<p>When athletes and coaches discuss reasons for success or failure the word concentration has an important role. Likewise, in sport research, the term attention tends to have the same central position. This notion gives the impression that everyone seems to know what concentration is and how it affects sport performances. However, the many theories in cognitive psychology are not primarily designed to be applied in the setting of sport and exercise, and thus have little or no validity in that field. Instead of applying scientific knowledge, the field of sport enhancement often utilizes myths and folklore as bases for practice and exercise.</p><p>This thesis started as a quest for this well-known concentration and often required state of mind. The overarching purpose of this hunt was to discover aspects that influence the ability of concentration in sport and exercise settings. The aim was to examine the usefulness of cognitive psychology and scientific methods in the field of sports. The search for concentration has follows three tracks. The first line of investigation was to study variations in concentration. The second path was to validate the Test of Attentional and Interpersonal Style (TAIS), (Nideffer, 1976). The third trail was to review the theory of ironic processing in mental control (Wegner, 1992) and try out its applications on sport performances movements.</p><p>The search of variations in concentration was carried out through interviewing and measuring heart rate of athletes from golf, pistol shooting, basketball, tennis, and handball. The results showed that the concentration vary within and between sports and athletes. The validation of TAIS was performed on a sample of 1230 athletes from different sports. The result confirms that the basic theory of TAIS not was adequate to explain the functions of attention on the basis of modern theories of cognition. TAIS did not manage to differentiate between different level of skills and between different sports. The original subscales of TAIS were not validated by a factor analysis. The application of ironic processing in sport settings was examined in a series of six studies. The result of these studies showed no support of any impact of ironic processing.</p><p>The overall conclusions of the quest for the covet concentration in sport settings can be summarized in one word, variation. It is difficult to consider the notion of general concentration in sports settings because of great differences within and between sports and individuals. These results cast doubt on the efficiency of universal concentration improving techniques. The review of theories of cognitive psychology showed that many modern theories are conspicuous by one's absence in the field of sport psychology. Perhaps the improvements in the sport arenas could be faster if the knowledge of cognitive psychology was better.</p>

When athletes and coaches discuss reasons for success or failure the word concentration has an important role. Likewise, in sport research, the term attention tends to have the same central position. This notion gives the impression that everyone seems to know what concentration is and how it affects sport performances. However, the many theories in cognitive psychology are not primarily designed to be applied in the setting of sport and exercise, and thus have little or no validity in that field. Instead of applying scientific knowledge, the field of sport enhancement often utilizes myths and folklore as bases for practice and exercise. This thesis started as a quest for this well-known concentration and often required state of mind. The overarching purpose of this hunt was to discover aspects that influence the ability of concentration in sport and exercise settings. The aim was to examine the usefulness of cognitive psychology and scientific methods in the field of sports. The search for concentration has follows three tracks. The first line of investigation was to study variations in concentration. The second path was to validate the Test of Attentional and Interpersonal Style (TAIS), (Nideffer, 1976). The third trail was to review the theory of ironic processing in mental control (Wegner, 1992) and try out its applications on sport performances movements. The search of variations in concentration was carried out through interviewing and measuring heart rate of athletes from golf, pistol shooting, basketball, tennis, and handball. The results showed that the concentration vary within and between sports and athletes. The validation of TAIS was performed on a sample of 1230 athletes from different sports. The result confirms that the basic theory of TAIS not was adequate to explain the functions of attention on the basis of modern theories of cognition. TAIS did not manage to differentiate between different level of skills and between different sports. The original subscales of TAIS were not validated by a factor analysis. The application of ironic processing in sport settings was examined in a series of six studies. The result of these studies showed no support of any impact of ironic processing. The overall conclusions of the quest for the covet concentration in sport settings can be summarized in one word, variation. It is difficult to consider the notion of general concentration in sports settings because of great differences within and between sports and individuals. These results cast doubt on the efficiency of universal concentration improving techniques. The review of theories of cognitive psychology showed that many modern theories are conspicuous by one's absence in the field of sport psychology. Perhaps the improvements in the sport arenas could be faster if the knowledge of cognitive psychology was better.

Ao materializar uma específica percepção/estilização de mundo por meio das imagens, dos jogos sonoros e do ritmo, o poema formaliza, por isso mesmo, um modo de ser do enunciador, o etos do sujeito lírico, instância enunciativa que se faz na e pela linguagem. Com base nesse pressuposto, objetivou-se, neste estudo da poesia do brasileiro Dante Milano (1899-1991), identificar os índices lingüísticodiscursivos que, em sua dimensão estilística, permitissem a apreensão e a compreensão de traços do enunciador, cronotopicamente marcado, aderente à percepção que o texto lírico constrói. Assumindo-se explicitamente como poeta e, ao mesmo tempo, desqualificando o valor de sua enunciação, o eu lírico milaniano constrói, nesse paradoxo pragmático, um dos núcleos de tensão que o corporifica no discurso poético e o enlaça à modernidade. Tal procedimento converge para a identificação do eu lírico com figuras emblemáticas da marginalidade, que erram num espaço existencial de peso e opressão. Molda-se, assim, o corpo tenso e comprimido do enunciador, que, contudo, se inscreve numa expressão de altivez heróica. A existência solitária desse eu petrificado na angústia de sua contínua ruminação poética, revela também, em contraponto, outra configuração: a de um corpo volátil e expansivo. Aquele que se faz no devaneio de um olhar desejante lançado à plenitude. Mas uma plenitude que, ao formalizar-se não raras vezes numa sintaxe fragmentada e em imagens da evanescência, se torna inconsistente, vazia. Essas corporificações marcam as conjunções e as dissonâncias que essa poesia, especialmente antitética, constrói entre a carne e o espírito, o sonho e a vigília, a palavra e o silêncio, a morte e a vida... Como significantes intercambiáveis - antagônicos e, ao mesmo tempo, afins - que acionam um jogo assimétrico, indiciam a perspectiva irônica da fala desse enunciador. Uma perspectiva irônica que, entendida como um evento deflagrado na situação comunicativa, instaura a especificidade de uma percepção que incorpora na construção de sua verdade a negação dessa mesma verdade. A configuração poética do locus horrendus, a sonoridade soturna de sua poesia, o sentido especial que assume a métrica decassilábica, as imagens nucleares da pedra e da evanescência, a espacialização textual, o ritmo dispnéico de muitos de seus versos, entre outros índices que emergem da tessitura poética de sutil ironia, corporificam o etos de um enunciador que vivencia a angústia em sua trágica dimensão. / When materializing a specific world perception/stylization by means of images, sound play and rhythm, the poem formalizes, for this very reason, the enunciator\'s way of being, the lyric subject\'s ethos, an enunciation instance that is produced in and by language. Starting from this presupposition, the aim of this study of the poetic work of Brazilian poet Dante Milano (1899-1991) will be to identify the linguistic and discursive indices which, in their stylistic dimension, would allow the apprehension and comprehension of the enunciator\'s traces, chronotopically marked, adherent to the perception built by the lyrical text. Explicitly assuming itself as a poet and, at the same time, disqualifying the value of its enunciation, Milano\'s persona builds, in this pragmatic paradox, one of the tension nuclei which embodies it in the poetic discourse and which ties it to modernity. Such procedure converges on the persona\'s identification with emblematic figures of marginality, which wander in an existential space of heaviness and oppression. Thus is molded the enunciator\'s tense and compressed body, which inscribes itself in an expression of heroic pride. The solitary existence of this self, petrified in the anguish of its continuous poetic rumination, also reveals, in counterpoint, another configuration: that of a volatile and expansive body, which is made in the reverie of a desiring gaze cast into plenitude, but a plenitude which, not rarely taking shape in a fragmented syntax and in images of evanescence, becomes inconsistent and hollow. These embodiments mark the conjunctions and dissonances that this poetry, specially antithetic, builds between flesh and soul, dream and vigil, word and silence, death and life... As interchangeable signifiers - antagonistic and, at the same time, similar - which actuate an asymmetric game, they indicate the ironic perspective of this enunciator\'s speech, an ironic perspective which, understood as an event triggered in the communicative situation, establishes the specificity of a perception that incorporates in the construction of its truth the denial of this very truth. The poetic configuration of the locus horrendus, the gloomy sonority of the poetry, the special meaning assumed by the decasyllabic meter, the nuclear images of stone and evanescence, the textual spatialization, the dyspnoeic rhythm of many of the verses, among other indices which emerge from the poetic tissue of subtle irony, embody the ethos of an enunciator that experiences anguish in its tragic dimension.

The narrative identity: Alexander Nehamas, Richard Rorty This work analyzes the problem of narrative identity developed in the works of Nehamas and Rorty. These two American philosophers work in the same – postnietzschean – paradigm. Both of them claim that the identity is not simply given to a person; rather, it is something one has to achieve if he/she wants to have one. A means both philosophers offer to such an achievement is to narrate a story about one’s person, one’s style of life and thus to create ones identity. Nehamas and Rorty assert that while creating identity one has to obey to some rules. However, the rules the philosophers announce are somewhat different. As to Nehamas, he claims that the project of the self-creation ought to be coherent and distinctive. These two criteria are to be achieved, otherwise the self-creation will fail. In addition, this project has to be accomplished in writing. Nehamas demonstrates how these criteria distinctiveness and coherence – are achieved in the writings of certain philosophers. These philosophers are Socrates, Plato, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Foucault and ultimately Nehamas himself. Nehamas suggests that all these philosophers belong to the tradition of the art of living and that all of them are primarily concerned with the projects of self-creation and self-perfection. As to Rorty, he asserts that the creator of oneself has to fulfil one major requirement. Like Nehamas, Rorty claims that the aim of self-creator, whom he... [to full text]

This thesis examines how women perform as leaders within male-dominated professions, including law, business, politics, the military, and the academy. In studying women's performances in terms of the corporeal and spectacular, the investigation seeks to understand how particular women enact leadership through their materiality within specific times and places. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's (1988) theorising of the processes of 'becoming', woman-as-leader is studied as an entity that passes from one incomplete and multiple assemblage to another, rather than as a singular 'developing' identity. The research is located within and between the paradoxes that complicate the performances of leadership for women. One key paradox serving as a rationale for this investigation is that, while 'equity' has become a truism of contemporary leadership, it is clear from formal reports (for example, the 2002 Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency (EOWA) report), that many women continue to be marginalised and under-represented as leaders and senior managers. Moreover, those few women who have achieved success often acknowledge themselves as both legitimately and differently - and sometimes awkwardly, located as leaders in the everyday enactments of their work. The investigation of leadership within and between such paradoxes is problematic for a neo-liberal order of thinking, and even for socially critical theory, because of the assumptions that modernist literature makes about women's struggle for political legitimacy (ie, a narrative of progress, emancipation, and/or linear cumulative historical development). It is for this reason that the conceptual tools used in this study are drawn from post-feminist and post-structuralist theory. Such theorising refuses literal categories in favour of 'ironic categories' (Rorty, 1989) where two apparently oppositional ideas are understood to be both necessary and true. To explore women 'becoming' leaders (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988), 'woman-as-leader' is interrogated using Jean François Lyotard's (1984) notion of 'performativity,' Mary Russo's (1994) theorising of the embodied spectacle of 'the female grotesque', and Richard Rorty (1989) and Donna Haraway's (1991) insistence on partiality, doubt, and the importance of 'undoing' the fixity of modernist categories - in this instance, for women. One ironic category of importance to the study is Haraway's theorising of a 'cyborgian identity', a technological assemblage that is part-human/part-machine. This allows acknowledgement that women leaders inhabit realms beyond the boundaries imposed by the same/difference, human/machine, present/past, and real/virtue binaries. Using these tools, the performances of a number of women leaders is examined in an empirical study that focuses on a few individual women located in male-defined and male dominated settings. The empirical work has two key components. First, it provides a reading of three moments in time where a female individual dys-appears (Leder, 1990) in the public gaze, erupting as a unique spectacle in spaces that are both enabling and constraining. It foregrounds the unique complexities of three public performances in which women made a spectacle of themselves, while the analysis refuses to either celebrate the individuals involved, or to bemoan the conditions under which they did so. The analysis demonstrates the value of re-thinking leadership in terms of its complexity for the female as embodied public 'performer'. It then moves on to focus specifically on the (embodied, spectacular) tactics being deployed by women leaders in contemporary professional work. This analysis is located in the professions of law, business, politics, the military, and the academy. The data-as-evidence emerging from the analysis show women leaders to be both and neither enacting and troubling 'proper' (ie, traditional and/or known) leadership conventions. The analysis provides a reading of how, through certain tactical shifts, women work to 'de-territorialise' both the 'forms of content' and 'forms of expression' (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988) constituting leadership performances. It makes visible the tactical assemblages these women deploy, and the ways in which such tactics separate, combine, and compound the same/difference, equality/inequality, either/or binaries. The specific tactical manoeuvres for achieving legitimacy in the public gaze cluster around four identifiable ironic categories: (i) legitimate cross-dressing (ii) assertive defence (iii) proper blasphemy, and (iv) humanly-machinic. When taken together, the two components of the empirical study compel a re-theorising of 'woman-as-leader' as both insider and outsider, an entity engaging in the on-going work of diss-assembling and re-assembling a leaderly self. Woman is shown 'to be not one, not multiple, but multiplicities', simultaneously (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988). This re-theorising provides a more nuanced account of women leaders working to maintain legitimacy, credibility, and propriety as leaders than mainstream theorising of leadership and management currently allows.

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There appears to be little doubt about the nature of the relationship between the fashion model and the young girl in contemporary Western culture. Dominant literature, emerging from medico-psychological and feminist research, situates the model as a disorderly influence, imbued with the capacity to infect and, hence, distort the healthy minds and bodies of 'suggestible' young girls. Opposing these perspectives is a smaller, more recent body of literature, emerging from post-feminist work that argues that the model-girl relationship is a delightful influence. Thus, the contemporary field of scholarship reveals an increasingly dichotomous way of thinking about fashion model influence: the model influences young girls in ways that are disorderly or delightful, never both. This thesis argues that to assume that the model-girl encounter is 'neatly' disorderly or delightful is shifty at best. It suggests that, in their rush to judge the fashion model as either pernicious or pleasurable, existing literature fails to account for the precision with which young girls know the fashion model. Using poststructuralist theory, the thesis argues that 'influence' may be more usefully thought of as a discursive effect, which may produce a range of effects for better and worse. Following Foucault (1972), fashion model influence is interrogated as a regime of truth about the model-girl encounter, constituted discursively under specific social, cultural and historical conditions. In so doing, the thesis makes different sense of fashion model influence, and questions influence as an independently-existing 'force' that bears down on vulnerable young girls. Drawing on a poststructural conceptual architecture, this thesis re-conceptualises the model-girl encounter as a pedagogical relationship focused on the (ideal) female body. It suggests that the fashion model, as an authoritative embodied pedagogue, transmits knowledge about 'ideal' feminine bodily conduct to the young girl, as attentive gazing apprentice. Fashion model influence is re-interrogated as the product of certain forms of disciplinary training (Foucault, 1977a), with young girls learning a discursive knowledge about how to discipline the body in ways that are properly feminine. Such a perspective departs from the notion that fashion model influence is necessarily disorderly or delightful, and makes possible a re-reading of influence in terms of learning outcomes. A problematic arises conceptualising the fashion model in this way. To consider the model as a 'good' teacher breaches a number of discursive rules for best pedagogical practice in postmodern times: She is not a pedagogue of the mind; she is not student-centred, facilitative, asexual, interpersonally engaged, relational, or authentic. To create a space for thinking differently about the model as a teacher, then, the thesis looks to ancient historical times and places in which female-to-female and body-to-body pedagogies were practised and understood. The first phase of the research project embedded in this thesis defamiliarises pedagogical work using historical texts from ancient Greece. It examines in particular the erotically embodied pedagogical relationships conducted between older, authoritative elite prostitutes known as hetairae, and their younger female apprentices. The discursive rules governing these pedagogical relationships are examined with a view to diagnosing the model-girl encounter in terms of these rules. These rules are then used to interrogate ethnographic data generated through observation of the model-girl encounter in situ in a modelling course, and through focus group interviews with groups of young girls. Working through notions of corporeal embodiment, self as art, desire, discipline, stillness, spectacle, the gaze and the conduct of conduct, the study interrogates the model-girl encounter as a contemporary pedagogical encounter. To avoid reaffirming more traditional binaries, the reading of data is ironic, working within and between binaries such as disorder/delight. Three ironic categories of femininity are produced out of the analysis: unnaturally natural, stompy grace and beautifully grotesque. These categories 'speak' the fragmentation, fissure, contradiction, inconsistency and absurdity that permeate the talk of young girls and model-girl pedagogy in the modelling classroom. Thus, the thesis offers up an analysis of the model-girl encounter that refuses the neatness and uni-dimensionality that characterises existing literature.