3.3 How others see us The relative nature of poverty is an old theme in social science. Adam Smith, the eighteenth century writer who is often regarded as the founding father of economics, put it this way: ‘By necessaries I understand not only the commodities that are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even the lowest orders, to be without’ (Smith, 1776, quoted in Sen, 1981). Ideas of what it is to be poor are
1.1.1 Summary Identity involves: a link between the personal and the social; some active engagement by those who take up identities; being the same as some people and different from others, as indicated by symbols and representations; a tension between how much control I have in constructing my identities and how much control or constraint is exercised over me.
1.3 Sexuality and parenthood In this course sexuality is used to refer to heterosexual reproductive sex, relationships and relations, and the meanings and discursive constructions which are associated with these. Sexual practices resulting in conception and the experience of parenthood are among the few remaining areas that are considered a ‘natural’ part of human existence. Just as sexuality has been seen as a ‘natural’, elemental drive in human identity, parenthood has also been closely associated with the ‘n
1.1 Declining fertility In Britain, fertility decline occurred roughly between 1860 and 1930 – a span which includes the middle and end of the Victorian period (1860–1900), the Edwardian period (1900–1914), the First World War (1914–1918) and the 1920s. We will focus on the British experience, although a similar phenomenon has been noted in many other parts of the world. Fertility decline, also known as the demographic transition, is characterised by a shift from a ‘traditional’ norm of large families an
4.3 Live fast, die young Both the automobile and PC industries were characterised by a great deal of turbulence in the first 20 to 30 years of their existence. In both cases, many new firms entered the industry, introduced new varieties of the product, and soon left the industry, leaving only a few dozen firms to compete during the growth phase. By 1926 only 33 per cent of the firms that had started producing automobiles during the previous 22 years had survived. In the case of PCs, by 1999 only 20 per cent of the fi
4.2 The industry life cycle The comparison between the automobile industry and the PC industry makes sense only if we concentrate on similar periods in their evolution. We will concentrate here on the ‘early’ development of both industries, in what will be called the ‘introductory’ and ‘early growth’ phases in their life cycles. This is the period running from 1900 to 1930 in the automobile industry and from 1975 to 2000 in the PC industry. The automobile industry refers here to all firms producing cars and
Keep on learning   There are more than 800 courses on OpenLearn for you to Acknowledgements The content acknowledged below is Proprietary (see terms and conditions) This content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this 2.3 Activity 1: Flora Macdonald temp – ground stewardess – office manager – accountant Introduction The material presented here focuses on the politics of racial violence in Britain. The material is an audio file, originally 30 minutes in length, and examines the issues around this subject. It was recorded in 1995. This OpenLearn course provides a sample of Level 2 study in Sociology. Introduction This course looks at developing reading skills in the context of using Social Science materials. This material is primarily an audio file, originally 11 minutes in length and recorded in 1988. This OpenLearn course provides a sample of Level 2 study in Sociology. Acknowledgements The content acknowledged below is Proprietary (see terms and conditions). This content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence Course image: Quinn Do 7 Conclusion We have explored nations, national self-determination and secession as living political ideas. Perhaps the key points to emerge from the discussion are that: the nation-state is the basic political community in the contemporary world, despite regional and global challenges; subjective approaches to defining nations, prioritising awareness of belonging to a national group, have advantages over efforts to construct objective definitions; Acknowledgements This free course is an adapted extract from the course DD203 Power, dissent, equality, which is currently out of presentation This chapter is taken from Living Political Ideas (eds) Geoff Andrews and Micheal Saward published in association with Edinburgh University Press (2005) as part of a series of books which forms part of the course DD203 Power, Dissent, Equality: Understanding Contemporary Politics. Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see Author(s): 6.7 What about alternatives to secession? We have seen that in principle there are alternatives: cultural autonomy or a form of federalism. There are alternative ways to recognise 'national' identity apart from secession. One conclusion to arise from this discussion of secession is that we are not cast adrift without any general principles or guidelines. We have also seen how the complexities of the real political world impinge upon poli 6.3 What size of majority vote should decide the issue? In many types of democratic vote, a bare majority (technically, 50 per cent +1) is enough to decide outcomes. But often constitutional changes – changes which would affect the basic structures or political rules of the game – are regarded as needing ‘supermajorities’ of, say, 60 or 70 per cent. A basic change in the sovereign political unit would certainly count as a constitutional change. If the Bs get to vote, we might be concerned if only a bare majority favoured secession, especia 5.3 How devolution in Scotland differs from devolution in Wales Devolution for Wales, rejected by the Welsh in a 1979 referendum, was also part of the constitutional reform package of the Labour government. However, in September 1997, the Welsh voted for the establishment of a National Assembly for Wales. The referendum result in favour was far narrower than in Scotland. On a 50.3 per cent turn-out in Wales, only 50.6 per cent voted in favour, indicating a far less entrenched sense of political identity and difference from the rest of the UK on the part o 2.5 Summary of Section 1 England, Scotland and Wales are nations. Wales was conquered by the English in 1282 and its parliamentary union with England took place in 1536. The United Kingdom of Great Britain was formed by the Act of Union of 1707, although the term Great Britain had been in use since 1603, when James VI of Scotland became James I of England (including Wales). Later unions created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and, 8 Conclusions In this course you have learned about the difference between the analogue world we inhabit and the digital world of the computer. I've described how features of our world can ‘cross the boundary’ and be represented or modelled in the digital world, and then brought back across the boundary to us. More excitingly, computer programs that manipulate digital representations of our world enable us to: simulate physical and social processes;< 4.3 Representing moving images A moving image is simply a series of still images presented at sufficiently short time intervals that the eye smoothes over the change from one image to the next. In practice, this means the images must change at a minimum rate of around 20 per second; if the rate is lower then the moving image flickers or is jerky. Each still image that goes to make up a moving image is known as a frame. So far as computers are concerned, moving images are of two types. One type is animations
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