This self-interview is the responsive document coming forth from the post-conference camaraderie. The four “Žižekian Performers” – found with themselves personally, creatively, and academically following the 2014 International Žižek Studies Conference. As a self-interview document that mimics the gameplay of Žižek himself in his own self-interview from his The Metastases of Enjoyment where he puts on the guise of the “big Other” to examine himself, we four performers here examine ourselves, each other, our work, and each other’s (...) work to produce this post-partum collaborative essay. In our collective project, we outline our individual performances from the Conference, each stake a claim and personal response to the critical question of what is a “Žižekian Performance,” and identify and discuss other synergies that emerged and exist amid our work in the form of cross-examinations and self-examinations. Ultimately, this group’s self-interview blazes the way for performance to interpenetrate the “Žižekian” and to intervene wherever theory, investigation, and presentation may lie. (shrink)

Scott Lash interviews John Searle, one of the foremost contemporary philosophers. Over the course of the conversation, Searle discusses his research into performativity, language and intentionality, the question of information and his account of social ontology. The conversation initially deals with the early influence of John Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein as well as Searle's relationship to phenomenology and the rest of the philosophical tradition. This offers a conceptual reconstruction of Searle’s work from multiple perspectives. Crucial concepts are highlighted such as (...) performativity, speech acts, intentionality and natural language. The discussion also touches on Searle’s recent debates around the questions of information and consciousness. The conversation ends with an overview of Searle’s social ontology, his theory of institutions and his relationship with post-structuralism. (shrink)

Organizations increasingly use technology-mediated interviews. However, only limited research is available concerning the comparability of different interview media and most of the available studies stem from a time when technology-mediated interviews were less common than in the present time. In an experiment using simulated selection interviews, we compared traditional face-to-face (FTF) interviews with telephone and videoconference interviews to determine whether ratings of interviewees’ performance, their perceptions of the interview, or their strain and anxiety are affected by the (...) type of interview. Before participating in the actual interview, participants had a more positive view of FTF interviews compared to technology-mediated interviews. However, fairness perceptions did not differ anymore after the interview. Furthermore, there were no differences between the three interview media concerning psychological and physiological indicators of strain or interview anxiety. Nevertheless, ratings of interviewees’ performance were lower in the technology-mediated interviews than in FTF interviews. Thus, differences between different interview media can still be found nowadays even though most applicants are much more familiar with technology-mediated communication than in the past. The results show that organizations should take this into account and therefore avoid using different interview media when they interview different applicants for the same job opening. (shrink)

This paper reports a Contingent Valuation application to estimate the non-market costs and benefits of hydro scheme developments in an Icelandic wilderness area. A deliberative group-based approach, called Market Stall, is compared to a control group consisting of conventional in-person interviews, in order to investigate flaws of Contingent Valuation, such as poor validity and protest responses. Perceived property rights suggested the use of willingness-to-accept in compensation for wilderness loss and willingness-to-pay for hydro scheme benefits. The study is novel as it (...) applies participant behaviour observation to gain insights into the shortcomings of conventional data collection modes. Main drawbacks with in-person interviews were found to be low motivation, standardised information and time pressure which hindered individuals from carefully considering their preferences. Market Stall performed better in the study: welfare estimates were more easily explained by socio-economic variables, the non-response rate was lower, and respondents were more engaged. Our research findings also suggest that participant behaviour can be used to supplement conventional validity tests. (shrink)

This paper reports a Contingent Valuation application to estimate the non-market costs and benefits of hydro scheme developments in an Icelandic wilderness area. A deliberative group -based approach, called Market Stall, is compared to a control group consisting of conventional in-person interviews, in order to investigate flaws of Contingent Valuation, such as poor validity and protest responses. Perceived property rights suggested the use of willingness-to-accept in compensation for wilderness loss and willingness-to-pay for hydro scheme benefits. The study is novel as (...) it applies participant behaviour observation to gain insights into the shortcomings of conventional data collection modes. Main drawbacks with in-person interviews were found to be low motivation, standardised information and time pressure which hindered individuals from carefully considering their preferences. Market Stall performed better in the study: welfare estimates were more easily explained by socio-economic variables, the non-response rate was lower, and respondents were more engaged. Our research findings also suggest that participant behaviour can be used to supplement conventional validity tests. (shrink)

Dieser Band entwickelt eine "mediensensible" Fachdidaktik Philosophie/Ethik. In Bezug auf die Lebenswelt der Schüler*innen werden Unterhaltungen und Kunstfilme des Medienphilosophen Alexander Kluge auf dessen Web-TV dctp.tv für eine philosophisch-ethische Bildung wahrnehmbar und denkbar. Kluges audiovisuelle Clips werden als Unterrichtsmedien ernst genommen, ihre Bild- und Tonspur(en) didaktisch gewürdigt. Das Montieren diskursiver und präsentativer Elemente ermöglicht zugleich eine medienphilosophiedidaktische Propädeutik zugunsten des Umgangs mit anderen Web-Inhalten (etwa auf YouTube).

Performance appraisal interviews are carried out on the basis of known-in-advance written materials such as preparation forms and interview guides. This article demonstrates how participants manage interviews by following a question–answer–response format fit to address interview guide entries one at a time. Two recurring supervisor responses to employees’ talk about problems in work are investigated: positive prediction and advice. It is suggested that these responses serve to establish supervisor authority and deter participants from discussing issues raised in (...) employee answers and thus go against norms emanating from literature on management communication. Results obtained in interviews are put down in writing along the way and subsequently summarized in documents to be signed by both participants, that is, employee and supervisor. The article demonstrates how participants use positive prediction and advice to coordinate talk-in-interaction with handling written materials and note taking, as well as formulating conclusions suitable for writing. The analyses shed light on how talk in an institutional context becomes a middle-medium, that is, a bridge between writings, and how this process is accomplished in turn-taking procedures. (shrink)

This paper examines how a standardized question is launched and received in a corpus of performance appraisal interviews, with a focus on how pre-­formulated questions are translated into interaction. Using conversation analysis, we demonstrate that the same question becomes many different actions in practice. Prefaces as well as prosodic and lexical alterations make relevant different responses, and as such, the question can be recruited to initiate diverse interactional projects such as assessments and other socially delicate activities. As a consequence, (...) goals of uniformity and standardization may be subverted. The interactional adaptations further evidence the strength of recipient design as reformulations also result in more fitted and personalized answers. Our study contributes to the understanding of standardization versus interactionalization, and points to the strong interrelationship between question design and the fitting of response options. (shrink)

Academic performance is among the several components of academic success. Many factors, including socioeconomic status, student temperament and motivation, peer and parental support influence academic performance. Our study aims to investigate the determinants of academic performance with emphasis on the role of parental styles in adolescent students in Peshawar Pakistan. A total of 456 students from 4 public and 4 private schools were interviewed. Academic performance was assessed based on self-reported grades in the latest internal examinations. (...) Parenting styles were assessed through the administration of the Parental bonding instrument. Regression analysis was conducted to assess the influence of socio-demographic factors and parenting styles on academic performance. Factors associated with and differences between “care” and “overprotection” scores of fathers and mothers were analyzed. Higher socio-economic status, father’s education level and higher care scores were independently associated with better academic performance in adolescent students. Affectionless control was the most common parenting style for fathers and mothers. When adapted by the father, it was also the only parenting style independently improving academic performance. Overall, mean “care” scores were higher for mothers and mean “overprotection” scores were higher for fathers. Parenting workshops and school activities emphasizing the involvement of mothers and fathers in the parenting of adolescent students might have a positive influence on their academic performance. Affectionless control may be associated with improved academics but the emotional and psychosocial effects of this style of parenting need to be investigated before recommendations are made. (shrink)

This is the second of two interviews with Arlie Russell Hochschild, Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. In her work, Hochschild explores the many ways we manage our emotions in personal life and perform emotional labor in the workplace.

This conversational opinion article between two parties – Kate, a disability performance scholar and Sarah, an interdisciplinary artist-scholar with lived experience of disability – considers the dancing body as redeemer in the specific case of a dancer experiencing ‘chemo fog’, or Chemotherapy-Related Cognitive Impairment (CRCI) after undergoing oncological treatments for Hodgkin Lymphoma. This work draws on Pini’s own lived experience of illness (Pini & Pini, 2019) in dialogue with Maguire-Rosier’s study of dancers with hidden impairments (Gibson & Maguire-Rosier, 2020). (...) In an exploratory account based on an interview with one another, the authors ask: when our senses and perceptions of ourselves and the world we become are obfuscated, what is the nature of the new relationship between the performing self and its absent body/mind/world? How can we shape our narrative and articulate who we are, what we are doing or where we are going, if we are moving in the ‘fog’? Our discussion reveals how Pini’s dancing body elucidates healing, while recovering an agentic perspective in her experience of alienation and frustration tied to chemo fog and related impairments. With this work we offer an original perspective on how a dancing body can resist theoretical diagnosis. (shrink)

How to measure performance in charitable organisations continues to excite interest among academics and practitioners. Despite the intellectual interest, little consensus has emerged as to what are the best measures of performance in charities. This is against the backdrop of an increased demand by donors and other stakeholders on charities to provide information on their performance. Building on prior studies, this paper examines the measures of performance in charities using a hybrid methodological approach which consists of (...) 14 exploratory interviews and a quantitative survey of 105 chief executive officers/board of trustees of large British charities. The results of factor analysis and internal reliability produced five broad measures of performance of charities: financial measures; client satisfaction; management effectiveness; stakeholder involvement; and benchmarking, indicating that the overall performance of charities is best measured by a set of factors that reflect the multiple and diverse stakeholders associated with charities. Further analysis using structural equation modelling corroborates the results that non-financial measures such as management effectiveness, stakeholder involvement and benchmarking are important to the performance of charities. (shrink)

The purpose of the present mixed method study was to investigate personal benefits, perceptions, and the effect of a 15-week sport psychological skills training program adapted for musicians. The program was individually tailored for six music performance students with the objective of facilitating the participants' instrumental practice and performance. The participants learnt techniques such as goal setting, attentional focus, arousal regulation, imagery, and acceptance training / self-talk. Zimmerman's ( 1989 ) cyclical model of self-regulated learning was applied as (...) a theoretical frame for the intervention. The present study's mixed-method approach (i.e., quan+ QUAL) included effect size, semi-structured interviews, a research log, and practice diaries of the participants (Creswell, 2009 ). Thematic analysis revealed that participants had little or no experience concerning planning and goal setting in regard to instrumental practice. Concentration, volition, and physical pain were additional issues that the participants struggled with at the time of pre-intervention. The study found that psychological skills training (with special emphasis on planning and goal setting) facilitated cyclical self-regulated learning patterns in the participants. In essence, the intervention was found to facilitate the participants' concentration, self-observation, self-efficacy, and coping in the face of failure. The appliance of practice journals facilitated the participants‘ self-observation, self-evaluation, and awareness of instrumental practice. Finally, the psychological skills intervention reduced participants' worry and anxiety in performance situations. An 8-month follow up interview revealed that the participants were still actively applying psychological skills. (shrink)

This paper considers the way in which Christian Religious Education (RE) teachers articulate the difficulties and challenges they experience both in school and with their peers as they navigate their way through their Initial Teacher Education. The paper offers a unique exploration of the relationship between elements of the three discourses of faith identity, emerging professional identity and the requirements of a performative teacher training context. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 184 student RE teachers across three universities. It became clear (...) that all students interpreted the Standards and policy guidelines ambiguously, as being value-laden or value-free. The idea of the 'good teacher' as someone who was, by very definition, neutral and objective immediately made the faith position of students problematic. This is a key point in relation to the notion of performativity and education and the disproportionate impact it made on Christian students. It appeared as though many Christian students were concerned to stress that although their faith was personally important for them it was not something that contributed to their understanding of a 'good teacher'. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 40–43. Lance Olsen is a professor of Writing and Literature at the University of Utah, Chair of the FC2 Board of directors, and, most importantly, author or editor of over twenty books of and about innovative literature. He is one of the true champions of prose as a viable contemporary art form. He has just published Architectures of Possibility (written with Trevor Dodge), a book that—as Olsen's works often do—exceeds the usual boundaries of its genre as it (...) explores his interests in narrative theory and pedagogy. The book is a kind of “anti-textbook;” a performative polemic against the stale, conservative and monolithic conception of the literary that so often dominates institutional discourse around creative writing. The following interview takes the occasion of AoP's publication as a chance to speak with Olsen about the book itself as well as to engage with larger, unanswerable, questions about the futures and intersections of literature and education. —Ben Segal INTERVIEW: 1) First, I want to start before the beginning, with the title. I’m really fascinated by the concept it conjures. Can you say something about innovative/experimental/(choose your adjective) literature in relation to both ideas around architecture and possibility? Innovative or experimental are tremendously fraught adjectives, needless to say. But for the purposes of my book, they modify a fiction concerned with the questions: What is fiction? What can it do, and how, and why? Now, of course, what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 17 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 27 or 57, and what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 1812 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 2012. A certain existential and historical perspectivism is always at work. But I think it’s fair to say that innovative and experimental usually refer to a narrativity that includes a self-reflective awareness of and engagement with theoretical inquiry, concerns, and obsessions, as well as a sense of being in conversation with fiction across space and time. One can't create challenging writing in a vacuum; it has to challenge in relation to something. So contemporary writers interested in the subject are not only in pursuit of the innovative, but are also always-already writing subsequent to it—writing, that is, in its long wake. Architectures of Possibility conceives of creativity as a possibility space, a locale just outside our comfort zones where we can and should take multiple chances in order to imagine in new ways, explore fresh strategies for finding and cultivating ideas, re-view what it is we’re doing and why, better understand what Samuel Beckett meant when he wrote: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” It reminds us that there are other ways of narrating our worlds and ourselves than those we have inherited from the entertainment industry, the government, academia, previous writing, and so on. 2) AoP seems to be directed at several audiences (and purposes) simultaneously. What I mean is that it seems at times a polemic in favor of innovative literature, at other times a creative writing textbook, and still other times a guide to the network of publishers, journals, and programs that make up the current world of non-mainstream literary art in the U.S. In my mind, Architectures is a theorized anti-textbook about writing. Most textbooks on the subject (think of Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft , taught in most creative-writing classroom across the country) orchestrate how to construct conventional stories. They instruct from a place of power how to generate familiar stories that are repeated so often that many of us begin to take them as the primary model for narrativity, if not unconsciously as a kind of truth. The result, as Brian Kiteley points out in 3 A.M. Epiphany (one of the only other alternative textbooks about innovative writing around, by the way, and a tremendous repository of exercises), is merely competent texts. Architectures problematizes that gesture by outlining what conventional narrativity looks like, urging writers to think about its ideology of form as well as content, and invites them to imagine writing, not as a set of relatively stable conventions, but, rather, as a possibility space where everything can and should be thought, tried, challenged. It thereby rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer—which is to say Architectures poses complications to the act of writing rather than solutions. 3) One of the most notable things about the book is the use of interviews. This is also one of the reasons that I think the book works so well for a variety of audiences—that anyone with even a passing interest in the state and future of literature will have an interest in your conversation with people like Ben Marcus, Samuel Delany, and Lydia Davis. I was hoping you could just talk a little about how you chose these subjects to interview, how you edited the interview material, and which answers you received struck you the most. Experimentalism , like realism , wants to appear in the plural. The idea of gathering more than forty interviews (with the help of my awesome collaborator, Trevor Dodge, himself a fine innovative author) represents an attempt to suggest that: the wide, rich, exciting opportunities inherent in the term. There are interviews with younger writers, elder statesmen in the field, publishers, editors, hypermedia artists, comic book makers, and so on: Joe Wenderoth, Carole Maso, Scott McCloud, Nick Montfort, Kathy Acker, et al. Trevor and I decided to do flash interviews: short, concentrated Q&As, each focusing on a particular troubling of writing. We only lightly edited the results to match the manuscript’s overall style, and every interview arrived as a surprise housing several unexpected insights. Three brief examples: Michael Mejia, when asked about what he dreads when setting about writing: “Dread is an interesting word here. I associate it less with loathing or aversion, I suppose, than with a kind of productive fear. Do I dread a project’s failure? Sure, who doesn’t? Who wants to waste time on something that comes to nothing, or is unreadable? But then, what do these terms mean, and who or what defines a work as a ‘failure,’ as ‘waste,’ as ‘unreadable’? Should a work actually try to interrogate and exceed these conceptual limitations? My tendency is to write into dread in order to reveal to myself, as much as to any reader that may come after, the varied complacencies that make other, mostly more conventional writings, readable. It’s at the frontier between readability (security) and unreadability (terror) that I want to live creatively.” Carole Maso, when asked what she’d like a sentence to accomplish: “I think a sentence can if allowed carry emotional and intellectual states as they flee, as they come and go, an escaping essence difficult to hold in other ways. In this way I think the sentence can work as a phrase of music does, sounding something large and elusive in us. Alternatively it can provide sometimes a stability, an essence, a moment of being. Unlike music the sentence also of course carries language with all its potential for meaning making and memory traces and association with it as well. I probably love the accretion of sentences most—those patterns, that shimmer, that resonance.” Shelley Jackson, when asked what is innovative about the innovative: “The purpose of the innovative is, I think, to wake us up. We are not quite alive, most of the time; we occupy a sort of cartoon version of our lives, its lines made smooth by repetition. Writing can open the seams in that world, reintroduce us to the real lives that we have forgotten. Maybe all good writing is innovative in some sense, in that it shows or tells or makes you feel something you never felt before—something for which you have no cartoon ready.” 4) You talk a little about N. Katherine Hayles’s concept of Media Specific Analysis and propose the supplemental notion of Medium Specific Generation—basically taking Hayles and applying her thought from the perspective of the writer. I’ve been trying to develop somewhat related theoretical frameworks, so I was really excited to come upon this section of the book. I’m wondering if you can talk a little more about this idea and, in general, about the potentials that you see as being opened up by writers engaging with and exploiting different media as literary platforms? “Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print,” Hayles urges in her (at least for me) transformative 2004 essay, “Print is Flat, Code is Deep,” “literary analysis should awaken to the importance of media-specific analysis, a mode of critical attention which recognizes that all texts are instantiated and that the nature of the medium in which they are instantiated matters.” She goes on to argue critics should learn to become more attuned to the materiality of the medium under investigation—which is to say a story isn’t a story isn’t a story. Rather, the “same” story remediated through film is intrinsically different from that story remediated through conventionally printed books is intrinsically different from that story remediated through hypermedia. “Materiality,” Hayles goes on, “is reconceptualized as the interplay between a text’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategies, a move that entwines instantiation and signification at the outset.” My point in Architectures is simply to emphasize Media Specific Generation: the idea that when writing you should be cognizant, not only of the thematics of the text you are working on, and, as it were, the internal components of its narrativity (character, language, plot, etc.), but also of the material embodiment those components take, and, perhaps more important, the material embodiment those components can take. The idea that the way texts matter matters isn’t something usually addressed in any significant way in creative-writing classrooms and textbooks. It may almost go without saying such experimentation with typography, layout, and white space has a long tradition—certainly one that tracks back at least as far as Guillaume Apollinaire’s early twentieth-century Calligrammes , Laurence Sterne’s textually ribald eighteenth-century Tristram Shandy , although one could arguably plot a hypothetical trajectory that reaches to ancient Greek romances like Achilles Tatius’ second-century Leucippe and Clitophon . Experiments into atomic materiality and digital immateriality bracket the definition of “book” at the same time they highlight Michael Martone’s prediction of its present future as increasingly viral, collaborative, and ephemeral. Or, as Matthew Battles points out: the future of the “book” has already arrived, and it is “ethereal and networked” rather than “an immutable brick.”While conventional writing and reading practices are conceptualized as private, individual, relatively fixed experiences, many of the new forms indicate that writing and reading—from production through dissemination—are rapidly becoming public, collective, incrementally unfixed experiences. That strikes me as an astonishing set of opportunities for a writer to investigate. 5) Another concept you elaborate in AoP is that of limit texts, basically texts that, once you read them, change what you imagine as the shape/horizon/potential of literature. You provide a fantastic reading list of limit texts at the end of AoP. I was hoping you could talk about a few of them in terms of how they specifically operate as limit texts for you—how they expand your understanding of what literature could be or do. Karl Jaspers coined the word Grenzsituationen (border/limit situations) to describe existential moments accompanied by anxiety in which the human mind is forced to confront the restrictions of its existing forms—moments that make us abandon, fleetingly, the securities of our limitedness and enter new realms of self-consciousness. Death, for example. Limit texts are a variety of disturbance that carries various elements of narrativity to their brink so the reader can never quite imagine them in the same terms again. Once you’ve taken one down from the shelf, you’ll never be able to put it back up again. They won’t leave you alone. They will continue to work on your imagination long after you’ve read them. Simply by being in the world, they ask us to embrace difficulty, freedom, radical skepticism. One of the most important for me is Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable . Instead of establishing conventional setting and building traditional character, from its first words it unsettles both: “Where now? Who now? When now?” That first trio of question marks broadcasts the thematics of the writing (“novel” may be too strong a word) that will follow: it is all about a voice (or, perhaps, voices, about the grammatical mistake of the first-person pronoun), a consciousness (maybe, again, too strong a word), often genderless, removed from place and chronology and socioeconomic reality, hovering in a state of perpetual aporia. All it knows is what it doesn’t know, and its not-knowing is blackly, sardonically comic. The Unnamable is the embodiment of an unreliable narrator—a subject position that can’t trust itself, let alone be trusted by a reader. It contradicts, takes back, digresses, undoes what it just did, forgets, lies, hallucinates gloriously. The language is abstract, disembodied, devoid of sensory data, grayish rather than painterly in texture. Without knowing this passage is from a novel, a reader might well conclude s/he were reading a patch of (anti-)Cartesian philosophy. It might be helpful to conceive of what Beckett is doing as post-genre writing, then, or perhaps what Raymond Federman referred to as critifiction—a mode that blurs conventional distinctions between theory and narrative. In completely different register, and much more recently, Anne Carson’s Nox blew me away. It takes the form of an elegy for her older brother, whom she didn’t know well and who died unexpectedly while on the run from the law in Europe. The thing itself arrives in a box that simulates a thick book, as well as the brother’s textual coffin. Open it, and inside you discover, not a codex, but an accordioned series of “pages” that folds out into an arrangement that suggests an ancient scroll (Carson is, perhaps illuminatingly, a professor of classics) made up of shards of her brother’s letters, old photographs, tickets, Carson’s observations, Catullus’ poem 101 (the one addressed to the Roman poet’s dead brother, a doubling of Carson’s situation), and extensive dictionary entries on all the words that compose that poem. The aggregate produces a collage about the impossibilities of aggregates, the impossibilities of understanding fully, of capturing absences in language. At times Nox feels less an example of what most readers consider a book than something closer to a three-dimensional work of assemblage art. It’s a beautiful mechanism for contemplating Media Specific Analysis, for urging us all to be more extreme. 6) Finally, I want to talk a little about pedagogy and institutions. I’m less interested in questions like “Are MFA programs good for writers?” than in questions about how your role as teacher informs your understanding of literature and your writing practice. I’m also very curious about your take on how commercially marginal literary art is largely patronized by large state institutions and at the same time often imagines itself as a critical and even possibly revolutionary practice. How have your own positions within universities and university-affiliated organizations shaped your thinking about them and about innovative literature? I can imagine in many ways it might make you even more critical. And (I know, another ‘and’...) how does AoP (especially given its relation to Rebel Yell , your previous text on creative writing) reflect your personal history and experience as a teacher and member of communities that are largely defined by institutions? In the classroom, I try to generate the pedagogical field I would have liked to have inhabited as a student, but didn’t. Roland Barthes has a lovely line about this: “We need to substitute for the magisterial [classroom] space of the past (the word delivered by the master from the pulpit above with the audience below, the flock, the sheep, the herd)—a less upright, less Euclidean space where no one, neither teacher nor students, would ever be in his final place.” Easier said than done, of course, but an important life project for all who think of themselves as educators. My own classroom, my own writing, and Architectures of Possibility itself attempt to create the sort of possibility space where, as I mentioned at the outset of our interview, everything should be thought, tried, challenged; where everything rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer. I’m not sure I could write what I’m writing now without the conversations I have almost daily with my students, the conversations they have with each other, the conversations we all have with the texts we study. Especially in light of the paradigm shift over the last, say, quarter century from academia as intellectual exploration to academia as McDonaldized trade school, the irony isn’t lost on me concerning the discrepancy between the safe harbor innovative authors find there and the cultural critiques those authors launch through their writing and pedagogical work. In 2001, I quit my full professorship at one institution precisely because of my disappointment over what had happened to the learning environment there. I had no intentions of reentering the field. In 2007, however, the University of Utah approached me, and I found myself in an environment much more hospitable to the sort of work I want to do—teaching experimental narrative theory and practice. It isn’t by any means a simple irony. One could easily argue innovative writing and pedagogy represents the trace of the paradigm Barthes suggests, and that trace is tremendously productive in all kinds of ways. Innovative writing has never and will never change the world in any large, macrocosmic way. But we’ve all had our lives changed, one by one, by an encounter with a difficult, rich, resonant piece of prose, poetry, music, art, you name it. We’ve all had our lives changed at the ahistorical, microcosmic moment by a class we’ve taken, a teacher we’ve studied with, to such an extent that we became, quite literally, different people. I just came across a stunning set of sentences from Derrida on the topic: “What is education? The death of the parents.” That’s what we’re all up to in the innovative, be it in written texts or the texts we call our classrooms or the texts we call our politics: trying to disrupt what both can and can’t be disrupted, trying to undo what both can and can’t be undone, continuously. (shrink)

These interviews with Hélène Cixous offer invaluable insight into her philosophy and criticism. Culled from newspapers, journals, and books, _White Ink_ collects the best of these conversations, which address the major concerns of Cixous's critical work and features two dialogues with twentieth-century intellectuals Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. The interviews in _White Ink_ span more than three decades and include a new conversation with Susan Sellers, the book's editor and a leading Cixous scholar and translator. Cixous discusses her work and (...) writing process. She shares her views on literature, feminism, theater, autobiography, philosophy, politics, aesthetics, religion, ethics, and human relations, and she reflects on her roles as poet, playwright, professor, woman, Jew, and, her most famous, "French feminist theorist." Sellers organizes _White Ink_ in such a way that readers can grasp the development of Cixous's commentary on a series of vital questions. Taken together, the revealing performances in _White Ink_ provide an excellent introduction this thinker's brave and vital work—each one an event in language and thought that epitomizes Cixous's intellectual and poetic force. (shrink)

Arlie Russell Hochschild is Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include: The Managed Heart, The Second Shift, The Time Bind and The Commercialization of Intimate Life. In her work, Hochschild explores the many ways we manage our emotions in personal life and perform emotional labor in the workplace. Her most recent work explores the growing political divide in America, and the need for each side to climb an ‘empathy wall’ to begin dialogue with those (...) on the other side. She reports on five years of field-work among Tea Party enthusiasts in Louisiana in her latest book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. In this interview, she reflects on the phenomenon of critique within the framework of emotional labor, which leads to discussions on neoliberalism and the ideal worker in contemporary working life. (shrink)

Black beauty shame emerges within the Black/white binary because of the beauty values sedimented in our structure of feeling since African enslavement. This article does not start from white beauty as the ideal, but focuses on the performativity of Black beauty shame as it transforms or intensifies the meanings of parts of the body in Jamaica and its UK diaspora. Using extracts from interviews with UK Jamaican heritage women, the discussion illustrates how Black beauty shame produces such intensification. First, where (...) white beauty is iconic and reproduces the Black other as ‘ugly’, and second, where the Black ‘mixed race’ body is constructed as ‘other’ because of Black Nationalist discourses on beauty. The women’s critique of the shaming event shows that shame is undone through dis-identification as speakers draw on alternative beauty discourses to produce new beauty subjectivities. Dis-identification illustrates the transformational potential of shame as new Black beauty positionings emerge within the diaspora, drawing on beauty ideologies and models from Jamaica and thus destabilising the Black/white binary. (shrink)

In its most radical version, Neurophenomenology asks researchers to suspend the quest of an objective solution to the problem of the origin of subjectivity, and clarify instead how objectification can be obtained out of the coordination of subjective experiences. It therefore invites researchers to develop their inquiry about subjective experience with the same determination as their objective inquiry. However, accessing lived experience raises the question of the investigation method, and of the reliability of its results. Here, we present an accurate (...) method of exploration of lived experience: the elicitation (or microphenomenological) interview. In the course of this interview, one first triggers a form of “phenomenological reduction”, then assists the subject in retrieving or “evoking” past experiences, and finally helps the subject to perform acts of attention about this evoked experience, to describe it faithfully. It is shown that this method addresses a set of traditional objections against introspection. (shrink)

Helene Cixous is widely regarded as one of the world's most influential feminist writers and thinkers. "White Ink" brings together her most revealing interviews, available in English for the first time. Spanning over four decades and including a new interview with the editor Susan Sellers, this collection presents a brilliant, running commentary on the subjects at the heart of Cixous' writing. Here, Cixous discusses her books and her creative process, her views on and insights into literature, philosophy, theatre, politics, (...) aesthetics, faith and ethics, human relations and the state of the world.As she responds to interviewers' questions, Cixous is prompted to reflect on her roles and activities as poet, playwright, feminist theorist, professor of literature, philosopher, woman, Jew. Each interview is a remarkable performance, an event in language and thought where Cixous' celebrated intellectual and poetic force can be witnessed 'in action'. The accessibility of the interview format provides an excellent starting-point for readers new to Cixous, while those already familiar with her work will find unexpected insights and fresh elucidations of her thought. (shrink)

Helene Cixous is widely regarded as one of the world's most influential feminist writers and thinkers. "White Ink" brings together her most revealing interviews, available in English for the first time. Spanning over four decades and including a new interview with the editor Susan Sellers, this collection presents a brilliant, running commentary on the subjects at the heart of Cixous' writing.Here, Cixous discusses her books and her creative process, her views on and insights into literature, philosophy, theatre, politics, aesthetics, (...) faith and ethics, human relations and the state of the world. As she responds to interviewers' questions, Cixous is prompted to reflect on her roles and activities as poet, playwright, feminist theorist, professor of literature, philosopher, woman, Jew. Each interview is a remarkable performance, an event in language and thought where Cixous' celebrated intellectual and poetic force can be witnessed 'in action'. The accessibility of the interview format provides an excellent starting-point for readers new to Cixous, while those already familiar with her work will find unexpected insights and fresh elucidations of her thought. (shrink)

This paper explores the conduct of performance appraisals of nurses in a New Zealand hospital, and how fairness is perceived in such appraisals. In the health sector, performance appraisals of medical staff play a key role in implementing clinical governance, which, in turn, is critical to containing health care costs and ensuring quality patient care. Effective appraisals depend on employees perceiving their own appraisals to be fair both in terms of procedure and interaction with their respective appraiser. We (...) examine qualitative data from interviews and focus groups, involving 22 nurses in a single department, to determine whether perceived injustices impact on the effective implementation of the appraisal system. Our results suggest that particular issues had been causing some sense of injustice, and most of these were procedural. Potential solutions focus on greater formalisation of the performance appraisal process, and more training for appraisers and appraisees. (shrink)

I started out as a student of physics, hard-working, interested, but alas, not ‘in love’ with my subject. Then logic struck, and having become interested in this subject for various reasons – including the fascinating personality of my first teacher –, I switched after my candidate’s program, to take two master’s degrees, in mathematics and in philosophy. The beauty of mathematics was clear to me at once, with the amazing power, surprising twists, and indeed the music, of abstract arguments. As (...) our professor of Analysis wrote at the time in our study guide “Mathematics is about the delight in the purity of trains of thought”, and oldfashioned though this phrasing sounded in the revolutionary 1960s, it did resonate with me. Then I had the privilege of being taught set-theoretic topology by a group of brilliant students around De Groot, our leading expert around the time, who worked with Moore’s method of discovering a subject for oneself. Topology unfolded from a few definitions and examples to real theorems that we had to prove ourselves – and the take-home exam took sleepless nights, as it included proving some results from scratch which came from a recent dissertation (as it turned out later). Only at the very end did De Groot appear, to give one lecture on Tychonoff’s Theorem where an application was made of the Axiom of Choice, a sacral act only to be performed by tenured full professors. (shrink)

The use of performance feedback in the workplace has gained popularity over the years, yet school heads have been challenged in providing it to teachers. In the initial interview, they shared that evaluation results can impact teachers’ motivation, and that feedback should be done carefully. However, they failed to clearly articulate a specific mechanism that had been applied in this vital role. Also, no studies have provided clear detail on the feedback mechanism used by school heads in the (...) past. For this reason, a study explored the feedback mechanisms employed by school heads in conveying the performance evaluation results to teachers. This study employed a narrative inquiry, and interviews were conducted with five school heads and five teachers who were chosen purposively for this research. Responses were recorded using a voice recorder. These responses were transcribed and analyzed using thematic narrative analysis. Based on transcripts, the study identified six emergent themes, such as conversational (one-on-one), relational, reflective, technical, reinforcing, and properly situated mechanisms in conveying performance evaluation results to teachers. Thus, a new feedback mechanism framework was developed. (shrink)

Interviewing as part of broadcast news includes a wide range of practices that go beyond calling public figures to account in ways that have received so much attention and analysis in the research literature. This article examines a major strand of news interviewing which it identifies as ‘experiential’ and argues, on the basis of close discourse analysis of interviews drawn from coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2005 London bombings, that the focus on personal experience and emotion in (...) them is managed in ways quite distinct from accountability interviewing. Indeed, the apparently formulaic quality of the verbal performance in these interviews gives shape to experience in a fashion close to ritual but demands a quite different kind of alignment from the audience than that implicated by accountability interviewing. (shrink)

The Philippine government has been relentless in its counterinsurgency campaigns. From the colonial wars that vilified as insurgents and bandits the honored heroes of today, up to the anti-communist and anti-secessionist civil and military efforts of the postcolonial regimes, these campaigns have not only rolled out large state resources but also cost lives of innocent civilians. Patterned after the United States (US) of America’s principle of low-intensity conflict aimed at countering Marxist and anti-imperialist movements (Reed 1986), counterinsurgency campaigns have unleashed (...) a warfare that indiscriminately target its supposed opponents, including unarmed activists. In 2007, the United Nations Special Rapporteur Philip Alston examined the horrible political situation of the Philippines – characterized by political killings, abductions, and tortures – and identified how state elements, under the blanket protection of waging a counterinsurgency campaign, were responsible for the political repressions then (Sales 2009). Today, under the murderous Duterte regime, the counterinsurgency campaign has reached an unprecedented level of ferocity as it is waged through a militarist whole-ofnation approach composed by multi-level government and multi-agency responses. -/- Being greatly influenced by the US, counterinsurgency campaigns in the Philippines follow the paranoiac and hysterical communist witch-hunt of McCarthyism (Hutchins-Viroux 2008). The hysteria’s contemporary and local expression is the phenomenon called red- or terror-tagging.1 Terror-tagging is the systematic process of maliciously naming or identifying an individual or group as a communist and/or terrorist by its association with a supposed communist and/or terrorist group. Being a systematic process, it is initiated and sustained by state elements with the view of maligning or defaming political activists. Terror-tagging is aimed against activists, dissenters, and even the political opposition. The social activist Rhoda Dalang (2014) has noted how terror-tagging has been deployed by the Philippine state in its counterinsurgency efforts, from the Marcos up to the then Aquino regime. And until the previous Duterte regime, yet with increased intensity and fatality, terror-tagging continued to defame and liquidate activists. As terror-tagging has not received enough academic attention, this chapter aims to fill this gap by providing a preliminary analysis of it. The chapter will be doing a critical discourse analysis. It will take off from a revealing study done by Don Kevin Hapal and Raisa Serafica of Rappler, a media outlet in the Philippines. Through a separate discourse analysis of Facebook posts of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTFELCAC),2 the chapter will also identify aspects of terror-tagging. The discussion will further be theorized using the Marxist analysis of the State and informed by interviews of Atty. Maria Sol Taule and Cristina Palabay. They are both human rights workers who have worked with terror-tagged activists and are themselves subjected to terror-tagging. (shrink)

In this paper we set out to explore the enactments of risk by clinicians involved in the development of stem cell therapy for liver disease. In the process, we contribute to a performative re-thinking of how ‘risk’ can be analytically treated in relation to health. The bulk of the paper, drawing on interview data, is concerned with how clinicians’ accounts about the risks entailed in their research-oriented work performatively ‘make’ clinicians themselves, but also various other ‘constituencies’ – notably, publics (...) and regulatory actors, and also such diverse ‘entities’ as scientific rigour and ethics. We trace the ways in which they enact the complexities of taking risks in the context of public demands, regulatory constraints, and resource limitation and explore how clinicians tend to represent themselves as caught between the ‘rock of courage’ and the ‘hard place of caution’. (shrink)

In 2011, Jiangsu Province set up the guidance fund for sports industry. In 2016, Jiangsu Provincial Finance Department jointly issued the document with Jiangsu Provincial Sports Bureau, which was changed to “Jiangsu Special Fund for Sports Industry Development.” By 2019, Jiangsu Province has funded 1,009 sports industry development projects with a total investment of 796.6 million yuan. The effect of the investment has attracted extensive attention from the government, society, and enterprises. Entrusted by Jiangsu Sports Industry Guidance Center, this research (...) team spent one year on the performance research of 1,009 projects supported by special funds for the development of sports industry, from the construction of evaluation index system to the design, issuance, collection, and processing of questionnaires. Using the methods of literature, questionnaire, expert interview, and mathematical statistics, this paper takes the performance management of the special funds for the development of sports industry in Jiangsu Province as the research object, based on the investigation and analysis of the current situation of the special funds for the development of sports industry in Jiangsu Province. It analyzes the special funds from four aspects: the rate of funds in place, the ratio of funds pulled, the completion rate of project implementation, and the rate of fund prerecovery. Then, this paper expounds the current situation, effectiveness, and problems of the performance management of the special funds for the development of sports industry and puts forward some countermeasures and suggestions for improvement. (shrink)

Social Theory, Performativity and Professional Power—A Critical Analysis of Helping Professions in England Drawing from interviews and ethnographic research, evidence is provided to suggest a sense of "anxiety" and "regret" amongst state social workers and case managers working on the "front-line" within local authority social service departments. There have been a number of theoretical approaches that have attempted to ground the concept of "power" to understand organizational practice though Foucauldian insights have been most captivating in illuminating power relations and subject (...) positioning. In order to theoretically interrogate the relationship between social theory and professional power, we draw from the neo-Foucauldian work of American Social Philosopher Judith Butler—especially regarding Butler's (1990, 1993 and 1998) powerful work on "performativity" and its relationship to social work. We also attempt to examine the "distances" between the social work role and social workers narratives through an examination of notions of "anxiety" and "regret" in the face of the professionalisation of state social work. (shrink)

This paper explores the circumstances that influence whether managers in the public services manipulate the measurement information that is used to assess performance; and if they do, what level of deception they might use. The realistic evaluation approach is adopted. A Delphi survey and the collection of critical incidents through interviews are used to identify possible configurations of contexts–mechanisms–outcomes that provide possible explanations of information manipulation. A number of these configurations are discussed. In a later stage of the project (...) these configurations will be further tested through another Delphi survey, with the intention of developing proposals for improved governance of performance measurement systems in the public services. (shrink)

How can performance transform places of urban renewal and regeneration? What does performance contribute to the creation of community? These are some of the questions addressed in this study of the relationship of performance to urban space. Marrying theory with a series of international case studies of performance practice and interviews with practitioners, this interdisciplinary study examines how space is performatively produced to create a sense of 'placeness'. Case studies are drawn from Canada, Brazil, the Czech (...) Republic, the UK and Spain. (shrink)

Students often face challenges while learning computer programming because programming languages’ logic and visual presentations differ from human thought processes. If the course content does not closely match learners’ skill level, the learner cannot follow the learning process, resulting in frustration, low learning motivation, or abandonment. This research proposes a web programming learning recommendation system to provide students with personalized guidance and step-by-step learning planning. The system contains front-end and back-end web development instructions. It can create personalized learning paths to (...) help learners achieve a sense of accomplishment. The system can help learners build self-confidence and improve learning effectiveness. In study 1, the recommendation system was developed based on the personal data and feedback of 41 professional web design engineers. The system uses C4.5 decision tree methods to develop a programming learning recommendation model to provide appropriate learning recommendations and establish personalized learning paths. The test group included 13 beginner programmers. After 4 weeks’ programming instructions in front-end and back-end web development, the learners were interviewed to understand their preferences and learning effectiveness. The results show that the effectiveness of the recommendation system is acceptable. In study 2, online real-time feedback and adaptive instruction platform is developed, which is different from the past adaptive curriculums mainly using the Internet platform and only the submitted assignments to determine the newly recommended learning process for students. The study found that the students’ learning performance in the adaptive instruction group is better than those in the fixed instruction group. (shrink)

Data access committees (DAC) gatekeep access to secured genomic and related health datasets yet are challenged to keep pace with the rising volume and complexity of data generation. Automated decision support (ADS) systems have been shown to support consistency, compliance, and coordination of data access review decisions. However, we lack understanding of how DAC members perceive the value add of ADS, if any, on the quality and effectiveness of their reviews. In this qualitative study, we report findings from 13 semi-structured (...) interviews with DAC members from around the world to identify relevant barriers and facilitators to implementing ADS for genomic data access management. Participants generally supported pilot studies that test ADS performance, for example in cataloging data types, verifying user credentials and tagging datasets for use terms. Concerns related to over-automation, lack of human oversight, low prioritization, and misalignment with institutional missions tempered enthusiasm for ADS among the DAC members we engaged. Tensions for change in institutional settings within which DACs operated was a powerful motivator for why DAC members considered the implementation of ADS into their access workflows, as well as perceptions of the relative advantage of ADS over the status quo. Future research is needed to build the evidence base around the comparative effectiveness and decisional outcomes of institutions that do/not use ADS into their workflows. (shrink)

This paper explores the circumstances that influence whether managers in the public services manipulate the measurement information that is used to assess performance; and if they do, what level of deception they might use. The realistic evaluation approach is adopted. A Delphi survey and the collection of critical incidents through interviews are used to identify possible configurations of contexts–mechanisms–outcomes that provide possible explanations of information manipulation. A number of these configurations are discussed. In a later stage of the project (...) these configurations will be further tested through another Delphi survey, with the intention of developing proposals for improved governance of performance measurement systems in the public services. (shrink)

Ritual circumcision of infant boys is controversial in Norway, as in many other countries. The procedure became a part of Norwegian public health services in 2015. A new law opened for conscientious objection to the procedure. We have studied physicians’ refusals to perform ritual circumcision as an issue of professional ethics. Qualitative interview study with 10 urologists who refused to perform ritual circumcision from six Norwegian public hospitals. Interviews were recorded and transcribed, then analysed with systematic text condensation, a (...) qualitative analysis framework. The physicians are unanimous in grounding their opposition to the procedure in professional standards and norms, based on fundamental tenets of professional ethics. While there is homogeneity in the group when it comes to this reasoning, there are significant variations as to how deeply the matter touches the urologists on a personal level. About half of them connect their stance to their personal integrity, and state that performing the procedure would go against their conscience and lead to pangs of conscience. It is argued that professional moral norms sometimes might become more or less ‘integrated’ in the professional’s core moral values and moral identity. If this is the case, then the distinction between conscience-based and professional refusals to certain healthcare services cannot be drawn as sharply as it has been. (shrink)

In recent years the possibility of using humanoid robots to perform interviews with children has been explored in a number of studies. This paper details a study in which a potential real-world user trialled a Robot-Mediated Interviewing system with children to establish if this approach could realistically be used in a real-world context. In this study a senior educational psychologist used the humanoid robot Kaspar to interview ten primary school children about a video they had watched prior to the (...) interview. We conducted a pre and post interview with the educational psychologist before and after using the system to establish how the system worked for him and the perceived potential for real-world applications. The educational psychologist successfully used the system to interview the children and believed that principally using a small humanoid robot to interview children could be useful in a real-world setting provided the system was developed further. (shrink)

In recent years the possibility of using humanoid robots to perform interviews with children has been explored in a number of studies. This paper details a study in which a potential real-world user trialled a Robot-Mediated Interviewing system with children to establish if this approach could realistically be used in a real-world context. In this study a senior educational psychologist used the humanoid robot Kaspar to interview ten primary school children about a video they had watched prior to the (...) interview. We conducted a pre and post interview with the educational psychologist before and after using the system to establish how the system worked for him and the perceived potential for real-world applications. The educational psychologist successfully used the system to interview the children and believed that principally using a small humanoid robot to interview children could be useful in a real-world setting provided the system was developed further. (shrink)

When Husserl discussed the phenomenology of willing, he concluded that the sole theoretical foundation of the intentionality of consciousness is insufficient to account for voluntary acts as they do not primarily represent their content as given entities, but instead create the willed during their performance. Nonetheless, Husserl did not suspend the theoretical foundation of intentionality, meaning that the theoretical concept of objectual intentionality juxtaposes a practical concept of performative intentionality. Recent results from the field of robot-assisted gait rehabilitation provided (...) experimental findings that may clarify this relationship, to the effect that the foundational structure of consciousness builds upon a heterarchical model of objectual and performative intentionality. A combination of phenomenological interview results, neural motor control, the functional design of the robot, and clinical data qualifies gait initiation as a non-objectifying act that creates its intentional object (i.e., the willed movement). In sum, the experimental findings support Husserl’s proposal of a genuine practical or performative intentionality that points to a heterarchical understanding of the relationship between representational and performative foundations of action consciousness. (shrink)

This article presents an overview of the transition that has taken place in Arab media over the course of time. It focuses more specifically on the case of Saudi Arabia to show how television interviewers there have performed their roles throughout three different phases. The first phase covers the period when the media was still controlled by Arab governments, the second focuses on the advent of satellite and the third focuses on the aftermath of the recent series of uprisings which (...) has become known as the Arab Spring. An examination of these three phases, which includes a discussion of some illustrative examples, will show how television interviewers have shifted from initially taking a very cautious and overtly deferential approach with interviewees, officials and public figures to adopting a more aggressive approach in the third phase. (shrink)

In a interview concerning the Internet and cyberculture, communications professor Nobert Bolz was asked how he prepares his children for a world in which the authority of experts is in competition with emerging lay communities of knowledge production, such as Wikipedia. Bolz replied: “I try to constantly hammer in that they should read books. I just always say, read books, otherwise you'll belong to the losers. This is the only objective for educating my own children that I've given myself—with (...) only modest success.” With regard to his students, however, Bolz added: “On the other hand, when I see my own…. (shrink)

Research regarding the drivers of acceptance of clinical decision support systems by physicians is still rather limited. The literature that does exist, however, tends to focus on problems regarding the user-friendliness of CDSS. We have performed a thematic analysis of 24 interviews with physicians concerning specific clinical case vignettes, in order to explore their underlying opinions and attitudes regarding the introduction of CDSS in clinical practice, to allow a more in-depth analysis of factors underlying acceptance of CDSS. We identified three (...) general themes from the results. First, ‘the perceived role of the AI’, including items referring to the tasks that may properly be assigned to the CDSS according to the respondents. Second, ‘the perceived role of the physician’, referring to the aspects of clinical practice that were seen as being fundamentally ‘human’ or non-automatable. Third, ‘concerns regarding AI’, including items referring to more general issues that were raised by the respondents regarding the introduction of CDSS in general and/or in clinical medicine in particular. Apart from the overall concerns expressed by the respondents regarding user-friendliness, we will explain how our results indicate that our respondents were primarily occupied by distinguishing between parts of their job that should be automated and aspects that should be kept in human hands. We refer to this distinction as ‘the division of clinical labor.’ This division is not based on knowledge regarding AI or medicine, but rather on which parts of a physician’s job were seen by the respondents as being central to who they are as physicians and as human beings. Often the respondents’ view that certain core parts of their job ought to be shielded from automation was closely linked to claims concerning the uniqueness of medicine as a domain. Finally, although almost all respondents claimed that they highly value their final responsibility, a closer investigation of this concept suggests that their view of ‘final responsibility’ was not that demanding after all. (shrink)

Despite the popularity of the employment interview in the employee selection literature and organizational talent selection process, few have examined the comments interviewers give after each interview. This study investigated the predictability of the match between interviewer post-interview notes and radar charts from job analysis on the candidate’s later career performance using text mining techniques and data from one of the largest internet-based technology companies in China. A large sample of 7,650 interview candidates who passed (...) the interviews and joined the company was obtained to show that the number of job-related capabilities interviewers mentioned in their notes was positively related to candidate’s job performance, the number of promotions, and negatively related to turnover. Moreover, the dimensions of the radar chart from job analysis covered in the interview moderated the predictability of interview post-interview notes. Our results indicated that a smaller number of radar chart dimensions by which interviewers assessed the candidates in the interview positively moderated candidates’ promotion for product development jobs, and negatively moderated turnover for technical jobs. The implications of these results for structured interview research in both theory and practice are discussed. (shrink)

Most investigations of musical performance anxiety have employed quantitative methodologies. Whereas such methodologies can provide useful insights into the measurable aspects of the experience in a larger group of participants, the complexity, subtlety and individuality of the emotional experience and the importance of the individual’s interpretation of it are often overlooked. This study employed a phenomenological approach to investigate the lived, subjective experience of performance anxiety, as described in professional musicians’ narratives. Semistructured interviews with four professional musicians (two (...) males, two females) specializing in Western classical and jazz music genres were conducted and analyzed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). The analysis revealed the presence of four overarching themes: (1) Intensity of performance anxiety experience, (2) perceived effects, (3) development of coping strategies and (4) achieving release from anxiety. Findings suggest that the lived experience of performance anxiety is multifaceted, characterized by a physical and a psychological dimension. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis is a useful research tool that can facilitate our understanding of the subjective experience of performance anxiety (how it is felt and understood at an individual level) and can thus be useful in the development of tailor-made intervention programs for musicians. (shrink)

Why do organizations conduct job interviews? The traditional view of interviewing holds that interviews are conducted, despite their steep costs, to predict a candidate’s future performance and fit. This view faces a twofold threat: the behavioral and algorithmic threats. Specifically, an overwhelming body of behavioral research suggests that we are bad at predicting performance and fit; furthermore, algorithms are already better than us at making these predictions in various domains. If the traditional view captures the whole story, then (...) interviews seem to be a costly, archaic human resources procedure sustained by managerial overconfidence. However, building on T. M. Scanlon’s work, we offer the value of choice theory of interviewing and argue that interviews can be vindicated once we recognize that they generate commonly overlooked kinds of noninstrumental value. On our view, interviews should thus not be entirely replaced by algorithms, however sophisticated algorithms ultimately become at predicting performance and fit. (shrink)

This paper explores the effects of performativity on the culture of a Scottish secondary school, Lochview High School. This is set against a backdrop of the Scottish education policy context which in recent years has been heavily focused on reducing the poverty-related attainment gap, namely through the Scottish Attainment Challenge (SAC). The analysis of the empirical data is supported by a cultural and ecological framework which emphasises the interwoven and complex nature of the school system. In particular, the paper provides (...) a critique of accountability and performative agendas which often run counter to other national agendas, such as the SAC. Through observations, staff interviews (teachers and senior management), and student interviews, task-based activities and group discussions, the data suggests performative and accountability measures are inextricably woven through the education system within which Lochview is situated. Despite this, Lochview provides a case study of a school which successfully navigates competing agendas. However, it is not without its struggles, but the school community often finds rewards and benefits in the positive school culture which develops as a result of responding to the local community’s needs. (shrink)