Becoming Horse–Capitalism and the Human Identity: An Analysis of Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You

The aim of the article is to dissect the phenomenon of capitalist labor in the US as depicted in Boots Riley’s film Sorry to Bother You (2018). The primary focus of the article is the film’s rendering of the creation of horse humans which the article reads as a metaphor for class relations in the modern society. First, the article analyzes the film’s plot in the context of the cultural assumptions and beliefs connected with the figure of the horse. Next, it draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming-animal” in order to unveil the revolutionary potential possibly latent in hybridization. Finally, after commenting on the ways in which capitalism weaponizes technological development, the article inscribes the notion of hybridization into the nature-culture dichotomy.

Tracing Cultural Values in Thai Students’ Dialogical Argumentation

Critical thinking and argumentation skills are crucial for developing responsible citizens and active participants in society. Indeed, reasoning and argumentation are known to be exercised differently in distinctive cultures. Historical, cultural and institutional contexts shape the way people in a society think, communicate and act. In this regard, the predominant Western assumption that reasoning should be detachable from emotion may not necessarily be accurate within the Thai cultural context. This paper highlights how different cultural assumptions were displayed in dialogical argumentation in English for fourteen, first-year undergraduates of the English Programme at a Thai university. The analysis of the argumentation data indicated that some participants presented their claims close to the end of their argumentative turns. In addition, personal experience was regularly employed as an argumentative strategy. Interestingly, there was also an absence of claims in some argumentative turns. The aforementioned findings and the themes derived from an analysis of the semi-structured interview data reflect some specific characteristics of Thai culture and values. They include indirectness and a desire for harmony, a subjectivity in argumentation and modesty.

In Defense of #blackAF's Celebration of Mediocrity

This article explores how television and film writer-producer Kenya Barris’ Netflix series #blackAF disturbs and seemingly upends Black millennial woke cultural assumptions about the good life. This, I contend - not discounting the valid classist and colourist critiques of the show - is the animus for Black millennial discontent with #blackAF. Specifically, I reveal the hashtags #blackexcellence and #supporteverythingblack to be ideological blankets covering the unfortunate reality of everyday Black life. These hashtags, which do the ideological work of covering over reality, are made unstable and incoherent by #blackAF’s apotheosizing of mediocrity as a grand cultural accomplishment. In one fell swoop #blackAF manages to give the death knell to Cosbyian respectability politics, which have hitherto been operating in the guise of the hashtag #blackexcellence.

Agency perspective in Islamic political treatises: implications for contemporary management research

PurposeClassical assumptions of agency theory (AT) fall short of providing satisfactory answers to modern management and organizational knowledge (MOK) problems, and there is a need for extending the scope of the field. This article aims to compare modern AT assumptions with the agency perspective of Islamic historical political treatises (namely, siyasetnamas) and point out how AT can be furthered.Design/methodology/approachThis article applies content analysis method to find out agency perspectives in Islamic political treatises and then compare them with those of the basic AT assumptions to find out similarities and differences between them in explaining agency problems.FindingsThe agency perspective in siyasetnamas are based on the following assumptions which could contribute to the development of AT with their emphasis on (1) responsibilities beyond contracts, (2) entrustment rather than ownership, (3) shared societal responsibility rather than conflicting individual interests, (4) importance of self-control for both principals and agents and (5) trust discourse which emphasizes inner virtues rather than control discourse.Originality/valueAgency perspectives cannot be considered independent of cultural imprints. By introducing siyasetnamas' agency perspective, this article makes an effort to suggest implications for how to further modern MOK based overwhelmingly on individualistic cultural assumptions to rediscuss agency problems from the viewpoint of specifically the emerging markets in which collectivist culture plays an important role in social and economic life. In this respect, siyasetnamas' agency perspective based on the notion of entrustment seems, arguably, to be a better fit to the contextual realities and managerial practices of emerging markets.

Tracing Cultural Values in Thai Students’ Dialogical Argumentation

Critical thinking and argumentation skills are crucial for developing responsible citizens and active participants in society. Indeed, reasoning and argumentation are known to be exercised differently in distinctive cultures. Historical, cultural and institutional contexts shape the way people in a society think, communicate and act. In this regard, the predominant Western assumption that reasoning should be detachable from emotion may not necessarily be accurate within the Thai cultural context. This paper highlights how different cultural assumptions were displayed in dialogical argumentation in English for fourteen, first-year undergraduates of the English Programme at a Thai university. The analysis of the argumentation data indicated that some participants presented their claims close to the end of their argumentative turns. In addition, personal experience was regularly employed as an argumentative strategy. Interestingly, there was also an absence of claims in some argumentative turns. The aforementioned findings and the themes derived from an analysis of the semi-structured interview data reflect some specific characteristics of Thai culture and values. They include indirectness and a desire for harmony, a subjectivity in argumentation and modesty.

On the Construction of Indigenous Chinese Communication Theories: An Analysis of the Cultural Roots

This study aims to look into the cultural roots in the active construction of indigenous Chinese communication theories. Theoretically guided by the paradigmatic cultural assumptions between China and the West and the Chinese cultural discourse system and research, and via qualitative content analysis, this study has found: First, there are three general categories of indigenous Chinese communication theories: (a) tapping the essence of the traditional Chinese culture embedded in terms, concepts and events, (b) visualizing and modeling the Chinese cultural factors like wind, grass, and water, and (c) integrating the advantages of Chinese and Western cultures, with each category illustrated by three representative samples. Second, the three categories are the three adopted approaches to fulfilling the three goals of the Chinese cultural discourse system and three missions of the Chinese cultural discourse research. The findings can bring about complimentary and mutual benefits to the communication studies within China and beyond.

The Relationship between Practitioners and Caregivers during a Treatment of Palliative Care: A Grounded Theory of a Challenging Collaborative Process

The possibility of coming to a “good death” is a challenging issue that crosses ethical and religious beliefs, cultural assumptions, as well as medical expertise. The provision of palliative care for relieving patients’ pain is a practice that reshapes the path to the event of death and gives form to a particular context of awareness, recalling the notion proposed by Glaser and Strauss. This decision redesigns the relationships between patients, practitioners and caregivers and introduces a new pattern of collaboration between them. Our study focuses on the implications of the collaboration between practitioners and caregivers, starting from the assumption that the latter may provide support to their loved ones and to the practitioners, but need to be supported too. We provide a qualitative analysis of this collaboration based on an empirical research that took place in four different settings of provision of palliative care, reporting the contrast between the affective engagement of caregivers and the professional approach of practitioners. We claim that this ambivalent collaboration, while embedded in contingent and incommensurable experiences, brings to the fore the broader understanding of the path to a “good death,” outlining its societal representation as a collective challenge.

Generating E-commerce Product Titles in Portuguese

This paper explores how Natural Language Processing techniques can be integrated to solve real-world problems in the e-commerce scenario. We address the issue of having high quality information products offered to customers in a marketplace platform, composed by thousands of sellers producing original content in multiple languages, following different SEO and cultural assumptions. We propose an NLP pipeline to generate high quality titles products in Portuguese.

Software literacy in shaping what we know in a software-saturated society

Today’s modern societies are increasingly dependent on digital technologies and the software underpinning these technologies in almost every sphere of professional and personal life. These technologies and software are poorly understood as tools that shape our engagement with knowledge, culture and society in the 21st century. None of these tools are ‘neutral.’ They embody social and cultural assumptions about their use and all have particular values embedded in their interfaces and affordances. This paper draws from a funded research project investigating the notion of software literacy (Khoo, Hight, Torrens, & Cowie, 2017). In the project software literacy is defined as the expertise involved in understanding, applying, problem solving and critiquing software when it is used to achieve particular goals. The project team hypothesised there exists three progressive tiers of development towards software literacy in professional contexts. We conducted case studies of engineering and media studies students’ learning of an ubiquitous software such as PowerPoint as well as proprietary discipline-specific software to examine how software literacy is understood, developed and applied in a tertiary teaching-learning context. In this contribution we outline the project findings then use the notion of software literacy as the lens to unpack and illustrate through three everyday examples how software literacy would seem to be an essential part of learning and living in the 21st century.

Uncensored: Recovering Anti-Christian Animosity in Contemporary Rabbinic Literature

This article focuses on the recovery of censored Jewish texts in contemporary Orthodox rabbinic literature. I show that contemporary Orthodox scholars make use of critical methods which are close to those of the historical, philological, and biblical sciences, in order to reconstruct those portions of the Jewish tradition which were omitted or transformed in the early-modern period by Christian censorship or by Jews with an “eye” to the censor. As the censored texts were mostly omitted or changed because they were recognized as offensive to Christian sensitivities, their current recovery entails also a renewed discussion of Judaism’s attitude to Christianity. I argue that the “uncensoring” of Jewish traditions is closely connected with expressions of animosity towards Christianity. The combination of this animosity with the use of modern scientific methods brings the common cultural assumptions which relate resistance to inter-faith rapprochement with “traditionalism,” and a reactionary approach to modernism, into question.