This article raises the question of how to conceive of religious education as a research discipline. The theory of activity systems is used in an analysis of the relationship between theory and practice, the systems of research and the systems of school. The author argues for a dialectical relationship between research and school practice, where…

Ethical questions have long been the impetus for philosophical inquiry around the world. When ethical questions arise in the classroom, during advising or in other academic settings, university and college instructors may appeal to the ethical codes within their own discipline for guidance. The materials presented in this article review…

In the South, as in the North, the need to confront and escape poverty forces people to seek out administrative knowledge as a way of participating in economic activities. The current study considers one such group of individuals and provides a case study of a cooperative of single mothers in El Salvador (the Madres) that produces fairly traded…

This paper investigates the differences in the discursive patterning of cases in Law and Management. It examines a corpus of 271 Law and Management cases and discusses the kind of information that these two disciplines call for and how discourses are constructed in discursive hierarchical patterns. A discursive hierarchical pattern is a model…

Economics is a subject worthy of study not only because it affects us all, information for making decisions at all organizational levels, but also because it stretches the mind and requires the use of moral as well as mental judgement. (JH)

Arguing for a "taxonomic approach" to the determination of the meaning of "rhetoric," this paper first indicates the need for renewed speculation about the ordering of knowledge as a whole. It then indicates the importance of general taxonomies for understanding rhetoric, illustrates its position with a pair of modern taxonomies, and concludes by…

What constitutes a discipline and what account can be given to the growth of knowledge in a discipline are discussed. (MT)

Controversies about the exact nature of geography are noted. It is assented that geography is not a discipline, but a synthesis of several; an interdisciplinary study using and synthesizing a variety of dates within an areal, systematic or thematic idiom." (NH)

Using bibliometric mapping techniques, authors developed a methodology of self-organized structuring of scientific fields which was applied to neural network research. Explores the evolution of a data generated field structure by monitoring the interrelationships between subfields, the internal structure of subfields, and the dynamic features of…

Proposes necessary conditions intellectual disciplines must meet to be considered disciplines: a community of scholars with shared interests; a research focus; a coherent body of knowledge linked to theory; and a commitment to communicating knowledge. Uses that framework as a basis for analysis and synthesis. (PA)

Grounded in a communication in the disciplines (CID) theoretical framework, this study was the first phase of a multiphased project exploring oral genres in the academic discipline of design. The purpose of this study was to provide a baseline understanding of how faculty perceive and assign meaning to the oral genres that students performed in…

The paper presents a part of authors' research results, they obtained within a wider research focused on possibilities to influence students' attitudes and approaches to individual subjects, mainly the less favourite ones. Following the empirically derived hierarchy of subjects identifying the degree of individual subjects popularity among…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the competencies required by industry in business graduates and the relative importance and current graduate proficiency levels in each skill area. A secondary purpose was to examine and compare the perceived role of contemporary business schools across different samples. The study was conducted during…

An extensive, internally cross-validated analytical study using nested (within academic disciplines) Multilevel Modeling (MLM) on 4,560 students identified functional criteria for defining high school curriculum rigor and further determined which measures could best be used to help guide decision making for marginal applicants. The key outcome…

This paper is drawn from a longitudinal case study in which the authors have tracked the progress of 20 Social Science students over the course of their undergraduate degrees at a historically "white" South African university. The students are all from disadvantaged educational backgrounds and/or speakers of English as a second language.…