The Least of These: American Evangelical Parachurch Missions to the Poor, 1947-2005

This dissertation narrates the historical development of American evangelical missions to the poor from 1947-2005 and analyzes the discourse of its main parachurch proponents, especially World Vision, Compassion International, Food for the Hungry, Samaritan's urse, Sojourners, Evangelicals for Social Action, and the Christian Community Development Association. Although recent scholarship on evangelicalism has been prolific, much of the historical work has focused on earlier periods. Sociological and political scientific scholarship on the postwar period has been attracted mostly to controversies surrounding the Religious Right, leaving evangelicalism's resurgent concern for the poor relatively understudied. This dissertation addresses these lacunae. The study consists of three chronological parts, each marked by a distinctive model of mission to the poor. First, the 1950s were characterized by compassionate charity for individual emergencies, a model that cohered neatly with evangelicalism's individualism and emotionalism. This model should be regarded as the quintessential, bedrock evangelical theory of mission to the poor. It remained strong throughout the entire postwar period. Second, in the 1970s, a strong countercurrent emerged that advocated for penitent protest against structural injustice and underdevelopment. In contrast to the first model, it was distinguished by going against the grain of many aspects of evangelical culture, especially its reflexive patriotism and individualism. Third, in the 1990s, an important movement towards developing potential through hopeful holism gained prominence. Its advocates were confident that their integration of biblical principles with insights from contemporary economic development praxis would contribute to drastic, widespread reductions in poverty. This model signaled a new optimism in evangelicalism's engagement with the broader world. The increasing prominence of missions to the poor within American evangelicalism led to dramatic changes within the movement's worldview: by 2005, evangelicals were mostly unified in their expressed concern for the physical and social needs of the poor, a position that radically reversed their immediate postwar worldview of near-exclusive focus on the spiritual needs of individuals. Nevertheless, missions to the poor also paralleled, reinforced, and hastened the increasing fragmentation of evangelicalism's identity, as each missional model advocated for highly variant approaches to poverty amelioration that were undergirded by diverse sociological, political, and theological assumptions.

Exact theory for localized envelope modulated electrostatic wavepackets in space and dusty plasmas

Abundant evidence for the occurrence of modulated envelope plasma wave packets is provided by recent satellite missions. These excitations are characterized by a slowly varying localized envelope structure, embedding the fast carrier wave, which appears to be the result of strong modulation of the wave amplitude. This modulation may be due to parametric interactions between different modes or, simply, to the nonlinear (self-)interaction of the carrier wave. A generic exact theory is presented in this study, for the nonlinear self-modulation of known electrostatic plasma modes, by employing a collisionless fluid model. Both cold (zero-temperature) and warm fluid descriptions are discussed and the results are compared. The (moderately) nonlinear oscillation regime is investigated by applying a multiple scale technique. The calculation leads to a Nonlinear Schrodinger-type Equation (NLSE), which describes the evolution of the slowly varying wave amplitude in time and space. The NLSE admits localized envelope (solitary wave) solutions of bright(pulses) or dark- (holes, voids) type, whose characteristics (maximum amplitude, width) depend on intrinsic plasma parameters. Effects like amplitude perturbation obliqueness (with respect to the propagation direction), finite temperature and defect (dust) concentration are explicitly considered. Relevance with similar highly localized modulated wave structures observed during recent satellite missions is discussed.

Les missions des bibliothèques publiques autonomes du point de vue des élus municipaux québécois

La légitimité d’une organisation est fondée sur sa mission, c’est-à-dire sur sa raison d’être. Des responsables des bibliothèques et de nombreux chercheurs craignent que la légitimité des bibliothèques publiques soit contestée dans la société de l’information. De plus, les textes officiels présentant les missions des bibliothèques publiques sont divers et les missions y sont délibérément non définies. Au Québec, où une grande majorité des bibliothèques publiques autonomes sont placées directement sous la tutelle des municipalités, les bibliothèques publiques doivent définir et légitimer leurs missions avec les élus municipaux. L’objectif principal de cette recherche est de comprendre, via les discours, le point de vue des élus municipaux québécois sur les missions des bibliothèques publiques autonomes, en comparaison avec les pratiques et les ressources des bibliothèques au plan local. Basé sur la théorie de la construction sociale de la réalité, un cadre conceptuel est proposé de manière à étudier non seulement les discours dans leur dimension textuelle, mais aussi à contextualiser ces discours et analyser l’écart entre ces discours et les pratiques des bibliothèques.La stratégie de recherche adoptée est une étude de cas multiples. L’objectif est de développer une analyse en profondeur de chaque cas et une analyse inter cas. Les douze cas (municipalités) ont été sélectionnés en fonction de deux critères de variation (la taille de la municipalité et le budget annuel alloué par la municipalité à la bibliothèque) et un critère discriminant (la distance par rapport à l’Université de Montréal). Des entrevues ont été menées auprès des élus municipaux présidant la commission ou le comité dont dépendent les bibliothèques publiques. Ces entrevues et les politiques culturelles ont fait l’objet d’une analyse de discours. Les entrevues auprès des responsables des bibliothèques et la documentation ont fait l’objet d’une analyse de contenu. Ces analyses ont permis la triangulation des méthodes et des sources de données.Les élus municipaux québécois, comme les professionnels, n’offrent pas un discours homogène sur les missions des bibliothèques publiques. Toutefois, un modèle de discours émerge. Il montre un discours « limité » par rapport à la littérature, dans lequel une image passive de la bibliothèque est présentée et dans lequel la tradition perdure malgré le contexte de la société de l’information. Mais l’analyse révèle aussi que les élus municipaux construisent leurs points de vue sur leurs propres convictions en tant qu’individus, sur leur rôle dans la gestion de la municipalité en tant qu’élus et sur l’image qu’ils ont des usagers des bibliothèques publiques. Enfin, l’analyse a révélé un axe de différenciation des points de vue selon que le discours s’appuie sur des valeurs fondamentales ou sur les usages (réels ou supposés) de la bibliothèque.

What can the Stakeholder Theory Learn from Enron?

Roughly speaking, Enron has done for reflection on corporate governance what AIDS did for research on the immune system. So far, however, virtually all of this reflection on and subsequent reform of governance has come from those with a stake in the success of modern capitalism. This paper identifies a number of governance challenges for critics of capitalism, and in particular for those who urge corporations to voluntarily adopt missions of broader social responsibility and equal treatment for all stakeholder groups. I argue that by generally neglecting the governance relation between shareholders and senior managers, stakeholder theorists have underestimated the way in which shareholder-focused governance can be in the interests of all stakeholder groups. The enemy, if you will, is not capitalists (shareholders), but greedy, corrupt or incompetent managers. A second set of governance challenges for stakeholder theorists concerns their largely untested proposals for governance reforms that would require managers to act in the interests of all stakeholders and not just shareholders; in other words to treat shareholders as just another stakeholder group. I suggest that in such a governance regime it may be almost impossible to hold managers accountable to anyone – just as it was when state-owned enterprises were given “multi-stakeholder” mandates in the 1960s and 1970s.

Combination of altimetry data from different satellite missions

Substantial altimetry datasets collected by different satellites have only become available during the past five years, but the future will bring a variety of new altimetry missions, both parallel and consecutive in time. The characteristics of each produced dataset vary with the different orbital heights and inclinations of the spacecraft, as well as with the technical properties of the radar instrument. An integral analysis of datasets with different properties offers advantages both in terms of data quantity and data quality. This thesis is concerned with the development of the means for such integral analysis, in particular for dynamic solutions in which precise orbits for the satellites are computed simultaneously. The first half of the thesis discusses the theory and numerical implementation of dynamic multi-satellite altimetry analysis. The most important aspect of this analysis is the application of dual satellite altimetry crossover points as a bi-directional tracking data type in simultaneous orbit solutions. The central problem is that the spatial and temporal distributions of the crossovers are in conflict with the time-organised nature of traditional solution methods. Their application to the adjustment of the orbits of both satellites involved in a dual crossover therefore requires several fundamental changes of the classical least-squares prediction/correction methods. The second part of the thesis applies the developed numerical techniques to the problems of precise orbit computation and gravity field adjustment, using the altimetry datasets of ERS-1 and TOPEX/Poseidon. Although the two datasets can be considered less compatible that those of planned future satellite missions, the obtained results adequately illustrate the merits of a simultaneous solution technique. In particular, the geographically correlated orbit error is partially observable from a dataset consisting of crossover differences between two sufficiently different altimetry datasets, while being unobservable from the analysis of altimetry data of both satellites individually. This error signal, which has a substantial gravity-induced component, can be employed advantageously in simultaneous solutions for the two satellites in which also the harmonic coefficients of the gravity field model are estimated.

Feminist Disability Theory: Domestic Violence Against Women with a Disability

Women with a disability continue to experience social oppression and domestic violence as a consequence of gender and disability dimensions. Current explanations of domestic violence and disability inadequately explain several features that lead women who have a disability to experience violent situations. This article incorporates both disability and material feminist theory as an alternative explanation to the dominant approaches (psychological and sociological traditions) of conceptualising domestic violence. This paper is informed by a study which was concerned with examining the nature and perceptions of violence against women with a physical impairment. The emerging analytical framework integrating material feminist interpretations and disability theory provided a basis for exploring gender and disability dimensions. Insight was also provided by the women who identified as having a disability in the study and who explained domestic violence in terms of a gendered and disabling experience. The article argues that material feminist interpretations and disability theory, with their emphasis on gender relations, disablism and poverty, should be used as an alternative tool for exploring the nature and consequences of violence against women with a disability.

Why do so few hold stocks : theory and evidence

This study develops a life-cycle model where investors make investment decisions in a realistic environment. Model results show that personal illiquid projects (housing and children), fixed costs (once-off/per-period participation costs plus variable/fixed transaction costs) and endogenous risky human capital (with permanent, transitory and disastrous shocks) together are able to address both the non-participation puzzle and the age-effects puzzle. Empirical implications of the model are examined using Heckman’s two-step method with the latest five Surveys of Consumer Finance (SCF). Regression results show that liquidity, informational cost and human capital are indeed the major determinants of participation and asset allocation decisions at different stages of an investor’s life.

Linking Theory and Practice: Performing a Reality Check on a Model of IS Success

The issue of ‘rigour vs. relevance’ in IS research has generated an intense, heated debate for over a decade. It is possible to identify, however, only a limited number of contributions on how to increase the relevance of IS research without compromising its rigour. Based on a lifecycle view of IS research, we propose the notion of ‘reality checks’ in order to review IS research outcomes in the light of actual industry demands. We assume that five barriers impact the efficient transfer of IS research outcomes; they are lack of awareness, lack of understandability, lack of relevance, lack of timeliness, and lack of applicability. In seeking to understand the effect of these barriers on the transfer of mature IS research into practice, we used focus groups. We chose DeLone and McLean’s IS success model as our stimulus because it is one of the more widely researched areas of IS.