The essays in this volume offer a wide variety of fresh perspectives on the assessment of quality in science and technology. They proceed from the premise that while quantitative measures may be useful for gross assessments, a rounded picture of scientific activity requires qualitative measures that are sensitive to the ethical, conceptual, social, and historical contexts of science. Among the questions they explore are: How do we develop such qualitative measures? Are different measures needed for different groups involved in and affected by scientific work? What are the constraints on...

Georg Lukac's most recent work of literary criticism, on the Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn, hails the Russian author as a major force in redirecting socialist realism toward the level it once occupied in the 1920s when Soviet writers portrayed the turbulent transition to socialist society.In the first essay Lukacs compares the novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to short pieces by "bourgeois" writers Conrad and Hemingway and explains the nature of Solzhenitsyn's criticism of the Stalinist period implied in the situation, characters, and their interaction. He also...

This important book offers a selection of papers cutting across the several disciplines in the social sciences in which mathematical techniques, especially model building, are increasingly becoming tools for research and conceptualization.Most of the papers are either early, seminal contributions to this type of research to psychology, sociology, political science, economics, anthropology, and linguistics or definitive statements synthesizing investigations by separate persons or groups.Each of the 18 papers is placed in its disciplinary and historical context by the editors, who also...

Charles P. Kindleberger is widely regarded as among the most accessible and intelligent practitioners of the economist's craft. This collection of his papers and lectures, articles and reviews, prepared over the past decade, focuses on the role of multinational corporations in the international economy, their relationships with home and host countries (both developed and less developed), the determinants of their size, the impetus to their investment behavior, their history, the literature about them, and their regulation.Chapters relate the phenomenon of the multinational corporation to...

Planning and evaluating air pollution control strategies is a difficult and demanding task requiring the application of the most advanced technical and computational resources that are available to the analyst. In this book, an economist applies the powerful tool of linear programming to develop a model that can be used by policy makers seeking to achieve specific goals in air pollution abatement. The author has implemented his model using engineering, meteorological, industrial, and pollution data taken from the St. Louis airshed.

Generative phonology, a comparatively recent development on the linguistic front, has stimulated a reconsideration of the conceptual scheme of phonology in general in the past ten years. The ground gained is certainly evident in the present study, a technical reorganization according to generative phonology of the phonological description of Yawelmani--one of the six dialects analyzed in Stanley Newman's classic book of 1944, The Yokuts Language of California.Although the informed reader will immediately see by comparison the remarkable advances made in the theory of phonology since...

What determines savings? The question is timely and important. The U.S. saving rate is less than half that of Japan, Germany, and other developed countries, and the imbalance in saving rates across countries is responsible, in large part for the imbalance in international trade. This book examines a number of important determinants of wealth accumulation, including retirement bequests, and precautionary saving motives, demographics, the tax structure, social security, and insurance institutions. Using a blend of theory, empirical research and simulation methods, it reaches some surprising...

During the past fifteen years, a unique wage structure emphasizing consistency and equity has developed in the USSR. Soviet Wages is the only detailed description and analysis of contemporary earnings determination for Soviet industrial workers. The study focuses on the period since 1956, during which the entire wage system has undergone a major restructuring.In contrast to "market forces," which are usually taken to be the main determinant of wage differentiation in Western economies, this book demonstrates how explicit quantifiable standards have been utilized for setting wages in the...