Journal articles on the topic 'Fragmentation and silos'

Purpose Organizational silos that build on the existing organizational structures are often considered to have negative effects in the form of focus on private narrow objectives and organizational fragmentation. To avoid such harmful outcomes, competence management is called for, and in this, the human resources (HR) function takes a key role. Among other things, it can provide basis for emergence and utilization of communities of practice (CoPs) that build on common interests and effectively cross organizational boundaries. These features of CoPs allow them to carry competences and ease knowledge transfer and to break down the harmful isolation. Quite paradoxically, the challenge is that CoPs can also form within silos, thereby strengthening isolation, and HR as a utility department can itself be particularly prone to the silo effects. Examination of boundaries and silos through an original study conducted in a Finnish energy sector company suggests that HR managers need competences outside their own expertise area and courage to augment their CoPs across the functional boundaries to break out of the HR silo and to assist other functions to do the same. Design/methodology/approach The study is based on qualitative research data gathered in four focus group interviews with HR personnel from an energy sector company in November 2012. Totally, 19 professionals were interviewed (five HR partners, five talent development and performance managers, five vice presidents of HR and four HR managers) in the four focus groups. The company’s HR personnel represented units from Finland, Sweden, Poland and Estonia. Findings Examination of boundaries and silos in the Finnish energy sector suggests that HR managers need competences outside their own field (e.g. knowledge of the business and offerings of the firm) and courage to augment their CoPs across the functional boundaries to break out of the HR silo and to assist other functions to do the same. Originality/value Research provided that CoPs can have different effects on silos. As they are capable of crossing organizational and functional boundaries, they may effectively mitigate adverse silo effects; however, if CoPs are formed within silos, they may strengthen isolation and fragmentation. In addition, utility departments and supporting functions are particularly prone to the risk of CoPs forming within silos. The HR function is one manifestation of this. Paradoxically, it also has the potential to enhance the other type of effects that CoPs can exert, as competence management can be used to foster intentional and self-organizing CoPs that counter silo effects.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the explanatory power of existing theories of entrepreneurship. The authors find gaps and fragmentation and offer propose a different approach – a theory of entrepreneuring – a theory of practice. Design/methodology/approach This is a conceptual paper, but the authors draw heavily on the literature. They also offer examples of what the theory can offer. Findings Existing theory is good at explaining aspects of entrepreneurship. However, most theories are discipline bound and operate in silos. A theory of entrepreneurship practice can connect and bridge disciplines. Originality/value A theory of entrepreneurship as practice will not replace current theories. It will however complement them and thus be well suited to emerging economies.

This paper introduces a new dimension to conceptualising smart cities – a cross-border approach for heterogeneous cities. There is a mutual agreement between smart city scholars that cities are smart when they reduce silos and enable better flow of data between city functions and services. This paper focuses on the cross-border aspect of smart cities and claims that ICT in cities do not automatically lead to ubiquitous services across the cities. This can even lead to more fragmentation compared to pre-ICT area. A new model for joint digital services in the cross-border cities – the Urban Operating System – is proposed and will be evaluated in context of two Northern European cities with high commuting frequency: Helsinki and Tallinn.

AbstractDespite the best efforts of event producers and on-site medical teams, there are sometimes serious illnesses, life-threatening injuries, and fatalities related to music festival attendance. Producers, clinicians, and researchers are actively seeking ways to reduce the mortality and morbidity associated with these events. After analyzing the available literature on music festival health and safety, several major themes emerged. Principally, stakeholder groups planning in isolation from one another (ie, in silos) create fragmentation, gaps, and overlap in plans for major planned events (MPEs).The authors hypothesized that one approach to minimizing this fragmentation may be to create a framework to “connect the dots,” or join together the many silos of professionals responsible for safety, security, health, and emergency planning at MPEs. Adapted from the well-established literature regarding the management of cardiac arrests, both in and out of hospital, the “chain of survival” concept is applied to the disparate groups providing services that support event safety in the context of music festivals. The authors propose this framework for describing, understanding, coordinating and planning around the integration of safety, security, health, and emergency service for events. The adapted Event Chain of Survival contains six interdependent links, including: (1) event producers; (2) police and security; (3) festival health; (4) on-site medical services; (5) ambulance services; and (6) off-site medical services.The authors argue that adapting and applying this framework in the context of MPEs in general, and music festivals specifically, has the potential to break down the current disconnected approach to event safety, security, health, and emergency planning. It offers a means of shifting the focus from a purely reactive stance to a more proactive, collaborative, and integrated approach. Improving health outcomes for music festival attendees, reducing gaps in planning, promoting consistency, and improving efficiency by reducing duplication of services will ultimately require coordination and collaboration from the beginning of event production to post-event reporting.LundA, TurrisSA. The Event Chain of Survival in the context of music festivals: a framework for improving outcomes at major planned events. Prehosp Disaster Med. 2017;32(4):437–443.

To date, the knowledge base on the topic of violence and integrity in sports is limited, the scientific community is relatively small, and the research field is in its infancy. The few researchers have predominantly been working in silos, and, consequently, initial studies have examined this issue with a singular discipline approach. Violence in sport is a multifaceted issue that has physical, psychological, social and organizational consequences. The fragmentation of the research efforts in this area thus far has limited the possibility of formulating a clear, collaborative and international agenda for future research. In this article, we aim to build on previous research, but also borrow insights from public administration, to pave the way for new studies that look from a governance perspective at policy strategies for the prevention of interpersonal violence against young athletes in sports. Particularly, we aim, in line with the Dutch policy development, to discuss the value of local networks, and its challenges, as vehicles of collaboration and prevention.

Risk-sensitive urban development is an innovative planning approach that can transform the way cities are built in order to face the uncertainties that arise from climate-induced disaster risks. However, the potential to initiate such a transformative approach has not materialized because of the many underlying issues that need to be understood properly. Therefore, this study conducted a systematic review to gather empirical evidence on the issues and challenges in implementing risk-sensitive urban development. The study identified forty-six issues and challenges under seven key themes that need addressing in order to facilitate the desirable transition: trade-offs, governance, fragmentation and silos, capacity, design and development, data, and funding. The issues and challenges that exist under trade-offs for negotiating solutions for risk-sensitive urban development and the governance of multiple stakeholders were identified as the top two areas that need attention in facilitating the desirable transition. This study also revealed that important information, such as scientific information, hazard and risk information, temporal and spatial information, and critical local details are not being produced and shared between stakeholders in decision-making. A profound participatory process that involves all the stakeholders in the decision-making process was identified as the pathway to ensure equitable outcomes in risk-sensitive urban development.

All of the objects in the real world are envisioned to be connected and/or represented, through an infrastructure layer, in the virtual world of the Internet, becoming Things with status information. Services are then using the available data from this Internet-of-Things (IoT) for various social and economical benefits which explain its extreme broad usage in very heterogeneous fields. Domain administrations of diverse areas of application developed and deployed their own IoT systems and services following disparate standards and architecture approaches that created a fragmentation of things, infrastructures and services in vertical IoT silos. Coordination and cooperation among IoT systems are the keys to build “smarter” IoT services boosting the benefits magnitude. This article analyses the technical trends of the future IoT world based on the current limitations of the IoT systems and the capability requirements. We propose a hyper-connected IoT framework in which “things” are connected to multiple interdependent services and describe how this framework enables the development of future applications. Moreover, we discuss the major limitations in today’s IoT and highlight the required capabilities in the future. We illustrate this global vision with the help of two concrete instances of the hyper-connected IoT in smart cities and autonomous driving scenarios. Finally, we analyse the trends in the number of connected “things” and point out open issues and future challenges. The proposed hyper-connected IoT framework is meant to scale the benefits of IoT from local to global.

PurposeTo help ensure that children with social and behavioral health problems get the support services they need, organizations collaborate in cross-sectoral networks. In this article, the authors explore and compare the structure of these complex child service delivery networks in terms of differentiation (composition) and integration (interconnection). In particular, the authors investigate the structure of client referral and identify which organizations are most prominent within that network structure and could therefore fulfill a coordinating role.Design/methodology/approach The authors used a comparative case study approach and social network analysis on three interorganizational networks consisting of 65 to 135 organizations within the Dutch child service delivery system. Semi-structured interviews with the network managers were conducted, and an online questionnaire was sent out to the representatives of all network members.Findings The networks are similarly differentiated into 11 sectors with various tasks. Remarkably, network members have contact with an average of 20–26 organizations, which is a fairly high number to be handled successfully. In terms of integration, the authors found a striking diversity in the structures of client referral and not all organizations with a gatekeeper task hold central positions.Originality/value Due to the scarcity of comparative whole network research in the field, the strength of this study is a deeper understanding of the differentiation and integration of complex child service delivery systems. These insights are crucial in order to deliver needed services and to minimize service silos and fragmentation.

Purpose Improving and transforming children and young people’s (CYP) mental health (MH) services is increasing in importance. Such systems, however, are often delivered across providers and commissioned in different ways which can lead to fragmentation and complexity, ultimately impacting negatively on how young people access services. With increased demand, this means that services are more likely to operate in silos when indeed they should be better integrated. Developing systemic interventions for service leaders and commissioners may support improved integration. The paper aims to discuss this issue. Design/methodology/approach Systemic issues across a CYP MH system were assessed and formulated. As a result, using systemic theory, appreciative inquiry and organisational change theories, a “systemic conversation” intervention was developed and delivered to senior leaders and commissioners of this system. This intervention comprised three workshop style sessions with numerous tasks. Findings Qualitative feedback and scores in the improvement of important elements that the conversations targeted were collected and examined descriptively. Participants rated their perceived improvement in relationships, transparency, integration, helpfulness and shared vision for future development. Practical implications In transforming CYP MH services, this paper considers how the authors can intervene across organisations representing the system to further integrate and improve care for those accessing services. Originality/value The intervention described is an original way of intervening with provider representatives from across the system. The paper provides a blueprint of how this might be adopted by others.

The key challenges of the building, engineering, construction, operations, and mining (BECOM) industries are the lack of trust, inefficiencies, and the fragmentation of the information value chain into vulnerable data silos throughout the lifecycle of projects. This paper aims to develop a novel conceptual model for the implementation of blockchain technology (BCT) for digital twin(s) (DT) in the BECOM industry 4.0 to improve trust, cyber security, efficiencies, information management, information sharing, and sustainability. A PESTELS approach is used to review the literature and identify the key challenges affecting BCT adoption for the BECOM industry 4.0. A review of the technical literature on BCT combined with the findings from PESTELS analysis permitted researchers to identify the key technological factors affecting BCT adoption in the industry. This allowed offering a technological framework—namely, the decentralized digital twin cycle (DDTC)—that leverages BCT to address the key technological factors and to ultimately enhance trust, security, decentralization, efficiency, traceability, and transparency of information throughout projects’ lifecycles. The study also identifies the gaps in the integration of BCT with key technologies of industry 4.0, including the internet of things (IoT), building information modeling (BIM), and DT. The framework offered addresses key technological factors and narrows key gaps around network governance, scalability, decentralization, interoperability, energy efficiency, computational requirements, and BCT integration with IoT, BIM, and DT throughout projects’ lifecycles. The model also considers the regulatory aspect and the environmental aspect, and the circular economy (CE). The theoretical framework provides key technological building blocks for industry practitioners to develop the DDTC concept further and implement it through experimental works. Finally, the paper provides an industry-specific analysis and technological approach facilitating BCT adoption through DT to address the key challenges and improve sustainability for the BECOM industry 4.0.

Purpose Research data publishing is today widely regarded as crucial for reproducibility, proper assessment of scientific results, and as a way for researchers to get proper credit for sharing their data. However, several challenges need to be solved to fully realize its potential, one of them being the development of a global standard for links between research data and literature. Current linking solutions are mostly based on bilateral, ad hoc agreements between publishers and data centers. These operate in silos so that content cannot be readily combined to deliver a network graph connecting research data and literature in a comprehensive and reliable way. The Research Data Alliance (RDA) Publishing Data Services Working Group (PDS-WG) aims to address this issue of fragmentation by bringing together different stakeholders to agree on a common infrastructure for sharing links between datasets and literature. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach This paper presents the synergic effort of the RDA PDS-WG and the OpenAIRE infrastructure toward enabling a common infrastructure for exchanging data-literature links by realizing and operating the Data-Literature Interlinking (DLI) Service. The DLI Service populates and provides access to a graph of data set-literature links (at the time of writing close to five million, and growing) collected from a variety of major data centers, publishers, and research organizations. Findings To achieve its objectives, the Service proposes an interoperable exchange data model and format, based on which it collects and publishes links, thereby offering the opportunity to validate such common approach on real-case scenarios, with real providers and consumers. Feedback of these actors will drive continuous refinement of the both data model and exchange format, supporting the further development of the Service to become an essential part of a universal, open, cross-platform, cross-discipline solution for collecting, and sharing data set-literature links. Originality/value This realization of the DLI Service is the first technical, cross-community, and collaborative effort in the direction of establishing a common infrastructure for facilitating the exchange of data set-literature links. As a result of its operation and underlying community effort, a new activity, name Scholix, has been initiated involving the technological level stakeholders such as DataCite and CrossRef.

With the increasing storage capacity of personal computing devices, the problems of information overload and information fragmentation are apparent on users’ desktops. For the Web, semantic technologies solve this problem by adding a machine-interpretable information layer on top of existing resources. It has been shown that the application of these technologies to desktop environments is helpful for end users. However, certain characteristics of the Semantic Web architecture that are commonly accepted in the Web context are not desirable for desktops. To overcome these limitations, the authors propose the sile model, which combines characteristics of the Semantic Web and file systems. This model is a conceptual foundation for the Semantic Desktop and serves as underlying infrastructure on which applications and further services can be built. The authors present one service, a virtual file system based on siles, which allows users to semantically annotate files and directories and keeps full compatibility to traditional hierarchical file systems. The authors also discuss how Semantic Web vocabularies can be applied for meaningful annotation of files and present a prototypical implementation of the model and analyze the performance of typical access operations, both on the file system and metadata level.

Este artículo es una aproximación histórica a la evolución en la tenencia de la tierra en Hatoviejo (Bello, Antioquia, Colombia) durante los siglos XVII y XVIII. En él se estudia el proceso de fragmentación de la merced de tierras entregada por el cabildo de la ciudad de Antioquia al conquistador Gaspar de Rodas en el siglo XVI, quien lo cedió a sus hijos. Brevemente se muestra como aquellas inmensas propiedades se subdividieron hasta conformar varios hatos y estancias donde se producían muchos de los alimentos que se consumían en la provincia. A partir de los protocolos notariales se reconstruye el proceso subsiguiente de fragmentación de aquellas haciendas hasta la aparición de pequeñas y medianas propiedades en manos de mestizos, indígenas y pardos libres, para concluir con el análisis de la estructura tenencial de la tierra al final del periodo estudiado.Palabras clave: Hatoviejo, tenencia de la tierra, poblamiento, haciendas, mediana y pequeña propiedad. “More cattle that fruits”. The land tenure evolution in Hatoviejo (Bello), Antioquia, from 17th to 18th centuries AbstractThis article is an historical approach to the land tenure evolution in Hatoviejo, (Bello, Antioquia, Colombia) during the 17th and 18th centuries. In this article it is studied the mercy fragmentation process of lands that were given by the city of Antioquia town council to the conqueror Gaspar de Rodas in the 16th century, who later ceded them to his sons. In a brief it is shown how those large properties were subdivided to become several cattle farms and farms where most of the food consumed in the province was produced. From notarial registers it is reconstructed the subsequent fragmentation of those farms until the birth of small and medium properties belonging to mestizo people, native people and mulatto people, and having as a conclusion the analysis of the land tenure structure from this studied period.Keywords: Hatoviejo, Land Tenure, Settlement, Farms, Medium and Small Property.

Objective: This study identified barriers to and facilitators of mental health (MH) and alcohol and drug (AOD) comorbidity services, in order to drive service improvement. Method: Participatory action research enabled strong engagement with community services, including Aboriginal and refugee groups. Surveys, interviews and consultations were undertaken with clinicians and managers of MH, AOD and support services, consumers, families, community advocates and key service providers. Community participation occurred through consultation, advisory and working party meetings, focus groups and workshops. Results: Barriers included inadequate staff training and poor community and workforce knowledge about where to find help. Services for Aboriginal people, refugees, the elderly and youth were inadequate. Service fragmentation (‘siloes’) occurred through competitive short-term funding and frequent re-structuring. Reliance on the local hospital emergency department was concerning. Consumer trust, an important element in engagement, was often lacking. Conclusions: Comorbidity should be core business of both MH and AOD services by providing consistent ‘no wrong door’ care. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) need longer funding cycles to promote stability and retain skilled workers. Comorbidity workforce training for government and NGO staff is required. Culturally appropriate comorbidity services are urgently needed. Despite the barriers, collaboration between clinicians/workers was valued.

Resumen. Durante siglos, la historia cultural europea ha sido escrita bajo una óptica eminentemente androcéntrica, que invisibilizó toda aportación de la mujer en la sociedad, ne­gándosele su desarrollo personal y profesional. A pesar de ello, la participación de determina­das mujeres en el progreso de la historia fue determinante a través de las diferentes épocas. Concretamente, en el desarrollo del s. XX , su contribución tuvo un papel bien significativo, por cuanto Occidente experimentó una serie de avances sin precedentes que trajeron consigo la primera ola feminista. En su afán de progreso y como una de las piezas clave del nuevo paisaje cultural, la mujer comenzó a tener presencia activa en diferentes ámbitos de la sociedad. De esta manera, la vanguardia europea dio voz a un destacado número de creadoras en su proyec­to de revitalización artística. En España, importantes creadoras contribuyeron a la conforma­ción del nuevo arte de vanguardia entre 1906 y 1936.Actualmente, esta parte omitida de la historia por el discurso oficial está siendo recu­perada, poniéndose en valor los nombres y el trabajo de las protagonistas que contribuyeron con sus diferentes aportaciones para reclamar, así, su presencia en la sociedad. Este artículo plantea un discurso inédito dentro de esta labor de recuperación. Su punto de vista innovador reside en el análisis de los procesos creativos de estas autoras de la vanguardia española, sos­teniendo la hipótesis de que dichas creadoras emplearon una metodología de creación común, de tipo fragmentaria. Interpretando determinados elementos importados de Europa y adap­tándolos a la cultura española, construyeron desde sus personalidades un lenguaje propio, acorde con la modernidad y diferente del de la comunidad artística masculina. Sus obras serán resultado de esta construcción fragmentaria, asemejándose a mosaicos cuyas teselas deberán ser analizadas para comprender sus referentes. Palabras clave: creadoras, vanguardia, vanguardia española, modernidad, fragmentación. Abstract. Throughout History, European cultural history was written from an eminently androcentric perspective that did not recognise all women’s contributions in society, denying their personal and professional development. Still, the participation of certain women in the progress of history was decisive in different periods. Specifically, was during the twentieth cen­tury when their contributions had a true significance. This fact was possible due to the series of unprecedented advances that took place in Western society that brought the first-wave femi­nism. Women began to have presence in different spheres of society in its eagerness of progress as key pieces of the new cultural landscape. In this way, the European avant-garde incorporated to an outstanding number of women artists into the project of artistic revitalization.In Spain, important women artists contributed to the generation of the new avant-garde art between 1906 and 1936.Currently, this part of history omitted by the official discourse is being recovered, finally taking in count the work done by these women artists who brought with their contributions in order to claim their presence in society. This paper presents a new discourse as a part of this recovery effort.Its innovative point of view lies in the analysis proposes the study of the creative proces­ses of these authors of the Spanish avant-garde, supporting the hypothesis that these creators used a common creation methodology based on a fragmentary nature.Due to their personality, women artists created an original style by interpreting some aspects coming from Europe and translated them to their Spanish culture. This was in the line of the modernity context and different from the male artists community. Their artworks are result of this fragmentary conception, which is presented as resembling mosaics whose tiles should be analysed in order to understand their references. Keywords: women artists, avant-garde, Spanish avant-garde, modernity, fragmentation.

Objectives: We aimed to understand the information architecture and degree of integration of mortality surveillance systems in Ghana and Peru.Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional study using a combination of document review and unstructured interviews to describe and analyse the sub-systems collecting mortality data.Results: We identified 18 and 16 information subsystems with independent databases capturing death events in Peru and Ghana respectively. The mortality information architecture was highly fragmented with a multiplicity of unconnected data silos and with formal and informal data collection systems.Conclusion: Reliable and timely information about who dies where and from what underlying cause is essential to reporting progress on Sustainable Development Goals, ensuring policies are responding to population health dynamics, and understanding the impact of threats and events like the COVID-19 pandemic. Integrating systems hosted in different parts of government remains a challenge for countries and limits the ability of statistics systems to produce accurate and timely information. Our study exposes multiple opportunities to improve the design of mortality surveillance systems by integrating existing subsystems currently operating in silos.

Accelerating environmental uncertainty and the need to cope with increasingly complex market and social demands, combine to create high value for the intuitive approach to decision-making at the strategic level. Research on intuition suffers from marked fragmentation, due to the existence of disciplinary silos based on diverse, apparently irreconcilable, ontological and epistemological assumptions. Not surprisingly, there is no integrated interdisciplinary framework suitable for a rich account of intuition, contemplating how affect and cognition intertwine in the intuitive process, and how intuition scales up from the individual to collective decision-making. This study contributes to the construction of a broad conceptual framework, suitable for a multi-level account of intuition and for a fruitful dialogue with distant research areas. It critically discusses two mainstream conceptualizations of intuition which claim to be grounded in a cross-disciplinary consensus. Drawing on the complexity paradigm, it then proposes a conceptualization of intuition as emergence. Finally, it explores the theoretical and practical implications.

Abstract Background Late-life depression is common, modifiable, yet under-treated. Service silos and human resources shortage contribute to insufficient prevention and intervention. We describe an implementation research protocol of collaborative stepped care and peer support model that integrates community mental health and aged care services to address service fragmentation, using productive ageing and recovery principles to involve older people as peer supporters to address human resource issue. Methods/design This is a non-randomised controlled trial examining the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of the “Jockey Club Holistic Support Project for Elderly Mental Wellness” (JC JoyAge) model versus care as usual (CAU) in community aged care and community mental health service units in 12 months. Older people aged 60 years and over with mild to moderate depressive symptoms or risk factors for developing depression will be included. JoyAge service users will receive group-based activities and psychoeducation, low-intensity psychotherapy, or high-intensity psychotherapy according to the stepped care protocol in addition to usual community mental health or aged care, with support from an older peer supporter. The primary clinical outcome, depressive symptoms, and secondary outcomes, self-harm risk, anxiety symptoms, and loneliness, will be measured with the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9), Self-Harm Inventory, Generalized Anxiety Disorder 7-item scale (GAD-7), and UCLA Loneliness 3-item scale (UCLA-3) respectively. Cost-effectiveness analysis will assess health-related quality of life using the EQ-5D-5L and service utilisation using the Client Service Receipt Inventory (CSRI). We use multilevel linear mixed models to compare outcomes change between groups and calculate the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio in terms of quality-adjusted life years. Discussion This study will provide evidence about outcomes for older persons with mental health needs receiving collaborative stepped care service without silos and with trained young-old volunteers to support engagement, treatment, and transitions. Cost-effectiveness findings from this study will inform resource allocation in this under-treated population. Trial registration ClinicalTrials.gov NCT03593889. Registered on 20 July 2018.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to critically evaluate the canonical contribution of the classical theories of multinational enterprises (MNE) and complement them with congruous multi-theoretical lenses to a propose a meta-theoretical view for competitive advantage. The proposed framework is applied to fundamental questions of MNE, and exploratory insights are revealed. Design/methodology/approach This study sought to review the literature on various paradigms such as resource-based view, knowledge-based view, attention-based view, relational view, dynamic capability view and institution-based view to propose a meta-theoretical approach explicating the phenomenon of competitiveness. Findings This study proffers that the key to global competitiveness lies in building micro-foundational, multidimensional and multilevel multinational orchestration capabilities. The requisite orchestration capabilities are capabilities par excellence that explain: how organizational capabilities originate through the cognition of individual employees at the micro level; how individual-level abilities are amplified when they are harnessed through relational capabilities to form knowledge capabilities at the meso-level; and how the confluence of knowledge capabilities and higher order dynamic capabilities gives rise to heterogeneous firm-level knowledge-based dynamic capabilities that can be combined with institution capabilities to aggrandize the prediction of competitive advantage for MNEs. Originality/value The successful development of MNE competitiveness as a field of academic inquiry, brought about by an increasing amount of theoretical specialization, has come at the price of significant fragmentation of the overall scientific quest. The abovementioned paradigms and their underlying constructs have primarily been conceptualized in silos. The classical theories of MNE have been used a starting point to which complementary multidisciplinary views have been scaffolded to gain a more nuanced understanding of global competitiveness.

An urban water system (UWS) has three main service components: 1) drinking water, 2) wastewater, and 3) stormwater. Historically, each component in urban water development evolved over time with different objectives for “different” types of water. Even today, the trend continues, as different urban water services are managed in silos. This trend is less sustainable, resilient, and reliable mainly because of significant pressures on freshwater supplies exerted by increasing population, demand for high living standards, rapid urbanization, and climate change. To cope with these challenges, the conventional thinking necessitates a change. This paper identifies a number of significant research gaps related to inter-relationships among various UWS service components. An innovative paradigm - One Water Approach (OWA), which considers “urban water” as a single entity, is investigated. Currently, Australia, the United States, and Singapore are leading the pack to implement OWA, whereas only a few Canadian municipalities have embraced OWA at a very basic level. In the European Union nations, Amsterdam (Netherlands) emphasized the need for integrated water resource management in an urban environment. This review highlights the challenges in adopting OWA and also proposes guiding principles in ongoing water management practices. Institutional complexities involving an intricate regulatory structure for different UWS service components, a wider fragmentation in decision making at government levels, and insufficient stakeholder engagement within and between water utilities and other institutions present serious challenges. Various strategies such as, data sharing between water utilities, use of novel technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence, sensor technologies), and visionary leadership at different government levels have been identified as key drivers for the adoption and implementation of OWA. The authors believe that a paradigm shift from ‘conventional’ approach to OWA is needed to increase resiliency and reliability of water services and assist decision-makers of UWSs.

Abstract Background People living with and beyond cancer (PLC) receive various forms of specialty care at different locations and many interventions concurrently or over time. They are affected by the operation of professional and organizational silos. This results in undue delays in access, unmet needs, sub-optimal care experiences and clinical outcomes, and human and financial costs for PLCs and healthcare systems. National cancer control programs advocate organizing in a network to coordinate actions, solve fragmentation problems, and thus improve clinical outcomes and care experiences for every dollar invested. The variable outcomes of such networks and factors explaining them have been documented. Governance is the “missing link” for understanding outcomes. Governance refers to the coordination of collective action by a body in a position of authority in pursuit of a common goal. The Quebec Cancer Network (QCN) offers the opportunity to study in a natural environment how, why, by whom, for whom, and under what conditions collaborative governance contributes to practices that produce value-added outcomes for PLCs, healthcare providers, and the healthcare system. Methods/design The study design consists of a longitudinal case study, with multiple nested cases (4 local networks nested in the QCN), mobilizing qualitative and quantitative data and mixed data from various sources and collected using different methods, using the realist evaluation approach. Qualitative data will be used for a thematic analysis of collaborative governance. Quantitative data from validated questionnaires will be analyzed to measure relational coordination and teamwork, care experience, clinical outcomes, and health-related health-related quality of life, as well as a cost analysis of service utilization. Associations between context, governance mechanisms, and outcomes will be sought. Robust data will be produced to support decision-makers to guide network governance towards optimized clinical outcomes and the reduction of the economic toxicity of cancer for PLCs and health systems.

Abstract Background An increase in chronic illness and multimorbidity together with ‘ageing societies’ and demand for long-term care have created growing need for integrated care and improved coordination of services. However, health systems largely failed to respond to changing needs. Education and training of health professionals are still organised ‘in silos’; connections between health and social care and other groups providing relevant services are usually absent; and fragmentation of care according to specialisation remains the dominant organising principle of healthcare services. In this situation there is an urgent need for change to build skills and competencies, use health human resources more effectively and rearrange care according to population needs and preventative approaches. Objectives This workshop brings together research from different national and European research projects positioned at the interface of healthcare services and workforce development. The major aim is to foster the building of bridges across professions, organisations and sectors. The workshop seeks to explore the benefits and novel insights gained from comprehensive efforts to strengthen coordination and integrated models of care and how this may foster agency of the health professions as well as the implementation of new models of care that strengthen health promotion. The findings illustrate that capacity for innovating health systems can be improved through coordination and the crucial role of health professions in these transformations. Health professionals may act as facilitators of integrated work and care arrangements. Strengthening professional agency and coordination across sectors, organisations and professional groups embodies new opportunities for innovating health service provision and health workforce development. These transformations, in turn, may foster people-centred healthcare services. Key messages Building bridges between sectors, organisations and professions is a key to people-centred care. Coordination improves health workforce agency and service capacity to respond to population needs.

Abstract Background The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged healthcare systems and research worldwide. Data is collected all over the world and needs to be integrated and made available to other researchers quickly. However, the various heterogeneous information systems that are used in hospitals can result in fragmentation of health data over multiple data ‘silos’ that are not interoperable for analysis. Consequently, clinical observations in hospitalised patients are not prepared to be reused efficiently and timely. There is a need to adapt the research data management in hospitals to make COVID-19 observational patient data machine actionable, i.e. more Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) for humans and machines. We therefore applied the FAIR principles in the hospital to make patient data more FAIR. Results In this paper, we present our FAIR approach to transform COVID-19 observational patient data collected in the hospital into machine actionable digital objects to answer medical doctors’ research questions. With this objective, we conducted a coordinated FAIRification among stakeholders based on ontological models for data and metadata, and a FAIR based architecture that complements the existing data management. We applied FAIR Data Points for metadata exposure, turning investigational parameters into a FAIR dataset. We demonstrated that this dataset is machine actionable by means of three different computational activities: federated query of patient data along open existing knowledge sources across the world through the Semantic Web, implementing Web APIs for data query interoperability, and building applications on top of these FAIR patient data for FAIR data analytics in the hospital. Conclusions Our work demonstrates that a FAIR research data management plan based on ontological models for data and metadata, open Science, Semantic Web technologies, and FAIR Data Points is providing data infrastructure in the hospital for machine actionable FAIR Digital Objects. This FAIR data is prepared to be reused for federated analysis, linkable to other FAIR data such as Linked Open Data, and reusable to develop software applications on top of them for hypothesis generation and knowledge discovery.

Abstract Background The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged healthcare systems and research worldwide. Data is collected all over the world and needs to be integrated and made available to other researchers quickly. However, the various heterogeneous information systems that are used in hospitals can result in fragmentation of health data over multiple data ‘silos’ that are not interoperable for analysis. Consequently, clinical observations in hospitalised patients are not prepared to be reused efficiently and timely. There is a need to adapt the research data management in hospitals to make COVID-19 observational patient data machine actionable, i.e. more Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) for humans and machines. We therefore applied the FAIR principles in the hospital to make patient data more FAIR. Results In this paper, we present our FAIR approach to transform COVID-19 observational patient data collected in the hospital into machine actionable digital objects to answer medical doctors’ research questions. With this objective, we conducted a coordinated FAIRification among stakeholders based on ontological models for data and metadata, and a FAIR based architecture that complements the existing data management. We applied FAIR Data Points for metadata exposure, turning investigational parameters into a FAIR dataset. We demonstrated that this dataset is machine actionable by means of three different computational activities: federated query of patient data along open existing knowledge sources across the world through the Semantic Web, implementing Web APIs for data query interoperability, and building applications on top of these FAIR patient data for FAIR data analytics in the hospital. Conclusions Our work demonstrates that a FAIR research data management plan based on ontological models for data and metadata, open Science, Semantic Web technologies, and FAIR Data Points is providing data infrastructure in the hospital for machine actionable FAIR Digital Objects. This FAIR data is prepared to be reused for federated analysis, linkable to other FAIR data such as Linked Open Data, and reusable to develop software applications on top of them for hypothesis generation and knowledge discovery.

Abstract Stratovolcanoes are commonly characterised by cyclic eruptive activity marked by transitions between dome-forming, Vulcanian, Subplinian and Plinian eruptions. Guagua Pichincha volcano (Ecuador) has been a location of such cyclicity for the past ~ 2000 years, with Plinian eruptions in the first and tenth centuries AD (Anno Domini/after Christ), and CE (Common Era) 1660, which were separated by dome-forming to Subplinian eruptions, such as the recent 1999–2001 eruption. These cycles are therefore a prominent example of effusive-explosive transitions at varying timescales. Here, we investigate the reasons for such shifts in activity by focusing on degassing and outgassing processes within the conduit. We have coupled a petrophysical and textural analysis of dacites from the CE 1660 Plinian eruption and the 1999–2001 dome-forming/Vulcanian eruption, with different percolation models in order to better understand the role of degassing on eruptive style. We demonstrate that the transition from dome-forming to Plinian activity is correlated with differences in phenocryst content and consequently in bulk viscosity. A lower initial phenocryst content and viscosity is inferred for the Plinian case, which promotes faster ascent, closed-system degassing, fragmentation and explosive activity. In contrast, dome-forming phases are promoted by a higher magma viscosity due to higher phenocryst content, with slower ascent enhancing gas escape and microlite crystallization, decreasing explosivity and yielding effusive activity. Resumen Los estratovolcanes se caracterizan comúnmente por presentar actividad eruptiva cíclica, marcada por transiciones entre erupciones formadoras de domos y erupciones de tipo Vulcanianas, Subplinianas y Plinianas. El volcán Guagua Pichincha (Ecuador) ha dado lugar a tal ciclicidad durante los últimos ~ 2000 años, con erupciones Plinianas tanto en los siglos Primero y Décimo, como en el año 1660, las cuales estuvieron intercaladas por erupciones formadoras de domos y de tipo Subplinianas, tal como ocurrió durante la erupción reciente de 1999–2001. Estos ciclos son, por lo tanto, ejemplos destacados de transiciones eruptivas de tipo efusiva-explosiva a escalas de tiempo variadas. En este trabajo, investigamos las razones de tales cambios de actividad enfocándonos en procesos de exsolución y pérdida de gases del magma en el conducto (desgasificación en sistemas cerrado y abierto). Hemos acoplado análisis petrofísicos y texturales tanto de dacitas de la erupción Pliniana de 1660, como de la erupción formadora de domos/Vulcaniana de 1999–2001, junto con diferentes modelos de percolación, para así comprender mejor el rol de la exsolución de volátiles en el estilo eruptivo. Demostramos que la transición desde una actividad efusiva formadora de domos a una Pliniana está correlacionada con diferencias en el contenido de fenocristales y, subsecuentemente, con la viscosidad total del magma. Un contenido inicial menor de fenocristales y una menor viscosidad se infiere para el caso Pliniano, lo que promueve un ascenso más rápido, desgasificación en sistema cerrado, fragmentación y finalmente actividad explosiva. Por el contrario, las fases formadoras de domos son promovidas por una viscosidad mayor debido a un contenido mayor de fenocristales, con ascenso más lento promoviendo a su vez el escape de gases y la cristalización de microlitos, disminuyendo la explosividad y produciendo actividad efusiva.

If you cannot understand my argument, and declare “It’s Greek to me,” you are quoting Shakespeare.Bernard LevinPsoriatic arthritis, in its acute or “generalised” stage, is unbearably painful. Exacerbating the crippling of the joints, the entire surface of the skin is covered with lesions only moderately salved by anti-inflammatory ointment, the application of which is as painful as the ailment it seeks to relieve: NURSE MILLS: I’ll be as gentle as I can.Marlow’s face again fills the screen, intense concentration, comical strain, and a whispered urgency in the voice over—MARLOW: (Voice over) Think of something boring—For Christ’s sake think of something very very boring—Speech a speech by Ted Heath a sentence long sentence from Bernard Levin a quiz by Christopher Booker a—oh think think—! Really boring! A Welsh male-voice choir—Everything in Punch—Oh! Oh! — (Potter 17-18)Marlow’s collation of boring things as a frantic liturgy is an attempt to distract himself from a tumescence that is both unwanted and out of place. Although bed-ridden and in constant pain, he is still sensitive to erogenous stimulation, even when it is incidental. The act of recollection, of garnering lists of things that bore him, distracts him from his immediate situation as he struggles with the mental anguish of the prospect of a humiliating orgasm. Literary lists do many things. They provide richness of detail, assemble and corroborate the materiality of the world of which they are a part and provide insight into the psyche and motivation of the collator. The sheer desperation of Dennis Potter’s Marlow attests to the arbitrariness of the list, the simple requirement that discrete and unrelated items can be assembled in linear order, without any obligation for topical concatenation. In its interrogative form, the list can serve a more urgent and distressing purpose than distraction:GOLDBERG: What do you use for pyjamas?STANLEY: Nothing.GOLDBERG: You verminate the sheet of your birth.MCCANN: What about the Albigensenist heresy?GOLDBERG: Who watered the wicket in Melbourne?MCCANN: What about the blessed Oliver Plunkett?(Pinter 51)The interrogative non sequitur is an established feature of the art of intimidation. It is designed to exert maximum stress in the subject through the use of obscure asides and the endowing of trivial detail with profundity. Harold Pinter’s use of it in The Birthday Party reveals how central it was to his “theatre of menace.” The other tactic, which also draws on the logic of the inventory to be both sequential and discontinuous, is to break the subject’s will through a machine-like barrage of rhetorical questions that leave no time for answers.Pinter learned from Samuel Beckett the pitiless, unforgiving logic of trivial detail pushed to extremes. Think of Molloy’s dilemma of the sucking stones. In order for all sixteen stones that he carries with him to be sucked at least once to assuage his hunger, a reliable system has to be hit upon:Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I replaced with a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced with the stone that was in my mouth, as soon as I had finished sucking it. Thus there were still four stones in each of my four pockets, but not quite the same stones. And when the desire to suck took hold of me again, I drew again on the right pocket of my greatcoat, certain of not taking the same stone as the last time. And while I sucked it I rearranged the other stones in the way I have just described. And so on. (Beckett, Molloy 69)And so on for six pages. Exhaustive permutation within a finite lexical set is common in Beckett. In the novel Watt the eponymous central character is charged with serving his unseen master’s dinner as well as tidying up afterwards. A simple and bucolic enough task it would seem. But Beckett’s characters are not satisfied with conjecture, the simple assumption that someone must be responsible for Mr. Knott’s dining arrangements. Like Molloy’s solution to the sucking stone problem, all possible scenarios must be considered to explain the conundrum of how and why Watt never saw Knott at mealtime. Twelve possibilities are offered, among them that1. Mr. Knott was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that he was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that such an arrangement existed, and was content.2. Mr. Knott was not responsible for the arrangement, but knew who was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that such an arrangement existed, and was content.(Beckett, Watt 86)This stringent adherence to detail, absurd and exasperating as it is, is the work of fiction, the persistence of a viable, believable thing called Watt who exists as long as his thought is made manifest on a page. All writers face this pernicious prospect of having to confront and satisfy “fiction’s gargantuan appetite for fact, for detail, for documentation” (Kenner 70). A writer’s writer (Philip Marlow) Dennis Potter’s singing detective struggles with the acute consciousness that words eventually will fail him. His struggle to overcome verbal entropy is a spectre that haunts the entire literary imagination, for when the words stop the world stops.Beckett made this struggle the very stuff of his work, declaring famously that all he wanted to do as a writer was to leave “a stain upon the silence” (quoted in Bair 681). His characters deteriorate from recognisable people (Hamm in Endgame, Winnie in Happy Days) to mere ciphers of speech acts (the bodiless head Listener in That Time, Mouth in Not I). During this process they provide us with the vocabulary of entropy, a horror most eloquently expressed at the end of The Unnamable: I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. (Beckett, Molloy 418)The importance Beckett accorded to pauses in his writing, from breaks in dialogue to punctuation, stresses the pacing of utterance that is in sync with the rhythm of human breath. This is acutely underlined in Jack MacGowran’s extraordinary gramophone recording of the above passage from The Unnamable. There is exhaustion in his voice, but it is inflected by an urgent push for the next words to forestall the last gasp. And what might appear to be parsimony is in fact the very commerce of writing itself. It is an economy of necessity, when any words will suffice to sustain presence in the face of imminent silence.Hugh Kenner has written eloquently on the relationship between writing and entropy, drawing on field and number theory to demonstrate how the business of fiction is forever in the process of generating variation within a finite set. The “stoic comedian,” as he figures the writer facing the blank page, self-consciously practices their art in the full cognisance that they select “elements from a closed set, and then (arrange) them inside a closed field” (Kenner 94). The nouveau roman (a genre conceived and practiced in Beckett’s lean shadow) is remembered in literary history as a rather austere, po-faced formalism that foregrounded things at the expense of human psychology or social interaction. But it is emblematic of Kenner’s portrait of stoicism as an attitude to writing that confronts the nature of fiction itself, on its own terms, as a practice “which is endlessly arranging things” (13):The bulge of the bank also begins to take effect starting from the fifth row: this row, as a matter of fact, also possesses only twenty-one trees, whereas it should have twenty-two for a true trapezoid and twenty-three for a rectangle (uneven row). (Robbe-Grillet 21)As a matter of fact. The nouveau roman made a fine if myopic art of isolating detail for detail’s sake. However, it shares with both Beckett’s minimalism and Joyce’s maximalism the obligation of fiction to fill its world with stuff (“maximalism” is a term coined by Michel Delville and Andrew Norris in relation to the musical scores of Frank Zappa that opposes the minimalism of John Cage’s work). Kenner asks, in The Stoic Comedians, where do the “thousands on thousands of things come from, that clutter Ulysses?” His answer is simple, from “a convention” and this prosaic response takes us to the heart of the matter with respect to the impact on writing of Isaac Newton’s unforgiving Second Law of Thermodynamics. In the law’s strictest physical sense of the dissipation of heat, of the loss of energy within any closed system that moves, the stipulation of the Second Law predicts that words will, of necessity, stop in any form governed by convention (be it of horror, comedy, tragedy, the Bildungsroman, etc.). Building upon and at the same time refining the early work on motion and mass theorised by Aristotle, Kepler, and Galileo, inter alia, Newton refined both the laws and language of classical mechanics. It was from Wiener’s literary reading of Newton that Kenner segued from the loss of energy within any closed system (entropy) to the running silent out of words within fiction.In the wake of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic turn in thinking in the 1940s, which was highly influenced by Newton’s Second Law, fiction would never again be considered in the same way (metafiction was a term coined in part to recognise this shift; the nouveau roman another). Far from delivering a reassured and reassuring present-ness, an integrated and ongoing cosmos, fiction is an isometric exercise in the struggle against entropy, of a world in imminent danger of running out of energy, of not-being:“His hand took his hat from the peg over his initialled heavy overcoat…” Four nouns, and the book’s world is heavier by four things. One, the hat, “Plasto’s high grade,” will remain in play to the end. The hand we shall continue to take for granted: it is Bloom’s; it goes with his body, which we are not to stop imagining. The peg and the overcoat will fade. “On the doorstep he felt in his hip pocket for the latchkey. Not there. In the trousers I left off.” Four more things. (Kenner 87)This passage from The Stoic Comedians is a tour de force of the conjuror’s art, slowing down the subliminal process of the illusion for us to see the fragility of fiction’s precarious grip on the verge of silence, heroically “filling four hundred empty pages with combinations of twenty-six different letters” (xiii). Kenner situates Joyce in a comic tradition, preceded by Gustave Flaubert and followed by Beckett, of exhaustive fictive possibility. The stoic, he tells us, “is one who considers, with neither panic nor indifference, that the field of possibilities available to him is large perhaps, or small perhaps, but closed” (he is prompt in reminding us that among novelists, gamblers and ethical theorists, the stoic is also a proponent of the Second Law of Thermodynamics) (xiii). If Joyce is the comedian of the inventory, then it is Flaubert, comedian of the Enlightenment, who is his immediate ancestor. Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881) is an unfinished novel written in the shadow of the Encyclopaedia, an apparatus of the literate mind that sought complete knowledge. But like the Encyclopaedia particularly and the Enlightenment more generally, it is fragmentation that determines its approach to and categorisation of detail as information about the world. Bouvard and Pécuchet ends, appropriately, in a frayed list of details, pronouncements and ephemera.In the face of an unassailable impasse, all that is left Flaubert is the list. For more than thirty years he constructed the Dictionary of Received Ideas in the shadow of the truncated Bouvard and Pécuchet. And in doing so he created for the nineteenth century mind “a handbook for novelists” (Kenner 19), a breakdown of all we know “into little pieces so arranged that they can be found one at a time” (3): ACADEMY, FRENCH: Run it down but try to belong to it if you can.GREEK: Whatever one cannot understand is Greek.KORAN: Book about Mohammed, which is all about women.MACHIAVELLIAN: Word only to be spoken with a shudder.PHILOSOPHY: Always snigger at it.WAGNER: Snigger when you hear his name and joke about the music of the future. (Flaubert, Dictionary 293-330)This is a sample of the exhaustion that issues from the tireless pursuit of categorisation, classification, and the mania for ordered information. The Dictionary manifests the Enlightenment’s insatiable hunger for received ideas, an unwieldy background noise of popular opinion, general knowledge, expertise, and hearsay. In both Bouvard and Pécuchet and the Dictionary, exhaustion was the foundation of a comic art as it was for both Joyce and Beckett after him, for the simple reason that it includes everything and neglects nothing. It is comedy born of overwhelming competence, a sublime impertinence, though not of manners or social etiquette, but rather, with a nod to Oscar Wilde, the impertinence of being definitive (a droll epithet that, not surprisingly, was the title of Kenner’s 1982 Times Literary Supplement review of Richard Ellmann’s revised and augmented biography of Joyce).The inventory, then, is the underlining physio-semiotics of fictional mechanics, an elegiac resistance to the thread of fiction fraying into nothingness. The motif of thermodynamics is no mere literary conceit here. Consider the opening sentence in Borges:Of the many problems which exercised the reckless discernment of Lönnrot, none was so strange—so rigorously strange, shall we say—as the periodic series of bloody events which culminated at the villa of Triste-le-Roy, amid the ceaseless aroma of the eucalypti. (Borges 76)The subordinate clause, as a means of adjectival and adverbial augmentation, implies a potentially infinite sentence through the sheer force of grammatical convention, a machine-like resistance to running out of puff:Under the notable influence of Chesterton (contriver and embellisher of elegant mysteries) and the palace counsellor Leibniz (inventor of the pre-established harmony), in my idle afternoons I have imagined this story plot which I shall perhaps write someday and which already justifies me somehow. (72)In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a single adjective charmed with emphasis will do to imply an unseen network:The visible work left by this novelist is easily and briefly enumerated. (Borges 36)The annotation of this network is the inexorable issue of the inflection: “I have said that Menard’s work can be easily enumerated. Having examined with care his personal files, I find that they contain the following items.” (37) This is a sample selection from nineteen entries:a) A Symbolist sonnet which appeared twice (with variants) in the review La conque (issues of March and October 1899).o) A transposition into alexandrines of Paul Valéry’s Le cimitière marin (N.R.F., January 1928).p) An invective against Paul Valéry, in the Papers for the Suppression of Reality of Jacques Reboul. (37-38)Lists, when we encounter them in Jorge Luis Borges, are always contextual, supplying necessary detail to expand upon character and situation. And they are always intertextual, anchoring this specific fictional world to others (imaginary, real, fabulatory or yet to come). The collation and annotation of the literary works of an imagined author (Pierre Menard) of an invented author (Edmond Teste) of an actual author (Paul Valéry) creates a recursive, yet generative, feedback loop of reference and literary progeny. As long as one of these authors continues to write, or write of the work of at least one of the others, a persistent fictional present tense is ensured.Consider Hillel Schwartz’s use of the list in his Making Noise (2011). It not only lists what can and is inevitably heard, in this instance the European 1700s, but what it, or local aural colour, is heard over:Earthy: criers of artichokes, asparagus, baskets, beans, beer, bells, biscuits, brooms, buttermilk, candles, six-pence-a-pound fair cherries, chickens, clothesline, cockles, combs, coal, crabs, cucumbers, death lists, door mats, eels, fresh eggs, firewood, flowers, garlic, hake, herring, ink, ivy, jokebooks, lace, lanterns, lemons, lettuce, mackeral, matches […]. (Schwartz 143)The extended list and the catalogue, when encountered as formalist set pieces in fiction or, as in Schwartz’s case, non-fiction, are the expansive equivalent of le mot juste, the self-conscious, painstaking selection of the right word, the specific detail. Of Ulysses, Kenner observes that it was perfectly natural that it “should have attracted the attention of a group of scholars who wanted practice in compiling a word-index to some extensive piece of prose (Miles Hanley, Word Index to Ulysses, 1937). More than any other work of fiction, it suggests by its texture, often by the very look of its pages, that it has been painstakingly assembled out of single words…” (31-32). In a book already crammed with detail, with persistent reference to itself, to other texts, other media, such formalist set pieces as the following from the oneiric “Circe” episode self-consciously perform for our scrutiny fiction’s insatiable hunger for more words, for invention, the Latin root of which also gives us the word inventory:The van of the procession appears headed by John Howard Parnell, city marshal, in a chessboard tabard, the Athlone Poursuivant and Ulster King of Arms. They are followed by the Right Honourable Joseph Hutchinson, lord mayor Dublin, the lord mayor of Cork, their worships the mayors of Limerick, Galway, Sligo and Waterford, twentyeight Irish representative peers, sirdars, grandees and maharajahs bearing the cloth of estate, the Dublin Metropolitan Fire Brigade, the chapter of the saints of finance in their plutocratic order of precedence, the bishop of Down and Connor, His Eminence Michael cardinal Logue archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, His Grace, the most reverend Dr William Alexander, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, the chief rabbi, the Presbyterian moderator, the heads of the Baptist, Anabaptist, Methodist and Moravian chapels and the honorary secretary of the society of friends. (Joyce, Ulysses 602-604)Such examples demonstrate how Joycean inventories break from narrative as architectonic, stand-alone assemblages of information. They are Rabelaisian irruptions, like Philip Marlow’s lesions, that erupt in swollen bas-relief. The exaggerated, at times hysterical, quality of such lists, perform the hallucinatory work of displacement and condensation (the Homeric parallel here is the transformation of Odysseus’s men into swine by the witch Circe). Freudian, not to mention Stindberg-ian dream-work brings together and juxtaposes images and details that only make sense as non-sense (realistic but not real), such as the extraordinary explosive gathering of civic, commercial, political, chivalric representatives of Dublin in this foreshortened excerpt of Bloom’s regal campaign for his “new Bloomusalem” (606).The text’s formidable echolalia, whereby motifs recur and recapitulate into leitmotifs, ensures that the act of reading Ulysses is always cross-referential, suggesting the persistence of a conjured world that is always already still coming into being through reading. And it is of course this forestalling of Newton’s Second Law that Joyce brazenly conducts, in both the textual and physical sense, in Finnegans Wake. The Wake is an impossible book in that it infinitely sustains the circulation of words within a closed system, creating a weird feedback loop of cyclical return. It is a text that can run indefinitely through the force of its own momentum without coming to a conclusion. In a text in which the author’s alter ego is described in terms of the technology of inscription (Shem the Penman) and his craft as being a “punsil shapner,” (Joyce, Finnegans 98) Norbert Wiener’s descriptive example of feedback as the forestalling of entropy in the conscious act of picking up a pencil is apt: One we have determined this, our motion proceeds in such a way that we may say roughly that the amount by which the pencil is not yet picked up is decreased at each stage. (Wiener 7) The Wake overcomes the book’s, and indeed writing’s, struggle with entropy through the constant return of energy into its closed system as a cycle of endless return. Its generative algorithm can be represented thus: “… a long the riverrun …” (628-3). The Wake’s sense of unending confounds and contradicts, in advance, Frank Kermode’s averring to Newton’s Second Law in his insistence that the progression of all narrative fiction is defined in terms of the “sense of an ending,” the expectation of a conclusion, whereby the termination of words makes “possible a satisfying consonance with the origins and with the middle” (Kermode 17). It is the realisation of the novel imagined by Silas Flannery, the fictitious author in Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller, an incipit that “maintains for its whole duration the potentiality of the beginning” (Calvino 140). Finnegans Wake is unique in terms of the history of the novel (if that is indeed what it is) in that it is never read, but (as Joseph Frank observed of Joyce generally) “can only be re-read” (Frank 19). With Wiener’s allegory of feedback no doubt in mind, Jacques Derrida’s cybernetic account of the act of reading Joyce comes, like a form of echolalia, on the heels of Calvino’s incipit, his perpetual sustaining of the beginning: you stay on the edge of reading Joyce—for me this has been going on for twenty-five or thirty years—and the endless plunge throws you back onto the river-bank, on the brink of another possible immersion, ad infinitum … In any case, I have the feeling that I haven’t yet begun to read Joyce, and this “not having begun to read” is sometimes the most singular and active relationship I have with his work. (Derrida 148) Derrida wonders if this process of ongoing immersion in the text is typical of all works of literature and not just the Wake. The question is rhetorical and resonates into silence. And it is silence, ultimately, that hovers as a mute herald of the end when words will simply run out.Post(script)It is in the nature of all writing that it is read in the absence of its author. Perhaps the most typical form of writing, then, is the suicide note. In an extraordinary essay, “Goodbye, Cruel Words,” Mark Dery wonders why it has been “so neglected as a literary genre” and promptly sets about reviewing its decisive characteristics. Curiously, the list features amongst its many forms: I’m done with lifeI’m no goodI’m dead. (Dery 262)And references to lists of types of suicide notes are among Dery’s own notes to the essay. With its implicit generic capacity to intransitively add more detail, the list becomes in the light of the terminal letter a condition of writing itself. The irony of this is not lost on Dery as he ponders the impotent stoicism of the scribbler setting about the mordant task of writing for the last time. Writing at the last gasp, as Dery portrays it, is a form of dogged, radical will. But his concluding remarks are reflective of his melancholy attitude to this most desperate act of writing at degree zero: “The awful truth (unthinkable to a writer) is that eloquent suicide notes are rarer than rare because suicide is the moment when language fails—fails to hoist us out of the pit, fails even to express the unbearable weight” (264) of someone on the precipice of the very last word they will ever think, let alone write. Ihab Hassan (1967) and George Steiner (1967), it would seem, were latecomers as proselytisers of the language of silence. But there is a queer, uncanny optimism at work at the terminal moment of writing when, contra Dery, words prevail on the verge of “endless, silent night.” (264) Perhaps when Newton’s Second Law no longer has carriage over mortal life, words take on a weird half-life of their own. Writing, after Socrates, does indeed circulate indiscriminately among its readers. There is a dark irony associated with last words. When life ceases, words continue to have the final say as long as they are read, and in so doing they sustain an unlikely, and in their own way, stoical sense of unending.ReferencesBair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. London: Jonathan Cape, 1978.Beckett, Samuel. Molloy Malone Dies. The Unnamable. London: John Calder, 1973.---. Watt. London: John Calder, 1976.Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths. Selected Stories & Other Writings. Ed. Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby. New York: New Directions, 1964.Calvino, Italo. If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller. Trans. 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