Chapter 7, ‘One of Geometry’s Nicest Applications’, relates the digging of the Deep-George draining tunnel (1771–1800), named after George III, King of Great Britain and Hanover. During the planning phase, surveyors designed this engineering project with a previously unknown level of detail. Jean-André Deluc, Fellow of the Royal Society and reader to Queen Charlotte, visited the Harz mines three times as the operations were under way. Deluc’s geological and meteorological inquiries led him to perform barometric experiments in these mines. He relied on practitioners’ data to test and calibrate his instruments, marvelling about their precision in the Philosophical Transactions and the Journal des Sçavans. Scholars and amateurs – from Goethe to Watt – but also merchants and their wives rushed to visit the project. Year after year, journals reported to the public how the various sections of the tunnel connected seamlessly. In the late eighteenth century, the two worlds of natural scientists and mine engineers were meeting one last time, this time around common issues of precision, data gathering, and instrumentation.

This chapter introduces donor financing of education reform in developing countries and the global compacts in the sector. There is an assumption that learning was not part of these compacts and if only it were part of the discourse and learning was consistently measured, this crisis would not be upon us. However, the first global event in Jomtien, Thailand in 1990 included a significant and urgent obligation of the donor community to address learning. This concerted focus disappeared in following global events. Nonetheless, donors influenced by the shared passion for learning at Jomtein were consistently involved with measuring learning, helping to keep an eye on the unfolding learning deficit. Three examples are offered to illustrate this commitment – in a project (the Indian District Primary Education), across regions and during the primary early grades. These examples shine a spotlight on the tried and tested assessments of learning. In spite of donor focus on this important aspect of education, there is a learning crisis across developing countries.

This chapter focuses on the writing of Sterling Brown and Zora Neale Hurston, specifically their representations of the folk and folk culture in the 1930s. In addition, it charts the development of their work from the 1920s into the 1940s and World War II. Both writers critiqued the practices and discourses of contemporary ethnography and their assertion of the disappearance of the folk and their culture in the face of modernization, a perspective largely adopted by the politics of the New Deal and the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP). Both writers confirmed the continued relevance and adaptability of Black culture and its place within both the African Diaspora and the national project of the United States so that their work for the FWP produced a counternarrative to its perspective. This chapter argues that a focus on the work of Brown – himself a self-identified leftist – and Hurston demonstrates that the writing of this period does not break down along strictly oppositional lines but is expansive, dialogic, and malleable.

Sequence organization was the pioneering insight that gave rise to conversation analysis (CA) and it remains the primary assumption in CA studies about how discourse is structured and how speakers manage their talk. In order to study discourse in an empirically grounded way, we must demonstrate how our analysis reflects the participants’ understanding of their own talk. CA does this through the concept of “response relevance.” When a speaker talks, they make relevant some “next” response, so speakers are always responding to some prior turn and simultaneously making relevant a next turn. In this way, participants demonstrate their understandings of prior talk while responding. These demonstrations form the basis of the “next turn proof procedure,” which is how CA uses participants’ responses as demonstrations of participants’ own analyses of prior talk. In this chapter, I explain how CA’s focus on sequence and “next” turns allows for an empirical understanding of how discourse is organized. I first outline the principles of sequence organization, starting with the concept of response relevance and adjacency pairs, before explaining pre-, insert and post-expansion components. Next, I review sequence research from the past four decades, highlighting the focus on specific sequences such as pre-sequences, storytelling and the effect of institutional contexts. More recent streams in sequence research include the investigation of “lapses” or discontinuities in interaction, the attempts to describe overall sequence structures of full (typically institutional) encounters, the focus on temporality, and investigations of closing sequences. Finally, I discuss the (sometimes uncritical) use of the words “activity” and “project” in CA research, and what evidence is presented for its effect on sequence.

Borges declared that a writer’s political views were circumstantial and should not interfere with his or her literary creation and reputation. However, the cases of Argentina and Cuba from the mid-1940s on illustrate the influence of context on the reception of his work. The chapter focuses on three periods: the mid-1940s, the mid-1950s, and the first decade of the Cuban Revolution of 1959. In Argentina, the failure of the jury to award Borges the National Literary Award in 1942 was politically motivated. In Cuba, the first critical text on Borges appeared in 1944 and was influenced by the attitude to culture of the Origenes group, led by J Lezama Lima. In the following decade, and after the overthrowing of Perón, Borges’s work was criticized for being out of touch with Argentine realities, whereas in Cuba, a new literary magazine, Ciclón, expressed support for his work. After the Cuban Revolution, Borges’s name continued to be mentioned; however, after 1968, he would be censored in the island for two decades. The chapter concludes that writers and c ritics tend to read other writers in relation with their own cultural credos or projects.

From Bermuda to the Amazon, key attitudes towards civility and cultivation impelled members of the elite to pursue colonial projects. This chapter gives an overview of Jacobean project culture, where implicit assumptions about savagery and the virtues of cultivation lay behind discourses about plantation. By viewing colonization as an extension of domestic political participation and reform, gentlemen did not separate the economic potential of plantation from the responsibilities of managing property and participating in civil governance. In contrast to hopes for quick profit through joint-stock investment and global trade, American landscapes became critical to elite concepts of their transatlantic polity and how it might be sustained and enjoyed. Land gave English gentlemen a sense of investment in political expansion that became rooted to their civil identities.

The objective of this chapter is to explore the potential of the partial-organization concept as applied to the analysis of inter-firm networks as a form of economic governance that is created, reproduced or transformed with the help of network management practices. Key insights that the partial-organization perspective can provide into the process and the outcome of organizing and managing inter-firm networks are discussed. Inter-firm networks are conceived as partial organization of more or less complete formal organizations. Under specific circumstances, inter-firm networks could even be considered, at least in some aspects, as being even more organized than organizations. With regard to insights into the dynamics of this organizational form the chapter argues that the concept of partial organization helps to understand the development of this form from initial market relationships as well as from hierarchical organizations

In this chapter, we explore the usefulness of applying the idea of partial organization as one way of mitigating the confusion surrounding the notion of organized crime. We examine three types of collectivities that are usually seen as examples of organized crime: outlaw motorcycle gangs (OMCs), street gangs, and mafias. When we examine the occurrence of organizational elements, we find substantial differences among these three cases not only in the amount of their organization, but also in the ways in which they are organized. A few multinational outlaw motorcycle gangs have gradually been able to form strong formal organizations containing all organizational elements. For a mafia, the situation is quite the opposite. Because its embeddedness in kinship relationships provides cohesion and protection, it needs little organization. Through its strong kinship ties, a mafia has access to several functional equivalents to the organizational elements one can find in OMCs. In street gangs the appearance of organizational elements varies among the gangs, and they rarely have more than a few elements at any one time. One obstacle for the organization of street gangs is their local embeddedness and limited duration, which loosen the boundaries of the gang.