Notion Of Failure Research Articles

We have to change; they stay the same

Overseas student integration and difficulties in adjusting into the academic life of the host country are often posited as personal failures, and international education scholarship focuses heavily on the notion of failure. However, the categorization of international students is premised on them not being active subjects in the curriculum and the ways in which they can contribute to internationalization of higher education. The current study addresses this negative characterization through qualitative methodology, observing and interviewing 24 Chinese international students at an Australian university. Conducted during the COVID pandemic period, this study offers new insights into how the shift to online learning exacerbated the failure of the teaching, learning, and curriculum models that predominate in Australian universities. We call for a rethinking of international students’ education; as the pandemic subsides, deeper conversations are necessary over the continued prevalence of the deficit model while considering international students’ agency in their learning practices.

Theorizing failure in digital media. Four eclectic theses

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the concept of 'failure' in relation to digital media, their development and appropriation in social contexts. In the first part, the article provides an overview of the category of failure for understanding digital media, addressing some of the most relevant contributions from several fields of study, including Science & Technology Studies (STS), History of Communication, Media Archaeology, and Post-Digital Art Aesthetics. In the second part, this sketched theoretical landscape is developed through the presentation of four 'eclectic' theses on failure in digital media, with the aim of inviting media scholars to reconsider some of the most recurrent assumptions about the development of digital media through a perspective focused on the notion of failure.

The Barriers to and Facilitators of Sustainable Organizational Change

As the contemporary environment is infused with change, organizations push for change, and the notions of failure and success associated with organizational change management interventions are linked to (perceived) barriers and facilitators.
 Purpose - This study aims to identify barriers and facilitators in organizational change management and investigate essential dimensions to consider to improve the successful implementation of change initiatives within organizations. As two ends of a spectrum, barriers and facilitators play a crucial role in either hindering or facilitating the progress of a change intervention. While barriers can impede organizational change success, they can also serve as facilitators.
 Research Design - A literature review of over forty (forty) articles was conducted to determine how and how scholars have identified the variables contributing to the success or impeding change efforts. The study was conducted using a descriptive exploratory approach to identify variables considered barriers to or facilitators of change.
 Findings - Based on descriptive analysis, the findings from the literature search were categorized under three (three) themes: 1/ Self; 2/ Social Support; and 3/ Organizational Support. A deeper understanding of each theme was achieved by categorizing it further into subcategories aligned with the given theme.
 Value - This article provides a unique perspective on why planned interventions do not always consider the identified variables and, as a result, struggle to effect organizational change. By understanding factors that have a direct impact on change and assisting leaders and employees, this article provides a pathway for success in organizational change.

The Failure of Therapy: Belief, Embodiment and the Limits of Pentecostal Healing in Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT I explore the view that efficacy in Pentecostal healing depends on confidence, or unwavering belief. My focus is on emic notions of failure – how people explain failures of therapy in their own terms – rather than on failures in the procedure employed or the inadequacies of the healer. Although anthropologists have criticised the notion of belief, my ethnographic example suggests that it remains useful, particularly since in this case it is central to the assessment of failure. The Pentecostals discussed here see belief in a more material way, as embodied and intimately bound up with the reformative project of becoming a born again Christian.

Towards a historical geography of marine engineering: D. & T. Stevenson, Wick harbour and the management of nature

This paper addresses the complex relationship between natural forces and human attempts to control them in the nineteenth century with reference to a failed harbour development project undertaken in Wick in Caithness, Scotland between 1863 and 1877 by the British Fishery Society and the engineering firm D. & T. Stevenson. The paper highlights how modernist ideas that engineering could and should control nature for human ends were challenged and reshaped by geographically and historically specific discourses, including public duty and responsibility; adversarial nature and the danger of the sea; notions of failure, its meanings and its role in engineering; and the contested epistemological, reputational and experiential nature of expertise. Rather than see an historical geography of marine engineering as about successfully directing nature for human ends – shaping a new geography through technical progress – the paper calls for attention to the implications of failure. This emphasis complicates geographical narratives of progress, technological dominance and human control of the sea.

The Voices of Others: Intertextuality and Authorial Presences in Jean Rhys's Short Fiction

My project here is to discuss the extent of Rhys's permeability to the voices of ‘others’, especially when it comes to quoting, inserting, using, or elaborating her own writing with a recourse to the literary authority of other writers. The postcolonial concept of ‘writing back’ obliterates the process of actual writing to the profit of the Western-constructed idea of an accusatory pattern in the literary agendas of authors from former Empires. As critical as Rhys might have been of European colonialism, a limitation of her work to a gesture of ‘writing back’ amounts to denying the polyphony orchestrated by the writer, thereby blurring any form of aesthetic purpose per se. Therefore, in an attempt to avoid a strictly postcolonial discourse, my article studies the wide scope of examples of intertextuality in Jean Rhys's short fiction (mainly in the short stories ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’, ‘Hunger’, ‘La Grosse Fifi’, ‘Invitation to the Dance’ and ‘Temps Perdi’), in relation to the very notions of authority—both the author's, and her peers’. What is more, ‘others’ are present in her writing under the form of absent voices piercing through the fabric of the text, which results in a failure to locate the main source of authority. I shall enquire into the notion of failure as writing and reading aesthetics, rather than a simple literary motif.

On the dynamics of failure in organizational change: A dialectical perspective

How does failure emerge and develop during organizational change? As organizations are pushed for change, the notion of failure that relates to change becomes gradually ingrained in contemporary research. However, with studies having primarily added to the conversation from a static outset, extant scholarly work might not fully capture the transience that marks change in essence. This article contributes to the literature on failure in change by advancing a dialectical perspective, offering the scholarly community insight in the emergence and development of failure as happening in three processes. In a retentive process, change agents adhere to a change approach deemed successful in spite of alternatives emerging, causing tensions to gradually build within the organization’s social atmosphere. In a reactive process, looming tensions find themselves affirmed and flare up, instigating the display of a new change approach that is antithetical to the one initially adhered to. Finally, in a recursive process, organizational members collectively recall the positive aspects of prior failure, smoothening organizational change towards re-combinatory synthesis. Marking failure’s emergence and development as a dialectic, this article notes failure in organizational change to be as generative as it is deteriorating, paving the way for both success and failure to continuously remit.

Thermofluctuational Fracture Mechanism in Solids in the Presence of an Active Medium

The paper addresses an approach to the physical notion of failure of solids in the presence of an active medium (a destructive compound), which is based on two successive steps. The first one is to go from considering a body as an elastic or viscoelastic continuum to studying it as an atomic-molecular system. The second step that follows the investigation of the atomic structure is to take into account the influence of atomic motion in a solid during the study of mechanical properties of solids (at high temperatures, in a wide range of loading speeds, under cyclic and vibrational loads), which is based on the experimental data on ultimate strength and yield stress of metals. A mechanism of crack initiation in a loaded metal under the action of destructive compounds is discussed. The capillary and diffusional propagation of a molten liquid-metal compound along grain boundaries and structural defects in a solid metal in combination with the viscous flow of the melt over its surface are shown to dictate the crack propagation into metal structure. The pattern of the affecting destructive factor has been clarified.

Performing Failure

Translation studies have moved beyond the phase of discussing translatability and untranslatability of a source text from the linguistic perspective alone. Issues such as gender and language inequality have entered the scene, foregrounding translation as a contextual, political, and potentially transformative act. Insofar as translation has to do with a mode of encounter firmly embedded in the ongoing disproportional distribution of knowledge and power, the relation between translation and original lies at the heart of translation as a performance, whereas the question of how to mobilise this relation becomes crucial to appropriating translation as a strategy.This article draws upon the writings of Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to look into translation as a practice wherein the source text is acted out through the translator and the audience. While these theorists have formulated distinct views in terms of the role of the translator, this article will focus on the notion of failure, which is proposed by Spivak and more thoroughly developed by Hetain Patel and Yuyu Rau in their stage performance Who am I? Think Again. If translation concerns doing something as opposed to merely saying something, this stage work shows that failure is constitutive to translation as a practice and that the performance of failure is productive to translation as a strategy.

Failure factors in the construction process

The ability of schedulers to predict the occurrence of failures in the construction process is very relevant in modern conditions. Classification of failures and the reasons for their occurrence includes such factors as technical, technological, organizational, managerial. The complication of building production systems leads to an increase in the number of consistently connected elements (brigades, mechanisms, vehicles, suppliers, etc.), which, according to the basic law of reliability theory, reduces the reliability of the entire system in proportion to the number of elements in geometric progression. According to this law, even with a small number of elements (100) and high reliability of each, the construction system as a whole should have little reliability and deny almost in 50% of cases. Therefore, practice shows that the actual reliability of building systems is higher with a significant number of system elements and small reliability of each.If taking into account the probabilistic nature of most destabilizing factors, it is quite difficult to establish analytical dependencies that reflect the nature and extent of their impact on the final performance indicators.This means the need for their aggregate accounting by using probabilistic estimates of these indicators.With the development and complication of all types of technology, the problem of reliability becomes global. As is well known, the basic notion of reliability theory is the notion of failure, that is, a complete or partial failure of the system (loss of main quality). At the same time, it is often not important to differentiate economically and technically from such, certainly different, failures, such as the deviation of the system parameters from the design values, and failures of the system that are themselves eliminated ("failures"), the complete failure of the system. All refusals have a random character, as they are caused by the influence of temporary factors. Therefore, the reliability of the system is determined by the probability of failure of the project's guaranteed period of uninterrupted operation.For buildingsystems manufacture characteristic non-complete failures, and partial (crashes), which are self-moving in the process of continuous functioning of the system. At the same time, the parameters of the system substantially deviate from the normative, but we can not determine the magnitude of these deviations yet. And the methods of mathematical reliability theory are not suitable for this.It is important to know the power of the influence of each of the factors in order to respond in a timely manner to the effect of each factor. This is also needed to anticipate the possible negative effects of the (occurrence) of these factors on the construction and to timely eliminate them. So, when a traditional analysis of possible organizational and technological solutions is added to reliability, it simplifies the process of choosing a solution option, since the reliability of each indicator can determine its priority in making a decision.

O juiz (diante) da desconstrução: hermenêutica constitucional e fracasso à luz da filosofia de Jacques Derrida

This article aims to investigate, from the perspective of deconstruction and differance, who is the judge (on the face) of deconstruction, which limits and contents deconstructive operation brings to constitutional hermeneutics. Taking the theory of performative acts and revisiting it in the light of authors such as Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, taking from them the notion of failure as “law” of the performative, legal interpretation will be placed not only as an activity open to dissent, but also as an activity that has failure as its “law”, demanding that a correct or ready sense never comes.Keywords: deconstruction, performative acts, failure, constitutional hermeneutics.

Gertrude Stein, Success Manuals, and Failure Studies

This paper poses the work of Gertrude Stein as a challenge to contemporary scholarship centered on theories of failure. Demonstrating that Stein’s notion of failure as a precondition for success derived from nineteenth-century selfhelp books, I follow her work with this paradox from her early writing about ethnic women, through her more recondite grammatical experiments, to her public emergence at the outset of the Depression. And I argue that Stein’s move from literary experiments rooted in the question of identity to her conservative rhetoric about white masculinity in the 1930s should serve as a warning to critics invested in failure as a figure of opposition.

L'historiographie espagnole face à l'Interrègne (1763-1800) en Louisiane : un cas d'amnésie volontaire?

For almost half a century, from the Treaty of Paris (1763) to the purchase of Louisiana by Napoleon (1800), this territory had been part of the Spanish colonial empire. However, this new, and ephemeral, possession never really became a central part of the Spanish historiography. The few allusions to the Interregnum are indeed associated to the terms and notions of failure, superficial and insufficient colonization, « poisoned gift »… Furthermore, the studies dedicated to this particular period and area are scarce, and very few were written in Spanish, by Spanish and Hispanic scholars, to the point one could be tempted to evoke a case of voluntary amnesia about the topic. In the Louisianan context, the very use of a term such as « Interregnum » to qualify this period reveals a common view that considers the Spanish presence in Louisiana as a mere transition. More generally, this intellectual attitude is thought provoking in the sense that it makes one wonder about how scholars tend to manifest a lack of interest for the failures of their national history.

Information systems project failure – analysis of causal links using interpretive structural modelling

The analysis of the root causes of information systems project failure has been the subject of intense scrutiny for some time within industry and the academic community. Researchers have developed various models, notions of failure and categorisations to succinctly classify project failure into a set of key factors for organisations and project managers to focus on in their attempts to avoid failure. This study incorporates a technique titled: interpretive structural modelling as the methodology to formalise the relationships between the selected failure factors. This approach is positioned as a mechanism that can yield greater insights into the relationships between the factors surrounding project failure, thereby developing a better understanding of how these relationships can have a bearing on project outcomes. The findings identify key driving variables that are presented as having significant impact on the other factors within the model. A number of variables are also identified as being heavily dependent on other connected factors highlighting that a failure in one or more of these connected factors is likely to result in a failure in one or more of the dependent factors unless timely steps are taken to address these key issues. This research details a number of practical implications for senior management and project managers as well as the academic community. These considerations form an underlying thread within this study as specific practice-related implications are highlighted and discussed throughout the study.

Glitch/Failure: Constructing a Queer Politics of Listening

This article is an attempt to bring sound studies discourses into dialogue with queer theory, to “queer” the field of sound studies, and to open up queer theory to the textual canon of sonic art. Concerned with notions of failure, this article deals with glitch and examines the result when error, malfunction and failure are amplified within systems. The author argues that the glitch, a key conceit of experimental music, is a productive framework for theorizing minoritarian politics and alternative modes of knowledge production.

Describing failure in geomaterials using second-order work approach

Geomaterials are known to be non-associated materials. Granular soils therefore exhibit a variety of failure modes, with diffuse or localized kinematical patterns. In fact, the notion of failure itself can be confusing with regard to granular soils, because it is not associated with an obvious phenomenology. In this study, we built a proper framework, using the second-order work theory, to describe some failure modes in geomaterials based on energy conservation. The occurrence of failure is defined by an abrupt increase in kinetic energy. The increase in kinetic energy from an equilibrium state, under incremental loading, is shown to be equal to the difference between the external second-order work, involving the external loading parameters, and the internal second-order work, involving the constitutive properties of the material. When a stress limit state is reached, a certain stress component passes through a maximum value and then may decrease. Under such a condition, if a certain additional external loading is applied, the system fails, sharply increasing the strain rate. The internal stress is no longer able to balance the external stress, leading to a dynamic response of the specimen. As an illustration, the theoretical framework was applied to the well-known undrained triaxial test for loose soils. The influence of the loading control mode was clearly highlighted. It is shown that the plastic limit theory appears to be a particular case of this more general second-order work theory. When the plastic limit condition is met, the internal second-order work is nil. A class of incremental external loadings causes the kinetic energy to increase dramatically, leading to the sudden collapse of the specimen, as observed in laboratory.

The Challenges of Retranslating The Great Gatsby into Hungarian With a Focus on Metaphors of Emotion and Embodiment

The Challenges of Retranslating <i>The Great Gatsby</i> into Hungarian With a Focus on Metaphors of Emotion and Embodiment

When the Bell Tolls: A Systems View of Cure

This article examines a systems view of cure. It proposes that a conceptualization of the notion of cure must include a perspective on the notion of failure. Failure and suffering are seen as integral parts of our subjectivity and serve as a valuable medium to allow us to learn how to be with one another. The interaction of differently organized subjective worlds in psychotherapy show how closely weakness and strength, cure and failure are entwined in any psychotherapeutic process. On the level of the bi-directional encounter, the process of cure has to do with how the idiosyncratic strengths and shortcomings of both participants become entangled and are subsequently dealt with in the working-through process. While the asymmetric setting is upheld and the focus of our work remains on our patients, any healing process will involve the personal transformation of both participants. Cure is, thus, understood as a razor's edge that cuts both ways. Inasmuch as we are able to come to terms with this, we may find ourselves released from an imperative to cure, but at home in a common humanity.

‘The Value of the Inexact’: An Apology for Inaccurate Motor Performance

Philosophic inquiry into the mental states of elite athletes during skilled motor performance continues to grow. In contrast to the bulk of these works that focus almost exclusively on skillful performance, this paper examines athletic motor behavior from a point of inexactness – or even failure – in athletic performance. Utilizing the works of Michael Polanyi, who believed that both ideas of achievement and failure were equally necessary to understand the behavior of living things and their physical actions, I examine the notion of failure as a framework to scrutinize the cognitive processes occurring during the development and performance of skilled motor behavior. After reviewing Polanyi’s conceptions of personal knowing to locate the source of inaccuracy in human activity, I present Polanyi’s distinction between two kinds of mistakes and apply each to inaccurate sport performance. I then suggest that mistakes in sport should be re-conceptualized beyond their current negative connotations. Instead, conceptions of mistakes should also include respect for ‘man’s most distinguished act’ – that being the production of knowledge. From this expanded perspective, the value of inexact motor performance can be found in addition to notions of uncertainty and skill development in what Polanyi calls ‘metaphysical implication of a groping for reality’. In some final thoughts, I will suggest future implications of the value of the inexact on broader sport issues.

'Fail Better': Pascal and the Good Uses of Failure

AbstractThis article proposes a new approach to the Pensees of Blaise Pascal by focusing on the notion of failure. It shows how failure lies at the core of Pascal's apologetic project in the Pensees and suggests that Pascal urges the reader to confront and reinterpret his own inevitable failure. The article identifies two models of secular failure in the Pensees, arguing for their importance for readers of Pascal today, and especially for answering the thorny question of what it would mean for a secular reader to take Pascal seriously when he speaks of 'la misere de l'homme sans Dieu'.