A one-year-old attempting to build a tower of blocks may bring the pile crashing down, yet her five-year-old sister accomplishes this task with ease. Why do young children have difficulty with problems that present no real challenge to older children? How do problem-solving skills develop? In Children Solving Problems, Stephanie Thornton surveys recent research from a broad range of perspectives in order to explore this important question.

What Thornton finds may come as a surprise: successful problem-solving depends less on how smart we are—or, as the pioneering psychologist Jean Piaget claimed, how advanced our skill in logical reasoning is—and more on the factual knowledge we acquire as we learn and interpret cues from the world around us.

Problem-solving skills evolve through experience and dynamic interaction with a problem. But equally important—as the Russian psychologist L. S. Vygotsky proposed—is social interaction. Successful problem-solving is a social process. Sharing problem-solving tasks—with skilled adults and with other children—is vital to a child’s growth in expertise and confidence. In problem-solving, confidence can be more important than skill.

In a real sense, problem-solving lies at the heart of what we mean by intelligence. The ability to identify a goal, to work out how to achieve it, and to carry out that plan is the essence of every intelligent activity. Could it be, Thornton suggests, that problem-solving processes provide the fundamental machinery for cognitive development? In Children Solving Problems she synthesizes the dramatic insights and findings of post-Piagetian research and sets the agenda for the next stage in understanding the varied phenomena of children’s problem-solving.

Late one afternoon, as you are organizing your new office as department chair, one of the senior members of the department drops by. He affably informs you of his plans for the coming semester: that contrary to the published class schedule, he only teaches on Tuesday afternoon, Wednesday, and Thursday morning, so as to have the weekends free for travel; that he expects the office staff to start his coffeemaker by 10 a.m. sharp on his teaching days; and that since he hasn’t been assigned a research assistant, his teaching assistant will do research tasks, including errands. What do you say? What do you do?

Never mind budgets or curriculum reform: staff problems can be the most thorny of any academic administrator’s job. Every day, professors who have never run anything bigger than a seminar find themselves in charge of a complex and volatile organization called a Department of English (or Biology, or Sociology, or Textile Marketing). What should they do?

In this book, a widely respected advisor on academic administration and ethics offers tips, insights, and tools on handling complaints, negotiating disagreements, responding to accusations of misconduct, and dealing with difficult personalities. With humor and generosity, C. K. Gunsalus applies scenarios based on real-life cases, examples from negotiation, law, and child-rearing to guide novice (and experienced) academic administrators through the dilemmas of management in not-entirely-manageable environments.

The book that every dean and department chair needs to survive—and thrive—in the twenty-first-century university.

First released in 2006, The College Administrator’s Survival Guide has served as the bible for a generation of provosts, deans, department chairs, and program directors. Shrewd administrators have returned to the guide time and again for C. K. Gunsalus’s advice on handling complaints, negotiating disagreements, and dealing with difficult personalities. Now, in this revised and updated edition, Gunsalus guides rookie administrators and seasoned veterans through today’s most pressing higher-education challenges.

These days academic leaders must respond to heightened demands for transparency and openness. These demands are intensified by social media, which increases the visibility of university conflicts and can foster widespread misinformation about campus affairs. Meanwhile, institutions have become flatter, with administrators expected to work more closely with faculty, students, and a range of professionals even as support staffs shrink. Between the ever-replenishing inbox, the integration of often-exasperating management systems into every dimension of academic life, and the new demands of remote learning, deans and department heads are juggling more balls than ever before. Tightening budgets have already forced administrators into more difficult choices and, in the wake of COVID-19, there will be no relief from financial constraints.

From #MeToo to partisan battles over curricula and funding, college and university leaders need more savvy and greater sensitivity than ever. What hasn’t changed are the challenges of dealing with difficult people and the importance of creating and maintaining environments in which faculty, staff, and students have the support they need to do their best work. The College Administrator’s Survival Guide provides the tools to keep cool and get the job done.

In Consistency, Choice, and Rationality, economic theorists Walter Bossert and Kotaro Suzumura present a thorough mathematical treatment of Suzumura consistency, an alternative to established coherence properties such as transitivity, quasi-transitivity, or acyclicity. Applications in individual and social choice theory, fields important not only to economics but also to philosophy and political science, are discussed. Specifically, the authors explore topics such as rational choice and revealed preference theory, and collective decision making in an atemporal framework as well as in an intergenerational setting.

In real life, Mitchell Stevens is a professor in bustling New York. But for a year and a half, he worked in the admissions office of a bucolic New England college that is known for its high academic standards, beautiful campus, and social conscience. Ambitious high schoolers and savvy guidance counselors know that admission here is highly competitive. But creating classes, Stevens finds, is a lot more complicated than most people imagine.

Admissions officers love students but they work for the good of the school. They must bring each class in "on budget," burnish the statistics so crucial to institutional prestige, and take care of their colleagues in the athletic department and the development office. Stevens shows that the job cannot be done without "systematic preferencing," and racial affirmative action is the least of it. Kids have an edge if their parents can pay full tuition, if they attend high schools with exotic zip codes, if they are athletes--especially football players--and even if they are popular.

With novelistic flair, sensitivity to history, and a keen eye for telling detail, Stevens explains how elite colleges and universities have assumed their central role in the production of the nation's most privileged classes. Creating a Class makes clear that, for better or worse, these schools now define the standards of youthful accomplishment in American culture more generally.

Amid mounting concern over the loss of jobs to low-wage economies, one fact is clear: America's prosperity hinges on the ability of its businesses to continually introduce new products and services. But what makes for a creative economy? How can the remarkable surge of innovation that fueled the boom of the 1990s be sustained?

For an answer, Richard K. Lester and Michael J. Piore examine innovation strategies in some of the economy's most dynamic sectors. Through eye-opening case studies of new product development in fields such as cell phones, medical devices, and blue jeans, two fundamental processes emerge.

One of these processes, analysis--rational problem solving--dominates management and engineering practice. The other, interpretation, is not widely understood, or even recognized--although, as the authors make clear, it is absolutely crucial to innovation. Unlike problem solving, interpretation embraces and exploits ambiguity, the wellspring of creativity in the economy. By emphasizing interpretation, and showing how these two radically different processes can be combined, Lester and Piore's book gives managers and designers the concepts and tools to keep new products flowing.

But the authors also offer an unsettling critique of national policy. By ignoring the role of interpretation, economic policymakers are drawing the wrong lessons from the 1990s boom. The current emphasis on expanding the reach of market competition will help the analytical processes needed to implement innovation. But if unchecked it risks choking off the economy's vital interpretive spaces. Unless a more balanced policy approach is adopted, warn Lester and Piore, America's capacity to innovate--its greatest economic asset--will erode.

Making Administrative Work Visible brings together voices from graduate students, associated faculty, administrative staff, and tenured and tenure-track faculty at community colleges, regional state universities, liberal arts colleges, private colleges, and research-intensive institutions across the country to speak to the challenges, both named and unnamed, faced by those who do writing program administration work. These authors call explicit attention to this work and examine WPAs’ lived labor experiences and research methodologies to truly understand the scope of lived WPA labor.
 
The collection has three parts, each of which focuses on the most confounding challenges facing WPAs as well as the most compelling sites of their contributions to administration, labor in higher education, and the discipline’s collective obligation to forwarding the goals of social justice and advocacy: Advocating through Representations of WPA Labor, Advocating by Accounting for Time and Labor, and Advocating in and through Complex Institutional Contexts. The chapters use data to share and track the work functions, job titles, grand narratives, program assessments, tenure and promotion, email practices, and more undertaken by WPAs in their administrative capacities. Chapters also surface narratives for future data and studies to be done by other scholars.
 
By taking up and answering questions about the range of WPA work—and the invisibility of much of that work—Making Administrative Work Visible creates avenues toward accounting for and acknowledging the complex activity systems in which WPAs lead the work of the university and advocate for data-driven strategies needed to sustain this foundational area of higher education.
 
Contributors: Kamila Albert, Brooke Anderson, Sheila Carter-Tod, Amy Cicchino, Ana Cortés Lagos, Kristi Murray Costello, Jennifer Cunningham, Ryan Dippre, Kimberly Emmons, Genevieve García de Müeller, Jill Gladstein, Caleb González, Michael Healy, Lyra Hilliard, Kristine Johnson, Seth Kahn, Rita Malenczyk, Troy Mikanovich, Lilian Mina, Angela Mitchell, Greer Murphy, Kate Navickas, Michael Neal, Patti Poblete, Jan Rieman, Heather Robinson, Katelyn Stark, Mary Stewart, Natalie Stillman-Webb, Lizbett Tinoco, Lisa Tremain, Martha Wilson Schaffer
 

You're young, ambitious, entering the field of your dreams; you're on your own, the competition is fierce--and then you see your chance: the big story, the big role, the big discovery. But you'll have to cut a few corners, bend the rules, cheat a bit. What choices will you make?

After studying more than a hundred young people launching their careers, these longtime researchers of "good work"--work that is both skillful and honorable--find unsettling answers. Although young workers know what it takes to do good work, they don't always feel they can follow the ethical route. "Later, when I'm successful," is their implicit promise.

Making Good explores the choices confronting young workers who join the ranks of three dynamic professions--journalism, science, and acting--and looks at how the novices navigate moral dilemmas posed by a demanding, frequently lonely, professional life. The authors also uncover striking comparisons between these young professionals and the veterans in their fields--most notably, older workers recall inspiring models and mentors, while today's beginners see themselves as on their own. With extensive insights into how young workers view their respective domains, the nature of their ambitions, the sacrifices they are willing to make, and the lines they are prepared to cross, this study will prove instructive to young employees and employers alike, as well as to those who wish to understand the shifting moral and social character of the working world.

This impressive collection features Richard Herrnstein's most important and original contributions to the social and behavioral sciences--his papers on choice behavior in animals and humans and on his discovery and elucidation of a general principle of choice called the matching law.

In recent years, the most popular theory of choice behavior has been rational choice theory. Developed and elaborated by economists over the past hundred years, it claims that individuals make choices in such a way as to maximize their well-being or utility under whatever constraints they face; that is, people make the best of their situations. Rational choice theory holds undisputed sway in economics, and has become an important explanatory framework in political science, sociology, and psychology. Nevertheless, its empirical support is thin.

The matching law is perhaps the most important competing explanatory account of choice behavior. It views choice not as a single event or an internal process of the organism but as a rate of observable events over time. It states that instead of maximizing utility, the organism allocates its behavior over various activities in exact proportion to the value derived from each activity. It differs subtly but significantly from rational choice theory in its predictions of how people exert self-control, for example, how they decide whether to forgo immediate pleasures for larger but delayed rewards. It provides, through the primrose path hypothesis, a powerful explanation of alcohol and narcotic addiction. It can also be used to explain biological phenomena, such as genetic selection and foraging behavior, as well as economic decision making.

The Department of Defense (DoD) may face challenges as it attempts to maintain its goal of spending about 23 percent of prime-contract dollars for goods and services with small businesses and at the same time apply strategic-sourcing practices to reduce total costs and improve performance and efficiency and in ways that will not conflict with small-business goals.

This edition of the Sanskrit text of the Subhāṣitaratnakoṣa—in the editors’ opinion the oldest known general anthology of Sanskrit verse—is the result of years of work deciphering and comparing the five different versions to arrive at a complete and reliable text. The editors’ aim has been to restore, as far as the sources permit, the text compiled by Vidyākara somewhere between A.D. 1100 and 1130. In the absence of written records from the period, studies such as this one are invaluable as sources of information about the literary and cultural history of eleventh century India, especially about Sanskrit poets, and also about the changes of ideas since the eleventh century as they have affected the versions compiled since Vidyākara’s. Included with the complete Sanskrit text and footnotes to the stanzas is an introductory section in which D. D. Kosambi discusses in detail the various versions in existence, the cultural background, and the authors and sources of individual verses.

Much of the innovative programming that powers the Internet, creates operating systems, and produces software is the result of “open source” code, that is, code that is freely distributed—as opposed to being kept secret—by those who write it. Leaving source code open has generated some of the most sophisticated developments in computer technology, including, most notably, Linux and Apache, which pose a significant challenge to Microsoft in the marketplace. As Steven Weber discusses, open source’s success in a highly competitive industry has subverted many assumptions about how businesses are run, and how intellectual products are created and protected.

Traditionally, intellectual property law has allowed companies to control knowledge and has guarded the rights of the innovator, at the expense of industry-wide cooperation. In turn, engineers of new software code are richly rewarded; but, as Weber shows, in spite of the conventional wisdom that innovation is driven by the promise of individual and corporate wealth, ensuring the free distribution of code among computer programmers can empower a more effective process for building intellectual products. In the case of Open Source, independent programmers—sometimes hundreds or thousands of them—make unpaid contributions to software that develops organically, through trial and error.

Weber argues that the success of open source is not a freakish exception to economic principles. The open source community is guided by standards, rules, decisionmaking procedures, and sanctioning mechanisms. Weber explains the political and economic dynamics of this mysterious but important market development.

The standard way of thinking about decisions is backwards, says Ralph Keeney: people focus first on identifying alternatives rather than on articulating values. A problem arises and people react, placing the emphasis on mechanics and fixed choices instead of on the objectives that give decisionmaking its meaning. In this book, Keeney shows how recognizing and articulating fundamental values can lead to the identification of decision opportunities and the creation of better alternatives. The intent is to be proactive and to select more attractive decisions to ponder before attempting any solutions.

Keeney describes specific procedures for articulating values by identifying and structuring objectives qualitatively, and he shows how to apply these procedures in various cases. He then explains how to quantify objectives using simple models of values. Such value analysis, Keeney demonstrates, can yield a full range of alternatives, thus converting decision problems into opportunities. This approach can be used to uncover hidden objectives, to direct the collection of information, to improve communication, to facilitate collective decisionmaking, and to guide strategic thinking. To illustrate these uses, Keeney shows how value-focused thinking works in many business contexts, such as designing an integrated circuit tester and managing a multibillion-dollar utility company; in government contexts, such as planning future NASA space missions and deciding how to transport nuclear waste to storage sites; and in personal contexts, such as choosing career moves and making wise health and safety decisions.

An incisive, applicable contribution to the art and science of decisionmaking, Value-Focused Thinking will be extremely useful to anyone from consultants and managers to systems analysts and students.

Strategies for engaging key stakeholders—evaluators, researchers, and designers—to discuss frameworks for promoting collaborative change.

Collaborative Change Research, Evaluation, and Design (CCRED) is a framework and collection of participatory practices that engage people and the systems around them to drive community outcomes. This framework emerged out of the recognition that deep participation (or engagement) is frequently missing in collaborative impact approaches. When collaborative change is implemented effectively, community members are viewed as valuable owners and experts instead of being seen as disinterested or unqualified partners.

CCRED is a social action process with dual goals of collective empowerment and the deepening of social knowledge. Executed successfully, CCRED has the potential to increase the rigor, reach, and relevance of research, evaluation, and design translated to meaningful action. Written in an easily accessible, narrative style, Working Together for Change, the fourth volume in the Interdisciplinary Community Engaged Research for Health series edited by Farrah Jacquez and Lela Svedin brings together evaluators, researchers, and designers to describe collaborative change by describing their own work in the space.