Diversity And Dissent

Early modern Central Europe was the continent’s most decentralized region politically and its most diverse ethnically and culturally. With the onset of the Reformation, it also became Europe’s most religiously divided territory and potentially its most explosive in terms of confessional conflict and war. Focusing on the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, this volume examines the tremendous challenge of managing confessional diversity in Central Europe between 1500 and 1800. Addressing issues of tolerance, intolerance, and ecumenism, each chapter explores a facet of the complex dynamic between the state and the region’s Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Utraquist, and Jewish communities. The development of religious toleration—one of the most debated questions of the early modern period—is examined here afresh, with careful consideration of the factors and conditions that led to both confessional concord and religious violence.

In Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report, ‘precogs’, who are imaginary individuals capable of seeing the future are relied upon to stop crime, with a consensus report synthesized from two of three precogs. When the protaganist is indicted for a future murder, he suspects a conspiracy and seeks out the “minority report,” detailing the suppressed testimony of the third precog. Science works a lot like this science fiction story. Contrary to the view that scientists in a field all share the same “paradigm,” as Thomas Kuhn famously argued, scientists support different, and competing, research programs. Statements of scientific consensus need to be actively synthesized from the work of different scientists. Not all scientific work will be equally credited by science as a whole. While this system works well enough for most purposes, it is possible for minority views to fail to get the hearing that they deserve. This book analyzes the support that should be given to minority views, reconsidering classic debates in science and technology studies and examining numerous case studies.

Creativity often leads to the development of original ideas that are useful or influential, and maintaining creativity is crucial for the continued development of organizations in particular and society in general. Most research and writing has focused on individual creativity. Yet, in recent years there has been an increasing acknowledgment of the importance of the social and contextual factors in creativity. Even with the information explosion and the growing necessity for specialization, the development of innovations still requires group interaction at various stages in the creative process. Most organizations increasingly rely on the work of creative teams where each individual is an expert in a particular area. This volume summarizes the exciting new research developments on the processes involved in group creativity and innovation, and explores the relationship between group processes, group context, and creativity. It draws from a broad range of research perspectives, including those investigating cognition, groups, creativity, information systems, and organizational psychology. These different perspectives have been brought together in one volume in order to focus attention on this developing literature and its implications for theory and application. The chapters in this volume are organized into two sections. The first focuses on how group decision making is affected by factors such as cognitive fixation and flexibility, group diversity, minority dissent, group decision-making, brainstorming, and group support systems. Special attention is devoted to the various processes and conditions that can inhibit or facilitate group creativity. The second section explores how various contextual and environmental factors affect the creative processes of groups. The chapters explore issues of group autonomy, group socialization, mentoring, team innovation, knowledge transfer, and creativity at the level of cultures and societies. The research presented in this section makes it clear that a full understanding of group creativity cannot be accomplished without adequate attention to the group environment. It will be a useful source of information for scholars, practitioners, and students wishing to understand and facilitate group creativity.

Diversity and dissent have been shown to improve decision-making in small groups. This understanding can be extended to the political arena and in turn it can enlighten ideas about policy-making. This book focuses on the relationship between electoral institutions and policy outcomes in order to effectively explore the impact of diversity and dissent on the political arena. In doing so, it provides an empirical assessment of three key areas: the diversity of political information. policy innovation. pandering. Drawing on economics, psychology, organization theory, and computer science, this innovative volume makes an important contribution to scholarship on the impact of electoral systems and the democratic nature of governments. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of governance, electoral systems, representation, comparative politics, public policy, democratic government and political theory.

Creating Postwar Canada showcases new research on this complex period, exploring postwar Canada's diverse symbols and battlegrounds. Contributors to the first half of the collection consider evolving definitions of the nation, examining the ways in which Canada was reimagined to include both the Canadian North and landscapes structured by trade and commerce. The essays in the latter half analyze debates on shopping hours, professional striptease, the "provider" role of fathers, interracial adoption, sexuality on campus, and illegal drug use, issues that shaped how the country defined itself in sociocultural and political terms. This collection contributes to the historiography of nationalism, gender and the family, consumer cultures, and countercultures.

Articulating Dissent analyses the new communicative strategies of coalition protest movements and how these impact on a mainstream media unaccustomed to fractured articulations of dissent. Pollyanna Ruiz shows how coalition protest movements against austerity, war and globalisation build upon the communicative strategies of older single issue campaigns such as the anti-criminal justice bill protests and the women's peace movement. She argues that such protest groups are dismissed in the mainstream for not articulating a 'unified position' and explores the way in which contemporary protesters stemming from different traditions maintain solidarity. Articulating Dissent investigates the ways in which this diversity, so inherent in coalition protest, effects the movement of ideas from the political margins to the mainstream. In doing so this book offers an insightful and original analysis of the protest coalition as a developing political form.

This book develops new perspectives on the cultural politics of climate change and its implications for responding to this challenge.