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Based on social representation theory, this study aims to evaluate and analyze the similarities and differences between social representations of climate change held by people living in two territories, which have in common that they are exposed to coastal risks but have different socio-cultural contexts: on the one hand, Cartagena (Colombia) and on the other, Guadeloupe (French overseas department, France).

A double approach, both quantitative and qualitative, of social representation theory was adopted. The data collection was undertaken in two phases. First, the content and organization of social representation of climate change (SRCC) was examined with a quantitative study of 946 participants for both countries, followed by a qualitative study of 63 participants for both countries also.

The study finds unicity in the SRCC for the quantitative study. In contrast, the qualitative study highlights differences at the level of the institutional anchoring of the climate change phenomenon in these two different socioeconomic and political contexts.

These results are relevant for a reflection in terms of public policies for the prevention and management of collective natural risks, as well as for the promotion of ecological behavior adapted to political and ideological contexts.

The use of a multi-methodological approach (quantitative and qualitative) in the same research is valuable to confirm the importance of an in-depth study of the social representations of climate change because of the complexity of the phenomenon.

Representations of time are commonly used to construct narratives in visualisations of data. However, since time is a value-laden concept, and no representation can provide a full, objective account of “temporal reality”, they are also biased and political: reproducing and reinforcing certain views and values at the expense of alternative ones. This conceptual paper aims to explore expressions of temporal bias and politics in data visualisation, along with possibly mitigating user approaches and design strategies.

This study presents a theoretical framework rooted in a sociotechnical view of representations as biased and political, combined with perspectives from critical literacy, radical literacy and critical design. The framework provides a basis for discussion of various types and effects of temporal bias in visualisation. Empirical examples from previous research and public resources illustrate the arguments.

Four types of political effects of temporal bias in visualisations are presented, expressed as limitation of view, disregard of variation, oppression of social groups and misrepresentation of topic and suggest that appropriate critical and radical literacy approaches require users and designers to critique, contextualise, counter and cross beyond expressions of the same. Supporting critical design strategies involve the inclusion of multiple datasets and representations; broad access to flexible tools; and inclusive participation of marginalised groups.

The paper draws attention to a vital, yet little researched problem of temporal representation in visualisations of data. It offers a pioneering bridging of critical literacy, radical literacy and critical design and emphasises mutual rather than contradictory interests of the empirical sciences and humanities.

This study adopts the popular culture lens to investigate the collective understanding behind the human resources (HR) occupations.

The empirical study analyzes 129 characters from 87 movies, television (TV) series, books and comics. The measurement model was tested using structural equation modeling and cluster analysis identified five HR representations in the popular culture.

Popular culture reflects five HR representations: The Executor, the Hero, the Buddy, the Bore, and the Good-time person. Results suggest that public opinion pays scarce attention to the so-called HR “strategic position” while underlining the need for a more socially responsible HR approach.

The authors' study serves as a means for integrating past research on HR role and reputation, occupational image, self-identity and popular media. While most scholars have addressed popular culture as a single case and paid almost no attention to the HR domain, this article complements the literature by offering a fruitful way to distil HR summative popular culture representations, thus advocating for both a theoretical and a methodological contribution.

The behavioral decision-making of digital-self is one of the important research contents of the network of crowd intelligence. The factors and mechanisms that affect decision-making have attracted the attention of many researchers. Among the factors that influence decision-making, the mind of digital-self plays an important role. Exploring the influence mechanism of digital-selfs’ mind on decision-making is helpful to understand the behaviors of the crowd intelligence network and improve the transaction efficiency in the network of CrowdIntell.

In this paper, the authors use behavioral pattern perception layer, multi-aspect perception layer and memory network enhancement layer to adaptively explore the mind of a digital-self and generate the mental representation of a digital-self from three aspects including external behavior, multi-aspect factors of the mind and memory units. The authors use the mental representations to assist behavioral decision-making.

The evaluation in real-world open data sets shows that the proposed method can model the mind and verify the influence of the mind on the behavioral decisions, and its performance is better than the universal baseline methods for modeling user interest.

In general, the authors use the behaviors of the digital-self to mine and explore its mind, which is used to assist the digital-self to make decisions and promote the transaction in the network of CrowdIntell. This work is one of the early attempts, which uses neural networks to model the mental representation of digital-self.

This paper presents a survey of research into interactive robotic systems for the purpose of identifying the state of the art capabilities as well as the extant gaps in this emerging field. Communication is multimodal. Multimodality is a representation of many modes chosen from rhetorical aspects for its communication potentials. The author seeks to define the available automation capabilities in communication using multimodalities that will support a proposed Interactive Robot System (IRS) as an AI mounted robotic platform to advance the speed and quality of military operational and tactical decision making.

This review will begin by presenting key developments in the robotic interaction field with the objective of identifying essential technological developments that set conditions for robotic platforms to function autonomously. After surveying the key aspects in Human Robot Interaction (HRI), Unmanned Autonomous System (UAS), visualization, Virtual Environment (VE) and prediction, the paper then proceeds to describe the gaps in the application areas that will require extension and integration to enable the prototyping of the IRS. A brief examination of other work in HRI-related fields concludes with a recapitulation of the IRS challenge that will set conditions for future success.

Using insights from a balanced cross section of sources from the government, academic, and commercial entities that contribute to HRI a multimodal IRS in military communication is introduced. Multimodal IRS (MIRS) in military communication has yet to be deployed.

Multimodal robotic interface for the MIRS is an interdisciplinary endeavour. This is not realistic that one can comprehend all expert and related knowledge and skills to design and develop such multimodal interactive robotic interface. In this brief preliminary survey, the author has discussed extant AI, robotics, NLP, CV, VDM, and VE applications that is directly related to multimodal interaction. Each mode of this multimodal communication is an active research area. Multimodal human/military robot communication is the ultimate goal of this research.

A multimodal autonomous robot in military communication using speech, images, gestures, VST and VE has yet to be deployed. Autonomous multimodal communication is expected to open wider possibilities for all armed forces. Given the density of the land domain, the army is in a position to exploit the opportunities for human–machine teaming (HMT) exposure. Naval and air forces will adopt platform specific suites for specially selected operators to integrate with and leverage this emerging technology. The possession of a flexible communications means that readily adapts to virtual training will enhance planning and mission rehearsals tremendously.

Interaction, perception, cognition and visualization based multimodal communication system is yet missing. Options to communicate, express and convey information in HMT setting with multiple options, suggestions and recommendations will certainly enhance military communication, strength, engagement, security, cognition, perception as well as the ability to act confidently for a successful mission.

The objective is to develop a multimodal autonomous interactive robot for military communications. This survey reports the state of the art, what exists and what is missing, what can be done and possibilities of extension that support the military in maintaining effective communication using multimodalities. There are some separate ongoing progresses, such as in machine-enabled speech, image recognition, tracking, visualizations for situational awareness, and virtual environments. At this time, there is no integrated approach for multimodal human robot interaction that proposes a flexible and agile communication. The report briefly introduces the research proposal about multimodal interactive robot in military communication.

The purpose of this paper is to examine mothers’ social media accounts that focus on children’s fashion. The authors probed children’s fashion photo practices as representations of the mothers’ extended self and the kind of childhood representations produced by the social media accounts. They also investigated mothers’ perceptions of children’s privacy when engaging in sharenting – the sharing of information about children or parenting online.

The study is based on 16 semi-structured interviews with Finnish mothers who had Instagram accounts focusing on children’s fashion.

Children’s fashion photos play a diverse role in mothers’ identity work. The photos can be used to express a mother’s taste and aesthetic skills, to express values, to fit into peer groups and to store memories of oneself and the children. Through the photos, representations of the prevailing Finnish childhood ideals, such as authenticity, naturalness and playfulness, are reproduced. The mothers perceived the children as part of their extended self and justified sharenting with mother- and child-centered arguments.

Through shedding light on the practices of social media fashion photography, this paper provides insights into how commercialism and social media shape cultural expectations for both motherhood and childhood. The paper contributes to previous research on sharenting, extending it to the context of fashion photography.

Theoretically, the quality of representation is likely to be enhanced when more societal segments are included in formal political structures. An interesting question, however, is whether a similar correlation holds empirically outside established Western democracies. In the 2015 Egyptian parliament, women representation achieved an all-time high of 14.9% of total seats – nearly four times the historical Egyptian average. It is asked whether female legislators riding this unprecedent tide were different from their male colleagues in terms of their socio-economic backgrounds. But more importantly, the authors examine whether this increased representation led to any change in inclusion of more women’s issues in the legislative agenda, and how traditional topics are debated.

The authors conducted a content analysis of selected parliamentary scripts – generating on an original data set – to trace the topics and interventions raised by female MPs. The authors draw on the extensive literature on women’s representation, giving special attention to the structure versus agency dichotomy in this quest.

The authors conclude that female MPs were as active in parliamentary debates as to their male colleagues. Moreover, women did stress women issues more than men. The results indicate that the inclusion of traditionally under-represented groups does affect parliamentary agendas.

The authors conducted a content analysis of selected parliamentary scripts – generating on an original data set – to trace the topics and interventions raised by female MPs based on a case study of the 2015 Egyptian parliament.

Informed by social representation theory, the study aims to explore how marketing workers represent their activities on social media.

A naturalistic data set of 17,553 messages posted on Twitter by advertising workers was collected. A sample of over 1,000 unique messages from this data set, incorporating all external links and images, was analysed inductively using structured thematic analysis.

Advertising workers represent marketing work as a series of fun yet constrained activities involving relationships with clients and colleagues. They engage in cognitive polyphasia by evaluating these productive differences in both a positive and negative light.

The study marks a novel use of social representation theory and innovative social media analysis. Further research should explore these relations in greater depth by considering the networks that marketing workers create on social media and establish how, when and why marketing workers turn to social media in their everyday activities.

Marketing workers choose to represent aspects of their work to one another, using social media. Marketing managers should support such activities and consider social media as a way to understand the lives and experiences of marketing workers.

Marketing researchers have embraced digital media as a route to understanding consumers. This study demonstrates the value of analysing digital media to develop an understanding of marketing work. It sheds new light on the ways marketing workers create social relationships and enables marketing managers to understand and observe the social aspects of effective marketing.

This paper analyzes how public servants who work with young people discursively cope with competing demands on their agency, defined as their orientation toward and capabilities to influence their clients. Previous studies revealed how public servants treat their clients when facing competing demands but paid less attention to how public servants define their agency.

Micro-level discourse analysis is applied to analyze how public servants represent their agency in client relationships, drawing on interviews with nine individuals in a Finnish city who work with young people lacking jobs or school placements.

Instead of describing their agency coherently, the interviewees applied several discourses to represent their agency differently in relation to different demands. This ability to navigate contradictory discourses is discussed as reflexive discursive coping strategy, which enables public servants to maintain a positive image of their agency despite tensions at work.

Although the method does not allow direct generalizations, it reveals discursive strategies likely to be found in many contemporary public organizations.

The study indicates a need to better acknowledge and nurture the multifaceted nature of agency to improve service quality.

The findings deepen the view on tensions in public servants' work and show that diverse discourses not only create anxiety but also help individuals dealing with contradictory work.

Using, for the first time, a sample of European listed firms from 30 countries with different legal regimes of board-level employee representation (BLER), the purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of BLER on firms’ value of European public companies, where employee representation is voluntary or imposed by law depending on the country of origin.

Using a difference-in-differences approach and a matching procedure, the authors analyze the impact of BLER on firms' value.

The results of this paper suggest that BLER adopted voluntarily affects positively firms’ value comparing to a group of firms where employee representation is in some way mandatory. Moreover, the findings of this paper show that firms from countries where BLER is not imposed by law tend to pay higher dividends. Nevertheless, the evidence presented in this paper only holds for low levels of employee representation on the board.

This research not only provides some evidence in favor of the codetermination on corporate governance but also offers new avenues for discussing the conditions necessary for codetermination to be effective, especially the level of employees' participation on board.

This study provides to policymakers new insights for them to gain perspective, analyze and decide if codetermination is a useful tool to improve firms’ performance or at least in what conditions it should be applied.

This study incentives the discussion of the proper way to include workers in firms’ boards with expected benefits on firms’ performance, economies and societies.

This paper provides evidence of a positive (but limited) impact on firms’ value derived from voluntary codetermination.