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Across Eurasia, horse transport transformed ancient societies. Although evidence for chariotry is well dated, the origins of horse riding are less clear. Techniques to distinguish chariotry from riding in archaeological samples rely on elements not typically recovered from many steppe contexts. Here, the authors examine horse remains of Mongolia's Deer Stone-Khirigsuur (DSK) Complex, comparing them with ancient and modern East Asian horses used for both types of transport. DSK horses demonstrate unique dentition damage that could result from steppe chariotry, but may also indicate riding with a shallow rein angle at a fast gait. A key role for chariots in Late Bronze Age Mongolia helps explain the trajectory of horse use in early East Asia.
For some years now there has been growing enthusiasm amongst practitioners, managers and some academics about the value of promoting fun at work, resulting in a substantial body of managerial literature. As a result, the authors believe that fun at work deserves further research attention. In this paper the authors critically review the large body of practitioner and management literature promoting fun at work. We find this literature dependent on a number of untheorised, untested assumptions about the nature of fun, its desirability and usefulness to business. Utilising Schein’s organisational theory, alongside ethnographic research into fun at work, we highlight the complexity of implementing fun at work initiatives in practice. Drawing on organizational psychology we also make a short case study of the current use of fun at work as a job marketing tool by recruitment agencies in New Zealand. Our discussion does make it possible to come to some conclusions about fun at work. However, we also pose a series of research questions that emerge from our discussion that will provide a framework for ongoing research.
Introduction
People, in common with other creatures, need to identify recurrences in the world in order to thrive. Recurrences, whether in space or time, provide the stability and predictability that enable both understanding of the past and effective action in the future. Recurrences are often collected into categories and, in humans, named. One crucial category, and set of categories, is events, the stuff that fills our lives: preparing a meal, cleaning the house, going to the movies. Event categories are an especially rich and complex set of categories as they can extend over both time and space and can involve interactions and interrelations among multiple people, places, and things. Despite their complexity, they can be named by simple terms, a war or an election or a concert and described in a few words, folding the clothes, rinsing the dishes, or tuning the violin. People have an advantage over their non-verbal relatives in that language can facilitate learning categories and serve as a surrogate for them in reasoning. What are the effects of naming or describing over and above identifying categories? And what do the descriptions reveal about the categories? Here, we examine some of the consequences and characteristics of language for familiar categories, events, and the bodies that perform them.
A category is a category is a category. The whole point of categorization is to treat unlike things as if they were alike. After all, if we treated each encounter with each object or event as the unique thing it is, we would be unable to generalize, unable to learn, unable to remember, unable to communicate. Ignoring differences underlies all of cognition. But which differences to ignore? And are all categories alike, or do some, in particular those associated with our bodies and their actions, have a special status? First, we review the structure of categories, then the special features of bodies and events, and finally relate them together and to the topic of this book, imitation.
Structure of categories
Defining features or family resemblance?
What has been termed the “classical theory” has been trounced in recent decades as a theory of how people decide on category membership or draw inferences about category members (e.g., Medin, 1989; Miller & Johnson-Laird, 1976; Rosch, 1978; Smith & Medin, 1981). At the core of the classical view is the notion of defining features, features that are singly necessary and jointly sufficient for category membership. Certainly some legal and mathematical categories, such as citizenship and odd number, have that character. But psychologists want to know how people think about categories: do they think of categories in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions? The evidence suggests otherwise. It suggests that people think of categories in terms of central tendencies or frequent features or typical examples.
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