Books in Social sciences and humanities

Handbook of Critical Issues in Goal Programming

1st Edition
June 28, 2014
C. Romero
English
eBook
9 7 8 1 4 8 3 2 9 5 1 1 4

Goal Programming (GP) is perhaps the oldest and most widely used approach within the Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) paradigm. GP combines the logic of optimisation in mathematical programming with the decision maker's desire to satisfy several goals. The primary purpose of this book is to identify the critical issues in GP and to demonstrate different procedures capable of avoiding or mitigating the inherent pitfalls associated with these issues. The outcome of a search of the literature shows many instances where GP models produced misleading or even erroneous results simply because of a careless formulation of the problem. Rather than being in itself a textbook, Critical Issues in Goal Programming is designed to complement existing textbooks. It will be useful to students and researchers with a basic knowledge of GP as well as to those interested in building GP models which analyse real decision problems.

Economics and Cognitive Science

1st Edition
June 28, 2014
Paul Bourgine + 1 more
English
eBook
9 7 8 1 4 8 3 2 9 4 8 9 6

Economics, dealing with mental processes of decision makers is part of cognitive science; conversely, cognitive science, faced with constraints on information processing, is part of economics. In July 1990, the Cecoia 2 conference was organised in Paris to further explore the connections between the two. The papers presented in this volume illustrate this truly interdisciplinary research intertwining social and cognitive sciences. Three main topics are represented: agent's mental representation when facing complex uncertainty; agent's computational constraints leading to bounded rationality; agent's learning and evolution in an imperfectly known environment.

The IEA Study of Mathematics III

1st Edition
June 28, 2014
Rami Burstein
English
eBook
9 7 8 1 4 8 3 2 9 6 3 1 9

The Second International Mathematics Study was conducted in the schools of 20 education systems under the sponsorship of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). This is the third of three international reports, each of which focus on a major component of the study. This volume describes the main findings from analyses of classroom processes and mathematic growth by posing such questions as: how successful have the national education systems been in providing the opportunity to learn mathematics by the end of the lower secondary school; what do students at the lower secondary level know across educational systems and what have they learned during their most recent schooling experiences; and what teaching practices are utilized in the mathematics classroom of the various systems and to what extent can these classroom processes explain differences in student achievements?

Advances in School Effectiveness Research and Practice

1st Edition
June 28, 2014
D. Reynolds + 5 more
English
eBook
9 7 8 1 4 8 3 2 9 4 3 1 5

Advances in School Effectiveness Research and Practice presents a worldwide state-of-the-art summary of the rapidly growing field of school effectiveness research by an internationally renowned group of authors.Current knowledge in the field is reviewed to present an integrated and coherent, internationally valid perspective on school effectiveness and instructional effectiveness.The book creatively outlines some new directions in which the field should move if it is to fulfil its promise. These include the development of international studies and the generating and testing of school effectiveness theory.

Higher Education Policy: An International Comparative Perspective

1st Edition
June 28, 2014
F. Kaiser + 5 more
English
eBook
9 7 8 1 4 8 3 2 9 7 1 6 3

Tremendous changes are affecting the structure and funding of higher education in many countries. This volume attempts to identify and analyze the principles, structural features and modes of work of the different higher education policies operating in eleven countries, as well as their commonalities and differences in the light of both general international trends and country-specific factors. In order to gather the relevant information for the project, national correspondents were provided with an overarching framework to guide them in their work and to ensure maximum comparability of the resulting reports. Each country report is broken down into four sections: the structure and goals of higher education systems; authority in the system; higher education policy; and the impact of each on institutional governance and management.The final chapter draws together the general trends which have emerged: a move towards less state control; a strengthening of institutional autonomy and increased governance; competition between institutions; privatization of funding; greater market orientation and growing institutional accountability for quality and service.

Sociolinguistic Metatheory

1st Edition
June 28, 2014
E. Figueroa
English
eBook
9 7 8 1 4 8 3 2 9 6 0 9 8

Linguistics is a discipline with ever expanding boundaries and interests. Despite the narrow definition of linguistics which dominates academia, sub-fields continue to flourish and ways of doing linguistics continue to expand. As ways to do linguistics increase, and as approaches to linguistics accumulate over time, it becomes increasingly necessary for students of linguistics to have ways of understanding and comparing developments in linguistics.Sociolin... Metatheory is a book which explains foundational developments in linguistics by taking the past three decades of developments in sociolinguistics and relating them to contemporaneous developments in received linguistics. Sociolinguistic Metatheory takes the reader through the basic philosophical questions which drive linguistic research. It looks in detail at three models of sociolinguistics - Dell Hymes and the Ethnography of Communication, William Labov and Sociolinguistic Realism, and John Gumperz and Interactional Sociolinguistics - and focuses on such questions as: Where is language located? How is an utterance-based approach to linguistics different from a sentence-based approach? How do metatheoretical paradigm assumptions such as realism or relativism affect the development of linguistic theory? What interesting developments in linguistic theory and analysis have sociolinguistics provided?

The Discourse of Negotiation

1st Edition
June 28, 2014
A. Firth
English
eBook
9 7 8 1 4 8 3 2 9 9 1 8 1

The study of negotiation has attracted considerable scholarly attention in recent decades, yet rarely have discourse analysts applied their particular concerns and interests to the phenomenon. Although a fundamental characteristic of negotiation is linguistic action, the detailed study of negotiation as a communicative, discourse activity is in its infancy. In the first collection of its kind, Alan Firth has brought together 14 original studies of negotiation discourse.Drawing on insights and methodologies from discourse and conversation analysis, pragmatics, ethnography and ethnomethodology, the book examines negotiations in a wide range of workplaces, including the US Federal Trade Commission, management-union meetings, doctors' surgeries, travel agencies, international trading houses in Denmark, Belgium and Australia, Swedish social welfare offices, and consumer helplines. Collectively, the book explores the notion of negotiation both as a formal encounter and as a gloss for more informal decision-making activities.Questions specifically addressed include: what is the interactional character of negotiation? How are negotiations related to the work context? And how are negotiations undertaken linguistically - as discourse-based activities? Answers are sought by utilising transcripts of real-life instances of negotiation. This allows for finely-detailed descriptions of the observed activities, providing important insight into the discourse-context relationship, the interactional bases of work acitivities, and the communicative processes of negotiation.

Accounting Education for the 21st Century

1st Edition
June 28, 2014
Jane O. Burns + 1 more
English
eBook
9 7 8 1 4 8 3 2 9 9 2 4 2

Accounting practice, whether in business or government, is more dynamic, more complex, and addresses a wider array of issues than it did as little as five years ago. Significant and rapid social, political, technological and economic changes are taking place in the world economy and it is increasingly recognised that accountants in all countries play a key role in the process of economic development.Accounti... education is undergoing a thorough review on a worldwide basis and major developments are taking place to produce quality accounting education that can keep pace with dramatic world change.This book provides an up-to-date view of the state of accounting education throughout the world and focusses on the global challenges facing accounting education as we approch the millenium.

International Finance in the New World Order

1st Edition
June 28, 2014
H.P. Gray + 1 more
English
eBook
9 7 8 1 4 8 3 2 9 5 2 8 2

Some of the most important developments of the last quarter century relate to the internationalization of financial issues: the advent of free trade areas; the efforts of the European Union in establishing a single currency; burdens of international indebtedness; and the economic growth and development of nations.Internationa... financial systems are increasingly fragile and vulnerable in the face of possible international financial shock. Exchange rate issues and other changes in financial conditions have profound consequences not only for multinational corporations which have to devise new ways of managing their global operations, but also for firms and industries at the national level.The papers in this book confront these and other problems in international finance that have arisen in recent years, seeking to identify causal linkages at the global, national and company levels.

Concise History of the Language Sciences

1st Edition
June 28, 2014
E.F.K. Koerner + 1 more
English
eBook
9 7 8 1 4 8 3 2 9 7 5 4 5

This book presents in a single volume a comprehensive history of the language sciences, from ancient times through to the twentieth century. While there has been a concentration on those traditions that have the greatest international relevance, a particular effort has been made to go beyond traditional Eurocentric accounts, and to cover a broad geographical spread. For the twentieth century a section has been devoted to the various trends, schools, and theoretical framework developed in Europe, North America and Australasia over the past seventy years. There has also been a concentration on those approaches in linguistic theory which can be expected to have some direct relevance to work being done at the beginning of the twenty-first century or those of which a knowledge is needed for the full understanding of the history of linguistic sciences through the last half of this century. The last section of this book reviews the applications of some of these findings. Based on the foundation provided by the award winning Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics this volume provides an excellent focal point of reference for anyone interested in the history of the language sciences.

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