Failure Stories Research Articles

Narrative approach to understanding compassion: a mixed methods study in a Polish sample

ObjectivesThis study investigates the relationship between compassion, defined by Gilbert as “a sensitivity to suffering in self and others, with a commitment to try to alleviate and prevent it” and narrative identity. We explored whether individuals with high and low levels of compassion differ in narrative characteristics such as affective tone, agency, and communion themes, as well as the use of redemption or contamination sequences in stressful life event narratives.MethodsA mixed-method study was conducted with Polish adult participants (N = 63), half of whom had low and the other half high levels of compassion. Participants completed several questionnaires, including the Compassion Action and Engagement Scale. A few weeks later, they participated in individual interviews where they narrated several key life events. The interviews were recorded, transcribed, and coded by an individual blind to the participants' compassion levels and other identifying information. The self-narratives were analyzed for affective tone, agency and communion themes, and redemption and contamination sequences. Differences in these elements between individuals with low and high compassion were analyzed using t-tests.ResultsOur findings indicate that individuals with higher compassion more frequently incorporate themes of agency and communion in their narratives, particularly in stories of failure and the past year's most difficult event. The narrative identity of a highly compassionate person includes more content related to seeing oneself as sensitive to suffering and actively working to reduce or prevent it.ConclusionsThis study highlights how individuals with varying levels of compassion construct narratives about significant life events. Narrative approaches can foster compassionate engagements and actions, potentially improving therapeutic practices and personal development strategies. The results underscore the importance of narrative analysis in understanding compassion and suggest that compassion levels may influence how individuals interpret and narrate their life experiences, offering valuable insights for future research.

Success rates and success stories: Staging anticipation on fertility clinic websites in Taiwan, Japan, and the UK.

This paper investigates how fertility clinics stage anticipation on their websites to create imagined futures for their potential users. We developed an analytical framework to explore their "tools of futuring," focusing on two key modes: probabilistic and interpretative. This framework helps identify the strategies used by clinics to convey specific visions of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs). Data comprise content analysis of 59 websites in Taiwan, 90 in Japan, and 55 in the UK, focusing on in-vitro fertilization (IVF) in 2020-2021. Our findings reveal that success rates and success stories dominate the clinic websites, while mentions of risks and failure stories are nearly absent. This indicates that fertility clinics mobilize a particular dimension of anticipation-namely, "hope,"-and marginalize "fear." In Taiwan, success stories are more prevalent than statistical calculations, highlighting an emphasis on emotional mobilization to attract clients. By comparison, a few clinics in Japan listed miscarriage rates on their websites, a rare practice aimed at presenting risks. Across all three countries, websites commonly highlight "pregnancy rate per embryo transfer" as the primary indicator, which tends to inflate the apparent effectiveness of the technology. However, clinics in the UK more frequently present live birth rates, the ideal metric for prospective users. The strength of regulatory power over fertility clinic websites at least partially explains the national differences in their anticipatory practices and calls for further research in this area.

ChatGPT stories of success and failure: a move forward in the legal profession?

ABSTRACT Our study aims to consider the artificial intelligence (AI) writing tool ChatGPT and the extent to which it can be used in the legal profession. Despite the positive views on the AI tool, particularly the belief it will be beneficial in all aspects of life, there are views that contradict this. In particular, our article will aim to consider the stories of both success and failure when it comes to the use of the tool in the legal profession.

Vad är väsentligt för att lyckas i arbetet som yrkeslärare? En studie av yrkeslärarstudenters berättelser

This article explores VET teacher students’ understanding of success and failure in VET teachers work. A theory-driven analysis, employing the theory of practice architectures is used for analysis of empathy-based stories from VET teacher students in Sweden and Finland. This approach, with its focus on practices and practice architectures, complements earlier research. The focus on complex and inter-related practices reaches beyond research themes such as competence, identity, and structural factors, and offers a multifaceted understanding of VET teachers’ work. The theory of practice architectures focuses on interconnected actions undertaken in a practice and the material-economic, cultural-discursive, and social-political arrange-ments that prefigure and hold the practice in place. The results reveal that vocational teacher students focus on the teaching practice and that they emphasise, both in stories of success and failure, similar actions. Teaching practice rests on didactical and pedagogical doings that are closely intertwined with various aspects of relatings to students. The stories also show how successful vocational teacher practices are prefigured by an inclusive and permissive work environment. Favorable cultural-discursive arrangements are characterised by a culture of collaboration and support and a trustful and affirmative school leadership.

Storytelling for Social Justice: Reconceptualizing Invisibility, Legitimacy, and Self-Censorship via Stories of Failure

ABSTRACT Building upon scholarship on stories – including oral-history and oral-tradition – this article considers often-silenced narratives in the form of stories of failures. Comparison between empirical research and qualitative methodologies highlight value of fictional storytelling, which has been mobilized by researchers to protect the anonymity of vulnerable groups and the intersectionally marginalized in research. While hierarchies in power lead to self-censorship and self-delegitimization as observed by bell hooks and Paulo Freire, stories of failure may resist social pressures to present successes – which in themselves have led to widely disseminated cases of academic fraud. Additionally, stories of failures may help acknowledge Kemmis and Mezirow’s considerations of negative emotions as valid, toward resolution, resistance, and social change. Stories may help elucidate the hidden curriculum, which confounds efforts toward social justice under Rawlsian theories. Lastly, these stories may elucidate the impacts of interest convergence under critical race theory, towards the promotion of social justice intersectionally.

Wetland Restoration and Conservation. Case of Uganda

Wetlands are the “natural filters with a variety of important ecosystem benefits and are more relevant in improving people’s livelihoods. However, as a result of increasing global economic pressures, they have drastically decreased resulting in more global environmental challenges such as climate change. This has attracted international and regional attention for wetland management through restoration which has several success and failure stories. This review aimed at establishing the dynamics for wetland restoration success and failure in Uganda through narrative literature review. This showed that institutional and policy environment, land tenure systems, traditional and indigenous knowledge, and project scope significantly affect the restoration outcomes. Therefore, there is a need for comprehensive interdisciplinary collaboration for effective and efficient governance and alternative live- hoods analysis, the integration of traditional knowledge for land tenure system support, fostering gender sensitive and a multisectoral, approach and prioritizing community-centered practices to address land tenure system complexities and ensure the sustainability of wetland ecosystems for future generations in restoration initiatives

Deserts of the Real: Paris and the Algerian Sahara as Postmodern Simulacra in Malek Haddad’s Je t’offrirai une gazelle

This article revisits an overlooked foundational text of early Algerian Francophone literature: Je t’offrirai une gazelle by Malek Haddad (1959). Reading Haddad’s novel through postcolonial and postmodern lenses, I rely on Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation theory to explain the psychological exiles suffered by Haddad’s characters. The novel tells the story of an unnamed Algerian writer during the war of independence attempting to publish an exotic fable he wrote taking place in the Sahara, also titled “Je t’offrirai une gazelle.” Analyzing this metatextual interplay and the search for an Algerian collective consciousness, I argue that Haddad’s novel is postcolonial and postmodern in two ways: in the Parisian frame of the story by criticizing the moral wasteland of the city as a Baudrillardian desert of the real, and in the Saharan frame by responding to colonial and Orientalist literature through the construction of “Arabs” and Tuaregs as a single, noble people. Although Haddad tells stories of failures and shortcomings, his Sahara as a site of culture, fertility, and industry foreshadows his political commitment to a pan-African Arabic-speaking Algeria a decade later under the Boumédiène administration.

Respect, Symbiosis, and Pluralism: Ideas of Ethics in Paradise Lost and Klara and The Sun

Literary ethics criticism regards literature as the specific ethical expression of human society at a particular stage of history, regarding literature as “the art of Ethics”. Ethical Literary Criticism takes it as its duty to explain the ethical function of literature, aiming at explaining the ethical phenomena in literature and making value judgments on them. In his Paradise Lost, which is regarded as “a monument in the history of European literature”, Milton explores ethical issues and considers the boundaries between good and evil in the classic Genesis stories of Satan's failure to rebel and Adam and Eve's expulsion from Paradise after stealing the forbidden fruit. As the edifying significance of literature gradually diminishes, the ethical thoughts embodied in literary works change with the times and break through the limitations of the times at intervals; in contemporary times, Kazuo Ishiguro, a Japanese writer with a “dual identity”, observes and participates in the life of Josie's family from the perspective of the AI in his novel Klara and The Sun, recounting insights into love and humanity and reflecting abundant ethical reflections on identity and moral goodness and evil, which shares some similarities with Paradise Lost written in the 17th century. Therefore, the thesis focuses on the three dimensions of self-internal, self and other, and self and morality attempting to show the ethical reflections on self-identity cognition, the relationship between man and other, the boundary between good and evil, and rationality and irrationality in Paradise Lost and Klara and The Sun, in order to reveal ethical changes of the times and explore the ethical ideals shared by Milton and Kazuo Ishiguro.

Stories of Systemic Failure?

Abstract In Europe, calls for ecosystems to be granted rights are mounting. While socio-legal research on the Rights of Nature tends to focus on the strategies of the few success stories, less attention is given to the many failed or stagnated initiatives, many of them in Europe. “Landscaping the Rights of Nature” is both a methodological proposition and an analytical approach to examining procedures available to citizens to introduce the Rights of Nature to the courts of Europe. This article examines three sociopolitical territories from our fieldwork sites in Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Germany in which procedures characteristic of Europe's democratic systems are used to mobilise national legal governance, international networks of lobbying groups, and citizens through artistic interventions. By engaging ethnographically with the wider sociopolitical processes involved in establishing rights for nature, we seek to offer a qualitative view on the possibilities and limitations of Europe's liberal democracies in effecting sociopolitical transformations.

Use of Human-Automation Taxonomies for System Modeling

Skraaning and Jamieson indicate the importance of developing a definition of automation failure in order to guide development of human performance models to predict human-automation interactions. They go on to develop a taxonomy including four categories: Elementary automation failures; Systemic automation failures; Human-automation breakdowns; and Human and organizational slips and misconceptions. They suggest that the latter category be excluded from classes of automation failures. They then proceed to identify important factors within each category. This paper presents a complementary taxonomy designed to identify factors contributing to automation-related failures in order to develop probes to elicit predictions of failure stories for some proposed new system design from a range of experts. While there is overlap between these two taxonomies, there are important differences. It is suggested that they could be integrated or used jointly both for knowledge elicitation and to identify requirements regarding needed capabilities of predictive performance models.

Moving beyond reflection and toward disruption in the post-field context of mathematics teacher education

Prospective teachers bring countless stories of success and failure from different mathematics classrooms to their post-field teacher education courses. These reflective stories often glorify school mathematics classrooms and dominant traditions within, instead of confronting the marginalization of diverse groups in school environments. Mathematics teacher educators have a significant role to play in teaching prospective teachers to reflect critically on their field experiences and, in doing so, create spaces for disruption and disruptive pedagogies. Drawing on critical and equity-based theories applied within the fields of mathematics education and teacher education research, we propose a disruptive pedagogy analytical framework that enables us to study the roles and practices of mathematics teacher educators as they conduct their work in these post-field contexts of teacher education. In this paper, we introduce our disruptive pedagogy framework and present the results that followed from using it to analyze data from a research study in which mathematics teacher educators from across Canada and Norway were interviewed. We claim that our analytical framework can be used to identify those disruptive and transformative practices initiated by mathematics teacher educators—practices that are necessary to bring about shifts in inequitable and unjust classroom practices of school mathematics and in becoming a teacher. Unfortunately, however, results reported here point to the need for further shifts and growth toward more explicitly disruptive practices initiated by mathematics teacher educators in the post-field context.

Universalization of Education and Educational Entrepreneurship in China: Market Opportunities and Challenges

This study examines Chinese education’s universalization, entrepreneurship, and potential. Since 1949, when China started tackling adult illiteracy, its education system has gone from universal to global. This advances national growth and human quality. Through research education, evidence-based policy, and industrial excellence, the study examines Chinese universal education and educational entrepreneurship. Educational entrepreneurship involves promotion, early childhood education in rich areas, K12, vocational training, and adult education. This study examines prominent education companies’ business strategy, market share, and competitive strategies and how Internet platforms, VR, AR, and gamification effect education. National policy affects special, minority, and social education. This research analyzes how Western teaching methods increase educational accessibility and entrepreneurship in China and other countries. This article discusses global education penetration, education entrepreneurship definitions and qualities, and success and failure stories. It provides evidence-based education policy, practice, and industry development advice to China. Chinese and international education accomplishments are examined for equality, technology integration, and educational entrepreneurship.

Earth, Water, Air, and Fire – Thinking about Farming and Farmscapes

Farming has changed the face of the earth in Africa as much as elsewhere. But histories of African farmscapes, shaped by millennia of agriculture, are obscured by narratives of pristine landscapes, whether of forests or savanna, and the role of farming in transforming African farmscapes is seldom taught in schools. We present examples of farming strategies and systems from western and southern Africa, which we hope are inspiring and maybe, at times, even surprising. Our exploration of the farmscapes, structured along the classical elements of Earth, Fire, Water, and Air, describes how plants and people deal with the influence these elements have on successful farming and how these influences show up in farmscapes. We hope these stories of flexibility, adaptation, and success and failure motivate teachers and students to think out of the box in grappling with the challenges our world is facing. These stories also provide opportunities for teaching about the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly the goals of Zero Hunger (SDG 2), Responsible Consumption and Production (SDG 12), and Life on Land (SDG 15).

Breaking open the black box of narratives on European Capital of culture: social positioning, cultural participation, and success and failure stories (case of ECOC Wrocław 2016)

ABSTRACT The study aims to clarify how social positioning and modes of cultural participation shape the meanings people attach to the European Capital of Culture Wrocław 2016 initiative. The authors analyse both quantitative and qualitative evidence for narratives on ECOC, drawing on data collected in a survey (N = 1000) in 2017 and qualitative group interviews (10 FGIs) in 2016 and 2017. A literature-based narrative on the ECOC legacy is first reconstructed as a point of reference. Local perspectives on ECOC 2016 are derived from a representative survey and in-depth qualitative analysis to reveal bottom-up perspectives on what ECOC 2016 was. The paper examines the relationship between ECOC’s values and the socioeconomic and sociocultural characteristics of city residents who support and oppose it, to determine how ECOC’s values are related to class dimensions of social positioning and modes of cultural participation. The paper concludes that ways of understanding and narrating ECOC are derived primarily from cultural practices. Socio-demographic variables are of secondary importance. Both affirmative narratives of ECOC’s achievements in cultural policy and critical accounts can be viewed as informative markers of who and how perceives cultural policy successes and failures.

Scientific Research for European Decision-Making

No AccessScientific Research for European Decision-MakingEmilia Blank, PhD Lukas Danko, Kata Katz, Dr. sc Volodymyr Polishchuk, Dr Ivan RubinićEmilia Blank University of Wuppertal Germany BA; is currently finishing her double master’s degree from the University of Wuppertal and Andrássy University in Budapest. She is majoring in Policy Science and International Relations, while also working at the Institute for Democracy and Participation Studies as a research assistant. In addition to being the chairwoman of an association advocating for equal access to education around the globe, her interests lie in development cooperation between countries as well as educational policies within Europe.Search for more papers by this author, PhD Lukas Danko Tomas Bata University Czech Republic PhD; is an assistant professor and secretary at Tomas Bata University in Zlín, Faculty of Management and Economics, Department of Regional Development, Public Sector Administration and Law. With a background in economics, Lukáš has a range of interests in creative economy, collaborative spaces, and multi-level governance. He has published both qualitative and quantitative papers in WoS and Scopus, and book chapters in Routledge, and Springer.Search for more papers by this author, Kata Katz University of Arts Berlin Germany MA; studied Philosophy, Literature and Film Studies at the University of Szeged, Hungary. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Arts Berlin (UdK), Germany. She is an independent lecturer and one of the co-founders of the Project Failure Stories. Her research focuses on media and photography theory, philosophy of science and science history.Search for more papers by this author, Dr. sc Volodymyr Polishchuk Uzhhorod National University Ukraine Dr. sc; is a professor at Uzhhorod National University (Ukraine). He is a project manager and expert on many IT and scientific projects, whose interests include research and development in information technology and aviation, with an emphasis on assessing process control in complex systems. He is the author of more than 150 scientific works.Search for more papers by this author, Dr Ivan Rubinić Maastricht University The Netherlands Dr; is a postdoctoral researcher in European integration at Maastricht University. He is working toward the advancement of political economy, economic inequality, and international trade. Ivan is a political economist committed to exposing that excessive inequalities stand in the way of the European vision of shared prosperity, equality, and cohesiveness. His scholarly record is comprised of a number of publications, including Palgrave Macmillan, Routledge, and Oxford University Press.Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:Feb 2023SectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail About Previous article Next article FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Download book coverVolume 63Issue 1-2February 2023 ISSN: 0012-5415eISSN: 2307-289XHistoryPublished online:February 2023 PDF download

Startup Culture: MLMs, Mormons, and Entrepreneurship

Startup Culture: MLMs, Mormons, and Entrepreneurship

On the Celebration of Failure in Serbian Technological Entrepreneurship from an Anthropological Perspective

The entering of the Serbian economy into a more markedly neoliberal phase after 2008 has been accompanied by attempts to implement the concept of the entrepreneurial economy into a national economic policy, thus creating the conditions for the emergence of an altered way of cultural conceptualization of the entrepreneurship phenomenon, and also for a change in the way in which the phenomenon of entrepreneurial failure is conceived. This paper analyzes “stories of failure”, typical narratives that technological entrepreneurs present as part of so-called Fuckup Nights, events organized in Belgrade as well as in a number of other cities around the world. The educational, propaganda and autodidactic function of these stories, which seek to bring about a change in the social perception of the phenomenon of entrepreneurial failure, is realized within an interpretative framework delineated by the discourse of the neoliberal system, which circulates a certain kind of implicit knowledge regarding the way that the surrounding reality and socially desirable roles assigned to subjects are defined. The way in which the phenomenon of entrepreneurial failure is conceived is linked to the paradoxes stemming from the concept of the entrepreneurial economy which, existing within the dominant neoliberal discourse, emphasizes the use of both innovativeness as an economically grounded concept and of creativity as an intrinsic, universal human quality, which is shaped by the mechanisms of culture but also in accordance with the demands of the current economic policy, with the aim of preserving the now already weakened neoliberal system. Through these concepts the modes of functioning of various types of entrepreneurial enterprises are examined, those involving elements of startups as well as entrepreneurial enterprises launched as part of the business processes of established technological companies. Starting from the assumption that the process of technological innovativeness functions both on the level of thought processes and the level of social interactions, that it involves the activity of the innovative as well as of other aspects of creative intelligence in individual subjects who engage in interaction on the level of the technology companies they work for on the one hand, and on the other, with consumers as a source of unrefined stimuli for the reconstruction of existing frameworks or their surpassing, with the aim of successfully (re)creating a certain product. By looking at the causes of failure in Serbian technological entrepreneurship, the paper points to the importance of the concepts of creativity and innovativeness in the narrative semantic structure of the analyzed stories, as well as to the heuristic potential of those concepts for the anthropological analysis of ideas and practices related to the phenomenon of contemporary Serbian entrepreneurship, which is connected to the characteristics of the process of Serbian transition in the period after 2008, which is referred to in the paper as the “mature phase” of the second transition.

Community MH Must Include Care for Incarcerated Individuals, Released Prisoners

Community MH Must Include Care for Incarcerated Individuals, Released Prisoners

Normalizing failure: when things go wrong in participatory marine social science fieldwork

Abstract Failure is a normal and critical part of the scientific process; however, the admittance of failure remains largely stigmatized within the sciences. In this paper, we argue that sharing stories of failure should be normalized, not only for the advancement of knowledge and improvement of research outcomes, but also for the health and well-being of the scientific community. We feel that this is particularly important for early career researchers, as it will help to set more realistic expectations of a career in science and to help reframe failure as a positive force for good. To do so, we draw upon our recent experiences of failure in participatory marine social science fieldwork. We share our personal perspectives of, among other things, how we felt when confronted with failure in the field, and more importantly, the strategies we used to confront, deal with, and overcome those failures. By doing so, we generate a list of practical steps and considerations that marine social science researchers can follow to help them navigate their own failures in the field, should they occur.

Thinking about future research on entrepreneurial failure: An interview with Dean Andrew Shepherd

Entrepreneurial failure is a sensitive research topic that remains understudied in the francophone literature. We pay great attention to success stories, startups, and new venture creation, but there is little focus on failure stories, startdowns and the disappearance of new ventures. This paper—which presents an interview that we conducted with Dean Andrew Shepherd about past, current and future research on entrepreneurial failure—calls for more integrative, processual and cross analysis. It also outlines theoretical and methodological challenges for future research on entrepreneurial failure.