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Competing Views (competing + views)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences45%
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting18%
Distribution within Humanities and Social Sciences
General & Introductory Political Science40%

Selected Abstracts

Evaluation of Rural Development Requires Clarity on Expected Outcomes L'évaluation du développement rural demande à ce que les résultats attendus soient clairement identifiés Die Evaluation der Entwicklung des ländlichen Raums erfordert Klarheit hinsichtlich der erwarteten Ergebnisse

EUROCHOICES, Issue 1 2010
Richard Wakeford
Summary Evaluation of Rural Development Requires Clarity on Expected Outcomes Without good evaluation, we deny ourselves the evidence that should influence choices of policy instrument in the future. Evaluation of rural development is complex. The crucial thing is to be absolutely clear about the outcome you want before starting the project. For a building, defining desired outcomes is not too difficult if the architect and partners in development work properly with the client from the start. Evaluation of whether society is achieving sustainable development is pretty near impossible, given so many competing views of what success might look like in terms of outcomes. Evaluation of rural development policy falls somewhere between these two extremes. The suspicion is that, despite Regulations agreed at Council level, the EU's 27 ,Rural Development' Ministers would not reveal much consensus about the desired outcomes of the EU's rural development policy. Ministers and officials may find it hard to bring themselves to do evaluation as it may show that their policies haven't delivered. Nevertheless, useful evaluation can take place. It has to face a series of technical issues, such as ,Should the evaluation be of individual programmes or combinations of programmes'. It also has to respect certain principles, such as the ,arms length' status of the evaluator. Sans une bonne évaluation, nous nous privons des informations qui devraient influencer les choix en matière d'instrument de politique pour l'avenir. L'évaluation du développement rural est complexe. Avant de démarrer un projet, il est crucial d'être absolument clair sur les résultats désirés. Définir les résultats désirés n'est pas tellement difficile pour une construction si les architectes et les partenaires du développement travaillent correctement avec le client dès le début. Évaluer si la société atteint un développement durable est pratiquement impossible du fait du grand nombre de vues contradictoires sur ce que pourrait constituer un succès en termes de résultats. L'évaluation de la politique de développement rural se situe quelque part entre ces extrêmes. On peut soupçonner qu'en dépit des règlements acceptés au niveau du Conseil, les ministres en charge du "développement rural" des pays de l'Union européenne à 27 n'atteindraient pas un grand niveau de consensus sur les résultats désirés de la politique de développement rural. Les ministres et les autorités pourraient trouver difficile de procéder à une évaluation car elle pourrait conduire à la conclusion que les politiques n'ont pas eu de succès. Il est pourtant possible de réaliser une évaluation utile. Elle devrait s'affronter à une série de questions techniques telles que "l'évaluation devrait-elle concerner des programmes individuels ou une combinaison de programmes". Elle devrait aussi respecter certains principes comme le statut "en retrait" de l'évaluateur. Ohne eine gute Evaluation verzichtet man bewusst auf Information, anhand derer zukünftige Politikmaßnahmen ausgewählt werden sollten. Die Evaluation der Entwicklung des ländlichen Raums ist kompliziert: Es kommt darauf an, das verlangte Ergebnis im Vorfeld ganz genau festzulegen. Beim Hausbau z.B. ist es nicht allzu schwierig, die gewünschten Ergebnisse zu definieren, wenn der Architekt und alle beteiligten Vertragspartner von Anfang an mit dem Bauherrn Hand in Hand arbeiten. Es ist dagegen nahezu unmöglich zu evaluieren, ob die Gesellschaft eine nachhaltige Entwicklung erreicht, wenn so viele widersprüchliche Vorstellungen hinsichtlich eines erfolgreichen Ergebnisses existieren. Die Evaluation der Politik des ländlichen Raums liegt irgendwo zwischen diesen beiden Extremen. Obwohl im Ministerrat Einigkeit über die entsprechenden Verordnungen erzielt wurde, würden die Minister für die "Entwicklung des ländlichen Raums" der EU27 vermutlich nicht in vielen Fragen, welche die gewünschten Ergebnisse der Politik zur Entwicklung des ländlichen Raums der EU betreffen, übereinstimmen. Minister und Beamte können sich möglicherweise nur schwer dazu motivieren, Evaluationen durchzuführen, da sich ihre Politikmaßnahmen eventuell nicht als erfolgreich herausstellen könnten. Dennoch kann eine nutzbringende Evaluation stattfinden. Sie steht einer Reihe von technischen Fragen gegenüber wie z.B. ,Sollte sich die Evaluation auf einzelne Programme oder auf eine Kombination von Programmen beziehen'. Sie muss ebenfalls auf gewissen Grundsätzen beruhen, wie z.B. der Unabhängigkeit des Evaluators. [source]

Globalization's Alternatives: Competing or Complementary Perspectives?1

GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION, Issue 1 2008
John Glenn
Recent writings on globalization have tended to argue that such economic interconnectedness is, in one way or another, geographically delimited. Three competing views appear in the literature, regionalization, triadization and the involutionist perspective. This article challenges the portrayal of these perspectives as competing conceptions and instead argues that each perspective furnishes us with a partial view of a larger process. In so doing, this paper revisits the involutionist perspective, arguing that, in relation to the developing countries' relative share of world trade and investment shares, the use of the term ,globalization' should be questioned. Rather, in relation to trade, involution is a more apt description. However, in terms of FDI, stasis better describes the contemporary international economy. The article then examines the trade and investment patterns within the triad, corroborating earlier findings that each leg of the triad is increasingly trading more with their neighbours than with each other, but that inter-triad FDI is indeed increasing. Three main factors are presented in order to explain the contemporary patterns of trade and investment associated with involution, regionalization and triadization: product differentiation, vertical specialization and the continuing concentration on primary product production in much of the developing world. [source]

Autonomy and Authorship: Storytelling in Children's Picture Books

HYPATIA, Issue 1 2010
LOUISE COLLINS
Diana Tietjens Meyers and Margaret Urban Walker argue that women's autonomy is impaired by mainstream representations that offer us impoverished resources to tell our own stories. Mainstream picture books apprentice young readers in norms of representation. Two popular picture books about child storytellers present competing views of a child's authority to tell his or her own story. Hence, they offer rival models of the development of autonomy: neo-liberal versus relational. Feminist critics should attend to such implicit models and the hidden assumptions they represent in children's books. [source]

Scientific Realism as a Meta-Theory of International Politics

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 2 2002
Fred Chernoff
The recent increase in interest in scientific realist foundations for international relations theory, spearheaded by Wendt in various works, most fully articulated in his Social Theory of International Politics, and supported by a number of other authors, has brought to the fore a set of related issues in the philosophy of the social sciences. The advocacy of scientific realism in the international relations literature has largely taken the form of attacks on various nonscientific realist foundational theories. Consequently, the success of the arguments for scientific realism depends in large measure on the accuracy of the characterizations of the competing views. This paper argues that Wendt and others have misrepresented the challengers and have thus overstated the superiority of scientific realism. The paper further considers the aims and purposes of providing meta-theoretical foundations for IR theories, and argues that when the alternative accounts are properly described, the purposes are better satisfied by the latter and, in particular, by a version of Duhemian conventionalism. [source]

Coalition Cabinet Decision Making: Institutional and Psychological Factors,

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 1 2008
Juliet Kaarbo
This essay reviews the intersection between institutional and psychological conditions that occurs in multiparty coalition cabinets and the effects on foreign policy and decision making. Parallel research in social psychology and foreign policy can provide clues to the underlying mechanisms linking institutional context to policymaking and policy choices. The psychological processes involved in group polarization, persuasion, and other influence strategies as well as psychological factors affecting the quality of decision making are important in coalition cabinets and are reinforced by the particular institutional dynamics of multiparty governance. Indeed, this essay proposes that future research focus on contingency factors in the policymaking process, given the competing views on the effects of multiple advocacy on the quality of decision making and on the types of foreign policies associated with multiparty cabinets. More broadly, this essay supports the view that a highly structural understanding of the effects of institutions on politics and policies is incomplete and that research on the interplay among structures and human agents is critical. [source]

The Puzzle of China's Township,Village Enterprises: The Paradox of Local Corporatism in a Dual-Track Economic Transition

MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATION REVIEW, Issue 2 2005
Peter Ping LiArticle first published online: 6 JUL 200
abstract This paper seeks to reconcile and synthesize the diverse views about the township,village enterprises (TVEs) and local corporatism in the context of ongoing institutional changes in China as a transition economy. Specifically, I attempt to integrate the economic, political, cultural, and social explanations for TVEs, especially the two competing views of market competition and political corruption. I focus on the puzzle of TVE efficiency as well as the paradox of local corporatism as a government,business partnership with both a positive function of public alliance for wealth creation and a negative function of private collusion for wealth transfer. I argue that the key to both the puzzle of TVEs and the paradox of local corporatism lies in China's dual-track reform paradigm (i.e. a market-for-mass track and a state-for-élite track). Lastly, I discuss the critical implications for theory building and policymaking regarding economic transition in general. [source]

Re-thinking the complexities of ,culture': what might we learn from Bourdieu?

NURSING INQUIRY, Issue 1 2007
M. Judith Lynam
In this paper we continue an ongoing dialogue that has as its goal the critical appraisal of theoretical perspectives on culture and health, in an effort to move forward scholarship on culture and health. We draw upon a programme of scholarship to explicate theoretical tensions and challenges that are manifest in the discourses on culture and health and to explore the possibilities Bourdieu's theoretical perspective offers for reconciling them. That is, we hope to demonstrate the need to move beyond descriptions ,of' culture to an understanding of cultures as dynamic, and to show ways cultural practices create contexts that have the potential to foster or impede health. In our early research, largely undertaken in Canada's multicultural context, we sought to make visible the ways in which culture shaped conceptions of health and influenced health practices of immigrant groups. In recent years this focus has expanded to include populations that reflect the cultural and social diversity of our region. From the outset we attempted to move towards a conception of culture as negotiated, unifying, transformative and dynamic. While this position continues to hold appeal we are continually reminded that, despite our leanings towards constructivism, there is salience to the notion of culture as having enduring elements. It is this tension between the view of culture as embodied and enduring and culture as constructed and dynamic that we seek to examine. We explore whether Bourdieu's theoretical perspective offers promise for reconciling these apparently competing views. Using exemplars from our research we share insights that Bourdieu's work has offered to our analyses, thereby enabling us to move towards a view of culture that holds in tension these apparently contradictory positions of culture as both essence (albeit unstable, negotiated) and constructed. [source]

On the roles of time, space and habitat in a boreal small mammal assemblage: predictably stochastic assembly

OIKOS, Issue 2 2005
Douglas W. Morris
Ecologists continue to debate the roles of deterministic versus stochastic (or neutral) processes in the assembly of ecological communities. The debate often hinges on issues of temporal and spatial scale. Resolution of the competing views depends on a detailed understanding of variation in the structure of local communities through time and space. Analyses of twelve years of data on a diverse assemblage of 13 boreal small mammal species revealed both deterministic and stochastic patterns. Stochastic membership in the overall community created unique assemblages of species in both time and space. But the relative abundances of the two codominant species were much less variable, and suggest a significant role for strong interactions that create temporal and spatial autocorrelation in abundance. As species wax and wane in abundance, they are nevertheless subject to probabilistic rules on local assembly. At the scales I report on here, poorly understood large scale processes influence the presence and absence of the majority of (sparse) species in the assembly. But the overall pool of species nevertheless obeys local rules on their ultimate stochastic assembly into groups of interacting species. [source]

Basic auditory dysfunction in dyslexia as demonstrated by brain activity measurements

PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY, Issue 2 2000
Teija Kujala
Although the generality of dyslexia and its devastating effects on the individual's life are widely acknowledged, its precursors and associated neural mechanisms are poorly understood. One of the two major competing views maintains that dyslexia is based primarily on a deficit in linguistic processing, whereas the other view suggests a more general processing deficit, one involving the perception of temporal information. Here we present evidence in favor of the latter view by showing that the neural discrimination of temporal information within complex tone patterns fails in dyslexic adults. This failure can be traced to early cortical mechanisms that process auditory information independently of attention. [source]

Comparing Competing Theories on the Causes of Mandate Perceptions

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 2 2005
Lawrence J. Grossback
The discussion of presidential mandates is as certain as a presidential election itself. Journalists inevitably discuss whether the president-elect has a popular mandate. Because they see elections as too complex to allow the public to send a unitary signal, political scientists are more skeptical of mandates. Mandates, however, have received new attention by scholars asking whether perceptions of mandate arise and lead representatives to act as if voters sent a policy directive. Two explanations have emerged to account for why elected officials might react to such perceptions. One focuses on the president's strategic decision to declare a mandate, the second on how members of Congress read signals of changing preferences in the electorate from their own election results. We test these competing views to see which more accurately explains how members of Congress act in support of a perceived mandate. The results indicate that members respond more to messages about changing preferences than to the president's mandate declaration. [source]

Stem Cell Research as Innovation: Expanding the Ethical and Policy Conversation

THE JOURNAL OF LAW, MEDICINE & ETHICS, Issue 2 2010
Rebecca Dresser
Research using human embryonic stem cells raises an array of complex ethical issues, including, but by no means limited to, the moral status of developing human life. Unfortunately much of the public discussion fails to take into account this complexity. Advocacy for liberal and conservative positions on human embryonic stem cell research can be simplistic and misleading. Ethical concepts such as truth-telling, scientific integrity, and social justice should be part of the debate over federal support for human embryonic stem cell research. Moreover, the debate should be conducted in accord with principles of deliberative democracy, including respect for people holding competing views. [source]