1,721,399 research outputs found
Religion, science and secularization: a consumer-centric analysis of religion’s functional obsolescence
No full textPurpose
This paper aims to offer a marketing perspective to the multidisciplinary debate on whether religion is expanding, declining or resurging in contemporary and allegedly secular society. Specifically, it examines the “secularization hypothesis”, which predicts that religion tends to lose its central role in people’s lives as secular reasoning spreads and scientific knowledge accumulates.
Design/methodology/approach
Borrowing from psychology literature, the authors identify the psychological and social needs satisfied by religion and in doing so uncover its functions. They then discussed whether religion can be claimed to be functionally obsolete.
Findings
The authors identified four functions of religion: explanatory, relieving, membership and moral. The content of religious doctrines offers consumers of religion unambiguous knowledge, absolute morality and promises of immortality, immanent justice and centrality in the universe. Religion also provides a social identity, through which people can build meaningful connections with others in the community and with their own history.
Originality/value
A change in the role of religion would be highly relevant for consumer research because religious ideologies shape consumption practices, social relations, products and brands. The authors observe that the content of religious answers is so well-crafted around human psychology that the explaining, relieving and moral functions of religion have not lost reliability. However, cultural change has weakened religion’s ability to gratify human psychology through social identity and meaningful socialization, which led to the marketization of religion, the rise of spirituality and the intensification of socialization around consumption
Carl Einstein e il suo Bebuquin funambolico
No full textProfilo dello scrittore Carl Einstein e del suo romanzo espressionist
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
Albert Einstein e la misteriosa civiltà dell'Era Glaciale
No full textAnalisi delle relazioni fra Albert Einstein e Charles H. Hapgood, autore di testi diventati classici della pseudoscienza
Einstein e Besso: un lungo sodalizio
No full textRiflessioni sulla lunga e proficua amicizia tra A. Einstein e M. Besso, igegnere e matematico italo-svizzero. Un'amicizia che divenne proficuo sodalizio scientifico. Da confidente del geniale fisico teorico, ma anche da controparte dialettica, Besso si può affermare che dette il suo personale contributo al'elaborazione della teoria della Relatività ristretta. Un episodio di storia della scienza esemplare e alquanto raro
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