Handling Resistance to Change When Societal and Workplace Logics Conflict

Changes in societal logics often leave firms’ policies and practices out of step. Yet when firms introduce a change that brings in a new societal logic, employees may resist, even though they personally value the change, because the incoming logic conflicts with existing organizational logics. How can change agents handle logic-based resistance to an organizational initiative that introduces a new logic? We studied elite law firms that introduced a new role into their traditional up-or-out career path in response to associates’ anonymously expressed desire for better work–life balance, which associates resisted because expressing family concerns was illegitimate within the firms. Change agents responded to three forms of resisters’ logic-based concerns—irreconcilability, ambiguity, and contradiction—with three tailored responses—redirecting, reinforcing, and reassuring—using contextually legitimate logic elements. Over time logic elements of each concern–response pair harmonized to enable individuals to enact their logics seamlessly and organizations to update the existing logic settlement to assimilate the societal change. We demonstrate that the way available logics are accessed and activated between pluralistic change agents and resisters can enable logic settlements to be updated in response to societal change. We draw insights about how logics do or do not constrain agency.

A Three-valued Approach to Strategic Abilities under Imperfect Information

A major challenge for logics for strategies is represented by their verification in contexts of imperfect information. In this contribution we advance the state of the art by approximating the verification of Alternating-time Temporal Logic (ATL) under imperfect information by using perfect information and a three-valued semantics. In particular, we develop novel automata-theoretic techniques for the linear-time logic LTL, then apply these to finding “failure” states, where the ATL specification to be model checked is undefined. Such failure states can then be fed into a refinement procedure, thus providing a sound, albeit incomplete, verification procedure.

Restraining Bolts for Reinforcement Learning Agents

In this work we have investigated the concept of “restraining bolt”, inspired by Science Fiction. We have two distinct sets of features extracted from the world, one by the agent and one by the authority imposing some restraining specifications on the behaviour of the agent (the “restraining bolt”). The two sets of features and, hence the model of the world attainable from them, are apparently unrelated since of interest to independent parties. However they both account for (aspects of) the same world. We have considered the case in which the agent is a reinforcement learning agent on a set of low-level (subsymbolic) features, while the restraining bolt is specified logically using linear time logic on finite traces f/f over a set of high-level symbolic features. We show formally, and illustrate with examples, that, under general circumstances, the agent can learn while shaping its goals to suitably conform (as much as possible) to the restraining bolt specifications.1

Ontology-Based Query Answering for Probabilistic Temporal Data

We investigate ontology-based query answering for data that are both temporal and probabilistic, which might occur in contexts such as stream reasoning or situation recognition with uncertain data. We present a framework that allows to represent temporal probabilistic data, and introduce a query language with which complex temporal and probabilistic patterns can be described. Specifically, this language combines conjunctive queries with operators from linear time logic as well as probability operators. We analyse the complexities of evaluating queries in this language in various settings. While in some cases, combining the temporal and the probabilistic dimension in such a way comes at the cost of increased complexity, we also determine cases for which this increase can be avoided.

Political Journalists and Their Social Media Audiences: New Power Relations

Social media use is now commonplace across journalism, in spite of lingering unease about the impact the networked, real-time logic of leading social media platforms may have on the quality of journalistic coverage. As a result, distinct journalistic voices are forced to compete more directly with experts, commentators, sources, and other stakeholders within the same space. Such shifting power relations may be observed also in the interactions between political journalists and their audiences on major social media platforms. This article therefore pursues a cross-national comparison of interactions between political journalists and their audiences on Twitter in Germany and Australia, documenting how the differences in the status of Twitter in each country’s media environment manifest in activities and network interactions. In each country, we observed Twitter interactions around the national parliamentary press corps (the Bundespressekonferenz and the Federal Press Gallery), gathering all public tweets by and directed at the journalists’ accounts during 2017. We examine overall activity and engagement patterns and highlight significant differences between the two national groups; and we conduct further network analysis to examine the prevalent connections and engagement between press corps journalists themselves, and between journalists, their audiences, and other interlocutors on Twitter. New structures of information flows, of influence, and thus ultimately of power relations become evident in this analysis.

A Label-Free Fluorescent DNA Calculator Based on Gold Nanoparticles for Sensitive Detection of ATP

Herein we described a deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) calculator for sensitive detection of the determination of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) using gold nanoparticles (GNP) and PicoGreen fluorescence dye as signal transducer, and ATP and single-stranded DNA (DNA-M′) as activators. The calculator-related performances including linearity, reaction time, logic gate, and selectivity were investigated, respectively. The results revealed that this oligonucleotide sensor was highly sensitive and selective. The detection range was 50–500 nmol/L (R2 = 0.99391) and the detection limit was 46.5 nmol/L. The AND DNA calculator was successfully used for the ATP detection in human urine. Compared with other methods, this DNA calculator has the characteristics of being label-free, non-enzymic, simple, and highly sensitive.