Relative Fluidity Research Articles

Innovation and Thought Leadership by Women in Healthcare during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Introduction: The purpose of this study was to explore the innovation and thought leadership of women in healthcare during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: We used a phenomenological qualitative design. Participants were women health leaders (WHLs) from multiple hospital administration levels. Their thought leadership profile and innovation were assessed. Results: All WHLs indicated awareness of strengths and weaknesses, actively prioritised tasks, showed openness to feedback, and effectively assessed sources of conflict. Most were willing to listen to others, accept advice, and open to change. They were confident of their credibility and comprehensibility of their messages, felt capable of solving problems and handling conflict, utilised a negotiating style, and showed situation-appropriate emotion. They were confident in managing teamwork, allocated resources efficiently, and supported employee work preferences. Conclusion: This study provides evidence of WHLs’ capabilities in leading healthcare organisations during crisis and the shift to virtual care in Saudi Arabia. Establishing women’s leadership programs that focus on placing women in healthcare executive positions is necessary to utilise their untapped potential. Facilitating research on women’s leadership capacity, administrative skill, and impact on providing the highest quality healthcare would be valuable. Evaluating infrastructure and preparedness of healthcare organisations to expand virtual care and the potential for innovation to sustain performance during crises are crucial. Supportive hospital culture provides confidence to WHLs to manage and achieve organisational goals with relative fluidity.

French Merchants in Buenos Aires (1816-1825): Economic Opportunities and Difficulties during the Wars of Independence

Unlike other foreigners, the French merchants who migrated to Hispanic America in the 19th century have received little attention, partly because they are supposed to have been few. With the emancipation of the River Plate, the Declaration of Independence in 1816 and the end of the Spanish commercial monopoly – and despite many difficulties due to revolutionary turmoil – some French merchants saw the legal opening of the rioplatense market as an opportunity and became more present in Buenos Aires, although less than their British counterparts. Building upon the Buenos Aires commercial court’s records and data from censuses, this paper sheds light on the French commercial presence in Buenos Aires during the Independence and civil wars, which hampered the circulation of credit instruments, the fluidity of credit relations, and business activities. It shows the importance of merchants’ private initiatives in consolidating the French presence, and how they coped with wartime consequences. Whereas those who were poorly integrated into local society were vulnerable in these times of crisis, others benefited from close relations within the local society and acquired economic and social prominence. Such integration may have contributed to making them key interlocutors for French authorities as they manifested an increased interest in the River Plate in the context of the post-1815 imperial reconfigurations, when international and European rivalries continued in Hispanic America, particularly between France and Britain.

Linkages in business-science cooperation as a driving force of technological innovation in the national economy

Purpose – The purpose of the article is to analyse the importance of linkages and trust in business‑science cooperation. Moreover, the aim is to verify the impact of close business‑science relations on the innovativeness of the national economy. Research method – Literature studies, surveys, FGI (Focus Group Interview) Results – The research confirms the high importance of relations and relationship management in the development of business‑science cooperation. Companies that assess cooperation with science as valuable and significant to innovation, also indicate a high level of mutual relations and related fluidity in the exchange of knowledge. On the other hand, weak relations and low levels of trust often lead to problems in the implementation of joint projects, and, as a result, in the development of innovation. Originality / value / implications / recommendations – The processes of relationship development and trust‑building are as important in business‑science cooperation as the carefully conducted technology transfer. Thus, companies and scientific units engaged in mutual cooperation should pay attention to both of these factors. In macroeconomic terms, the level of relations between representatives of business and science affects the number of innovations created by a given economy. As a result, it also determines its innovativeness.

Fixing Ownership: Land Agents, Settlers, and Property Relations in Two Eastern Townships, 1840–1865

The general fluidity and ambiguity of property relations during colonization meant settlers, who were often "squatters," relied on land agents to fix their relationship with property-owners. In turn, the latter needed the agent's on-the-ground expertise to manage their affairs and responsibilities for "improvements." Land agents thus became intermediaries between cash-poor settlers and absentee owners. George Bonnallie, active in the northern part of Stukely Township and western Orford Township had a repertoire of routine practices he pursued. Organized in a typology, they provide detail about late colonization and reveal the part played by entrepreneurial intermediaries in fixing property relations in areas still peripheral to the market economy. With in-coming settlement completed in these townships by the mid-1860s, after municipal reform, and with the arrival of speculation by local notables, neither property-owners nor settlers needed the suite of routines deployed to enable settlement. A standardized market for land transfers had developed.

Conjunctures: Who Counts, What Circulates, and the Politics of Children

Conjunctures: Who Counts, What Circulates, and the Politics of Children

Fixed not fluid: European identification in the Aotearoa New Zealand census

Social scientists have long treated ethnicity as socially constructed and historically contingent, rather than fixed at birth and transmitted across generations in a linear fashion. A growing body of work has theorised and examined how individuals construct and express their ethnic identities in a variety of contexts and at different life course stages. Most studies have focused on Indigenous and ethnic minority groups; studies focusing on the experience of majority or dominant groups are rare. Utilising a unique longitudinal census dataset that links whole census microdata in successive censuses, this article adds to the literature by empirically measuring the relative fluidity or rigidity of majority European ethnic identification over several decades. Analysing four sets of linked census pairs, we find that European patterns of self-identification diverge significantly from those of Māori and ethnic minority groups. Individuals who identify solely as European in one census are far less likely to change their ethnic self-identification in the next census. These findings suggest that affiliation to dominant ethnicity operates in ways that are meaningfully different to other ethnic groups, indicating key cross-category differences in how majority ethnicity is socially constructed.

Mykola Khvyl’ovyy, Dmytro Dontsov, and the Transgressive Symbiosis of Communist and Nationalist Visions for a Revolutionary Ukrainian Literature

Despite the tense geopolitical situation in interwar Eastern Europe, Ukrainian litterateurs at first elided the physical and ideological boundaries guarded by state authorities on either side of the Polish-Soviet border. Cultural leaders on the far right and far left, separated by a chasm of fear and loathing, nevertheless read andresponded to one another’s works. In some cases, representatives of the two sides shared common influences, beliefs, and aesthetic ideals, and even took the risk of signalling their admiration for the theories and creative accomplishments of sworn enemies in the opposing camp, favourably invoking “foreigners” to serve opposing agendas. Amid the relative openness, fluidity, and experimentalism that characterised the first (i.e. pre-Stalinist) half of the interwar period in Ukraine, few regarded nationalism and socialism, or even Bolshevism, as mutually exclusive concepts. Rather, there were synergies and points of contact between the two. Examining the public interaction of the Communist writer Mykola Khvyl’ovyy (1893–1933) and the nationalist literary critic Dmytro Dontsov (1883–1973), I argue that the Ukrainian cultural and political ferment of the 1920s was transgressive in two senses. Firstly, it cut across the political boundaries of party membership and citizenship that divided Ukrainians into Soviet and non-Soviet, socialist and nationalist. Secondly, it defied expectations of ideological purity and loyalty at a time of growing but not yet insurmountable hostility. The result was a symbiosis of right and left-wing agitation, in both Soviet Ukraine and south-eastern Poland, for a revolutionary, anticolonial, and modernist Ukrainian literature.

Portraying Migrant Families in Academic Publications: Naming and Framing

In this chapter the authors set out to examine how migrant families are named and framed in academic publications by Lithuanian researchers published from 2004 to 2017, available in Lithuanian and international academic databases. The authors aim to disclose how Lithuanian academics perceive the change of family boundaries and fluidity of family relations in the context of global migration, and how the meanings of ‘change’ are used within academic publications that have sought to define the migrant family life as ‘troubling’. The analysis of publications presented in this chapter was carried out from January to March 2018. It formed a sub-study of the research project ‘Global Migration and Lithuanian Family: Family Practices, Circulation of Care, and Return Strategies’ (2017–2019), funded by the Lithuanian Research Council. The analysis has revealed that Lithuanian researchers portray migrant families as extended in space, liquid, networked, survived, but unsecure because of ongoing risks as well as experiencing ‘losses’ or/ and ‘gains’. The researchers conclude that portraits presented by the academics are framed by the family ideology, while naming of migrant families highly rely on the images of ‘how a family should be’.

Military Mobility, Authority and Negotiation in Early Colonial India*

Abstract This article focuses on the career of Muhammad Yusuf Khan, an officer in the British East India Company who sought to turn his military service into political and diplomatic authority, only to be executed as a rebel in 1764. His rise and fall occurred early in the so-called colonial transition, a period characterized in recent scholarship as one of relative fluidity in contrast to later, more rigid instantiations of colonial rule. Institutionally, the Company’s armies seem to contradict that pattern: their rapid growth in the eighteenth century produced new exclusions and restrictions, including some of the earliest formal articulations of a racial binary between Indian and European actors. Yusuf Khan, however, gained political capital by mobilizing elements of those intended restrictions in new contexts, imbuing the Company’s military hierarchies with alternate meanings outside of its formal infrastructure. His innovative reinterpretation of military prestige becomes clear when the Company’s records are read alongside Persian-language material from the Indian courts against which he fashioned his political identity. His career offers insight into how the inequitable, but dynamic relationship between the Company and its soldiers shaped the former’s approach to and understanding of India s political landscape

Kinship intensity and the use of mental states in moral judgment across societies

Abstract Decades of research conducted in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, & Democratic (WEIRD) societies have led many scholars to conclude that the use of mental states in moral judgment is a human cognitive universal, perhaps an adaptive strategy for selecting optimal social partners from a large pool of candidates. However, recent work from a more diverse array of societies suggests there may be important variation in how much people rely on mental states, with people in some societies judging accidental harms just as harshly as intentional ones. To explain this variation, we develop and test a novel cultural evolutionary theory proposing that the intensity of kin-based institutions will favor less attention to mental states when judging moral violations. First, to better illuminate the historical distribution of the use of intentions in moral judgment, we code and analyze anthropological observations from the Human Area Relations Files. This analysis shows that notions of strict liability—wherein the role for mental states is reduced—were common across diverse societies around the globe. Then, by expanding an existing vignette-based experimental dataset containing observations from 321 people in a diverse sample of 10 societies, we show that the intensity of a society's kin-based institutions can explain a substantial portion of the population-level variation in people's reliance on intentions in three different kinds of moral judgments. Together, these lines of evidence suggest that people's use of mental states has coevolved culturally to fit their local kin-based institutions. We suggest that although reliance on mental states has likely been a feature of moral judgment in human communities over historical and evolutionary time, the relational fluidity and weak kin ties of today's WEIRD societies position these populations' psychology at the extreme end of the global and historical spectrum.

Transitional environmentality – Understanding uncertainty at the junctures of eco-logical production in Timor-Leste

Environmentality has proven an enduring framework for interrogating issues around environmental behaviours and discourse as a means of subject governance and citizen-making. However, its application often insufficiently reflects the temporal nuances of environmental (eco) logics as transient, emergent and differentiated amongst ‘citizens’. This is particularly the case in post-conflict zones of transition where the fluidity, friction and fractural nature of socio-political relations between state and subject are often overlooked. By examining community experiences in the establishment of Timor-Leste’s first national park, this article highlights the inadequate attention directed towards addressing these concerns. It proposes ‘transitional’ environmentality as a novel framework that first, better reflects the ever-transient nature of environmental behaviour and regulation; and second, recognizes the prevalence for this in post-conflict landscapes. Transitional environmentality emphasizes the temporal fragility of environmental authority structures and its potential for renegotiation of resource management between the frictions of the state and the subjects it seeks to make.

TRANSITION IN FAMILY RELATIONS IN IMMIGRANT FAMILIES: THE CASE OF CHINESE OLDER IMMIGRANTS IN THE UNITED STATES

Using panel data of 2,604 Chinese older immigrants in Chicago over a two-year period, this study examined continuity and changes in intergenerational relationship patterns and their mental health implications. Latent transition analysis revealed five types of family relations: traditional, modified traditional, coresiding-unobligated, independent, and detached. Over the two years, about 43% of the respondents shifted to a different relationship type, with the most common changes being shifting into modified traditional or independent relations, or from detached relations. Controlling for baseline socio-demographic, acculturation, mental health variables, and variables representing life transitions over time, having detached relations was related to greater depressive symptoms in two years and having modified traditional relations was associated with better quality of life at the follow up. The findings revealed heterogeneity and fluidity of intergenerational relations among older immigrant populations and point to the important role of family relations in their well-being.

Navigating the Terrain of Dis/Ability

Through my lens as an adult educator with non-apparent dis/abilities, this paper has been constructed as an autoethnographic cartography in the lived experience of a dis/ability paradigm. Like a navigational pelorus used to sustain a vessel’s bearing at sea, the relative fluidity of my dis/abled identity, lost and found, has been charted against encounters and relapses of stroke and mental illness. Drawing from personal dis/ability narratives, I illustrate how I captured and studied the familiar yet unaccustomed geography of my body’s dis/abling experiences. I describe how the use of visually captivating, artistic underwater photographs of feminine bodies—strong—sensual—alive, and reminiscent of my embodied experiences, serve not only as visual representations of my dis/ability, but as entry points into the messy process of textualizing dis/ability experiences.

Tuberculosis in the borderlands: migrants, microbes and more-than-human borders

Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) has been a widely recognized threat since the TB epidemic was declared a global emergency in the 1990s. The epidemic is particularly critical in the borderlands where humans and microbes move across geographic borders. In this article, we explore the contingency of human-microbe relations in Thailand-Myanmar borderlands. Initially constituted by the colonial encounters, the Siam–Burma border’s continuing existence was constantly enacted, negotiated, and co-produced through the entangled interplay of various actors, microbes and pharmaceuticals included. We examine how global forms such as biomedical science, epidemiological practices, and public health interventions were actualized in an attempt to control MDR-TB in this borderland. While disease surveillance and control were seemingly hindered by the permeability of the border and geographic mobility of migrants, the potency of Mycobacterium tuberculosis to lie dormant in human bodies for long periods of time without symptoms posed an additional challenge to epidemiological attempts to segregate the healthy from the contaminated. Combining ethnographic materials from Umphang District, Tak Province at the western border of Thailand with national policy analysis, natural history, and microbiological insights, we reveal how the indeterminacy of borders and complex microbe-human entanglements necessitate changes in the prevailing biocontainment model of infectious disease control. We propose that disease surveillance and response need to transcend the rigid geographic notion of space and include a more flexible topological conception of spatiality that embraces the fluidity of pharmaceuticals, microbes, and human relations. This reinvention of the spatial approach in epidemic control begins by attending more closely to the entanglement of human-microbe relations in the more-than-human borders.

Microplate assay for lipophilicity determination using intrinsic fluorescence of drugs: Application to a promising anticancer lead, pyridoclax

Lipophilicity must be necessarily determined in drug discovery since this physicochemical property will directly influence the pharmacokinetics of a drug as its pharmacodynamics profile. Pyridoclax is an original lead, recently identified as very promising in treatment of chemoresistant cancers. The partition coefficient (Kp) of this anticancer drug was determined by microplate assays, well adapted in drug discovery, since being rapid, and requiring only poor drug amounts. The analytical approach was performed either by UV derivative spectrophotometry after validation thanks to a set of basic, neutral and acid reference substances, or originally, by raw fluorescence spectrophotometry by taking advantage of the pyridoclax intrinsic fluorescence. Large unilamellar vesicles (LUVs) were formulated from soybean-, egg-, or dipalmitoyl-phosphatidylcholine, characterized in terms of granulometric properties, ζ potential (determined by DLS), and of phospholipid content (quantified by 1H NMR, also in presence of cholesterol). Whatever the detection method used, log Kp of pyridoclax were in the same magnitude order, and pyridoclax appeared as a lipophilic compound. It was also established that interactions between this lead and biomimetic membranes were influenced by the relative fluidity of the membranes, as confirmed by results of a liposome leakage assay.

Restoration of polar-flagellum motility and biofilm-forming capacity in the mmsB1 mutant of the alphaproteobacterium Azospirillum brasilense Sp245 points to a new role for a homologue of 3-hydroxyisobutyrate dehydrogenase.

The bacterium Azospirillum brasilense can swim and swarm owing to the rotation of a constitutive polar flagellum (Fla) and inducible lateral flagella, respectively. They also form biofilms on various interfaces. Experimental data on flagellar assembly and social behaviours in these bacteria are scarce. Here, for the first time, the chromosomal coding sequence mmsB1 for a homologue of 3-hydroxyisobutyrate dehydrogenase (protein accession Nos. ADT80774 and E7CWE2) was shown to play a role in the assembly of motile Fla and in biofilm biomass accumulation. In the previously obtained mutant SK039 of A. brasilense Sp245, an Omegon-Km insertion in mmsB1 was concurrent with changes in cell-surface properties and with suppression of Fla assembly (partial) and Fla-dependent motility (complete). Here, the immotile leaky Fla- mutant SK039 was complemented with the expression vector pRK415-borne mmsB1 gene of Sp245. In the complemented mutant, the elevated relative cell hydrophobicity and changed relative membrane fluidity of SK039 returned to the wild-type levels; also, biofilm biomass accumulation increased and even reached Sp245's levels under nutritionally rich conditions. In strain SK039 (pRK415-mmsB1), the percentage of cells with Fla became significantly higher than that in mutant SK039, and the Fla-driven swimming velocity was equal to that in strain Sp245.

Influência da substituição da areia natural pelo vidro no desempenho mecânico do concreto

O concreto é o material de construção mais utilizado no mundo. Ao passo desse elevado consumo, ocorre o desmatamento de áreas para a implantação de pedreiras e jazidas para extrair as matérias-primas utilizadas no concreto. Diante disso, diversas pesquisas buscam reduzir o extrativismo mineral e se aproximar do desenvolvimento sustentável com a utilização de resíduos no processo de produção do concreto. Muitos pesquisadores tem estudado a utilização de adições minerais em substituição ao cimento Portland e resíduos em substituição ao agregado graúdo e ao agregado miúdo. A presente pesquisa tem como objetivo estudar o desempenho mecânico e a consistência de concretos com substituição de 25%, 50%, 75% e 100% da areia natural pelo vidro. Foi feita a análise da granulometria dos agregados utilizados para realizar a correta dosagem e proporcionamento dos materiais com base no método da Associação Brasileira de Cimento Portland – ABCP. Para mensurar a consistência, foi realizado o ensaio de abatimento do tronco de cone em todos os traços analisados. Para avaliar o desempenho mecânico dos concretos, foram moldados cinco corpos de prova para cada traço, que foram rompidos aos 28 dias. Os resultados mostraram que alguns teores apresentaram menor fluidez em relação ao concreto referência e que o teor de 75% apresentou o melhor desempenho mecânico entre os traços analisados.

Emotional Response and Changes in Heart Rate Variability Following Art-Making With Three Different Art Materials.

Art therapy encourages the use of art materials to express feelings and thoughts in a supportive environment. Art materials differ in fluidity and are postulated to thus differentially enhance emotional response (the more fluid the material the more emotion elicited). Yet, to the best of our knowledge, this assumption has not been empirically tested. The current study aimed to examine the emotional and physiological responses to art-making with different art materials. We were particularly interested in vagal activity, indexed by heart rate variability (HRV), because of its association with numerous health related outcomes. In this study, 50 adults (mean age 33 ± 10.27 years, 52% males) participated in a repeated measures experiment, in which they were requested to draw with three art materials (order randomized) differing in their level of fluidity (pencil, oil-pastels, and gouache paint) intermittent with periods of music. We measured the emotional response to art-making with each material using a self-report measure and matrices of HRV using a wearable electrocardiogram device. We calculated two indices of HRV, one indicative of parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) activity, and one indicative of sympathetic nervous system (SNS) activity. Art-making with gouache paint and oil-pastels resulted in improved positive mood, while pencil did not. Art-making explained approximately 35% of the variability in parasympathetic reactivity, which may indicate changes in emotional regulation processes during the art-making task. Yet, fluidity was not sufficient to explain the reaction to art-making. Surprisingly, the largest suppression of PNS and augmentation of the SNS occurred during art-making with oil-pastels and not with Gouache. Moreover, PNS and SNS reactivity to oil-pastels were related to emotional valance, which may point to emotional engagement. We can conclude that art-making with oil-pastels, first created in Japan in 1924 to increase self-expression of students, results in a unique emotional and physiological responses. These findings might be explained by the enhanced tactile experience of art-making with oil-pastels along with their relative fluidity, triggering an arousal pattern. Further studies that take the format and presentation of the materials as well as the content of the artwork, into account, are needed.

Midiatização, cultura do consumo e contemporaneidade

As transformações ocorridas após a segunda metade do seculo XX que marcam o advento da contemporaneidade (ou transição da modernidade para a pós modernidade, para Slater, 2002, ou modernidade tardia para Hall, 2003), tem por um dos fatores principais a aceleração do fluxo de informações, compressão espaço tempo, pós-fordismo, consolidação da cultura de consumo e mediação dos meios de comunicação. Este último fenômeno é chamado de midiatização por Sodré, sendo fator que impulsiona a fragmentação da identidade e a fluidez das relações sociais. O presente trabalho tem por objetivo analisar a contribuição da midiatização para a difusão da cultura do consumo e fragmentação da identidade, sobretudo no ambiente da televisão. Esses fenômenos serão analisados e depois confrontados com as vertentes mediadoras da TV. Será feito um estudo de caso com o programa televisivo Esquadrão da Moda, exibido pelo SBT.

Away from home: How young Chinese consumers travel with global brands?

This interpretive study investigates how a group of young Chinese students consume global brands of American origins, in China and in the UK. More specifically, this research examines how meanings attached to global food brands travel abroad with consumers and investigates the relationship between brand consistency and brand meanings across national boundaries. Findings from a thematic analysis of focus group interviews conducted over a nine-month period, reveal that some brand meanings are context and culture specific (contextual meanings) while other meanings travel with consumers across borders (core meanings). Theoretically, this study shows how global brands provide a platform of structural meanings, ideas and practices that are global and globalising in themselves, allowing a degree of fluidity and adaptation in relation to the local context of consumption.