Assimilation and Its Discontents: Ironies and Paradoxes

Assimilation and its discontents: between rhetoric and reality.

"It is in [the] conceptual interstices between theory, rhetoric, and reality that paradoxes (or at least what may appear as paradoxes) emerge. By focusing on paradoxes--on evidence that contradicts orthodox expectations and points instead to assimilation's discontents--the aim of this article is to test empirically the conception of assimilation as a linear process leading to improvements in im...

The Golden Age of Aging, and Its Discontents

A qualitative analysis of consumer attitudes on adoption of online travel services

The study reported in this paper explores consumers' experiences with technology-assisted service encounters by investigating the applicability of Mick and Fournier's paradoxes of technology adoption to the online travel agents' services scenario. In-depth interviews were conducted to explore consumers' experiences when using travel agents' online services and the results were compared to those...

Assimilation of Final Low Back Vowel in Eghlidian Dialect

In this article, the low back vowel /A/ in word-final positions in Eghlidian dialect, one of Persian dialects, is studied. This vowel is represented phonetically as [A], [o] and [@] in different phonetic environments. Therefore many words were collected via interviewing ten native speakers so that these different alternant forms can be accounted for appropriately. Since one of the authors of th...

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...