The prime ministers all play chess on a multi-dimensional board, prey to challenges that vary in type and intensity over time, some of which are new and growing, and others constant. The most skilful negotiate their way through these constraints, turning them to their advantage, and refuse to be defined by adversities. The least able are swallowed up by them. We first consider institutional restraints, the checks and balances they face, some dating back to 1721, before considering variable constraints, which have made and destroyed premierships, and have rendered even the best-qualified incumbent a cornered animal.

Drawing on a combined ethnographic and historical case study of BLOX, a landmark building in Copenhagen, this chapter advances a processual understanding of buildings by exploring the intersection between materiality, temporality, and politics. We analyze organizing processes unfolding between the material building and public, private, and philanthropic organizations. We distinguish between three dimensions of the building’s material temporality, which we analyze drawing on an event-based approach: historicizing the building through time, projecting the building over time, and enacting the building in time. While the ‘projecting’ and ‘enacting’ dimensions are inspired by prior work on material temporality, our study adds the ‘historicizing’ dimension. We develop an empirical model showing the interplay between these three dimensions. A main implication of our study is to show how the organizing effects of material buildings emerge not only from their material durability, but also from their temporal malleability. In closing, we discuss implications for a temporal understanding of affordances and propose a temporally relational view of affordances.

The pandemic has settled work and management situations in which collaborators more rarely meet. Beyond issues of maintaining a sense of co-presence, what seems to be more and more at stake is the dramatization and intensification of encounters on site but also the dramatization of remote narrative events in the future or the past. Collaborators, customers, need to meet physically at some point in a meeting room, and something need more than ever to happen at this moment. But beyond that, organizing needs also to have an intensity. Discussions around projects, problems, opportunities, happen in the flow of an open life, in a decentered way. Organizing events of the past and the future thus need to call each other, to intensively call each other in time. Managers need to build dispersed narrative events likely to intensively elaborate this dramatic resonance for people continuously coming in and out of ephemeral projects. This Intense Decentered Organizing (IDO) based on intense moments of co-presence and intensification of past and future events is a huge stake of our time. And more than ever, dramatization and theatralization appear as very important new regimes of historicity and eventfulness.

Chapter 18 opens by asking readers to list places in their communities where people go to learn new things. The chapter describes types of places that support public engagement, offers resources for finding specific places or events, and addresses practical considerations. Zoos, libraries, and different types of museums, as well as event-based opportunities such as different types of festivals, are addressed. Suggestions are also given for using one’s own institution. For example, many universities host programs for school-aged children or participate in local events such as cultural celebrations. Practical considerations related to such places and events include timing (once or recurring); registration, rules, and fees; specific space and resources (booth, table, electricity, internet access); audience typical at the venue; and individual and team logistics. The chapter includes resource lists related to these various suggestions. Its Closing Worksheet asks readers to find three places or events where they might take the demonstrations they have developed and to note about each one specifics such as dates and contacts, as well as some of their demonstration’s logistical needs.

The goal of this paper is to discuss which basic semantic entities we should include in our formal semantic ontology, and on which principles we should include them (cf. Bach 1986b). The vast majority of formal theories employ individuals as a basic type; they represent quantification over, modification of, and reference to individuals. But many theories include additional types or entities, including possible worlds, but also less common ones like vectors. Some papers have argued that types should be constrained or reduced; others that they should be proliferated. I present some representative arguments on both sides and suggest a path forward in evaluating them against one another.

The three broad classes of emotions are characterized as Event-based emotions, Agent-based emotions, and Object-based emotions. Event-based emotions consist of a Well-being group, a Prospect-based group, and a Fortunes-of-others group. Emotion types in the first two of these groups focus on the self-relevance of focal events, while those in the Fortunes-of-others group focus on the self-relevance of events that primarily affect others. In addition to Event-based emotions are the Attribution emotions, which arise from focusing on the actions of agents, and the Attraction emotions, which result from focusing on objects. Also introduced is a group of Compound emotions. These emerge when focusing at the same time on both an event and an agent held to be responsible for that event. The three broad classes of emotions are evaluated (appraised) in terms of goals, standards, and tastes, respectively, and individual emotion types are distinguished by their location within this overall global structure of emotions. A skeptical view of the notion of basic emotions is presented.

Part V explores how Batswana manage interdependencies and distinctions between kinship and politics on local, national, and transnational levels. It takes in three major events: in Chapter 13, a family party; in Chapter 14, a homecoming celebration for the first age regiment to be initiated in a generation; and in Chapter 15, an opening event held by a respected national NGO. Chapter 13 argues that family celebrations are catalysts for conflict, performing familial success and distinguishing home from village by demonstrating an ability to manage dikgang. In Chapter 14, families prove pivotal to regenerating the morafe (tribal polity), and initiation proves pivotal in re-embedding Tswana law in families – equipping them to better engage dikgang. NGO, government, and donor performances of success also rely on the performance of kinship; in Chapter 15’s opening ceremony, idioms and ideals of kinship legitimise the work of government and civil society agencies, establishing their precedence over the families they serve. But their everyday work is also permeated – even generated – by unmarked, conflicting kinship dynamics. In their interventions, these agencies unsettle both the interdependencies and distinctions Batswana customarily make between kinship and politics; and, in doing so, they may create more profound challenges than the AIDS epidemic.

Dijo ga di ratanelwe.

An introduction to the book, covering key ideas and concepts.

I provide a checklist/recipe for doing relativity calculations.

In an interview with Lisa Wedeen, one of the contemporary comparative political scientists whose work most consistently speaks to both political science and interdisciplinary audiences, the editors ask Wedeen to reflect on the role that comparison has played in her work. Wedeen is the author of three groundbreaking monographs on seemingly single cases – two on Syria and one on Yemen. Yet, in the course of the interview, it becomes apparent how profoundly comparative Wedeen’s work is. She discusses her comparison of “exemplary events” in her field sites as a method through which to draw broad lessons about politics from apparent ephemera. She discusses the comparisons she makes between ethnographic insights and political theory to tack back and forth between empirical and theoretical material with the goal of developing new ways to think about politics. And she discusses the ways in which these comparative practices make her work not just an empirical practice but also a political practice – one that makes the work of a comparative political scientist not just a career but a vocation.

This chapter integrates the treatments of quantifier phrases, genitives, and pronouns from Chapters 6 and 7 in a more detailed assignment-variable-based layered n analysis of noun phrases. Applications to additional effects associated with “specificity” are explored, including presuppositional vs. nonpresuppositional uses, contextual domain restriction, weak vs. strong quantifiers, existential ‘there’ sentences, and modal independence. Possibilities for nonlocal readings of world arguments are captured in a general phase-based syntax. An alternative matching analysis of relative clauses is provided, which improves on the head-raising account from Chapter 6. A semantics incorporating events is briefly considered in a parallel layered v analysis of verb phrases.

In this chapter, I articulate and defend several views that play important roles throughout the remainder of the book. First, I articulate the task of a metaphysical theory of action as that of providing an account of the distinction between actions and mere behaviours. I then distinguish two things we might mean to talk about when we talk about someone’s actions: the things they do; and their particular doings of those things. I argue that we are ontologically committed to entities of both types, and defend my preferred ontology, according to which particular doings are events, while the things we do are a kind of property we possess.

In this chapter, I provide two positive arguments in favour of my sophisticated Neo-Davidsonian treatment of negative action sentences and against the Deflationist alternative. I argue that my view can accommodate a range of data about the behaviour of adverbs in negative action sentences and their interaction with perceptual locutions, which Deflationism can’t. Thus, we can solve the problem of negative action by rejecting Deflationism, and with it the thought that (at least some) negative actions aren’t events. Instead, we should claim that negative actions are simply events which play the ensuring role. I close by comparing my view to two recent alternatives.

In this Introduction, I briefly sketch 'the problem of negative action', which I will be concerned, in the remainder of the book, to explore and to solve. I also provide a sketch of the book as a whole, and provide a brief defense of my methodology.

I pull together the main threads of the book, showing how the arguments of the previous chapters allow us to solve the problem of negative action by rejecting (PNA 3).