Search results for "Agency"

Extending the semiotics of embodied interaction to blended spaces.

2015

In this paper, we develop a new way of understanding interactions in blended spaces. We do this by developing ideas about embodied semiotics and then apply these ideas to the analysis of interaction in mixed-reality blended spaces (where the physical world and digital world are blended deliberately to provide new forms of interaction). We discuss how blended spaces provide a new medium within which people have experiences. The semiotic analysis reveals how blended spaces are constructed across the physical and the digital, highlighting the ontology, topology, volatility, and agency present within them. It shows how people move between the physical and digital spaces through the objects and …

Emotional separation and detachment as two distinct dimensions of parent--adolescent relationships

2011

The study examined adolescents’ emotional separation and detachment from parents, analyzing their relations with connectedness and agency, with some aspects of self—other boundary regulation and with problem behavior. The participants were 331 Italian adolescents, aged from 16 to 19 years (mean age = 17.40, SD = 1.14). Separation and detachment were positively related; they were negatively related to connectedness; detachment was also negatively associated to agency. Emotional separation was negatively predicted by empathic concern, perspective-taking and separate self; emotional detachment was negatively predicted by empathic concern and self—other differentiation. Separation negatively p…

Perceptions of institutions and social capital accumulation: A social categorization and shared agency‐based approach. Evidence from the Russian Fede…

2021

Students’ evocative impact on teacher instruction and teacher–child relationships

2015

Classroom research has typically focused on the role of teaching practices and the quality of instruction in children’s academic performance, motivation and adjustment—in other words, classroom interactions initiated by the teacher. The present article presents a model of classroom interactions initiated by the child, that is, the notion that a child’s characteristics and active efforts may evoke different instructional patterns and responses among teachers. Then follows a review of previous research on the role of children’s academic performance, their motivation and their socio-emotional characteristics in their teachers’ instruction methods and teacher–child relationships. Some of the m…

Fostering transformational teacher agency in Finnish teacher education

2018

In this article, we studied how well teacher education in Finland is able to answer the changing needs of the contemporary world. More precisely, we focussed on the question of how well an alternative teacher education model guides teacher students’ agency towards a transformational view of the teaching profession, making it possible for schools to enable social change. This question was studied in the framework of critical social pedagogy. The data for this article was collected ethnographically by observing meetings in the Critical Integrative Teacher Education (CITE) programme at the University of Jyväskylä in 2015–2017. The analysis is based on a theoretical background in which we outli…

(Un)Natural and contractual international society: A conceptual inquiry

2011

This article offers a critical perspective on one of the central concepts of IR and the English School of IR in particular, namely the concept of international society. It argues that the moral agency of international society and its ‘naturalness’ were affirmed simultaneously with the marginalization of the concept of societas designating contractual political relations. The article traces the concept of contracted societas back to the work of Hugo Grotius, an acclaimed founder of the ‘international society’ tradition. By placing Grotius’ use of the concept in the context of ancient and early modern discussion of political alliances and partnerships, it demonstrates that politically contra…

How Orthogonal Are the Big Two of Social Perception? On the Curvilinear Relation Between Agency and Communion.

2017

Humans make sense of their social environment by forming impressions of others that allow predicting others’ actions. In this process of social perception, two types of information carry pivotal importance: other entities’ communion (i.e., warmth and trustworthiness) and agency (i.e., status and power). Although commonly thought of as orthogonal dimensions, we propose that these Big Two of social perception are curvilinearly related. Specifically, as we delineate from four different theoretical explanations, impressions of communion should peak at average agency, while entities too high or too low on agency should be perceived as low on communion. We show this pattern for social groups acr…

Transnational social work with young refugees

2016

In late 2014, the UN Refugee Agency counted 59.5 million people around the world on the run (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 2015). This is the highest number that has been r...

Where Did the Money Go? Endogenous Money Creation for International Fraudulent Purposes - The Case of the 2015 Moldovan Banking Scandal

2015

On Monday 4 May 2015, the speaker of Parliament of the Republic of Moldova published the Kroll report on his Internet blog after thousands of people rallied on Sunday 3 May in the capital, Chisinau, to protest against endemic corruption in the country, and demand recovery of the missing billions in the Ilan Shor group scandal. The Kroll report aims at investigating the apparent theft of nearly one-fifth of the country's annual GDP. In a spectacular lender-of-last resort move, the Moldovan central bank was forced to issue some 16 billion lei ($870 million) in emergency loans to keep the economy afloat. The Kroll report focuses on three commercial banks that account for a third of the country…

Reintegration Failure and Outsourcing Upside: Organisation of Public Transport in Norway

2014

AbstractAfter two decades of public sector outsourcing, debates for reintegration of services back into the public sector have emerged. However, so far outsourcing remains prevalent and reintegration is sparsely utilised. An in-depth analysis of the reorganisation of public transport in a Norwegian county, Sor-Trondelag, provides three key reasons as to why there is an ‘outsourcing upside’. Firstly, existing structures limit available alternatives for legislators, thereby making reintegration of public services back into public hands difficult. Secondly, under certain conditions competitive tendering may enhance political steering and thus make outsourcing politically desirable. Thirdly, th…