Waging War from Remote Cubicles: How Workers Cope with Technologies That Disrupt the Meaning and Morality of Their Work

Technologies are known to alter social structures in the workplace, reconfigure roles and relationships, and disrupt status hierarchies. However, less attention has been given to how an emerging technology disrupts the meaning and moral values that tether people to their work and render it meaningful. To understand how workers respond to such an emerging technology, we undertook an inductive, qualitative study of military personnel working in unmanned aerial vehicles, or drone operations, for the U.S. Air Force. We draw on multiple data sources, including personal diaries kept by personnel involved in drone operations. We identified three characteristics of drone technology: remote-split operations, remote piloting of unmanned vehicles, and interaction through iconic representations. Our analysis suggests that drone technology has revolutionized warfare by (1) creating distanciated intimacy, (2) dissolving traditional spatio-temporal boundaries between work and personal life, and (3) redefining the legal and moral parameters of work. Drone program workers identified with these changes to their working environment in contradictory ways, which evoked emotional ambivalence about right and wrong. However, their organization gave them little help in alleviating their conflicting feelings. We illuminate how workers cope with such ambivalence when a technology transforms the meaning and morality of their work. We extend theory by showing that workers’ responses to a changed working environment as a result of a remote technology are not just based on how the technology changes workers’ tasks, roles, and status but also on how it affects their moral values.

“Looking at” Negation: Faster Processing for Symbolic Rather Than Iconic Representations

Many studies have shown the double processing of negation, suggesting that negation integration into sentence meaning is delayed. This contrasts with some researches that have found that such integration is rather immediate. The present study contributes to this debate. Affirmative and negative compound sentences (e.g., “because he was not hungry, he did not order a salad”) were presented orally in a visual world paradigm while four printed words were on the screen: salad, no salad, soup, and no soup. The eye-tracking data showed two different fixation patterns for negative causal assertions, which are linked to differences in the representation and inferential demands. One indicates that negation is integrated immediately, as people look at the explicit negation (e.g., no salad) very early. The other, in which people look at the alternate (e.g., soup) much later, indicates that what is delayed in time is the representation of the alternate. These results support theories that combine iconic and symbolic representations, such as the model theory.

Action-Depicting Gestures and Morphosyntax: The Function of Gesture-Speech Alignment in the Conversational Turn

The current study examines the role of action-depicting gestures in conversational turns by focusing on their semantic characteristics and temporal position in relation to their verbal affiliates (action verbs or more complex verb phrases). The data are video recordings of naturally occurring interactions in multilingual construction sites in Norway. The analysis distinguishes two modes of action depiction: generic depictions, which represent the action as a general type, and contextualized depictions, which in addition include deictic references to the spatio-material environment or iconic representations of the specific manner of action performance. These two modes typically occupy different positions in the turn. Generic depictions are mostly initiated before the verbalization of the action or are synchronized with it, while contextualized depictions mostly start simultaneously with the verbalization and extend beyond the verb phrase or the turn. The pre-positioned and synchronized generic gestures are shown to serve as a practice for facilitating recognition of the verbalized action and may be temporally manipulated in order to pre-empt understanding problems in the face of reduced common linguistic resources. The post-positioned contextualized depictions serve instead to add specifying information about aspects of the action referred to and thereby to complement or supplement the meaning of the verb phrase, securing understanding of action specifics. The study contributes to research on gesture-speech synchrony by demonstrating how variation in the alignment of action depiction and syntax is used to direct the recipient’s attention toward different interactional goals.

The Construction and Dynamics of Cultural Icons

Departing from the present need for cultural models within the public debate, this volume offers a new contribution to the study of cultural icons. From the traditional religious icon to the modern mass media icon, from the recognizable visual icon to the complex entanglement of image and collective narratives: The Construction and Dynamics of Cultural Icons offers an overview of existing theories, compares different definitions and proposes a comprehensive view on the icon and the iconic. Focusing in particular on the making of iconic representations and their changing social-cultural meanings through time, scholars from cultural memory studies, art history and literary studies present concrete operationalizations of the ways different types of cultural icons can be studied.

Improvised Numerals Rely on 1-to-1 Correspondence

Symbolic representations of number are instrumental to mathematical reasoning and many aspects of social organization. What explains their emergence in human cultures? To understand how functional and cognitive constraints impact people’s communication about number, we used a drawing-based reference game to investigate how human dyads coordinated to form novel number systems. We found a systematic bias towards symbols exploiting 1-to-1 correspondence to objects in visual arrays, and that this strategy was contingent on the communicative relevance of number. Moreover, the meaning of these symbols was transparent to third party observers not present during their production. Finally, model-based analyses of these symbols' visual properties suggest that the ability to decode exact quantity from them may rely on perceptual processing mechanisms beyond those sufficient for object recognition. These findings contribute to our understanding of how both communicative need and capacity for visual abstraction constrain the emergence of iconic representations of exact number.

The concept sketch as a space

In this paper I explore some of the ways a concept sketch can be used in the professional practice of industrial design. The paper shows generally how an inscribed object is situated and utilized in collaborative activity, by focusing particularly on the space over the sketch as a site for participation in a concept development meeting. This participation is both bodily and verbally manifested and I attempt to show how using the sketch and not using the sketch are distinctly organized. A main finding is that the sketch – a ubiquitous artifact in design – is much more than the iconic representations inscribed upon it. For example, the ‘sketch space’ in the air over the sketch is a site that can arbitrate a fundamental organizational resource, namely turn taking. Another type of organization concerns the sorts of verbal actions carried out with and without the sketch, or the space over it. Actions concerning the organization of design were carried out without the sketch, while actions concerned with the concrete particulars of the design project at hand were carried out with the sketch. Its uses in the meeting allow for the artful demonstration of the professional competences of industrial designers.

Maps, Language, and the Conceptual–Non-Conceptual Distinction

To make the case for non-conceptualism, Heck (2007) draws on an apparent dichoto-my between linguistic and iconic representations. According to Heck, whereas linguistic representations have conceptual content, the content of iconic representations is non-conceptual. Based on the case of cartographic systems, the authors criticize Heck’s dichotomous distinction. They argue that maps are composed of semantically arbitrary elements that play different syntactic roles. Based on this, they claim that maps have a predicative structure and convey conceptual content. Finally, the authors argue that, despite their differences, maps and sentences can logically interact with each other through heterogeneous inferences. These considerations not only challenge the view that conceptual content and inferential processes necessarily involve linguistic representations; furthermore, they provide a new perspective for thinking about maps, their semantics and syntax, and their interaction with linguistic systems.

Through Archie Lindo’s Lens

The “creation” of Jamaican national identity owed much to the artistic movement that preceded and followed independence in 1962. While depictions of the peasantry, particularly male laborers, have become iconic representations of “true” Jamaicans, the scholarship surrounding these works has conspicuously ignored any erotic potential inherent in them. Using the contemporaneous, mostly private homoerotic photographic archive of Archie Lindo as a point of entry, this essay questions and complicates the narrative surrounding nationalist-era art in Jamaica, particularly the ways the black male body was mobilized in the development of Jamaican art and visual culture.

The Politics of Neoclassicism in Belfast and Dublin

This chapter offers a comparative analysis of the divergent histories and symbolic associations of the neoclassical Stormont and General Post Office buildings, in Belfast and Dublin respectively. Completed in 1932, the Northern Irish Parliament buildings at Stormont were constructed as a bastion of unionism, designed according to the imperial neoclassical vision of Sir Arnold Thornely, but influenced by the idiosyncratic ideas of Sir James Craig, who is also buried on site in a manner analogous to classicizing hero cult. The General Post Office in Dublin, by contrast, although a colonial building in its 1818 origin, has become one of the most iconic representations of Irish independence as the headquarters of the 1916 Rising. Despite being bombed by British forces during the Rising, it has since been restored and divested of its colonial symbolism.