Comparative Frame Of Reference Research Articles

An Extension of Chung-ying Cheng’s Onto-Generative Hermeneutics

Abstract Chung-ying Cheng’s onto-generative hermeneutical studies of the foundational philosophical texts of China and the Western philosophical traditions expand the horizon of comparative interpretative analyses. The origin of onto-generative hermeneutics is multifaceted, ranging from the Yijing 《易經》(the Book of Changes) and the Neo-Confucian text of Zhang Zai, Ximing《西銘》 (the Western Inscription) to the phenomenology of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, and to the hermeneutics of Gadamer. Building on Cheng’s examination of the relation between phenomenology, hermeneutics, and the classical texts of Chinese philosophy, the present discussion begins with an exploration of the origin and the continuation of phenomenology and hermeneutics in a comparative frame of reference of Chinese and Greek texts.

An Intercultural Analysis of the Algerian Middle School Coursebook "My Book of English-Year One"


 The cultural component has become as important as the other language components in foreign language instruction. Teaching materials in general and coursebooks in particular are required to assist learners to develop intercultural communicative competence in today’s globalisation era. This work is an attempt to analyse ‘My Book of English-Year One’, one of the “second generation” coursebooks introduced recently at the Algerian middle school level, to see to what extent it incorporates the necessary ingredients for intercultural teaching/learning to take place. The analysis revealed that ‘knowing oneself’ is predominant in the book and pupils are not encouraged to consider cultural information in a comparative frame of reference, facts which do not promote the development of intercultural understanding.
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The Comparative Frame of Reference in Self-Rated Health Questions Matters When Predicting Difficulty with Activities of Daily Living.

Within the assessment of frailty, self-rated health (SRH) questions remain frequently used in survey research attempting to quantify a subjective and global measure of health. Studies have largely ignored the fact that SRH questions may differ in their ability to predict level of difficulty with performing activities of daily living (ADLs)-a variance partially influenced by whether a comparative frame of reference in used in the SRH question. Investigate if a Comparative-SRH (C-SRH) question with response options ranging on an adjectival scale ranging from 0 to 3; and a Non-Comparative-SRH (NC-SRH) question with an adjectival response scale from range 0 to 5; differ in their ability to predict level of difficulty in performing ADLs after accounting for demographic, psychosocial, and related health factors. Cross-sectional study of community-dwelling adults (n=275; x age=68; female=54%; x BMI=31) from North Carolina participating in the Hispanic Aging Survey (HAS) were used in multivariable linear regressions to predict a granular measure of level of difficulty performing ADLs. Only C-SRH has a statistically significant relationship with ADLs-where each increase in C-SRH (i.e., more positively self-rated health) is associated with a decrease in ADL level of difficult. Using a comparative frame of reference in SRH questions may have important implications when attempting to understand the statistical relationship between self-rated global health and physical function in the assessment of frailty in older adults.

Good Faith and the Fair Work Act: Its Potential, in Light of the New Zealand Experience

AbstractThis article addresses the potential of the Fair Work Act’s good faith bargaining provision to enhance good faith bargaining and employment relationships, using New Zealand’s good faith provisions under the Employment Relations Act 2000 as a comparative frame of reference. It explores the limitations of the Fair Work Act’s compliance-based approach to good faith, which consists mainly of the parties presenting a legally defensible appearance of not acting in bad faith. In contrast, the New Zealand legislation aims to suffuse good faith with considerable content and definition, enabling parties to the employment relationship to extend good faith well beyond bargaining. In contrast to the Employment Relations Act, the formalistic, procedural approach promoted by the Fair Work Act is unlikely to encourage a significant cultural change towards meaningful good faith principles and practices.

‘For the honour of the town’: comparison, competition and civic identity in eighteenth-century England

Eighteenth-century England was not merely ‘polite and commercial’; it was also notoriously competitive. This article argues that competition and contrast were not confined to weighing up the comparative status and achievements of individuals but were also fundamental to the development of civic consciousness and identity. Contemporaries developed a wide, comparative frame of reference which encouraged a heightened sense of competition with rival urban centres. However, this process also encouraged elements within urban society to define themselves in opposition to rival ‘communities’ within their own walls.

Cultures of Empire

In view of the ever-increasing specialization and volume of contemporary scholar-ship, one can only applaud any effort to break down the boundaries that tend to be drawn around separate disciplines. In this provocatively ambitious essay Ann Laura Stoler manages to do exactly that. She zeroes in on key trends in the scholarly litera-tures on European and American empires, identifies hitherto unrecognized points of convergence and congruence within those distinct literatures, and suggests poten-tially fruitful comparative projects that might uncover additional common ground. That an anthropologist who specializes in European imperialism—a self-identified interloper—has accomplished so much, and more, in this wide-ranging article makes hers an unusually important and welcome intervention in American history. My comments will concentrate on the utility of the insights Stoler offers, largely through the comparative lens that she deploys, for just one of the scholarly audiences her stimulating article addresses: students of United States foreign relations. There is much of value here for diplomatic historians, it bears emphasizing from the outset, especially if they accept Stoler's invitation to approach potential comparative projects with imagination and breadth of vision. By insisting upon the essential comparability of European and American experiences of empire, she joins a swelling chorus of U.S. historians who have been seeking to internationalize the study of American history. This intellectual ferment, abetted by the Organization of American Historians and well reflected in the pages of this journal, aspires to get a firmer handle on the dis-tinctive and not-so-distinctive features of United States history by looking closely at how other states and societies responded to, and were shaped by, similar transna-tional processes. Slavery and the slave trade, emancipation, industrialization, immigration, the rise of organized labor, the emergence of movements for women's rights and other reforms, state development—each of those subjects has been enriched in recent years by scholars who have sought to place American developments within a broader, comparative frame of reference. So, too, has the study of U.S. imperialism, even if, as Stoler rightly notes, more extended and extensive conversations between students of the American empire and their Europeanist counterparts could redound to the benefit of both groups.

ADVERTISING CONTENT FOR THE GLOBAL AUDIENCE: A RESEARCH PROPOSAL

This paper provides a theoretical framework for examining a global (standardized) versus specialized (adaptive) print advertising strategy for the global audience. Likelihood of standardization will depend upon the information content and emotional appeals conveyed in the advertisements. A research design is provided which may study and compare advertisements of identified product types and sponsors using content analysis. Development of a comparative frame of reference for competitive product positioning is explored as an alternative to direct comparative advertising.

Public administration theory a futurist vision

As the world becomes increasingly interdependent, Americans interested in public administration will begin to realize that it is a universal phenomenon and field of inquiry that attracts the attention of researchers and teachers in all countries of the world. This will lead them to stop equating American governance with Public Administration. They will come to see that, in a comparative frame of reference, American bureaucracy, its administrative practices and political functions are quite unique. Comparative Public Administration as a special focus of study will disappear because all administrative studies must be comparative, and “American Public Administration” will gain recognition as one of many parochial foci for research as a country-specific emphasis. Before this shift in perspective can gain widespread acceptance in America, however, the relevant work of non-American scholars will have to become more generally read in America, and the distinctively American conditions that led to the origin of this field and its subsequent dissemination on a global basis must be recognized. Among the specific points that this paradigmatic shift will highlight are the following: the reasons why bureauphilia and bureauphobia persist in a context marked by pressure to make administrative studies and performance non-political and to divorce “politics” from “public administration;” the vain effort to gain recognition for Public Administration as either a profession or a discipline; the institutional implications of this false dilemma; the effects of focusing on career civil servants while paying scant attention to other bureaucrats, namely military officers, partisan appointees, retainers and consultants; and the causes and consequences of the American bureaucracy's semi-powered status.

A Significant Social Revolution: Cross-Cultural Aspects of the Evolution of Compulsory Education

British Educational Research Journal- A valuable source book for issues in the history of education. History of Education Quarterly- Mangan has seized upon a topic ripe for examination and has presented it in an imaginative, comparative frame of reference. He deserves our commendation

Folklore, Anthropology, and the Government of Social Life

Despite the enormous diversity of research within the anthropological tradition, a common unifying theme has been the “reach into otherness” (Burridge 1973:6), the venture of discovering humanity through the exploration of other cultures. From the inception of anthropology as a distinct domain of knowledge, this ethnographic curiosity has been staged within a comparative frame of reference (Hymes 1974). Early inquiries into different customs and social forms were based on the writings of European travelers, whose observations about people in distant lands provided the narrative material for constructing a plausible vision of their own world. Initially, insights into the workings of society remained implicit, hidden beneath the projected images of “otherness.” By the second half of the eighteenth century, these encounters with the unfamiliar through travel and commerce had begun to generate a conscious desire for societal self-knowledge among Europeans. The haphazard collection of ethnographic information was gradually transformed into a reflective methodology.

Commentary

Like Dr. Ryan, I too hesitate to speak for my profession. But I would like to record substantial agreement with the main points in Ryan's stimulating paper: that anthropology and sociology complement and reinforce each other. And I would like to place my exclamation point beside Ryan's insistence that modern mass society be viewed in the context of the total range of societal variation. This view offers, it seems to me, the only promise of a widely comparative science of society which will yield successively more accurate generalizations about the nature of human social organization, rather than specific statements about the social organization of Chicago, Detroit, and St. Louis. In such a comparative frame of reference, anthropology and sociology can find their proper place in the search for generalizations about the nature of human culture and human social structure.