Normative Orientation Research Articles

Overcoming Aggressive Monolingualism: Prejudices and Linguistic Diversity in Russian Megalopolises

AbstractThe study deals with linguistic prejudices of citizens of the two main Russian cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg, toward speakers of foreign languages. It aims to reveal possible recent changes in the language ideology dominating Russian society. Monolingual and linguistically normative orientations rooted in the Soviet ideological approach are being challenged nowadays by global processes of migration and cultural diversification, which influence the everyday reality of Russian megalopolises. The research is based on the analysis of two sets of data: (1) meta-discourse on language attitudes derived from interviews with labor migrants and native Russian speakers in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and posts and comments on issues of language, migration, and linguistic landscapes, collected from websites and social media and (2) linguistic landscape data collected in 2016–2019, mainly in St. Petersburg, which reflect recent changes in attitude toward linguistic diversity in public space. These data show, on the one hand, that most city dwellers still relate to monolingual speech norms and try to implement control over public space; on the other hand, that the tolerance toward multilingual communication has been increasing over the years. The study suggests that these “first cracks” in monolinguals facades of Russian cities could eventually lead to the establishing of a less rigid language regime.

Соціально-психологічні особливості вироблення уявлень про життєвий успіх

Актуальність дослідження пов’язана з необхідністю з’ясування ролі особистісних властивостей у виробленні молоддю уявлень про життєвий успіх. Надалі це дало б змогу визначити, як можна допомогти тій молоді, яка мала досвід невдач у минулому і яка наразі переживає труднощі самовизначення щодо життєвих орієнтирів.
 Метою статті було виявити на основі результатів емпіричного дослідження соціально-психологічні особливості вироблення уявлень про життєвий успіх у молоді з різним життєвим досвідом.
 Результатом дослідження стало визначення низки соціально-психологічних особливостей вироблення молоддю уявлень про життєвий успіх. Соціально-компенсаторні особливості полягають у тому, що досвід невдач актуалізує вплив негативних особистісних властивостей на процес зумовлення змісту аксіологічного компонента уявлень; соціально-статусні – характеризують вплив досвіду легкого досягання успіхів у молоді з позитивними аспектами самоставлення на посилення важливості соціального визнання та прагнення кар’єри; владно-статусні – ґрунтуються на тому, що досвід важкого або легкого досягання успіхів у минулому однаковою мірою посилює роль цінностей влади у виборі впливовості і багатства як орієнтирів життєвого успіху; маніпулятивно-орієнтаційні – означають, що внаслідок впливу досвіду невдач у молоді з негативними аспектами самоставлення досягання життєвого успіху відбувається через знецінення загальноприйнятих правил і перебільшення ролі соціальних зв’язків; нормативно-орієнтаційні – проявляються в підвищенні значення загальноприйнятих правил і посиленні орієнтації на себе, а не на соціальні зв’язки. 
 Перспективи практичного застосування результатів дослідження полягають у більш поглибленому вивченні впливу досвіду невдач на вироблення стратегій досягання життєвого успіху та в напрацюванні програм активної допомоги й наданні рекомендацій молоді, яка переживає труднощі в плануванні власного майбутнього, в особистісному та професійному самовизначенні.

An Examination of the Interaction of Democratic Ideals with Journalism Training Programmes in the Global South: The Case of Cambodia

The presumption that a liberal media landscape and associated press culture strengthens good governance and human development has approached orthodoxy in the western world. Consistent with this, journalism training has been a central component of media aid strategies in the Global South. This research examines how normative assumptions about journalism roles can interact with ideas about democracy in a training environment and the possible implications of this. It explores parallels between programme elements relating to democracy facilitation and particular role conceptualisations of journalists trained by these programmes, with a specific interest in how this process is borne out in countries where democratisation processes are ongoing. A qualitative-based methodology, using journalism training in Cambodia as a case study, finds some correlations between democracy-related emphases at training level and specific normative orientations among working journalists who participated in these programmes. However, we find that these democratic norm-related orientations of practitioners contain subtle, but key differentiations from those advocated by programme facilitators. A vocational, advocacy-oriented approach to journalism programmes may have contributed to this outcome in a Cambodian context.

Displaying entitlement

Adopting the methodology of conversation analysis, this study explores accounts in request sequences in mundane Mandarin conversations. It demonstrates that accounts are normatively due in request sequences, often placed in four sequential positions, namely pre-expansions, the request turn (either prior or subsequent to the request proper), insert expansions, and post-expansions. Accounts in these positions may accomplish four main interactional functions: soliciting pre-emptive offers, justifying the initiation of the request, forestalling a dispreferred response, and legitimising the initiated request. These functions can be managed through providing background information attributing to the requester’s trouble, his or her inability to fulfil/get the requested action/the requested object and expressing his or her immediate or future needs. Essentially, accounts display the requester’s normative orientation to which they are deployed as a device of showing the requester’s entitlement to make a request.

Imagining the future: Social struggles, the post-national domain and major contemporary social transformations

The question this article seeks to answer is what are the major social transformations going on in contemporary society that will shape the future? The argument is that the analysis of the future requires a clearer perspective on social struggles and major social transformations in societal structures including structures of consciousness. The future is thus both actuality and possibility; it is of the present but also beckons beyond the present. Or, in the terms of Koselleck (2004 [1976/1979]), it opens up the space of expectations beyond the horizons of the present. The radical uncertainty of the future has opened it up to imaginary significations of all kinds. Yet many such projections of the future lack a normative orientation and also do not provide a satisfactory connection with actuality, namely the world as it exists. This is to the detriment of a perspective on possibility. The future is created in moments of transformation when radically new interpretations of the present take root. The article discusses the fate of the post-national domain in the context of societal struggles in which new visions of the future are created and which play out in three major social transformations of the present. The argument in this article places more emphasis on a normative conception of a cosmopolitan future that identifies links between the social and the ecological as well as widening the notion of justice to include a broader sphere of issues than those that have traditionally been the concern of the left.

The Normative Permission and Legal Utterances

Abstract The author proves that rejecting the existence of permissive norms and limitation of norms to prohibitions and commands alone is possible only with reducing the idea of a function. The essence of the function is then the ability of the expression to generate independently the universal norm formation. Such manipulation is easy on the level of logical analysis, but proves risky from other points of view. If we want the deontic logic, which we construct, to consider the fact that permission is pragmatically necessary for the law-maker to convey his normative preferences, we must solve the consequences of the adopted structure of the function of norms, which originate on the socio-linguistic level. It appears, however, that due to a lack of a pragmatic theory useful for lawyers, there is no proof that the pragmatically strong permission can be expressed by means of a lot of prohibitions and commands (dos and don’ts). Besides, reducing permissions only to the language of legal rules is an obligation to accept the structure of an act of communication, which can find its full motivation in the Husserl’s structure of the direct cognition.

The Right to Process Data for Machine Learning Purposes in the EU

Europe is now at a crucial juncture in deciding how to deploy data driven technologies in ways that encourage democracy, prosperity and the well-being of European citizens. Normative preferences about how related technology laws ought to be designed should define sustainable exponential innovation policy. These preferences are dynamic and contextual. The upcoming European Data Act provides a major window of opportunity to change the story. In this respect, it is key that the European Commission takes firm action, removes overbearing policy and regulatory obstacles, strenuously harmonizes relevant legislation and provides concrete incentives and mechanisms for access, sharing and re-use of data. The article argues that to ensure an efficiently functioning European data-driven economy, a new and as yet unused term must be introduced to the field of AI & law: the right to process data for machine learning purposes. To make AI and machine learning thrive, we should critically re-examine the applicability and scope of intellectual property rights to data, including copyrights, sui generis database rights and trade secrets. The article demonstrates that exclusive de facto possession or control over machine learning input training, testing and validation datasets hinders healthy competition, a fair level playing field and rapid European innovation. The article rejects exclusive legal ownership rights over autonomously machine generated non-personal data, including AI made creations and inventions: this output belongs to the public domain. Machines do not need incentives, people need freedom of expression and businesses need freedom to operate. Synchronous to harmonized legislation, the social impact of digital transformation can be balanced and regulated by the architecture of digital systems. Embedding values in design should become a fundamental starting point of our data paradigm. Data has become a primary resource that should not be enclosed or commodified per se, but used for the common good. Commons based production and data for social good initiatives should be stimulated by the state. We need not to think in terms of exclusive, private property on data, but in terms of rights and freedoms to use, (modalities of) access, process and share data. If necessary and desirable for the progress of society, the state can implement new forms of property. Against this background the article explores normative justifications for open innovation, drawing inspiration from the works of canonical thinkers such as Locke, Marx, Kant and Hegel. Whether or not data as digital assets are ultimately admitted to the numerus clausus of legal objects i.e. acknowledged as subject matter eligible for private ownership, or whether other modalities and states of property are being developed, the article maintains that there should also be exceptions to (de facto, economic or legal) ownership claims on data that provide user rights and freedom to operate in the setting of AI model training. The article concludes that this exception is conceivable as a legal concept analogous to a quasi, imperfect usufruct in the form of a right to process data for machine learning purposes. A combination of usus and fructus (ius utendi et fruendi), not for land but for primary resource data. A right to process data that works within the context of AI and the Internet of Things (IoT), and that fits in the EU acquis communautaire. Such a right makes access, sharing and re-use of data possible, and helps to fulfil the European Strategy for Data’s desiderata.

Alternative provision of public health care: the role of citizens' satisfaction with public services and the social responsibility of government - ERRATUM.

This paper explores the factors that influence citizens' attitudes toward the alternative provision of health care services, leading them to be willing to make extra, informal payments within the public health care system. We question whether these attitudes depend primarily on inherent normative preferences, such as beliefs about the government's responsibility to its citizens, or on certain aspects of the reality that they experience, such as satisfaction with the quality and quantity of services as well as the fairness of public systems. Analyzing the findings from a national survey, the paper shows that practical considerations and real-world conditions strongly relate to attitudes more than normative perceptions do.

The changing discourse of intercultural ethics: a diachronic meta-analysis

ABSTRACT Contemporary epistemological debates on how to research interculturality frequently draw on either side of a schism between positivist and essentialist approaches vs. critical and poststructuralist paradigms. The debate lives from its retrospective either-or character dividing the history of research on interculturality into a first epoch of epistemological naiveté and a more recent age of ethical consideration and reflection. This dichotomy however is too simplistic, and it blurs our views from perceiving a more complex present and past reality. This study assumes that research on interculturality has always built on normative orientations from social discourse and that this discourse has been under permanent change. Accordingly, it assumes that there has not been a paradigm shift or break in research but that this shift has only been used as a hegemonic instrument in inner-disciplinary discourses. This study re-traces this changing discourse of intercultural ethics using a grounded theory approach to central literature from the field. Since the 1960s, four epochs of different normative orientations have been identified from pragmatism via modesty and then a new hope up to a most recent epoch of new explorations. This results in a more complex picture of the normative discourse on interculturality beyond the positivism-poststructuralism debate.

“Do you know banana boat?”: Occasioning overt knowledge negotiations in Japanese EFL conversation

This paper adds to a growing body of conversation analytic (CA) research that seeks to explicate how knowledge is negotiated in talk-in-interaction. It does so by documenting the specific interactional practices novice Japanese EFL learners use to claim, demonstrate, and monitor knowledge during conversation. Of particular note is one practice that speakers use to determine the extent of their recipient's epistemic access: “Do you know?” (DYK) formulations. DYK formulations are found to occur in a consistent sequential environment of initial reference sequences and to have regularly patterned, highly organized sequential trajectories. I show how both speakers and recipients display orientations to normative preferences regarding knowledge access and how knowledge check questions like DYK serve the larger role of maintaining intersubjectivity, epistemic congruence and managing topics. In particular, I argue that although morpho-syntactically “do you know?” constitutes a polar interrogative of Y/N access, sequentially it serves as a means of constraining the next relevant action to an overt claim of access or non-access that drives the ongoing interaction toward the public instantiation of intersubjectivity.

Alternative provision of public health care: the role of citizens' satisfaction with public services and the social responsibility of government.

This paper explores the factors that influence citizens' attitudes toward the alternative provision of health care services, leading them to be willing to make extra, informal payments within the public health care system. We question whether these attitudes depend primarily on inherent normative preferences, such as beliefs about the government's responsibility to its citizens, or on certain aspects of the reality that they experience, such as satisfaction with the quality and quantity of services as well as the fairness of public systems. Analyzing the findings from a national survey, the paper shows that practical considerations and real-world conditions strongly relate to attitudes more than normative perceptions do.

Principal professionalism in the time of COVID-19

PurposeIn this paper, we describe the impact of COVID-19 on principals and their work. Drawing on prior research undertaken prior to the onset of the pandemic, we describe how principals were already grappling with difficult tensions associated with their expertise, autonomy, normative orientation and rewards that may have real implications for their work moving forward and how, in the current context of uncertainty and change we believe the issue of principal professionalism requires our collective attention and action.Design/methodology/approachOver the last year, we undertook a multistate qualitative study of 17 school leaders to explore how principals working in traditional public schools conceptualize the principal profession and their role within it. Briefly, we found that the principalship is an “emergent profession” characterized by shared but individually determined knowledge and skills; a normative orientation of service; confused notions of external expectations and rewards and ongoing tensions among all of these elements.FindingsProfessionalism may be a surprising lever for improving the capacity of school leadership. Through our research, we identified that little is known about professionalism as it relates to the unique work of school leaders, but that understanding more about it could lead to greater knowledge of how to encourage and retain them. In the current context of uncertainty, chaos and change, the pressure on leaders to stay in the role and to succeed has never been greater. Thus, it is critical that principals have the capacity to exert professionalism over their work and to have greater say in elements of it, recognizing that some decisions must be made at district, state and federal levels.Originality/valueWhile many studies investigate how teachers of various backgrounds and in different contexts think about teaching as a profession (e.g. Anderson and Cohen, 2015; Stone-Johnson, 2014b; Torres and Weiner, 2018; Hall and McGinty, 2015), we had difficulty identifying studies focused on principals and using frameworks of professionalism to understand how these activities reflect larger shifts in the profession itself. This is despite the changing nature of principals' work, which, like the work of teachers, has been and continues to be largely influenced by the increasing role of neoliberal principles and policies in education. The public nature of the work of school leadership and the potential to support students, families and the communities in which they live brings in sharp focus the necessity of greater understanding of it during the COVID-19 crisis.

Post-corona World: Balancing International Cooperation and National Sovereignty

Introduction.National governments play a key role in the Covid-19 Pandemic as they have to lead the national policy, under emergency law. This is the opposite of the globalization boom since the 1990s after the end of the bi-polar world, where many predicted and expected that national governments will no more be important as the global economy will be run by international companies and globalized markets. What is in the post-corona world the relation between national sovereignty and international cooperation? How much cooperation is needed just under the global threat of the pandemic?Materials and methods.This article is based on my presentation at the MGIMO International Conference on 25 May on “Pandemic as a motor of transformation» and on an extensive research over several years on the ethical concept of balancing opposite values, under the term Globalance [3], and applying this concept to thirty sectors of society, in the perspective of the experiences and new realities after the Covid-19 pandemic. The method is classical ethical decision making [See: 4] with a combination of collecting empirical data from social sciences (here only few) and normative orientation on fundamental values, based on philosophical and theological ethical concepts and principles (justifications not elaborated in detail in the article).Studyresults.The study focusses on the two values freedom and solidarity as value-poles with the ethical goal to show their relationality and balance them. These two values are applied to the poles of international cooperation and national sovereignty.Сonclusion.The Covid-19 pandemic shows the importance of sovereign national governments in handling such a pandemic within its territory and its shows the crucial global cooperation and strong respective multilateral institutions and mechanisms such as the WHO, but also ILO, UNCTAD, migration and refugees organisations, International Telecommunication Union ITU and financial institutions such as IMF and World Bank. A key aspect of Globalance is also the balance between national cybersovereignty and international cooperation for cybersecurity by fighting cybercrime.

Normative Preferences and Responses to Dissension on the U.S. Supreme Court

With high profile cases being decided by 5-4 votes divided along ideological lines, there is a worry that frequent ideological disagreement over the Constitution will erode the legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court and the public’s acceptance of its decisions. While other scholars have studied the effects of dissenting opinions on public acceptance of decisions, we engage in a more nuanced analysis that takes into account a person’s normative preferences for how the Court should reach decisions. More specifically, we explore whether the effect of a dissenting opinion on public acceptance is moderated by the style of the dissent, or by the normative preferences of the person reading the dissent. We predict that there is significant variation within the public regarding the degree to which politics and public opinion should influence Court decisions, and this variation is important in explaining how people respond to disagreement between the Court’s justices. Our experimental survey first measures the degree to which respondents feel that judges should utilize public opinion or ideological considerations when making decisions, and then provides respondents with a fictional Supreme Court decision either with or without a dissenting opinion. We find that the effect of a dissenting opinion on acceptance of the decision and institutional legitimacy depends upon the normative preferences of the respondent and not the content or rhetorical style of the dissent.

Der digitalkapitalistische Geist in der Schweiz. Muster normativer Orientierungen in einem Traditionsunternehmen und einem transnationalen Digitalunternehmen

This article discusses to what extent the legitimation of the economic actions of pioneering actors in the Swiss digital economy is oriented towards solutionism. In a first step, we propose an analytical framing of solutionism that focuses on the actor’s perspective and its negotiations within the context of nation-state. In a second step, we ask about the empirical manifestations of solutionism in Switzerland based on semi-structured expert interviews. Using the example of two large companies in the mobility sector, we argue that a Swiss adaptation of solutionism can be identified, which differs according to whether the company is state-affiliated or an international firm. On the basis of the analysis of their corporate structure, entrepreneurial strategies and normative orientations, we show that the traditional stateaffiliated company represents a solutionism oriented towards the nationstate and that the transnational enterprise, on the other hand, is oriented towards a globally intended solutionism, which, however, relativizes its peculiar anti-regulationism in the context of the Swiss economy.

Addressing Individual Values to Impact Prudent Antimicrobial Prescribing in Animal Agriculture.

Antimicrobial resistance is a growing public health threat driven by antimicrobial use—both judicious and injudicious—in people and animals. In animal agriculture, antimicrobials are used to treat, control, and prevent disease in herds of animals. While such use generally occurs under the broad supervision of a veterinarian, individual animals are often treated by farm owners or managers. The decision to administer antimicrobials is therefore influenced not only by the clinical situation but also by the motivations and priorities of different individual actors. Many studies have examined the drivers of external forces such as costs, workload and time constraints, or social pressures on antimicrobial use by veterinarians and producers, but none have explored the role of individually held values in influencing decision-making related to antimicrobial use. Values are deeply held normative orientations that guide the formation of attitudes and behaviors across multiple contexts. Values have been shown to be strongly tied to perceptions of and attitudes toward polarizing topics such as climate change, and preliminary evidence suggests that values are also associated with attitudes to antimicrobial resistance and stewardship. In this article, we draw on lessons learned in other fields (human health care, climate change science) to explore how values could be tied to the extrinsic and intrinsic factors that drive antimicrobial use and prescribing in animal agriculture. We also provide suggestions for ways to build a bridge between the veterinary and social sciences and incorporate values into future research aimed at promoting antimicrobial stewardship in animal agriculture.

Culture Moderates the Normative and Distinctive Impact of Parents and Similarity on Young Adults’ Partner Preferences

To examine cultural, parental, and personal sources of young adults’ long-term romantic partner preferences, we had undergraduates ( n = 2,071) and their parents ( n = 1,851) in eight countries (Canada, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Malaysia, Philippines, the United States) rate or rank qualities they would want in the student’s partner. We introduce and use a method for separating preference patterns into normative patterns (shared across families and generations) and distinctive patterns (that characterized particular families or individuals). We found that youth everywhere wanted partners who aligned with both their own dispositions and their parents’ preferences, and these alignments reflected both culturally normative preferences and preferences distinctive to specific individuals or families. Students also predicted their parents’ responses: Their predictions were reasonably accurate reflections of what a typical parent prefers, but also reflected distinctive assumed agreement (i.e., they overestimated the degree to which their particular parents shared their particular preferences for qualities that diverged from culturally normative ideals). Culturally normative patterns exerted a stronger influence on actual or assumed parent–child agreement and accuracy in relatively collectivistic Southeast Asia (Philippines and Malaysia) than in relatively individualistic English-speaking North America (the United States and Canada). Conversely, preferences for partners who shared one’s distinctive personal dispositions were stronger in Western than Asian countries.

Enriching evaluation practice through care ethics

Recently, several authors have called for a critical assessment of the normative dimensions of evaluation practice. This article responds to this call by demonstrating how evaluation practice can be enriched through deliberate engagement with care ethics. Care ethics has a relational and practice view of morality and places caring relationships and responsibilities at the forefront of our being in the world. We will demonstrate how care ethics, in particular Joan Tronto’s moral-political theory of democratic caring, can help evaluators to reshape our way of working by placing caring and relationality at the centre of our evaluative work. Care ethics as a normative orientation for evaluation stretches beyond professional codes of conduct, and rule- or principled-based behaviour. It is part of everything we do or not do, how we interact with others, and what kinds of relationships we forge in our practice. This is illustrated with two examples: a democratic evaluation of a programme for refugee children in Sweden; and a responsive evaluation of a programme for neighbours of people with an intellectual disability in The Netherlands. Both examples show that a caring ethos offers a promising pathway to address the larger political, public issues of our times through the interrogation of un-caring practices. We conclude a caring ethos can help evaluators to strengthen a caring society that builds on people’s deeply felt need to care, to relate, and to connect within and across communities.

Cold Science Meets Hot Weather: Environmental Threats, Emotional Messages and Scientific Storytelling

Science is frequently called upon to provide guidance in the work towards sustainable development. However, for science to promote action, it is not sufficient that scientific advice is seen as competent and trustworthy. Such advice must also be perceived as meaningful and important, showing the need and urgency of taking action. This article discusses how science tries to facilitate action. It claims that the use of scientific storytelling—coherent stories told by scientists about environmental trajectories—are central in this; these stories provide meaning and motivate and guide action. To do this, the storylines need to include both a normative orientation and emotional appeals. Two different cases of scientific storytelling are analyzed: one is a dystopic story about a world rushing towards ecological catastrophe, and the other is an optimistic story about a world making dramatic progress. These macrosocial stories offer science-based ways to see the world and aim to foster and guide action. The article concludes by stating that using storylines in scientific storytelling can elicit fear, inspire hope, and guide action. The storylines connect cold and distant scientific findings to passionate imperatives about the need for social transformation. However, this attachment to emotions and values needs to be done reflexively, not only in order to create engagement with an issue but also to counteract a post-truth society where passionate imperatives go against scientific knowledge.

Against the orthodox: Walras and Laveleye’s reluctant alliance

What is the purpose of economic science? Is it about discovering general laws of economic behaviour? Is it about policy-making? And how do those objectives tie in with political views and normative preferences? In 1882–1883 a debate about the existence of economic laws arose between the French Liberal School and Émile de Laveleye, who had just published his Éléments d’économie politique. The debate concerned the form and meaning of economic science and it was bound up with the political views of both sides. A third party to this debate, Léon Walras, was having great difficulty in finding institutional and political support. Although he was closer to the French Liberals in terms of method, he was more inclined to Laveleye’s views concerning the purpose of political economy and in his political outlook. Based on unpublished letters, we will trace the imbroglio between method and purpose of political economy in the triangle formed by Émile de Laveleye, Léon Walras and the “orthodox” French Liberal School.