Supercomplexity and the university: Ronald Barnett and the social philosophy of Higher Education

Ronald Barnett's modern classic Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity (published December 1999), has had a crucial impact internationally on the field of Higher Education research and development since the book was published now nearly 20 years ago. Bridging an academic oeuvre across almost 30 years with close to 30 published volumes, Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity plays an important role in the development and transformation of Barnett's social theory of Higher Education into a social philosophy of Higher Education. In the book Barnett performs an important move from a focus on knowledge and epistemology to a focus on being and ontology in relation to Higher Education practices. Barnett shifts his fundamental perspective and view on the relation between universities and the wider society from one of caution and worry to a perspective of hope and vision that fully embraces the future of Higher Education. This way, Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity has not only paved the way for Barnett's own development of a social philosophy of Higher Education, but also contributed invaluably to the rise and maturing of philosophy of Higher Education as a research field in its own right.     

Financial Feeling: An Investigation of Emotion and Communication in the Workplace

There is growing interest in the role of emotion when considering communication in the workplace. This work has most often considered workers in front-line service positions in investigations of emotional labor, and human service workers in investigations of empathy and emotional work. In this study, we consider processes of both emotional labor and emotional work in the financial planning profession. Financial planners occupy a role requiring ongoing relationships with clients, conversations about the often emotional topic of money, and a need to manage emotion in a variety of interaction contexts. Thus, from extant theory and literature regarding emotion and communication, we proposed research questions regarding the roles of emotional labor and emotional work in the financial planning profession. These questions were investigated in a web-based survey study of almost 300 professional financial planners and supporting interviews with 14 financial planners. Results indicate support for existing theory on emotional work, extensions to current research regarding emotional labor, and important implications for the role of emotion and communication in a range of professional service roles.     

Forschungs- und Entwicklungsprojekte Virtuelle Maschinen: zSeries- und S/390-Partitionierung

Der gleichzeitige Betrieb mehrerer Gast-Betriebssysteme auf einem einzigen physischen Rechner unter einem Host-Betriebssystem ist eine leistungsfähige moderne Entwicklung. Bekannte Beispiele sind VMware für die IA32-Architektur sowie das Betriebssystem z/VM und die PR/SM-LPAR Einrichtungen der zSeries-Architektur. Die Nutzung eines Betriebssystems als Gast bedingt einen Leistungsverlust. Die als Partitionierung bezeichnete Zuordnung von Systemressourcen zu den einzelnen Gast-Betriebssysteme ist schwierig, wenn eine dynamische Anpassung an sich ändernde Lastprofile erforderlich ist. Diese Probleme lassen sich mittels Erweiterungen der Hardwarearchitektur adressieren, sowie durch Softwarestrukturen, welche diese Erweiterungen nutzen. Die Erweiterungen der Hardwarearchitektur gehen über das hinaus, was auf heutigen Rechnerarchitekturen wie IA32 oder Mips verfügbar ist. Der vorliegende Beitrag erläutert den optimalen Betrieb von Gast-Betriebssystemen und die begleitenden Partitionierungsmöglichkeiten auf der zSeries-Plattform und beschreibt die zusätzlichen Hardware- und Software-Einrichtungen, welche dies ermöglichen.     

Granularity of algorithmically constructed publication-level classifications of research publications: Identification of topics

The purpose of this study is to find a theoretically grounded, practically applicable and useful granularity level of an algorithmically constructed publication-level classification of research publications (ACPLC). The level addressed is the level of research topics. The methodology we propose uses synthesis papers and their reference articles to construct a baseline classification. A dataset of about 31 million publications, and their mutual citations relations, is used to obtain several ACPLCs of different granularity. Each ACPLC is compared to the baseline classification and the best performing ACPLC is identified. The results of two case studies show that the topics of the cases are closely associated with different classes of the identified ACPLC, and that these classes tend to treat only one topic. Further, the class size variation is moderate, and only a small proportion of the publications belong to very small classes. For these reasons, we conclude that the proposed methodology is suitable to determine the topic granularity level of an ACPLC and that the ACPLC identified by this methodology is useful for bibliometric analyses.     

Investigating the quality of interactions and public engagement around scientific papers on Twitter

This study explores science communication on Twitter by investigating a sample of tweets referring to academic papers in five different scientific fields. The specifications of science communicators on Twitter, the characteristics of those who initiate actions (by tweeting), the extent and quality of reactions (retweeting), individual and group interactions, and the distribution of tweets across types of engagement in the process of science communication (i.e., dissemination, consultation, and evaluation) were explored. A broad array of actors is involved in the communication of science on Twitter, with individual citizens and individual researchers playing an important role. In principle, this is promising for creating direct interaction, which can be difficult through more traditional mass media. The vast majority of communication activities regarding academic papers is undigested dissemination with almost no sign of debate, contestation, or collective reflection. Another general finding of this study is that bot accounts play a major role in the science communication landscape on Twitter.     

“Enactment of Sámi Past in School Textbooks: Towards Multiple Pasts for Future Making”

The article examines the use of archaeological knowledge in elementary history textbooks used in Norwegian schools today. The aim is to determine whether we can find any traces of colonialism by reviewing how these narratives perform in interrelations within and between the Sámi and Norse pasts, and how the narratives allow for hybridity and heterogeneity. Postcolonial theory turns the narrative into an object of analysis. The findings show that the Sámi material remains are outside the system of cultural change and that the temporal and spatial distances produce binary and homogeneous cultures. New material perspectives can intervene in singular performativity. Learning to enact dynamic material heterogeneity may affect the future of pupils’ participation in cultural negotiations of pastsin present.