The Significance of Shils

Edward Shils was a widely recognized but misunderstood thinker. The original contexts of his thought are not well understood and greatly distorted by associating him with the concerns of Parsons. Shils provides a fully comparable alternative to the thought of Habermas and Foucault, with essentially similar roots: practice theory, the dissolution of Marxism in the twenties, and Carl Schmitt. Though Shils was indebted to the American sociological tradition, with respect to these issues his sources were outside it: in Hendrik de Man, T. S. Eliot, and Michael Polanyi. It is shown how Shils responded to Schmitt's argument about the inherent conflict between democracy and liberalism in terms of an account of civility and tradition, and how this argument results in a critique of Foucault, Habermas, and collectivistic liberalism.     

An Exploratory Analysis of the Value of the Skills of IT Personnel: Their Relationship to IS Infrastructure and Competitive Advantage

Determining and assessing the requisite skills of information technology (IT) personnel have become critical as the value of IT has risen in modern organizations. In addition to technical skills traditionally expected of IT personnel, softer skills like managerial, business, and interpersonal skills have been increasingly cited in previous studies as mandatory for these employees. This paper uses a typology of IT personnel skills—technology management skills, business functional skills, interpersonal skills, and technical skills—and investigates their relationships to two information systems (IS) success variables, IS infrastructure flexibility and the competitive advantage provided by IS. The study investigates these relationships using the perceptions of chief information officers (CIOs) from mostly Fortune 2000 companies. The contributions of this study are: IT personnel skills do affect IS success, technical skills are viewed as the most important skill set in affecting IS infrastructure flexibility and competitive advantage, and modularity is viewed as more valuable to competitive advantage than integration. Several explanations are offered for the lack of positive relationships between the softer IT personnel skills and the dimensions of IS success used in this study.     

Local volunteers respond to the Rena oil spill in Maketū, New Zealand

Following the MV Rena grounding and oil spill in the Bay of Plenty, New Zealand in October 2011, the Māori community of Maketū were quick to respond to the arrival of oil on their beaches. They asserted their rangatiratanga by establishing their marae as a base and successfully coordinated a clean-up by more than 450 volunteers, feeding these volunteers every day. We interviewed 11 clean-up leaders and volunteers in Maketū to gather information about how the oil spill affected people in the community and how they ensured the success of their clean-up efforts. Many volunteers returned to help with the clean-up day after day over several weeks. Concepts of kaitiakitanga and manaakitanga underpinned the work of the Maketū clean-up organisers. Participants attributed the success of the Maketū clean-up to the speed with which they responded, the support they received from their community and local businesses, and their local knowledge.     

Social Work Student Views on Palliative Care Learning Resources

Abstract

Many social workers are expected to work with individuals and families who are dealing with life-limiting illnesses, yet during their university education they may not have been exposed to materials that address issues related to death and dying. The Social Work Department of University of New England in Armidale, Australia designed and delivered a palliative care teaching and learning session using publicly funded online materials. Themes emerging from questionnaire and focus group data analysis included appreciation for the importance and emotional demands of the materials, sensitivity and flexibility among educators who ideally have work experience in the field, expanding presence of social work philosophy in curriculum materials and exploring spirituality, and examining culture-informed practice in greater depth. Among the implications is the need for concerted efforts to teach about death and dying using high quality accessible materials, while ensuring social work values and approaches are reflected in the content.     

Overseas Field Placement: An Educational Experiment

This paper describes an educational experiment with the placement of second-year students in field settings in the United Kingdom. The practicum assignments were in a rural area of Northern Scotland and in London. The paper also includes a preliminary analysis of the educational goals and the unique personal and professional gains for faculty and students.     

The relationship between explicit and implicit learning processes and probable pathological gambling

This paper reports the findings of a study of explicit and implicit learning and gambling with non-problem (n = 107), sub-clinical problem gamblers (n = 13), and probable pathological gamblers (n = 46). Two probability learning tasks modeled after gambling games and an artificial grammar task were used to explore how people learn patterns. In each of the two probability learning tasks, the outcome of the game was biased during the first part (learning phase) of the task. The results showed that many of the participants in the experimental conditions learned the bias and gradually unlearned the bias during the extinction phase of the study. Probable pathological gamblers showed less retention of the bias during two probability tasks and repeated the same errors during the artificial grammar task suggesting that they emphasize explicit learning strategies rather than implicit learning strategies. The results are consistent with the idea that pathological gamblers are more likely to utilize explicit rules than implicit rules.     

‘Setting the captive free’: Thomas perronet thompson,british radicalism and the west indies, 1820s–1860s

This article explores the aims and agitation of British radicals who interested themselves in the West Indies during the early and mid nineteenth century. It analyses debates about slavery, race, empire, free trade, sugar and the conduct of those who hold power at home and in the West Indian colonies, using lines of inquiry suggested by the conduct, speeches and writings of Thomas Perronet Thompson, the radical MP and political economist who devoted much of his public career to colonial and particularly West Indian matters. Thompson can be taken to represent a body of opinion that wanted significant changes in the economic and constitutional relationship between Britain and the West Indies, and he was no less committed to a radical reform of the political, economic and social make up of the colonies themselves. Radicals frequently disagreed with each other on the West Indies, however, and Thompson's role in these disputes also reveals a great deal about the context within which the aforementioned debates proceeded.