Background: The ecology of physical education is created through the interaction of three task systems: managerial task system, instructional task system, and the student social system. Within the ecological framework tasks are presented and task development is influenced by concepts such as ambiguity, risk, and accountability. Teachers' and…

During the 1940s and 1950s the U.S. Communist Party upgraded and broadened its adult education schools, abandoning or ideologically modifying the militant pedagogical centres that had sprung up during the 1920s and 1930s in many American cities. In New York the transformation was complicated as two Party schools (the Workers School and the School…

Given Russian students' general lack of group work and opportunities to develop student responsibility in their prior schooling experiences, the purpose of this study was to examine how a group of Russian high school students responds to novel demands of participation in a sport education season. Forty-two students from two ninth-grade physical…

The article explores the transition from the linguistic imperialism of the colonial and postcolonial ages to the increasingly dominant role of English as a neoimperial language. It analyzes "global" English as a key dimension of the U.S. empire. U.S. expansionism is a fundamental principle of the foreign policy of the United States that can be…

Cognitive capitalism--sometimes referred to as "third capitalism," after mercantilism and industrial capitalism--is an increasingly significant theory, given its focus on the socio-economic changes caused by Internet and Web 2.0 technologies that have transformed the mode of production and the nature of labor. The theory of cognitive…

The American economy has had the fastest and most dramatic development of all the world's major economies. Four hundred years ago, the economic output of the area that became the United States was negligible by world standards. Yet only 250 years later, the U.S. economy had become the largest in the world, surpassing all other countries, including…

This paper provides a critique of the current policy orthodoxy of using markets to organise and structure education provision in England, focusing in particular on Further Education (FE) provision. Starting from the context of New Labour's so-called Third Way, it sets out research findings that indicate that marketisation not only produces…

In this paper, we explore educational inequality through a theoretical and empirical analysis. We use classical Marxian scholarship and class-based analyses to theorise the relationship between education and the inequality in society that is an inevitable feature of capitalist society/ economy. The relationship between social class and the process…

The article outlines a deficit in Holocaust education: The motives of the perpetrators and bystanders are often not dealt with. In order to explore these motives, interviews with former Nazis were conducted and evaluated in the "Geschichte und Erinnerung" (History and Memory) research project; two of the findings are presented here. Subsequently…

Chaos theory describes the way systems change over time. It proposes that systems governed by physical laws can undergo transitions to a highly irregular form of behavior and that although chaotic behavior appears random, it is governed by strict mathematical conditions. This paper applies chaos theory to administrative and organizational issues.…

Presents the idea that social systems evolve to increase the genetic fitness of individuals in specific environments. Cites examples of animal behavior and environmental influences that may indicate why different social systems have evolved. (GS)

In this volume the author provides a definition of the technique of simulation in order to examine the relevance of this technique for research in the social sciences. He looks into the philosophical and epistemological bases of simulation, examines its intellectual roots, and illustrates its use in a variety of disciplines--economics, political…

This study attempts to analyze and compare the structure of influence in two rural communities in southern Ohio with population centers of less than 10,000 inhabitants. (For a study of one of the communities only, see AC 010 451.) The two communities are studied as to reputed influentials, the business and economic subsystem, the civic…

The structure of influence in a community is the ordering and patterning of the interaction within a system based on the element power (influence) and all other elements as they relate to the use of influence within the social system. The structure of influence in a rural community, Riverview (a pseudonym for the town), Ohio, was analyzed, using…

A model of early intervention that focuses on Proactive Empowerment through Partnerships (PEP) is described. The manner in which the PEP principles and social systems notions are operationalized at the programmatic level is also described. Data are presented to validate and evaluate the social systems perspective of early intervention. (Author/CL)