Concurrent Evaluation of Customer Relationship Management and Organizational Excellence: An Empirical Study

This article concurrently studies customer relationship management (CRM ) and organizational excellence (OE ) by pursuing three goals. First, it investigates the relationship between CRM and OE ; second, it conducts a performance assessment from CRM and OE viewpoints; and third, it analyzes how each factor of CRM and each criterion of OE affects an organization's performance. To achieve the first goal, a number of hypotheses about potential relationships between CRM factors and OE criteria are proposed with the cooperation of experts and using fuzzy DEMATEL . These hypotheses are then examined using the path analysis method to find out which one is supported and which one must be rejected. Subsequently, the data envelopment analysis (DEA ) approach is employed to accomplish the second goal. Finally, a t‐test is used to achieve the third goal. To implement the research in the real world, two major international airports of Iran are considered as our survey cases.     

‘To Catch at and Let Go’: David Bakhurst,Phenomenology and Post‐phenomenology

This paper examines David Bakhurst's attempt to provide a picture of ‘the kinds of beings we are’ that is ‘more realistic’ than rationalism. I argue that there is much that is rich and compelling in Bakhurst's account. Yet I also question whether there are ways in which it could be taken further. I introduce the discussion by exploring Bakhurst's engagement with phenomenology and, more specifically, Hubert Dreyfus—who enters Bakhurst's horizon on account of his inheritance of the philosophy of John McDowell. Whilst I recognise that Bakhurst's encounter with Dreyfus demonstrates his achievements—over rationalism and over Dreyfus—I also suggest that it opens up certain questions that remain to be asked of his position on account of its conceptualism. These questions originate, not from a Dreyfusian phenomenological perspective, but from the post‐phenomenological perspective of Jacques Derrida. Through appealing to key Derridean tropes, I aim to show why the conceptual idiom Bakhurst retains may hold us back from understanding the open nature of human thought. I end by considering what therefore needs to come—and what needs to be let go—in order to best do justice to the ‘kinds of beings we are’.     

Does Education have Independent Power? Bernstein and the question of relative autonomy

In this article, I focus on some of the ways Basil Bernstein's positions can help us understand the question of the relative autonomy of the school and of the 'class belongingness' of its cultural dynamics. In the process, I show how this differentiation of various social fields of power and of the complex ways in which class relations work within them enables a considerably more subtle perspective on 'who controls what' and on what that 'what' actually is. I also argue that we cannot fully answer the question of whether schools can 'create a new social order' unless we unpack the relations of outside to inside, of what constitutes the inside, and especially of what the specific power relations are both within what Bernstein calls 'the symbolic field' and between it and 'the field of production' and the 'field of the state'. Of particular importance here is the notion of the 'pedagogic device', Bernstein's apparatus for demonstrating the specific cultural configuration that enables us to uncover 'why things stay the same' and how they might be different. For Bernstein, the issue became not only explaining change, but also explaining what he saw as the remarkable stability and similarity of education among different political economies. I use as an example the pedagogic device in one specific nation and demonstrate how we can employ it to more rigorously focus our attention on the possible effects education itself has.     

Rejoinder to Aaron Cooley's Review of Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy

Because of Professor Cooley's prosecutorial review, I want to make clear at the outset that my rejoinder is not a codefendant's answer to a plaintiff's replication. Instead, I first attempt to provide an “immanent” analysis of Cooley's indictment, in the sense of dealing with what dwells within his reasoning. A specific philosophical definition of “immanent” reads: taking place within the mind of the subject, but having no effect outside (this does not apply to me as an outsider). I intend to battle with Cooley up close—no “dancing”—my defense against his offense. In the second part, the focus will be on what I think is missing from Cooley's attempt to discredit McLaren and Farahmandpur's book. His decision or failure to deal with what Marx and the most effective Marxists have written, and how some of this provided analyses that could be and/or was acted upon, may be more serious than his beating up on the book's authors.     

Lessons From Rental Cars: The Struggle to Create Seeing Communities

This article takes the ordinary workings of colorblindness—overlooking distinguishing factors and characteristics that mark what it is to be—and problematizes the impact of being blind to the human conditions students and families of color bring to the educational setting. Hicks argues that, even among actors committed to lessening its power, the negative tenets of colorblindness sneak into our practices and policies. Using Appiah and Gutmann's (1996) notion of "color consciousness"—a conception of noticing and learning from our inherent differences—Hicks posits how being conscious of difference not only enriches cross-cultural relationships, but opens spaces for deeper learning. He supports his argument by revisiting an experience of documenting a multicultural public school that successfully employs color-conscious pedagogical strategies. He closes by challenging theorists and practitioners to be intentional in creating conditions for consciousness to thrive in schools.     

Learning from MacIntyre about Learning: Finding Room for a Second-Person Perspective?

In this article I try to bring into relief the background significance of learning in Alasdair MacIntyre's writings. After briefly adverting to his own manner of learning from other thinkers, I begin by outlining what he sees as essential to learning in early childhood (§I). Next, I spell out what I take to be important implications for learning, mainly in the context of schooling, of his conception of ‘practice’ (§II). Turning then to the ‘revolutionary Aristotelianism’ of his later work, I elucidate the kind of transformative learning that he deems necessary because of dominant tendencies in late modern societies (§III) and because of key features of human lives—including fallibility, narrativity and ‘final end’—that he analyses in his most recent book, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity (§IV). I then consider his conception of how one person's learning can be aided by another, suggesting that this conception would be strengthened by the incorporation of a second-person perspective (§V). I link the absence of such a perspective to what I see as his underestimation of the salience of the teacher–student relationship and his consequently diminished account of teaching—a largely Aristotelian-Thomist account whose strengths in other respects I acknowledge (§VI). I conclude by asking whether this line of criticism, if valid, might not indicate a lack in MacIntyre's conception of personal relationships more generally—despite the great import that he grants to them, for weal or woe, in all human lives (§VII). [The present article is included in wider discussion of issues bearing on learning and teaching in my Persons in Practice: Essays between Education and Philosophy (Wiley, forthcoming)].     

University Studies and Concept of Reality—A Study of Effects of Education

The project's background

Research about the effects of education at an individual level are to a great extent concentrated to the higher levels of the educational system. Ever since the 1930's extensive research has been conducted, not least in the United States, about what effects on knowledge and values originate from university training. As this project has as its main purpose—with examples from a number of different fields of study—to describe and try to understand enduring effects of a cognitive nature which higher education can contribute to, there is reason to pay attention to those features in previous research that have concerned growth of knowledge and/or cognitive development. According to a survey that was made in a different context (Dahlgren, 1982), it is possible to classify the cognitive effects of education into three levels. The first level might be the one that is most evidently associated with formal education, i.e., the level where specific knowledge and skills within different subjects appear. It is of course not surprising to find that students that are about to leave an education where they have taken extensive courses in, for instance, biology and chemistry perform better at tests with problems of a scientific nature than a group of students that have recently started the same kind of education.     

On the muckiness of science,ethics, and preservice teacher education: contemplating the (im)possibilities of a ‘right’-eous stance

In this article, we wade through the muckiness of ethics in science, teaching, and teacher education, in the form of a generative metalogue. Grounded in Sara’s experience with preservice teachers learning about ethics through a case study of a high school dissection, we contend with what it means to shift away from colonial and masculinist binaries that produce particular moralistic orientations as 'wrong' or 'right.' We contemplate what it means to attempt to teach-think-feel with ethics as 'mucky,' without diminishing attention to relations of power in science and ethics. Through our own thinking–feeling process and grappling with the ways that science and education can be simultaneously oppressive and liberating in an unfinished, complex, and interdependent world (of difference), we propose: Thinking with muckiness is ethical praxis; drawing from our own embodied resources for ethical feelingthinkingdoing is central to this praxis; and (place-conscious) powered relations in science and education must be made explicit.

     

Losing Our Way: Pragmatism,Perfectionism and Education as Anxiety

I explore in this paper the extent to which Stanley Cavell's contribution to the philosophy of education is measured by his distance from American pragmatism. I wish to argue that pragmatism and what Cavell calls ‘perfectionism’ are simply not offered in the same key and crucially that it is this stylistic or tonal difference that separates Cavell not only from his pragmatist contemporaries but from the pragmatist picture of democracy and education as sketched so compellingly in the work of John Dewey. I suggest, in other words, not only that Cavell is importantly distant from the pragmatists but that it is this very distance—this very ambivalence to that tradition of thought often taken as the native philosophy of America—that captures Cavell's distinctive educational promise.     

Education and Life's Meaning

There are deep connections between education and the question of life's meaning, which derive, ultimately, from the fact that, for human beings, how to live—and therefore, how to raise one's children—is not a given but a question. One might see the meaning of life as constitutive of the meaning of education, and answers to the question of life's meaning might be seen as justifying (a particular form of) education. Our focus, however, lies on the contributory relation: our primary purpose is to investigate whether and how education might contribute to children's ability to find meaning in life or at least deal with the question. This issue is not only theoretically interesting (though relatively neglected)—it also has practical urgency. For people have a need for meaning that, if unfulfilled, leads to personal and potentially social crises—a need that often expresses itself first and strongly in adolescence; and there are reasons to have doubts about the contribution of today's traditional formal education system to the meaningfulness of children's (and future adults’) lives. We argue for the importance of frameworks of values, as well as for a greater emphasis on the affective dimension of meaning, though we reject pure subjectivism. The underlying purpose of this article, however, is not to argue for a particular comprehensive position, but to persuade philosophers of education of the importance of the issue of life's meaning in thinking about education today.     

Learning to Write: Plowing and Hoeing,Labor and Essaying

In this paper Amanda Fulford addresses the issue of student writing in the university, and explores how the increasing dominance of outcome‐driven modes of learning and assessment is changing the understanding of what it is to write, what is expected of students in their writing, and how academic writing should best be supported. The starting point is the increasing use of what are termed “technologies” of writing — “handbooks” for students that address issues of academic writing — that systematize, and smooth the work of writing in, Fulford argues, an unhelpful way. This leads to a reconsideration of what it means to write in the university, and what it is to be a student who writes. Fulford explores etymologically the concept of “writing” and suggests that it might be seen metaphorically as physical labor. Writing as physical labor is explored further through the agricultural metaphors in Henry David Thoreau's Walden and through Stanley Cavell's reading of that text. In making a distinction between writing‐as‐plowing and writing‐as‐hoeing, Fulford argues that some technologies of writing deny voice rather than facilitate it, and she concludes by offering a number of suggestions for the teaching and learning of writing in the university that emphasize the value of being lost (in one's subject and one's work) and finding one's own way out. These “lessons” are illustrated with reference to Thoreau's text Walden and to American literature and film.     

The Significance of Myth for Environmental Education

Philosophers of education have argued that in order for Environmental Education's goals to succeed, students must form bonds and place attachments with nature. Some argue that immersive experiences in nature will be sufficient to form such attachments. However, this may not be enough, requiring other means of motivating them for environmental stewardship. Here, I explore the role the imagination could play for helping (re)enchant students’ perception of themselves‐in‐relationship‐with nature which could support the work these educators are already doing. I explore philosophical, psychological, and pedagogical domains to begin developing a holistic vision of what imagination could contribute for human‐environmental flourishing. Philosophically, I build from Martha Nussbaum's work that stories imaginatively shape our understanding of ourselves and the world, arguing that story—namely, myth—may have a unique power to enchant student's moral and ethical imaginations. I attempt to synthesise Michael Bonnett's rich ‘primordial’ phenomenology with what some mythologists identify as ‘implicit myth’—both of which are drawing attention to the human‐environmental interrelationship. Psychologically, I posit that if myth of this kind can develop a human‐environmental imagination in students, it may serve to create conditions to motivate students to act for environmental stewardship. Pedagogically, I close by identifying authors who seem to embody this primordial and mythic way of being in the world, arguing that studying their writings may help educators and students cultivate this human‐environmental imagination. I draw particular attention to Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetry for exemplary inspiration and guidance.     

Adult Questions and Children's Responses: Coordination of perspectives in studies of children's theories of other minds

The main aim of this study is to shed light on the issue of how children learn to identify what is meant by what is said in communicative practices. The study replicates and extends the well-known work on what is referred to as children's 'theories of other minds'. The focus in the present study is on the interplay between the adult and the child, the nature of the task and the child's position in the communicative encounter. Rather than assuming that children have or do not have 'theories of other minds', we explore the communicative conditions under which children can be made sensitive to the nature of other people's (mistaken) beliefs. The empirical work was carried out amongst children aged three to five, since this is the critical age at which it is claimed that children become sensitive to the fact that other people's perspectives of a situation may differ from their own. The results show that whether or not children 'are able' to adopt other people's perspectives is very much a situated affair and reflects the manner in which they are brought into a position where they can share the framing of the adult. The questions posed are interpreted differently by the children in ways that go beyond the intended difference that concerns perspectivity. The test situation is polysemous in many respects and the variation in responses cannot be reduced to such a simple distinction as the one implied in the theory of mind research paradigm, which represents a monological conception of communication.     

Hard to reach parents or hard to reach schools? A discussion of home—school relations,with particular reference to Bangladeshi and Pakistani parents

In the authors' research with Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage parents, some teachers, head teachers and other educational professionals referred to the South Asian parents as ‘hard to reach’. Whilst it was clear from the parents that they were not very, and in some cases not at all, involved in their children's schools and knew little about the education system or what their children were doing in school, it was also very apparent that the parents were not ‘difficult’, ‘obstructive’, or ‘indifferent’—the kind of behaviour ‘hard to reach’ implies. The article therefore considers that rather than parents being ‘hard to reach’, it is frequently the schools themselves that inhibit accessibility for certain parents. The authors challenge the cultural interference model, arguing that it is incorrect and pathologises parents. The article arises out of a two‐year, Economic and Social Research Council funded, qualitative study of Bangladeshi and Pakistani heritage families and schools, in the north‐east of England.     

Wonder and Moral Education

Many authors have claimed a moral and educational significance for wonder. In this article Anders Schinkel assesses these claims in order to address the question whether we do indeed have reason to stimulate the sense of wonder and to provoke experiences of wonder in education with a view to its moral effects or importance. Are there moral effects of wonder — or does wonder have a moral significance — that give us a (further) reason to promote children's sense of wonder and to attempt to elicit the experience of wonder in children? And if so, will any experience of wonder do, from a moral perspective, or do only some experiences of wonder — in specific contexts, or with a specific object — have the desired effect? Schinkel argues that, although there is certainly a case to be made for wonder's moral (educational) importance, it needs to be made cautiously. Wonder coheres more easily with some emotions and attitudes than with others, but in the end its moral significance depends to a large extent on how we interpret or make sense of our wonder and what we wonder at. In moral education, therefore, the value of wonder depends on how it is framed and morally charged.     

Prolegomena to the Study of Personality by Physical Educators

On the premise that profession does not know where it stands in regard to the developing body of knowledge in the many subdisciplinary and subprofessional aspects of sport and physical education, it is recommended that an inventory of scientific finding arranged as ordered generalizations be developed to help the field's many professional practitioners — be it as teacher, coaches, performers, scholars and researchers, superviosor, or administrators. This paper discusses the 20th century development of the field. Based on this development, the discussion will consider what a comprehensive taxonomy of the profession's knowledge base should include, how a plan was formulated for an inventory of scientific finding and how that inventory would be constructed, why a systems approach is needed now to consolidate the evolving profession's future status and what is needed as the profession develops in the next few years. A concluding statement explains that this golden opportunity to achieve true professional status must be exploited very soon or it may never be available again.     

Making 'Good Citizens': The social and political attitudes of PGCE students

This article arises from a research project examining the understanding of 'citizenship' amongst trainee teachers in UK primary and secondary schools. The study covers attitudes to a broad range of social, political and moral issues and examines how these affect the students' perception of the socio-political dimension of their future professional role. Tracking a group of students through their postgraduate training year highlights the relationship between the individual's political world-view and their response to the school experience. One of the key findings is the high degree of political disengagement and cynicism about the operation of democracy in the UK; this is particularly strong amongst the youngest students, those coming to adulthood during the 1990s. Although the majority of students are positively inclined to fostering 'good citizenship values' in schools, there was much confusion over what it means to be 'a good citizen'. The concept of 'citizenship' was felt to be tainted with negative imagery, although a sense of 'being part of a community' was thought to be vital for social cohesion. In addition to this, a small minority of students displayed social attitudes and values incompatible with a pluralist, tolerant society. The teacher education experience did not appear to have given students a clear picture of what to teach or how to teach it, and both the pressures of the National Curriculum and the changing climate of schooling, favouring a more 'traditionalist' approach, may result in a greater unwillingness to tackle challenging issues.     

Grading of Student's Attainment: Purposes and Functions

Abstract

Lysne, A. 1984. Grading of Students' Attainment: Purposes and Functions. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research 28, 149‐165. The article discusses the complex problem of evaluation and grading of students' achievement. During the 1970's a strong movement against the traditional formal grading and use of marks came up in many countries in the western world. The basic problem under question has been what type of reference measures should be used in grading students' achievement — measures of individual potentials or comprehensive norms or standards for attainment of skills and knowledge? The answer to this question depends, of course, on the type of functions the grades are supposed to serve. For individual guidance, it might be sufficient to give information about progress in relation to personal potentials, but that type of evaluation and grading can certainly not be used for selective purposes. A number of factors and viewpoints have to be taken into consideration when new reforms of grading systems for our schools are under discussion and planning.