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Examines some of the more salient features of international administrations. Differentiates the various types of administrations on the basis of the degree of authority that they possess—ranging from supervisory (Cambodia) to direct governance (Kosovo and East Timor). Further distinguishes international administrations with regard to the aims and contextual factors that establish the framework of an operation. These operations are not entirely without precedent and the chapter also discusses relevant historical antecedents. Concludes with a discussion of the various international actors involved and the nature of the organizational structures created.

Explanatory power is a complex theoretical virtue, not reducible to empirical strength or adequacy, which includes other virtues as its own preconditions. Since this virtue provides one of the main criteria by which theories are evaluated, it presents thus a challenge to any empiricist account of science. After a critical account of attempted explications of the concept of scientific explanation, this chapter offers a pragmatic account that identifies explanations with answers to why‐questions. Since such questions are set by the questioner, and have their family of relevant direct answers determined by the presuppositions, values, and interests involved in the questioning, that makes explanation relative to contextual factors. On this understanding, evaluations of scientific explanation cannot play the role required for their use in support of scientific realism––and, incidentally, the large array of standard puzzles in the literature on this subject are solved.

The suggestion is explored that we experience words and sentences the way we experience tools, as functionally-propertied objects. This way of experiencing language-objects is at cross-purposes both with a type-token analysis and with the actual ontology of language objects. The chapter then turns to an exploration of how contextual effects are invisible to us. There is a close analogy to simultaneous color contrast illusions, where the impact of adjacent colors affects how colors are seen. In the same way, invisibly to speakers, contextual vectors affect how they interpret the meaning of language artefacts without their realizing it. Inferential interpretations of these phenomena—suggestions that speakers infer interpretations on the basis of background information—are criticized.

In most recent work on conceptual systems, the issues of embodied cognition and the universal nature of cognitive operations have been emphasized. The chapter proposes that in many cases metaphorical concepts do not arise from pre-stored mappings in the conventional conceptual system, as is often assumed in the cognitive linguistic literature on metaphor, but result from the priming effect of contextual factors in real situations of discourse. A number of contextual factors are identified. The workings of these factors suggest that conceptualizers take advantage of the various factors that make up the immediate (local) and nonimmediate (global) context in which metaphorical conceptualization takes place. We can think of this contextual influence on conceptualization as large-scale priming by context that is occurring simultaneously (and competitively) with the influence of entrenched embodiment.

This chapter focuses on the phenomenological notion of implicated content. It’s shown that the distinction between what the nonprofessional perceives as what is said and what is implicated is robust. The speaker-hearer expects agreement on what is said; the speaker-hearer expects debates over what is implicated. What can be implicated, based on what is said, is seen to be quite open-ended—subject only to the ingenuity of the speaker and the speaker’s audience. The topic of how much contextual infiltration into what is said is then taken up. Against Cappelen and Lepore, Travis, and others, it is argued that what is said is fairly circumscribed in how much it can be affected by context.

The omissibility of unspecified objects is for many verbs subject to contextual factors. A relatively small number of verbs allow object drop freely in episodic sentences. Many more allow it in habitual sentences. This chapter argues that this is, in large part, connected to the fact that such sentences tend to have unquantized objects, and that the objects, if present, would be backgrounded.

This chapter focuses on developing an experimental technique for inducing flow and creating instances of effortless action in the laboratory. The effort to experimentally induce flow involves two conditions which are correlated with the flow state: The firstis the idea that the challenges of a given task are well within one’s capabilities; the other involves perceived goals and immediate feedback from the given task. The chapter explores these factors along with other contextual factors, including autonomy and distractions, to experimentally induce flow and demonstrate instances of effortless action in the laboratory. One of the most extensively used approaches for experimental induction of flow in the laboratory involves exploring difficulty levels of video games.

This chapter talks about the role that mobility plays in helping older rural adults stay connected within their community. It defines mobility as the ability of a person to get access via movement to the desired facilities. The discussion looks at how personal resources of older adults affect the likelihood that they will have access to transportation. It then considers how the contextual factors might decrease or increase the vulnerability of those at risk for unmet needs, because they cannot independently meet their transportation needs.

This introductory chapter talks about the main topic of the book, which is individualisation. It defines individualisation of social service provision as services that should be adjusted to individual circumstances to increase their effectiveness. The main focus of the book is on one kind of social services, namely activation services. The chapter discusses important contextual factors that are important to understand the similarities and differences in the ways individualisation shapes and changes the processes of service provision and delivery. It then examines the transformation processes and the individualisation of social services before moving on to a discussion of individualisation and the implementation process. The latter portion of the chapter includes a summary of the next few chapters.

Focused on the study of discretion at the frontline, the chapter explores the following central question: what are the main factors potentially accounting for both weak and strong amounts of used discretion simultaneously observed within the same social service field unit? Based on empirical data collected in a Swiss Public Unemployment Fund through ethnographic methods, the chapters main result is that the amounts of used discretion depend of a combination of factors such as the task at hand, the material economy of cases to be processed, the regulation framework and the existing control mechanisms. While the main insights gained regard the complex multi-causal nature of discretion and the importance of distinguishing discretion as granted and discretion as used, the conclusion argues that future research should favour analytical and empirical disaggregation of the concept of discretion into the various specific tasks street-level bureaucrats have to achieve in their given context.

The purely phenomenological notion of what is said is explored and contrasted with the theoretically-laden notions developed by Grice, Bach, Recanati, Carston, and others. It’s shown that the phenomenological notion is not a truth conditional notion nor does it bear a straightforward relationship to indirect discourse idioms. Nevertheless, it is quite robust and involuntary. Even though it is affected by contextual factors, these are largely invisible to speaker-hearers. Isolating such a notion is valuable for two reasons. First, because it is an important part of the evidential basis for semantic and pragmatic theories, and second, because its role in the phenomenology of understanding words and expressions explains our folk views about language, and in particular, the relationships between natural language and artificial ones.

This chapter returns to the idea of ‘nexus politics’ and the collection’s overall concern with how depoliticization functions to reinforce anti-politics in the context of changes in governance. We organize an agenda for further research around theoretical, methodological, and empirical themes. Theoretically, we argue that further work is needed to better account for how and why depoliticization and politicization occur, and on which forms of politicization promote choice, deliberation, and agency. Methodologically, we need to develop analytical models that map out what institutional and discursive configurations make choice and collective agency appear more or less visible. We need to keep pushing the envelope by examining how depoliticization operates in unconventional arenas. While much more work still needs to be done, this book makes a modest yet distinctive contribution towards a better understanding of ‘nexus politics’ and the growth of anti-politics as one of the most significant issues of our time.

This chapter looks at an employment tribunal case by a senior Asian police officer whose complaint of racial discrimination did not draw on, or refer to, institutional racism at all. It also studies the Race and Faith inquiry, where institutional racism could also have been expected to feature as a key issue but did so in a low-key and awkward way. In exploring these cases, the chapter stresses the significance of contextual factors — meaning the political environment in which they occurred. The relationship between knowledge production and policies requires acts of translation. Thus, it is not enough to say that knowledge and politics interact; it is the form in which they do — and do not — combine in each context that matters.

As part of mixed-methods impact evaluations (IE) of cash transfer programmes in sub-Saharan Africa, qualitative methods are used to strengthen understanding of contextual factors that mediate impact processes and outcomes, and people’s perceptions and experiences of programmes and their effects. Qualitative methods can also make mixed-methods IE more participatory and better able to inform policy. In this chapter, we present three qualitative design approaches used in the mixed-methods IE covered in this book: (1) comparative cross-country case; (2) longitudinal; and (3) thematic focus. For each approach, we describe the conceptual framework, methods, and analysis and reporting. We provide critical analysis of each approach and propose a combined approach incorporating breadth, flexibility, comparison, and longitudinal analysis to explain pathways of change.

The chapter Neurocognitive Development During Adolescence describes the interplay of biological, psychological, and environmental influences on adolescent development. It provides an overview of how recent neurocognitive research can further our understanding of both adaptive and maladaptive adolescent behaviors and the development of their underlying neurocognitive processes. First, recent findings regarding brain maturation during adolescence are outlined; an introduction to the techniques used to study this is provided. Then brain–behavior relationships are discussed that elucidate how cognitive control and socioemotional processing develop during adolescence. Finally, work examining how individual differences in neurocognitive development can occur due to external influences such as peers, parents, and the sociocultural environment adolescents where grow up is reviewed.