Critical Theoretical Framework Research Articles

A critical theoretical model for library‐led technological development: A case of open source software and libraries

AbstractThe public discourse of libraries is increasingly aligned with the development of a global “information society.” This current research study critiques the global policy discourse of the information society, building upon the critiques of Webster (2002) and arguing that a global information society may serve to undermine library service goals and accelerate processes of information commoditization and the privatization of library services in an increasingly commercial environment. Countering these ideologies and policy goals requires developing critical theoretical frameworks and modes of action. In response to this idea, this study, building upon technology studies and critical theory, proposes a theoretical model for library‐led technological development. Using a critical theoretical framework and an in‐depth, qualitative case‐study methodology, prominent open source software initiatives in libraries around the world are analyzed, with a particular focus on library consortia activity in Western Canada. The open source movement has generated a great deal of attention for its challenges to proprietary models of software development, as well as to traditional notions of property (Weber, 2004). An emerging movement within the library profession is considering open source software as a way to reduce dependence on proprietary software vendors, and to have more control in the development of technology in libraries (Frumkin, 2002). However, little work has been done in theorizing and understanding how and/or whether open source software can enhance library service ethics and goals. This case study of open source software development will thus serve as an exploration in the development of a theoretical model for library‐led technological development. Findings from this research will contribute to an understanding of the open source movement within libraries, and can provide a theoretical lens for analyzing other forms of library‐led technological development in different contexts, both local and global, such as the growing open access publishing movement.

An Examination of the Sociopolitical History of Chicanos and its Relationship to School Performance

How does a history of discrimination and marginalization affect Chicanos’ perceptions of schooling? This article offers a brief analysis of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo as an instantiation of a historical metanarrative of colonialism. Using a critical theoretical framework, the article explores the destructive impact of this narrative on Chicano youth. Although it is clear that times change, certain essential elements of a colonial relationship remain; they are inescapable for Chicano youth and affect their view of schooling along with their school performance. Furthermore, students’ critical examinations of these metanarratives can empower young people to disrupt predictable educational trajectories. The article concludes with suggestions for creating a caring school culture through a culturally relevant critical pedagogy that empowers students to develop a sense of hope, purpose, and positive identity.

No Poor Child Left Unrecruited: How NCLB Codifies and Perpetuates Urban School Militarism

A critical theoretical framework is used to analyze the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) federal legislation and its role in codifying and perpetuating educational practices and policies that contribute to growing campus militarism in urban schools serving low-income African American and Latino students. The author argues that NCLB § 9528 is part of a broader strategy by the Pentagon to recruit low-income urban youth for the military. The article examines how NCLB's focus on standardized tests and punitive sanctions reinforces urban schools' already narrow curriculum, leading to the diminished capacity of students to question militarism and challenge social oppression.

The Goals of a Voluntary Integration Program and the Problems of Access: A Closer Look at a Magnet School Application Brochure

The article incorporates a critical theoretical and methodological framework to study a large urban district's implementation of a court-ordered voluntary integration program through magnet school choice. Drawing on the interview data from parents and district staff, the author analyzes the data as they relate to the district's magnet school application brochure, Opportunities for Success, and how the application is designed to support the voluntary integration program. The article first presents a short historical grounding for the district's voluntary integration program and how it influences the choice options for parents. Next, it discusses how the district implemented and organized the voluntary integration program and produced the magnet school application text. It then introduces data on parents' interactions with the magnet school brochure and application. The article concludes with a discussion of what can be learned from studying the texts of a voluntary integration program, what it tells us about racial and class privilege and diverse families' access to magnet school programs, and how text analysis can help us see where, in the institutional processes of school choice, further resegregation is likely to take place.

Extending Learning Communities: New Technologies, Multiple Literacies, and Culture Blind Pedagogies

Technologies such as videoconferencing used for distance education are creating ways for high schools to extend their learning communities to connect youth with professional communities of practice in ways that approximate the face-to-face interactions in traditional classrooms. These technologies are often touted as a way to augment course offerings and curricula, particularly those needed for college-going. The use of videoconferencing technologies alone, however, does not ensure that the desired forms of interaction will occur particularly given their reliance on traditional banking-model pedagogies and literacies. In this article, we focus on college bound Black and Latino/a youth from under resourced urban communities and their negotiations of new technologies, multiple literacies, and traditional pedagogies within a music education learning community extended through videoconferencing technologies. Employing a multicultural feminist critical theoretical framework, we unearth the ways Black and Latino/a youth’s identities as active learners and college-bound musicians shape, and are shaped, in the interplay of new technologies, multiple literacies, and traditional pedagogies within a music education classroom.

The linguistic ideologies of modern Japanese honorifics and the historic reality of modernity

This paper analyzes honorifics and deference entitlement in Modern Japanese along with the modern Japanese and Euro-American pragmatic theories thereof, as ideologically mediated social phenomena, in the critical–theoretical framework where they are contextualized to their socio-historic surrounds, inter alia to the modern socio-economic conditions giving rise to, but hidden behind, the modern pragmatic theories and the honorific phenomena analyzed by them.

The Illusive Search for Justificatory Theories: Copyright, Commodification and Capital

The traditional philosophical justifications for copyright policy fail to account for current expansionary trends. The proprietary logic of contemporary copyright policies is justified on neither utilitarian nor rights-based grounds. Instead, copyright developments are located within the broader framework of commodification and the logic of capital itself. Since copyright law has been outpaced by a technology that undermines both the legal framework and the underlying economic theory on which it is based, a critical theoretical framework rooted in political economy is needed to harmonize the use and dissemination of information with the developing productive forces in society. Central to this framework is the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value, which is inherent in every commodity. This tension, which is particularly acute in the case of the information commodity, becomes sharper with the use of new technologically enabled exclusion mechanisms, as well as with various policy initiatives that seek to expand the duration, scope, and intensity of the copyright monopoly. Reconceptualizing copyright theory through the lens of critical political economy will help raise issues that are often overlooked in the current policy environment, and should decrease the acceptance of traditional justifications without considering all of the policy alternatives.

Placing the consumption of private complementary medicine: everyday geographies of older peoples’ use

Using a combined questionnaire and interview survey of older users of complementary medicine, an interpretative framework is developed to examine their consumer behaviour. Collectively, three inter-related levels of interpretation provide a detailed description of complementary medicine as a consumer experience very much associated with particular places and settings. First, structural features of two local private sectors are investigated, including the different organisational modes and local cultures of provision. Second, experiential features are investigated, including how treatment impacts on older users’ use of space and on their personal mobility. Third, conceptual features are investigated, including how older users articulate the belief systems associated with complementary medicine. Overlying these levels are a wide-variety of therapeutic settings that make up the total therapeutic experience. These range in scale from the micro-level of clinics and users’ homes to the macro-level of towns. The paper unravels the complex, individualized, dispersed and everyday consumer geographies associated with these emerging forms of health care, highlights the intimate dynamics that exist between places and care and showcases how these may be effectively mapped by using qualitative methods and a critical theoretical framework.

Young Lives, Learning and Transformation: Some theoretical considerations

The term 'learning' is now used to signal a range of political, social and economic aspirations. At the same time, the political, economic and cultural conditions under which learning occurs are changing. In these circumstances, it is appropriate to return to some fundamental questions about what learning is. This paper draws from a four-year longitudinal study of young people and their experiences of learning, jointly directed by Phil Hodkinson and myself. The study was based upon semi-structured interviews commencing with 50 young people in their final year of compulsory schooling. Over the four-year period, it witnessed transformations in their lives, including transformations in their dispositions to learning. In the paper, I draw from a range of theoretical sources for the illumination of these transformations and attempt to ground the work in a critical theoretical framework. I argue that theory must acknowledge the situated, positional, relational and participatory nature of learning if it is to capture adequately the complexities of learning and transformational processes. I conclude, also, that the explanatory power of theory is enhanced when it incorporates a temporal dimension and when it addresses how learning is embedded within the complex and continually changing patterns of other life experiences.

Intercultural Perspective and Knowledge for Equity in the Mercosul Countries: Limits and potentials in educational policies

This article discusses the extent to which the tension between globalized moves towards market-oriented educational policies and the pressing need to respond to cultural diversity and inequality surfaces in the way knowledge is viewed in the educational policies of the recently created Mercosul block. In a critical intercultural theoretical framework, it explores the local context of sociocultural inequality and considers limits and potentials for working out knowledge for equity and transformation as proposed by two influential agencies in the area-the World Bank and CEPAL (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, from UNESCO)-and developed in the Brazilian national curricular guidelines, which are taken as a case study.

Modernization and Juridification in Latin America: A Reassessment of the Latin American Developmental Path

What is the distinctive trait of the Latin American pattern of modernization? In contrast to western societies, where the debate on modernization has been dominated by the Weberian thematic of bureaucratiz-ation, the most salient feature of the Latin American developmental path is the chronic frailty of legal-constitutional arrangements. In Latin America, the process of modernization and social differentiation has not been followed by the legal stabilization of social complexity but is characterized by a low degree of juridification and institutional precariousness. Drawing on insights from both Luhmann's and Habermas' theories, the article provides a critical theoretical framework for the study of the peculiarities of the Latin American modernizing path.

Marxism and Critical Realism: The Same, Similar, or Just Plain Different?

The author examines the relationship between Marxism and critical realism. He problematises the suggestion that Marx implicitly utilised a critical realist theoretical framework. He does this by exploring three areas of inquiry: epistemology and ideology; the method of abstraction; causal powers and social form. By exploring these areas, the author demonstrates that critical realism in fact pursues a different theoretical project to that of Marxism. Moreover, by severing the link between theory and practice, critical realism commits fundamental theoretical problems and errors which it initially claimed to have surpassed. The author concludes by suggesting that these problems were inherent within the critical realist project from the outset.

"Barefoot” Sports Administrators: Laying the Foundation for Sports Development in South Africa

The author provides a perspective on South African sport, in terms of the existing perceptions, challenges, and constraints with which its managers are confronted. The unique needs of the disadvantaged communities with regard to sport management are discussed in relation to the Empowerment Model of Friedman (1992), and placed within the critical theoretical framework. The certified course in sports administration, being administered under the auspices of The University of the Western Cape (together with The University of Cape Town, National Sports Council Western Cape, and World Teach/Score), serves as a case study for this paper. It is argued that in order to address the immediate sporting needs of communities, and also to prepare them for future development, the training of community members as lay sports administrators is imperative. The role of sport and sport development in community development is explored, with special emphasis on the conditions in economically depressed communities. The importance of empowering communities to become more self-reliant in terms of sport management, was emphasized. Finally, an evaluation of the course was provided, and major shortcomings and future challenges are discussed.

Public Relations and the Production of News: A Critical Review and Theoretical Framework

Because the source-reporter relationship forms the focal point of news gathering, it is a significant topic in the media sociology literature. Most of the source-reporter literature, however, focuses on the routines and values of the reporter. In this chapter the authors argue that public relations often sets the agenda for news media simply because the source in source-reporter interaction is often either a public relations practitioner or a practitioner’s client. A three-section model explaining the role and impact of public relations in the news-gathering and news dissemination process is presented and used to organize a review of the literature. The source-reporter relationship section of the model includes studies of mutual assessments and power dynamics. The organizational section contains studies of practices and values in public relations, including ethics and professional values such as routines and news values. The societal section of the model covers studies pertaining to information subsidies and other influences on news media agendas, such as marketing pressures. A summary assessment of the source-reporter literature concludes that too much of the scholarly research has been merely descriptive. Theoretical directions are suggested to enrich public relations research and our understanding of public relations practice.

Mental Imagery as the Adaptationist Views It

Mental images are one of the more obvious aspects of human conscious experience. Familiar idioms such as “the mind's eye” reflect the high status of the image in metacognition. Theoretically, a defining characteristic of mental images is that they can be analog representations. But this has led to an enduring puzzle in cognitive psychology: How do “mental pictures” fit into a general theory of cognition? Three empirical problems have constituted this puzzle: The incidence of mental images has been unpredictable, innumerable ordinary concepts cannot be depicted, and images typically do not resemble things well. I argue in this paper that theorists have begun to address these problems successfully. I argue further that the critical theoretical framework involves thinking of mental images as information within a cognitive system that is fundamentally adaptive. The main outline of the adaptationist framework was evident in the school of thought known as American Functionalism, but adaptationism has formed a consistent pattern of theorizing across many authors and decades. I briefly describe Functionalism and then present seven basic claims about imagery that were common in the years before the predominance of behaviorism. I then show how these claims have reappeared and been further articulated in modern cognitive psychology. I end with a brief integration of some of the basic elements of an adaptationist theory of imagery.