The authors describe percutaneous disc surgery performed via the unilateral monoportal method with a C-arm image intensifier, a working endoscope, and an yttrium-aluminum-garnet laser in 300 patients at three community hospitals over a 6-year period. Visualizing the area of the annulus to be fenestrated, verifying the status of the nerve root, inspecting the cavity created, and monitoring laser hemostasis and vaporization all contributed to patient safety. Fewer than 2% of the cases required a second surgery. The only postoperative sequelae recorded were one psoas hematoma, which resolved, and sympathetic mediated pain in 5% of the patients who responded to appropriate treatment. For treatment of a prolapsed lumbar disc, a 1-hour endoscopic procedure performed while the patient receives a neuroleptanalgesic continues to be a significant surgical alternative.

Advocacy organizations are viewed as actors motivated primarily by principled beliefs. This volume outlines a new agenda for the study of advocacy organizations, proposing a model of NGOs as collective actors that seek to fulfil normative concerns and instrumental incentives, face collective action problems, and compete as well as collaborate with other advocacy actors. The analogy of the firm is a useful way of studying advocacy actors because individuals, via advocacy NGOs, make choices which are analytically similar to those that shareholders make in the context of firms. The authors view advocacy NGOs as special types of firms that make strategic choices in policy markets which, along with creating public goods, support organizational survival, visibility, and growth. Advocacy NGOs' strategy can therefore be understood as a response to opportunities to supply distinct advocacy products to well-defined constituencies, as well as a response to normative or principled concerns.

Over the past half-century, the word “andragogy” has migrated from the fringe vocabulary to the standard lexicon of adult education. It has identified common psychological traits in “non-traditional” students and distinguished its methods from “pedagogy,” the teaching of children. This chapter will explore andragogy's apparent strengths and arguable weaknesses in terms of its socio-economic assumptions and the social class interests it may wittingly or unwittingly serve. It will conclude with a critique.

No abstract

The historical failures of Marxism in the twentieth-century came in three forms: the inability to account for the rise of fascism and Nazism; the establishment of authoritarian regimes where “communist” revolutions had occurred, largely in pre-industrial societies from barely post-feudal Russia to peasant-based China and “developing” nations such as Vietnam; and the incapacity of the proletariat to develop class consciousness and foment class conflict in advanced industrial societies, where Marx and his followers knew capitalism to have arisen and where they assumed it would first be transcended. Seeking to understand these failures, yet to preserve and apply foundational elements of Marx's thought, the “critical theorists” of the Frankfurt Institute—at home and in exile—drew on additional sources including Hegel and Freud to diagnose the pathologies of modernity, though rarely to offer restorative treatments for Enlightenment values or Marxian transformation. Jürgen Habermas, the acknowledged leader of the “second generation” of critical theorists refused to succumb to the pessimism of his elders and reached out to increasingly diverse scholars in an effort to redeem the goals of reason, democracy and equity in modern life. His theoretical work—often abstract and dense—remains almost as marginal to mainstream thought as that of Adorno and Horkheimer before him; yet, it has influenced a minority of philosophers and social scientists still interested in education as an emancipatory human project. Using the specific context of contemporary community colleges, this contribution seeks to build bridges between Habermas' combination of basically Marxian, often Kantian, and always eclectic thought to show how educators could profitably reflect upon their professional lifeworlds, better comprehend the neoliberal ideology and power relations that entrap them, and find new inspiration and advice should they wish to interrogate and confront the corporate world in which they ply their trade.