This special issue of the Journal of Research Practice focuses on integration research, also known as integrated or integrative research. Integration between disciplines and between research and practice is increasingly recognised as essential to tackle complex problems more effectively. But there is little to guide researchers about how to undertake integration research. This special issue provides a number of case studies of how integration has been approached and exemplifies the challenges facing researchers seeking to embed integration in both existing and (...) new organisations and make it acceptable and respectable. Documenting these developments provides a unique illustration of how integration research is evolving as a type of practice. (shrink)

The spatial dynamics of the optical emission from an array of 50 times 50 individual microcavity plasma devices is investigated. The array is operated in argon and argon-neon mixtures close to atmospheric pressure with an ac voltage. The optical emission is analysed with phase and space resolution. It has been found that the emission is not continuous over the entire ac period, but occurs once per half period. Each of the observed emission phases shows a self-pulsing of the discharge, with (...) several bursts of emission of fixed width and repetition rate. The number of emission bursts depends on applied voltage and frequency. Spatially resolved measurements prove that the emission bursts are formed by overlapping emission pulses from single discharge cavities. Intensity differences between positive and negative half-wave can be interpreted through spatially resolved measurements of single discharge cavities. (shrink)

Ragnar Rommetveit University of Oslo Let me start this introduction to Professor O'Connell's Critical essays on language use and psychology with some reflections on psychologists and crabs. It so happens that the first professor of psychology in Norway had the middle name Krabbe ("Crab") His full name was Harald Krabbe Schjelderup. Hence, the crab became our symbol for the psychologist. For many years a "crab feast" was held every autumn in Oslo in order to celebrate the material union of crabs (...) and psychologists and ponder (symbolically and metaphorically) their shared fate. A comparison between the predicament of the crab and that of the modern psychologist may indeed be illuminating, once we make certain assumptions about their unique epistemic missions and systematically explore the severe constraints on their heroic search for knowledge. The crab is ordained to unravel the mysteries of the ocean, yet doomed to crawl sidewise on the is most of the time mollusks and bottom. His catch, alas, cadavers of sea creatures, and he cannot help envying the fish swimming freely above him. The psychologist's mission is to unravel the mysteries of His obligation to seek insight into essential the human soul. (shrink)

The past years have seen the official completion of the Opera Omnia of Nicholas of Cusa and have witnessed, as well, the production of a plethora of new studies on this fifteenth-century thinker. It is no longer enough, however, to be familiar with scholarship in German, Italian, and English in order to have a comprehensive view of the newer Cusanus research. One must also have a command of Spanish and Portuguese as well. An informal survey of the Philosopher's Index, by (...) no means exhaustive, of the secondary literature on Cusa reveals that over the last decade, the ratio approaches 1:1 when one compares Spanish and Portuguese entries on Cusa with those in other languages. Although Cusa was already a figure of interest in these two countries in the early 1960s, due in no small part to the work of Eusebio Colomer involving Ramon Llull, and that of Mariano Álvarez-Gómez, one can now see the work of these earlier scholars bearing fruit in the work of their students and their students' students. This scholarship, while it may be categorized broadly as history of philosophy or ideas, has tended to. (shrink)

The late Michael Frede once drew a distinction between the study of the history of philosophy in its own right and “a philosophically oriented study of the history of philosophy.” The key difference was that the study of the history of philosophy in its own right had to be aware of the historical context of the views it studied, both in a narrower and in a broader context, which broader context might very well have little to do with philosophy as (...) such. A careful consideration of the contextual and oftentimes non-philosophical reasons given for a philosophical position was necessary in order to get past any “doxographical substitute” for a philosopher’s position—a position and chain of reasoning that might be assigned to a philosopher because of one’s own philosophical interests—to get to the true position of that philosopher, e.g., Aristotle on the question of the agent intellect.Eric Perl, in his introduction to this study of Dionysius the Areopagite, positions himself strongly in the tradition of what Frede would have called doxographical or philosophically oriented history of philosophy. Thus, he would differ with Frede on the question of what is most important in exploring the positions of. (shrink)

Connecting influence and leadership, the professor of business ethics assumes a sacred moral vocation. Directed towards the student's role in the marketplace, the business ethics course enjoins consideration of the values of social responsibility for the human community in its political, economic, and familial manifestations.