Author(s):  
Diane-Laure Arjaliès ◽  
Philip Grant ◽  
Iain Hardie ◽  
Donald MacKenzie ◽  
Ekaterina Svetlova

Chapter 1 introduces the idea of the chain as related to investment management. It highlights the increasing importance and influence of the asset management industry and argues that, despite this fact, the behaviour and decision-making of asset managers has been little studied. The chapter suggests that investment decisions today cannot be understood by focusing on isolated investors. Rather, most of their money flows through a chain: a sequence of intermediaries that ‘sit between’ savers and companies/governments. The chapter introduces the central argument of the book that investment management is shaped profoundly by the opportunities and constraints that this chain creates.


Author(s):  
Amanda J. Baugh

Chapter 1 describes Faith in Place’s origins and development within the context of the American environmental movement and with attention to strategic decisions its leaders made to help their organization survive and ultimately flourish. Although Faith in Place originated with priorities, activities, and participants that were quite similar to numerous other environmental groups, Faith in Place’s first ten years involved a series of strategic decisions in which leaders developed measures to differentiate their work from mainstream environmentalism. Strategic decision-making led to a coalition distinct for its racial diversity.


Author(s):  
Liesbet Hooghe ◽  
Tobias Lenz ◽  
Gary Marks

Chapter 1 sets out the core puzzle of international governance, introduces postfunctionalist theory, and situates it in relation to realism, liberal institutionalism, and constructivism. Postfunctionalism theorizes how conceptions of community constrain the functional provision of public goods across territorial scale. It hypothesizes that international organization is social as well as functional and provides a precise and falsifiable explanation of the institutional set-up of an IO, including its membership, contractual basis, policy portfolio, and the extent to which an IO pools authority in collective decision making and delegates authority to independent actors.


Author(s):  
Deborah Roberts

This chapter introduces the underlying principles of decision making. You will be encouraged to consider decision making as a student in university together with decision making as a student nurse (see Chapter 1 ). In 2010, following a review of pre-registration nursing education, the professional body for nursing in the United Kingdom, the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC), published new Standards for Pre-Registration Nursing Education , including competencies that all students must achieve to qualify as a registered nurse. These competencies have to be met in four broad areas known as ‘domains’. 1. Professional values 2. Communication and interpersonal skills 3. Nursing practice and decision making 4. Leadership, management, and team working You will find reference to these domains throughout the book, and there will be an opportunity to learn how the competencies in each of these that relate to decision making can be linked to your clinical and university-based learning. There are a number of terms that can be found in the literature that are often used interchangeably; you may see terms such as ‘decision making’, ‘problem solving’, ‘clinical reasoning’ or ‘clinical judgement’, and others used when writers are discussing how and why nurses respond to clinical situations in a particular way (see Chapter 1 for more detail). For example, Levett-Jones et al. (2010: 515) provide a helpful definition of clinical reasoning as ‘the process by which nurses collect cues, process the information, come to an understanding of a patient problem or situation, plan and implement interventions, evaluate outcomes, and reflect on and learn from the process’. They also emphasize that a nurse’s ability to develop these clinical reasoning skills depends on what they term as ‘five rights’—that is, the nurse’s ability ‘to collect the right cues and to take the right action for the right patient at the right time and for the right reason’. In the context of ensuring that any patient receives the best possible care, these ‘five rights’ are very appropriate, and indeed if one were to fail to pick up on the right cues and to take the appropriate actions in many clinical situations, the outcome may have serious repercussions for the nurse and the patient.


Author(s):  
Roger A. Hart ◽  
Michael K. Conn

The task we have been set is to review developmental theory concerning how individuals act in real-world environments. To simplify this difficult task we have emphasized the developmental span of childhood, the area of our professional expertise. Before proceeding with the review, a few comments regarding the framework of this book and, within it, the definition of our task will enable us to illuminate some of the assumptions inherent in the structure of this volume and to explain how this has affected our conceptualization of the problem. The stated goal of this book is to look at the separate areas of human relatedness to the environment that are recognized by “most research in environmental psychology”: environmental cognition, environmental appraisal and decision making, and action in environments (see Table 1.1 in Chapter 1 of this volume). We agree that although such a separation of cognition and evaluation from action is a reflection of the dominant tendency of research, it is true of only some theories. To accept this division and to discuss primarily action would prevent us from emphasizing those theorists who have argued that human relatedness to the environment must be thought of holistically and dynamically. Consequently, although we have tried to emphasize action, this chapter actually deals simultaneously with cognition and appraisal. The question of why more integrative and holistic theories have been largely ignored is itself important. We argue that the answer lies in a fear by psychologists of such research because it cannot easily meet the traditional tenets of what constitutes good theory—building through experimental research design. A second problem in the task definition is the use of the word “space.” We should not simply be addressing “spatial decisions and actions” but environmental decisions and actions. In the field of environmental psychology the terms “space” and “environment” are commonly used synonymously. We think of space as just one characteristic of objects in the environment. Unfortunately, space is the characteristic that most environmental cognition research has addressed. This is somewhat understandable, for environmental psychology finds its distinctiveness in the study of the large-scale environment in which space (spatial relatedness) is the most distinguishing variable.


Author(s):  
William B. Rouse

Chapter 1 provides the introduction to this book. Predictions can seldom specify what will happen, so, inevitably, one addresses what might happen. There are often many possible futures, with leading indicators and potential tipping points for each scenario. Computational models can be used to explore designs of systems and policies to determine whether these designs will likely be effective and to aid in decision-making. Models are means to ends rather then ends in themselves. Decision-makers seldom crave models. They want their questions answered in an evidence-based manner. Decision-makers want insights that provide them with a competitive advantage. They want to understand possible futures to formulate robust and resilient strategies for addressing these futures.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Jane Stapleton

Chapter 1 describes the approach of reflexive tort scholarship and how it depends on a clear understanding of the environment of judicial decision-making. Part of that environment is the conception that judicial ‘lawmaking’ is ‘retrospective’, by which is usually meant that it is imposed retroactively. Yet retroactivity is in sharp tension with the fundamental principle that situations should be judged according to the law as it was at that time. To resolve this tension, the text offers a conception of the common law as ‘living’, that it evolves in line with changes in society. Later, litigation invites the ultimate court to articulate this evolution and how the law stood at the time that the parties interacted. The descriptive claims of Grand Theories are contrasted with reflexive tort scholarship, which accommodates key aspects of judicial decision-making, such as the heterogeneity of judicial reasons, in ways that those descriptive claims cannot.


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