Technical Rationality Research Articles

Reconceptualizing Somatic Dysfunction in the Light of a Neuroaesthetic Enactive Paradigm

Background: Palpatory findings are considered a central element of osteopathic practice, especially when associated with a patient's altered regulative functions than with named somatic dysfunctions. Although osteopathic theories for somatic dysfunction could be plausible, the clinical applicability of the concept is debated, especially because it is largely related to simple cause-effect models of osteopathic care. In contrast to a linear kind of diagnosis of a "tissue as a producer of symptoms", this perspective article aims to provide a conceptual and operational framework in which the somatic dysfunction evaluation process is seen as a neuroaesthetic (en)active encounter between osteopath and patient. Subsections relevant to the subject: To summarize all concepts of the hypothesis, the enactive neuroaesthetics principles are proposed as a critical foundation for the osteopathic assessment and treatment of the person, specifically addressing a new paradigm for somatic dysfunction. Conclusions, and future directions: The present perspective article represents a proposition to blend technical rationality informed by neurocognitive and social sciences, and professional artistry clinical experience informed by traditional tenets, to overcome the controversy around somatic dysfunction, rather than dismissing the concept.

DIMENSÕES POLÍTICA, CONTEXTUAL E DO CONHECIMENTO DA FORMAÇÃO DOCENTE: UMA PERSPECTIVA À LUZ DO PENSAMENTO BAKHTINIANO

ABSTRACT: Based on Bakhtinian thought, we developed dimensions of a perspective of counter-hegemonic training of Science teachers. This training perspective, which we call “dialogical-responsible teacher education,” consists of seven dimensions - practical, ethics, aesthetics, investigative, political, contextual, and knowledge. The last three will be developed in this paper. The development of these dimensions was built up from the collating of Bakhtinian Circle texts with texts from the literature on teacher education, tensions, and contrasts, showing insufficiencies and proposing advances concerning the hegemonic training model guided by technical rationality. In this process, formative dimensions emerged that distanced from a prescriptive profile, are constituted as principles that allow rethinking, transforming, giving directions, and structuring formations that break with the hegemonic perspective. We argue that our dimensions make it possible to resignify teacher education regarding the broad understanding of reality, criticality, teaching autonomy, organicity of training processes, and dialogicity in constructing knowledge.

技术理性与价值理性的审视

技术理性与价值理性的审视

Something else than usual hospital nursing care: An ethnographic study of nurse case managers’ everyday practices

Support interventions, such as nurse case managers, has been developed in response to the inequality in health and a growing population with multi-morbidity. The aim of the present study was to explore the everyday practices of nurse case managers at a Danish university hospital. An ethnographic approach with a constructionist perspective was applied. Data generation entailed participant observation and one group interviews with all nurse case managers in a Danish region ( n = 4). The data were analysed using thematic analysis. The everyday practices of nurse case managers were characterised by providing something else than the usual hospital nursing care by continuously establishing and maintaining relationships with their patients. They emphasised the patient's psychosocial needs in a biomedical context and accompanied patients across different healthcare settings. The nurse case managers’ everyday practices resonate with the key values of nursing. These values are under pressure in healthcare dominated by technical rationality and efficiency leading to increased inequality in health. Further exploration of the potential benefits for multi-morbidity and co-existing social issues is needed. There is a need for continued critical debate about the conditions for caring for patients’ psychosocial needs. The implications of continuing to neglect patients’ psychosocial needs are related to further increasing inequality in health and impeding equal access to services.

Ecology, Anti-Christianity, and the Far Right

Ecology, Anti-Christianity, and the Far Right

Marcuse's Critical Theory of Technical Rationality

As a representative of the Frankfurt School, Marcuse has repeatedly discussed the relationship between technology and freedom. He attributes human alienation to the fact that technological rationality has become a covered ideology in developed industrial society, thus making people lose negativity, transcendence and criticism, and then become 'one-dimensional people '. This paper takes Marcuse's "comfortable non-freedom" as the starting point, and discusses Marcuse's critical theory of technical rationality from three aspects: loss of freedom, paralysis of freedom and return to freedom. It further analyzes how Marcuse reshapes subject freedom and achieves social liberation from the perspective of aesthetics and art.

“En Bolivia lo hacen andar”: Régimen de mantenimiento, dimensión emotiva y prácticas de renovación vehicular del transporte colectivo de La Paz

AbstractIn this article I analyze the emotional logic that urban transport drivers in La Paz assign to their vehicles in their life cycle. I pay attention to the emotive dimension of the “technical rationality” of practices of vehicle renewal, reuse, and maintenance—that is to say, the set of emotions, affections, and, especially, feelings that emerge in keeping the vehicle in good condition or in its possible replacement. This emotional dimension does not emerge as an autonomous sphere of technical rationality but rather is inherent to it. My hypothesis also points to its overflowing and kaleidoscopic character, since it transcends the individual experience by allowing us to analyze other phenomena of social life.

What is the Public Interest in Professional Regulation? Canadian Regulatory Leaders’ Views in a Context of Change

Professions are regulated in the public interest, but precisely what the term “public interest” means can vary across time and place. Research exploring changes to professional regulation in the West has begun to identify such shifts: for instance, highlighting the emphasis on consumer satisfaction and public protection over other potential meanings of the public interest. To understand these societal shifts and their implications for professional regulation, this article first reviews neo-Weberian theories of rationalization, and empirical literature. Subsequently, it presents findings from interviews with regulatory leaders across six Canadian provinces to determine if the trends in rationalization identified are reflected in leaders’ accounts of professional regulation in the public interest. Interviews reveal that many leaders define the public interest in ways consistent with technical rationality, including a safety lens and consumer orientation; however, there is also evidence of broader meanings and values. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Marcuse's Theory of Scientific and Technological Alienation and its Contemporary Reflections

The status of science and technology in the process of human social development has been increasing, which has promoted the continuous progress of modern industrial society, and at the same time, a series of negative effects brought about by science and technology have gradually emerged. Alienation is an important concept of Marx's philosophy, and Marcuse absorbed Marx's idea of alienation and put forward the theory of technological alienation under new conditions. This technical rationality constantly satisfies people's false needs, so that people's negative sexual dimension and critical dimension are constantly lost, which eventually leads to the formation of one-dimensional and one-dimensional society. The development of science and technology in the new era of our country should firmly establish a reasonable concept of scientific and technological development, adhere to the people-oriented thinking, and strengthen the regulations of morality and law on the development and utilization of science and technology, so as to overcome the alienation of science and technology and promote the healthy development of society.

The Powers of a Fish: Clinical Thinking, Humanistic Thinking, and Different Ways of Knowing.

How are ways of knowing similar between clinical reasoning and the humanities, and can the latter be used to elucidate the former? This commentary considers a conceptual model proposed by Prince and colleagues in this issue to explore the different ways of knowing in art and medicine. Their proposed model links 2 approaches to clinical reasoning with an analytic approach said to be characteristic of the humanities-visual thinking strategies (VTS)-to teach skills in clinical reasoning. They suggest that the VTS approach aligns well with the 2 clinical reasoning approaches and use this relationship to argue for the introduction of the humanities into graduate medical education. However, is VTS truly an exemplar of analytic approaches used in the humanities? The approach to clinical decision making is a version of what Donald A. Schön calls technical rationality, but what is the epistemology used in the humanities and art? This commentary explores this question through the perspective of hermeneutics, a branch of philosophy that centers on an interpretive understanding of art, and through art, a way of knowing the self, others, and the world. In contrast to limiting the focus of the humanities in medical education to sharpening the powers of observation and analytical thinking, the author argues that art also offers a way to explore the challenges and triumphs of providing care to those in need and to explore the meanings, feelings, and experiences of living and dying. It offers a way of understanding and expressing the moral dilemmas of our time that aspires toward the aesthetic, philosophical, and existential truths of a life in medicine.

Logical Approach, Realistic Situation and Behavioral Selection of Higher Education Governance Empowered by Big Data

Big data has become an important tool to promote the transformation of higher education governance. In internal mechanism, the governance of higher education empowered by big data can continuously optimize the governance structure of higher education, enrich the governance subjects of higher education, expand the boundaries of higher education governance and update the governance rules of higher education. In terms of value logic, the governance of higher education with big data empowerment is mainly reflected in shaping data thinking, reconstructing value cognition, surpassing technical rationality and realizing characteristic development. At present, the governance of big data empowerment higher education mainly has practical difficulties, such as lack of institutional guarantee for data application, weak research ability of data technology, information risk in data based governance and technological governance ignoring the needs of the subject. In the future, the governance of big data empowerment higher education needs to further standardize data governance and improve the modern university system with Chinese characteristics. Mining data value to stimulate the internal power of higher education governance; Based on the whole data, realize the collaborative governance of higher education; In-depth interpretation of data, highlighting the people-oriented value orientation.

Business-Like and Still Serving Society? Investigating the Relationship Between NPOs Being Business-Like and Their Societal Roles

Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) becoming business-like is a contested issue. Some understand the adoption of business-like practices by NPOs as a case of adopting rational myths through institutional isomorphism and thus potentially dangerous for NPOs’ ability to fulfill their unique societal roles. Others are more optimistic, arguing that technical rationality is possible in the adoption of business-like practices, and that such practices can therefore support NPOs in fulfilling a wide range of societal roles. Drawing on survey data of NPOs in Flanders, we examine the relationship between the extent to which NPOs use business-like practices, and the extent to which they engage in various societal roles. We find that business-like practices are weakly related to NPOs’ societal roles. All roles are positively related to nonprofit managerialism and unrelated to NPOs’ reliance on commercial funding. Our results suggest that a certain optimism regarding the rational use of business-like approaches is justified.

Clasping Together the Magical and the Menial

Since decolonizing aesthetics should demand that we question historical templates that are treated uncritically as the vehicles for conveying authoritative knowledge, this experimental essay aims at the level of form to enact the content for which it is arguing. It suggests that interacting with the works of three African-American women artists involves viewers in a mode of creolizing or reenfranchising marginalized creative resources. Specifically, the relevant aesthetic objects facilitate relationships among spheres of life that have been attenuated or made distant from one another in worlds dominated by Euromodern hegemony and its models of scientific and technical rationality. These works cultivate the meeting of the once and still living by centring the continued dynamism of shared aspirations; they bridge an affirmation of dignified Black femininity and ladyhood with facing and fighting the gruesome attacks on projects of Black freedom; and they connect ancestral and contemporary artists similarly involved with making the everyday sublime through concretely interweaving the extraordinary with the quotidian. As they clasp together what have been severed domains, they offer their viewers a distinct context for becoming in ways that exemplify the larger quality of a decolonizing aesthetics focused on creating a world in which many worlds thrive.

Study on the Treatment Technology of Silty Clay in Reconstruction and Expansion Project

<p>According to different geological conditions and different soft foundation thicknesses, this paper uses Terzaghi's one-dimensional consolidation theory, finite element simulation condition calculation and combined with code requirements to analyze the effects of replacement, cement mixing piles, and prestressed pipe piles on the foundation treatment of silty silty clay, and finally through the comparison and selection of plans, from the perspective of economic and technical rationality, determines the specific treatment method used.</p>

Advancing a critical social psychological perspective on women's leadership: A case illustration from the Global South

AbstractWhen applied to the Global South, mainstream positivist approaches to work and organisational psychology impose alien theories of personality (the self) and leadership. In the case of women, they fail to capture the richness of their experiences of life and leadership, which are influenced by the nexus between history, power and marginalisation—for many, even oppression. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the value of a critical social psychological approach, despite its grounding in the Global North discourse, to analyse women's leadership from a cross‐cultural context. To illustrate, we provide an empirical example of a Vietnamese woman leader's life‐story drawing on the theoretical resources from critical social psychology to interpret her experiences. When viewed from this perspective, women's leadership is understood within a dialogical space, which is prior to and more fundamental than any instrumental reason and technical rationality. It is argued that this approach resists essentialising assumptions about gender and cultural practices of leadership, providing a more liberating means to understand the life and leadership of Vietnamese women. In the final analysis, we argue that this study contributes to the nascent field of critical work and organisational psychology.

Mining the ambient commons: building interdisciplinary connections between environmental knowledge, AI and creative practice research

ABSTRACT According to Brooks [2017. “The Big Problem with Self-driving Cars Is People”. IEEE Spectrum: Technology, Engineering, and Science News], artificial intelligence has had a variable track-record of usefulness in situations where context and environmental knowledge are responsible for shaping human interactions. In 2021, providing contextually aware training to supervised machine learning is still a non-trivial task for AI models that involve complex systems. In addition, knowledge held only across distributed members of a community, within culture, or tacitly within the wider environment of the ambient commons [McCullough 2013. Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press] evades consistent generalizable modelling – even in technical domains such as traffic flow management, atmospheric chemistry, or the prediction of election results. Yet it is precisely these interactions of context, community, culture and environment that also define how music can be created. The creative arts can themselves be thought of as a complex system. Assuming that creativity is non-generalizable, this paper assesses creative processes through a humanities-centric lens of machine learning and robotics, aiming to better understand relationships between context, environment and experimental system in artistic research. These relationships are now themselves significantly digitally mediated, requiring a change in academic discourse away from artefacts which need discrete research justification towards a more holistic, and often non-linear view of networks that require cultural situation. In doing so, issues of creative accountability [Field 2021. “Changing the Vocabulary of Creative Research: The Role of Networks, Risk, and Accountability in Transcending Technical Rationality.” In Sound Work: Composition as Critical Technical Practice, edited by J. Impett, 303–317.Orpheus Institute Series. Leuven: Leuven University Press] and the implications of substituting “creative question” for “research question” are examined within creative research. Early twentieth century ideas related to progressivism which have instrumentalized creative practice, particularly where technology forms part of art making, are challenged by re-thinking change through new models. The Three Horizons change model [Sharpe 2016. “Three Horizons: A Pathways Practice for Transformation.” Ecology and Society 21 (2): 47] originally intended to describe environmental ecosystems, is assessed as a practical tool for designing creative research.

Information systems in nurses' work: Technical rationality versus an ethic of care

AbstractNurses increasingly interact with health information systems (HIS) in their daily work. This article examines how the problems that they confront in that interaction can be understood through the theoretical concepts of technical rationality and an ethic of care. The findings are based on a qualitative study of nurses in one Swedish hospital. They suggest that HIS did not support the holistic care of patients, and were not adapted to the varied and often urgent situations that nurses faced in their daily work, leaving them feeling isolated with their problems. In summary, HIS were found to serve the administrative aims of a hospital organisation, based on technical rationality, rather than supporting patients' needs as seen from an ethics of care perspective. The contribution of the study is to show how the use of these two conceptual tools connects nurses' daily problems with HIS to more fundamental issues about the values upon which healthcare is grounded.

Critical Thinking and Judgment on Engineer's Work: Its Integration in Engineering Education

In the present work we develop some core ideas to strengthen the inclusion of humanistic knowledge in scientific and technical education sustained in the mainstream definition of engineering provided by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). In order to achieve such a goal we developed a novel formal definition of the term ‘judgment’ to enlighten the conceptual links between technical rationality and critical thinking in the context of the engineering profession. The analysis intends to overcome some obstacles still present when integrating humanities in engineering training rather than including them as a mere afterthought.

PERSPECTIVAS DE FORMAÇÃO DE PROFESSORES NOS TRABALHOS DA FEIRA CATARINENSE DE MATEMÁTICA: UM OLHAR PARA A CATEGORIA PROFESSOR

ABSTRACT: Teacher training in Brazil has been the focus of interest and research in recent decades and has contributed to the understanding and advancement of the area. However, when its direction moves towards Mathematics Fair, research is still incipient. To contribute to this data change, the present study is the result of qualitative research centered on the problem: what teacher training perspectives can be revealed from the written texts from works presented in the category Santa Catarina’s teachers at Math Fair? For this purpose, the corpus of analysis consisted of 38 publications registered from annals, relating to the category Teacher, for the period from 2014 to 2019. The descriptive and interpretative analysis of the corpus revealed that there are different perspectives for teacher training: one is more prominently, closer to practical rationality; another is more related to critical rationality; and, finally, a third one that is related to technical rationality. Therefore, it is possible to evidence a tendency of the lecturing teacher to report practices, which seek to overcome the traditional, prominently valuing the actions from their own successful experiences, but also with a view from the praxis. We conclude by indicating the relevance of discussions in the scope of the Math Fair about the implications of each identified training perspective, as well as suggesting problematizing the Teacher category.

“Dangerous modernity!”, or the shadow play of modernity and its characters: instrumental rationality - money - technology (part 1)

The article is an essay on the critical analysis of one of the fundamental issues of social theory of the 19th - 20th centuries - alienation and its manifestations in modern societies. Alienation is interpreted not in one of its special meanings (such as alienation of labor, etc.), but in the broadest way - as the transformation of products of individual and collective activities into an independent force that subjugates a person and transfers him from the position of the subject to the position of the object of social relations. Such a definition makes alienation a universal feature of social life. However, in different societies and in different historical periods, alienation can have variable specific forms. The historically specific manifestations of alienation in modern societies can be explained by referring to the classical theme of their genesis. The originality of their institutional organization is largely associated with the originality of their culture and spiritual life (in particular, with the radical demarcation between human and nature, subject and object in the modern era). The multifaceted phenomenon of scientific and technical rationality, the product of the post-Renaissance Western-European culture, becomes a source of social realities and practices fraught with alienation. The article illustrates it by a number of examples, including the logic and mechanisms of the capitalist money economy. The author refers to the heritage of world philosophy and social thought, which problematized and conceptualized the considered issues in various ways: the Frankfurt School, existentialist philosophers, pillars of theoretical sociology - Karl Marx and Georg Simmel.