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In this chapter I explore the professional socialization of medical students through the preclinical to clinical transition of medical education. I discuss professional socialization, the importance of transitions in medical education and student stress, and formal and informal learning. Lave and Wenger’s sociocultural learning theory provides a theoretical underpinning related to workplace learning. The research presented was undertaken in a traditionally structured medical program with some early clinical experiences provided to students during the preclinical years of teaching. Twenty-one students volunteered to be interviewed in their third year and again in their fourth year, before and after their transition into the clinical environment. I undertook in-depth semistructured interviews focusing on students’ experiences with patients. The audiotaped interviews were transcribed and analyzed for themes. I present the following themes: medical work; sad and tragic events; bridging professional and personal worlds. I discuss student stress and legitimate peripheral participation through these three themes. Finally, the relevance of this research to medical students and clinical teachers is considered.

This chapter seeks to firm up a distinction between actions and events, eventually motivating a more important distinction between the right and the good. The chapter contrasts the bombing of Hiroshima with the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004 to suggest that actions and events are not as easy to compare as they may first appear. It then discusses decision trees and introduces “the case of the poisoning stranger,” to illustrate how difficult comparisons between actions and events can be. In doing so, it lays the groundwork to cover the distinction between the right and the good.

The introduction puts forward the basic thesis of the book that the three publications discussed played a key role in crafting a particular ideology in the area of foreign policy. These ideas created an ideological platform that revived the fortunes of the Republican Party, culminating in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. The chapter also gives background on the history of National Review, Human Events, and Commentary. It discusses the publications’ key personalities and ideological points of view. It also analyzes the underlying historical themes and background of how the issues discussed in the book emerged.

In the opinion of these media outlets, America’s failure to achieve victory in Southeast Asia was due to an inherent weakness at the foundation of the nation’s foreign policy. Those who wrote for Human Events and National Review argued that the misdirection and uncertainty that plagued the war strategy of the Johnson and Nixon administrations were due to the divisiveness in the country over the ramifications of the civil rights movement and the Great Society. Conservative commentators believed that the disunity among the nation’s citizenry, combined with the failure of the two administrations to do whatever was necessary to win the war, caused the United States’ credibility as a combatant in the Cold War to be questioned around the world.

Nixon’s policy of détente eventually led the United States and the Soviet Union to sign an arms agreement in Moscow in 1972 at what became known as the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT). While symbolically the negotiations were considered significant, they did not do a great deal to limit the arms race. Nixon’s resignation in 1974 left the future of SALT in the hands of Vice President Gerald Ford. The treaty was scheduled to expire that year, and the longtime congressman from Michigan was determined to make progress with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. However, due to difficulties during the SALT II negotiations and Ford’s abbreviated presidency, Jimmy Carter inherited the unfinished arms control negotiations when he took the oath of office in early 1977. As American and Soviet negotiators focused on finalizing the SALT II arms agreement, Commentary, National Review, and Human Events expressed their concern over the ongoing debate between the two superpowers about nuclear and chemical weapons. That contentious public policy issue was not simply about arms control but was symbolic of the state of American foreign policy itself.

The strain of Black Nationalism that existed within the United Nations also worried conservatives as they monitored the evolution of events in Southern Africa. In their intense desire to rid the world of communism, other issues, such as race, were either marginalized or ignored. The chapter analyzes the three publications’ view of race as it relates to the issue of Rhodesia during the height of the Cold War. In ignoring the suppression of an entire race of people, Human Events and National Review contrasted what they perceived to be a stable, anticommunist, biracial society with the militarism and lawlessness that they argued defined the 1960s and 1970s. While the two conservative publications viewed Rhodesia as a model of biracial success, Commentary focused on the Carter administration’s dismissive attitude about the dangers of Soviet encroachment within the African hemisphere. The Right argued that the Carter White House, in its refusal to endorse Rhodesia’s 1979 parliamentary elections due to a lack of representation of militant nationalist groups, and its belief in the policy of détente, continued to send a message of American weakness and indifference to totalitarianism around the world.

Throughout the 1970s, Human Events, National Review, and Commentary drew connections to argue that the nation’s dependence on foreign oil continued to grow because of numerous regulations imposed on energy producers by the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations. The three media outlets also concluded that America’s inability to respond to the economic aggression of OPEC represented another example of the weakness that had been at the heart of the American worldview for decades. Finally, the seizure of the US embassy in Iran in 1979 by Islamic fundamentalists led writers for these publications to contend that in order for the United States to regain national greatness it must free itself from limitations imposed on it by hostile forces at home and abroad. That goal of national revival was a key theme that Ronald Reagan and his supporters at Human Events, National Review, and Commentary capitalized on as the country moved into the presidential election of 1980.

In 2003, Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi published a groundbreaking study examining how the serotonin transporter gene and stressful life events interact to contribute to the risk of developing depression. When dozens of research teams around the globe attempted to replicate that original result, a peculiar thing emerged—some of the studies supported the original finding, but many came back negative. Faced with this dilemma, scientists performed meta-analyses of the replications; however, the meta-analyses only created their own puzzle—one came back supportive of the original finding, while several came back in conflict with it. Scientists studying the nature and nurture of depression were thus unable to agree whether the original study held up to the scrutiny or fell into disrepute, and unable to agree whether research on gene-environment interaction or research on genome wide association studies was the way forward for human genetics. This episode can be understood as the most recent instantiation of a long-standing dispute about gene-environment interaction. This chapter displays how contemporary scientists debating the nature and nurture of depression have repeated arguments for and against interaction that can be traced back through nearly a century of scientific debate.

Scientists have been debating the interaction of nature and nurture for nearly a century. Over those 100 years, two radically different visions of interaction have emerged—one side understanding it to be a nuisance to biological explanation and rare in nature, and the other side understanding it to be common in nature and vitally important to biological explanation. This chapter surveys that 100 years of empirical research on the interaction of nature and nurture to offer up an integrative analysis of interaction that rises above the divisive debate. That new analysis is then applied to the contemporary debate over the serotonin transporter gene, exposure to stressful life events, and the development of depression.

This chapter responds to issues surrounding Mega Sports Events (MSE) using a study of the political and international relations dimensions of South Africa’s hosting of the 2010 Football World Cup. The findings presented confirm the importance of foreign policy in the political ambitions held for the event and provide discussion points concerning the position of Middle Powers within the international community and the policy tools available to them. They also highlight how the value placed on the foreign policy potential of the event, such as the perceived opportunity to demonstrate parity of status with the developed international community, reduced the capacity to pursue or protect domestic policy interests. This notwithstanding, positive outcomes were perceived in a range of areas which suggests that hosting events in developing country contexts may provide valuable opportunities to advance domestic and foreign policy interests if more is known about the true nature of the opportunities presented and how to realise them.

This chapter argues that the science of history has been misrepresented by postmodernists as a monolithic relic of modernity. If history and event are seen not as binary opposites but as a complementary pair, then both classical Marxism and a strand of French theory after Louis Althusser offer unique sciences of history. Although there is greater stress on historical discontinuity in post-Althusserian theory, this body of contemporary thought has commitments consistent with the Marxist understanding of revolution as a quantity to quality leap. The political stakes of Marxist and post-Althusserian theories are then introduced. The Hegelian influence on Marxism is presented as supporting political gradualism and technological determinism. Althusser is shown to set in motion a self-referential rationalism that shores up the authority of theorists. Chapter abstracts follow.

This chapter concerns a striking paradox: on the one hand, Alain Badiou has emerged as one of the most influential public intellectuals of recent decades; on the other, he is known for insisting that philosophy is subservient to truths produced by politics, science, art and love. The chapter argues that the paradox can be unravelled by attending to how the philosophical categories and choice of mathematical models in Being and Event aim to, and fall short of, imposing limits on theoretical authority. These difficulties highlight the problematic nature of Badiou’s attempt to revive Althusser’s rationalist programme of the 1960s while avoiding that project’s theoreticist excesses. The final section reflects on how these unresolved tensions can help make sense of the charges of Stalinism levelled against Badiou after the Arab Spring.

This chapter argues that although Quentin Meillassoux’s philosophy has been received as a scientistic realism, its fundamental commitments are shaped by political opposition to Hegelian historicism. By drawing on published fragments of his long-awaited book, The Divine Inexistence, the chapter shows that it is Meillassoux’s rejection of the historical symbol of modernity and its collective politics that leads him to propose replacing it with an individual, ethical orientation guided by speculative philosophy. Read in the context of this wider body of work, Meillassoux’s After Finitude realises the authoritative trajectory set in motion by Althusser and Badiou.

The chapter is a brief introduction to the barber, Ibn Budayr, and his work, and to the phenomenon of nouveau literacy. It outlines the conceptual contours of the phenomenon by positing it as an effect of a changing social and political order in the eighteenth-century Levant. It argues that socially mobile individuals of varied backgrounds converged on the writing of chronicles in order to negotiate for or within new social positions. Nouveau literacy, thus, is not about a rise in technical literacy among the Levantine populace, but about the acquisition of new cultural literacy. In short, this is about the rise of authority among new social groups. With their arrival on the stage of historiography, these new authors marginalize the habitual author of the chronicle, the `ālim, that is, the scholar. The chapter also offers a brief description of the chronicle of the barber, The Daily Events of Damascus.

This chapter discusses the role emotions play as antecedents or consequences of deviant behavior at work, in the context of the Affective Events Theory. The theory suggests that emotions arising from organizational events shape members' behaviors and attitudes. In relation to this notion, the chapter discusses the Five-Level Model of Emotions in the workplace: (1) within person, (2) between persons (individual differences), (3) interpersonal interactions, (4) group, and (5) organization-wide. At level 1, emotions are ephemeral, varying moment-by-moment within each organizational member. At level 2, emotions are held to be between-person individual differences. Level 3 encompasses all aspects of recognizing and communicating emotion. Level 4 deals with multiple interactions as found in groups and teams, including team leadership. Finally, level 5 refers to emotion at the whole-of-organization level.