Reconfiguring Sovereignty in Foucauldian Genealogies of Power: The Case of English Master and Servant Law and the Dispersion and the Exercise of Sovereignty in the Modern Age

This paper is a critique and partial reconfiguration of the Foucauldian genealogy of sovereignty. Sovereignty is largely conceptualized as the antithesis of governmentality and disciplinary power in the modern age; presented as a negative case as a juridical and centralized power of interdiction and containment in the classical age. I argue that we can genealogically examine how sovereignty in the modern age underwent transformation and dispersion. My empirical focus is on how master and servant law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, along with the development and transformations of local courts, led to the increasingly dispersal of sovereign power as it as practiced in specific industrial sites and regions.     

5‐Month‐Olds’ Categorization of Novel Objects: Task and Measure Dependence

To examine key parameters of the initial conditions in early category learning, two studies compared 5‐month‐olds’ object categorization between tasks involving previously unseen novel objects, and between measures within tasks. Infants in Experiment 1 participated in a visual familiarization–novelty preference (VFNP) task with two‐dimensional (2D) stimulus images. Infants provided no evidence of categorization by either their looking or their examining even though infants in previous research systematically categorized the same objects by examining when they could handle them directly. Infants in Experiment 2 participated in a VFNP task with 3D stimulus objects that allowed visual examination of objects’ 3D instantiation while denying manual contact with the objects. Under these conditions, infants demonstrated categorization by examining but not by looking. Focused examination appears to be a key component of young infants’ ability to form category representations of novel objects, and 3D instantiation appears to better engage such examining.     

Same same but different: managerial influences on organisational performance in foundations and associations

In the last few years the management orientation of nonprofit organisation (NPOs) has been gaining importance. Management is said to have made the organisation of NPOs more effective and efficient. However, the influence of the institutional settings is often neglected in nonprofit management literature. By using a quantitative empirical approach this study investigates the influence of the legal type of Swiss nonprofits on the relationship between management dimensions and organisational performance. The research findings reveal significant differences in the management of foundations and associations. In particular, foundations have a competitive advantage in terms of innovation and market orientation. Whereas associations profit from investing in governance issues.     

Defender–Attacker Decision Tree Analysis to Combat Terrorism

We propose a methodology, called defender–attacker decision tree analysis, to evaluate defensive actions against terrorist attacks in a dynamic and hostile environment. Like most game‐theoretic formulations of this problem, we assume that the defenders act rationally by maximizing their expected utility or minimizing their expected costs. However, we do not assume that attackers maximize their expected utilities. Instead, we encode the defender's limited knowledge about the attacker's motivations and capabilities as a conditional probability distribution over the attacker's decisions. We apply this methodology to the problem of defending against possible terrorist attacks on commercial airplanes, using one of three weapons: infrared‐guided MANPADS (man‐portable air defense systems), laser‐guided MANPADS, or visually targeted RPGs (rocket propelled grenades). We also evaluate three countermeasures against these weapons: DIRCMs (directional infrared countermeasures), perimeter control around the airport, and hardening airplanes. The model includes deterrence effects, the effectiveness of the countermeasures, and the substitution of weapons and targets once a specific countermeasure is selected. It also includes a second stage of defensive decisions after an attack occurs. Key findings are: (1) due to the high cost of the countermeasures, not implementing countermeasures is the preferred defensive alternative for a large range of parameters; (2) if the probability of an attack and the associated consequences are large, a combination of DIRCMs and ground perimeter control are preferred over any single countermeasure.     

Coaching und Mentoring

The program “Mentoring for female junior executives at schools” in Hamburg has the goal of recruiting more female executives for schools in Hamburg. As a headmaster of a high school the author has attended this program as a mentor. She discusses the following questions: What are the differences between mentoring and coaching? Where are the limits of mentoring? When is coaching the better method? The main result is, that the mentor has to be very attentively of his position as a member of the organization. He has to decide, if he can advise the mentee for example in conflicts with superiors or if a coach could do a better job. A missing link in the mentoring program is the analysis of the culture of organizations, because this is an important factor for a successful start into the new function.     

Audiovisual Correlates of Interrogativity: A Comparative Analysis of Catalan and Dutch

Languages employ different strategies to mark an utterance as a polar (yes–no) question, including syntax, intonation and gestures. This study analyzes the production and perception of information-seeking questions and broad focus statements in Dutch and Catalan. These languages use intonation for marking questionhood, but Dutch also exploits syntactic variation for this purpose. A production task revealed the expected language-specific auditory differences, but also showed that gaze and eyebrow-raising are used in this distinction. A follow-up perception experiment revealed that perceivers relied greatly on auditory information in determining whether an utterance is a question or a statement, but accuracy was further enhanced when visual information was added. Finally, the study demonstrates that the concentration of several response-mobilizing cues in a sentence is positively correlated with the perceivers’ ratings of these utterances as interrogatives.     

The disinterested state: negative diasporic policy as an expression of state inclusion and national exclusion

ABSTRACT

This article engages with the understudied phenomenon of the ‘disinterested, denouncing’ diaspora state (Levitt, P., and N. G. Schiller. 2004. “Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society.” International Migration Review 38 (3): 1002–1039. doi:10.1111/j.1747-7379.2004.tb00227.x) or ‘indifferent’ diaspora state (Ragazzi, F. 2009. “Governing Diasporas.” International Political Sociology 3 (4): 378–397. doi:10.1111/j.1749-5687.2009.00082.x). Focusing on U.S. citizens abroad, the article argues that there is negative diasporic outreach on the part of the state – ‘disinterested’ from the state's perspective, but ‘denouncing’ from that of the diaspora. Negative diasporic outreach is exemplified by the 2010 FATCA legislation, which sought to root out tax evaders resident in the U.S., but has, instead, affected millions of American emigrants through increased financial control and the repercussions of those policies, and has resulted in sharply higher citizenship renunciation figures. Impact on an American diaspora was not considered in the law's proposal, debate and passage into law. Second, the article argues that this negative diasporic outreach, in combination with the continued facilitation of the right to vote, is a reflection of the inclusion of these American emigrants in the American state, but their simultaneous exclusion from the American nation.