Different Starting Points (different + starting_point)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Learner, Student, Speaker: Why it matters how we call those we teach

EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY, Issue 5-6 2010
Gert Biesta
Abstract In this paper I discuss three different ways in which we can refer to those we teach: as learner, as student or as speaker. My interest is not in any aspect of teaching but in the question whether there can be such a thing as emancipatory education. Working with ideas from Jacques Rancičre I offer the suggestion that emancipatory education can be characterised as education which starts from the assumption that all students can speak. It starts from the assumption, in other words, that students neither lack a capacity for speech, nor that they are producing noise. The idea of the student as a speaker is not offered as an empirical fact but as a different starting point for emancipatory education, one that positions equality at the beginning of education, not at its end. [source]


Social interaction distance and stratification

THE BRITISH JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, Issue 2 2003
Wendy Bottero
ABSTRACT There have been calls from several sources recently for a renewal of class analysis that would encompass social and cultural, as well as economic elements. This paper explores a tradition in stratification that is founded on this idea: relational or social distance approaches to mapping hierarchy and inequality which theorize stratification as a social space. The idea of ,social space' is not treated as a metaphor of hierarchy nor is the nature of the structure determined a priori. Rather, the space is identified by mapping social interactions. Exploring the nature of social space involves mapping the network of social interaction , patterns of friendship, partnership and cultural similarity , which gives rise to relations of social closeness and distance. Differential association has long been seen as the basis of hierarchy, but the usual approach is first to define a structure composed of a set of groups and then to investigate social interaction between them. Social distance approaches reverse this, using patterns of interaction to determine the nature of the structure. Differential association can be seen as a way of defining proximity within a social space, from the distances between social groups, or between social groups and social objects (such as lifestyle items). The paper demonstrates how the very different starting point of social distance approaches also leads to strikingly different theoretical conclusions about the nature of stratification and inequality. [source]


Regulation, productivity and growth: OECD evidence

ECONOMIC POLICY, Issue 36 2003
Giuseppe Nicoletti
SUMMARY Liberalization and privatization have made the regulatory environment more market-friendly throughout the OECD. However using a large new dataset on product market regulation, we show that regulatory policies in OECD nations have become more dissimilar in relative terms, even as all nations have liberalized. This seemingly contradictory finding is explained by different starting points and different reform speeds. Our data also show that this divergence in the regulatory settings lines up with the divergent growth performance of OECD nations, in particular the poor performance of large Continental economies relative to that of the US. The data, which tracks various types of product market regulation in manufacturing and service industries for 18 OECD economies over the past two decades, allows us to explore this link in detail. We find that productivity growth is boosted by reforms that promote private corporate governance and competition (where these are viable). Moreover, our detailed findings suggest how product market regulation and productivity growth are linked. In manufacturing, the productivity gains from liberalization are greater the further a given country is from the technology leader. This indicates that entry-limiting regulation may hinder the adoption of existing technologies, possibly by reducing competitive pressures, technology spillovers, or the entry of new high-tech firms. These results offer an interpretation of poor Continental performance. Strict product market regulations , and lack of regulatory reforms , appear to underlie the meagre productivity performance of some European countries, especially in those industries where Europe has accumulated a technology gap (e.g. industries producing or using information and communication technologies). , Giuseppe Nicoletti and Stefano Scarpetta [source]


Competition and Integration among Stock Exchanges in Europe: Network Effects, Implicit Mergers and Remote Access

EUROPEAN FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT, Issue 1 2001
Carmine Di Noia
The economic theory of network externalities and a simple-game theoretical framework are used to explore the issue of competition among stock exchanges and the possibility of consolidation in the European stock-exchange industry. The paper shows the existence of equilibria where exchanges may decide, even unilaterally, to achieve full compatibility through implicit mergers and remote access, specialising only in trading or listing services. Thus the consolidation of European exchanges into one may occur with a welfare-efficient outcome or with a lock-in to a Pareto-inferior equilibrium, due to the network externalities and the different starting points of the various exchanges. ,Implicit mergers' among exchanges together with remote access are always weakly (in half of the cases, strictly) more efficient than the actual competition. This finding also sheds light on the existence and efficacy, of ATS and rating agencies, which can be viewed respectfully as exchanges specialising in trading and listing services. [source]


Coordination as a Political Problem in Coordinated Market Economies

GOVERNANCE, Issue 1 2006
KATHLEEN THELEN
The purpose of this article is to explore the political dynamics of employer coordination in three well-known "coordinated market economies." We examine differences in how employer coordination has been organized in Sweden, Germany, and Japan in the area of industrial relations, and we examine the extent to which such coordination represents a self-sustaining equilibrium, as some of the most influential treatments suggest. To preview the findings, we argue that precisely the intensification of cooperation between labor and management in some firms and industries (that the "varieties of capitalism" literature correctly emphasizes) has paradoxically had deeply destabilizing collateral effects that have undermined or are undermining these systems as they were traditionally constituted. All three cases are characterized not so much by a full-blown breakdown of coordination so much as a very significant reconfiguration of the terms and scope of such coordination. Specifically, all three countries feature the emergence of new or intensified forms of dualism,different in each case based on different starting points,in which continued coordination within a smaller core has in some ways been underwritten through the breaking off of other, more peripheral, firms and workers. [source]


The Ideal Explanatory Text in History: A Plea for Ecumenism

HISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 3 2004
Tor Egil Fřrland
ABSTRACT This article presents Peter Railton's analysis of scientific explanation and discusses its application in historiography. Although Railton thinks covering laws are basic in explanation, his account is far removed from Hempel. The main feature of Railton's account is its ecumenism. The "ideal explanatory text," a central concept in Railton's analysis, has room for not only causal and intentional, but also structural and functional explanations. The essay shows this by analyzing a number of explanations in history. In Railton's terminology all information that reduces our insecurity as to what the explanandum is due is explanatory. In the "encyclopedic ideal explanatory text," different kinds of explanation converge in the explanandum from different starting points. By incorporating pragmatic aspects, Railton's account is well suited to show how explanations in historiography can be explanatory despite their lack of covering laws or tendency statements. Railton's account is also dynamic, showing how the explanatory quest is a never-ending search for better illumination of the ideal explanatory text. Railton's analysis is briefly compared to, and found compatible with, views on explanation presented by David Lewis, C. Behan McCullagh, and R. G. Collingwood. Confronted with Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutics and Donald Davidson's insistence on the indeterminacy of interpretation, the essay suggests that the objectivity of the ideal explanatory text should be regarded as local, limited to the description under which the action is seen. [source]


A comparison of mothers' and fathers' experiences of the attachment process in a neonatal intensive care unit

JOURNAL OF CLINICAL NURSING, Issue 6 2008
Liv Fegran RN
Aim., To compare mothers' and fathers' individual views and experiences of the attachment process in a neonatal intensive care unit within the first week after a premature birth. Background., The attachment between parents and children is a precursor to the consolidation of parenting skills, the growth and development of the infant and the establishment of a bond between parent and child. Premature birth and the resultant hospitalization disrupt the normal attachment process between parent and child. Most of the litteraure on attachment theory focuses on the mother,child connection and is being criticised for regarding the father's role as supportive and peripheral. Methods., The design of this study was descriptive with a hermeneutic approach. Twelve parents (six mothers and six fathers) in a 13-bed neonatal intensive care unit in a Norwegian regional hospital participated in a field study addressing the encounter between parents and nurses. This paper is based on the semi-structured interviews with the parents at discharge. Results., The interview analysis revealed two main categories. (a) Taken by surprise: For mothers, the premature birth created a feeling of powerlessness and they experienced the immediate postnatal period as surreal and strange. The fathers experienced the birth as a shock, but were ready to be involved immediately. (b) Building a relationship: Mothers experienced a need to regain the temporarily lost relationship with their child, whereas the fathers experienced the beginning of a new relationship. Conclusion., Comparing parents' experiences of the attachment process within the first days after a premature birth reveals a striking contrast between the mother's experience of surrealism and the father's ability to be involved immediately after birth. Relevance to clinical practice., Parents' of premature children's different starting points should be acknowledged as professionals encourage parents to have early skin-to-skin contact with their premature infant. [source]


A REGIONAL ECONOMY, LAND USE, AND TRANSPORTATION MODEL (RELU-TRANŠ): FORMULATION, ALGORITHM DESIGN, AND TESTING,

JOURNAL OF REGIONAL SCIENCE, Issue 3 2007
Alex Anas
ABSTRACT RELU is a dynamic general equilibrium model of a metropolitan economy and its land use, derived by unifying in a theoretically valid way, models developed by one of the authors [Anas (1982), Anas,Arnott (1991, 1997), Anas,Kim (1996), Anas,Xu (1999)]. RELU equilibrates floor space, land and labor markets, and the market for the products of industries, treating development (construction and demolition), spatial interindustry linkages, commuting, and discretionary travel. Mode choices and equilibrium congestion on the highway network are treated by unifying RELU with the TRAN algorithm of stochastic user equilibrium [Anas,Kim (1990)]. The RELU-TRAN algorithm's performance for a stationary state is demonstrated for a prototype consisting of 4-building, 4-industry, 4-labor-type, 15-land-use-zone, 68-link-highway-network version of the Chicago MSA. The algorithm solves 656 equations in a special block-recursive convergent procedure by iterations nested within loops and loops within cycles. Runs show excellent and smooth convergence from different starting points, so that the number of loops within successive cycles continually decreases. The tests also imply a numerically ascertained unique stationary equilibrium solution of the unified model for the calibrated parameters. [source]


Internal and external motivation in phonetic change: Dialect levelling outcomes for an English vowel shift

JOURNAL OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS, Issue 1 2004
Eivind Torgersen
This article is a contribution to the debate about the primacy of internal versus external factors in language change (Farrar and Jones 2002; Thomason and Kaufman 1988). Taking Labov's Principles of Vowel Shifting (Labov 1994) as representing internal factors, we examine a vowel shift in Ashford, south-east of London. F1 and F2 measurements of the short vowels suggest a classic chain shift, largely following Labov's Principles II and III (though Labov's assumption that London short front vowels are rising is shown to be wrong). However, corresponding data from Reading, west of London, evidence no signs of a chain shift. The two datasets show identical targets for the changes in each town. Thus, there has been convergence between the two short vowel systems , from different starting points. We argue that a dialect contact model is more explanatory than internal factors in ,this case of regional dialect levelling in the south-east of England. [source]