Instrumental Perspective Research Articles

Balancing energy and environment: The effect and perspective of management instruments in China

The rapid growth of Chinese economy has tremendously stimulated the expansion of energy consumption. The structure of energy consumption in China is featured with the coal domination. Air pollution is becoming increasingly severe. As a result, we are confronted with the extremely arduous task to balance energy consumption and environmental protection. In order to coordinate the relationship between energy consumption and environmental protection in a strategic way, this paper analyzes comprehensively the instruments, effects and perspectives of energy-related environmental management. Meanwhile, this paper illustrates the barriers and challenges facing the energy and energy-related environmental management in China, and suggests a priority strategy of management instrument, mainly composed of energy-saving, optimization of energy structure, promulgation of environmental standards, advance in environmental technologies, internalization of environmental costs, establishment of a public benefit fund and adoption of a Renewable Portfolio System.

How public relations works: Theoretical roots and public relations perspectives

Public relations is often studied from a managerial, instrumental perspective or a psychological, behavioral perspective. To understand the role of public relations in building trust or mistrust and to develop – or destroy – a license to operate, it needs also to be studied as a social phenomenon. This special issue of Public Relations Review will attempt to broaden the theoretical scope of public relations studies by applying the works of a string of prominent social theorists – Jürgen Habermas, Niklas Luhmann, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Erving Goffman, Max Weber, and Anthony Giddens. What can be culled from using the perspectives of these scholars? None of them studied public relations as such, and hence it must be asked: can public relations fit into their theoretical frameworks, and if so, how? The papers in this special issue discuss these questions, after giving short overviews of the theorists’ key concepts and contributions. This introduction locates the purpose of the special issue within a broader research agenda in public relations. It is argued for a pluralistic approach to the field.

Modern Regulatory Policy – Ideals and Practice

In this article we examine the preconditions for fulfilling the aims of regulatory reform, exemplified through the case of Norway. We cover both the process of regulatory reorganization and decision-making within established regulatory structures. We argue that regulatory agencies operate in a complex political-administrative context and that we must combine instrumental and institutional perspectives to understand how they work in practice. This is done by applying a transformative approach that embraces organizational-structural elements, interests, cultural components and features from the institutional environment. We describe how a new regulatory reform policy has been introduced in Norway and focus on agency reform processes in two policy areas and on regulatory practice in two regulatory agencies. The main picture is that there is a loose coupling between the OECD regulatory policy ideal and a) general Norwegian regulatory policy; b) the reorganization of regulatory agencies in specific policy areas; and c) regulatory practice in individual cases.

Discursos de pais e alunos sobre o aprender: um estudo no 5º ano de escolaridade<A NAME="n1"></A>

People's concept on 'learning' is influenced by the interrelation among individuals, contexts and cultures. The student's age, his family and cultural conceptions and the learning context are some of the main aspects that can influence the conceptions regarding the student's learning process. Under the framework of phenomenographic theory, this paper focus on people's description of the learning conceptions which are present in daily life phenomena. Mapping fifth grade students and their parents' conceptions concerning the learning process is the main goal of this study. Semi-structured interviews were used; data were treated by following qualitative and quantitative approaches. The outcomes suggest that parents use to conceptualize 'learningas something 'processual and experimental´, whereas their children, the students, understand 'learningunder a processual, but also instrumental perspective. The implications of such findings, in relation to the learning process, are also discussed in the paper.

Developing undergraduate research skills in a faculty of education: motivation through collaboration

This paper explores motivational factors underpinning undergraduates’ learning of research skills through individual research projects with collaborative tutorials. Research has long pointed to group support, positive affect and scaffolding as important for motivating and facilitating learning. Furthermore, UK government priorities have placed an increasing emphasis on the need to develop the key skills of inquiry and working with others. However, this is set in a context of assessment and practice in higher education that encourages individualist and instrumental perspectives on gaining competencies and knowledge. Traditionally undergraduate research skills have been taught through lectures and small‐scale projects chosen by the students with individual tutorial support in a faculty of education. Here our action research introduced collaborative tutorials as another element of teaching. We examine the process of collaboration to explore factors that support motivation to learn through two principal theoretical frameworks.

Political Leadership, Conflict and the Prospects for Constitutional Peace

The emphasis on constitutional political economy has been that new rules and institutions can be devised that improve the welfare of a society. Given the number of societies that are infected with political conflict and, as a result, lower levels of welfare, this paper attempts to analyze why we do not see more constitutional conventions aimed at eliminating conflict. The key idea is that expressively motivated group members may create incentives for instrumentally motivated group leaders such that it leads them to choose conflict rather than compromise. Nonetheless, it is not argued that such a peace is impossible to obtain. This leads to a further question, that if such a constitutional agreement could be found, would the expressive perspective alter the conventional instrumental perspective on the sort of constitutional reform that should be undertaken?

Through the Back Door: Applying Theories of Legal Compliance to Illegal Immigration During the Chinese Exclusion Era

This article applies theories of legal compliance to analyze the making of this country's first “illegal immigrants”—Chinese laborers who crossed the U.S.-Canadian and U.S.-Mexican borders in defiance of the Chinese exclusion laws (1882–1943). Drawing upon a variety of sources, including unpublished government records, I explore the ways in which Chinese laborers gained surreptitious entry into the United States during this period and ask, what explains their mass noncompliance? I suggest that while an instrumental perspective is useful for understanding these border crossings, it overlooks other important determinants of noncompliance: normative values and opportunity structures. Specifically, the exclusion laws were widely perceived by the Chinese as lacking social and moral legitimacy, and thus not worthy of obedience. In addition, the existence of smuggling networks and liberal immigration policies in Canada and Mexico played a critical role in facilitating noncompliance. The article concludes with a discussion about the benefits and challenges of using this theoretical framework to analyze noncompliance in immigration law.

The social functions of ingroup bias: Creating, confirming, or changing social reality

We describe our motivational analysis of ingroup bias. Central to our approach are two functions of ingroup bias: an identity function (the creation and expression of one's social identity) and an instrumental function (the facilitation of intergroup competition and social change). We present a research programme on the determinants of these two functions in which we have focused on socio-structural factors (group status and status stability), psychological factors (group identification and threat), and strategic considerations concerning the audience to which ingroup bias is communicated. In addition, we relate the different functions of ingroup bias to different forms of ingroup bias (symbolic versus material forms of ingroup bias; ingroup favouritism versus outgroup derogation). Our conclusions centre on the social and diverse nature of motivations underlying ingroup bias, and the integration of identity and instrumental perspectives on this phenomenon.

A Retrieval of Awe: Examining Disruption and Apprehension in Transformative Education

THE DECLINE OF WONDER IN ADULT ONTOLOGY Wonder is generally recognized as the fiefdom of the young. As children, it seemed as if we regularly found ourselves enrapt in a state of awe. Dumbstruck, overpowered, yet ultimately transfixed by some external phenomena, we would regularly exist simply marveling at things from our surroundings. This amazing character of experience, once a regular fixture of our way of experiencing the world, has gradually ebbed — receded to the point where we barely experience wonder at all. Yet, where did this formative experience go? Did it gradually vanish as we assumed greater knowledge and mastery of our surroundings? Did it abandon us as we became routinely familiar with an increasingly finite set of rote experiences offered by our environment? Or was it at odds with an instrumental perspective of the world: a mindset we were expected to adopt in order to become effective adults — one that sees all objects as tools and stepping stones to improve our efficacy?

Citizens' Perceptions of Distributive and Procedural Injustice During Traffic Stops with Police

This article examines the hypothesis that citizens' perceptions of injustice are based on normative factors (i.e., perceptions of equity and fairness) rather than instrumental factors (i.e., the outcomes received) by examining citizens'perceptions of injustice after traffic stops by police. The factors that predict citizens'perceptions of injustice are assessed using data collected for the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS)–sponsored Police-Public Contact Survey, a national survey of citizens regarding their contacts with police, collected in 1999. Using multinomial logistic regression, the influences of the normative and instrumental perspectives are examined while controlling for citizens' characteristics and race-interaction terms, along with legal, situational, and other control variables. The findings support Tyler's proposition that citizens are concerned with issues of fairness in addition to the actual outcomes they receive from criminal-justice officials. The findings also show significant differences in citizens' perceptions of distributive and procedural injustice by race. The implications for policy and future research are explored.

Cities and Water Pollution: An Historical and Geographic Perspective

Cities have been a prominent source of water pollution over the years. Historians have argued an instrumental conception of water-use that developed in New-England-sanctioned environmental abuses in the interest of economic development. This interpretation assumes both a geographic and temporal consistency in policy responses to water-quality degradation. Several historical assessments of state laws, a review of court cases responding to complaints to pollution, and conference proceedings of federal intervention in interstate pollution disputes provide a means to re-examine the instrumental interpretation. Both early nuisance law suits and early federal enforcement bypassed the country's urban-industrial core. Yet outside the region with the greatest concentration of urban population and industrial discharges, the instrumental perspective was less pronounced exposing geographic and temporal variation in the development of both state and federal pollution policy.

Novices in clinical practice settings: Student nurses stories of learning the practice of nursing

Drawing on 24 stories of clinical practice in an apprenticeship context of training in Israel, this qualitative study examined student nurses' perspectives towards learning to become a nurse, as revealed through the language and content of their written stories of clinical practice. As our findings suggest, student nurses' stories of learning to become a nurse in practice settings, are characterized by procedural language, by medical rather than nursing terminology, and by a focus on actions rather than on interactions. We have learned that, despite the rich content that characterizes clinical practice settings, the apprenticeship orientation of the training program, combined with student nurses' state of being a novice, yielded representations of the experience of learning to nurse which were characterized by an instrumental perspective towards the practice. We interpret these findings through four interrelated insights that emerge from the study: (1) an 'instrumental practice' orientation in the setting of caring, (2) knowledge of clinical facts-not knowledge of clinical principles, (3) the fragmented character of novices' learning to nurse in practice, and (4) rich content of practice alone does not yield rich content of learning.

Language attitudes of the first postcolonial generation in Hong Kong secondary schools

Following the return of sovereignty from Britain to China, Hong Kong has undergone significant sociopolitical and educational changes. This study is a quantitative investigation of the language attitudes of 1,048 secondary students from the first postcolonial generation brought up amid the significant changes after the political handover. The results show that the respondents feel the most integratively inclined to Cantonese (the vernacular variety), and they perceive English (the colonizers' language) as the language of the highest instrumental value and social status, while Putonghua (the language of the new ruler) is rated the lowest from both the integrative and the instrumental perspectives. Unlike what has been predicted by scholars, Putonghua has not yet taken the place of English as the language of power. Despite this, there are signs of a subtle transition toward an accommodating attitude to Putonghua, mainly induced by the growing instrumental value of the language for economic purposes. (Language attitudes; postcolonial Hong Kong.)

Who wants to be a mentor? An examination of attitudinal, instrumental, and social motivational components

PurposeThis study investigates the influence of affective organizational commitment, career aspirations, and networking activities on propensity to mentor (serving as a mentor and desiring to become a mentor).Design/methodology/approachData from websurveys of 262 managerial employees of a Dutch bank are analyzed using logistic regression.FindingsResults indicate that affective organizational commitment is unrelated to propensity to mentor, whereas career aspirations are positively related, and networking activities are negatively related to serving as a mentor, but not desiring to be a mentor.Research limitations/implicationsThe study is limited by its reliance on self‐report data and the Dutch culture may have influenced the results of the study to an unknown degree.Practical implicationsResults of this study suggest that employees volunteering to be a mentor are clearly ambitious in terms of their own career, but are not necessarily highly committed to their organization nor do they perform exemplary behaviors in terms of extra role behavior or networking.Originality/valueIndividuals are more likely to engage in mentoring activities and to desire to become a mentor if they have high career aspirations. This relationship may be the result of an instrumental perspective on the part of the mentor, who sees developing a cadre of loyal and supportive organizational members as having a positive effect on his or her own career advancement.

On Technology as Material in Design

And what is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. John Cage Silence In many ways, design has been moving away from the physical object. Emerging practices such as interaction, experience and service design, often utilising new technologies with almost 'immaterial' properties, seem to point to a situation where the material 'thing' as we used to know it is replaced by communication, information, systems and infrastructures. From another perspective, however, the importance of the things themselves is being re-discovered, and perhaps these new 'immaterial' technologies play a role in this. A central reason for this shift is that though technical objects are often characterised by their practical functionality, their everyday lives seem a bit more complicated than these official functions might suggest. Thus, the predominant focus on practical functionality in the design of technical objects need to reconsidered and above all complemented. As we turn to these things, we do not only have to re-locate the functions of technical objects within a rich context of use; to understand the presence of technical objects, we also need to consider the materials that build them. In what follows, I will present some ideas on how the properties of technologies (such as information technology) seem to influence the way we think about the design of technical objects. Further, I will try to challenge the instrumental perspective on technology by considering it to be design material, asking question about it such as: what are its expressions as material? What are its form elements?

From the Six-Party Talks to a Northeast Asian Security Regime?: Cooperative Threat Reduction Strategies and Institutional Development

Are there relevant lessons from the Nunn Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction case that can inform counterproliferation policy versus the nuclear weapons threats presented by North Korea? During the 1990s, there were various attempts by the Clinton Administration to innovate in national security policymaking. Innovations were attempted in peace operations, the interagency process, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Were the 1990s Clinton policy leadership efforts in stopping the threats of WMD proliferation in North Korea, India, Pakistan, Iran and Iraq all policy failures that could have been prevented? Could more effective Clinton Administration policy leadership have made US counterproliferation efforts more successful? This paper focuses on the Clinton Administration’s Counterproliferation Policy Initiative in the development and implementation of the Nunn Lugar programs for Cooperative Threat Reduction with Russia and the Former Soviet Republics. This case study uses institutionalist theory to explore using a cooperative strategy approach for building a counterproliferation regime in Northeast Asia. The analytical framework includes an examination of the Nunn Lugar, or Cooperative Threat Reduction Programs, from policy relevance and instrumental relevance perspectives. Overall, this paper’s findings suggest the significance of institution and organization-building approaches for improving counterproliferation policymaking. The option suggested here is to nurture a small group of like-minded states and statesmen (the six parties), focused around one specific functional area (counterproliferation), to build effective rules, organizations and enforcement mechanisms for developing an effective Northeast Asian security regime.

A Space in Between: A Case Study of the Mareeba Community Response Group

This paper is an account of the creation of ‘a space-in-between’ – a multi-party collaboration known as the Mareeba-Dimbulah Irrigation Area (MDIA) Community Response Group (CRG) in Far North Queensland. The CRG consisted of multiple communities of practice that coincided to generate new meaning amidst global (dis)order in the local context. The paper briefly describes the history of restructuring in the MDIA and the emergent model of organising for local development used by the CRG.The CRG has become a working model of a collaborative space that enables the blend of old and new, the sharing of information, the identification of the possibilities for common ground and innovation, and the organising of local economic and social entrepreneurs. In this account the emphasis shifts from the instrumental perspective on participants, planning processes and strategies of organisation to the transformational perspective that engages with the essence of organising for community wellbeing.

Brackets and black boxes: research on water users' associations

This paper reviews the current state of research on Water Users' Associations in canal irrigation. It argues that, while it makes several important contributions to our understanding of water institutions, collective action and local governance, it suffers from several weaknesses. Technology is treated as a black box. There is a very static and instrumental perspective. There is also a bracketing of the social relationships of which collective action is an expression. This paper concludes that further research is needed in order to understand the organizational dynamics of water users associations and how different technological conditions of water distribution influence the possibilities for collective action. Research is also needed on the interplay of the broader contextual factors under which water users’ associations operate and on the effects of WUA formation on social power relationships, water management and distribution practices.

Collaborating with writing tools: An instrumental perspective on the problem of computer-supported collaborative activities

This paper presents an analysis of the modifications that a synchronous computer support for collaborative writing introduces into the organization of co-authors' writing. The analysis is grounded in case studies of different groups of co-authors writing a report together face to face and at a distance through a collaborative writing computer system. Drawing from these studies I suggest that the problems with using a collaborative writing computer system to provide a fully collaborative writing environment derive from underlying assumptions concerning collaboration within the co-authoring activity. I point out that a more thorough understanding of how co-authors organize their writing can provide resources to envisage more radical solutions to the problem of computer support for collaboration. I conclude by considering ways that might be adequate to reconfigure collaborative writing systems in order to provide more satisfactory support for collaboration in writing environments.

The role of the four electric power sectors in the Korean national economy: an input–output analysis

The electric power industry has played an important role in the dramatic economic development in Korea, and electricity has become a critical factor sustaining the well-being of the Korean people. This study uses input–output analysis to investigate the role of the four electric power sectors (hydroelectric, fossil-fuels, nuclear and non-utility) in the Korean national economy for the period 1985–1998, focusing on three topics: the impact of electricity supply investment on individual sectors and the inter-industry linkage effect; the electricity supply shortage effect; and the impact of the rise in electricity rates on prices of other products. The overall results reveal that the non-utility electric sector is superior in terms of national economy-wide effects to the other three sectors throughout the period. Finally, potential uses of the results are illustrated from the perspective of policy instruments and some policy implications are discussed.