Gender and feminine Identities - women as managers in a UK academic institution

The paper considers gender identities in higher education. It examines how people involved in university life engage in (re)creating gender identities and in (re)producing gender-related expectations (and stereotypes) of managerial behaviour. The process of construction of feminine identities is explored through the discourses of academics from a UK university (mainly women who hold managerial positions). The paper reports findings from a series of in-depth interviews with women managers (dean, associate deans and heads of departments) and with university academics (men and women) from a Business School, part of a large British new university. The school was of special interest because women held the majority of senior managerial posts. It appears that the process of construction of femininities is mainly developed around four (stereo-)typical aspects generally associated with feminine management practices (multi-tasking, supporting and nurturing, people and communication skills, and team-work).

Is it all tough talking at the top? A post-structuralist analysis of the construction of gendered speaker identities of British business leaders within interview narratives

This paper uses a feminist post-structuralist approach to examine the gendered identities of a sample of British business leaders in Britain. While recent national surveys offer many material reasons why women are acutely under-represented as business leaders, the role of language is rarely addressed. This paper explores the ways in which ten senior women and men construct their sense of leadership identities through the medium of interview narratives. Drawing upon two poststructuralist models of analysis (Derrida’s 1987 theory of deconstruction and Bakhtin’s 1927/1981 concept of double-voiced discourse), the paper shows how both females and males are able to shift pragmatically between interwoven corporate discourses, which demand competing cultural allegiances from one moment to the next, allegiances constantly tested by the rapid change and uncertainty that characterise global business. While male leaders experience a relative freedom of movement between different cultural discourses, female leaders are circumscribed by negative and reductive representations of female speech and behaviour. In sum, senior women are required constantly to observe, review, police and repair their use of leadership language, which potentially undermines their confidence and authority as leaders.

Statnote 20: non-linear regression: fitting a general polynomial curve

In some circumstances, there may be no scientific model of the relationship between X and Y that can be specified in advance and indeed the objective of the investigation may be to provide a ‘curve of best fit’ for predictive purposes. In such an example, the fitting of successive polynomials may be the best approach. There are various strategies to decide on the polynomial of best fit depending on the objectives of the investigation.

Contesting Europe's Eastern Rim:cultural identities in public discourse

Since 1989, Europe's eastern rim has been in constant flux. This collection focuses on how political and economic transformations have triggered redefinitions of cultural identity. Using discursive modes of identity construction (deconstruction, reconstruction, reformulation, and invention) the book focuses on the creation of opposition to old and new outsidersA" and insidersA" in Europe. The linguistic study of discourse elements in connection with an exploration of the significance of metaphors in anchoring individual and collective identity is innovative and allows for a unique analysis of public discourse in Europe.

White identities:a critical sociological approach

The study of white ethnicities is becoming increasingly important in the social sciences. This book provides a critical introduction to the topic. Whiteness has traditionally been seen as "ethnically transparent" - the marker against which other ethnicities are measured. This analysis is clearly incorrect, but only recently have many race and ethnicity scholars moved away from focusing on ethnic minorities and instead oriented their studies around the construction of white identities. Simon Clarke and Steve Garner's book is designed to guide students as they explore how white identities are forged using both sociological and psycho-social ideas. Including an excellent survey of the existing literature and original research from the UK, this book will be an invaluable guide for sociology students taking modules in race and ethnicity. Show More Show Less

Empirical research into white racialized identities in Britain

The intellectual project of using whiteness as an explicit tool of analysis is not one that has taken root in Britain. However, there are a number of empirical studies that investigate the racialization of white identities. In this article, I look at some empirical sociological fieldwork carried out on white identities in Britain since the early 1990s and identify the key themes arising. These themes are (in)visibility, norms and values, cultural capital and integration, contingent hierarchies and Empire in the present. In Britain, a pertinent distinction is between rural and urban settings for the enactment of white identities vis-a`-vis those of minorities, and there is an exploration of some of the contingency that draws the boundary between ‘white’ and ‘Other’ in different places. Areas of commonality and distinctiveness are noted in terms of the American work. In the last section, I argue that there are a number of issues to resolve around continuing such studies, including linking the micro-level to the macro-level analysis, and expanding to international comparative work.

Immigrant dislocated identities:Rachid Nini’s Diario de un ilegal

This article describes the process through which the subjectivity of the illegal immigrant is deconstructed and later reconstructed, as revealed by the Moroccan journalist and intellectual Rachid Nini in his book Diario de un ilegal/Diary of an Illegal Immigrant (2002), an account of the author's perils as an illegal immigrant in Spain. The analysis focuses firstly on the narrative form that Nini employs to give an account of his story, and secondly on the spatial displacement to which the subject and his subjectivity are exposed, which leads to the obliteration of his identity. The abrupt changes that the subject faces in a new location are paramount and impel him to a constant quest for self-definition and of negotiation with the new Other. Thus, the privileges that Nini enjoyed while in Morocco, those of a male journalist, poet, translator and intellectual with a university degree, disappear altogether once his plane has landed on the Canary Islands. In this new location, the place of origin and/or race are now what define his identity; he is now simply a moro - a Moor - he is not considered as an individual but, as will be shown, as a member of a homogenizing category which resists definition. The article finishes by addressing how Nini, in his quest to destroy homogenizing stereotypes, employs other stereotypes as though this were the only escape from the schizophrenic state the illegal immigrant identity had been forced into.

Critical approaches to care:understanding caring relations, identities and cutures

What does ‘care’ mean in contemporary society? How are caring relationships practised in different contexts? What resources do individuals and collectives draw upon in order to care for, care with and care about themselves and others? How do such relationships and practices relate to broader social processes? Care shapes people’s everyday lives and relationships and caring relations and practices influence the economies of different societies. This interdisciplinary book takes a nuanced and context-sensitive approach to exploring caring relationships, identities and practices within and across a variety of cultural, familial, geographical and institutional arenas. Grounded in rich empirical research and discussing key theoretical, policy and practice debates, it provides important, yet often neglected, international and cross-cultural perspectives. It is divided into four sections covering: caring within educational institutions; caring amongst communities and networks; caring and families; and caring across the life-course. Contributing to broader theoretical, philosophical and moral debates associated with the ethics of care, citizenship, justice, relationality and entanglements of power, Critical Approaches to Care is an important work for students and academics studying caring and care work in the fields of health and social care, sociology, social policy, anthropology, education, human geography and politics.

Laminar distribution of the pathological changes in sporadic frontotemporal lobar degeneration with transactive response (TAR) DNA-binding protein of 43kDa (TDP-43) proteinopathy:a quantitative study using polynomial curve fitting

Aims: Previous data suggest heterogeneity in laminar distribution of the pathology in the molecular disorder frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) with transactive response (TAR) DNA-binding protein of 43kDa (TDP-43) proteinopathy (FTLD-TDP). To study this heterogeneity, we quantified the changes in density across the cortical laminae of neuronal cytoplasmic inclusions, glial inclusions, neuronal intranuclear inclusions, dystrophic neurites, surviving neurones, abnormally enlarged neurones, and vacuoles in regions of the frontal and temporal lobe. Methods: Changes in density of histological features across cortical gyri were studied in 10 sporadic cases of FTLD-TDP using quantitative methods and polynomial curve fitting. Results: Our data suggest that laminar neuropathology in sporadic FTLD-TDP is highly variable. Most commonly, neuronal cytoplasmic inclusions, dystrophic neurites and vacuolation were abundant in the upper laminae and glial inclusions, neuronal intranuclear inclusions, abnormally enlarged neurones, and glial cell nuclei in the lower laminae. TDP-43-immunoreactive inclusions affected more of the cortical profile in longer duration cases; their distribution varied with disease subtype, but was unrelated to Braak tangle score. Different TDP-43-immunoreactive inclusions were not spatially correlated. Conclusions: Laminar distribution of pathological features in 10 sporadic cases of FTLD-TDP is heterogeneous and may be accounted for, in part, by disease subtype and disease duration. In addition, the feedforward and feedback cortico-cortical connections may be compromised in FTLD-TDP. © 2012 The Authors. Neuropathology and Applied Neurobiology © 2012 British Neuropathological Society.

Assuming identities:the workings of intertextual metaphors in dating ads

In this article I propose an augmented pragmatic framework for interpreting metaphors of identity, built upon Grice's co-operative principle and incorporating Levinson's concept of uptake and Austin's notion of felicity. The framework is applied to a selection of intertextual identity metaphors drawn from The Guardian's dating ad column, ‘Soulmates’. First I provide a detailed exposition of the textual and discursive workings of a small selection of typical fictional metaphors in these dating ads, to show how co-textual selections steer interpretation and contribute to a metaphor's success, or felicity. Then discussion turns to consideration of how these textual and discursive processes might be mapped onto the proposed pragmatic framework of recognition, uptake and felicity.

Polynomial function intervals for floating-point software verification

The focus of our work is the verification of tight functional properties of numerical programs, such as showing that a floating-point implementation of Riemann integration computes a close approximation of the exact integral. Programmers and engineers writing such programs will benefit from verification tools that support an expressive specification language and that are highly automated. Our work provides a new method for verification of numerical software, supporting a substantially more expressive language for specifications than other publicly available automated tools. The additional expressivity in the specification language is provided by two constructs. First, the specification can feature inclusions between interval arithmetic expressions. Second, the integral operator from classical analysis can be used in the specifications, where the integration bounds can be arbitrary expressions over real variables. To support our claim of expressivity, we outline the verification of four example programs, including the integration example mentioned earlier. A key component of our method is an algorithm for proving numerical theorems. This algorithm is based on automatic polynomial approximation of non-linear real and real-interval functions defined by expressions. The PolyPaver tool is our implementation of the algorithm and its source code is publicly available. In this paper we report on experiments using PolyPaver that indicate that the additional expressivity does not come at a performance cost when comparing with other publicly available state-of-the-art provers. We also include a scalability study that explores the limits of PolyPaver in proving tight functional specifications of progressively larger randomly generated programs. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.

On the Hyperbolicity Domain of the Polynomial x^n + a1x^(n-1) + 1/4+ an

∗ Partially supported by INTAS grant 97-1644