Implicit View Research Articles

Hacia una nueva visión de la planificación en Cuba

The process of social change that has been installed in the Cuban public agenda since 2011 has been focusing on modification of game rules prevailing in the economy and society. The new rules lead to a reconfiguration of the system of actors and their interactions, and content an implicit view that differs from previous ossified model: in the near term we may witness a market economy in Cuba operating in relative fullness, with the broad participation of domestic and foreign private sector, but with the predominance of state property. Hence if economic planning is to continue to play a leading role under the new conditions, then the need to reconfigure its epistemological basis is clear. The urgent release of a certain dose of laissez-faire for all agents combined with the apprehension of new methods of intervention and indirect driving are presented as two major challenges for planners in Cuba.

Postmodernism as seen through the Swahili novel: a reading of Babu alipofufuka and Dunia yao by Said Ahmed Mohamed

In this article the interpretation of two Swahili novels by the Zanzibari writer Said Ahmed Mohamed, Babu alipofufuka (Grandpa's Resurrection) and Dunia yao (Their World), will be related to the current critical debates around the interrelationships between postmodernism and African literatures. In the African context, postmodernism, a broad category which refers to a wide range of literary discourses and practices that disrupt rationality, unity, and exclusivity, can be linked to the writer's aspiration to dismantle the realistic trend and its implicit optimistic view of national development, which characterized the emergence of modern African literatures after independence. The aim of the article is to focus on the Afrophone novel, by exploring some of the new literary techniques employed by Said Ahmed Mohamed and relating them to the writer's changing perspectives on East African society.

‘EDUCATING A GIRL MEANS EDUCATING A WHOLE NATION’ GENDER MAINSTREAMING, DEVELOPMENT AND ISLAMIC RESURGENCE IN NORTH CAMEROON

Abstract: The paper is an example of ‘local’ reception of global terminology concerning gender in the Cameroonian context: a gender awareness training for local religious, Muslim, and political leaders is analyzed. These leaders want development that departs from Islamic ‘roots’, emphasizing the importance of women's education. However, a concept such as ‘gender’ turned out to be incongruent with local concepts for relations between human beings. Because of that, they needed not reflect on their own attitudes as male citizens. Their implicit view is, so was discovered after analysis of the workshop, that a process of Islamization would automatically lead to gender mainstreaming. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In Defense of Paraphrase

This essay notes initially an assumption underlying much of the criticism addressing ethics and literaturethe belief that if there is something especially ethically significant about literature, it results from the peculiar nature of the relationship between the aesthetic text and its reader. Readings relying on this assumption often seek to outperform each other in emphasizing their attention to the ineffable features of literary texts, while criticizing rivals as inappropriately reading for a paraphrasable “message” commendable on philosophical grounds. I suggest that an alternative approach, one that sees the paraphrasable ideas such texts express as part of what makes them worthwhile, would be promising. The essay goes on to defend this account from two objections: an aesthetic objection, which suggests that it is mistaken to see literary texts as making theoretical assertions at all; and an objection from the history of literary criticism, which points out that it is debatable whether this approach is really new. I respond to the first by arguing that in fact moral-philosophical ideas are a necessary element of the artistic form of narratives, especially that of realist novels. Insofar as narratives necessarily involve the depiction of persons who make decisions and subsequently act, they cannot help but present at least an implicit view of the nature of human agency. Moreover, when narrators describe and reflect upon the decisions and actions of such characters, their articulations bring the implicit philosophical claims to a level of awareness. I draw out these ideas through a brief reading of George Eliot’s Middlemarch . The reply to the second objection depends on a genealogy of interpretative theory, one that draws out how an opposition to critical emphasis on ideas in literature developed within formalist theories of the novel, a process culminating in the New Critical insistence that literary ideas matter only insofar as they create an aesthetic structure. The genealogy shows then how deconstruction and the hermeneutics of suspicion share this fundamental opposition through their insistence that one must go beyond the mere ideas in a text to something more fundamental—either its reliance upon a fundamental instability or its repression of a non-normative political entity. Against this opposition, I propose a “content formalism”: an approach that openly admits its primary attention to the intellectual content of the literary work while accompanying this attitude with a non-reductive recognition of the importance of literary form.

A Single‐Stage Approach to Learning Phonological Categories: Insights From Inuktitut

To acquire one's native phonological system, language-specific phonological categories and relationships must be extracted from the input. The acquisition of the categories and relationships has each in its own right been the focus of intense research. However, it is remarkable that research on the acquisition of categories and the relations between them has proceeded, for the most part, independently of one another. We argue that this has led to the implicit view that phonological acquisition is a "two-stage" process: Phonetic categories are first acquired and then subsequently mapped onto abstract phoneme categories. We present simulations that suggest two problems with this view: First, the learner might mistake the phoneme-level categories for phonetic-level categories and thus be unable to learn the relationships between phonetic-level categories; on the other hand, the learner might construct inaccurate phonetic-level representations that prevent it from finding regular relations among them. We suggest an alternative conception of the phonological acquisition problem that sidesteps this apparent inevitability and acquires phonemic categories in a single stage. Using acoustic data from Inuktitut, we show that this model reliably converges on a set of phoneme-level categories and phonetic-level relations among subcategories, without making use of a lexicon.

Seeing through multicultural perspectives

The narrative that links the migrant rights movements with the formation of multiculturalism is now well known. There is still much to debate on the centrality of social justice in multicultural discourse and the dynamic versus static view of cultural representation. In this article, I aim to revisit some of the reflections by founding figures in Australian multiculturalism with the purpose of examining the cultural horizons that framed their motivation and aspiration. It is my contention that among many of these figures, there was not only a desire to see a more just society in which the welfare service, political rights and economic opportunities for migrants were developed in a more responsive manner, or what we may call activist multiculturalism, but there was also an implicit world view that was not only focused on securing more rights for minorities and gaining support of marginalised ethno-specific communities, but also committed to a wider sense of diversity. This article will explore the aesthetic dimensions that relate to the rather vague and often abstract sentiments that were expressed towards cultural diversity, but were also expressive of different multicultural perspectives.

Rapid aneuploidy detection or karyotyping? Ethical reflection

No consensus exists whether women at increased risk for trisomy 21, 13, and 18 should be offered stand-alone rapid aneuploidy detection (RAD) or karyotyping. In this paper, the ethical implications of a fast, relatively cheap and targeted RAD are examined. The advantages of RAD seem less robust than its proponents suggest. Fast test results only give a short-term psychological benefit. The cost advantage of RAD is apparent, but must be weighed against consequences like missed abnormalities, which are evaluated differently by professionals and pregnant women. Since pre-test information about RAD will have to include telling women about karyotyping as a possible alternative, the advantage of RAD in terms of the quantity of information that needs to be given may also be smaller than suggested. We conclude that none of the supposed arguments in favour of RAD is decisive in itself. Whether the case for RAD may still be regarded as convincing when taking these arguments together seems to depend on one's implicit view of what prenatal screening is about. Are we basically dealing with a test for trisomy 21 and a few conditions more? Or are there good grounds for also testing for the wider range of abnormalities that karyotyping can detect? As professionals and pregnant women may have different views about this, we suggest that the best approach is to offer women a choice between RAD and karyotyping. This approach is most in line with the general aim of prenatal screening: providing opportunities for autonomous reproductive choice.

Distribution of the phenotypic effects of random homologous recombination between two virus species.

Recombination has an evident impact on virus evolution and emergence of new pathotypes, and has generated an immense literature. However, the distribution of phenotypic effects caused by genome-wide random homologous recombination has never been formally investigated. Previous data on the subject have promoted the implicit view that most viral recombinant genomes are likely to be deleterious or lethal if the nucleotide identity of parental sequences is below 90%. We decided to challenge this view by creating a bank of near-random recombinants between two viral species of the genus Begomovirus (Family Geminiviridae) exhibiting 82% nucleotide identity, and by testing infectivity and in planta accumulation of recombinant clones randomly extracted from this bank. The bank was created by DNA-shuffling—a technology initially applied to the random shuffling of individual genes, and here implemented for the first time to shuffle full-length viral genomes. Together with our previously described system allowing the direct cloning of full-length infectious geminivirus genomes, it provided a unique opportunity to generate hundreds of “mosaic” virus genomes, directly testable for infectivity. A subset of 47 randomly chosen recombinants was sequenced, individually inoculated into tomato plants, and compared with the parental viruses. Surprisingly, our results showed that all recombinants were infectious and accumulated at levels comparable or intermediate to that of the parental clones. This indicates that, in our experimental system, despite the fact that the parental genomes differ by nearly 20%, lethal and/or large deleterious effects of recombination are very rare, in striking contrast to the common view that has emerged from previous studies published on other viruses.

War, Reconstruction, and the Nationalization of Britain, 1939-1951

The pairing ‘war and reconstruction’ is a central idea in the social democratic historiography of Britain between 1939 and 1951. 1 The linking reflects the implicit view that plans for reconstruction were important during the war itself, and indeed that society was being reconstructed before 1945. Reconstruction is taken to be about the building of a society very different from that of 1939, indeed one more like that of 1945. In this story the events of 1939, and especially of 1940, inaugurated a People’s War , which put Britain on the Road to 1945 and thus to the People’s Peace , to give the titles of relevant and famous books. 2 It is hardly surprising then that we have ‘the triumph of social democracy’, or the rise of the ‘benign state’ used as chapter headings for periods covering both the war and post-war years. 3 Tellingly, an account of the British state which took seriously the fiscal-military state of the eighteenth century gives Britain a ‘Social-Service State’ between 1880 and 1939, while the period 1939 to 1979 is covered in a chapter on ‘Total War and Cradle-to-Grave Welfare’. 4 Such ideas are of course linked to the suggestion that the 1940 coalition embodied a new consensus which persisted despite party government after the war; it has a political as well as a policy dimension, one in which the Left becomes more important as the welfare state was being forged in a new Britain where the People were central.

The politics of sport-for-development: Limited focus programmes and broad gauge problems?

This article explores the almost evangelical policy rhetoric of the sports-for-development ‘movement’ and the wide diversity of programmes and organizations included under this vague and weakly theorized banner. It is suggested that, although the rhetoric of sport as a human right has provided some rhetorical and symbolic legitimation for sport-for-development initiatives, the recent dramatic increase in interest reflects broader changes in the aid paradigm, reflecting perceived failures of top-down economic aid and an increased concern with issues of human and social capital, as well as the strengthening of civil society organizations. In this context the presumed ability of sport to offer an economy of solutions to a wide range of development problems led the United Nations, with the encouragement of a vociferous sport-for-development lobby, to turn to the world of sport in an effort to achieve its Millennium Development Goals. While there is a certain theoretical logic to some of the policy assertions about the contribution of sport to aspects of development, it is argued that the new approaches contain a number of dangers: confusing potential micro-level individual outcomes with community and broader macro-level impacts; ignoring wider socio-political contexts within which sport-for-development organizations have to operate; seeking to solve broad gauge problems via limited focus interventions; and encouraging mission drift by sport-for-development organizations wholly dependent on aid from a variety of aid agencies, with often overly ambitious non-sporting agendas. It is argued that if sport-for-development is to make a contribution to wider processes of development there is a need to ‘de-reify’ the rhetoric of sport-for-development and its implicit view of sport, and to view research and evaluation in terms of local programme development rather than the legitimation of international organizations and lobbies.

Is Power Production Flexibility a Substitute for Storability? Evidence from Electricity Futures Prices

textabstractElectricity is not storable. As a consequence, electricity demand and supply need to be in balance at any moment in time as a shortage in production volume cannot be compensated with supply from inventories. However, if the installed power supply capacity is very flexible, variation in demand can be counterbalanced with flexible adjustment of production volumes. Therefore, supply flexibility can replace the role of inventory. In this paper, we question whether power production flexibility is a substitute for storability. To do so, we examine power futures prices from countries that differ in their power supply and test whether power futures prices contain information about expected future spot prices and risk premiums and examine whether futures prices from a market in which power supply is more flexible would lead to futures prices that are more in line with the theory of storage. We find the opposite; futures prices from markets with flexible power supply behave according to the expectations theory. The implicit view from futures prices is that flexibility is not a substitute for storability.

CHANGING CONCEPTS IN PARKINSON DISEASE: MOVING BEYOND THE DECADE OF THE BRAIN

I congratulate Marras and Lang1 on their invited article concerning the changing concepts in Parkinson disease (PD). They provide three alternatives to define PD: 1) a clinical syndrome dominated by levodopa responsive parkinsonism; 2) a neuropathologic entity characterized by degeneration of the substantia nigra and formation of Lewy bodies; or 3) levodopa responsive parkinsonism associated with Lewy bodies. They opt for “an adult onset progressive disorder dominated by parkinsonism responsive to levodopa and commonly associated with motor complications.”1 The authors had previously termed this “classic parkinsonism.” I agree with Marras and Lang’s implicit view that clinicians need an accurate, nonspeculative, working definition for what can …

‘Developing’ the Self in the Knowledge Economy

The term ‘knowledge economy’, like the term ‘globalisation’, has become a catchword in political and educational debate over the last decade or so, especially in debates upon educational policy where the role of education in preparing young people to take their part in the Knowledge Economy is often seen as paramount over other traditional schooling activities. It is said in such debates that the production of knowledge, information and skills, will become more valuable than traditional primary and secondary production. A lot is said about the knowledge required in the Knowledge Economy, and about how institutions, businesses, activities and human beings are to be ordered or structured in accordance with views of knowledge and new Management theories. But little is said of the young people expected to take their part in the knowledge economy. Do they have a choice? Is lying on a surfboard excluded from their life options? How will they be developed, trained or educated to take their part? Will they be committed to developing their selves in accordance with the model of the IT Knowledge Entrepreneur (hereinafter TIKE) presented as a model for education by policy makers in the Knowledge Economy? This article will argue against this latter notion of the development of the self, arguing that because knowledge is prioritised over ethics, there is both an inadequate notion of the self and the educational development of the self and, because of its implicit view only of ethics, an inadequate ethical and moral view of education [246 words].

Veterinary Education as Leader: Which Alternatives?

This article suggests that veterinary medicine has a leadership role to play in our society on ethical matters involving non-human animals. The article contrasts two trends within veterinary medicine; the first trend is a continuation of the avowedly utilitarian attitude toward non-humans that has its roots in Western veterinary medicine's eighteenth-century origins, and the second is the implicit view in veterinary practice that animals matter in and of themselves. Using the idea of alternatives in research and teaching, the article suggests that, in the years to come, veterinary medicine's answers to the relationships of these two trends will shape not only the soul of veterinary medicine, veterinary education, and the veterinary profession but, just as importantly, the larger society and culture themselves. This text is based on the keynote address delivered at the AAVMC Education Symposium in Washington, DC, on March 9, 2006, under the title "Ethical Issues Impacting Animal Use in Veterinary Medical Teaching."

The Everyday Social Sources of Economic Crises: From "Great Frustrations" to "Great Revelations" in Interwar Britain

Who drives domestic institutional change in the face of international economic crisis? For materialists, self-interested actors struggle for material gains during exogenously generated crises. For constructivists, norm entrepreneurs strategically construct how crises should be interpreted to justify certain institutional reforms. While both these approaches are analytically powerful, they suffer from an implicit view of legitimacy as established by elite command or proclamation during periods of uncertainty. This article adds an extra piece to the puzzle of which institutional reforms are selected in the construction of a crisis. It suggests that everyday discourses constructed by mass public agents, or non-elites, provide impulses for elite actors to select institutional reforms that will receive social legitimacy. The article re-examines the case of interwar Britain, arguing that a “legitimacy gap” between elite and mass understandings informed institutional experimentation during the 1920s and 1930s, fertilizing the eventual “Keynesian Revolution.” In this way, this article seeks to show how the expressive practices and changing conventions of non-elite agents can shape institutional development. It also suggests that an “agent-centered constructivism” interested in explaining institutional change may be well served by taking into account popular as well as elite views.

What Did the Politburo Maximize?

The objectives of the Soviet economy's rulers received little attention in the literature. The majority (often implicit) view held growth of the official measure of aggregate output, irrespective of its use structure, i.e., growth for its own sake, to be the predominant objective. We show that the pursuit of this objective would have been irrational for a range of plausible utility functions of the rulers. The Soviet official pronouncements and the economy's observed performance suggest that the rulers pursued military might, with consumption being a secondary objective. This formulation returns the Soviet rulers to the company of rational economic actors, helps explain the main characteristics of the Soviet economic development better than the majority view, and provides a different prospective on the system's final decades.

Shopping for plastids

Recent suggestions that endosymbionts in a diatom and an amoeba represent independent origins of plastids from those in plants and algae raise again the question of how many times plastids have evolved. In this Opinion article, we review the evidence for a single origin or multiple origins of primary plastids. Although the data are widely taken as supporting a single origin, we stress the assumptions underlying that view, and argue for a more cautious interpretation. We also suggest that the implicit view of plastids being acquired from single ancestors at a single point (or points) in time is an over-simplification.

A manufacturer becoming service provider – challenges and a paradox

PurposeTo provide a perspective on the nature of service infusion in manufacturing companies based on a case analysis in the context of a maintenance management solution for industrial production equipment.Design/methodology/approachThe paper first discusses how manufacturers becoming service providers is treated in the literature. Next, a qualitative single‐case study is reported, in which a troublesome business concept was surveyed through 35 thematic focus group interviews. The analysis revealed a set of challenges that were compared to arrive at a conclusion, the paradox.FindingsThe findings suggest that many challenges stemmed from the manufacturing‐oriented way of doing business. This further indicates that the common implicit view, that manufacturers can shift to service provision steadily, by adding service offerings to their total offering one by one, may actually be hazardous.Research limitations/implicationsThe limitations are based on the methodology. First, the case study focuses on only one manufacturing company, and therefore the aim of the paper is not to generalize the findings. On the other hand, the data collected for the case are rich and in‐depth in nature, and the brief reporting can only cover the tip of the iceberg. Yet, even one divergent case yields for questioning the existing beliefs, which is the aim of this study.Originality/valueThe paper provides an original perspective to this topical, but under‐studied, phenomenon of manufacturers increasingly providing service offerings, and brings into daylight the implicit tone of the existing research.

An empirical study of the value-relevance of using proportionate consolidation accounting for investments in joint ventures

This research examines bond risk premiums to determine whether creditors of companies with investments in joint ventures reflect legal or implicit measures of the debts of joint ventures. The legal view suggests that the amount of potential loss from an investment in a joint venture is limited to the investment. The implicit view suggests that the operations of the joint venture and the venturer are interdependent. Equity method accounting reflects the legal view and proportionate consolidation reflects the implicit view. The study examines whether bond risk premiums are more highly associated with accounting numbers from proportionate consolidation than equity method accounting. The study uses data from 10Ks, the Wall Street Journal, and Moody's Bond Record from May 1, 1995 through April 30, 1998. These 4 years are used because US interest rates were fairly stable during this period, which is an important factor when examining bond risk premiums. Additionally, the companies in the study needed to remain stable across the window of study – no mergers, acquisitions, buy-outs, or liquidations – in order to maintain a comparative sample over the entire time period. The risk premium model uses measures of default that change between equity method accounting and proportionate consolidation. Differences in the explanatory power of the model determine how creditors view the joint venture debts. The study shows that approximately half of equity investments represent investments in joint ventures. Furthermore, the average joint venture uses debt to finance about two-thirds of the assets. The results show that proportionate consolidation fails to improve the explanatory power of the model when examining the entire set of companies that invest in joint ventures. However, the data reject the null hypothesis of no improvement with proportionate consolidation when examining companies who guarantee the debt of their joint venture. The policy implication of this study indicates that a change to proportionate consolidation would provide more value-relevant information to creditors when companies guarantee the debt of the joint venture.

Teachers’ implicit view of intelligence predict pupils’ self-perception as learners

Teachers regularly make judgements about their pupils’ intelligence while interacting with them in the classroom. The main aims of this paper are to analyse the structure of teachers’ judgements of their pupils’ intelligence, and to evaluate the influence that teachers have on pupils’ judgements of their own and their peers’ intelligence. Cross-cultural comparisons between English and Portuguese pupils are considered. In total 58 children 10- to 11-year-old and two teachers from London, UK and 47 children 5- to 6-year-old and two teachers from Lisbon, Portugal participated. The children completed aptitude tests and self-perception measures for general ability, reading and mathematical ability. The teachers ranked their pupils’ academic abilities from ‘best in the class’ to ‘weakest in the class’. Results show that teachers’ implicit conceptions of intelligence reflect a view of intelligence that is similar to what IQ tests measure. In addition the results support the notion that children’s verbal ability is more highly valued than mathematical ability. Moreover, the results also suggest that teachers have a considerable impact on their pupils’ self-perception as learners. Cultural differences are also discussed.