2,208 research outputs found

    Bodies, sexualities and women leaders in popular culture: from spectacle to metapicture

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    Purpose – This paper focuses on visual representation of women leaders and how women leaders’ bodies and sexualities are rendered visible in particular ways. Design/methodology/approach – The arguments are based on a reading of the Danish television drama series, Borgen. The authors interpret the meaning of this text and consider what audiences might gain from watching it. Findings – The analysis of Borgen highlights the role of popular culture in resisting patriarchal values and enabling women to reclaim leadership. Originality/value – The metaphor of the spectacle enables explanation of the representation of women leaders in popular culture as passive, fetishised objects of the masculine gaze. These pervasive representational practices place considerable pressure on women leaders to manage their bodies and sexualities in particular ways. However, popular culture also provides alternative representations of women leaders as embodied and agentic. The notion of the metapicture offers a means of destabilising confining notions of female leadership within popular culture and opening up alternative

    My Mother\u27s Hometown

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    Home in the boondocks An unchanging town A curse and a relic Fossil fuels ate up this town Spit us out Put coal in our hearts and potholes in the street Left us coughing up our black lungs

    “Large, unpleasant thugs”? Criminal responsibility and young people in France and the United Kingdom

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    International audienceIn an attempt to tackle not just youth crime itself, but also the causes of youth crime, the New Labour administration sought to combat social exclusion. It consequently set up a number of social intervention projects such as Sure Start in the most deprived areas of Britain, promised to abolish child poverty before 2010, invested heavily in education, and attempted to reduce the number of unemployed young people via its New Deal for Young People. For the first time, the Youth Justice Board, a special committee charged with overseeing the youth justice system and coordinating social and criminal justice services, was established. A social work approach was to be combined with punishment. Yet, despite these attempt to promote the social inclusion of British youths, in practice they have been ‘demonised'. According to the British press, young people are out-of-control, antisocial and violent. The recent ‘moral panic' (Cohen, 2001) concerning knife crime seemed to confirm the idea that young people are a threat to society. Even the former justice minister, Jack Straw, declared that most young people who find themselves in prison are not children but ‘large, unpleasant thugs' who frighten the general public. Whilst young people have often been the focus of moral panics (Pearson, 1983), it is only recently that panic has been met with such a punitive response which has led to an 800% increase in the number of young people incarcerated since 1992. Despite attempts to adapt the system of juvenile justice to young people, they are increasingly treated like adults. Indeed, the New Labour government's first White Paper on the subject was entitled No More Excuses and the government pledged to eliminate the ‘excuse culture' which supposedly dominated the youth justice system. Consequently, there has been a ‘dejeuvenalisation' of youth justice policy (Pitts, 2001), marking a rupture with the policy of diversion of youths from the adult justice system which had dominated the criminal justice system since at least the middle of the 19th Century. Similar trends are identifiable in France where there has recently been an erosion of the ordonnance 1945 principle that young people cannot be help fully responsible for their criminal actions. A 2002 law (la loi d'orientation et de programmation pour la justice du 9 septembre) fixes the age of criminal responsibility at 13, leading some experts to speak of the notions of ‘premajority'. As in the UK, the rhetoric of responsibilisation has been adopted by Nicolas Sarkozy who has described young people in the criminal justice system as ‘black giants from the inner cities'. This paper seeks to determine if the hardening of attitudes to young offenders in France and England can be explained by the same factors. It is a knee-jerk response to moral panic of can it be explained by other socio-economic factors common to the two cultures?Dès son arrivée au pouvoir, l'administration néo-travailliste a reconnu que toute tentative pour s'attaquer à la criminalité des jeunes doit se concentrer sur le problème de l'exclusion sociale. Par conséquent, elle a mis en place de nombreux projets Sure Start dans les quartiers les plus défavorisés du Royaume-Uni, elle s'est engagée à éliminer la pauvreté des enfants avant 2020, elle a investi davantage d'argent dans l'éducation, et elle a cherché à réduire le nombre de jeunes au chômage par le biais du New Deal for Young People. Pour les jeunes considérés comme étant les plus susceptibles de sombrer dans la criminalité, le premier gouvernement Blair a créé des Youth Inclusion Programmes qui offrent aux enfants en difficulté un lieu de sociabilité où ils peuvent en outre bénéficier d'une aide scolaire. Pour la première fois, un comité spécial chargé de la justice juvénile, le Youth Justice Board, a été créé afin de coordonner le travail des services sociaux et des services judiciaires ; il a également pour mission de développer une stratégie commune capable de prévenir la criminalité et d'éviter ainsi aux jeunes d'être exposés au système de justice formelle. L'accent est mis tant sur le travail social que sur le châtiment des jeunes délinquants. Or, en dépit de ces tentatives pour favoriser l'inclusion sociale des jeunes britanniques, ces derniers ont souvent été « diabolisés », pour emprunter le terme du Comité des droits de l'enfant de l'ONU. D'après la presse britannique, les jeunes sont de plus en plus difficiles à contrôler, antisociaux et violents. La récente « panique morale » concernant l'apparente montée du nombre d'agressions à l'arme blanche perpétrées par des jeunes semble confirmer l'idée que ces derniers représentent un danger pour la société. Même le ministre de la Justice, Jack Straw, a déclaré que la plupart des enfants qui sont actuellement incarcérés ne sont pas des enfants mais des « gros voyous antipathiques » qui font peur au grand public. Il semblerait bien que la majorité des Britanniques ont peur de la jeunesse, constat confirmé par un rapport récent publié par l'Institute for Public Policy Research. Alors que la jeunesse a souvent fait l'objet de paniques morales dans le passé (Geoffrey Pearson), ce n'est que récemment qu'une telle panique a entraîné une réponse judiciaire aussi punitive, qui se traduit par une augmentation de 800 % du nombre de jeunes âgés de moins de 15 ans incarcérés depuis 1992. Malgré les tentatives d'adapter le système de justice pénale aux jeunes, leur traitement judiciaire est actuellement de plus en plus semblable à celui qu'on réservait autrefois aux adultes. En effet, dès ses premiers jours au pouvoir, le gouvernement de Tony Blair s'est engagé à éliminer la « culture d'absolution » en faveur d'un système judiciaire qui met l'accent sur la responsabilité individuelle des jeunes et de leurs parents. Par conséquent, on assiste actuellement à une « déjuvénilisation » de la politique pénale, se traduisant par une rupture nette avec l'orthodoxie pénale en vigueur depuis le milieu du XIXe siècle, d'après laquelle les jeunes délinquants doivent être soumis à un régime spécial, si possible en dehors du système pénal. Les mêmes tendances sont identifiables en France, où l'on a récemment constaté un durcissement de la loi à l'égard des mineurs et l'érosion de l'excuse de minorité instaurée par l'ordonnance de 1945. Tout particulièrement, la loi d'orientation et de programmation pour la justice du 9 septembre 2002 affirme la responsabilité pénale des mineurs à partir de l'âge de 13 ans, ce qui incite certains commentateurs à parler de l'invention de la notion de « prémajorité ». La rhétorique de responsabilisation est adoptée par Nicolas Sarkozy, à l'instar de ses homologues britanniques (sur le même ton que Jack Straw, il a déclaré qu'on n'a pas affaire ici à des mineurs mais à des « géants noirs des banlieues »). Cet article s'attache à déterminer si le durcissement à l'égard des jeunes délinquants en France et en Angleterre peut s'expliquer par les mêmes facteurs. Est-ce qu'il s'agit d'une réponse à la panique publique ou peut-il s'expliquer par la présence d'autres facteurs socio-politiques communs aux deux cultures

    A Quest in Reverse

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    My parents, when I had reached the age of five, gave me a gold coin. I wrapped my pudgy hand around it and marveled at how the light danced across the reflective surface. It was cool to the touch

    Being Judas

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    Meet me at confession On my knees “The spirit of God flows within everyone,” The father says, “Crowns of thorn lay on all our heads, We share the collective calloused hands of a carpenter.”

    Vernacular mourning and corporate memorialization in framing the death of Steve Jobs

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    This article explores the role of vernacular mourning in framing the death of Apple co-founder and former chief executive Steve Jobs. Using the concept of heterotopia to explore the spatio-temporal power relations of contemporary organizational memorialization, we show how the construction of temporary shrines and visual imagery rendered spaces and objects temporarily sacred and maintained Jobs as an ongoing presence in the lives of consumer-believers. Our analysis of these mourning practices identifies three themes: the construction of shrines as temporary organizational memorials in vernacular mourning; the distribution of photographs as memento mori; and the role of official corporate memorialization in disciplining mourners into letting go, severing their connection with Jobs so that the organization could continue without his physical presence. This highlights the importance of organizations in attempting to control mourning through official corporate memorialization and reveals the power relations entailed in determining who and what is mourned in organizational life, and how the dead are remembered

    Digital Organizational Storytelling on YouTube: Constructing Plausibility Through Network Protocols of Amateurism, Affinity, and Authenticity

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    In this article, we focus on “digital organizational storytelling” as a communicative practice that relies on technologies enabled by the Internet. The article explores the dialogical potential of digital organizational storytelling and considers how this affects the relationship between online storytellers and audiences. We highlight the importance of network protocols in shaping how stories are understood. Our analysis is based on a case study of an organization, which produces online animated videos critical of corporate practices that negatively affect society. It highlights the network protocols of amateurism, affinity, and authenticity on which the plausibility of digital organizational storytelling relies. Through demonstrating what happens when network protocols are breached, the article contributes toward understanding digital organizational storytelling as a dialogical practice that opens up spaces for oppositional meaning making and can be used to challenge the power of corporations

    Beyond letting go and moving on: New perspectives on organizational death, loss and grief

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    Understandings of organizational death, a term used to describe events including downsizing, site closure and business failure, are dominated by psychological stage models that promote letting go as a solution to collective loss. This approach neglects the empirical and conceptual shift which has transformed understandings of bereavement at the individual level through the theory of continuing bonds. This is the consequence of: (i) a managerialist focus on grief as a problem to be solved; (ii) a cultural orientation that constructs relationships between life and death, self and others, positive and negative emotions in dualistic terms and; (iii) an empirical emphasis on North American organizations. We conclude by suggesting how a continuing bonds perspective could enhance understandings of organizational death as a cultural phenomenon that is fundamental to the construction of meaning

    Portraiture and the construction of “charismatic leadership”

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    During the history of Western art, the link between portraits and status or power has been widely documented. Commissioned portraits have been traditionally the privilege of certain groups and individuals occupying positions of authority (West, 2004). The possibility of understanding portraits as a tool for what Weber has called the “routinization of charisma” offers an interesting avenue to link portraits and the field of leadership studies. This chapter aims at presenting some elements of the analysis of portraiture as a form of art that can illuminate the understanding of leadership in contemporary organizational studies. The questions inspiring this chapter include: a. How portraiture can reveal aspects of leadership in Western cultures? b. Which notions of leadership are highlighted through portraits in contemporary culture? c. What are the contributions of art history in the analysis of images of leadership

    SB06-22/23: Resolution Generally Amending Article IV of the Bylaws

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    SB06-22/23: Resolution Generally Amending Article IV of the Bylaws This resolution passed unanimously at the November 9, 2022 meeting of the Associated Students of the University of Montana (ASUM)
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