Modes of engagement with the future in everyday life

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 681-703
Author(s):  
Giuliana Mandich

This paper is aimed at understanding how we engage with the future in different ways in everyday life. Many empirical studies have emphasised that what we usually call ‘imagination’ of the future takes diverse forms and meanings. Varied narratives of the future that are possible coexist in daily life in a bumpy, semi-conscious and occasionally tense dialogue with one another. To understand this variation of narratives, a thorough exploration of the different modes of engaging with the future that various forms of agency bring into play is required, together with a sensitive empirical analysis. I use Thévenot’s theory of regimes of engagement as a starting point to at least partially explain this variety. Thévenot’s idea that different types of individual involvement in relation to different definitions of the relevant reality (e.g. familiarity, plans and the public domain of justification and exploration) contain interesting implications for the analysis of what I define as modes of engagement with the future. As involved as we are with social reality through specific formats, so are we with the future. As the ‘relevant reality’ is different according to the regime of engagement that we are involved in, the nature of anticipation also varies. The future is ‘made and measured’ within the logic of probability in the regime of plans; of possibility in the regime of justification; of practical anticipation in the regime of familiarity; and of discovery in the regime of exploration. This perspective helps to avoid a reification of the future as something that is ‘there’ and that we simply discover and avoids easy dichotomisation of forms of anticipation of the future as realistic or unrealistic.

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-133
Author(s):  
Larry Hirschhorn

This article develops some novel extensions of the classical Tavistock model of organisational psychodynamics. The classical model privileges the emotion of anxiety as the primary trigger for psychosocial experiences in organisations. While this approach has been very generative, it has also been limiting, since there are several other important emotions that shape how people take up their work and their roles in organisations. The article shows how open systems theory and sociotechnical thinking emerge logically from the anxiety model by highlighting how organisations become functional, and work becomes satisfying. The article goes on to explore how desire as a feeling for the future, stimulates such feelings as danger, dread, and excitement. When these feelings become dispositive, they generate experiences associated with anxiety, and the primary risk, as well as the potential for developmental politics. Politics can be developmental rather than defensive when executives create settings where conflict is seen as transaction and rationality as an achievement. This article explores these issues through the use of case vignettes in the public domain, including a skunk works project in Data General, and leadership struggles and strategy dilemmas in Apple, IBM, and Polaroid.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Yifeng Peng

Over the years, as people's lives have improved, our need for transportation and accommodation has increased, driving the rapid growth of the sharing economy. Some well-known network sharing platforms, such as Uber, Drip and Airbnb, provide a large number of convenient options for users with transactional needs, make more use of idle tourism, accommodation and other resources. Sharing economy platforms continue to improve the content and format of their products, but at the same time, the future of sharing platforms and the difficulty of competition is a concern as more platform companies become involved and prices become more transparent. Under this circumstance, optimizing product pricing has become an urgent need for many sharing economy platforms. In this paper, we take Airbnb as the starting point and conduct an empirical analysis of the blocking behavior of homeowners based on proprietary data to explore the factors that affect their product supply. We find that price, number of beds, and listing type all have a significant impact on blocking houses. After that, we conducted further research on price factors and developed a model aiming at profit maximization to obtain the best pricing range for the region and provide suggestions for pricing strategies. Keywords: Sharing Economy, Blocking behavior, Pricing Strategy, Airbnb


2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (9) ◽  
pp. 879-890
Author(s):  
Stephen Alexander
Keyword(s):  

Abstract This article considers the development, and future course, of the law of privacy in administrative trust proceedings. The author argues that the principles of open justice should remain as the starting point of judicial thinking; that this should mean that the courts' approach is driven by what is necessary to enable the public to see that justice is being administered fairly and impartially; and that the publication of details of parties and trusts in non-contentious trust proceedings is usually unlikely to help achieve that end. The author concludes that the issues of open justice and privacy are best balanced and accommodated by the policy, in administrative trust proceedings, of the court sitting in private and then issuing an anonymised judgment giving as much information as possible.


2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 865-886 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nina Hall ◽  
Ngaire Woods

International Relations scholars have long neglected the question of leadership in international organizations. The structural turn in International Relations led to an aversion to analysing or theorizing the impact of individuals. Yet, empirical studies suggest that different leaders affect the extent to which international organizations facilitate cooperation among states and/or the capacity of a global agency to deliver public goods. It is difficult to study how and under what conditions leaders have an impact due to the challenges of attributing outcomes to a particular leader and great variation in their powers and operating context. We offer a starting point for overcoming these challenges. We identify three different types of constraints that executive heads face: legal-political, resource and bureaucratic. We argue that leaders can navigate and push back on each of these constraints and provide illustrations of this, drawing on existing literature and interviews with executive heads and senior management of international organizations. Executive heads of international organizations may operate in a constrained environment but this should not stop scholars from studying their impact.


2013 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 798-800 ◽  
Author(s):  
Veena Das

An important issue in considering violence at both the conceptual and empirical levels is the question of what counts as “violence” and how it is acknowledged. In many polities of the Middle East, including Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan, there is no clear boundary between war and peace. Conflicts have lasted over a long period and even the project of securing a future in which the struggle for decolonization and political autonomy can be kept alive faces enormous hurdles as everyday life is corroded by betrayals, accusations, and the sheer exhaustion of keeping political energies from waning. Most acute observers of prolonged conflicts recognize the corrosive effects of these conflicts on everyday life. In this brief thought piece, I want to reflect on one aspect of the problem: that of the relation between sexual violence as an aspect of dramatic and spectacular violence—in wars (including modern ones), pogroms against ethnic or religious minorities, or episodes of lethal riots between sectarian groups—and everyday forms of sexual violence that could be both part of the public domain and constitutive of domestic intimacy. Said otherwise, I am interested in how experience of violence travels from one threshold of life to another.


2011 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-146
Author(s):  
Filip Schmidt

The article discusses contemporary changes in intimate relationships. A starting point for this discussion is Anthony Giddens’s theory presented in his book The Transformation of Intimacy (1992), particularly the specificity of self-help literature as a source of information for sociological reasoning. On the example of housework, the nature of the tensions between the conflict expectations of partners is presented. Today, many people are torn between several different models of intimate relations and different needs. The thesis of the article is that the ambivalence observed in the process of relationship formation is neither marginal nor only psychological but it represents tensions between different types and dimensions of knowledge which are used in this process. This ambivalence is also a perfect indicator of the discourse struggle in the public sphere and an element of changes of social bonds; its study may help answer the question about transformation of intimacy and about the commonness of “pure relations” or other models of intimate relationships.


Author(s):  
B. B. North

Philosophy as the love of wisdom is informative and can be inspiring and generative to students; it opens up possibilities for philosophical thinking to be more relevant for everyday life. Highlighting philosophy as the love of wisdom emphasizes the ancient and deep-rooted value of philosophy and does not restrict philosophy to the use of specific methodologies or to a specific subject matter, but rather expands it to encompassing a way of life. In this way, philosophy is meant to help promote valuable human lives and the public good at large. Philosophy as the love of wisdom is a call to remember that philosophy is not only a discipline to be studied in academia. Plato’s Socrates can be interpreted as a paragon of philosophy as a way of life and as exemplifying a love of wisdom. Contrary to philosophy as the love of wisdom, the popular conception of philosophy—as the paramount use of logic and argumentation—can be alienating. The scholastic or instrumental view of education promotes this popular conception and conceptually segregates the different academic disciplines. When this occurs, education is not seen as continuous with life. To move beyond the narrow and popular conception of philosophy, it is helpful to look at how explicitly connects philosophy and education: when considering the many different types of education, one should not forget the ethical value of the given intellectual pursuits. This opens up space for the peripheries of philosophy to be more centralized. Emotion, art, and practical considerations of everyday life are illuminated as the material of philosophic thinking. Philosophy is the lived love of wisdom.


2008 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Len M Hunt ◽  
Wolfgang Haider ◽  
Peter C Boxall ◽  
Jeff Englin

Resource-based tourism is an important economic activity occurring on publicly owned forested lands in northern Canada. However, little is known about the economic contribution of this sector to the regions where it is located. This paper describes a method to estimate revenues generated by tourist operators from data sources that are primarily in the public domain. The method is illustrated with an examination of northern Ontario’s resource-based tourism sites that are not accessible by road. This method estimates that the 1137 tourist sites of the region generated approximately $114 million in revenues in 2000. The analysis also estimated revenues for six sub-regions and for different types of operations that were segmented by accessibility and accommodation type. We found that revenues were much higher for sites in northwestern than in northeastern regions of Ontario, and that float plane-accessible sites commanded significantly greater revenues than did train- or boat-accessible sites. Key words: resource-based tourism, revenues, use, method, criteria and indicators, supply


Leonardo ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 132-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Last

Mutable Matter is an experimental public engagement pilot program that seeks to enable non-scientists to explore and co-imagine the future of nanotechnology. Located at the intersection of geography, science communication and art practice, Mutable Matter is intended as a starting point for examining playful sensory engagement methods bridging tangible public and intangible scientific spaces. The project both challenges the role of non-scientists as mere commentators on pre-decided innovation trajectories and draws attention to the way scientific information is creatively encountered in the public realm.


Author(s):  
Thomas Schultz ◽  
Thomas Grant

This chapter reflects on the future directions that arbitration might take. The privatization of justice through arbitration no doubt has advantages. However, privatized justice all too readily looks like justice for hire. So is privatized justice to be promoted, or should it be restrained? A fair reply is, it depends. The answers one gives in the debate over arbitration, as in so many debates over institutions that affect the public interest, are often shaped by one’s ideological starting point. Ultimately, arbitrators and the parties who call upon them should remain conscious of both arbitration’s promise and its limits, if they mean this noble institution well.


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