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Purpose: Strategic pivoting, the decision to invest in shifting the attention of an organization, is no longer limited to early-stage organizations and entrepreneurs but has, without a discussion of complications, been applied to large corporations and public agencies. Design/methodology/approach: This conceptual paper defines strategic pivoting, highlights the centrality of pivoting in new and entrepreneurial organizations and critically examines its application as a strategy fostering organizational agility in corporations. Findings: Pivoting in the corporate context complicates the ease of executing an attention shift by introducing a path-dependent momentum that requires modification of the time horizon, stakeholder strategy and the frequency of pivoting. Practical implications: This comparative examination of pivoting highlights the importance of organizational size, complexity, degree of specialization and path-dependent history when deciding to pivot. Originality/value: The present ease with which the strategic pivot is treated as an adaptive strategy to corporate leaders seeking greater flexibility overstates the ease of execution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine the new normal within a continuum of three types of disruption, each of varying duration. References to the new normal draw attention to the periodic and rising importance of different levels, types, and consequences of game-changing disruption for those in governance roles. Design/methodology/approach: In this conceptual research, given the discussion of a return to normalcy near the expected end of the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors organize the literature on disruption in governance into a disruption continuum – emergency, crisis and super crisis – to demonstrate the differences in each type of disruption to establish a distinct view of the new normal. Findings: Within the three types of disruption, the first two suit the rational authority model in which disruption is turned over to those in governance roles. However, the rational authority model comes under attack in the super crisis and is increasingly associated with the post-truth era. Social implications: In Type 3 disruptions or super crises, the failure of those in control to set the parameters of the new normal raises concerns that the center no longer holds, and as a result, the assumption of an attentive public splinter into multiple contending publics, each with its version of data, facts and images. Originality/value: The new normal is typically treated after the result of a black swan or rare and surprising long-lived disruption. In this work, the formulation of the recurrence, ubiquity and controversy engendered by super crises suggests that it is one of the features attenuating and giving rise to fractious incivility in the post-truth era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This conceptual paper explores the implications for the sociology of the professions of robo-advice (RA) provided by robo-advisors (RAs) as an early example of successfully programmed algorithmic knowledge managed by artificial intelligence (AI). Design/methodology/approach: The authors examine the drivers of RAs, their success, characteristics, and establish RA as an early precursor of commercialized, programmed professional advice with implications for developments in the sociology of the professions. Findings: Within the lens of the sociology of the professions, the success of RAs suggests that the diffusion of this innovation depends on three factors: the programmed flows of automated professional knowledge are minimally disruptive, they are less costly, and attract attention because of the "on-trend" nature of algorithmic authority guided by AI. The on-trend nature of algorithmic governance and its increasing public acceptance points toward an algorithmic paradox. The contradictions arise in the gap between RA marketed to the public and as a set of professional practices. Practical implications: The incursion of RA-like disembodied advice into other professions is predicted given the emergence of tech-savvy clients, the tie between RA and updatable flows of big data, and an increasing shift to the "maker" or "do-it-yourself" movements. Originality/value: Using the success of RAs in the financial industry, the authors predict that an AI-managed platform, despite the algorithmic paradox, is an avenue for growth with implications for researchers in the sociology of the professions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate COVID-19 as a super crisis in the design and management of places. Design/methodology/approach: This theory-driven work outlines why and how, by treating COVID-19 as a super crisis, the immunological view rises in priority and swiftly ushers in short- and long-term implications for space design and place management. Findings: First, this paper looks at the short-term impact of COVID-19 upon space and place management in addressing how porous bubbling, stippling and flexible curtaining respond to immediate retrofitting needs during the pandemic. Using the concept of COVID-19-induced collective trauma, this paper draws attention to health-care facilities, schools, workplaces, commercial buildings and public outdoor spaces. These sites require short-term improvisation in place and space design and will, where the collective trauma of COVID-19 leaves strong traces, require long-term redesign and rethinking. Social implications: As a super crisis, COVID-19 generates contradictions in the existing trend in space and place studies from the notion of space and place as a container to one focusing on "flow." A focus on flow highlights a focus on space and place as adaptable to changes in flow, especially as augmented and mediated by technology. Originality/value: This treatment of COVID-19 as a super crisis is intended to stimulate the design and management of spaces and places in the post-COVID-19 period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An outstanding challenge for consciousness research is to characterize the neural signature of conscious access independently of any decisional processes. Here we present a model-based approach that uses inter-trial variability to identify the brain dynamics associated with stimulus processing. We demonstrate that, even in the absence of any task or behavior, the electroencephalographic response to auditory stimuli shows bifurcation dynamics around 250–300 milliseconds post-stimulus. Namely, the same stimulus gives rise to late sustained activity on some trials, and not on others. This late neural activity is predictive of task-related reports, and also of reports of conscious contents that are randomly sampled during task-free listening. Source localization further suggests that task-free conscious access recruits the same neural networks as those associated with explicit report, except for frontal executive components. Studying brain dynamics through variability could thus play a key role for identifying the core signatures of conscious access, independent of report. Current knowledge on the neural basis of consciousness mostly relies on situations where people report their perception. Here, the authors provide evidence for the idea that bifurcation in brain dynamics reflects conscious perception independent of report. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This paper examines the relevance of the wicked problem continuum, particularly the emergence of super wicked challenges for public leadership researchers. Contemporary theorizing on public leadership adequately deals with tame challenges, struggles with wicked problems and remains in the dark with regards to the implications of super wicked problems Design/methodology/approach: The wicked problem continuum provides a typology or set of dilemmas running from tame to wicked through to super wicked problems. These different problem types are treated as if they were on a three-zone continuum in which the difficulty of solving or substantially reducing the problem varies from relatively low to very high. Findings: We delineate the three-problem contexts in the wicked problem continuum and discuss the ideal type of organization thriving in each zone. We then posit two opposing wicked problem interpretations-taming and wilding- for those interested in public leadership. Taming calls for prudent, results-oriented leaders employing tried and tested practices. Wilding demands leaders who test the status quo by seeking alternatives. Social implications: On the global leadership agenda, wilding problems—those calling attention to the super wicked zone—are escalating. Despite this, public leaders' training lacks a framework for making sense of these urgent and publicly contentious super wicked problems. Originality/value: Public policy researchers are beginning to direct attention to super wicked problems such as climate change, and pandemics. This work introduces the wicked problem continuum and demonstrates its pertinence for researchers of public leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the visual quartet, alternating diagonal pairs of dots produce apparent motion horizontally or vertically, depending on proximity. Here, we studied a tactile quartet where vibrating tactors were attached to the thumbs and index fingers of both hands. Apparent motion was felt either within hands (from index finger to thumb) or between hands. Participants adjusted the distance between their hands to find the point where motion changed directions. Surprisingly, switchovers occurred when between-hand distances were as much as twice that of within-hand distances—a general bias that was also found for tactile judgments of static distances. This expansion of within-hand felt distances was again seen when lights were placed on the hands rather than vibrating tactors. Importantly, switchover points were similar when the hands were placed at different depths, indicating that representations governing tactile motion were in perceptual three-dimensional space, not retinal two-dimensional space. This was true whether the quartets were visual stimuli on the hands or were purely visual on a monitor, suggesting that proximity is generally determined in three-dimensional coordinates for motion perception. Finally, the similarity of visual and tactile results suggests a common computation for apparent motion, albeit with different built-in distance biases for separate modalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine and place "context collapse," as employed in social media studies, into context. In the hands of social media researchers, context collapse demonstrates how users lose track of the context in which they are operating when they enter into exchanges on social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Examples that users lose their way include oversharing, failure to recognize privacy issues, and a belief that the imagined audience on these sites is much more trustworthy than further scrutiny warrants. In this paper, we praise context collapse researchers for drawing attention to users' difficulty in early stage navigation on social networking sites. However, we argue that the focus on users' early stage navigational difficulty can be limited in several aspects. It fails to examine social networking platforms as the basis for understanding context on social media sites; it restricts the idea of concept collapse to a narrow conception of the user; and finally, it does not distinguish variations among these platforms. Putting social networking into context requires considering how multiple users on social networking platforms--sponsors, entrepreneurs, information brokers, data analysts, platform owners, platform regulators--create a workable assemblage in which the interactions of participants create a discernible context. To derive this, we unpack three binaries used to establish the existence of context collapse: 1) leap/lag; 2) collusion/collision; and 3) publicity/privacy. First, aligned with the existent research on context collapse, we apply these binaries to social network sites with a narrow conception of the user. Then, we employ the same three binaries under two conditions: firstly, using a multi-stakeholder model of social networking platform participation; and secondly, using these binaries with three different variations on the social networking platform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the social sciences, literature on third places attempts to assist in the construction of a social concept of "place". This notion of a place is an idealization of the bridging space with home and family on one side, and work with the rule-based impersonality of life in mass society, on the other. Like the idea of work-life balance--as seen through the vocabulary of placemaking--third places provide people with a place in which there is a balance between the emotive attachments of home and family and the challenge striving for merit and reward in the marketplace. To date, third places have been treated as a unified construct. This paper makes the case that both the discourse and design models used to make sense of third places are significantly different. After reviewing and placing third-place literature in its historical context, we distinguish communitarian, commercial and digital third places. These three types of places--in both their physical and virtual forms--are important parts of the private, public and not-for-profit sectors. Subsequently employing a cui bono approach or who benefits framework, we highlight the ways in which ideological points of view imbedded in the varying versions of third places have implications for practice and theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Slow Food Movement (SFM) has been characterized as a reminder of the centrality of the kitchen in the "good old days". It has also been referred to as a poor use of science posing as a rallying point for the beleaguered middle class trying to reclaim psychological territory lost to the fast-paced commercialization of what was once private or leisure time. This paper argues that both these criticisms contain more than a kernel of truth. However, each misses the mark when it comes to explaining the relative successes of SFM. In this paper, we explore SFM's basic ideological premises. It is neither a simple return to a traditional society nor a poorly formulated anticonsumerist position. Rather, from an ideological framing, SFM employs a "big tent" strategy drawing upon the positions of other lifestyle movements such as voluntary simplicity, localism, green consumption and communitarian social capital movements. This "big tent" of overlapping ideological positions is helpful in creating a credible set of alliances and a mass following. Moreover, SFMinsists that a small but basic lifestyle change, namely, investing more quality time in the acquisition, preparation and sharing of fresh food - can ripple outwards and offer benefits to individuals, but also via selective consumption, put pressure on transnational firms, agri-business and banks to heed the demands of those in the "movement". This paper concludes with a discussion of both the costs and complications of the "big tent" ideology and how SFM has attempted to keep each of these within its reach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of perception usually emphasize processes that are largely universal across observers and--except for short-term fluctuations--stationary over time. Here we test the universality and stationarity assumptions with two families of ambiguous visual stimuli. Each stimulus can be perceived in two different ways, parameterized by two opposite directions from a continuous circular variable. A large-sample study showed that almost all observers have preferred directions or biases, with directions lying within 90 degrees of the bias direction nearly always perceived and opposite directions almost never perceived. The biases differ dramatically from one observer to the next, and although nearly every bias direction occurs in the population, the population distributions of the biases are nonuniform, featuring asymmetric peaks in the cardinal directions. The biases for the two families of stimuli are independent and have distinct population distributions. Following external perturbations and spontaneous fluctuations, the biases decay over tens of seconds toward their initial values. Persistent changes in the biases are found on time scales of several minutes to 1 hour. On scales of days to months, the biases undergo a variety of dynamical processes such as drifts, jumps, and oscillations. The global statistics of a majority of these long-term time series are well modeled as random walk processes. The measurable fluctuations of these hitherto unknown degrees of freedom show that the assumptions of universality and stationarity in perception may be unwarranted and that models of perception must include both directly observable variables as well as covert, persistent states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose -- The purpose of this paper is to highlight both the contribution and the present need to reconfigure the literature on "queue culture" as a precursor of the sociology of waiting. Design/methodology/approach -- The study employs a legal-structural lens in comparing the initial conceptual treatment of the archetypal "waiting line" with the "line" modifying sociology of waiting that results in waiting rooms, number and telephone queues and in the experience of online waiting. Findings -- The initial conception of the culture of the queue understates the importance of three factors: first, the role of third parties in the design, management and inculcation of rules binding those experiencing thick time; second the degree to which communication technology and its attachment to the "mobilities" paradigm has thinned the experience of thick time and lastly the degree to which the increasing commodification of the wait has resulted in the creation of waiting time as a form of pay as you go flexitime. Social implications -- The social construction of waiting and the experience of thick time are shown to be increasingly part of the privatized market experience where queue management innovations not only are commercialized but have strong implications for the egalitarian social assumptions imbedded in the initial queue culture based sociology of waiting. Policy implications support the present pay for use philosophy increasingly applied in the transition from public to private management of space. Originality/value -- The self-policing "fairness" of the waiting line is now open to scrutiny given the proliferation of the newly shaped distributional logics imbedded in the management, design and use of waiting spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although motor actions can profoundly affect the perceptual interpretation of sensory inputs, it is not known whether the combination of sensory and movement signals occurs only for sensory surfaces undergoing movement or whether it is a more general phenomenon. In the haptic modality, the independent movement of multiple sensory surfaces poses a challenge to the nervous system when combining the tactile and kinesthetic signals into a coherent percept. When exploring a stationary object, the tactile and kinesthetic signals come from the same hand. Here we probe the internal structure of haptic combination by directing the two signal streams to separate hands: one hand moves but receives no tactile stimulation, while the other hand feels the consequences of the first hand's movement but remains still. We find that both discrete and continuous tactile and kinesthetic signals are combined as if they came from the same hand. This combination proceeds by direct coupling or transfer of the kinesthetic signal from the moving to the feeling hand, rather than assuming the displacement of a mediating object. The combination of signals is due to perception rather than inference, because a small temporal offset between the signals significantly degrades performance. These results suggest that the brain simplifies the complex coordinate transformation task of remapping sensory inputs to take into account the movements of multiple body parts in haptic perception, and they show that the effects of action are not limited to moving sensors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]