Individual Actions Research Articles

Infrastructural justice for responsible software engineering,

In recent years, we have seen many examples of software products unintentionally causing demonstrable harm. Many guidelines for ethical and responsible computing have been developed in response. Dominant approaches typically attribute liability and blame to individual companies or actors, rather than understanding how the working practices, norms, and cultural understandings in the software industry contribute to such outcomes. In this paper, we propose an understanding of responsibility that is infrastructural, relational, and cultural; thus, providing a foundation to better enable responsible software engineering into the future. Our approach draws on Young's (2006) social connection model of responsibility and Star and Ruhleder's (1994) concept of infrastructure. By bringing these theories together we introduce a concept called infrastructural injustice, which offers a new way for software engineers to consider their opportunities for responsible action with respect to society and the planet. We illustrate the utility of this approach by applying it to an Open-Source software communities’ development of Deepfake technology, to find key leverage points of responsibility that are relevant to both Deepfake technology and software engineering more broadly.

Going Local: An Agency-Based Approach to Collapse, Resistance, and Resilience in Hittite Anatolia

Abstract Crisis and collapse have long been prominent themes in Hittite studies (much more so than the related topics of resistance and resilience) and most of the extant body of scholarship on these themes have concentrated on the disintegration of the Hittite Empire around 1200 BCE. Though the events, conditions and processes that culminated in the disintegration of the Hittite Empire elude historical reconstruction, recent studies have unanimously rejected monocausal explanations of collapse in favor of the view that it was brought about by a combination of factors – internal, external, acute or chronic. In Hittite scholarship, the study of collapse and its aftermath have typically operated within a markedly state-centered and progressivist framework, focusing primarily on figuring out “what went wrong.” Meanwhile, especially in text-based studies, the agency and resilience of local, small(er)-scale, peripheral, and non-state individuals and communities, as well as their role in the construction, maintenance, and collapse of the Hittite empire, remain largely overlooked. The aim of the present paper is to shift the focus and scale of analysis away from the state, and to draw out from the textual record, the long-term agency, resistance, and resilience of local, small-scale, and often non-state individuals, communities, or socio-political institutions, which have typically been left out of text-based modern narratives. This paper will reassess the prominent view of the Hittite king (and state) as the absolute political, military, judicial, and religious authority, and argue that certain local and non-state communities and socio-political institutions exercised diverse kinds of agency, were remarkably resilient in the long term, and survived the final collapse of the Hittite state. In order to situate the inquiry in its broader scholarly and intellectual context, it will begin with an overview of where things stand in the study of the Hittite collapse. The next step will be to identify individual or collective local actors in the textual record. It will lastly focus on the interactions of diverse local agents with the Hittite state.

The interplay of competencies and governance settings in dealing with uncertainty: A comparison of mobility as a service in the Netherlands and Australia

Actors experience considerable uncertainty when developing and realizing mobility innovations that can contribute in the transition to a sustainable transport system. Although the role of uncertainty and its handling is mentioned as important in the literature on transitions and innovations, there is a lack of understanding how uncertainty affects decision-making processes and actors themselves. This paper investigates the interplay of uncertainty competencies and governance settings in four innovation cases of Mobility as a Service (MaaS). Our findings demonstrate it is difficult to sustain MaaS beyond a research trial, because actors experience too much uncertainty about governance questions of long-term responsibilities and role distribution. Although individual actors possess effective project management skills and willingness to innovate in a trial context, they are unable to bring MaaS to a next level because MaaS is not seen as a part of a larger design quest in which stakeholders experiment and play with uncertainty through different institutional configurations.

Dairy farming technologies and the agency of cows

Studies on animal cognition, emotion, language, culture, and politics have shown that non-human animals are agents who engage in self-willed actions and have an interest in shaping their own lives. In today’s world, however, animals’ lives are affected significantly by circumstances that humans have created, including animal farming systems. The current paper explores how the agency of cows relates to technology by reporting on fieldwork performed in the Dutch dairy sector. Multi-species ethnography was used as a flexible methodology that allowed readjusting questions and methods as our research developed. In the first research phase, observations and informal talks were held on six farms which had been recruited on the basis of convenience sampling and which were each visited for one full day. In the second research phase, five more farms were selected for 1-day visits through theoretical and snowball sampling, and one farm was visited repeatedly for in-depth observations. The observational strategies used included following individual actors (farmers, cows or technologies) and documenting their interactions with other actors; participating in daily routines such as feeding cows roughage and scraping manure; witnessing cows’ responses to non-routine events such as the introduction of new technologies or new cows; and sometimes waiting for notable occurrences by just ‘hanging out’ with cows. Observations and informal talks were in this research phase complemented by a small number of interviews with farmers, cow shed designers, and technology developers. Our main conclusion is that the agency of dairy cows is presupposed and mediated by dairy farming technologies. Dairy farming technologies presuppose cow in the ‘scripts’ and ‘programs of action’ which they enforce: they require cows to act in specific ways, anticipate some ways in which cows could disrupt technological routines, and (successfully or unsuccessfully) attempt to ensure cows’ cooperation by appealing to their wants and desires and their ability to learn. Dairy farming technologies thus assign to cows not only the ability to perform ‘metabolic labour’ but also the capacity to act purposively and learning abilities. Technologies mediate cow agency by (co–)shaping how cows express agency in relation to other entities, including other cows, humans, other non-human animals, material entities including technologies, and the world at large. That technologies can be relevant for animal agency in various ways raises the question of how technologies can be designed for agency – although the concept of animal agency also challenges us to reconsider animal agriculture more fundamentally.

Leaders and Managers Key Characteristics and Open Innovation Adoption in SMEs: Systematic Review and Future Directions

Existing literature provides limited insights into the role of individual actors and the human side of Open Innovation (OI) adoption in SMEs. Additionally, there is a lack of studies that systematically consolidate and analyze the publications addressing this specific topic. This research aims to fill this gap by pursuing three main objectives: firstly, to review the influence of SME leaders and manager's characteristics on the adoption of OI; secondly, to identify the characteristics of leaders and managers of SMEs and their leadership styles when adopting OI; and lastly, to explain their role in promoting OI. A total of 43 peer-reviewed articles published in reputable scientific journals from 2003 to 2022 were examined. This study classifies manager's characteristics that contribute to the effective implementation of OI within SMEs into three categories: demographic characteristics, personal characteristics, and managerial characteristics. This review contributes to prior research by outlining a leader and manager profile that leads to the successful implementation of OI in SMEs. The article concludes with theoretical and practical contributions and suggestions for potential directions for future research.

Who Took the Fall in 1408, and Why? Vienna's Elites in Alliances and Conflicts with Habsburg Dukes

Abstract This article focuses on the involvement of Viennese elites in wide-reaching political conflicts around 1400. Central European princes often held positions as city lords, which resulted in ambivalent relations between them and urban elites, as well as with their kin residing in the countryside. Setting aside grand categories of institutional history in favor of the interactions and relations of concrete actors, their social networks, and their involvement in shaping politics, the article follows six urban actors through a major conflict that involved the city lords, urban authorities, and individual actors and eventually resulted in the beheading of three of them. The article adopts a prosopographical approach to find out more about patterns of social costs and benefits in these conflicts. It argues that considering polyvalent and relational dimensions of belonging can help us better understand constellations of conflict and alliance and the modes and mechanisms of late medieval politics. It eventually establishes the boundaries of social network approaches when it comes to assessing individual motives and their alleged resonance in contemporary narratives of community.

A framework for business continuity management in a multiactor context

AbstractBusiness continuity management (BCM) is an analytic process capable of fostering the resilience of critical societal functions. While previous research on BCM primarily has focused on its applications within individual organizations, today's modern society involves networks of interdependent actors collectively delivering these essential functions to end users. This necessitates an expansion of BCM to accommodate a multiactor context. Critical considerations that need to be addressed in multiactor BCM involve shared use of a common, finite resource by several actors, or situations where an alternative continuity solution is relied upon by more than one actor, but its capacity is insufficient for simultaneous use by all. The aim of this paper is to propose a framework for multiactor BCM. The framework expands upon existing ISO 22301 standards to outline how BCM can be approached for the multiactor context. It diverges from the conventional BCM approach conducted by individual actors and embraces a societal safety perspective, facilitating the definition of a common analytic focus and promoting high conceptual harmonization. While acknowledging potential practical barriers, the framework facilitates the connection of BCM efforts from different actors with minimal additional analytic efforts. The overarching goal of the framework is to provide increased understanding of the continuity of the multiactor system, specifically focusing on its ability to deliver the most critical products or services to end users. Based on this understanding, the aim is to identify ways to further improve the continuity, for example by identifying and ranking critical products or services, identifying resources or alternative continuity solutions that many actors depend on in delivering their critical products and services. Finally, the paper addresses lingering challenges and highlights success factors necessary for the effective application of the framework.

Composing Synergistic Macro Actions for Reinforcement Learning Agents.

Macro actions have been demonstrated to be beneficial for the learning processes of an agent and have encouraged a variety of techniques to be developed for constructing more effective ones. However, previous techniques usually do not further consider combining macro actions to form a synergistic macro action ensemble, in which synergism exhibits when the constituent macro actions are favorable to be jointly used by an agent during evaluation. Such a synergistic macro action ensemble may potentially allow an agent to perform even better than the individual macro actions within it. Motivated by the recent advances of neural architecture search (NAS), in this brief, we formulate the construction of a synergistic macro action ensemble as a Markov decision process (MDP) and evaluate the constructed macro action ensemble as a whole. Such a problem formulation enables synergism to be taken into account by the proposed evaluation procedure. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework is able to discover the synergistic macro action ensembles. Furthermore, we also highlight the benefits of these macro action ensembles through a set of analytical cases.

Socially Innovative Initiatives in Deprived Rural Areas of Germany, Ireland and Portugal: Exploring Empowerment and Impact on Community Development

In many (remote) rural areas of Europe and the world, rural communities are facing various challenges. One response is residents leaving their communities. However, there are also many empirical examples of residents staying, launching project initiatives, developing new solutions and experimenting with new practices. This is what we call social innovation. What experiences do actors have in these processes? Can we speak of empowerment? To what extent can such initiatives have an impact on community development? In this article, we explore these questions, for which there is little related empirical research. By applying a multi-sited individualising comparison to case studies in three European countries (Germany, Ireland and Portugal), we obtain empirical evidence of the following dimensions of empowerment that Avelino et al. outline conceptually: the achievement of autonomy, competence and relatedness and also impact, meaning and resilience. Often, however, it is not the individual actors for whom such effects can be reported. Rather, the social initiative as such or the local administration has acquired new skills and autonomy. Regarding community development, ‘pathways to impact’, such as infrastructure improvements and/or the creation of new employment opportunities and/or the influx of new residents, could be identified. However, this development often depended on both opportunity and the cooperation and goodwill of many stakeholders.

Environmental Governance Networks and Geography: A Research Agenda at the Confluence of Critical Concepts for Navigating Rapid Environmental Change

Social networks are foundational to modern environmental governance, and particularly influential in supporting societal navigation of rapid environmental change. Social network science crosses disciplinary boundaries and provides theoretical and methodological tools to predict and assess relationships between network characteristics, structures, and the diffusion of information and innovations critical to navigating environmental governance challenges such as climate change and biodiversity loss. Most network studies examine networks that operate at a particular spatial scale, and research questions often rest on the relationships between simple network structures and characteristics of individual network actors and their associations. Geographers are poised to further develop theory underlying social network science specifically relevant to navigating human–environment governance challenges by disentangling the influences of scale, place, and identity in network studies. In this article, we advance the concept of environmental governance networks as multiscale, multilevel, and multi-identity social networks formed organically in response to environmental governance challenges. We propose that geographers are well positioned to expose the socially constructed nature of environmental governance networks as barriers and opportunities for societal navigation of rapid environmental change by explicitly theorizing critical influences across time, space, place, levels of social organization, and the multiple roles and social identities individual network actors hold. We develop a research agenda that leverages geographic theory to expand network science questions relative to concepts such as network proximity, affiliation, interaction, and intra-individual roles and identities to better understand the position and potential of environmental governance networks as a social structure for navigating rapid environmental change.

Methodological aspects of ensuring the smooth functioning of the digital ruble platform

Subject. The article addresses the smooth functioning of the digital ruble platform (SFDRP). Objectives. The purpose is to disclose methodological aspects of ensuring the SFDRP, considering the practices of ensuring the smooth functioning of payment systems (SFPS). Methods. The study provides a comparative analysis of characteristics of the digital ruble platform and of payment systems. It is determined that the activity of both is based on smooth functioning of individual independent actors, thus, the practices of ensuring SFPS can be applied to ensure SFDRP. Based on GOST R ISO 31000-2019 "Risk Management. Principles and Guidelines" and GOST R ISO 22301-2014 "Business Continuity Management Systems", I offer a methodological approach to ensuring SFDRP. Results. The study discloses unified SFDRP support structure and the risk and continuity management processes. Risk management is aimed at reducing the expected severity of consequences of events that may occur. At the same time, continuity management involves influencing the events that have already occurred. Conclusions. It is necessary to consider the fact of interaction between the digital ruble platform and the Bank of Russia Payment System, which implements the practices of ensuring SFPS. Efficiency of the organization of SFPS of the Bank of Russia will have a direct impact on the ability to ensure SFDRP, and vice versa. Supporting the SFDRP is especially important from the perspective of regulating the volatility of cash flows to maintain the financial stability of the economy.

Leveraging natural language processing techniques to explore the potential impact of the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM)

Debates on controversial policies often stimulate extensive discourse, which is difficult to interpret objectively. Political science scholars have begun to use new textual data analysis tools to illuminate policy debates, yet these techniques have been little leveraged in the international business literature. We use a combination of natural language processing, network analysis and trade data to shed light on a high-profile policy debate—the EU’s recently enacted Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). We leverage these novel techniques to analyze business inputs to the EU’s public consultation, differentiating between different types of organizations (companies, trade associations, non-EU actors) and nature of impact (direct, indirect, potential). Although there are similarities in key concerns, there are also differences, both across sectors and between collective and individual actors. Key findings include the fact that collective actors and indirectly affected sectors tended to be less concerned about the negative impacts of the new measure on international relations than individual firms and those directly affected. Firms’ home country also impacted on their positions, with EU-headquartered and foreign-owned companies clustering separately. Our research highlights the potential of natural language processing techniques to help better understand the positions of business in contentious debates and inform policy making.

Epistemological criticism of the concept of individualism in conventional economies

This research critically examines the epistemology surrounding the concept of individualism within conventional economics, focusing on elucidating the influence of non-economic factors—namely culture, social norms, and collective psychology—on economic decision-making processes. This study endeavors to uncover the role of these factors in individual economic decisions by employing a methodology rooted in analyzing economic and sociological literature. The findings shed light on the discordance between the traditional notion of individualism and the multifaceted realities of contemporary society, where culture, social norms, and collective psychology significantly shape economic behaviors and preferences. By providing nuanced insights into how these non-economic factors impact individuals' economic choices and actions, this research underscores the imperative for a broader, more inclusive perspective within economic paradigms. This study contributes to a richer comprehension of the complexities inherent in individual economic decisions when viewed against non-economic influences.

“Doesn’t Matter if It’s Crack or . . . Pesticides, AIDS, It’s All the Same Shit”: Body-Land Metonymies in Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints

Abstract This article closely examines Mario Valle, the seroconverted Chicano gay male minor protagonist in Cherríe Moraga’s play Heroes and Saints (1992) as a case study of Chicanx environmentalism informed by a materially metonymic body-land relationship. The article addresses Mario Valle’s HIV+ status not as a peripheral aberration but as integral to the play. The play renders legible the entangled impact of environmental toxins—pesticide poisoning and AIDS—as necessary to understanding the soothing metonymic acts of substitution queer care makes possible. AIDS and pesticide poisoning, this article argues, are mutually reinforcing and intra-acting embodied parts of an environmental, soil, and land-based whole. Through Moraga’s recuperative lens of “Queer Aztlán,” AIDS can finally be understood as its own unique environmental issue alongside agrochemical usage rather than as a separately delineated social concern of individualized risky behavior. The poetic potential of metonymy does not solely focus on individual human actors in service of one another. Rather, such a literary device considers the environmental nesting potential of part/whole substitutability: human, non/human, and more-than-human parts continuously generate connection and care beyond the borders of skin and soil. There is no membrane of separation between toxic bodies and toxic lands. Characters in the play often fulfill alternative roles, abilities, and bodily parts—a sister acting as a substitute child, lesbian lover, nourishing/nourished mouth for a sibling—in order to alleviate the suffering caused by acts of environmental degradation. Although truncated by enforced forms of toxicity, such contaminated bodies negate negation, producing canceling forms of negativity that are neither anti-relational nor driven toward death. Rather, these body-land relationships reinscribe the possibility for toxic bodies to perform acts of emotional labor and alleviate suffering in the face of forcibly foreclosed futurity.

Hiding Behind Complexity: Supply Chain, Oversight, Race, and the Opioid Crisis

The opioid crisis has ravaged the United States, taking 69,000 lives in 2020, with prescription opioids accounting for 98% of opioid abuse. Although this epidemic is often considered a White public health crisis nationally, overdose deaths among people of color doubled from 2017 to 2019. As research has shown that the crisis was fueled by excessive supply from the pharmaceutical industry, several individual firms have received significant public criticism. However, we find evidence that the scope of the blame transcends individual actors to indict the very structure of complex supply chains, which may have exacerbated the crisis by dispensing significantly more opioids. In specific, we posit that supply chain complexity allowed mass quantities of opioids to escape detection by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Further, we find new evidence showing the greater impact of complexity on opioid dispensing in non-White communities, which underscores their exclusion from the public discourse and governmental response surrounding the crisis and suggests possible racial bias in the DEA’s regulatory policies. Our analysis was made possible by the 2019 release of the DEA’s Automation of Reports and Consolidated Orders System database, which logged every shipment in the US opioid supply chain from 2006 to 2014. Using a fixed effects model, we find that a one-unit increase across three dimensions of supply chain complexity is associated with a 16% increase in opioid dispensing. This effect is intensified in non-White communities, where a 10% increase in the non-White population is associated with a 3.39% (1.33%) increase in opioid dispensing by pharmacies that have supply chains with high (average) complexity. To verify that high-complexity pharmacies’ excess dispensing supplied non-medical/recreational demand, we exploit the reformulation of OxyContin (designed to prevent recreational use) as an exogenous shock to the market. In a novel approach, we leverage the fact that different pharmacies received their first shipment of reformulated OxyContin at different times and use a difference-in-differences model to estimate the heterogeneous effect of the shock on dispensing. As the reformulated OxyContin stifled demand, high-complexity pharmacies experienced a 15.31% greater reduction in dispensing compared to lower-complexity pharmacies, suggesting that their excess dispensing was indeed satisfying non-medical/recreational demand.

Situated minds and distributed systems in translation

Abstract This article sheds light on two different perspectives on the boundaries of the cognitive system and the consequences of their adoption for Cognitive Translation and Interpreting Studies (CTIS). Both are represented by different approaches within the cognitive scientific cluster of approaches referred to as situated or 4EA (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended, and affective) cognition. The first, the person-centred perspective, takes individuals as a starting point and describes their interactions with their social and material surroundings. The second, the distributed, extended perspective, takes the joint activity of different situated actors and material artefacts as its starting point and depicts this socio-cognitive unit as the object of analysis. With this article, we do not seek to advocate the use of one over the other. Rather, we attempt to offer a coherent interpretation of how the cognitive process of translation can be studied and interpreted as a situated activity either from the perspective of individual actors or from a larger, distributed, and extended angle that considers people and the relevant social and material environment as a system. Specifically, we discuss what is to be gained if translation is studied from a distributed cognitive perspective. To this end, we illustrate key aspects of the discussion using empirical examples from current field research in which both an individual and a distributed perspective are applied to analyse interaction in a translation workplace.

Qaddafi's Hidden History? The Libyan World Islamic Call Society's Editions and Translations of the Qur'an

AbstractOne of the most important developments in modern Islamic missionary activism was the establishment in 1972 of the Libya‐based World Islamic Call Society (WICS, originally the Islamic Call Society) which acted as a leading think tank advocating Muslim unity and Pan‐Arabism throughout the Qaddafi era. Despite the severe challenges facing post‐revolutionary Libya, WICS remains active today, albeit with reduced global visibility. This article demonstrates the ways that WICS's endeavors in publishing were innovative in the Northern African Arabic context, notably when it comes to the al‐Muṣḥaf al‐Jamāhīriyya (1983) and the various Qur'an translations it produced, and argues that its activities are a neglected yet critical aspect of modern Islamic missionary endeavors at the nexus of Pan‐Islamism and Pan‐Arabism. Through exploring WICS's historical background, the individual actors affiliated with it, and its primary publishing projects, the current study sheds light on an overlooked chapter in modern Islamic missionary activity. It also explores the contextual factors that have influenced the success of its Qur'an translations beyond issues of religious identity, offering new insights into the intersection of politics and religion that underlie many modern translations of the Qur'an.

Saint Joseph, the Turks, and the Jews: The Path to Antisemitism of Josef Deckert, Priest in Vienna, 1869–1901

Abstract This article studies the development of antisemitism in Austria in the late nineteenth century through the example of Josef Deckert. The priest is depicted in historiography as one of the most prominent anti-Jewish agitators of that period, but his path to antisemitism has not been explored. This research indicates that Deckert's adoption of antisemitic ideology happened abruptly and was not guided by ecclesiastical or lay authorities. The article, therefore, invites us to look more at individual actors and local cultures and less on strategies from above when studying the spread of populist movements. At the same time, the analysis draws attention to two aspects that have been studied little in connection to the diffusion of antisemitism in the modern period, the cult of Saint Joseph and the remembrance of the Turkish siege of Vienna. Deckert was deeply devoted to Saint Joseph and invoked the patron saint of the Habsburg monarchy, not only as protector of Catholic Austria at the time of the Ottoman wars, but as patron of the workers and defender against the contemporary Austrian Jews.

The Gaze Dialogue Model: Nonverbal Communication in HHI and HRI.

When humans interact with each other, eye gaze movements have to support motor control as well as communication. On the one hand, we need to fixate the task goal to retrieve visual information required for safe and precise action-execution. On the other hand, gaze movements fulfil the purpose of communication, both for reading the intention of our interaction partners, as well as to signal our action intentions to others. We study this Gaze Dialogue between two participants working on a collaborative task involving two types of actions: 1) individual action and 2) action-in-interaction. We recorded the eye-gaze data of both participants during the interaction sessions in order to build a computational model, the Gaze Dialogue, encoding the interplay of the eye movements during the dyadic interaction. The model also captures the correlation between the different gaze fixation points and the nature of the action. This knowledge is used to infer the type of action performed by an individual. We validated the model against the recorded eye-gaze behavior of one subject, taking the eye-gaze behavior of the other subject as the input. Finally, we used the model to design a humanoid robot controller that provides interpersonal gaze coordination in human-robot interaction scenarios. During the interaction, the robot is able to: 1) adequately infer the human action from gaze cues; 2) adjust its gaze fixation according to the human eye-gaze behavior; and 3) signal nonverbal cues that correlate with the robot's own action intentions.

Dual routes of chunking social interaction: Insights from grouping two agent actions in working memory.

Humans have evolved the sophisticated ability to extract social relations embedded in interactive entities. One typical demonstration is a social chunking phenomenon wherein the cognitive system chunks individual actions into a unified episode basing on perceived interactive actions. However, the mechanisms underlying social chunking remain to be elucidated. Most studies have adopted static images and manipulated interactions through agents' facingness (face-to-face vs. back-to-back). Connecting agents via directed contingent actions is crucial in forming real-life social interaction. Hence, we employed dynamic actions as stimuli, separated physical- and communicative-contingency interactive actions, and predicted that domain-general physical regularities and domain-specific social relationships are crucial in social interactions, respectively. We tested this prediction by using an involuntary chunking effect in working memory, wherein two individual actions are involuntarily chunked when containing task-irrelevant interactive information. We found that involuntary chunking occurred for both types of upright interactive actions (Experiments 1, 3, 5, and 6). Inverting actions erased the chunking of communicative- but not physical-contingency actions (Experiments 2, 4, and 5). The facingness of dyads did not participate in chunking physical-contingency actions but was a prerequisite for chunking communicative-contingency actions (Experiments 3 and 6). These results reveal the dual routes of chunking interactive actions. Moreover, they suggest that the chunking mechanisms of dynamic social interaction are distinct from those of static images, highlighting the importance of using dynamic stimuli to explore the mechanisms of social interaction in emerging people-watching interdisciplinarity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).