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Popular Assumption (popular + assumption)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences75%

Selected Abstracts

Roads to Poverty Reduction?

DEVELOPMENT POLICY REVIEW, Issue 4 2008
Exploring Rural Roads' Impact on Mobility in Africa
Within current poverty reduction programmes, focus on the social-welfare millennium development goals is widening to embrace a concern with infrastructural investment, particularly for remote areas. The previously popular assumption that rural disadvantage can be remedied by road-building is resurfacing. Using survey data from Ethiopia, Zambia and Vietnam, this article explores how effective such investment is in addressing mobility and social-service accessibility in rural areas. The findings indicate that, in extremely remote areas, road improvements may catalyse the expansion of social-service provision, as evidenced in Ethiopia. However, given the poor's relative lack of motor vehicles and ability to pay for public transport, they are, by no means, a sufficient condition for enhancing the mobility of the rural poor. [source]

CHALLENGING CERTAINTY: THE UTILITY AND HISTORY OF COUNTERFACTUALISM

HISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 1 2010
SIMON T. KAYE
ABSTRACT Counterfactualism is a useful process for historians as a thought-experiment because it offers grounds to challenge an unfortunate contemporary historical mindset of assumed, deterministic certainty. This article suggests that the methodological value of counterfactualism may be understood in terms of the three categories of common ahistorical errors that it may help to prevent: the assumptions of indispensability, causality, and inevitability. To support this claim, I survey a series of key counterfactual works and reflections on counterfactualism, arguing that the practice of counterfactualism evolved as both cause and product of an evolving popular assumption of the plasticity of history and the importance of human agency within it. For these reasons, counterfactualism is of particular importance both historically and politically. I conclude that it is time for a methodological re-assessment of the uses of such thought-experiments in history, particularly in light of counterfactualism's developmental relatedness to cultural, technological, and analytical modernity. [source]

ROLE CONFLICT AND FLEXIBLE WORK ARRANGEMENTS: THE EFFECTS ON APPLICANT ATTRACTION

PERSONNEL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 1 2002
BARBARA L. RAU
This paper challenges a popular assumption that organizations with flexible work arrangements are more attractive to job seekers than those with a standard work arrangement. Drawing on boundary theory, we suggest that the attractiveness of these arrangements depends in part on job seekers' interrole conflict. Subjects were 142 MBA students at a midsized midwestern university. Those with high role conflict were more attracted to an organization when flextime was offered than when it was not. Those with low role conflict, however, were just slightly less attracted to an organization when flextime was offered. Conversely, subjects with low role conflict were more attracted to an organization when telecommuting was offered than when it was not; subjects with high role conflict were indifferent. These results suggest that organizations should understand the needs of their targeted applicant pool and carefully consider recruitment implications of work arrangements when analyzing costs associated with these policies. [source]

Semantic markup for literary scholars: How descriptive markup affects the study and teaching of literature

PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY (ELECTRONIC), Issue 1 2002
D. Grant Campbell
This paper describes a qualitative study, which investigated the attitudes of literary scholars towards the features of semantic markup for primary texts. The scholars were shown seven variations of the same text in XML format, each varying according to the two main features of semantic markup: the separation of structure from layout, and the ability to add interpretive markup to enhance searchability. The responses suggest that, contrary to many popular assumptions, layout is a vital part of the reading process, which implies that the standardization of DTDs begun with the Text Encoding Initiative should extend to styling as well. Second, interpretive markup achieves problematic results: while searchability is improved, the markup threatens to inhibit the reader's experience of the text. [source]