This book presents a thorough overview of a model of human functioning based on the idea that behavior is goal-directed and regulated by feedback control processes. It describes feedback processes and their application to behavior, considers goals and the idea that goals are organized hierarchically, examines affect as deriving from a different kind of feedback process, and analyzes how success expectancies influence whether people keep trying to attain goals or disengage. Later sections consider a series of emerging themes, including dynamic (...) systems as a model for shifting among goals, catastrophe theory as a model for persistence, and the question of whether behavior is controlled or instead 'emerges'. Three chapters consider the implications of these various ideas for understanding maladaptive behavior, and the closing chapter asks whether goals are a necessity of life. Throughout, theory is presented in the context of diverse issues that link the theory to other literatures. (shrink)

Affective dynamics are discussed from the perspective of a view of origin and functions of affective valence based in control processes. This view posits that affect reflects the error signal of a feedback loop managing rate of progress at goal attainment or threat avoidance. Negative feelings signal doing poorly, demanding more effort. Positive feelings signal doing better than necessary, allowing coasting, which yields goal attainment without unnecessary resource expenditure. Given multiple simultaneous goals, these functions assist in moment-to-moment priority management, facilitating (...) attainment of all. (shrink)

Another Marx -- Making Marx Marx -- Class struggle and class compromise -- History and progress -- Democracy and Communism/Socialism -- Capitalism and revolution -- Exploitation and alienation.

Genetic determinism can be described as the attribution of the formation of traits to genes, where genes are ascribed more causal power than what scientific consensus suggests. Belief in genetic determinism is an educational problem because it contradicts scientific knowledge, and is a societal problem because it has the potential to foster intolerant attitudes such as racism and prejudice against sexual orientation. In this article, we begin by investigating the very nature of belief in genetic determinism. Then, we investigate whether (...) knowledge of genetics and genomics is associated with beliefs in genetic determinism. Finally, we explore the extent to which social factors such as gender, education, and religiosity are associated with genetic determinism. Methodologically, we gathered and analyzed data on beliefs in genetic determinism, knowledge of genetics and genomics, and social variables using the “Public Understanding and Attitudes towards Genetics and Genomics” instrument. Our analyses of PUGGS responses from a sample of Brazilian university freshmen undergraduates indicated that belief in genetic determinism was best characterized as a construct built up by two dimensions or belief systems: beliefs concerning social traits and beliefs concerning biological traits; levels of belief in genetic determination of social traits were low, which contradicts prior work; associations between knowledge of genetics and genomics and levels of belief in genetic determinism were low; and social factors such as age and religiosity had stronger associations with beliefs in genetic determinism than knowledge. Although our study design precludes causal inferences, our results raise questions about whether enhancing genetic literacy will decrease or prevent beliefs in genetic determinism. (shrink)

In the wake of Communism's collapse in Eastern Europe, one of today's foremost interpreters of Marx's texts and ideas offers postmodern readings of canonical texts to discover what Marx has to say to our postmodern condition. Terrell Carver takes advantage of the ideological release of Marxism from its association with Soviet Communism to explore how Marx's writings can be reread in the spirit in which they were written: as a critique of capitalist society. Employing textual and narrative analysis developed within (...) postmodernism, Carver carefully examines Marx's language—and the language around Marx—to arrive at a reassessment that is free from the restraints of past dogma. He addresses ways in which Marx is changing: which texts are read, how hermeneutics and deconstruction have altered our reading of them, and trends toward viewing Marx not simply as a revolutionary or an economist but as a political thinker whose insights are relevant to current debates over free markets and mixed economies. Carver first leads readers through a new, detailed examination of _Capital_. He then explores Marx's relationship with the socialism of his contemporaries, critiques translations of Marx, examines works written with Engels, considers Marx's relationship to Hegel, and applies Marx's thought to issues of gender. These re-readings convey the importance of continuing to engage Marx's thought and show that there is more to Marx than we might ever hope to discover. It is a lucid and provocative work that liberates Marx's ideas for what they can contribute to a fresh evaluation of our present political milieu. (shrink)

Judith Butler has been arguably the most important gender theorist of the past 20 years. This edited volume draws leading international political theorists into dialogue with her political theory.

The UK Supreme Court in Montgomery v Lanarkshire Health Board adopts an approach to information disclosure in connection with clinical treatment that moves away from medical paternalism towards a more patient-centred approach. In doing so, it reinforces the protection afforded to informed consent and autonomous patient decision making under the law of negligence. However, some commentators have expressed a concern that the widening of the healthcare providers’ duty of disclosure may provide impetus, in future cases, for courts to adopt a (...) more rigorous approach to the application of causation principles. The aim would be to limit liability but, in turn, it would also limit autonomy protection. Such a restrictive approach has recently been adopted in Australia as a result of the High Court decision in Wallace v Kam. This paper considers whether such an approach is likely under English negligence law and discusses case law from both jurisdictions in order to provide a point of comparison from which to scope the post- Montgomery future. (shrink)

The German Ideology as a 'book' dates only from the early 1920s and 1930s. The opening 'chapter' 'I. Feuerbach' was factitiously constructed to solve the problem posed by Marx's engimatic reference in 1859 to 'self-clarification'. This was in autobiographical passages detailing his 'outlook', termed by Engels the 'materialist interpretation of history'. Factual evidence presented here makes this framing untenable. 'The German ideology' manuscript materials of 1845-6 are best studied -- not as a 'smooth text' of the 'last hand' -- but (...) as a 'variant-rich' text that allows access to a 'laboratory' where Marx and Engels were learning to think as they did. (shrink)

Marx was a highly original and polymathic thinker, unhampered by disciplinary boundaries, whose intellectual influence has been enormous. Yet in the wake of the collapse of Marxism-Leninism in Eastern Europe the question arises as to how important his work really is for us now. An important dimension of this volume is to place Marx's writings in their historical context and to separate what he actually said from what others interpreted him as saying. Informed by current debates and new perspectives, the (...) volume provides a comprehensive coverage of all the major areas to which Marx made significant contributions. (shrink)

Marx's work in the first chapters of Capital is sometimes taken to be ?metaphysical?, since his remarks do not lend themselves to ?scientific? testing against quantitative data. I argue that Marx aimed to re?present the economic theory of his day in order to reveal the characteristic presuppositions of capitalist society, and ? in the first instance ? to rid the theory of logical confusions. Though his distinctions are ingenious and his arguments consistent, the enterprise fails in certain respects, because he (...) relies on Ricardian propositions about value and labour, and because his use of certain methods and distinctions of nineteenth?century logic is no longer convincing. Hence he reaches conclusions about the meaning of value, and the nature of commodities and labour, that are wrong in principle. These conclusions were the logical basis for his most sweeping predictions about capitalist society. (shrink)

Vector autoregression (VAR) modeling allows probing bidirectional relationships in gender/sex development and may support hypothesis testing following multi-modal data collection. We show VAR in three lights: supporting a hypothesis, rejecting a hypothesis, and opening up new questions. To illustrate these capacities of VAR, we reanalyzed longitudinal data that recorded dyadic mother-infant interactions for 15 boys and 15 girls aged 3 to 11 months of age. We examined monthly counts of 15 infant behaviors and 13 maternal behaviors (Seifert et al., 1994). (...) VAR models demonstrated that infant crawling predicted a subsequently close feedback loop from mothers of boys but a subsequently open ended, branched response from mothers of girls. A different finding showed that boys’ standing independently later predicted significant later increases of four maternal behaviors: rocking/jiggling, lifting, affectionate touching, and stimulation of infant gross-motor activity. In contrast, crawling by girls led mothers to later decrease the same maternal behaviors. Thus, VAR might allow us to identify how mothers respond differently during daily interactions depending on infant gender/sex. The present work intends mainly to showcase the VAR method in the specific context of the empirical study of gender/sex development. (shrink)

A collection of essays which considers how the personal is political. The intertwining of gender with class and ethinicity is examined along with a technological theory of gender and parenting. Emphasis is placed upon the gendered perspective in political theory in this text.

Marx's 'production theory' of society and social change is unique in social science and functions as a powerful hypothesis. It is not a casual law. The author assesses the central difficulties encountered by the theory, and shows that it sprang from a desire not simply to interpret the world, but to change it.

Four women have been conventionally framed as wives and/or mistresses and/or sexual partners in the biographical reception of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as heterosexual men. These women were Jenny Marx, Helene Demuth, Mary Burns, and Lydia Burns. How exactly they appear in the few contemporary texts and rare images that survive is less interesting than the determination of subsequent biographers of the two “great men” to make these women fit a familiar genre, namely intellectual biography. An analysis of Marx–Engels (...) biographies shows how this masculinized genre enforces an incuriosity that makes gendered political partnerships unthinkable and therefore invisible. By contrast, a positive interest in these women, which rethinks what a gendered political partnership is or could be, results in a significantly different view of the two men. As historical figures, they shift from being individualized or paired‐with‐each‐other “great thinkers” to communist/socialist activists working in and through everyday spaces and material practices. Their pamphlets, articles, and books thus appear more as immediate political interventions and less as timeless theorizing or as the raw material for such intellectualizing reconstructions. (shrink)

Billy Wilder's classic film ‘Some Like It Hot’ prefigures Judith Butler's concept of performativity in relation to sex, gender and sexuality. Butler introduced this in Gender Trouble, demonstrating that sex, gender and sexuality are naturalized effects of citation and repetition. In that text she explains that denaturalization is visibly demonstrated by drag. Later in Bodies that Matter she argues that drag in ‘Some Like It Hot’ does not denaturalize heterosexuality, but rather fortifies it. What then for Butler divides denaturalizing drag (...) from non-denaturalizing drag? Butler locates denaturalizing drag in the film ‘Female Trouble’, where Divine's drag-queen persona satirizes gender in a hyperbolic performance. However, Butler misconstrues the cross-dressing performances in ‘Some Like It Hot’ as drag, which are better understood as instances of theatrical disguise. Narrative analysis reveals that all the characters in ‘Some Like It Hot’ function within a dystopian critique of heteronormativity. Because the film takes a performative view of sex, gender and sexuality, it can validate three queer couples who defy the strictures of heterosexual romance. Butler thus overlooks a discourse of critique and destabilization alternative to gay perspectives. Current developments in sexual politics, broadly conceived, track both Butlerian concepts of performativity and dystopian critiques of heteronormativity. (shrink)

Who writes? For whom is the writing being done? In what circumstances? These, it seems to me, are the questions whose answers provide us with the ingredients making for a politics of interpretation. E. Said.

: Offering an introduction to both John Dewey's philosophy of education and the 4-H Youth Development Program, this paper draws clear connections between these two topics. Concepts explored include Dewey's principles of continuity and interaction, and contagion with respect to learning. Roles of educational leaders (including teachers) are investigated in the context of a discussion about the structuring of opportunities for students to develop habits of meaningful and life-long learning. Specific examples are described in depth to demonstrate, from a Deweyan (...) perspective, the educational process and value of 4-H participation. Brief comments are made about the place of 4-H in the U.S. system of public education. (shrink)

Biografie van de Duitse socioloog (1820-1895).

Understanding how emotions emerge is difficult without determining what characteristic of the trigger actually triggers them. Knowing whether emotional experiences self-stabilize is difficult without remembering what other processes are set in play as the emotion emerges. It is not clear either that positive feedback is required for the emergence of emotion or that an attractor model captures well what is happening when an emotion arises.

Political theorists are certainly familiar with violence, an ever-present spectre of disorder in every major text. And while The Republic raised the sex issue more than two millennia ago, it has taken considerable feminist effort in recent years to get this re-centred again so that it is not just an issue about women, but an issue debated and expanded from women's perspectives on power relations in social relationships. Today this covers critical engagement with the ways that sex itself is constructed (...) as knowledge about anyone's body, the gendered hierarchies of power through which women and men are perceived and constrained, and the modes through which diverse sexualities are experienced within and projected upon the foregoing. (shrink)

This book's importance is derived from three sources: careful conceptualization of teacher induction from historical, methodological, and international perspectives; systematic reviews of research literature relevant to various aspects of teacher induction including its social, cultural, and political contexts, program components and forms, and the range of its effects; substantial empirical studies on the important issues of teacher induction with different kinds of methodologies that exemplify future directions and approaches to the research in teacher induction.