Introduction : facets of the alien -- The human as a liminal being -- Between pathos and response -- Response to the alien -- Corporeal experience between selfhood and otherness -- Thresholds of attention -- Between cultures.

Management and organization researchers are being called to conduct research that is more caring, yet the concept of care and how to practice it within the profession is undertheorized. Adopting a feminist epistemology and methodology, we develop the concept of care by weaving the personal, ethical, and political into the research process. First, we reflect critically on how aspects of care—attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness (Tronto, Moral boundaries: a political argument for an ethic of care, Routledge, 1993; Tronto, Caring democracy: (...) markets, equality, and justice, New York University Press, 2013)—unfolded in our personal research experiences, and secondly, we conduct a review of articles published in management and organization studies and analyse expressed or concealed conceptions of care in scholars’ accounts of research purpose and ethics. We find three ethical sensibilities at the heart of enacting care: encountering the ‘other’, interpreting roles and responsibilities, and deliberating needs and resources. We contribute to a feminist research ethics by highlighting issues related to care that are concealed in dominant ethos guiding management and organization research. Further, we develop methodological insights for implementing an ethic of care as an alternative ethical standpoint in business research ethics. Finally, we provide suggestions for how to embed more care within research ethics practices in academic institutions. (shrink)

Normativität hat in den Sozialwissenschaften noch immer etwas Anrüchiges, fast Abschreckendes. Es gibt eine lange Traditionslinie in den Sozialwissenschaften, die versucht, ihre Disziplin gegenüber normativen Argumenten „sauber“ zu halten. Das wird in der Regel damit begründet, dass im wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnisprozess Gesinnungsmotive nicht hilfreich sind und im Extremfall Ergebnisse verzerren. Befürworter normativer Sozialwissenschaften halten dagegen, dass die fehlende Thematisierung etwa von sozialen Ungleichheits- und Herrschaftsverhältnissen die Welt, so wie sie gerade ist, einmal mehr bestätigt – und das ist eben auch nicht (...) normfrei und kann es auch nicht sein, weil, so eine zentrale These des vorliegenden Bandes, Theorien notwendig mit normativen Bezügen behaftet sind. Damit ist das Spektrum der Positionen angedeutet, die in diesem Sammelband zu finden sind. Er hat einerseits das Ziel, normative Verwicklungen auch in den sozialwissenschaftlichen Ansätzen aufzuspüren, die stärker auf die Idee einer wertfreien Wissenschaft verpflichtet sind. Andererseits werden Ansätze, die explizit herrschaftskritische Positionen vertreten, auf die Plausibilität ihrer normativen Setzungen hin überprüft. Die normativen Hintergründe sozialwissenschaftlicher Theoriebildung aufzuzeigen und eine Debatte über die normativen Bezüge der Sozialwissenschaften anzuregen ist das Anliegen dieses Bandes. (shrink)

Digital data inundation has far-reaching implications for: disciplinary jurisdiction; the relationship between the academy, commerce and the state; and the very nature of the sociological imagination. Hitherto much of the discussion about these matters has tended to focus on ‘transactional’ data held within large and complex commercial and government databases. This emphasis has been quite understandable – such transactional data does indeed form a crucial part of the informational infrastructures that are now emerging. However, in recent years new sources of (...) data have become available that possess a rather different character. This is data generated in the cultural sphere, not only as a result of routine transactions with various digital media but also as a result of what some would want to view as a shift towards popular cultural forms dominated by processes of what has been termed prosumption. Our analytic focus here is on contemporary prosumption practices, digital technologies, the public life of data and the playful vitality of many of the ‘glossy topics’ that constitute contemporary popular culture. (shrink)

Večina slikovnih koncepcij boleha za tem, da začenjajo previsoko, namreč na ravni slikovnih del in slikovnih medijev. Zaradi tega pri doživljanju slike nismo pozorni na razpoke in brezna. Ta očitek zadeva tako filozofske teorije slike kot tudi umetnostno teorijo, umetnostno zgodovino in muzejsko prakso, ki se ne zna več čuditi temu, da obstaja nekaj takega kot slike. Naslednji razmisleki se vrtijo okoli geneze slike, ki omogoča vdor v zaprtost nekega v lepi ali nič več lepi videz ujetega estetskega sveta, tako (...) da se sprostijo tako pred- kot tudi post-estetski motivi umetnosti. Umetnost terja genealogijo, ki bo enakovredna Nietzschejevi genealogiji morale ali Husserlovi genealogiji logike.The majority of pictorial conceptions are troubled by starting from too high a level, namely from the level of fine-art works and fine-art media. This is why we are likely to fail to notice crevices and chasms. This reproach is directed both at philosophical theories of the painting and at art theory, art history and museum practice, which is no longer able to express wonder at the sheer existence of the painting. The following reflections tackle the issue of the genesis of the painting, which enables us to penetrate into the closed sphere of the aesthetic world as caught in the beautiful, or no longer beautiful, appearance, and thereby sets free pre- as well as post-aesthetical motives of art. Art demands a genealogy on an equal stand with Nietzsche’s genealogy of morality or Husserl’s genealogy of logic. (shrink)

Taking its lead from Ian Hacking’s article ‘How should we do the history of statistics?’, this article reflects on how we might develop a sociologically informed history of Big Data. It argues that within the history of social statistics we have a relatively well developed history of the material phenomenon of Big Data. Yet this article argues that we now need to take the concept of ‘Big Data’ seriously, there is a pressing need to explore the type of work that (...) is being done by that concept. The article suggests a programme for work that explores the emergence of the concept of Big Data so as to track the institutional, organisational, political and everyday adoption of this term. It argues that the term Big Data has the effect of making-up data and, as such, is powerful in framing our understanding of those data and the possibilities that they afford. (shrink)

Neuroscience investigations of emotional influences on social cognition have been dominated by the somatic marker hypothesis and dual-process theories. Taken together, these lines of inquiry have not provided strong evidence that emotional influences on social cognition rely on neural systems which code for bodily signals of arousal nor distinguish emotional reasoning from other modes of reasoning. Recent findings raise the possibility that emotionally influenced social cognition relies on two stages of neural changes: once when emotion is elicited and a different (...) set of changes at the time of social cognitive judgment. These findings suggest that affect infusion models may be a fruitful framework for bridging neuroscience and psychological understanding of the role of emotion in social cognition. (shrink)

This article seeks to present challenges of negotiating difference and diversity in Christiancommunities in South Africa today. It reflects the intersectional nature of racial, gender, ethnicand economic difference, and ways in which land, capital and other power constructs continueto underpin and deepen exclusion. It then considers the status of diversity in Christiancommunities highlighting ways in which the fault lines in society are running throughChristian communities, and how such communities almost spontaneously engage in ‘othering’more naturally than in ‘embracing’. The article proposes (...) the re-conceptualisation of diversitywithin the bigger South African project of socio-economic transformation, and that theconversation about difference and diversity in Christian communities should be brought intodialogue with critical diversity theory, which considers diversity in relation to equity, humanrights and social justice. Finally, the article provides an overview of the contributions that formpart of this collection of articles, tracing how a number of Christian communities seek tonegotiate diversity and difference ecclesially and theologically. (shrink)

This article sets out to describe how churches have responded and continue to respond to fast-changing urban environments in Pretoria Central and Mamelodi East, animating Henri Lefebvre’s sociological perspective of citadins or urban inhabitants. We make tentative interpretations and offer critical appreciation. Churches, which were historically separated from the city centre, now directly participate in claiming a right to the city. With necessary fluidity, churches express lived African urbanisms through informality, place-making, spatial innovation and everyday rituals. Though not exhaustive, the (...) article focuses on rituals shared among historic urban Christians and contemporary African urban Christians, namely prayer, listening to the Bible and worship. These rituals, when combined with the churches’ spatial innovation, to a certain degree contribute to place-making. (shrink)

We have grown used to leading the hermeneutics to its philosophical honorary status up various steps. It begins relatively innocently with the skill of interpretation and explanation: it goes on with philosophical hermeneutics which prepares the general epistemological and theoretical framework for methodical understanding, and it ends with the hermeneutic philosophy, in which both philosophizing and pre-philosophical life are decisively defined as understanding and mutual understanding. This hermeneutic philosophy need not restrict itself to the hermeneutics of texts, but can extend (...) to encompass the hermeneutics of senses, images and that of human comportment. The touchstone for determining the direction in which hermeneutics is going will be otherness. The crucial question is: can otherness be overcome on the grounds of hermeneutics or can hermeneutics itself become questionable by otherness? In dealing with this question we are mostly referring to the third of the above-mentioned phases, i.e. the philosophical core of hermeneutic philosophy, which finds its most effective expression in Gadamer’s Truth and Method. That this effect is not without its doubts is not evident only from the German debates, in which the older, »traditional« hermeneutics presents various arguments defending its rights against Gadamer’s attempt at overcoming it, but also from a variety of types of hermeneutics from Italy. If we side with Jean Greisch in defining the contemporaneousness as »the age of hermeneutic reason«, it may well be that this definition of our age also reveals its limits. (shrink)

The Europe of many voices is founded on a balance between me and us. Even if persons, regions and countries communicate with their own voices, each voice is imbued with its inner and outer alienness, which can be represented but not replaced by others. There is no single European language, there is a variety of European languages. Interregional, international and intercultural experiences are characterized by the interweaving of one’s own and the foreign. We can be more or less close to (...) one another. Humanity can be understood only as an open horizon. Europe is not a stop on the path to a worldwide state, but a specific answer to global challenges. When the struggle for economic and military survival prevails, alienness turns into enmity. And the enemy is voiceless, just like the Barbarians. (shrink)

This article reflects on how data circulations and data analysis have become a central and routine part of contemporary life; it does this through the lens of a particular cultural form: the game of football. More specifically, the article focuses upon the role of data in the production and playing of football, with the suggestion that forms of measurement and pattern recognition are now central to the performance of footballers and the recruitment and organization of squads. The article reflects on (...) what this case study reveals about the implications of data, metrics and analytics for contemporary culture and suggests that we can use examples like football to see how embedded these data-processes are in the social world. This article presents the concept of productive measures as one means for analysing such developments. (shrink)

As a result of a growing interest in neoliberal political economy, surveillance and new forms of data, questions around metrics and the governance of life are moving to the forefront of contemporary conceptual analysis. This particular interview draws upon the key themes from Btihaj Ajana’s recently published book Governing through Biometrics: The Biopolitics of Identity (2013). Although the interview focuses centrally upon the book, it also covers broader topics including identity, measurement, the work of Foucault, big data, biopolitics, bioethics and (...) biometrics. Ajana’s book sketches out a valuable conceptual set of resources for thinking through these pressing issues, the interview looks to explore how such a set of resources might continue to develop. (shrink)

In this paper the Hurwicz decision rule is applied to an adjustment problem concerning the decision whether a given action should be improved in the light of some knowledge on the states of nature or on other actors' behaviour. In comparison with the minimax and the minimin adjustment principles the general Hurwicz rule reduces to these specific classes whenever the underlying loss function is quadratic and knowledge is given by an ellipsoidal set. In the framework of the adjustment model discussed (...) in this paper Hurwicz's optimism index can be interpreted as a mobility index representing the actor's attitude towards new external information. Examples are given that serve to illustrate the theoretical findings. (shrink)

We modify the semantics of topological modal logic, a language due to Moss and Parikh. This enables us to study the corresponding theory of further classes of subset spaces. In the paper we deal with spaces where every chain of opens fulfils a certain finiteness condition. We consider both a local finiteness condition relevant to points and a global one concerning the whole frame. Completeness of the appearing logical systems, which turn out to be generalizations of the well-known modal system (...) G, can be obtained in the same manner as in the case of the general subset space logic. It is our main purpose to show that the systems differ with regard to the finite model property. (shrink)

The co-reporting theory holds that for every A-sentence-token there is a B-sentence that differs in sense but reports the same event orstate of affairs. Thus, if it is now t7, what is reported by now tokening “It is t7 now” is identical with what is reported by tokening “It is t7 at t7.” Quentin Smith has argued that the fact that the sentence-tokens differ in sense but are co-reporting is compatible with the A-theory supposition that their difference in sense consists (...) in the fact that the A-sentence-token alone conveys the information that t7 has an irreducible A-property of presentness. I counter argue that every time the indexical “now” is tokened it expresses, not an irreducible A-property, but a unique individual essence of a moment of time which can be apprehended only at that time. (shrink)