Showing papers by "Albion College published in 2002"

Issues and initiatives surrounding rail freight transportation in Europe

Abstract: With social responsibility now fully integrated into many areas of business such as accounting and general business practices, there is a need for logistics to embrace the same considerations and see where they can be integrated into logistics management. Social responsibility generally means that an organization's behavior needs to be measured by more than its economic desirability or how much it favors the shareholders but how it affects the public at large, customers and local communities. This is an exploratory study to assess the degree to which social responsibility has permeated logistics operations and where it should be incorporated for greatest effect. A large number of the participating logistics practitioners said social responsibility was already an important concern in their companies and predicted that it would continue to grow in importance in coming years. Social responsibility is most often expressed in codes of ethics, and the most immediate concern is fairness to suppliers and customers and the use of logistics to minimize waste and maximize salvage of discarded parts.

Multiple paternity in the nurse shark, Ginglymostoma cirratum

Abstract: For over a decade, we have been studying the reproductive behavior of the nurse shark, Ginglymostoma cirratum, in the Dry Torugas off the Florida Keys, an important mating and nursery ground for this species. In the course of these studies, we have used a variety of tags and tagging protocols to monitor individual animals. Here we report the use of molecular methods for the genetic analysis of nurse sharks. Specifically we have analyzed genetic variation at the MHC II alpha locus using the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) followed by restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) analysis of the amplified products. We found this technique to be a relatively rapid and reliable method for identifying genetic differences between individual sharks. Applying this method to a family of sharks consisting of a mother and 32 pups, we demonstrate that at least four fathers must have fathered this brood. Multiple paternity in the nurse shark suggests a mechanism by which populations of this species may maximize genetic variability. This seems especially valuable for philopatric species whose migratory movement, and thus potential for genetic diversity, is limited.

Crimes of Color: Risk, Profiling, and the Contemporary Racialization of Social Control

Abstract: In the United States the phenomenon of racial profiling has emerged as an important and controversial issue within political and criminal justice policy debates. For the most part, these debates have assumed a sort of racism at work in order to explain law enforcement's use of criminal profiles largely determined by racial classifications. Accordingly, many have worked to expose this allegedly racist behavior in the hopes that such exposure will bring an end to the practice. This essay argues that racial profiling is embedded in much larger social developments that must be explored in order to understand the role race now plays in the maintenance of social order in contemporary American society.

Inverting Development Discourse in Colombia: Transforming Andean Hearths

Abstract: In the 1990s, 60 percent of the households in Tuquerres, a highland town in Colombia's southwestern Andes, bought their first gas range for cooking. The residents frame their purchases as a manifestation of "development" and "modernization," say- ing the ranges are more economico, rapido, and limpio—terms readily translated as economic, fast, and clean. However, the spread of gas ranges by independent initiative inverts a top-down model of development through government and corporate actors. The resi- dents' use of a development discourse does not emanate primarily from a government or corporate development apparatus but, rather, results from the incorporation of development terms into a local history of hierarchy and stigma. Because residents use these terms to counter stigma and hierarchy, the terms involve unexpected nuances: Economico concerns spending money and cash pur- chases, ra'pido refers to new forms of family and sociability, and limpio becomes a foil to the shame of dirt. Use of these terms incorpo- rating these expanded meanings reveals that Tuquerrenos embrace aspects of development, but on their own terms. (Keywords: development, modernization, households, Colombia, Andes)

The Early Cold War and American Political Development: Reflections on Recent Research

Abstract: This paper is a review essay of three books representing new research into the relationship between Cold War mobilization and postwar American political development: Michael Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–1954 (Cambridge University Press, 1998); Guy Oakes, The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture (Oxford University Press, 1994); and Peter Trubowitz, Defining the National Interest: Conflict and Change in American Foreign Policy (University of Chicago Press, 1998).

Tourism and the Market Revolution

Abstract: The nearly simultaneous publication of these three books on nineteenthcentury mineral springs resorts marks the maturation of the history of tourism and its inclusion in the mainstream of historical studies. For years the study of tourism stood outside traditional historiography, regarded as a subject for sociology or cultural studies. Even the most important works to emerge over the past decade or so, including John Sears' Sacred Places (1989), Dona Brown's Inventing New England (1995), and Cindy Aron's Working at Play (1999), addressed broader issues such as tourism's cultural importance, its commercial development, or the concept of leisure in American life. The appearance of Orvar Lofgren's theoretical work, On Holiday (1999), and the reissue of Dean MacCannell's classic sociological study, The Tourist (1976; reprint, 1999), might lead some readers to assume that theory and the most general questions about tourism's historical significance were again dominating the subfield. But Charlene Lewis, Jon Sterngass, and Theodore Corbett have used the archetypal method of social history, the case study, to remind historians of nineteenth-century America that tourism and leisure were central to American culture and society. The resorts that these historians study both created and responded to the major changes of nineteenth-century America: the Market Revolution, the process of class formation, the commercialization of leisure time, and the construction of regional identities. What some scholars might see as the esoteric diversions of a dissipated leisure class

Shifting Terrain: Styles of Liberalism, Periodization, and Levels of Analysis

Abstract: The appraisal of background conditions is an important but often neglected element of political interpretation. Influential interpretations of American politics, such as Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America, dismiss the importance of changing political contexts. Set in terms of the debate over “American exceptionalism,” this article explores changes in political mood in the United States during the twentieth century. Hartz is not wrong to assert the persistence of a uniform underlying political culture in the United States, nor the lasting impact of Lockeanism in establishing boundaries to possibility—for the left and the right. But a finer-grained appraisal of the interaction between political-cultural ethos and activism is possible. As David Greenstone rightly argued, contestation still occurs within a predominantly liberal society. This article contends that the character of this contestation is determined by the nature of political periods produced by interpretations of the underlying Lockean bedrock by political actors. It makes explicit that Hartz and Greenstone were operating at different levels of analysis—Hartz established the persistence of dedication to Lockean liberal tenets in the deep structure of American politics, while Greenstone's interpretation established a meso-level of analysis, above this deep structure. The present article adds temporal periodization to this meso-level. Political actors make history upon a stage received from the past—in the United States, the Lockean bedrock—but they inflect this stage with crucial interpretations that set or stretch the limits of political expression in a new period. It discerns four varieties of liberalism—economic liberalism, social state liberalism, social movement liberalism and cold war liberalism—that have interpreted the deep structure differently since the 1920s. It also suggests that sensitivity to historical changes in political mood does not necessitate repudiation of Hartz's thesis of Lockean liberal predominance in the United States.

COATT: a state-wide initiative to evaluate and improve teacher technology education

Abstract: Like many other states, Michigan has recently instituted minimum technology standards for pre-service teachers. A group of teacher education institutions decided that that standard needed to be a baseline rather than an end goal. Together they formed the Consortium for Outstanding Achievement in Teaching with Technology (COATT), whose purpose is to set in place a formal process to recognize pre-service, and eventually in-service, teachers for going beyond the mandated standard. Here we discuss both the process of bringing the consortium together and the progress of our students as they applied for the M-COATT certificate. This article discusses the origins of the consortium, the evaluation process, the results of the first rounds of evaluation, and the possible future of the consortium.