document archiving is very important in any large educational institution, as they contain information that is critical and affects quality management as well as knowledge management. The purpose of knowledge management and information systems is to organize the intellectual capital of the universities in a formally structured way for easy use and help managers make better decisions in all areas. Thus, the sources of competitive advantage in universities derive from intellectual capital and innovations. In addition, the path to a competitive advantage comes from the ability to manage knowledge to create quality of knowledge. Quality and knowledge are good indicators with which to measure a university’s overall competitiveness. This research illustrates the importance of knowledge management in universities and the role of the Information Technology (IT) in facilitating, sharing and accelerating growth of knowledge, in addition to improving the quality of education level in the university. The research also describes both the conceptual and the empirical frame work of a Quality management automated system. We expect this approach to noticeably reduce the cost in the faculties in the University of Jordan, and prevent all the disadvantage of the current situation and improve the quality of education.

The Empirical Frame of the Decision to Annuitize

Microeconomic theory suggests that annuities are favorable because they ensure a steady path of consumption no matter how long the annuitant will live. As a promising attempt to explain why actual annuitization rates are lower than expected, it has recently been argued that consumers do not use such a consumption frame when they decide on annuitizing their wealth. Instead, they might rather apply an investment frame: They evaluate the annuity as a standalone financial product, focusing mainly on its risk and return characteristics and thereby ignoring its insurance value. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to empirically test which frame is actually used by consumers. More precisely, we argue that uncertainty about one’s subjective prospects of survival should have opposing effects on the decision to annuitize depending on the frame. In a consumption frame, an annuity provides a hedge against the financial risks of an uncertain lifetime whereas in an investment frame uncertainty about one’s future survival translates directly into financial risk. Using field data from the Health and Retirement Study, we show that respondents who have more precise beliefs about their chances of survival tend to annuitize larger parts of their wealth. We therefore find empirical support for the investment frame.

‘The global assemblage of digital flow’

Geographers have been at the forefront of interrogating the changes made possible by the ubiquity of computing and the phenomenon of ‘big data’ in an emerging field known as ‘critical data studies’. In this article, I argue that engagement with the proliferation of computing infrastructures that make these new developments possible in the first place allows critical data studies to gain important historical-geographical perspective, connect to new manifestations of uneven development, and better grasp the role of non-human actors within emerging socio-technical relations. This expanded empirical framing opens up new theoretical implications and opportunities for public engagement with critical infrastructure.

Media Rituals in Eusébio’s Exequies

While celebrating collective representation, the media can be seen as spaces of ritualization that are fundamental to the consolidation of wider social values.
 In this paper we give an empirical frame to the concept of “media rituals” considering it as an entrenched symbolic practice that could be traceable in Eusébio’s exequies television broadcasting. Three sorts of media rituals are identified: rituals dealing with immediacy, rituals dealing with collective prominence and rituals dealing with the revelation of reality.
 Each media ritual exemplifies how a space of comprehensive ritualization is erected. It is through this generalized and mediated ritualization that the idea of a major social occurrence is refreshed and worked through.

Amazon and the self

In his classic book on the information society Castells described the relationship between "the self and the net". The rise of Internet giants such as Google, Apple and Amazon, have been spectacular successes on an unprecedented scale. However, the relationship we have with these companies is characterized by ambiguity; on the one hand it is part of the daily life, such as searching for information or buying a book, through personalized and easy-to-use services. On the other hand, the dominant position of these actors raises concerns on privacy, and monopoly power. In this paper we try to make sense of these asymmetrical relationships, and propose a way forward to achieve a more balanced relationship. Our empirical framing is an investigation of the evolution of Amazon, through the years 1995-2013. We analyze the company at two levels, focusing at first on the individual interaction and then at the level of infrastructure. For the customers the infrastructure is not visible, although the aggregates of personal and behavioral information are the basis for the rich set of "individualized" interactions between customers and company. The basic asymmetry of the relationship cannot be solved at an individual level. We therefore call for a new kind of institution, and discuss some alternative strategies..

Finite-strain laminates: Bending-enhanced hexahedron and delamination

With a new finite strain anisotropic framework, we introduce a unified approach for constitutive modeling and delamination of composites. We describe a finite-strain semi-implicit integration algorithm and the application to assumed-strain hexahedra. In a laminate composite, the laminae are modeled by an anisotropic Kirchhoff/Saint-Venant material and the interfaces are modeled by the exponential cohesive law with intrinsic characteristic length and the criterion by Benzeggagh and Kenane for the equivalent fracture toughness. For the element formulation, a weighted least-squares algorithm is used to calculate the mixed strain. Löwdin frames are used to model orthotropic materials without the added task of performing a polar decomposition or empirical frames. To assess the validity of our proposals and inspect step and mesh size dependence, a least-squares based hexahedral element is implemented and tested in depth in both deformation and delamination examples.

What is mental health? Evidence towards a new definition from a mixed methods multidisciplinary international survey

ObjectiveLack of consensus on the definition of mental health has implications for research, policy and practice. This study aims to start an international, interdisciplinary and inclusive dialogue to answer the...

Creating numbers: carbon and capital investment

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to seek to illustrate the way in which carbon emissions are given calculative agency. The authors contribute to sociology of quantification with a specific focus on the performativity of the carbon number as it was introduced to the organization’s capital investment accounts. In following an intangible gas to a physical amount and then to a dollar value, the authors used categories from the sociology of quantification (Espeland and Stevens, 2008) to explore the persuasive attributes of the newly created number and the way it changed the work of actors, including the way they reacted and viewed authority. Design/methodology/approach – An empirical case study in a large Australian water utility drawing on insights from the sociology of calculation. Findings – The authors present empirics on the calculative appeal of the carbon emissions number, how it came into being and its performative (or reactive) effects. The number disciplined behaviour and acted like a boundary object, while at the same time, enroled allies through its aesthetic appeal in management accounting system designs. In framing the empirics, the authors were able to highlight how the carbon number became a visible actor in the newly emergent and evolving carbon market. Practical implications – This paper provides an empirical framing that continues the project of writing the sociology of calculation into accounting. Originality/value – This study contributes to the sociology of quantification in accounting with an empirical framing device to reveal the representational work of a number and how it expands as it becomes implicated in broader networks of calculation.

The Garden Is the Machine: New Media and Technology in American Studies

The Garden Is the Machine:New Media and Technology in American Studies Iván Chaar-López (bio) Digital Memory and the Archive. By Wolfgang Ernst. Edited by Jussi Parikka. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. 256 pages. $75.00 (cloth). $25.00 (paper). Life after New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process. By Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. 288 pages. $32.00 (cloth). Networks without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media. By Geert Lovink. Cambridge: Polity, 2011. 220 pages. $69.95 (cloth). $22.95 (paper). In his editorial for American Quarterly’s 2006 special issue on technology, Siva Vaidhyanathan invited American studies scholars to grapple with the strong influences of techno-fundamentalism—the “misguided faith in technology and progress.”1 To challenge this faith, Vaidhyanathan asserted, one must ask the following questions: Who decides what technologies are developed, bought, sold, and used? Who creates technology and for whom? What are the cultural and economic assumptions influencing a particular technology’s operations and its effects?2 This special issue displayed how the fields of technology studies, communication, and history of technology can come together through the critical endeavor of American studies. One salient example is Caitlin Zaloom’s complex study of technology through the creation of a new trading floor for the Chicago Board of Trade in 1930 and the opening of a Chicago-style dealing firm in 2000 London.2 Zaloom claims that the design of spaces for market processes, either face-to-face or face-to-screen, marked an important event in the articulation of neoliberal ideals. As Zaloom argues, technological and social arrangements presume a conscious effort in designing around constraints exerted on the process. She notes that “focusing attention not only on a single new technology, but also on the blend of devices, social forms, and human skills that are necessary to make them work … expand[s] both the empirical frame and the analytic [End Page 1143] categories for cultural studies of technology.”3 Zaloom reframes the study of technology in a broader milieu of human power relations, interventions, and limits. Yet machine agency and machinic time remain out of the frame. What can technological specificity tell scholars about the arrangements that Zaloom and American studies wish to elucidate? How can scholars approach the ways that technology demarcates and challenges what is possible? What does it mean when life itself is mediated? These are some of the questions that Networks without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media, Digital Memory and the Archive, Life after New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process, and the present essay address. Machines and technology have been subjects of inquiry in our field for many decades. One of the foundational works in American studies, Leo Marx’s Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964), casts machines as tropes of industrial power in the writings of canonical US authors. Marx elaborated this trope to explain how machines suddenly intruded on the sanctity and serenity of the natural environment—the “garden” of the title.4 Literary images of the-machine-in-the-garden underscored the tensions between civilization and nature; they also functioned as tactical maneuvers against industrialization. The 2006 special issue of American Quarterly revisited Marx’s critical examination of how technology was conceived, represented, and used. Like Marx, the issue’s authors criticized the narrative of technological progress and how it obscures many of the injustices produced by technological change. The garden, nonetheless, is a design, a construction appeasing our nostalgic longing for “nature” and the “real,” which are themselves constructions. Even “in the garden” subjects are not outside the machine and its software of representation and power/knowledge. The issue at stake, then, is not to think of new media and technologies as mere extensions of human agency but to scrutinize their specific operations, procedures, and structures while engaging their associations across agents (both human and nonhuman). From this perspective, not only are new media tools through which human subjects enact their desires; they also produce and delineate those same subjects as they autonomously associate with other agents. Though the books reviewed here fall “outside” American studies, they have...

Inquiry-based learning with young learners: a Peirce-based model employed to critique a unit of inquiry on maps and mapping

Inquiry-based learning (IBL) has become a common theme in both school and higher education in recent years. It suggests a model of curriculum development and practice that moves educational debate beyond teacher or student-based approaches towards a model of teaching and learning in which the endeavour is shared. This paper discusses an investigation into the practice of IBL among primary schoolchildren in the setting of the Primary Years Programme of the International Baccalaureate. Three ideas from the work of the philosopher C.S. Peirce are used to provide an epistemological base for analysing the pedagogical practice of IBL: semiotics, reasoning and community of inquiry. Findings are presented under these three headings to illustrate the potency of Peirce's conceptualisation of learning. Drawing in particular on findings from a unit of inquiry on maps and mapping, it suggests an empirical frame for IBL for the use of teachers in the development and assessment of IBL.

Credible Political Leaders: Reflections on the X-Factor and Beyond

Abstract In this paper, the crucial factors behind credible political leadership are investigated, distinguishing between the X-factor, the Y-factor, and the Z-factor. The X-, Y-, and Z-factors relate to appeal, persuasion, and competence, or to put it quite simply, to images, words, and deeds. The paper connects to the relevant literature on leadership, credibility, charisma, rhetoric and dramaturgy, finding an empirical frame of reference in the Netherlands and other countries. Ultimately, a credible politician is compared to a tightrope walker, mastering a balance pole with the X-factor of appeal at one end, the Z-factor of competence at the other end, and, as their essential connector in the middle, the Y-factor of conviction. Keywords: political leadership – credible governance – appeal – persuasion – competency – charisma – rhetoric – dramaturgy ----- Bibliography: Hendriks, Frank: Credible Political Leaders: Reflections on the X-Factor and Beyond, PCS, 2-2013, pp. 158-180. https://doi.org/10.3224/pcs.v4i2.19803

Who signs the “empirical facts”?

One of the most ambitious forms in which literary theory’s aspiration toward a democratic universality was recently manifested followed from the so called cognitive turn induced by discoveries in modern biology. Its declared objective was to root the idea of literature in the unconscious empirical level of its reception, situated below and beyond the conscious hermeneutic level of its understanding. The first such turn toward the deep and constitutive structure of the empirical was undertaken by the Empirische Literaturwissenschaft put forth during the 1980s under the aegis of radical constructivism of the Chilean biologists Maturana and Varela; the second and more “scientific” one, proposed in the first decade of our century, pertains to what has been alternatively called the neuroaesthetics of literature, the biological literary theory, or cognitive literary studies. Both turns emerged in the German academic milieu. Both here and in the Anglophone world arguments rose against the elite bourgeois spirit of hermeneutically-oriented literary studies, by trying to establish a purely empirical frame for the reception of literature in order to introduce a universal intersubjective basis to replace the elevated subjective platform of literary studies. Without neglecting their different shaping of the basic distinction between cognition and experience, I insist that both finally reduce experience to cognition in a manner reminiscent of that which Benjamin has criticized in Kant. In his early Program of the Coming Philosophy Benjamin objects to the subordination, in Critique of Pure Reason, of empirical consciousness to transcendental categories of pure consciousness which ultimately turns experience into a mechanical unity. Though this critique may not exactly hold for Kant, as is testified by more recent readings that depart from his transcendental schemes, I will try to demonstrate that it holds for recent cognitive literary studies. This is why Benjamin’s linguistic structuring of experience, the addressed blind spot of his polemics notwithstanding, remains highly instructive. It mobilizes the concept of human mimetic ability as do the recent cognitive literary studies, to be sure, but dismantling behind the future-oriented democratic intention of the latter the hard-core bourgeois tradition. While Benjamin’s seemingly past-oriented approach to experience revitalizes the “antiquated” concept of similarity, it turns out to be opening much more democratic vistas for literary studies.

Extreme value analysis of empirical frame coefficients and implications for denoising by soft-thresholding

Denoising by frame thresholding is one of the most basic and efficient methods for recovering a discrete signal or image from data that are corrupted by additive Gaussian white noise. The basic idea is to select a frame of analyzing elements that separates the data in few large coefficients due to the signal and many small coefficients mainly due to the noise ϵn. Removing all data coefficients being in magnitude below a certain threshold yields a reconstruction of the original signal. In order to properly balance the amount of noise to be removed and the relevant signal features to be kept, a precise understanding of the statistical properties of thresholding is important. For that purpose we derive the asymptotic distribution of maxω∈Ωn|〈ϕωn,ϵn〉| for a wide class of redundant frames (ϕωn:ω∈Ωn). Based on our theoretical results we give a rationale for universal extreme value thresholding techniques yielding asymptotically sharp confidence regions and smoothness estimates corresponding to prescribed significance levels. The results cover many frames used in imaging and signal recovery applications, such as redundant wavelet systems, curvelet frames, or unions of bases. We show that ‘generically’ a standard Gumbel law results as it is known from the case of orthonormal wavelet bases. However, for specific highly redundant frames other limiting laws may occur. We indeed verify that the translation invariant wavelet transform shows a different asymptotic behaviour.

From Rural to Urban: A Geography of Boundary Crossing in Southeast Asia

AbstractMigration, mobility, and movement are the inter-linked processes which provide the empirical scaffold for this paper. The paper uses this empirical framing to reflect on a series of methodological, conceptual, and theoretical challenges for scholars of Southeast Asia. Mobility and associated geographical (spatial) boundary crossings have raised questions about the analytical units employed in research; the unsettling of these analytical units has challenged whether conceptual categories still have explanatory purchase; and the fracturing of conceptual categories has implications for the theoretical frameworks that scholars have traditionally deployed. Drawing on field research undertaken in Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam the paper argues that evolving mobilities in the region, particularly in rural areas, require a degree of explanatory ‘catch-up’ on the part of scholars as we try to keep pace with the rate of change in the countryside. Instead of focusing on households in space, we should be trying to map out the networked relations that link lives and individuals across national and transnational space. The paper further argues that we should focus our attention on local-level dynamics associated with societal change, settlement dynamism and sustainability, population turbulence, and evolving cultural preferences which operate partly independently of the rural development project, thus highlighting the shifting web of mutual dependencies and interdependencies that shape lives and living patterns.

The Circulation of Non-Economic Capital in the Migration Cycle. Empirical Perspective

In the context of post‑accession migration from Poland it is important to analyze not only its economic but social and cultural implications for receiving and home country as well as for migrants themselves. Recent migration takes place in a new context of inter‑European mobility and as such can be treated as a part of ‘life project’, career strategy and a new form of migration. The paper focus is on the theoretical and empirical frame of social and cultural capital accumulated by migrants abroad and transferred into home country. The theoretical framework is supposed to provide a base for empirical research on the social and cultural capital transfer possibilities in the case of return migration. The question such a research would try to answer is: can the return migrants be an active actors of innovation and social change?

Violent Accumulation: A Postanarchist Critique of Property, Dispossession, and the State of Exception in Neoliberalizing Cambodia

Employing a poststructuralist-meets-anarchist stance that advances conceptual insight into the nature of sovereign power, this article examines the dialectics of a triadic system: capital/primitive accumulation, law/violence, and civilization/savagery, which are argued to exist in a mutually reinforcing “trilateral of logics.” This is a radical (re)appraisal of capitalism, its legal processes, and its civilizing effects that together serve to mask the originary and ongoing violences of primitive accumulation and the property system. Such obfuscation suggests that wherever the trilateral of logics is enacted, so too is the state of exception called into being, exposing us all as potential homo sacer (life that does not count). Using the empirical frame of Cambodia's contemporary neoliberalization, I offer a window on how sovereign power configures itself around the three discursive-institutional constellations (i.e., capitalism, civilization, and law) that form the trilateral of logics. Rather than formulating prescriptive solutions, the intention here is critique and to argue that the preoccupation with strengthening Cambodia's legal system should not be read as a panacea for contemporary social ills but as an imposition that serves to legitimize the violences of property.

Institutionalization of risk and safety management at the local governmental level in Sweden

The starting point for this article is the need for empirical knowledge about organizational configuration for societal risk and safety management activities in a modern welfare society. In this paper, we use Sweden as an empirical frame to analyze the administrative management structure at the local governmental level. The analysis is based on statistical analysis of information from a web‐survey with administrative chief/head officials (n = 1283) with responsibilities for different municipal functions and sectors. The sample represented 25% of the Swedish municipalities (n = 290) and the response rate was approximately 60% (n = 766). The responses to two sets of questions (25 and 45 questions) are used for statistical analyses of management structures and task distribution within the municipal organizations. Principal component factor analyses with Varimax and Kaiser's Normalization was applied as a structure detection method. The results indicate a clear and uniform way to institutionalize societal risk and safety management at the local level. Furthermore, the management course of action is found to have different types of value characters. The implications that arise from the patterns identified in this study are considered to be of general relevance and topicality for research and practice in this area.

The typology for allocations of societal risk and safety management tasks at the local governmental level – Framing the current directions in Sweden

The starting point for this article is the need to develop empirical insights about contemporary societal risk and safety management practice and executive structures. In order to facilitate insights about societal risk and safety management in a Scandinavian welfare context we use Sweden and its local governmental level (municipal) as an empirical frame in this paper. The aim for this article is to analyse how a variety of risk and safety management tasks are divided within the Swedish municipalities. The objectives are to frame the current directions for internal allocations of risk and safety issues by providing an empirically based executive typology and to contemplate the implications and future research needs that arise from that management pattern.The analysis is based on statistical analysis of information from a web-survey with chief officials ( n = 1283) with responsibilities for different municipal functions and sectors. In this study the responses to one of the survey questions are used for statistical analysis. The analyzed question focused on the degree that the respondents estimated that their administrative sector or function handled a selection of risk and safety management assignments ( n = 45). A factor analysis was applied to identify patterns in the dataset. The analysis resulted in an eight factor solution with a high degree of explained variance (74.3%). The results provide an elementary contribution to the understanding of the current societal risks and safety management directions.

Knowledge and Artifacts: People and Objects

AbstractIn the study of material culture, the connection between artifacts and knowledge is discernible. The knowledge derives primarily from people, the indigenous voice. To elucidate the inter‐relationship between knowledge and objects, a narrative approach will be emphasized. The main argument relates to the connection of oral history, material culture, and ethnographic museums. My empirical frame of reference is the Sámi culture in Northern Fennoscandia and its basketry tradition, and the general focus will emphasize adequate knowledge‐generating processes. One single object, a so‐calledmini kisa, collected in 2003, will be used as a case in point. The body of knowledge discussed contains both tangible and intangible heritage, thereby making the object speak for culture. And, in my view, museums have an obligation to master these demands.

Moving Beyond Computational Cognitivism: Understanding Intentionality, Intersubjectivity and Ecology of Mind

The emergence of the Cognitive Sciences, in the middle of the 20th Century, was initially based on an abstract model of the mind: the computer metaphor. The human mind was understood in analogy to the digital computer, as a rule-based, symbol processor. As a consequence, the human being was envisioned as logically-rationally guided, radically disembodied and isolated from culture. Over the last few decades, several disciplines, such as Biology, Mathematics, Philosophy, Psychology and Neuroscience, have begun to address the study of intentionality, intersubjectivity and natural cognition. Searching for a better understanding of these complex issues, a number of approaches have been developed with the promise of capturing the specific qualities of human cognition, radically omitted from a computationalist view of mind. Nevertheless, since these research programs are rather recent, concrete methodological designs and empirical approaches in the form of experimentally testable hypotheses are still scarce. This special issue brings together several perspectives in order to propose alternative research approaches in the topics of Intentionality, Intersubjectivity and Ecology of Mind. We believe it is necessary to discuss and advance towards explicit empirical frames in the form of actual experiments, specific predictions and formal models. The essays presented here constitute an attempt to move in this direction, with the specific aim of reconsidering the study of some forgotten properties of brain and mind.