Academic Controversy Research Articles

Augmenting Spatial Intelligence in the Geography Classroom

This paper describes part of the results of a study investigating how adolescents, between the ages of 14 and 15, construct and share meaning about their local environments. Specifically, the results presented focus on how adolescents perceive and interpret spatial and three-dimensional data presented in various formats, such as in terms of virtually-rendered objects, photo-realistic panoramas, and traditional maps. The research was undertaken with a view to informing more effective teaching of map-skills through the improvement of aspects of spatial intelligence. Participants were required to undertake both a pre- and a post-test, which were identical in task. These tests involved having the participants match a series of computer-rendered three dimensional objects with similar objects rendered from the same perspective, as well as to deduce the axis of rotation and viewing perspective of a QuickTime VR cylindrical panorama when presented with a map of the same area. The pre- and post-tests were separated by an intervention activity in the field, designed around the format of a Structured Academic Controversy. Data obtained from the pre- and post-test results indicates that with regard to the rotation of objects and orientation of perspectives, some performance gains were significant amongst both males and females.

Prevention and management of superficial pressure ulcers

Superficial pressure ulcers – those involving the upper layers of skin – are currently the object of academic controversy, in particular regarding the influence of moisture in their formation. This article aims to steer nurses round these debates with a practical approach to preventing pressure damage, placing a strong emphasis on skin care and reduction of friction.

The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey, and: Che Guevara Reader (review)

Ernesto Che Guevara. The Motorcycle Diaries: on a Latin American Journey. Melbourne and New York: Ocean Press, 2003; and David Deutschmann, ed. Che Guevara Reader, 2nd ed. Melbourne and New York: Ocean Press, 2003.The production of books, articles, clothing, accessories, posters, photographs, documentaries, and feature films about revolutionary Che Guevara remains as profitable communist Cuba as it does the capitalist west. These two books form part of a collaborative project between Ocean Press and the Che Guevara Studies Center Havana to respond to a global demand for the works and ideas of Che Guevara. Most of the entries these two editions have long been available. Scholars will find greater significance the fact of their publication than the contents of their pages.With the 2004 release of The Motorcycle Diaries as a major motion picture produced by Robert Redford and directed by Walter Salles, professors might be tempted to dispense with the book altogether and use the more attractive film version, which is fairly true to Guevara's diary. However, professors should not ignore the brief text and the minor academic controversy that it and the film generated. The young Ernesto Guevara depicted print and film has been compared to James Dean and Jack Kerouac. Cinto Vitier, his preface to The Motorcycle Diaries, compares the travelogue to Jose Marti's campaign diary and even Don Quixote. Vitier sees Guevara's account precious pearls of diction, colorful prose, and nimble freshness. Although literary critics and historians, knowing who this young Argentine becomes, will be sorely tempted to read much into this account of a South American journey, they should exercise caution. While Guevara contributes valuable descriptions of South American people and places 1952, he does not describe any political epiphany or self-discovery prose that should evoke comparisons to Marti or Shakespeare.There are, nevertheless, legitimate reasons to study Guevara's travelogue carefully, for it has spawned a serious debate among his biographers. Jean Cormier attached great significance to Guevara's encounter with a poor married couple near the mining center of Chuquicamata, Chile, March 1952. As Guevara described an evening spent with these two people, who happened to be communists: They had not one single miserable blanket to cover themselves with, so we gave them one of ours and Alberto and I wrapped the other around us as best we could. It was one of the coldest times my life, but also one which made me feel a little more brotherly toward this strange, for me anyway, human species (78). According to Cormier, this cold night northern Chile marked the beginnings of Ernesto's political transformation. From that time on, Cormier argues, Ernesto was in a state of revolutionary incubation. Biographer Jorge Castaneda disputes the significance of Guevara's Chuquicamata experience, asserting that nothing his diaries reflected the beginnings of any political transformation. Jon Lee Anderson devotes more space, and hence respect, to Guevara's meeting with the Chilean communists, and it receives good play the film version as well.Because we all know who Guevara becomes, we are all enchanted by the possibility that some dramatic event his youth sparked a revolutionary commitment a man who had been training to enter the Argentine bourgeoisie as a medical doctor. We must not dismiss the possibility that no single event on this South American journey shook Guevara out of his political indifference. Guevara's political development certainly intensified as a result of this South American journey, but he does not describe one epiphany. The journey as a whole moved Guevara closer toward a revolutionary commitment, a conclusion that Guevara himself reached sometime after his trip. After he returned to Buenos Aires, Guevara rewrote his travel diary as a narrative document and added an epilogue titled Notes on the Margin. …

Unipolaridade, governabilidade global e intervenção unilateral anglo-americana no Iraque

As intervenções humanitárias (Bósnia 1995-2003, Somália 1992-1993, Kosovo 1999-2003) e de substituição de regimes ditatoriais (Haiti 1994, Afeganistão 2001-2003, Iraque 2003) na política internacional têm sido objeto de muitas controvérsias acadêmicas durante a última década. O presente artigo, à luz dos teóricos das relações internacionais e da ciência política, analisa a legitimidade dessas atitudes por meio do unilateralismo norte-americano.

Latin Drama and Leveller Ideas: Pedagogy and Power in the Writings of Richard Overton

IThe Presbyterian cleric Thomas Edwards has been awarded the title of 'first discoverer of the Levellers'. The 'prime targets' of the third part of Edwards's voluminous heresiography Gangraena (three parts, 1646) were 'the men who were later to be recognized as the leaders of the Leveller party' - John Lilburne, William Walwyn and Richard Overton - and his summary of their constitutional radicalism anticipates fairly accurately the contents of the first Agreement of the People (3 November 1647).1 By attacking the political theories of the future Leveller leaders within the genre of the heresiography, Edwards explicitly linked political radicalism with religious heterodoxy. Lilburne, Walwyn and Overton had a history of religious activism and involvement in separatist congregations: the three men appear in the first and second parts of Gangraena as prominent heresiarchs as well as in the third part as political radicals or 'civil heretics'. Most scholars have concurred with Edwards's connection between radical religious belief and Leveller ideas, even if they cannot agree over the nature and importance of that connection.2 For Edwards, the seditious political opinions of men such as Lilburne, Walwyn and Overton confirmed the anarchic consequences of allowing the laity to engage openly in religious speculation. The multitude of 'Errors, Heresies, Blasphemies and pernicious Practices' infecting England in the 1640s was a consequence of allowing 'illiterate Mechanick persons' to debate theology and voice opinions 'both unsound and weak, fit to take women and weak people, but not to satisfie any scholar'.3There might appear to be a curious contradiction in Edwards's characterization of the radicals as 'illiterate'. He frequently quotes from heretical books in the margins of Gangraena and explicitly connects the usurpation of the university-trained clergy by 'illiterate Mechanick persons' with Parliament's failure to enforce both its 1645 Act against lay preaching and its Licensing Act of 1643.4 However the apparent contradiction in Edwards's simultaneous accusation of illiteracy and citation of radical texts is the effect of an anachronistic understanding of terms. In the early seventeenth century 'literate' and 'illiterate' largely retained the medieval sense of their Latin roots, litteratus and illitteratus. These terms denoted 'two educationworlds: literate, the education-world of Latin and the cleric . . . illiterate, the education-world of the vernacular and the lay person'.5 It is literacy in Latin, not in the vernacular, that Edwards erects as a boundary between clergy and laity. Christopher Hill, the most influential historian of seventeenth- century English radicalism, has repeated these hostile contemporary claims about the lowly educational background of the radicals but from a positive and sympathetic Marxist perspective: 'the eloquence, the power of the simple artisans who took part in these disputes is staggering'.6 Edwards uses the charge of ignorance to disqualify radical voices from being heard, whereas Hill celebrates the conditions in which ordinary people were free to engage openly in religious and political speculation. Like Edwards, however, Hill sees radical ideas and writings as an authentic expression of popular beliefs that evolved outside the institutional educational and cultural structures of early modern England:[P]ersons (including women) who had no university education, often no grammar school education even, found no obstacles to publication . . . [s]o in the interregnum discussions there was no longer a shared background of classical scholarship; the rules of logic which structured academic controversy were ignored. University scholars treated the newcomers with contempt, and this in turn fuelled opposition to the universities as such. The whole classical curriculum and the conventions of academic argument were called in question.7As this extract indicates, Hill does not identify radical ideas exclusively with the oral culture of the illiterate; such a position would be untenable given his total reliance on printed sources for evidence of those ideas. …

:Medicine and the Italian Universities, 1250-1600

Acknowledgements Introduction 1. The Medical Learning of Albertus Magnus 2. How to Write a Latin Book on Surgery: Organizing Principles and Authorial Devices in Guglielmo da Saliceto and Dino del Garbo 3. Avicenna and the Teaching of Practical Medicine 4. Two Models of Medical Culture, Pietro d'Abano and Taddeo Alderotti 5. The libri morales in the Faculty of Arts and Medicine at bologna: Bartolomeo da Varginana and the pseudo-Aristotelian Economics 6. The Music of Pulse 7. Medical Scholasticism and the Historian 8. The Physician's Task: Medical Reputations in Humanist Collective Biographies 9. Renaissance Critiques of Medicine, Physiology, and Anatomy 10. Renaissance Readers and Avicenna's Organization of Medical Knowledge 11. 'Remarkable' Diseases, 'Remarkable' Cures, and personal Experience in Renaissance Medical Texts 12. Vesalius and the Reading of Galen's Teleology 13. Vesalius and Human Diversity in De humani corporis fabrica 14. Giovanni Argenterio: Medical Innovation, Princely Patronage and Academic Controversy 15. Signs and Evidence: Autopsy and Sanctity in Late sixteenth-Century Italy Index

Academic Controversy: Fostering Constructive Conflict in Natural Resources Education

Students who graduate from natural resource management curricula are virtually assured of having to deal with controversial public issues throughout their professional careers. Regardless of whether or not students will face such issues after they graduate, they can benefit from learning strategies that foster productive conflict in the classroom. Such strategies can lead to deeper understanding of issues than would be the case with lecture formats or outside readings. This paper discusses the use of a strategy called an academic controversy to facilitate critical thinking about, and deeper understanding of, natural resource issues. A format is given for conducting an academic controversy in the classroom along with suggestions for timing of the strategy. Students who have been involved in such controversies in forestry at Iowa State University rate themselves highly on team skills used during the controversy. Their overall impressions of the exercise are quite positive. Instructors have observed that students stay more focused on the problem being discussed than when the material is presented in a lecture format. The authors have not conducted controlled experiments to compare students' level of understanding between those who have participated in an academic controversy and those who have not. However, discussions and exam scores following the use of this strategy indicate that students do, in fact, develop a better understanding of central issues as a result of having experienced this strategy. Suggestions are also provided for other techniques to assess the effectiveness of the strategy.

Shoring up the humanities

o o d af ternoon. It's a real pleasure to be h e r e h e s p e c i a l l y since I see so any old fr iends in the audience and, I hope , new ones. Thank you for honor ing me with the invitation to speak to you. I first learned of the good work of the NAS over breakfast. Between sips of coffee my eye caught a newspaper article abou t a g roup of professors who had fo rmed a new scholarly organization. Thei r mission s ta tement spoke of discourse as the founda t ion of academic life in a free and democra t ic society, and p r o m o t e d an informed unders t and ing of the Western intellectual heritage. Wow, I thought , who are these revolutionaries and how can I f ind them? What impressed me most abou t NAS m e m b e r s was no t their scholarly distinction, which was considerable, nor their courage to chal lenge the status quo, bu t their call for true diversity: for many voices all engaged in free and rational discussion, for an open marketp lace of ideas, some new and promising, some old and proven. At the cen te r o f this enterpr ise was Steve Balch, a scholar who has devoted much of his life to the NAS and labored tirelessly toward its success. Many o f you here today worked alongside him; to you I offer congratulat ions and sincere thanks. You have made an e n o r m o u s and courageous cont r ibu t ion to h igher educat ion in our country. From what I read, the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education often call Steve and NAS executive di rector Brad Wilson to ask them to weigh in on this scholarly event or that academic controversy. I've jokingly told Steve that he and the NAS have b e c o m e par t o f The Establishment. He never laughs.

Are All Types of Cooperation Equal? Impact of Academic Controversy Versus Concurrence-Seeking on Health Education

Cooperative learning is commonly used to promote prosocial outcomes. It is often assumed that all types of cooperative learning are equal. One way in which cooperative learning procedures differ is in the role of conflict. This study compares the relative impact of two types of cooperative learning (concurrence-seeking which emphasizes harmony among students and academic controversy which emphasizes intellectual conflict among students) on outcomes of a health education program focusing on tobacco use, alcohol use, and AIDS. Participants were 37 students from grades 9–12 in a career-education track in a suburban mid-western high school. The students were classified as being low performing academically and at risk for destructive health habits. Students in the controversy condition, compared with those in the concurrence-seeking condition, significantly improved in knowledge about AIDS, developed healthier attitudes related towards safe sex and cigarettes, developed higher academic self-esteem, generated greater social influence, and improved in constructive conflict skills.

The Use of Academic Controversy in Elementary Science Methods Classes

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of academic controversy as a teaching strategy in elementary science methods classes. The academic controversy model was used with 80 elementary science methods students in one class at Utah State University and two classes at Westminster College in Pennsylvania. Small groups of students engaged in one of the following class-selected controversies: (1) the effects of smoking; (2) genetic engineering, and (3) an environmental issue dealing with the widening of a canyon road. Qualitative data were collected from student note cards, transcriptions of taped controversies, synthesis papers, and a post-controversy survey. Results were consistent, regardless of the topic or group of students. Outcomes indicated that (a) students demonstrated a high level of task commitment as they participated in this learning model, (b) students had a positive attitude toward the use of the academic controversy model, (c) students perceived a high level of content attainment, and (d) students exhibited positive attitudes toward other members of their controversy group.

Developing and dealing with controversial issues in criminal justice courses*

One of the most stimulating but trying aspects of teaching criminology and criminal justice courses centers on the controversial issues that so frequently arise in our courses. In this paper we discuss five models or approaches to dealing with controversial issues in the classroom: the due process approach, the peacemaking approach, the academic controversy approach, the devil's advocate approach, and the avoidance approach. These models are intended as ideal types to be used by instructors find them useful, not as models to be compared critically. Strategies to prevent or cool down heated discussions are also suggested.

Identification of African-Derived Bees in the Americas: A Survey of Methods

In 1956, honey bees of the African subspecies A. m. scutellata were imported to Brazil, and their descendents subsequently spread to South, Central, and North America. This invasion sparked significant academic controversy, particularly concerning the genetic composition of the expanding population. We review the biogeography and intraspecific phylogeny of Apis mellifera in the Old World as it pertains to African-derived bees in the Americas, the methods used to study gene flow between European-derived and African-derived populations in the New World, and the techniques used in identification of African-derived bees.

Die Pharisäer: Ihr Verständnis im Spiegel der christlichen und jüdischen Forschung seit Wellhausen und Graetz (review)

Pharisaer: Ihr Verstandnis im Spiegel der christlichen und judischen Forschung seit Wellhausen und Graetz, by Roland DienesAs its subtitle indicates, this book is not so much a study of the Pharisees in the setting of Second Temple Judaic culture as it is a study of the role that the Pharisees have played in the European and American historical imagination since the late nineteenth century. By focusing upon ways in which modern historians and theologians have read and interpreted the ancient Christian and Jewish sources on the Pharisees, Professor Deines hopes to learn as well how an apparently academic controversy over the nature and influence of an ancient Jewish religious community-cum-political party serves as a subtext of a modern debate among Christians and Jews over the continuing legitimacy of Judaism as a religion conceived to stem from primarily Pharisaic origins.This book began as a doctoral dissertation under the direction of one of the great contemporary scholars of Second Temple Judaism, Professor Martin Hengel of the University of Tubingen. It is, accordingly, characterized by extensive learning, painstaking attention to details, and an encyclopedic effort at documenting every possible publication of relevance to the question. The bibliography alone is an unparalleled source of literature on the interpretation of the Pharisaic role in early Judaism, while the extensive footnotes guide professional readers expertly through the maze of secondary scholarly discussion of each and every issue relevant to the project.A summary of the book's structure indicates its comprehensive character. The first two chapters, focusing on the foundations of the modern critical discussion, document the rather different contours that the Pharisaic question took among Christian and Jewish scholars working within the scientific-historiographical paradigms developed in the nineteenth-century German university. The first chapter begins with the foundational study of the great biblical historian, Julius Wellhausen, whose essay on Die Pharisaer und die Sadducaer of 1874 set the terms of the modern historical-critical discussion among New Testament scholars. Deines documents how a rather unreflective anti-Judaism shaped the ways in which Wellhausen and his major successors (E. Schurer and W. Bousset) fleshed out ancient depictions of the Pharisees in the Gospels and Josephus to interpret the nature of the Judaism that ultimately made necessary the redemptive moment represented by Jesus of Nazareth. As a kind of counter-salvo, Chapter Two moves behind Wellhausen to the earliest attempts of Jewish scholars such as I. M. Jost, A. Geiger, and N. Krochmal to wrestle with the Pharisaic question in purely inner-Judaic terms. Deines here points out how the discourse on Jews and Judaism in German culture dramatically shaped the way Jewish historians -- and the great Heinrich Graetz in particular -- would position the Pharisees in ancient Judaism in relation to the teachings of Jesus. …

Book Review: Academic Controversy: Enriching College Instruction through Intellectual Conflict

"Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. If investigates invention. It shocks us out of sheeplike passivity and sets us at nothing and contriving....Conflict is a sine qua non of reflection and ingenuity." -- John Dewey. Conflict - the opposition of contraries - has long served as an essential component of learning and understanding in higher education. The deepest learning is almost always a confrontation between established beliefs and new ways of knowing, a friction of minds meeting.

Book Review: Academic Controversy: Enriching College Instruction through Intellectual Conflict

"Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. If investigates invention. It shocks us out of sheeplike passivity and sets us at nothing and contriving....Conflict is a sine qua non of reflection and ingenuity." -- John Dewey. Conflict - the opposition of contraries - has long served as an essential component of learning and understanding in higher education. The deepest learning is almost always a confrontation between established beliefs and new ways of knowing, a friction of minds meeting.

Malory: Texts and Sources by P.J.C. Field (review)

110arthuriana p.j.c. field, Malory: Texts and Sources. Arthurian Studies XL. Woodbridge, Suffolk and Rochester, N.Y: Boydell & Brewer, 1998. Pp. x, 313. isbn: 0-85991-5360. $90. Malory: Text and Sources assembles twenty-three essays which the learned and assiduous P.J.C. Field published separately in edited collections and scholarly journals between 1972 and 1996. As one would expect from the reviser of The Works ofSir Thomas Malory cd. Eugene Vinaver, Third Edition, a concern with the texts ofboth Caxton and Winchester dominates a number of essays, including "I he Earliest Texts of Malory's Morte Darthur,' 'Author, Scribe and Reader in Malory: The Case of Harleuse and Peryne,' and 'Malory's Place-Names: Westminster Bridge and Virvyn.' Several essays are combative in tone. 'Caxton's Roman War' deals with an academic controversy initiated at the Exeter Arthurian Congress in 1975 when a paper by William Matthews proposed that Malory himself revised from a longer account the version of the Roman war which Caxton printed. Charles Moorman's defence of the theory, published in Arthuriana (5.2 Summer, 1995), Field, relying on Yuji Nakao's statistical proof, condemns as 'inaccurate,' 'implausible,' and 'false.' Claude Luttrell's complaint that the hunt associated with Arthur's wedding feast is obscure and confused in the Morte compared with its French source (Arthurian Literature IX, 1989) is countered in 'Hunting, Hawking and Textual Criticism in Malory's Morte Darthur.' Not only had the English author developed a different kind ofstory-telling technique, one that aimed at conciseness, speed, and heightened suspense, but his own expertise in hunting matters led him to add realistic details that departed from the French source. Moreover, some discrepancies can be blamed on scribal error. Medievalists are suigeneris hypothesists. Expressions such as 'perhaps,' ' suppose,' 'would have had to have been,' 'something very like it could well have appeared,' and 'a reasonable guess' are frequent throughout this collection. Sometimes the assumption of lost manuscripts and scribal additions or errors is used to support theories when mere coincidence might provide a more reasonable explanation. Consider Malory and The WeddingofSir Gawain andDame Ragnell which proposes Malory as the author of the metrical romance. In the fifteenth century when the London standard ofEnglish prevailed in written works and when the language had not yet been enriched by abundant Renaissance imports, a commonality ofdiction and expression, particularly in the romance genre, is more likely to explain the seven examples ofsimilar wording. Nor do the common motifs relating to hunting, marriage, and happy endings prove that one work was drawn from the other. One is also dubious about the number ofbooks that this impoverished knightprisoner , a military man not a scholar, is said to have known. Given that the 800 volume library ofCharles V, which the Duke ofBedford acquired in 1425, contained only thirteen Arthurian texts, it is unlikely that in addition to his five major French sources and two English metrical romances Malory could also have acquired Perlesvaus, Arthur and Merlin, The Avowing ofArthur, Lybeaus Desconus, Ywain and REVIEWS111 Gawain, the Suite de Merlin, Robert de Baron's Joseph, Chrétien de Troyes' Yvain, Lancelot and Erec, Sir Triamour, Girart d'Amiens' Escanor, not to mention Hardyng's Chronicle, Chaucer's Trodus, Knight's Tale' and 'Franklin's Talc' and other volumes as suggested in 'Malory's Minor Sources,' 'Malory and Perlesvaus! 'Malory and Chrétien de Troyes' et al—to which Field adds, Tt is unlikely that we yet have a full list.' On the subject ofwhat particular manuscripts constituted Malory's 'Frensshe bookes,' however, 'Malory and the French prose Lancelot' describes a procedure which might bring us closer to answering this perennial question. Using as his base the sixteen Lancelot manuscripts now in the British Isles along with Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale MSS fr. 119-20, Field compares the Malory text, episode by episode, with the French texts and tabulates significant agreements. The results indicate that in choosing as his yardstick London, British Library Additional MS. 10293, Vinaver 'could hardly have chosen worse.' Alexander Michas Lancelot, based on Oxford, Bodleian MS. Rawlinson D.899 is closer, giving a better image ofMalory's source manuscript 'which must have stemmed from early...

Zhou Enlai and the Foundations of Chinese Foreign Policy (review)

Reviews 541 acknowledged master explore China. In the process, the reader also will be introduced to a sophisticated analysis ofscholarly disputes about the meaning of equality, the role ofritual, philosophic reductionism in ancient Greece and China, and shifts and turns in Chinese communism. Arthur Lewis Rosenbaum Claremont McKenna College ArthurRosenbaum is an associateprofessor ofhistoryspecializing in late nineteenthand early twentieth-century history. Kuo-kang Shao. Zhou Enlai and the Foundations ofChinese Foreign Policy. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997. xii, 370 pp. Hardcover $49.95, isbn 0312 -15892-0. In the introduction to his new book, Kuo-kang Shao notes that at the time he conceived this book in the summer of1986 there was "still no in-depth study of Zhou Enlai's concepts of statecraft available for a general audience" (p. ix). Subsequently , he regrets the lack of a "comprehensive study ofZhou's intellectual development and his influence on Chinese foreign policy during the period from 1949 to 1976" (p. 3). This reviewer should probably clarify that in his own volume, The Diplomacy ofZhou Enlai (St. Martin's/Macmillan Press, 1989), it was also indicated that "in neither China nor the West has there been a systematic study of the policies which sustained [Zhou Enlai's] rational practice ofdiplomacy in the service ofrevolution." The reviewer's volume was thereafter translated and issued by two separate publishing houses in Beijing, and a subsequent review article analyzed these two translations, together with a Chinese translation ofDickWilson's well-known biography on Zhou Enlai, in China Review International (vol. 1, no. 2 [Fall 1994]: 58-72). Zhou Enlai's diplomacy still enjoys extraordinary relevance to the study of international relations, and even with Shao's new study there is still room for further research and related academic controversy. Professor Shao asks much the same questions as I did in my 1989 volume, but he often answers differently.© 1998 by UniversitySnaQ retraces znou's career in order to identify the conceptualbasis ofhis "pragmatism," to analyze how this pragmatism affected Chinese foreign policy, and finally to assess Zhou's specific negotiating style and skills. In his ensuing analytical correlations Shao logically deploys the biographical detail ofZhou's forofHawai 'i Press 542 China Review International: Vol. 5, No. 2, Fall 1998 mative intellectual development. This analysis reviews the traditional philosophical dimensions of Zhou's "pragmatism," which is then related to Zhou's participation in the ideas and politics ofthe May Fourth Movement. Shao's analysis of Zhou's European correspondence focuses particularly on his appreciation of European statecraft and international relations, but he may have given less attention than my 1989 volume as to how Zhou's view of social and economic conditions affected his understanding offoreign policy and the general drift to world war. Shao greatly improves on the historical record with a new, detailed analysis of Zhou's reactions to Charles Darwin, Thomas H. Huxley, John Dewey, and Hu Shih. He roots the famous slogans "seeking the truth from the facts" and yin shi zhi yi, or "doing what is guided by circumstances," within an imperial tradition of "Chinese pragmatism," but unfortunately this thematic material is not fully integrated with ongoing historical reference to the Yan'an era and the post-1949 MaoZhou appropriation of these same terms as key ideological constructs for understanding complex social and political realities. In fact, this brings out a major point ofdisagreement as to how best to understand the origins of Zhou's foreign policy "pragmatism" and negotiating style. Shao prefers to treat "ideology" as "dogma." For Marx, "ideology" might have invoked the "false consciousness" of the ruling class, but for both Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, "ideology" was also a "scientific" logic, or epistemology, that was eminently useful in unlocking the contradictions ofmaterial reality. For Mao and Zhou, praxis was part of ideology. Shao's analysis is consistent with mainstream distinctions between Mao's "ideology" and Zhou's "pragmatism." This distinction is further complemented in the tendency to bifurcate communist ideology and Chinese nationalism, but this begs the question as to whether Zhou as a communist leader realistically focused on China's national interest from within die Party's ideological framework. Zhou did indeed emphasize the...

Against the Odds? Social Class and Social Justice in Industrial Societies

What is the relation between social class and social justice? This is currently a matter of public as well as academic controversy. While nobody would deny that the distribution of rewards in industrial societies is unequal, there is sharp disagreement about whether this inequality can be justified. Some see existing patterns of social mobility as evidence of inequality of opportunity. Others regard them as meritocratic, simply reflecting the distribution of abilities among the population. This fascinating, interdisciplinary study brings together recent developments in normative thinking about social justice with new empirical findings about educational attainment and social mobility. The result is a path-breaking contribution to our thinking about issues of class and justice, one that will be of interest to both sociologists and political theorists for many years to come.

Meritocratic equality of opportunity: Economic efficiency, social justice, or both?

The relation between social class and social justice is currently a matter of public as well as academic controversy. Some analysts see existing patterns of social mobility as evidence of inequality of opportunity, while others regard them as meritocratic, simply reflecting the distribution of ability and motivation among the population. This article brings together some important developments in normative thinking about social justice with recent empirical findings about educational attainment and social mobility. Various conceptions of ‘merit’ are identified, with different senses shown to be appropriate in different contexts. The authors argue that it is important to distinguish between the criteria that do or should govern the allocation of individuals to occupations, on the one hand, and the criteria that do or should govern the allocation of rewards to individuals on the other. They conclude that the New Right defence of a meritocratic but unequal society points to a conception of social justice that is consistent with persisting social inequality, based on the differential possession of qualities over which people have no control. The article therefore argues for a more rigorous examination of the relationship between meritocracy and social justice.

Vitamin supplementation practices: health/nutrition education implications

A sample of 310 supplement users, 216 nonsupplement users and 247 inconsistent (user/nonuser) supplementers were followed for 18 months to examine the consistency of supplementation. Since supplementation is often not required for a healthy diet, factors associated with persistence or stability of supplement use have implications for appropriate health/nutrition education. Consistent supplementation (at least 18 months' duration) was associated (P < 0·01) with (i) female sex, (ii) health beliefs in the efficacy of supplementation, (iii) seeking health information from physicians, nurses, dietitians and nutritionists, (iv) using periodicals, TV/radio and books for sources of nutrition information, (v) older age, (vi) higher income and (vii) higher levels of education. Nonusers were more likely to attribute health to chance on the Multidimensional Health Locus of Control scale, and inconsistent users were more likely to have experienced a change in employment status, relocation to another town/city and a higher number of ‘change’ events in the previous 18 months. Based on the characteristics of the consistent supplement user, ‘academic controversy’ may be an effective educational strategy to employ, if changes in supplementation attitudes and beliefs are desired.