Personal Authority Research Articles

Auctorialité et autorité dans les lettres de Paul

Writing in Antiquity was an eminently collective process, a process in which the modern categories of author, scriptor, editor and lector often superpose and merge. Valuing this decisive parameter of any communication in the 1st century, the present study aims, following others, to reopen the exegetical file of the authorship of Pauline letters. Defending the hypothesis of a participative composition of the latter, it is in particular the use of the “I” in Paul that is under revision and reassessed. More precisely, the article demonstrates that, in the proto-Pauline writings, it is less a question of an early author’s consciousness than the construction of a posture of personal authority.

Suggestions on the Revision of Korean Cataloging Rules for Personal Name Authority Records and Authorized Access Point

Suggestions on the Revision of Korean Cataloging Rules for Personal Name Authority Records and Authorized Access Point

PERSON AS A MEDIA PHENOMENON OF SOCIO-CULTURAL PROCESSES

The article discusses a reference concept of a person, a media phenomenon of socio-cultural process, it also finds out problems of personalization and their salvation in anthropocentric and socio-centric aspects. Using the example of Spivakov, the role of influence of the personality on a socio-cultural context is grounded. The phenomenon of Vladimir Spivakov means ultimately much: musical talent, love of people, and unique intelligence. To turn early world-class violin player means already to actualize oneself to the full. What is more, to create an orchestra Moscow Virtuosi and to become world idols more than enough for one person. Thus, the authority of the musician person helps to solve the socio-cultural challenges facing the government and society. In the very personal initiative Spivakov sees the ground of culture of his day in his homeland. Not everyone has the ability of personalization. It is an aggregate of individual and psychological features of the personality, which allows him/her to carry out socially important actions that transforms other people and is provided by wealth of subject individuality, diversity of means, with the help of which via communication and activity he/she can carry out personalizing effect on socio-cultural processes.

The American Man of Letters

The American Man of Letters George Core Hans Bak, ed., The Long Voyage: Selected Letters of Malcolm Cowley, 1915–1987, foreword by Robert Cowley. Harvard University Press, 2014. 828 pages. $39.95. Malcolm Cowley’s latest book—and his last—is his best and will prove the most enduring. These letters have been expertly edited by Hans Bak, an established hand in the field, and by Cowley’s son, Robert, an extremely effective and professional team that could not have been improved. There is a full battery of notes and a full index, making this book exceptionally easy to read and use. Anyone who knows Cowley’s other books will still be grateful for this book’s comprehensiveness. Nobody could have expected a more detailed or better book. It is an encyclopedia of American literature and literary history from 1915 to 1987, written by an extraordinarily learned man, who wrote clearly and cogently from the beginning of his career until the end. The narrative here is smooth, yet charged with momentum, which is unusual in a collection of letters. Just over halfway through the book, Cowley says, “I won’t emulate Yeats, but I think one of the noblest projects for anyone in any age is to find a shape in his life.” These letters illustrate the shape of the life of one of America’s most earnest and intelligent men of letters. Enjoined to write a “retrospective evaluation” of his career six years before he died, Cowley states, “The aims, so it seems to me, have always been to celebrate American literature and to defend American writers as a community within the larger community.” It is this ideal of the literary community that is the common thread running through these letters. Cowley had a regular correspondence with Kenneth Burke, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and three major editors—Pascal Covici, Hiram Haydn, and Albert Erskine—to whom he wrote about writers he revered (not without some reservations) and new writers on the horizon who had piqued his curiosity. Here you’ll find countless passages on Hemingway, Wolfe, T. S. Eliot, and Louise Bogan; but Faulkner, as one would think, gets the lion’s share on the major American authors considered in this book. Cowley also shows great interest in the burgeoning careers of Ernest Gaines, Ken Kesey, and Cormac McCarthy. He writes to Erskine at Random House, “Cormac McCarthy is a new talent, and I congratulate you on finding him. … He tells a story marvelously, with a sort of baresark [sic] joy as he rushes into scenes of violence.” In the sixties Cowley grieved the loss of old friends, especially Ernest Hemingway; soon after his suicide in July of 1961, Cowley writes to Conrad Aiken: [End Page 180] I mourn for Hemingway. He could be as mean as cat piss and as sweet as a ministering angel. It’s hard to think that so much vitality, vanity, unflagging zest, eagerness to excel in everything, willingness to learn and study and finally teach everything, ability to participate in other people’s lives—that all this should simply vanish. … When he conquered certain weaknesses of character, when he stopped being a coward, when he became more or less the image he had created of himself—at that point he pretty well stopped being a writer. Let’s nurse our vices and neuroses; it’s dangerous to cure them. Writing to Allen Tate on the death of R. P. Blackmur in 1965, Cowley speaks directly about the interdependence of the literary community: “all of us who started writing in the twenties had some curious feeling of closeness, of having shared the same perilous undertaking. And we all seem diminished when one of us goes.” To his principal correspondent and closest friend, Kenneth Burke, he speaks of the “fraternity”: “all of us survivors of the 1920’s.” One of those survivors, but perhaps not so chummy with the fraternity, was Eliot, whom Cowley champions: “I disagree with Karl [Shapiro] when he talks as if T. S. Eliot were the central figure in a dire conspiracy. Eliot has been a man of very great personal authority ever since he was an undergraduate at Harvard...

Expert evidence in fetal alcohol spectrum disorder cases

Summary Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) is an umbrella term relating to a set of disorders, including Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS), partial Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (pFAS), Alcohol Related Developmental Disorder (ARND) and Alcohol Related Birth Defects (ARBD). Each disorder is pervasive and life-long, resulting from prenatal exposure to alcohol (PEA). While the incidence of FASDs remains debatable, it may well be in the region of 1% of the population in countries such as Canada, New Zealand and Australia. They have been disproportionately identified in persons from an indigenous background in a number of countries. In addition, FASDs are present in significant numbers amongst persons who are charged with criminal offences and who are sentenced to imprisonment, especially young offenders. Understandably, as FASDs continue to be attended by a level of diagnostic uncertainty, they have been significantly under-diagnosed. They can easily be mistaken for other disorders, especially in the context of comorbidities. However, their relevance in the forensic context in terms of reduced culpability for criminal offending and problematic capacity to respond to interviewing by persons in authority, such as police, is significant but in many instances subtle. In addition, the potential for FASDs to be misinterpreted on the basis of persons with FASDs appearing ‘normal’ is significant. Thus, mental health professionals who assess persons charged with criminal offenders have an important role in identifying FASD symptomatology and, where necessary, referring such offenders for specialist assessment. Those who provide FASD assessments to the courts need not only to educate judicial officers about the phenomenology of FASDs but about how in the particular scenario a FASD may have forensic relevance, in the sense of having played a role in the offender's criminal offending and in relation to how the offender is likely to fare in a custodial environment. As there are different forms of FASDs and as their symptomatology varies significantly in nature and severity, it is incumbent upon assessors to provide offender-specific assistance to courts, sometimes incorporating counter-intuitive information. Judicial officers are increasingly receiving submissions about FASDs in many countries, especially in respect of offenders from First Nations. The quality of such evidence has been variable and there have been occasions when courts have not received the assistance they have required. Some have become experts in the area; others have little knowledge about the issues. However, international case law, based upon expert assessments from psychiatrists and psychologists, has evolved substantially since 2000. There is now a significant body of sentencing law, in particular, upon which advocates can draw and judicial officers can rely, based upon expert opinions provided by mental health assessors, when imposing sentences upon offenders with FASDs. This article reviews important and illustrative examples of such law from Canada, England, New Zealand and Australia. It argues that this corpus of legal authority now provides constructive guidance for FASD cases, and that it should be utilized to enhance forensic FASD assessments and judicial decision-making about offenders with FASDs.

The efficacy of cognitive behavior therapy in an adult who stutters

Byline: Sanjeev. Gupta Sir, Research studies show that speech therapy treatment for stuttering is available in early childhood,[sup][1] but stuttering in adults is much less responsive to speech therapy.[sup][2] Behavioral speech programs involving speech restructuring are the strongest evidence-based stuttering treatments for adults who stutter (AWS).[sup][3] Hence, cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) has been used in the present case to examine the efficacy in the reduction of anxiety, reduction of avoidance behavior, reduction of frequency of stuttering, and increasing the social interaction, increasing self-esteem, increasing the positive thoughts and attitudes about verbal communication. Index patient Mr. NN was a 24-year-old postgraduate student, belonging to middle socioeconomic family and the younger of two brothers with normal birth and developmental history. He came with the chief complaints of dysfluent speech and difficulty to speak with authority persons and strangers for the last 5 years which have increased in the last 8 months. Dysfluent speech significantly impacted his personal and social life. The onset was insidious, and course of the disorder was progressive. He had poor self-esteem and negative automatic thoughts (NATs) that “I will stutter and I am inferior” as well as autonomic arousal such as sweating and palpitation during communication and interaction with teachers and strangers. Premorbid personality was well adjusted. No significant family and treatment history were reported by him. The patient was diagnosed as a case of stuttering (ICD-10 DCR, F98.5)[sup][4] and was not having any concurrent diagnosis of psychiatric and medical illness or previous exposure to the cognitive behavioral intervention. The pre- and post-intervention assessments were done using Perceptions of Stuttering Inventory (PSI), Stuttering Severity Instrument (SSI), Modified Erickson Scale of Communication Attitudes (MESCA), Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES), and Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI). The CBT program consisted of 25 sessions and each session lasted for 45–50 min duration. CBT components included trust building, psychoeducation, deep breathing, relaxation techniques, cognitive restructuring, problem-solving, and prolongation technique. The prolongation is the speech production style used to facilitate fluency, where the person prolongs segments in spoken utterances. The client was asked to self-monitor and/or control the situations, where he stutters, and maintain a diary for the same. The cognitive-behavioral model of stuttering of Mr. NN is shown in [Figure 1].{Figure 1} The significant improvement was observed on both pre- and post-intervention scores on the following scales such as PSI (reduced from 42 to 19, 54. …

Sumienie jako fundament godności i wolności człowieka w kontekście jego społecznej odpowiedzialności

Conscience acts not only as a personal moral authority, but it is also a pillar of dignity and human freedom in the social life. It allows the joint search for the truth and resolve moral dilemmas by members of the human community. After presenting different interpretations of conscience, the author discusses the relationship of conscience with human dignity. The dignity of conscience is the basis of human freedom. At the same time human dignity is affirmed by the respect for freedom of conscience. The practical expression of this freedom is the right to conscientious objection. This problem occurs most often in the context of the duties of health professionals. Respect for their personal rights also demands respect for their right to conscientious objection when the proper procedure implies their moral responsibility which creates a conflict of conscience.

Personality Traits of Micro Enterprises Runs by Women Self Help Groups in Madurai, Ramnad and Dindigul Districts of Tamil Nadu - A Study

Micro enterprises make an important contribution to economic output and employment in Micro enterprise faces many problems in raising finance, as the provider of finance may not find the return on investment interesting as compared to large enterprise, and also investor is more skeptical about repayment. Entrepreneurship gives women the chance to own property and help commodity production in the state, which in turn would help sustain the social sector. Unlike in a paid job scenario, women can have personal freedom and decision-making authority. This will help them get empowered and create a better image and place for women in the society, an attempt has been made in the personality traits of women entrepreneurs in order to identify whether they have the requisite personality dispositions to undertake activities which are independent and self-sustaining, there by contributing to entrepreneurship.

On Falling Fastidiously: Marianne Moore’s Slapstick Animals

This essay examines one unexpected point of contact between modernist poetics and slapstick film in the work of Marianne Moore. Specifically, in Moore’s unpublished and hitherto unknown review of Charlie Chaplin’s travel memoirs, we learn that Chaplin provided Moore with a blueprint for performing a self-effacing moral authority through virtuosic style. This connection helpsdevelop a more fundamental account of the comic in Moore, starting with the numerous clumsy, slapstick animalsin her poems and ending with the authoritative yet amusing personality she performed as a celebrity poet late in her career. Along the way, the essay proposes theaddition of “slapstick verse” to the modernist prosodic toolshed and reframes recent discussions of Moore’s queer celibacy and agency around descriptive style. Submitted Dec 3, 2014

Development of a Quantitative Measure of the Mentorship Experience in College Students

Development of a Quantitative Measure of the Mentorship Experience in College Students Rebecca Lakin Gullan (bio), Kathleen Bauer (bio), Pierre Korfiatis (bio), Jennifer DeOliveira (bio), Kelsey Blong (bio), and Meagan Docherty (bio) In a single academic year, nearly two million individuals are projected to receive a bachelor’s degree from a college or university in the United States (Hussar & Bailey, 2013). Many of these graduates will not have the cognitive skills needed to successfully navigate the challenges of modern life (Flores, Matkin, Burbach, Quinn, & Harding, 2012; Kegan, 1994). Yet, emerging adulthood is a crucial time to develop an ability to critically and meaningfully engage with the world, as it is a “period of life that offers the most opportunity for exploration in the areas of love, work, and worldviews” (Arnett, 2000, p. 473). As such, Kegan (1994) suggested that institutes of higher education are ideal “holding environments” wherein emerging adults have the opportunity to develop a “self-authoring mind.” Within this context, Baxter Magolda (2002) recommended mentorship as a powerful means by which college students may develop the “capacity to define their own beliefs, identity, and relationships internally” (p. 3). Specifically, Baxter Magolda (2009) suggested that mentors who provide a balance between challenge (encouraging the development of personal authority) and support (validation and reassurance) help students develop the emotional, cognitive, and interpersonal skills necessary to succeed both within and beyond the college years. Although the importance of mentorship has been widely recognized, operationalizing and measuring critical components of the mentoring relationship has proved to be a greater challenge. As such, relevant assessment tools typically approach this multifaceted construct through in-depth qualitative methodology (Baxter Magolda & King, 2012). Of the few quantitative tools, most are not germane to college students or measure outcomes of mentoring, rather than the process itself. We focused on the development of a quantitative measure of mentoring relationships during the college years. Specifically, we investigated the factor structure of a measure assessing college student perceptions of their mentoring relationships with faculty/professional staff at their university. Questions were designed to reflect critical aspects of mentorship as [End Page 1049] defined by Baxter Magolda (2009) and to explore aspects of both challenge and support, particularly as they relate to the development of self-authorship, that is, the mentee’s internal sense of self and how he or she understands and relates to the world (Kegan, 1994). The measure was expected to serve as a means to effectively identify and assess aspects of the mentoring relationship fundamental to college student development. METHOD A principal components analysis was conducted using data from 321 undergraduate students at a small, private university. Students completed a 66-item measure asking about their experience with a mentor on campus. Participants reflected the overall campus composition in gender (70% female) and age (age mode = 19 years). The largest segment of participants identified as having a major in nursing and allied health (40%), and the second most common majors fell within behavioral and social sciences (34%). Participants represented all 4 years of enrollment, with 28% identifying as freshman, 31% sophomores, 21% juniors, and 20% seniors. Finally, 51% of students indicated that they lived on campus. After providing written, informed consent, each participant was asked to choose one faculty, coach, or other professional staff at the university whom he or she identified as a mentor and to complete a 66-item measure as it pertained to that specific relationship. The measure was created by a group of undergraduate students and one faculty member with the goal of reflecting developmental theory (Baxter Magolda, 2001; Kegan, 1994) and previous qualitative explorations of mentoring and self-authorship during the college years (Baxter Magolda, 2001; Baxter Magolda & King, 2012). In addition to assessing cognitive challenges (e.g., questioning/exploring decision-making) and support (e.g., time, patience, mutual intent), items were also included to assess the scope (e.g., brief/long-term, specific/broad) and formality (e.g., assigned/natural, formal/friendly) of the relationship. RESULTS Of the 333 students who completed a survey, 12 were not included due to incomplete or missing data. The final sample size (N = 321) satisfied the minimum amount of data needed for principal component analysis...

Identifying Opinion Leader in the Internet Forum

Opinion leader is an authority person who has great influence in BBS. Their linguistic behavior has a huge impact on net citizen’s behavior and thought. In this paper, we propose an algorithm called OLRA (Opinion Leader PageRank Algorithm) based on topic-field to identify opinion leaders in the Internet forum. In the algorithm the closeness degree factor and sentiment analyses are taken into consideration. Meanwhile, these two authority values are defined as the weight of links among users. The data is collected from a number of posts on Tianya forum which is a famous forum in China. In the experiment, the algorithm is compared with Interest-based PageRank algorithm, online time Algorithm, and Experience-based Algorithm, the result shows that the OLRA algorithm can identify opinion leaders than others in the Internet forum effectively.

Marketing, media, and misogyny: interactive advertising critique in a Huffington Post forum

This paper examines 3,144 comments in a March 2012 Huffington Post forum about an online Belvedere vodka advertisement that was widely interpreted to depict sexualized violence. The study applies critical textual analysis, relating discourse to context to illuminate recurring themes and clues to the strategies and resources influencing how comments were constructed. Four major recurring themes emerge from within a wide range of topics: (1) speculations on advertising strategy; (2) contested perceptions of sexual assault; (3) links between gender politics and party politics; and (4) media literacy lessons. Cutting across themes is an apparent awareness of context, including the site’s reward system, its predominantly left-leaning politics, and the potential consequences of participant commentary being exploited by Belvedere to increase brand recognition. Comments often invoke personal or professional authority by articulating qualifications presumed relevant to the advertisement’s deconstruction. The study suggests that forum participants can be understood as members of productive communities, who construct responses structured by shared contextual constraints and/or relevant common experience. The study also suggests that online forum participation offers mixed prospects for lay critics of media misogyny in that their commentary vies for attention alongside missives calculated to be provocative.

Correlations Between Clinical Judgement and Learning Style Preferences of Nursing Students in the Simulation Room.

Background:Health care educators account for variables affecting patient safety and are responsible for developing the highly complex process of education planning. Clinical judgement is a multidimensional process, which may be affected by learning styles. The aim was to explore three specific hypotheses to test correlations between nursing students’ team achievements in clinical judgement and emotional, sociological and physiological learning style preferences.Methods:A descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted with Swedish university nursing students in 2012-2013. Convenience sampling was used with 60 teams with 173 nursing students in the final semester of a three-year Bachelor of Science in nursing programme. Data collection included questionnaires of personal characteristics, learning style preferences, determined by the Dunn and Dunn Productivity Environmental Preference Survey, and videotaped complex nursing simulation scenarios. Comparison with Lasater Clinical Judgement Rubric and Non-parametric analyses were performed.Results:Three significant correlations were found between the team achievements and the students’ learning style preferences: significant negative correlation with ‘Structure’ and ‘Kinesthetic’ at the individual level, and positive correlation with the ‘Tactile’ variable. No significant correlations with students’ ‘Motivation’, ‘Persistence’, ‘Wish to learn alone’ and ‘Wish for an authoritative person present’ were seen.Discussion and Conclusion:There were multiple complex interactions between the tested learning style preferences and the team achievements of clinical judgement in the simulation room, which provides important information for the becoming nurses. Several factors may have influenced the results that should be acknowledged when designing further research. We suggest conducting mixed methods to determine further relationships between team achievements, learning style preferences, cognitive learning outcomes and group processes.

Emperor Nicholas II free hospital and clinic for visiting patients at the Kiev Pokrovsky monastery at the end of XIX and beginning of XX century

The article describes the Kiev Pokrovsky monastery hospitals for outpatients, providing the medical aid at the end of XIX and at the beginning of XX century for the population of South-West and North-West region of the Russian Empire. Interesting documentary facts are enlightened: «December 6, 1898 Emperor Nicholas II Highest deigned to call the hospital and clinic for outpatients as the “Free hospital and clinics for outpatients of Emperor Nicholas II at the Kiev female cenobitic monastery”». The article uncovers the activities of a magnificent doctor Nikolay Viktorovich Solomka, companion of the Grand Duchess Aleksandra Petrovna, who was able to find proper word for moral and spiritual influence on patients while addressing to the colleagues and sisters. Medicine in Kiev Pokrovsky Monastery-hospital was praised by an authoritative person and statesman, Academician Georgiy Ermolaevich Reyn (in future - long-term chairman of the Medical Board of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the first chief superintendent of the Main Directorate of Public Health). According to the report of the scientific mission of doctor A. Turkevich to the Kiev Pokrovsky Monastery-hospital, discovered by author, we can get a picture of the state of affairs in the medical facilities of the monastery. Achievements, raising the Monastery-hospital on the unprecedented level, are becoming evident. It is no coincidence that doctors - Delegates of the «Pirogov’s VI Congress» and doctors - delegates of the «X Congress of Russian naturalists and doctors» praised all of his hospital institutions and medical personnel while being acquainted with the Kiev Pokrovsky Monastery-Hospital.

Reading Communities and Hippocratism in Hellenistic Medicine.

The sect of ancient Greek physicians who believed that medical knowledge came from personal experience also read the Hippocratic Corpus intensively. While previous scholarship has concentrated on the contributions of individual physicians to ancient scholarship on Hippocrates, this article seeks to identify those characteristics of Empiricist reading methodology that drove an entire medical community to credit Hippocrates with medical authority. To explain why these physicians appealed to Hippocrates' authority, I deploy surviving testimonia and fragments to describe the skills, practices, and ideologies of the reading community of ancient Empiricist physicians over the one-hundred year period 175 to 75 BCE. The Empiricist conception of testimony taken on trust operative within that reading community elided the modern distinction between personal and institutional targets of trust by treating Hippocratic writings as revelatory of the moral character of Hippocrates as an author. Hippocrates' moral character as an honest witness who accurately observed empirical phenomena aligned with the epistemic virtues of an empirical medical community who believed that medical knowledge came from personal experience. So I argue that Empiricist reading culture constructed a moral authority of honesty and accuracy from Hippocratic writings, enlarged the personal authority of Hippocrates among medical readers, and contributed to the development of Hippocratism.

Robert Nisbet and the Present Age

Among well-known sociologists, Robert Nisbet was almost unique in considering himself a “conservative.” He defined this orientation not in terms of conventional American partisan affiliation but as a sociological and anthropological perspective. Nisbet viewed human relations as requiring organic relations, which he assumed to be hierarchical and communally determined. Such relations seemed to Nisbet natural and even beneficial; and his lifelong interest in nineteenth-century social theory and his efforts to locate organicist positions among social thinkers of the Left, especially Emile Durkheim, can be attributed to an attempt to substantiate his understanding of basic human relations. Nisbet also significantly viewed contemporary America as departing rapidly and perhaps irreversibly from what he considered to be a good society. This concern pervades his studies of social theory; and it is possible to interpret his emphasis on the “conservative” origins of sociology and his attack on leveling public administration from the 1950s onward as related reference points. Against the social disintegration and social engineering that he already criticizes in his early work The Quest for Community, Nisbet (1990) poses his vision of personal authority and communal hierarchy. This vision is present in Nisbet’s writings, from his early studies of French counterrevolutionary thinkers through his final assaults on America in the present age.

Perception of Nursing students about importance of educational needs and its relation to academic achievement.

Abstract Aim of this study: was to examine the perception of nursing students about importance of educational needs and its relation to academic achievement. Methodology: A descriptive correlational design was used for this study. Setting: The present study was conducted at nursing faculty in Minia University. Subject: The present study included a total coverage sample includes all four academic years nursing students during academic year (2012- 2013). Total number of students was (n=727). Tools of the study: 1 st tool was demographic data sheet, 2 nd tool was Nursing Education Importance Instrument (NEII) developed by Schorpp, (2008), and 3 rd tool was student academic achievement. Results: This study revealed that, there was a highly statistical significant differences among the four academic years nursing students as all fourth year nursing students had reported that the educational needs is very important. Conclusions: there was a highly statistical significant difference between perception of the four academic years nursing students about importance of educational needs and academic achievement (favoring to the students had excellent, and followed very good grade). Recommendations: Ask authoritative persons to improve educational environment through providing more space, and educational resources for conducting teaching learning process.

Tension and Approximation in Poetic Translation

Simple observation reveals that each language and each culture enjoys specific linguistic features and rhetorical traditions. In poetry translation difference and the resultant linguistic tension create a gap between Source Language and Target language, a gap that needs to be bridged by creating an approximation processed through the translator’s interpretation. The existentialist thrust behind this position supersedes equivalence and disallows “intervention”, since in producing his/her pre-dictionary self-attributed translation, the poetry translator works from within the first person domain, a theoretical construct which is assumed to handle Davidson’s first person authority and more. Translating Herbert’s “Even-Song” requires knowledge of Arabic Islamic discourse and the ability to create, via interpretation, the right angle that allows Herbert’s deep religious experience and voice to be heard in a discourse that relates Arab audience to English religious devotion to God, a devotion which lies well beyond tension and cultural difference. Keywords: Interpretation, Translational tension, Difference in translation, Poetry translation

Drugs and discretionary power in prisons: The officer's perspective

BackgroundDrugs play an increasing role in contemporary prison life. Prisoners’ drug use, drug smuggling and drug selling have also had a growing impact on the work routines and practices of prison officers. This has led to critiques that prison staff have become ‘too lenient’ regarding drug use. MethodsBased on observational data, qualitative interviews and survey data, this study examines the role of drugs in the way Danish prison officers exercise power. ResultsTwo forms of power are analysed: institutional power, by which the officers can sanction or reward inmates in everyday prison life, and personal power, by which the officers’ personal authority and skills can reduce the more intrusive aspects of prison control. These forms of power are applied by officers’ use of discretion in order to maintain what they consider to be adequate levels of peace and order in the prison wings. It is shown that officers are highly ambivalent towards the presence of drugs in prisons. On the one hand, they support the stricter drug policies implemented over the past two decades. On the other hand, they are aware that drug use can have a positive function in the everyday running of the prison. Officers’ acceptance of inmates’ drug use (mainly cannabis), therefore, is not necessarily a sign of leniency but one way in which prison officers exercise their power in prison settings. ConclusionsIt is concluded that discretionary power is still very central to the officers’ work. This conclusion contradicts recent arguments that prison officers’ agency is being threatened or restricted by ‘neoliberal’ management reforms. The prison officers’ discretion and informal power is the key to understanding their acceptance of inmates’ drug use.

Lexical Definitions of Some Performative Verbs

Abstract The author upholds Anna Wierzbicka’s opinion that unless strict scientific definitions of performatives are reached, no successful classification of these verbs can be made. The article compares definitions of the verb elect and four performative verbs (appoint, declare, excommunicate and pronounce) as presented in four English dictionaries, as well as in the form of Wierzbicka’s explicatives and the author’s formulations reached by means of the collocational method. This method seeks to gain a realistic insight into the semantic structure of lexemes because most metalinguistic elements are drawn from facts offered by the language itself. The definitions of the performative verbs, like of any other verb, can be marshalled by combining and incorporating semantic definitions of the collocating grammar words and constructions. The latter task is done by extracting the common content of the grammar words and constructions in the relevant meanings as appearing in collocations of their own. The same procedure is carried out for the noun collocates occurring in the subject and object slots of the verbs in question. The performative force within this small lexical field manifests gradation, depending on the presence of a person in authority.