721 research outputs found
The emergence of institutions:an aesthetic-affective perspective
No full textThis book presents an experiential, aesthetic-affective approach to the study of institutions. Drawing on institutional sociology, hermeneutics, phenomenology and process philosophy, it conceptualises institutions as collective experiences with their own self-promoting and self-propelling powers. Instead of seeing institutional emergence, change and decline as the result of actors’ interests and manipulations, this book re-establishes the importance of factors beyond human design and intervention. Drawing on process theory, it shows how ideas, norms and values can form self-stabilising configurations that affect people without conscious realisation. It complements current thinking about institutions by showing how institutions constitute people long before people constitute them. With the help of authors as diverse as Antonio Damasio, A.N. Whitehead, J.W. von Goethe and Max Weber, Elke Weik crafts a perspective that allows us to understand institutions as aesthetic and affective powers in their own right. This book is for researchers interested in process theory, institutional and organisational studies, hermeneutics, and aesthetics.</p
Whose story is it anyway? The ethics of narration and the narration of ethics in Summertime and Die Sneeuslaper
No full textIncludes bibliographical references.This dissertation analyses and compares the narrative strategies in J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime and Marlene van Niekerk’s Die sneeuslaper and considers the implications of these strategies for the authors’ exploration of the ethics of writing. Much has been written about the literary oeuvres of both Coetzee and Van Niekerk, including studies of the translations of Van Niekerk’s Afrikaans novels into English. There are few “interlingual” comparative studies of contemporary works in Afrikaans and English, however, and certainly none to my knowledge which compares the work of Coetzee and Van Niekerk. My contribution to the conversation about Coetzee’s and Van Niekerk’s work, but also to an increasingly multilingual and interconnected South African literary criticism, will be a comparison of one recent work by each of these two authors, written in English and Afrikaans respectively. I draw on the theories of Bakhtin, Barthes and Levinas to consider the ethical dimension of texts in which “double-voicedness”, a questioning not only of existence, but of the self is fore grounded in the content and narrative structure; where there is a shift in focus from the author to the reader (“the birth of the reader”) and “utterances” are made with the response of “the other” in mind
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Institutional Forgetting/Forgetting Institutions: Space and Memory in Secure Forensic Psychiatric Care
Get PDFEconomic Organizations and the Transformation Towards Degrowth
No full textDegrowth seeks to achieve a sustainable society in the future. It implies overcoming capitalist norms and structures. Economic organizations have found little attention in degrowth scholarship. The existing literature focuses on degrowth compatibility without the wider structural and societal consideration that degrowth implies. Further, it is riddled with incoherences, such as a supposed compatibility of degrowth values with capitalist norms. We unpack these persisting tensions and incoherences by employing Gramsci’s concepts of hegemony and counter-hegemony. We make the case for two key systemic principles for economic organizations that hitherto have found little attention: not-for-profit and non-accumulation. These principles are complementary to, and enabling factors for, other organizational principles commonly focused on in degrowth scholarship, such as inclusive decision-making and material sufficiency. Combined, these principles describe the kinds of economic organizations that have to emerge along with wider societal structures to make a degrowth transformation possible. As economic organizations are at the core of the economy, they must be active agents for a degrowth transformation. Our analysis contributes to organizational and degrowth scholarship alike by not only clarifying how economic organizations can be compatible with a degrowth society, but also explaining their central role in enabling transformations towards such a society
Exploring the potential of using bio briquette ash in building materials
No full textAs the population and urbanization increase, the demand for affordable housing and the environmental
impact of conventional materials have become more pronounced. This study seeks sustainable solutions
through the repurposing of waste products. This study examined the potential application of bio-briquette
ash derived from sanitary sludge in building-material production. Bio-briquette ashes were produced by
incinerating bio-briquette char in an open kitchen at temperatures ranging from 300°C to 450°C.The
chemical composition of bio-briquette ashes produced with different binders (cassava peels, wastepaper,
and no binder) was analyzed using X-ray fluorescence (XRF) and X-ray diffraction (XRD). The results
showed that the ashes contain substantial amounts of oxides, including SiO2, Fe2O3, Al2O3, and CaO,
which are comparable to other supplementary cementitious materials like rice husk ash, sugarcane
bagasse ash, and fly ash. The findings indicate that these bio-briquette ashes have low pozzolanic
properties, however, they have the potential to produce cement-based products after activating their
reactivity either by optimization of burning temperature, mechanical grinding or chemical activation to
improve strength, durability, and workability. Future studies will focus on optimizing the burning
temperature, mechanical grinding, or chemical activation of the bio-briquette ashes to enhance their
reactivity as well as utilizing bio-briquette ash in building materials production and evaluating their
performance in practical applications.The author would like to express gratitude to
the funder of this research project, the Vrilous
Project of Belgium, as well as Ardhi University for
sponsoring this study. Special thanks are
extended to Prof. Elke Knapen from Hasselt
University and Prof. Shadrack M. Sabai from
Ardhi University for their valuable support
throughout the research. Additional appreciation
goes to the project team members of the
Decent Housing Project, as well as the
management of Hasselt University in Belgium
and Ardhi University in Tanzania, for their
administrative assistance
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