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Middle Ground (middle + ground)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences75%

Selected Abstracts

INDEFENSIBLE MIDDLE GROUND FOR LOCAL REDUCTIONISM ABOUT TESTIMONY

RATIO, Issue 2 2009
Axel Gelfert
Local reductionism purports to defend a middle ground in the debate about the epistemic status of testimony-based beliefs. It does so by acknowledging the practical ineliminability of testimony as a source of knowledge, while insisting that such an acknowledgment need not entail a default-acceptance view, according to which there exists an irreducible warrant for accepting testimony. The present paper argues that local reductionism is unsuccessful in its attempt to steer a middle path between reductionism and anti-reductionism about testimonial justification. In particular, it challenges local reductionism ,from within', without appealing to anti-reductionist intuitions. By offering novel arguments to the effect that local reductionism fails by its own standards, the present paper considerably strengthens the case against this version of reductionism. Local reductionism, it is argued, fails for three main reasons. First, it cannot account for the rationality of testimonial rejection in paradigmatic cases, even though the possibility of rational rejection is thought to be of central justificatory importance. Second, it does not provide a sufficiently distinct non-testimonial basis to which testimonial justification can be successfully reduced. Finally, local reductionism is shown to be an intrinsically unstable position, in danger of collapsing into full-fledged ,credulism' of the kind historically associated with Thomas Reid. [source]

In Search of Causality: A Regional Approach to Urban Growth in Eighteenth-century England

GEOGRAFISKA ANNALER SERIES B: HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, Issue 3 2000
Jon Stobart
The simple equation of industrialisation and urbanisation contains much truth: recent national surveys confirm that rapid coal-based industrial growth spawned massive urban development in Britain. And yet at the local level a wide diversity of growth experiences reflect a complex and overlapping nexus of growth stimuli which defy attempts at generalisation. In taking a regional perspective, this paper seeks to occupy a productive middle ground in this ongoing debate. Placing urban growth in north-west England into its real economic and geographical context, it recognises the complexities of urban growth but transcends the narrowness of the particular. In so doing, it challenges some of the certainties of industrial urbanisation, emphasising instead the importance of rural industry, urban commercial functions and inter-place linkages. Most fundamentally, it argues for a more nuanced understanding of the geography of causality. [source]

Spatially Disaggregated Modelling of Voting Outcomes and Socio-Economic Characteristics at the 2001 Australian Federal Election

GEOGRAPHICAL RESEARCH, Issue 3 2006
ROBERT STIMSON
Abstract This study uses GIS and spatial modelling to relate voting outcomes at the 2001 federal election for polling booths across Australia with the socio-economic characteristics of polling booth catchment areas. The data and analysis used are more detailed and comprehensive than previous studies. It is conducted at a fine level of spatial disaggregation across the whole nation to examine voting outcomes for both major and minor political parties. Because the aim of the paper is to distinguish voting outcomes between political parties rather than to predict voting outcomes for particular political parties, a discriminant analysis is used rather than regression analysis. The statistical discriminant analysis identifies two main socio-economic dimensions that are able to predict polling booth outcomes with a relatively high degree of accuracy. That analysis shows how, at the 2001 federal election, the middle ground, in terms of socio-economic characteristics, was being claimed by the Liberal Party, Country Liberal Party, The Greens, and, to a lesser extent, by the Australian Labor Party. However, the Australian Democrats, National Party and One Nation had more distinctive constituencies, with the National Party and One Nation Party competing for areas with similar socio-economic characteristics. Using GIS mapping tools, examples of actual and predicted polling booth voting outcomes are given, along with selected socio-economic characteristics of booth catchments. [source]

One size does not fit all: Managing IT employees' employment arrangements

HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT, Issue 3 2007
Jayesh Prasad
As alternative employment arrangements proliferate within the information technology (IT) function, it becomes increasingly important to understand the impact of these arrangements on IT employees. A prevalent notion in the IT literature is that these employees are homogeneous in their work values and that they prefer similar employment arrangements. Given the inefficiency of designing individual employment programs, we advocate a middle ground between the two extremes of individualized employment arrangements and "one size fits all." We conducted two studies. The first study developed an individual's work values profile as a psychological construct. It used a national sample of IT employees to validate a simple, heuristic procedure that was successful in classifying about 80% of the sample into three work values profiles. The second study demonstrated the use of work values profiles for understanding how employment arrangements differentially influence employee satisfaction. It applied the validated procedure to a single organization in order to demonstrate the general applicability of the procedure and to show that it provides researchers and HR professionals with better insights than the assumption that all IT employees are alike. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [source]

Departures from Everyday Resistance and Flexible Strategies of Domination: The Making and Unmaking of a Poor Peasant Mobilization in Bangladesh

JOURNAL OF AGRARIAN CHANGE, Issue 2 2007
SHAPAN ADNAN
James Scott's influential work has popularized the notion that everyday resistance among the peasantry takes covert and backstage forms, termed ,weapons of the weak'. This paper, however, provides a case study involving transformation of covert resistance and outward compliance of the poor into open dissent and confrontation with power-holders, though falling well short of the limiting conditions of rebellion or revolution. Such instances serve to dispel the notion that poor and weak groups adopt only covert forms of resistance in their everyday existence. The paper takes up the questions of why, and under what circumstances, such transformation of covert resistance into overt forms can come about. These issues are explored using evidence from a poor peasant mobilization in rural Bangladesh during the parliamentary election of 1986. The analysis shows that there were sequential shifts in the respective strategies of domination and resistance of the rich and the poor, which shaped each other interactively over a dynamic trajectory. Such adaptive and variable responses require an approach that can accommodate flexibility and substitution in the strategies adopted by the weak and the powerful. These also call for further exploration and analysis of the middle ground between everyday and exceptional forms of resistance. [source]

Religion, Politics and Civic Education

JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION, Issue 1 2005
Robert Kunzman
The proper role and influence of religion in the public sphere continues to be contested and has important implications for civic education in a liberal democracy. Paul Weithman and Michael Perry argue that religion makes valuable contributions to civic participation and that religiously grounded beliefs should be fully welcome in political decision-making. In response, this paper strives for a middle ground of preparing citizens to engage thoughtfully with a wide range of moral perspectives, religious and otherwise, while promoting a civic virtue that still honours a commitment to public reason. [source]

Elements of a theory of Ukrainian ethno-national identities

NATIONS AND NATIONALISM, Issue 1 2002
Andrew Wilson
Despite winning independence in 1991, Ukraine remains an amorphous society with a weak sense of national identity. One possible explanation is ,late' nation-creation, but in this article emphasis is laid on a continuing plurality of identity projects and the legacy of the ,failed' identity-building projects of the past. Ukraine's most important distinguishing feature , the existence of a substantial middle ground between Ukrainian and Russian identities , has considerable capacity to resist the logic of consolidating statehood. [source]

INDEFENSIBLE MIDDLE GROUND FOR LOCAL REDUCTIONISM ABOUT TESTIMONY

RATIO, Issue 2 2009
Axel Gelfert
Local reductionism purports to defend a middle ground in the debate about the epistemic status of testimony-based beliefs. It does so by acknowledging the practical ineliminability of testimony as a source of knowledge, while insisting that such an acknowledgment need not entail a default-acceptance view, according to which there exists an irreducible warrant for accepting testimony. The present paper argues that local reductionism is unsuccessful in its attempt to steer a middle path between reductionism and anti-reductionism about testimonial justification. In particular, it challenges local reductionism ,from within', without appealing to anti-reductionist intuitions. By offering novel arguments to the effect that local reductionism fails by its own standards, the present paper considerably strengthens the case against this version of reductionism. Local reductionism, it is argued, fails for three main reasons. First, it cannot account for the rationality of testimonial rejection in paradigmatic cases, even though the possibility of rational rejection is thought to be of central justificatory importance. Second, it does not provide a sufficiently distinct non-testimonial basis to which testimonial justification can be successfully reduced. Finally, local reductionism is shown to be an intrinsically unstable position, in danger of collapsing into full-fledged ,credulism' of the kind historically associated with Thomas Reid. [source]

On Compromise and Coercion,

RATIO JURIS, Issue 4 2006
RAPHAEL COHEN-ALMAGOR
When compromise takes place between two or more parties, reciprocity must be present; that is, the concessions are mutual. A relevant distinction is between principled and tactical compromise. A principled compromise refers to a mutual recognition by each side of the other's rights, which leads them to make concessions to enable them to meet on a middle ground. It is genuinely made in good faith and both sides reconcile themselves to the results. On the other hand, the notion of tactical compromise reflects a temporary arrangement reached as a result of constraints related to time. Here, in fact, agents do not give up any of their aims. They do not act in good faith and do not intend to meet their counterpart on a middle ground. Instead, they simply realize that the end could not be achieved at a given point of time, and they aim to reach it stage by stage. The essential component of compromise, namely, mutuality, is lacking. Next, the paper draws a further distinction between internalized coercion and designated coercion. Internalized coercion relates to the system of manipulation to which members of a certain sub-culture are subjected, which prevents them from realizing that they are being coerced to follow a certain conception that denies them basic rights. Designated coercion is individualistic in nature, aimed at a certain individual who rebels against the discriminatory norm. Unlike the internalized coercion it is not concerned with machinery aiming to convince the entire cultural group of an irrefutable truth; instead it is designed to exert pressure on uncertain, "confused" individuals so as to bring them back to their community. Ever since I assumed my present office my main purpose has been to work for the pacification of Europe, for the removal of those suspicions and those animosities which have so long poisoned the air. The path which leads to appeasement is long and bristles with obstacles. The question of Czechoslovakia is the latest and perhaps the most dangerous. Now that we have got past it, I feel that it may be possible to make further progress along the road to sanity. (Neville Chamberlain, "Peace in Our Time", October 3, 1938)** [source]

FRAGMENTED IDENTITIES: READING SUBJECTIVITY IN HENRY TONKS' SURGICAL PORTRAITS

ART HISTORY, Issue 3 2009
EMMA CHAMBERS
This article considers the construction of identity in Henry Tonks' portraits of soldiers with facial injuries incurred during the 1914,18 war. The discussion draws on a number of theoretical perspectives to analyse in different ways the relationship between the physical body and the inner self, and provide critical tools for thinking through issues of identity in surgical portraiture, where the surfaces of the face are damaged, and interior flesh is exposed. Tonks' portraits occupy an ambiguous middle ground between portraiture and medical record, and the article analyses the different modes and contexts of viewing required by portraits and by medical illustrations, and considers how a close reading of the viewer's interaction with the portrait sitter in surgical portraits can also suggest ways of theorizing the viewer's experience of other forms of portraiture. [source]

Intergenerational class mobility in contemporary Britain: political concerns and empirical findings1

THE BRITISH JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, Issue 4 2007
John H. Goldthorpe
Abstract In Britain in recent years social mobility has become a topic of central political concern, primarily as a result of the effort made by New Labour to make equality of opportunity rather than equality of condition a focus of policy. Questions of the level, pattern and trend of mobility thus bear directly on the relevance of New Labour's policy analysis, and in turn are likely be crucial to the evaluation of its performance in government. However, politically motivated discussion of social mobility often reveals an inadequate grasp of both empirical and analytical issues. We provide new evidence relevant to the assessment of social mobility , in particular, intergenerational class mobility , in contemporary Britain through cross-cohort analyses based on the NCDS and BCS datasets which we can relate to earlier cross-sectional analyses based on the GHS. We find that, contrary to what seems now widely supposed, there is no evidence that absolute mobility rates are falling; but, for men, the balance of upward and downward movement is becoming less favourable. This is overwhelmingly the result of class structural change. Relative mobility rates, for both men and women, remain essentially constant, although there are possible indications of a declining propensity for long-range mobility. We conclude that under present day structural conditions there can be no return to the generally rising rates of upward mobility that characterized the middle decades of the twentieth century , unless this is achieved through changing relative rates in the direction of greater equality or, that is, of greater fluidity. But this would then produce rising rates of downward mobility to exactly the same extent , an outcome apparently unappreciated by, and unlikely to be congenial to, politicians preoccupied with winning the electoral ,middle ground'. [source]

Rethinking Kashmir's History from a Borderlands Perspective

HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 7 2010
Chitralekha Zutshi
Although borders haunt its historical and recent past as well as its contemporary political situation, Kashmir has rarely been theorized as a borderland. This article examines the perspective of borderlands as conceptualized in North American, Asian and African borderlands scholarship. It argues that the application of this perspective , in which borderlands are defined as middle grounds where imperial competition and negotiations among a variety of imperial and indigenous actors led to the production of distinct political cultures , to rethinking Kashmir's history has the potential to liberate the region from the imperatives of national borders that misread its history, while also reinvigorating South Asian borderlands scholarship. [source]