London Yearly Meeting’s Response to the Richmond Declaration, 1887: A Case Study in the Avoidance of Religious Schism

London Yearly Meeting’s response to the Richmond Declaration of 1887 was neutral in that it neither endorsed nor rejected it. The Declaration was seen by British Friends in a variety of ways. These included it being viewed as either an affirmation or not of existing Quaker beliefs, a document that was more relevant to the American Quaker context, a useful statement of beliefs or an attempt to impose a creed. While failure to accept the Declaration has been interpreted as a move towards supporting an emerging liberal Quakerism, the decision to also not reject it has often been overlooked. An evaluation of the discussions about the Declaration that took place at the Yearly Meeting in London, May 1888, and which were reported in the Quaker journals The British Friend and The Friend (London), highlights the wide range of views that were held. It is proposed that the complex set of relationships that existed between different groups within London Yearly Meeting and the role played by key individuals determined a nuanced response to the Declaration which was sufficiently acceptable to all sides. Paradoxically, this unity was founded upon a collective acceptance of theological discordance within London Yearly Meeting. Consequently, schism was avoided as evangelical, conservative and liberal Quaker narratives were able to coexist alongside a non-committal response to the Declaration.

Navigating ambiguous negativity: A case study of Twitch.tv live chats

On Twitch.tv, the gaming-oriented live streaming platform, users interact by sharing and viewing gameplay and participating in live chats. Negativity in online gaming is often explored on a large scale using broad categories. This study offers a nuanced look at Twitch.tv communities dedicated to the Dark Souls game series to examine the descriptive and injunctive community norms surrounding both aggressive negativity and ambiguous negativity, which involves interactions where the valence is not obvious and must be interpreted based on community-specific meanings and rules. This study systematically analyzed excerpts of chats and stream recordings of 22 live streamed sessions. It found ambiguous negativity was prevalent in cases of cursing, game jargon, banter, spam, and sarcasm. Aggressive negativity was rare but manifested in exclusionary language and banter gone too far. The response of community members and collective acceptance or rejection of such negativity was not clearly defined.

Neutrality and relative acceptability in judgment aggregation

One of the fundamental normative principles in social choice theory is that of neutrality. In the context of judgment aggregation, neutrality is encoded in the form of an axiom expressing that, when two possible judgments enjoy the same support amongst the individuals, then either both or neither of them should be accepted. This is a reasonable requirement in many scenarios. However, we argue that for scenarios in which individuals are asked to pass judgment on very diverse kinds of propositions, a notion of relative acceptability is better suited. We capture this notion by a new axiom that hinges on a binary “acceptability” relation A between propositions: if a given coalition accepting a proposition p entails the collective acceptance of p, then the same should be true for every other proposition q related to p via A. Intuitively, pAq means that p is at least as acceptable as q. Classical neutrality is then a special case where all propositions are equally acceptable. We show that our new axiom allows us to circumvent a classical impossibility theorem in judgment aggregation for certain scenarios of practical interest. Also, we offer a precise characterisation of all scenarios that are safe, in the sense that any aggregation rule respecting the relative acceptability between propositions will always return logically consistent outcomes.

N’zassa: from a collaborative translation approach to a collective construct

The ethnographic approach to literary translation offers, undoubtedly, many avenues yet to be explored. If we can consider translation to be a perpetual search for a possibility, dialogic translation consists of waging with the ‘other’–be they present physically and/or metaphysically–the battle for meaning. The n’zassa approach has no aim but to both reinforce the translator’s visibility and build a trustworthy relationship with (trans)readers. I argue that every translation act is–or should be–based, to some extent, on a n’zassa approach, which sees translation practice as a collaborative activity, and its product, a collective construct wherein writers, translators and readers are Meaning Weavers. Each text carries an embryo of such an encounter, which stems from and results in mutual influences. With regard to the relation ethnography-translation, Buzelin (2004, 2005), Ferreira (2014, 2017) and Wolf’s (2000) discussions prove fundamental. I conclude that Adiaffi’s n’zassa, read through the lens of Latour’s (2008) ANT, helps reduce information lost and gives the translator a type of immediate collective acceptance. It is only through dialogue between subjects and forms, between divergent and convergent choices in the practice of translation that one can strive for a real and inclusive knowledge economy.N’zassa: De un enfoque de traducción colaborativa a una construcción colectivaResumenSin duda, el enfoque etnográfico en la traducción literaria ofrece muchas posibilidades sin explorar. Si se considera a la traducción una búsqueda perpetua de posibilidad, la traducción dialógica consiste en librar contra el otro –sea su presencia física o metafísica– la batalla por el sentido. El enfoque n’zassa busca tanto reforzar la visibilidad del traductor como construir una relación de confianza con los (trans)lectores. Defiendo que todo acto traductivo está –o debería estar–basado en cierta medida en un enfoque n’zassa, que ve en la traducción una actividad colaborativa y en su producto una construcción colectiva, en la que los escritores, traductores y lectores son tejedores de sentido. Sobre la relación entre etnografía y traducción, los trabajos de Buzelin (2004, 2005), Ferreira (2014, 2017) y Wolf (2010) son fundamentales. Concluyo que la lectura del n’zassa adiaffiano, desde la perspectiva de la teoría del actor-red de Latour, ayuda a reducir la pérdida de información y le otorga al traductor una especie de aceptación colectiva inmediata. Solo a través del diálogo entre sujetos y formas, y entre decisiones divergentes o convergentes en la práctica traductiva, se puede esperar una economía real e inclusiva del conocimiento.Palabras clave: n’zassa, traducción colaborativa, construcción colectiva, dialogismo, enfoque etnográficoFecha de recepción: 30/04/2019Fecha de aceptación: 22/06/2019¿Cómo citar este artículo? N’zassa: from a collaborative translation approach to a collective construct. Mutatis Mutandis. Revista Latinoamericana de Traducción, 12(2), 519-539. DOI: 10.27533/udea.mut.v12n2a09

Women on Boards Improving Women's Empowerment Through Entrepreneurship in Turkey

It appears to be a collective acceptance that women must reason like men, act like women, look like girls, and work like horses. Talking about women vs. men in leadership, a person must first differentiate between the female aspect of leadership—delegating, pull leadership participative, encouraging, motivating, inspiring—and the male element of leadership—enforcing regulations, pushing people, setting rules, creating obligations, corporate behavior, putting limitations. The chapter contains the existing literature concerning women; entrepreneurship and family business in Turkey is studied, followed by the revision of the entrepreneurship of women due to Turkey's cultural context. Profiles of Turkish entrepreneurial women are deliberated upon. Then problems of entrepreneurial women are discussed in the latter segment. The chapter concludes with the applications and policy recommendations to aid entrepreneurship of women in Turkey.

Understanding Institutions without Collective Acceptance?

Francesco Guala has written an important book proposing a new account of social institutions and criticizing existing ones. We focus on Guala’s critique of collective acceptance theories of institutions, widely discussed in the literature of collective intentionality. Guala argues that at least some of the collective acceptance theories commit their proponents to antinaturalist methodology of social science. What is at stake here is what kind of philosophizing is relevant for the social sciences. We argue that a Searlean version of collective acceptance theory can be defended against Guala’s critique and question the sufficiency of Guala’s account of the ontology of the social world.

Declarations and Status Functions

Chapter 12 evaluates, in the light of the analysis of status functions in previous chapters, a recent claim by Searle that all institutional facts, and so all status functions, are created by declarative speech acts. An example of a declaration is an employer saying “You’re fired” to an employee and thereby making it the case that he is fired. The chapter argues that while declarations are often used, given background conventions in a community, to impose status functions on objects, they are not necessary, and that more generally the idea that status functions are imposed by representing that object as having them is mistaken, in the light of the earlier analysis of collective acceptance as a matter of members of a community having appropriate we-intentions or conditional we-intentions directed at the relevant things.

Status Functions and Conventions

Chapter 9 argues first that the assignment of a status function to an object or type of object for use on repeated occasions constitutes a convention. The relevant notion of convention is that of collective acceptance by a group of a solution to a coordination problem. This is contrasted with David Lewis’s account of convention. Next, it provides an analysis of collective acceptance as a matter of members of a group having either appropriately interlocking we-intentions directed at particular objects or appropriately interlocking conditional we-intentions directed at objects or types of objects. Finally, it explains, in light of this, in what sense a status function is an intention dependent function, that is, a function that cannot be performed by an object having it unintentionally.

Summary and Conclusion

This chapter summarizes in broad terms the work of the book, which focuses on how the multiple agents account of collective action can be extended to institutional and mob action. It reviews the problems raised by singular group agents. It reviews the account of logical form developed for grammatically singular group action sentences. It reviews the account of constitutive rules and constitutive agency. It reviews the analysis of status functions, collective acceptance, and conventions. It reviews the account of membership in singular group agents. It reviews the account of proxy agency. It reviews the application to corporations and nation states. It concludes with a big picture view of the territory and brief description of directions for future research.