Symbolic Landscapes presents a definitive collection of landscape/place studies that explores symbolic, cultural levels of geographical meanings. Essays written by philosophers, geographers, architects, social scientists, art historians, and literati, bring specific modes of expertise and perspectives to this transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary study of the symbolic level human existential spatiality. Placing emphasis on the pre-cognitive genesis of symbolic meaning, as well as embodied, experiential (lived) geography, the volume offers a fresh, quasi-phenomenological approach. The editors articulate the epistemological doctrine that perception and imagination form a continuum in which both are always implicated as complements. This approach makes a case for the interrelation of the geography of perception and the geography of imagination, which means that human/cultural geography offers only an abstraction if indeed an aesthetic geography is constituted merely as a sub-field. Human/cultural geography can only approach spatial reality through recognizing the intimate interrelative dialectic between the imaginative and perceptual meanings of our landscapes/place-worlds. This volume reinvigorates the importance of the topic of symbolism in human/cultural geography, landscape studies, philosophy of place, architecture and planning, and will stand among the classics in the field.

The theory of symbolic management reveals a pervasive pattern of 'symbolic decoupling' - a separation between appearances and reality - at every level of the governance system. At each level the processes of governance are less efficient or effective than they appear; from interpersonal relations within organizations such as those between CEOs and directors, top managers and lower-level employees, to relations between firm leaders and external stakeholders such as journalists and security analysts. There is even a separation between appearances and reality at the level of the governance system itself. In this book, James Westphal and Sun Hyun Park develop symbolic management into a major theoretical perspective on governance. Not only does symbolic management provide a compelling behavioral alternative to economic perspectives such as agency theory, but it subsumes economic theory. Agency theory is reconceived as a historically contingent institutional logic that became taken for granted among corporate stakeholders for a period of time and eventually replaced by a new logic of governance. Through a body of extensive empirical research Westphal and Park demonstrate how the symbolic management activities of firm leaders have contributed to this historical shift in prevailing logics of governance, and present a warning to regulators, investors, and the general public.

This book examines identity theory’s centrality within social psychology and its foundations within structural symbolic interaction, highlighting its links not only to other prominent sociological subfields, but also to other theoretical perspectives within and beyond sociology. The book provides a synthetic overview outlining the intellectual lineage of identity theory within structural symbolic interactionism, and how the “Indiana School” of identity theory and research, associated especially with Sheldon Stryker, relates to other symbolic interactionist traditions within sociology. It also analyses the latest developments in response to the push to integrate identity theory, which initially focused on role identities, with the study of personal, group and social identities. Further, it discusses the relationship between identity theory and affect control theory, providing a sense of the many substantive topics within sociology beyond social psychology for which the study of identity has important, sometimes underappreciated implications. The book concludes with a chapter summarizing the interrelated lessons learned while also reflecting on remaining key questions and challenges for the future development of identity theory.

What is symbolic representation? Since Hanna Pitkin’s seminal The Concept of Representation, the symbolic has been the least studied dimension of political representation. Innovatively adopting a discursive approach, this book - the first full-length treatment of symbolic representation - focuses on gender issues to tackle important questions such as: What are women and men symbols of, and how is gender constructed in policy discourse? It studies what functions symbolic representation fulfils in the construction of gender, what social roles get legitimized in policy discourse, and how this affects power constellations, ultimately revealing much about the relation between symbolic, descriptive, and substantive representation. Emanuela Lombardo and Petra Meier draw on theories of symbolic representation and gender, as well as rich primary material about political debates on labour and care issues, partnership and reproductive rights, gender violence, and quotas. Using this original data, the authors show that reconsidering symbolic representation from a discursive perspective makes explicit issues of (in)equality embedded within particular constructions, as well as their consequences for political representation and gender equality. This important exploration raises relevant new questions regarding the representation of gender that form valuable contributions to the fields of political science, political theory, sociology, and gender studies.

Power is the central organizing principle of all social life, from culture and education to stratification and taste. And there is no more prominent name in the analysis of power than that of noted sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Throughout his career, Bourdieu challenged the commonly held view that symbolic power—the power to dominate—is solely symbolic. He emphasized that symbolic power helps create and maintain social hierarchies, which form the very bedrock of political life. By the time of his death in 2002, Bourdieu had become a leading public intellectual, and his argument about the more subtle and influential ways that cultural resources and symbolic categories prevail in power arrangements and practices had gained broad recognition. In Symbolic Power, Politics, and Intellectuals, David L. Swartz delves deeply into Bourdieu’s work to show how central—but often overlooked—power and politics are to an understanding of sociology. Arguing that power and politics stand at the core of Bourdieu’s sociology, Swartz illuminates Bourdieu’s political project for the social sciences, as well as Bourdieu’s own political activism, explaining how sociology is not just science but also a crucial form of political engagement.

Symbolic analysis is an intriguing topic in VLSI designs. The analysis methods are crucial for the applications to the parasitic reduction and analog circuit evaluation. However, analyzing circuits symbolically remains a challenging research issue. Therefore, in this book, we survey the recent results as the progress of on-going works rather than as the solution of the field. For parasitic reduction, we approximate a huge amount of electrical parameters into a simplified RLC network. This reduction allows us to handle very large integrated circuits with given memory capacity and CPU time. A symbolic analysis approach reduces the circuit according to the network topology. Thus, the designer can maintain the meaning of the original network and perform the analysis hierarchically. For analog circuit designs, symbolic analysis provides the relation between the tunable parameters and the characteristics of the circuit. The analysis allows us to optimize the circuit behavior. The book is divided into three parts. Part I touches on the basics of circuit analysis in time domain and in s domain. For an s domain expression, the Taylor's expansion with s approaching infinity is equivalent to the time domain solution after the inverse Laplace transform. On the other hand, the Taylor's expansion when s approaches zero derives the moments of the output responses in time domain. Part II focuses on the techniques for parasitic reduction. In Chapter 2, we present the approximation methods to match the first few moments with reduced circuit orders. In Chapter 3, we apply the Y-Delta transformation to reduce the dynamic linear network. The method finds the exact values of the low order coefficients of the numerator and denominator of the transfer function and thus matches part of the moments. In Chapter 4, we handle two major issues of the Y-Delta transformation: common factors in fractional expressions and round-off errors. Chapter 5 explains the stability of the reduced expression, in particular the Ruth-Hurwitz Criterion. We make an effort to describe the proof of the Criterion because the details are omitted in most of the contemporary textbooks. In Chapter 6, we present techniques to synthesize circuits to approximate the reduced expressions after the transformation. In Part III, we discuss symbolic generation of the determinants and cofactors for the application to analog designs. In Chapter 7, we depict the classical topological analysis approach. In Chapter 8, we describe a determinant decision diagram approach that exploits the sparsity of the matrix to accelerate the computation. In Chapter 9, we take only significant terms when we search through determinant decision diagram to approximate the solution. In Chapter 10, we extend the determinant decision diagram to a hierarchical model. The construction of the modules through the hierarchy is similar to the Y-Delta transformation in the sense that a byproduct of common factors appears in the numerator and denominator. Therefore, we describe the method to prune the common factors.

Graphs are ubiquitous in Computer Science. For this reason, in many areas, it is very important to have the means to express and reason about graph properties. In particular, we want to be able to check automatically if a given graph property is satisfiable. Actually, in most application scenarios it is desirable to be able to explore graphs satisfying the graph property if they exist or even to get a complete and compact overview of the graphs satisfying the graph property. We show that the tableau-based reasoning method for graph properties as introduced by Lambers and Orejas paves the way for a symbolic model generation algorithm for graph properties. Graph properties are formulated in a dedicated logic making use of graphs and graph morphisms, which is equivalent to firstorder logic on graphs as introduced by Courcelle. Our parallelizable algorithm gradually generates a finite set of so-called symbolic models, where each symbolic model describes a set of finite graphs (i.e., finite models) satisfying the graph property. The set of symbolic models jointly describes all finite models for the graph property (complete) and does not describe any finite graph violating the graph property (sound). Moreover, no symbolic model is already covered by another one (compact). Finally, the algorithm is able to generate from each symbolic model a minimal finite model immediately and allows for an exploration of further finite models. The algorithm is implemented in the new tool AutoGraph.

Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of culture has been much discussed in recent years. However, it remains unclear how it evolved from his older theory of knowledge. This study deals with this question on the basis of Cassirer’s ‘disposition’ of a ‘philosophy of the symbolic’, reconstructed here for the first time. This text shows that the ‘symbolic’ refers to culture as a whole and to its inherent diversity. Therefore, ‘the symbolic’ includes the relationship between the general transcendental conditions of culture and its empirical specificities in language and languages, art and the arts, myth and myths, science and disciplines. Cassirer does not comprehend this empirical and specific reality of symbolization depending on pre-existing transcendental conditions. Instead, he proceeds from the empirical diversity of the symbolisations and reflects on their simultaneously general and specific conditions. Thus, Cassirer embarks on a path that he finds paved in Kant’s "Critique of Judgement": He consequently defines ‘the symbolic’ as the horizon for a reflective approach based on empirical findings – and not as the foundation of a systematic derivation of the diversity of culture in the style of the idealistic tradition.

Seeking a concise and substantial vision of symbolic interactionism, this volume manifests the crucial research endeavors and key elements that contribute to the vitality of the interactionist theoretical framework.

This book offers a comprehensive account of official multilingualism and its legal ramifications. Janny H.C. Leung shows that while offering official status to multiple languages has become normalized, actual implementation and success vary. Despite often elaborate institutional adaptations, changes hardly ever challenge the status quo enjoyed by a dominant linguistic group. Leung argues that both "shallow equality" and "symbolic jurisprudence" are characteristics of official multilingualism driven by strategic pluralism.