Empty Promise Research Articles

The weight of things: Object-oriented mania, citational hoarding and critical-mess literature

This creativecritical essay investigates the author’s object-oriented mania and her anticipatory relationship to “happy objects” (Ahmed, 2010) through the lens of her obsessive-compulsive disorder, shadowed by memories around inheritance, a family propensity toward hoarding and the empty promise of capitalism under a “regime of crisis ordinariness” (Berlant, 2011). The chaos of the hoard, in which objects congeal rather than circulate, suspends the hoard in a time outside of time, similar to Kristeva’s (1982) chora (Lepselter, 2011). While the hoarder as artist manifests a “poetics of accumulation” (Falkoff, 2021), a writer as hoarder amasses a citational hoard via reference manager. This essay applies Zinman and Reese’s “critical-mess theory” (qtd. in Singer, 2001) to creative writing, arguing that critical mess literature demands a collaged form where one might draw conclusions from patterns made evident by the accumulated, intertextual, polyvocal hoard. It poses citations managers as a modern tool of Lévi-Strauss’s (2021) bricoleur. In “stringing up a narrative” of things (Juckes, 2017), the author puts word-things into place through object recollection, curation and citation, forming an interweb of narrative objects to demonstrate the application of critical mess theory with and through life writing.

Excluded and left behind: Racial discrimination and structural inequalities in the right to health

Racial discrimination is a structural social determinant of health and a separate health risk leading to preventable negative health inequities. This column introduces the recently adopted (2024) general recommendation by the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination which focuses on racial discrimination and structural inequalities in the enjoyment of the right to health. This column provides insight into the comprehensive and intersectional approach of the Committee in clarifying the right to equality and freedom from racial discrimination in the enjoyment of the right to health. Recalling that it does not suffice to prohibit and refrain from racial discrimination under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the column briefly explains what measures must be taken to ensure that equality in the enjoyment of the right to health does not remain an empty promise for millions of people around the globe.

Mineralocorticoid receptor antagonists for atrial fibrillation prevention: effective solution or empty promise?

Mineralocorticoid receptor antagonists for atrial fibrillation prevention: effective solution or empty promise?

“Too few, too far away, for what is paid”: Consumer voices about the personal assistance worker crisis

BackgroundThe growing gap between demand and supply of personal assistance service (PAS) workers presents a significant burden to those who use services. The intensity and duration of hardship is growing, and consumer voices need to be heard and incorporated into the national dialogue. ObjectiveThis paper explores how PAS worker shortages manifest themselves in the daily lives of people with disabilities using or needing PAS services in the United States. MethodsWe used thematic coding of qualitative data from the 2022 National Survey on Health and Disability. Respondents (n = 330) provided open-ended responses to the prompt “Briefly explain the types of problems or issues you have had finding PAS or support workers.” ResultsThree themes emerged regarding consumer perspectives and experiences with worker shortages (1) low pay, few benefits, and undervalued work, (2) demanding working conditions and logistics, and (3) low quality workers. In combination, these themes informed a fourth theme (4) impacts for PAS consumers characterized by substandard care and additional stress and workload for those who direct their own care. ConclusionsAs a society, we have taken steps to increase opportunities for community living and created policies to uphold choice and independence for people with disabilities. In the absence of an adequate workforce to support these policies, however, we convey an empty promise. Without tangible steps to resolve these problems at the policy level, such as improved worker pay and protections, hope for resolution to these issues remains elusive.

Why Did Plato not Write the ‘Unwritten Doctrine’? Some Preliminary Remarks

Abstract This article asks the question “Why did Plato not write the ‘unwritten doctrine’?” and answers it by citing a combination of two obstacles. The first derives from the limitations of the episteme available to an embodied soul about the essence of the good. Even if the dialectician has access to some kind of knowledge, the mismatch between the unchanging essence of the good and the precarious logoi which aim to identify it (and allow others some measure of access to it) can never fully be overcome. At best, Socrates (or Plato) can lead souls to an incomplete account of it: It is possible that even the most expert dialectician can only have a claim to knowledge, but no absolute certainty. Another obstacle lies in the audience or readership itself: No shortcut to understanding is possible, and yet a mere written presentation, which is all they have, is just such a shortcut, and so represents an empty promise. In memory of Charles H. Kahn (1928–2023), a letter of his from September 5, 1989, concerning the question “Why did Plato not write the ‘unwritten doctrine’?” is published, along with some comments.

The Foundational Blunders of Human Rights and the Naturalisation of Refugees under International Law: A Historical Perspective

This paper traces the historical antecedents of the displacement of rights pertaining to the naturalisation of refugees and the foundational blunders of human rights inherent under international law. With more than 36 million recognised refugees worldwide as of 2024, the vexed question of the naturalisation of refugees is timelier than ever to revisit. Divided into seven parts from introduction to conclusion, this paper analysed why the current human rights architecture is incapable of restoring the humanity of refugees due to statist control of human rights in the guise of citizenship. It argued that despite successive human rights treaties and declarations, universal human rights within the context of naturalising refugees remain almost an empty promise. Using the doctrinal research method, it reconciled the competing conceptions of human rights with the current difficulties in the naturalisation process and makes the case for the realisation of this process as a human rights imperative. Keywords: Naturalisation of Refugees, Human Rights, Treaty of Westphalia, Statehood, Geneva Convention, Borders.

Use-Value, Exchange-Value, and the Empty Promise of Black Homeownership

Andrew Kahrl has gifted the field a forceful book that urges us to remember the property taxes. The Black Tax tells us, “The property tax is the most local of all taxes” (5). More than that, though, the property tax is the most literal way that state policy hits close to home. Kahrl thus studies local taxation to show how white people wielded state power to threaten Black Americans’ tenuous grip on property ownership—and generate handsome profits along the way. The ends—dispossession of Black-owned property and unfair tax burdens—will surprise few readers. But the means—tax-buying, fractional assessments, and other bureaucratic technicalities—will shock, frustrate, and anger most. This is the force of The Black Tax: Kahrl reminds us that, for Black people as with other racialized minorities, the barriers to homeownership do not end when the sale closes.

A Fusion Pretrained Approach for Identifying the Cause of Sarcasm Remarks

Sarcastic remarks often appear in social media and e-commerce platforms to express almost exclusively negative emotions and opinions on certain instances, such as dissatisfaction with a purchased product or service. Thus, the detection of sarcasm allows merchants to timely resolve users’ complaints. However, detecting sarcastic remarks is difficult because of its common form of using counterfactual statements. The few studies that are dedicated to detecting sarcasm largely ignore what sparks these sarcastic remarks, which could be because of an empty promise of a merchant’s product description. This study formulates a novel problem of sarcasm cause detection that leverages domain information, dialogue context information, and sarcasm sentences by proposing a pretrained language model-based approach equipped with a novel hybrid multihead fusion-attention mechanism that combines self-attention, target-attention, and a feed-forward neural network. The domain information and the dialogue context information are then interactively fused to obtain the domain-specific dialogue context representation, and bidirectionally enhanced sarcasm-cause pair representations are generated for detecting sarcasm spark. Experimental results on real-world data sets demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed model. The findings of this study contribute to the literature on sarcasm cause detection and provide business value to relevant stakeholders and consumers. History: Accepted by Ram Ramesh, Area Editor for Data Science and Machine Learning. Funding: This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants 72293575, 62071467, and 62141608] and the Research Grant Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China [Grants 11500322 and 11500421]. Supplemental Material: The software that supports the findings of this study is available within the paper and its Supplemental Information ( https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/suppl/10.1287/ijoc.2022.0285 ) as well as from the IJOC GitHub software repository ( https://github.com/INFORMSJoC/2022.0285 ). The complete IJOC Software and Data Repository is available at https://informsjoc.github.io/ .

Linguistic authority in the context of European mobility: addressing the empty promise of élite multilingualism

ABSTRACT This qualitative study examines linguistic authority in an international department of a European Union institution in Luxembourg. Using socio-pragmatic discourse analysis, it investigates language workers’ stances towards language use at work. The findings reveal manipulative effects of language ideologies – (élite) multilingualism and native speakerism – that promote a business-like understanding of the value of language(s) in a public institution. While the institution benefits from this setup, its negative effects seem more pronounced for (“routed”) workers in unstable situations of international mobility compared to those who are settled (“rooted”). The paper advocates for increased critical language awareness and seeks to sensitise stakeholders to the effects of language ideologies in professional settings. This discussion is particularly relevant for public institutions that promote multilingualism while using English as the common language of communication. However, it may also inspire other multilingual organisations in which management aims to enhance their employees’ work experience.

How Credible Is the 25-Year Photovoltaic (PV) Performance Warranty?—A Techno-Financial Evaluation and Implications for the Sustainable Development of the PV Industry

To support the bankability of PV projects, PV manufacturers have been offering some of the longest warranties in the world, typically in the range of 25–30 years. During the warranty period, PV manufacturers guarantee that the degradation of PV modules will not exceed 0.4–0.6% each year, or the buyer can at any time make a claim to the manufacturer for replacement or compensation for the shortfall. Due to PV popularity, the performance warranty terms have become more and more competitive each year. However, long-term PV operating data are very limited, and the bankruptcy of PV manufacturers has been quite common. Without a proper methodology to assess the adequacy of the warranty fund (WF) reserves of PV manufacturers, the 25-year performance warranty can reflect an empty promise. To ensure sustainable development of the PV industry, this study develops a probability-weighted expected value method to determine the necessary WF reserve based on benchmark field degradation data and a prevailing degradation cap of 0.55% per year. The simulation results show that, unless the manufacturer’s degradation pattern is significantly better than the benchmark degradation profile, 1.302% of the sales value is required for the WF reserve. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that provides WF reserve requirement estimation for 25-year PV performance warranties. The results will provide transparency for PV investors and motivation for PV manufacturers to engage in continuous quality improvement, as all such achievements can now be reflected in the annual report results of manufacturers.

Human rights issues in the English language curriculum in China

As China increasingly engages in global human rights mechanisms, it has demonstrated a commitment to reforming its national curriculum. Through examining textbooks published during Xi Jinping’s tenure, this study investigates how China embeds human rights issues in the English language curriculum. The findings indicate that the human rights issues addressed in the English textbooks have surpassed China’s official revisionist narrative. This can be attributed more to the inherent features of the discipline of English than to a deliberate state strategy. Human rights issues are sorted into three categories: strictly taboo, decontextualised, and actively promoted. The meticulously constructed narratives highlight China’s leadership in addressing global issues while avoiding critical examination of its domestic human rights situation. As a result, genuine social issues in human rights education (HRE) are overshadowed by propaganda. This study concludes that China’s commitment to HRE largely remains an empty promise.

Subsidiarity in the ECHR: an empty promise for local authorities?

ABSTRACT Member States of the ECHR are complex entities made up of many levels. The subsidiarity principle is grounded in this social reality. However, the ECHR, just like general international law, treats its States as unitary entities: local authorities are procedurally and institutionally inexistent in the ECHR system, although they play important roles as protectors and violators of human rights. I show that the codification of the subsidiarity principle in the ECHR preamble was not intended to strengthen the role of local and regional authorities. Protocol No. 15 was only concerned with reinforcing ‘the’ States role vis-à-vis the Court. I explain this with the state’s role as the bearer of political sovereignty and the fact that sovereignty is a pre-condition for a functioning political democracy and, therefore, a democratically legitimate human rights system. Finally, the paper enquires into whether the subsidiarity principle of the ECHR might be read as an interpretative principle, which contributes to determining the scope and content of the human rights that the Strasbourg Court must guarantee, and whether this might benefit local and regional associations. I answer in the negative. Such a reading would be contrary to Protocol No. 15, as it would further empower the Court.

Space Charges in Solid State Batteries: Friend, Foe or Fantasy?

Thermodynamics tells us that all materials have an internal energy that determines how they act and react with all matter in the universe. Furthermore, it forces all matter to strive towards equilibrium with its surroundings. For solid-state lithium-ion conductors, the chemical potential of lithium is an important parameter that determines stability and influences conductivity. However, it also implies something deeper. The chemical potential of an element in a solid is determined by the bonds that surround it as well as its concentration. Whereas the former is an intrinsic property of the material, the latter can be altered. When two solids with different chemical potentials are placed in contact, a driving force is created for atoms to migrate across the surface and establish thermodynamic equilibrium by altering their concentration. For semiconductors, in which either only a hole or electron can migrate, something interesting occurs. The migrating entity moves across but the counter-charge cannot, resulting in excess charge at the interface. The migrating partner, unable to return to its original material due to thermodynamics, is now unable to dissipate into the new material due to electrostatics. The result is a thin, charged layer across the interface. Because solid electrolytes conduct lithium cations but no anions or electrons, this ‘space-charge layer’ is also thought to occur in solid-state batteries between electrolyte and electrode. Whereas its size is thought to only be a few nanometres, its (negative) influence could be very large as it can act as barrier for lithium transport across the surface. Yet experimental evidence of its existence is rare and investigation of its behaviour even more so. The space charge between two materials is very thin and chemically almost identical to the bulk. But just like how water can carve the stone, we employ liquids to crack a solid-state problem.We find that when mixing an argyrodite solid electrolyte (Li6PS5Cl) with an ionic liquid (1-Ethyl-3-methylimidazolium bis(trifluoromethyls ulfonyl) imide or EMIN TFSI) , we observe a new chemical environment with NMR (see figure) that cannot be attributed to dissolved precursors. We see an increase in the mobility of lithium ions in the solid electrolyte itself with NMR and an increase in conductivity of the mixture with EIS. Furthermore, exchange of lithium has been confirmed between argyrodite and the mystery environment. What does this all mean? Are we observing the illusive space charge layer? Or are we just staring at an empty promise in the well-known shape of a mysterious peak in a spectrum? Figure 1

Self‐sacrifice or empty symbolism: A study of $1 CEOs

AbstractWe examine whether CEOs' voluntary acceptance of a $1 salary is a credible signal of sacrifice. We find that firms with $1 salary CEOs are: (i) more likely to be associated with income‐increasing accrual‐based earnings management; (ii) less likely to use real earnings management; and (iii) more likely to engage in corporate tax avoidance. Our results indicate that this performance enhancement is driven by the motivation to restore salaries to their original levels. Our results suggest that extreme salary sacrifice could indicate an empty promise to improve firm performance and should be considered cautiously by investors and regulators.

“An Empty Promise”: Experiences of Student Affairs Professionals of Color

Abstract: Student Affairs Professionals of Color (SAPC) serve a critical role in the field of higher education. Using a phenomenological approach, this study gathered data from semi-structured interviews with eight SAPC from various backgrounds and institutions. Findings from this study illuminated how the participating SAPC experienced code-switching, student affairs fatigue, and professional crossroads. This study revealed a trend in which SAPC felt a lack of fulfillment and encountered unmet expectations in the profession. This research offers key recommendations for future exploration and practice to improve the field of student affairs and higher education for SAPC.

The new EU carbon removal certification: Landmark legislation or an empty promise?

The new EU carbon removal certification: Landmark legislation or an empty promise?

Empty talk or real action? Exploring how local government's attention to the environment affects urban land use efficiency.

Improvingurban land use efficiency (ULUE) hasemergedasan important strategy in cities pursuing sustainable development. Since 2007, governments at different levels have enhanced the emphasis on environmental protection, as embodied in their annual work reports. Thus, we became interested in whether local government's attention to the environment translates into real action or remains an empty promise. Using Chinese prefecture-level panel data from 2007 to 2020, we found that local government's attention to the environment was positively associated with ULUE, indicating that there is not a complete decoupling effect between attention and action. In addition, the relationship between environmental attention and ULUE was negatively moderated by the land finance channel and positively moderated by the industrial optimization channel. This study also employs a threshold model to precisely determine the ideal scale for land market agreements to maximize the role of the government. Notably, the positive effect of local government's environmental attention on ULUE was negated when the proportion of negotiated land transfer surpassed 0.1874. The findings provide a benchmark for governments to improve sustainability through land resource management.

Equity Crowdfunding: Game Changer or Empty Promise for Inclusive Entrepreneurship

Equity Crowdfunding: Game Changer or Empty Promise for Inclusive Entrepreneurship

The Meta Oversight Board and the Empty Promise of Legitimacy

The Meta Oversight Board and the Empty Promise of Legitimacy

Analisis Semiotika Charles Sanders Pierce pada Karikatur Cover Majalah Tempo Edisi 16-22 September 2019

This research aims to identify the representamen or sign, object, and interpretant on Tempo magazine cover of the 16-22 September 2019 edition. Tempo magazine carries political elements, and it is interesting to analyze. The caricature of the Indonesian President is used as the primary discussion to seek the messages that are being delivered. The magazine cover conveys meanings. This study uses qualitative research by using Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotic analysis. The study focuses on signs which are divided into three categories: representamen, object, and interpretant. The finding shows that the caricature implies that the President of Indonesia betrayed himself and the citizens. His promise to make the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) stronger was only an empty promise. The controversial icon of Pinocchio is associated with the Indonesian president because of the revision of Law No. 30 2002 that weakens KPK.