Kind Of Inertia Research Articles

EN PARTANT D’UNE METAPHORE: PHENOMENOLOGIE DU STATUT DE L’INERTIE

My paper highlights some meanings of the metaphor of aging, used by André Gorz (1923-2007) in his homonymous article published in Les Temps Modernes in December 1961 and January 1962, the first part of which was republished by Gallimard in 2005 (copyright Éditions Galilée in 2004) as a coda to the new edition of one of his "most philosophical" pieces, The Traitor (1958), as noted by Christophe Fourel in André Gorz, a thinker for the 21st century (Éditions La Découverte, 2009, p. 10). Aging is a process based on inertia and generating – because aging also generates – more and more inertia. But what kind of inertia, that of continuing the movements testifying to the vivacity of body and mind, or that of resisting them, therefore of stopping the rest, of flowing into it while forgetting the previous momentum? To the healthy young man of 36, the metaphor of aging appears to have a bitter correspondence with the shock of suddenly feeling the end of existence while living it. The well-known tripartite division of life – childhood youth, maturity, old age – has been transformed into the youth, old age diptych because maturity itself has become the negation of youth, not a mere stable state but already a slope, a masked old age, a fact. If yet young, "he started over again" (André Gorz, The traitor, followed by The aging, p. 377) that is to say, he was the author of audacious movements that took into account only his aspirations of creativity, aging requires of him only the qualities that conform to the specific roles that are asked of him and that are expected to be assumed without the slightest doubt. The phenomenology of this becoming, meticulously dissected, envisages not only the transformation of the unique being who is the subject of the story (but not the master of the phenomenological approach as such because he is desperate before "the cowardice" of his “free choice” of “integration” into the anonymity of the “Others” producing the society which imposes this decline on him (“Aging (II)”, Les Temps Modernes, nº 188, January 1962, p. 829- 852 (830-832). Because the picture of the individual, torn between his existential resistance against all the factors that impose inertia and, on the other hand, the conformism that has become "his nature", extends into the representation of society which is the counterweight to this individual and at the same time frames him. The development of the metaphor of aging has involved the phenomenology of its elements, among which the principal, inertia, and the phenomenology itself has generated messages of social philosophy, pioneers of the powerful ideas commented on in the philosophical thought of the decades later. The phenomenology of the text is and describes awareness, namely the awakening of consciousness, and the metaphor is a manifestation of this process. The metaphor of the aging of the individual thus resonates with the theoretical descriptions of crises and decadence, of degeneration: here, of the capitalist society. The construction of André Gorz is a suggestive model. Today our conclusion in front of such models can only forget the hypocritical criticisms of the phases of the decline, indeed accomplices for their persistence: and, thus, to learn from the previous models. But, it must be emphasized, the metaphor of inertia refers to the awareness of the limits of the figurative meanings of such – and these – metaphors. The awareness of the text is an awareness of metaphors, too, and thus, they become means of intellectual resistance for man.

აგრარული პოლიტიკის ფორმირების რეგიონული გამოწვევები საქართველოში

The modern world has entered an acute phase of irreversible changes and implementation of global economic transformation. In today's situation, a sensible, coherent, flexible and adaptable national economic strategic doctrine created by the state, delineating the proper role and function of the country's regional and agrarian policy, is becoming urgent. The Strategy of Agriculture and Rural Development of Georgia for 2021-2027 considers the creation of competitive products the main objective, however, the single action plan and the service programs available to the Ministry today do not leave the feeling that we have understood all the problems and challenges that arise at different stages, step or phase. Based on the foregoing, it is appropriate to raise the issue of policy options to promote production of agricultural products in the regions. Georgia's agriculture and regional development are moving absolutely haphazardly. It is this kind of inertia that needs to be stopped and urgently reformed and transformed, where the determination of the “rules of the game” of the institutional economy and the activity of regional structures in terms of statistical-analytical and situational-contextual studies become a prerequisite for targeted-program actions and the development of the field. It I safe to say that creating a regional agriculture and rural development strategy is an urgent and at the same time difficult task in today's situation. First of all, the problem is specified in the area of –administrative-territorial system and imperfections of legislation. As for the socio-economic aspects and the range of actions and thematic diversity here encourage us to think creatively and determine the advantages of causal programs. Contemporary world challenges in recent years show even more attention to issues of regionalization and the introduction of decentralization-deconcentration principles in the processes generally. The programs developed in the regions, which should be formed according to the “bottom-up” principle, fall under the institutional order network, because they become a continuation of the centripetal macroeconomic strategy of the government and create the needs of the centrist policy with the help of the principles of the regional economy. It is of the utmost importance that flexible and effective institutional changes appear in the regions, thus we will be able to analyze the resource potential and prospeects of the economy, motivate active behavior, which will replace evolutionary inertia and fragmentation with a complex, structurally-organizationally formed, technical-economically sound policy. The five directions of agricultural production optimization presented in the paper, starting from the land optimization formula and ending with the importance of introducing innovative technologies, are a single complex action module, where each has its own unique function-duty, and it is not unacceptable to disable or ignore them from a business and economical point of view.

The European Media Portrayal of Climate Change: Implications for the Social Mobilization towards Climate Action

Beyond other social actors, such as policymakers and scholars, common citizens are also expected to actively engage with climate change, by adopting sustainable actions and supporting environmental policies. However, and despite the actual growing of environment-related social movements, a kind of inertia still prevails in the social climate of our society. The media should play a key role in promoting, among common individuals, the adoption of new and more sustainable practices. However, it is argued that the media seems to be failing to effectively address the climate crisis. As such, this study aims to identify the main weaknesses of climate change media communication to further discuss possible opportunities of communication improvements. For that, 1609 news articles published between 2017 and 2018 in five European countries were analyzed in-depth, through quantitative content analysis. The news’ general characteristics, specifically reported themes, and the specificities of actors’ discourses were taken into account for the analysis. It was verified that the European media tends to report climate change by using distant (e.g., future-focused) and outcome (e.g., threatening messages) framings, based on non-resilient, scientific, and political narratives, whilst overlooking the role of civil society on adapting to climate change. These results demonstrate that instead of promoting society’s climate action, the media may be contributing to a widespread social apathy about the climate and the disengagement of individuals regarding environment-related matters. Evidence-based forms of improving the media’s communication on climate change will be further discussed.

Complex Networks in Macroeconomics: A New Research Frontier

The economist Friedrich Von Hayek, to whom it was awarded the Nobel memorial prize in Economic Sciences in 1974, viewed and interpreted the economic system as an entity governed by a spontaneous order. Such term designates the potential of the market relations to be self-organized, thus not requiring any centralized coordination. Selfinterested agents, pursuing their own goals, will form a spontaneous, hence not planned, network of relations that scientists need to carefully analyze in order to acquire a panoramic and solid understanding on how the economy as a whole truly works. Surprisingly, and despite the advancements on other sciences, e.g, Biology or Physics, concerning the study of network relations, Economics has resisted to adopt network analysis as a mainstream instrument for its research. This happens for several reasons. One of them, perhaps the most striking, is a kind of inertia that prevents economists to escape the straightjacket they themselves have created. Many theorists in this area appear to be fully satisfied with the benchmark model of Economics, and use it to the exhaustion to address every possible issue they are confronted with. Such paradigm is the popular representative agent intertemporal optimization model. Representative agent models are built upon an extremely strong premise. Namely, they consider that agents not only act rationally, but that they are also able to gather all the available information that is relevant for decision-making. The straightforward corollary of such an assumption is that every agent will produce identical decisions and behave exactly in the same way. Therefore, in this scenario, the macro economy could be characterized taking the behavior of a single average agent, who consequently would be a central planner. In such a worldview, the difference between micro and macro analysis would be just a matter of scale. A fallacy of composition emerges from the argument in the previous paragraph. In most scenarios, the whole is far from being just the sum of its constituent parts, and it is precisely this simple observation that is leading to a gradual but firm paradigm shift in Economics.

Organisational inertia in Japanese institutions

A bureau of hierarchical authority is responsible for overseeing the banking industry. We show that career concerns of officials in the authority generate organisational inertia in the sense that, regardless of changes in the environment, a new junior official prefers to stick to the decision made by the former junior official, which may be suboptimal. This kind of inertia is acute in typical Japanese organisations, which have lifetime employment with internal promotion. We provide anecdotal evidence from the Ministry of Finance’s policy making in the early 1990s, which seems to be well explained by our model.

Household energy preferences for cooking in urban Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

An extensive survey on household expenditures in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, was used to analyze the factors determining urban household energy choices using a multinomial logit model. Wood-energy remains the preferred fuel of most urban households in the country; though rational, the choice is not sustainable as it portends a threat to the savanna woodlands and the economy. Many important policies have been adopted by public authorities to minimize household wood-energy consumption and to substitute it by alternative fuel. Despite the magnitude of all these policies, the depletion rate of the forest resource is increasing. A kind of inertia is thus observed for household preferences for cooking fuel. This model analyzes the sociological and economic variables of household energy preferences for cooking in Ouagadougou. The analyses show that the inertia of household cooking energy preferences are due to poverty factors such as low income, poor household access to electricity for primary and secondary energy, low house standard, household size, high frequency of cooking certain meals using woodfuel as cooking energy. The descriptive analyses show that the domestic demand for wood-energy is strongly related to household income. The firewood utilization rate decreases with increasing household income. In other words, this fuel appears as a “transition good” for these households which aim for other sources of energy for cooking that are more adapted for urban consumption. This implies that a price subsidy policy for liquid petroleum gas (LPG) and its cook stoves could significantly decrease the utilization rate of wood-energy.

From the Heights of Metaphysics:

I felt I should reply to Andy Pickering's short Response to my long Review of his book; I did not want to leave it uncontested in the literature.1 I will pick up a couple of points from his comments to indicate just what it is that he has failed to grasp about my Review. If these points are understood, then all else falls into place. Though Pickering writes that my critical remarks 'form a disconnected series' [AP, 307], I think on the contrary that the seven sections of my Review raised questions about each of the central themes of his book.2 Of course, for the sake of clarity and to respect the property of a language that is written linearly from left to right and from top to bottom all could not be 'mangled' together, and they were presented in sequence, which may explain their apparent unconnectedness from Pickering's 'point of view'. So let us briefly recall the content of those sections, answering his comments along the way. In the first section, I pointed out that the 'dialectic of resistance and accommodation', which is the central analytical tool proposed in the book, was reminiscent of Piaget's theory of knowledge acquisition, but with one major difference: Piaget was explicitly structural in his analysis (via the concept of'scheme'), whereas Pickering is purely phenomenalist. I thought a comparison of the two would make clear the limitations of Pickering's dialectic, which offers no way (except verbal) to make possible a real integration of different elements of practice through their incorporation into a practical scheme of action, which orients (and thus limits) future action [YG, 319-20]. The second section discussed Pickering's return to realism, and showed that his approach was simply a restatement, in a new language, of classical positions, using terms too loose to effect a 'renewal' of the debate. But on these sections, Pickering has nothing to say. The third section, on agency, again focused on a concept central to Pickering and followed in detail the way in which this 'agency' supposedly works. I concluded that since things 'just happened' (as Pickering writes so many times in his book), agency was in fact a kind of inertia that just resists action, instead of acting by itself. For if words have meaning, 'agency' must be more than 'resistance'. It is in this context that I sketched out the example of the blind man. I insisted that I thought this discussion purely metaphysical, but that it could not be passed over, given the importance it

Toward Functionalism in Political Science: The Case of Innovation in Party Systems

In the life of all organizations there seems to be a general tendency toward a state of affairs called “equilibrium” by the favorably disposed and “rigidity” by the disaffected. Once the internal processes of an organization have become routine and its relations to the outside world have become stabilized, a kind of inertia seems to set in. The prevailing patterns are seen as good by the members. Identification involves a good deal of resistance to change. But if this is true of organizations, certain conditions also provide incentives for innovation.All stable organizations are in a continual process of adaptation. Innovation is that part of the process which is deliberate, self-conscious adaptation. Activities are innovative if they are attempts to change the organization and its environment in keeping with policies thought out in advance of the attempt. Innovation is not to be confused with liberalism or reform. The antonym for innovation is “consolidation,” not conservatism. Liberalism and conservatism are postures toward the kinds of changes required. To have no policy at all for changing things or to have a policy against changing things is to be neither liberal nor conservative; it is to be non-innovative or consolidative.