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Although numerous signal modalities are available for emotion recognition, audio and visual modalities are the most common and predominant forms for human beings to express their emotional states in daily communication. Therefore, how to achieve automatic and accurate audiovisual emotion recognition is significantly important for developing engaging and empathetic human–computer interaction environment. However, two major challenges exist in the field of audiovisual emotion recognition: (1) how to effectively capture representations of each single modality and eliminate redundant features and (2) how to efficiently integrate information from these two modalities to generate discriminative representations.

A novel key-frame extraction-based attention fusion network (KE-AFN) is proposed for audiovisual emotion recognition. KE-AFN attempts to integrate key-frame extraction with multimodal interaction and fusion to enhance audiovisual representations and reduce redundant computation, filling the research gaps of existing approaches. Specifically, the local maximum–based content analysis is designed to extract key-frames from videos for the purpose of eliminating data redundancy. Two modules, including “Multi-head Attention-based Intra-modality Interaction Module” and “Multi-head Attention-based Cross-modality Interaction Module”, are proposed to mine and capture intra- and cross-modality interactions for further reducing data redundancy and producing more powerful multimodal representations.

Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets (i.e. RAVDESS and CMU-MOSEI) demonstrate the effectiveness and rationality of KE-AFN. Specifically, (1) KE-AFN is superior to state-of-the-art baselines for audiovisual emotion recognition. (2) Exploring the supplementary and complementary information of different modalities can provide more emotional clues for better emotion recognition. (3) The proposed key-frame extraction strategy can enhance the performance by more than 2.79 per cent on accuracy. (4) Both exploring intra- and cross-modality interactions and employing attention-based audiovisual fusion can lead to better prediction performance.

The proposed KE-AFN can support the development of engaging and empathetic human–computer interaction environment.

The visualisation and the level of abstraction of complicated organic relations within an urban setting still remains a major problem with regard to urban discipline. This paper captures the dialectic relation within the urban network, in which the interaction between the spatial process of becoming and the temporal state of being is fundamental. ‘Envelopment’ is developed from and based upon Giddens’ structuration theory. It enables visualisation of ‘relations’ and, as problem-setting matrices, allows the fundamentals of the urban network to be itemised within forms of relationships: modalities. Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of deterriorialisation is also adopted into urban studies to support further investigations in respect of decoding and Translating ‘modalities’ as fundamentals in achieving continuous reproduction of Envelopment-as a topological space. Generally, topological space is defined in terms of processes and relations, Vocabularies are accepted as essences of urban dialog embodied in the system, needs to be visualised and meanings to be assigned according to their role and position in the system. In envelopment, system will be considered as macro-scale, multi-scalar topology, where all other modes of relations (amongst people, space and time) can be elaborated. The language game of Wittgenstein, as a metaphoric tool allows us to explore and group the modes of relations as vocabularies; “set of modalities”, enabling dialog upon their role and position in the system. Although the approach of Envelopment can be used as a tool, in enabling the representation of the equilibrium of state and process characteristics of system; it also helps as a tool in enabling the representation of macroscopic space-time scale; enabling representation of urban development and enabling representation of change in urban narrative. The various implementation of the Envelopment will be represented as a final discussion of the paper.

With the rapid development of short videos in China, the public has become accustomed to using short videos to express their opinions. This paper aims to solve problems such as how to represent the features of different modalities and achieve effective cross-modal feature fusion when analyzing the multi-modal sentiment of Chinese short videos (CSVs).

This paper aims to propose a sentiment analysis model MSCNN-CPL-CAFF using multi-scale convolutional neural network and cross attention fusion mechanism to analyze the CSVs. The audio-visual and textual data of CSVs themed on “COVID-19, catering industry” are collected from CSV platform Douyin first, and then a comparative analysis is conducted with advanced baseline models.

The sample number of the weak negative and neutral sentiment is the largest, and the sample number of the positive and weak positive sentiment is relatively small, accounting for only about 11% of the total samples. The MSCNN-CPL-CAFF model has achieved the Acc-2, Acc-3 and F1 score of 85.01%, 74.16 and 84.84%, respectively, which outperforms the highest value of baseline methods in accuracy and achieves competitive computation speed.

This research offers some implications regarding the impact of COVID-19 on catering industry in China by focusing on multi-modal sentiment of CSVs. The methodology can be utilized to analyze the opinions of the general public on social media platform and to categorize them accordingly.

This paper presents a novel deep-learning multimodal sentiment analysis model, which provides a new perspective for public opinion research on the short video platform.

Examining infertility through the prism of gender allows a more refined understanding of what infertility does to persons. Draw on the research conducted in a public centre for assisted reproduction in Italy, this chapter will show how the diagnosis of infertility fits into a medical description which is differentiated according to gender. By analyzing the way in which infertility is described and constructed in the course of consultations, we will see how infertility is understood both as a modality of relationship and action and as a property of persons.

The purpose of this article is to review current literature on intellectual capital and its second‐tier sub‐components with a view to developing an improved research framework and a foundation for measures.

Refereed journal articles were selected from social sciences citations index (SSCI) and business source premier with a time limit of ten years.

Clear definitions are developed for each sub‐component of intellectual capital. This was done after identifying, for each sub‐component, the dimensions along which current definitions and research differ. A research framework is developed, which emphasizes the interaction between sub‐components of intellectual capital.

The paper provides a clear integrated framework and measures of forms of intellectual capital to guide and inform future research.

On Justification: Economies of Worth (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1991/2006) was a synthetic and comprehensive parsing of common goods, goods that could and had to be justified in public. In response to Bourdieu’s critical sociology, they rather provided a robust and disciplined sociology of critique, the situated requirements of justification. They refused power and violence as integral to the operability of justification. They emphasized the ways in which conventions of worth afforded coordination, not their constitution of or by domination. They refused to make either capitalism, or the state, into primary motors of social order. Indeed, they refused social sphere, structure, or group as the ground of the good. They emphasized the cognitive capacities of agents. There was no passion, no desire, no bodily affect in these justified worlds. There wasn’t even any account of production of value, of children, or of money. And while they recognized the metaphysical aspect of the good and even used Christianity as a template for one of their cités, they rigorously excluded religion. The theory was designed to analyze moments of controversy, not quiescence or quietude. In his subsequent work, Boltanski aimed to address these absences. In this essay, we examine how Boltanski sought to restore love, violence, religion, production, and institution across five texts: Love and Justice as Competences (1990/2012), The New Spirit of Capitalism, co-authored with Eve Chiapello (1999/2007), The Foetal Condition: A Sociology of Engendering and Abortion (2004/2013), On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation (2009/2011), and La «Collection», Une Forme Neuve du Capitalisme – La Mise en Valeur Economique du Passé et ses Effets (2014) co-authored with Arnaud Esquerre.

This chapter considers financial instability as a phenomenon endogenous to the functioning of capitalism. Consequently, it seeks to identify the main sources and different forms of the latter in financialised capitalism. According to Keynes, capital assets prices are conceived as the expression of financial conventions. It is, therefore, important to distinguish between the returns expected by company directors, bankers, holders of equity titles, risk-takers and, in contrast, risk-averse holders of debt securities. Minsky enriches the analysis by attributing a decisive role to the leverage effect, at the origin of an accumulation of financial weaknesses in the balance sheets of non-financial agents during the expansion phases preceding financial crises. Regulation theory leads to the introduction of a distinction between the financial accelerator and the leverage effect. The first establishes a procyclical relationship at the macroeconomic level between the price of capital assets and the debt ratio of non-financial agents; the second acts at the microeconomic level through shareholder corporate governance, which determines the institutional conditions inciting firm directors to integrate shareholder expectations into their return forecasts. The empirical analysis identifies three forms of financial instability in financialised capitalism: the long-term financial cycle governed by the debt ratio of non-financial agents; the business cycle governed by the impact of stock prices on investment; and the short-term or even very short-term expected return revisions of financial actors. Its originality is to show that these three forms of instability acquire different characteristics depending on the national economy considered.

During the past decade we have witnessed renewed interest in the study and analysis of both social policy and social structure. Journalists, administrators, politicians, welfare personnel and social scientists have extensively been engaged in the interpretation and assessment of the impact of social policy on social structure and vice versa. It would appear that the return of liberal governments in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia had much to do with this time‐honoured revival. In the United States this activity can be largely attributed to the promise of the “Great Society” ‐ an attempt by the Johnson administration (1963–1968) to eliminate poverty, create employment, improve medical care and education and revitalise cities and rural areas. In the United Kingdom the Labour Governments of Wilson (1964–1970; 1974–1976) and Callaghan (1976–1979) held out similar promises for a more equitable society. Predictably the literature on social policy and social structure increased accordingly.

The paper aims to discuss liminal ethnography as a new approach for conducting research in segregated organisations.

The paper proposes liminality as a conceptual key to understanding both the condition of the organisational ethnographer and that of her interlocutors. Conversatio is the novel hermeneutical method that is discussed in conjunction with liminal ethnography.

Liminal ethnography as outlined in the paper emerged as an approach from preliminary contact with the organisational reality of the monastery as a type of total institution. Similarly, conversatio suggested itself as a method that maximises limited face to face contact with interlocutors whose access to the external world is restricted by a behavioural code enshrined in a Rule.

Paradoxically, the restrictions imposed on the researcher provided inspiration for the analytical approach proposed by the paper therefore initial limitations such as restricted access eventually spurred conceptual development.

The original approach should be of interest to organisational researchers operating in total institutions or in organisations where severely restricted access renders extant methodologies only partly applicable, if at all. The paper also discusses ethical issues arising from collaboration with rule‐governed communities.