Set Of Theoretical Concepts Research Articles

Hacking the Techno-Transition: The Possibilities of Deep Energy Literacy

This article takes the E.L. Smith Solar Farm at the E.L. Smith Water treatment plant in Alberta – a province at the epicentre of Canada’s oil and gas industry – as a case study for what I call deep energy literacy. An energy transition away from fossil fuels to sustainable energy sources is a necessary first response to climate change. Deep energy literacy is a proposition, a set of theoretical concepts, through which to disrupt, or “hack”, technophilic transitions by attending to intersectional feminist and decolonial politics and solidarities. Technocratic solutions for decarbonization that do not radically reorient existing social, economic, and political relationships are failed solutions even before implementation begins because they have not addressed the root cause of climate change: a bankrupt extractivist worldview. This worldview is the cause of not only climate change but multiple converging crises. Deep energy literacy is a proposition grounded in relationality that can help us identify problems more holistically and thereby come up with solutions that not only address necessary energy transition shifts, but that do so while simultaneously addressing a plethora of other concerns – including but not limited to Indigenous (re)conciliation – by creating more equitable and just societies and ecosystems. Seen through the lens of deep energy literacy, this analysis of the processes through which the E.L. Smith Solar Farm project was approved illustrates that when decisions about new energy infrastructure are based in entrenched economic, political, social, and epistemological paradigms, they fail to disrupt the status quo and therefore fail to adequately address the root causes of climate change. To achieve a just transition many experiments need to take place; many of these experimentations will be imperfect. In the case study considered in this paper, I suggest that while deep energy literacy conversations were begun, they were not integrated fulsomely enough. Nonetheless, there are positive lessons to be taken from the E.L. Smith Solar Farm and integrated into future decision-making processes.

Torn between Cultures: Reading Shashi Tharoor’s Riot

Shashi Tharoor is a distinctivevoice in the Postcolonial Indian literature in English with his remarkable contribution of more than 16 works of fiction and non-fiction. Postcolonialism refers to a set of theoretical concepts, approaches and interventions which deals with the diverse effects of the interaction between the colonizer and the colonized. History, politics and culture have always been a dominant preoccupation of the Indian English novelists. The compulsive obsession was perhaps inevitable since the genre originated and developed concurrently with the climatic phase of colonial rule. As a diplomat and writer, Shashi Tharoor has explored the diversity of culture in his native country. He has made his point in many of his interviews that the novel is full of collisions of various sorts- personal, political, cultural, emotional and violent. Riot is a novel about the ownership of history, about love, hate, cultural collision, religious fanaticism and the impossibility of knowing the truth. The novel chronicles the mystery of an American 24-year old lady, Priscilla Hart. The intention of this paper is to explore the cultural conflict between the East and the West and an attempt is made to examine Shashi Tharoor’s Riot as a conveyor of the various distinguishable features to the divergent cultures. The characters of Riot are facing problems and striving to achieve their identities as Indians and as individuals in Indian society. Lakshman, though an educated Indian, cannot share his intellectual ideas with any fellow Indians, but feels quite comfortable with Priscilla, an American lady. Yet, he cannot completely forego his Indian identity and is aware of their irreconcilable gap between their culture, values and outlook towards life.

Administration of justice: an emerging research field

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to discuss the concept of Administration of Justice as a research field and set out an agenda for future studies that could promote the production of scientific knowledge in this area. Design/methodology/approach This paper explores the idiosyncratic features, dimensions of analysis upon the Administration of Justice, states a research agenda and discusses the main challenges on this theme. This paper conceptualizes Administration of Justice as a research field and discusses related phenomena from institutional and economic perspectives on innovation, performance, governance and legitimacy. Findings As a research field, Administration of Justice is defined as a set of theoretical concepts, research methods and techniques, aiming to investigate the management processes associated with the use and articulation of resources, knowledge and institutions, at different levels of the justice system, and their influence on the provision of justice in a given social context. As social phenomena, four levels of analysis are proper to investigate the justice system: societal, inter-organizational, organizational and operational. Innovation, performance, governance and legitimacy are central themes of the Administration of Justice and present various gaps and research opportunities. Research limitations/implications The main implications is the proposal of an agenda for future studies on the Administration of Justice field, which is an important step in raising awareness of the issue. Originality/value Administration of Justice encompasses a growing interest among academics, justice practitioners and public managers regarding managerial and political practices carried out in the justice system. Although relevant, this subject has been scarcely studied by the management community. This paper invites community to adopt an organizational and institutional perspective to Administration of Justice, setting an agenda for future research.

New South Africa Speak: race talk in an undergraduate debate on racialisation in post-apartheid South Africa

ABSTRACTWorking with a set of theoretical concepts from critical race theory, this article examines perspectives on the impact of micro-aggressions and systemic inequality, as elicited during on online debate among undergraduate students. The debate centred on the degree to which white South Africans may legitimately identify as Africans. This topic served as a means of stimulating talk about the effects of racialisation in post-apartheid South Africa. During the analysis, the arguments that emerged from the online debate were analysed within a framework of white talk, referred to as New South Africa Speak. All contributions to the debate were measured against the discursive forms and functions that characterise New South Africa Speak. The findings are reported in terms of: During the conclusion the potential relevance of these findings to ongoing protest movements at South African universities is considered.

پهنه بندی فضایی جهت مکان یابی پایگاه اسکان موقت با رویکرد ارزیابی چند عامله در محیط GIS مطالعه موردی : بخش مرکزی شهرستان فاروج

پهنه بندی فضایی جهت مکان یابی پایگاه اسکان موقت با رویکرد ارزیابی چند عامله در محیط GIS مطالعه موردی : بخش مرکزی شهرستان فاروج

Fear and Phobia: A Critical Review and the Rational-Choice Theory of Neurosis

This article reviews the empirical status of theories of fear and phobia. Psychoanalysis received little support, as findings tend to refute its basic assumption that phobia results from repressed material. Although conditioning has its weaknesses, it appears to be the strongest explanation of simple phobia. Findings raise question as to whether interoceptive conditioning can account for the development of panic disorder and agoraphobia, as these disorders develop in the absence of environmental conditioning events. A significant body of research supports Clark’s claim that catastrophic misinterpretation of bodily sensations are involved in both the development and treatment of panic disorder and agoraphobia. However, the causal relationship between the two remains unclear. Likewise, while biological factors certainly increase the vulnerability to developing fear and phobia, findings have not yet confirmed that these behaviors are controlled by biological mechanisms. A new theory, the Rational-Choice Theory of Neurosis (Rofé, 2010; Y. Rofé & Rofé, 2013), which preserves the psychoanalytic claim that bizarre phobias need to be explained within a theory that accounts for neuroses by one set of theoretical concepts, was used to resolve the theoretical confusion in this field.

Local quality work in an age of accountability – between autonomy and control

This article analyses a specific part of the actions taken to improve the quality of Swedish education, namely the expectations formulated in national policy documents for the quality work that local authorities, schools and teachers are supposed to undertake. For the empirical analysis of how these expectations have changed over the last two decades, two sets of theoretical concepts have been combined: management of placement and management of expectation and autonomy and control. The specific research question is: How can local systematic quality work be understood in an age of accountability and what are the implications for teachers’ practices? The results show that expectations for local quality work have changed radically during the studied period. There has been a significant change in the language used, the content of education has been recontextualised and there are obvious changes in the relation between local autonomy and national control. It is argued that these changes are a consequence of the changed design of the education system, rather than an answer to a content-related question of what is educationally desirable. As a consequence, paradoxical expectations land at the local level and have to be resolved by teachers.

Local educational actors doing of education – a study of how local autonomy meets international and national quality policy rhetoric

This article studies how local autonomy meets international and national quality policy rhetoric. The research question asked is: How can the local doing of education be understood in relation to international and national quality policy rhetoric, and how does this affect teachers’ autonomy to realise nationally formulated goals? To answer this, two sets of theoretical concepts are combined: horizon of expectation and space of experience (Koselleck, 2002) and autonomy and control (Cribb & Gewirtz, 2007). An earlier study (Bergh, 2010) of how the use of the quality concept has successively changed in Swedish authoritative educational texts from the 1990s and onwards provides a broader context for the local study, which empirically builds on interviews with local politicians, civil servants, school leaders and teachers. The results show that the national policy rhetoric has a strong impact on local practice, but also that certain interpretations are taken further in the local context, such as an emphasis on market forces. Although possible conflicts in the national context are concealed by the use of positive concepts like quality, these conflicts eventually erupt in the local setting, often with far reaching consequences for its different actors and for the education in question.

Measurement in Psychology: Conceptual Analysis and Synthesis Revisited

The imagined existences of "quantity" in psychology is a prerequisite for measurement. Any person (researcher or subject) may imagine homogeneous concepts as quantities, for example, (perceived) redness, loudness or heaviness of different kinds of objects or events. Conversely, heterogeneous concepts may be merged to imagined quantities such as intelligence or personality, which both are constructed from agreed upon sets of theoretical concepts. Measurement in physics, psychophysics and psychology will be contemplated, comparatively.

Autonomous mission management for UAVs using soar intelligent agents

State-of-the-art unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are typically able to autonomously execute a pre-planned mission. However, UAVs usually fly in a very dynamic environment which requires dynamic changes to the flight plan; this mission management activity is usually tasked to human supervision. Within this article, a software system that autonomously accomplishes the mission management task for a UAV will be proposed. The system is based on a set of theoretical concepts which allow the description of a flight plan and implemented using a combination of Soar intelligent agents and traditional control techniques. The system is capable of automatically generating and then executing an entire flight plan after being assigned a set of objectives. This article thoroughly describes all system components and then presents the results of tests that were executed using a realistic simulation environment.

The chronotope of the queue: Methadone maintenance treatment and the production of time, space and subjects

This paper considers methadone maintenance treatment as a temporal and spatial phenomenon, a set of practices and arrangements that operate ‘intra-actively’ in response to, and in provocation of, certain kinds of subjects understood as ‘methadone clients’. In doing so, the paper uses Australian interview data on everyday experiences of methadone dosing to look at methadone maintenance treatment in terms of two sets of theoretical concepts: Mikhail Bakhtin's chronotope; and Karen Barad's formulations of the space–time manifold and of what she calls iterative intra-activity. The paper argues that in the context of the methadone dosing point, time and space co-produce each other as a chronotope of the queue, and that this chronotope helps materialise particular methadone subjects. Often, these are the very kinds of subjects considered undesirable; that is, the ‘unproductive’, the ‘disorderly’, the ‘illicit’. In light of this, the paper asks whether the demands of the clinic and its convention of queuing reproduce rather than depart from the model of waiting and dependence widely seen as characteristic of lifestyles associated with regular heroin use. In conclusion, the paper considers the policy and practice implications of the chronotope and of its role in methadone maintenance treatment.

The Genesis of Maring Christianity: The First Quarter Century, 1955-1980

The focus is the genesis of Christianity among the Maring, a Melanesian people missionized by the Anglican Church. The A. argues that to understand the mission as an aspect of the colonial encounter it is essential to tell both sides of the history and grasp the ways in which both Maring and mission were transformed by the encounter. Toward this end, he tries to develop a set of theoretical concepts that help to illuminate the historical emergence of disjunctive perceptions and perspectives.

Cognitive change processes in psychotherapy.

Several types of cognitive-behavioral therapy are now practiced that use different sets of theoretical concepts and propose different kinds of change mechanisms. None, however, is directly grounded in experimental research in cognitive and social psychology, and few address basic issues such as the relevance of conscious versus nonconscious cognitive processes and the validity of the self-report data on which therapy depends. Put forward in this article is a model that describes the conscious and nonconscious processing of emotional stimuli and distinguishes between knowledge that is verbally accessible and knowledge that can only be recovered by exposure to situational cues. Also proposed are three mechanisms of cognitive change that involve altering verbally accessible knowledge, the accessibility of nonconscious situational memories, and self-regulatory strategies. These mechanisms are related to the current practices of behavioral and cognitive-behavioral therapists.

A Systems Approach to Organization Development

Organization development (OD) efforts are often exclusively oriented to one method, one set of theoretical concepts, or one organizational variable. An input-process-output model of an organization was used as a framework for planned change." The program dealt with many organizational dimensions and used several intervention strategies and OD technologies. The effort resulted in substantial changes in organizational inputs, processes, and outputs. A number of findings about organization development have emerged from this OD experience and include the following: (1) OD efforts must not always start at the top; (2) the organization itself is the best laboratory for learning; (3) structural and interpersonal changes must complement and reinforce each other; (4) adult learning starts with behavioral change rather than cognitive change; and (5) the selection of change leaders as initial targets for the change program is a useful OD strategy.