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This essay advances the proposition that the quality of the collaborative process can exercise considerable influence on the success and sustainability of community initiatives, especially those addressing community health and wellbeing. The force and direction of this influence, the essay argues, is largely accounted for by stakeholders' perceptions of their collective power and whether the collaborative process feels authentic. Further, this influence can last for many years, flowing downstream from stakeholders participating in early stages of the collaborative process to those giving and receiving care. The essay offers a phenomenological account of collaboration – as animated by the flow and force of affective energy – to address several critical questions: what motivates collaboration; what sustains group cohesion; what are the features of high-quality collaborative processes; and what makes a collaborative process authentic? The essay concludes with an affective re-specification of authenticity – grounded in vitality, not essence – to explain why some collaboratives are more successful than others.

In this essay I want to extend the brief discussion of "higher-order" conditions presented in Reconstructing Argumentative Discourse (Van Eemeren, Grootendorst, Jackson, and Jacobs, 1993). After a brief discussion of the scope and function of higher-order conditions, I will examine the modes of subjectivity entailed in their description of the ideal arguer. I will then move to a discussion of the relationship between governance and rationality underwriting their description of the socio-political environment conducive to critical discussion. I will conclude the essay with remarks on the role of procedural theories of argumentation in a deliberative conception of democracy.

This paper reports the preliminary results of a content analysis of the use and functions of reasonableness in the New York Times editorial page from 1860-2004. We begin by setting out several reasons why we should devote our critical attention to the concept of reasonableness. We then justify our choice of the New York Times editorial page and describe our sample and analytic method. The body of the paper reports three results. First, the primary meanings of the concept are detailed. These include prudence, rationality, fairness, and appropriateness. Second, a distinction between an epistemic and a non-epistemic function of the concept was found in both the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data. Moreover, we found that the vast majority of the editorials employ the non-epistemic function--a fact that we argue has significant consequences for argumentation theory. Finally, we found that the topoi of reasonableness primarily concern the legitimacy of applications of social and political power. We conclude that to explicate the meanings and functions of reasonableness is to explicate the rhetoric of power in liberal democracies.

Facilitators that use a collaborative governance approach are regularly pushed, mandated, or naturally desire to achieve broad inclusion of stakeholders in collaborations. How to achieve such inclusion is an important but often overlooked aspect of implementation. To fully realize the value of collaborative governance, we investigate how institutional design choices made about inclusion practices during the critical early stages of collaboration affect stakeholders' expectations of each other's contribution to a civic program and subsequently influences collaboration process outcomes. Informed by field observations from uniquely successful community health programs, we identify two institutional design choices related to inclusion that are associated with favorable group outcomes. The first design process uses time instrumentally to build trust and commitment in the collaboration, whereas the second design process includes new participants thoughtfully to limit their risk exposure. Based on experimental economics, strategic behaviors of stakeholders are formalized as a minimum effort coordination game in a multiagent model. A series of simulated experiments are conducted to gain fine-grained understanding of how the two design processes uniquely engender and reinforce commitment among stakeholders, minimize uncertainty, and increase the likelihood of positive process outcomes. For practitioners, the findings suggest how to navigate collaboration tensions during the early stages of their development while still respecting the competing need for stakeholder inclusiveness. The theoretical framework and the multiagent method of this study embrace the complexity of collaborative processes and trace how each intervention uniquely contributes to increases in trust and commitment. Adapted from the source document.

Though collaboration is often required in community initiatives, little evidence documents relationships between collaboration and program success. The authors contend that clarification of the construct collaboration is necessary for investigating its contribution to the success of community initiatives. After respecifying collaboration, they present a study of a multisite program that involved varying degrees of collaboration in the 16 communities adopting a nurse home visitation program. The authors employ hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) to test the predictive power of individual participant characteristics and examine the increased accuracy of predictions from a second level model of site qualities—specifically, features of the collaborative process associated with different sites. The first-level model predicted approximately 10% of the variance in attrition, or dropout, of program clients. The second-level model accounted for an additional 28% of the variance in attrition. A theory of commitment transfer is offered as a first explanation of this result.

Essays in the The Prettier Doll focus on the same local controversy: in 2001,a third-grade girl in Colorado submitted an experiment to the school science fair. She asked 30 adults and 30 fifth-graders which of two Barbie dolls was prettier. One doll was black, the other white, and each wore a different colored dress. All of the adults picked the Barbie in the purple dress, while nearly all of the fifth graders picked the white Barbie. When the student's experiment was banned an uproar resulted that spread to the national media. School board meetings and other public exchanges highlighted the potent intersection of local and national social concerns: education, censorship, science, racism, and tensions in foundation values such as liberty, democracy, and free speech. For the authors of these essays, the exchanges that arose from "Barbiegate" illustrate vividly the role of rhetoric at the grassroots level, fundamental to civic judgment in a democratic state and at the core of "ordinary democracy.".