Yes / Given the devastating impact of austerity upon employment in the public sector and the re-prioritising of union funds, it is essential for PCS to continue to develop new and innovative ways of offering support to their officials in respect of their existing roles as well as their potential development into decision making positions and onto committees. Moreover, true influence and representation within the workplace is achieved through an effective voice within the union and as such PCS must continue to promote gender proportionality throughout decision making structures and leadership roles at all levels. Mentoring as a support strategy within business and the third sector has received much attention in recent years and is reportedly positively associated with career and job satisfaction, expectations for advancement, intention to stay (increased tenure), being better able to deal with negative work scenarios and conflict, improved confidence, feeling better prepared and supported and feeling better integrated into a wider organisation or network. This research report, therefore, ultimately seeks to generate empirical evidence to support the development of a national PCS mentoring programme as a means of providing support and encouraging the development of all officials whilst also providing a means for female officials to better circumvent barriers to activism and development. This report presents the headline findings from a large scale survey of almost 500 PCS lay officials and concludes that where informal mentoring already occurs officials receive tangible developmental benefits, moreover there is universal support for the development of a national PCS mentoring programme.

Yes / Purpose This article investigates the treatment of translation within the international business and management (IBM) literature in order to highlight colonialist assumptions inscribed in this treatment as a result of the hegemonic status of English. Design/methodology/approach This investigation takes the form of a systemic literature review to examine the treatment of translation in the IBM literature through a postcolonial lens Findings The findings demonstrate that despite growing interest in language in international business, matters of translation have received comparatively little attention. However, those articles which do address translation matters tend to do so in five key ways, including epistemological/methodological considerations, exploring translator agency, the investigations of the discursive void/conceptual fuzziness between languages, and approaches which discuss translation as social practice. Research limitations/implications Despite our critique of English language hegemony, our literature review is restricted to English-language journals, which we acknowledge as problematic and discuss within the article. Practical implications In exposing the limited treatment of translation within the literature, we provide a call to action for IBM scholars to be more explicit in their treatment of translation in order to ensure representation of cultural and linguistic Others, rather than providing domesticated accounts of multilingual research. Originality/value Although there have been other articles which have examined translation in the past, this article is the first to do so through a postcolonial lens, demonstrating from a linguistic perspective the colonialist assumptions which are still prevalent in IBM knowledge production as evidenced by the treatment of translation in the field.

Yes / Qualitative dementia research emphasises the importance of recognising the voice of the person with dementia. However, research imbued with a politics of selfhood, whereby individuals are called upon to give coherence to experience and emotion, jars with representations of dementia as a gradual decline in capacity. Moreover, it reinforces an assumption that there is an essential experience that can be accessed through different methods. Drawing on Atkinson and Silverman, we view the interview not as confessional but rather as an outcome of social interaction. This paper draws on qualitative interviews from the Improving the Experince of Dementia and Enhancing Active Life (IDEAL) study, to focus specifically on the forms of accounting and storytelling of people living with dementia and how these are produced through the course of the interview encounter. Extracts from our interviews highlight key aspects of this interactional process: (a) social conventions and temporality, (b) self presentation and identity work, (c) accounts and wider cultural meanings. To conclude, we suggest that qualitative research with people with dementia requires a reframing of both the interview encounter and interpretive practices. / The IDEAL study’ was funded jointly by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) through grant ES/L001853/2 ‘Improving the experience of dementia and enhancing active life: living well with dementia’

Body representation disorders have a key role in the characterization of obesity. So far, the literature consistently pointed to a negative attitudinal body image. Conversely, after reviewing the pertinent literature, it emerges that more incoherent results have been reported for the self-perceived body size. Chapter 2 tries to clarify this issue by adopting a more innovative theoretical framework (i.e., the implicit/explicit model; Longo, 2015). For the first time, we probed the implicit representation underlying position sense in obesity, reporting a similar representation to healthy weight participants. Importantly, this result shows that not all components of body representation are affected by obesity. Chapter 3 addresses another aspect of body representation that has been neglected in obesity, namely bodily self-consciousness. The Rubber Hand Illusion has been traditionally used to investigate the mechanisms underlying body awareness. Our results show that individuals with obesity have comparable subjective experience of the illusion, while the effect of the illusion on self-location is reduced. This dissociation can be interpreted as the result of a preserved visuo-tactile integration and an altered visuo-proprioceptive integration in obesity. However, in Chapter 4 we reported that individuals with obesity have a reduced temporal resolution of visuo-tactile integration, meaning that they integrated stimuli over an extended range of asynchronies than healthy weight participants. In fact, this evidence predicts that in the RHI individuals with obesity might perceive more synchronously the asynchronous stimulation, showing a greater effect of the illusion also in this condition. Nevertheless, we failed to show this pattern of results in our study with an interval of asynchronous stimulation of 1000 ms (usually adopted in the RHI paradigm). We hypothesized that smaller time-lags, which are inside the temporal binding window of individuals with obesity and outside the temporal binding widow of healthy weight participants, might not be perceived by individuals with obesity but detected by healthy weight individuals. Accordingly, a dissimilar susceptibility to the illusion should be observed. Chapter 5 investigates this issue by adopting a modified version of the RHI that enables a parametrical modulation of the timing of the stimulation. However, we could not replicate the RHI even in healthy weight participants. The possible methodological reasons for this failure are discussed. Overall, this work tries to fill some gaps in the previous literature about body representation in obesity. Moreover, our findings provide an important clue about the possible cognitive mechanisms involved in body representation disorders in obesity. However, many questions still need an answer: due to the complexity of the domain a comprehensive knowledge of the topic might be challenging. A deep understanding of obesity is fundamental to develop multidisciplinary and efficacious rehabilitative protocols. Indeed, better treatments would significantly ameliorate individuals’ well-being but also contribute to reduce the huge health costs related to obesity comorbidities.

No description available.

This paper describes ARLO, a representation language loosely modelled after Greiner and Lenant's RLL-1. ARLO is a structure-based representation language for describing structure-based representation languages, including itself. A given representation language is specified in ARLO by a collection of structures describing how its descriptions are interpreted, defaulted, and verified. This high level description is compiles into lisp code and ARLO structures whose interpretation fulfills the specified semantics of the representation. In addition, ARLO itself- as a representation language for expressing and compiling partial and complete language specifications- is described and interpreted in the same manner as the language it describes and implements. This self-description can be extended of modified to expand or alter the expressive power of ARLO's initial configuration. Languages which describe themselves like ARLO- provide powerful mediums for systems which perform automatic self-modification, optimization, debugging, or documentation. AI systems implemented in such a self-descriptive language can reflect on their own capabilities and limitations, applying general learning and problem solving strategies to enlarge or alleviate them.

Drawing on earlier research and theories regarding female political representation and its effects on gender equality, the attempt in this study is to investigate whether political gender quotas, legislated in the constitution, has a positive association and effect on gender equality in a society. A substantial number of studies supports the notion that quotas increase female representation in the political context. Yet, few studies examine gender quotas effect on women’s everyday life. The study investigates the variation in gender equality amongst new democracies where countries with gender quotas are compared to countries without. The overall findings appoint that political gender quotas demonstrate more far-reaching effects than to increase the number of women elected. Having a high female representation does affect women’s everyday life and a quota will increase gender equality in a society. This should be regarded as a solid argument in favour of an implementation of a gender quota. Additionally, the results from this study indicate that Anne Phillips theory the Politics of Presence, which points out the importance of having high female representation, does exert an effect.

This qualitative case study focuses on the development of women’s political representation in national legislation, from 2000 to 2021 in Mexico. To examine the development of women’s political representation, this study will use Hanna Pitkin’s (1967) four interconnected diminutions of representation: formal, descriptive, substantive, and symbolic representation. The result of this study has revealed a predominantly positive development trends in Mexican women’s political representation in the Congress of the Union, from 2000 to 2021 in terms of formal, descriptive, substantive representation. While the implantation of a gender quota system has had an overall positive impact, the unwavering scepticism and lack of trust of the democratic and representative political institutions, among women is still persistent.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the organization that provides the technical support for the Internet. ICANN is a nonprofit organization based in California and is under contract to the United States Department of Commerce. It has come under attack from many sides because it is contracted through the U.S. government and it is a private entity. One of the main components of the controversy surrounding ICANN is whether it can represent a global society as a private entity and whether that private entity can represent Internet users. I focus my study on ICANN's Board of Directors. I evaluated the Board on the dimensions of descriptive, substantive, and formal representation (Pitkin 1967). Evaluation of ICANN's descriptive representation focused on the Board members' sex, educational backgrounds, and nationalities and compared the geographic representation on the Board to the global distribution of Internet users. The assessment of substantive representation looked at the Board members' votes to determine if patterns could be viewed based on members' descriptive characteristics. Finally, the evaluation of ICANN's formal representation examined its Bylaws, its 2006 contract with the U.S. Department of Commerce, and the California Nonprofit Public Benefit Corporations Code. The analysis found that the descriptive representativeness was low. The ICANN Board does not mirror Internet users: few women have served on the Board, those with technical educational backgrounds dominated, and the regions were not represented proportionate to their use of the Internet. Analysis of substantive representativeness was inconclusive and further investigation is needed. The formal representation analysis suggests that the ICANN Board has been formally representative. / Master of Arts

This dissertation is comprised of three papers, which aim to improve our knowledge of how democracy and legislature size matter for ethnic representation among political leaders. The first paper introduces the Global Leadership Project (GLP), which provides the first dataset to offer biographical information on an array of leaders (i.e. members of the executive, the legislature, the judiciary and other elites) around the world. Personal characteristics and identities of political leaders influence their behavior in elective office, and thus carry implications for the course of politics and policy. The GLP encompasses 145 nation-states and 38,085 leaders, each of whom is coded along 31 parameters, producing approximately 1.1 million data points in a cross-sectional format centered on 2010-13. This data allows comparison of the demographic characteristics (i.e. gender balance, age, ethnicity, education, languages spoken, education, and tenure) of leaders within countries, across countries, and across regions. The second paper examines the causal mechanism of how democratization increases ethnic descriptive representation through a longitudinal case study of Kurdish representation in the Turkish parliament from 1920 until 2011. It argues that ethnic descriptive representation increases in a competitive democracy because out-parties collaborate with ethnic groups to gain electoral advantage over their rivals. In Turkey, the collaboration of emerging out-party actors with the Kurds explains the rise of Kurdish descriptive representation. Through process tracing, this paper examines this collaboration, explaining the precarious increase in Kurdish descriptive representation in Turkish political history. The third paper argues that larger legislatures foster greater ethnic descriptive representation regardless of regime type. Theoretically, larger legislatures provide more "room" to pay off key elites, improve the inclusion of disadvantaged groups by diminishing the value of a seat, and are less subject to stochastic features that might upset descriptive representation. The argument is tested with a series of cross-national research designs drawing on the GLP database. A new disproportionality index of Ethnic Representation is created with the aggregated data at the national level. The argument is also tested with Two-Stage Least Squares analysis where the variation in population size is taken as an instrument of legislative size. / 2999-01-01T00:00:00Z