Croatian journal of philosophy, 2024

In their discussion of the interpretation of the literary work of fi ction, Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen explain that: "Literary appreciation is the appreciation of how a work interprets and develops the general themes which the reader identifi es through the application of thematic concepts. […] The thematic concepts are, by themselves, vacuous. They cannot be separated from the way they are 'anatomized' in literature and other cultural discourses" (Lamarque and Olsen: 399). The subtle unravelling of the work's thematic concepts relies on the context of its reception, with its idiosyncratic sensitivities and cultural sensibilities of that time and place. However, cultural sensitivity also has a dark side as it may occasionally ignite a sort of allergic reaction to a work, identifying it as a threat that must be eliminated. My paper examines the case of literary censorship in Israel. Three partially banned works of fi ction refl ect three aspects of the Israeli right-wing anxiety concerning the Israeli-Palestinian confl ict: The futility of sacrifi cing Israeli soldiers' lives, the acknowledgement of the Palestinian perspective, and, fi nally, the possibility of defl ecting the animosity between the two nations to a point of allowing for mutual love.

Opportunities arising from globalization, advances in technology, and outsourcing have meant that companies have increasingly turned their attention to consolidating customer service across national borders in order to bring down costs, while at the same time trying to increase customer accessibility through a single point of contact. From an economic viewpoint, it is very lucrative to establish a pan-regional customer service center, able to serve an entire region or continent such as Europe, Latin America, and Asia. In developed countries, labor often makes up as much as 60-70% of operating costs, which makes it particularly attractive to relocate customer service to sites where labor cost are but a fraction of what they are at home. Countries and regions such as India, The Philippines, Mexico, Central and South America, Africa, Central and Eastern Europe have been especially attractive to such initiatives. Adding into the equation is the issue of the economy of scale; consolidating customer service into one single location or a few allows large call centers to handle large call volumes instead of small call centers handling a variety of issues. On a superficial level, the choice is self-evident. While some companies have been successful to different degrees in their efforts to centralize (e.g., IBM, Morgan Stanley, Nortel Networks, and MetLife) i , others have had to revert part of or the whole consolidation (e.g. Dell, Orange, and Nike iiiii ). Whether through outsourcing or near/off shoring, consolidating customer service internationally is a complex endeavor and often an ongoing battle. One of the reasons why it is more complex than most organizations realized is the intercultural part of the operation. Customer service is about strategy Customer service is about strategy Customer service is about strategy Most companies see customer service centers as cost centers. Few companies see customer service centers as providers of competitive advantage. iv Creating a winning customer strategy is to deliver a customer value proposition based on a thorough understanding of the customer's culture, values and needs that

The Palgrave Handbook of EU-Asia Relations

Proceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 2018

Porn Studies, 2015

2020

In modern linguistics, universalism has been historically a dominant trend owing to the influence of Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar and the Embodiment Hypothesis in cognitive science. As an outgrowth of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, work on diversity showed that universalism should not be of the menu since what divides languages is more important than what unites them. The current article brings evidence from Arabic to bear on diversity. In particular, it offers data on body parts, emotions, motion events, color system, and organization of space in support for diversity.

Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 2013

I read these essays with immense appreciation for the creative construction of reflective analyses, elaborated through conversation between ethnographers and academic physicians, as designed and realized by the special issue's editors, Elizabeth Carpenter-Song and Sarah Willen, and their collaborating authors. I also appreciate the authors' frankness in critical reflection, exposing, and puzzling over the conflicts and ''pitfalls'' in the pedagogical interventions discussed and their rise to the challenge set by Willen, drawing on George Devereux, to ''lift the hood.'' I approach my commentary having spent decades studying the culture of medicine in its many guises, at times through observations and surveys but mostly through conversations with physicians across the globe from highly diverse institutional and societal settings. I have published with some of these physicians representing a conversation internal to our projects, most recently in Shattering Culture, American Medicine Responds to Cultural Diversity (Good et al. 2011b), for which Willen and Hannah are contributors and co-editors and Bullon and Carpenter-Song contributors. I have often engaged collaborating physicians who were also subjects of my research in jointly authored essays, for instance on psychiatry, oncology, end-of-life research primary care, HIV in Africa, maternal and child health, global health, and medical education. A few examples of essays in which I drew in my clinician collaborator-subjects as co-authors include ''American Oncology and the Discourse on Hope'' (1990); ''Oncology and Narrative Time'' (1994); ''Conversations with Oncologists'' (1995); ''Clinical Realities and Moral Dilemmas'' (1999); ''Physicians Narratives at the End of Life'' (2004); ''The Culture of Medicine and Disparities in Healthcare by Race, Ethnicity and Social Class'' (2003, 2004); and ''Communication Barriers among Physicians in Care at the End of Life'' (2012). As primary author, my voice most often dominated as I wove the clinicians' voices into the text. What is refreshing and unique in this issue of Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry are

This edited collection explores the fruitfulness of applying an interpretive approach to the study of global security. The interpretive approach concentrates on unpacking the meanings and beliefs of various policy actors, and, crucially, explains those beliefs by locating them in historical traditions and as responses to dilemmas. Interpretivists thereby seek to highlight the contingency, diversity and contestability of the narratives, expertise and beliefs that inform political action. The interpretive approach is widespread in the study of governance and public policy, but arguably it has not yet had much impact on security studies. The book therefore deploys the interpretive approach to explore contemporary issues in international security, combining theoretical engagement with good empirical coverage through a novel set of case studies. Bringing together a fresh mix of senior and junior scholars from across the fields of security studies, political theory and international relations, the chapters explore the beliefs, traditions and dilemmas that have informed security practice on the one hand, and the academic study of security on the other, as well as the connections between them. All contributors look to situate their work against a broader historical background and long-standing traditions, allowing them to take a critical yet historically informed approach to the

Pragmatics, 2000

Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth; for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand. [Judges 12: 6] The identity test imposed by the Gileadites on the Ephraimite fugitives at the passages of Jordan suggests that the recognition of ways and means of speaking as indices of social categories has a venerable history. After the passage of several millenia, much the same associational understanding of the relationship between language and identity employed to such violent ends by the Gileadites guides the contemporary -and one would hope more benignline of sociolinguistic inquiry that centers on the investigation of ethnicity or region or gender or age or occupation as "sociolinguistic variables" (see, e.g., Coulmas 1997). The addition of a third term, performance, to the nexus of language and identity, however, occasions a reorientation of analytical perspective. If we take performance in the sense of linguistic practice -situated, interactional, communicatively motivated -our investigative focus shifts from correlational sociolinguistics to the pragmatically oriented exploration of "when and how identities are interactively invoked by sociocultural actors" through the discursive deployment of linguistic resources (Kroskrity 1993: 222). In this perspective, identity is an emergent construction, the situated outcome of a rhetorical and interpretive process in which interactants make situationally motivated selections from socially constituted repertoires of identificational and affiliational resources and craft these semiotic resources into identity claims for presentation to others. This is clearly a productive line of inquiry, and one to which all of the contributors to this issue would subscribe. While acknowledging and exploiting the analytical power of this practice-centered perspective, however, the authors of the papers collected here have taken an additional step into less well charted investigative territory, guided by a more marked conception of verbal performance. Here, performance is understood as a special mode of situated communicative practice, resting on the assumption of accountability to an audience for a display of communicative skill and efficacy. In this sense of performance, the act of expression is put on display, objectified, marked out to a degree from its discursive surroundings and opened up to interpretive scrutiny and evaluation by an audience. Performance foregrounds form-functionmeaning interrelationships through verbal display . The six casestudies that follow suggest some of the ways that an orientation to this mode of performance

Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 2022