Practising Comparison

Practising Comparison PDF Author: Joe Deville
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780993144943
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
This book compares things, objects, concepts, and ideas. It is also about the practical acts of doing comparison. Comparison is not something that exists in the world, but a particular kind of activity. Agents of various kinds compare by placing things next to one another, by using software programs and other tools, and by simply looking in certain ways. Comparing like this is an everyday practice. But in the social sciences, comparing often becomes more burdensome, more complex, and more questions are asked of it. How, then, do social scientists compare? What role do funders, their tools, and databases play in social scientific comparisons? Which sorts of objects do they choose to compare and how do they decide which comparisons are meaningful? Doing comparison in the social sciences, it emerges, is a practice weighed down by a history in which comparison was seen as problematic. As it plays out in the present, this history encounters a range of other agents also involved in doing comparison who may challenge the comparisons of social scientists themselves. This book introduces these questions through a varied range of reports, auto-ethnographies, and theoretical interventions that compare and analyse these different and often intersecting comparisons. Its goal is to begin a move away from the critique of comparison and towards a better comparative practice, guided not by abstract principles, but a deeper understanding of the challenges of practising comparison.

Practising Comparison

Practising Comparison PDF Author: Joe Deville
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780993144943
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book compares things, objects, concepts, and ideas. It is also about the practical acts of doing comparison. Comparison is not something that exists in the world, but a particular kind of activity. Agents of various kinds compare by placing things next to one another, by using software programs and other tools, and by simply looking in certain ways. Comparing like this is an everyday practice. But in the social sciences, comparing often becomes more burdensome, more complex, and more questions are asked of it. How, then, do social scientists compare? What role do funders, their tools, and databases play in social scientific comparisons? Which sorts of objects do they choose to compare and how do they decide which comparisons are meaningful? Doing comparison in the social sciences, it emerges, is a practice weighed down by a history in which comparison was seen as problematic. As it plays out in the present, this history encounters a range of other agents also involved in doing comparison who may challenge the comparisons of social scientists themselves. This book introduces these questions through a varied range of reports, auto-ethnographies, and theoretical interventions that compare and analyse these different and often intersecting comparisons. Its goal is to begin a move away from the critique of comparison and towards a better comparative practice, guided not by abstract principles, but a deeper understanding of the challenges of practising comparison.

Constitutional Comparison

Constitutional Comparison PDF Author: François Venter
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004481400
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
In our globalized era it has become impossible to deal effectively with constitutional law and related subjects such as fundamental rights, administrative law and political science without knowledge of foreign systems. A wealth of literature is available on practically all constitutional systems and the intricacies of their application. This, however, presents the constitutionalist with a formidable problem: Which foreign systems should I explore in order to make relevant comparisons, and how should I go about it? This book addresses the core problems of comparability and appropriate comparative methodology in the realm of contemporary constitutionalism. The outcome is, however, not mere theorizing. Most of the text is devoted to an incisive application of the chosen comparative method to four geographically, historically, and culturally divergent, but thoroughly comparable, constitutional systems. In the course of the comparative exercise, contemporary constitutional dogma and constitutional mechanics are analyzed and explained, in many instances in their historical contexts, making the book itself a useful source of comparative and historical information.

Performance Comparison and Organizational Service Provision

Performance Comparison and Organizational Service Provision PDF Author: Christopher Dorn
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000349519
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
Exploring the mechanisms underlying performance comparisons, Performance Comparison and Organizational Service Provision investigates how such assessments shape hospitals’ service provision and medical professionals’ work. With a focus on U.S. health care, this study outlines how medical quality was defined and compared in the hospital sector from the late 19th century to the present. Developing a novel theoretical framework to investigate performance comparisons, several different forms of internal and external performance assessments are contrasted throughout this period. The transformative effects of these comparisons on hospitals’ relationships to patients, insurers, regulators, and staff are analyzed and their ramifications for current hospital care are explored. Drawing on this analysis, the book examines the controversial nature of these measures and the struggles among hospital managers, patients, physicians, and policy makers to determine hospital quality. Affording a deeper understanding of how performance comparisons influence organizational service provision, the book will be of interest to researchers in a broad range of fields including organization studies, accountability and evaluation, health care, and policy research as well as practitioners in hospital care and management.

Comparison in Anthropology

Comparison in Anthropology PDF Author: Matei Candea
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108474608
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 407

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Book Description
Presents a systematic rethinking of the power and limits of comparison in anthropology.

Elgar Encyclopedia of Science and Technology Studies

Elgar Encyclopedia of Science and Technology Studies PDF Author: Ulrike Felt
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1800377991
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 643

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Book Description
This Encyclopedia provides a comprehensive overview of the expanding field of science and technology studies (STS). Covering key frameworks, themes and topics, Ulrike Felt and Alan Irwin bring together expert contributors to map the development of STS within its historical and intellectual context.

The Routledge Handbook of Comparative Global Urban Studies

The Routledge Handbook of Comparative Global Urban Studies PDF Author: Patrick Le Galès
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100090413X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 962

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Book Description
The Routledge Handbook of Comparative Global Urban Studies is a timely intervention into the field of global urban studies, coming as comparison is being more widely used as a method for global urban studies, and as a number of methodological experiments and comparative research projects are being brought to fruition. It consolidates and takes forward an emerging field within urban studies and makes a positive and constructive intervention into a lively arena of current debate in urban theory. Comparative urbanism injects a welcome sense of methodological rigor and a commitment to careful evaluation of claims across different contexts, which will enhance current debates in the field. Drawing together more than 50 international scholars and practitioners, this book offers an overview of key ideas and practices in the field and extends current thinking and practice. The book is primarily intended for scholars and graduate students for whom it will provide an invaluable and up-to-date guide to current thinking across the range of disciplines which converge in the study of urbanism, including geography, sociology, political studies, planning, and urban studies.

Comparative Metaphysics

Comparative Metaphysics PDF Author: Pierre Charbonnier
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 178348859X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
How does the ontological turn in anthropology redefine what modern, Western ontology is in practice, and offer the beginnings of a new ontological pluralism? On a planet that is increasingly becoming a single, metaphysically homogeneous world, anthropology remains one of the few disciplines that recognizes that being has been thought with very different concepts and can still be rendered in terms quite different than those placed on it today. Yet despite its critical acuity, even the most philosophically oriented anthropology often remains segregated from philosophical discussions aimed at rethinking such terms. What would come of an anthropology more fully committed to being a source of (post-) philosophical concepts? What would happen to philosophy if it began to think with and through these concepts? How, finally, does comparison condition these two projects ? This book addresses these questions from a variety of perspectives, all of which nonetheless hold in common the view that “philosophy” has been displaced and altered by the modes of thought of other collectives. An international group of authors, including Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Marilyn Strathern, Philippe Descola, and Bruno Latour, explore how the new anthropology/philosophy conjuncture opens new horizons of critique.

Modern Social Work Practice

Modern Social Work Practice PDF Author: Mark Doel
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351916963
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
Modern Social Work Practice is an interactive book designed to provide readers with an opportunity to engage with key aspects of current social work practice. It also provides an excellent digest of the significant literature. Each chapter is introduced with an activity or exercise designed to aid student learning in discrete aspects of practice, building up to a complete curriculum for practice learning. The book builds upon the success and style of Social Work Practice (1993) and The New Social Work Practice (1998). Mark Doel and Steven M. Shardlow have shaped the book to take account of the National Occupational Standards for Social Work, aiming to provide a creative, practical and up-to-date resource for teaching and learning in line with current practices.

Practice Methodologies in Education Research

Practice Methodologies in Education Research PDF Author: Julianne Lynch
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000699218
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Practice Methodologies in Education Research offers a fresh approach to researching practice in education. Addressing a major gap in research methodology scholarship, it highlights how integral practice theory is to the transformational agendas of education research, introducing a theory of activist practice methodologies informed by expansive theories of practice. With contributions from leading education researchers drawn from across the world, the book confronts onto-epistemological dilemmas for doing research that arise from taking practice theory seriously, including the theories of Bourdieu, de Certeau, Deleuze, Haraway, Latour, Taylor, and Vygotsky. A defining feature of the chapters is their activist axiologies and their experimental approach to researching practice in education, in fields as diverse as educational leadership, schooling, higher education, adult and workplace education and training, professional practice, and informal learning. Practice Methodologies in Education is essential reading for education academics and postgraduates engaged in critical research using practice theory.

Comparative Urbanism

Comparative Urbanism PDF Author: Jennifer Robinson
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119697557
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 475

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Book Description
COMPARATIVE URBANISM ‘Comparative Urbanism fully transforms the scope and purpose of urban studies today, distilling innovative conceptual and methodological tools. The theoretical and empirical scope is astounding, enlightening, emboldening. Robinson peels away conceptual labels that have anointed some cities as paradigmatic and left others as mere copies. She recalibrates overly used theoretical perspectives, resurrects forgotten ones long in need of a dusting off, and brings to the fore those often marginalised. Robinson’s approach radically re-distributes who speaks for the urban, and which urban conditions shape our theoretical understandings. With Comparative Urbanism in our hands, we can start the practice of urban studies anywhere and be relevant to any number of elsewheres.’ Jane M. Jacobs, Professor of Urban Studies, Yale-NUS College, Singapore ‘How to think the multiplicity of urban realities at the same time, across different times and rhythmic arrangements; how to move with the emergences and stand-stills, with conceptualisations that do justice to all things gathered under the name of the urban. How to imagine comparatively amongst differences that remain different, individualised outcomes, but yet exist in-common. No book has so carefully conducted a specifically urban philosophy on these matters, capable of beginning and ending anywhere.’ AbdouMaliq Simone, Senior Research Fellow, Urban Institute, University of Sheffield The rapid pace and changing nature of twenty-first century urbanisation as well as the diversity of global urban experiences calls for new theories and new methodologies in urban studies. In Comparative Urbanism: Tactics for Global Urban Studies, Jennifer Robinson proposes grounds for reformatting comparative urban practice and offers a wide range of tactics for researching global urban experiences. The focus is on inventing new concepts as well as revising existing approaches. Inspired by postcolonial and decolonial critiques of urban studies she advocates for an experimental comparative urbanism, open to learning from different urban experiences and to expanding conversations amongst urban scholars across the globe. The book features a wealth of examples of comparative urban research, concerned with many dimensions of urban life. A range of theoretical and philosophical approaches ground an understanding of the radical revisability and emergent nature of concepts of the urban. Advanced students, urbanists and scholars will be prompted to compose comparisons which trace the interconnected and relational character of the urban, and to think with the variety of urban experiences and urbanisation processes across the globe, to produce the new insights the twenty-first century urban world demands.