Despite Stanley Fish's assertion that the interpretive communities basic to his theory of literary and legal interpretation are "engines of change," it seems clear that in Fish's conception of change, "plus ca change, c'est plus la meme chose." In particular, Fish denies that the legal profession can achieve the more…

This paper addresses questions concerning the role of education and technology in a fair and equitable global political and economic system. The education and information professions have worked to design effective learning environments and produce various formats for the delivery of instructional materials. These presentational formats have tried…

This paper advocates the use of cognitive maps by researchers in comparative education. Cognitive maps are defined as "visual imageries depicting on the two dimensional surface of a screen or paper the researcher's perceived application, allocation, or appropriation of social space by social groups at a given time and in a given place." The use of…

Individuals tend to hold on to initial impressions even after the data upon which they have formed the impression have been discredited. To partially replicate and extend a previous study (Ross et al., 1977) on belief perserverance, in which subjects were told they were to act as clinical psychologists attempting to understand and predict…

For an exploration of the components and sources of disputatiousness, Canadian education administrators identified 181 legislators and school board members in 5 regions (British Columbia, Quebec, Prairie provinces, Atlantic provinces, and Ontario) who provided data in interviews. Two coders' judgments of interview transcripts subjected to factor…

Bronfenbrenner's ecological model--consisting of the microsystem (setting in which the child experiences reality), the mesosystem (relationships between settings), the exosystem (situations impacting the child's development), and the larger, encompassing macrosystem--serves as the basis for a theory of sibling and stepsibling bonding. Although…

Focusing particularly on communication as a discipline, this paper is a review and synthesis of literature about scholarly communication in the social sciences. Drawing from literature about ferment in the communication discipline, from information science, the sociology of knowledge, and the philosophy of social science, the paper argues that…

At the present time the social sciences implicitly or explicitly start from a normative vision which has a dialectical objective: a reasoning that is at once theoretical and practical, or that is both a political and a scientific discourse. A focus on Jurgen Habermas' theory of communicative action provides possibilities of shifting the frontier…

Each of the four distinct ideological positions concerning the literacy problem is deficient. "Technological utopianism," the position arguing that traditional literacy standards are obsolete in the world of mass media, not only presents major conceptual and research difficulties but also suffers from the fact that its proponents, most…

Tiryakian's "school" approach is used to analyze the evolution of Kohlberg's study of moral development over the past 25 years. The first part of the paper contrasts the paradigm approach (Kuhn 1970) to the schools approach in defining the development of the social sciences. Specifically, Kuhn's definition of a paradigm…

This paper is concerned with the relationship between black adolescents' performance on school measures of success, particularly as this performance is perceived to be indicative of their intellectual and academic capabilities and their group identity. The paper's basic premise is that many black adolescents have made the decision not to seek…

Human agency, the ability to organize and direct one's own behavior, has recently been considered, reconsidered, and even abandoned by many psychological perspectives. This paper provides a discussion on the idea that an intelligible concept of agency can be articulated by revolutionizing the perspective on the relation of the individual person to…

This qualitative two-year study traces the changes in beliefs and actions of four preservice teachers through the final two years of their university education program. Dialectical Theory of Socialization and Cognitive Dissonance Theory provide the theoretical framework. The findings show that three main factors affect the transfer of learning…

This paper conceives of a model of democracy that is tied up with narrative practices, and demonstrates how the initially democratic and radical auspices of one scholar's critique developed into a form of theory that was profoundly undemocratic in its narrative. The paper notes that the contemporary debate about power derives from a series of…

The future role of the social sciences in educational administration theory is explored in this paper. First, the turn toward the social sciences in educational administration is considered. Attacks by the subjectivist and critical theorists on positivistic science are examined next, with attention to the decline of those two views in sociology…