Controversy and Discourse: The Arts of Transforming Negativity Through Transitivity

Controversial topics make discourse complicated and hard to construct. However, through selected linguistic tools, the negativity of controversies can be subdued and reconstructed successfully. In this study, Halliday’s Transitivity System and van Leeuwen’s role allocation were utilized to show how speakers construct social actors in such a discourse to experientially reconstruct controversial topics without evoking negative feelings or creating conflicts. This study examined Jared Kushner’s interview on the peace deal to show how such a controversial topic was constructed. It was noted that Kushner utilized three tools. He (1) foregrounded noncontroversial participants and backgrounded controversial ones, (2) identified actions of noncontroversial participants and suppressed the actions of those who are controversial, and (3) activated positive aspects and passivated negative aspects. In doing so, Kushner evaded controversial arguments by selectively representing participants and their social roles to achieve strategic goals, for example, obtaining a positive response, subduing negativity, and eventually may succeed in encouraging his audience to listen or consider his view.

Leader–Follower Role Allocation for Physical Collaboration in Human Dyads

People often find themselves in situations where collaboration with others is necessary to accomplish a particular task. In such cases, a leader–follower relationship is established to coordinate a plan to achieve a common goal. This is usually accomplished through verbal communication. However, what happens when verbal communication is not possible? In this study, we observe the dynamics of a leader–follower relationship in human dyads during collaborative tasks where there is no verbal communication between partners. Using two robotic arms, we designed a collaborative experimental task in which subjects perform the task individually or coupled together through a virtual model. The results show that human partners fall into the leader–follower dynamics even when they cannot communicate verbally. We demonstrate this in two steps. First, we study how each subject in a collaboration influences task performance, and second, we evaluate whether both partners influence it equally or not using our proposed sorting method to objectively identify a leader. We also study the leader–follower dynamics by analysing the task performance of partners during their individual sessions to predict the role distribution in a dyad. Based on the results of our prediction method, we conclude that the higher-performing individual performance will assume the role of a leader in collaboration.

Decentralized Judicial Review

This chapter explores the practice of decentralized judicial review and its implications for the European Court of Justice’s relationship with Member State courts. The division of judicial powers in the EU is assessed with a focus on justification and proportionality review. Drawing on the data from the case law survey, the analysis sheds light on the role allocation between European and national judges in free movement disputes. It investigates to what extent the distinctions between law/fact and interpretation/application capture their respective functions. The findings show that the power of Member State courts has grown significantly over time, with the Court of Justice delegating an ever greater number of decisions to the domestic judiciaries. As a result of this, EU free movement law is being increasingly shaped at the national level.

Kindred spirits: Doing family through craft entrepreneurship

While there is a tradition of viewing both craftwork and entrepreneurship as characteristically individualistic and autonomous activities, this article examines the way in which social ties of family and kinship are often integral to many entrepreneurial ventures. Instead of a neat divide between ‘separate spheres’, work and home permeate each other in meaningful ways. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 20 workers from UK craft gin distilleries, this article explores how kinship and intimacy are put to work in craft enterprises. Findings show that the involvement of family and kin is vital to the operations of many craft businesses. Working together with spouses and siblings brings benefits and challenges and involves negotiating task and role allocation, often through invoking heteronormative notions of suitability and complementarity. Such concerns are bound up with how family and kin are understood by participants. Their reflections on entrepreneurial kinship involve both narratives of work and visions of a lifestyle which are both familial and entrepreneurial.

Augmenting Scalable Communication-Based Role Allocation for a Three-Role Task

In evolutionary robotics role allocation studies, it is common that the role assumed by each robot is strongly associated with specific local conditions, which may compromise scalability and robustness because of the dependency on those conditions. To increase scalability, communication has been proposed as a means for robots to exchange signals that represent roles. This idea was successfully applied to evolve communication-based role allocation for a two-role task. However, it was necessary to reward signal differentiation in the fitness function, which is a serious limitation as it does not generalize to tasks where the number of roles is unknown a priori. In this paper, we show that rewarding signal differentiation is not necessary to evolve communication-based role allocation strategies for the given task, and we improve reported scalability, while requiring less a priori knowledge. Our approach for the two-role task puts fewer constrains on the evolutionary process and enhances the potential of evolving communication-based role allocation for more complex tasks. Furthermore, we conduct experiments for a three-role task where we compare two different cognitive architectures and several fitness functions and we show how scalable controllers might be evolved.

The Effects of Automation and Role Allocation on Team Performance

An experiment was conducted to investigate the effects of automation and role allocation on performance in a simulated picture compilation task with fourteen two-person student teams. In the absence of automation support, the system integrated sensor information. In the presence of automation support, the system both integrated sensor information and identified contacts. Roles were assigned either based on warfare domain or geographical sectors. Results showed that human-automation system performance was similar in two automation conditions, but participants were slower in classifying tracks and overall classified fewer tracks when the automation was present. We conclude that working with automation may lead to degraded team performance due to complacency and additional task complexity.

Self-initiated expatriates in the local organizations of developing countries

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to report three main findings. First, the paper reports why local organizations in developing countries would demand self-initiated expatriates (SIEs); second, the paper reports why SIEs accept employment with such organizations; and third, the paper reports the factors that seem to govern the role allocation to SIEs. Design/methodology/approach The authors used semi-structured interviews to elicit and collect data. The authors followed the procedures of grounded theory for data analysis. Findings Local organizations in developing countries seem increasingly willing to employ SIEs. Emergence of hitherto nonexistent businesses, rapid expansion, global ambition and organizational maturity seem to drive the demand for SIEs. Industrial decline elsewhere, attractiveness of emerging economies, challenging role, prior experience within similar countries and non-working spouse are factors that enable the SIEs’ acceptance of employment with such organizations. Required boundary spanning and repatriation status determine the role allocation for SIEs. Research limitations/implications The findings may be idiosyncratic as they result from a qualitative research design. External validity could, therefore, be low. Practical implications Managers can benefit by comprehending the factors motivating SIEs to work for local organizations in developing countries. SIEs can benefit by understanding why such organizations need them, and the roles they are likely to get therein. Originality/value Unlike the typical SIEs studied in literature, the authors theorize about SIEs who move from developed countries to work in developing countries and occupy senior positions. Additionally, unlike a typical SIE study, the authors gathered the perspectives of both SIEs and organizations. Lastly, the paper is about an emerging trend: SIEs’ employment in the local organizations of developing countries.