Manufacture and Date of a Goryeo dynasty Sutra Box with Mother-of-pearl Inlaid Decoration at the Rijksmuseum,Amsterdam

Currently, about ten Goryeo dynasty (918–1392 CE) sutra boxes are preserved in museums in Korea, Japan, the United States, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. This article is the result of an examination of a sutra box in the collection of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (hereafter ‘Rijksmuseum sutra box’), which was first introduced to a European audience in the Transactions and Proceedings of the Japanese Society, in 1913–1914. The Rijksmuseum sutra box differs from other Goryeo sutra boxes. With its altered structure and modified motifs, this box bears significant value, not only for the research of thirteenth-century Goryeo mother-of-pearl art, but also for the study of cross-cultural adaptations in East Asian lacquer art. This article investigates the date of manufacture of the sutra box by analysing the manufacturing techniques and its various original and modified parts. For this, an X-ray radiograph was carried out for the first time. As a result, discoveries have been made regarding the structure and decoration of the lower part, which has been modified and is different from Goryeo mother-of-pearl sutra boxes. Finally, this paper reconsiders conservation and repair of Goryeo sutra boxes, as illuminated by an understanding of the original and repaired parts of this box.     

Disciplined freedom,branded authenticity,and dependable independence: how tensions enact flexibility in lifestyle blogging careers

Analyzing 219 blog posts from 52 self-employed women lifestyle bloggers in North America, this study shows how these digital professionals navigate tensions and communicatively constitute work flexibility. In their narratives, women bloggers employed tension management approaches such as reframing, continual connections, and reflective practice in response to tensions in enacting temporal–spatial, identity, and financial flexibility. Specifically, women followed oxymoronic constructions – disciplined freedom, branded authenticity, and dependable independence – to embrace and transform competing poles of fluidity?structure, authenticity?marketability, and independence?interconnection. Expanding work–life research to the self-employed digital labor context, this study responds to recent calls to uncover more-than tension management strategies in empirical settings and contributes to a tension-centered, contextual, and processual analysis of workplace flexibility construction.     

Relational turbulence and perceptions of partner support during reintegration after military deployment

The transition from deployment to reintegration can be stressful for returning military personnel and at-home partners, and support plays a key role in their ability to transition effectively. We draw on relational turbulence theory to advance predictions about how parameters of the relationship between returning service members and at-home partners predict their perceptions of their partner’s support during the post-deployment transition. We surveyed 235 individuals (117 returning service members, 118 at-home partners) who had experienced the transition within the past 6 months. Findings consistent with the theory indicated that relational turbulence partially mediated the negative associations that relational uncertainty and interference from a partner shared with partner support. Partner uncertainty was a direct negative predictor of partner support as well. We consider how these results extend theory, research, and practice.     

Institutional policy process improvement: using structurating activity theory to inform practice

Organizational communication scholars are increasingly called upon to use theoretical knowledge to address problematic processes in public institutions. This article reports a process improvement project focused on a university conflict of interest (COI) policy as an example of how scholars can engage theory to improve ongoing policy processes. The project team included communication scholars and research administration staff who designed, implemented, and evaluated the mixed-methods project guided by structurating activity theory. Baseline survey results were used to design the process improvement project. Results of the follow-up survey indicate that researchers who participated in some aspect of the process improvement project (i.e. attending a policy café, using the redesigned website, or reading the new Quick Reference Guide) reported higher levels of policy communication and knowledge and more positive attitudes toward the COI policy than researchers who had not engaged with process improvement efforts. We offer theoretical and practical implications of results for organizational communication scholars and practitioners.     

The Information Nature of Culture

This paper explores the information nature of culture. It is represented as an extragenetic and nonorganizational information process and system. Information is regarded as a universal property of matter that is essentially associated with development processes and realizes various forms and ways of storage and circulation at various development stages of global evolution. The socio-cultural principle of exogenous accumulation, transmission, and transformation of information is analyzed in the context of the continuing growth of the information content of material systems on the superhighway of global-universal evolution. It is noted that the information concept of culture evolves into a new area of cultural studies, that is information and cultural studies, advancing our understanding of the nature of culture and cultural genesis.