Search

Based on the work of Japanese political economists Kozo Uno and Thomas Sekine, this essay develops a levels-of-analysis approach to better deal with the fundamental tensions between abstract theory...

This article outlines a problem-centered approach to the topic of canonical matrix forms in a second linear algebra course. In this approach, abstract theory, including such topics as eigenvalues, generalized eigenspaces, invariant subspaces, independent subspaces, nilpotency, and cyclic spaces, is developed in response to the patterns discovered in studying similarity classes of square matrices, rather than as a disconnected prerequisite to this topic. Furthermore, the subtopics involved afford an opportunity to highlight many common mathematical problem-solving techniques and philosophies.

Economics presents capitalism as a harmonious society made coherent by a network of mutually advantageous transactions. This article challenges that view, showing how economists structured their abstract theory in terms of transactions in order to eliminate any consideration of the conflicts and contradictions within capitalism. To make this point, the article includes examples, such as the United States Federal Reserve's efforts to strangle economic growth to keep wages in check, the performance of development states, and the repeated bankruptcies of US railroads during the nineteenth century.

The aim of this paper is to consider the possibilities and limits of using political philosophy to inform housing policy debates. The paper begins by exploring the paucity of philosophical discourse on housing and argues that this is because of the inherent practicality and ubiquity of housing compared to other welfare goods. The paper then considers the work of Robert Nozick, as an example of the possibilities for applying abstract political philosophy to housing issues. The problems of using abstract theory are then discussed, particularly the need to compromise in policy implementation. The attempt to implement “pure” abstract ideas might be difficult. However, the application of abstract principles can also be important in adjudicating between rival policy alternatives and in assessing the effects of policies. The paper concludes that a toolkit approach is the best means to tackle abstract thinkers such as Nozick and that their constructions should be seen as ideal types rather than as bluepr...

This article contributes to an understanding of policy change. Exploring a local land planning case, it investigates how an environmental advocacy coalition effectively challenged road and housing plans, with the result that an area was instead developed into a nature reserve. In the course of the article, the value and practical effectiveness of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) is examined and developed with the help of two central concepts—the “value network” and “inside activist”. The outcome of the case is explained by the powerful influence of a value network of ornithologists, with particular inside activists of that network playing important roles in presenting a challenge to development of the area. Instead of trying to build an abstract theory of the ACF, the article argues the need to develop the ACF as a framework, opening it up to insights from policy network and social constructionist research as well as from practical processes.

This article looks at the hegemonic process of neo‐liberal globalisation and its implications for culture in general and cultural policy in particular from a critical perspective. A consideration of its ideological features is a necessary supplement to the economic analysis of neo‐liberal globalisation. Ideology mediates economics and culture. As it is used here, the concept of “ideology” refers to how dominant power relations and inequalities are legitimised by distorted representations of reality at various levels. While these include abstract theory and professional expertise, it is argued that everyday language and “common sense” exemplify the operations of ideology most profoundly in securing consent to prevailing and otherwise questionable arrangements. Culture is now saturated with a market‐oriented mentality that closes out alternative ways of thinking and imagining. The general argument is illustrated with several examples drawn from across the range of lived experience and institutionalised stru...

Theory from Feminist Therapy is extended to analyze group themes and out-of-group contact in a women's survivor group: principles regarding feminist groups are proposed.

Theory will not directly explain the development of policy and provision for homeless people, but it is an important consideration and one deserving of careful attention. In the UK, however, homelessness has often been explained simplistically and somewhat atheoretically as either a housing or a welfare problem, caused either by structural or by individual factors. Likewise, homeless people have been frequently classified as either deserving or undeserving. Such dualistic explanations are less than adequate and any policy and provision influenced by them will, consequently, also likely be less than optimal. Accordingly, this paper explores the potential of alternative theoretical perspectives (feminism, post‐structuralism, postmodernism, structuration and critical theory) for increasing our understanding of homelessness and so potentially improving policy and provision for homeless people in the future.

Theory predicts that a compound whose structure possesses both rod-like and disc-like characteristics should exhibit a biaxial nematic phase. With this in mind we have synthesized and characterized two new series of non-symmetric dimers containing rod-like and disc-like mesogenic units linked by a flexible spacer. The two series differ in that in one the perimeter of the disc-like unit is decorated with alkyl chains, whereas for the other it is not. The liquid crystalline properties of the two series were investigated both as pure systems and in their equimolar binary mixtures with an electron acceptor. The nematic phase formed by the equimolar binary mixtures is monotropic. However, a small entropy change at the nematic-isotropic transition could be determined. The nature and structure of the monotropic nematic phase is discussed.

Theory and research have overlooked a subtype of serious leisure referred to here as the liberal arts hobby, or the systematic and fervent pursuit during free time of knowledge for its own sake. People who take up such a hobby have as their primary goal the acquisition of a broad knowledge and understanding of, for example, one or more arts, sports, foods, languages, cultures, histories, sciences, philosophies, or literary traditions. A similar goal motivates the inveterate followers of current politics. These hobbyists look on the knowledge and understanding they acquire as ends in themselves rather than as background, or means, to involvement in another hobby or in an amateur activity. When compared with the other hobbies and the various amateur activities, the knowledge acquired is of primary rather than secondary importance. The proposition is introduced, explained, and elaborated that the free-time pursuit of a liberal art is both a distinct hobby and a distinct type of serious leisure.

Urban political economy has been prone to two errors: overgeneralizing to abstract theory and overemphasizing the role of economic interests. Drawing on postmodern philosophy, the author examines these two errors, which he labels economism, and suggests a more concrete culturally rooted approach to urban political economy. The author develops his argument through a critique of the conventional concept of urban economic restructuring. Far from being a unified global process, urban economic restructuring is, in fact, highly fragmented and rooted in particular political and cultural relations. Geographically rooted political and cultural loyalties are not drags on economic growth but are essential, the author argues, for a well-functioning economy. The paper concludes with some policy implications for the problem of concentrated urban poverty.

Theory is developed for dd fusion resulting from the impact of accelerated clusters of D2O on deuterated solid targets. Sequences of collisions between D atoms and heavy atoms of the beam and target are studied as a mechanism for quickly increasing the relative velocities of pairs of deuterons. Fusion yields are calculated as a sum over 10 such sequences. Calculated yields are many orders of magnitude smaller than the results reported by Beuhler, Friedlander, and Friedman. Implications of these differences are discussed.

Theory and experiment are compared for Raman intensities near continuous structural phase transitions. Situations in which the order parameter couples linearly to light or quadratically are considered. Both cases are easily analyzed for the soft modes in ferroelastic LnP5O14 (Ln = La, Pr, Nd, Tb). The trace polarizability tensor yields β = 0.49 ± 0.02; off-diagonal terms give γ’ = 1.16 ± 0.15 and γ = 1.07 ± 0.10. Mean field results are also obtained for barium sodium niobate near T (incommensurate) = 582 K and for tris-sarcosine calcium chloride near T c = 128 K.

Eight unsolved problems, related to the abstract stationary one-dimensional linear transport equation, are presented.

Information theory as originally developed by Hartley, Shannon, and Wiener for the two-variable “Sender-Receiver” case, and further extended by McGill and Ashby, is believed to be a specific instance of a more general and abstract theory. This paper discusses possible foundations of such a theory starting from a “micro-approach” based on the primitive notions of variety and constraint also due to Ashby. Some slight inconsistencies in earlier definitions are cleared up, whereas some ambiguities in the “macro” quantities are pointed out. The applied theory, called constraint analysis, is very well suited for the analysis of constraints in multivariate systems (structure modelling or reconstructability analysis).

Theory and research in the sociology of prison life and prisonization, particularly Clemmer and Wheeler and their followers, focused mostly on the normative aspects of these processes and concepts, giving rise to two prominent conceptions: the functional and importation models of adaptation to prison life. Behavioral measures were relatively neglected. This paper reviews in detail these two paradigms and their basic premises, and proposes a new direction for prisonization study, namely the focus upon behavioral measures of the prisoners' acculturation to life within the prison community. Based upon data gathered on (N = 306) prisoners in a large northwestern state maximum security prison the author identifies intra-prison misconduct as a significant variable that sheds some light on the many aspects of prisonization. Four patterns of misconduct are highlighted (Incidental/Accidental, “Early Starter,” “Late Bloomer,” “Chronic”), and their respective linkages with prisonization are explored.

In the debate over the “value-free” approach to sociology, most cities have developed their position from structural analyses (Aronowitz, 1973; Bowles and Gintis, 1975) or from abstract theory constructs which are only generally grounded in the work of major sociological figures and trends within the discipline at earge (Gouldner, 1970; Papche and Oppenheimer, 1983). There is a need to analyze the development of this approach in the context of a given social and academic setting to determine whether it arose from concerns of disciplinary development or from political exigencies. An analysis of the Sociology Department of the University of North Dakota de lineates both the concrete pressures placed upon individual sociologists and the structural processes which influenced the transition of the discipline from a socially responsive attempt at social analysis and praxis to a socially detached, descriptive, intellectual profession. It demonstrates the difficulty of performing research which makes a social contribution while subject to the institutional pressures of the academy. Finally, it reconsiders the influences of the “value-free” position on the production of social knowledge and the resulting impact on the discipline and society.

In the last quarter century, the interests of the investigators of automata have ranged over many problems, from algorithms for economical and reliable relay-type automata to abstract theory, including problems of representability of events in various automata. Among the many topics of that theory, much attention has recently been devoted to behavior of automata in competitive situations and games. The interest in these topics was stimulated by developments in physiology and psychology, by attempts to explain the development of purposeful behavior in animals and by the desire to simulate behavioral acts. Later, it was found that the results achieved in this field were useful in several complex control problems, in particular, the control of industrial plants, and this led to new problems in the theory. In this paper we shall sketch out an approach to the problem of behavior of automata in various situations (environments).

A general definition of the notion of ‘ system ’ ia given. Starting from this definition, some basic principles of an abstract system theory are developed. The theory loads to a specification of several terms often used in this field, such as ‘ model ’, ‘ continuous or discrete system ’, ‘ discrete model of a continuous system ’, etc. Also some properties of the systems are specified, under extremely general conditions.

Theory of testing hypotheses (see [1]) derives sufficient conditions for the existence of optimum tests. These conditions often require that the class of distributions in question be ordered in some way, e.g., stochastically ordered, monotone likelihood ratio, Polya of some order, or exponential class. This article gives four simple examples which show that the sufficient ordering restrictions cannot be weakened to less stringent ordering restrictions and which thus give some insight into the structure and use of such orderings. A fifth example shows that ordering properties are not necessary for the existence of optimal tests.

Theory and experiment agree that the character of the phase transition in layered hydrogen bonded crystals depends strongly on the specifics of the local hydrogen bonding. Exploratory dielectric measurements are presented for pinacol hexahydrate which has a hydrogen bonded network different from those previously studied.