Human Agency, Responsibility, and Tawḥīd

2019 ◽  
pp. 162-184
Author(s):  
Taraneh R. Wilkinson
Keyword(s):  
Positive Relationship ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Relationship With God ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Holistic Vision ◽  
Communal Responsibility

This chapter continues to treat Şaban Ali Düzgün’s work, exploring his take on human agency and moving from an abstract sense of communal responsibility towards more concrete and constructive Muslim responses to the trauma of Western colonialism. By highlighting his understanding of human agency, it explores Düzgün’s theological and conceptual toolbox, showing how he draws confidently on Enlightenment and classical Islamic resources to produce a holistic vision of the individual in positive relationship with God. Specifically, this chapter shows how Düzgün finesses conceptions of human knowledge and affirms human plurality—a plurality facilitated by divine unity that does not stand in antagonistic relationship to individual agency. For Düzgün, tawḥīd, or God’s utter oneness, stands in positive and open relation to an empowered individual piously conscious of her responsibility to society and those around her.

Married Life in the Middle Ages, 900-1300

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth van Houts
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Married Couple ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Emotional Life ◽  
Social And Emotional ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
Married Life ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual

This book contains an analysis of the experience of married life by men and women in Christian medieval Europe c. 900–1300. The focus will be on the social and emotional life of the married couple rather than on the institutional history of marriage. The book consists of three parts: the first part (Getting Married) is devoted to the process of getting married and wedding celebrations, the second part (Married Life) discusses the married life of lay couples and clergy, their sexuality, and any remarriage, while the third part (Alternative Living) explores concubinage and polygyny as well as the single life in contrast to monogamous sexual unions. Four main themes are central to the book. First, the tension between patriarchal family strategies and the individual family member’s freedom of choice to marry and, if so, to what partner; second, the role played by the married priesthood in their quest to have individual agency and self-determination accepted in their own lives in the face of the growing imposition of clerical celibacy; third, the role played by women in helping society accept some degree of gender equality and self-determination to marry and in shaping the norms for married life incorporating these principles; fourth, the role played by emotion in the establishment of marriage and in married life at a time when sexual and spiritual love feature prominently in medieval literature.

The Crisis of Becoming-Nature in Howard Barker’s Recent Dramas

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-114
Author(s):  
Karoline Gritzner
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Elderly Women ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
The Self ◽  
Love Relationships ◽  
Late Style ◽  
Life Force ◽  
The Individual

AbstractThis article discusses how in Howard Barker’s recent work the idea of the subject’s crisis hinges on the introduction of an impersonal or transpersonal life force that persists beyond human agency. The article considers Barker’s metaphorical treatment of the images of land and stone and their interrelationship with the human body, where the notion of subjective crisis results from an awareness of objective forces that transcend the self. In “Immense Kiss” (2018) and “Critique of Pure Feeling” (2018), the idea of crisis, whilst still dominant, seems to lose its intermittent character of singular rupture and reveals itself as a permanent force of dissolution and reification. In these plays, the evocation of nonhuman nature in the love relationships between young men and elderly women affirms the existence of something that goes beyond the individual, which Barker approaches with a late-style poetic sensibility.

An experimental approach to communal coping

2021 ◽  
pp. 026540752199246
Author(s):  
Melissa Zajdel ◽  
Vicki S. Helgeson
Keyword(s):  
Health Outcomes ◽  
Positive Relationship ◽  
Experimental Approach ◽  
Positive Mood ◽  
Self Report ◽  
Communal Coping ◽  
Observational Measures ◽  
Relationship Outcomes ◽  
The Individual

Communal coping has been linked to better psychological and physical health across a variety of stressful contexts. However, there has been no experimental work causally linking communal coping to relationship and health outcomes. In addition, research has emphasized the collaboration over the shared appraisal component of communal coping. The present study sought to isolate the role of appraisal by manipulating whether dyads viewed a stressor as shared or individual. Friend dyads (n = 64 dyads; 128 participants) were randomly assigned to view a stressor as either a shared or an individual problem, but both groups were allowed to work together. Across self-report and observational measures dyads reported more collaboration and support, better relationship outcomes, and more positive mood after the stressor in the shared than the individual appraisal group. This is the first laboratory evidence to establish causal links of communal coping—specifically shared appraisal—to positive relationship and health outcomes.

Executive Agency and State Capacity in Development: Comparing Sino-African Railways in Kenya and Ethiopia

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuan Wang
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
State Capacity ◽  
Institutional Constraints ◽  
Infrastructure Projects ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Executive Agency

Why do infrastructure projects that are similar in nature develop along starkly different trajectories? This question sheds light on the varying state capacity of developing countries. Divergent from structural explanations that stress external agency and institutional explanations that emphasize bureaucratic capacity, I propose a political championship theory to explain the variance in states capacity of infrastructure delivery. I argue that when a project is highly salient to leaders’ survival, leaders commit to the project; leaders with strong authority build an implementation coalition, leading to higher effectiveness. I trace the process of the Standard Gauge Railway in Kenya and Addis-Djibouti Railway in Ethiopia, relying on over 180 interviews. This research highlights the individual agency within structural and institutional constraints, a previously understudied area in state capacity.

scholarly journals Frankly, We Do Give a Damn

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (7) ◽  
pp. 816-826 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gilad Feldman ◽  
Huiwen Lian ◽  
Michal Kosinski ◽  
David Stillwell
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Positive Relationship ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Linguistic Analysis ◽  
The Other ◽  
Aggregate Level ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Common Causes ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship

There are two conflicting perspectives regarding the relationship between profanity and dishonesty. These two forms of norm-violating behavior share common causes and are often considered to be positively related. On the other hand, however, profanity is often used to express one’s genuine feelings and could therefore be negatively related to dishonesty. In three studies, we explored the relationship between profanity and honesty. We examined profanity and honesty first with profanity behavior and lying on a scale in the lab (Study 1; N = 276), then with a linguistic analysis of real-life social interactions on Facebook (Study 2; N = 73,789), and finally with profanity and integrity indexes for the aggregate level of U.S. states (Study 3; N = 50 states). We found a consistent positive relationship between profanity and honesty; profanity was associated with less lying and deception at the individual level and with higher integrity at the society level.

The Individual Agency of Corporate Entrepreneurship

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (1) ◽  
pp. 13476
Author(s):  
Gabriel Akel Abrahão ◽  
Paulo Arvate ◽  
Marcus Alexandre Yshikawa Salusse
Keyword(s):  
Corporate Entrepreneurship ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
The Individual

Warriors

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Haour
Keyword(s):  
Historical Records ◽  
Widespread Occurrence ◽  
North West ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
Military Innovations ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Military Activity ◽  
Building Walls

This chapter examines military activity and violence, as manifest in aspects of the archaeological and historical records for medieval times in the central Sahel and north-west Europe. It explores the contribution of military innovations to political centralisation, the prevalence of fortifications and town walling, and the widespread occurrence of slave raiding. It highlights the individual agency and motives in attracting followers for one's army, in building up stables of horses for prestige and power, and in building walls for purposes both definitional and defensive.

Agency and Contingency in Televisual Alternate History Texts

2019 ◽  
pp. 170-185
Author(s):  
Karen Hellekson
Keyword(s):  
Feedback Loop ◽  
General Sense ◽  
Alternate History ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
Capacity To Act ◽  
History Texts ◽  
Per Se ◽  
The Individual

Televisual alternate history texts concern themselves with not with history per se but rather the individual, agency, and self-contingency. In televisual texts including An Englishman’s Castle (miniseries, 1978), Sliders (1995–2000), Charlie Jade (2005), Fringe (2008–13), and Continuum (2012–15), individual characters are presented as being able to affect events by contingency—that is, an event that may occur but that is not certain to occur—and agency, or the capacity to act or exert power. History is used in only the most general sense to permit displacement; alternate worlds are a mode of this displacement. Contingency is used as a narrative and temporal construction to frame agency. Televisual alternate histories control the narrative so as to permit characters’ agency to permit causal, contingent events, resulting in a sort of feedback loop of contingency and agency.

Epistemetrics

2011 ◽  
pp. 205-215
Author(s):  
Eliezer Geisler
Keyword(s):  
Explicit Knowledge ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Fundamental Level ◽  
Organizational Levels ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Brain

This chapter is focused on the ways and processes by which we measure human knowledge at both the individual and organizational levels. “How” we measure knowledge is strongly related to the notion of “what” we measure, described in the previous chapter. The nature of knowledge that can be measured is the externalized or explicit knowledge shared and diffused among individuals and their organizations. We recognize the existence of KANEs as the clustering of sensorial input, but we are unable at this point to adequately measure them. We have the capability to measure sensorial activities and the locations in the brain of excitations and activities that signify cognition and emotions, but we are still unable to measure knowledge at the fundamental level of clustering of sensorial inputs.1

Tolerance for Cheating From the Classroom to the Boardroom: A Study of Underlying Personal and Cultural Drivers

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Glen H. Brodowsky ◽  
Emily Tarr ◽  
Foo Nin Ho ◽  
Don Sciglimpaglia
Keyword(s):  
Academic Dishonesty ◽  
Positive Relationship ◽  
Cultural Dimension ◽  
Academic Cheating ◽  
Corporate Behavior ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Self Construal ◽  
Diverse Student ◽  
Business Behavior ◽  
The Individual

Professors face increasingly diverse student bodies that exhibit divergent understandings and motivations to engage in academic dishonesty. Research suggests that collectivism/individualism is the cultural dimension underlying such differences. This study measures this dimension at the individual level using two constructs—agency-communion and self-construal—and their relationships to tolerance for academic cheating and unethical corporate behavior. Analyses show a positive relationship between tolerance for academic cheating and for unethical corporate behavior. Both measures of collectivism (interdependent self-construal and communion) exhibit positive relationships to tolerance for unethical business behavior, while interdependence is also positively related to tolerance for academic cheating.

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