Leadership Dispositions: What Are They and Are They Essential to Good Leadership

George Orwell once wrote an intriguing and acclaimed short-story called The Shooting of an Elephant. The story takes place in the mid 1930’s in Moulmein, lower Burma. Orwell was a young police officer in the province that was still under British colonial rule. He describes in lurid detail how is pressured into killing a tame elephant that had escaped his trainer’s chains and was enjoying a day of freedom. Unfortunately, the elephant ravages a local market and a man is killed by the elephant. Over 2,000 Burmese were watching and waiting to see what he would do. What happens next is an example of what leadership courage is not. “I halted on the road. When I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him.” He shoots the elephant anyway. “I often wondered if any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to keep from looking the fool (Literature Network, 2009).” Sometimes it takes extreme courage not to act on something when being pressured by the majority. This quality or disposition called courage is one of five absolutely essential dispositions every leader must possess. Is it possible to define those qualities, traits, skills or dispositions which could guarantee or predict success for a leader in any endeavor or position which requires leadership? Do leaders at all levels and in all organizations possess certain dispositions which make them successful? I’m sure the young Orson learned a valuable lesson from that experience, and probably reasoned later his lack of courage was related to his youth. Was it? Certainly many people blame their youth for all kinds of lapses of judgment, failures of conscience and for just doing the wrong thing. Could it be that they simply don’t have the “right stuff.

Foucault and complicity: attributing an ethics to the subject-as-spectacle

Is it still possible to see an act of violence and feel guilt? To feel a sense of complicity beyond social duty or desire? There have been questions similar to this in discussion for centuries now, in fact, many of the systems of thought dedicated to answering it invoke entire metaphysical apparatuses to provide for its completion. This one, however, is specific to our time. Is it even possible to feel guilt anymore? In an attempt to provide an outline of the ethical ramifications of complicity, this paper discusses the effects of Immanuel Kant on our present day understanding of violence and of ourselves. That is, there is none. Instead the shortcomings consist of an obfuscation of the dominant order and an obstruction of political action. By continuing from the historical analysis of the subject begun by Michel Foucault in his early writing, coupled with his assessment of disciplinary power from his earlier writings, these difficulties may not only become apparent, but also an issue that may hold the potential for change. In this light, it may be possible to consider an ethics of the subject as spectacle and progress towards, or at least entertain, the idea of complicity

Film in the city: a report on the film & video sub-Sector in London

The movie business, and the distribution of films through the associated cinema and home video sectors is a truly global phenomenon. In terms of both production and distribution, Hollywood has traditionally dominated international markets, however, with radical innovations in information and digital technologies and the spread of the Internet, it has become increasingly easier to make and distribute films around the world . Coupled with this is the ‘runaway production’ concept, whereby Hollywood productions are no longer tied to site-specific studios and can choose to shoot and edit their (usually high-budget) movies in locations around the globe. This has created an international market where cities, such as Vancouver, Sydney, Brisbane, Prague, Cape Town, London and many more, compete for big movie business. London has a thriving film and video sub-sector and a highly competitive infrastructure, nurtured by a host of supporting institutions, which together create a powerful creative network of players capable of competing at a global scale. The physical geography of the city also matters to the film industry, not only in terms of shooting locations, but also in determining where to locate, pitch or exhibit the final creative product. Consequently, the location and interconnected value chain of producers, post-production, financiers, sales agents and distributors, cinemas and theatres, as well as the myriad of specialised and highly skilled workforce is key to the industry’s success. The co-location and clustering tendencies of individuals and institutions located at close proximity in London and highlighted in this report are evidence of the intense social networking that characterises the industry

Criminality and Englishness in the aftermath: The racecourse wars of the 1920s

This article explores the extent to which post-war concerns about Englishness and fears about ‘the enemy within’ shaped understandings of the ‘racecourse wars’ of the 1920s. These conflicts involved mainly metropolitan criminals in various affrays and fights on the streets of London, and on the racecourses of South-East England. The press coverage of the events has been described as akin to a ‘moral panic’ and certainly they provided serious headline fodder during the peaks of 1922 and 1925. Moreover, the key personnel of these ‘wars’, arguably dramatically overwritten by the press, have become signposts in the chronology of twentieth-century British organized crime. This article will draw upon newspaper reports, police autobiography, trial reports, Metropolitan Police records and correspondence with the army to explore concerns about the nature and prevalence of gang crime and forms of inter-personal violence

Killing for Trophies: An Analysis of Global Trophy Hunting Trade

As the trophy hunting industry has grown over the last few decades, governments, conservationists, and animal welfare advocates are keen to understand its global economic and conservation impacts with data as supporting evidence. Unfortunately, little credible research had been done to understand the global trophy industry's extent and impact..This report is a result of a comprehensive analysis of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) Trade Database. This analysis can serve as a baseline for more study on how trophy hunting is changing and how the global industry ultimately affects animals and their populations, both regionally and globally

Reassessing the Significance of Firearms in Central Africa: The Case of North-Western Zambia to the 1920s

Based on a close examination of European travelogues and the evidence produced in the wake of the formulation of colonial gun policies, this article contends that the significance of firearms in Central Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been unduly played down in the existing literature. The first substantive section of the article charts the movement of the gun frontier in nineteenth-century north-western Zambia. It foregrounds the new technology’s economic and military applications, the means through which north-western Zambians overcame some at least of its limitations, and the plurality of innovative social roles that they attributed to it. Successive sections centre on the pervasiveness of gun-running in the early twentieth century and the implementation and profound social consequences of gun control laws

Disjunctive Logic Programs with Inheritance

The paper proposes a new knowledge representation language, called DLP<, which extends disjunctive logic programming (with strong negation) by inheritance. The addition of inheritance enhances the knowledge modeling features of the language providing a natural representation of default reasoning with exceptions. A declarative model-theoretic semantics of DLP< is provided, which is shown to generalize the Answer Set Semantics of disjunctive logic programs. The knowledge modeling features of the language are illustrated by encoding classical nonmonotonic problems in DLP<. The complexity of DLP< is analyzed, proving that inheritance does not cause any computational overhead, as reasoning in DLP< has exactly the same complexity as reasoning in disjunctive logic programming. This is confirmed by the existence of an efficient translation from DLP< to plain disjunctive logic programming. Using this translation, an advanced KR system supporting the DLP< language has been implemented on top of the DLV system and has subsequently been integrated into DLV.Comment: 28 pages; will be published in Theory and Practice of Logic Programmin

Imagined and imaginary whales: Benedict Anderson, Salman Rushdie and George Orwell

George Orwell, anticipating many of the arguments made by Benedict Anderson in the “Patriotism and Racism” chapter of Imagined Communities, illuminated patriotism and nationalism as shifting aspects of a wider dialectical interplay between an identification with imagined communities and a loyalty to humanity. Orwell's essay “Inside the Whale” can be seen, contrary to Salman Rushdie's criticism that it advocates quietism, as an essay about imaginary homelands. In this reading the whale is a metaphor for a dialectical space created by a writer in order to gain purchase on the unceasing dialectic of history. Analysis of The Lion and the Unicorn in this article links Orwell's work with that of Anderson and Rushdie by exploring in his vision of a classless England the relationship between the personal imaginary homeland and the political imagined community

Usage of Specialized Fence-Gaps in a Black Rhinoceros Conservancy in Kenya

Fencing is increasingly used in wildlife conservation. Keeping wildlife segregated from local communities, while permitting wildlife access to the greater landscape matrix is a complex task. We investigated the effectiveness of specially designed fence-gaps on animal movement at a Kenyan rhinoceros conservancy, using camera-traps over a four-year period. The fence-gap design restricted the movement of black (Diceris bicornis) and white rhinoceroses (Ceratotherium simum simum) but permitted the movement of other species. We documented over 6000 crossing events of over 50 000 individuals which used the fence-gaps to enter or leave the conservancy. We recorded 37 mammal species and two species of bird using the fence-gaps. We conclude that this fence-gap design is effective at restricting rhinoceros movement and at permitting other wildlife movement into and out of the conservancy. We recommend that fenced-in rhinoceros conservancies that desire enhanced connectivity consider this fence-gap design to help re-connect their reserves to the outside landscape matrix while continuing to provide enhanced protection for their rhinoceroses