The Second Edition of Introduction to Action Research: Social Research for Social Change makes social science matter! It focuses on how it is possible to combine practical problem solving with generating new theoretical insights. Authors Davydd J. Greenwood and Morten Levin combine a thorough discussion of the epistemological foundations of action research with a broad overview of major contemporary trends in the field. New to the Second Edition: Includes a vast amount of updated information: Nine chapters have been significantly updated, including two new chapters that engage readers into the current debates on action research as "tradition" or its own "methodology," and how action research takes shape in the university environment. New textboxes highlight important issues in each chapter and more detailed cases and real-world examples illustrate the practical implications of AR in a variety of settings. Incorporates a new structure: New information pertains specifically to issues of techniques, work forms, and research strategies based on the authors’ experiences in using the book in teaching. The book now has 4 parts instead of 3, with an entirely new section on higher education and democracy as a concluding section. Emphasizes the skill sets needed to do action research: This book deals with the process of educating action researchers and reviews a number of programs that do this. Specific attention is given to the challenges of writing and intellectual property in AR, and more focus is devoted to both adult and formal education, creating a comprehensive overview of the field that is not found in any other action research book. Intended Audience: This is an excellent textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in Action Research, Social Research, and Qualitative Research across the social sciences.
Public universities are in crisis, waning in their role as central institutions within democratic societies. Denunciations are abundant, but analyses of the causes and proposals to re-create public universities are not. Based on extensive experience with Action Research-based organizational change in universities and private sector organizations, Levin and Greenwood analyze the wreckage created by neoliberal academic administrators and policymakers. The authors argue that public universities must be democratically organized to perform their educational and societal functions. The book closes by laying out Action Research processes that can transform public universities back into institutions that promote academic freedom, integrity, and democracy.
In Participative Transformation, Roger Klev and Morten Levin insist that participative learning and developmental processes are essential in organizational change. They focus on introducing the kind of learning and development that shapes a self-sustaining developmental process that is an integral part of the daily activities of an organisation. This process is essentially one of collective reflection in order to develop alternatives for action, experimentation to achieve desired goals, then collective reflection on the results achieved. Reflection on own practice can contribute to direct improvements of own practice, but may also contribute to new practices, new frameworks of understanding, and to processes involving other participants and fields of interaction. The first part of the book provides an introduction to participative change management and particularly to the concept of co-generative learning inherited from action research, in which change becomes a joint management and employee learning, development, and knowledge creating process. In the second part, the focus of each chapter is on an aspect of the practice of leading change. There is practical guidance for leaders, internal problem owners, external change agents, or action researchers on how employees can be actively engaged in shaping their own work conditions. Readers will learn how experiencing negative results as well as success can form a basis for continued development, even on how to handle an organisational development process when it is in terminal trouble, to ensure there is still learning from it.
The Second Edition of Introduction to Action Research: Social Research for Social Change makes social science matter! It focuses on how it is possible to combine practical problem solving with generating new theoretical insights. Authors Davydd J. Greenwood and Morten Levin combine a thorough discussion of the epistemological foundations of action research with a broad overview of major contemporary trends in the field. New to the Second Edition: Includes a vast amount of updated information: Nine chapters have been significantly updated, including two new chapters that engage readers into the current debates on action research as "tradition" or its own "methodology," and how action research takes shape in the university environment. New textboxes highlight important issues in each chapter and more detailed cases and real-world examples illustrate the practical implications of AR in a variety of settings. Incorporates a new structure: New information pertains specifically to issues of techniques, work forms, and research strategies based on the authors’ experiences in using the book in teaching. The book now has 4 parts instead of 3, with an entirely new section on higher education and democracy as a concluding section. Emphasizes the skill sets needed to do action research: This book deals with the process of educating action researchers and reviews a number of programs that do this. Specific attention is given to the challenges of writing and intellectual property in AR, and more focus is devoted to both adult and formal education, creating a comprehensive overview of the field that is not found in any other action research book. Intended Audience: This is an excellent textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in Action Research, Social Research, and Qualitative Research across the social sciences.
In Participative Transformation, Roger Klev and Morten Levin insist that participative learning and developmental processes are essential in organizational change. They focus on introducing the kind of learning and development that shapes a self-sustaining developmental process that is an integral part of the daily activities of an organisation. This process is essentially one of collective reflection in order to develop alternatives for action, experimentation to achieve desired goals, then collective reflection on the results achieved. Reflection on own practice can contribute to direct improvements of own practice, but may also contribute to new practices, new frameworks of understanding, and to processes involving other participants and fields of interaction. The first part of the book provides an introduction to participative change management and particularly to the concept of co-generative learning inherited from action research, in which change becomes a joint management and employee learning, development, and knowledge creating process. In the second part, the focus of each chapter is on an aspect of the practice of leading change. There is practical guidance for leaders, internal problem owners, external change agents, or action researchers on how employees can be actively engaged in shaping their own work conditions. Readers will learn how experiencing negative results as well as success can form a basis for continued development, even on how to handle an organisational development process when it is in terminal trouble, to ensure there is still learning from it.
Statistical Analysis of Contingency Tables is an invaluable tool for statistical inference in contingency tables. It covers effect size estimation, confidence intervals, and hypothesis tests for the binomial and the multinomial distributions, unpaired and paired 2x2 tables, rxc tables, ordered rx2 and 2xc tables, paired cxc tables, and stratified tables. For each type of table, key concepts are introduced, and a wide range of intervals and tests, including recent and unpublished methods and developments, are presented and evaluated. Topics such as diagnostic accuracy, inter-rater reliability, and missing data are also covered. The presentation is concise and easily accessible for readers with diverse professional backgrounds, with the mathematical details kept to a minimum. For more information, including a sample chapter and software, please visit the authors' website.
Morten Ougaard provides a new and distinct theoretical perspective to the analysis of the globalization of politics. The book analyzes global governance as the partial and uneven globalization of different aspects of statehood. It focuses on the institutional infrastructure, highlighting the role of the G7/OECD nexus in providing strategic leadership; discusses an emerging global function of societal persistence or public goods; governance and relations of power between social forces; and finally it discusses American hegemonic leadership in the light of the dual power/persistence perspective.
We show the importance of a dynamic aggregation bias in accounting for the PPP puzzle. We prove that established time-series and panel methods substantially exaggerate the persistence of real exchange rates because of heterogeneity in the dynamics of disaggregated relative prices. When heterogeneity is properly taken into account, estimates of the real exchange rate half-life fall dramatically, to little more than one year, or significantly below Rogoff's "consensus view" of three to five years. We show that corrected estimates are consistent with plausible nominal rigidities, thus, arguably, solving the PPP puzzle.
In 2006, Claus Feveile published Det ældste Ribe [The earliest Ribe], launching the publication series Ribe Studier [Ribe Studies]. The goal of that series was to make the core archaeological evidence from excavations in the town of Ribe between 1984 and 2000 accessible to the scholarly world and to give an account of Ribe’s special status in the archaeological landscape of Denmark and northern Europe. Ribe 700-1050: From Emporium to Civitas in Southern Scandinavia is volume 2 in Ribe Studies. The main text here provides a comprehensive presentation and analysis of the archaeology of the town through to the end of the Viking Period. Alongside that, the book has a major topographical section which discusses West Jutland in this period and the connexions between Ribe and the hinterland of the town. In addition, a concluding chapter discusses the origin of towns in southern Scandinavia.
Sound and music is a product of technology. Whether we are enjoying a concert, working in a sound studio or listening with headphones on, technical equipment lays the foundation of our musical experience. In Machine Music. A Media Archaeological Excavation postdoc, composer and PhD Morten Riis tunes into normally undetected layers of music. Musical machines - be it ancient or modern instruments, computers, loudspeakers or amplifiers - are not just silent mediators of sounds. They all have their own unique voices. We simply have to learn to listen to them.
This book will serve as a valuable source of information about triangulations for the graduate student and researcher. With emphasis on computational issues, it presents the basic theory necessary to construct and manipulate triangulations. In particular, the book gives a tour through the theory behind the Delaunay triangulation, including algorithms and software issues. It also discusses various data structures used for the representation of triangulations.
A work that reveals the profound links between the evolution, acquisition, and processing of language, and proposes a new integrative framework for the language sciences. Language is a hallmark of the human species; the flexibility and unbounded expressivity of our linguistic abilities is unique in the biological world. In this book, Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater argue that to understand this astonishing phenomenon, we must consider how language is created: moment by moment, in the generation and understanding of individual utterances; year by year, as new language learners acquire language skills; and generation by generation, as languages change, split, and fuse through the processes of cultural evolution. Christiansen and Chater propose a revolutionary new framework for understanding the evolution, acquisition, and processing of language, offering an integrated theory of how language creation is intertwined across these multiple timescales. Christiansen and Chater argue that mainstream generative approaches to language do not provide compelling accounts of language evolution, acquisition, and processing. Their own account draws on important developments from across the language sciences, including statistical natural language processing, learnability theory, computational modeling, and psycholinguistic experiments with children and adults. Christiansen and Chater also consider some of the major implications of their theoretical approach for our understanding of how language works, offering alternative accounts of specific aspects of language, including the structure of the vocabulary, the importance of experience in language processing, and the nature of recursive linguistic structure.
Forget the language instinct—this is the story of how we make up language as we go Language is perhaps humanity’s most astonishing capacity—and one that remains poorly understood. In The Language Game, cognitive scientists Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater show us where generations of scientists seeking the rules of language got it wrong. Language isn’t about hardwired grammars but about near-total freedom, something like a game of charades, with the only requirement being a desire to understand and be understood. From this new vantage point, Christiansen and Chater find compelling solutions to major mysteries like the origins of languages and how language learning is possible, and to long-running debates such as whether having two words for “blue” changes what we see. In the end, they show that the only real constraint on communication is our imagination.
Since 1988, when Burma's military rulers crushed a popular uprising, Western governments have promoted democracy as a panacea for the country's manifold development problems, from ethnic conflict to weak governance, human rights abuses, and deep-rooted, structural poverty. Years of escalating censure and sanctions, however, have left the military firmly entrenched in power, the opposition marginalized, and the general population suffering from deepening poverty. In the first book-length study of Western human rights policy in Burma, Morten B. Pedersen argues that Western democracy rhetoric has not supplied the solution to these problems. Each year, Burma's human and natural resources are further eroding, the HIV/AIDS epidemic is mounting, and the prospect of turning the situation around is becoming less and less likely. Based on extensive field research, Promoting Human Rights in Burma proposes an alternative model of "critical engagement" that emphasizes more pragmatic efforts to help bring a deeply divided society together and promote socioeconomic development as the basis for longer-term political change. Although the focus is squarely on Burma, the fallacies in Western policy thinking that this case study reveals, as well as the alternative policy framework it offers, have wider relevance for other poor, conflict-ridden countries on the periphery of the global political and economic system.
This fully updated and revised second edition of Preliminary References to the European Court of Justice provides a meticulous and yet easily accessible examination of all aspects of the preliminary reference procedure. Since the first edition there have been significant changes to the European Union's legal foundations. First and foremost of those being the signing of the Lisbon Treaty, which has had both direct and indirect consequences for the preliminary reference procedure. In addition, the authors have taken into account amendments to the Rules of Procedure of the Court of Justice and the Court's amended Statute, they have added expanded treatment of the acte clair doctrine and the Court's Cartesio ruling and a more general revision of the text bringing it up to date by taking into account new case law and new legal writings. In addition to these important updates, the authors have also revised the structure of the book. With backgrounds as both practitioners and academics the two authors have produced a book that caters for the needs of both practitioners and academics.
Languages differ from one another in bewildering and seemingly arbitrary ways. For example, in English, the verb precedes the direct object ('understand the proof'), but in Japanese, the direct object comes first. In some languages, such as Mohawk, it is not even possible to establish a basic word order. Nonetheless, languages do share certain regularities in how they are structured and used. The exact nature and extent of these "language universals" has been the focus of much research and is one of the central explanatory goals in the language sciences. During the past 50 years, there has been tremendous progress, a few major conceptual revolutions, and even the emergence of entirely new fields. The wealth of findings and theories offered by the various language-science disciplines has made it more important than ever to work toward an integrated understanding of the nature of human language universals. This book is the first to examine language universals from a cross-disciplinary perspective. It provides new insights into long standing questions such as: What exactly defines the human capacity for language? Are there universal properties of human languages and, if so, what are they? Can all language universals be explained in the same way, or do some universals require different kinds of explanations from others? Language Universals is unique in starting with the assumption that the best way to approach these and related questions is through a dialogue between a wide range of disciplines, including linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy, computer science and biology.
Pleasure is fundamental to well-being and the quality of life, but until recently, was barely explored by science. Current research on pleasure has brought about ground-breaking developments on several fronts, and new data on pleasure and the brain have begun to converge from many disparate fields. The time is ripe to present these important findings in a single volume, and so Morten Kringelbach and Kent Berridge have brought together the leading researchers to provides a comprehensive review of our current scientific understanding of pleasure. The authors present their latest neuroscientific research into pleasure, describing studies on the brain's role in pleasure and reward in animals and humans, including brain mechanisms, neuroimaging data, and psychological analyses, as well as how their findings have been applied to clinical problems, such as depression and other disorders of hedonic well-being. To clarify the differences between their views, the researchers also provide short answers to a set of fundamental questions about pleasure and its relation to the brain. This book is intended to serve as both a starting point for readers new to the field, and as a reference for more experienced graduate students and scientists from fields such as neuroscience, psychology, psychiatry, neurology, and neurosurgery.
This book provides a comprehensive coverage of the basic principles of structural biology, as well as an up-to-date summary of some main directions of research in the field. The relationship between structure and function is described in detail for soluble proteins, membrane proteins, membranes, and nucleic acids.There are several books covering protein structure and function, but none that give a complete picture, including nucleic acids, lipids, membranes and carbohydrates, all being of central importance in structural biology.The book covers state-of-the-art research in various areas. It is unique for its breadth of coverage by experts in the fields. The book is richly illustrated with more than 400 color figures to highlight the wide range of structures.
This book invites readers to embark on a journey into the world of agency encompassing humans, other organisms, cells, intracellular molecular agents, colonies, populations, ecological systems, and artificial autonomous systems. We combine mechanistic and non-mechanistic approaches in the analysis of the function and evolution of organisms, their subagents, and multi-organism systems, and in this way offer a theoretical platform for integrating biosemiotics with both natural science and the humanities/social sciences. Agents are autonomous systems that incorporate knowledge on how to make sense of their environment and use it to achieve their goals. The functions of all agents are supported by mechanisms at the lowest level; however, the explanatory power of mechanistic analysis is not sufficient for complex agents. Non-mechanistic methods rely on the goal-directedness of agents whose dynamics follow self-stabilized dynamic attractors. The properties of attractors depend on stable or slowly changing factors, and such dependencies can be interpreted as sign relations if they are adaptive in nature. Agents can replace or redirect mechanisms on demand in order to preserve their functions; for performing higher-level semiotic functions, mechanisms are thus only means. We assume that mechanism and semiosis are not mutually exclusive, and that simple agents can interpret signs mechanistically. This assumption allows us to extend semiotic analysis to all agents, including ribosomes in cells, computers, and robots. This book challenges established traditions in natural science and the humanities/social sciences: semiotics no longer appears as restricted to humans and rational thinking, and biology is no longer limited to rely exclusively on mechanistic reasoning.
The forms of contemporary society and politics are often understood to be diametrically opposed to any expression of the supernatural; what happens when those forms are themselves regarded as manifestations of spirits and other occult phenomena? In Not Quite Shamans, Morten Axel Pedersen explores how the Darhad people of Northern Mongolia's remote Shishged Valley have understood and responded to the disruptive transition to postsocialism by engaging with shamanic beliefs and practices associated with the past.For much of the twentieth century, Mongolia's communist rulers attempted to eradicate shamanism and the shamans who once served as spiritual guides and community leaders. With the transition from a collectivized economy and a one-party state to a global capitalist market and liberal democracy in the 1990s, the people of the Shishged were plunged into a new and harsh world that seemed beyond their control. "Not-quite-shamans"—young, unemployed men whose undirected energies erupted in unpredictable, frightening bouts of violence and drunkenness that seemed occult in their excess— became a serious threat to the fabric of community life. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in Northern Mongolia, Pedersen details how, for many Darhads, the postsocialist state itself has become shamanic in nature.In the ideal version of traditional Darhad shamanism, shamans can control when and for what purpose their souls travel, whether to other bodies, landscapes, or worlds. Conversely, caught between uncontrollable spiritual powers and an excessive display of physical force, the "not-quite-shamans" embody the chaotic forms—the free market, neoliberal reform, and government corruption—that have created such upheaval in peoples' lives. As an experimental ethnography of recent political and economic transformations in Mongolia through the defamiliarizing prism of shamans and their lack, Not Quite Shamans is an attempt to write about as well as theorize postsocialism, and shamanism, in a new way.
A fully revised and updated third edition, this book details the form, contents, and procedures for preliminary references. Written for both practitioners and academics, this is an essential guidebook covering all aspects of preliminary references.
The monitoring and surveillance of genetically modified higher plants (GMHP) is an area that is still lacking an established international monitoring program. This volume presents ideas and suggestions by focusing on procedures in composing such a program and methods for detection of transgene dispersal and of environmental effects when GM plants are cultivated. Objectives and procedures for monitoring and surveying present and new types of GM plants are described, including herbicide tolerance, insect resistance and changed agronomic performance. Other issues covered in this book include: detection of GM plant dispersal and hybridisation; agricultural use and large scale effects; habitat selection and community invasibility; baseline definition and the time perspective; effects on ecosystems, vegetation and organism groups; sampling designs; data analysis and relevant statistical methods. In a final chapter, conclusions and recommendations are presented...
This groundbreaking book arrives at a time of growing concern for the future of true scholarship. Calling for coordinated efforts to reorganise the scholarly ecosystem, Morten Huse reflects on the past and looks to the future to uncover a communal approach to scholarship that comprises an open, innovative and impact-driven attitude to research that can change the academic game.
Analysis of the Court of Justice's practice, and the book is extensively referenced throughout with all the most relevant sources reproduced in the annexes. Readership: Advocates, Judges, and legal academics with an interest in EU law.
Public universities are in crisis, waning in their role as central institutions within democratic societies. Denunciations are abundant, but analyses of the causes and proposals to re-create public universities are not. Based on extensive experience with Action Research-based organizational change in universities and private sector organizations, Levin and Greenwood analyze the wreckage created by neoliberal academic administrators and policymakers. The authors argue that public universities must be democratically organized to perform their educational and societal functions. The book closes by laying out Action Research processes that can transform public universities back into institutions that promote academic freedom, integrity, and democracy.
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