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This paper aims to explore the interplay between methods and methodologies in the field of international relations (IR) over the 100 years of its lifetime reflecting on the relationship between the rise of new research methods and the rise of new methodologies.

This paper looks in retrospect into the field’s great debates using a historiography approach. It maps chronologically the interplay of methods and methodology throughout the stages of the development of the study of IR.

This paper argues that inspite of narratives of triumph being common in the field, the coexistence of competing research methods and methodologies is the defining feature of the field. All theories, all methods and all methodologies have undergone a process of criticism, self-criticism and change. New methodologies have not necessarily accompanied the rise of new research methods in the field.

Drawing a map of the field’s methodologies and methods reveals necessarily its dynamism and its plurality. An honest map of the field is one that highlights not only theoretical differences but also ontological, epistemological and methodological differences embedded in the field’s debates.

This paper offers a definition of the core of information science, which encompasses most research in the field. The definition provides a unique identity for information science and positions it in the disciplinary universe.

After motivating the objective, a definition of the core and an explanation of its key aspects are provided. The definition is related to other definitions of information science before controversial discourse aspects are briefly addressed: discipline vs. field, science vs. humanities, library vs. information science and application vs. theory. Interdisciplinarity as an often-assumed foundation of information science is challenged.

Information science is concerned with how information is manifested across space and time. Information is manifested to facilitate and support the representation, access, documentation and preservation of ideas, activities, or practices, and to enable different types of interactions. Research and professional practice encompass the infrastructures – institutions and technology –and phenomena and practices around manifested information across space and time as its core contribution to the scholarly landscape. Information science collaborates with other disciplines to work on complex information problems that need multi- and interdisciplinary approaches to address them.

The paper argues that new information problems may change the core of the field, but throughout its existence, the discipline has remained quite stable in its central focus, yet proved to be highly adaptive to the tremendous changes in the forms, practices, institutions and technologies around and for manifested information.

Recently, various policies have been implemented in Saudi Arabia to reform science teaching at K-12 levels in order to focus on critical thinking, inquiry-based learning, and problem solving. Research is needed to explore the adequacy of teacher preparation programs to determine whether these programs sufficiently prepare Saudi science teachers to teach according to these new reforms. This study explores the challenges that Saudi pre-service science teachers face in these higher education programs. Results indicated that graduates of the programs studied were satisfied with their experiences; however, various concerns were expressed by some pre-service teachers regarding the theory-practice gap between their university coursework and field experiences, and the supervision structures and functions in place for the professional experiences component. Modifications to the teacher preparation programs are suggested in order to address these concerns and to successfully enact reforms in science education in Saudi Arabia.

Under the background of economic and technological globalization, all countries will pay attention to science and technology innovation policies. At this time, the era of innovation policy plays an important role. In order to thoroughly implement the spirit of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, earnestly innovate development concepts and strengthen the key supporting role of scientific and technological innovation for social development.

The research will make an in-depth study on the policy of scientific and technological innovation, take the change trend of the number of laws and regulations and the analysis of the basic content as the entry point, and classify it from five different aspects, such as the policy of scientific and technological system and mechanism, the policy of financial guidance, the policy of technological innovation of enterprises, the policy of scientific and technological talents, and the policy of intellectual property.

Through the comparison of the development history of science and technology policies at home and abroad, the development history of science and technology innovation policies under the special national conditions of China is obtained. Combining with the relevant basic theories of science and technology innovation system, designing from the publishing department, main content, and implementation subject, constructing a synergistic science and technology innovation system of “government, industry, university and research,” and forming an “integration of supply and demand” technology innovation framework will guide the development of China's science and technology innovation in the future.

The authors construct the policy framework of science and technology collaborative innovation based on the concept of science and technology innovation policies. The framework has realistic significance for its future development.

The purpose of this paper is to review and discuss Luciano Floridi’s 2019 book The Logic of Information: A Theory of Philosophy as Conceptual Design, the latest instalment in his philosophy of information (PI) tetralogy, particularly with respect to its implications for library and information studies (LIS).

Nine scholars with research interests in philosophy and LIS read and responded to the book, raising critical and heuristic questions in the spirit of scholarly dialogue. Floridi responded to these questions.

Floridi’s PI, including this latest publication, is of interest to LIS scholars, and much insight can be gained by exploring this connection. It seems also that LIS has the potential to contribute to PI’s further development in some respects.

Floridi’s PI work is technical philosophy for which many LIS scholars do not have the training or patience to engage with, yet doing so is rewarding. This suggests a role for translational work between philosophy and LIS.

The book symposium format, not yet seen in LIS, provides forum for sustained, multifaceted and generative dialogue around ideas.

This study aims to acknowledge that most Indonesian small and medium enterprises (SMEs) experience slow growth. It highlighted that this sluggishness is because of some falsification of Indonesia’s ecological psychology. It focuses on investigating the situated cognition that probably supports this falsification, such as affordance, a community of practice, embodiment and the legitimacy of peripheral participation situated cognition and social intelligence theories.

This study obtained data from published newspapers between October 2016 and February 2019. The authors used the Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis and the J48 C.45 algorithm. The authors analyzed the data using the emergence of news probability for both the Government of Indonesia (GoI) and Indonesian society and the situated cognition concerning the improvement of the SMEs. The authors inferred ecological psychology from these published newspapers in Indonesia that the engaged actions were still suppressed, in comparison with being and doing.

This study contributes to the innovation and leadership policies of the SMEs’ managerial systems and the GoI. After this study identified the backward-looking practices, which the GoI and the people of Indonesia held, this study recommended some policies to help create a forward-looking orientation. The second one is also a policy for the GoI, which needs to reduce the discrepancy between the signified and the signifier, as recommended by the structuralist theory. The last one is suggested by the social learning theory; policies are needed that relate to developing the SMEs’ beliefs, attitudes and behavior. It means that the GoI should prepare the required social contexts, which are in motoric production and reinforcement. Explicitly, the authors argue that the GoI facilitates SMEs by emphasizing the internal learning process.

The authors present some possibilities for the limitations of this research. The authors took into account that this study assumes the SMEs are all the same, without industrial clustering. It considers that the need for social learning and social cognition by the unclustered industries is equal. Second, the authors acknowledge that Indonesia is an emerging country, and its economic structure has three levels of contributors; the companies listed on the Indonesian Stock Exchange, then the SMEs and the lowest level is the underground economy. Third, the authors did not distinguish the levels of success for the empowerment programs that are conducted by either the GoI or the local governments. This study recognizes that the authors did not measure success levels. It means that the authors only focused on the knowledge content.

From these pieces of evidence, this study constructed its strategies. The authors offer three kinds of policies. The first is the submission of special allocation funds from which the GoI and local governments develop their budgets for the SMEs’ social learning and social cognition. The second is the development of social learning and social cognition’s curricula for both the SMEs’ owners and executive officers. The third is the need for a national knowledge repository for all the Indonesian SMEs. This repository is used for the dissemination of knowledge.

This study raises argumental novelties with some of the critical reasoning. First, the authors argue that the sluggishness of the Indonesian SMEs is because of some fallacies in their social cognition. This social cognition is derived from the cultural knowledge that the GoI and people of Indonesia disclosed in the newspapers. This study shows the falsifications from the three main perspectives of the structuration, structuralist and social learning theories. Second, this study can elaborate on the causal factor for the sluggishness of Indonesia’s SMEs, which can be explained by philosophical science, especially its fallacies (Hundleby, 2010; Magnus and Callender, 2004). The authors expand the causal factors for each gap in every theory, which determined the SMEs’ sluggishness through the identification of inconsistencies in each dimension of their structuration, structuralism and social learning. This study focused on the fallacy of philosophical science that explains the misconceptions about the SMEs’ improvement because of faulty reasoning, which causes the wrong moves to be made in the future (Dorr, 2017; Pielke, 1999).