Traditions Standards Transformations

This book tells the story of the Towson University, Maryland, Professional Development School Network, which serves more than eighty schools in metropolitan Baltimore and surrounding areas. It describes the development and implementation of state and national standards for professional development schools, accountability and sustainability issues, and impacts on the roles of faculty and teachers. This book is a source of advanced information for institutions that face the complexities of professional development school work for connecting policy with practice. The Towson project not only examines the «how to» of professional development schools but also examines some of the impacts on teaching and learning.

Transformations of Tradition probes how the encounter with colonial modernity conditioned Islamic jurists' conceptualizations of the shari'a. Departing from the tendency to focus on reformist-minded thinkers and politically charged issues, Junaid Quadri directs his attention towards the overlooked jurisprudential writings of Muhammad Bakhit al-Muti-i (1854-1935), Mufti of Egypt and a frequent critic of the famed reformists Muhammad 'Abduh and Rashid Rida. There, he locates a remarkable series of foundational intellectual shifts. Offering a fresh perspective on a pivotal period in the history of Islamic thought, Quadri tracks how Bakhit reworks the relationship of the shari'a to categories of understanding as fundamental as history and authority, science and technology, and religion and the secular, thereby upending the very ground upon which Islamic law had until then functioned. Through close readings of complex legal texts and mining of oft-neglected archives, this carefully researched study situates its argument in both the contested scholarly world of a quickly-changing Cairo, and the transregional school of Hanafi law as represented by jurists writing in Kazan, Lucknow, and Baghdad. Examining Islamic jurisprudential discourse in the colonial moment, Transformations of Tradition uncovers a shari'a that is neither a medieval holdover nor merely a pragmatic concession to the demands of a new world, but rather deeply entangled with the epistemological commitments of colonial modernity.

Unilever is one of the world's largest suppliers of fast moving consumer goods in foods, home and personal care. It operates in over 100 countries. Its scope and scale make it a unique global corporation. Yet the story of Unilever is not simply a tale of corporate evolution: Unilever is a corporation that has a big impact on the lives of people round the world. Indeed, a Unilever brand can be found in one in every two households worldwide. Geoffrey Jones, a leading businesshistorian from the Harvard Business School, takes us inside this corporation, which, from its origins in Britain and the Netherlands, has become a worldwide manufacturer of fast moving consumer products. Unilever's operations cover food and home and personal care, and its brands include Lipton, Hellmann's,Birds Eye, Wall's, Surf, Domestos, Comfort, Dove, Sunsilk, Pond's, Signal, Axe, and Ben & Jerry's.In particular the book focuses on the evolution of the company over the last half century. Managing such a firm in the era of globalization posed enormous challenges. The book covers the company's strategies and provides compelling evidence of its decision-making, marketing, brand management, innovation, acquisition strategies, corporate culture, and human resource management.The author has had full access to corporate archives and executives and provides us with a unique insight into the workings and strategies of one of the world's oldest and largest multinationals.

The Argobba are an ethnic and religious minority in southeastern Wallo and northeastern Sawa. Despite living in harsh environments and menace from more dominant ethnic groups, they have for centuries maintained their agricultural activity, trader and weaver identity, and religious unity.At present they are undergoing rapid cultural change, and are caught up in a tension between encapsulation and the struggle for the survival of Argobba cultural tradition and political position in what once was a strategic location. This book presents a perceptive historical and cultural analysis of change and continuity, looks at how the Argobba define and redefine their agricultural and commercial ways of living as a response to threats from Oromo migration, Amhara settler penetration and Adal aggression, and examines the past and present condition of Argobba social and economic transformation in north-central Ethiopia.

German constitutionalism has gained a central place in the global comparative debate, but what underpins it remains imperfectly understood. Its distinctive understanding of the rule of law and the widespread support for its powerful Constitutional Court are typically explains in one of two ways: either as a story of change in a reaction to National Socialism or as the continuation of an older nineteenth-century line of constitutional thought that emphasizes the function of constitutional law as a constraint on state power. But while both narratives account for some important features, their explanatory value is ultimately overrated. This book adopts a broader comparative perspective to understand the rise of the German Constitutional Court. It interprets the particular features of German constitutional jurisprudence and the Court's strength as a reconciliation of two different legal paradigms: first, a hierarchical legal culture as described by Mirjan Damaska, building on Max Weber, as opposed to a more co-ordinated understanding of legal authority such as prevails in the United States and secondly, a more recent paradigm of transformative constitutionalism, which is most often associated with countries like South Africa and India. Using post-war legal history and sociological and empirical research in addition to case law, this book demonstrates how German developments reflect the frequently conflicting demands of these two legal paradigms - yielding an idiosyncratic synthesis in Value Formalism, a specific type of constitutional reasoning, at once pragmatic, open, formalist, and technical. Value Formalism however, also comes with serious problems, such as a lack of self-reflection in the Court's jurisprudence and the closure of constitutional discourse towards laymen.

A collection of essays on the development of science and the history of ideas.

At a time in American history when football ruled the American campus and fraternities dominated student life, Frank Aydelotte, through his determination to specialize exclusively in initiating an Honors program of study, accomplished a feat virtually unknown in American higher education. That is, he succeeded in shaping one regional, run of the mill, Quaker school - Swarthmore College - into an intellectually-charged, academically-focused institution able to command national respectability, prestige, and financial support and commit itself to intellectual life at a time when higher education in the United States met with pressures against such change. Under Aydelotte's leadership, Swarthmore was able to hold out in a period of tremendous expansion of higher education and staggering growth of intercollegiate athletics, "student activities," and vocational education. While oxymoronic in the early 20th century to suggest to mainstream America that a college would define itself by a commitment to the life of the mind, Aydelotte did just that, indelibly shaping the culture of Swarthmore in a manner so deep-seated as to persist to the present day. The ways in which Swarthmore changed as a college under Aydelotte's leadership shed light on how change occurs and persists in higher education and how change on a single campus can bring about wide-spread educational reform that affects a nation. Frank Aydelotte returned from his time in England as a Rhodes Scholar fully committed to affording to America's highest achieving college students the educational experiences that had shaped him while abroad. A complicated combination of idealism and elitism, mixed with a deep reformer's drive to spread the Oxford gospel in America, led to his focus on pedagogy when he returned to the US. Aydelotte undertook concrete and highly strategic steps toward the long-term goal of introducing to American higher education Oxford-like methods aimed at empowering intellectually-oriented students to excel far beyond the barriers present in American education that resulted from high achievers being held back by the "pace of the average." This mission became his personal crusade for the rest of his life and played out most vividly on the campus of tiny Swarthmore College where he served as president from 1921 to 1940.

This book examines the interplay between political culture and diplomatic strategy in the U.S., revealing the transformation of American political culture and its impact on the country’s foreign strategy. The theoretical pivot of this study is an analysis of the dynamics of political culture and the mechanisms of the interaction between political culture and diplomatic strategy. Given this premise, the core chapters revisit the historical transformations of American political culture and analyze the responses and countermeasures taken to attempt to reverse the perceived decline in American hegemony during the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, factors interwoven with security, economic, and institutional crises. The discussion describes the landscape and evolution of contemporary American political culture and the correlated adjustments of U.S. global strategy over the course of the twenty-first century. Given the myriad of challenges and political legacies left by its predecessors, the author gives a pessimistic prognosis of the prospect of resolving America’s political plight by the Joe Biden administration. The title will be a valuable reference for academic and general readers interested in American politics, U.S. diplomatic strategy, and international relations.