Disciplinary Framework Research Articles

Tracking ‘the transnational’: studying transnational organizations and managements, and the management of cohesion

This article argues for greater clarity in researching transnational organizations and management, and the need for gendered multi‐level theory and gendered multi‐actor analysis. It examines different understandings and conceptualizations of ‘the transnational’ in studying transnational organizations and management, and their implications for understanding and conceptualizing the ‘management of cohesion’. In so doing, three conceptual and theoretical questions are considered: what are the major meanings of ‘the transnational’ in studying transnational organizations and management? What are the major different disciplinary frameworks in studying transnational organizations and management? What are the major epistemological debates in studying transnational organizations and management? Particular emphasis is placed on: the field of studies on transnational organizations and management; transnational research projects on transnational organizations and management; and the lives of transnational researchers. Two ongoing research projects – on gender relations in transnational organizations and managements, and men's changing organizational practices in Europe – are focused on to illustrate these issues. The theme of gender critique is developed throughout.

Complexity and interprofessional education

AbstractCalls for greater collaboration between professionals in health and social care have led to pressures to move towards interprofessional education at both pre‐ and postregistration levels. Whilst this move has evolved out of ‘common sense’ demands, such a multiple systems approach to education does not fit easily into existing traditional disciplinary frameworks and there is, as yet, no proven theoretical framework to guide its development. What is more, it lacks a clear causality and predictability and therefore does not fit easily into traditional scientific frameworks with their focus on analysis, prediction and control. This article considers how complexity theory, with its focus on connectivity, diversity, self‐organization, and emergence, can provide interprofessional education with a coherent theoretical foundation, freeing it from the constraints of a traditional linear framework, enabling it to be better understood, questioned and challenged as a new paradigm of learning.

Ralph Bunche: University and Diplomatic Legacies Fostering Innovative Paradigms

This article is based upon the 2003 24th Annual Charles H. Thompson Lecture at Howard University. It devotes attention to the nexuses between Ralph Bunche's scholarly publications and diplomatic speeches and their relationships to contemporary university plans and programs to address ongoing crises. In-depth interviews with a university chancellor and a president at two major public research universities-the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor-were undertaken in order to ascertain the current roles of universities as they directly and/or indirectly build upon Bunche's conceptual writings, policy perspectives, and higher education program implementation. Little could the parents of Ralph Johnson Bunche envision on August 7, 1903, that their newborn son would become one of the 20th century's foremost diplomats and world scholars. During the middle part of the 20th century, Ralph Bunche was internationally renowned as a Nobel Peace Laureate-the first person of color to achieve this distinction-for negotiating armistices between Israel and Arab states in 1949. Within this period, the Nobel Laureate was being investigated by the House Committee on Un-American activities for his alleged ties to the Communist Party and its endeavors in the United States. Simultaneously, Bunche's former colleagues from Howard University (such as historian John Hope Franklin) and students (such as psychologist Kenneth Clark) were preparing the historical, educational, psychological, and legal arguments for eliminating but public school systems for African Americans and European American students (Henry 1999; Keppel, 1995). Most Americans and many international scholars and policymakers are aware of the historical Supreme Court decision on May 17, 1954-Brown vs. the Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas-which declared that separate but equal were inherently unequal. During that same week in May 1954, the House Committee cleared Bunche of alleged ties to the Communist Party. A half-century later, numerous educational institutions and organizations are commemorating the Brown decision. Fifty years later, Bunche is now known primarily in select academic and diplomatic circles. To rectify this absent legacy and to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Bundle's birth, a national Centenary Committee (with Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush and United Nations secretary Kofi Annan as honorary chairs and co-chaired by a diplomat who held six ambassadorial posts, a knighted United Nations executive, and a university director emeritus of a Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies) is undertaking a careful portrait and dissemination of the diplomatic, international relations, public policy, and educational contributions of Ralph Bunche (Ralph Bunche Centenary, 2004). The Journal of Negro Education is devoting its spring 2004 issue to an exploration and analysis of Bunche's contributions to education and domestic and international diplomacy. This lead article provides a general overview of Bundle's life by explicating educational and policy contributions of Bunche particularly as they pertain to contemporary universities. Other scholars and diplomats devote detailed attention to his life via examinations of his original and lingering influences on progressive social movements, specific disciplinary frameworks (such as political science, race relations, public policy, and globalization), and diplomacy within the United Nations. CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORKS To begin our conceptual examination, we build upon the historical, sociological, and political science literature by and about Bunche (Bunche, 1941; Henry 1999; Keppel, 1995; Urquhart 1993) and the nexuses between diplomacy and education (Amin, 1997; Clark, 1990; Lindsay 2003; Stromquist, 2002). Based upon tenets of these scholarly and diplomatic works, a salient overarching question is posited: What components of Bunche's scholarly and diplomatic skills may be used to facilitate contemporary college and university endeavors as they address pressing diplomatic and public policies after September 11th or ongoing crises in the Middle East and other hot spots? …

Digitize This: The Cultural Studies e-Archive Project

My challenge to those that use Derrida or Bey or Adorno or Bourdieu within their disciplinary frameworks to advance our understanding of new media, is can you enact the ideas of these thinkers in a sophisticated way through new media, or can it only be done through writing books about books? I challenge cultural studies and new media theorists to produce a Derrida engine or a Bourdieu database or a Bey GIS map. I am not aware of any major contribution that cultural studies has made within this medium beyond using it as a publishing and networking mechanism, and beyond writing innumerable valuable books to critique it from a distance. We need more people engaged in building academic resources on-line that help us to look at things in new ways. Craig Bellamy, “The Milk Bar Challenge,” posted on the fibreculture mailing list on 22 July, 2002

Preparing Tomorrow's Foresters: Embedding Professional Interactive Skills in a Technical Discipline

Abstract In recent surveys, employers of forestry graduates have indicated that interpersonal skills as well as technical competencies are essential for long-term success in forestry. These employers find that many recent graduates fall short in their ability to work in teams, listen to and address public questions, and solve problems collaboratively. New classroom approaches that embed interactive skills within a disciplinary framework can assist students in developing those necessary social skills and at the same time enhance students' learning and retention of technical information. A six-course sequence for Iowa State University sophomores illustrates the concept of cooperative learning as an alternative to individual and competitive learning models. Instructors find that supervised practice of interactive skills in a classroom environment develops the professional competencies employers want.

Decolonizing Pacific Studies: Indigenous Perspectives, Knowledge, and Wisdom in Higher Education

As part of a larger effort to reflect critically on the nature, scope, and processes of colonialism in Oceania, decolonizing the field of Pacific studies must focus on the impact of colonialism on people's minds—particularly on their ways of knowing, their views of who and what they are, and what they consider worthwhile to teachand to learn. It is essential to challenge the dominance of western philosophy, content, and pedagogy in the lives and the education of Pacific peoples, and to reclaim indigenous Oceanic perspectives, knowledge, and wisdom that have been devalued or suppressed. Modern scholars and writers must examine the western disciplinary frameworks within which they have been schooled, as well as the ideas and images of the Pacific they have inherited, in order to move beyond them. The curricula of formal education, particularly higher education, should include indigenous Oceanic knowledge, worldviews, and philosophies of teaching and learning, for several reasons: to contribute to and expand the general knowledge base of higher education; to make university study more meaningful for many students; to validate and legitimize academic work, particularly in the eyes of indigenous peoples; and to enhance collaboration between indigenous and nonindigenous peoples.

Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers: A New Convergence

Poverty reduction strategy papers represent both a primary policy device of international development institutions, and an instance of a wider international convergence of public policy around global integration and social inclusion. Charting the emergence of these approaches, this paper argues that this convergence has a number of structural predilections which favor the technical and juridical over the political economic, and a disciplinary framework over a practical contest. Drawing extensively on decentralized governance and poverty reduction programs in Uganda, this paper shows how these predilections obscure power relations and restrict practical and political options, while exacting heavy establishment and compliance costs.

Developmental plasticity in plants: implications of non-cognitive behavior

There has been a surge of interest in phenotypic plasticity in the last two decades. Most studies, however, are being carried out within relatively narrow disciplinary frameworks. Consequently, researchers differ not only in their scientific agenda; they often use different terminologies and conceptual frameworks even when studying the very same phenomena. The diversity of approaches has often generated parallel bodies of theory on subjects that can be best understood in broader interdisciplinary terms. This special issue points out the differences between the concepts and questions that are characteristic of various approaches. Bridging all gulfs may be impossible and not necessarily desirable, yet, awareness of the varied approaches should be instrumental in promoting interdisciplinary advances. It is the contribution to such awareness that is the major purpose of this special issue, and for this reason it deals with molecular, physiological, ecological and evolutionary approaches to the study of developmental plasticity. So as to focus the discussion, six topics have been selected, ranging from the fundamental essence of developmental plasticity to its implications to ecology and evolution. These topics were considered by scholars who were chosen for the diversity of their research, not only their expertise. Rather than a comprehensive body of theory, the current issue thus seeks the diversity of opinions on the discussed topics. It is hoped that the confrontation, in its original Latin sense, which includes bringing together and discussion, of scholars who are studying these phenomena at very different levels and from different points of view will generate new insights and promote future interdisciplinary research.

Clinical evaluation: constructing a new model for post-normal medicine.

The current paradigm in medicine is served by an explanatory model based on scientific positivism. We argue that there are inherent weaknesses in this model: its basis on reductionism, its reliance on linear thinking and its failure to incorporate human values invite a revision of our thinking about knowledge in medicine. We propose that a fresh explanatory model should be based on complexity theory, and argue that this better suits the new era of post-normal medicine, where analytical and predictive power are obtained by stepping back and looking at the relationships and overall context of a system rather than forcing reality into a preferred disciplinary framework. Better at times to be vaguely right, we argue, rather than precisely wrong.

The Transformation of Academic Culture in Mainland Chinese Archaeology

Although antiquarianism in China can be traced back at least to the 8th century BC, modern archaeology was introduced from the West into China in the late 19th century, and developed in isolation from 1949 to 1978. However, after China opened her door to the world in 1978, there have been noticeable changes in the academic culture of Chinese archaeology, which can be illustrated in terms of its disciplinary objectives, research agendas, methodologies and theoretical frameworks. These changes reflect a cultural transformation resulting from the economic, social, political and ideological changes taking place in contemporary China.

Anticipatory action learning: conversations about the future

This paper proposes experimenting with anticipatory action learning for helping to create the future. It is an interactive process that relies strongly on a central thread of conversation among a variety of participants, from multiple perspectives, concerned with the social unit or project. Basically, anticipatory action learning is action research modified for foresight. It integrates research/search with decision and action, and downgrades the prerogative of a research elite, empowering all participants. Conversation allows meaning from a range of different worldviews to be shared and negotiated for studying, theorising and otherwise engaging the future—and more importantly, for helping to create it. Criteria are proposed for anticipatory action learning and procedural and administrative limitations are addressed. The visions we have about our own futures vary according to the mindset each of us stands in. It would be fascinating to compare the personally envisioned futures of everyone at an international meeting of futurists. Our futures should converge in some way where we share common interests as futurists, and diverge on the point of intercultural variety. But, would they differ from each other as widely as those of Aung San Suu Kyi and the Burmese generals? It would be even more telling to compare the range of alternative futures envisioned by world leaders with the visions of their constituents and especially, say, with the visions of a woman in Africa’s Central Lakes region and of the homeless in Osaka. In a similar way, the means of engaging the future in order to study it, and its uncertainties, and the way people think about it, are variously dependent on the mindsets of the scholars and researchers, and the realities they find themselves in. Methodologies of futures studies range across the predictable: from empirical quantitative projection (linear and non-linear); to qualitative interpretation and critical analysis; and to participatory action research or its associate, action learning. Then, futures studies differs according to the disciplinary framework of the researcher, whether in physics, ecology, complexity science, social science and the humanities, critical cultural theory or philosophy. Further, there is the division of the pragmatic and academic perspectives. Actually, the very fact of having a formal methodology is itself derived from a dominant civilisational and ethical perspective, mainly Western. There is another important distinction in futures studies. On the one hand, there is the perspective from which futurists research, analyse and critique the future, or more precisely what other people think and say about the future. On the other, there is the perspective from which people in the focal social unit may think and act to create their own futures. Then, acting to create a future poses at least two further distinctions depending on whether one believes the future is structurally preordained, or whether human interaction and intervention play a significant part. It is from the perspective of participative human agency acting to create one future or another, at least partially, that this paper proceeds. Before going further, let us address the question of whether future-creating can rightly be claimed to constitute the study of the future, or future studies. If it is not part of futures studies, then at least future-creating activity does rely on input from the field, the results of studying and reflecting on alternative options for the future—futures, plural. Whatever way we look at creating the future, as opposed to merely researching data about it, the activity does represent a fairly direct, personal engagement of the future, as much as anyone can do about a time–space that has yet to arrive. This is an important distinction, since many empirical futures studies do not so directly engage the future, well not personally. Rather, they examine stated opinions of others about future options, and other people’s preferences, emerging issues and the like, themselves all valuable activities.

Contextualizing the Process of Accounting Regulation: A Study of Nineteenth‐Century British Friendly Societies

Friendly societies date from the seventeenth century and have been the subject of statutory recognition and regulation since 1793. These societies developed rapidly in the nineteenth century as a mechanism of self‐help for the emerging industrial working class. This article embraces an historical examination of the social, economic and political contexts within which a discourse on the issue of their regulation took place and reveals the ideologies underpinning the disciplinary framework that was constructed. Ideas of the philosophical radicals were influential in making friendly societies the subject of closer regulation. This development came at a time when laissez‐faire as a guide to government action gave ground to the acceptance of the need for state control in the endeavour to enhance the common good. The concepts of paternalism and financial safety are found to have influenced the decision to regulate friendly societies, and the disciplinary framework constructed is located within the range of provisions applying to organizational entities operating in nineteenth‐century Britain.

Politics, institutional structures, and the rise of economics: A comparative study

Our modernity has been a witness to the dramatic rise of economics around the world. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, the study of the economy has evolved from a loose discursive "field," with no clear and identifiable boundaries, into a fully "professionalized" enterprise, relying on both a coherent and highly formalized disciplinary framework, and extensive practical claims in administrative, business, and mass media institutions. Perhaps more than any other form of knowledge, economics has participated in the rationalization of our "life-world," to use Habermas's phrase, by extending its logic into ever more remote areas of our everyday experience. At first glance, the expansion of the discourse and profession of economics may be understood as a fairly homogeneous, world-level, trend of societal rationalization. Certainly, the dominant intellectual form in economic science (largely derived from the Anglo-Saxon tradition) generally presents itself as a universalistic paradigm. Its main rhetorical tool - model-building - is often taken-for-granted as a "natural" product of the cumulative development of scientific knowledge. And since professions derive much of their authority and social legitimacy from the delimitation of a coherent and widely shared domain of knowledge, we may regard modern economics' claims to expert monopoly as a logical extension of its own internal theoretical and methodological strength. The extensive jurisdictional prerogatives of economists thus seem to be legitimated by the fact that their discipline constitutes undoubtedly the most well-bounded and organized scholarly enterprise in the social scientific field.

Some Millennial Thoughts about the Future of Writing Centers

When most writing centers in the United States were being founded and developed, colleges and universities had very few entities they labeled “centers.” Today, however, centers are cropping up with increasing regularity. At our own institutions, we have (between us) Centers for Humanities, Centers for Advanced Materials Research, Centers for Cognitive Studies, Centers for the Study of First Americans— even a Center for Epigraphy. It seems worth pausing to consider this phenomenon: Where are all these centers coming from, and why are they proliferating so rapidly? One strong possibility: Centers create spaces for the kind of work that needs to be done in higher education, work that is difficult or impossible to do within traditional disciplinary frameworks. In almost every case, for example, the previously mentioned centers allow for interor cross-disciplinary research and scholarship, and at their best they encourage highly productive forms of collaboration. Furthermore, they often initiate projects designed to bring college and community closer together. In short, these new centers seem to us one of the major signs of stress on old ways of taxonomizing and creating knowledge. Their growing popularity signals, we think, one institutional response to changing educational demands, populations, budgets, and technologies. We are well aware that these are difficult times at most community colleges, colleges, and universities, and that faculty and staff in many writing centers must spend an inordinate amount of time struggling to provide basic services. Nevertheless we wish to emphasize those opportunities that we believe are available to writing centers, even those that are in various ways marginalized on their campuses. The opportunities that we will discuss involve four potentials that we see for institutional refiguration: the refiguration of institutional space, of concepts of knowlWork Cited

Feminist psychology in an Interdisciplinary Context

This paper describes, for an interdisciplinary audience, the impact of gender analyses within psychology as a discipline and the implications of this for interdisciplinary research on gender issues. The paper argues that, because psychological notions (personality, motive, desire etc.) are part of ordinary contemporary Western discourse, the unreflective incorporation of psychological ideas into other disciplinary frameworks is commonplace. While much feminist psychology also uncritically adopts such notions, critical feminist psychology exposes the socially constructed nature of this discourse, explores the way in which it infuses our ordinary everyday accounts of experience—and, indeed, how it comes to constitute that experience. Because psychological notions are so pervasive, and are implicit to (when not explicit in) many of the analyses carried out by other disciplines, critical psychology—especially feminist critical psychology—has a crucial role to play in the development of a tvansdisciplinary scholarship of gender.

At Work in the Fields of Public Health: The Abuse of Rationality

his special issue presents anthropological involvement in public health both as a vehicle for enhancing the participation of anthropologists in preventive and curative health programs, and as an intellectual activity of theorizing around the rationality of human beings. As a theorizing activity, anthropology provides its own critical insights about the connections assumed to exist between beliefs and behaviors, knowledge, attitudes, and practices, and about related problems such as the differential exposure to messages, the conditions in which behavioral changes are produced, and the decision-making process regarding the use of health services. Wherever anthropologists in public health work (developing or more developed countries), whatever they do in health promotion, prevention, care, and rehabilitation (for example, education for safe sex, promotion of needle exchange programs among intravenous drug users, studies of therapeutic itineraries, formulating culturally appropriate measures for controlling tuberculosis or malaria), and whoever their colleagues may be (health educators, experts in communication, demographers, epidemiologists, social psychologists, nutritionists, health administrators, social workers, etc.), anthropologists tend to use a disciplinary framework organized around three key parameters: a focus on local knowledge, cultural sensitivity, and a grounding in community. These articles abundantly echo the idea that the bottom-up approach allows the use of indigenous knowledge and community resources, and also makes local persons and community groups coresponsible for developing policies, programs, and activities for improving health. The articles have identified with great clarity weaknesses that severely limit the effectiveness of many preventive and curative activities that still rely too exclusively on conventional schemes-the mere transposition of Western models to quite different societies-largely unconnected to the ways local communities identify, explain, and manage health problems. Case studies such as Lane's evaluation of television soap operas for health education in

Policy‐focused approach to manpower planning

Discusses the limitations of labour market analysis (LMA), which is widely advocated as a successor to conventional manpower planning. Argues the need for a more systematic approach within the framework of policy formulation and implementation. The proposed “policy‐focused” approach would overcome some of the problems associated with LMA, in particular its lack of a disciplinary framework and operational process.

Argument Fields as Arenas of Discursive Struggle

Argument theorists have long been concerned with the explanation of practical everyday argument. Since Stephen Toulmin's The Uses of Argument,(1) the study of argument fields has become a theme in argumentation theories that examine arguments in social space.(2) Responding to analytic philosophers, Toulmin posited that formal logic was an inadequate system for explaining engaged argumentative practices of social agents. Because claims of universal rationality inevitably fail to explain arguments in their real world context, Toulmin argued that different of propositions correspond to different human arenas, metaphorically referred to as From this perspective argument theorists could delineate among fields by examining the systems of argumentative forms successfully employed in social fields. The study of argument fields, therefore, allowed for the systematic inquiry and consideration of argument without having to make universal claims. This view offered a practical step toward the recognition of the dynamics of social authority in particular social contexts.(3) In Human Understanding, Toulmin recasted the discussion of fields to include a schemata more analogous to academic disciplines.(4) From this perspective, a field is defined as a more formal organization based on subject matter. The institutional or disciplinary framework is the arena in which the participants apply arguments. Both of these approaches to the study of practical argumentation have generated useful scholarly debates about the definition and purpose of argument fields and the goal of argumentation studies. While the assumption that arguments are based on fields seems to be accepted uniformly by argument scholars, this insight has yet to yield a coherent theory of everyday argumentative practices within fields.(5) Despite the heuristic value, the argument field literature has not provided a concrete descriptive or method to guide inquiry. We have isolated three problems limiting the formulation of a theory of argument fields. First, argument theorists have not defined argument fields in a way in which both the internal logic of argumentative utterances and the external organization constraining those utterances are adequately taken into account. Second, the literature on fields has virtually ignored the dynamic discursive struggles for epistemic legitimacy in social fields in favor of a more evolutionary conception of epistemic development. Third, research into fields has failed to reconcile the riced for sociological description with its overarching disciplinary preference for normative criticism. The call to reconcile such problems in field theory is not unique to this essay. We agree with Pamela Benoit's claim that the conceptual confusion has contributed to a set of articles that construct critical appraisals lacking a central theoretical focus.(6) This lack of correspondence between theory and practice also caused Raymie McKerrow to question whether the 'theory' undergirding field research has provided a sufficiently powerful vocabulary for the explication of arguments.(7) This essay argues that the integration of Pierre Bourdieu's theory of social practice to argument field theory provides an answer to the persistent problems confronting scholars interested in a social theory of argument. LIMITATIONS OF ARGUMENT FIELD LITERATURE The first practical obstacle to the formation of a coherent theory of argument fields is the lack of a theoretical consensus regarding the defining characteristics of an argument field. Examining the general characteristics of argument fields is useful and some degree of conceptual fuzziness is needed to allow argument fields to account for the diversity of argument and settings.(8) However, current field definitions have failed to resolve adequately the tension between fields as logical types or as disciplines, impeding the goal of explaining practical argumentative practices. …

A multidimensional view of healthy sexuality

Abstract This article addresses the multiple disciplines that are involved with, that are challenged by, and that influence sexual addiction. Its intent is to review some of the disciplinary frameworks for viewing sexuality along with some of the historical sociocultural structures that affect sexuality. The article concludes with an agenda for action to direct sexual addiction/compulsion therapy and recovery toward healthy sexuality.

Mastering the challenge of optoelectronic computing

We discuss the research on optoelectronic computing systems that is being conducted in one of the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Engineering Research Centers. The center, now in its sixth year as a NSF Engineering Research Center, is located at the University of Colorado in Boulder and Colorado State University in Fon Collins. We focus on the contributions that an Engineering Research Center can make to research, education. and technology transfer because of its interdisciplinary nature, its focus on systems, and its involvement with industries active in the field of interest to the Center. We describe the mission, vision. the research goals, and the structure of the Optoelectronic Computing Systems Center to demonstrate how the Center provides a powerful cross·disciplinary framework within which to conduct important research in the field of optoelectronic computing. Several unique research issues that are being pursued at the Center are discussed. Examples of these issues are new neural network algorithms that are specifically tailored to the application of optics in the design of neural network computing machines, speed·of.light digital computer architectures in which the infonnation is in constant motion and is never static or stored in a latching memory, and ferroelectric liquid crystal materials that are tailored for use in spatial light modulators and optoelectronic neural computing systems. The paper also explores the impact of the Center on education at the two universities.