During the past 2 decades, business has become increasingly active in the political process, and scholars continue to debate the extent to which this activity is organized. This fundamental issue is addressed by using multidimensional scaling to structurally analyze political action committee (PAC) campaign contributions within the context of resource dependence and class cohesion theories. Results indicate that resource dependence theory can better explain the forces that drive business participation in the U.S. public policy process. Both theoretical and managerial implications (...) are discussed. (shrink)

Sex‐determining factors are usually assumed to be either genetic or environmental. The present paper aims at drawing attention to the potential contribution of developmental noise, an important but often‐neglected component of phenotypic variance. Mutual inhibitions between male and female pathways make sex a bistable equilibrium, such that random fluctuations in the expression of genes at the top of the cascade are sufficient to drive individual development toward one or the other stable state. Evolutionary modeling shows that stochastic sex determinants should (...) resist elimination by genetic or environmental sex determinants under ecologically meaningful settings. On the empirical side, many sex‐determination systems traditionally considered as environmental or polygenic actually provide evidence for large components of stochasticity. In reviewing the field, I argue that sex‐determination systems should be considered within a three‐ends continuum, rather than the classical two‐ends continuum. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Radical Constructivist Structural Design Education for Large Cohorts of Chinese Learners” by Christiane M. Herr. Upshot: The concept of proscription enables certain characteristics of the design studio to be highlighted and some of the difficulties mentioned by Herr to be understood, and it raises the question: What does “open-ended” mean in a formal learning context?

What is needed now is a critical method which does justice to an evangelist's literary activity and yet moves beyond concern for authorial activity and theology to include a concern for the text of the Gospel as a totality.

The dynamic interaction between text and interpreter is the heart of the hermeneutical enterprise. The challenge of the parable and the interpretative response it has provoked disclose and display this interaction more fully than any other contemporary interpretative work.