Actions in Slow Motion: Theoretical and Methodological Reflections on Temporality in Actions and Intersubjective Understanding

This article examines the connection between actions, temporality, and media-based observation. Slow motion technology is currently being used especially in sports to examine and evaluate athletes’ actions more precisely in order to identify potential infringements of rules. Starting with a phenomenological perspective, this article engages in a critical assessment of the degree to which the intentions underlying athletes’ actions become clearer if their actions are slowed down using slow motion. It transpires that a more in-depth understanding is not possible because the process of time-stretching using media technology tends to obscure intersubjective understanding. Nevertheless, the use of different playback speeds does increase observers’ sensitivity to the temporality of action and observation. This is particularly the case when greater emphasis is placed on the body and its role in the formation and carrying out of intentions. With the phenomenological view and in special consideration of the body and the subjective intentionality, the paper contributes to a discussion about the connection of time and (inter-)action already led in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. These findings mark a contribution to empirical social research as well, which is increasingly using video material in action analysis and should take slow motion as a possible augmented but also manipulated access to actions into account adequately. To this end, this article suggests a method for identifying the merits and demerits of using slow motion to analyse actions, and discusses the methodological implications of temporality in observation.

Linking coopetition benefits and innovative performance within small and medium-sized enterprises networks: a strategic approach on knowledge sharing and direct collaboration

PurposeThe present study aims to tackle SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) managers' awareness of coopetition benefits underpinning the process of knowledge sharing with a view to achieve innovative performance. The scrutiny of coopetition is placed within the context of SMEs strategic networks, which foster a fertile ground for competitive knowledge sharing and direct collaboration among members.Design/methodology/approachIn total, 102 top managers and business owners of European steel SMEs were questioned regarding various issues related to coopetition, knowledge, collaboration and innovative performance strategies. The collected data were analyzed via the technique of partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM).FindingsThe obtained values confirm that intense competition in the field stimulates SMEs to become aware of the benefits of coopetition. This awareness directly influences the innovative performance of the SMEs, as well as their interest in competitive knowledge sharing and their willingness to engage in direct collaboration. Direct collaboration catalyzes more intense competitive knowledge sharing at the inter-unit level whereas both direct collaboration and competitive knowledge sharing lead to better innovative performance in the case of the studied steel SMEs.Research limitations/implicationsA key theoretical contribution resides in revealing the influence of manifold factors in the overall equation of innovative performance, integrating competition, coopetition and knowledge sharing as antecedents.Originality/valueThe research advances a phenomenological view on SMEs networks in their strategy to leverage competitive knowledge and enhance system-driven innovation.

Health and Illness as Enacted Phenomena

In this paper I explore health and illness through the lens of enactivism, which is understood and developed as a bodily-based worldly-engaged phenomenology. Various health theories – biomedical, ability-based, biopsychosocial – are introduced and scrutinized from the point of view of enactivism and phenomenology. Health is ultimately argued to consist in a central world-disclosing aspect of what is called existential feelings, experienced by way of transparency and ease in carrying out important life projects. Health, in such a phenomenologically enacted understanding, is an important and in many cases necessary part of leading a good life. Illness, on the other hand, by such a phenomenological view, consist in finding oneself at mercy of unhomelike existential feelings, such as bodily pains, nausea, extreme unmotivated tiredness, depression, chronic anxiety and delusion, which make it harder and, in some cases, impossible to flourish. In illness suffering the lived body hurts, resists, or, in other ways, alienates the activities of the ill person.

Shifting the Weight of Inaccessibility: Access Intimacy as a Critical Phenomenological Ethos

This paper offers a critical phenomenological view of the concept of access intimacy, a term coined by disability justice advocate Mia Mingus. Access intimacy refers to a mode of relation between disabled people or between disabled and non-disabled people that can be born of concerted cultivation or instantly intimated and centrally concerns the feeling of someone genuinely understanding and anticipating another’s access needs. Putting in conversation this notion of intimacy with Kym Maclaren’s critical phenomenological account of intimacy, I show how accessibility is not about what one person or institution can do for another but involves an ongoing, interpersonal process of relating and taking responsibility for our inevitable encroachment on one another in ways that enhance one another’s freedom.

What is Existential Educational Encounter?

This paper aims to clarify the meaning of the pedagogical concept of encounter by providing an overview of its use from the historical foundations of the concept in Otto Friedrich Bollnow’s (1903 to 1991) philosophy to contemporary phenomenological readings by Maxine Greene, Donald Vandenberg and Robyn Harrison. The outcome is a critical analysis and evaluation of the significance of the concept in educational contexts. The aims of the paper are as follows: a) to articulate the educational significance of the concept of encounter, and b) to clarify its relationship to the humanistic concept of formation (or unfolding; Bildung), in order to establish the tension between Bildung-theory and the existential theory of human formation. The paper claims that, for a more elaborated understanding of the human educative process, the tension between the processes of encounter and Bildung should be seen as the core tension behind the holistic view of becoming human. Also, c) for an analysis of the Anglo-American reception of the concept, a phenomenological view of the encounter as a transcendental aspect of a learning process will be made in order to gain a wider view of the concept.

The Meaning of Monument in the Life of Toba Batak Tribe in Palipi Subdistrict, Samosir Regency, Indonesia

This study aims to analyze the meaning of monument in the life of Toba Batak tribe in Palipi Subdistrict, Samosir Regency. This research uses descriptive analytic method with phenomenology approach. Researchers in the phenomenological view try to understand the meaning of events and their relation to ordinary people in certain situations. The results of this study indicate that the monument is one place that will unite a clan and clan groups. The monument in Toba Batak community in Samosir is called the Procurement Monument where with the monument, a clan group will more often make offerings to its ancestors. In addition, with the existence of the monument, it is expected that fellow clans will meet and silaturrahmi relations will be maintained between clan relatives. In this study there were six monuments discussed as samples, namely Sitohang clan, Sinaga clan, Situmorang clan, Toga Pandiangan Tugu clan which was found in Palipi Subdistrict.

Recalcitrant Emotions: A Phenomenological View

In this paper, I sketch an account of emotion that is based on a close analogy with a Husserlian account of perception. I also make use of the approach that I have limned, viz., to articulate a view of the kind of “conflict without contradiction” (CWC) which may obtain between a recalcitrant emotion and a judgment. My main contention is that CWC can be accounted for by appeal to the rationality of perception and emotion, conceived as responsiveness to experiential evidence. The conflicts in question can be regarded as obtaining between different strands of evidence, and our perceptual and emotional experiences can be thus conflicted even among themselves, not only in the special case of a conflict with a judgment.

Human Egalitarianism and the Patriarchal Illusion: A Phenomenological View

Este es un estudio fenomenológico sobre las bases ontológicas de la vida igualitaria. La fuente fundamental de la vida igualitaria es la experiencia de la conciencia de igualdad y la visión de igualdad. La base la conciencia de igualdad y la visión de igualdad es nuestra experiencia directa de la pureza de nuestro ser y el ser de los demás. La conciencia de igualdad no es simplemente un valor mental sino una percepción directa de la pureza del ser de todos los hombres. Nuestra experiencia de que todos los hombres son creados iguales no es simplemente una creencia sino nuestra experiencia del conocimiento directo del Ser de los seres humanos. El estudio también explora la fenomenología del Maestro Patriarcal como aquel que conoce la Verdad Absoluta con la experiencia correspondiente de dominación y sumisión, también conocida como la relación maestro-esclavo. La Institución Patriarcal, cualquiera que sea la circunstancia, destruye la Igualdad de Conciencia y la Igualdad de Visión y, en última instancia, destruye la vida igualitaria.

Consciousness, Being and Life: Phenomenological Approaches to Mindfulness

A phenomenological view of contemplative disciplines is presented. However, studying mindfulness by phenomenology is at odds with both neurobiological and anthropological approaches. It involves the first-person standpoint, the openness of being-in-the-world, the umwelt of the meditator, instead of assessing her neural processes and behaviors from a neutral, distanced, third-person standpoint. It then turns out that phenomenology cannot produce a discourse about mindfulness. Phenomenology rather induces a cross-fertilization between the state of mindfulness and its own methods of mental cultivation. A comparison between the epochè, the phenomenological reduction, and the practice of mindfulness, is then undertaken.