Ontological Distinction Research Articles

Holacracy: redefining organizational ontology and epistemology

Purpose This paper aims to examine Holacracy as a self-management system and its implications for organizational theory. By exploring its distinctive ontology and epistemology, the paper explains how Holacracy redefines organizational structures and contributes to organizational change. Design/methodology/approach Adopting a conceptual approach, this essay draws upon existing literature to explore Holacracy’s departure from conventional organizational theories. Findings The paper discusses how Holacracy challenges traditional organizational concepts, defining its holarchical approach, and emphasizing dynamic hierarchies and role-based organization. It also highlights Holacracy’s focus on emergent intelligence, continuous feedback loops and structured knowledge acquisition through roles and organization spaces. By examining its unique ontology and epistemology, the paper offers insights into how Holacracy aligns with an emergent paradigm known as integral, metamodern or teal. Research limitations/implications Further empirical research is needed to assess its practical implementation and long-term effects on organizational performance and employee well-being. Future studies could also explore challenges and limitations associated with adopting Holacracy in different organizational contexts. Practical implications Organizations considering alternative ways of working should examine Holacracy. Implementing Holacracy requires understanding its principles and may involve significant changes, with potential benefits such as increased agility and employee engagement. Social implications Holacracy’s departure from traditional structures and approach to power can have broader social implications and contribute to more democratic and participatory cultures. Originality/value This paper is a pioneering contribution to the under-researched domain of alternative organizational models. It sheds light on the originality and distinctiveness of Holacracy, highlighting its unique approach to hierarchy, role-based organization and consciousness within organizations.

The abandonment of the ideal of wilderness: Rewilding as the consequence of the Anthropocene metaphysics on restoration ecology

The idea of wilderness is being abandoned in restoration ecology due to metaphysical changes in the conception of nature. These changes are associated with the hybridization of nature and culture, an ontological distinction of modernity that touches its end in the Anthropocene. The notion of wilderness is falling because it was based on a static idea of nature, inherited from the modern conception of nature as passive, and this is affecting ecological restoration practices. The pursuit of wilderness has been abandoned in favor of wildness, vindicated by the so-called “rewilding philosophy.” Both restoration ecology and rewilding are based on the same corpus of ecology, but the first has historically operated in a period under the modern ontological distinction between nature and culture, while the second operates already in the hybridization of both categories. Rewilding does not pursue wilderness, no longer possible in the hybrid Anthropocene, but aims to restore the spontaneous order of the wildness.

Indigenous climate finance and the worlding of International Relations: climate justice in motion

This exploratory research investigates how Indigenous Peoples (IPs) reshape International Relations (IR) and challenge established boundaries through an analysis of two Indigenous Climate Funds: the “Shandia Alliance for People, Nature and Climate” and the “Podáali Fund,” both autonomously managed by indigenous communities. By examining their engagements at COP-26 and conducting interviews, this study demonstrates how IPs act as pivotal agents shaping IR through their distinct ontologies and epistemologies. The findings underscore these funds’ role in broadening international perspectives, particularly in navigating tensions and fostering dialogues that redefine climate justice as an ongoing process of resistance. Ultimately, this paper contributes to re-rooting IR frameworks by centering indigenous perspectives and practices, thus exemplifying a “worlding” exercise that enriches our understanding of climate justice in motion.

Opposing positions, dividing interactions, and hostile affect: A systematic review and conceptualization of “online climate change polarization”

AbstractOnline climate change polarization has increasingly received academic interest over time. Online media facilitate and accelerate processes of climate change polarization. Yet, throughout the years, online climate change polarization became a fuzzy concept, holding different meanings in different academic contexts. By reviewing the available evidence, the current article identified three ontological distinctions in online climate change polarization research: (1) focus on different groups that polarize; (2) either investigate the positions, relations, or emotions of actors; and (3) states or processes of polarization. Based on the latter two ontological distinctions, the article reconceptualizes online climate change polarization as a multidimensional phenomenon, by introducing a framework comprising six dimensions of polarization. Accordingly, by identifying gaps in the literature, the article proposes a future research agenda.This article is categorized under: Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change > Communication Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change > Perceptions of Climate Change Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change > Behavior Change and Responses

Xyloid Sexuality

Abstract The Kenyan-born, US-based artist Wangechi Mutu is fascinated by the human body and its nonhuman possibilities. In Mutu's collaged works, human forms are repeatedly ripped apart and reassembled within fantasy landscapes that speak of decomposition and regrowth. This article analyzes the significance of trees to Mutu's project of dismantling the human. Drawing from critical plant studies, forest ecology, cultural anthropology, and the mycological turn, it argues that Mutu's artworks forcefully reclaim the nonhuman as a site of Black expressive culture. These artworks blur ontological distinctions between the human and the arboreal through xyloid sexuality, a weirding of human eroticism and reproduction that pushes desire, procreation, and sexual fulfillment beyond species boundaries. Mutu's use of xyloid sexuality can be understood as a radical utopian gesture to supplant the violence of the colonial gaze with a powerfully more-than-human Black gaze.

NARRATIVITY, EXPERIENCE, AND MEANING1

ABSTRACTThis review essay aims to reconstruct the main tenets of the “narrative constructivist” position defended by Kalle Pihlainen in his book titled Historia fallida and to lay out some of the ambiguities this position generates. I begin by exposing the core commitments underwriting this theoretical project and insist upon the centrality of the distinction between constructivism and constructionism and upon the arguments he advances against the contemporary approaches in the theory of history that advocate the idea of an experience or a presence of the past. Then, I outline the criticism he levels against the understanding of historians’ work as a “conversation with the past” and highlight that, on Pihlainen's account, a responsible historical enterprise must necessarily assume the unavailability of the past and, hence, the ontological distinction between the present and the past. In the final part of the essay, I formulate three interrogations with regard to the overall orientation of this project. First, drawing on Reinhart Koselleck's concept of a “historical nonsynchronicity,” I question the possibility of establishing a clear‐cut separation between the past and the present and show that the present is never a homogenous field, for it entails different levels of temporality and a plurality of conflicting registers of meaning. Then, I challenge the description of the past as “a closed domain with no room for interaction.” Finally, I point out that the gap Pihlainen introduces between historical narratives and existential narratives cannot be maintained insofar as the historian's practice must be anthropologically grounded—that is, it must be understood as drawing on a narrative capacity (narrativeness) that belongs to the human life‐form.

The Appreciative Language of the Appreciative Paradigm

In the realm of Appreciative Paradigm and Inquiry, the mantra ‘words create worlds’ resonates deeply, emphasizing the transformative potential of language. Through oral and written expressions, our linguistic choices shape our perceptions and aspirations. This essay explores Appreciative Language’s essence, tracing its roots, unique traits, and its role in social sciences. By examining its distinct ontology, research methods, intervention approaches, axiology and defining characteristics, we unravel its potential impact on fostering positive change and shaping a better world.

On the Economies of Brown Salvation: Impoverishment, Assimilationist Imaginaries, and Dominant-Caste Capture

Abstract: This essay tackles the ontological distinctiveness of brown/ness by locating it within the (neo)colonially emplaced "economies of salvation." Although it is an underacknowledged aspect of the coloniality of power, colonial racial capitalism actually required an economy of salvation that demarcated racialized and gendered difference and hierarchy along the savior–saved binary. The essay elaborates on three ways that the economies of salvation structure the multivalent racial politics of brown/ness for dominant-caste Indians, both on the subcontinent and in its diaspora: (1) as impoverishment, (2) as assimilability, and (3) as (caste) capture. The "as" evinces the degree to which these three dimensions constitute the ontopoetic state that is brown/ness, producing some of its multivalent and contradictory affective intimacies.

Clustering and declustering things: The meaning of collective and singulative morphology in Ukrainian

Many languages have systems of collective and singulative derivational morphology (e.g., de Vries 2021; Dali & Mathieu 2021b). Recent research on Slavic collectives (Grimm & Dočekal 2021; Wągiel 2021a) and singulatives (Kagan & Nurmio to appear; Kagan, Geist & Erschler to appear) shows the significance of these data for the study of linguistic mechanisms of individuation. In this paper,we contribute by investigating the semantics of two derivational morphemes in Ukrainian: the collective suffix -j- and the singulative suffix -yn-, and the interaction between the two in secondary singulatives, e.g., pero ‘a feather’⇒pirja ‘clustered feathers’⇒pirjina ‘a (small) feather’, and secondary collectives, e.g., popil ‘ash’ ⇒ popelyna ‘a speck of ash’ ⇒ popelynnja ‘clustered specks of ash’. Building on the theory of Grimm (2012), we propose a mereotopological account that explains the Ukrainian data in terms of the ontological distinction between integrated objects and clusters: -j- turns properties of integrated objects into properties of clusters, whereas -yn- takes properties of clusters and yields properties of integrated objects.

The conceptual exportation question: conceptual engineering and the normativity of virtual worlds

Debate over the normativity of virtual phenomena is now widespread in the philosophical literature, taking place in roughly two distinct but related camps. The first considers the relevant problems to be within the scope of applied ethics, where the general methodological program is to square the intuitive (im)permissibility of virtual wrongdoings with moral accounts that justify their (im)permissibility. The second camp approaches the normativity of virtual wrongdoings as a metaphysical debate. This is done by disambiguating the ‘virtual’ character of ‘virtual wrongdoings’. Doing so is supposed to provide illuminating ontological distinctions that inform ethical aspects of the debate. We argue that each approach faces its own set of issues, and as a result, motivates consideration of an alternative. The alternative we suggest turns inquiry concerning the normativity of virtual wrongdoings into a distinctively conceptual question. Rather than asking whether some action is right or wrong, or whether some virtual phenomenon counts as a particular action at all, we argue that research into the normativity of virtual wrongdoings may be guided by reflecting on whether a concept that originated and developed within a non-virtual context should be exported into a foreign virtual domain. We consider this approach and several objections.

Si(gh)ting the City: An Uber View of Calcutta

In this article, I take a socio-material approach to highlight the changes in the legibility of the built environment due to digital interfacing and the subsequent fragmentation of urban space. Using Uber as an example, I demonstrate how app-reliant mobility practices, reflexive of the changing mobility values in the city of Calcutta, manifest certain “temporal spaces”—quasi-virtual spaces of the online/digital-offline/material continuum—that imbricate the physicality of the city with the digital traces that Uber accrues about a particular location and the data about the rhythms of the individual users within that space. The investigation uses screenshots of Uber pick-up points to conceptualize legibility in the context of temporal spaces and how this changing legibility alters the kinaesthetic quality of Calcutta. Siting the argument in postrepresentationalist thought—one that does not assume an ontological distinction between representations and the referent—this article offers a posthumanist account of spatial performativity that considers the everyday entanglements of human actors, social practices, networked technologies, algorithms, and interfaces that render “legible” the urban space.

Ecstatic Temporality and Transcendence in Section 65 of Chapter III and Section 69 of Chapter IV in Relation to Ontological Movement in Section 74 of Chapter V in Division Two of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), Part I

This first article is part of a two-article series labeled Parts I and II. In Part I, we will attempt a close reading of Division Two of Heidegger’s greatest work, Being and Time (1927). We will execute a granular analysis of a few lines and phrases in section 65 in Chapter III, section 69 in Chapter IV, and sections 72 and 74 in Chapter V; those sections cover ‘primordial ecstatic, finite, unified, authentic temporality’ (Heidegger 1962, 380) and the ‘equiprimordiality of the unity of the ecstases’ (Heidegger 1962, 378), ‘the whitherings and horizontal schemas,’ (Heidegger 1962, 416), and the ontological distinction of movement/Bewegtheit and the Western metaphysical tradition on spatialized motion/Bewegung (Heidegger 1962, 427) respectively. Attempting to show the connectedness of these problems in a manner different from Being and Time, itself, requires a bracketing of how we renew our engagement with Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel even after Heidegger’s attempted ‘destruction’ (Heidegger 1962, 41) of the ontological and metaphysical traditions of the West. We want to set up the possibility of reengaging Heidegger on a cryptic moment in the 1962 English translators’ footnote on the ‘swoon’ and ‘clairvoyance’ (Heidegger 1962, 436) that immediately precedes Heidegger’s great articulation of the ‘moment of vision for its time’ and the possibility of an ‘authentic understanding of fate, which is historicality’ (Heidegger 1962, 437). In Part I, we will resume the possibility of an abstract metaphysical undertaking about a four-dimensional temporality that Heidegger could not and did not articulate in Being and Time. This first article constitutes Part I, which then sets up Part II to appear in a second article. In the second article, we will attempt a direct appropriation of Hegel’s The Science of Logic (1813-1816), particularly on his enigmatic introduction of the term ‘quadruplicity’ (Hegel 2010, 746), which comes at the very end of his greatest and most complex work.

The Unity, Power and Energy of the Holy Trinity in the Theology of Gregory of Nyssa

The article discusses the problem of the ontological distinction between God’s transcendence and immanence in the theological thought of Gregory of Nyssa, a Church Father of the 4th century. The author presents the main conceptual and terminological apparatuses that Gregory used in his antinomic approach to the complex interpretation of apophatic and kataphatic images of God. He analyzes the main characteristics of these two dimensions of the nature of God. Special attention is paid to the analysis of the Trinitarian approach in answering the question: how can God, who is completely ontologicaly removed from creation, be at the same time actively present in the world and filling it. In this context the author analyzes the key notions, which express the ontological remoteness of the divine essence of the Holy Trinity and God’s active nearness in relation to created being.

The ontology of financial markets and the policy paradigm of financial regulation

ABSTRACT This study aims to discern the ontological assumptions of the financial regulatory paradigm to clarify the meaning of a paradigm shift and the significance of the macroprudential turn in global financial regulation. An ontological understanding of financial markets is a key requirement to understand the hard core assumptions of the financial regulatory paradigm because the conflation of distinct ontologies makes it impossible to maintain the internal coherence of the financial regulatory paradigm. In terms of the ontological assumptions of the financial regulatory paradigm, the macroprudential turn in global financial regulations after the 2008 financial crisis fell short of leading to a paradigm shift in global financial regulation since it brought about an explanatory rather than ontological change. Macroprudential ideas rejected the explanatory reductionism of existing microprudential regulation without abandoning its ontological individualism.

Cartwheel or Ladder? Reconsidering Sinhala Caste

AbstractIs Sinhala caste simply a weak regional variant of Hindu caste or is it something else entirely? This essay argues that Sinhala caste as found in the territory of the former Kandyan Kingdom has had a distinctive ontology and retains its unique character. The essay begins with an overview of textual, genetic, and archaeological evidence for the origins of caste on the subcontinent. It then turns to the island and the fourth century CE bifurcation of Sinhala society into “high” and “low”; this duality’s persistence into the second millennium CE; its elaboration in the Kandyan Kingdom’s bureaucratic political economy; and the dissonance between this Sinhala “cartwheel” model of collective inequality and the Brahmanical “ladder” of colonial powers and the Sinhala elite. The essay concludes by examining how the ongoing discordance between these two models of Sinhala caste plays out in people’s lives through a case study of a non-elite caste community.

“As safe as possible”: a qualitative study of opioid withdrawal and risk behavior among people who use illegal opioids

BackgroundOpioid withdrawal is a regular occurrence among many people who use illicit opioids (PWUIO) that has also been shown to increase their willingness to engage in risk-involved behavior. The proliferation of fentanyl in the illicit opioid market may have amplified this relationship, potentially putting PWUIO at greater risk of negative health outcomes. Understanding the relationship between withdrawal and risk-involved behavior may also have important implications for the ways that problematic drug use is conceptualized, particularly in disease models of addiction, which position risk behavior as evidence of pathology that helps to justify ontological distinctions between addicts and non-addicts. Examining withdrawal, and its role in PWUIO’s willingness to engage in risk, may aid in the development of alternative theories of risk involvement and create discursive spaces for de-medicalizing and de-othering people who use illegal drugs.MethodsThis article is based on 32 semi-structured interviews with PWUIO in the New York City area who also reported recent withdrawal experience. Interviews were conducted remotely between April and August 2022 and recorded for later transcription. Data were then coded and analyzed based on a combination of inductive and deductive coding strategies and informed by the literature.ResultsParticipants described a strong relationship between withdrawal and their willingness to engage in risk-involved behavior that was exacerbated by the proliferation of fentanyl. Yet, their descriptions did not align with narratives of risk as a product of bad decisions made by individuals. Rather, data demonstrated the substantial role of social and structural context, particularly drug policies like prohibition and criminalization, in the kinds of risks that PWUIO faced and their ability to respond to them.ConclusionsWithdrawal should be taken more seriously both from an ethical perspective and as an important catalyst of risk behavior. However, theories that position activities taken to avoid withdrawal as irrational and as evidence of pathology are poorly aligned with the complexity of PWUIO’s actual lives. We recommend the use of less deterministic and less medicalized theories of risk that better account for differences between how people view the world, and for the role of socio-structural forces in the production of risk.

Deep Ontology Alignment Using a Natural Language Processing Approach for Automatic M2M Translation in IIoT.

The technical capabilities of modern Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0 are vast and growing exponentially daily. The present-day Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) combines manifold underlying technologies that require real-time interconnection and communication among heterogeneous devices. Smart cities are established with sophisticated designs and control of seamless machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, to optimize resources, costs, performance, and energy distributions. All the sensory devices within a building interact to maintain a sustainable climate for residents and intuitively optimize the energy distribution to optimize energy production. However, this encompasses quite a few challenges for devices that lack a compatible and interoperable design. The conventional solutions are restricted to limited domains or rely on engineers designing and deploying translators for each pair of ontologies. This is a costly process in terms of engineering effort and computational resources. An issue persists that a new device with a different ontology must be integrated into an existing IoT network. We propose a self-learning model that can determine the taxonomy of devices given their ontological meta-data and structural information. The model finds matches between two distinct ontologies using a natural language processing (NLP) approach to learn linguistic contexts. Then, by visualizing the ontological network as a knowledge graph, it is possible to learn the structure of the meta-data and understand the device's message formulation. Finally, the model can align entities of ontological graphs that are similar in context and structure.Furthermore, the model performs dynamic M2M translation without requiring extra engineering or hardware resources.

Untimely thoughts on the culture of diversity

The study of cultural diversity and relevant models of diversity management, including historical patterns of cultural dominance, helps to form immunity to the latest manifestations of Eurocentrism. As a new approach to diversity, interculturalism implies a shift in the focus from the diversity of cultures and multicultural coexistence to the culture of diversity. The main dimensions of the culture of diversity are awareness of diversity, recognition of diversity, engagement in contexts of diversity, and the creation of more common public spaces. Another important trend is rethinking the diversity: a) its destigmatization as a phenomenon associated with Others, with exotic and peripheral loci, and representation of diversity as an advantage in terms of creativity and innovation; b) conceptualization of contemporary social and cultural contexts in terms of superdiversity. Unlike the classical concepts of multiculturalism, interculturalism focuses on both positive contacts as the most promising way of social integration and social dynamics in local contexts of superdiversity. However, the understanding of these processes differs in the political (G. Bouchard), social (T. Cantle) and cultural (R. Zapata-Barrero) directions of interculturalism. Under the destruction of social structures and institutions, interculturalism focusing on the development of interpersonal contacts and relations across borders can become a basis for the search for compromises and mutual understanding. However, the ideas of interculturalism and the processes launched by it turned out to be ‘locked’ in Western contexts, outside of which polarization is obvious in both political and cultural spheres. These tendencies imply an epistemological and ontological distinction between the West and Russia, producing gaps in the social-cultural space, patterns of escalation of schismogenesis and cultural encapsulation, and the rejection on intercultural contacts.

The ‘Ideal’ Atheist

Abstract Drawing on theories of moral exemplarism and ethnographic research with an atheist movement in South India, this article explores how narratives of idealism and the Telugu concept of ‘ādarśam.’ signal a distinct register of moral experience. By foregrounding the role of concrete interpersonal and affective relationships, the article complicates methodological approaches to the ethics of nonreligion that concentrate on forms of moral reasoning based on semiotic or ontological distinctions between religion and nonreligion. Rather than positing idealism as an intrinsic attribute of nonreligion, the article investigates ethnographically how atheist activists draw on different moral registers and ambivalent investments in the making and policing of boundaries between religion and nonreligion for making moral judgments and working out what it means to lead an idealist life.

Digital sovereignty or sovereignism? Investigating the political discourse on digital contact tracing apps in France

ABSTRACT In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, European countries implemented several non-pharmaceutical interventions with country-specific policies and reduced coordination. Digital Contact Tracing (DCT) was one of the few interventions on which European countries had a common approach oriented toward DCT apps’ interoperability. As most EU countries implemented interoperable apps relying on an Apple and Google’s framework, France developed the app autonomously. Recent literature argues that France’s choice was mainly due to its strong stance in defense of national digital sovereignty. However, current contributions do not largely cover the issue empirically. Therefore, we aim to better explore the role played by digital sovereignty in the political debate related the development of DCT apps. To do so, we conducted a thematic analysis of 16 documents from France’s political bodies, selected from a larger corpus of 438 documents dealing with DCT. Three main relevant dimensions related to digital sovereignty emerge. First, the initially sponsored EU interoperability progressively faded in the French political debate. Then, Apple and Google’s involvement in the healthcare domain was perceived as highly problematic. Finally, having national players developing the DCT app was largely preferred. Based on our empirical findings, we further engaged with the concept of digital sovereignty, pointing out its difference from digital sovereignism by highlighting the ontological distinction between practices and ideas. Building on these reflections, we argue that France’s stance towards DCT and the related digital sovereignty practices subtended digital sovereignism positions.