Academic blogging

 

1. The question

A reader of the previous post on this blog wondered about the role of blogging in the writing process. For example, are blog posts a good way to put out drafts?

Here are a few thoughts on the use of blogs in academic writing. In section 2 we shall concentrate on the blog post that is written as a step on the way to some other piece of work, where the post may or may not amount to a draft. In section 3 we shall look at blog posts that are written as parts of a public drafting exercise. In section 4 we shall consider the place in academic practice of blog posts that are themselves intended to be finished pieces of work. In section 5 we shall note some side-effects of the use of blog posts.

2. A blog post that is a step on the way

We shall start by considering a blog post as a step on the way to a longer piece, for example a paper in a journal. Here the main thing will be the envisaged longer piece. The blog post itself might be a draft, or it might be far from being even a preliminary draft. It might for example merely sketch a question to tackle and some lines of enquiry.

While comments on the post are likely to be sought, any resulting dialogue will be used in preparing the longer piece but may not be regarded as a result in its own right. We shall cover dialogues as results in their own right in section 3.3.

This use of a blog post as a step on the way is a natural extension of discussions with others, whether spoken or in writing, about ideas one has for future work. If an author shares an idea with others, feedback on lines of enquiry and on important considerations can be very valuable. If a blog post gets the attention of knowledgeable people, they can provide useful feedback either by commenting publicly or by sending private communications.

What is different from private discussions is that a blog post is public. Anyone can read it, not only those whom the author wishes to consult. And anyone might comment on the post or on other comments that are made publicly.

There are advantages to this degree of publicity.

One advantage is that if an author is going to expose a piece of work to public view, he or she is likely to put effort into making it clear and as intellectually respectable as is feasible. Even if the piece is clearly labelled as only some initial thoughts, the author's reputation will be on the line to some extent. The process of putting thoughts into a presentable form is itself likely to spark fresh thoughts in the author's mind.

Another advantage is that a wider range of comments may be obtained than would be available from consulting people privately.

A third advantage is that public posts facilitate the advancement of knowledge. A post may spark thoughts in a reader who can then start his or her own project.

There is the associated risk that someone else may develop the ideas in a blog post in the same way that the original author would have done, making it pointless for the original author to develop the project in the way envisaged. But at least he or she would have publicly established priority in the ideas. And while it might be nice always to have priority in developing one's ideas, it is not at all clear that there should be any right to do so, or that the existence of any such right would be beneficial to the world of thought.

3. Blogs as writing in public

3.1 The practice

There is a practice of writing in public. The intended sense here is that of making evolving drafts visible, and perhaps inviting comments. We do not mean sitting in a café and publicly tapping on a laptop. A web search for the phrase "writing in public" will turn up plenty of comments on the practice, although some of them will relate to the café sense that we do not intend.

A sequence of blog posts on a given topic would be one way to write in public. It would keep each version distinct from others. 

Another option would be to follow the model of open source software and write in a Git repo that is made available to the world on Github or some similar service. Readers might then be allowed to propose changes directly. Successive versions and the differences between them would be visible, but people would be most likely simply to look at the most recent version on the main branch, especially if there had been frequent commits or there were several branches. To that extent, a sequence of blog posts would make the development of thought more visible.

3.2 Benefits shared with blog posts as steps on the way

Writing in public may have several benefits. We shall start with benefits that are shared with the writing of blog posts as steps on the way to longer pieces, where the posts may or may not amount to drafts of those longer pieces.

There is the benefit of forcing oneself to produce work that is reasonably polished, and the benefit of having fresh thoughts sparked in the effort to achieve an appropriate standard. The pressure to improve the quality of a piece of work may however be less when one is avowedly publishing drafts, because it is clearly understood that they will be improved later. A blog post that is not published as part of an exercise in writing in public must be able to pass for a finished piece of work, because there is no evidence on its face that it is still work in progress.

The benefit of obtaining a wide range of comments carries over from the publication of individual blog posts with a view to producing longer pieces later.

The benefit of facilitating the advancement of knowledge by sparking thoughts in others likewise carries over from the publication of individual blog posts.

3.3 Benefits specific to blog posts as public drafts

We shall now turn to considerations that are specific to blog posts written within a process of writing in public.

One benefit is the motivation to keep going. If readers have been promised a more developed version of a piece of work, the author may feel committed to producing it. Since there is almost always scope for improvement, it is unlikely that the author will look at a version already published and declare some time afterwards that it is the final version. An author may however declare at the time of publication of a version that it will be the final one.

Another benefit lies in the dialogue that is generated by successive drafts and comments on them. Such a dialogue may be seen as a valuable piece of work in its own right, regardless of whether any ideal final form of the work being drafted is reached. The activity of debate can be instructive both to the participants, and to outside readers who merely review successive versions and responses to them. 

Dialogue may be the locus not only of instruction, but also of virtue. On this, there is a paper currently in draft by Frisbee Sheffield, entitled "Socrates and Dialogue as the Greatest Good", which will appear in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society for 2024-25 (volume 125).

4. Blog posts as finished pieces of work

It is perfectly possible for a blog post to be a finished piece of work, rather than a step on the way to something else. Essays have long been a respectable literary form. The blog post can be a modern embodiment of this form, with a few differences.

One difference is that there can be a convenient facility for readers to comment.

Another difference is that there is more variation in length than has been traditional, with some posts being very short while others have the more traditional essay length of several thousand words.

Another difference is that the traditional publishing process is bypassed. There are no delays, and no need to go through review or copy-editing. There may of course be a loss here. Such processes can improve work before it is shown to the world. But a blogger who is concerned about such things can always ask a colleague to review work before publication.

A consequence of bypassing the traditional publishing process is that a blog post cannot be regarded as on a par with a peer-reviewed scholarly paper. There is not normally any systematic review under the control of someone other than the author.

This is however not a serious loss for a piece of work in the style of an essay in the humanities. The form is not one dedicated to establishing specific conclusions by reference to evidence, but one dedicated to presenting an illuminating view of a topic.

5. Side-effects

5.1 The erosion of boundaries

5.1.1 Connections between pieces

If blog posts are used as steps on the way to further posts or to work in other forms, boundaries between individual pieces of work may be eroded.

There is nothing new about drafts of pieces of work, but such drafts have traditionally been hidden from view. And while there are books and papers that explicitly develop other pieces of work by the same authors, the majority of published work is not like that. What is new with blog posts that are steps on the way is that they are public drafts or public statements of intent to work on a given topic in a particular way, at the same time as being capable of being viewed as works in their own right so long as they are sufficiently full and polished.

The result when blog posts are steps on the way is that rather than a set of free-standing pieces, bound together only by authorship and some recurring themes, we see an organic body of pieces that can be read separately but an important feature of which is that they are bound together. The binding may be more or less tight, and earlier pieces may point more or less clearly to the contents of later pieces. But one would not get a proper view of the author's achievement if one did not recognise the binding.

5.1.2 Forms of writing

There are some traditional forms of writing - essays, academic papers, monographs, and so on. The blog post is a newcomer, even if it might be thought to have predecessors from earlier centuries in published letters and other short pieces in journals.

Adding a new form of writing tends to erode sharp boundaries between forms, for two reasons. 

The first reason is that a blog post can be a perfectly respectable piece of work in its own right, despite lacking some traditional features such as having gone through a standard process of review and publication. So those features are seen not to be essential, and they no longer appear to demarcate serious writing from casual jottings and journalism.

The second reason is that the more forms of writing one has, forms that share some characteristics but not others, the easier it is to see a spectrum of forms that merge into one another. Large gaps between forms that would encourage clear demarcation are filled in by new occupants.

It is good to erode traditional boundaries between forms of writing. What matters is the content rather than the method of publication. And blog posts certainly make it easier to put content out into the public domain.

5.2 Citation and attribution

A blog post that is not part of a sequence of drafts can be attributed to its author like any other piece of writing, and cited by others so long as the URL is stable.

When there are modifications in later versions of a post or in a finished piece in some other form in response to comments, and the modifications are substantial and incorporate text supplied by commentators, attribution may be more problematic. There may come a point, particularly in an exercise in writing in public, when a mere acknowledgement of assistance provided by commentators is inadequate. A post or other finished piece should then be regarded as having one lead author and several other contributors. There would however be the difficulty of getting the consent of commentators to have their names on the work, given that they might still have substantial disagreements with its content.

When there is a sequence of drafts, there is also a problem of citation. Traditionally, when papers have been circulated in draft, there has eventually been a version of record, and this has been the one to cite. This practice can continue with a sequence of drafts so long as it is clear which is the final one. But if earlier versions remain available, it is perfectly possible that they will contain material worth citing that has been deleted from the final version. So the same post, with variations, may be cited under several URLs. And what is thought to be the final version may get cited under its URL, but then turn out not to be final, with the new final URL not replacing or being added to the earlier one in citations already given.

There is a solution, exemplified by the arXiv ( https://arxiv.org/ ). In that repository, each version of a paper has a page with an abstract and a link to the full text. There is also a short URL which always points to the page for the latest version, and that page includes links to pages for earlier versions. So one can give the short URL and also mention the version cited. Then anyone who uses the short URL can find all versions. 

This degree of organisation could be implemented by individual authors within their own blogs, although it would be more convenient to have a blog post that served as the main page and that simply contained links to all versions, treating the latest version in the same way as earlier versions. Then there would be no need to change the content of the main page beyond adding links to new versions. Others could give the URL for the main page and state which version they were citing.

The use of blog posts in academic work may also have effects on the ease with which academics who are building their reputations and careers can get credit for their work and for getting widely cited. But there are ways in which we could adapt. And any losses would be small compared to the prize of getting out into the hands of the public more work, and work that was better because it had been subject to comment and modification.

The method of contraries

1. The uses of contrary accounts

People may favour various accounts of aspects of the world. These may be straightforwardly factual accounts, as when someone favours an account of the dynamics of galaxies that assumes the existence of dark matter or an account of the American Civil War that emphasis economic causes. Or they may concern concepts rather than concrete reality, as when someone favours a particular account of knowledge or of value. We do however mean to exclude positions that are not accounts of how things are, for example the position that people should live in accordance with Aristotelian virtues or the position that there should be an unlimited right to free expression.

Our topic is a way to clarify the contents of accounts and the intensions of the terms that are used when giving them.

Someone who wishes to argue for an account may well spend time arguing against contrary accounts. This is not surprising. Rivals must be vanquished if the chosen account is to triumph.

There is another reason to explore contrary accounts. Doing so can help to clarify the favoured account. This, and not defence against rival accounts, is the reason we shall explore here. We shall call this use of contrary accounts the method of contraries.

Our focus on clarification means that we are not interested in how one might arrive at an account by a process of dialectic. More generally, our interest is in what to do once one has a favoured account to convey, rather than in any zetetic activity - although in practice we may of course modify an account because difficulties emerge as we try to clarify it.

We deliberately speak of contrary accounts, not contradictory ones. The reason is that clarifying a contradictory account, in the strict sense of an account that was the negation of a favoured account, would be precisely as challenging a task as clarifying the favoured account. It would require colouring in the territory on the other side of the same boundary.

When it comes to concepts, it is usual to speak of definitions that give the intensions of the corresponding terms. But we shall speak of accounts of the intensions of terms, accounts that may be rather more discursive than is normal for definitions. One reason is that in the humanities and sometimes in the social sciences, definitional precision is unavailable for lack of a complete and precise vocabulary to use in giving definitions. We can only say more or less about the intension of a term, not give a precise definition. Another reason is that we want to discuss a single method of contraries that straddles accounts of the intensions of terms and accounts of aspects of the world.

2. Where contrary accounts are used

In mathematics and the natural sciences, we can mostly say what we mean without saying what we do not mean. At the other extreme, there is a tradition of apophatic theology. So little can be said about God, either with confidence or without inappropriately limiting God, that theologians in this tradition resort to saying what God is not. They do so in the hope of somehow conveying something about God. And one could extend the practice to other areas of deep unclarity, outside theology.

Our interest is not in either of these extremes, but in the middle ground where entities discussed and concepts that are applied to them are sufficiently well understood for plenty to be said in a positive way, but there is still not enough clarity or precision to give favoured accounts in a wholly satisfactory way without reference to contrary accounts. It is in the humanities and the social sciences that we can expect to observe this phenomenon.

3. Examples

We shall now consider some examples. They differ from one another markedly. But they do share the use of contrary accounts to clarify as well as defend favoured accounts.

3.1 The Theaetetus

Plato's dialogues are replete with argument and counter-argument. Accounts of the topic under consideration are put up and shot down, and these turn out to be contraries of accounts proposed later. The final result may not be a positive conclusion. Sometimes the aporia remains. But each account still helps to show what is meant by some later account to which it is a contrary.

This kind of content of the dialogues is the result of applying Socratic questioning, a tool of pedagogy and research. Our concern will however be with the results, accounts and the contrasts between them, rather than with the process.

Early in the Theaetetus, the method of contraries is used to clarify what is sought. This is a unified account of knowledge itself, as opposed to a list of types of knowledge (146c-147c).

Then the extended discussion of perception as knowledge which ends at 160e lays the groundwork for bringing out the required distinctions between knowledge and perception (164b), and between knowledge and opinions that may differ from one person to another (169d-171e). These contrasts not only guide the discussion. They also indicate an essential element in knowledge, the truth of what is believed. The discussion also draws attention to the cases where different opinions can happily coexist (as when a wind is hot for one person but cold for another), and to the contrasting cases where there is a matter of fact that is independent of people's opinions so that if two people think different things, at least one of them must lack knowledge (179a-d).

Immediately after that point we are reminded of the use that has been made of the method of contraries, when Socrates notes that the task is to find out what knowledge is, not what it is not. He says we must wipe out everything up to now and start afresh (187a-b). But our view of the problem has already been thoroughly shaped by the dialogue up to this point.

There are also small examples. For example, when Socrates wants to investigate mistakes about the sum of 5 and 7, he emphasises that he means the numbers themselves, not 5 men and 7 men or anything like that (195e-196a). Here the method of contraries is used to show what is meant by abstract numbers. They are not collections of concrete objects. The distinction is obvious to us now, but it may not have been obvious in the early days of science and reflection on science.

3.2 The Renaissance

Our next example comes from historiography. Jacques Le Goff, in his book Must We Divide History Into Periods?, argues against accounts that impose on history a division into periods which would see a significant leap from the medieval period to the Renaissance. He favours an account that would acknowledge significant changes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but would also recognise that there was too much continuity across the supposed leap and not enough radical change to take the traditional view of the Renaissance as a distinct historical period.

In order to make his case, Le Goff makes extensive use of the method of contraries. At the highest level he sets out the traditional conception of the Renaissance, particularly as developed in the work of historians of the last 200 years, so as to be clear about what he is arguing against and therefore about what he is arguing for. At a more detailed level he identifies several allegedly transformational developments and argues against traditional views that they were revolutionary. He measures their significance as somewhat less but not trivial.

His position may be summarised in two quotations from the book. The first is: "However reasonable it may seem to mark it off as a discrete segment of historical time, I do not believe that the Renaissance can truly be said to constitute a separate period. It seems to me instead to constitute the last renaissance of a long Middle Ages" (page 58). The second is: "My own view is that the transition from one period to another, in this case at the end of a long Middle Ages, is to be situated in the mid-eighteenth century" (page 105).

Use of contraries is inevitable when one wants to argue that something did not exist, or was not of the nature commonly supposed. One has to set out what the thing would have been if it had existed, or what its commonly supposed nature was. Nonetheless, we have here perfectly good examples of the method of contraries in our sense. The positive thesis is set out in opposition to the rejected common view. It is then clarified by being set against specific elements in the common view.

3.3 Globalisation

Turning to an example from the social sciences, globalisation may be conceived in different ways by different authors. One example that brings out use of the method of contraries is supplied by Jan Aart Scholte (Globalization: A Critical Introduction, second edition, chapter 2).

Here the favoured account and contrary accounts are accounts of the intension of a term that may be useful, a term that might be thought to be entirely the invention of social scientists in order to help them understand developments in the human world. There is a contrast with knowledge as regarded in the Theaetetus. Plato takes it that there is such a thing as knowledge out there in the (human) world, the nature of which is to be discovered. The term "knowledge" is not one merely invented by philosophers, to have its intension modified as they may find useful.

Nonetheless, the idea of favouring a particular account of a term's intension remains. It is just that the basis of favouring is usefulness rather than correctness. And the role of the method of contraries in giving the favoured account also remains. So does the aptness of speaking of accounts rather than definitions that we noted in section 1. It may seem more legitimate to give precise definitions if one thinks one is using a term for a concept of one's own invention than if one thinks one is trying to fit a concept to something out in the world. But a desire to come up with something that is truly useful in understanding the world may lead one to hold back from providing a definition that by its rigidity may generate too many inconvenient exceptions to its applicability. There is also the point that in the humanities and to some extent in the social sciences, the available vocabulary often does not provide the words that would be needed to give precise definitions.

Scholte rejects accounts of the intension of "globalisation" in terms of internationalisation, liberalisation, universalisation, and westernisation (pages 54-58).

Scholte then homes in on his preferred account in terms of a spread of connections between people across the planet (pages 59-65). A key contrast with the rejected accounts is set out in these words: "In this fifth usage, globalization refers to a shift in the nature of social space. This conception contrasts with the other four notions of globalization discussed above, all of which presume (usually implicitly rather than explicitly) a continuity in the underlying character of social geography" (page 59). He reinforces the point in the words: "Whereas international relations are inter-territorial relations, global relations are trans- and sometimes supra-territorial relations" (page 65). These quotations highlight the importance of the method of contraries. In order to give his preferred account of the intension of "globalisation" in a way that gives the term sufficient (although still imperfect) precision, and to highlight the importance of a change in the nature of social space, the author has to give rejected accounts.

4. Why is the method of contraries useful?

4.1 The natures of disciplines

It is in the humanities, and to a lesser extent in the social sciences, that we are most likely to see the method of contraries doing work for which it is the only or the best tool. In mathematics and the natural sciences the method is likely only to have pedagogical uses, except perhaps in those natural sciences that are at a considerable distance from physics and chemistry.

The explanation lies in the nature of the humanities and to some extent the social sciences. It can easily be impossible to give a favoured account precisely if one gives it only in a positive way. Recourse must then be had to the method of contraries. The result may still not be fully precise, but it may be markedly more precise.

We shall now consider ways in which the natures of disciplines may give a role to the method of contraries.

4.2 The extensions of terms

Sometimes the difficulty in making precise positive statements will arise from imprecision in the extensions of terms. There may be borderline cases. It may not be possible to spell out necessary and sufficient conditions for entities to fall within the extensions of terms in ways that could in practice be applied to settle every case.

Here the method of contraries may help by picking off some borderline cases as outside the extensions of terms that are used in the positive statement of the favoured account. But the assistance may not be great, and in any case this would be a narrow and relatively uninteresting use of the method of contraries.

4.3 The intensions of terms

A more interesting source of difficulty is that there may be unclarity as to even the broad meaning of the favoured account on account of substantial unclarity as to the intensions of some significant terms. We may expect use of the method of contraries to make a significant contribution to the resolution of difficulties of this type.

Lack of clarity as to an intension may arise because a term is novel and not already well-embedded in the relevant discourse, or because it is being used in a novel sense. This helps to explain why the method of contraries has a much wider role in the humanities than in the natural sciences. In the natural sciences, when new terms are introduced, they are given places in rich networks of inter-definition, with implications between the possession of various sets of properties by entities that can be almost as strong as logical entailment. (Such implications are not verbal artefacts of definition. They need to be discovered by painstaking work. But once the results of research are in, the network of terms will be formulated or modified to fit the results. And the closer we get to physics, the more it is a feature of how the world works that use of terms which fit the world allows strong implications to be identified.) In the humanities and in much of the social sciences, tightly drawn networks of implication are rarely available. New terms must be given their senses in some looser way.

The method of contraries can help in that task. One may display contrary intensions of terms by giving accounts of some rejected intensions of those terms. If the main favoured account is an account of the intension of a term, then the accounts of contrary intensions will simply be contraries to that main account. And if the main favoured account sits above that level, and uses terms with potentially unclear intensions, the accounts of contrary intensions will be contraries to accounts that would convey the intensions of terms as they are used in the main favoured account.

We can see this sort of thing by returning to the examples we gave in sections 3.2 and 3.3.

Jacques Le Goff makes clear what sense of renaissance he will countenance largely by considering the traditional conception and denying its applicability to the relevant period of history. If we analyse his whole argument in our terms, we can see him first making clear what sort of change he has in mind under the term "renaissance", a significant but not necessarily revolutionary change, by presenting the contrary conception of a great transformation. Then he can build an account of the relevant stretch of history, an account that includes several renaissances in his sense but no great transformation of the type that is central to traditional accounts of the Renaissance.

That example is largely one of giving us a sense of the position of the Renaissance on a scale of radicality. And scale is at least in principle a quantitative variable, even if it is hard to measure when it means something other than any kind of physical scale. The example of globalisation is more complex, because the distinctions that Jan Aart Scholte wishes to draw are not in any significant aspect quantitative. Instead he wants to focus on different forms of interaction between entities and barriers to such interactions, before homing in on connections between people.

The way to bring out the form of interaction that is germane to Scholte's approach is to contrast it with other forms of interaction. The points of contrast between the favoured notion of globalisation and notions that are centred on other forms of interaction are not the only points that could be brought out by the method of contraries. But by choosing other notions that have been thought to do the same job of understanding the specific phenomenon of the world's becoming more socially and economically connected, the author can make it likely that he will bring out the points about his favoured notion that will be most significant in doing that job of understanding the phenomenon.

4.4 The favoured account as a whole

There are cases in which the difficulty in giving a favoured account purely positively is not a consequence of imprecision in the extensions or the intensions of terms that are brought together to give the account. Rather, it is a consequence of potential unclarity in the account as a whole when those terms are brought together to give it.

We can see this in the example of the Theaetetus that we introduced in section 3.1.

The goal, a unified account of knowledge itself, is clarified by contrast with a list of types of knowledge. Without this clarification, it would not be clear that a unified account would not even be given by a list of types together with a statement that the list was complete. It would also not be clear that Plato saw a fundamental difference between the intension and the extension of the term "knowledge" which would exist even if there was only one kind of knowledge.

The discussion of perception, about which the perceiver is not mistaken, provides the background for an argument that the intension of "knowledge" must allow for beliefs that do not count as knowledge. That need is then turned back on the proposal to define knowledge as perception, showing its inadequacy.

5. How good a tool is the method of contraries?

We shall now consider whether the method of contraries is a good tool.

On the positive side, the method works. This is indicated by numerous examples of its use. If it did not work, it would have fallen out of use.

It is the negative side that should concern us. Does use of the method of contraries present a high risk of misleading understandings of accounts or terms?

Abstractly, it would seem that it does. If we indicate what is meant partly by saying what is not meant, we are at risk of choosing the contraries that happen to occur to us because they are the ones that we thought of in the context of discovery, when we were still exploring accounts and terms. The contraries chosen in that way may not be the contraries most needed to convey a good understanding. And neglected contraries might have changed our assessment of the adequacy of the favoured account or the appropriateness of the terms used. We could only have full confidence in the results of using the method of contraries if we could be confident that we had identified and made use of all the contraries that would contribute significantly to an understanding and assessment of the account or the terms.

Concretely, there is less reason to worry than might at first appear. This is because of what is achieved in the humanities, and to some extent in the social sciences. The human world is not as amenable to precise characterisation as the physical world, and it is the possibility of precise characterisation that makes the demand that our accounts and terms should match the world an unforgiving demand. Without that possibility, we should not expect a total ordering of accounts by quality. So use of one selection of contraries need not lead us to an inferior result to use of another selection.

Moreover, adding some contraries to a selection may not yield an understanding that is better to any worthwhile extent. It may even muddy the waters. It may be some clear statement that B is neither C nor D that gives insight to the reader. Adding that B is also not E may take the edge off the contrast with C and D. That might seem to be a merely psychological consideration, but such considerations matter when the goal is Verstehen rather than, or at least in addition to, Erklären.

Indeed the tendency we have to cite the contraries that appear most salient, either because they show the reason for homing in on the intended target as distinct from other ones or because they rule out the obvious misunderstandings of the intended target, means that use of the method of contraries should improve accounts in respect of their conferring an understanding of the world. That is a different function from finding out some single and precise way that the world is, a function that is in any case beyond the scope of the humanities.

This is not to say that use of the method of contraries is without risk. We could pick contraries idiosyncratically and thereby mislead ourselves. And citing contraries, while it improves readers' sense of what is meant, does not take us all the way to unambiguous statements or definitions. It may however be the best we can do.

References

Le Goff, Jacques. Must We Divide History Into Periods?, translated by M. B. DeBevoise. New York, NY, Columbia University Press, 2015.

Plato. Theaetetus.

Scholte, Jan Aart. Globalization: A Critical Introduction, second edition. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.