Thursday, October 31, 2019
Retail Theories and Strategies Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words
Retail Theories and Strategies - Essay Example Retailing is an activity of enormous economic significance to most developed nations. In Britain, 2.5 million people are employed in retailing, comprising 10.5 percent of all employees (National Statistics, 2001a). Retailers provide the goods and services needed--from food, auto parts, apparel, home furnishings, appliances and electronics to advice, home improvement and skilled labor. Retailing is one of the fastest-growing segments of the economy. As one of the nation's largest employers, the retail industry provides excellent business opportunities. At least one-third of the 100,000 or so new enterprises launched each year are retail operations. The entrepreneurs behind these ventures risk their capital, invest their time and make a living by offering consumers something they need or want. Most retailing involves buying merchandise or a service from a manufacturer, wholesaler, agent, importer or other retailer and selling it to consumers for their personal use. The price charged fo r the goods or services covers the retailer's expenses and includes a profit. Each year, this vital sector of the UK economy accounts for about 08 percent of our gross national product--more than $1 billion.. Most are store retailers, though there are other types of enterprises--such as e-commerce, mail order, automatic-merchandising (vending) machines, direct retailing (door-to-door and home party sales), and service providers. ... Strategically, food retailing has become a highly competitive industry increasingly answerable to the City and shareholder pressure. Labour represents the second largest financial outlay for the retailer after merchandise costs. The most efficient means of labour utilization are therefore a strategic priority. Attempts to improve market share and increase profitability have resulted in operational changes that have influenced the structure of the retail food labor market.It is essential that retailers are aware of the advantages and disadvantages of different methods of targeting a particular segment of customers which needs to be done considering the suitability of different options to their kind of business and the environments in which they wish to operate. In a retailing environment, it requires major market analysis to understand what type of customers needs to be targeted for a specific product. This is highly time - consuming and irrelevant and inappropriate data might result in the loss of the retailer. Another important task involves, UK retailers and their suppliers of retail branded products must take "all reasonable precautions and exercise all due diligence", in the development, manufacture, distribution, advertising or sale of food products to the consumer. Segmenting Retail Markets Every customer has a different set of needs, wants and motives, but in few consumer goods market it is feasible fully to tailor the retailing mix to the level of the individual customer. Hence the need to identify reasonably homogeneous groupings, or segments, of shoppers to be the target(s) of retail marketing
Tuesday, October 29, 2019
Ideological Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words
Ideological - Essay Example Such has been the case with of this author with regards to the topic of prayer in school. As a function of seeking to explain and ideological biography for how this belief has grown and evolved through time, the following analysis will analyze the different stages and approaches that existed within my mind up until the present time. Before delving into the issue, it must be understood that the issue of prayer in school has been one that has been hotly contested and debated within the sphere of politics and current media during my adolescence and childhood. As a result of this fact, the perennial presence of this debate allowed me to be presented with the arguments for and against school prayer at a relatively young age. In keeping with the way in which the majority of society viewed the issue, I was led to believe that prayer in school, although representing a few key benefits, was ultimately against the separation of church and state and should not exist to any degree or level withi n the educational system. Rather than this being informed by a particularly atheist and/or anti-religious viewpoint, this was instead informed as a result of the impact that media and the political debate had upon my own views. However, as I began to mature, I began to note the failures within the educational system as compared to the prior years in which it has been so successful. For instance, my parents, as well as older generations work continually discussing the devolution of the United States educational system and seeking to understand what changes could potentially be made as a means of remedying this decline. As a function of the presence of this issue and the clear and unmistakable fact that the United States educational system was merely a shell of what it was during the time of my parents and/or grandparents, my views with respect to the role of prayer in school began to change. Rather than being diametrically opposed to such an idea, I began to integrate with a level of appreciation with respect to some of the benefits that it might provide. However, of all of the factors that influence this progression of ideology within my own life, perhaps the most important was a level of increased importance with regards to the role in which religion played within my own life. As was the case of many individuals growing up in a religious home, religion did not have a personal impact upon me until such a time that I began to experience religious growth and appreciation within my own life. Realizing the power and help that prayer exhibited within my own life allowed me to come to a greater level of appreciation and understanding with regards to the degree of help and power that prayer could provide within the group setting. Anyone with even a cursory level of understanding concerning the power that prayer can provide understands that group prayer is a particularly powerful means through which intercession can be provided. As such, failing to utilize such a powe rful tool within the educational system is merely ignoring a cost of free and highly successful method through which the educational system and personal development of the individual students can be maximized. All too often, within the current system, millions of dollars are poured into particular programs with little result. However, it is my firm belief, as a result
Sunday, October 27, 2019
Application Performance Optimization and Load Balancing
Application Performance Optimization and Load Balancing Application Performance Optimization and Load Balancing using RAID and Caching Techniques Akilesh Kailash Sunil Iyer Kolar Suresh Kumar Sabarish Venkatraman ABSTRACT As the data processing and demand for storage grows, the performance of a critical application should always be intact with respect to disk I/O. There has been considerable improvements related to disk seek, latency and spindle speeds; However, these improvements have not met the challenges and addresses the need for better performance and load balancing. The challenge of any Database administrator is to maximize the Application I/O performance and ensure the high availability with zero downtime. This performance challenge can be met using I/O monitoring, Load balancing, Cache management and RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) technologies. The primary goal of this paper is to exemplify the details of successfully solving the I/O problems of a database application in a consistent fashion with the appropriate RAID configurations, caching mechanisms and load balancing algorithm. Categories and Subject Descriptors B.3.2 [Design Styles]: Mass storage ââ¬â RAID. D.4.2 [Storage Management]: Secondary storage, Storage hierarchies. D.4.3 [File Systems Management]: File organization. D.4.4 [Communications Management]: Input/Output. D.4.5 [Reliability]: Backup procedures, Fault-tolerance. General Terms Algorithms, Performance, Design, Theory, Reliability. Keywords RAID Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks I/O ââ¬â Input/Output DBA Database Administrators HA High Availability OLTP Online Transaction Processing. IOPS HBA 1. INTRODUCTION RAID technology addresses the need for higher storage capacity in IO system and provides the feature of data redundancy. This helps in efficient and improved disk access and avoids data loss by disk failures. Theoretically, RAID is mainly used to create a logical disk from two or more physical disk drives in order to provide high bandwidth. RAID is an imperative part of storage stack and fabric layer and is coordinated by various storage vendors like EMC, Hitachi, NetApp. RAID technologies have enumerated different methods in building storage stacks and sub-systems for different kinds of databases. Thus, the two main technical reasons for switching to RAID are scalability and high availability in the context of I/O and system performance. As the database sizes of today have grown manifold from the gigabytes to petabytes range, the intricacy to scale I/O performance of such gigantic systems is needed very much for critical applications. Load balancing is a critical factor in environments like Operating Systems, Clusters, Networking and Applications. They play a quintessential role in the performance and reliability of any environment avoiding catastrophic failures. In a quotidian scenario, the resource allocation and load balancing are done through hash methods, genetic algorithms and several scheduling algorithms in Operating systems. Many database applications demand high throughput and availability from storage subsystems. For instance, a stock market application running in New York stock exchange will need to have a high throughput and bandwidth with absolutely no downtime. This requires continuous operation i.e., the need to satisfy each I/O request even in the case of disk failures. It is not acceptable to meet the aforementioned requirements at the cost of deprived performance mainly in real-time applications such as video and audio. It is highly unacceptable if a video is played at slower speed or the data is lost during transmission and ends abruptly. Since a database application may encounter extreme I/O activity or suffer a sudden spike of I/O activities for a brief period of time, the organization of the database structure onto the disk becomes imperative. 2. PROBLEM DEFINITION Mission critical data centers have a compelling need to have highly available applications and services thereby ensuring zero downtime. Current clustering solutions, like MSCS or HP Service Guard enable HA for vital applications. However, such applications are specific and developed only for the OS/application for which they are designed. The I/O performance and their patterns of a database application has to be analyzed by understanding their relation with the physical storage so that it helps in determining the deployment of application based on any given workload. I/O from an application needs to be categorized based on which appropriate techniques can be used in order to improve its performance. There are many DBA tuning software which are primarily used for indexing the database and monitor the drive activities. This approach is effective but requires lot of time and in reality it is quite tedious in nature. 3. ABSTRACT SOLUTION The possible solutions are: Determining the RAID Level and stripe size RAID levels are determined on factors such as type of I/O, disk cost, read/write I/O and so on. The data transfer rate and IOPS performance is very much influenced based on the segment size chosen and the striping size used. For example: In a RAID 5 configuration, there are 4 disks and 1 parity disk. Let the segment size of each disk be 64KB. Thus, when an I/O of 64KB has to be addressed, it is written to the first drive. The next I/O of 64KB is written to next and so on and finally the parity of the 4 I/Oââ¬â¢s is calculated and written to the last disk. In case of RAID 1 (Mirroring), there are 2 disk groups and 2 mirror groups. A 64KB I/O would be written to each of the disk drives and mirrored drives. Caching techniques Splitting the cache The cache acts as an interface between the host application and RAID controllers. The cache can be divided into two parts viz. front-end and back-end. Database applications can rely on the front-end cache. Prefetching OLTP applications may have I/O operations which are not sequential; the pre-fetch algorithm confirms the addresses which will fetched in future and loads it in memory. The amount of data to be pre-fetched depends on the application requirement, memory and performance desired by application. Database organization on a storage system Organizing the database objects such as tables, logs, views on storage layout comes in a wide range. Based on the structure of the database layout, an appropriate storage is chosen. Load Balancing I/O load balancing across cluster nodes are performed using regression analysis. If a port of an HBA or fabric node is loaded heavily, then the I/O is balanced across the ports which are not utilized to its full potential. 4. LITERATURE SURVEY I/O performance and disk I/O contention plays a vital role for critical applications. Our proposal and work on application performance monitoring and I/O tuning and load balancing is motivated based on the ââ¬Å"Oracle I/O Performanceâ⬠and ââ¬Å"Array tuning Best Practicesâ⬠paper. The proposed solution and enhancements are based on similar lines of these papers. We start off the survey by explaining the technical feasibilities, the pros and cons of these approaches discussed in the papers and explain in brief about the issue we are addressing based on the survey findings. 5. PERFORMANCE BOTTLENECKS Application performance and write access is generally obtained by using storage Arrays having different RAID configurations. For instance, the striping of data across multiple disks using RAID 1 in order to achieve redundancy is the most common way of obtaining high availability. Disk failure vulnerabilities in enterprise storage The main motivation of going for striping technologies is because of the vulnerability in disk failures in enterprise storage Arrays which can result in catastrophic loss of data. This high availability of application and I/O is obtained at the cost of write performance. Keeping synch of write operations During a write operation, all the writes have to be updated simultaneously to all the disks in order to keep the disks in synch. This will have a catastrophic result in operations which will have heavy writes and its performance. In addition to it, maintaining the synchronization of data between all disks and achieving concurrency is a difficult task and can lead to system crashes. In order to overcome the aforementioned problems; a number of different striping mechanisms have been proposed; each of them have their specific tradeoff based on cost, high performance, scalability and robustness. The majority of RAID configurations are based on the interleaving of the data and the pattern is which the redundant information is distributed across the disks. Load Balancing of I/O and resource utilization Load balancing is essentially implemented in SQL server clustering and is very common practice. There are many third party tools that provide solutions to load balancing and resource utilization; however the limitations of such tools is that the factors to decide on load balancing are very system specific and are dependent heavily on the characteristic of each application. As the database size grows in a short period, we generally observe that the query speed has a performance hit as the number of rows increases. This is mainly observed on applications where the performance data is being collected in frequent intervals and simultaneously the data is read from the DB for other purposes. The general and quick solutions to optimize query speed it to partition the views, indexing and table partitioning. But even then, things are observed to be quite slow. The main problem with such solutions is that the database tables and views are located on different servers. Hence a server cluster is used which add in reliability if there is any performance issues seen on one of the cluster nodes. 6. RAID LEVEL SELECTION CRITERIA The choice of RAID level to be chosen is based on different factors. When a mirrored configuration is chosen such as RAID 1 or RAID 1+0, each write request is duplicated to disk by the raid controller. This results in performance issues if the application does not rely heavily on data duplication and its availability. When higher levels/parity based RAID configuration is used, things get more intricate. Let us consider that, when RAID 5 or RAID 6 is used and if the size of the write I/O is less than the stripe size which is frequently observed in database applications where the data write is around 4kb pages contrasting to the drive size of around 128KB; as a result of this, the raid controller has to perform magnitude of I/O operations for just a single request. The main drawback of the above technique is that for a small write request, the raid controller has to first fetch the data from the back end disk to the main memory. Then it has to insert the fresh data at the appropriate position and calculate the new parity stripe to perform another write operation back to the disk. Hence, one I/O operation results in roughly 3 to 4 times the IOPS. This overhead adds in if the calculation of parity is for two sets as in RAID 6. The other factors of choosing the RAID configuration are the disk/drive cost and I/O pattern. The cost is zero for RAID 0 as there is no redundancy; while it is highest for RAID 1 or its combination such as RAID 10. This cost is high because of drive mirroring. The cost of RAID 5 is comparatively lower than RAID 1 but it has one disk which is dedicated for parity. A cleared distinction is required to classify small I/O and large I/O. The bursty nature and large I/O is seen if the request for the I/O is more than the one third of the cache size. All the small/short I/Oââ¬â¢s are addressed in cache thereby avoiding the RAID access. All in all, RAID 5 and 6 are generally preferred for large I/O and sequential I/O operations while RAID 1 and RAID 10 is preferred for short I/O operations. 7. SCOPE FOR IMPROVEMENT This paper goes on the aforementioned aspects and concentrates on monitoring the I/O pattern, analyzing the load on each of the I/O and performing a load balance if required; In addition to the above criteria, taking the I/O pattern into consideration, an appropriate RAID configuration along with write-back cache method is used if necessary. 8. PROPOSED SOLUTION Characterize the I/O pattern The first step is to monitor the I/O and characterize it. This is done using tools such as Perfmon or IO Meter. We plan to use these tools and analyze the I/O pattern of a given application. This monitoring of pattern is required as we will characterize the request as read intensive, write intensive, how the load is being varied. Perform load balancing upon I/O threshold The second step is to perform load balancing. This is done by analyzing the load and identifying the threshold of the I/O from a server HBA Port through the fabric layer to the storage Array. Threshold is a boundary which serves as a benchmark for comparison or guidance, and any deviation or breach of the said threshold may result in a change in state of an overall system. Our proposed infrastructure identifies the threshold by analyzing the I/O graph and monitoring the following parameters: Linear Regression Slope of the curve Using Linear Regression, the value of the slope is calculated. Based on these two parameters, if we observe that if one of the HBA ports is heavily loaded, we tend to balance it out by redistributing the excess load to different cluster nodes. Once the I/O is balanced, an appropriate RAID configuration is calculated. 9. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK After studying the I/O access patterns of various workloads, we can clearly the map the database application to the physical storage thereby achieving high performance, fast access and retrieval. This would be helpful for DBAââ¬â¢s to deploy management applications and would be easy to track the application performance. This analysis can be implemented at the enterprise level configuration as well resulting in efficient usage of physical storage, making it cost effective and reducing the work for DBAââ¬â¢s or lab administrators. 10. REFERENCES The RAID Book: Sixth Edition. RAID Advisory Board. LACIE: RAID Technology White Paper. RAID: High-Performance, Reliable Secondary Storage ââ¬â ACM Computing Surveys Peter M. Chen, Edward K. Lee. Array tuning best practices A Dell technical white paper DOI=http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pvaul/en/powervault-md3200i-performance-tuning-white-paper.pdf. Exploring Disk Size and Oracle Disk I/O performance DOI= http://www.openmpe.com/cslproceed/HPW02CD/paper/11026.pdf
Friday, October 25, 2019
John Keats :: essays research papers
John Keats was one of the greatest poets of the Romantic Era. He wrote poetry of great sensual beauty and had a unique passion for details. In his lifetime he was not recognized with the senior poets. He didn’t receive the respect he deserved. He didn’t fit into the respected group because of his age, nor in the younger group because he was neither a lord nor in the upper class. He was in the middle class and at that time people were treated differently because of their social status. John Keats was born in London on October 31, 1795. He was educated at Clarke’s School in Enfield. He enjoyed a liberal education that mainly reflected on his poetry. His father died when he was eight and his mother died when he was fourteen. After his mother died, his maternal grandmother granted two London merchants, John Rowland Sandell and Richard Abbey, guardianship. Abbey played a major roll in the development of Keats, as Sandell only played a minor one. These circumstances drew him extremely close to his two brothers, George and Tom, and his sister Fanny. When he 15, Abbey removed him from the Clarke School, as he became an apothecary-surgeon’s apprentice. Then in 1815, he became a student at Guy’s Hospital. He registered for a six- month course to become a licensed surgeon. Soon after he decided he was going to be a doctor he realized his true passion was in poetry. So he decided he would try to excel in poetry also. His poetry that he wrote six years before his death was not very good. As his life progressed his poetry became more mature and amazing. He looked up to Shakespeare and Milton. He studied a lot of there poetry and imitated these two writers. His work resembled Shakespeare. Soon after medical school, he returned to London and met Leigh Hunt. They began to write the Examiner, which was love poetry. In his lifetime he published three books of verse: Poems (1817), Endymion (1818), Lamia Isabella and other poems including two famous poems “Odes'; and “Hyperion.'; Ã Ã Ã Ã Ã Hunt then introduced him to a circle of literary men, including Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Wordsworth. These men influenced him to create his first volume of verses, called Poems by John Keats. Shelly persisted that he needed to develop a stronger body of work before publishing.
Thursday, October 24, 2019
Implant tractable ID chips in newborn babies Essay
Our companyââ¬â¢s idea to implant tractable ID chips in newborn babies offers a revolutionary approach to effectively combat the high incidences of abductions of newborns and children, a menace against which eve police forces are finding themselves helpless. Once the chip is placed within children, their every movement can be traced to exactitude using the GPRS technology, making their abduction and subsequent hiding a practically impossible task. Apart from this, these IDs would act as a database for these children, containing their relevant medical, physiological and personal details, with provisions of constant upgrades. Thus doctors needs to only access childrenââ¬â¢s ID to know their history of previous medical complications and treatments, police officers can easily trace parents of a lost child and parents can keep constant vigil on the movement of their children even from their workplace. However, there are many exacting complications in successful rollout of this idea. It can be safely assumed that this concept would come under severe moral, ethical, and religious censure through the entire world. Many, if not all, would form organizations and international groups to canvass on social and legal platforms against our proposal to ââ¬Ëtagââ¬â¢ human infants, and doubts would be raised on even our integrity, commitment and sanity. Moreover, the thrust of objection and criticism is likely to come from our own scientific intelligentsia, religious and spiritual gurus, intellectuals and similar eminent personalities. These estimated objections and criticism are hardly a surprising possibility, given worldââ¬â¢s historical anathema against every new scientific invention or discovery, any path-breaking medicinal technology, or even against any idea that appeared contrary to its set of framed ideas and concepts. History is replete with evidences that from the time of Archimedes to modern day age of cloning, people have always approached every major scientific and technological breakthrough with skepticism, incredulity and more than often, downright hostility. We can see how strong the sentiments ran when Copernicus presented the theory that its Sun that is at center of solar system, and not moon and that world is sphere shaped, against what world had been led to believe (Hall, 1954). Later Galileo was humiliated by Roman Church on the same issue. We further see the way almost entire educated western society rose against Charles Darwin for his theory of evolution through natural selection and the stringent social and religious criticism he was subjected to (Hall, 1954). Even Einstein, one of the greatest human brains of all times, was not spared from hostile criticism and rejection when he denied the existence of gravity in his general theory of relativity (Hawkins, 1988). Technological innovations and many scientific inventions were treated with similar aggressive denial and denunciation. Whether it was construction of railway locomotives, invention of telegraphs and telephones, constructions of dams, introduction of vaccination techniques, advent of contraceptive pills, gene therapy or subject of cloning and stem cell research, a significant section of society always protested and rejected the concept on plethora of supposedly ethical and moral grounds (Thomas, 2005). It is futile to say that each of these innovations contributed to further advancement and growth of human society. The reason of this persistent fear of new technological innovations is that they defy and sometimes even break the existing concepts, perceptions and notions. Often these concepts and perceptions are embedded part of a social culture, and therefore their rejection is construed as a planned attack by scientists and technicians on the very foundation of the culture (Lyne, 2005). We cannot flippantly dismiss their fears, and overlook their arguments just because they happen to contradict our idea. Instead, we need to reach out to people, address their every valid question and dispel their remotest of the doubts related to implant of IDs in newborn babies. My own understanding of the issue says that we should move ahead with project because when people are presented with rational arguments and valid answers to their queries, their gravest arguments turns in staunchest of the support. Indeed, one of their first objections we are likely to face is ethical as well as medical propriety of inserting an unnecessary foreign object in the fragile body of a newborn. But as we maintain, this implant is done for childrenââ¬â¢s own security and safety. Further, the chip is especially designed in such a way that its implant would cause minimum distress for child and the implant can be done by any surgeon through a very superficial incision. The presence or location of the chip may very well remain unknown to child unless specifically told. Of course, implanting a foreign object in human body in itself is no more an ethical issue, especially after advent of pacemakers and artificial limbs. Rather a valid query may concern the possible radiation effect of the chip on childââ¬â¢s developing body, and whether that this radiation would impede or in any way alter hormonal or chemical composition of the growing child. But as our repeated lab tests and years of experiments have shown, the chip does not interfere with human bio- chemical growth in any way. It stays in the body like a neutral object, deactivated unless recalled for. Even upon activation, the signals emitted by chip are no more harmful than the fields of electromagnetic radiation surrounding us every second of our life. The final debate around our proposed chip would center on moral and ethical issue of tagging children. Is it right to tag children like animals are tagged in zoo and safari and then observed? Further, when these children grow up, they might become uncomfortable with the idea of being watched or remotely tracked for their every movement, and may very likely treat this an infringement of their privacy. But in my opinion, these objections are specious, and deviating from our main issue- that of stopping crime and providing a safe and secure world for children. Parents, and later on Children, may be given the option to remove or manually deactivate the chip, when they start to feel that it is more a burden than as a benefit. However, for that time that it is there, it is the best way to ensure infants are secure, safe and sound under their parentââ¬â¢s, physicians and teacherââ¬â¢s constant observation. It is the best way to completely eliminate the threat of organized abduction industry, and certainly it is the surest way to ensure that no child goes every lost or missing. I would reiterate therefore we should confidently move ahead with this revolutionary idea and usher in the new era of human-technology integration.
Wednesday, October 23, 2019
Rationalist Approaches Essay
International relations (IR) are ââ¬Ëthe diplomatic strategic relations of states, and the characteristic focus of IR is on issues of war and peace, conflict and cooperationââ¬â¢ (Brown and Ainley, 2009). Many different theories exist within IR to define and analyse certain situations. Rationalism is classified as the major in IR analysis theory (Baylis, et al, 2011). The study of IR according to a comprehensive and scientific methodology became a key demand after the First World War, resulting from a desire to clarify international politics. Following the First World War, international relations were initially taught in different fields, such as international law and diplomatic history and international organisations. The importance of studying international relations as an independent rapporteur emerged after the Second World War, precipitated by unprecedented US involvement in global affairs (both during the war and in the subsequent Cold War) and the decline of the European empires in the post-war political situation (Hook and Spanier, 2007). International relations seeks to interpret the phenomena of international reality and reliably and realistically conceptualise and analyse international events for the purpose of building theory and prediction and the study of IR itself. IR aims to reach analytical exact facts of the international situation by recognising the power that controls the formation of various approaches of States with each other and by determining how they dynamically interact, and their consequent impact on the conditions of the international community (Burchill, 2011). International relations are changing constantly under the influence of international politics and pressure, which affect the content and characteristics of IR. The problem of correlation between domestic and foreign policy of the most complex and controversial problems precipitates debate in many theoretical trends in the science of international relations, such as neo- realism (Baldwin, 1993). The theory of international relations is a homogeneous group and methodology of assumptions that seeks to clarify relations, which we call internationalisation. This essay will demonstrate critically some of international relations theories and the interpretations of some key concepts, for example power, state and world order, by using historic and contemporary examples in terms of: firstly, realism and neo-realism; secondly, liberalism and neo-liberalism; thirdly, decision-making theory; and finally, to evaluate the extent to which the rationalist approaches are appropriate in the study of international relations and to illustrate the weaknesses and the strengths of rationalist approach in the study of IR, to bring out the essence of various social entities through epistemological approaches grounded in rationality and interpretation based on the event goal finding forms of social organisation. The events of September 11th, 2001 (hereafter referred to as ââ¬Ë9/11ââ¬â¢) and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003 respectively have alerted researchers in international relations to the role of ideological factors in the behaviour of states, something that contributed to the enrichment of the debate and opposed some fundamental assumptions of Western sociology, especially those relating to humanitarian actions based on rationality and social councils, and the associated view that the world is moving towards a common destiny of liberal democracy and market economy, overriding the self-specificities of peoples and cultural differences (Baylis, et al, 2011). Many researchers have tried possible analyses of reality and built theories from to enable a preview of variable events in international reality, and others used these models for intellectual and contemplative purposes in an attempt to extrapolate theoretical exchange, leading to a different understanding of reality and perception and overcoming the impact of the analysis of external behaviour with proposed forms and formats of relations and international transactions; this is the so-called war of paradigms. In addition, the most important reasons for the differences between these paradigms are due to the complexity of the field of international relations and the complex nature of these relations on the one hand, and the difference in perspectives and ideological motives from which each approach on the other. There is no doubt that the selection of work by the term ââ¬Å"paradigmâ⬠is the most effective and beneficial, as the hallmark of this field is relative to these paradigms that do not live up to many researchersââ¬â¢ level of theory, but there are poles of paradigms to serve the interests and certain objectives which sometimes may not be available in scientifically objective conditions, and which facilitate the ideological framing of the general orientation of groups or individuals. Firstly, the theory of realism called for overcoming differences among nations through the international rule of law. The most prominent representatives of this trend, such as Morgenthau, considered that the international system is by nature chaotic and driven by a single law (Schuett, 2011). Realism has interests and is supported by historians. However, the theory suffers from uncertainty because it lacks universally supported definitions for example ââ¬Å"powerâ⬠, and it assumes that state officials act for national interests in accordance with the interests of power; if this is true, this indicates that the state is in a constant struggle (Brown & Ainley, 2000). Morgenthau was mostly concerned with his concept of power. The policy is determined in relation to the power, and aims to own and keep them and their development. The power is always the ultimate goal of the policy. For Morgenthau, sovereignty is authority over the thought or actions of other human beings; he accordingly rated different countries depending on their political objectives (Cozette, 2008). This category consists of four sections: rated countries seeking to adopt the status quo with any exposure to the existing arrangement; rated countries seeking to develop their strength, practicing a policy of imperialism; and states seeking fame. Three forms of power parallel these categories: to retain power, power development, and highlighting power. The classification uses Morgenthauââ¬â¢s concept of power in a relative sense, a classification that lacks rigour in terms of the definition of terms and reference problems posed by the application of this classification (Turner & Mazur, 2009). However, he also warned that common errors can occur when assessing power, resulting in the following recommendations: first, one should not deal with the power as an absolute concept, and should use a relative analysis; second, power should not be regarded as something acquired; and third, one should not restrict focus to one of the power components, rather all should be carried by the dimensions of this concept. Kenneth Waltz diverged from the realist school and added the experience of new realism in his development of the theory of international relations in his book Theory of International Politics (1979). His new concept of foreign policy is based on the understanding of the system and systemic dynamics, and not of peoples or countries, Waltz pioneered realistic visualisation alongside his focus on the study of manifestations of international economics, with the development of the theory of stability to maintain the status quo, when superpowers impose their concepts that are antithetical to some parties such as the initiative to establish neoliberal international financial institutions to support imaginable ideological outlooks (Waltz, 1959). According to Waltz, the main actors that unite on the basis of securing their survival are states. Neo-realism is an alternative vision. Waltz tried in his book to refine the theory of realism by searching for ââ¬Å"essence.â⬠The theory concerns the international system, and maintains this level of analysis as the only way to understand the actions of the actors who make up the elements of this system, which impose specific restrictions on acts. In this sense, Waltz does not have any hostile vision of international relations. The only issue of importance is the system; albeit other factors such as religion, psychology and internal politics and the economy are considered to some extent in a secondary capacity, he believes that the essence of international relations is located above the other factors. Moreover, the appreciation that the chaotic situation of international relations obliges states to pursue policies that are realistic renders the theory of Waltz a revolutionary one that abrogates a number of factors to permit a general theory of international relations. Waltz stresses on properties that are analysed at the level of the base units and conducts classification systems for example (Islamic, democratic) to enable the interpretation of international relations. Waltz claimed that the foreign policies of states are not the most important elements in the interpretation of international relations; opponents say that the g lobal system is the sum of the states and mutual decisions and actions (Waltz, 1959). The most famous example of the new realistic analysis was conducted by Mearsheimer (1990) on the future of Europe. The baseline of the scenario for analysis was the assumption that the end of the Cold War was absolute, and that the complete withdrawal of Soviet influence from Europe was imminent. It is noteworthy that in 1990 the dismantling of the Soviet Union could be a potentially destabilizing danger that could exacerbate the crisis situation and prospects of major wars for two main reasons: first, because the multi-polar system was less stable due to the increased diodes and the growing relations between states in the international system and the lack possible symmetry authorities, and miscalculations tensions and power; and second, because there was a change in conventional military force. Mearsheimer identified four scenarios based on nuclear deterrence: nuclear disarmament of Europe, which was not expected because of the fundamental role of nuclear deterrence in consolidating international relations; to maintain the status quo, which would raise a number of countries such as Germany or Eastern Europe, and could also precipitate an escalation reaction to their possession of nuclear weapons, and resorting to internal action against threats to other countries owning nuclear weapons; nuclear proliferation in the hands of bad management, which could cause an increase in the potential for conflicts in Europe; fourth, nuclear proliferation in the hands of a good management policy associated with the balance of power led some key countries (Mearsheimer, 2007). The latter was the solution proposed by Mearsheimer. This entailed the provision of nuclear weapons to Germany, based on a balance of power engendered by the United States and Britain transferring powers to Europe. His argument was based on the proviso that nuclear weapons are a stabilising factor and that Germany was seeking to consolidate its security. The criticism of Mearsheimer that can be addressed by specialists in the affairs of the institutions is that the policy of maintaining the status quo through organisations such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) was entirely possible. The counterpoint to the realist theory is the liberal approach, which is thought to be the dominant paradigm capable of producing dimensional explanation essential to international relations, with the evolution of scientific and technological progress and economic shifts, which laid the foundations of the liberal intellectual paradigm, which emerged with the seminal pioneers of international law such as Jean Bodin (1552-1608) in his book The Law of War and Peace (1625). Pioneers of liberalism glorified personal freedom and inflated the status of the individual within the state and society and the rule of law against the caprice and tyranny they associated with states, a trend which continued into the era of Classical Liberalism during the 19th century, epitomised with regard to states by Richard Cobdenââ¬â¢s argument that Free Trade engendered peace in international relations, and with regard to the individual by John Stuart Millââ¬â¢s On Liberty (1869) (Grey, 1995). Modern neo-liberalism has outgrown the narrow framework of national sovereignty, focussing instead on the building blocks for international cooperation such as organisations and regional institutions supporting this ethos (Baldwin, 1993). One more recent development is that of the notable neoliberal Karl Doetsch, who moved from inside-loop integration to the role of communication and information between individuals and groups. However, other theories calling for a different vision about international reality cannot be overlooked, such as the theory of dependency developed by some thinkers concerned with Third World countries, in parallel with which political theories and academic attempts to explain changes in the international situation after the end of the Cold War emerged, which predicted the type and nature of upcoming global conflicts such as the notion of the end of history (Francis Fukuyama) and the clash of civilisations (Samuel Huntington), which reduced future conflicts to the spheres of religion and culture (El Anis, et al, 2010). In fact, no single claim has the rigour to encompass and comprehend all dimensions of the complex characteristics of world politics, and a wide range of ideas compete away from the traditional theoretical paradigms, and this competition between theories exposes the strengths and weaknesses of each, and identifies the necessary modifications to be made. In the process of decision-making in a rational manner, one of the logical operations follows a path that starts by defining the problem until a solution is reached, and revolves around the idea of ââ¬â¹Ã¢â¬â¹the role of individualsââ¬â¢ ability to increase their own personal benefit; this self-interest of individuals is held to collectively produce the public interest. (Cuban) Rationality is restricted to a basis dependent on personal impressions as well as control methods that are followed in making and implementing decisions. Before turning to the theory of rational choice, studying each of the conditions of the emergence of the concept and definition of the theory of decision-making is necessary. Decision-making theory scrutinises the comprehensiveness of the various elements that must be taken into account when analysing a specific policy, whether in general or in a particular moment; the theory works between these variables, but hypotheses do not necessarily require the decision maker to work on this basis, and it is perhaps more appropriate that the latter consider the decision theory of partial theories rather than the theory of a school if they are focusing on the political system as a whole or specifically on certain private units. Decision-making as an attempt to develop a systemic study of international politics began in the 1950s, led by Richard Snyder and Graham Allison, inspired by the international circumstances then prevailing. At the time, other theories appeared circumstantial and contingent to Cold War policies in the context of the international standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States of America and their allies. The Cold War was at one of its peaks during the 1950s, and led to the emergence of numerous critical scenarios worldwide, which erupted into proxy wars between the USA and USSR in numerous instances for instance the Korean War during the 1950s, and the Vietnam War during the 1960s, fuelled by the competition for military, economic or ideological influence between these two states. This led theorists of international relations in that period to find theories that kept pace with the tense reality of life, and thus came the theory of decision-making in order to determine who makes the decision taken and what frameworks affect relationships between states, and how crises can be managed. Richard Snyder focused his search of international relations on attitudes and reactions and interactions between states, and this theory converged with the theory of realism in some dimensions due to its common identification of the state as the main determinant in international relations (Krasner & Stephen, 1976). Finally, rational analysis has an important place in the analysis of strategic traditionalists who deal with the actorsââ¬â¢ behaviours according to the data and plans calculated (military school) that deal with states as the actors seeking to achieve the greatest benefit at minimal cost ( ). This perspective of rationality was enhanced by Hans Morgenthauââ¬â¢s study of rationality aspects relating to the behaviour of states. Morgenthau stressed that countries collide externally and internal variables do not contribute to the external behaviour. The theory is linked in some forms to the stream of the political right, but the 1980s saw the emergence of a school of Marxism espousing the theory of rational free choice, which constitutes an example that there is no necessary link between theory and the political situation. It is clear that the theory of rational choice in the social sciences in general, which first appeared and grew up in sociology, but later separated into different fields of knowledge in the social sciences, had room for application in all the social sciences, particularly political science, and in particular relations in international decision-making foreign policy, and in the profit and loss theories, specifically game theory (Myerson, 1991). This means that the options for each of the parties to the game options and priorities, and in front of opportunities to choose alternatives available to them. However, every alternative is open to each party to affect the value achieved by the other players. If these choices are available for any player, they are available to all other players. This theory helps researchers, especially as they deal with the international strategic situation, in clarifying the alternative options before the decision-makers and helps them understand the problem and the ability to solve systematic analysis more deeply. Rationality in decision-making theory is based on determining rational behaviour, intended behaviour of decision-makers and which player can win. It does not address what route people actually take, and individuals may behave contradictorily and irrationally at times. The advocates of this theory used rational behaviour on the basis that it is most able to make the fittest theory of inte rpretation, and rational behaviour means that each player in international politics has a set of values ââ¬â¹Ã¢â¬â¹and goals and decides its policy accordingly, without errors. This is analogous to the analysis of sports, but this game theory is a method of analysis that provides evidence to choose the best route to work; states are required to look for the best ways to work and the attitudes and the results of this appear in the actions of others. The goal is to identify potential irrational acts that can and do lead to decisions and the most convenient work in order to achieve goals. Rational decision links the objectives and means thinking about the results, and rational analysis analyses the relationship between means and goals. Rationality provides full information in advance, so actors are able to stop their analysis when the results they expect are produced. However, the results of rational decision-making are not necessarily useful. It could be argued that one of the signs of an irrational decision is not using the information available. But we experimentally note that the decision is a rational decision in terms of the integration of the goals and objectives, including any tuning account of costs and benefits for explicit values ââ¬â¹Ã¢â¬â¹given, and states should take into account the various means at their disposal and also analyse and evaluate the results. In conclusion, neo-realism along with neoliberalism can be categorised as rationalist approaches in IR. While neo-realism is a concept of foreign policy based on understanding the system not the individual states, neo-realists cannot explain change in the system or in some circumstances predict potential dangers (Keohane, 1986). Neoliberalism refers mainly to economic liberalisation, and the facilitation of trade throughout the globe, with the onus on the development of the private sector. To this fundamentally economic programme, a vague concept of political freedom is appended much less forcefully than in Classical Liberalism (Doyle & Michael, 1986). However, the reforms of neoliberalism focus on increasing competition and achieving high economic growth and ignoring the influences that could affect such activities. Although they differ in many aspects, they both look to determine phenomena requiring explanation, for instance, the new realistic analysis conducted by Mearsheimer about the future of Europe, and both approaches identify the key actors. It is clear that they are demonstrating how the findings would be under given conditions if the actors function rationally. References Baylis, J. et al. (2011), The globalization of world politics an introduction to international relations, 5th edition, Oxford University press, New York. Baldwin, David A., (ed.) (1993) Neorealism and Neoliberalism: The Contemporary Debate. (New York: Columbia University Press) Brown, C. Ainley, K. 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(1986), Neorealism and its critics, New York: Columbia University Press. Krasner, Stephen D., (1976) ââ¬ËState Power and the Structure of International Tradeââ¬â¢, World Politics, 28(3): 317-47. Mearsheimer, John J., ââ¬ËStructural Realismââ¬â¢, in Tim Dunne, Milja Kurki and Steve Smith, International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) pp. 71-88 Myerson, R. (1991), Game Theory Analysis of conflict, President and fellows of Hravard College, United States of America. Schuett, R. (2010) ââ¬ËClassical realism, Freud and human nature in international relationsââ¬â¢ History Of The Human Sciences, Vol.23, No.2, pp.21-46 Turner, S., and Mazur, G. (2009) ââ¬ËMorgenthau as a Weberian Methodologistââ¬â¢ European Journal Of International Relations, Vol.15, No.3, pp.477-504 Waltz, K. (1959) Man, the State and War, New York: Columbia University Press. Waltz, Kenneth, (2000) ââ¬ËStructural Realism after the Cold War,ââ¬â¢ International Security, Vol. 25, No. 1
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