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This chapter traces the origin of racism and reviews the historical and contemporary debates around race and racialisation in western thought. There are persistent disagreements surrounding the origin and nature of racism. Because of the evolution of racist ideas, behaviours and institutional practices and policies, there are various views about the meaning and analytical application of racism. This chapter explores how ideas of race – understood as innate and immutable human differences that can be classified and ranked hierarchically based on race – has emerged in western history and evolved over time. It examines how this has influenced social and political practices and associated policies across the evolution of modernity. The chapter specifically discusses the Atlantic slave trade and how it shaped the historical development of race and racism within the context of colonialism. It concludes with a discussion and critical review of some of the racist systems and policies which have been enforced across different multiracial countries.

Stein Rokkan (1921–1979) gave this lecture in Paris, 4th December 1976. Comparative Social Research here publishes the first English language translation of Rokkan's manuscript for the lecture, which was given in French. The lecture was earlier only available in German (published 1980) and Norwegian (published 1921) translations. The lecture presents the sequence of models that Rokkan developed for his Europe-project aiming to explain the variations between 16 Western European democracies with reference to rights, party systems and systems alternatives. It is the only extensive intellectual autobiography that Rokkan ever wrote.

We revisit the problem of redesigning the Master in Business Administration (MBA) program, curriculum, and pedagogy, focusing on understanding and seeking to tame its “wicked problems,” as an intrinsic part and challenge of the MBA program venture, and to render it more realistic and relevant to address major problems and their consequences. We briefly review the theory of wicked problems and methods of dealing with their consequences from multiple perspectives. Most characterization of problems classifies them as simple (problems that have known formulations and solutions), complex (where formulations are known but not their resolutions), unstructured problems (where formulations are unknown, but solutions are estimated), and “wicked” (where both problem formulations and their resolutions are unknown but eventually partially tamable). Uncertainty, unpredictability, randomness, and ambiguity increase from simple to complex to unstructured to wicked problems. A redesigned MBA program should therefore address them effectively through the four semesters in two years. Most of these problems are real and affect life and economies, and hence, business schools cannot but incorporate them into their critical, ethical, and moral thinking.

The purpose of this chapter is to cover banking efficiency using the concept of the Meta frontier function and to study group and subgroup differences in the production technology. This study estimates the technical efficiency (TE) and technology gap ratios (TGRs) for banks in Islamic countries. Using the assumption of the convex hull of the Meta frontier production set using the virtual Meta frontier within the nonparametric approach as presented by Battese and Rao (2002), Battese et al. (2004), and O'Donnell et al. (2007, 2008) and after relaxing this assumption, the study investigates if there is a significant difference between these two methods. To overcome the deterministic criterion addressed to nonparametric approach, the bootstrapping technique has been applied. The first part of this chapter covers the analytical framework necessary for the definition of a Meta frontier function and its estimation using nonparametric data envelopment analysis (DEA) in the case where we impose the assumption of the convex production set and follows in the case of relaxation of this assumption. Then we estimated the TE and the TGR in concave and nonconcave Meta frontier cases by applying the Bootstrap-DEA approach. The empirical part will be reserved for highlighting these methods on data bank to study the technical and technological performance level and prove if there is a difference between the two methods. Three groups of banks namely commercial, investment, and Islamic banks in 17 Islamic countries over a period of 16 years between 1996 and 2011 are used.

In times of crisis, such as the Covid-19 global pandemic, journalists who write about biomedical information must have the strategic aim to be clearly and easily understood by everyone. In this study, we assume that journalistic discourse could benefit from language redundancy to improve clarity and simplicity aimed at science popularization. The concept of language redundancy is theoretically discussed with the support of discourse analysis and information theory. The methodology adopted is a corpus-based qualitative approach. Two corpora samples with Brazilian Portuguese (BP) texts on Covid-19 were collected. One with texts from a monthly science digital magazine called Pesquisa FAPESP aimed at students and researchers for scientific information dissemination and the other with popular language texts from a news Portal G1 (Rede Globo) aimed at unspecified and/or non-specialized readers. The materials were filtered with two descriptors: “vaccine” and “test.” Preliminary analysis of examples from these materials revealed two categories of redundancy: paraphrastic and polysemic. Paraphrastic redundancy is based on concomitant language reformulation of words, sentences, text excerpts, or even larger units. Polysemic redundancy does not easily show material evidence, but is based on cognitively predictable semantic association in socio-cultural domains. Both kinds of redundancy contribute, each in their own way, to improving text readability for science popularization in Brazil.

This study employs Stein Rokkan's methodological approach to analyse state formation in the Greater Middle East. It develops a conceptual framework distinguishing colonial, populist and democratic pacts, suitable for analysis of state formation and nation-building through to the present period. The framework relies on historical institutionalism. The methodology, however, is Rokkan's. The initial conceptual analysis also specifies differences between European and the Middle Eastern state formation processes. It is followed by a brief and selective discussion of historical preconditions. Next, the method of plotting singular cases into conceptual-typological maps is applied to 20 cases in the Greater Middle East (including Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey). For reasons of space, the empirical analysis is limited to the colonial period (1870s to the end of World War 1). Three typologies are combined into one conceptual-typological map of this period. The vertical left-hand axis provides a composite typology that clarifies cultural-territorial preconditions. The horizontal axis specifies transformations of the region's agrarian class structures since the mid-19th century reforms. The right-hand vertical axis provides a four-layered typology of processes of external intervention. A final section presents selected comparative case reconstructions. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first time such a Rokkan-style conceptual-typological map has been constructed for a non-European region.

This chapter sought to answer the following questions: (a) what does special education means for students with intellectual disability?, (b) what is being done, and (c) how do we maintain tradition? The answers, while complicated, suggest special education for students with intellectual disability historically and currently involves attention to what, how, and where, with the how being the key elements of special education for students with intellectual disability. This chapter discussed the what, how, and where for students with intellectual disability in a historical and current framework while also providing evidence-based practices for students with intellectual disability to implement to maintain the tradition of high-quality services.

Estimation of (in)efficiency became a popular practice that witnessed applications in virtually any sector of the economy over the last few decades. Many different models were deployed for such endeavors, with Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) models dominating the econometric literature. Among the most popular variants of SFA are Aigner, Lovell, and Schmidt (1977), which launched the literature, and Kumbhakar, Ghosh, and McGuckin (1991), which pioneered the branch taking account of the (in)efficiency term via the so-called environmental variables or determinants of inefficiency. Focusing on these two prominent approaches in SFA, the goal of this chapter is to try to understand the production inefficiency of public hospitals in Queensland. While doing so, a recognized yet often overlooked phenomenon emerges where possible dramatic differences (and consequently very different policy implications) can be derived from different models, even within one paradigm of SFA models. This emphasizes the importance of exploring many alternative models, and scrutinizing their assumptions, before drawing policy implications, especially when such implications may substantially affect people’s lives, as is the case in the hospital sector.