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The rhetorics of ‘agile’ and the practices of ‘Agile Working’: consequences for the worker experience and uncertain implications for HR practice
Get PDFThe various rhetorics of ‘agile’, ‘agility’, and ‘agile working’ (AW) set an agenda for new ways of working and have gained traction in popular management discourse recently, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet conceptually, these varieties are underdeveloped in the academic literature. In this article we examine the stream of AW by first locating separate streams and rhetorics of ‘agile’ in the literature, each seemingly unaware of each other, and then situating AW within this typology to show its distinctiveness from other streams of ‘agile’. To understand a particular version of reality being mainstreamed by the AW rhetoric, we then examine its conceptualisation as a new way of working, as promoted by dominant actors within the UK work context. We then consider existing studies of worker experiences under different employment arrangements that can be subsumed under the heading of ‘AW practices’. Our analysis highlights voids between what may be considered as mainstream HR practices when applied to standard employees compared to a spectrum of ‘non-standard’ workers. The implications for the role of HR in the implementation of AW and in managing the worker experience are discussed and future avenues for this under-researched area are offered
Young domestic chicks spontaneously represent the absence of objects
Get PDFAbsence is a notion that is usually captured by language-related concepts like zero or negation. Whether nonlinguistic creatures encode similar thoughts is an open question, as everyday behavior marked by absence (of food, of social partners) can be explained solely by expecting presence somewhere else. We investigated 8-day-old chicks’ looking behavior in response to events violating expectations about the presence or absence of an object. We found different behavioral responses to violations of presence and absence, suggesting distinct underlying mechanisms. Importantly, chicks displayed an avian signature of novelty detection to violations of absence, namely a sex-dependent left-eye-bias. Follow-up experiments excluded accounts that would explain this bias by perceptual mismatch or by representing the object at different locations. These results suggest that the ability to spontaneously form representations about the absence of objects likely belongs to the initial cognitive repertoire of vertebrate species
Identifying custom in universal periodic review recommendations
Get PDFBook synopsis: Although customary international law (CIL) has been central to international law from its inception, it is often misunderstood. This edited volume remedies that problem by tracing the history of CIL and provides an in-depth study of its theory, practice, and interpretation. Its chapters tackle the big questions which surround this source of international law such as: what are the rules that regulate the functioning of CIL as a source of international law? Can CIL be interpreted? Where do lines between identification, interpretation, application, and modification of a rule of CIL lie? Using recent developments, this volume revisits old debates and resolves them by proffering new and innovative solutions. With detailed examples from international and national courts, it places CIL in a range of settings to explain, explore and reflect upon this developing and highly significant field
"Like the Papacy of Mexican Cuisine": Mayoras and traditional foods in contemporary Mexico
Get PDFIn 2010, UNESCO declared Mexican traditional cuisine as Intangible Heritage of Humanity. The figure of the mayora – the wife or concubine of the Spanish American Hacienda owner and therefore principal cook in the Estate household during the colonial period – has over the past couple of decades been recovered, revalorised and promoted in Mexico as a purveyor of ancestral culinary knowledge among First Nations (pueblos originarios). Native ingredients, techniques and practices, mostly transmitted orally and almost exclusively by women, have been reinterpreted and included in the culinary repertoire of high-end restaurants, with mayoras acting as ‘traditional cooks (never ‘chefs’) and guarantors of the intergenerational transmission of ‘traditional Mexican food’.
We seek in this paper to critically explore the political, socioeconomic, and cultural processes by which mayoras have come to represent Mexican culinary authenticity whilst at the same time ‘elevating’ this cuisine to fine dining. In particular, we are interested in explaining how and why First Nation female household cooks so emblematic of Mexico’s settler-colonial past have been recharged with distinctive economic value, cultural authority and political power at the start of the twenty-first century
Margaret Cavendish and the rhetoric and aesthetics of the microscopic image in Seventeenth-Century England
Get PDFIn his 1989 article ‘Rhetoric and Graphics in Micrographia’, John T. Harwood argued that in presenting his microscopic findings to the public Robert Hooke employed a ‘rhetoric of graphics’, that is a range of ‘strategies for linking not only text and image but larger segments of texts and images to make a broader argument about mechanical philosophy.’ In this paper I consider how Hooke and Henry Power sought to rhetorically establish the truthfulness of the visual images produced by their instruments, and how a counter-rhetoric of the image was established by Margaret Cavendish in her critique, "Observations upon experimental philosophy", using a very different set of strategies, aimed at discrediting and undermining the mechanical philosophy whilst simultaneously establishing the authority of her own method of philosophising. Although Cavendish’s attitudes towards the use of the microscope and experimental philosophy have already received a fair amount of critical attention, up to now critical accounts have tended to focus on her contestation of male-dominated scientific practices rather than on the epistemological and aesthetic issues surrounding the status of the visual image in the natural philosophy of the period. In this chapter I examine the ways in which the micrographic texts of Hooke and Power sought to lend credibility to the microscopic enterprise by emphasising the image as the appearance of the truth of nature itself, and how Cavendish sought to overturn this through an attack on the new ‘visual technology’ of the microscope and the visual images which it produced. In particular I will look at Cavendish’s appeal to the contemporary aesthetic ideal of the pictorial “likeness”.
Book synopsis: Margaret Cavendish's prolific and wide-ranging contributions to seventeenth-century intellectual culture are impossible to contain within the discrete confines of modern academic disciplines. Paying attention to the innovative uses of genre through which she enhanced and complicated her writings both within literature and beyond, this collection addresses her oeuvre and offers the most comprehensive and multidisciplinary resource on Cavendish's works to date. The astonishing breadth of her varied intellectual achievements is reflected through elegantly arranged sections on History of Science, Philosophy, Literature, Politics and Reception, and New Directions, together with an Afterword by award-winning novelist Siri Hustvedt. The first book to cover nearly all of Cavendish's major works in a single volume, this collection brings together a variety of expert perspectives to illuminate the remarkable ideas and achievements of one of the most fascinating and prolific figures of the early modern period
Phantasmal commodities: law, violence and the Juris-diction of drugs
Get PDFAn appreciation of the social function of the concept of drugs is essential for understanding the moral panic that they engender. Despite only emerging as a concept over the course of the twentieth century, Drugs have come to be seen not as mere plant life in the manner that they appear in nature, nor are they seen as commodities, natural resources to be exploited for capitalist gain. Drugs instead function as the primary example of what anthropologist Michael Taussig calls ‘transgressive substances.’ Within the conceptualisation of prohibitionist law, drugs are not taken as the standard commodity to be exploited by humans for profits but instead are feared as phantom commodities that have the power to rule their creators. The concept of drugs through the law imbuing existing plant life with the phantasmal powers to able to use and consume the human subject as opposed to allowing humanity to use and consume it. Drugs become not just objects but pathways, seen to facilitate movement between different states of being, transferring its consumers from the realm of the human to the non-human. This article examines prohibition’s engagement with the everyday life of drugs to open up how the concepts theoretical grounding is anchored a law-making violence that seeks to cleanse an idealised imagination of the social
Transatlantic divergencies in the regulation of uncertain risks: co-production, normative frames and ideal evidence-based and socially acceptable risk approaches
Get PDFThis article analyses the US and the EU systems of risk regulation through the lens of two ideal models: evidence-based and socially acceptable risk approaches. The examination is conducted against the backdrop of these ideal regulatory paradigms, which broadly inform US and EU risk governance. The article employs an analysis of transatlantic divergencies in the regulation of pesticides and agricultural biotechnologies to illustrate that neither approach can lay claim to neutrality and objectivity; non-scientific normative frames are always at stake in the field of risk regulation. Through these case studies, the article thus challenges the narrative that transatlantic divergencies result from a focus on “risks” or “hazards”, “science” or “politics”. The US and the EU systems reflect different approaches to scientific uncertainty, the pursuit of different levels of protection, and consideration of different non-scientific factors. They also have very different implications. The conclusive section of the article sketches out some final considerations on the strategic vision of the Biden administration. Environmental and public health protection are high on President Biden’s agenda; further, public interest litigation is thriving in the US. Will this be sufficient to break regulatory path dependency and lay the foundations for a paradigm shift in US risk governance
William Blake’s 'Pestilence', sympathy, and the politics of feeling
Get PDFPestilence has often been encountered as an 'invisible enemy'. What happens when we give it visual form? This essay examines the dynamics of sympathy, spectatorship, and the politics of feeling activated in William Blake’s watercolour ‘Pestilence: The Death of the First-Born’ (c. 1805), now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. While the Biblical story of Exodus controls the fear of the plagues by identifying the reader with the chosen people protected by providence, Blake’s Romantic vision articulates an alternative politics of feeling. Drawing on David Hume’s and Adam Smith’s theories of sympathy, this essay demonstrates how Blake’s composition invites the viewer to engage with the Egyptian plagues through a dynamics of divided attention, alternating between different points of view, identifying with the position of the destroying angel, the chosen, and the victims. The temporal dynamic of looking contrasts the gigantic form of the destroyer, which initially arrests the eye, with the miniaturized figures of the victims. By giving a face and a reciprocating gaze to the child threatened by the tenth plague of Egypt, Blake’s scene of Pestilence becomes a virtual test of moral sentiments in which viewers confront the ethics of freedom built on sacrifice
The effect of proficiency on “non-native” EFL teachers’ feelings and self-reported behaviours
Get PDFThe current study addresses the question whether the level of proficiency of teachers who teach a “non-native” language, English, affects their attitudes, motivation, well-being and self-reported classroom practices. This quantitative study is based on a cross-sectional research design in order to investigate the relationship between actual English proficiency of 376 English Foreign Language (EFL) teachers from around the world who had English as a Foreign Language and feelings and self-reported behaviours. Statistical analyses showed that more proficient teachers scored higher on the dimensions “Classroom practice” and “Attitudes toward students and institution”. They were also more motivated and happier. Intermediate (B1-B2) teachers scored significantly lower on these measures than EFL educators with Advanced proficiency (C1-C2). No significant differences emerged between teachers at Lower advanced (C1) and Upper advanced levels (C2). An argument is made that all dependent and independent variables are connected, highly dynamic and interacting directly and indirectly, which means that causality is multi-directional. The implication is that educational authorities should organise regular in-service training to maintain and boost teachers’ proficiency because investing in teachers’ linguistic skills represents a long-term investment in their emotional well-being and will ultimately benefit their students
Quaternary sea level landforms and sediments in southern England: description of Geological Conservation Review sites
Get PDFThe Hampshire Basin of southern England contains a number of sites, reviewed here, that contain evidence for former sea levels over a period of c. 0.5 million years and can also be used to aid in understanding of uplift over time and human activity in the landscape. They include three sites where fossiliferous sediments overlie a palaeo shore platform in either Chalk (Boxgrove and Black Rock) or softer sediments (Bembridge), which are the most robust evidence of former sea levels. The other four sites are less useful as palaeo sea level indicators, but contain rich fossil sequences (e.g., Selsey East Beach, Boxgrove, Earnley, Stone Point) or abundant archaeological artefacts (Boxgrove, Priory Bay). Black Rock is most significant for the very rare cold-stage deposits overlying the raised beach and their associated fauna
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