Tuesday, January 28, 2020

Interpersonal Relationship and Beauty Essay Example for Free

Interpersonal Relationship and Beauty Essay Beauty is not something we can measure, it something that we judge on a person. We can see a face for less than a second and rate whether that person is beautiful or not. Beauty is a characteristic of a person, animal, place, object, or idea that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure, meaning, or satisfaction. Beauty is studied as part of aesthetics, sociology, social psychology, and culture. An ideal beauty is an entity which is admired, or possesses features widely attributed to beauty in a particular culture, for perfection. Helen Keller once said, The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart. Beauty is a kind of quality. Websters dictionary defines beauty as something that is pleasing to ones sight or mind. However, beauty encompasses so much more than that. Beauty may not be recognized at once in people that you meet, but is recognized through close relationships such as family and friends. After time, though, beauty shines through a person by them giving their hearts. So, the stereotypical guy or girl model that most of the world perceives as beautiful, is not the same beauty that family and friends see. Aaron Spelling director of Bay Watch had this to say â€Å"I can’t define it, but I know it when I walk into a room. I talked with a modeling agency that books top male models and they were more descriptive: Its when someone walks in the door and you almost cant breathe. † (Etcoff) Aaron Spelling gives a good definition on what society perceives beauty as. Society thinks of beauty as features that can be found by examining someone just by looking at them not by who they are through their actions and feelings in life. In the article â€Å"What is beauty† it says â€Å"The oxford English dictionary defines the word beautiful as excelling in the grace form, charm of color, and other qualities. †(Etcoff) See, all points are proven that beauty is looked at through external form except through â€Å"and other qualities. † This is where close relationships, such as your family and friends see these other internal qualities rather than outside qualities. In Nancy Etcoff article it states â€Å"We can see a face for a fraction of a second, and rate its beauty. † (Etcoff) How can a fraction of a second determine if someone is beautiful or not? Etcoff explains that it is absurd that you can rate someone beautiful or not in a fraction of a second. This is where family and friends rate your beauty through your actions. This is from the close relationship you have with them. This shows that it takes time to know if someone is truly beautiful of not. David Hume, a Scottish philosopher and historian said â€Å"Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them. That is something that everyone should take to heart. Beauty is missed by so many people because they do not take the time to stop and appreciate all that God has created. † This quote explains beauty is all around us and it’s not our right to judge and say what is beautiful. Instead of judging someone, families do not. They judge you for who you are as a person rather than your looks. Internal and external beauty is both very important in our society. To be beautiful internally means to have a knind heart and be understanding. To be beautiful externally means to be beautiful on the outside such as having a nice figure and a attractive smile. Internal beauty is important because beyond looks, it is your personality that is noticed. External beauty is important because it is your attractive figure that brings attention to someone’s great personality. These two types of beauties are represented and influenced by family members, friends, and society as a whole. Family members are important in how we perceive beauty. Depending on the family member, there is an absolute distinction made between beauties. Parents are most likely to look at the internal beauty rather than the external, while siblings look at the external part more closely. Family members are key in how society perceives beauty and how they show it. Without this part of society, people would most likely judge people for there looks rather than their personality. Internal beauty shows someone’s character. There character is the most important part that is judged. In the article â€Å"What is Beauty† it states â€Å"Although the object of beauty is debated, the experience of beauty is not. Beauty can stir up a snarl of emotions. (Etcoff 68) Nancy Etcoff means that beauty is considered and object in society, but family and friends don’t consider it an object but a possession that is unique to that specific person through there personalities and actions. So, although friends ar friends, they tend to be one of the most hypocritical judges. The thing that matters to friends is if a girl is pretty or vise versa. Then chances are she may also have a nice personality. But if she doesn’t appeal externally, then her internal beauty must also be lacking. This, however, is not always true. Society is the most judgmental of all critics regarding beauty. But in todays society, external beauty is always stressed significantly. This is one of the main reasons why there are so many girls in our country that have eating disorders. Successful women are perceived with external beauty which makes girls feel that they have to look like that which makes them go on ridiculous diets that cause them harm. Society rarely stresses the importance of internal beauty. But family and friends see the persons personality and overlooks the external beauty. By this it gives that person the confidence to accomplish and that they set there mind too no matter what gets in there way. It seems however, that society places too much effort than before how a person looks. Rarely, does a society ever judge a person by the way they act. Based on the influences of family, friends, and society, it looks like family is the most reasonable judge of external and internal beauty. Siblings especially are the fairest judges. Friends are somewhat neutral, and stand the middle ground in differentiating between the two beauties. Society is the harshest critics of beauty, always stressing the external beauty. It seems society will always be one sided; and no one can do anything about it. The best way to judge beauty is by the individuals own standards, not from any other influences. Nancy Etcoff says â€Å"Our bodies respond to it viscerally and our names for beauty are synonyms with physical cataclysms and bodily obliteration breathtaking, femme fatale, knockout, drop dead, gorgeous, bombshell, stunners and ravishing. We experience beauty not as rational contemplation but as a response to physical urgency. This means that all these names that we say to represent beauty have an effect on the people they are being said about. Society has this beauty on a pedestal that no one can ever reach. Family and friends show reality and show the standard of beauty that everyone is at in there unique way. Beauty is something influenced by society, making us look at people externally and not internally. We are based on that beauty has to be perfect in every way that we miss out on internally beautiful people. In life, God didn’t create everyone the same way or the same shape; he created everyone different from one another. So no one can be perfect. We as a society and in the whole world need to look passed the flaws we see in people and truly, sincerely look at who they are and how they act. In a sense there really is no true definition for beauty. Its family and friends that hive a unique definition that everyone should go by. It’s how you act that is your beauty not your looks. Looks don’t last forever, its your personality that last a lifetime.

Monday, January 20, 2020

The Ethics of the Mental Pursuit of Perfection Essay -- Exploratory Es

Introduction    The number of individuals diagnosed for one or more mental disorders and consequently treated with a corresponding drug has significantly increased the past several years. The following statistics displaying this are shocking: * 8.5 million people are prescribed Effexor, an anti-depressant every year (Harris, 2004). * More than 1 million children and teenagers are taking drugs for some form of mental disorder (Elias, 2004). * There are close to 2 million cases each year of drug complications that result in 180,000 deaths or life-threatening illnesses in the eldery (Langreth, 2004). These alarming figures call us to question the causes behind this influx of diagnosed mental disorders as well as the consequential drug prescription as a solution. When asked to discuss the ethics of the mental pursuit of perfection, there are several different aspects to consider. The main ethical issues raised lie in the prescription of drugs to children and the over prescription of drugs. In addition, I will discuss who and what are responsible for our culture’s desire to â€Å"quick fix† every definable problem with some type of drug, be it prescribed, non-prescribed, or self-prescribed.       Mental Disorders in Children When one thinks about mental disorders in respect to children, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) immediately comes to mind. Defined now as â€Å"children who are excessively active, are unable to sustain their attention, and are deficient in their impulse control to a degree that is deviant for their developmental level† (Loewenton, 2002), ADHD now affects up to 5% of schoolchildren and continues in roughly 60% of those youths as they age (Henderson, 2004). There are many different opinions re... ...ago Press, 2002.    Langreth, Robert. â€Å"Just Say No!† Forbes. 29 November, 2004. pgs. 103-112    Loewenton, Ed. â€Å"Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.† Turner toys. 4 October 2004. .    Merrow, John. â€Å"Attention Deficit Disorder-A Dubious Diagnosis?† The Merrow Report. 4 October..    Moore, Thomas. â€Å"No prescription for happiness.† Boston Globe 17 October 1999. .    USA Today. â€Å"FDA cites possible suicide link between children, Paxil.† USA Today. 19 June, 2003. .    Zernike, Kate and Melody Petersen. â€Å"Schools’ Backing of Behavior Drugs Comes Under Fire.† New York Times: 18 August 2004. .

Sunday, January 12, 2020

Critical Discourse Analysis, Organizational Discourse, and Organizational Change Essay

Discourses is an element of all concrete social events (actions, processes) as well as of more durable social practices, though neither are simply discourse: they are articulations of discourse with non-discoursal elements. ‘Discourse’ subsumes language as well as other forms of semiosis such as visual images and ‘body language’, and the discoursal element of a social event often combines different semiotic forms (eg a television programme). But the use of the ‘term ‘discourse’ rather than ‘language’ is not purely or even primarily motivated by the diversity of forms of semiosis, it is primarily registers a relational way of seeing semiosis[i], as one element of social events and practices dialectically interconnected with other elements. The overriding objective of discourse analysis, on this view, is not simply analysis of discourse per se, but analysis of the dialectical relations between discourse and non-discoursal elements of the social, in order to reach a better understanding of these complex relations (including how changes in discourse can cause changes in other elements). But if we are to analyse relations between discourse and non-discoursal elements, we must obviously see them as ontologically (and not just epistemologically, analytically) different elements of the social. They are different, but they are not discrete – that is, they are dialectically related, in the sense that elements ‘internalize’ other elements, without being reducible to them (Harvey 1996, Chouliaraki & Fairclough 1999, Fairclough 2003, Fairclough, Jessop & Sayer 2004). A realist view of social life sees it as including social structures as well as social events – in critical realist terms, the ‘real’ (which defines and delimits what is possible) as well as the ‘actual’ (what actually happens). There is a general recognition that the relationship between structures and events must be a mediated relation, and I follow for instance Bhaskar (1986) and Bourdieu (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992) in regarding social practices as the mediating entities – more or less durable and stable articulations of diverse social elements including discourse which constitute social selections and orderings of the allowances of social structures as actualisable allowances in particular areas of social life in a certain time and place. Social fields, institutions and organizations can be regarded as networks of social practices. Networks of social practices include specifically discoursal selections and orderings (from languages and other semiotic systems, which are counted amongst social structures) which I call ‘orders of discourse’, appropriating but redefining Foucault’s term (Foucault 1984, Fairclough 1992). Orders of discourse are social structurings of linguistic/semiotic variation or difference. Realist discourse analysis on this view is based in a dialectical-relational social ontology which gives ontological priority to processes and relations over objects, entities, persons, organizations etc, yet sees the latter as socially produced ‘permanences’ (Harvey 1996) which constitute a pre-structured reality with which we are confronted, and sets of affordances and limitations on processes. Epistemological priority is given to neither pre-constructed social structures, practices, institutions, identities or organizations, nor to processes, actions, and events: the concern is with the relationship and tension between them. People with their capacities for agency are seen as socially produced, contingent and subject to change, yet real, and possessing real causal powers which, in their tension with the causal powers of social structures, are a focus for analysis. Social research proceeds through abstraction from the concrete events of social life aimed at understanding the pre-structured nature of social life, and returns to analysis of concrete events, actions and processes in the light of this abstract knowledge. Discourse and non-discoursal elements of social events and social practices are related in many ways. I distinguish three main ways: representing, acting (and interacting), and being. At the level of social practices, orders of discourse can be seen as articulations of specific ways of representing, acting, and being – ie specific discourses, genres and styles. A discourse is a particular way of representing certain parts or aspects of the (physical, social, psychological) world; a genre is a particular way of (inter)acting (which comprises the discoursal element of a way of inter)acting which will also necessarily comprise non-discoursal elements); a style is a way of being (the discoursal element of a way of being, an ‘identity’, which will also include non-discoursal elements). I shall use the term ‘text’[ii], in a generalized sense (not just written text but also spoken interaction, multi-semiotic televisual text etc) for the discoursal element of social events. Texts are doubly contextualized, first in their relation to other elements of social events, second in their relation to social practices, which is ‘internal’ to texts in the sense that they necessarily draw upon orders of discourse, ie social practices in their discoursal aspect, and the discourses, genres and styles associated with them. However, events (and therefore texts) are points of articulation and tension between two causal forces: social practices and, through their mediation, social structures; and the agency of the social actors who speak, write, compose, read, listen to, interpret them. The social ‘resource’ of discourses, genres and styles is subject to the transformative potential of social agency, so that texts do not simply instantiate discourses, genres and styles, they actively rework them, articulate them together in distinctive and potentially novel ways, hybridize them, transform them. My focus in this paper is on organizational change, and this version of CDA has indeed been developed in association with research on discourse in social change. Social change comprises change in social structures, social practices, the networking of social practices, and (the character of) social events; and change in languages and other semiotic systems, in orders of discourse and relations between orders of discourse, and in texts. With respect to orders of discourse, social change includes change in the social structuring of linguistic/semiotic variation, therefore change in discourses, genres and styles, and change in their articulation in orders of discourse, and change in relations between orders of discourse (eg political and media orders of discourse). With respect to texts, social change includes tendential change in how discourses, genres and styles are drawn upon and articulated/hybridized together in various types of text. The process of social change raises questions about causal relations between different elements. Causal relations are not simple or one-way. For instance, it would seem to make more sense to see new communication technologies (ICTs) as causing the emergence of new genres than vice-versa – changes in discourse caused by changes in non-discoursal elements. In other cases, change appears to be discourse-led. A pervasive contemporary process (for instance in processes of ‘transition’ in central and eastern Europe) is change initiated through the recontextualization[iii] in an organization, a social field, or a country of ‘external’ discourses, which may then be enacted in new ways of (inter)acting including new genres, inculcated as new ways of being including styles, and materialized in for example new ways of organizing space. These enactments, inculcations and materializations are dialectical processes. There is an important proviso however: these processes are contingent, they depend upon certain conditions of possibility. For instance, when a discourse is recontextualized, it enters a new field of social relations, and its trajectory within those social relations is decisive in determining whether or not it has (re)constructive effects on the organization, social field etc overall. In contexts of social change, different groups of social actors may develop different and conflicting strategies for change, which have a partially discursive character (narratives of the past, representations of the present, imaginaries for the future), and inclusion within a successful strategy is a condition for a discourse being dialectically enacted, inculcated and materialized in other social elements (Jessop 2002, Fairclough, Jessop & Sayer 2004). Discourses construe aspects of the world in inherently selective and reductive ways, ‘translating’ and ‘condensing’ complex realities (Harvey 1996), and one always needs to ask, why this particular selection and reduction, why here, why now? (For a discussion of ‘globalisation’ discourse in these terms, see Fairclough & Thomas forthcoming. Locating discourses in relation to strategies in contexts of social change enables us to connect particular representations of the world with particular interests and relations of power, as well assess their ideological import. Discourses do not emerge or become recontextualized in particular organizations or fields at random, and they do not stand in an arbitrary relation to social structures and practices, forms of institutionalization and organization. If we can construct explanations of change in non-discoursal elements of social reality which attribute causal effects to discourses, we can also construct explanations of change in discourses which attribute causal effects to (non-discoursal elements of) structures and practices, as well as social and strategic relations. The social construction of the social world may sometimes be a matter of changes in non-discoursal elements caused by discourses (through the concrete forms of texts), but discourses (and texts) are also causal effects, the dialectics of social change is not a one-way street. We can distinguish four elements, or moments, in the social trajectories of discourses: their emergence and constitution (through a re-articulation of existing elements); their entry into hegemonic struggles from which they may emerge as hegemonic discourses; their dissemination and recontextualization across structural and scalar boundaries (ie between one field or institution or organization and others, and between one scale (‘global’, macro-regional (eg the EU), national, local) and others; and their operationalization (enactment, inculcation, materialization). These are distinct moments with respect to the causal effects of discourses on non-discoursal (as well as discoursal, ie generic and stylistic) elements of social life, and they are all subject to non-discoursal as well as discoursal conditions. CDA claims that social research can be enriched by extending analysis of social processes and social change into detailed analysis of texts. More detailed (including linguistic) analysis of texts is connected to broader social analysis by way of (a) analysing texts as part of analysing social events, (b) interdiscursive analysis of shifting articulations of genres, discourses, styles in texts (Fairclough 2003). The latter locates the text as an element of a concrete event in its relationship to orders of discourse as the discoursal aspect of networks of social practices, and so allows the analyst to (a) assess the relationship and tension between the causal effects of agencies in the concrete event and the causal effects of (networks of) social practices, and through them of social structures (b) detect shifts in the relationship between orders of discourse and networks f social practices as these are registered in the interdiscursivity (mixing of genres, discourses, styles) of texts. Text can be seen as product and as process. Texts as products can be stored, retrieved, bought and sold, cited and summarized and so forth. Texts as processes can be grasped through seeing ‘texturing’, making texts, as a specific modality of social action, of social production or ‘making’ (of meanings, understandings, knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, feelings, social relations, social a nd personal identities, institutions, organizations). The focus is on ‘logogenesis’ (Iedema 2003:115-17), including the texturing of entities (objects, persons, spaces, organizations) which can, given certain preconditions, be dialectically internalized (enacted, inculcated and materialized) in non-discoursal elements of social life. See for instance the discussion of the significance of nominalization as a logogenetic process in texts in processes of organizing, producing organization objects, in Iedema (2003). Organizational Discourse  I shall construct my very selective comments on organizational discourse analysis around the following four themes: organization and organizing; variation, selection and retention; understandings of ‘discourse’; and intertextuality. Organization and organizing Mumby & Stohl (1991) argue that researchers in organizational communication most centrally differ from those in other areas of organization studies in that the former problematize ‘organization’ whereas the latter do not. ‘For us, organization – or organizing, to use Weick’s (1979) term – is a precarious, ambiguous, uncertain process that is continually being made and remade. In Weick’s sense, organizations are only seen as stable, rational structures when viewed retrospectively. Communication, then, is the substance of organizing in the sense that through discursive practices organization members engage in the construction of a complex and diverse system of meanings’. Another formulation of this shift in emphasis from organizations as structures to ‘organizing’ (or ‘organizational becoming’, Tsoukas & Chia 2002) as a process is that of Mumby & Clair (1997: 181): ‘we suggest that organizations exist only in so far as their members create them through discourse. This is not to claim that organizations are â€Å"nothing but† discourse, but rather that discourse is the principal means by which organization members create a coherent social reality that frames their sense of who they are’. Despite the disclaimer at the beginning of the second sentence, this formulation can as argued by Reed (forthcoming) be seen as collapsing ontology into epistemology, and undermining the ontological reality of organizational structures as constraints on organizational action and communication. From the perspective of the realist view of discourse I have outlined, it makes little sense to see organizing and organization, or more generally agency and structure, as alternatives one has to choose between. With respect to organizational change, both organizational structures and the agency of members of organizations in organizational action and communication have causal effects on how organizations change. Organizational communication does indeed organize, produce organizational effects and transform organizations, but organizing is subject to conditions of possibility which include organizational structures. The paper by Iedema, Degeling, Braithwaite and White (2004) in the special issue of Organizational Studies is an analysis of how a ‘doctor-manager’ in a teaching hospital in Australia manages ‘the incommensurable dimensions’ of his ‘boundary position between profession and organization’ by positioning himself across different discourses, sometimes in a single utterance. The authors identify a heteroglossia ‘that is too context-regarding to be reducible to personal idiosyncracy, and too complex and dynamic to be the calculated outcome of conscious manipulation’. They see the doctor-manager’s talk as a ‘feat’ of ‘bricolage’, not as a display of ‘behaviours that are pre-programmed’. Nor is it an instantiation of a ‘strategy’, for ‘strategies are they assume ‘conscious’. Although the authors recognize that organizations can ‘set limits’ on what workers can say and do, impose ‘closure’, they see the doctor-manager as successfully ‘deferring closure on his own identity and on the discourses that realize it’. One can take this as an interesting and nuanced study of organization as the ‘organizing’ that is achieved in interaction (nuanced in the sense that it does not exclude organizational structures, though it does suggest that they are more ‘fluid’ and less ‘categorical’ than they have been taken to be, and it does recognize their capacity to impose ‘closure’). I would like to make a number of connected observations on this paper. First, one might see the doctor-manager’s ‘feat’ in this case as a particular form of a more general organizational process, the management of contradictions. Second, discourse figures differently in different types of organization (Borzeix 2003, referring to Girin 2001). The type of organization in this case seems to be in Girin’s terms a ‘cognitive’ (or ‘learning’, or ‘intelligent’) organization, in which the normative force of (written) texts (rules, procedures) is limited, and there is an emphasis on learning in spoken interaction. There seems to be, in other terms, a relatively ‘network’ type of structure rather than a simple hierarchy, where management involves a strong element participatory and consultative interaction with stakeholders. Third, connecting the first two points, spoken interaction in this type of organization accomplishes an ongoing management of contradictions which contrasts with the management of contradictions through suppressing them by imposing rules and procedures. Fourth, the doctor-manager’s ‘feat’ can be seen as a performance of a strategy as long as we abandon the (somewhat implausible) claim that all aspects and levels of strategic action are conscious – the doctor-manager would one imagines be conscious of the need to sustain a balancing act between professional and managerial perspectives and priorities, and of certain specific means to do so, but that does not entail him being conscious of all the complex interactive means he uses to do it. Fifth, while particular performances of this strategy (or, indeed, any strategy) are not ‘pre-programmed’, the strategy is institutionalized, disseminated, learnt, and constitutes a facet of the type of organization as a network of social practices, ie a facet of organizational structure. Sixth, it strikes me that bringing off a sense of creative bricolage is perhaps itself a part of the managerial style of this type of organization, ie part of the strategy, the network of social practices, the order of discourse. My conclusion is that even in a case of this sort, rather more emphasis is needed on the relationship between organizing and organization, performance and practice, ‘feat’ and strategy[iv]. Organizational discourse studies have been associated with postmodernist positions (Chia 1995, Grant, Harvey, Oswick & Putnam forthcoming, Grant, Keenoy, Oswick 2001), though the field as a whole is too diverse to be seen as simply postmodernist. Chia identifies a postmodern ‘style of thinking’ in organizational studies which ‘accentuates the significance, ontological priority and analysis of the micro-logics of social organizing practices over and above their stabilized ‘effects’ such as ‘individuals’. As this indicates, the focus on organizing rather than organisation is strongly associated with this ‘style of thinking’. Like the dialectical-relational ontology I advocated earlier, this ‘style of thinking’ sees objects and entities as produced within ontologically prior processes. The key difference is that this ‘style of thinking’ tends towards a one-sided emphasis on process, whereas the realist view of discourse analysis I have been advocating centres upon the tension between (discoursal) process and pre-structured (discoursal and linguistic, as well as non-discoursal) objects. This form of realism is not subject to the tendency within modernist social research which is criticized by Woolgar (1988) to take the objects it arrives at through abstraction (which would include in the case of CDA orders of discourse, as well as language and other semiotic systems) to be exhaustive of the social reality it researches. The key difference in this case is whereas this form of modernist research moves from the concrete to the abstract and then ‘forgets’ the concrete, the dialectic-relational form of realism I have advocated crucially makes the move back to analysis of the concrete. CDA is not merely concerned with languages and orders of discourse, it is equally concerned with text and texturing, and with the relations of tension between the two.

Saturday, January 4, 2020

Medieval Theology Texts - 2348 Words

Medieval Theology Texts Final Exam 1. Both Bernard of Clairvaux and Bonaventure show an appreciation for the natural world not seen in many of the other authors that we read. In what way does this appreciation guide their theologies and mystical journeys? How are their journeys similar and how are they different? Be sure to touch on their understandings of human nature and each author’s methodologies. The natural world plays an important role in Bernard of Clairvaux’s theological life. According to Bernard of Clairvaux, love is one of the passions and what is natural should be at the service of the Lord of nature. There are 4 degrees of love, and the first one is when man loves himself for his own sake. Because nature has become rather frail and weak, man is driven by necessity to serve nature first. It results in bodily love and such bodily animal that does not know how to love anything but himself begins to love God for his own benefit, because he learns from frequent experience that in God he can do everything which is good for him, and without God he can do nothing. The second degree of love is when man loves God for his own good. Man loves good for his own sake, not God’s. The wise man will know what he can do by himself and what he can do only with God’s help, and then people will avoid hurting him who keeps you from getting hurt. The third degree is whe n man loves God for God’s sake. As man needs God more frequently, the taste of his own sweetness leads us to loveShow MoreRelatedHow Truth Was Defined By Medieval Europeans1696 Words   |  7 PagesEric Green Urban British Literature 1st 3 December 2015 How Truth Was Defined By Medieval Europeans In life majority of people believe telling the truth is the correct way of living. 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