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Ocean acidification is a significant but under-recognised climate impact where oceans absorb CO2, leading to a 30–40 per cent decrease in pH since pre-industrial times. This poses a threat to marine ecosystems and food webs, as calcifying organisms such as oysters and corals struggle to build their shells, while non-calcifying species face behavioural changes. Despite an increasing amount of scientific literature, OA receives minimal attention from social sciences and lacks international governance. The book explores how OA should be governed, mapping the governance landscape as a regime complex involving multiple actors and instruments. It proposes global experimentalist governance as suitable for addressing the complexity of OA, examining case studies of the OA Alliance and the International Maritime Organization. The research finds that while OA is framed as a climate change effect needing holistic responses, including mitigation, adaptation, and resilience measures, current governance remains fragmented, with limited coordination among relevant international frameworks.
This chapter analyses the Ocean Acidification Alliance (OAA) against five elements of global experimentalist governance. The OAA, launched in 2016 by Pacific Coast governments, comprises over 145 members addressing ocean acidification. Evaluating the five elements reveals: (1) A shared problem exists – members agree on OA definition and causes; (2) Open-ended goals are present – six framework objectives like ‘reduce CO2 emissions’ with provisional, loosely worded targets; (3) Delegation occurs – members create Action Plans with discretion to experiment, although delegation is not solely to lower levels; (4) Feedback and peer review are limited – information sharing occurs through webinars and meetings but lacks systematic reporting on specific metrics; (5) Goal adjustment is possible – goals and metrics can evolve based on scientific findings and member experiences. A key limitation is that metrics lack specificity, undermining systematic reporting and peer-review cycles essential to experimentalist governance. No penalty default exists due to voluntary membership. While the OAA exhibits features of experimentalist governance, the absence of concrete metrics weakens the recursive learning process. Future metric development could enhance the implementation of experimentalist governance within this voluntary, multilevel climate coalition.
Chapter 1 introduces the study’s core puzzle and overall logic of inquiry. It discusses main themes, locates arguments relative to relevant scholarship, and establishes the analytical framework. Early in the chapter, the puzzle of varying illiberal electoral outcomes is presented and contextualized. Captured by two distinct yet related indicators – illiberal voting and post-neoliberal populist magnitude – illiberal electoral outcomes not only varied persistently across countries but also signaled the high salience of economic issues in postcommunist Europe. The next section establishes the rationale for explaining outcomes by drawing insights from Latin America – another semi-peripheral space that experienced consequential neoliberal junctures. Having argued, based on key economic and political parallels between the two regions, that a critical juncture approach is appropriate also for making sense of developments in Eastern Europe, I spell out the work’s central propositions and highlight theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions. The final sections discuss matters of research design and evidence – namely, the mixed method approach, case studies, and quantitative and qualitative data, including 100 interviews – as well as the book’s organization.
Navigating the Souring Seas explores how ocean acidification (OA)-a significant yet under-governed environmental threat-is being addressed on the global stage. Bridging science, law, and international policy, this interdisciplinary book introduces global experimentalist governance as an innovative and adaptable framework for tackling complex and uncertain issues like OA. It provides a clear overview of the scientific background of OA and maps the international governance landscape, identifying it as a regime complex. Through detailed interview-based case studies of the Ocean Acidification Alliance and the International Maritime Organization, the book evaluates real-world efforts to govern OA and highlights how experimentalist features, such as flexibility, learning, and multilevel collaboration, can enhance their effectiveness. Accessible and timely, this book is essential reading for scholars, students, policymakers, and environmental practitioners seeking practical, forward-looking governance strategies for ocean and climate challenges. It offers both theoretical insight and concrete recommendations for improving global environmental governance.
It is difficult to know exactly how many coverage denials there are because the American health care system is notoriously fragmented. This chapter introduces a novel survey of 1,340 US adults, finding that 36 percent of respondents have been denied at least once, and typically experience multiple denials. Those in private health insurance experience denials to the greatest degree, which is consistent with private insurers’ cost containment objectives. Health care can be denied for any number of reasons, such as the lack of medical necessity, the absence of a required prior authorization, or an assessment that the care is experimental or investigational. Combining survey and interview evidence, the chapter highlights the destabilizing impact that denials – whether pre-treatment (as with prior authorization) or post-treatment (as with emergency care) can have on patients, whose trust in the health insurance system can be shaken. While prior authorization and other coverage denials can constitute important ways to guard against overtreatment in the American health care system, this chapter presents new evidence that managed care tools may overcorrect, instead denying appropriate care.
The so-called dispersed Nerudiana, composed of interviews, speeches, prologues, notes, and letters, provides a necessary horizon to rescue, organize, and disseminate. Nerudian letters, in particular, are a privileged source that has not been cataloged or collected in a single corpus. This surprising daily life of a famous writer, a sort of parallel itinerary, lies vast and dispersed in libraries, private archives, and documentary repositories awaiting a systematic effort that allows the long-awaited “deployment of the self-portrait” (à la Boersner), the ultimate goal of historical-literary research. Without his correspondence, in short, his self-portrait is impoverished, leaving room for criticism, speculation, and political dithyramb.
Chapter 8 explains why there has been so much enthusiasm for integrating AI into multiple dimensions of the hiring process, from resume screening to interview bots, despite these endeavors being marred by fundamental flaws, including, in some cases, integrating bias, unreliable pseudoscientific methods, and dehumanizing interactions. In addition to analyzing the incentives that have motivated companies to use flawed, innovative tools, we provide a road map for how to develop and use responsible AI upgrades in the hiring process.
In addition to immigration grievances, research shows that radical right voters grieve societal developments regarding gender equality and sexual freedom. Adding to research treating these grievances separately, this article advances a joint understanding of these grievances. I analyse interviews with voters of the German radical right Alternative für Deutschland for perceptions about discrimination and (dis)advantages of natives versus immigrants, men versus women and cis‐hetero versus LGBTQI+ people. I find similar argumentations about these social groups: Most interviewees do not perceive existing structural discrimination. They further perceive zero‐sum dynamics between advances for outgroups and losses for ingroups. In doing so, they consider different ingroup and outgroup characteristics, resulting in perceptions of different material and symbolic (dis)advantages for different groups and a hitherto under‐researched perception of legal (dis)advantages. Additionally, some interviewees jointly refer to various social groups in an expression of ‘multidimensional’ grievances, and some refer to the intersections between several ingroup and outgroup identities in determining a person's (dis)advantages. The parallels in argumentation and the perceptions of multidimensional and intersectional grievances highlight the importance of jointly studying different kinds of cultural grievances.
Elite donors are a crucial and sought-after source of funding for many nonprofit organisations, but there is a dearth of substantive empirical studies presenting primary data on such donors’ motivations, experiences and perspectives. There are challenges for social scientists in conducting interviews with elites, notably: gaining access to elite donors; developing sufficient rapport to discuss a topic that involves money and morals; and making sense of data without being dazzled by striking surface differences between elites and non-elites. These barriers have resulted in a long-standing over-reliance on secondary sources and on interviews with proxies such as foundation staff and wealth advisers. This paper reviews the small body of work that presents findings from interviews with elite donors and draws on my experience of conducting interviews with 46 wealthy UK donors, in order to critically analyse the implementation of this research design. This paper adds to the literature by extending understanding of elite donors’ reasons for agreeing to be interviewed and contributes to advancing third sector research by highlighting strategies to overcome challenges in conducting elite interviews in order to gain a less mediated understanding of the contexts, cultures and subjectivities of their focus of study.
This paper provides an overview of post-study employability for students of linguistics. We begin with a review of the literature on employability, education, and skills. We then conduct an analysis of fifty-one interviews with people who studied linguistics and went on to work in a diverse range of occupations. We provide a summary of the interview participants, and then conduct an analysis of the domain-specific and transferable skills reported and the advice offered in these interviews. Finally, we look at how linguistics programs can use the existing literature and insights from these interviews to help their students think about careers.
The interdependencies and conflicts between civil society and welfare states are of continuing interest and controversy among civil society researchers. Particularly, issues of motivation, collaboration, management, and institutional contexts have been subject to extensive scrutiny. Less prominent on this research agenda, the issue of public perceptions and legitimacy is highly relevant to the conversation on welfare state and civil society. This study contributes on this topic by investigating the public legitimacy of volunteer involvement in public welfare services. The article presents findings from a qualitative interview study of perceptions of welfare institutions conducted in 2013–2014 among 115 participants from Sweden and Denmark. The hypothesis investigated is that the Nordic model of welfare is legitimized by its public nature to a degree which excludes volunteers from legitimately contributing as part of public welfare institutions. Findings suggest that volunteers are held in high regard among Swedes and Danes, but the involvement of volunteers in public welfare provision is deemed both a threat to the Nordic model of Welfare and matter-out-of-place in regards to the role the interview participants ascribed to volunteers and civil society.
This article reports on a starter exercise that trains beginner interview skills without overloading a course with a single project. The exercise is a response to three developments: first, interviewing skills are undertaught in most political science programmes; second, productive elements of online teaching ought to be integrated in campus-based courses; and, third, experiential learning is possible in virtual spaces. Students are exposed to interviews as a methodology through a lower pressure experience. Replacing two classes, students take part in a series of short, student-led but instructor-organised structured group interviews with practitioners. Students then progress to develop their own independent interviewing skills, including identifying informants, in later courses. Survey data collected from students suggest that applying course concepts was one of the top learning outcomes. Surveys and focus groups also illustrate that the exercise made students see an issue differently and they intend to continue learning about the subject armed with new information. This teaching format is practical for a wide range of themes in political science where experts can be interviewed and students will leave such courses with a question-oriented analytical approach, better equipped to interpret answers, and ready to more extensively engage with interviews in their lives.
This paper seeks to reconstruct the specific experiences that strengthen or erode the commitment of volunteers in the welfare sector. The empirical basis is narrative interviews with volunteers who have withdrawn from their role at a welfare organisation in Germany. The findings show tensions: on the one hand, experiences of successful relationships with clients and fellow volunteers strengthen volunteers’ commitment. On the other hand, volunteers observe practices and approaches that run counter to their values. This tension between engaging and disengaging experiences arises from the welfare sector itself, for while care can enable close interpersonal experiences, it is also shaped by economisation. Overall, our study shows that the motivations underlying volunteers’ long-term commitment can be both strengthened and undermined by actual volunteering experiences. In the light of our findings, we present heuristics for understanding volunteering processes that focus on field-specific experiences and tensions.
Nonprofit boards of directors are responsible for overseeing executive transitions, and the practitioner literature is rich with prescriptive guidance of how they should fulfill this vital responsibility. Nevertheless, we have limited evidence of what boards actually do as they navigate the space between an outgoing and an incoming executive, and moreover, we have no research that seeks to explain this critical juncture from a theoretical perspective. This exploratory study sought to fill this gap by applying theories commonly used in other literature about nonprofit governance in the context of an executive transition. Using a sample of twenty-nine US-based nonprofits that had recently experienced an executive transition, interviews were conducted and the resulting analysis is insightful about the approach boards took, the priorities they had, and their reflections on the transitions. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for both research and practice.
This article deals with the main obstacles in the way of conducting field research in Eastern Europe. Focusing on Ukraine, the article confronts a number of research design rules with the post-Soviet reality. Taking into consideration cultural and political factors, the article seeks to highlight the challenges that await researchers. Thanks to personal experience acquired in Ukraine, the author points to some of the potential difficulties, as well as opportunities awaiting political scientists conducting research in the region.
Rational choice theories belong to the most important building blocks of 20th century economics. Their usefulness to model human behaviour has been extensively debated in modern social science and beyond. While some have argued that rational choice theories should be applied to a broad range of political and social phenomena, the rise of behavioural economics questions whether they are appropriate at all for understanding economic behaviour. Conversations on Rational Choice sheds light on what is actually at stake in these debates. In 23 conversations, some of the most prominent protagonists from economics, psychology, and philosophy discuss their individual perspectives on the nature, possible justifications, and epistemic limitations of rational choice theories. Offering a comprehensive assessment of the value of rational choice theories in producing knowledge in economics, these conversations lay the ground for a more nuanced appraisal of rational choice theories from a practical viewpoint.
This chapter analyzes Egypt’s 2011 revolution and 2013 coup, one of the most prominent counterrevolutions of the 21st century. Drawing on approximately 100 original interviews with Egyptian politicians and activists, it argues that Egypt’s counterrevolution only became possible when revolutionaries squandered their initial capacity to hold the old regime’s military in check and presented them with an opportunity to rebuild their popular support. Specifically, the chapter makes the following claims: (1) revolutionary forces began the transition with considerable leverage over the former regime, grounded in their ability to threaten a return to mass mobilization and their backing from the United States; (2) after Mohamed Morsi was elected president, his administration’s poor management of the post-revolutionary governance trilemma, particularly its decision to prioritize the concerns of old regime elements over those of his secularist allies, caused the revolutionary coalition to fracture and Washington to begin questioning its support; and (3) these developments created opportunities for the military to bolster its domestic and foreign support and sapped revolutionaries’ capacity to resist a counterrevolutionary coup. Ultimately, the chapter concludes that, though the task facing Egypt’s revolutionary leaders was not easy, a counterrevolutionary end to the transition was far from a foregone conclusion.
In this chapter, differences between quantitative and qualitative studies are presented. Students are taught the basic skills for performing a qualitative study, such as performing interviews, observations, and researching material culture. Methods for analyzing these qualitative data such as finding themes and creating concept maps are discussed. Students are encouraged to use qualitative analytical methods with a quantitative study (i.e., a mixed-methods approach) to help create a richer, more detailed study.
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted significant vulnerabilities in long-term care (LTC) homes, severely impacting residents and care partners. This study investigates how care partners of older adults living in Ontario LTC homes perceived residents’ experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how those perceptions shaped their own caregiving experiences. Using critical ethnography, we identified four key themes: (a) masks and miscommunication, (b) loneliness and loss, (c) from interaction to isolation, and (d) loss of the advocacy role. Supportive actions included transparent masks, increased allied health professionals, and enriching daily programs. These findings emphasize the need for policies that balance infection control with the emotional and social needs of LTC residents, addressing power imbalances, ageism, and systemic inequities.
In this chapter, we explore the most common qualitative data collection tools used in applied linguistics research. You will learn about key methods such as interviews, focus groups, observation, questionnaires, verbal reports (both introspective and retrospective), field notes, and diaries/journals. We will discuss the strengths and limitations of each tool, helping you identify the most suitable method for your specific research questions. Additionally, the chapter will guide you through practical considerations such as sample selection, data management, and analysis techniques for each method. With numerous examples, you will see how these tools are effectively applied to research in applied linguistics, equipping you with the skills to select and implement the right data collection strategies for your study. By the end, you will be able to confidently use these methods to gather rich, qualitative data that address your research objectives.