Intersubjective Level Research Articles

The Market

Markets have led a shadowy existence in economics. The ruling paradigm, neoclassical economics, for which markets are a central institution, has mainly been concerned with the determination of market prices. Until recently, sociological investigations of modern markets focused on production, as did anthropological work that ascertained how each culture made a living. The major debate among anthropologists to date has been about whether the economic rationality of the maximizing individual is to be found in all societies or whether substantive economies are always embedded in a cultural matrix that determines its logics and forms of transaction. A new feature of financial markets is that they are based upon scopic systems – electronic and informational mechanisms of observing and contextualizing market reality and of back-projecting this reality onto the computer screens of globally operating traders. When such a mechanism is in place, coordination and activities respond to the reflected, represented reality rather than to pre-reflexive occurrences. This form of coordination contrasts with network forms of coordination that are pre-reflexive in character. In network markets, participants rely on their relationships to determine ‘where the market is’. In a market based on scopic systems, the market is fully visible on screen – as a set of tradable, comprehensively contextualized, quickly moving prices for various trading instruments. In this situation, a level of global inter-subjectivity emerges that derives from the character of these markets as reflexively observed by participants on their computer screens in temporal continuity, synchronicity, and immediacy. As a consequence, these markets are communities of time. As temporalized systems, financial markets project a form of coordination adapted to a global world that leaves behind the patterns of traditional producer and exchange markets.

The Labouring Sleepwalker: Evocation and expression as modes of qualitative educational research

This paper deals with the highly personal way an individual makes sense of the world in a way that avoids the pitfalls of the so‐called private language. For Wittgenstein following a rule can never mean just following another rule, though we do follow rules blindly. His idea of the ‘form of life’ elicits that ‘what we do’ refers to what we have learnt, to the way in which we have learnt it and to how we have grown to find it self‐evident. But the reference to the ‘bedrock’, to what was originally learnt, is the only kind of situation for which it makes sense to ask whether the meaning of a concept is correctly stated. Dialogue, conversation, and exchange of ideas are the right ways to characterize all the other situations. The challenge of Wittgensteinian philosophy is therefore that of a balance of the individual and the community, of language and the world. His insistence on the third person (or the intersubjective level) is countered by the importance he gives to each individual's personal stance: persons must speak for themselves and do what they can do. Given the growing interest for the kind of educational research where the ‘personal’ is focused on, I will try to take up the challenge to see how here as elsewhere ‘language’ works. By making clear what it does for us, it will gradually become clear how this kind of research may itself have to be reinterpreted.

Sound from silence: On listening in organizational learning

One of the central challenges for organizational learning at an intersubjective level has been proposed in terms of developing a shared language as a prerequisite for shared understanding in a community. In this respect, social learning theory suggests communities of practice as loci, and discourse as the medium of such learning. Rather than knowledge acquisition, social learning refers to identity formation through competent participation in a discursive practice. Listening as a central, yet so far neglected, element of discursive practice involves the constitution of a relational basis that allows for intersubjective meaning generation. We suggest listening as a condition for the possibility of social learning and illustrate our suggestion with an empirical case. We discuss the implications of our argument for organizational and social learning as well as its broader relevance.

Occlusal phase of gum-chewing strokes.

The occlusal phase of chewing is especially interesting because food particles are being pulverized in this phase. For efficient chewing the upper and lower teeth must come together in a congruent fashion with less variation than in other phases. To examine this expectation the chewing motions of 28 women were recorded optoelectrically, and their frontal and sagittal angles of the closing and following opening strokes were measured at 3.0 mm (3-D linear distance) of opening. Closing strokes were more stable than opening strokes. The frontal angle was correlated with the sagittal angle during closing. The opening and closing sagittal angles were moderately correlated, and the opening and closing frontal angles were negatively correlated at the intersubject level. No direct association was found between the closing strokes and following opening strokes at the intra-subject level. These results suggest that closing strokes are more stable than opening strokes, resulting in efficient mastication.

Participant Perception of Others' Acts: Virtual Otherness in Infants and Adults

This commentary examines how the `matrices' of intersubjectivity distinguished by Coelho and Figueiredo (2003) may link to the levels of intersubjectivity identified in recent research on infant social cognition and communicative development, and follows up their point about `simultaneous' supplementary processes. Illustrations are offered of how a primary intersubjective mode of participant perception of actions in others is sometimes also bodily manifested in contexts of higher-order intersubjectivity, for example when spoon-feeding caregivers unwittingly open their mouth as the patient opens the mouth to take in the food, or when spectators open their mouth when watching a video of a newborn trying to imitate mouth-opening. Such virtual other participation, leaving a participatory emotional memory of having been a virtual co-author, simulating the other's movements, is seen to play a role in cultural learning and circular re-enactment of care and abuse, pertaining to intrapsychic and traumatic aspects of intersubjectivity. Finally, some impending needs in research on the nature, nurture and impairment of intersubjectivity are indicated.

Global Microstructures: The Virtual Societies of Financial Markets

Using participant‐observation data, interviews, and trading transcripts drawn from interbank currency trading in global investment banks, this article examines regular patterns of integration that characterize the global social system embedded in economic transactions. To interpret these patterns, which are global in scope but microsocial in character, this article uses the term “global microstructures.” Features of the interaction order, loosely defined, have become constitutive of and implanted in processes that have global breadth. This study draws on Schutz in the development of the concept of temporal coordination as the basis for the level of intersubjectivity discerned in global markets. This article contributes to economic sociology through the analysis of cambist (i.e., trading) markets, which are distinguished from producer markets, and by positing a form of market coordination that supplements relational or network forms of coordination.

Interpretation in the Context of Supervision

The author looks into the issue of interpretation and traces its evolution both from mere opinion, and from the point of view of the historical development of hermeneutics. In supervision interpretive dissonance may occur at several levels starting with the patient himself as well as his “gatekeepers,” and going up to the supervisor. The relationship between interpretation and supervision is examined in this context, taking into consideration the subjective and intersubjective levels of scientific inquiry. Supervision enhances the complexity of interpretation by introducing yet a third subjectivity that questions the supervisee's interpretation. This has advantages and shortcomings, as supervisors are not always aware that it is ultimately in the supervisee-patient situation where hypotheses are tested and confirmed. Theory alone cannot supersede the intersubjective situation. It is pointed out that psychoanalytic curricula should be reexamined in order to include semiotic science and its application to interpretation and supervision.

Assessment of the horizontal, fore-aft component of the ground reaction force from insole pressure patterns by using artificial neural networks

Objective. In this study it was investigated whether an artificial neural network can be used to determine the horizontal, fore-aft component of the ground reaction force from insole pressure patterns. Design. An artificial neural network was applied to map insole pressures and ground reaction forces. Method. To train an artificial neural network insole pressure patterns and ground reaction force data were simultaneously determined for a wide range of different speeds (0.9–2.3 m s −1) for five subjects. Both intrasubject and intersubject generalizability were evaluated. Results. At the intrasubject level generalizability was good when the speed for which the force was to be predicted was within the range of speeds from which data were used to train the network. Besides in some cases, generalizability to a condition outside the range of training conditions could be demonstrated. At the intersubject level the quality of generalization differed widely over subjects, from poor to good. Conclusions. It was found that an artificial neural network is able to map the relationship between insole pressure patterns and the fore-aft component of the ground reaction force. Relevance Good intrasubject generalization of `knowledge' obtained by an artificial neural network will allow the assessment of the fore-aft component of ground reaction force in condition that cannot be evaluated with force plates, e.g. activities of daily living or real sport situations. Additionally, intersubject generalization will allow shear-force recordings in subjects that are not able to complete a great number of runs to acquire enough force-plate hits.

Prediction of dynamic tendon forces from electromyographic signals: An artificial neural network approach

Artificial neural networks (ANN) with a backpropagation algorithm were used to predict dynamic tendon forces from electromyographic (EMG) signals. To achieve this goal, tendon forces and EMG-signals were recorded simultaneously in the gastrocnemius muscle of three cats while walking and trotting at different speeds on a motor-driven treadmill. The quality of the tendon force predictions were evaluated for three levels of generalization. First, at the intrasession level, tendon force predictions were made for step cycles from the same experimental session as the step cycles which were used to train the ANN. At this level of generalization very good results were obtained. Second, at the intrasubject level, tendon force predictions were made for one cat walking at a given speed while the ANN was trained with data from the same animal walking at different speeds. For the intrasubject predictions, the quality of the results depended on the walking speed for which the predictions were made: for the speeds at the low and high extremes, the predictions were worse than for the intermediate speeds. The cross-correlation coefficients between predicted and actual force time histories ranged from 0.78 to 0.91. Third, at the intersubject level, tendon forces were predicted for one animal walking at a given speed while the ANN was trained with data from the remaining two animals walking at the corresponding speed. The cross-correlation coefficients between predicted and actual force time histories ranged from 0.72 to 0.98. It was concluded that the ANN-approach is a powerful technique to predict dynamic tendon forces from EMG-signals.

Philosophical Thought and Sociological Theory in Postwar Japan

First in this paper, after discussing the changes in knowledge in 1960-70's, the development of philosophical thought of Japan in this period is discussed from the perspective of phenomenology. And next, the relationship of these thoughts to Japanese sociological theory in 1960-70's and in 1980's are investigated.Among these changes in knowledge are several typical trends including inquiries into science and positivism in general, questions about the essence and functions of language such as studies on speech-act theory and language-game theory and the re-interpretation of Saussure's linguistics, problems raised by structuralism on Western modernity, reinterpretations of Marxism, and new developments in phenomenological philosophy by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. While focusing briefly on the opposing views between Marxian sociology and sociological functionalism, and between sociological functionalism and phenomenological sociology, it is demonstrated by bibiographical reference that during the process of change in philosophical thought inquiries into the problem of subjectivity inevitably reached its fundamental level, that is, the level of intersubjectivity. Above all, the studies in fundamental interaction at the intersubjective pre-linguistic level, argued by Japanese philosophers in 1960-70's, are dealt with at §. 2 in this paper.However, investigations into the problem of intersubjectivity in Japanese sociological theory did not develop sufficiently until the 1990's. Today, there exists a rift between those sociologists who support sociological theory which chooses not to study this problem and those sociologists who support sociological investigations (including phenomenological sociology) which choose to study intersubjectivity and life-world at the fundamental level. Finally, the importance of the latter point of view is asserted in this paper.