Journal articles: 'Illinois Type Founding Company' – Grafiati (2024)

Abstract:

Start-ups organizations are increasing rapidly. To overcome “liability of newness,” it is essential for entrepreneurs to compose the right co-founding team. Based on the review of 57 journal articles on start-up co-founding teams and new venture teams, we found that the composition of the team, especially diversity among team members, was frequently studied. However, previous research has only focused on surface-level diversity such as gender, age, functional background, previous experience. Only a very few studies investigated deep-level diversity such as co-founding team members’ value, personality or thinking style. The present study explored what type of diversity is required in start-ups. Since this topic is rarely studied, we first conducted a qualitative study by interviewing with nineteen start-up founders and venture capitalists in Study 1. As a result we found that four individual characteristic factors (extraversion, agreeing to different idea, risk taking, optimism) and four work-related factors (business opinion, speed oriented, big-picture oriented, time perspective) were the key component of deep-level diversity. In Study 2, we conducted a quantitative study to empirically investigate these aspects by a survey to thirty start-up related individuals. The result confirmed that the diversity were required for six aspects deducted from Study 1. For the other factors of optimism and speed orientation, frequency tendency supported Study 1’s result.

Abstract:

This research aims to explore the factors influencing the decision of investment in the Saudi Arabian stock market which are the following factors: the analysis and financial ratios, the history and reputation of the company, dividends, date of the company’s founding, company size, recommendations and opinions of analysts, the nature of the company's activity) and its impact on investment decision. A questionnaire has been used as a research tool, the study group consisted of all individuals investing in the Saudi stock market in 2018, and the sample was selected in an available way which is one type of non-random sample, with a total of 128 valid questionnaires for analysis out of 130 questionnaires. The research on its theoretical side touched on the efficiency and importance of the market, the types of financial markets, the formation and evolution of the Saudi stock market, the period of collapse of the Saudi stock market, the post-collapse Saudi stock market. While the tests of reliability and stability (Cronbach's alpha coefficient), frequencies, percentages, arithmetic averages and standard deviation, (T- test) for differences between two independent samples (independent sample T-test), one-way analysis of variance (one-way ANOVA) were used in the practical aspect of the research. The research has found an effect of the following factors: analysis and financial ratios, the history and reputation of the company, dividends, date of the company’s founding, company size, recommendations and opinions of analysts, the nature of the company's activity) on investment decision.The most influential factor on investment decision is the analysis and financial ratios, followed by the reputation and history of the company, dividends and its impact on investment decision ranked third, while date of the company’s founding ranked fourth in terms of influencing investment decision, while the nature of the company's activity ranked fifth in terms of impact, followed by company size in the sixth rank, and finally recommendations and opinions of analysts ranked seventh and last in terms of influencing the decision of investment in the Saudi stock market.

Abstract:

The Illinois Department of Professional Regulation, in fulfilling its obligation to protect the health, safety, and welfare of the citizens of Illinois, administers the state statutes that govern licensure and discipline of professional groups, including pharmacists. In doing so, it frequently calls before it various members of these groups to determine whether or not a violation of these statutes has occurred. If it is determined that a violation has occurred, the Department decides upon the type of discipline to be administered. This article is intended to familiarize the pharmacist with the make-up and disciplinary procedures of the Department of Professional Regulation, with the Illinois statutes governing the practice of pharmacy, and with the violations that seem to most frequently occur and how to prevent them. Copyright © 1995 by W.B. Saunders Company

Abstract:

This paper begins by introducing what other researchers have learnt on the subject of technology-based entrepreneurs and their start-ups. We coined the new term technopreneurs to denote this special type of entrepreneurs. The metaphor of an airplane taking off from a runway is used to describe the precarious state of a high-tech start-up company. Three new cases of technopreneurs, Sim Wong Hoo of Creative Technology, Robin Lau of Excel Machine Tools and Henry Yuen of Gemstar Development, whose businesses took off recently were investigated with the aim of finding the enabling forces for the successful take-off. Four enabling forces identified are the audacious technopreneurs, perceptive opportunities pursuers, core founding teams and enabling agents. Technopreneurs’ audacity are backed by their strong capabilities in relevant technologies.

Abstract:

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide a “Q&A interview” conducted by Joanne Pransky of Industrial Robot Journal as a method to impart the combined technological, business and personal experience of a prominent, robotic industry engineer-turned entrepreneur regarding his pioneering efforts in the industrial robot industry and the commercialization and challenges of bringing robotic inventions to market. This paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach The interviewee is Charlie Duncheon, CEO, Cofounder and Chairman of the Board at Celltrio, Inc, a manufacturer of automation-based solutions for the life sciences industry. Duncheon shares his nearly 40-year journey as a robotics industry executive and entrepreneur, including his achievements and challenges. Findings Charlie Duncheon received a Bachelor of Science in industrial engineering from Purdue University and an MBA from Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. At Monsanto, the first company he worked for after college, he worked his way up to be the Chairman of the Corporate Robotics Task Force. Duncheon then chose to work for the startup Fared Robot Systems, Inc., where he became the VP of Sales. In 1984, he joined Adept Technology at its inception and became Senior VP. About 20 years later, Duncheon founded his own consulting company, Duncheon Associates, and from the multiple consulting contracts he executed in automation, he was asked four different times to serve as the company CEO of the new companies: Artificial Muscle, Inc., EIG America, Grabit, Inc. and Celltrio, Inc., the last three which he also cofounded. Originality/value Charlie Duncheon, with a passion for robotic engineering and love for new challenges, led seven different robot companies to successful growth. His major accomplishments include establishing an unprecedented worldwide channel of 100+ integrators while at Adept Technology, growing Adept to $100m+ revenues and an initial public offering; being promoted to CEO of Artificial Muscle, Inc., later acquired by Bayer Material Science LLC; founding EIG America and transferring lithium battery technology from EIG Korea to the US market; and cofounding Grabit, Inc., raising two venture backed rounds of several million dollars. Duncheon is the recipient of the Joseph Engelberger Award for Leadership in Robotics. He is currently an Executive in Residence at Purdue University and a mentor for Plug and Play Tech Center. He was elected President of the Robotics Industries Association (RIA) and served a total of eight years on the RIA Board. He holds patents for automated material handling and electroadhesion grippers. His proudest accomplishment was the successful publication of his book, Reflections of a 5th Grade Girls Basketball Coach.

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Shares of Polish joint stock companies in the 18th century – historical and legal analysis, part II The paper analyses the legal construction of the shares of Polish public companies in the 18th century. The analysis relied on the statutes and documents referring to the shares. The Woolen Products Manufacturing Company founded in 1766 should be considered the first Polish public company. Before 1795, i.e. before the Third Partition of the country and the subsequent lost of independence, there had been established as many as seven companies of that type. The surviving projects of statutes show that there were plans for founding several other companies. The period in which the first Polish companies functioned was short and most of them were dissolved within a few years after they had been founded. This was partly due to the difficulties in collecting the capital fund. The preserved source materials allow for an analysis of the legal nature and function performed by the shares in the construction of these companies. In the second part of the paper the author focuses on the nature of shares as a bundle of shareholder rights and as securities. Shares of Polish public companies in the 18th century conferred upon their holders a number of rights such as, for example, the right to participate in the profits of the company or the right to vote at the shareholders’ meetings. Some of the preserved statutes provided for restrictions on exercising shareholders’ rights (e.g. voting rights), however, the scope of these rights was similar to the scope defined by present-day regulations. The shares of the first Polish public companies may also be attributed the nature of transferable security. The analysis of methods of transferring them as well as methods of affirming the status of a shareholder indicates that the character of 18th-century shares was similar to that of registered shares.

Abstract:

The affirmation of resolution through arbitration of commercial disputes in the field of contract law, both at national levels (as an undisputable trend of varying degrees) as well as at the international level, has raised the issue of the possibility of resolving intercompany disputes in this manner, in order to extend the freedom of will of investors from the domain of establishing companies to include the domain of the freedom of choice of a forum for resolving possible disputes arising from numerous legal relations of this kind. However, unlike contracts, with the primacy of free will compared to limitations (the relation of rules and exceptions), the sphere of intercompany relations, although basically contractual by its origin, has, in its functioning, an emphasized need to resolve the conflict of contract and company law in order to make the arbitrability of these disputes realistically possible, while on the other hand, compared to the contract law, the sphere of company law is always more in the focus of attention of national public orders, as a universal institute (regardless of its scope), which represents an obstacle to arbitrability of these disputes. In this paper, the author first analyses the legal nature of the constituent acts of companies (the founding act and statute of a joint stock company) in the context of an arbitration agreement, on which the arbitrability of intercompany disputes can solely be based, finding that their contractual nature is a serious obstacle to mandatory arbitrations of these disputes (if these acts with this clause are adopted by majority of votes), and that the theory of adhesion contracts could be a solution to encourage arbitrability, but only for closed type of companies, while this would not be possible in the case of a public joint stock company, especially in the case of non-professional shareholders because of the need to additionally protect them through consumer law. The author continues by analysing the notion of intercompany disputes and systems of possible objective arbitrability (ratione materiae) of these disputes, finding that the Serbian arbitration law and company law, especially with regard to the possible restrictive concept of „exclusive jurisdiction of commercial courts“ for these disputes, has at least serious reasons for changes in favour of strengthening their arbitrability, with certain necessary individual exclusions in case of the dominance of public order interest. Finally, the author also analyses certain aspects of multiparty nature of the intercompany disputes, especially regarding public joint stock companies, as possible procedural obstacles to their resolution through arbitration, even in cases of their possibly undisputable objective arbitrability.

Abstract:

Synopsis AfrobitLink Ltd was an information technology (IT) firm with headquarters in Lagos, Nigeria. AfrobitLink started as a very small IT firm with less than two dozen staff. Within a few years of its founding, AfrobitLink established itself as a dependable organization known for delivering high-quality IT services. However, starting in 2004, AfrobitLink experienced rapid growth as it expanded to serve the telecommunications firms taking advantage of the deregulated market. This rapid expansion resulted in many challenges for AfrobitLink. The firm rapidly expanded into all 36 states in Nigeria, hiring a manager to oversee the company’s operations in each of the states. Poor hiring practices, inadequate training, excessive spans of control, low accountability, a subjective reward system, and other cultural issues, such as a relaxed attitude to time, resulted in low motivation, high employee turnover, poor customer service, and financial losses. By 2013, the firm was operating at a loss and its reputation was in shambles. Generally, the culture was toxic: employees did not identify with the firm or care about its goals, there were no performance standards, employees were not held accountable, self-interest and discrimination prevailed. The organization was in a downward spiral. Consultants were hired to help sort out the firm’s problems but these efforts yielded few results. Ken Wilson, the founder’s son, was hired in 2014 as VP of Administration to help get the firm back on track. As a change agent, Ken had to decide how to address the issues facing the firm and how to achieve profitable growth. Research methodology Primary sources included interviews with the company CEO, his wife, his son, and a volunteer staff member. Secondary sources included the company website. The names of the people and the firm in the case have been changed to provide anonymity. Relevant courses and levels This case is intended for use in graduate courses (although it can also be used in upper level undergraduate courses) in change management/organization development, organizational behavior, leadership, or international management. For graduate courses, students may focus on application or integration of several theories or concepts. For upper level undergraduate courses, students may focus on application of a single theory or concept. Below are suggested texts or readings for each type of student by subject. Theoretical bases Change management theories (e.g. Lewin’s force field analysis (Schein, 1996), Kotter’s eight-step change management process (Kotter, 2007), The change kaleidoscope approach (Balogun and Hailey, 2008)), social identity theory (Tajfel, 1981), attribution theory (Kelley, 1972), leadership theories (e.g. Hersey and Blanchard, 1969), intercultural/international management theories (e.g. Hofstede, 1980, 1991).

Abstract:

Abstract Background: Follicular lymphoma (FL) is the second most common type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in the Western world. It is generally an indolent disease, however some patients experience rapid clinical progression. Identification of this subset of patients at the time of initial diagnosis would allow for more informed decisions to be made regarding clinical management. Methods: We investigated whether a multi-dimensional profiling approach using gene expression microarrays, a tissue microarray (TMA) and baseline clinical parameters, would allow for survival prediction for FL patients. Sixty-seven cases of FL were identified, of which high quality gene expression data were obtained with a minimum of 5 years of follow-up for 41 patients. Expression data were subjected to Predictive Interaction Analysis (PIA) to identify pairs of interacting genes that predict poor outcome, defined as death within five years of diagnosis. A TMA of all 67 patients was subjected to immunohistochemistry for markers routinely used in lymphoma diagnosis, and for numerous proteins whose relevance to oncogenesis is well-established, including p53, bcl-2, bcl-6, MUM1, p16 and p65. Results: Gene expression analysis revealed numerous genes that are highly predictive of clinical outcome. Many of these genes are known to be involved in pathways that regulate apoptosis, cell survival, proliferation and hematological function. The highly predictive single genes included BMX, NOTCH2, TFF3, BIRC4 and RIPK5, which have established roles in promoting or antagonizing apoptosis. The PIA approach further identified numerous pairs of genes that together possess greater predictive power than their individual constituent genes. Subsequent Kaplan-Meier analysis indicated that segregation of the cases according to the top performing gene pair, LOXL3 and NTS, produced two groups of cases with significantly different survival. This gene pair was able to further differentiate patient outcomes following stratification of the cases according to the Follicular Lymphoma International Prognostic Index (FLIPI), indicating its utility in providing supplementary information to the FLIPI. Upon analysis of the TMA results, detectable expression of p53 in lymphoma cells, along with clinical involvement of multiple nodal sites and B symptoms emerged as significant predictors of overall survival. Further IHC results examining expression of proteins identified as highly predictive at the transcript level will be presented. Conclusions: Our results support the utility of our profiling approach for the identification of candidate biomarkers in follicular lymphoma. Queen’s University and Biosystemix Ltd are co-owners of the intellectual property and are respectively the assignees of a provisional patent application filed at the US PTO in Sept. 2007. Roland Somogyi PhD and Larry D. Greller PhD as founding directors retain ownership positions in Biosystemix Ltd, a privately held company incorporated in Canada. Queen’s University, Biosystemix, and all the co-authors believe and agree to the best of our respective knowledge that there are no conflicts of interest in how the study was initiated, conducted, analyzed, and reported.

Abstract:

Multiple Myeloma (MM) is a malignancy of plasma cells that affects over 30,000 Americans every year. Despite advances in the treatment of the disease, approximately 12,000 American patients will still die of MM in 2019. One of the mainstays of treatment for MM is the immunomodulatory and antiangiogenic drug lenalidomide; which is used in induction therapy, maintenance therapy and treatment of relapsed disease. Although not fully elucidated, lenalidomide's mechanism of action in MM involves the drug binding to Cerebelon (CBN) and leads to the subsequent degradation of the Ikaros (IKZF1) and Aiolos (IKZF3) transcription factors (TF). These TFs play important regulatory roles in lymphocyte development. Despite lenalidomide's importance in MM treatment, several groups have reported that MM patients treated with lenalidomide rarely go on to develop B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-ALL). The genetics and clonal relationship between the MM and subsequent B-ALL have not been previously defined. Importantly, it is not clear if the MM and B-ALL arise from the same founding clone that has been under selective pressure during lenalidomide treatment. As deletions in IKZF1 are common in B-ALL, one could hypothesize that lenalidomide's mechanism of action mimics this alteration and contributes to leukemogenesis. We sequenced the tumors from a cohort of seven patients with MM treated with lenalidomide who later developed B-ALL. These data did not show any mutational overlap between the MM and ALL samples-the tumors arose from different founding clones in each case. However, several genes were recurrently mutated in the B-ALL samples across the seven patients. These genes included TP53, ZFP36L2, KIR3DL2, RNASE-L, and TERT. Strikingly, five of the seven patients had a TP53 mutations in the B-ALL sample that was not present in the matched MM sample. The frequency of TP53 mutations in our cohort was much higher than that reported in adult de novo B-ALL patients which can range between 4.1-6.4% (Hernández-Rivas et al. 2017 and Foa et al. 2013). Utilizing CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, we disrupted the Zfp36l2 or Actb in murine hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) of mice with or without loss of Trp53. We performed our first transplantation experiment in which the cohorts of mice have loss of Trp53 alone, loss of Zfp36l2 alone, loss of both Trp53 and Zfp36l2, or a control knockout (KO) of Actb. To characterize the disruption of Zfp36l2 alone and in combination with Trp53 we analyzed the hematopoietic stem and progenitor cell compartments in the bone marrow of the above transplanted mice. In mice with a loss of Zfp36l2 there is a decrease in Lin- Sca-1+ c-Kit+ (LSK), short term-HSC (ST-HSC), and multipotent progenitors (MPP). This decrease was not observed in the mice with a loss of both Trp53 and Zfp36l2, where instead we noted an increase in monocyte progenitors (MP), granulocytes-macrophage progenitors (GMP), and common myeloid progenitors (CMP) cells. In this Trp53 Zfp36l2 double loss model we also noted a decrease in B220+ B-cells that was not seen in the Zfp36l2 alone. In this cohort of Trp53 Zfp36l2 loss, we characterized B-cell development through hardy fraction flow cytometry, and identified a decrease in fractions A and B/C (pre-pro and pro-B-cells, respectively) as compared to Zfp36l2 or Actb alone. As lenalidomide does not bind to Cbn in mice, we used the human B-ALL NALM6 cell line to test if treatment with lenalidomide will lead to a selective growth advantage of cells with the same genes knocked out versus wild-type control cells grown in the same culture. We hypothesize that lenalidomide treatment selectively enriched for pre-existing mutated cell clones that evolved into the B-ALL. Preliminary data in NALM6 cells with a loss of TP53 demonstrate a slight increase in cell number at day 7 compared to a RELA control. These experiments will be repeated with concurrent ZFP36L2 and TP53 mutations as well as ZFP36L2 alone. Treatment-related disease is a key consideration when deciding between different treatment options, and this project aims to understand the relationship between MM treatment and B-ALL occurrence. It may be possible to identify MM patients who are at-risk for B-ALL. For example, MM patients who harbor low-level TP53 mutations prior to lenalidomide treatment could be offered alternative treatment options. Disclosures Barnell: Geneoscopy Inc: Current Employment, Current equity holder in private company, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees. Wartman:Novartis: Consultancy; Incyte: Consultancy.

Abstract:

Neomorphic mutations in IDH1/2 producing R-2-Hydroxyglutrate (R-2HG), are common in myeloid malignancies and in various solid cancers. A diffuse hypermethylated status is the biological consequence of the R-2HG-mediated inhibition of several α-ketoglutarate (αKG)-dependent enzymes including DNA dioxygenases TET1, TET2 and TET3.1,2 Specifically, the inhibition of TET2, either induced by the interaction with R-2HG or by direct genomic silencing (as in case of TET2 loss of function mutations) is responsible for the block of the DNA cytosine demethylation pathway, inducing changes in expression patterns, (e.g. decreasing expression of tumor suppressor genes) and impairing execution of differentiation programs. Analysis of genomic data from a Cleveland Clinic (CCF) cohort of AML/MDS patients combined in a meta-analytic fashion with BeatAML3 and Tumor Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) cohorts (1119 profiled patients) showed that IDH1/2 mutations are mutually exclusive (only 3% [N=4/106] of AML IDH1/2 mutated cases had TET2 mutations, expected to be at a frequency of 18% [N=110/585] in IDH1/2 wild type cases, p=.000125). In this scenario we suggest that the loss of TET2 activity due to mutations prevents the expansion of IDH1/2 mutant myeloid neoplasms (MNs) because of phenotypic redundancies inducing synthetic lethality. With this premise we stipulated that a critical level of DNA dioxygenase activity exists and thus cells with low TET2 activity will not tolerate further inhibition by R-2HG. Here we propose to apply pharmacologic inhibition of TET2 to produce an additive effect on DNA dioxygenases to investigate whether this will result in a synthetic lethality of IDH1/2 mutant cells. Specifically we hypothesize that TET-dioxygenase inhibition may be implemented as a possible therapeutic strategy in neomorphic IDH1/2 mutant MNs. To explore this hypothesis we conducted a series of in vitro experiments in different isogenic cell lines expressing either mutant or wild type IDH1 or IDH2, that were simultaneously mutant, wild type (WT) or knock down (KD) for TET2 (TF1-IDH2R140Q, K562-IDH1R132C both WT for TET2 gene, and K18-IDH1R132CTET2KD and SIGM5-IDH1R132C TET2MT, both with a doxycycline inducible promoter for mutant IDH1). First we found that the doxycycline induction of ectopic IDH1R132C expression led to R-2HG increase (~10,000-fold over the baseline) and induced cell death in TET2-deficient cells (experiments conducted in SIGM5-IDH1R132C cells showing 70% of decrease in cell growth after five days of IDH induction with doxycycline), confirming the cytotoxic effect of cellular R-2HG. We then tested in IDH1/2MT cells sensitivity towards TETi76, a specific TET inhibitor designed on R-2HG scaffold (with more than 200 fold potency compared to R-2HG in cell-free assays of 5-hydroxy-methyl cytosine [5hMC] production).4 This compound showed particular selectivity towards inhibition of DNA dioxygenases when a set of 23 other dioxygenase inhibitors were screened. Most importantly, consistent with our hypothesis, TETi76 preferentially inhibited the proliferation of IDH1/2MT cells either following doxycycline-induction both in TET2WTand TET2 deficient models (K562 TET2WT, K18 TET2kD, SIGM-5 TET2MT cell lines), or in models not carrying the inducible promoter (TF1 TETWT) (Growth inhibition: 20-25% in IDHWT vs 70-80% in IDHMT cell lines after 72h of co-culture with TETi76 treatment for concentrations ranging between 1 and 5 µM. P-value range: 0.04-0.001 in pairwise comparisons with untreated controls). Overall, our findings are consistent with the idea that neomorphic IDH1/2MT phenocopies loss of function TET2MT, through R-2HG, down-modulating pathways fundamental for cell homeostasis, division and differentiation. If a residual TET-activity is needed for the function of IDH1/2MT cells, the complete block of the residual activity appears to inevitably disrupt this phenotype impairing cell growth and proliferation. This is also in agreement with the paucity of TET3 and TET1 mutation in the context of TET2MT carriers. In summary, results shown here represent an important proof of concept that the increased inhibition of DNA dioxygenase activity, instead of being more leukemogenic, can be synthetically lethal. Our observations may have implications with regard to the therapy of IDH1/2 mutated neoplasms including AML and MDS Disclosures Saunthararajah: EpiDestiny: Consultancy, Current equity holder in private company, Patents & Royalties: University of Illinois at Chicago. Maciejewski:Alexion, BMS: Speakers Bureau; Novartis, Roche: Consultancy, Honoraria.

Abstract:

Background Patients treated with chronic immunosuppression face a six-fold increase in their cumulative lifetime risk of lymphoma relative to age-matched immunocompetent counterparts. These malignances represent a spectrum of lymphoid and plasmacytic histologies collectively referred to as post-transplant lymphoproliferative disorders (PTLD). Accurate risk-stratification and optimal treatment strategies are unclear given wide histologic and clinical heterogeneity. Current standard-of-care models include immunosuppression reduction and sequential, response-adapted chemoimmunotherapy platforms, however 80% of patients will require chemotherapy exposure. Overall response rates (ORR) are >90%, however relapse is common and serious treatment-related toxicities including infection and allograft rejection pose significant challenges. Several risk-stratification schemes have been proposed to direct initial therapy and predict clinical outcomes, however their external validity has been inconsistent across patient populations. We report here the results of a single-center retrospective study assessing the treatment patterns and outcomes of patients diagnosed with PTLD and provide a risk-assessment profile that may help improve clinical outcomes. Methods Patients with a diagnosis of PTLD were identified by Electronic Medical Records database query. Inclusion criteria were: age ≥ 18 years at the time of diagnosis, confirmation of PTLD by internal pathology review, primary diagnosis from 2008-2018, and receipt of therapy and surveillance care at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, USA. Exploratory univariate analyses were performed using Kaplan-Meier estimates with 95% confidence intervals and log-rank p-values for time-to-event outcomes; significance was set at p < 0.05. Response to treatment and disease progression were classified per provider-specific interpretations of clinical data as assessed by patient chart review. ORR is defined as complete or partial response. Progression-free survival (PFS) is defined as time from diagnosis to disease progression; patients who died before restaging or who were lost to follow-up were censored. Overall survival (OS) is defined as time from diagnosis to death from any cause; patients who were alive at last follow-up were censored. Results A total of 182 patients were identified by database query and 111 patients met our inclusion criteria. Demographics data are provided (Figure 1A). Five-year PFS and OS were 55.7% and 87.2%, respectively (Figure 1B). 92.6% of patients treated with immunosuppression agents underwent dose reduction and 16.8% experienced graft rejection, of which 27.8% required re-transplantation. Exploratory univariate analyses were performed on the following clinical factors: age, LDH, Ann-Arbor Stage, presence of extranodal disease, histologic EBER positivity, ECOG PS, comorbid conditions (type II diabetes, obesity, and coronary artery disease), CNS involvement, transplant type, presence of EBV viremia, and PTLD subtype. Established risk stratification models, including the IPI, R-IPI, Leblond score, Ghobrial score, and PTLD prognostic index, were applied to this cohort. We identified elevated LDH (p=0.04) and IPI score >3 (p=0.015) as predictors of PFS (Figure 1C); elevated LDH (p=0.02) and thoracic allograft transplantation (p=0.03) were predictors of OS (Figure 1D). The PTLD prognostic index significantly predicted PFS (p=0.03) and OS (p=0.013) (Figure 1E). 50.4% received Rituximab monotherapy prior to risk-stratification for combination chemoimmunotherapy; ORR and CR rates with Rituximab monotherapy were 67.9% and 41.1%, respectively. Overall response to Rituximab monotherapy was found to be a significant predictor of PFS (p<0.0001) but not OS (p=0.14) (Figure 1F). Conclusions This study represents one of the largest retrospective cohorts of PTLD patients to date. We show that the PTLD prognostic index is the most accurate risk stratification tool in predicting PFS and OS in this patient population and may have utility in guiding therapeutic approaches in PTLD patients. LDH, IPI score, and type of allograft transplantation are significant clinical variables in predicting clinical outcomes. Furthermore, response to Rituximab monotherapy was a significant predictor of PFS; improving frontline outcomes to high-risk patients remains a critical unmet need. Figure Disclosures Winter: Epizyme: Other: DSMB; Delta Fly Pharma: Consultancy; Amgen: Consultancy; CVS/Caremark: Consultancy; Ariad/Takeda: Consultancy; Norvartis: Consultancy, Other: DSMB; Merck: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Other: advisory board; Karyopharm: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Other: advisory board. Gordon:Zylem Biosciences: Patents & Royalties: Patents, No Royalties. Karmali:BeiGene: Speakers Bureau; BMS/Celgene/Juno: Honoraria, Other, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Gilead/Kite: Honoraria, Other, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Takeda: Research Funding; Karyopharm: Honoraria; AstraZeneca: Speakers Bureau. Ma:AbbVie: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding; AstraZeneca: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; BeiGene: Honoraria, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Bioverativ: Consultancy, Honoraria; Genentech: Consultancy, Honoraria; Gilead: Consultancy, Honoraria; Janssen: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Kite: Consultancy, Honoraria; Pharmacyclics, LLC, an AbbVie Company: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Juno: Research Funding; Novartis: Research Funding; TG Therapeutics: Research Funding. Ganger:Mallinkrodt: Consultancy; Gilead: Speakers Bureau. Pro:Verastem Oncology: Research Funding.

Abstract:

The study of indirect translations (IT) into Ukrainian, viewed from a psycholinguistic perspective, will contribute to a better understanding of Soviet national policies and the post-Soviet linguistic and cultural condition. The paper pioneers a discussion of the strategies and types of IT via Russian in the domains of literature and religion. In many cases the corresponding Russian translation, which serves as a source text for the Ukrainian one, cannot be established with confidence, and the “sticking-out ears” of Russian mediation may only be monitored at the level of sentence structure, when Russian wording underlies the Ukrainian text and distorts its natural fluency. The discussion substantiates the strategies and singles out the types of IT, in particular, (1) Soviet lower-quality retranslations of the recent, and mostly high-quality, translations of literary classics, which deliberately imitated lexical, grammatical, and stylistic patterns of the Russian language (became massive in scope in the mid1930s); (2) the translation-from-crib type, or translations via the Russian interlinear version, which have been especially common in poetry after WWII, from the languages of the USSR nationalities and the socialist camp countries; (3) overt relayed translations, based on the published and intended for the audience Russian translations that can be clearly defined as the source texts for the IT into Ukrainian; this phenomenon may be best illustrated with Patriarch Filaret Version of the Holy Scripture, translated from the Russian Synodal Bible (the translation started in the early 1970s); and, finally, (4) later Soviet (from the mid1950s) and post-Soviet (during Independence period) hidden relayed translations of literary works, which have been declared as direct ones but in fact appeared in print shortly after the publication of the respective works in Russian translation and mirrored Russian lexical and stylistic patterns. References Белецкий, А. Переводная литература на Украине // Красное слово. 1929. № 2. С. 87-96. Цит за вид.: Кальниченко О. А., Полякова Ю. Ю. Українська перекладознавча думка 1920-х – початку 1930-х років: Хрестоматія вибраних праць з перекладознавства до курсу «Історія перекладу» / Укладачі Леонід Чернований і Вячеслав Карабан. Вінниця: Нова Книга, 2011. С. 376-391. Бурґгардт, Осв. Большевицька спадщина // Вістник. 1939. № 1, Кн. 2. С. 94-99. Dollerup, C. (2014). Relay in Translation. Cross-linguistic Interaction: Translation, Contrastive and Cognitive Studies. Liber Amicorum in Honour of Prof. Bistra Alexieva published on the occasion of her eightieth birthday, Diana Yankova, (Ed.). (pp. 21-32). St. Kliminent Ohridski University Press. Retrieved from https://cms13659.hstatic.dk/upload_dir/docs/Publications/232-Relay-in-translation-(1).pdf Dong, Xi (2012). A Probe into Translation Strategies from Relevance Perspective—Direct Translation and Indirect Translation. Canadian Social Science, 8(6), 39-44. Retrieved from http://www.cscanada.org/index.php/css/article/viewFile/j.css.1923669720120806.9252/3281 Дзера, О.. Історія українських перекладів Святого Письма // Іноземна філологія. 2014. Вип. 127, Ч. 2. С. 214–222. Філарет, Патріарх Київський та всієї Руси-України, Василь Шкляр, Микола Вересень, В’ячеслав Кириленко. Розмова В’ячеслава Кириленка із Патріархом Київським та всієї Руси-України Філаретом. Віра. У кн.: Три розмови про Україну. Упорядник та радактор В. Кириленко. Х.: Книжковий Клуб «Клуб Сімейного Дозвілля», 2018. С. 9-92. Flynn, P. (2013). Author and Translator. In Yves Gambier, Luc van Doorslaer (Eds.), Handbook of Translation Studies, 4, (pp. 12-19). Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Gutt, E.-A. (1990). A theoretical account of translation – without a translation theory. Retrieved from http://cogprints.org/2597/1/THEORACC.htm Коломієць Л. В. Український художній переклад та перекладачі 1920-30-х років: матеріали до курсу «Історія перекладу». Вінниця: «Нова книга», 2015. Іларіон, митр. Біблія – найперше джерело для вивчення своєї літературної мови / Митр. Іларіон // Віра і культура. 1958. Ч. 6 (66). С. 13–17. Іларіон, митр. Біблія, або Книги Святого Письма Старого и Нового Заповіту. Із мови давньоєврейської й грецької на українську дослівно наново перекладена. United Bible Societies, 1962. Jinyu L. (2012). Habitus of Translators as Socialized Individuals: Bourdieu’s Account. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 2(6), 1168-1173. Leighton, L. (1991). Two Worlds, One Art. Literary Translation in Russia and America. DeKalb, Ill.: Northwestern Illinois UP. Лукаш М. Прогресивна західноєвропейська література в перекладах на українську мову // Протей [редкол. О. Кальниченко (голова) та ін.]. Вип. 2. X.: Вид-во НУА, 2009. С. 560–605. Майфет, Г. [Рецензія] // Червоний шлях. 1930. № 2. С. 252-258. Рец. на кн.: Боккаччо Дж. Декамерон / пер. Л. Пахаревського та П. Майорського; ред. С. Родзевича та П. Мохора; вступ. ст. В. Державіна. [Харків]; ДВУ, 1929. Ч. 1. XXXI, 408 с.; Ч. 2. Цит за вид.: Кальниченко О. А., Полякова Ю. Ю. Українська перекладознавча думка 1920-х – початку 1930-х років: Хрестоматія вибраних праць з перекладознавства до курсу «Історія перекладу» / Укладачі Леонід Чернований і Вячеслав Карабан. Вінниця: Нова Книга, 2011. С. 344-356. Munday, J. (2010). Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and Applications. 2nd Ed. London & New York: Routledge. Pauly, M. D. (2014). Breaking the Tongue: Language, Education, and Power in Soviet Ukraine. Toronto Buffalo London: University of Toronto Press. Pieta, H. & Rosa, A. A. (2013). Panel 7: Indirect translation: exploratory panel on the state-of-the-art and future research avenues. 7th EST Congress – Germersheim, 29 August – 1 September 2013. Retrieved from http://www.fb06.uni-mainz.de/est/51.php Плющ, Б. O. Прямий та неопрямий переклад української художньої прози англійською, німецькою, іспанською та російською мовами. Дис. …канд. філол. наук., Київ: КНУ імені Тараса Шевченка, 2016. Ringmar, M. (2012). Relay translation. In Yves Gambier, Luc van Doorslaer (Eds.), Handbook of Translation Studies, 4 (pp. 141-144). Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Simeoni, D. (1998). The pivotal status of the translator’s habitus. Target, 10(1), 1-39. Солодовнікова, М. І. Відтворення стилістичних особливостей роману Марка Твена «Пригоди Тома Сойера» в українських перекладах: квантитативний аспект // Перспективи розвитку філологічних наук: Матеріали ІІІ Міжнародної науково-практичної конференції (Хмельницький, 24-25 березня). Херсон: вид-во «Гельветика», 2017. С. 99-103. Sommer, D, ed. (2006). Cultural Agency in the Americas. [Synopsis]. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Špirk, J. (2014). Censorship, Indirect Translations and Non-translation: The (Fateful) Adventures of Czech Literature in 20th-century Portugal. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Venuti, L. (2001). Strategies of Translation. In M. Baker (ed.). Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, (pp. 240-244). London & New York: Routledge. References (translated and transliterated) Beletskii, A. (1929). Perevodnaia literatura na Ukraine [Translated literature in Ukraine]. Krasnoe Slovo [Red Word], 2, 87-96. Reprint in: Kalnychenko, O. A. and Poliakova, Yu. (2011). In Leonid Chernovatyi and Viacheslav Karaban (Eds.). Ukraiins’ka perekladoznavcha dumka 1920-kh – pochatku 1930-kh rokiv: Khrestomatiia vybranykh prats z perekladosnavstva do kursu “Istoriia perekladu” [Ukrainian translation studies of the 1920s – early 1930s: A textbook of selected works in translation studies for a course on the “History of Translation”]. (pp. 376-391). Vinnytsia: Nova Knyha, Burghardt, O. (1939). Bolshevytska spadschyna [The Bolsheviks’ heritage]. Vistnyk [The Herald], Vol. 1, Book 2, 94-99. Dollerup, C. (2014). Relay in Translation. Cross-linguistic Interaction: Translation, Contrastive and Cognitive Studies. Liber Amicorum in Honour of Prof. Bistra Alexieva published on the occasion of her eightieth birthday, Diana Yankova, (Ed.). (pp. 21-32). St. Kliminent Ohridski University Press. Retrieved from https://cms13659.hstatic.dk/upload_dir/docs/Publications/232-Relay-in-translation-(1).pdf Dong, Xi (2012). A Probe into Translation Strategies from Relevance Perspective—Direct Translation and Indirect Translation. Canadian Social Science, 8(6), 39-44. Retrieved from http://www.cscanada.org/index.php/css/article/viewFile/j.css.1923669720120806.9252/3281 Dzera, O. (2014). Istoriia ukraiinskykh perekladiv Sviatoho Pysma [History of Ukrainian translations of the Holy Scripture]. Inozemna Filologiia, 127, Part 2, 214-222. Filaret, Patriarch of Kyiv and all Rus-Ukraine et al. (2018). Rozmova Viacheslava Kyrylenka iz Patriarkhom Kyivskym ta vsiiei Rusy-Ukrainy Filaretom. Vira [A Conversation of Viacheslav Kyrylenko with Patriarch of Kyiv and all Rus-Ukraine Filaret. Faith]. In: Try rozmovy pro Ukrainu [Three Conversations about Ukraine], compiled and edited by V. Kyrylenko. Kharkiv: Family Leisure Club, 9-92. Flynn, P. (2013). Author and Translator. In Yves Gambier, Luc van Doorslaer (Eds.), Handbook of Translation Studies, 4, (pp. 12-19). Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Gutt, E.-A. (1990). A theoretical account of translation – without a translation theory. Retrieved from http://cogprints.org/2597/1/THEORACC.htm Kolomiyets, L. (2015). Ukraiinskyi khudozhniy pereklad ta perekladachi 1920-30-kh rokiv: Materialy do kursu “Istoriia perekladu” [Ukrainian Literary Translation and Translators in the 1920s-30s: “History of translation” course materials]. Vinnytsia: Nova Knyha. Ilarion, Metropolitan (1958). Bibliia – naipershe dzherelo dlia vyvchennia svoiei literaturnoi movy [The Bible is the first source for studying our literary language]. Vira i kultura [Faith and Culture], No. 6 (66), 13–17. Ilarion, Metropolitan. 1962. Bibliia abo Knyhy Sviatoho Pusma Staroho i Novoho Zapovitu. Iz movy davnioievreiskoi i hretskoi na ukrainsku doslivno nanovo perekladena. Commissioned by United Bible Societies. Jinyu L. (2012). Habitus of Translators as Socialized Individuals: Bourdieu’s Account. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 2(6), 1168-1173. Leighton, L. (1991). Two Worlds, One Art. Literary Translation in Russia and America. DeKalb, Ill.: Northwestern Illinois UP. Lukash, M. (2009). Prohresyvna zakhidnoievropeiska literatura v perekladakh na ukraiinsku movu [Progressive West European Literature in Ukrainian]. Protei. Vol. 2. Edited by O. Kalnychenko. Kharkiv: Vydavnytstvo NUA, 560-605. Maifet, H. (1930). [Review]. Chervonyi Shliakh [Red Path], 2, 252-258. Review of the book: Boccaccio G. Decameron. Tr. by L. Pakharevskyi and P. Maiorskyi; S. Rodzevych and P. Mokhor (Eds.).; introduction by V. Derzhavyn. Kharkiv: DVU, 1929. Part 1. XXXI; Part 2. Reprint in: Kalnychenko, O. and Poliakova, Yu. (2011). In Leonid Chernovatyi and Viacheslav Karaban (Eds). Ukraiins’ka perekladoznavcha dumka 1920-kh – pochatku 1930-kh rokiv: Khrestomatiia vybranykh prats z perekladosnavstva do kursu “Istoriia perekladu” [Ukrainian translation studies of the 1920s – early 1930s: A textbook of selected works in translation studies for a course on the “History of Translation”]. (pp. 344-356). Vinnytsia: Nova Knyha. Munday, J. (2010). Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and applications. 2nd Ed. London & New York: Routledge. Pauly, M. D. (2014). Breaking the Tongue: Language, Education, and Power in Soviet Ukraine. Toronto Buffalo London: University of Toronto Press. Pieta, H. & Rosa, A. A. (2013). Panel 7: Indirect translation: exploratory panel on the state-of-the-art and future research avenues. 7th EST Congress – Germersheim, 29 August – 1 September 2013. Retrieved from http://www.fb06.uni-mainz.de/est/51.php Pliushch, B. (2016). Direct and Indirect Translations of Ukrainian Literary Prose into English, German, Spanish and Russian. PhD thesis. Manuscript copyright. Kyiv: Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Ringmar, M. (2012). Relay translation. In Yves Gambier, Luc van Doorslaer (Eds.), Handbook of Translation Studies, 4 (pp. 141-144). Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Simeoni, D. (1998). The pivotal status of the translator’s habitus. Target, 10(1), 1-39. Solodovnikova. M. I. (2017) Vidtvorennia stylistychnykh osoblyvostei romanu Marka Tvena “Pryhody Toma Soiera” v ukrainskykh perekladakh: kvantytatyvnyi aspekt. Perspektyvy rozvytku filolohichnykh nauk: Book of abstracts of III International Scientific Conference (Khmelnytskyi, 24-25 March). Kherson: Helvetyka Publishing House. (99-103). Sommer, D., Ed. (2006). Cultural Agency in the Americas. [Synopsis]. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Špirk, J. (2014). Censorship, Indirect Translations and Non-translation: The (Fateful) Adventures of Czech Literature in 20th-century Portugal. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Venuti, L. (2001). Strategies of Translation. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, (pp. 240-244). M. Baker (ed.). London & New York: Routledge.

Abstract:

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to contribute to understanding the impact of entrepreneurial team composition on new venture performance. Different types of entrepreneurship motivation among founding team members are defined. Using a relatively recent theory as a framework (i.e. self-determination theory), the authors group these motives into two categories: autonomous and controlled motivation. The business impact of the level of each type of motivation within the team, as well as the impact of having team members with different motivational drivers, is examined. New venture performance is modelled in two different ways: financial performance (i.e. return on assets) and innovation performance. Design/methodology/approach The analyses are based on 66 founding teams active in diverse activity sectors. The teams represent a total of 142 business founders. Data was collected through structured interviews, a company questionnaire and a secondary data source (i.e. certified financial statements). Findings The results confirm that the level of autonomous motivation within the team contributes to start-up financial performance, whereas the level of controlled motivation hampers innovation performance. No direct effects of diversity of team member motivation on start-up performance were discovered. Originality/value This is one of the first papers to study multiple firm performance effects of the composition of entrepreneurial founding teams in terms of motivation.

Abstract:

We examine the influence of founders’ prior shared international experience on the timing of their new ventures’ first entry into foreign markets. We propose that this experience, which is gained by founders working concurrently for the same international firm prior to the founding of the current company, provides them with shared knowledge and routines that they can use to enter foreign markets for the first time earlier in the venture’s life. Further, we propose that founders’ diversity strengthens this relationship, because diverse groups of founders have a broader range of knowledge, skills, and perspectives, which facilitates the adaptation of their prior shared international experience to their new venture setting. This is likely to further reduce the time it takes them to enter foreign markets for the first time. We also argue that industry dynamism weakens the relationship between founders’ prior shared international experience and the time to first foreign market entry, because this type of experience is likely to become obsolete in a rapidly changing environment. Finally, we hypothesize that early internationalizers enjoy higher performance than late internationalizers. We test these predictions using a sample of Swedish new ventures. Our results contribute to the literatures on founders’ shared experience and early internationalization.

Abstract:

How does an employee’s centrality in intrafirm research and development activities affect the employee’s propensity for outward mobility? Does this proclivity vary by the type of employment the employee seeks: moving to other firms versus founding a new venture? We maintain that, to answer these questions, we must distinguish between an employee’s centrality in the intrafirm collaboration network and the employee’s centrality in the intrafirm technological recombination network. We utilize the curricula vitae and patent data of corporate inventors at a leading semiconductor company between 1993 and 2012 to test our hypotheses. Contrary to prevailing views, our competing risk model indicates that corporate inventors who are central in the intrafirm collaboration and technological network and, thus, have the most opportunities are less likely to leave the current employer. However, when considering external employment opportunities, their preferences vary. Collaboration-central individuals are more likely to start a new venture than to move to another employer. Their skill in developing interpersonal relationships enables them to attract the tangible and intangible resources needed in a new firm. In contrast, inventors whose technological expertise is central to the firm’s technology recombination network are more likely to move to another employer than to start a new venture. In an established firm, they can leverage their technological know-how using the resources that a new venture would lack. Our theory highlights the trade-offs in employees’ attempts to take advantage of their internal and external value based on their position within the firm’s collaboration and technological networks.

Abstract:

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to tackle the grand issue of climate change in a managerial perspective by proposing a new type of management.Design/methodology/approachClimate change has now been debated for many years, and in spite of different viewpoints, analyses and opinions, is a phenomenon that is accepted by all. There are thousands of studies on the nature of climate change and its consequences on the planet Earth and its inhabitants. However, there are few studies investigating the consequences of climate change on the founding tenets and practices of management. This paper aims to contribute to this facet of the issue. In the first part, it examines the main facts about climate change, their impact on businesses and proposes an adapted model of management for agriculture, industry, services and supply chains. In the second part, it advocates a shift in paradigm from the “maximization of profit” to the “maximization of well-being” as the foundation of a new managerial philosophy that can both address climate change and sustainability.FindingsCompanies and managers are in a much better position than politicians and consumers to find a solution to climate change problems for the very reason that they are not stupid in Cipolla's (2011) sense. Companies and managers do have the power to rewrite the rules of the game in order to get to a firm and management metamorphosis. Starting from a return to company ownership by and for the company itself (not just external shareholders), a switch in purpose from profit-seeking to people's well-being, fair remuneration of stakeholders, progress as a measure of success and long-term orientation are suggested as new tenets in management.Research limitations/implicationsAlthough this paper has several limitations (it may be too wide in scope, utopian, its ideas may sound unachievable and even sometimes naïve in their arguments), its starting point is very clear: the authors, as management scholars, must do something to try and stop the crash of economies and businesses in an ecological disaster. And its logic is very clear and straightforward as well: if people want things to change, then they have to change the foundations of management thinking, both in theory and in practice. The authors do not claim their solution is the only one or the best: avenues for future research aimed at providing better solutions are wide open from this point of view, and the authors genuinely encourage colleagues to continue in this direction and contribute to this work. What matters most, however, is to stop looking for precise answers to “wrong, well-defined, narrow problems” and to start looking for “approximate answers to important problems” (Brown et al., 2005) as the authors tried to do here.Practical implicationsDeveloping a new management operating model and foundations able to keep companies alive while not compromising mankind survival on planet Earth.Originality/valueThis paper addresses the Tourish (2020) challenge for purposeful research in management by providing some fresh ideas about the way companies and management principles and practices should change to prevent irreversible environmental damages.

Abstract:

JISIB continues to publish Case Studies. In addition we also publish in this issue Patents Analyses. Patent analyses can be read both as examples of how to perform such analyses, but may also find interest within specific industries. Professor Henri Dou, who is a founding father of this journal, was one of the pioneers in this area, also with the development of patent analyses software. We have also included a conceptual and theoretical paper. All of the contributions in this issue show that scientific work does not have to be limited to more narrowly defined empirical studies.The second paper by Salavdor et al. is dedicated to Associate Professor Jonas Rundquist, a colleague at Halmstad University and at the same time a great admirer of the Spanish speaking Americas, who passed away in December 2014. He will be greatly missed.The first article by Salvador and Léon is a patent analysis of the industry for hybrid vehicules. The paper shows that the company with the highest patent activity also has a strong focus on collaborative technology development. The analysis further shows that research on parallel hybrid vehicle predominate, followed by series-hybrid and series-parallel hybrid type. The findings support the strategic decision process for organizations, companies, institutes and other stakeholders involved in this sector. The analysis and procedure presented can be used for analyses in other industries.The second paper by Salador et al. is also a patent analysis, but this time for the Additive Manufacturing industry. Unlike the first paper this one identifies a number of trends through a keyword patent analysis. “The main areas of research are focused on shaping of plastics and after-treatment of shaped products and working metallic powder and manufacture articles from this material”. The leading countries on additive manufacturing research are United States, Great Britain and Switzerland.The third article by Vriens and Solberg Søilen is an attempt to show the implication of disruptive innovation on Intelligence Studies. It is a theoretical paper. Through a broad discussion of disruptive innovation theory the authors arrive at what they coin”Disruptive Intelligence”. In addition they describe ‘biases’ which may impair the production of ‘disruptive intelligence’.The Fourth article is a case study written by Calof. It is about how the National Research Council’s Technical Intelligence Unit work with intelligence. The study shows that intelligence users understood and could appreciate a combination of hard and soft intelligence type measures. A survey in the form of an intelligence evaluation instrument was developed to gather data for the paper.The last article by Avner is a case study about CI in the Israeli defense industry. It confirms previous assumption that the industry in general and especially in Israel is using CI intensively to support the decision making process.As always we would first of all like to thank the authors for their contributions to this issue of JISIB.On behalf of the Editorial Board,Sincerely Yours,Prof. Dr. Klaus Solberg SøilenEditor-in-chief

Abstract:

Photo by Cecilie Johnsen on Unsplash INTRODUCTION Across the country, states are enacting legislation that curtails LGBTQ+ rights and liberties.[1] In March 2021, Arkansas enacted Senate Bill 289, titled the Medical Ethics and Diversity Act (the “Act”).[2] The Act permits medical practitioners, healthcare institutions, and insurance companies to refuse to treat, or, in the case of insurance companies, to cover, a non-critically ill person if treating the individual violates their religious or personal beliefs. Though masked as protecting religious liberties, the Act discriminates against LGBTQ+ patients. While the Act purports to protect different types of healthcare workers, I frame my discussion of the Act to discuss the physician’s obligations given the changes to Arkansas law. Even if legally permissible, I believe virtuous physicians do not consider patients’ sexual orientation or gender identity when deciding whether to treat them. I will explain why a virtuous physician would never conscientiously object to treating a patient based on the patient’s sexual orientation or gender identity, even if allowed, like in Arkansas. Conscientious objection based on sexual orientation or gender identity, even if permitted under state law, is always unvirtuous. l. Senate Bill 289 and the LGBTQ+ Patient On March 29, 2021, Governor Hutchinson adopted the Act by signing Senate Bill 289 into Arkansas state law. To protect a “right of conscience” in health care, the Act invokes traditions of the United States and the Hippocratic Oath, stating: [t]he right of conscience was central to the founding of the United States, has been deeply rooted in the history and tradition of the United States for centuries, and has been central to the practice of medicine through the Hippocratic Oath for millennia. As used in the Act, conscience means “religious, moral, or ethical beliefs.” The Act protects medical practitioners, healthcare institutions, or healthcare payors when they act from their conscience and extends this protection to include the following: (1) the right not to participate in a healthcare service that violates his, her, or its conscience; (2) no requirement to participate in a healthcare service that violates his, her, or its conscience; and (3) no civil, criminal, or administrative liability for declining to participate in a healthcare service that violates his, her, or its conscience. The Act limits which services physicians can refuse to perform: it permits conscientious objection only if the patient requires non-emergency care. Under Arkansas state law, an emergency is defined as an “immediate threat to the life or health of a patient.”[3] Before the Act, conscientious objection was limited in medical practice in the United States. The American Medical Association’s (“AMA”) Code of Medical Ethics states physicians can act as moral agents. The AMA’s code supports conscientious objection if it is based on a moral objection to a treatment rather than discrimination against patients.[4] From the Church Amendments to the Affordable Care Act, federal law has protected practitioners’ rights to object to participating in treatments contrary to their religious or moral beliefs, such as abortions, sterilization, euthanasia, or physician-assisted suicide.[5] However, the language of these laws emphasizes treatment-based objection; the laws protect healthcare workers who are unwilling to participate in medical practices based on a moral objection to a treatment. In addition, the laws specifically name procedures like sterilization, euthanasia, or physician-assisted suicide as permissible grounds for objection. The Act extends physicians’ rights to conscientious objection by removing the treatment-specific language. In Arkansas, the broad language of the law could permit conscientious objection based on a patient’s LGBTQ+ identity because it does not limit objections based on type of treatments. The Act broadened conscientious objection in Arkansas to include treatment-based and patient-based objections. ll. Virtue Ethics Virtue ethics is an ethical framework that focuses on the character of the individual performing actions during the individual’s life and career. In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle writes that virtue is a state of being, such as a courageous or amiable person, rather than a system for ethical action selection.[6] Society understands these virtues as falling at the mean—or between— a deficiency and an excess. For example, the virtue of courage lies between the deficiency of cowardness and excess of rashness, never in abundance or excess. A virtuous person exemplifies the virtues required of the person’s role and performs the required functions well. Aristotle writes, “[w]e become just by doing just actions, temperate by doing temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions.” In this way, we must live our virtues to become virtuous. A. The Virtuous Physician The virtuous physician exemplifies virtue and practices medicine in congruence with medicine’s ethos. Since an individual can practice and learn virtue, it provides a unique ethical framework to distinguish between the virtuous or “good” physician and the unvirtuous or “bad” physician. Aristotle writes that life’s virtues are courage, temperance, generosity, magnificence, magnanimity, mildness, amiability, truthfulness, wit, and shame.[7] Individuals possessing these traits are virtuous, but virtuous physicians must also demonstrate traits integral to their professional duties. A virtuous physician’s qualities include empathetic listening, emotional sensitivity, and respect for patients. These additional qualities create trust and comfort patients.[8] Also, the virtuous physician exemplifies trustworthiness, integrity, discernment, compassion, patience, and conscientiousness.[9] Others even include theological virtues such as faith, hope, and charity as important characteristics in a physician’s practice.[10] While not an exhaustive list of the values that compose a virtuous physician, these standards are the basic requirements for physician to exemplify virtue and perform the job’s functions well. One may argue that theological virtues like faith, hope, and charity support the conscientious objection because physicians are virtuous when they are faithful, or loyal to their religious beliefs. However, this argument fails to consider the four principles of medical ethics. Using conscientious objection to withhold care from even non-critically ill patients can cause harm that is physical and emotional. A physician cannot act virtuously and simultaneously undermine non-malfeasance and beneficence. The virtuous physician must also practice medicine in congruence with medicine’s ethos, acting for the patient’s benefit and taking a patient-centered approach. The patient’s benefit has multiple elements, such as the medically defined good outcome, the patient’s definition of a good outcome, what is dignifying to the patient, and what is considered universally good.[11] If a physician acts against a patient’s good or the physician does not exemplify virtue in their own life, the physician would be considered unvirtuous. B. Unvirtuous Conscientious Objection Through the Act Conscientious objection is a debated topic. Some argue that physicians’ values should not influence the care they provide.[12] In addition, the legalization of conscientious objection is seen by some to violate medicine’s central ethos of caring for the patient.[13] Others do not view conscientious objection as wholly wrong. Despite the debate over the role of conscientious objection in the physician’s practice, conscientious objection based on a patient’s LGBTQ+ identity under the Act is unvirtuous. The Act extends the understood norm of treatment-based objections to objections based on any component of health care, including a patient’s LGBTQ+ identity. This patient-based objection is discriminatory and unrelated to the patient’s requested medical service which may conflict with the physician’s morals.[14] A virtuous physician would never refuse to treat a patient based on the patient’s race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin. Refusing to treat a patient because of the patient’s LGBTQ+ identity is unvirtuous because it defies a physician’s duty, is discriminatory, and displays a lack of respect for patients, amiability, and compassion. Even if permitted under the Act, a virtuous physician must never object to treating a patient based on the patient’s sexual orientation or gender identity. One may argue a physician can be virtuous while conscientiously objecting if the physician clearly communicates all limitations and refers the patient to another medical provider. This is the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ view.[15] Under this view, physicians maintain respect for themselves as agents but ultimately provide proper care for the patient, even if their hands do not perform the service. However, to be virtuous, this objection must never be discriminatory. Even with prerequisites, objection based on gender identity and sexual orientation is discriminatory and indicates deficiencies in the physician’s virtue. The simple act of objection can cause psychological pain to a patient. LGBTQ+-based discrimination and rejection causes unnecessary physiological harm like anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideations, whereas social acceptance increases feelings of self-esteem.[16] The virtuous physician would never cause pain to the patient, as this violates the principle of non-maleficence. Regardless of actions taken before or after the objection, a physician is unvirtuous when the physician inflicts pain on a patient by conscientiously objecting to treating the patient based on LGBTQ+ status. CONCLUSION To avoid discrimination, a physician must have a valid reason for employing conscientious objection. The Medical Ethics and Diversity Act extends physicians’ rights from treatment-based objection to patient-based objection. Arkansas’s LGBTQ+ community is at risk of suffering from discriminatory healthcare practices. The physician who objects based on LGBTQ+ identity is unvirtuous because the physician’s action causes psychological harm to the patient, displays deficiencies in virtues, and opposes the central ethos of medicine. - [1] For examples of Senators and State Representatives passing laws affecting LGBTQ+ rights to protect religious liberties and fairness, see ACLU. (2021). Legislation Affecting LGBTQ Rights Across the Country 2021. https://www.aclu.org/legislation-affecting-lgbtq-rights-across-country-2021 [2] Medical Ethics and Diversity Act, Ark. Acts 462 §§17-80-501-06 (2021). https://www.arkleg.state.ar.us/Acts/FTPDocument?path=%2FACTS%2F2021R%2FPublic%2F&file=462.pdf&ddBienniumSession=2021%2F2021R [3] Emergency Medical Care Act, Ark. A.C.A. § 20-9-309 [4] AMA. (n.d.) Physician Exercise of Conscience. https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/ethics/physician-exercise-conscience [5] U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2021). Your Conscience Rights. https://www.hhs.gov/conscience/conscience-protections/index.html [6] Aristotle. (1999). Nicomachean Ethics. (Irwin, 2nd ed.). Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. [7]Aristotle. (1999). Nicomachean Ethics. (Irwin, 2nd ed.). Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. [8] Bain, L. E. (2018). Revisiting the need for virtue in medical practice: a reflection upon the teaching of Edmund Pellegrino. Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine, 13(1), 4. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13010-018-0057-0 [9] Gardiner, P. (2003). A virtue ethics approach to moral dilemmas in medicine. Journal of Medical Ethics, 29(5), 297-302. https://doi.org/10.1136/jme.29.5.297 [10] Toon, P. D. (1999). Towards a philosophy of general practice: a study of the virtuous practitioner. Occasional Paper Royal College of General Practitioners, (78), iii-vii, 1-69. [11] Shelp, E. E. E., & Pellegrino, D. (1985). The Virtuous Physician and the Ethics of Medicine Virtue and medicine explorations in the character of medicine, 17, 237-255. [12] Savulescu, J. (2006). Conscientious objection in medicine. BMJ, 332(7536), 294-297. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.332.7536.294 [13] Stahl, R. Y., & Emanuel, E. J. (2017). Physicians, Not Conscripts - Conscientious Objection in Health Care. New England Journal of Medicine, 376(14), 1380-1385. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMsb1612472 [14] Reis-Dennis, S., & Brummett, A. L. (2021). Are conscientious objectors morally obligated to refer? Journal of Medical Ethics, medethics-2020-107025. https://doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2020-107025 [15] ACOG. The limits of conscientious refusal in Reproductive Medicine. (n.d.). Retrieved September 12, 2022, from https://www.acog.org/clinical/clinical-guidance/committee-opinion/articles/2007/11/the-limits-of-conscientious-refusal-in-reproductive-medicine [16] Meanley, S., Flores, D. D., Listerud, L., Chang, C. J., Feinstein, B. A., & Watson, R. J. (2021). The interplay of familial warmth and LGBTQ+ specific family rejection on LGBTQ+ adolescents' self-esteem. Journal of Adolescent Health, 93, 40-52. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.adolescence.2021.10.002 ; Ruben, M. A., Livingston, N. A., Berke, D. S., Matza, A. R., & Shipherd, J. C. (2019). Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Veterans' Experiences of Discrimination in Health Care and Their Relation to Health Outcomes: A Pilot Study Examining the Moderating Role of Provider Communication. Health Equity, 3(1), 480-488. https://doi.org/10.1089/heq.2019.0069. ; Sutter, M., & Perrin, P. B. (2016). Discrimination, mental health, and suicidal ideation among LGBTQ people of color. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 63(1), 98-105. https://doi.org/10.1037/cou0000126

Abstract:

During World War II, the Soviet Union’s food supply was in a state of crisis. Hitler’s army had occupied the agricultural heartlands of Ukraine and Southern Russia in 1941 and, as a result, agricultural production for the entire nation had plummeted. Soldiers in Red Army, who easily ate the best rations in the country, subsisted on a daily allowance of just under a kilogram of bread, supplemented with meat, tea, sugar and butter when and if these items were available. The hunger of the Red Army and its effect on the morale and strength of Europe’s eastern warfront were causes for concern for the Soviet government and its European and American allies. The one country with a food surplus decided to do something to help, and in 1942 the United States agreed to send thousands of pounds of meat, cheese and butter overseas to help feed the Red Army. After receiving several shipments of the all-American spiced canned meat SPAM, the Red Army’s quartermaster put in a request for a more familiar canned pork product, Russian tushonka. Pound for pound, America sent more pigs overseas than soldiers during World War II, in part because pork was in oversupply in the America of the early 1940s. Shipping meat to hungry soldiers and civilians in war torn countries was a practical way to build business for the U.S. meat industry, which had been in decline throughout the 1930s. As per a Soviet-supplied recipe, the first cans of Lend-Lease tushonka were made in the heart of the American Midwest, at meatpacking plants in Iowa and Ohio (Stettinus 6-7). Government contracts in the meat packing industry helped fuel economic recovery, and meatpackers were in a position to take special request orders like the one for tushonka that came through the lines. Unlike SPAM, which was something of a novelty item during the war, tushonka was a food with a past. The original recipe was based on a recipe for preserved meat that had been a traditional product of the Ural Mountains, preserved in jars with salt and fat rather than by pressure and heat. Thus tushonka was requested—and was mass-produced—not simply as a convenience but also as a traditional and familiar food—a taste of home cooking that soldiers could carry with them into the field. Nikita Khrushchev later claimed that the arrival of tushonka was instrumental in helping the Red Army push back against the Nazi invasion (178). Unlike SPAM and other wartime rations, tushonka did not fade away after the war. Instead, it was distributed to the Soviet civilian population, appearing in charity donations and on the shelves of state shops. Often it was the only meat product available on a regular basis. Salty, fatty, and slightly grey-toned, tushonka was an unlikely hero of the postwar-era, but during this period tushonka rose from obscurity to become an emblem of socialist modernity. Because it was shelf stable and could be made from a variety of different cuts of meat, it proved an ideal product for the socialist production lines where supplies and the pace of production were infinitely variable. Unusual in a socialist system of supply, this product shaped production and distribution lines, and even influenced the layout of meatpacking factories and the genetic stocks of the animals that were to be eaten. Tushonka’s initial ubiquity in the postwar Soviet Union had little to do with the USSR’s own hog industry. Pig populations as well as their processing facilities had been decimated in the war, and pigs that did survive the Axis invasion had been evacuated East with human populations. Instead, the early presence of tushonka in the pig-scarce postwar Soviet Union had everything to do with Harry Truman’s unexpected September 1945 decision to end all “economically useful” Lend-Lease shipments to the Soviet Union (Martel). By the end of September, canned meat was practically the only product still being shipped as part of Lend-Lease (NARA RG 59). Although the United Nations was supposed to distribute these supplies to needy civilians free of cost, travelers to the Soviet Union in 1946 spotted cans of American tushonka for sale in state shops (Skeoch 231). After American tushonka “donations” disappeared from store shelves, the Soviet Union’s meat syndicates decided to continue producing the product. Between its first appearance during the war in 1943, and the 1957 announcement by Nikita Khrushchev that Soviet policy would restructure all state animal farms to support the mass production of one or several processed meat products, tushonka helped to drive the evolution of the Soviet Union’s meat packing industry. Its popularity with both planners and the public gave it the power to reach into food commodity chains. It is this backward reach and the longer-term impacts of these policies that make tushonka an unusual byproduct of the Cold War era. State planners loved tushonka: it was cheap to make, the logistics of preparing it were not complicated, it was easy to transport, and most importantly, it served as tangible evidence that the state was accomplishing a long-standing goal to get more meat to its citizenry and improving the diet of the average Soviet worker. Tushonka became a highly visible product in the Soviet Union’s much vaunted push to establish a modern food regime intended to rival that of the United States. Because it was shelf-stable, wartime tushonka had served as a practical food for soldiers, but after the war tushonka became an ideal food for workers who had neither the time nor the space to prepare a home-cooked meal with fresh meat. The Soviet state started to produce its own tushonka because it was such an excellent fit for the needs and abilities of the Soviet state—consumer demand was rarely considered by planners in this era. Not only did tushonka fit the look and taste of a modern processed meat product (that is, it was standard in texture and flavor from can to can, and was an obviously industrially processed product), it was also an excellent way to make the most of the predominant kind of meat the Soviet Union had the in the 1950s: small scraps low-grade pork and beef, trimmings leftover from butchering practices that focused on harvesting as much animal fat, rather than muscle, from the carcass in question. Just like tushonka, pork sausages and frozen pelmeny, a meat-filled pasta dumpling, also became winning postwar foods thanks to a happy synergy of increased animal production, better butchering and new food processing machines. As postwar pigs recovered their populations, the Soviet processed meat industry followed suit. One official source listed twenty-six different kinds of meat products being issued in 1964, although not all of these were pork (Danilov). An instructional manual distributed by the meat and milk syndicate demonstrated how meat shops should wrap and display sausages, and listed 24 different kinds of sausages that all needed a special style of tying up. Because of packaging shortages, the string that bound the sausage was wrapped in a different way for every type of sausage, and shop assistants were expected to be able to identify sausages based on the pattern of their binding. Pelmeny were produced at every meat factory that processed pork. These were “made from start to finish in a special, automated machine, human hands do not touch them. Which makes them a higher quality and better (prevoskhodnogo) product” (Book of Healthy and Delicious Food). These were foods that became possible to produce economically because of a co-occurring increase in pigs, the new standardized practice of equipping meatpacking plants with large-capacity grinders, and freezers or coolers and the enforcement of a system of grading meat. As the state began to rebuild Soviet agriculture from its near-collapse during the war, the Soviet Union looked to the United States for inspiration. Surprisingly, Soviet planners found some of the United States’ more outdated techniques to be quite valuable for new Soviet hog operations. The most striking of these was the adoption of competing phenotypes in the Soviet hog industry. Most major swine varieties had been developed and described in the 19th century in Germany and Great Britain. Breeds had a tendency to split into two phenotypically distinct groups, and in early 20th Century American pig farms, there was strong disagreement as to which style of pig was better suited to industrial conditions of production. Some pigs were “hot-blooded” (in other words, fast maturing and prolific reproducers) while others were a slower “big type” pig (a self-explanatory descriptor). Breeds rarely excelled at both traits and it was a matter of opinion whether speed or size was the most desirable trait to augment. The over-emphasis of either set of qualities damaged survival rates. At their largest, big type pigs resembled small hippopotamuses, and sows were so corpulent they unwittingly crushed their tiny piglets. But the sleeker hot-blooded pigs had a similarly lethal relationship with their young. Sows often produced litters of upwards of a dozen piglets and the stress of tending such a large brood led overwhelmed sows to devour their own offspring (Long). American pig breeders had been forced to navigate between these two undesirable extremes, but by the 1930s, big type pigs were fading in popularity mainly because butter and newly developed plant oils were replacing lard as the cooking fat of preference in American kitchens. The remarkable propensity of the big type to pack on pounds of extra fat was more of a liability than a benefit in this period, as the price that lard and salt pork plummeted in this decade. By the time U.S. meat packers were shipping cans of tushonka to their Soviet allies across the seas, US hog operations had already developed a strong preference for hot-blooded breeds and research had shifted to building and maintaining lean muscle on these swiftly maturing animals. When Soviet industrial planners hoping to learn how to make more tushonka entered the scene however, their interpretation of american efficiency was hardly predictable: scientifically nourished big type pigs may have been advantageous to the United States at midcentury, but the Soviet Union’s farms and hungry citizens had a very different list of needs and wants. At midcentury, Soviet pigs were still handicapped by old-fashioned variables such as cold weather, long winters, poor farm organisation and impoverished feed regimens. The look of the average Soviet hog operation was hardly industrial. In 1955 the typical Soviet pig was petite, shaggy, and slow to reproduce. In the absence of robust dairy or vegetable oil industries, Soviet pigs had always been valued for their fat rather than their meat, and tushonka had been a byproduct of an industry focused mainly on supplying the country with fat and lard. Until the mid 1950s, the most valuable pig on many Soviet state and collective farms was the nondescript but very rotund “lard and bacon” pig, an inefficient eater that could take upwards of two years to reach full maturity. In searching for a way to serve up more tushonka, Soviet planners became aware that their entire industry needed to be revamped. When the Soviet Union looked to the United States, planners were inspired by the earlier competition between hot-blooded and big type pigs, which Soviet planners thought, ambitiously, they could combine into one splendid pig. The Soviet Union imported new pigs from Poland, Lithuania, East Germany and Denmark, trying valiantly to create hybrid pigs that would exhibit both hot blood and big type. Soviet planners were especially interested in inspiring the Poland-China, an especially rotund specimen, to speed up its life cycle during them mid 1950s. Hybrdizing and cross breeding a Soviet super-pig, no matter how closely laid out on paper, was probably always a socialist pipe dream. However, when the Soviets decided to try to outbreed American hog breeders, they created an infrastructure for pigs and pig breeding that had a dramatic positive impact of hog populations across the country, and the 1950s were marked by a large increase in the number of pigs in the Soviet union, as well as dramatic increases in the numbers of purebred and scientific hybrids the country developed, all in the name of tushonka. It was not just the genetic stock that received a makeover in the postwar drive to can more tushonka; a revolution in the barnyard also took place and in less than 10 years, pigs were living in new housing stock and eating new feed sources. The most obvious postwar change was in farm layout and the use of building space. In the early 1950s, many collective farms had been consolidated. In 1940 there were a quarter of a million kolkhozii, by 1951 fewer than half that many remained (NARA RG166). Farm consolidation movements most often combined two, three or four collective farms into one economic unit, thus scaling up the average size and productivity of each collective farm and simplifying their administration. While there were originally ambitious plans to re-center farms around new “agro-city” bases with new, modern farm buildings, these projects were ultimately abandoned. Instead, existing buildings were repurposed and the several clusters of farm buildings that had once been the heart of separate villages acquired different uses. For animals this meant new barns and new daily routines. Barns were redesigned and compartmentalized around ideas of gender and age segregation—weaned baby pigs in one area, farrowing sows in another—as well as maximising growth and health. Pigs spent less outside time and more time at the trough. Pigs that were wanted for different purposes (breeding, meat and lard) were kept in different areas, isolated from each other to minimize the spread of disease as well as improve the efficiency of production. Much like postwar housing for humans, the new and improved pig barn was a crowded and often chaotic place where the electricity, heat and water functioned only sporadically. New barns were supposed to be mechanised. In some places, mechanisation had helped speed things along, but as one American official viewing a new mechanised pig farm in 1955 noted, “it did not appear to be a highly efficient organisation. The mechanised or automated operations, such as the preparation of hog feed, were eclipsed by the amount of hand labor which both preceded and followed the mechanised portion” (NARA RG166 1961). The American official estimated that by mechanizing, Soviet farms had actually increased the amount of human labor needed for farming operations. The other major environmental change took place away from the barnyard, in new crops the Soviet Union began to grow for fodder. The heart and soul of this project was establishing field corn as a major new fodder crop. Originally intended as a feed for cows that would replace hay, corn quickly became the feed of choice for raising pigs. After a visit by a United States delegation to Iowa and other U.S. farms over the summer of 1955, corn became the centerpiece of Khrushchev’s efforts to raise meat and milk productivity. These efforts were what earned Khrushchev his nickname of kukuruznik, or “corn fanatic.” Since so little of the Soviet Union looks or feels much like the plains and hills of Iowa, adopting corn might seem quixotic, but raising corn was a potentially practical move for a cold country. Unlike the other major fodder crops of turnips and potatoes, corn could be harvested early, while still green but already possessing a high level of protein. Corn provided a “gap month” of green feed during July and August, when grazing animals had eaten the first spring green growth but these same plants had not recovered their biomass. What corn remained in the fields in late summer was harvested and made into silage, and corn made the best silage that had been historically available in the Soviet Union. The high protein content of even silage made from green mass and unripe corn ears prevented them from losing weight in the winter. Thus the desire to put more meat on Soviet tables—a desire first prompted by American food donations of surplus pork from Iowa farmers adapting to agro-industrial reordering in their own country—pushed back into the commodity supply network of the Soviet Union. World War II rations that were well adapted to the uncertainty and poor infrastructure not just of war but also of peacetime were a source of inspiration for Soviet planners striving to improve the diets of citizens. To do this, they purchased and bred more and better animals, inventing breeds and paying attention, for the first time, to the efficiency and speed with which these animals were ready to become meat. Reinventing Soviet pigs pushed even back farther, and inspired agricultural economists and state planners to embrace new farm organizational structures. Pigs meant for the tushonka can spent more time inside eating, and led their lives in a rigid compartmentalization that mimicked emerging trends in human urban society. Beyond the barnyard, a new concern with feed-to weight conversions led agriculturalists to seek new crops; crops like corn that were costly to grow but were a perfect food for a pig destined for a tushonka tin. Thus in Soviet industrialization, pigs evolved. No longer simply recyclers of human waste, socialist pigs were consumers in their own right, their newly crafted genetic compositions demanded ever more technical feed sources in order to maximize their own productivity. Food is transformative, and in this case study the prosaic substance of canned meat proved to be unusually transformative for the history of the Soviet Union. In its early history it kept soldiers alive long enough to win an important war, later the requirements for its manufacture re-prioritized muscle tissue over fat tissue in the disassembly of carcasses. This transformative influence reached backwards into the supply lines and farms of the Soviet Union, revolutionizing the scale and goals of farming and meat packing for the Soviet food industry, as well as the relationship between the pig and the consumer. References Bentley, Amy. Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity. Where: University of Illinois Press, 1998. The Book of Healthy and Delicious Food, Kniga O Vkusnoi I Zdorovoi Pishche. Moscow: AMN Izd., 1952. 161. Danilov, M. M. Tovaravedenie Prodovol’stvennykh Tovarov: Miaso I Miasnye Tovarye. Moscow: Iz. Ekonomika, 1964. Khrushchev, Nikita. Khrushchev Remembers. New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1970. 178. Long, James. The Book of the Pig. London: Upcott Gill, 1886. 102. Lush, Jay & A.L. Anderson, “A Genetic History of Poland-China Swine: I—Early Breed History: The ‘Hot Blood’ versus the ‘Big Type’” Journal of Heredity 30.4 (1939): 149-56. Martel, Leon. Lend-Lease, Loans, and the Coming of the Cold War: A Study of the Implementation of Foreign Policy. Boulder: Westview Press, 1979. 35. National Archive and Records Administration (NARA). RG 59, General Records of the Department of State. Office of Soviet Union affairs, Box 6. “Records relating to Lend Lease with the USSR 1941-1952”. National Archive and Records Administration (NARA). RG166, Records of the Foreign Agricultural Service. Narrative reports 1940-1954. USSR Cotton-USSR Foreign trade. Box 64, Folder “farm management”. Report written by David V Kelly, 6 Apr. 1951. National Archive and Records Administration (NARA). RG 166, Records of the Foreign Agricultural Service. Narrative Reports 1955-1961. Folder: “Agriculture” “Visits to Soviet agricultural installations,” 15 Nov. 1961. Skeoch, L.A. Food Prices and Ration Scale in the Ukraine, 1946 The Review of Economics and Statistics 35.3 (Aug. 1953), 229-35. State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF). Fond R-7021. The Report of Extraordinary Special State Commission on Wartime Losses Resulting from the German-Fascist Occupation cites the following losses in the German takeover. 1948. Stettinus, Edward R. Jr. Lend-Lease: Weapon for Victory. Penguin Books, 1944.

Abstract:

In 1996, the iconoclastic economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote a manifesto, The Good Society, that elaborated his vision for what societal excellence and goodness should amount to. Though nearly 96, Galbraith was still a rabble-rouser, and he castigated the powers that be in the United States for propping up a “democracy of the fortunate” (8). To Galbraith, those who engaged in electoral politics, win or lose on any specific issue, tended to have all the social and economic advantages, while the less well off were deliberately marginalised by ‘the system.’ He lamented that “money, voice and political activism are now extensively controlled by the affluent, very affluent, and business interests" (140), making of the political sphere an "unequal contest" (8).To make democracy American style more inclusive, Galbraith called for “a coalition of the concerned and the compassionate and those now outside the political system” (143), so that all citizens had optimal prospects for enjoying “personal liberty, basic well-being, social and ethnic equality, the opportunity for a rewarding life" (4). Have inroads been made, in the nearly 15 years since first publication of The Good Society, in making come true Galbraith’s version of a good society? If not, how might such a coalition be achieved? What would it look like? Who among Americans would constitute the concerned, compassionate outsiders that would make such a coalition authentically ‘Galbraithian’? A Coalition on the MoveWhat about MoveOn.org? A progressive public advocacy group founded in 1998, MoveOn.org, according to Lelia Green in The Internet, is “an important indicator of the potential for bringing together communities of like-minded individuals” (139). Green singles out MoveOn.org as particularly pivotal in galvanising support for Barack Obama’s presidency (139). The New York Times describes MoveOn.org as “a bottom-up organization that has inserted itself into the political process in ways large and small” (Janofsky and Lee). Indeed, it represents “the next evolutionary change in American politics, a move away from one-way tools of influence like television commercials and talk radio to interactive dialogue, offering everyday people a voice in a process that once seemed beyond their reach.” MoveOn.org has expertly utilised the Internet to mobilise its members “to sign online petitions, organize street demonstrations and donate money to run political advertisem*nts”. Green considers MoveOn.org one of today’s standout “coalitions of interests and political agendas”, “extraordinary” in its ability to “use websites and email lists to build communities around a shared passion” (139). In 2008, its 4.2 million members were at the vortex of a “dynamic that tipped the balance in favour of a more radical agenda with the election of President Barack Obama in 2008” (139). Galbraith, for one, would certainly agree with MoveOn.org’s politics, and likely would claim that their radical agenda is a compassionate and encompassing one that effectively addresses the concerns of everyday citizens. Yet the fact is that millions of disaffected Americans are not liberals, and so are not in sync with MoveOn.org’s interests and agendas, such as its firm insistence that a ‘public option’ is the best way to bring about meaningful health care reform, and its demand that all U.S. troops be immediately withdrawn from Iraq and Afghanistan. Tea Anyone?Another sort of coalition filled the void created by MoveOn.org. Enter the Tea Party. A movement that has been every bit as effective in its way in inspiring once-jaded ordinary citizens to coalesce around a set of interests and agendas – albeit, at least in principal if not necessarily in actual practice, of a professed libertarian strain – the Tea Party got underway in the waning days of the second presidential term of George W. Bush. It started out as a one-issue protest group voicing umbrage over the proposed economic stimulus plan, which it considered an unconstitutional subsidy. After Barack Obama became president, the Tea Party burgeoned into a much more influential movement that now professes to be a grassroots citizens’ watchdog for all unconstitutional activities (or what it deems to be such) on the part of the federal government. A New York Times article notes that many of its members are victims of the economic downturn; they “had lost their jobs, or perhaps watched their homes plummet in value, and they found common cause in the Tea Party’s fight for lower taxes and smaller government” (Zernike). Its members are akin to the millions of middle class Americans who lost their livelihoods during the Great Depression of the 1930s, an unparalleled economic downturn that eventually “mobilized many middle-class people who had fallen on hard times” to join forces in order to have an effective political voice. But those during the Great Depression who were aroused to political consciousness “tended to push for more government involvement”; in contrast, the Tea Party is a coalition that “vehemently wants less”. While Galbraith depicted the Republican Party of his time as “avowedly on the side of the fortunate” (141), the majority of today’s Tea Party members align themselves with the Republican Party, yet they are by no means principally made up of "the fortunate." Erick Erickson, a prominent Tea Party spokesman and a television commentator for the CNN news channel, blogs on Redstate.com that the Tea Party “has gotten a lot of people off the sidelines and into the political arena...” Erickson further contends that the Tea Party has “brought together a lot of likeminded citizens who thought they were alone in the world. They realized that not only were they not alone, but there were millions of others just as concerned.” Galbraithian Coalitions?Do MoveOn.org and Tea Party constitute Galbraithian-type coalitions, each in its own right? Both have inspired millions of once-disenchanted common citizens to come together around common political concerns and become a force to be reckoned with in electoral politics. As such, each has served as an effective counterweight against the money, voice and political activism of the very affluent. While Galbraith would probably have as much disdain for the Tea Party as he would have praise for MoveOn.org, the fact is that both groups have seen to it that an increasing number of regular Americans whose concerns had been ignored in the political arena now have to be reckoned with. But this is by no means where their commonality ends. Above and beyond the fact that both are comprised of millions who had been political outsiders, each has a decided anti-establishmentarian strain, along with a professed sense of alienation from and disdain for "politics as usual" and an impassioned belief in the right to self-government (though they differ on what this right amounts to). Moreover, both consider themselves grassroots-driven, and harbor anathema for professional lobbying organisations, which both regularly criticize for their undue political influence. Even though the two groups usually differ to the nth degree when it comes to those solutions they believe would effectively remedy the most pressing public problems in the U.S., they nonetheless share the conviction that one must initially focus one’s efforts at the local level if one is eventually to have the greatest impact on political decision-making on a national scale. The two groups came of age during the Internet revolution – indeed, it would have been impossible for their like-minded members to have found one another and coalesced so quickly and in such great numbers without the Internet – and they utilise the Internet as the principal tool for spurring concerted activism at the local level among their members. One can consider their shared approach Deweyan, in that Dewey maintained that genuinely democratic community, “in its deepest and richest sense, must always remain a matter of face-to-face intercourse” (367). Yet the two groups’ legion differences prevent them from engaging in meaningful face-to-face exchanges with one another. While the prospect of cultivating linkages between Tea Party and MoveOn.org are remote for the foreseeable future, it might nonetheless be seen as a promising development that some rank and file Tea Party acolytes do at least recognise that they must not identify solely with the Republican Party, lest they discourage potential recruits from rallying around their cause. For instance, one warns fellow members on the Redstate.com blog to be wary of casting their lot with Republicans, “because it would drive away the Democrats and Independents”. He actually uses Galbraith’s coinage in describing the Tea Party: “This movement is a coalition of the concerned, not a Republican outreach program.” Indeed, contrary to popular belief, the Tea Party is not, as a whole, on the conservative fringe (though it does often seem that those members who are given the most attention by the mainstream media are the fringe element, particularly the breakaway Tea Party Express). A Gallup Poll reveals that fully 17 percent of all Americans of voting age identify themselves as affiliated with the Tea Party; and while a majority have Republican leanings, fully 45 percent of all Tea Party members claimed they were either Democrats (17 percent) or independents (28 percent). To Tea Party leader Erick Erickson, the paramount challenge today for the Tea Party is for it to transform itself into a greater umbrella coalition, since the “issues and advocacy within the tea party movement are issues that resonate with the majority of Americans.” After all, he asserts, the Tea Party’s is “a very American cause — the first amendment right to protest, petition, and speak up.” While an expansion of its coalition does not in any way make it incumbent for the Tea Party to find common cause with MoveOn.org, can the claim nonetheless be legitimately made – utilising Erickson’s own criteria – that MoveOn.org’s is equally a very American cause? Christopher Hayes points out in an essay in The Nation that most of MoveOn.org’s members, as with the Tea Party’s, are “not inclined to protest,” but their “rising unease with the direction of the country has led to a new political consciousness.” Hayes could just as well be speaking of the Tea Party when he describes MoveOn.org’s members as made up mostly of “citizens angered, upset and disappointed with their government but [who were] unsure how to channel those sentiments.” For such citizens, MoveOn.org “provides simple, discrete actions: sign this petition, donate money to run this ad, show up at this vigil.” This is convincing evidence that MoveOn.org’s is also “a very American cause”, by the very benchmarks set forth by Erickson. A ‘Higher Coalition’?But is this in any way akin to a demonstrable sign that these unlikeliest of political bedfellows might be inspired at some future point to see themselves as part of a ‘higher coalition’ — one of the unlikeminded, that celebrates difference? Might a critical mass in both movements ever deem it a boon to coalesce around the cause of democratic pluralism? As things stand, neither side embraces such pluralism. Rather, one other attribute they share pervasively is dogmatism: both are convinced that their respective political sensibilities are beyond reproach. As a consequence, over the shorter term, neither group is likely to shed its brand of dogmatism and supplant it with an openness or receptivity to new, much less opposing, points of view. So, for instance, even as the Tea Party seeks to expand its fold, it is no more inclined to change its ideology-based stances on the issues than is MoveOn.org. For the time being, each group not only is entrenched in its own collective political mindset, but each coalesces around a demonstrated antipathy towards alternative approaches to public problem-solving. Is there any remotely plausible scenario by which the members of MoveOn.org and Tea Party might eventually come not just to tolerate their differences but to extol them? One other key Galbraithian element that those comprising an ideal coalition in a democracy must possess is compassion. For members of any coalition to cultivate compassion, they must first, or concomitantly, inculcate empathy, which is typically considered either a precursor to compassion or, along with understanding, a vital component of it. Henning Melber, Executive Director of the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, and Reinhard Kössler maintain that “(w)hile empathy does not automatically translate into solidarity (nor into ethical behaviour), it can serve as a compass” for doing so, and can lead to a Galbraithian “coalition of the concerned and aware”(37). Such empathy is “a prerequisite for the ability to listen to one another and for permissiveness and openness towards ‘otherness’, and further, can only be born out of a sense of shared suffering” (37). To the authors, it isn’t just that “(s)uffering in its variety of forms requires empathy and solidarity by all,” but that it necessarily “transcends a politically correct ideology” (37). Millions in both the Tea Party and MoveOn.org long suffered from being a mere afterthought to the political establishment, both of them impacted by policies that they are convinced exacerbated rather than ameliorated their woes. But they have shown few if any indications of a willingness to transcend a politically correct ideology. For this to come about, it would, as Melber and Kössler maintain, require “hard, sustained, and imaginative work” (33). How might this come to pass? Greg Anderson, in The Athenian Experiment: Building an Imagined Political Community in Ancient Attica, 508-490 B.C., points to ancient Athens as a paradigmatic example of a society that undertook the hard imaginative work needed to develop the types of mediated connections that over time created a sense of shared belonging to a democratic community. “The process of transformation” in Attica, he argues, is “best understood as a bold exercise in social engineering, an experiment designed to bring together the diverse and far-flung inhabitants of an entire region and forge them into a single, self-governing political community of like-minded individuals” (5). While those males of sufficient socioeconomic distinction who were privileged enough to be citizens in the West’s first experiment in democracy were indeed like-minded, prising a self-governing political community, they were not single-minded; rather, those in the twelve dispersed tribes throughout Attica who coalesced to form a self-governing community apparently thrived on the free exchange and consideration of a wide range of ideas. They held that greater insights emerged only when a variety of views were subjected to scrutiny in the public sphere. Paul Woodruff notes in First Democracy that each Athenian was “given a share of the ability to be citizens, and that ability is understood both as a pair of virtues and as a kind of citizen wisdom.” Governing in this way was based on the shared view that “it is a natural part of being human to know enough to help govern your community” (149). Neither Tea Party nor MoveOn.org followers at present have this shared view on any semblance of a broad scale; rather, each betrays the sensibility that each ‘knows better’. As a consequence, any efforts at expanding their respective folds clearly do not include making overtures (or even extending olive branches) to one another. Even so, as impossibly optimistic as it might seem under current circ*mstances, I believe eventually they might come to see themselves as part of a greater or higher coalition – one serving the overriding cause of democracy itself – over the much longer term. But for this to become a reality, each group will first have to suffer some more. One other commonality they demonstrate is the power of grassroots activism – and the decided limitations. My hunch is that just as MoveOn.org’s progressives came to feel betrayed when Obama abandoned the liberal agenda of his presidential campaign to engage in political compromise and accommodation, Tea Party activists will come to find that their own expectations for political change will be equally stymied. In the 2010 elections, the Tea Party was a kingmaker in electoral politics, giving Republicans a decisive majority in Congress in the 2010 elections. But I suspect that those candidates the Tea Party supported will eventually resort to the practice of “politics as usual,” largely departing from the Tea Party agenda, in order to accomplish anything in Washington or become irrelevant in the existing system – a system long dominated by two political parties interested above and beyond all else in perpetuating their shared stranglehold on political power, and each equally beholden to corporate America for the contributions to their coffers that enable them to sustain this. If this scenario plays out, then at least some Tea Party activists might plausibly arrive at the unsettling conclusion that their suffering in the political arena is remarkably similar to that experienced by MoveOn.org’s cadre of concerned citizens who catapulted Obama into the office in the land, only to have most of their principal concerns neglected or dismissed, lost in the seamy world of back-room political deal-making. There is another possible scenario: What if either MoveOn.org or Tea Party becomes such an overwhelming force in politics that the other is attenuated, its members relegated once again to the fringe? If this occurred, the public sphere in the United States would be missing a vital dimension that has been part of its makeup since its founding days. For as Joseph Ellis, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, points out: the achievement of the revolutionary generation was a collective enterprise that succeeded because of the diversity of personalities and ideologies present in the mix. Their interactions and juxtapositions generated a dynamic form of balance and equilibrium, not because any of them was perfect or infallible, but because their mutual imperfections and fallibilities, as well as their eccentricities and excesses, checked each other… . (17) At the United States’s beginnings, the ties that bound those who revolted against Britain were forged despite their unbridgeable chasms of ideology; their “differing postures toward the twin goals of freedom and equality” were “not resolved so much as built into the fabric of our national identity” (16). Even or especially as irreconcilable differences prompted early Americans to continue waging a battle of ideas in the political trenches, Thomas Jefferson, for one, believed they were all (or nearly all) “constitutionally and conscientiously democrats” (185). Extrapolating from this, one can posit that MoveOn.org and Tea Party, regardless of whether they choose to acknowledge it, are in tandem a modern-day manifestation of the original American coalition. If they could be inspired to see that each is an important player in furthering the democratic experiment as singularly practiced in the U.S., they just might come to care more for one another. Out of such caring, they might realise that neither has a monopoly on political wisdom, and as a result coalesce around the cause of promoting a less hostile body politic. AcknowledgementsThe author is grateful to the two blind peer reviewers for their most helpful suggestions. ReferencesAnderson, Greg. The Athenian Experiment: Building an Imagined Political Community in Ancient Attica, 508-490 B.C. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Dewey, John. In J. Boydston (Ed.) John Dewey, Volume 2: 1925-1927. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University, 1984. Ellis, Joseph. Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation. New York, NY: Vintage. 2002. Erickson, Erick. “Tea Party Movement 2.0: Moving beyond Protesting to Fighting in Primaries, Ballot Boxes, and Becoming More Effective Activists.” 14 April 2010. 28 Sep. 2010 ‹http://www.redstate.com/erick/2010/04/14/tea-party-movement-20/>.Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Good Society: The Humane Agenda. New York: Mariner Books, 1997. Green, Lelia. The Internet: An Introduction to New Media. Oxford: Berg, 2010.Hayes, Christopher. “MoveOn.org Is Not as Radical as Conservatives Think." The Nation. 16 July 2008. 28 Sep. 2010 ‹http://www.thenation.com/article/moveonorg-not-radical-conservatives-think>. Janofsky, Michael, Jennifer B. Lee. “Net Group Tries to Click Democrats to Power”. New York Times, 18 Nov 2003. 1 Oct. 2010 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/18/us/net-group-tries-to-click- democrats-to-power.html?scp=1&sq=%22bottom-up%20organization%22&st=cse>. Jefferson, Thomas. In M. Peterson, ed. The Political Writings of Thomas Jefferson. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Kossler, Reinhart, and Hening Melber. “International Civil Society and the Challenge for Global Solidarity.” Development Dialogue 49 (Oct. 2007): 29-39. Malcolm, Andrew. “Myth-Busting Polls: Tea Party Members Are Average Americans, 41% Are Democrats, Independents.” Los Angeles Times, 5 April 2010 ‹http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2010/04/tea-party-obama.html>.MoveOn.org. n.d. 27 Sep. 2010 ‹http://moveon.org>. Tea Party. n.d. 1 Oct. 2010 ‹http://teaparty.freedomworks.org>.Tea Party Express. n.d. 1 Oct. 2010 ‹http://www.teapartyexpress.org>. Woodruff, Paul. First Democracy: The Challenge of an Ancient Idea. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Zernike, Kate. “With No Jobs, Plenty of Time for Tea Party.” New York Times, 27 Mar. 2010. 29 Sep. 2010 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/us/politics/28teaparty.html?scp=1&sq=%22watched%20their%20homes%20plummet%20in%20value%22&st=cse>.

Abstract:

Introduction Films with deaf characters often do not focus on the condition of deafness at all. Rather, the characters seem to satisfy a role in the story that either furthers the plot or the audience’s understanding of other hearing characters. The deaf characters can be symbolic, for example as a metaphor for isolation representative of ‘those without a voice’ in a society. The deaf characters’ misunderstanding of auditory cues can lead to comic circ*mstances, and their knowledge can save them in the case of perilous ones. Sign language, because of its unique linguistic properties and its lack of comprehension by hearing people, can save the day in a story line. Deaf characters are shown in different eras and in different countries, providing a fictional window into their possible experiences. Films shape and reflect cultural attitudes and can serve as a potent force in influencing the attitudes and assumptions of those members of the hearing world who have had few, if any, encounters with deaf people. This article explores categories of literary function as identified by the author, providing examples and suggestions of other films for readers to explore. Searching for Deaf Characters in Film I am a sign language interpreter. Several years ago, I started noticing how deaf characters are used in films. I made a concerted effort to find as many as I could. I referred to John Shuchman’s exhaustive book about deaf actors and subject matter, Hollywood Speaks; I scouted video rental guides (key words were ‘deaf’ or ‘disabled’); and I also plugged in the key words ‘deaf in film’ on Google’s search engine. I decided to ignore the issue of whether or not the actors were actually deaf—a political hot potato in the Deaf community which has been discussed extensively. Similarly, the linguistic or cultural accuracy of the type of sign language used or super-human lip-reading talent did not concern me. What was I looking for? I noticed that few story lines involving deaf characters provide any discussion or plot information related to that character’s deafness. I was puzzled. Why is there signing in the elevator in Jerry Maguire? Why does the guy in Grand Canyon have a deaf daughter? Why would the psychosomatic response to a trauma—as in Psych Out—be deafness rather than blindness? I concluded that not being able to hear carried some special meaning or fulfilled a particular need intrinsic to the plot of the story. I also observed that the functions of deaf characters seem to fall into several categories. Some deaf characters fit into more than one category, serving two or more symbolic purposes at the same time. By viewing and analysing the representations of deafness and deaf characters in forty-six films, I have come up with the following classifications: Deafness as a plot device Deaf characters as protagonist informants Deaf characters as a parallel to the protagonist Sign language as ‘hero’ Stories about deaf/hearing relationships A-normal-guy-or-gal-who-just-happens-to-be-deaf Deafness as a psychosomatic response to trauma Deafness as metaphor Deafness as a symbolic commentary on society Let your fingers do the ‘talking’ Deafness as Plot Device Every element of a film is a device, but when the plot hinges on one character being deaf, the story succeeds because of that particular character having that particular condition. The limitations or advantages of a deaf person functioning within the hearing world establish the tension, the comedy, or the events which create the story. In Hear No Evil (1993), Jillian learns from her hearing boyfriend which mechanical devices cause ear-splitting noises (he has insomnia and every morning she accidentally wakes him in very loud ways, eg., she burns the toast, thus setting off the smoke detector; she drops a metal spoon down the garbage disposal unit). When she is pursued by a murderer she uses a fire alarm, an alarm/sprinkler system, and a stereo turned on full blast to mask the sounds of her movements as she attempts to hide. Jillian and her boyfriend survive, she learns about sound, her boyfriend learns about deafness, and she teaches him the sign for org*sm. Life is good! The potential comic aspects of deafness may seem in this day and age to be shockingly politically incorrect. While the slapstick aspect is often innocent and means no overt harm or insult to the Deaf as a population, deafness functions as the visual banana peel over which the characters figuratively stumble in the plot. The film, See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989), pairing Gene Wilder with Richard Pryor as deaf and blind respectively, is a constant sight gag of lip-reading miscues and lack-of-sight gags. Wilder can speak, and is able to speech read almost perfectly, almost all of the time (a stereotype often perpetuated in films). It is mind-boggling to imagine the detail of the choreography required for the two actors to convince the audience of their authenticity. Other films in this category include: Suspect It’s a Wonderful Life Murder by Death Huck Finn One Flew over the Cuckoo’s NestThe Shop on Main StreetRead My Lips The Quiet Deaf Characters as Protagonist Informants Often a deaf character’s primary function to the story is to give the audience more information about, or form more of an affinity with, the hearing protagonist. The deaf character may be fascinating in his or her own right, but generally the deafness is a marginal point of interest. Audience attitudes about the hearing characters are affected because of their previous or present involvement with deaf individuals. This representation of deafness seems to provide a window into audience understanding and appreciation of the protagonist. More inferences can be made about the hearing person and provides one possible explanation for what ensues. It is a subtle, almost subliminal trick. There are several effective examples of this approach. In Gas, Food, Lodging (1992), Shade discovers that tough-guy Javier’s mother is deaf. He introduces Shade to his mother by simple signs and finger-spelling. They all proceed to visit and dance together (mom feels the vibrations on the floor). The audience is drawn to feel ‘Wow! Javier is a sensitive kid who has grown up with a beautiful, exotic, deaf mother!’ The 1977 film, Looking for Mr. Goodbar presents film-goers with Theresa, a confused young woman living a double life. By day, she is a teacher of deaf children. Her professor in the Teacher of the Deaf program even likens their vocation to ‘touching God’. But by night she cruises bars and engages in promiscuous sexual activity. The film shows how her fledgling use of signs begins to express her innermost desires, as well as her ability to communicate and reach out to her students. Other films in this category include: Miracle on 34th Street (1994 version)Nashville (1975, dir. Robert Altman)The Family StoneGrand CanyonThere Will Be Blood Deaf Characters as a Parallel to the Protagonist I Don’t Want to Talk about It (1993) from Argentina, uses a deaf character to establish an implied parallel story line to the main hearing character. Charlotte, a dwarf, is friends with Reanalde, who is deaf. The audience sees them in the first moments of the film when they are little girls together. Reanalde’s mother attempts to commiserate with Charlotte’s mother, establishing a simultaneous but unseen story line somewhere else in town over the course of the story. The setting is Argentina during the 1930s, and the viewer can assume that disability awareness is fairly minimal at the time. Without having seen Charlotte’s deaf counterpart, the audience still knows that her story has contained similar struggles for ‘normalcy’ and acceptance. Near the conclusion of the film, there is one more glimpse of Reanalde, when she catches the bridal bouquet at Charlotte’s wedding. While having been privy to Charlotte’s experiences all along, we can only conjecture as to what Reanalde’s life has been. Sign Language as ‘Hero’ The power of language, and one’s calculated use of language as a means of escape from a potentially deadly situation, is shown in The River Wild (1996). The reason that any of the hearing characters knows sign language is that Gail, the protagonist, has a deaf father. Victor appears primarily to allow the audience to see his daughter and grandson sign with him. The mother, father, and son are able to communicate surreptitiously and get themselves out of a dangerous predicament. Signing takes an iconic form when the signs BOAT, LEFT, I-LOVE-YOU are drawn on a log suspended over the river as a message to Gail so that she knows where to steer the boat, and that her husband is still alive. The unique nature of sign language saves the day– silently and subtly produced, right under the bad guys’ noses! Stories about Deaf/Hearing Relationships Because of increased awareness and acceptance of deafness, it may be tempting to assume that growing up deaf or having any kind of relationship with a deaf individual may not pose too much of a challenge. Captioning and subtitling are ubiquitous in the USA now, as is the inclusion of interpreters on stages at public events. Since the inception of USA Public Law 94-142 and section 504 in 1974, more deaf children are ‘mainstreamed’ into public schools than ever before. The Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in 1993, opening the doors in the US for more access, more job opportunities, more inclusion. These are the external manifestations of acceptance that most viewers with no personal exposure to deafness may see in the public domain. The nuts and bolts of growing up deaf, navigating through opposing philosophical theories regarding deaf education, and dealing with parents, siblings, and peers who can’t communicate, all serve to form foundational experiences which an audience rarely witnesses. Children of a Lesser God (1986), uses the character of James Leeds to provide simultaneous voiced translations of the deaf student Sarah’s comments. The audience is ushered into the world of disparate philosophies of deaf education, a controversy of which general audiences may not have been previously unaware. At the core of James and Sarah’s struggle is his inability to accept that she is complete as she is, as a signing not speaking deaf person. Whether a full reconciliation is possible remains to be seen. The esteemed teacher of the deaf must allow himself to be taught by the deaf. Other films in this category include: Johnny Belinda (1949, 1982)Mr. Holland’s OpusBeyond SilenceThe Good ShepherdCompensation A Normal Guy-or-Gal-Who-Just-Happens-to-Be-Deaf The greatest measure of equality is to be accepted on one's own merits, with no special attention to differences or deviations from whatever is deemed ‘the norm.’ In this category, the audience sees the seemingly incidental inclusion of a deaf or hearing-impaired person in the casting. A sleeper movie titled Crazy Moon (1986) is an effective example. Brooks is a shy, eccentric young hearing man who needs who needs to change his life. Vanessa is deaf and works as a clerk in a shop while takes speech lessons. She possesses a joie de vivre that Brooks admires and wishes to emulate. When comparing the way they interact with the world, it is apparent that Brooks is the one who is handicapped. Other films in this category include: Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (South Korea, 1992)Liar, LiarRequiem for a DreamKung Fu HustleBangkok DangerousThe Family StoneDeafness as a Psychosomatic Response to Trauma Literature about psychosomatic illnesses enumerates many disconcerting and disruptive physiological responses. However, rarely is there a PTSD response as profound as complete blockage of one of the five senses, ie; becoming deaf as a result of a traumatic incident. But it makes great copy, and provides a convenient explanation as to why an actor needn't learn sign language! The rock group The Who recorded Tommy in 1968, inaugurating an exciting and groundbreaking new musical genre – the rock opera. The film adaptation, directed by Ken Russell, was released in 1975. In an ironic twist for a rock extravaganza, the hero of the story is a ‘deaf, dumb, and blind kid.’ Tommy Johnson becomes deaf when he witnesses the murder of his father at the hands of his step-father and complicit mother. From that moment on, he is deaf and blind. When he grows up, he establishes a cult religion of inner vision and self-discovery. Another film in this category is Psych Out. Deafness as a Metaphor Hearing loss does not necessarily mean complete deafness and/or lack of vocalization. Yet, the general public tends to assume that there is utter silence, complete muteness, and the inability to verbalize anything at all. These assumptions provide a rich breeding ground for a deaf character to personify isolation, disenfranchisem*nt, and/or avoidance of the harsher side of life. The deafness of a character can also serve as a hearing character’s nemesis. Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995) chronicles much of the adult life of a beleaguered man named Glenn Holland whose fondest dream is to compose a grand piece of orchestral music. To make ends meet he must teach band and orchestra to apparently disinterested and often untalented students in a public school. His golden son (named Cole, in honor of the jazz great John Coltrane) is discovered to be deaf. Glenn’s music can’t be born, and now his son is born without music. He will never be able to share his passion with his child. He learns just a little bit of sign, is dismissive of the boy’s dreams, and drifts further away from his family to settle into a puddle of bitterness, regrets, and unfulfilled desires. John Lennon’s death provides the catalyst for Cole’s confrontation with Glenn, forcing the father to understand that the gulf between them is an artificial one, perpetuated by the unwillingness to try. Any other disability could not have had the same effect in this story. Other films in this category include: Ramblin’ RoseBabelThe Heart Is a Lonely HunterA Code Unkown Deafness as a Symbolic Commentary on Society Sometimes films show deafness in a different country, during another era, and audiences receive a fictionalized representation of what life might have been like before these more enlightened times. The inability to hear and/or speak can also represent the more generalized powerlessness that a culture or a society’s disenfranchised experience. The Chinese masterpiece To Live (1994) provides historical and political reasons for Fenxi’s deafness—her father was a political prisoner whose prolonged absence brought hardship and untended illness. Later, the chaotic political situation which resulted in a lack of qualified doctors led to her death. In between these scenes the audience sees how her parents arrange a marriage with another ‘handicapped’ comrade of the town. Those citizens deemed to be crippled or outcast have different overt rights and treatment. The 1996 film Illtown presents the character of a very young teenage boy to represent the powerlessness of youth in America. David has absolutely no say in where he can live, with whom he can live, and the decisions made all around him. When he is apprehended after a stolen car chase, his frustration at his and all of his generation’s predicament in the face of a crumbling world is pounded out on the steering wheel as the police cars circle him. He is caged, and without the ability to communicate. Were he to have a voice, the overall sense of the film and his situation is that he would be misunderstood anyway. Other films in this category include: Stille Liebe (Germany)RidiculeIn the Company of Men Let Your Fingers Do the ‘Talking’ I use this heading to describe films where sign language is used by a deaf character to express something that a main hearing character can’t (or won’t) self-generate. It is a clever device which employs a silent language to create a communication symbiosis: Someone asks a hearing person who knows sign what that deaf person just said, and the hearing person must voice what he or she truly feels, and yet is unable to express voluntarily. The deaf person is capable of expressing the feeling, but must rely upon the hearing person to disseminate the message. And so, the words do emanate from the mouth of the person who means them, albeit self-consciously, unwillingly. Jerry Maguire (1996) provides a signed foreshadowing of character metamorphosis and development, which is then voiced for the hearing audience. Jerry and Dorothy have just met, resigned from their jobs in solidarity and rebellion, and then step into an elevator to begin a new phase of their lives. Their body language identifies them as separate, disconnected, and heavily emotionally fortified. An amorous deaf couple enters the elevator and Dorothy translates the deaf man’s signs as, ‘You complete me.’ The sentiment is strong and a glaring contrast to Jerry and Dorothy’s present dynamic. In the end, Jerry repeats this exact phrase to her, and means it with all his heart. We are all made aware of just how far they have traveled emotionally. They have become the couple in the elevator. Other films in this category include: Four Weddings and a FuneralKnowing Conclusion This has been a cursory glance at examining the narrative raison d’etre for the presence of a deaf character in story lines where no discussion of deafness is articulated. A film’s plot may necessitate hearing-impairment or deafness to successfully execute certain gimmickry, provide a sense of danger, or relational tension. The underlying themes and motifs may revolve around loneliness, alienation, or outwardly imposed solitude. The character may have a subconscious desire to literally shut out the world of sound. The properties of sign language itself can be exploited for subtle, undetectable conversations to assure the safety of hearing characters. Deaf people have lived during all times, in all places, and historical films can portray a slice of what their lives may have been like. I hope readers will become more aware of deaf characters on the screen, and formulate more theories as to where they fit in the literary/narrative schema. ReferencesMaltin, Leonard. Leonard Maltin’s 2009 Movie Guide. Penguin Group, 2008.Shuchman, John S. Hollywood Speaks. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Filmography Babel. Dir. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. Central Films, 2006. DVD. Bangkok Dangerous. Dir. Pang Brothers. Film Bangkok, 1999. VHS. Beyond Silence. Dir. Caroline Link. Miramax Films, 1998. DVD. Children of a Lesser God. Dir. Randa Haines. Paramount Pictures, 1985. DVD. A Code Unknown. Dir. Michael Heneke. MK2 Editions, 2000. DVD. Compensation. Dir. Zeinabu Irene Davis. Wimmin with a Mission Productions, 1999. VHS. Crazy Moon. Dir. Allan Eastman. Allegro Films, 1987. VHS. The Family Stone. Dir. Mike Bezucha. 20th Century Fox, 2005. DVD. Four Weddings and a Funeral. Dir. Mike Newell. Polygram Film Entertainment, 1994. DVD. Gas, Food, Lodging. Dir. Allison Anders. IRS Media, 1992. DVD. The Good Shepherd. Dir. Robert De Niro. Morgan Creek, TriBeCa Productions, American Zoetrope, 2006. DVD. Grand Canyon. Dir. Lawrence Kasdan, Meg Kasdan. 20th Century Fox, 1991. DVD. Hear No Evil. Dir. Robert Greenwald. 20th Century Fox, 1993. DVD. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Dir. Robert Ellis Miller. Warner Brothers, 1968. DVD. Huck Finn. Stephen Sommers. Walt Disney Pictures, 1993. VHS. I Don’t Want to Talk about It. Dir. Maria Luisa Bemberg. Mojame Productions, 1994. DVD. Knowing. Dir. Alex Proyas. Escape Artists, 2009. DVD. Illtown. Dir. Nick Gomez. 1998. VHS. In the Company of Men. Dir. Neil LaBute. Alliance Atlantis Communications,1997. DVD. It’s a Wonderful Life. Dir. Frank Capra. RKO Pictures, 1947. DVD. Jerry Maguire. Dir. Cameron Crowe. TriSTar Pictures, 1996. DVD. Johnny Belinda. Dir. Jean Nagalesco. Warner Brothers Pictures, 1948. DVD. Kung Fu Hustle. Dir. Stephen Chow. Film Production Asia, 2004. DVD. Liar, Liar. Dir. Tom Shadyac. Universal Pictures, 1997. DVD. Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Dir. Richard Brooks. Paramount Miracle on 34th Street. Dir. Les Mayfield. 20th Century Fox, 1994. DVD. Mr. Holland’s Opus. Dir. Stephen Hereck. Hollywood Pictures, 1996. DVD Murder by Death. Dir. Robert Moore. Columbia Pictures, 1976. VHS. Nashville. Dir. Robert Altman. Paramount Pictures, 1975. DVD. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Dir. Milos Forman. United Artists, 1975. DVD. The Perfect Circle. Dir. Ademir Kenovic. 1997. DVD. Psych Out. Dir. Richard Rush. American International Pictures, 1968. DVD. The Quiet. Dir. Jamie Babbit. Sony Pictures Classics, 2005. DVD. Ramblin’ Rose. Dir. Martha Coolidge. Carolco Pictures, 1991. DVD. Read My Lips. Dir. Jacques Audiard. Panthe Films, 2001. DVD. Requiem for a Dream. Dir. Darren Aronofsky. Artisan Entertainment, 2000. DVD. Ridicule. Dir. Patrice Laconte. Miramax Films, 1996. DVD. The River Wild. Dir. Curtis Hanson. Universal Pictures, 1995. DVD. See No Evil, Hear No Evil. Dir. Arthur Hiller. TriSTar Pictures,1989. DVD. The Shop on Main Street. Dir. Jan Kadar, Elmar Klos. Barrandov Film Studio, 1965. VHS. Stille Liebe. Dir. Christoph Schaub. T and C Film AG, 2001. DVD. Suspect. Dir. Peter Yates. Tri-Star Pictures, 1987. DVD. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. Dir. Park Chan-wook. CJ Entertainments, Tartan Films, 2002. DVD. There Will Be Blood. Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson. Paramount Vantage, Miramax Films, 2007. DVD. To Live. Dir. Zhang Yimou. Shanghai Film Studio and ERA International, 1994. DVD. What the Bleep Do We Know?. Dir. Willam Arntz, Betsy Chasse, Mark Vicente. Roadside Attractions, 2004. DVD.

Abstract:

Being a celebrity sure ain’t what it used to be. Or, perhaps more accurately, the process of maintaining a stable star persona isn’t what it used to be. With the rise of new media technologies—including digital photography and video production, gossip blogging, social networking sites, and streaming video—there has been a rapid proliferation of voices which serve to articulate stars’ personae. This panoply of sanctioned and unsanctioned discourses has brought the coherence and stability of the star’s image into crisis, with an evermore-heightened loop forming recursively between celebrity gossip and scandals, on the one hand, and, on the other, new media-enabled speculation and commentary about these scandals and gossip-pieces. Of course, while no subject has a single meaning, Hollywood has historically expended great energy and resources to perpetuate the myth that the star’s image is univocal. In the present moment, however, studios’s traditional methods for discursive control have faltered, such that celebrities have found it necessary to take matters into their own hands, using new media technologies, particularly Twitter, in an attempt to stabilise that most vital currency of their trade, their professional/public persona. In order to fully appreciate the significance of this new mode of publicity management, and its larger implications for contemporary subjectivity writ large, we must first come to understand the history of Hollywood’s approach to celebrity publicity and image management.A Brief History of Hollywood PublicityThe origins of this effort are nearly as old as Hollywood itself, for, as Richard DeCordova explains, the celebrity scandals of the 1920s threatened to disrupt the economic vitality of the incipient industry such that strict, centralised image control appeared as a necessary imperative to maintain a consistently reliable product. The Fatty Arbuckle murder trial was scandalous not only for its subject matter (a murder suffused with illicit and shadowy sexual innuendo) but also because the event revealed that stars, despite their mediated larger-than-life images, were not only as human as the rest of us, but that, in fact, they were capable of profoundly inhuman acts. The scandal, then, was not so much Arbuckle’s crime, but the negative pall it cast over the Hollywood mythos of glamour and grace. The studios quickly organised an industry-wide regulatory agency (the MPPDA) to counter potentially damaging rhetoric and ward off government intervention. Censorship codes and morality clauses were combined with well-funded publicity departments in an effort that successfully shifted the locus of the star’s extra-filmic discursive construction from private acts—which could betray their screen image—to information which served to extend and enhance the star’s pre-existing persona. In this way, the sanctioned celebrity knowledge sphere became co-extensive with that of commercial culture itself; the star became meaningful only by knowing how she spent her leisure time and the type of make-up she used. The star’s identity was not found via unsanctioned intrusion, but through studio-sanctioned disclosure, made available in the form of gossip columns, newsreels, and fan magazines. This period of relative stability for the star's star image was ultimately quite brief, however, as the collapse of the studio system in the late 1940s and the introduction of television brought about a radical, but gradual, reordering of the star's signifying potential. The studios no longer had the resources or incentive to tightly police star images—the classic age of stardom was over. During this period of change, an influx of alternative voices and publications filled the discursive void left by the demise of the studios’s regimented publicity efforts, with many of these new outlets reengaging older methods of intrusion to generate a regular rhythm of vendible information about the stars.The first to exploit and capitalize on star image instability was Robert Harrison, whose Confidential Magazine became the leading gossip publication of the 1950s. Unlike its fan magazine rivals, which persisted in portraying the stars as morally upright and wholesome, Confidential pledged on the cover of each issue to “tell the facts and name the names,” revealing what had been theretofore “confidential.” In essence, through intrusion, Confidential reasserted scandal as the true core of the star, simultaneously instituting incursion and surveillance as the most direct avenue to the “kernel” of the celebrity subject, obtaining stories through associations with call girls, out-of-work starlettes, and private eyes. As extra-textual discourses proliferated and fragmented, the contexts in which the public encountered the star changed as well. Theatre attendance dropped dramatically, and as the studios sold their film libraries to television, the stars, formerly available only on the big screen and in glamour shots, were now intercut with commercials, broadcast on grainy sets in the domestic space. The integrity—or at least the illusion of integrity—of the star image was forever compromised. As the parameters of renown continued to expand, film stars, formally distinguished from all other performers, migrated to television. The landscape of stardom was re-contoured into the “celebrity sphere,” a space that includes television hosts, musicians, royals, and charismatic politicians. The revamped celebrity “game” was complex, but still playabout: with a powerful agent, a talented publicist, and a check on drinking, drug use, and extra-marital affairs, a star and his or her management team could negotiate a coherent image. Confidential was gone, The National Inquirer was muzzled by libel laws, and People and E.T.—both sheltered within larger media companies—towed the publicists’s line. There were few widely circulated outlets through which unauthorised voices could gain traction. Old-School Stars and New Media Technologies: The Case of Tom CruiseYet with the relentless arrival of various news media technologies beginning in the 1980s and continuing through the present, maintaining tight celebrity image control began to require the services of a phalanx of publicists and handlers. Here, the example of Tom Cruise is instructive: for nearly twenty years, Cruise’s publicity was managed by Pat Kingsley, who exercised exacting control over the star’s image. With the help of seemingly diverse yet essentially similar starring roles, Cruise solidified his image as the co*cky, charismatic boy-next-door.The unified Cruise image was made possible by shutting down competing discourses through the relentless, comprehensive efforts of his management company; Kingsley's staff fine-tuned Cruise’s acts of disclosure while simultaneously eliminating the potential for unplanned intrusions, neutralising any potential scandal at its source. Kingsley and her aides performed for Cruise all the functions of a studio publicity department from Hollywood’s Golden Age. Most importantly, Cruise was kept silent on the topic of his controversial religion, Scientology, lest it incite domestic and international backlash. In interviews and off-the-cuff soundbites, Cruise was ostensibly disclosing his true self, and that self remained the dominant reading of what, and who, Cruise “was.” Yet in 2004, Cruise fired Kingsley, replaced her with his own sister (and fellow Scientologist), who had no prior experience in public relations. In essence, he exchanged a handler who understood how to shape star disclosure for one who did not. The events that followed have been widely rehearsed: Cruise avidly pursued Katie Holmes; Cruise jumped for joy on Oprah’s couch; Cruise denounced psychology during a heated debate with Matt Lauer on The Today Show. His attempt at disclosing this new, un-publicist-mediated self became scandalous in and of itself. Cruise’s dismissal of Kingsley, his unpopular (but not necessarily unwelcome) disclosures, and his own massively unchecked ego all played crucial roles in the fall of the Cruise image. While these stumbles might have caused some minor career turmoil in the past, the hyper-echoic, spastically recombinatory logic of the technoculture brought the speed and stakes of these missteps to a new level; one of the hallmarks of the postmodern condition has been not merely an increasing textual self-reflexivity, but a qualitative new leap forward in inter-textual reflexivity, as well (Lyotard; Baudrillard). Indeed, the swift dismantling of Cruise’s long-established image is directly linked to the immediacy and speed of the Internet, digital photography, and the gossip blog, as the reflexivity of new media rendered the safe division between disclosure and intrusion untenable. His couchjumping was turned into a dance remix and circulated on YouTube; Mission Impossible 3 boycotts were organised through a number of different Web forums; gossip bloggers speculated that Cruise had impregnated Holmes using the frozen sperm of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. In the past, Cruise simply filed defamation suits against print publications that would deign to sully his image. Yet the sheer number of sites and voices reproducing this new set of rumors made such a strategy untenable. Ultimately, intrusions into Cruise’s personal life, including the leak of videos intended solely for Scientology recruitment use, had far more traction than any sanctioned Cruise soundbite. Cruise’s image emerged as a hollowed husk of its former self; the sheer amount of material circulating rendered all attempts at P.R., including a Vanity Fair cover story and “reveal” of daughter Suri, ridiculous. His image was fragmented and re-collected into an altered, almost uncanny new iteration. Following the lackluster performance of Mission Impossible 3 and public condemnation by Paramount head Sumner Redstone, Cruise seemed almost pitiable. The New Logic of Celebrity Image ManagementCruise’s travails are expressive of a deeper development which has occurred over the course of the last decade, as the massively proliferating new forms of celebrity discourse (e.g., paparazzi photos, mug shots, cell phone video have further decentered any shiny, polished version of a star. With older forms of media increasingly reorganising themselves according to the aesthetics and logic of new media forms (e.g., CNN featuring regular segments in which it focuses its network cameras upon a computer screen displaying the CNN website), we are only more prone to appreciate “low media” forms of star discourse—reports from fans on discussion boards, photos taken on cell phones—as valid components of the celebrity image. People and E.T. still attract millions, but they are rapidly ceding control of the celebrity industry to their ugly, offensive stepbrothers: TMZ, Us Weekly, and dozens of gossip blogs. Importantly, a publicist may be able to induce a blogger to cover their client, but they cannot convince him to drop a story: if TMZ doesn’t post it, then Perez Hilton certainly will. With TMZ unabashedly offering pay-outs to informants—including those in law enforcement and health care, despite recently passed legislation—a star is never safe. If he or she misbehaves, someone, professional or amateur, will provide coverage. Scandal becomes normalised, and, in so doing, can no longer really function as scandal as such; in an age of around-the-clock news cycles and celebrity-fixated journalism, the only truly scandalising event would be the complete absence of any scandalous reports. Or, as aesthetic theorist Jacques Ranciere puts it; “The complaint is then no longer that images conceal secrets which are no longer such to anyone, but, on the contrary, that they no longer hide anything” (22).These seemingly paradoxical involutions of post-modern celebrity epistemologies are at the core of the current crisis of celebrity, and, subsequently, of celebrities’s attempts to “take back their own paparazzi.” As one might expect, contemporary celebrities have attempted to counter these new logics and strategies of intrusion through a heightened commitment to disclosure, principally through the social networking capabilities of Twitter. Yet, as we will see, not only have the epistemological reorderings of postmodernist technoculture affected the logic of scandal/intrusion, but so too have they radically altered the workings of intrusion’s dialectical counterpart, disclosure.In the 1930s, when written letters were still the primary medium for intimate communication, stars would send lengthy “hand-written” letters to members of their fan club. Of course, such letters were generally not written by the stars themselves, but handwriting—and a star’s signature—signified authenticity. This ritualised process conferred an “aura” of authenticity upon the object of exchange precisely because of its static, recurring nature—exchange of fan mail was conventionally understood to be the primary medium for personal encounters with a celebrity. Within the overall political economy of the studio system, the medium of the hand-written letter functioned to unleash the productive power of authenticity, offering an illusion of communion which, in fact, served to underscore the gulf between the celebrity’s extraordinary nature and the ordinary lives of those who wrote to them. Yet the criterion and conventions through which celebrity personae were maintained were subject to change over time, as new communications technologies, new modes of Hollywood's industrial organization, and the changing realities of commercial media structures all combined to create a constantly moving ground upon which the celebrity tried to affix. The celebrity’s changing conditions are not unique to them alone; rather, they are a highly visible bellwether of changes which are more fundamentally occurring at all levels of culture and subjectivity. Indeed, more than seventy years ago, Walter Benjamin observed that when hand-made expressions of individuality were superseded by mechanical methods of production, aesthetic criteria (among other things) also underwent change, rendering notions of authenticity increasingly indeterminate.Such is the case that in today’s world, hand-written letters seem more contrived or disingenuous than Danny DeVito’s inaugural post to his Twitter account: “I just joined Twitter! I don't really get this site or how it works. My nuts are on fire.” The performative gesture in DeVito’s tweet is eminently clear, just as the semantic value is patently false: clearly DeVito understands “this site,” as he has successfully used it to extend his irreverent funny-little-man persona to the new medium. While the truth claims of his Tweet may be false, its functional purpose—both effacing and reifying the extraordinary/ordinary distinction of celebrity and maintaining DeVito’s celebrity personality as one with which people might identify—is nevertheless seemingly intact, and thus mirrors the instrumental value of celebrity disclosure as performed in older media forms. Twitter and Contemporary TechnocultureFor these reasons and more, considered within the larger context of contemporary popular culture, celebrity tweeting has been equated with the assertion of the authentic celebrity voice; celebrity tweets are regularly cited in newspaper articles and blogs as “official” statements from the celebrity him/herself. With so many mediated voices attempting to “speak” the meaning of the star, the Twitter account emerges as the privileged channel to the star him/herself. Yet the seemingly easy discursive associations of Twitter and authenticity are in fact ideological acts par excellence, as fixations on the indexical truth-value of Twitter are not merely missing the point, but actively distracting from the real issues surrounding the unsteady discursive construction of contemporary celebrity and the “celebretification” of contemporary subjectivity writ large. In other words, while it is taken as axiomatic that the “message” of celebrity Twittering is, as Henry Jenkins suggests, “Here I Am,” this outward epistemological certainty veils the deeply unstable nature of celebrity—and by extension, subjectivity itself—in our networked society.If we understand the relationship between publicity and technoculture to work as Zizek-inspired cultural theorist Jodi Dean suggests, then technologies “believe for us, accessing information even if we cannot” (40), such that technology itself is enlisted to serve the function of ideology, the process by which a culture naturalises itself and attempts to render the notion of totality coherent. For Dean, the psycho-ideological reality of contemporary culture is predicated upon the notion of an ever-elusive “secret,” which promises to reveal us all as part of a unitary public. The reality—that there is no such cohesive collective body—is obscured in the secret’s mystifying function which renders as “a contingent gap what is really the fact of the fundamental split, antagonism, and rupture of politics” (40). Under the ascendancy of the technoculture—Dean's term for the technologically mediated landscape of contemporary communicative capitalism—subjectivity becomes interpellated along an axis blind to the secret of this fundamental rupture. The two interwoven poles of this axis are not unlike structuralist film critics' dialectically intertwined accounts of the scopophilia and scopophobia of viewing relations, simply enlarged from the limited realm of the gaze to encompass the entire range of subjectivity. As such, the conspiratorial mindset is that mode of desire, of lack, which attempts to attain the “secret,” while the celebrity subject is that element of excess without which desire is unthinkable. As one might expect, the paparazzi and gossip sites’s strategies of intrusion have historically operated primarily through the conspiratorial mindset, with endless conjecture about what is “really happening” behind the scenes. Under the intrusive/conspiratorial paradigm, the authentic celebrity subject is always just out of reach—a chance sighting only serves to reinscribe the need for the next encounter where, it is believed, all will become known. Under such conditions, the conspiratorial mindset of the paparazzi is put into overdrive: because the star can never be “fully” known, there can never be enough information about a star, therefore, more information is always needed. Against this relentless intrusion, the celebrity—whose discursive stability, given the constant imperative for newness in commercial culture, is always in danger—risks a semiotic liquidation that will totally displace his celebrity status as such. Disclosure, e.g. Tweeting, emerges as a possible corrective to the endlessly associative logic of the paparazzi’s conspiratorial indset. In other words, through Twitter, the celebrity seeks to arrest meaning—fixing it in place around their own seemingly coherent narrativisation. The publicist’s new task, then, is to convincingly counter such unsanctioned, intrusive, surveillance-based discourse. Stars continue to give interviews, of course, and many regularly pose as “authors” of their own homepages and blogs. Yet as posited above, Twitter has emerged as the most salient means of generating “authentic” celebrity disclosure, simultaneously countering the efforts of the papparazzi, fan mags, and gossip blogs to complicate or rewrite the meaning of the star. The star uses the account—verified, by Twitter, as the “real” star—both as a means to disclose their true interior state of being and to counter erastz narratives circulating about them. Twitter’s appeal for both celebrities and their followers comes from the ostensible spontaneity of the tweets, as the seemingly unrehearsed quality of the communiqués lends the form an immediacy and casualness unmatched by blogs or official websites; the semantic informality typically employed in the medium obscures their larger professional significance for celebrity tweeters. While Twitter’s air of extemporary intimacy is also offered by other social networking platforms, such as MySpace or Facebook, the latter’s opportunities for public feedback (via wall-posts and the like) works counter to the tight image control offered by Twitter’s broadcast-esque model. Additionally, because of the uncertain nature of the tweet release cycle—has Ashton Kutcher sent a new tweet yet?—the voyeuristic nature of the tweet disclosure (with its real-time nature offering a level of synchronic intimacy that letters never could have matched), and the semantically displaced nature of the medium, it is a form of disclosure perfectly attuned to the conspiratorial mindset of the technoculture. As mentioned above, however, the conspiratorial mindset is an unstable subjectivity, insofar as it only exists through a constant oscillation with its twin, the celebrity subjectivity. While we can understand that, for the celebrities, Twitter functions by allowing them a mode for disclosive/celebrity subjectivisation, we have not yet seen how the celebrity itself is rendered conspiratorial through Twitter. Similarly, only the conspiratorial mode of the follower’s subjectivity has thus far been enumerated; the moment of the follower's celebrtification has so far gone unmentioned. Since we have seen that the celebrity function of Twitter is not really about discourse per se, we should instead understand that the ideological value of Twitter comes from the act of tweeting itself, of finding pleasure in being engaged in a techno-social system in which one's participation is recognised. Recognition and participation should be qualified, though, as it is not the fully active type of participation one might expect in say, the electoral politics of a representative democracy. Instead, it is a participation in a sort of epistemological viewing relations, or, as Jodi Dean describes it, “that we understand ourselves as known is what makes us think there is that there is a public that knows us” (122). The fans’ recognition by the celebrity—the way in which they understood themselves as known by the star was once the receipt of a hand-signed letter (and a latent expectation that the celebrity had read the fan’s initial letter); such an exchange conferred to the fan a momentary sense of participation in the celebrity's extraordinary aura. Under Twitter, however, such an exchange does not occur, as that feeling of one-to-one interaction is absent; simply by looking elsewhere on the screen, one can confirm that a celebrity's tweet was received by two million other individuals. The closest a fan can come to that older modality of recognition is by sending a message to the celebrity that the celebrity then “re-tweets” to his broader following. Beyond the obvious levels of technological estrangement involved in such recognition is the fact that the identity of the re-tweeted fan will not be known by the celebrity’s other two million followers. That sense of sharing in the celebrity’s extraordinary aura is altered by an awareness that the very act of recognition largely entails performing one’s relative anonymity in front of the other wholly anonymous followers. As the associative, conspiratorial mindset of the star endlessly searches for fodder through which to maintain its image, fans allow what was previously a personal moment of recognition to be transformed into a public one. That is, the conditions through which one realises one’s personal subjectivity are, in fact, themselves becoming remade according to the logic of celebrity, in which priority is given to the simple fact of visibility over that of the actual object made visible. Against such an opaque cultural transformation, the recent rise of reactionary libertarianism and anti-collectivist sentiment is hardly surprising. ReferencesBaudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1994.Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968. Dean, Jodi. Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003. DeCordova, Richard. Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Jenkins, Henry. “The Message of Twitter: ‘Here It Is’ and ‘Here I Am.’” Confessions of an Aca-Fan. 23 Aug. 2009. 15 Sep. 2009 < http://henryjenkins.org/2009/08/the_message_of_twitter.html >.Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1984.Ranciere, Jacques. The Future of the Image. New York: Verso, 2007.