Gathering ideas for academic writing

Т.П.БРЮШКОВА,

ИЗВОЛЬСКАЯ И.В.

 

GATHERING IDEAS FOR ACADEMIC WRITING

 

(For students of Sociological Department)

 

 

Москва – 2010

Брюшкова Т.П.

Извольская И.В.

Gathering ideas for academic writing. – Москва. Международные отношения, 2010 – 77 с.

 

Данный курс предназначен для студентов старших курсов, занимающихся написанием проектов на английском языке, Имеющийся учебный материал может быть также полезен при написании научных текстов.

 

Учебное издание

БРЮШКОВА Татьяна Петровна

ИЗВОЛЬСКАЯ Ирина Вадимовна

Gathering ideas for academic writing

Student’s book

Подготовка к изданию и оформление изд-ва " Международные отношения ", 2010

Москва, Садовая-Спасская, 20

E-mail: [e-mail]

Сайт: www.inter-rel.ru

CONTENTS

I.	Gathering ideas and searching for useful words and phrases (Texts for study with practical tasks) …….………………………..……
II.	Common instructions on writing summaries and introductions …………………………………...……………………………
	1.	How to write a summary …………………………………...……………
	2.	How to start a proposal …………………...…………………….........
	3.	How to formulate a problem statement ……………………..…
	4.	How to prove the professional significance of the project …………...……………………………………………………
	5.	Project Proposal Skeleton …………...…………..……………………

 

I.	GATHERING IDEAS AND SEARCHING FOR HELPFUL WORDS (Tests for study with practical tasks)

Tasks

Translate the underlined expressions and word combinations into Russian.

Find synonyms for the following words.

manifold

adjacent

powerful

appropriate

complexity

to retain

fabulous

a response to

Find English equivalents to the following Russian words and word combinations.

отдать должное

беглый взгляд

общественное положение

нет недостатка в доказательствах

недооценивать

основываться на

начать обсуждение

Learn the following collocations and add some more.

Belief

· To cling, to adhere, to stick to the belief that…

· To question, to undermine smb's belief

· To confirm, to support, to reinforce one's belief

· Contrary to popular belief

· Common, popular, widely-held belief

Distinction

· To draw, to make a distinction

· Essential, fundamental, rigid, broad, strong, clear-cut distinction

· A historian of great distinction

Standing

· High, low, international, academic, professional, social standing

· To have, enhance, improve damage one's standing (Professor
Green has a high standing in the academic world)

Make up a mind map of the first paragraph. Supply it with key words and compress it into one or two sentences. Write an introduction of your own.

CHANGES IN THE LIFE COURSE

The full impact of changes in values and functions on-the condition of the family today can be best understood in the context of demographic changes affecting the timing of life transitions, such as marriage, parenthood, the "empty nest", and widowhood. Since the end of the nineteenth century, fundamental and dramatic changes have occurred in the family cycle and have affected age configurations within the family and generation relations.

Beginning in the early nineteenth century the American population has experienced a steady decline in the birth rate, except for the baby boom in the immediate post-World War Two period. This decline has had a profound impact on the life course, especially on the timing of marriage, the birth of the first child and subsequent children, and the spacing of children. It has also considerably influenced the very meaning of marriage and parenthood. In traditional society little time elapsed between marriage and parenthood, since procreation was a major goal / objective of marriage. In modern society contraception has made possible a gap between marriage and parenthood. Marriage has become recognized as important on its own, rather than merely a transition to parenthood.

One widely-spread myth about the past is that the timing of family transitions was once more orderly and stable than it is today. The complexity that governs family life today and the variations in family roles and in transitions into them are frequently contrasted to this more placid past. The historical experience, however, reveals precisely the opposite condition; patterns of family timing in the past were often more complex, more diverse, and less orderly than they are today. Paradoxically, voluntary and involuntary demographic changes that have come about since the late nineteenth century have brought about greater uniformity in the timing of transitions along the life course, despite greater societal complexity.

The increasing uniformity in timing has been accompanied by a shift from involuntary to voluntary factors affecting crucial events. An increase in life expectancy, the decline in fertility, and earlier marriage age have considerably fostered the chances for temporal overlap in the lives of family members. Families are now able to go through a life course much less subject to sudden change than that experienced by the vast majority of population in the nineteenth century. This trend toward greater uniformity in the life course is counteracted only by divorce. Over the past few decades the "typical" cycle of modern American families has included early marriage and early commencement of childbearing, with only a small proportion of children closely spaced.

Families tracing this type of cycle experience a compact period of parenthood in the middle years of life, followed by an extended period without children (encompassing one-third of their adult life), and finally often by a period of solitary living after the death of a spouse, most frequently that of a husband. This type of family cycle has important implications for the composition of the family and for relationships within it in contemporary society. Husbands and wives are spending a relatively longer lifetime together; they invest a shorter segment of their lives in child rearing; and they more commonly survive to grandparenthood. This sequence has been uniform for the majority of the population since the beginning of the twentieth century.

By contrast to past times, most families see their children through to adulthood with both parents still alive. As Peter Uhlenberg has pointed out, the normal family cycle for women – a sequence of leaving home, marriage, childbearing, child rearing, launching of children from home, and survival at age fifty with the first marriage still intact unless broken by divorce – was not the typical pattern of family timing before the early twentieth century. Prior to 1900, only about 40% of the white female population in the United States experienced this ideal family cycle. The remainder either never married, never reached marriageable age, died before childbearing, or were widowed while their offspring were still young children.

The significance of various transitions in family roles also differed in the past. In the nineteenth century, when conception was likely to take place very shortly after marriage, the major transition in a woman's life was represented by marriage itself. The transition into the "empty nest" have been more generally experienced and were clearly marked in the twentieth century until a decade ago. The trend has reversed recently with the tendency of young people to return to their parental home, or even not to leave it at all.

The overall historical pattern pf family behavior has been marked by a shift from involuntary to voluntary forces controlling the timing of family events. It has been also characterized by greater rigidity and uniformity in the time of people's passage from one family role to another over the life course. For instance, the transitions into adult roles experienced by young people leaving home, getting married and establishing a separate household follow a more orderly sequence and are accomplished over a shorter time period in a young person's life today than was the case in the nineteenth century. Prior to the beginning of this century life transitions were timed in accordance with family needs and obligations rather than to specific age requirements.

The changes in the family cycle discussed above reflect major discontinuities in the life course. Some of these have resulted in increasing problems in the middle and later years of life. It is precisely in this area that problems of family life and generational relations are lodged today.

 

Tasks

Experience

· Considerable, relevant, unrivalled, professional, practical
experience

· To have, gain, broaden one's experience

· To come through, to get over, to be based on experience

Experienced

· Extremely, immensely, vastly, sufficiently experienced
in smth.

To recognize

· To be generally, universally, increasingly recognized

· Full, due, immediate„belated, wide, professional recognition

· To achieve, obtain, deserve, require recognition

Cycle

· Annual, regular, endless, natural, economic, life cycle

· To go through cycle, to complete a cycle

FAMILY TRADITIONALISM

Our exploration of recent Swiss data on couples and their internal organization has produced evidence in accordance with the results of other studies from different countries; and can be summarized in the following way:

1. In a perspective, different types of (internal) family regulation vary considerably, especially the dimension of task inequality between women and men, whereas their general change over the last thirty years seems relatively moderate. No single type predominates, neither the fully traditional one which still exists, nor any opposite or inverse type. The main departure from the traditional model is the more widespread employment of non-single women, much more than certain trends towards less inequality in the family.

2. We find a strong asymmetry concerning the partners' patterns of handling the parallelism of family and employment obligations. Male participation profiles are mainly organized around employment that remains, to a very large extent, fixed on full-time enrolment, leaving only little room for family duties. Female participation profiles pivot around the family. They include work loads that vary strongly between typical phases of family life and influence women's employment while men's remains unaffected.

3. Thus, according to our findings, the male breadwinner mode has much less disappeared than statistical data on male and female employment seem to reveal. It has, however, undergone changes: men's employment careers are steady and tend to ascending, women's careers are broken and static or tend to descending.

4. The overall result is that only a minority of women living in couples stay permanently out of employment (but still about 1/3), others attune their occupational life to lesser and not necessarily constant extents to the family life cycle, which itself varies according to a calendar or agenda that is largely set by extra-familial institutions.

Once a child is born, the calendar of family life is largely determined by the social institutionalization of children's upbringing, to the point that their school career has traditionally been used to define the phases of the family life cycle. This implies that individual couples have a limited possibility to influence the conditions under which the tasks and work loads typical of each phase can be honored. This gives to the institutional environment a considerable influence on a couple’s choices of internal organization. This influence is likely to be affected again by sociopolitical measures. If we found many signs of wide-spread normative egalitarianism [1] among our respondents, it appears that this belongs more to the area of generalized beliefs and opinions than to personal convictions that would be strong enough to motivate decisions going against choices that are generally considered to be rational (like renouncing to parts of employment that induce greater losses of income – usually the man's – for the sake of gender equality in the couple). It would be interesting to enlarge our questioning to the conditions and consequences of this situation. Let us just mention the comparative research literature on the influence of the institutional frame-work in various societies on the rules relevant for the couples' choices concerning the partners' employment. These comparisons are working with adapted typologies of regimes of social policy. The results show that the Swiss situation, that has been our focus, belongs to an especially "liberal", i.e., non‑interventionist and de facto inequality-fostering regime otherwise typical of the Anglo-Saxon countries.

This makes us think that the modernization of family traditionalism which we have found instead of a simple disappearance of the traditional model, expresses a resilience of traditional elements that may be due to a large extent to the extra-familial context of living and its ways of functioning. Thus, a considerable part of the family structure appears to be institutionalized indirectly by social rhythms and structures as much as or even more than by the personal beliefs and interpersonal negotiations of individual partners. This gives some credibility to the institutional rather than to the constructivist, or resource-theoretical interpretations, without contradicting complementary elements of utility-optimization.

In this context, let us come back to the concept of master status. As already pointed out, the actual use of the concept in the literature is strongly limited to cultural mechanisms like sex-specific prestige differentials, sex-role expectations and possibly gender performance and their inter-individual enactment. With respect to the interconnections between the different (gendered) ways of combining or not combining family work and occupational work and the (equally gendered) life course, Krüger & Levy discussed the necessity not to focus on the problems preferentially or even exclusively on the inter-individual, micro-social level, but to apply it to the sometimes macro- but more frequently meso-social, institutional level as well. Institutions in the sense of organizations, are doing gender as well as or even more effectively than individual actors, and a gendered functioning of the institutional environment where a couple lives may create strong incentives to accept sex-specific master-statuses even if the partners have other, e.g., egalitarian, normative convictions.

In the end, a methodological consequence of our findings should also be pointed out. The introduction of a typology of family-life configurations or phases has not only added strong evidence to our substantial conclusion. It is plain that unlike for men, strictly synchronic data about women's participation profiles have to be regarded as nothing more than mean values that are sociologically meaningless because of the strong variation induced by these phases. This implies, more specifically, that women's employment rates are at a time over- and then underestimated by such figures, since there are typical phases with much higher rates than the mean and other no less typical phases with much lower rates. For the study of systematically changing participation profiles in the individuals' lifetime and the consequences of these changes, the inclusion of the life‑course dimension and of longitudinal data proves to be indispensable.

Tasks

Evidence

· Abundant, considerable, overwhelming, convincing, conclusive,
decisive, powerful, striking evidence

· To search for, accumulate, come up with obtain produce
evidence

· To present, offer, provide, consider, review, cite, admit
evidence

· Evidence about, concerning, regarding, relating to

Determination

· Absolute, great determination

· To be full of determination, to reveal, show determination

· To determine smth. exactly, precisely

RESTRUCTURING A RURAL TOWN

This paper traces the recent history (1948-1998) of economic restructuring in a rural community in central New York State. It's argued that several similarities exist between the experience of the village of Hartwick and many metropolitan areas. Chief among these is the role of the restructuring of production, the increased importance of the automobile, and the discourse, around the concept of "progress" found during this time period. Due to the difference in population, however, Hartwick has also experienced a marked decline in community autonomy and identity.

The literature focusing on restructuring of the American economy often explored such trends at the national and international levels or in urban settings. Studies of economic restructuring in rural areas have typically examined specific industries (coal extraction and agriculture). This study deviates from such approaches by examining the restructuring of an individual rural village as an urban area. Although most people would refer to Hartwick, as a "rural town," it's worth noting that the village is in fact an urban one. 600 residents live in close proximity to one another and there's a central business district. Though there're several miles of open land in any direction, the village exhibits an urban settlement pattern and thus warrants analysis as an urban community. So, it'd be expected that the experience of the village has been similar to that of larger communities. These similarities fall into four broad categories: 1) the production restructuring; 2) the automobile impact; 3) the prevailing discourses of progress; 4) residents' defence of community in response to perceived threat. We'll deal with the two first ones.

In most urban settlements, the capacities of production have been altered. This is often called de-industrialization, but the concept is also applicable to agricultural production. This has often occurred due to competition from more efficient productive regions, and/or technological innovations that led to a reduction in the necessary workforce.

Advances in transportation technology have translated into consumers being able to drive farther than in the past for goods and services. This has been accompanied by a need for commercial structures that have adequate parking facilities. In suburban areas this necessity has resulted in the construction of new structures that feature readily available parking. Such shopping areas often compete for customers – leading in many cases to a decline in commercial activity in such areas. In some small towns, the business district has declined significantly due to competition with businesses in other communities.

This economic and spatial restructuring has been accompanied by a de-concentration of residents in metropolitan areas and rural areas. In metropolitan areas, great residential developments sprawled across the landscape just beyond the city limits, bringing middle class residents to the suburbs. In rural areas, small villages have often ceased to grow.

The Car Culture:Like neighborhoods in older cities, Hartwick developed to meet the demands of pedestrians. So, it's not surprising that the downtown resembled small towns all over the nation. Buildings were close to one another and most were multi-leveled due to the needs of the central business district. This structure was appropriate for a pedestrian-oriented business district, but the automobile would place new requirements on downtown Hartwick.

The impact of the car in urban communities, large and small, was a mixed blessing. In rural areas, the car gave people the freedom to travel to and from town more frequently, but brought with it a need for adequate parking, improved road surfaces, etc. After WW II, new highways were constructed around historic business districts, diverting traffic away from established businesses. The automobile made it easier for residents of small towns to travel to urban centers. After the end of WW II, Hartwick experienced the dominance of the automobile.

In 1948, Hartwick was typical of many rural villages throughout central N.Y. The local economy was dominated by agricultural production, and Hartwick, by and large, existed to service the needs of local farmers. The automobile had already begun to make an impact on the village. For instance, there were 7 different establishments in and around the village that sold gasoline. Also, local residents began to drive to the nearby communities (eight miles distant and fifteen miles distant) for items bought less regularly, such as clothing and furniture. It was during this period that the automobile became the dominant form of transportation. In the '20s, state and federal programs improved local highways. The 1950s witnessed a great expansion of such efforts, the most obvious national program being the Interstate Highway System. Many local residents were able to buy cars during this period and take advantage of the newly paved highways, and weekend excursions became more common throughout the region.

The increasing dominance of the automobile set the stage for more frequent commutes to other villages, and so contributed to the economic and social changes Hartwick would face during the next 4 decades. Both the dominance of the automobile and the restructuring of urban space are related to the discourses defining progress. Much of the restructuring of urban space was meant to accommodate the automobile: expressways, parking lots, the growth of the suburbs, etc. But this wouldn't have been possible without a public discourse that promoted such accommodations as necessary and desirable. Hartwick, too, has been influenced by the prevailing discourse, and the business district was dramatically restructured even without the federal funds that were made available to larger communities.

 

Tasks

Impact

· Big, strong, enormous, tremendous, growing, decisive,
immediate, potential impact

· Catastrophic, cultural, social impact

· To achieve, create, assess, explore, measure, maximize,
judge impact

Tasks

Guidance

· Careful, detailed, firm, helpful, practical, expert guidance

· To give, offer, provide guidance

· Under the guidance of

 

· A set of guidelines

· To develop, draw up, lay down suggest guidelines

 

Objective

· Key, primary, principal, overall, long-term, strategic objective

· To accomplish achieve, attain, meet, succeed in an objective

· To declare, state, promote an objective

Involvement

· An active, direct, deep, day-to-day involvement

· To require, demand presuppose involvement of... in

Indispensable

· Absolutely, virtually indispensable

· To prove, become indispensable

Tasks

To view

· To view smth. objectively, favourably, cautiously

· Generally, widely viewed as...

· Increasingly viewed as smth.

Reasoning

· Careful, sound, underlying, practical, logical, scientific
reasoning

· To adopt, to apply, to employ, to accept, to challenge smb's
reasoning

Standpoint

· Different, positive, historical, theoretical standpoint

· To adopt a standpoint

· To approach smth. from a standpoint

Tasks

Challenge

· Big, considerable, strong, radical, serious challenge

· То pose, present, face, rise to, take up a challenge

· Directly, seriously successfully challenge

 

· To make smth. challenging

· Extremely, sufficiently challenging

Assessment

· Broad, general, overall, balanced, systematic, comprehensive assessment

· To carry out, do, undertake an assessment

To regard, to be regarded

· To regard, to be regarded highly, widely, universally, properly,
reasonably

· Seem to regard, tend to regard, come to regard
(we have to regard this term as of primary value)

MOMS NOT WANTED

Europeans and Americans alike have certain romantic notions about Sweden. We imagine it as a land of liberal-minded people living in
a bastion of equality -which, in many ways, it is. Sweden has the second highest number of female parliamentarians in the world. Half its government ministers are women. Its wage gap is narrow, and females are well represented in the labor force. Both the United Nations and the World Economic Forum have rate it tops in the world for equality.

But no paradise is without its paradoxes. In Sweden, the biggest one is this: while the government has done much to improve the lives of women, it has also created a glass ceiling for them that is thicker than that in many other European countries, as well as in the United States. While state-funded child care and extremely long and cushy maternity benefits (480 days with up to 80 percent of pay) make it easy to be a working mother in Sweden, such benefits also have the effect of dampening female employment in the most lucrative and powerful jobs. In Sweden, more than 50 percent of women who work do so in the public sector‑most as teachers, nurses, civil servants, home health aides or child minders, according to the OECD. Compare this to about 30 percent in the U.K. and 19.5 percent in America. "Private-sector employers are less willing to deal with the disruption caused by very long maternity leaves", says Manuela Tomei, a labor sociologist with the International Labor Organization in Geneva. "Gender discrimination in Sweden may be more subtle, but it is very much there".

The link between family‑friendly policies and female employment are a hot topic all over the developed world, as birthrates fall and a shortage of skilled labor looms. Europeans have looked to the Nordic countries as a model‑longer maternity leaves and state‑funded child care must make it easier for women to have careers, or so the conventional wisdom goes. And indeed the system does make it easier for women to hold lower- to midlevel jobs and have children (Sweden has managed to keep its birthrate relatively high). But as London School of Economics fellow Catherine Hakim notes, policies that raise the birthrate "don't necessarily translate into complete gender equality, particularly in the private sector."

Swedish women are unlikely to hold important managerial positions. A study by former ILO economist Richard Anker using data from 2000 found that while women in the United States held 45.3 percent of managerial positions, their Swedish counterparts held only 29.2 percent (Britons held 33 percent, Germans 27 percent and Danes 23 percent). And, while the average wage gap between the genders in Sweden is narrow (about 15 percent), it can exceed 40 percent in high‑end jobs. And while the gap is closing in other countries, it has held steady in Sweden for most of the last decade.

The situation is becoming a key political issue. Swedish officials are considering whether to emulate a recent move in Norway, which decreed that all companies must have at least two women on their boards by the end of 2006. But whether quotas can change the social dynamic is unclear. Anker points out that most countries with a high number of women in Parliament also have a high number in corporate management, but not Sweden. He attributes this to the fact that the number of women in Parliament is dictated by law, not by wider social shifts, which presumably would have affected the private sector, too.

Swedish officials argue that generous welfare makes the system more competitive, in part because childcare frees women to work. But it can't be fully competitive if it frees women to work only at middle- or low‑level jobs. And many larger companies are beginning to see the advantage of promoting women. Nearly 40 percent of the managers at SEB, Sweden's largest bank, are female and the bank is pushing for more. Goteborg University professor of gender history Anita Goransson says that Swedish women in top jobs often have mothers who also worked at high levels. One tough woman begets another, and more of them will make Sweden an even tougher competitor.

Tasks

Subtle

· Subtle distinction, difference, approach, plan, mind.

· To seem, to become subtle

Gap

· Big, huge, significant, widening, gender, cultural gap

· Knowledge, information, credibility gap

· To bridge a gap

· To identify, to create, to fill, to leave a gap

Tasks

To administer

· To administer effectively, efficiently, locally, jointly

· To be difficult, easy, simple to administer

 

Administration

· Educational, day-to-day, general, social, government administration

· To be in charge of, to be responsible for administration

Alternative

· Attractive, constructive, effective, credible, reasonable, realistic, obvious alternative

· To have, offer, provide, seek, find alternative

· To leave smb. with no alternative

DANGEROUS IDEAS

In man's early days, competition with other creatures must have been critical. But this phase of our development is now finished. Indeed, we lack practice and experience nowadays in dealing with primitive conditions. I am sure that, with­out modern weapons, I would make a very poor show of disputing the ownership of a cave with a bear, and in this I do not think that I stand alone. The last creature to compete with man was the mosquito. But even the mosquito has been subdued by attention to drainage and by chemical sprays.

Competition between ourselves, person against person, community against community, still persists, however; and it is as fierce as it ever was.

But the competition of man against man is not the simple process envisioned, in biology. It is not a simple competition for a fixed amount of food determined by the physical environment, because the environment that determines our evolution is no longer essentially physical. Our environment is chiefly conditioned by the things we believe. Morocco and California are bits of the Earth in very similar latitudes, both on the west coasts of continents with similar climates, and probably with rather similar natural resources. Yet their present development is wholly different, not so much because of different people even, but because of the different thoughts that exist in the minds of their inhabitants. This is the point I wish to emphasize. The most important factor in our environment is the state of our own minds.

It is well known that where the white man has invaded a primitive culture the most destructive effects have come not from physical weapons but from ideas.

Ideas are dangerous. The Holy Office knew this full well when it caused heretics to be burned in days gone by. Indeed, the concept of free speech only exists in our modern society because when you are inside a community you are conditioned by the conventions of the community to such a degree that it is very difficult to conceive of anything really destructive. It is only someone looking on from outside that can inject the dangerous thoughts. I do not doubt that it would be possible to inject ideas into the modern world that would utterly destroy us. I would like to give you an example, but fortunately I cannot do so. Perhaps it will suffice to mention the nuclear bomb. Imagine the effect on a reasonably advanced technological society, one that still does not possess the bomb, of making it aware of the possibility, of supplying sufficient details to enable the thing to be constructed. Twenty or thirty pages of information handed to any of the major world powers around the year 1925 would have been sufficient to change the course of world history. It is a strange thought, but I believe a correct one, that twenty or thirty pages of ideas and information would be capable of turning the present-day world upside down, or even destroying it. I have often tried to conceive of what those pages might contain, but of course I cannot do so because I am a prisoner of the present-day world, just as all of you are. We cannot think outside the particular patterns that our brains are conditioned to, or, to be more accurate, we can think only a very little way outside, and then only if we are very original.

Tasks

Conceive

Conceive = think of/imagine

· To be difficult, impossible, easy to conceive

· To conceive originally, broadly, poorly, narrowly, carefully

Conceivable

· To be, seem, become entirely, perfectly conceivable

· For every conceivable emergency

To persist

To persist = continue doing smth.

· To persist doggedly, stubbornly

To persist = continue to exist

· To persist to this day

Persistence

· Dogged, remarkable persistence

· Persistence be rewarded, pay off

Persistent

· Extremely, incredibly, really persistent

THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN

 

The anthropologist Hugh Brody has spent most of his working life studying, filming, living among, and campaigning for, hunter-gatherers. He has written a number of books on the subject — including the intriguing Maps and Dreams. He has made documentaries, and sat on advisory committees established to protect these isolated peoples from the rampant expansion of a more acquisitive way of life. The Other Side of Eden (part ethnography, part autobiography, part manifesto) has the sense of distilling all that experience and knowledge. It is a big book in every way, a paean for a vanishing version of ourselves. Brody sets it up as nothing less than a “search for what it has meant, and can mean, to be a human being”. Reading such a claim at the beginning of a book, you tend to think “uh‑huh...” – and wait for it to fall short. But it does not. It is wonderfully persuasive, deeply felt and as exhilarating as an Arctic sky.

Brody's first brush with hunter-gatherers was with the Inuit of Hudson Bay. Equipped with little more than caribou skins, some hard biscuits, a burgeoning stock of Inuktitut words and a well-honed relativism, he set off across the ice on week-long expeditions of genuine hardship. His guide and mentor was a man named Anaviapik, who later came to London in his seal-skin boots and was amazed by the apartment blocks: how, he asked, could people live in cliffs?

It was Anaviapik who taught Brody the early lesson that the word 'Inuktitut' is a synonym for the Inuit language from which it comes and also for the 'way of being' of the people themselves. In this lay the two themes that have driven his work: the importance of language and the essential integration of hunter-gatherer society. Over the coming years, Brody revisited the Inuit many times, as well as the Nisga'a and Dunne‑za of northwestern Canada. If his portrait of them appears at times a little rosy, he would probably claim that that view in itself is merely ethnocentric; that looking for the ''flipside'' is a habit of our own dualistic worldview. Traditionally, he tells us, hunter-gatherers live in prosperity, in harmony with their environment, free from infectious disease. They display a calm self-confidence and wisdom. They respect their elders and in their relationships are open and honest. Inuit parents, for instance, openly talk in front of their children about which one of them they love most. Far from creating neurosis, claims Brody, such candour means that hunter-gatherer groups remain largely immune to the kind of mental anguish that arises from half-truths.

That all changes when they encounter us. We – the scions of
agriculturalists – have ridden roughshod over their pristine lands. We have plucked their children from them, sent them to residential schools, drummed their language from them. We have 'settled' them – and anyone who has witnessed settlements around the areas they once depended on, will know just what that can mean: alcoholism, confusion and a pathetic lassitude.

At the heart of Brody's ideas about hunter-gatherers is this contrast with agriculturalists. In this, is an inversion of the popular wisdom that hunter-gatherers are nomadic, while herders and grain-growers are settled. In fact, he claims, the opposite is true. Hunter-gatherers always have a profound and dependent relationship with a single area. They tend to keep small families and are demographically stable. It is agriculturalists, on the other hand, who have wandered the earth. With larger families, they have developed the habit of expansion – and in their constant colonising of new land they have left only those hunter-gatherers who inhabit areas unfit for agriculture. Here lies the problem with such theorising. If there was a pre-agricultural period in which all humans were hunters and gatherers, then they must also have occupied much more favorable land than they do now. Those who do survive may not be typical. In better land, for instance, they may have had large families, may also have developed rudimentary ''agricultural'' techniques independent from each other.

As an anthropologist, Brody shows less respect for his discipline than for the people he studies. This is very welcome. Like most social sciences, ethnography has been hobbled by an attachment to methodology. In the debates between other theorists, essential questions have often been forgotten. But Brody breaks the rules by writing well and saying what he thinks. He evokes the landscape of the Inuit with shivering accuracy. He employs a clear aphoristic style (''to equivocate is to refuse absolutes... words are the beginning of the end of nothingness... verbal untruth has the power to render us neurotic''). A book that could have been leaden and dry has been transformed by good prose into one that glitters with universalideas. The Other Side of Eden is a potent elegy to marginalised societies. But in managing to convey the complexities of an alien cosmology, Brody highlights attitudes that, in our post-agricultural society, have a renewed urgency — the importance of knowing nature, the integral power of language and a mystical respect for place.

Tasks

Drive

1) Drive = energy, determination

· competitive, personal, narrative

· to have/to lack drive

2) Drive = desire/need

· innate, inner, instructive, creative

3) Drive = effort

· big, nationalwide, cost-cutting, marketing, modernization,

anti-corruption

To depend on/upon

· to depend on/upon crucially, greatly, largely, entirely, partly, ultimately

Dependence

· Growing, continuous, excessive, economic, complete, total

dependence

Dependent

· To be, to feel, to come, to remain dependent

· Closely, deeply, heavily, crucially, wholly, directly

Accuracy

· Absolute, deadly, perfect, pinpoint, amazing, uncanny, actual accuracy

Tasks

How to write a summary

The goal of writing asummary or an article, a chapter, or a book is to offer as accurately as possible the full sense of the original, but in a more condensed form. A summary restates the author’s main point, purpose, intent, and supporting details in your own words.

• The process of summarizing enables you to better grasp the original, and the result shows the reader that you understand it as well. In addition, the knowledge gained allows you to better analyze and critique the original.

• First, try to find the main idea in the reading; it's usually in the first paragraph. Next, skim through the article, glancing at any headings and graphics. Then, read the conclusion. The intent here is both to give yourself a review of the work and t o effectively engage yourself with it.

• Now go back and read the original text carefully, jotting down notes on or highlighting the important points. Write the central idea and the author's reasons (purpose and intent) for holding this viewpoint. Note the supporting elements the author uses to explain or back up her/his main information or claim.

• Make an outline that includes the main idea and the supporting details. Arrange your information in a logical order, for example, most to least important or chronological. Your order need not be the same as that in the original, but keep related supporting points together. The way you organize the outline may serve as a model for how you divide and write the essay.

• Write the summary, making sure to state the author's name in the first sentence. Present the main idea, followed by the supporting points. The remainder of your summary should focus on how the author supports, defines, and/or illustrates that main idea. Remember, unless otherwise stated by your instructor, a summary should contain only the author’s views, so try to be as objective as possible.

• As you revise and edit your summary, compare it to the original and ask yourself questions such as: Have I rephrased the author’s words without changing their meaning? Have I restated the main idea and the supporting points accurately and in my own words?

• If you are asked to write a critical summary or to include a critique, you may want to ask yourself questions such as: Does the author succeed? How and why or why not? What are the strengths, weaknesses? Why? What did the author do well? Not well? Why?

 

How to start a proposal

Your proposal should begin with two introductory paragraphs that serve mainly to get the reader into the paper.

The first paragraph states the purpose of the proposed study and the general methodological approach. The second paragraph outlines the organization of the proposal.

Here is an example:

This paper describes a proposed study that will examine the relationships between corporate culture and logistics outsourcing using primarily depth interviews from about thirty participants in three companies. Based on the interpretation of the data obtained from the interviews, models will be developed to provide frameworks for understanding the role of cultural orientations in influencing logistics outsourcing in the participating companies.

The proposal includes four sections: introduction to the study (1), review of the literature (2), methodology (3), summary of the results anticipated (4).

Each section or chapter should be also opened with an introductory sentence. Study some examples:

The first part of the proposal introduces the background of the study, states the problem, indicates the professional significance, determines the scope of the research and present the definitions of the key terms.

The second part chapter provides an overview of the literature on corporate culture and logistic outsourcing which form a basis for the present study.

The third part chapter explains the methods that will be used in carrying out the study. The following part of the proposal reports on the results which are likely to be obtained with the methods used.

WRITING PRACTICE

1. Read the text below, which is the abstract from a PHD dissertation. Identify the purpose and the general methodological approach of the research conducted and write an introductory paragraph (in no more than 70 words) for an imaginary proposal.

 

Title: The social capital and corporate leaders.

The concept of social capital has been linked to a variety of individual outcomes but a review of social capital and leadership literature reveals that there is no body of empirical research that links social capital to leadership. The general thesis of this research is that the social capital of leaders can be a significant source of their ability to influence others and that the nature of the relationship between social capital and leadership influence is moderated by the leader's level of authority. I argue that social capital is a source for leaders in much the same way that human capital is considered a resource. For example, types of social capital might serve as cues for the cognitive processes that people use to perceive and evaluate leadership. This observation, while applicable at all levels of leadership, is moderated by the organizational level at which leadership is exercised. In order to analyze this relationship, I collected survey data on social networks of approximately two hundred corporate leaders while collecting leadership ratings on these leaders from more than one thousand of their co-workers. The subsequent analysis provided insights of interest into the amount and type of social capital of different sets of corporate leaders. This dissertation sought to identify and examine possible theoretical linkages between the two previously unrelated concepts of social capital and leadership. Although this research did not identify any significant support for the hypothesized relationships, it provided support for many earlier findings in the field of social capital and leadership. This research also developed theoretical insights into the contingent nature of the relationship between these two concepts. The results of this analysis suggest that there is a need for relevant network measures based on the nature of contacts in individual social networks for the study of social capital and leadership. A further exploration of the role that social capital plays in the exercise of leadership could provide a more multidimentional perspective to a range of issues that are of importance to the field of strategic management.

 

2. Analyze the following titles of research projects and formulate possible introductory paragraphs for research papers:

 

1. Advertising: increasing consumer choice, or brainwashing.

2. Class ethnicity and education achievement.

3. Problems of Vocational education in modern Russia.

4. Modern threats to family life.

5. "Class matters": human and social capital in the entrepreneurial process.

 

WRITING PRACTICE

Choose one of the titles from the previous assignment and practice with problem statement formulation.

 

4. How to prove the professional
significance of the project

Here you are to answer the questions. Why is your project worth doing? If you are sure the paper is a substantial contribution to the existing knowledge you also state it here alongside with the originality of your research. The definition of aims and objectives belongs with this part of the proposal.

WRITING PRACTICE

Study the following extract with problem significance aspect and write one of your own using the titles of research project given above.

Professional significance of the study. The research study will be of primary significance to organizational development managers, marketing managers, project managers and middle managers in corporations. Project managers and organization development managers may use the findings to better understand the organizational context in terms of CRM and to coordinate different departments more efficiently when executing this strategy. In addition the improved conceptual model of CRM innovation will serve them as an advanced tool of implementation process diagnostics or even as a vehicle for predicting its future outcomes, which will be greatly appreciated by marketing managers. Moreover the research will contribute to the development of theoretical works concerning CRM by providing deeper analysis of such constructs as dynamic CSFs or social dimension of organization change.

5. Project proposal skeleton

 

	ABSTRACT
	Field of study Background Aims and objective Methods Major findings Expected Results
Background	Problem Statement	Problem Significance	Literature Review	Methodology	Results Anticipated	Conclusion
General topic. Specify the research problem, one fact on the area. Its place within a larger scholarly literature. State reasons for your choice	Clear definition of the research problem, hypothesis, general purpose, several bullet points of the research (may by broken into several subproblems)	Why is it worth doing? Contribution to the existing knowledge. Original message. Gap in the existing knowledge.	Landmark studies which help me in the research. Theoretical basis.	The ways you study the problem. Explain why they are the most appropriate.	If the research is quantitative supply it with table. If qualitative with descriptive information.	Почему выбрал? Что буду делать? Зачем? Как? Какой продукт получу?

 

[1] Egalitarianism – эгалитаризм ("уравниловка")

[2] Suffrage – избирательное право

Т.П.БРЮШКОВА,

ИЗВОЛЬСКАЯ И.В.

 

GATHERING IDEAS FOR ACADEMIC WRITING

 

(For students of Sociological Department)

 

 

Москва – 2010

Брюшкова Т.П.

Извольская И.В.