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Testing 1 - 2 - 3 - Johannes Ledolter - Bog - Stanford University Press - Plusbog.dk

This book gives students, practitioners, and managers a set of practical and valuable tools for designing and analyzing experiments, emphasizing applications in marketing and service operations such as website design, direct mail campaigns, and in-store tests.

DKK 573.00

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Status, Network, and Structure - - Bog - Stanford University Press - Plusbog.dk

This book challenges much that has been written about the decline of sociology as a vital, essential area of inquiry into the human condition. Against this Greek chorus of woe, these papers show by example that sociology can make progress, select significant problems, and cumulate an integrated and coherent set of findings and theoretical understandings. Although the twenty papers in the book engage a wide variety of issues, they are united by their adherence to one of the most active and successful traditions in sociology, the group process tradition. Group process research programs can examine tractable problems posed by social psychological phenomena for which sociology has the best methods of study; they have the potential for a hardware-based, technological research front that discovers new phenomena; and they come closest of all approaches in sociological research to using cognitive criteria in the choice of problems and to studying immutable phenomena. The overall aim of the book is to provide models for researchers struggling to develop, construct, and integrate coherent sociological theory and knowledge. The papers are grouped around three themes: (1) the problem of theory construction in sociology, including what is meant by “theory” and the methods of testing it, particularly empirical testing; (2) the extension and elaboration of existing theories of group processes, notably in the study of status, sentiment, and the comparison process; and (3) the theoretical issues at the intersection of social structures, the pattern of connection in social networks, and the process of rational choice.

DKK 716.00

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Pedagogical Economies - Cathy Shuman - Bog - Stanford University Press - Plusbog.dk

The examination''s arbitrariness and cultural bias, its association with a normalizing surveillance, and its ridiculous attempts to quantify the unquantifiable have been perfectly obvious to generations of authors, educators, and even bureaucrats—yet it still dominates both British and American education systems. This book explores the examination''s figurative power for nineteenth-century discourses of subject formation and value through readings of works by Matthew Arnold, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, and John Ruskin, writers who were active during the 1850s and 1860s, when the examination began to structure a range of British institutions, from the working-class primary school to the Indian Civil Service. Although they routinely resisted the spread of formal educational testing, their work reveals a fascination with the examination''s unique ability to make reading and writing visible as value-able labor. As an element in literary discourse—as topos, plot structure, and figurative intersection—the examination remaps relations between the subject and knowledge, the person and the state, masculine self-discipline and feminine self-sacrifice, and intellectual and money economies. The book thus speculates on institutional, sexual, and economic aspects of Victorian professional gentility, as well as contributing to recent debates on Arnold''s seductive stupidity, Trollope''s "mechanical" realism, Dickens''s bourgeois critique of capitalist exchange, and Ruskin''s ambivalent attachment to schoolgirls. The economic, erotic, and institutional relationships implicit in educational testing and the debates surrounding it continue to trouble literary critics as well as scholars, administrators, and teachers. Pedagogical Economies can thus shed light on current questions about the relationship between school and society.

DKK 539.00

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Self-Regulation and Human Progress - Evan Osborne - Bog - Stanford University Press - Plusbog.dk

Most of us are familiar with free-market competition: the idea that society and the economy benefit when people are left to self-regulate, testing new ideas in pursuit of profit. Less known is the fact that this theory arose after arguments for the scientific method and freedom of speech had gone mainstream—and that all three share a common basis. Proponents of self-regulation in the realm of free speech have argued that unhindered public expression causes true ideas to gain strength through scrutiny. Similarly, scientific inquiry has been regarded as a self-correcting system, one in which competing hypotheses are verified by multiple independent researchers. It was long thought that society was better left to organize itself through free markets as opposed to political institutions. But, over the twentieth century, we became less confident in the notion of a self-regulating socioeconomy. Evan Osborne traces the rise and fall of this once-popular concept. He argues that—as society becomes more complex—self-regulation becomes more efficient and can once again serve our economy well.

DKK 606.00

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Fragile Elite - Susanne Bregnbaek - Bog - Stanford University Press - Plusbog.dk

China's One Child Policy and its rigorous national focus on educational testing are well known. But what happens to those "lucky" few at the very top of the pyramid: elite university students in China who grew up under the One Child Policy and now attend the nation's most prestigious universities? How do they feel about having made it to the top of an extremely competitive educational system—as their parents' only child? What pressures do they face, and how do they cope with the expectations associated with being the best?Fragile Elite explores the contradictions and perplexities of being an elite student through immersive ethnographic research conducted at two top universities in China. Susanne Bregnbæk uncovers the intimate psychological strains students suffer under the pressure imposed on them by parents and state, where the state acts as a parent and the parents reinforce the state. Fragile Elite offers fascinating insights into the intergenerational tensions at work in relation to the ongoing shift in educational policy and definition of what a "quality" student, child, and citizen is in contemporary China.

DKK 712.00

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Writing Our Extinction - Patrick Whitmarsh - Bog - Stanford University Press - Plusbog.dk

Mid-twentieth-century developments in science and technology produced new understandings and images of the planet that circulated the globe, giving rise to a modern ecological consciousness; but they also contributed to accelerating crises in the global environment, including climate change, pollution, and waste. In this new work, Patrick Whitmarsh analyzes postwar narrative fictions that describe, depict, or express the earth from above (the aerial) and below (the subterranean), revealing the ways that literature has engaged this history of vertical science and linked it to increasing environmental precarity, up to and including the extinction of humankind. Whitmarsh examines works by writers such as Don DeLillo, Karen Tei Yamashita, Reza Negarestani, and Colson Whitehead alongside postwar scientific programs including the Space Race, atmospheric and underground nuclear testing, and geological expeditions such as Project Mohole (which attempted to drill to the earth''s mantle). As Whitmarsh argues, by focusing readers'' attention on the fragility of postwar life through a vertical lens, Anthropocene fiction highlights the interconnections between human behavior and planetary change. These fictions situate industrial history within the much longer narrative of geological time and reframe scientific progress as a story through which humankind writes itself out of existence.

DKK 712.00

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Eisenhower, Science Advice, and the Nuclear Test-Ban Debate, 1945-1963 - Benjamin P. Greene - Bog - Stanford University Press - Plusbog.dk

Based on extensive research in government archives and private papers, this book analyzes the secret debate within the Eisenhower administration over the pursuit of a nuclear test-ban agreement. In contrast to much recent scholarship, this study concludes that Eisenhower strongly desired to reach an accord with the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom to cease nuclear weapons testing. For Eisenhower, a test ban would ease Cold War tensions, slow the nuclear arms race, and build confidence toward disarmament; however, he faced continual resistance from his early scientific advisers, most notably Lewis L. Strauss and Edward Teller. Extensive research into previously unavailable government archival sources and collections of private manuscripts reveals the manipulative acts of test-ban opponents and other factors that inhibited Eisenhower''s actions throughout his presidency. Meticulously analyzed, these sources underscore Eisenhower''s dependence on the counsel of his science advisors, such as Strauss, James R. Killian, and George B. Kistiakowsky, to determine the course he pursued in regard to several components of his national security strategy. In addition to its comprehensive analysis of the test-ban debate, this book makes important contributions to the scholarly literature assessing Eisenhower''s leadership and his approach to arms control.

DKK 716.00

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Mobilizing the Masses - Odoric Y. K. Wou - Bog - Stanford University Press - Plusbog.dk

A study of the roots of revolution in the Chinese province of Henan, this book describes in detail more than two decades (1925 to 1949) of the efforts of the Communist Party to build mass support for revolution. These were decades of social and political crisis, beginning with the May 30th Movement, exacerbated by the Japanese invasion in 1937, and culminating in the Communist victory of 1949. Looking for historical continuities and changes, the book traces the Communist movement''s trajectory from the cities to the countryside and back to the urban centers, in the process testing the major social science paradigms of peasant-based revolution. The author studies the interaction in Henan between the Communist revolutionaries and various groups that constituted the social base of the revolution - workers, religious sectarians, rural elites, student intellectuals, the military, and, above all, the peasantry. He closely studies the behavior of these groups and explains the social and structural forces that facilitated or constrained the Communist movement. He also shows how Communist mobilization tactics changed to accommodate such varied settings as the war zone, the mountains, and the floodplain. The author concludes that the key to the Communists'' victory lay in their ability to maneuver their way to political power, their skillful use of nationalist sentiment, and their community and reform programs that ultimately won over the peasant masses. Thus, he sees the Chinese Communist movement as a dual revolutionary process of power politics and social revolution.

DKK 674.00

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Song in an Age of Discord - H. Mack Horton - Bog - Stanford University Press - Plusbog.dk

Song in an Age of Discord is a companion volume to the author''s translation of The Journal of Socho , the travel diary and poetic memoir of Saiokuken Socho (1448-1532), the preeminent linked-verse ( renga ) poet of his generation. The Journal —which records several journeys that Socho made between Kyoto and Suruga Province during the tumultuous Age of the Country at War—is unparalleled in the literature of the period for its range of commentary and freshness of detail, and for its impressive array of literary genres, including more than 600 poems. The present volume opens with an overview of the author''s life and times, and explores the relationships between politics, patronage, and the creative process in late medieval Japan. Raised in the service of a feudal lord in Suruga Province, Socho subsequently became the devoted student of the renga master Sogi and the iconoclastic Zen monk Ikkyu, a variety of influences clearly visible in his journal. Socho lived in an era in which established values and hierarchies were being questioned, and his journal reflects his own testing of traditional literary boundaries. Subsequent chapters read the journal in terms of the standard norms of genres that Socho appropriated and reinterpreted in fashioning his own literary persona. The norms of medieval eremitic literature are presented via works by two other noted linked-verse poets, Shinkei and Shohaku, and those of travel literature are set forth in travel diaries by Socho''s teacher Sogi, who also supplied the template for Socho''s orthodox ( ushin ) poetry. The comic and unorthodox haikai verse of Yamazaki Sokan serves as a point of comparison for Socho''s frequent excursions into that genre. Unlike other orthodox renga masters, Socho maintained parallel interests in composing and preserving haikai poetry, and he contributed much to that evolving art form. Throughout, Song in an Age of Discord illustrates the dialogue Socho pursued with his literary and cultural heritage.