Suchergebnisse

There is voluminous survey evidence identifying which, when, and how individuals contact elected officials, but there is less evidence by way of external validation. The goal in this exploratory article is to investigate and extend the empirical trends in letter writing to the chief executive to validate the causes of political letter writing. Using a longitudinal series of heretofore unutilized data spanning 1953 to 1984 collected at individual presidential archives from President Eisenhower to President Reagan, the author tests competing theories about the causes of political letter writing during the modern presidential era. The findings reveal that exogenous events have the strongest effect, followed by presidential mobilization through speeches. Public approval has mixed effects but is strongest when those individuals most likely to participate approve of the president. These findings can help inform us about trends in participation and the evolving role of the public presidency.

AbstractBeginning in the 1850s, Christian missionary organizations established schools in Ottoman Palestine. A variety of networks developed over the years, principally those of the Anglicans and Catholics. Initially, these schools provided an education emphasizing European Christian values and subjects. Over time, however, a slow process of indigenization occurred. The first fruits of this process are illustrated by young leaders like Emil Tume and Tewfik Tubi who were prominent in the political opposition in Israel's first years of statehood. Another generation produced such notables as author Raja Shehadeh and Hanan Ashwari. In today's Israel and the Palestinian territories, the best schools, from a standpoint of matriculation, are Christian private schools that are open to all communities. Through this history, the article examines the development of a Christian school network and the political activism, involvement, and empowerment they engendered. It also provides a case study of the Rosary Sisters' school system.

Some scholars advocate for health care organizations designed around the principles of volume and focus, while others suggest that the complexity of patient care renders this approach to organizing care inefficient (and ineffective). This article attempts to reconcile these views, drawing on the idea of organizational capabilities as knowledge integration to motivate an empirical examination of the extent to which the efficiency benefits of hospital volume and focus depend on the degree of patient comorbidity. In doing so, the article has two aims: (a) to shed light on both the benefits and limitations of volume and focus as organizing principles and (b) to contribute to our understanding of the implications of comorbidity for the organization of health care delivery. Using data on U.S. hospitals, the author finds evidence that the efficiency benefits of volume and focus are diminishing in the level of patient comorbidity.

This study examines the decision-making process of the George W. Bush administration which led to the decision in late 2006 to order the Iraq troop surge. The study analyzes whether the bureaucratic politics model of foreign policy decision making can accurately explain the events of the case. The study seeks to further test the explanatory power and descriptive accuracy of the bureaucratic politics model, while also attaining a more textured, academic understanding of the decision-making process leading to the Iraq troop surge. The decision to order the troop surge in Iraq is one of the more important decisions in post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy and continues to impact U.S. strategy in Iraq, Afghanistan, and overall military doctrine. Finally, the author endeavors to contribute to the further development and refinement of the bureaucratic politics model of foreign policy decision making.

AbstractJapan is geographically located on the fringe of Asia. Japan's location is often divided between those arguing that Japan is inside Asia and those arguing it is outside Asia. Japanese ideas of Asian regionalism are thus immensely varied. This article details a number of Japanese ideas on Asian regionalism with author/agency, scope and method specified. Special mention is made of weak integration of government agencies, thus causing proliferation of many Japanese ideas within Asia. With the increasing self-assertiveness of China, the apparent peaking out of American hegemony, and the steady rise of non-Chinese Asians, Japan tries to maintain enduring alliance with the United States, to invigorate interdependence with China, and to reinvent new relationships with the countries of the East Asian Summit. Japanese ideas of Asian regionalism take those templates as guidelines to develop new ideas of Asian regionalism.

Drawing upon the personal as well as political life of Mahatma Gandhi, this article argues that a series of experiments shaped and determined Gandhi';s life and politics. Experiments, usually associated with hesitance and lack of confidence, were what the Father of the Indian Nation took earnestly to ensure the seriousness of his intents and doings. Always open and willing to create, execute, modify and indulge in experiments, Gandhi made sure of what worked and what did not on the basis of pragmatic considerations and proper contexts, thereby working from truth to truth and adopting what he thought worked well and discarding what he deemed erroneous. Taking cues from Gandhi';s writings and actions, the author further explores the interconnectedness between his experiments and experiences and hints at how the Mahatma was made as much of the failures as of the successes.

During the 1950s, Mexican railway women, known popularly as rieleras, joined their male counterparts to stage the most militant series of strikes of the postwar era. This study contests a large body of popular and scholarly literature which focuses exclusively on men in the making of the railway movement. Combining oral histories with union and company documents, the author traces how gender notions at work and in the community subordinated women to men, a process which nevertheless helped produce an identity for women based on the railway industry. Women did not challenge the patriarchal order but rather made use of it during the railway movement to mobilize in defense of their own interests as rieleras. These findings suggest that historians must look beyond the electoral arena, as well as beyond the archive, to capture working-class women's participation in postwar politics.

This paper reports on a rich, qualitative research study that aimed to discover how undergraduate and culturally diverse students experienced a collaborative, international, online, experiential project to learn about intercultural communication. Student participants in the study endorsed experiential learning in culturally diverse groups about intercultural communication through intercultural communication. The data revealed how participants made sense of and responded to intercultural communication amongst team members by juxtaposing personal experience of working in the online international learning group, their own cultural heritage and the literature available to them. The author concludes that experiential learning is a powerful tool for learning about intercultural communication through intercultural communication in the context of online, international and culturally diverse teams working on business case studies. It is also recommended as an activity that serves the process of internationalising a business communication curriculum and some of the broad aims of global citizenship.

Projects undertaken without the knowledge of their likely social impacts tend to produce unintended hardships for the local population. In order to preempt such failures, planning agencies, especially international aid agencies, insist on a prior assessment of possible harmful consequences of development interventions, so that corrective actions could be taken well in time. In India, the new National R&R policy 2007 has also mandated that a SIA be carried out whenever either a new project or expansion of an existing project is undertaken. This article provides a short history of the concept, discusses the causes and types of impacts commonly encountered, and then proceeds to describe the SIA process and the participatory social research methodology used in conducting a comprehensive SIA study. The author concludes that despite the many known advantages of SIA, its potential for informed decision-making still remains to be fully realised.

This paper outlines briefly the contribution of philosophers of Jewish origin to Polish philosophy. The author contrasts the phrases "philosophy in Poland" and "Polish philosophy." The former refers to philosophical ideas created in Poland as a territory, but the latter indicates philosophy as a part of the national Polish culture. Since the paper deals with "Polish philosophy," it omits representatives of Jewish philosophy living in Poland, like Isserles (Remu), the Gaon of Vilna, Maimon, or Krochmal. The participation of Jews in Polish academic life was a result of Haskala and began in the second half of the nineteenth century. Various factors, political and social, determined restrictions of activities of Jews in Polish science, including philosophy. The situation improved in 1918–1939, although most Jewish people had no full chance to make successful academic careers. Nevertheless, several Jews played a prominent role in Polish philosophy, particularly in the Lvov-Warsaw School.

The Standard Model has become the primary approach to military group cohesion. Yet the key theoretical drivers that explain where the Model came from have not been well articulated. This article addresses that deficiency by presenting those main drivers in past research and the key questions derived from the research that guided development of the Model. Additionally, recent research has brought several potential challenges to the Standard Model, which also have not been well articulated or presented together in one place. This effort addresses those theoretical problems as well as logically deduced challenges, which in all have been labeled by the author as the Horizon Problem, Individual Differences Problem, Roman Road Problem, Reductionist Problem, Life Cycle Problem, Frame Problem, Common Goal Problem, and Action Problem. Some limits to the Standard Model are noted in the process of showing how the Model can accommodate these challenges.

This article focuses on Fred Shuttlesworth, founder and president of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and the one who convinced Martin Luther King Jr. to participate in the Birmingham civil rights campaign of 1963. A folksy preacher and an exceptional leader, the article examines his use of the precept hermeneutic in his rhetoric. Like King, Shuttlesworth falls within the African American jeremiad tradition of David Walker, Frederick Douglass, and Sojourner Truth. Unlike King, the author argues, Shuttlesworth utilizes the precept hermeneutic to repudiate segregation but not simply because of his fundamentalist worldview; he deployed this form of exegesis to foreground larger principles of progressive patriotism, religious activism, and racial egalitarianism. As a result, Shuttlesworth constructs a rhetorical strategy that, drawing upon a canonized view of scripture, paradoxically deconstructs, disrupts, and dismantles canonized perspectives on racial, religious, national and international identities.

This article is inspired by the current attention paid to bibliometric methods in evaluating research relevance and impact. The logic behind the trend is examined by comparing highly and less cited publications in the same knowledge field (i.e. performance measurement) to see if and how they are different, especially in terms of research design and methods used. Findings indicate that various research designs and methods are equally represented among highly and less highly cited works, and that the only feature that does seem to play a role is if the cited author is an internationally renowned scholar. Findings also indicate an indiscriminate use of citation where the quality and relevance of secondary data are taken for granted. A vague hint of something, found in a single case study or inferred from a purely theoretical work, may thus over time and with more citations added become universal fact or even 'evidence'.

• Resumen: Este artículo presenta una interpretación de las tesis de Lauchlin Currie en los campos del desarrollo económico y de la macroeconomía desde el punto de vista del modelo macroeconómico convencional de oferta y demanda agregadas. Según esta interpretación las tesis de Currie son coherentes con este modelo pero no pueden reducirse al keynesianismo ni al clasicismo tradicional: tienen su propia especificidad y, a juicio del autor, son de gran pertinencia para los países subdesarrollados. • Abstract: This paper interprets Laughlin Currie's thesis in the fields of economic development and macroeconomics from the conventional supply and demand macroeconomic model approach. According to this interpretation; Currie's thesis can be encompassed in this model but they cannot be limited to textbook Keynesian or classic schemes. They have their own identity and the author considers them of great importance for underdeveloped countries.

This article examines three different ways of establishing connections between political models and the realm of the family. It scrutinizes and criticizes the patriarchal homology between political and private father figures (Filmer vs. Locke), casts light on the political bearings of sympathetic rela- tions which are modeled based on maternal love (Adam Smith and Condorcet), and examines the revolutionary ideal of fraternity (Friedrich Schiller). The author distinguishes symbolic (paternal), synergetic (fraternal) and sympathetic relations and analyzes their bearings for modern democracies. He takes issue with the liberal separation between the private and the political, as it tends to lose sight of the marked correspondences between these spheres. He also questions the conservative idea of a family compensating for the discontent in the public realm. Gender concepts and generational issues turn out to be intertwined with theories of the political.