Lena Finkle’s magic arc: hybrid influences in the Russian American graphic novel

ABSTRACT

The article examines Anya Ulinich’s graphic narrative Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel and the novel’s use of visual culture from both the author’s Russian and US American backgrounds. The article interrogates the use of history and timelines, Russian art history and Russian art education in Ulinich’s text. It also analyzes other literary constructs that influenced Ulinich’s novel: US American comics/graphic novels and their use of stereotype, and novels by Russian-speaking Jewish American writers, with their thematized Jewishness.     

Two-Group Classification Using Neural Networks*

Artificial neural networks are new methods for classification. We investigate two important issues in building neural network models; network architecture and size of training samples. Experiments were designed and carried out on two-group classification problems to find answers to these model building questions. The first experiment deals with selection of architecture and sample size for different classification problems. Results show that choice of architecture and choice of sample size depend on the objective: to maximize the classification rate of training samples, or to maximize the generalizability of neural networks. The second experiment compares neural network models with classical models such as linear discriminant analysis and quadratic discriminant analysis, and nonparametric methods such as k-nearest-neighbor and linear programming. Results show that neural networks are comparable to, if not better than, these other methods in terms of classification rates in the training samples but not in the test samples.     

Parental Leave Policies and Second Births: A Comparison of Czechia and Slovakia

Population Research and Policy Review - The paper investigates the transition to second births in Czechia and Slovakia in the context of the development of parental leave policies since the...     

Writing resistance together

This piece of writing is a joint initiative by the participants in the Gender, Work and Organization writing workshop organized in Helsinki, Finland, in June 2019. This is a particular form of writing differently. We engage in collective writing and embody what it means to write resistance to established academic practices and conventions together. This is a form of emancipatory initiative where we care for each other as writers and as human beings. There are many author voices and we aim to keep the text open and dialogical. As such, this piece of writing is about suppressed thoughts and feelings that our collective picket line allows us to express. In order to maintain the open‐ended nature of the text, and perhaps also to retain some ‘dirtiness’ that is essential to writing, the article has not been language checked throughout by a native speaker of English.     

The Eurovision Song Contest – A Continent (still) Divided?

Credited as one of the most successful major televised music events held annually in Europe, the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) still serves as a battlefield between Eastern and Western European aesthetic paradigms. Although the Western paradigm has long been regarded as an almost universal criterion of success, the contemporary ESC presents a unique opportunity for post-communist acts to contest that hegemony while playing with its conventions. This article examines how, in the post-1989 situation, the most successful Eastern European acts purposely exploited, juxtaposed and subverted several aesthetic categories, demonstrating their understanding of the conventions promoted at the ESC on the one hand, while undermining and contesting them on the other. The article argues for greater attention to such strategies as over-exploitation of stereotypes and auto-stereotypes, as well as mocking the prevailing aesthetics by playing with such notions as authenticity, folklore, nationalism, essentialism, camp, kitsch or hyper-reality and challenging the contest's utopian and nostalgic ideals.     

Bringing Japanese Continuous Improvement Approaches to U.S. Manufacturing: The Roles of Process Orientation and Communications*

Continuous improvement (CI) has played a key role in Japan's quality management. U.S. companies have begun to adopt CI in recent years. This paper studies the implementation of CI in seven U.S. manufacturing companies. We view values as the core concept of culture that impacts CI effectiveness. Using both qualitative and quantitative data with a sample of seven companies, we observe empirically a relationship between process-oriented values and CI effectiveness. We also find that communications involving workers is strongly associated with CI effectiveness. Finally, we find an association between process orientation and communication frequency, and argue that communications act as an intervening variable between process orientation and effectiveness.     

TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT: A LITERATURE REVIEW AND AN AGENDA FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

Total quality management (TQM) is a revolutionary approach to effective management. The research in TQM has emerged from practical needs of organizations embracing this philosophy, and the literature is mostly conceptual and practitioner-oriented. There is a lack of sound theoretical framework classifying past efforts and guiding future research. To fill the void, a study of the published TQM literature is undertaken. A review, classification, and analysis of the research in TQM spanning the last two decades is presented. A total of 226 TQM-related articles are identified from 44 refereed management journals published from 1970 to 1993. These articles are then classified and analyzed using the following two-dimensional scheme: (1) article orientation (conceptual, case study, empirical, analytical, simulation, and overview) and (2) article focus using the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award criteria. The analysis of the literature presents pertinent developments in each of the seven criteria. In addition, it provides future research directions as well as a ready reference of the TQM literature. The suggestions for research should guide future developments in the TQM field and help transform it into a formal discipline.     

Professional discretion and length of work experience: what findings from focus groups with care managers in elder care suggest

ABSTRACT

Research has explored how care managers in elder care – who often function as ‘street-level bureaucrats’ – regard professional discretion. The way in which length of work experience affects care managers’ use of professional discretion remains, however, unexplored. This article present findings from 12 focus groups with 60 care managers. By bringing attention to how care managers experience the needs assessment process, this article sheds light on how these ‘street-level bureaucrats’ struggle when they try to balance their clients’ needs against institutional frameworks and local guidelines. Length of work experience seems to play a role in how care managers claim to use professional discretion. Experienced care managers describe how they deviate from the guidelines at times in order to create an increased scope of action in their decision-making process. Those with less time in the profession describe greater difficulties in this respect. Findings suggest that research should explore if length of work experience plays a role in the actual way in which care managers assess needs and make decisions. As such, they contribute to our understanding of how needs assessment processes are navigated by professionals while also pointing towards the nature of professional discretion in gerontological social work.