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Entrepreneurs have two advantages over credentialed experts. They “know” less of what is false, and they (informally) know more of what is true. They know less of what is false because they are either ignorant of, or willing to ignore, the currently dominant theories. They know more of what is true by having more informal knowledge (whether local, tacit, or inchoate). Funding of projects by firms or governments will rely on expert judgments based on the currently dominant theory. So breakthrough innovations depend on innovative entrepreneurs being able to find funding independent of the insider incumbent institutions, usually self-funding.

Fernandez knew, as did Kenneth Burke to whom Fernandez owed so much, that the fundamental human problem of maintaining what he elsewhere called the “inchoate sense of wholeness” was critically linked to the never-ending dilemma of “the degree to which men can feel the aptness of each other’s metaphors.” And since the publication of “Persuasions and Performances” nearly 30 years ago, a great deal of anthropological, sociological and historical work on “power and resistance,” “hegemony,” and “cultural reproduction and change” can be usefully framed as particular responses to a number of fundamental questions implicit in Fernandez’ quote – When, and under what types of conditions, does any particular “metaphor” or “trope” serve to promote cooperation and social integration? When, and under what types of conditions, does it serve to promote conflict and social disintegration? When and how is the “aptness” of any given “metaphor” or “trope” lost? We believe these to be among the most central, enduring questions in the Human Sciences.

This is an interpretive study in the sociology of literature that explores Aeschylus’s trilogy of dramatic plays known as the Oresteia. The plays dramatize a normative argument that exemplifies the dialectical struggle between domination and democracy. Social relations are characterized by agon (struggle), domination, and contradictions brought about by learning through suffering. These social realities reflect the primary theoretical claim of radical interactionism (RI) that domination and conflict are profound, pervasive, and perennial. On the interpersonal level, the plays dramatize structure, agency, role-taking, and the Thomas Axiom. As the first drama to interrogate an inchoate polity as an object of the public’s gaze, the Oresteia anticipates the sociological importance of critical consciousness, collective decision-making, political institutions, moral and, ultimately, cultural transformation. Despite a social context of slavery, imperialism, xenophobia, ostracism, misogyny, exclusivity, and constant warfare, the Oresteia foreshadows Western civilization’s ideals of legal-rational domination, citizenship, human rights, persuasion, and justice that have been imperfectly institutionalized to reduce surplus domination. The West still struggles to realize those ideals.

The 1950s and 1960s were times of haphazard and yet vigorous growth in many academic and policy disciplines. The end of the World War II left the United States at the economic center of the world with commensurate technological, political, and cultural might. For many products, much of the higher technology, free-market leadership, and new social and administrative models, the world looked inordinately ‘to the United States.’ American leadership as a countervailing force to communism was particularly evident. However, foreign aid during the time, impressive though the Four Point and the Marshall Plan might have been, was as much an answer to an emergency as a strategic plan. Precursors ‘to the U.S. Agency for International Development’ (USAID) were little more than continuing resolutions. During this time comparative and development administration were coming into importance as academic domains of discourse with an inchoate sense of identity.¹⁰

The quest to understand the experience of stress and how it affects our mental and physical well being continues to fill volumes of journals and books. Despite this fecundity we seem to be no closer to a comprehensive theory of the stress process, or even a common definition of what it is, than we were twenty years ago. This is true for the subfield of occupational stress as well. Thus arises the inchoate suspicion that all is not well in our field. Our view is more sanguine than some, however. We are quick to concede that there is not a useful comprehensive theory of work stress, but we also hasten to add that this is not a critical lack. We prefer to think of the study of work stress and well being as defining a constellation of theories and models that each attacks a meaningful process or phenomenon. In this sense, the term stress serves as a general rubric for a diverse set of research questions (and their associated theories) concerning workplace experiences, individuals’ reactions to those experiences, and workers’ well being in all its various manifestations. The field of work stress excites many of us because of the incredible diversity of disciplines that have entered the fray, each of them attacking the question of how our work lives determine our health, and using the unique theoretical perspectives and methods of their discipline. In this sense, we are all united in our interest in trying to understand how what happens in the workplace affects our mental and physical health, in spite of the range of specific questions, theories, and methodologies that characterize our research programs.

This chapter presents a very broad synopsis of the intensification of education governance. It opens by narrating the multifaceted nature of governance and in what way it has developed as the axiom for professed policy problems that national educational systems are experiencing. The chapter chronicles the amplification of education governance and it explicates the metamorphosis and myriad typographies that “governance” has taken in responding to perceived endogenous and exogenous policy problems. It explains how managerialism and neo-corporate reforms sought to destabilize the activities of education governance and the results. In making this argument, it suggests that new public management policy prescriptions in education were part of the earliest form of disruptive innovation in education. It advances that educational managerialism, in hollowing out national educational systems, has generated the perfect breeding ground for the rise of newer modus operandi (or modes, styles, and arrangements) that governs and regulates education systems through the use of different techniques and mechanisms. The second half of the chapter discusses five different modus operandi that are inchoate in the post-managerialist era and highlights that in education, we have progressed beyond the movement from government to governance across national education systems and these systems are now employing additional modes of governance (vertical and horizontal) across different scales. The chapter concludes by drawing on the concept of a “Wicked Problem” (an unsolvable or difficult problematic, that is, fluid, paradoxical, and unfinished) to insinuate that education governance is an example of a wicked problem that has been and continues to be shaped by the ideological contours of endogenous and exogenous policy influences.

To describe how low-stakes writing can assist teachers in eliciting greater student engagement and involvement in their own writing by focusing the stages of the writing process more on student thinking than on the surface structure of their writing.

This chapter examines some of the important research literature addressing process writing in general and low-stakes writing in particular. The authors’ experiences with teaching English in the secondary classroom inform their analysis of implementing low-stakes writing assignments as part of the writing process.

The authors describe how using non-judgmental feedback on low-stakes writing assignments allows the teacher and students to have conversations on paper which are intended to help students explore, expand, and clarify their own thinking about a topic. By establishing a continuing conversation on paper with the students about their writing, the teacher takes on the role of “trusted ally” in the writing process, rather than the more traditional role of an arbiter of writing conventions.

Although the presumptive focus of writing instruction for the last two decades has been on the writing process, the tendency to turn the individual steps of the writing process into discrete writing products in a formulaic manner can cause many important parts of the writing process itself to be either overlooked or given short shrift. This chapter provides useful descriptions of ways in which low-stakes writing assignments can afford teachers the means by which to focus their students’ attention on key portions of the writing process so that their writing products are ultimately improved.