1 Developing reading skills John Clarke and course team member Ross Fergusson, look at developing reading skills in the context of Social Science resources, with suggestions on how to read such materials critically and effectively. The material is primarily an audio file, 11 minutes in length and recorded in 1998. Participants in the audio programme were: John Clarke Professor of Social Policy at The Open University; Ross Ferguson Social Scie
Learning outcomes After studying this unit you should be able to: understand how arguments may be presented in the Social Sciences.
Learning outcomes On completion of this unit, you should be able to: illustrate how cities can be represented as dangerous places to live; give examples of the place of crime in representations of cities.
7.1 History So far, I have provided a brief historical background for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, one that accounts for their distinctive identities and for the origins of their differing role within the UK. I have also defined devolution as an asymmetric decentralisation process which responds to the claims advanced by the nations constituting the UK state. What, then, do we mean by Britain? Is it a nation? If so, when did the British nation begin to exist? The historian Linda Colley
5.5 Devolution in outline Through devolution, Westminster has devolved different functions to the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales and the Northern Ireland Assembly (Hazell, 2000, p. 4).[Brian McG1] 5.4 Devolution in Northern Ireland: a particular case Devolution in Northern Ireland has been an integral part of the post-1994 peace process, which aims to share power between the two divergent communities, the Unionist-Protestant majority and the Republican-Catholic minority. All-party talks, chaired by the former US Senator George Mitchell, followed the 1997 renewal of a paramilitary ceasefire. The decommissioning of arms by paramilitary groups was made a condition of the talks, but no specific date for its accomplishment was ever given. Thi 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 5.2 Devolution in Scotland Scotland endured a long and complicated process towards self-determination. In a 1979 referendum, the Scots voted in favour of the Labour government proposals to establish a Scottish Parliament, but, thanks to a special majority provision requiring at least 40 per cent of the registered electorate to vote in favour, devolution was rejected when only 32.9 per cent of the electorate voted in favour in the referendum. 3.2 Sub-state forms of nationalism The advancement of democracy in contemporary Western nation-states and the intensification of globalisation processes have encouraged the re-emergence of nationalist movements representing oppressed or silenced nations that demand the right to self-determination. In the case of ethnic groups formed by people of immigrant origin, democracy has provided them with the tools to pursue the right to develop and practice their indigenous culture and language alongside those of the host country. One 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, 2.4 Northern Ireland Ireland was long considered a de facto province of England, a colonial possession dominated politically and militarily by its more powerful neighbour to the east. The English divided Ireland into counties for administrative purposes, introduced English law and established a Parliament in England and Ireland in 1297, within which only the Anglo-Irish were represented. By the fourteenth century Irish discrimination by the English had prompted widespread protests, which had resulted in a revival 2.3 Wales In 1282, Edward I conquered Wales and the Statute of Rhuddlan (or Statute of Wales, 1284) established English rule. Rather than involve the assimilation of the Welsh by the English the conquest saw ‘a colonial system … established in those parts of Llywelyn's Principality which were by 1284 in the hands of the king’ (Davies, 1991, p. 166). In 1400, Owain Glyndwr led the most outstanding and successful rising in Wales against the new order and the tyranny of the English border barons, wh 2.2 Scotland Having enjoyed political independence until 1707, the survival of many of Scotland's institutions – notably its systems of law, religion and education – after Union with England contributed to the preservation of its singular identity. The different way in which Scotland began to be incorporated into the UK, through monarchical ascent (of James I of Scotland to the English throne) rather than by conquest (as was the case in Wales and Ireland), may account for the lesser impact the develo 2.1 England England played a dominant role in the medieval history of Britain, and the history of the UK is undoubtedly the history of the political and cultural power of England in comparison to Scotland, Wales and Ireland. In the making of the UK, each component nation played a different role: the English and Scottish kingdoms, the incorporation of Wales into the English Crown, and the subjugation of Ireland. The making of the UK was complex and fraught with violent confrontations, particularly virule 5.3.2 Productivity difference The preceding discussion has only considered what would happen if all women undertake less investment in human capital than men. If men and women invest to the same extent, human capital theory suggests that no wage differences would be observed. What happens, however, if there are differences in skill levels both between genders and within gender groups? To consider this we will also make the additional assumption that firms do not know when recruiting workers who are the most productive. Ho 4.3 Summary In this section we have tried to sketch some of the main lines of division in social constructions of social issues. The distinction between the natural and the social in constructing the causes that underlie social issues is a profound and recurrent one. A ‘social’ orientation involves the construction of social causes and conditions as the explanations for social issues. However, it is also important to bear in mind that such an orientation will itself be complicated by differences of p 3.6 Summary Three explanations of poverty developed by social scientists have been considered. The first sees poverty as natural or inevitable, the second focuses on the behaviour of poor people, while the third analyses poverty as the result of economic or political processes. Considering these explanations makes it possible to draw some conclusions about the social science approach to social problems: It relies on arguments making causal claims, rather than ass 4.2.2 ATM layer The primary functions of the ATM layer are associated with the routing and switching of ATM cells. Because ATM cells are packets, the switches are packet switches and the switching operation can be called forwarding, but by convention, because the ATM layer provides a connection-oriented service, the term ‘forwarding’ is generally not used. The path cells take and the resources allocated to them depend on their service category. This is determined when a virtual connection is 3.5 Internet protocol (IP) At the time of writing (2002), two versions of IP are available: versions 4 and 6. In this section I shall describe version 4, which is abbreviated to IPv4, as it is the more widely available version. Version 6 may eventually replace version 4 because it has some additional features that may prove essential for multiservice networks. IPv4 is the main TCP/IP protocol in the internetwork layer of the TCP/IP reference model. It supports a connectionless service between hosts in an interne 2.2 Vertical communication Figure 6 shows the OSI view of adjacent layers. The interface between two layers in the same system is called a service access point (SAP). One of the features of a service access point is that it has an identifier, or an address, which allows each communication between adjacent layers to be uniquely identified. The processes that communicate across the interface are called entities. These are typically software routines, but may also be hardware components. The notation in Figu
Author(s):
