Market Analysis- Opening a Tapas Restaurant in Pearland Texas Research Proposal - 1

Market Analysis- Opening a Tapas Restaurant in Pearland Texas - Research Proposal Example â€Å"Pearland is on its way to becoming the next major employment center in the Houston region† (Living in Pearland par. 1). Thus, it transpires that the city offers a highly conducive environment for launching a new restaurant, which can operate well in this region due to several factors. The population growth in this town shows a high market potential of Tapas Restaurant. Pearland is near to Hobby Airport and therefore the restaurant can cater to tourists and business people who travel to this area. Pearland Park and restaurant is one of the main attractions of Pearland city. Besides, Pearland Art League can be another potential source of market for the restaurant as it invites several people round the year for many functions. These are the market potential in Pearland. The restaurant has competitors there such as Pear Tree, Santa Barbara Italian Restaurant and Busy Bee Cafà © etc. The potential target customer groups for Tapas Restaurant include the employees and visitors of Texas Medical Center, Johnson Space Center’s workers, visitors to Pearland Park and Hobby Airport etc. Besides, there are several well established families living in the area. Since there are no outlets of Tapas Restaurant in this region, Pearland City is a potential market for opening such a restaurant. This restaurant’s target customers are youth and upper middle class people. Target market identification involves the process of determining the group of potential clients from the inhabitants of a community, which may comprise several sections. Once this is done, the firm concerned has to make sure that they are in position of gratifying the desires and requirements of each section. Marketing aims, which add to the achievement of the general industry objectives should be recognized for all target markets. The objectives must be in quantitative language, should indicate the target market and must also point out the period within which the goals must be

The affects of football Essay Example for Free

The affects of football Essay From the early ages in history to present day, sports have had a major impact on society. Football is a very popular sport played in America and many other countries. Some may say that football is a violent sport and its not beneficial in any way, but in reality it gives a person all the basic tools needed not only for playing the game, but also how you interact with people in society. Also it is very simple to get involved in most cites and towns. Football is a great game that is both fun and instructive. Football is game played by twenty-two players on a field at once, with eleven players on the defensive and offensive side of the ball. The goal of the game is to get a leather cone shaped ball, called a football, into the opposing teams end zone. On offense you have four tries to gain ten yards and gain a first down, which mean you have another four tries to go another ten yards. The defense in return has four tries to stop the offense or they get the football. A great football team is one that works very well together, and is disciplined enough that they can win without falling apart. Football is such a great sport because it takes eleven players on each side of the ball to do their assignment to become a great team. Each player has a different job, and if every player does their job than they can accomplish their task. There is no other game like football, it is a game where you can tackle and throw your rival as hard as you can without getting in trouble. It is a violent sport but a teams violence has to be controlled. Sports in society today are often a big deal. Teens go to high school and can get very competitive in any sport. Football is one of the best sports to get involved with because it teaches so many things children and teens need to be active in society. It teaches: discipline, teamwork, interaction, self-restraint, and perseverance. It is one of the only team sports that you actually need all the players on the field to work together and knows what theyre doing to become a good team. Practice makes prefect, and to become a better player you need to be disciplined and learn from your mistakes. Football also teaches players to control their anger on and off the field, and to keep working harder. It keeps teens out of trouble and gives them something to do, rather than cause trouble. Living in Amsterdam has a major effect on why I and many other teens play football. Amsterdam is, and has always been, and great football tradition. It all starts out with the children and the great Pee Wee football program we call Little Giants. This program teaches little kids from age seven through twelve the art of the game of football. When players get too old for this program they move on to the junior high school team which has always been another great program that teaches kids the fundamentals of life. Then the players move on to the junior varsity team where they get trained to play on the top school level. Varsity is the top of line for school football. This is where every little giants player wants to play. These players are envied by all, for the decades of great football they have played. There is no other greater feeling than to play a home game on a Friday night under the lights on the Amsterdam turf, while being watches by thousands of screaming fans, the steam that can be seen on the top of every players head, and the joy that runs through your body as you see the time run out and your are a champion again. The greatest accomplishment these players have is winning the state title and raising their helmets in the dome of Syracuse and yelling champions for the last time of their football career. As a player walks off that field there is no better feeling of pride in the fact that you are an Amsterdam football player. Sports have had a major impact on society. Football is a very popular sport played in America and many other countries. Some may say that football is a violent sport and its not beneficial in any way, but in reality it gives a person all the basic tools needed not only for playing the game, but also how you interact with people in society. Also it is very simple to get involved in most cites and towns. It can be the one thing that matters the most in a students high school career. The accomplishments that can be earned from football are like no other. Football takes time and effort to become a better player. To know that your whole team has worked the hardest and plays the best together is an incredible feeling. Football is a great game that is both fun and instructive. After winning a state title and walking off the field I thought to myself, there is not one other thing I would have dedicated myself to for so many years than the hot turf of a football field.

Top and Bottom Down Approaches in Research

Top and Bottom Down Approaches in Research 1.1 Introduction: The theoretical challenge of managed environments General works in the field of development studies or environmental management typically imitate structural, institutional and political economy analyses. This dissertation however focuses on the theoretical and methodological foundations of an actor-oriented, process-based and social constructionist form of analysis. It also aims to show the usefulness of such an approach for providing new insights into critical areas of empirical enquiry. In the introductory chapter I posed the dilemma confronting change managers and citizens with existing practices of environmental governance reform that are performing inconsistently. My starting point is the premise that experiences of decision-making over environmental management practices have not reflected the intent of smoother transitions and greater legitimacy that a turn to more participative approaches had promised. More democratic methods are not consistently producing more democratic outcomes, at least so are reports from practice warning. Instead, governance reform is experienced as frustrating struggles by actors brought together using ideals of collaborative practice that are frequently proving disappointing in application. The stories that this report recounts are indicative of the type of struggles and indeterminacies more and more encountered by policy actors in addressing issues of society-nature relations. It will be shown that the day-to-day tensions are not well expressed in the languages of social science or practitioners. Are there better ways to conceptualize these problems? Do we have language for this? To answer this, I will have to look for alternative ways to enter the subject and pose questions in different ways. A search for models of practice and theoretical foundations that may prove relevant to the rapidly changing contexts of managed environments encounters a rich literature that has engaged with the problems posed by the environmental pressures of population increase and technological development. However, as will be seen, existing conceptualisations encounter limits of abstraction. The implicit recognition of that has seen practitioners develop a wide range of approaches that are nearer to a recognition of actor perspectives in the field of environmental governance reform that more anthropological perspectives will highlight. A closer examination shows that abandoning abstraction in order to acknowledge the natural complexity of modern contexts in a post-modern time does not resolve the problem of constructively navigating changing knowledge systems. I therefore turn to post-structuralist thinking which allows me to give more attention to the social constructivist view and, in particul ar, to the co-constructed nature of knowledge, framing and subjectivities. The method that proves most promising to demonstrate and resolve the ambiguous nature of social knowledge is a dialectical approach to mapping the deliberative spaces of 21st century environmental governance reform. To do this work, perspectives from different disciplinary areas are brought together, including environmental sociology, environmental policy, anthropology, development studies, conservation management, political ecology and public policy. The discussion will seek to ‘ambiguate key notions in the society-nature literatures, that is, work with the ambiguity that becomes exposed when different scholarly worldviews are applied to core concepts of environmental governance. Working dialectically with the framings of theorists and practitioners means moving at different levels of extension, probing generalisation and rethinking subjects. This will show how ideas of nature, knowledge, community, and identity are central. The journey I will pursue in this chapter and effectively continue in the following transects key themes in the literature on environmental and development issues that I will not attempt to treat comprehensively a futile task even with the best of intentions but instead I want to trace insightful tensions and contours in the landscapes of academic, practitioners and subjective knowledges that shape the individual and institutional behaviour of social actors. By focussing on boundaries, and the conceptual or physical movement across these, I claim that I can show useful insights into the processes through which actors engage in participative, democratic spaces. By evoking a journey through the literature, I shadow the journey that I myself followed when I entered into and pursued this research, coming from a career as aid worker and encounter with the Great Barrier Island setting. Entering into academic reflection on social and political situations from that background opened perspectives that are not easily available to a researcher arriving from the outside or evaluating social processes with less reference to practical experience. At the same time, a positioning on the boundaries of the settings studied that my own background with the frequent geographic and career changes allowed, can be said to have greatly elevated my ‘hermeneutical horizon, opening up better appreciation of multiple, overlapping contexts. The aim of this chapter is to reveal a range of features and entry points into a number of settings that I gained access to, even if not comprehensively but certainly illustrative. I want to show that abstraction needs to adopt not only an actor-grounded and situated methodology but equally a more subjective theorisation, in order to give new meaning to abstraction. The literature I will bring into the discussion will help me elaborate how simultaneously seeking out top-down, bottom-up and reflective positions can give complementary insights into processes of actor engagement over environmental governance. The reason is that the political, social and cultural complexities that determine human-nature, and particularly society-nature, relations impose a need for multiple perspectives. In the following sections I will construct several positions located on metaphoric boundaries that offer perspective on subject areas and cultures of practice. To do that, I will open three views, or categories of view: one as a top-down view, which uses analytical thinking looking at overviews, comparisons and indicators to form structural explanations that underlie theory and practice. A second position approaches actors within a situation and is interested in narratives that convey the struggles and explanations present in a given situation, as they are seen from the bottom up. And with a view that is neither top-down, nor bottom-up, I want to emphasize a self-conscious, reflective treatment of knowledge and the co-construction of world views that deliberative practices can entail. 1.1.1 Case study or research intervention? The scholarly practitioner as participant in knowledge production Before I enter the subject area however, I must first clarify my point of entry into and positionality within the subject. In particular, the performative character of social science research needs to be acknowledged. Scientific inquiry is recognized as a social practice mediated contextually through symbolic means {Foucault, 2002; Pryke, Rose, Whatmore, 2003}. Sociological research has documented the extent to which science is as much a socio-cultural activity as a technical enterprise. The post-positivist challenge to the social sciences that was evoked by Fischer and quoted introductory chapter, derives from evidence that the elements of empirical inquiry from observation and hypothesis formation through data collection and explanation are grounded in often limited theoretical assumptions of the socio-cultural practices through which they are developed {Root, 1993}. Scientific explanations therefore have to be understood as explanations offered by specific communities of inquirers situated in particular places and times, so Fischer emphasizes (1998). These are discursive communities that are located alongside and intermeshed with other political communities in the social landscape. This draws attention to positioning researcher and science within the political communities that are present. Attention must be paid throughout the approach, engagement and interpretation of social situations to be reflective about the relation of the researcher to the subject. In my engagement with the actors within the settings I investigated, my approach and interest was shaped by all of my curriculum vitae but especially by my background as former aid worker. At least three specific aspects of this career were particularly significant in forming my approach to this study and, in particular, the lines of questioning that I adopted. For many years while working on behalf of large non-governmental aid organisations like Oxfam and Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), when I was often assigned as project planner in collaboration with medical or logistics experts with the task to research the humanitarian, political and security context in a particular setting to identify priority needs an organisation was able to address and to design the detailed aid interventions. I led needs assessment missions lasting 2 to 4 weeks to Georgia, Tajikistan, Congo, Burundi, Syria, Iraq, and Nepal among others,. The output would consist of reports documenting findings of data collection and interviews, verbal and written interpretation of implications for launching aid operations, and proposals to governmental donor agencies that complied to institutional requirements and priorities in order to maximise chances of gaining funding support. Essentially this was a research role with an action orientation. My primary role while working for these international aid organisations was project manager and/or country representative, positions that I held in Russia. Chechnya, Congo, Kenya, Lebanon, and Mauritania among others. Aid projects would be managed by a team of expatriates and local staff, often growing into large, well-resourced and formalised organisations with up to 50 staff. This required me to manage teams and situations with a view to producing outcomes, conforming to organisational policies. As head of usually one of the larger NGOs in a sector, I would frequently also act on behalf of a wider community of aid agencies that shared similar values and objectives in collaborating and representing interests to government counterparts. The emphasis on advocating for universal rights and principles on behalf of vulnerable and victims under threat was an important advocacy priority for organisations like Oxfam and MSF, and thus was a critical rationale for situating, maintaining, and promoting many aid activities. At the same time I would be representing associations that had explicitly defined visions and principles in an organisational environment and so I had to be very self-conscious about the philosophical distinctions between advocacy, religious, purely charitable, bilateral or inter-governmental agencies. In other words, through this work I had been sensitized to the subtleties of organisational culture and its relationship to operational policies. In general, as a project manager I shared an outcome orientation that allowed me to identify with the role of other project managers in comparable organisational settings, even outside the domain international aid. The reason I found myself in a ten-year career as aid worker was in part due to a long-standing interest in foreign settings and the extensive time I had already spent living abroad. The familiarity with different cultures from growing up in the Middle East, emigrating during school years to New Zealand and working in several European countries not only opened my appreciation of how cultures and societies are distinguished but also permitted me to acquire conversational fluency in eight languages. Overhearing the words our interpreter used to translate my speech into Arabic for a group of village elders in a Sahel village, or joking with Russian militia officers to be able to enter an ethnic enclave in the Caucasus, added diverse points of view that only first-hand knowledge can make relevant to other situations. The value of knowing how language and cultural upbringing can shape world views, understanding and humour is invaluable when attempting to reflect on other situations from a position that is neither entirely inside nor outside but on the boundary between cultures and places that are in (dialectical) relation. 1.1.1.1 Adopting an inside-out view: focus on protagonist, on the relationship between identity and subject. While it is tempting to examine a situation from the point of view of those with the power to affect it the change makers and potential audience for the research findings it can be critical to also adopt the point of view of less influential actors. An inside out view seeks to show how outside forces influence the nature of polity, rather than using the people in the area of interest to provide a background against which to set the actions of outsiders {see also Routledge, Pacific History as seen from the Pacific Islands, Pacific Studies Spring 1985}. This study, in other words, seeks to be not merely island-centred but islander-oriented. The perspective thus adopted is that of a scholarly practitioner. Bentz and Shapiro {, 1998 #1684} use this term to recognise that in the enterprise of knowledge generation and critical reflection, there is a two-way relationship. The role of the scholarly practitioner involves â€Å"using professional practice and knowledge as a resource for the formulation and production of scholarly knowledge as well as for evaluating, testing, applying, extending, or modifying existing knowledge† (p. 66). Bentz and Shapiro stress that this requires also an awareness of the limits of knowledge, and, I would add, the contested nature of knowledge. This recognition brings attention to the production of knowledge in environmental politics. 1.1.1.2 Social science must be conscious of its performative character: Reconnecting the researcher with the researched There are a number of research traditions that address the ontological gap between researcher and the researched. Action research for one, is a participatory methodology that seeks to produce knowledge that emerges from context of action as a collaborative project between researcher and the researched. It typically sees the researcher performing functional roles within groups working together on real world projects and tasks (Wadsworth, 1998). Participatory research finds many other outlets and emphasizes a philosophy of co-production or research, from the formulation of the question, through reflection on outcomes to the communication of findings (Cornwall Jewkes, 1995). A methodology that seeks to discard theoretical preconceptions completely is grounded theory. Theories are grounded in the groups observable experiences, but researchers add their own insight into why those experiences exist. It is a method formulated by Strauss and Corbin that categorizes empirically collected data to build a general theory to fit the data (Barney G. Glaser, 2004; B.G. Glaser Strauss, 1967; A. McCarthy, 1999). The investigator develops conceptual categories from the data and then makes new observations to develop these categories. Hypotheses are derived directly from the data, and may be tested against it. All conclusions must be grounded in and supported by the data. Their seminal work, The Development of Grounded Theory (1967), moved researchers past the hypothesis-testing uses of raw data into the hypothesis-generating potential of their observations. The approach has been steadily expanding its reach within academia through sociology and social anthropology an d, more recently into applied disciplines like nursing and educational research. Notwithstanding the uptake of grounded philosophy by researchers motivated to reconnect with the empirical subject, the lack of theorizing underlying this may be criticized by more ‘sophisticated theorists like Habermas, who I later want to bring into this discussion. For the German, the lack of critical framing that grounded theory represents is a crucial shortcoming that needs to be addressed methodologically. I will begin this by first discussing methodological treatment of settings and context. 1.1.2 Accounting for context with mental models and ethnographic methods The cognitive patterns that underlie social behavior are not easily accessible to the researcher. Conceptualizing mental models that can account for communicative behavior in a way that relates to settings and context must represent basic notions of cognition such as ideology, knowledge and values. Ideologies in the sense used here, are general and abstract, principle based, axiomatic beliefs, while knowledge are the actual facts and beliefs held as true. Attitudes are taken to comprise opinion, beliefs, feelings, and intentions about specific issues, typically socially shared (see also Leiserowitz, Kates, Parris, 2006). A mental model then, is the categorical understanding constructed from ideologies, knowledge, and attitudes of specific contexts and situations. An accompanying notion is that of group knowledge as those social beliefs that which a group, or imagined community, holds to be true according to its own evaluation or verification (truth) criteria (eg science) and which can be doubted by outsiders. But such cultural, common ground knowledge is not challenged within groups, and is presupposed in public discourse, even when they are shifting as are the notions of conservation, environment and sustainability did that were discussed. 1.1.2.1 Context models as subjective representation To study context and its relation to subjective meanings, ethnographic approaches hold most promise as they work with subjective representation and group knowledge processes (e.g. Descola, 1996; Wolfe Yang, 1996). Such a view is also interested in how context structures social relations (communicative and interactional), social dynamics (group membership and interaction). But it also brings another interest relevant to the study of participation, of how cognition has a role in terms of framing goals, knowledge and other beliefs of participants in deliberation. The notion of context is used in scholarship as ambiguously as ‘environment is in wider discourses. To be able to treat it as an analytical object needs a basic model. By defining contexts and contextualization in terms of mental models and their role in discourse production and comprehension, this can account not only for the role of social representations such as attitudes and ideologies in discourse, but also allows a more subjective explanation of discourse and its variation in terms of personal mental models. The empirical studies will demonstrate this. Van Dijk (2001) sees context as a model of relevance that shapes actors opinions and actions. He recognizes that context is subjective and individual and with that is ideologically based and has coherence within group discourse. Thus, context models are subjective representations of social situation, including communicative events they define what is relevant. This makes an account of context critical for understanding participation. And subjective context framing may be ideologically biased. 1.1.2.2 Frames of referenceand the ‘black box of mental models The concept of frame of reference is also used commonly used to refer to the cognitive effect of contextual models (Swaffield, 1998). It describes and categorizes the attitudes displayed by individuals when discussing a management issue. The framing concepts in this study were defined as follows: A frame of reference is an analytical model of attitudes concerning a resource policy or management issue. A personal frame of reference refers to the attitudes expressed by an individual. A common frame of reference refers to the distinctive pattern of attitudes that is common to a number of individuals. However, there is no claim that the frame of reference as defined here represents cognitive processes. Rather, it is a model of the attitudes openly expressed by individuals when discussing an issue. A basic problem that remains, is that context, subjectivities and cognition remain inaccessible to a researcher. A ‘black box model of subjective context therefore lacks explanatory relevance. But as the subject of deliberation, context circumscribes the cognitive boundaries of actors ‘mentalities. For van Dijk (2001), the advantage of such an approach is that it accounts not only for the role of social representations, such as attitudes and ideologies in discourse, but also allows a more subjective explanation of discourse and its variation in terms of personal mental models. And since contexts are by definition unique and personal, context models of framings precisely allow an individual approach to contextualization to be combined with a more social one, in which shared representations, groups, and other societal aspects play a prominent role. 1.1.3 Boundaries: Locating and moving across by following, pushing or re-imagining phenomena ## I will begin with the premise that the totality of relations in a socio-ecological geography are meaningful, that is the relations between people, places and things. And that the inverse of relationships are distinctions that coalesce to form boundaries between categories and instances. This is worth emphasizing since the recognition that boundaries constrain meaning can draw attention to the contrived and therefore limiting nature of abstraction. How this premise will permit established abstraction and meanings to be questioned, fragmented and reassembled is the work that this chapter will begin and will be completed in the methodological chapter that follows. The first boundary to highlight and that can show what is meant by transgressing distinctions consists of the separation of human from non-human nature. Imagining environmental governance reform as regulating the entry of humans into nature and the export of non-human resources out of nature is counter-intuitive to any gardener. Fence lines, compost bins and patio seating all blur the boundaries. Self-identity for many derives from emotional attachments to home and garden, nurturing roles that a vegetable plot reinforces and status that manicured lawns or urban bio-diversity islands respectively can demonstrate. Thus the domain of interest should not be a non-human nature as an object of human intervention but instead a nature as a geography of human relations that are linked to an environment through diverse interests. This is a geography that is physically located in both the commons and in private property another paired abstraction that will prove to be divided by a blurred boundary. But this is also a geography that exists in the social imagination as social, cultural or political objects. The environment so seen can be conceived as the total of society-nature relations which relate to all material, subjective, cognitive, political, and other interests or dimensions. The challenge then becomes not in naming these complex relations but in thinking about them, in framing them. 1.1.4 Environmental governance as an adjustable lens [## develop] The first conceptual tool to prepare will thus be the notion of environmental governance as an adjustable lens. Rather than using the literature in an inevitably selective manner to stabilize the meaning of this concept at least for the duration of this discussion, I will adopt a counter-strategy of reinforcing the ambiguity of the notion and employing it with shifting meanings to approach the research problem from different scales, extension and perspectives. Environmental governance is a category of practices and ideas that are of interest to several perspectives. As a domain of practice it is the concern of academic text books (Durant, Fiorino, OLeary, 2004; Hempel, 1996; Kettl, 2002; Levy Newell, 2005) as much as ministerial policy statements {Ministry of the Environment 2000, 2003}, international donor policy, and publications of environmental agencies. In practice, actually relating good governance to ecological outcomes is near impossible. Choosing one arbitrary example from international experience, an in-depth evaluation of different forest management governance regimes in Madagascar showed how there were enormous difficulties in explaining the dynamics and assessing measures of sustainability and equity (McConnell Sweeney). The term of environmental governance can be encountered in a range of contexts. In a recent survey of issues in environmental policy and management Durant et al (ibid.) identify key topics in environmental governance as sustainability, the precautionary principle, common-pool resource theory, deliberative democracy, civic environmentalism, environmental justice, property rights, environmental conflict resolution, devolution, among others. This has introduced a range of perspectives from environmental economics, democratic theory, public policy, law, political science, and public administration. In effect, environmental governance does not so much represent a theoretical field or a professional discipline, but a theme of shared concerns in scholarship and applied practice. This chapter will consider how environmental governance can be re-approached by detaching it from the portfolio of resource managers and relocating it within a wider arena of development and democratic practices. In the development field the notion that the public, stakeholders or local people have an important role in environmental governance is emphasized. Environmental governance includes the structures (e.g. management regimes), organizational forms (e.g. farmer research teams, water user associations), processes (e.g. multi-stakeholder dialogue), actors and rules (e.g. negotiated access rights and boundaries) that determine how resources are managed at international, national and local levels. (International Development Research Centre) Aside from government agencies and development practitioners, scholars will also characterize contemporary environmental governanceas a â€Å"collaborative approach to policy formulation and implementation†(Durant et al., 2004, pp. 22-23). Environmental governance therefore is relevant to several different fields of interest to scholars and can be framed in several ways. In the first instance, environmental governance is political and so a subject of political inquiry. This opens up a diverse body of literature to employ in developing an approach to environmental governance. Another dimension that arises out of the political, and that the following discussion shows to be explicitly present, is deliberative democracy. But the most promising approach to begin to problematize environmental governance lies with the notion of development and its contemporary manifestation as sustainable development, particularly its application by foreign agents in local settings. Each of these dim ensions embodies unresolved tensions tensions that can also be encountered in many sites of social theory and practice which centre on epistemological concerns. It may also be useful to think in terms of environmental governance as a body of political theory, as Humphrey has done (2007), that has a central focus upon environmental concerns as these relate to democracy, justice, globalization, political economy, freedom, the welfare state, and other aspects of political life. This body of work is no longer as closely related to the environmental ethics and values of nature of a deep ecology, but is more integrated into mainstream political theory. For the purpose of this discussion, I will develop the notion of environmental governance as a conceptual tool to approach the research problem from different scales, extension and perspectives. The complementary notions of environmental governance offer entry points into related literatures and cultures of practice: Environmental Democracy, Environmental Reform, Environmental Collaboration, and Environmental Sustainability. Environmental governance can thus best be treated as both as assembly of practice and as a body of theory that is doing political work. To reconnect theory and practice will be the task of this chapter. 1.1.5 We are being ‘participated again: An incomplete typology of participative approaches There is an emerging consensus that the public need to be more involved in the processes of environmental decision making. From the international arena exemplified in documents such as Agenda 21 and the initiatives of the World Bank to national government policy initiatives, local policy and planning systems such as the New Zealand Resource Management Act, and in the discourses of actors including scientists and business groups, a role for public participation has been instituted (Davies, 2002). Implicit in the idea of participation is that the initiative lies with the reformers, the change-makers to approach the public with a project to respond to. From the perspective of an un-associated citizen, the prospect of another round of workshops and discussion groups events that have become familiar to many villagers in target zones of international aid the process is passive and invites the expression not surprisingly encountered in developing nations of ‘we are being participated again. The notion of taking part in environmental decision-making and in contrast to an authority taking top-down action is taken up by a wide range of terms and practices. Participation in the social science is an umbrella term including different means for the public to directly participate in political, economic, management or other social decisions. Participatory decision making then infers a level of proportionate decision making power and can take place along any realm of human social activity, including economic (e.g. participatory economics), political (e.g. participatory democracy), cultural (e.g. communalism) or familial (e.g. Feminism). In practice, the term participation applies to processes initiated by an agency seeking to initiate a project or introduce reform. It thus becomes critical to ask, who is invited to participate, and by whom. What regulatory requirements may apply, is there precedent, and what resources are available are only some of the parameters that the term participation by itself does not convey. In the government sector, at least in New Zealand, the word consultation is frequently used to describe a range of processes to engage with the community i.e. citizens and citizen associations. These range from the prescribed processes in the Local Government Act (2002) such as the special consultative procedure (section 83) to informal processes such as e-mail chat groups or anecdotal local knowledge. In this report, the term consultation will be used in a broad sense to include any form of government agency engagement with local communities, including activities carried out by an authority to inform itself of community views as well as specific consultation exercises. Collaboration is another category that carries the notion to work jointly with others or together especially in an intellectual endeavour. The sense that will be used here, emphasises the absence of authority, a consensual decision making process with respect to an established domain. Dispute resolution is a related practice that seeks to reduce differences or to seek a solution when a conflict situation exists. When the services of a third party are utilized, this is often referred to as mediation. These categories denote some of the dimensions that structure relationships in public involvement: consultation as an exercise in information exchange, participation implying a direct input into deliberation over decisions linked to

Expansion and the Evolutionary Lottery :: Evolution Essays

Expansion and the Evolutionary Lottery For a young scholar learning the basic concepts of science and biology, evolution was this grand theory of past life becoming more like present life over time via the utilization of such complicated and foreboding means as "natural selection" and "survival of the fittest." I came to understand that there was endless diversity of life, and variation was a result of the interactions of organisms with their environments. Natural selection placed pressure on the organisms forcing adaptations to be made, hence new species to arise over time. The oversimplified image of evolution that began to form in my head involved one single organism adapting to its environment and undergoing change in its own life span, therefore that one organism experiences evolution in action. I didn't think evolution was a process of becoming more "perfect" necessarily, but "better suited for more diverse situations," which boiled down to being better. Obviously this picture I was conjuring up was far from the mos t scientifically logical, and I was surprised and impressed to hear a better explanation. Evolution is depicted as an inconceivably time- consuming and expansion-driven process; it is not about "survival of the fittest" or being perfect, rather the most able to produce genetically variable offspring (less likely to be eliminated by natural selection). The major discrepancy between the two (oversimplified and clarified) formulations of evolution is the importance of random innate expansion, which arguably is a quality assigned not only to energy and matter on Earth, but also to evolution and as the entire universe. One of the simpler discrepancies in my illogical view of evolution merely involved timescale and the mechanism of change. A single organism cannot evolve within its own life span because of environmental pressure. The very first of Mayr's seventeen principles of inheritance states, "genetic material is constant ('hard'); it cannot be changed by the environment or by use and disuse of the phenotype... Genes cannot be modified by the environment... There is no inheritance of acquired characters" (Mayr, 2001, p. 91). Therefore, one organism cannot possibly experience evolution in action as a result of environmental interactions. The term adaptation creates some confusion here because it is so often coupled with evolutionary change and expresses a change suited for certain environmental conditions. The fact of the matter is evolution, as well as adaptation, occur over many generations and changes are not directly related to the conditions of the environment.

Erikson’s Stages of Development, Relating to the Great Santini Essay

Erikson’s Stages of Development, Relating to the Great Santini The Great Santini is about a father who is a great pilot in the military. He uses his military training to help him be a father; treating his children like recruits. He has a supportive wife, and four children, including Ben, the oldest. He commands his children and they must obey his every orders. Ben has a hard time dealing with his father and his need for acceptance. The movie focuses on his cluelessness to family life and being a father. Ben has a hard time succeeding through the stages of Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development, because his father’s authoritarian parenting styles keep him from progressing. Authoritarian parents are â€Å"parents who make arbitrary rules, expect unquestioned obedience from their children, punish transgressions, and value obedience to authority† (E. Wood, S. Wood, & Boyd, 2011, p. 261). During Erikson’s first stage, trust vs. mistrust, â€Å"infants learn to trust or mistrust depending on the degree and regularity of care, love, and affection provided by parents or caregivers† (Wood et al. 2011, p. 261). When playing a basketball game with his son, he resorts to pushing and shoving in order to win. Ben’s father tells him that no one in the family has ever beaten him in anything, then, Ben makes the last basket and beats his dad, his dad changes up the rules and makes him play for another basket, this time he begins to call his son a little girl and tells him he is nothing. Ben is unable to develop trust with his father, which will cause an unhealthy personality. Researchers have concluded, â€Å"Erikson’s theoretical propositions have had wide influences on understanding and further theorizing in areas of child development, adolescence, adulthood, and aging. Much child-rearing, educational, and clinical practice has also been influenced, either explicitly or implicitly, by his stage model of development† (Rosenthal, Gurney, & Moore, 1981). Ben is more harsh and rough on the outside, but soft and sensitive on the inside, because his father has not shown him love and compassion. His mother, who is loving and supportive, helps balance out his personality. Autonomy vs. shame and doubt is Erickson’s second stage, this stage is when â€Å"Children learn to express their will and independence, to exercise some control, and to make choices, if not, they experience shame and doubt† (Wood et al. , 2011, p. 261). Ben’s father holds such high standards that he must come out autonomy because his father has told him there is no other option. This also goes along with stage three, initiative vs. guilt, when â€Å" Children begin to initiate activities, to plan and undertake tasks, and to enjoy developing motor and other abilities. If not allowed to initiate or if made to feel stupid and considered a nuisance, they may develop a sense of guilt† (Wood et al. , 2011, p. 261). Ben has a great amount of pressure on him to be the best and do the best, he is afraid that he will not live up to his father’s expectations. When Ben had finally beat his father in the backyard basketball game, his father wanted him to win by two baskets instead of one, he was putting him down and telling his son he wasn’t good enough. His mother had to step in to support her son and says to her husband, â€Å"Don’t you talk to me like that! Now, he beat you and it was beautiful†(Carlinio, 1979). His mother helps him become initiative rather than his father who makes him feel guilty for not being good enough. Ben has major conflict in the stage of industry vs. inferiority, this is â€Å" Children develop industriousness and feel pride in accomplishing tasks, making things, and doing things. If not encouraged or if rebuffed by parents and teachers they may develop a sense of inferiority† (Wood et al. , 2011, p. 261). Ben has always been told to be the best; he is becoming a well-rounded boy on the outside because of his acceleration in sports and school. He takes a sense of pride in his work, but on the inside still doubts himself. He knows his father wants more from him, Ben knows he will never be able to be as good as his father. In the stage, identity vs. role confusion he is finally able to start caring about his wants more than his fathers. At his high school basketball game his father is screaming at him from the sidelines and he chooses not to listen and does what he thinks is best. He wins the game on his own and sees that he can do it without his father. The movie ends about the time that Ben is in the stage of a young adult, â€Å" Adolescents must make the transition from childhood to adulthood, establish an identity, develop a sense of self, and consider a future occupational identity. Otherwise, role confusion can result† (Wood et al. , 2011, p. 261). Ben is able to love his father after a night of his eighteenth birthday, when his father becomes extremely drunk, and lets down his guard, and makes a toast to his son, â€Å"I’d like to propose a toast, to my son. He is eighteen today. He has just ordered his first drink. Before he drinks it, I’d like to wish him a long life, a wife as fine as his mother, and a son as fine as he’s been. To my son† (Carlinio 1979). This shows Ben that his father loves and respects him. He is able to show compassion to his father, making it easier for him to show compassion to others. Because of Ben’s fathers authoritarian parenting styles and high demands, Ben has a hard time maturing through Erickson’s stages, but Ben is finally able to develop a sense of self. When watching The Great Santini, I noticed that Erikson’s psychosocial stages of development show through in Ben’s personality and self. Each stage Ben experiences, and depending on how he is treated, will affect the outcome of the person he will become. The reason people are not the same is because every one experiences different things during each stage, which makes every one different. Each person must work through the conflicts in each stage to become a healthy person, just like Ben does in the movie.

Fiddler on the Roof Essay Example

Fiddler on the Roof Essay Example Fiddler on the Roof Paper Fiddler on the Roof Paper The opening scene bursting to life with its historical brilliance and explanation of Jewish tradition is an amazing opening to a musical. As soon as you see and hear Topol you know you are in for a wonderful treat. Tevye (Topol) a poor milkman has five young girls to feed. He battles with tradition and his love for his children. His three eldest all fall in love with men who are traditionally not acceptable, an underprivileged man, a revolutionary and a man who is not Jewish. They are eventually allowed to marry the men whom they love, with a few hiccups on the way, without the use of a matchmaker. He and all the Jewish people of Russia are forced to leave their lands and leave the country in exile. A great story of how Tevyes love, pride and faith help him face the oppression of the turn-of-the century tsarist Russia. : Norman Jewisons adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof has many great screen shots and is a visual marvel. Jewisons Fiddler on the Roof is bright, both in appearance and in mood. Jewisons vision of tsarist Russia is brilliant, bright, wonderful and yet extremely dangerous especially for the Jews. This is portrayed through costume, a great set and a brilliantly hilarious script. As aforementioned the script is brilliant and has a lot of speech for a musical. The language is perhaps more modern than it would have been in tsarist Russia however with it being written in English it is hard to tell how a Russian would have spoke. The accents that they have chosen for Fiddler on the Roof are perfect for the type of musical it is. Joseph Steins script is extremely funny and tremendously emotional. The lyrics of the songs are wonderful and proof of this is how well known and notorious the songs have become. The songs that come to mind are Matchmaker, If I Were a Rich Man and Sunrise, Sunset, even modern artists have attempted to use these songs in their profession. The signing is radiant and breathtaking which would be excellent on stage and film. Topols singing, acting and dancing combination is without a doubt the highlight of the film. Every actor even the extras are good singers, dancers and actors without a single performer lowering the brilliance of the musical. Topol is a comic genius; he has compassion for acting which is evident in Fiddler on the Roof. Leonard Frey is a fantastic supporting actor and deserves as much credit for his role in Fiddler on the Roof as any other actor. All aspects of this film are brilliant the acting, directing, lyrics, singing and dancing are all equally great. Fiddler on the Roof is stunning, elated and jubilant a musical masterpiece. Due to the great original ideas that this musical holds and the qualities that it possesses Fiddler on the Roof is without a doubt one to see. Rating: five out of five.