Behind the telephone debates

Putting together a book from conference presentations is a tricky business. Often, papers given at conference are necessarily brief and insufficiently detailed due to the time constraints of oral presentations. Pehaps more often than is desireable, work is presented in a less-than-final stage-empirical studies may still be in progress and conceptual papers may not be fully formulated. In addition, many conferences are forums for presentations by graduate students and junior faculty--people who are beginning their careers and who may not have published much. For a book of this sort to have merit, selected papers should be complete and make significant contributions to the field. The majority of papers in this volume fail on both counts.