Exposition Of Technique Research Articles

Researching complex projects: Using causal mapping to take a systems perspective

Extant literature has called for researchers to be more pluralistic in their approaches to researching projects. Responding to this call, this paper offers an exposition of a causal mapping technique. In the project management literature, there already exists a small number of articles reporting effective use of causal mapping. However, these are not dedicated to detailed explanation of the technique itself and so lack consideration of its features beyond those relevant to a particular application. Consequently, an exposition of the technique is needed to enable comprehensive understanding of causal mapping to be gained and its suitability for research designs assessed. Specifically, this paper examines causal mapping's theoretical grounding, explores its strengths and weakness, presents example applications, compares alternative causal mapping approaches, and overall, explains how causal mapping can support a systemic perspective on projects. These issues will be of interest to researchers who wish to incorporate causal mapping into their project management research designs.

Groundwork for the Concept of Technique in Education: Herbert Marcuse and Technological Society

This article articulates the groundwork for a new understanding of the concept of technique through a critical engagement with Herbert Marcuse's critical theory of technology. To this end, it identifies and engages three expressions of technique in Marcuse's work: mimesis, reified labor, and the happy consciousness. It is argued that this mapping of the concept of technique provides the philosophy of education with a new perspective in which to understand the relationship between technology and the educational experience in the contemporary moment. The exposition of technique, moreover, when applied to the educational context, applies not only to technological artifacts per se but also extends to educational policies that share the mutual logic embedded within existing expressions of technique. Finally, it is suggested that Marcuse's project to theorize a ‘qualitatively new form’ of technology must be taken up within the educative process. The article contends that this will require rethinking interactions between students and science and technology within the educational context that can promote and produce democratic and liberatory expressions of technique.

Arthrography of the Knee Joint

This tidy volume from the Netherlands, written by a radiologist working in close collaboration with the orthopedic department of a state university hospital, reviews in some detail double-contrast arthrography of the knee joint. Discussion is well organized, beginning with a short historical annotation and a clear exposition of technique (the author prefers multiple roentgen views, while fluoroscopic examination seems to be the method used most by American radiologists). There follow chapters devoted to the various components of the knee, each correlating normal variations in gross and roentgen anatomy with the physiology and pathology of the structures in question. Included are not only meniscal lesions, for which arthrography is widely accepted as a diagnostic tool, but also conditions of the patellofemoral joint, cruciate and collateral ligaments, articular cartilage, and other internal structures of the joint for which the technique is not so well known. Arthrography is compared with arthroscopy of the

On Giving Works of Art a Face

The remarks that critics make about works of art are various in character. Some of them are strictly interpretative—for instance, The Lord of the Rings may be claimed to be an allegorical representation of the Gospel Story; the slow movement of a symphony may be said to express a period of calm after a revolution; a painting may be said to depict the horrors of war. Some may be biographical—that the play was written in 1654, that the poem was written while the poet was in love, that the sculpture was commissioned by the Canada Council. Some may be autobiographical—that the 7th has always been one's favourite Beethoven symphony, that one identifies with Joe in Room at the Top, that Medea was the first tragedy one saw performed in the original Greek. Some are ‘descriptive’ in the philosopher's sense, ‘matters of fact’—that the narrator is a senior civil servant, that the painting is all in pastel colours, that the conductor has not played all the repetitions. Some invoke formal structural principles—that the doors are in classical proportions, that the work's catastrophe is deferred to the finale, that the poem is in iambic pentameters. Some are concerned with the exposition of technique—that the spaciousness is suggested by the use of open fifths, that speed is portrayed by making the moving object sharper than anything else in the picture, that the effect of a sculpture is achieved by the use of metallurgically distinct materials. I wish to concentrate on a type of remark found frequently in art criticism, which defies reduction to any of the kinds mentioned above. The following are typical instances:That picture will not, at the first glance, deceive as a piece of actual sunlight; but this is because there is more in it than the sunlight, because under the glazing veil of vaulted fire which lights the vessel on her last path, there is a blue deep, desolate hollow of darkness, out of which you can hear the voice of the night wind, and the dull boom of the disturbed sea; because the cold deadly shadows of twilight are gathering through every sunbeam, and moment by moment as you look, you will fancy some new film and faintness of the night has risen over the vastness of the departing form (Ruskin, on Turner's The Fighting Temeraire).