Taxonomy Of Styles Research Articles

Social Emotional Learning with Conversational Agents

Social emotional skills are foundational competencies upon which children draw throughout their lives. This work investigates current, commercially available experiences for social emotional learning (SEL) through conversational agents (CAs). Specifically, we reviewed 3,767 Skills available in the "Kids" category of the Alexa Skills Marketplace and found 42 working Skills with connections to SEL. We found that the most common scenarios these Skills sought to support were: active listening, emotional wellbeing, conversation with other people, and politeness. The interaction patterns used by these Skills distilled into a taxonomy of styles we labeled: The Delegator, The Lecturer, The Bulldozer, and The One-Track Mind. We found that, collectively, these Skills provide shallow experiences and lack contingent feedback. To examine the gap between current offerings and families' needs, we also conducted 26 interviews with parents to probe parents' ideas about CAs supporting children's SEL. Parents see potential for CAs to support children in four concrete ways, including attuning to others, cultivating curiosity, reinforcing politeness, and developing emotional awareness. Despite their optimism about these opportunities, parents expressed skepticism about CAs' impoverished conversational abilities and worry about CAs advancing values and behavioral norms that are at odds with their own.

Production and Consumption in Organizational Knowledge: The Case of the `Paradigms Debate'

Recent debates on the production of knowledge in organizational analysis are interpreted from a largely postmodernist, `sociology of consumption' perspective. Drawing upon the work of Jean-François Lyotard, Michel de Certeau and Stanley Deetz in particular, the analysis rejects both positivist and conventionalist theses on knowledge production in favour of a deconstructionist approach that embraces acts of production and consumption in a reflexive way. The argument is developed by way of a case study of production and consumption in organizational analysis. Through an assessment of scientific status and institutional control-centrally in relation to the `paradigm incommensurability' debate-a taxonomy of styles of knowledge production and consumption is proposed. Five main `camps' comprise this taxonomy-non-consumers, integrationists, protectionists, pluralists and postmodernists. We describe the basic knowledge philosophies of the camps and subject them to evaluation and critique. This analysis sees, inter alia, Jeffrey Pfeffer's proposals for producing an integrated knowledge paradigm for organizational analysis—the so-called `Pfefferdigm' thesis-confounded by the indeterminate rationalities and networks of signification of postmodern analysis. For explaining processes of knowledge production and consumption, it is argued ultimately that the notion of `discourse' should replace that of `paradigm'.

A Rhetorical Approach to the Prose of Daniel Defoe

Abstract: Previous attempts to account for Defoe's stylistic versatility have failed to take account of the important role played by his training in rhetoric. Ttiis essay argues that a useful taxonomy of styles can be generated by taking into account traditional rhetorical principles of sentence composition, prose rhythms and clausulae construction, the use of various figures of speech, and the frequency of tropes. This method of analyzing Defoe's prose shows deliberate rhetorical choices in his lesser-known essays and pamphlets as well as in his better-known fiction.