288 research outputs found
Identifying the complex relationships among emotional labor and its correlates
No full textStudied since the late 70s, emotional labor has received much attention especially in the service product context due to its presumed double edged wedge potential. Several job-related and person-related factors are postulated and tested for influence on emotional labor. However, the influence of culture, as a blanket factor, has been overlooked thus far. The aim of this study is to measure the complex relationships between emotional labor and a few of its antecedents and outcomes, including those previously measured and those missed such as culture. A structural equation modeling approach is used to identify the complex relationships inherent among emotional labor and other relevant factors, namely, personality, culture, work experience, job autonomy, and job satisfaction; job satisfaction was identified as being dependent on emotional labor and all other variables were identified as being independent. Findings revealed a negative relationship between emotional labor and job satisfaction and a surprising positive relationship between emotional labor and neuroticism but not extraversion, which are both defined by cultural values. Job autonomy, affected by work experience and extraversion, had a positive relationship with job satisfaction. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd
Strategic orientation and performance of tourism firms: Evidence from a developing country
No full textThis study investigates whether tourism firms in a developing country, namely Turkey, which adopt one of the four strategic orientations of Miles and Snow (1978), differ based on their financial and non-financial performance. The study results show that there is a difference in both financial and non-financial performance based on the strategic orientations followed by tourism enterprises. Generally, prospectors were found to outperform defenders, whereas analyzers showed a comparable performance to prospectors. The findings of this study imply that in developing countries, tourism businesses may be indifferent when choosing between these two strategies based on their internal characteristics since they yield similar financial results. Specific factors and developments in the macro environment and company-specific factors seem to affect tourism firms’ strategic orientation as well as their performance. Better understanding and closer analysis of such factors can help improve the performance of tourism businesses in developing countries. Further research using both perceptual and objective measures is needed to confirm the present results to better assess possible differences in performance among strategic orientations in some other developing countries
Participatory policy-making, participatory civil society: A key for dissolving elite rule in new democracies in the era of globalization
No full textKorkut, Umut (Dogus Author)The author argues that in democracies a strong state and strong civil society are not mutually exclusive. Only a democratic, legitimate, and strong state can provide the environment for civil society activities to flourish; in return, only a strong and a participatory civil society can outline the reach of state strength vis-`a-vis the society. The author discusses the need for civil society organizations to collaborate with policy-making institutions, in which they can negotiate policy concerns with ministers and officials while retaining an independent distance from the state and the political parties. Further, the author argues that an environment as such would provide for the transformative capacity of human agency to manifest itself in full in a globalizing world. The author discusses how participatory state and çivil society structures will enhance the role of the human agency in order to dissolve elite rule, especially in new democracies
: An Inquiry into a Non-Dualistic Duality of Human and Nonhuman
No full textIn-Habitant is an art and life project based on artist Umut Tasa’s decade-long encounters with urban wildlife. It is a quest to utilize art as a research method to contemplate her memories, nature discoveries, audiovisual records, and archive of haiku and prose through a body of artworks. These artworks bring together the corporeality of nonhumans with their digital re-presentation and literary text with creative coding. The author inquires into dualistic and nondualistic ontological approaches to human-nonhuman relations in urban settings
Türkçe Dergilerde Yayımlanan Makaleler Üzerine Bir İnceleme
No full textThere are currently more than 2,000 journals published in Turkey. Yet studies dealing with articles published in Turkish journals are scarce. This paper provides descriptive data on approximately 518,000 articles that appeared in 2,509 Turkish journals published between 1923 and 1999. Data comes from the Bibliography of Articles of the Republican Era 1923-1999 that was recently published by the Turkish National Library. Two thirds of the articles were on technology and social sciences. Articles in medicine constituted one fifth of all articles followed by economics (12.5%) and agriculture (6.1%). An overwhelming majority of articles were authored by a single author. One tenth of all articles appeared in ten journals. Findings can be used to develop library collection management policies for Turkish journals
Cumhuriyet Dönemi Makaleler Bibliyografyası 1923-1999: Eleştirel Bir Değerlendirme.
No full textThe Turkish National Library has recently published the Bibliography of Articles of the Republican Era 1923-1999 (BARE) on CD-ROM. BARE is the most comprehensive bibliography that indexes the articles contained in Turkish journals received by the Library through “legal depot”. It contains bibliographic information on a total of 566,627 articles that appeared in 4,418 Turkish journals and periodicals. This paper critically reviews the Bibliography on the basis of its user interface, database design and data quality. Human-computer interaction (HCI) issues and the usability criteria seem to have not been taken into account when designing the user interface of the BARE CD-ROM. The user interface is not intuitive. It appears that a comprehensive systems analysis study was not carried out before designing the database and the principles of database management design seem to have been ignored. Bibliographic data listed in the printed copies of the Bibliography was simply transferred to a flat table, which resulted in data redundancy and waste of space. Boolean searches cannot be performed on author and article titles. Nine percent of the records contained errors in article and journal titles as well as authors’ names. Used through the web site of the Turkish National Library, the Bibliography and its interface should be redesigned and improved, and the functions of the search engine should be increased
The Influences of Sectarian Fanaticism on Descriptions of Other Sects
No full textWOS: 000391860100006Kitab al-Firaq is an important work belonging Abu Muhammad al -Yemeni. It reflects sectarian perception of Sunni scholars who lived in Yemen in the sixth century AH. But there is not enough information about the author and his work in the sources. But it is known that he has affected some scholars like Saksaki. In addition, influences of political, social and religious structure of Yemen can be seen in Kitab al-Firaq. Ash'arite, Ashabu'l-Hadith, Ismaelite, and Zaidiyyah were the most common sects in Yemen at that time. The social life of the region had been shaped by politics behaving sectarian competition. Hence, written books had ideological contents. Sectarian fanaticism was affecting the descriptions made on opponents. For instance, Abu Muhammad has used exclusionary language about dissident sects. In addition, he has selected the marginal views of sects; moreover, presented some opinions by falsifying and sometimes made generalizations. Therefore, modern researchers should be careful while using his book and similar works of Islamic heresiographical literature about problems such as these
What direction for Turkey? A plea for political reconciliation. EPIN Commentary No. 26/14 October 2015
No full textEven before the recent terrorist attacks in Ankara, Turkey was a country in crisis. In this EPIN Commentary Umut Uzer attempts to shed light on the political turbulence and increasing polarisation in the country, and makes a plea for a return to consensus-building ahead of the fresh round of elections in November.
The author also calls upon the EU to offer incentives to Turkey to continue on the path of EU membership, but if membership is out of the question, then other platforms for cooperation should be negotiated. The EU should speak in a candid manner and make clear what kind of future relationship it envisages for Turkey, because now, more than ever, cooperation is in both their interests
Recognizing and Discovering Activities of Daily Living in Smart Environments
No full textIdentifying human activities is a key task for the development of advanced and effective ubiquitous applications in fields like Ambient Assisted Living. Depending on the availability of labeled data, recognition methods can be categorized as either supervised or unsupervised. Designing a comprehensive activity recognition system that works on a real-world setting is extremely challenging because of the difficulty for computers to process the complex nature of the human behaviors.
In the first part of this thesis we present a novel supervised approach to improve the activity recognition performance based on sequential pattern mining. The method searches for patterns characterizing time segments during which the same activity is performed. A probabilistic model is learned to represent the distribution of pattern matches along sequences, trying to maximize the coverage of an activity segment by a pattern match. The model is integrated in a segmental labeling algorithm and applied to novel sequences. Experimental evaluations show that the pattern-based segmental labeling algorithm allows improving results over sequential and segmental labeling algorithms in most of the cases. An analysis of the discovered patterns highlights non-trivial interactions spanning over a signifcant time horizon. In addition, we show that pattern usage allows incorporating long-range dependencies between distant time instants without incurring in substantial increase in computational complexity of inference.
In the second part of the thesis we propose an unsupervised activity discovery framework that aims at identifying activities within data streams in the absence of data annotation. The process starts with dividing the full sensor stream into segments by identifying differences in sensor activations characterizing potential activity changes. Then, extracted segments are clustered in order to find groups of similar segments each representing a candidate activity. Lastly, parameters of a sequential labeling algorithm are estimated using segment clusters found in the previous step and the learned model is used to smooth the initial segmentation. We present experimental evaluation for two real world datasets. The results obtained show that our segmentation approaches perform almost as good as the true segmentation and that activities are discovered with a high accuracy in most of the cases. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model by comparing it with a technique using substantial domain knowledge. Our ongoing work is presented at the end of the section, in which we combine pattern-based method introduced in the first part of the thesis with the activity discovery framework. The results of the preliminary experiments indicate that the combined method is better in discovering similar activities than the base framework
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