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call for papers: nonprofit management for social change

ASPA's Section on Nonprofit Management has issued a call for papers for a symposium to explore how nonprofit and philanthropic research and practice might embrace its interdisciplinarity by developing theories and methodological approaches to challenge traditional ways of understanding and address wicked problems facing communities today. We invite you to submit original manuscripts on methodological approaches to nonprofit and philanthropic studies that embrace interdisciplinarity in a number of ways. Please see the attached for more details.

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PAQ Articles

Coming to Terms with the Complementarity of Agent and Structure

THEO P.C.M. JOCHOMS and MARK R. RUTGERS
PAQ, Vol. 29 No. 4, (2006)

This article questions how to conceptualize the relation
between different ontologies in the social sciences. Giddens’
Structuration Theory is analyzed as an example of an unifying theory
linking ©agent© and ©structure© ontologies. The concept of interaction is
used to pinpoint Giddens’ notion of the complementarity of these two.
The resulting abstract unification does, however, not result in a unified
social analysis. Rather it implies that we need to ©bracket© the one or the
other approach in empirical observation. This raises the question: What
is complementarity? In this article it is argued the notion of
complementarity as developed in quantum theory (Q-complementarity)
applies to the case at hand. Q-complementarity does not refer to the
possible simultaneous attribution of characteristics, but establishes the
validity of both attributes for describing reality depending on the
circumstances of observation.

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