bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Secular Living as a Context for Moral Development
Authors: Zuckerman Phil , Thompson Kyle
Published: February 2020

Despite widespread suspicion to the contrary, secular living can and does serve as an adequate, or even excellent, context for moral development. In this chapter, the authors present the contours of contemporary anti-atheist prejudice, with an emphasis on the United States. Next, they explore the empirical data showing that individual atheists and highly secularized societies, such as Sweden and Denmark, are often quite moral, which serves to counter and debunk anti-atheist prejudice. Then, the authors move to a philosophical discussion centering around secular morality itself, outlining general merits of atheistic morality specifically while simultaneously pointing out various problematic assumptions of theistic morality. Finally, the authors conclude and make recommendations for future research.
Moral Choices in Digital Games
Authors: Graver Cleve , Blumberg Fran C.
Published: February 2020

Digital game play is increasingly acknowledged as an activity in which moral decisions are made. Research to date has largely addressed decisions pertaining to transgressions despite opportunities for prosocial moral choices. These decisions range from relatively benign acts of cheating to gain advantage within a game to the more egregious infliction of physical harm on virtual others to advance one’s goals. Research examining the ramifications of these transgressions as they apply to perceptions of game play and to real-world behaviors is still relatively new and largely studied among undergraduate participants. We survey this growing body of work with consideration of the theoretical perspectives that have been used to frame it and the factors, such as game narrative and mode of play, that have been identified as impacting players’ moral judgments and choices in the digital game world.
The Interplay of Developing Morality and Gender Attitudes
Authors: Bigler Rebecca S. , Liben Lynn S.
Published: February 2020

Morality and gender are intersecting realms of human thought and behavior. Reasoning and action at their intersection (e.g., views of women’s rights legislation) carry important consequences for societies, communities, and individual lives. In this chapter, the authors argue that children’s developing views of morality and gender reciprocally shape one another in important and underexplored ways. The chapter begins with a brief history of psychological theory and research at the intersection of morality and gender and suggests reasons for the historical failure to view gender attitudes through moral lenses. The authors then describe reasons for expecting morality to play an important role in shaping children’s developing gender attitudes and, reciprocally, for gender attitudes to play an important role in shaping children’s developing moral values. The authors next illustrate the importance and relevance of these ideas by discussing two topics at the center of contentious debate in the United States concerning ethical policy and practice: treatment of gender nonconformity and gender-segregated schooling. The chapter concludes with suggestions for future research.
The Environmental Commons
Authors: Flanagan Constance , Dower Becca Jo , Smallwood Morgan , Gallay Erin , Pykett Alisa , Skye Clifton
Published: February 2020

Contrasting policies according rights of humans to non-human entities (corporations vs. rivers) and the principles guiding behavior within those competing moral orders provide the ecological argument for this chapter. As an alternative to a moral order that privileges private ownership of natural resources, the authors provide an example from the Anishinaabe people, where cultural practices remind people that their identity is rooted in the land and that other species are their relatives. The interdependence of humans with other living things is extended in the discussion of environmental commons theory. Tenets of this theory and educational practices that flow from its principles are used to address the challenges raised in Bandura’s discussion of the mechanisms by which humans selectively disengage from moral responsibility for the environment.
The Development of Purpose
Authors: Damon William , Malin Heather
Published: February 2020

Purpose is a unique character strength that develops over the life span, beginning with the formulation of personal, family, and vocational goals in early adolescence. A growing body of research has produced a clear picture, international and multicultural in scope, of how purpose is acquired and sustained, how purpose functions, how new purposes evolve over the life span, and how purpose relates to other character strengths and psychological capacities. The chapter presents a psychological definition of purpose, describes the dynamics of purpose development, and reviews studies of purpose across a variety of cultural contexts. The chapter also discusses education for purpose in secular and religious schools.
Humanism Against Religion
Authors: Kline David
Published: February 2020

Focusing on the broad epistemological and political effects of humanism in the modern West beginning in the European humanist movements of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, this chapter will trance the emergence of a rudimentary discourse of “humanism against religion” that is rooted in the historical emergence of the modern state as a deconstructive movement against the theo-political order of Medieval Christian Europe. The chapter argues that the emergence of both a human-centric discourse of knowledge and the modern “secular” state out of medieval Christian Europe provide the most significant cultural and political conditions for the rise of western humanism and its wide-ranging critical perspectives of religion. Following this account of the discourse of humanism in the west, the chapter surveys a small sample of modern perspectives and authors that have offered direct humanist critiques of religion toward the service of explicit humanist philosophies or worldviews.
Can Humanism be the Social Norm?
Authors: Welch Sharon D.
Published: February 2020

Assaults on truth and divisions about the nature of wise governance are not momentary political challenges, unique to particular moments in history. Rather, they demonstrate fundamental weaknesses in human reasoning and core dangers in ways of construing both individual freedom and cohesive communities. It will remain an ongoing challenge to learn to deal rationally with what is an intrinsic irrationality in human cognition and with what is an intrinsic tendency toward domination and violence in human collectivities. In times of intense social divisions, it is vital to consider the ways in which humanism might function as the social norm by, paradoxically, functioning in a way different from other social norms. Humanism is not the declaration that a certain set of values or norms are universally valid. At its best and most creative, humanism is not limited to a particular set of norms, but is, rather, the commitment to a certain process in which norms are continuously created, critically evaluated, implemented, sustained or revised. Humanism is a process of connection, perception, implementation, and critique, and it applies this process as much to itself as to other traditions.
Real Time Bidding System as a mediating technology of organization
Authors: Vurdubakis Theodore
Published: February 2020

This chapter focuses on Real-Time Bidding (RTB) as representative of the market devices by which the commercialization of attention is currently organized. RTB enables advertisers (in the form of automated agents) to select and target Internet and social media users in real time and through multiple third-party websites. In so doing, the devices and machinations of digital advertising bring into being complex chains of parasitic (in Serres’ sense) inhabitations as advertisers, publishers, fraudsters, bots, etc. jockey for the best positions from which to intercept and divert money and attention.
Container as a mediating technology of organization
Authors: Klose Alexander
Published: February 2020

This chapter offers a multi-level interpretation of container logistics as one of today’s key organizational principles. As a universal storage and transport means for cargo as well as a conceptual entity that connects the worlds of physical goods and digital data, the container can be understood as the realization of a rationalistic utopia of organization. Discussing the parts, principles, motifs, and multiple uses of containers in and outside of their logistical systems, the chapter complicates the understanding of the standardized shipping container as a simple, self-evident technical solution by depicting it as a multi-faceted—even poetic—entity.
Conversational Interface as a mediating technology of organization
Authors: Bunz Mercedes
Published: February 2020

Conversational interfaces such as Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa allow technology companies to reach deeper into the social fabric of our societies than they already had. For centuries we used media to speak with each other; now to speak directly to a device has become normal. To understand this reorganisation further, this chapter explores the technology that drives it—the new Artificial Intelligence driven by machine learning—and links it back to social organization such as to the bias conversational interfaces learn from the data they are trained with, and to bots that start to converse in their own human-like language.
Filter System as a mediating technology of organization
Authors: Chun Wendy Hui Kyong
Published: February 2020

Filter systems are software tools which survey, select, prioritize, and predict information, items and users. Through their content and form, they shape behaviour by collecting individuals and items into similarity-based neighbourhoods. They limit choice and amplify past trends in the name of efficiency and desire. As technologies of organizing, filter systems are thus updating, and perhaps exacerbating, the organizational consequences of media technologies. This raises thorny questions: What are the ramifications of this kind of similarity-based categorization, and of its affectively charged zones? What (class-based, racial, gendered) aspects are factored into its parameters directly or indirectly through proxies?
Interface as a mediating technology of organization
Authors: Shah Nishant
Published: February 2020

The interface is a ubiquitous organizational metaphor. This chapter shows how the interface is discussed simultaneously but discretely as a noun and as a verb—as a site of encounter as well as an active controller of our digital practices, respectively. This duality produces a deadlock in critical examination of digital interfaces. The chapter proposes to break the impasse by positioning the interface as a process and analysing it through three sites of inquiry—thresholds, intentionality, and measurement—to enliven the politics of power and control in the organizational promises of the interface.
Office Plant as a mediating technology of organization
Authors: Rieger Stefan
Published: February 2020

This chapter is dedicated to the office plant. The office plant takes on different roles: as environmental medium, it transforms offices into natural habitats. As medium of organization, it shapes everyday work life and its social relations. Based on artistic documentations (of office plants) and a history of knowledge of indoor plants and their cultivation, the office plant’s career is retraced and reconstructed—from a seemingly inconsequential prop of office organization to an agential medium that retains its efficacy even (or especially) under conditions of digitalization and virtualization.
Paper Shredder as a mediating technology of organization
Authors: Comi Alice
Published: February 2020

This chapter shows how the paper shredder mediates aspects of confidentiality, transparency, and secrecy in organizations. Following Susan Star Leigh’s ‘tricks of the trade’, it conceptualizes the paper shredder as material infrastructure and retraces its organizing force and effects. This brings into view virtuous as well as vicious practices in which the paper shredder becomes implicated—ranging from the protection of sensitive data, to the covering of unethical practices. The chapter concludes with suggestions to re-conceptualize material infrastructures in organizations, and unveil related aspects of confidentiality, transparency, and secrecy.
Planning Table as a mediating technology of organization
Authors: Conrad Lisa
Published: February 2020

Planning tables are a ubiquitous tool of organizing. They can have different shapes and different names, but what all the variants have in common is a twofold capacity: to create an unambiguous order on the one hand, and to quickly reshuffle this order on the other. A planning table allows the drafting of different plans of how to act and eventually, it initiates the translation of the plan into the real. This is how the planning table unfolds its organizational powers. Planning tables that are appropriate and fit well with the context elicit affection, whereas the lack of these properties creates resistance.
Suit as a mediating technology of organization
Authors: Vinken Barbara
Published: February 2020

The suit, the garb of modernity, presents itself as a sheath, hiding the body and elevating the intellect. The aristocrats were all ostentation and conspicuous display; the bourgeois industrialists, in contrast, shed ornament in favour of demure, sober, proper, and functional attire suited to the business of business. This chapter shows the suit is not against fashion, but constitutes its own organizing force as fashion: it promises constancy, dependability, and an unthinking willingness to subject the private to the corporate body, with few exceptions.
Typeface as a mediating technology of organization
Authors: Holt Robin
Published: February 2020

Type was moulded from metals, before becoming immaterial. This chapter acknowledges this mediating transformation toward digital modulation, whilst holding on to the persistent sense of type having a face, an aesthetic form whose organizing affects permeate human understanding. The chapter isolates indicative typefaces—Doves Press, Baskerville, Universalschrift—showing how their design harboured expectations about how to organize meaning, expectations that were themselves already organized. The chapter ends with those who cast themselves in critique of these organized conditions—Mallarmé and Schwitters.
Calendar as a mediating technology of organization
Authors: Hoof Florian
Published: February 2020

This chapter dwells on the calendar and more specifically on personal time management systems as a technology that mediates between the organization and the individual. The calendar is discussed as a technical medium of standardization and modularization as well as a medium of cultural synchronization, which provides an interface between the demands of an organization and those of its employees. Following Weber’s claim on the interrelatedness of capitalism and the Christian conduct of life, the calendar is discussed as a medium of Protestantism and as an integral part of the media and cultural history of the rationalization of the self.
Clock as a mediating technology of organization
Authors: Gregg Melissa , Kneese Tamara
Published: February 2020

The clock has long been a social technology, or a way of authorizing a singular source to propel collective activity. This chapter explores whether this social function continues in quite the same way in the wake of digital technology. It investigates the particular role of the clock in the workplace—how a predictable relationship to time accrued value for The Organization as an institutional form. The chapter traces the history of the clock, from factories to the contemporary digital workplace, asking how new technologies have changed the status of the clock as a way of organizing labour and productivity.
The Killing Fields of Identity Politics
Authors: Clarke Caroline , Knights David
Published: February 2020

The obsession with securing recognition through identity pervades organizational, institutional, political, and everyday life. As academics, our culpability in promulgating this fascination, or idée fixe is indisputable, for as a collective body we are responsible for a proliferation of articles, books, and conference streams on identity. However, apart from a few exceptions, the majority of texts fail to interrogate the concept to uncover its dangers, but instead reproduce the everyday common-sense fascination, indeed addictive, preoccupation with seeking order, stability, and security through identity. In this chapter, the authors expose this neglect within the organization studies literature and argue that it contributes to, rather than challenges, some of the major social ills surrounding identity—discrimination and prejudice, aggressive masculine competition, conquest and control, and the growing identity politics of nationalist, if not xenophobic and racist, constructions of boundaries and borders.
Finding OurSelves in Space
Authors: Hirst Alison , Humphreys Michael
Published: February 2020

This chapter explores the management and organization studies (MOS) literature concerned with the relationships between identity, space, and place. The authors define identity-related terms and highlight the principal ways in which space is conceptualized in MOS. They then examine three categories of empirical and theoretical studies linking organized space and processes of identity and identification: workspaces designed to enable highly interactive modes of working; homes, where work is increasingly taking up residence; and spaces that facilitate identity change in ways unanticipated by managements. The authors then make suggestions for future research and conclude by highlighting the powerful dynamic reciprocal connections between space and individual and organizational identities.
Conversations with the Self and Others
Authors: Cutcher Leanne
Published: February 2020

Research often entails engaging with others from a different race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexuality, or other identity marker. These encounters can lead to a ‘bending back’ on the self that challenges taken for granted aspects of our research identity. This chapter explores the ‘spaces of possibility’ created in the encounter between researchers and research subjects. Drawing on encounters from her own fieldwork, the author explores being both an insider and outsider in the research process and how this led to different kinds of shared identity work, as well as the ways in which she has been ‘undone’ by her encounter with others in the research process.
‘If You Have to Say You Are, You Aren’t’
Authors: Fairhurst Gail T. , Sheep Mathew L.
Published: February 2020

How are identities constituted in a post-truth context? To answer this question, the authors of this chapter take a paradox approach to identity, which can address the contradictions of a post-truth era. They show how the paradoxical tensions that actors experience serve as discursive resources for individual and collective identities. The authors assert that the greater the interrelatedness of paradoxical tensions evidenced in discourse, the more likely are they to knot in a dynamic interplay that may result in self-referential action of a contradictory or paradoxical nature. Drawing from the logic of extreme context research, the chapter examines the discourse of the post-truth presidency of Donald J. Trump to illustrate how identity knotting subverts managerial agency in identity construction.
Fiction and the Identity of the Manager
Authors: Learmonth Mark , Griffin Martyn
Published: February 2020

This chapter explores fictional portrayals of managers in popular culture and considers the different ways that they shape our understanding of the identities of managers. Focusing on films and novels, the chapter begins by exploring the fundamental nature of the claim that well-known fiction has a capacity to shape and influence the world, albeit indirectly, and in unobtrusive, relatively unnoticed ways. The chapter builds upon established traditions of literary-orientated work in organization studies to show how fiction can transmit ideals, identity models, and patterns for sensemaking about organizations. However, the chapter also represents a fresh direction for research, focusing on the tensions and continuities across a wide range of contrasting fictional portrayals of manager-like figures. The chapter explores ‘positive’, ‘negative’, and ‘tragic’ portrayals of managers in fictional works to consider how they might help shape who we think of when we consider a ‘manager’ in contemporary society. In doing so, the authors encourage a wider consideration of the cultural content and context of managerial identity work and the ways that it can be imagined and understood.
Noise, Identity, and Pre-Interpreted Worlds
Authors: Patriotta Gerardo
Published: February 2020

Identities form and develop through the experience of encountering the world on a day-to-day basis. The world we encounter is pre-interpreted, it presents itself to us as a largely undifferentiated and tacit background against which we organize our experience and make sense of ourselves. Pre-interpretation means that it is often difficult to disentangle identities from the worlds we inhabit unless something goes wrong and we are compelled actively to reflect on the situation at hand. This chapter proposes a phenomenological perspective on identity based on the concept of ‘noise’. Noise refers to any instance that violates the background expectancies of everyday life and calls for interpretation on the part of those who experience it. The author argues that noise can pose identity threats when it challenges the ‘pre-interpreted world’ that we would normally take for granted and enact in everyday situations. At the same time, noise also provides researchers with an opportunity to account for the ways in which individuals experience and understand the worlds of which they are part.
Race and Identity in Organizations
Authors: Greedharry Mrinalini , Ahonen Pasi , Tienari Janne
Published: February 2020

This chapter tackles the question of how race can be researched and written about as a formative rather than circumstantial aspect of identity in organizations. The authors go beyond race as a subject of inquiry for scholars who specialize in problems of managing racialized bodies in subfields such as cross-cultural management, diversity, and inclusion. Their aim is to connect the study of identities in organizations to the rich, extant literature in other fields that theorizes race and identity. The authors renew calls for understanding race as an organizing principle and conclude with the proposition that thinking about racial identity as a productive, generative identity rather than a limit and a problem of particular bodies may give a new direction to organizational studies of race and identity.
Bridging Self and Sociality
Authors: Ybema Sierk
Published: February 2020

‘Identity’, Berger and Luckmann (1991: 195) maintained, ‘remains unintelligible unless it is located in a world’. In order to ‘locate’ identity, this chapter provides, first, a theoretical underpinning for an essentially social understanding of identity construction by conceptualizing identities as arising at the intersection of, and in the interaction between, people’s personal lifeworlds and environing social worlds. Second, it discusses the implications of such a view, summarizing the principles underpinning a social constructivist perspective in terms of five p’s: identity as positioning, performance, (co)production, process, and (an act or effect of) power. Third, it locates identity construction in four different worlds or social circuits where we might observe the interaction between self and sociality ‘in action’: (1) inner conversations (self-directed positioning), (2) self–other definitions (relational positioning), (3) situated interactions (reciprocal positioning), and (4) institutional dynamics (subject positioning). By sketching what to look for (the five p’s) and where to look (the four circuits), this chapter assists scholars in deploying identity as an analytical bridge between agency and structure.
Between the Bridge and the Door
Authors: Zundel Mike , Mackay David , MacIntosh Robert , McKenzie Claire
Published: February 2020

This chapter explores the liminal spaces of the identity work of individuals in organizations. Following the processual outline of rites of passages by anthropologist van Gennep, the authors draw on sociologist Georg Simmel’s elaboration of the ‘bridge and the door’ as modes of transition to analyse the liminal processes of a manager of a newly formed firm. Based on video diary entries collected over a four-month period the authors illustrate how rites of transition are enacted and how these change relational patterns—bridging, opening or closing off present, past, and future possibilities. Video diaries are helpful in indicating in particular the emotive aspects of such transitions and, therefore, the often hard to study personal processes that represent liminal spaces where there is neither a new beginning nor a completed process.
Identities in Organizations
Authors: Brown Andrew D.
Published: February 2020

The future of research on identities in and around organizations is ours to make. Sifting through the chapters of this handbook gives indications of what the immediate future may look like and the issues that might figure large in identities theorizing. Substantial attention is paid by contributors to: (i) our changing times and their implications for identities; (ii) the increasingly less definite and less assured nature of identities; (iii) the scope for generating new metaphors for understanding identities and their utility; (iv) the possible benefits of focusing not merely on discursively construed identities but their performed, embodied, and emotional characteristics; (v) the contextual and relational dynamics of identities formation; (vi) issues of temporality and spatiality; (vii) discourses of authenticity, real and fake selves; (viii) the need for intersectional approaches to identities research; and (ix) the desirability for identities scholars to be reflexive in the conduct and write-up of their research.
Language Contact and Endangered Languages
Authors: Aikhenvald Alexandra Y.
Published: February 2020

A major reason for language endangerment is intensive contact with another group whose language has gained, or is gaining, greater political, social and economic prestige and advantages. Speakers of an endangered language will gradually lose the capacity to fully communicate in the language, and fully understand it. As a consequence, an endangered language will gradually become obsolescent. The process of language obsolescence ultimately leads to language shift and language loss. The impact of the increasingly dominant language onto an endangered language tends to involve a massive influx of non-native forms from the dominant language; a high amount of structural diffusion; reinforcement of forms and patterns shared with the dominant language; and the loss of forms or patterns absent from the dominant language. Language endangerment and impending language shift may result in dialect leveling, and creating new mixed, or ‘blended’ languages. A major difference between contact-induced language change in ‘healthy’ and in endangered languages lies in the speed of change. A high degree of individual variation between speakers and disintegration of language communities result in the lack of continuity and stability of linguistic change.
Creoles
Authors: McWhorter John
Published: February 2020

Creole languages are new languages, each of them with communities of L1 speakers, that have developed from adults’ second-language renditions of, usually, European languages amidst conditions of colonization and imperialism. The period in question lasted from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries. This chapter discusses various aspects of creolization such as its clinal manifestation, the diachronic relationships between creoles, and especially the various theories accounting for how creole languages were born.
Language Contact in the History of English
Authors: Beal Joan C. , Faulkner Mark
Published: February 2020

Britain is not and never has been monolingual. The 2011 census counted inhabitants of Britain speaking nearly ninety languages, including Slovenian, Farsi, Tagalog, and Swahili; a visitor to mid-twelfth-century London might have heard as many as fourteen languages: English, French, German, Flemish, Danish, Genoese, Spanish, Breton, Welsh, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Hebrew, Arabic, and Greek. Britain has therefore of necessity always been a site of language contact. This chapter focuses on what influence this language contact has had on British English, a topic of increasing interest to historical linguists. Following a brief account of some of the methodological challenges attendant on studying historical language contact, the chapter sketches the influence of the four main contact influences on English: Celtic, Latin, Norse, and French.
Northeastern Neo-Aramaic and Language Contact
Authors: Coghill Eleanor
Published: February 2020

The North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects form one of the surviving branches of the Aramaic language family. Extremely diverse, they are or were spoken by Christian and Jewish minorities originating in Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran. They have been in intense contact with other languages of the region, most notably Kurdish, but also Arabic, Turkic languages and Persian. As a result, they show a great deal of contact influence, not only in lexicon and phonology but also in morphology and syntax. The precise forms of the borrowings, as well as their behavior, usually reflect the local dialects of the donor language, showing how important fine-grained dialectal data is in a study of language contact. While some of the languages in contact, namely Kurdish, Turkish and Persian, are structurally very different to NENA, structural congruence or compatibility plays at best a fluctuating role in facilitating borrowings.
Language Contact in Tagdal, a Northern Songhay Language of Niger
Authors: Benítez-Torres Carlos M.
Published: February 2020

This chapter describes non-Songhay structures (mostly of Berber origin) in Tagdal, a Northern Songhay language of Niger that has preserved a few hundred morphemes of Songhay origin and which exhibits extensive contact-induced change including bilingual suppletion. Regional and literary forms of Arabic (and latterly French) have played their roles, but the major components which have been absorbed into Tagdal are from Berber languages, including (but not exclusively) Tuareg varieties. This has included not only massive lexical transfer (much more than 50% of the attested Tagdal lexicon) but a large number of morphosyntactic subsystems, fabric as well as transfer, and it has also resulted in the increase in use of phonemes of non-Songhay origin.
Language Contact and Tok Pisin
Authors: Blaxter Paliwala Adam A. H.
Published: February 2020

As a creole language developed from an English-lexifier pidgin, the varieties of Melanesian Pidgin English (MPE) are traditionally viewed as consequences of a particular kind of language contact: processes of pidgin-creole (PC) language development. Studies have highlighted the legacy and impact of both indigenous ‘substrate’ languages and ongoing contact with the lexifier that operated as a social ‘superstrate’ in the Solomon Islands, post–World War II New Guinea, and parts of Vanuatu. Stepping outside the debates of pidgin and creole studies, however, MPE provides an incredibly rich and diverse field of study from which to consider language contact phenomena: from the initial contact context of the South Pacific whaling ships and beche la mer and sandalwood traders moving from New South Wales across the islands, to the incredible multilingual melting pot of the plantations in Samoa, Queensland, and Fiji, to the stabilization of Tok Pisin in German-controlled New Guinea between 1880 and 1918 and the substantial Austronesianization of the early jargon, through the impact of shared proto-Oceanic features on the developing language, and the eventual establishment of the currency of this regional lingua franca as previous colonial dominions achieved independence in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Today, MPE varieties are once more under scrutiny as test beds for theories of decreolization: with ongoing contact with English resulting in changes, apparent destabilization, and the possible development of new varieties.
Contact Influences on Ossetic
Authors: Belyaev Oleg
Published: February 2020

Ossetic is an Iranian language spoken by around half a million people (Census 2002) mostly in the North Caucasus, in the Republic of North Ossetia–Alania, part of Russia, and in the adjacent region of South Ossetia beyond the Caucasian mountain range. Ossetic is descended from a language spoken by a subgroup of the Alans, a tribe of Sarmatian origin, which has found refuge in the highlands of the Caucasus following the invasions of the Mongols and Tamerlane. Centuries-long contact with neighboring peoples speaking Northwest Caucasian, Northeast Caucasian, South Caucasian, and Turkic languages has made a considerable impact on Ossetic phonology, grammar, and lexicon. Ossetic is a textbook example of an Indo-European language in a foreign linguistic environment, and therefore its data are highly important for the typology of language contact.
Morphology and Contact-Induced Language Change
Authors: Gardani Francesco
Published: February 2020

This chapter focuses on a wide range of phenomena occurring under the heading of contact-induced morphological change, including several degrees of morphological integration, non-integration (qua indeclinability or maintenance of original markers), and borrowing. It also discusses three major types of mechanisms leading to morphological borrowing: ‘macro-mechanisms’ are general psycholinguistic mechanisms of transfer conceived in terms of source language vs. recipient language agentivity; ‘meso-mechanisms’ are conscious and unconscious techniques which are responsible for contact-induced language change, such as ‘Trojan horse structures’; ‘micro-mechanisms’ are local, concrete mechanisms, such as reborrowing and reanalysis. Cross-linguistic data are presented and discussed in light of the implications that contact-induced morphological change has for the theory of morphology.
Code-Switching as a Reflection of Contact-Induced Change
Authors: Backus Ad
Published: February 2020

Code-switching is often studied in purely synchronic terms, as recorded speech is analyzed for patterns of language mixing. Though this has yielded numerous useful theoretical advances, it has also shielded the code-switching literature from serious engagement with the phenomenon of language change, even from the subtype of change caused by language contact. There is also the additional practice of limiting the study of code-mixing and code-switching to lexical mixing. On the other side of the fence, meanwhile, discussions of contact-induced language change tend to be limited to morphological and syntactic phenomena. This chapter breaks through this stalemate, and argues that a usage-based approach to language change actually demands integration of these perspectives. Code-switching should be seen as a reflection of lexical change. It is for this reason that a synchronic distinction between loanwords and code-switching makes no sense, since the terms refer to the diachronic and synchronic planes, respectively, of the same phenomenon. In the chapter, the author interprets the code-switching literature from this theoretical viewpoint, and explores what both the literature on code-switching and that on contact-induced change stand to gain from linking their empirical findings to a usage-based theory of language change that allocates proper attention to synchrony and diachrony, and unites lexical and structural change in the same framework.
The Role of Pain-Related Cognitions in the Relationship Between Pain Severity, Depression, and Pain Interference in a Sample of Primary Care Patients with Both Chronic Pain and Depression
Authors: Sánchez-Rodríguez Elisabet , Aragonès Enric , Jensen Mark P , Tomé-Pires Catarina , Rambla Concepció , López-Cortacans Germán , Miró Jordi
Published: February 2020

Objective

The aims of this study were twofold: 1) to better understand the associations between pain-related cognitions and pain severity, and psychological and physical function, and 2) to determine the extent to which these cognitions function as mediators in the association between pain severity and depression in a sample of primary care adult patients with chronic pain and depression.

Design

Cross-sectional design.

Methods

Three hundred twenty-eight patients with both depression and chronic pain from primary care centers responded to measures of pain severity, pain interference, depression severity, and pain-related cognitions (including measures of catastrophizing and other pain-related beliefs). We performed three hierarchical regression analyses and two multiple regression analyses.

Results

The helplessness domain of pain catastrophizing was positively associated with pain severity, depression severity, and pain interference and mediated the relationship between depression and pain severity and vice versa. Beliefs about disability showed a positive association with pain severity, pain interference, and depression severity, and also mediated the relationship between pain severity and depression. Believing in a medical cure was positively associated with pain interference and negatively associated with depression; emotion beliefs were positively associated with pain severity.

Conclusions

These findings provide important new information about the associations between several pain-related cognitions and pain severity, depression, and pain interference and the potential mediating roles that these cognitions play in the associations between pain severity and depression in patients with both chronic pain and depression in the primary care setting.
Effects of exercise training combined with psychological intervention compared to exercise training alone in prediabetes subjects
Authors: Siyu Yu , Hong Liu , Qun Yan , Hua Qiu , Kang Wu , Yibiao Ding , Wenping Wang , Qian She , Bo Feng , Xiaonan Ruan
Published: February 2020

Background

Prior research has confirmed the efficacy of exercise training (ET) in patients with prediabetes. However, whether the effectiveness of a combination of exercise and psychological intervention (EP) is better than ET alone in prediabetes in terms of physiological function, psychological status and glycometabolism has rarely been investigated.

Methods

Forty newly diagnosed prediabetes patients (65.3 ± 8.1 years) took part in the study. Subjects were divided into a pure ET group and a combined EP group. Interventions were conducted in 40–50-min sessions twice weekly for 32 weeks. Physiological, psychological and biochemical indicator measurements were taken after pre-, mid- and post-interventions, respectively.

Results

The main finding confirmed a significant improvement in systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure (DBP) and heart rate, high-density lipoprotein, fasting plasma glucose (FPG) and glycosylated hemoglobin (HbA1c) from pre- to mid- and post-test differentially in both groups (P < 0.05) by post hoc analyses. The EP group has a greater magnitude of improvement of DBP than the ET group. Significant differences were observed in FPG at mid-intervention and total cholesterol at post-intervention between the ET and EP groups. Self-Rating Anxiety Scale (SAS) scores of EP group were significantly less than ET group after post-intervention.

Conclusion

Our results suggest that EP might be a promising method lead to more apparent long-term effects on glycometabolism and psychological status for prediabetes patients. Other domains were improved by both interventions, but no typical pattern could be identified. Its underlying mechanisms need further study, and directions for future research are suggested.
Trends in access to female cancer screening in Brazil, 2007–16
Authors: Passos Camila M , Sales Jacqueline B , Maia Emanuella G , Caldeira Thaís C M , Rodrigues Roberta D , Figueiredo Natasha , Claro Rafael M
Published: February 2020

Background

This study aims to analyse changes in the prevalence of cervical cancer (CCa) and breast cancer (BCa) screening among women in the Brazilian capitals and Federal District in the last decade (2007–16).

Methods

Data from the surveillance system of risk and protective factors for chronic diseases through telephone interviews (n = 267 949) were used. Adequate screening consisted of, at least, one Pap test triennially, for women aged between 25 and 64 years, and mammography exam biannually, for women aged between 50 and 69 years. The prevalence of adequate screening was investigated for each type of cancer isolated and combined (women aged between 50 and 64 years). The prevalence of adequate screening was estimated for the total population and according to socioeconomic variables. Linear regression models were used.

Results

The prevalence of adequate screening test for CCa remained stable, around 82%, while the screening test for BCa increased from 71 to 78% between 2007 and 2016. Higher increases were observed among women with low schooling and from less developed regions. The percentage of adequate screening (considering both types), for women aged between 25 and 69 years, remained stable, close to 78%.

Conclusions

Screening for BCa increased significantly. Smaller coverage rates are verified among women with low schooling and from less developed regions.
Neoleukin-2 enhances anti-tumour immunity downstream of peptide vaccination targeted by an anti-MHC class II VHH
Authors: Crowley Stephanie J. , Bruck Patrick T. , Bhuiyan Md Aladdin , Mitchell-Gears Amelia , Walsh Michael J. , Zhangxu Kevin , Ali Lestat R. , Jeong Hee-Jin , Ingram Jessica R. , Knipe David M. , Ploegh Hidde L. , Dougan Michael , Dougan Stephanie K.
Published: February 2020

Cancer-specific mutations can lead to peptides of unique sequence presented on MHC class I to CD8 T cells. These neoantigens can be potent tumour-rejection antigens, appear to be the driving force behind responsiveness to anti-CTLA-4 and anti-PD1/L1-based therapies and have been used to develop personalized vaccines. The platform for delivering neoantigen-based vaccines has varied, and further optimization of both platform and adjuvant will be necessary to achieve scalable vaccine products that are therapeutically effective at a reasonable cost. Here, we developed a platform for testing potential CD8 T cell tumour vaccine candidates. We used a high-affinity alpaca-derived VHH against MHC class II to deliver peptides to professional antigen-presenting cells. We show
in vitro
and
in vivo
that peptides derived from the model antigen ovalbumin are better able to activate naive ovalbumin-specific CD8 T cells when conjugated to an MHC class II-specific VHH when compared with an irrelevant control VHH. We then used the VHH-peptide platform to evaluate a panel of candidate neoantigens
in vivo
in a mouse model of pancreatic cancer. None of the candidate neoantigens tested led to protection from tumour challenge; however, we were able to show vaccine-induced CD8 T cell responses to a melanoma self-antigen that was augmented by combination therapy with the synthetic cytokine mimetic Neo2/15.
Response to resources and parasites depends on health status in extensively grazed sheep
Authors: Liddell Caroline , Morgan Eric R. , Bull Katie , Ioannou Christos C.
Published: February 2020

A fundamental question in animal ecology is how an individual's internal state and the external environment together shape species distributions across habitats. The increasing availability of biologgers is driving a revolution in answering this question in a wide range of species. In this study, the position of sheep (
Ovis aries
) from Global Positioning System collars was integrated with remote sensing data, field sampling of parasite distributions, and parasite load and health measures for each tagged individual. This allowed inter-individual variation in habitat use to be examined. Once controlling for a positive relationship between vegetation productivity and tick abundance, healthier individuals spent more of their time at sites with higher vegetation productivity, while less healthy individuals showed a stronger (negative) response to tick abundance. These trends are likely to represent a trade-off in foraging decisions that vary between individuals based on their health status. Given the rarity of studies that explore how animal distributions are affected by health and external factors, we demonstrate the value of integrating biologging technology with remote sensing data, traditional ecological sampling and individual measures of animal health. Our study, using extensively grazed sheep as a model system, opens new possibilities to study free-living grazing systems.
A window into lysogeny: revealing temperate phage biology with transcriptomics
Authors: Owen Siân V. , Canals Rocío , Wenner Nicolas , Hammarlöf Disa L. , Kröger Carsten , Hinton Jay C. D.
Published: February 2020

Prophages are integrated phage elements that are a pervasive feature of bacterial genomes. The fitness of bacteria is enhanced by prophages that confer beneficial functions such as virulence, stress tolerance or phage resistance, and these functions are encoded by ‘accessory’ or ‘moron’ loci. Whilst the majority of phage-encoded genes are repressed during lysogeny, accessory loci are often highly expressed. However, it is challenging to identify novel prophage accessory loci from DNA sequence data alone. Here, we use bacterial RNA-seq data to examine the transcriptional landscapes of five

Salmonella

prophages. We show that transcriptomic data can be used to heuristically enrich for prophage features that are highly expressed within bacterial cells and represent functionally important accessory loci. Using this approach, we identify a novel antisense RNA species in prophage BTP1, STnc6030, which mediates superinfection exclusion of phage BTP1. Bacterial transcriptomic datasets are a powerful tool to explore the molecular biology of temperate phages.
An extension to: Systematic assessment of commercially available low-input miRNA library preparation kits
Authors: Heinicke Fatima , Zhong Xiangfu , Zucknick Manuela , Breidenbach Johannes , Sundaram Arvind Y.M. , Flåm Siri T. , Leithaug Magnus , Dalland Marianne , Rayner Simon , Lie Benedicte A. , Gilfillan Gregor D.
Published: February 2020

High-throughput sequencing has emerged as the favoured method to study microRNA (miRNA) expression, but biases introduced during library preparation have been reported. To assist researchers choose the most appropriate library preparation kit, we recently compared the performance of six commercially-available kits on synthetic miRNAs and human RNA, where library preparation was performed by the vendors. We hereby supplement this study with data from two further commonly used kits (NEBNext, NEXTflex) whose manufacturers initially declined to participate. As before, performance was assessed with respect to sensitivity, reliability, titration response and differential expression. Despite NEXTflex employing partially-randomised adapter sequences to minimise bias, we reaffirm that biases in miRNA abundance are kit-specific, complicating the comparison of miRNA datasets generated using different kits.