Ironies of automation

Instructional Design and Professional Informal Learning: Practices, Tensions, and Ironies

This qualitative study explored the nature of informal learning in professional instructional designers’ everyday work activities. Based on intensive interviews with six full-time practitioners, and using a hermeneutic form of data analysis, this study produced seven themes concerning the practices, tensions, and ironies associated with this largely unexplored aspect of instructional design. Sp...

The Politics and Ironies of Educational Change: The Case of Vouchers

Historical Perspectives in Master Narratives: Ironies and Subversions in the Novels of Cary and Achebe

The history of the colonial world is interpreted differently by western historians and “nativist” historians and ethnologists. The colonialist perspective of history often disregards an entire phase of history before the colonial period, exalting the colonialist enterprise. On the other hand, ethnologists and native historians stress indigenous sources of history, including oral accounts. The p...

Gunder Frank Political Ironies in the World Economy

The world capitalist economy, its interstate system, and its class structure seem to be pursuing a development that may, like Frankenstein, have been created by man (and not by woman?), but which seems no longer to be subject to his/her control least of all through the formulation and implementation of conscious political policy. Indeed, political and economic policies seem more and more to be ...

Ironies of success: a new history of the American health care "system".

The context for contemporary research and policy is set through a theoretically informed history of the modern American health care system that draws on the concept of countervailing powers and Fligstein's theory of control. In this context, the papers of this special issue are then introduced.