Managing open-ended style

Date: 17 November 2016
Speaker: Professor Vaughn Tan (pictured), Assistant Professor at the School of Management, UCL.
Abstract
Professor Tan will be presenting a qualitative, ethnographic field study of five internationally renowned teams working in high-end cutting-edge cuisine. He will first introduce the concept of open-ended style, then document and theorize about organizational knowledge management practices appropriate for this type of style. The consistency of a style makes an organization’s products familiar to consumers: Style can be a source of durable differentiation. However, an organization’s style must also be open-ended for it to be able to create innovative products that are nonetheless familiar to consumers. The inherent tension between novelty and familiarity makes open-ended style difficult to codify and transfer internally: Open-endedness can make style a management challenge and operational liability. In this paper, Professor Tan will describe how uncodified knowledge about open-ended style was more effectively transferred between team members using three practices:
1) Group evaluations of prototypes
2) concrete exemplar-based feedback, and
3) outcome-focused feedback.
Based on these practices, he proposes a process mechanism—transfer through testing and update of successively more accurate approximations—for managing knowledge about open-ended style in organizations. He concludes by discussing the value of open-ended style as a strategic concept in creative industries, and how this study extends our understanding of the effect of feedback practices on organizational knowledge. 

‘We are at war, but we don’t know where the front is’: Researching everyday patriotism as politicized identity in Russia

Date: 1 December 2016
Speaker: Dr  Paul Goode (pictured), Senior lecturer in Russian Politics, Department of Politics, Languages & International Studies, University of Bath.
Abstract
There is a distinct preference in the study of “everyday” ethnicity and nationalism for ethnographic methods and indirect observation, though this preference depends upon the perceived neutrality of the observer and the presumed naturalness of one’s observations. For scholars examining sensitive identities in authoritarian regimes, however, neither condition is likely to be present. Hence, outside observers may never be considered neutral and, at worst, contact with them may be toxic for respondents in security-conscious regimes. Rather than attempting to conceal one’s identity, however, opportunities may arise for utilizing one’s outsider status to better understand everyday identities in ways that may not be available to participant observation. This paper draws on the author’s experience as an American Fulbright Scholar conducting in-depth interviews, group discussions, and focus groups on patriotism in provincial Russia in 2014-2015. It argues that one may fruitfully leverage outsider status (or more specifically, respondents’ awareness of the researcher’s outsider status) in interviews to identify the range of practices comprising social identities, especially in terms of respondents’ attempts to reconcile official narratives with personal experiences and evaluations. In turn, the social salience and dynamics related to those practices may be verified with locally-moderated, quasi-experimental focus groups.

Measuring and explaining political sophistication through textual complexity

Date: 24 November 2016
Speaker: Professor Ken Benoit, Department of Methodology at the LSE (with Kevin Munger and Arthur Spirling)
Abstract
The sophistication of political communication has been measured using ``readability'' scores developed from other contexts, but their application to political text suffers from a number of theoretical and practical issues. We develop a new benchmark of textual complexity which is better suited to the task of determining political sophistication. We use the crowd to perform tens of thousands of pairwise comparisons of snippets of State of the Union Addresses, scale these results into an underlying measure of reading ease, and ``learn'' which features of the texts are most associated with higher levels of sophistication, including linguistic markers, parts of speech, and a baseline of word frequency relative to 210 years of the Google book corpus ngram dataset. Our refitting of the readability model not only shows which features are appropriate to the political domain and how, but also provides a measure easily applied and rescaled to political texts in a way that facilitates comparison with reference to a meaningful baseline.

Detecting the Structure and Dynamics of Political Concepts from Text

Date: 8 December 2016
Speaker: Dr Paul Nulty, Research Associate, Cambridge Language Sciences at the University of Cambridge
Abstract
The availability of large archives of digitised political text offers new opportunities for analysing the emergence and formation of political concepts. This talk describes new methods for discovering the structure of abstract political concepts from large text corpora. Working in a theoretical framework that treats concepts as cultural entities that can be studied through patterns of lexical behaviour (De Bolla, 2013), Dr Nulty will outline several methods from computational linguistics that enable researchers to discover the architecture of political concepts from text. At the level of the sentence, grammatical relation parsing (dependency parsing) is used to extract predicates and propositions that compose complex concepts. Beyond the sentence-level, Paul will describe a weighted mutual-information measure calculated from long-range co-occurrences to discover looser conceptual associations that might not occur in a predicating relation with the central concept. Finally, he will present several examples from historical corpora of traces of the origin and structure of political concepts, and how these have changed over time.