This article challenges Nicholas Wolterstorff’s rights-based reading of Old Testament orphans by arguing that the prophetic demand for their cause not only assumes a right-order ethos championed in the Torah, but in doing so exposes the shortcomings in how justice is defined for orphaned children within current rights ideology, whether theistic or not. I present the orphan’s historical trajectory towards becoming socially vulnerable as the final stage in the transition from the kinship-redeemer justice of Israelite village clans to the chesed (...) justice of the patronage economy in emerging urban conditions. In light of these conditions, I show how the orphan laws in Deuteronomy are, counter to Wolterstorff’s claims of corruption, attempting to re-create in legal terms the kinship bond and chesed benevolence that defines the orphan’s justice as the return to a family. I argue that the prophet does not blame inherently corrupt laws, but rather blames patrons and elders who have ignored good laws and ignored right-order by forgetting their brothers’ and sons’ children. (shrink)

Men often make riskier decisions than women across a wide range of real-life behaviors. Whether this sex difference is accentuated, diminished, or stable under stressful conditions is, however, contested in the scientific literature. A critical blind spot lies amid this contestation: Most studies use standardized, laboratory-based, cognitive measures of decision making rather than complex real-life social simulation tasks to assess risk-related behavior. To address this blind spot, we investigated the effects of acute psychosocial stress on risk decision making in men (...) and women using a standardized cognitive measure and a novel task that simulated a real-life social situation. Participants were exposed to either an acute psychosocial stressor or an equivalent control condition. Stressor-exposed participants were further characterized as high- or low-cortisol responders. Results confirmed that the experimental manipulation was effective. On the IGT, participants characterized as low-cortisol responders made significantly riskier decisions than those characterized as high-cortisol responders. Similarly, in the online chatroom, participants characterized as low-cortisol responders were, relative to those in the Non-Stress group, significantly more likely to make risky decisions. Together, these results suggest that at lower levels of cortisol both men and women tend to make riskier decisions in both economic and social spheres. (shrink)

This article discusses the contributions of American industrial engineers Frank and Lillian Gilbreth to management thought. It suggests that the work of the Gilbreths represents a very modernist form of rationalization, of the measuring, categorization, recording, and governing of work, work methods, employees, and processes. The motion studies and uses of psychology stressed by the Gilbreths would seem to represent some of the most pronounced forms of governance of production in the history of management thought. Frederick Taylor’s mental revolution (...) entailed recourse to a ‘science’ of management as the ultimate arbiter of work processes. The committing of processes to writing and film would be Taylorized even more completely under Frank Gilbreth’s motion study, while workers would be enrolled more fully into the new labour process by the equally coercive and ideologized Taylorization of their minds in Lillian Gilbreth’s much more teacherly psychology of management. (shrink)

Muslims; Conduct of life; Quotations, maxims, etc.

Sensory and tracking technologies are being introduced into workplaces in ways Taylor and the Gilbreths could only have imagined. New work design experiments merge wellness with productivity to measure and modulate the affective and emotional labour of resilience that is necessary to survive the turbulence of the widespread incorporation of agile management systems, in which workers are expected to take symbolic direction from machines. The Quantified Workplace project was carried out by one company that fitted sensory algorithmic devices to workers’ (...) computers and bodies, which, this article argues, identify workers’ so-called agility and reveal management practices that track affective and emotional labour, categorized in the project as stress, subjective productivity and wellbeing. Capital’s accelerated attempts to capture more areas of work and workers’ capacities facilitate the conversion of labour power into a source of value but also results in alienation and abstraction. Participants’ resistance to participation in the Quantified Workplace reveals tensions in the labour process when affect is measured in processes of corporate change. (shrink)

The article discusses two bioart projects that bring the symbolically core human substances of blood, sweat and tears into technologically mediated relationships with plants and fungi to explore human kinship with other species: Tarah Rhoda’s BS&T (short for ‘blood, sweat and tears’) and OurGlass, and Saša Spačal’s MycoMythologies: Patterning. The article analyses the art projects through the lens of the molecular gaze and different perspectives on kinning, bringing anthropological conceptualizations of kinship together with Haraway’s pathways to connect with other (...) species. How can bioart use technologies to explore interspecies kinship through a molecular gaze? And may such artworks contribute to the toning down of human exceptionality in the face of a precarious future? We find that artworks providing a molecular gaze on interspecies biological processes may risk a decontextualized approach to complex relational processes but may also create new visions of filiation even with biological organisms imagined to be genetically distant from humans, thus spurring awareness of the fragile interrelationships among species. (shrink)

Three examples try to give an historical overview of strategies of visual normalization. Duchenne de Boulogne, Francis Galton and the taylorist procedures of Frank Bunker Gilbreth are conceived as strategies to transform the human face in practices of truth and knowledge.