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New public management–the new discipline that serves as an intellectual basis for public management reform–is far from constituting a unified intellectual field. New public management theoretical–ideological orientations vary also according to the different national realities that analysts face. We have, for instance, an Anglo-Saxon, a Continental European, and a Scandinavian tradition of approaching government and the state. It is possible to discern at least three orientations in the literature on managerial public administration, which I propose to the call ‘technical’, ‘economic’, and ‘political and sociological’ approaches. The political and sociological approach is the one that I adopt in this book. This approach founds inspiration rather in political theory and in the sociology of organizations than in rational choice theory.

This introductory chapter explains the aim of the book, which is to contribute to the opening of research on information systems and organizational change to accommodate meanings and concerns manifested in the diverse organizational contexts into which ICT is implemented. It presents the rationale for putting emphasis on diversity in the context of globalization, and introduces the fundamental theoretical tenets of the book. Specifically, it explains the choice of a socialized conception of organizations and information systems innovation, the study of innovation processes in their context, and the adoption of a critical theoretical approach. The book is structured into two parts: the first elaborating its theoretical perspective, and the second drawing empirical evidence from four case studies to form and support the book’s argument on diversity regarding ICT and organizational change.

This chapter presents and explains the five basic problems of using a quantitative research design and methodology in studying the development and performance of the twenty countries over thirty decades: the use of a single, interval-scaled variable in measuring institutional concepts; how indicators do not reflect validity; the time series properties of the cross-sectional data used in the study; the use of significance tests in analysing the ‘populations’ of the countries involved; and the limited number of variables that can be included. The study takes on a theoretical approach to analyse the impact of internationalization of labour relations and the effects of institutional factors. The study's main focus lies on developing new measures for labour relations that fair comparably better while addressing the issues in question.

This chapter reviews some of the theoretical approaches to the study of altruism in an attempt to clarify some basic concepts, focusing on the models and statistical tools that have appeared in the levels of selection literature and attempting to make connections between different theoretical approaches in the process. It also describes laboratory and field experiments that have addressed the evolution of different forms of altruism, some directly and some indirectly. The chapter ends by discussing some philosophical issues in the debate over the levels of selection, and the general impact of theoretical and empirical results for this debate.

This chapter takes a look at EU theorising and some methodological issues surrounding the study of the regional process. It studies various theoretical approaches to European integration that were developed during the formative years of the process and up to the late 1970s, and also addresses the difficulty surrounding the issue of defining the regional system and the origins of political unions.

Indian popular cinema is marked by many transformations. It has been subjected to the ‘constants’ found within the beliefs and worldview of the people of the Indian society and to the ‘variables’ associated with the changing social and cultural climate in India. This chapter traces the history of Indian popular cinema from the 1930s, particularly the approaches and methods employed. Also discussed are the critical approaches in the academic study of popular cinema and the drawbacks in the theoretical approach in examining and understanding the phenomena of a film. Later sections discuss the aims and goals of the book. Here, the narrative approach to Indian films and other means of codifying the methods of popular Indian cinema are discussed and detailed.

Until the 1970s it was widely assumed that pain was not amenable to accurate measurement. This chapter outlines the subsequent historical development of pain research, covering different theoretical approaches to understanding pain. It compares the resulting wide variety of measurement instruments.

This chapter provides some overall conclusions, including reflections on the strengths and weaknesses of the approach employed. It is intended to prompt researchers and practitioners working in the area of policy analysis and management to revisit the arguments presented, develop them further, complement them with other theoretical approaches, and apply them in actual analysis situations. It presents some reflections on the strengths and weaknesses of our theoretical concepts and their application in concrete cases. It describes two possible future directions for the development of policy analysis, that is, governance and institutional regimes.

The Introduction argues that Dickens's consciousness of the emerging mass culture of his day was fundamental to his popular art and to his unique place in literary and cultural history. It establishes that Dickens's popularity in his lifetime was so striking that it was seen as a cultural phenomenon in itself, transcending barriers of class, gender, age, and nation. It argues that numbers of readers were important to Dickens in a way that has not been fully appreciated, but that the statistical and sociological basis of Dickens's popularity is contested. It surveys Dickens's extra‐literary lives and suggests that the translatability of Dickens's works and image across multiple media has arguably been more crucial to his ability to establish a long‐term mass cultural presence than have sales of the novels themselves. It considers Dickens's mixed fortunes with literary critics and discusses theoretical approaches to the terms ‘mass culture’ and ‘popular culture’, and argues that ‘fancy’ or fantasy and a certain doubleness are integral to Dickens's cultural politics — in particular to his vision of an intimate public or imagined community existing between himself and a mass readership.

Anxiety ranges from a normal reaction to an unfamiliar situation, to a debilitating pathological state. Because it is such a common reason for people to take medications or to seek care, many assessment scales have been developed. This chapter reviews the evolution of theoretical approaches to anxiety. It considers eight leading anxiety scales that represent different approaches to its measurement.

This chapter examines the latest theoretical trends and the two treaty revisions that occurred during the mid-1980s and early 1990s, introducing the Single European Act and the Treaty on European Union (TEU), which resulted from the treaty revisions, and neofunctionalism, which re-emerged as the leading theory of European integration. The next part studies the state of theorising European integration in the 1990s in relation to the constitutional and political physiognomy of the Maastricht Treaty. The final part of the chapter focuses on the new theoretical approaches, which include the fusion thesis and new institutionalism.

This chapter summarizes the findings and arguments of the book and reiterates its valuable contribution to studies in Romance and Historical Linguistics. Moreover, it organizes and provides the reader with various venues for future research, particularly with regard to current issues in theoretical approaches to sound change and the collection of new dialectal data with which previous historical accounts may be revisited.

The chapter provides an overview of the theoretical background to stylistics and of the main language theories pertinent to the volume, reappraising the usefulness of a stylistic approach to non-literary discourse. It is divided into two main parts: the first looks at style and stylistics, showing how they are intrinsically related and how stylistics is a fast developing and growing area of study in linguistics; the second briefly introduces a number of related theoretical concepts, such as the construction and communication of discursive identity, multimodality, narrative analysis, corpus linguistics, genre analysis, critical discourse analysis, speech acts and pragmatics. These conceptual approaches to the study of language are often used to analyse texts as if they were not interconnected, thus enabling the scholar to turn a specific lens on a particular text, or group of texts. However, this isolating of only certain aspects of texts, while practical, often conceals the relevance of other approaches and their interconnectedness. Indeed, a stylistics-oriented interdisciplinary approach provides a holistic framework for the study of language use and language choice and the way texts are woven; in many ways it forms an excellent interface for bringing together overlapping theoretical approaches.

This chapter begins by critically examining different theoretical approaches that aim to explain fathers' violence towards women. These are significant, since they inform different policy and professional approaches towards addressing this violence as a significant social problem and developing appropriate strategies for change. Second, the chapter looks at the research undertaken with violent perpetrators that informs some of these perspectives. It also examines the limited amount of research that specifically addresses violent fathers as carers of children, including studies where violent fathers have killed their children. These studies contrast with other research on violent fathers that has often been undertaken from a rehabilitative perspective. Third, the chapter discusses some current practice strategies in addressing violent fathering and children's safety. These include the use of risk identification and assessment, perpetrator programmes, and parenting programmes for violent fathers.

The chapter presents Ragnar Frisch and Trygve Haavelmo’s vision of a science of economics, explicates in simple terms the meaning of a formal theory-data confrontation, and describes and resolves an interesting riddle in applied econometrics. Frisch and Haavelmo’s idea of a unified theoretical-quantitative and empirical-quantitative approach to economic problems can be realized in two ways. In one the researcher identifies his theory variables with Haavelmo’s true variables and carries out his empirical analysis the way present-day econometricians do. In the other the researcher identifies his theory variables with variables in Frisch’s model world and carries out his empirical analysis the way formal econometrics prescribes. As exemplified in a formal data confrontation of a simultaneous-equations model of a perfectly competitive commodity market, the empirical analyses in the two scenarios may end in different descriptions of the dynamics of data variables and yield different statistical inferences about social reality. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the mentioned riddle in applied econometrics. The riddle elicits a clear view of the kind of knowledge about social reality that an applied econometrician can obtain.

In this chapter, we start by considering external university factors—historical and environmental. We then move to internal factors—culture, policy, and organization—and consider the literature on organizational change. We conclude by presenting the theoretical approach of this book: there is no one formula for successful university technology commercialization. Universities affect their local economies using different mechanisms. The choice of mechanisms and their economic impact are influenced by the location (history and environment) in which the university is situated.