The Resilience of the Captive Girl Child in 2 Kings 5

2 Kings 5 contains a brief reference to an unnamed Israelite girl, a war captive in the household of leprosy-afflicted Naaman, the commander of the Syrian army. She instigates her master’s healing by recommending that he seek out the prophet (Elisha). Although the girl utters only a single statement (2 Kgs 5.3), her words have been subject to divergent critical interpretations. Some scholars valorize her utterance as evidence of her faith, compassion, and courage. A contrasting view maintains that as a trauma victim whose sufferings have been glossed over, the girl’s words express her adaptation to an abusive environment. This study posits an alternative interpretation, by drawing upon research on the concept of resilience with regard to war-affected children. While acknowledging the girl’s trauma, this article argues that her words reflect a resilience-building process by affirming her cultural identity, values, and beliefs.

Using sentiment analysis to predict opinion inversion in Tweets of political communication

Social media networks have become an essential tool for sharing information in political discourse. Recent studies examining opinion diffusion have highlighted that some users may invert a message's content before disseminating it, propagating a contrasting view relative to that of the original author. Using politically-oriented discourse related to Israel with focus on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, we explored this Opinion Inversion (O.I.) phenomenon. From a corpus of approximately 716,000 relevant Tweets, we identified 7147 Source–Quote pairs. These Source–Quote pairs accounted for 69% of the total volume of the corpus. Using a Random Forest model based on the Natural Language Processing features of the Source text and user attributes, we could predict whether a Source will undergo O.I. upon retweet with an ROC-AUC of 0.83. We found that roughly 80% of the factors that explain O.I. are associated with the original message's sentiment towards the conflict. In addition, we identified pairs comprised of Quotes related to the domain while their Sources were unrelated to the domain. These Quotes, which accounted for 14% of the Source–Quote pairs, maintained similar sentiment levels as the Source. Our case study underscores that O.I. plays an important role in political communication on social media. Nevertheless, O.I. can be predicted in advance using simple artificial intelligence tools and that prediction might be used to optimize content propagation.

Exploring the Utility of a Global Coaching Framework: Sociocultural Perspectives From Japanese Secondary School Rugby Coaches

Having investigated the history of rugby over the last century in Japan, a study reported that, historically, rugby participation has been underpinned by the quest to develop young males’ character. The traditional Japanese view of rugby as a medium for education and dominant cultural values has also been considered to be a contrasting view to the Westernised professional perspectives of rugby as a form of entertainment. With a focus on the role of rugby in the school-based club experience, this article presents hermeneutic interpretations of conversations held with four Japanese secondary school rugby coaches and four players, and it explores the socioculturally relevant notion of kimochi (気持ち; feeling/attitude/vitality) in players’ corporeal experiences. Furthermore, the ways in which kimochi is described by the coaches as a means to cultivate kokoro (mind/heart/spirit) and prepare players for adult life are investigated. The extent to which this idea emerged from the participants’ comments is offered as an important consideration for the International Coach Development Framework and the International Sport Coaching Framework, and we posit that the exploration of inherent sociocultural discourses must be carefully contemplated if the future conceptualisation, interpretation and utility of such frameworks is to be enduring.

Taking Responsibility for Negligence and Non-negligence

Negligence reminds us that we often do and cause things unawares, occasionally with grave results. Given the lack of foresight and intention, some authors argue that people should not be judged culpable for negligence. This paper offers a contrasting view. It argues that gaining control (over our agency, over a risky world) is itself a fundamental responsibility, with both collective and individual elements. The paper underlines both sides, focussing on how they relate as we ascribe responsibility or culpability. Following the introduction, Section 2 (“Culpability and Control: The Negligence Sceptics”) argues that conscious awareness is neither necessary nor sufficient for control. Control is not a property of deliberate choice, so much as a practical achievement. Section 3 (“Non-negligence as a Shared Task”) stresses the collective aspects of non-negligence: creating knowledge about risks, structuring environments to guard against them, and developing standards of care. Failings in the collective task, rather than lack of individual control, mean it can often be unfair to pin culpability on a single individual. Section 4 (“Culpability for Negligence Revisited”) suggests that a basic duty of a responsible person is to acknowledge the ways in which we may do more or less than we mean to, often in ways that create risks. It then sketches an approach to culpability as part of a collective exercise: as we take responsibility for standards of care, and for our own and others’ agency.

Being Motivated and Being the Best We Can Be

This chapter explores the role of motivation in contemporary work. Beginning with an overview of motivation in the recent history of working, the role of the Hawthorne effect and contributions on flow provide a contrasting view of both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. The narrative excerpts from the participants of the Boston College Working Project identified the role of creating and accomplishing, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, personal attributes related to motivation, relationships and motivation, and the role of competition in motivation. The chapter concludes with a review of promising new directions in motivation, including self-determination and organizational justice, culminating in a discussion of how work-based policies need to support and nurture our natural striving to accomplish and do well at work.

Ziran: Authenticity or Authority?

This essay explores the core Daoist concept of ziran (commonly translated as spontaneity, naturalness, or self-so) and its relationship to authenticity and authority. Modern scholarship has often followed the interpretation of Guo Xiang (d. 312) in taking ziran as spontaneous individual authenticity completely unreliant on any external authority. This form of Daoism emphasizes natural transformations and egalitarian society. Here, the author draws on Heshanggong’s Commentary on the Daodejing to reveal a drastically dissimilar ziran conception based on the authority of the transcendent Way. The logic of this contrasting view of classical Daoism results not only in a vision of hierarchical society, but one where the ultimate state of human ziran becomes immortality. Expanding our sense of the Daodejing, this cosmology of authority helps unearths greater continuity of the text with Daoism’s later religious forms.

Time Will Tell

This chapter provides an overview of the book. It addresses major themes and terms such as synchrony, entrainment, and driving and driven rhythms, all of which are likely to be novel to the intended reading audience. The basic ideas that underlie the dynamic attending involving modes of synchrony, manifest in entrainment, are sketched. For each chapter, certain relevant constructs are previewed and briefly described. This chapter also outlines the rationale for developing a dynamic approach to attending. This involves providing contrasting view of attention that are currently prominent in psychology. Finally, this chapter provides a brief outline of each chapter in the book and discusses the rationale for its organization.

Examining the existence of double jeopardy and negative double jeopardy within Twitter

Purpose The theory of double jeopardy (DJ) is shown to hold across broad ranging geographies and physical product categories. However, there is very little research appertaining to the subject within an online environment. In particular, studies that investigate the presence of DJ and the contrasting view point to DJ, namely, that of negative double jeopardy (NDJ), are lacking. This study aims to contribute to this identified research gap and examines the presence of DJ and NDJ within a product category, utilising data from Twitter. Design/methodology/approach A total of 354,676 tweets are scraped from Twitter and their sentiment analysed and allocated into positive, negative and no-opinion clusters using fuzzy c-means clustering. The sentiment is then compared to the market share of brands within the beer product category to establish whether a DJ or NDJ effect is present. Findings Data reveal an NDJ effect with regards to original tweets (i.e. tweets which have not been retweeted). That is, when analysing tweets relating to brands within a defined beer category, the authors find that larger brands suffer by having an increased negativity amongst the larger proportion of tweets associated with them. Research limitations/implications The clustering approach to analyse sentiment in Twitter data brings a new direction to analysis of such sentiment. Future consideration of different numbers of clusters may further the insights this form of analysis can bring to the DJ/NDJ phenomenon. Managerial implications discuss the uncovered practitioner’s paradox of NDJ and strategies for dealing with DJ and NDJ effects. Originality/value This study is the first to explore the presence of DJ and NDJ through the utilisation of sentiment analysis-derived data and fuzzy clustering. DJ and NDJ are under-explored constructs in the online environment. Typically, past research examines DJ and NDJ in separate and detached fashions. Thus, the study is of theoretical value because it outlines boundaries to the DJ and NDJ conditions. Second, this research is the first study to analyse the sentiment of consumer-authored tweets to explore DJ and NDJ effects. Finally, the current study offers valuable insight into the DJ and NDJ effects for practicing marketing managers.

Key stakeholders’ perspectives towards UK new-build housing defects

Purpose Research on housing defects has limited its enquiry to the classifications of defects, potential impact of defects, and their detection and remediation during construction and the builder’s liability period, without considering the warranty period. The purpose of this paper is to better understand which impacts of defects are perceived as important by the key stakeholders involved in their detection and remediation over the construction, builder’s liability and insurer’s warranty periods. Design/methodology/approach The questionnaire survey approach was used. The questionnaire distribution list was drawn from the UK’s largest warranty provider (WP) and approved inspector’s records. The questionnaire was distributed to 2003 people, receiving 292 responses, a response rate of 15 per cent. Findings This research challenges the assertion that the house building industry (i.e. house builders (HBs), building inspectors and WPs) is predominantly cost focussed and finds that the potential impact of defects on home occupants (HOs) are their primary concern. In contrast, the HOs’ appear solely focussed on the disruption defects caused on their daily lives and perceive a lack customer focus in the house building industry. Originality/value This study provides empirical evidence of the contrasting view of the house building industry and HOs with respect to the prioritisation of the impacts of defects. Further, this research offers HBs an alternative approach to determine which defects should be targeted for reduction purposes which may lead to improved levels of customer satisfaction.

Circuits of Capital, Ground Rent and the Production of the Built Environment: A (New) Framework for Analysis

This paper develops prior work on Marxian theories of ground rent and property investment to outline a framework for interpreting the long-term rise in property prices observed in the neoliberal period. Orthodox economists and private developers have consistently maintained that the primary barrier to addressing affordability problems in expensive urban regions is excessive regulation. A diametrically contrasting view is developed in this paper. I argue the affordability crisis expresses the confluence and interaction of three primary factors: widening income and wealth disparities; the fictitious nature of land as a commodity, and the ability of property developers to extract surplus profits. Land is not a genuine commodity; and housing is a heterogeneous economic good whose production is targeted toward particular buyers of this good. Contra the hypothetical constructions of neoclassical economics, there is no “general supply” or “general demand” in urban housing markets. I show why increased production can lead the market toward higher overall levels of rents and prices. The primary counter-tendency to this basic dynamic is recurrent overproduction crises, with some modicum of affordability restored only through a collapse of prices once markets become severely overbuilt. Internal factors within the land market operate to limit the actual fall in prices, so that the longer-term trend in the neoliberal period shows a pronounced inflationary bias.