Master Concepts Research Articles

Cultural studies: which paradigm?

This essay is a critical review of ‘Cultural Studies: two paradigms’ by Stuart Hall, published in this journal in 1980. The two paradigms are ‘experience’ and ‘ideology’, the respective master concepts of the first and second generation of Cultural Studies. I situate Hall’s article in the context of its time (the late 1970s) as a response to internal disagreements within British Marxism and, more broadly, to a crisis in the humanistic disciplines–notably English Literature and History. Hall, I conclude, privileges ideology over experience. I prefer the paradigm of ‘lived experience’ and, in the second part of this essay, offer a revaluation of its meaning and significance for media and cultural studies.

To Play or to Learn?

Research evidence of the last two decades indicates positive effects of game-based learning on students' attitude and performance in math education. Game-based Internet math sites are geared to help students stay motivated and master grade-appropriate math concepts. This review presents One) a literature review on game-based learning via instructional design and game design considerations, Two) a tabulated review of 30 Internet math games from a math educator's first-hand experience in playing and critiquing in reference to Grades 6th - 8th players' motivation and cognition. Its educational implications include helping educators (a) select Internet math games with a heightened awareness of Internet games' motivational factors and concept-building potential during gameplay and (b) incorporate game-based technology to foster meaningful immersion when students explore mathematical concepts.

American Nietzsche. A History of an Icon and His Ideas by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen (review)

Reviewed by: American Nietzsche. A History of an Icon and His Ideas by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen Larry S. McGrath Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen. American Nietzsche. A History of an Icon and His Ideas Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2012. 450 pages. Nietzsche’s corpus offered European philosophers a conceptual playground. Throughout the twentieth century, monographs systematically reinterpreted and reconciled Nietzsche’s master concepts such as the will to power, the [End Page 1263] eternal recurrence, the Übermensch, and the revaluation of values. The most prominent include Heidegger’s four-volume study (1936–1940); Karl Jaspers’ Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity (1936); George Bataille’s On Nietzsche (1945); and Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962). Jennifer Ratner-Rosnehagen reminds readers in American Nietzsche. A History of an Icon and His Ideas that Americans were also probing readers of Nietzsche; even if their readings did not always assume an exclusively philosophical form. Ratner-Rosenhagen dedicates her book to unearthing the rich and forgotten American archives of Nietzsche’s cultural receptions that paralleled his metaphysical treatments on the other side of the Atlantic. She demonstrates how Nietzsche remained a fixture throughout the long American twentieth century by tracing his receptions across literary, religious, political, as well as philosophical realms. American Nietzsche is a reception history. Behind it lurks the thorny problem that Nietzsche has always posed for reception histories. For those giants of twentieth century European philosophy, reading Nietzsche was like playing on a conceptual jungle gym with him. That is to say the value of their monographs depends less on their fidelity to what Nietzsche really said than on their playfulness: how idiosyncratically each recruits Nietzsche in service of the author’s own project. The problem for reception histories is thus: does an authoritative account of Nietzsche exist that could serve as a basis for comparing his disparate readings? Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen tackles the problem by writing American Nietzsche as a Rezeptionsgeschichte, or a history of creative appropriations. She affords each reception equal weight, regardless of whether it conforms to the Nietzschean letter. The problem of what Nietzsche really meant is never posed. Ratner-Rosenhagen’s is not the first Rezeptionsgeschichte of this kind. Steven Ascheim’s The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890–1990 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1992); Eric Forth’s Zarathustra in Paris (Illinois: Northern Illinois UP, 2001); and the recent edited volume Interpreting Nietzsche: Reception and Influence (London: Continuum, 2011) are exemplary. Given the density of Nietzsche studies, it is a feat that American Nietzsche manages to rejuvenate the field by following his reception to fertile American soil. The impact also resonates through intellectual history generally. Ratner-Rosenhagen extrapolates from Nietzsche’s case to reflect on what constitutes the very notion of a reception. In a methodological interlude, she examines personal letters written to Nietzsche that did not formulate their authors’ thoughts in systematic, let alone published form. She takes it as her project to rethink what counts as a reception by resisting the picture of readers as passive vessels into which the historian pours Nietzsche’s ideas. Fan mail demonstrates a productive dimension in “how readers used Nietzsche’s words to imagine new moral and intellectual worlds for themselves” (208). Ratner-Rosenhagen’s project of writing, as it were, a production history animates the book’s close attention to Nietzsche’s cultural influence and sets the book’s methodology apart from other histories of his reception abroad. [End Page 1264] Each chapter is organized chronologically and thematically. They march through the long twentieth century following the waves along which Americans read Nietzsche. Each wave concerns both the content of ideas received and the channel of reception. The book opens with Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom Nietzsche read as a young Gymnasium student. Ratner-Rosenhagen mines Nietzsche’s personal library at Weimer both to illuminate the neglected influence on Nietzsche and to signal her recurring method of closely reading marginalia. Following her account of Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for the American philosopher, Ratner-Rosenhagen demonstrates how, like in Europe, Nietzsche was first read as literature outside the academy. The first chapter examines how the arts critic James Gibbons Huneker first popularized Nietzsche in the States...

Religious and Political Violence: Globalising Syncretism and the Governance State*

In this paper we argue that the conjunctions of religion and politics through eruptions of violence are codetermined and codependent through syncretic manifestations rather than a result of some kind of basic clash between different, self-contained systems of ideas and values. The vicissitudes of religious fervour are linked to issues of development and social change in which long-cherished traditions are confronted by seemingly inexorable forces beyond the control of those being affected by them. Religious violence is a political movement which should be understood as not being outside modernisation in the sense of being opposed to it; it is in fact part of the development of modernisation. Resistance arises from the experience of being excluded from the fruits of modernity while at the same time being enmeshed within the multiple social relations underpinning the production and distribution of those ‘fruits’. Whether from a postmodern or from a more conventional perspective a totalising analysis organised around master concepts like ‘globalisation’ or ‘civilisation’ is often developed to explain the intersections of religion and violence. We reject these approaches in favour of one predicated on the idea of the ‘governance state’. It is our argument that this better captures the core axis of analysis – namely the changing nature of the state and its management of populations and the concomitant forms of resistance by those subjected to it in an era in which such ‘modernities’ are played out.

Three Evolutionary Precursors to Morality

ABSTRACT: Recent evolutionary thinking suggests that morality may have three distinct roots, corresponding to the three “master concepts” in the history of philosophical ethics: sympathy, virtue, and duty. Evolutionary biologists are nearly unanimous in the view that there are two distinct mechanisms that can generate altruism in other animal species, and there is increasing recognition that there must be a third mechanism at work among humans. Altruism in the biological sense is not the same thing as morality, but it is a precursor to morality. An examination of such precursors can help us gain a deeper understanding of morality proper.

What is context?

This essay is an attempt to explore the ontology of context by elucidating its uses in the production of new knowledges out of the old. It is argued that some of the master concepts in anthropological discourse, to wit nature, culture, society and the individual, serve an important function of knowledge production by virtue of the ways they are deployed and emplotted as contexts to gather together, connect and reconstitute domains of data or phenomena. Drawing on the works of Marilyn Strathern and Roy Wagner, among others, two symbolic-metaphysical configurations of knowledge practices tentatively delineated as `Euro-American' and `Melanesian' are juxtaposed in order to make explicit particular modalities of contextualization. Some unexpected consequences, or predicaments, of our investment in making (explicit) partial connections as a privileged relational facility are then revealed; among them are the relativizing effects of a self-consciously universalizing epistemological strategy.

The Social Economics of Neoliberal Globalization

The recent period of intensive and extensive development of global economic integration, or globalization, has reached a crossroads. The regime of the neoliberal Great Capitalist Restoration is not sustainable and fundamental governance changes must be made. This paper adds perspective to the choices that must be made at this critical juncture of the global social economy by applying the master concepts of Schumpeter’s Creative Destruction and Polanyi’s Protective Response.

Savvy Investors and Domestic Goddesses? New Challenges for Feminist Housing Research

The arrival of savvy female investors and domestic goddesses in mainstream media poses considerable challenges for a feminist housing research agenda that was once aimed squarely at accommodating gender equality within the housing market and the urban landscape. In this paper, I outline some of the ways that feminist scholarship is being reformulated in response to theoretical critiques from within the social sciences, namely the destabilization of a unified female identity and the unpacking of master concepts such as patriarchy. Here I chart the rise of feminist standpoint theory, which provides some intermediary solutions to these critiques, as well as the limits of this position. I then suggest some strategies for reinvigorating feminist housing scholarship which has lost some momentum since the publication of Sophie Watson's groundbreaking work on gender and housing in the 1980s. This reformulation I contend is important in analysing and interpreting recent shifts in women's housing careers and domestic lives, as well as broadening the gender‐agenda to include consideration of the negotiation of masculinity and femininity within contemporary housing markets and homes.

Bringing Bourdieu’s master concepts into organizational analysis

This article argues that while elements of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology are increasingly employed in American sociology, it is rare to find all three of Bourdieu’s master concepts—habitus, capital, and field—incorporated into a single study. Moreover, these concepts are seldom deployed within a relational perspective that was fundamental to Bourdieu’s thinking. The article “Bourdieu and Organizational Analysis” by Mustafa Emirbayer and Victoria Johnson is a welcomed exception, for it draws on all three of Bourdieu’s pillar concepts to propose a relational approach to the study of organizations. It both reframes existing thinking about organizations, particularly from the neo-institutional and resource dependence schools, and indicates new directions for research in organizations to move. This paper evaluates their contribution calling attention to its many strengths and suggesting a few points that need future clarification and elaboration.

Reaction and Revolution in Thomas Mann

In two passages Friedrich Nietzsche discusses the relation between reaction and revolution. In the second of these texts Nietzsche deploys a structure of argumentation found in the writings of Friedrich Schiller, termed 'binary synthesis'. Similarly, the notions of reaction and revolution form two master concepts in the political thought of Thomas Mann. The phrase 'Conservative Revolution', often associated with Mann, is used in the lecture 'Das Schrifttum als geistiger Raum der Nation' (1927) by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, which demonstrates the argumentational structure of both 'Hegelian' and 'binary' synthesis. Understanding Mann's political writings in general and Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (1918) in particular in terms of binary synthesis reveals an essential continuity in his politico-cultural thought. Mann's 1929 paper on Freud is centred on the opposition of irrationalism and the rational, culminating in his definition of psychoanalysis as 'a manifestation of modern irrationalism that unambiguously resists reactionary misuse'. The same binary synthetic structure underlying Goethe's concept of 'highest reason', Schiller's notion of 'second nature', and Mann's conception of reaction and revolution, informs his discussion in Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen of the relation between Geist and Leben, which offers a parallel to Hofmannsthal's position in his 1927 lecture. Mann's political essays reveal his insight into how, out of reaction, there can come revolution, and his cultural task is best described, using an expression from his discussion of Kleist's Amphitryon, as the attempt to create a 'conservatism of the future'.

The Use of Writing in the Apparel Curriculum: A Preliminary Investigation

Writing activities can be used throughout the apparel curriculum to promote successful learning and to develop and improve students’ written and verbal communication skills. As a result of a mandate from our university to incorporate writing-intensive courses within our apparel curriculum, this descriptive study was designed to investigate the amount and types of writing currently required within undergraduate apparel curricula within the United States. We used a questionnaire to survey instructors representing 34 institutions that offered undergraduate apparel programs. The data for 136 courses are presented. Writing was a component of both required assignments and examinations. An in-class essay was the primary type of writing used on exams. The majority of courses had at least one written assignment. Written assignments were primarily research projects or papers, out-of-class essays, and reading reports. Overall, respondents indicated that the amount of writing required in apparel courses was about right but very few respondents indicated these courses had been approved as “writing intensive.” More respondents agreed that requiring additional writing would help students develop necessary workplace skills than agreed that requiring additional writing would help students master key course concepts.

What is Rationality? Selected Conceptions from Social Theory

The paper surveys selected alternative conceptions of rationality in contemporary and (especially) traditional economics and sociology. While the status of rationality as one of the master concepts, subjects and objectives of social science and philosophy has been further promoted in contemporary economics and sociology, questions often arise among economists and sociologists themselves as to its meaning or definition. As an attempt to help address this issue, the paper selects and examines a (limited) number of pertinent definitions and conceptions of rationality from both economic and sociological theory. By virtue of its coverage of economics and sociology, this study is thoroughly interdisciplinary and contributes toward filling in a void in the current literature in which such studies are relatively rare.

Master Concepts in the Field of Death, Dying, and Bereavement: Coping Versus Adaptive Strategies

This article proposes that thanatological studies attempt to develop broad master concepts that integrate knowledge both within the field and in relation to other disciplines. The authors then debate the adequacy of two possible master concepts—coping or adaptation—as ways to increase understandings of responses to events related to death and loss, such as dying, bereavement, grief, and mourning. Each of the co-authors of this article offers arguments and a rejoinder or rebuttal on behalf of one of these favored concepts. The article concludes by noting areas in which they agree in this discussion and by suggesting ways in which the discussion itself can benefit our field.

A Capital Theory of School Effectiveness and Improvement [1

Abstract A new theory of school effectiveness and improvement is outlined, based on the master concepts of intellectual capital, social capital and leverage, linked with the conventional concept of institutional outputs. Each master concept is defined in terms of two subsidiary concepts. Twelve specifically educational concepts are set within this framework to provide the theory. It is proposed that, through a simplified model, the range and fertility of the theory can be exemplified and tested in three specific cases—the changing nature of school effectiveness and improvement in knowledge economies, citizenship education and teacher effectiveness.

Liquid Assets: Increasing Students' Mathematical Capital

One of the visions common to all the Standards is that students and teachers should use mathematics in a variety of meaningful settings. Certainly, direct instruction, acquisition of basic skills, and textbooks still have an important place in teaching mathematics, but students must be actively involved in mathematical processes while they practice skills, master concepts and structure, and extend what they have learned.

The minilab as a tool in physics instruction

This paper describes a method that helps students master concepts by hands-on experimentation — the concept-centered minilab — and lists possible minilabs for use in introductory physics courses. We have used minilabs successfully at Rutgers for 15 years. They are inexpensive and inherently student-active.

Grammar in a Nutshell

Certainly we've come a long way in education since the 1960s when Richard Braddock and friends made that oft-quoted harm statement about grammar not helping students write (1963, Research in Written Composition, Urbana, IL: NCTE). We now know much more about Learning Modalities, Benjamin Bloom's Mastery Learning (1989, Building Effective Mastery Learning Schools, New York: Longman), and Jean Piaget's ideas about concrete and formal operational thinkers. Also, we've seen new research on how chunking ideas helps people master concepts. Over these years, several new methods for dealing with grammar have also emerged, including Sentence Combining, Mini-Lessons, and Error Logs. Yet, as good as they are, these approaches seem rather hit or miss-never quite giving the students a full grasp of the amazing intricacies of our language. Here is something that does just that: Grammar in a Nutshell is a visual-auditorykinesthetic approach to traditional textbook grammar, usage, and mechanics concepts. Even though the material is not new, the approach is, and it has proven itself in the classroom. The Nutshell chart is designed to work efficiently twixt and in-between the writing process: it is a systematic way to bring students' intrinsic background knowledge about grammar and usage to a conscious level.

Understanding Late-Twentieth-Century Capitalism: Reassessing the Globalization Theme

There are Many Ambiguities Within The Literature on globalization. Some scholars speak of a world that is chunging others use the framework as part of a new univocal discourse to describe late twentieth-century capitalism. Apart from ‘globalization’, many other cartographic and navigational metaphors have been employed to describe the present world order. There is the loss of the ‘magnetic North’; an ‘emerging global civilization’; and a curious notion of an evolving ‘global civil society’. Master concepts like ‘sustainable development’ and ‘world politics’ have consequently become popular and are creeping into international relations discourse. In extreme cases the literature seems to suggest or imply that history is coming to an end on convenient Western socio-cultural terms only. Indeed it seems that proponents of globalization have come to proclaim universality afresh in similar vein to that of those who indulge in and perpetuate the notion of a post-Columbus 500-year capitalist historicism. I do not share the triumphalism of the liberal globalization discourse. It is certainly important to ask whether the wave of technological change, interdependent policy-making, international socialization of production, and time-space compression have or have not come to transcend or replace the complex web of centre-periphery relations. There remains generally a familiar interstate world system, albeit with the spatial and temporal limits to state, market and human interactions experientially compressed. Questions about who rules, who benefits or suffers, and whether prospects for social survival are better or worse remain as important as ever.

The Commodity-Body-Sign: Toward a General Economy of "Commodity Fetishism"

Tr he following article attempts to formulate what I call a critical affirmative account of, among other things but most especially, commodity fetishism. The most influential attempt, at least within the Frankfurt School, to come to terms with the problem of affirmation is Herbert Marcuse's Affirmative Character of Culture. Even though Marcuse performs the, by now familiar, negative critique of commodity culture, he also broaches-in a distinctly pre-post-modernist vein-the question of the body. This attention to the material exorbitance of the body reintroduces one of the master concepts of the discourse of classical Marxism, the commodity-body, in which the commodity refers to exchange-value and the body to usevalue. I begin there. After a brief review of Freud and Marx respectively on fetishism and commodity fetishism, I enlist the work ofJean Baudrillard in order to formulate what, after Marx, I call the perverse, general economy of the commodity-body-sign, where sign-value is the supplement or super-signifier of use-exchange value. The point

Social class differences on the Boehm test of basic concepts: Are they due to bias?

One of Jensen's internal criteria for the detection of bias was applied to the standardization data for the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts (BTBC). Despite sizable social class differences in mean scores, differences in the rank orders of item difficulties were negligible. Thus, by this one criterion, there was little evidence of test bias. Instead, the findings suggest that children of different socioeconomic levels master basic concepts in about the same temporal order, differing only in the rate at which they do so.