Beyond all reason: spaces of hope in the struggle for England's universities

England’s public university system has been groaning and lurching toward privatization for decades. Until recently, however, it was still possible to argue that “the attempt to close off and render impossible the experience of education as a collaborative pursuit of a public good and to make possible its full commodification has not yet wholly succeeded” here.1 Despite being deeply disillusioned with increasingly neoliberal forms of academic work, many academics have thus also maintained that these could never be totalizing; that their implementation could be mediated through critical professional practice, and that social-democratic justifications for public higher education could prevail even within discourses that had become inhospitable to the very idea of the public itself. [...

Management on the neoevolutionary foundations

The purpose of the article is to outline the perspective of the influence of contemporary evolution concept on social sciences, management in particular. It covers searching for sources of the processes of organisation and management in the biological and social specificity of the homo sapiens species

Out of the Ordinary: Law, Power, Culture, and the Commonplace

Review of The Common Place of Law: Stories From Everyday Life by Patricia Ewick & Susan S. Silbey (1998). Sometimes a work\u27s intellectual influences reveal both its strengths and its shortcomings. This is certainly the case with Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey\u27s The Common Place of Law: Stories From Everyday Life, and its indebtedness to the thinking of Michel Foucault and Michel de Certeau. Taken together, Foucault and de Certeau\u27s work suggests that investigations of law\u27s power are most fruitful not at the level of legal institutions and the state but at the level of lived experience, where we can see how power is exercised, understood, and sometimes, resisted. This is, in essence, the narrative at the heart of The Common Place of Law, where two sociologists of law examine how law or legality (power that is at once institutional and embedded in day-to-day social practices) is recognized, resisted, and reconstituted by a wide variety of ordinary people going about their lives. It is out of the most ordinary acts that law is constituted as law

Manipulative Use of Short Messaging Service (SMS) Text Messages by Nigerian Telecommunications Companies

This paper is an application of Relevance Theory for the interpretation of short messaging service (SMS) text messages emanating from Nigerian telecommunications companies to their subscribers. The aim of the research was to identify and describe the manipulative strategies employed by Nigerian telecommunications companies to induce subscribers to part with their money through sales promotion lotteries. 100 SMS texts were purposively extracted from the cell phones of randomly selected residents of Lagos Nigeria who had received promotional SMS text messages from three major Nigerian telecommunications companies. Using Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory (1995) as its theoretical framework, the paper described the manipulative use of SMS by Nigerian telecommunications companies. The analysis revealed that SMS text messages were encoded to achieve maximization of relevance through explicature and implicature; contextual implication and strengthening; and the reduction of processing effort through violating the maxim of truthfulness and the creative use of graphology. The paper concludes that SMS text-messages were used manipulatively by Nigerian telecommunications companies to earn indirect income from sales promotion lottery

Neoevolutionism : the new paradigm of the social sciences?

The neoevolutionary paradigm in the social sciences is in the initial stage of development, although the idea of social Darwinism having been discredited, this is actually its second beginning. It seems however, that neo-Darwinism, closely related to evolutionary psychology, has in the last few decades achieved significant cognitive successes, which make it more respected by philosophers of science. The paper analyses relations between the quickly-developing neoevolutionary paradigm and other paradigms of the social sciences. The basis for the analysis is the suggestion by G. Burell and G. Morgan to divide the social sciences into four paradigms

Representing Strategic International Human Resource Management: Is the Map the Territory?

This paper is focused on the emergent field of strategic international human resource management (SIHRM). We suggest that SIHRM is becoming an integrated intellectual map in terms of: (1) the typologies created; (2) the language used; and (3) its pedagogy. Does the way in which we articulate SIHRM assist theory development or enact intellectual imperialism? Or both? It is argued that, by exploring the implications of SIHRM for theory, research, practice and teaching, we may raise awareness of current deficiencies and unanswered questions. Do we need to set a new course, or at least make explicit our navigational assumptions

Toward new dominations: Flawed devotions to human rights discourse and its contingent hope

Human rights movement dominates over how people articulate their interests to be heard. It controls massive resources in the name of those interests. This dissertation articulates a path for new emancipation projects to hinder the domination of the human rights movement. Devotion to the movement maintains the illusion of objectifying people’s interests outside politics. Though, the movement fails to deliver on that objectification when activists choose between competing interests, deferring their failures to the future. That temporal space holds the movement’s universal claim. The instability of the movement lies in the gap between what it promises and what it delivers, creating its emancipatory and imperial sides. I argue that the present gets filled up with development towards economic growth, which justifies the universal claims of the movement while the movement justifies the absence of development. The movement acquires the role of representing the universal function with the aid of development. Power holds that representation, which becomes contingent. The contingency of the representation of the universal function is hopeful for different emancipation movements to compete along the human rights discourse. I retain the universal as an empty ground to disprove the fullness of the universal function. Then, I move to suggest that the Other, with the plurality inside that category, can either struggle for the representation for the universal function or for utilizing the emancipatory side of the rights discourse. I choose the former. I urge new liberation projects to fight for the representation of the universal function, without essentializing the subaltern voices, since all Other(s) can struggle their way(s) towards new forms of dominations. Essentializing the subaltern voices within the plurality gains them recognition within the hegemonic. But, I fight for the liberation in struggling rather than recognition; for the Other(s)’ laments to dominate over the rights’ laments

Manipulating Meaning : Language and Ideology in the Commodification of Online Sociality

Marxist Internet scholars have recently shed light on the commodification and exploitation of social media users. While some of these studies have also acknowledged the ideological nature of how online sociality is understood and discussed, they have not yet addressed in great detail the ways in which ideology figures in the process of commodification of social media users. We address this question by combining Marxist ideology theory with insights from cognitive pragmatics. Focusing on the idea of illusion, we draw on Relevance Theory and employ the notions of "relevance" and "cognitive illusion" to discuss the ideological process we call context manipulation, a concept that helps bring to focus the discursive obscuring of the capitalist operational logic of social media corporations. We illustrate our cognitive-pragmatic model of ideology with examples of Facebook's discursive practices. The paper contributes to the discussion on ideology in cultural studies and the discussion on commodification of online sociality in critical Internet and media studies by offering a revised interpretation of Marx's ideology theory that highlights the discursive and cognitive nature of ideological processes, and by elaborating on the workings of ideology in the specific context of corporate social media.Peer reviewe

A humanities of resistance: fragments for a legal history of humanity

Law and the Humanities: An Introduction brings together a distinguished group of scholars from law schools and an array of the disciplines in the humanities. Contributors come from the United States and abroad in recognition of the global reach of this field. This book is, at one and the same time, a stock taking both of different national traditions and of the various modes and subjects of law and humanities scholarship. It is also an effort to chart future directions for the field. By reviewing and analyzing existing scholarship and providing thematic content and distinctive arguments, it offers to its readers both a resource and a provocation. Thus, Law and the Humanities marks the maturation of this ‘law and’ enterprise and will spur its further development