Ethics and responsibilisation in agri-food governance: the single-use plastics debate and strategies to introduce reusable coffee cups in UK retail chains

This paper extends arguments about the potential for reflexive governance in agri-food sustainability by linking food ethics to the notion of ‘unintended consequences’ and ‘responsibilisation’. Analysis of sustainable consumption governance shows the way authorities and intermediaries use food waste reduction projects to ‘responsibilise’ the consumer, including recent examples of shared responsibility. This paper takes this argument further by developing a ‘strategies of responsibilisation’ framework that connects relations between food system outcomes, problematisation in public discourse and strategies of responsibilisation in agri-food governance. A food and drink waste case study of strategies to introduce reusable coffee cups in UK coffee shops and food retail chains is examined to exemplify relations between problematisation and responsibilisation. We examine problematisation and responsibilisation discourses that have emerged in relation to the issue, particularly in relation to single-use plastics, together with emerging governance arrangements and their underlying rationalities. The case study shows two key things: firstly, how ethical questions about food in public discourses connect to wider environmental planetary concerns (in this case packaging in relation to the environment); and secondly, how responsibility has emergent and dynamic properties, which we term ‘cycles of responsibilisation’. The paper concludes by assessing the wider value of applying a responsibility framework to examine governance responses to increasingly complex agri-food system sustainability challenges

Introduction. Post-truth – another fork in modernity’s path

This text provides an introduction to the volume as a whole, focusing on topics that were much discussed during its preparation and writing. It gives a critical overview of some main events, public and academic discussions, related to post – truth, and of the volume’s individual contributions. It argues that post – truth is deeply connected to main developments of knowledge societies, and their intensifications along multiple axes and dimensions. These developments amount to tipping – points or shifts to relations between technoscience and society and public uses of knowledge, indicating their increasingly political and politicised characters. Such shifts, variously displayed and analysed throughout the book, require discussion and re – articulation of some deeply held beliefs and assumptions about the role of knowledge and truth in public. They pose requirement for new starting points, in societal debates, for critique and academic analyses.publishedVersio

Climate change and cities: problem structuring methods and critical perspectives on low-carbon districts

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier via the DOI in this record.Cities around the world have set climate change mitigation targets, yet actions to implement these targets have so far proved inadequate. Better methodology is needed to support this impetus for action. Problem structuring methods (PSMs) enable improvements to be made in wicked problem situations; they appear to have potential to improve climate change mitigation actions but they are difficult to carry out in highly pluralist problem contexts. A case study (STEEP) that applied a PSM to support lowcarbon urban energy master planning in three cities is presented. The STEEP methodology was effective in reducing the wickedness of the problem but issues of a lack of clarity on problem ownership and lack of interessement were seen. A reflective boundary critique study found that there was a mismatch between power and interest amongst key stakeholders towards the low-carbon vision. Three key issues identified in the case study were discussed through the lens of critical systems thinking: (i) the need for new competencies, (ii) dealing with wickedness, and (iii) behavioural complexity and discordant reference systems. The paper suggests how these issues might be improved through the application of non-PSM theories which can support the use of PSMs in improving city-level climate change mitigation.This work was supported in part by the EU FP7-ENERGY-SMARTCITIES-2012 (314277) project STEEP (Systems Thinking for Comprehensive City Efficient Energy Planning)

From environmental Malthusianism to ecological modernisation: toward a genealogy of sustainability

This is a genealogy of sustainability. It begins with a single discontinuity, observed throughout the literature: that there was once environmental Malthusianism, but now there is ecological modernisation. By working outward from this discontinuity, it is possible to trace the most significant events in the history of sustainability, from its emergence in thought and discourse, through to its present form. The discontinuity itself took the form of a three-stage process: the fall of Malthusianism, the vacuum it left behind, and the rise of ecological modernisation. In order to understand the fall of environmental Malthusianism it is necessary to trace its descent and unpick its emergence; in order to understand the rise of ecological modernisation, it is necessary to discern the conditions of possibility and the unique characteristics that determined its success. The story begins circa 1920, with the birth of ecology, and the ecological problematisation it brought with it. Ecology not only gave us ‘the’ environment as a single ontological object—and the environmentalism that seeks to protect it—but also provided us with the language and concepts with which to problematise our relationship with it. The first expression of this problematisation was environmental Malthusianism, but Malthusianism itself was a problematic discourse, built upon a relation of power exercised over women. With the rise of feminism came the fall of Malthusianism, and the vacuum in environmental politics was made. By then several decades had passed, and the vacuum was shaped by the political context of the 1980s. The new discourse of environmental politics had to be sufficiently different from its toxic predecessor, sufficiently developed as a policy discourse, and sufficiently compatible with the nascent politics of the time—and ecological modernisation was an ideal fit. What this genealogy shows is that the roots of sustainability are to be found in the ecological problematisation, and that its trajectory has been shaped by events that were often only indirectly related. Sustainability is a product of historical contingency; to understand sustainability is to understand the contingencies that determined its emergence

The invisibility of men's practices: A discourse analysis of gender in domestic violence policy

Domestic violence is a phenomenon which is both gendered and social, in that it is perpetrated overwhelmingly by men against women, and is pervasive throughout all areas of society. Yet the history of the response to domestic violence by the state has often been one of inaction and failure. This master's thesis explores how the governments of Finland and the United Kingdom approach the issue today, by examining how policy around domestic violence is discursively gendered, constructed, and problematised. This is carried out through an analysis of two national policy documents from each country, published between 2008 and 2011, which focus on domestic violence or violence against women more broadly. These texts are studied by a combination of discourse analysis methods and a problematisation approach to policy analysis. The UK and Finland were chosen for comparison because of the different ways in which feminists have traditionally interacted with the state in the two countries. In Britain, feminists have theorised the state as being inherently patriarchal and their struggle has therefore often been oriented 'outside' of the state. In Finland meanwhile, the more consensus-oriented nature of welfare state development has meant that feminists have viewed the state more benignly, and have been more willing to work 'inside' its apparatus. This research investigates whether this traditional contrast between the two countries is apparent in their contemporary policy discourses. It was found that, in all four of the policy documents, men's practices are almost entirely invisible and unproblematised, and that the discourse is instead centred around the victimhood of women. The violence of men, and its underlying causes, is not engaged with, and is routinely concealed through the use of agentless language. Where men's practices are referred to, they are often degendered, through a gender-neutral discourse which obfuscates the patriarchal dynamics of domestic violence. In this representation of the problem, a deafening silence surrounds men's responsibility for domestic violence. With the focus limited only to the victims, the phenomenon is instead represented as being a problem of women, and women are thus denoted with the onus of responsibility for stopping and preventing men's violence. A fundamental transformation away from this representation of domestic violence is therefore advocated, based on the problematisation of men's practices and the gendered power relations which underpin them, as a vital part of efforts to prevent men from ever choosing to use violence in the first place. This demonstrates that there is an urgent need for further research into primary prevention work and how the norms, assumptions, and ideas which fuel men's violence can be tackled. Furthermore, confronting the practices of men means fundamentally challenging the structures of the patriarchal system, which is itself an essential step in tackling domestic violence

[Introduction] Toward an anthropology of the just price: history, ethnography, critique

No description supplie

A construção discursiva de uma nova realidade no discurso Zeitenwende de Olaf Scholz

This article applies Bakhtinian dialogism and the concept of centripetal-centrifugal struggle to critical discourse studies to analyse how powerful and marginalised discourses are brought into competition in political language to justify paradigm changes. I analyse German chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Zeitenwende (‘watershed’) speech, which he gave as a response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, announcing a radical armament programme and change in foreign policy, a paradigm shift that had previously been unthinkable in German politics. Based on a qualitative analysis using the Appraisal Theory strategies Attitude and Engagement, I identify how Scholz aligns himself with particular powerful discourses, centring some powerful ones and marginalising others, constructing an existential threat for Germany, the so-called watershed, a new situation which casts his policies of German armament as without alternative. The paper demonstrates the strength of the analysis of dialogically contractive and expansive strategies in critical discourse studies.Este artigo aplica o dialogismo bakhtiniano e o conceito de luta centrípeta-centrífuga a estudos de discurso crítico para analisar o quão poderosos e marginalizados discursos são trazidos à concorrência na linguagem política para justificar mudanças de paradigma. Analiso o discurso Zeitenwende ("início de uma era") do chanceler alemão Olaf Scholz, que ele deu como resposta à invasão russa da Ucrânia, anunciando um programa radical de armamento e uma mudança na política externa, uma mudança de paradigma que antes era impensável na política alemã. Com base em uma análise qualitativa utilizando as estratégias da Teoria da Avaliação Atitude e Engajamento, identifico como Scholz se alinha a discursos particulares e poderosos, centrado em alguns poderosos e marginalizando outros, construindo uma ameaça existencial para a Alemanha, o chamado início de uma era, uma nova situação que lança suas políticas de armamento alemão como sem alternativa. O artigo demonstra a força da análise de estratégias dialogicamente contrativas e expansivas em estudos de discurso crítico

Contradictions of citizenship and environmental politics in the Arabian littoral

This article scrutinizes the limitations of environmental citizenship among citizens and non-citizens in the Arab Gulf states, with a focus on the United Arab Emirates (UAE). There are particularly heightened concerns about water scarcity, food security, marine pollution, and dependence on oil and gas industries and how states can address these challenges in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Yet environmental citizenship in the Indian Ocean's Arabian littoral remains poorly understood both in terms of theoretical and grounded questions. This article considers how labor relations and discourses relating to citizenship, environment and sustainability enable or foreclose environmental reform in GCC countries. It shifts the technological and economic focus predominant in literature on sustainability in the GCC to take a more social perspective and examine distinctions between citizens and non-citizens and the depoliticising of environmental claims and national industrial legacies.Archaeological Heritage Managemen

Socioemotional wealth in family firms: a longitudinal content analysis of corporate disclosures

This is the Accepted Manuscript of the article published in Journal of Family Business Strategy, 2019, 10(2), pp. 119-132, available online: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfbs.2018.11.002. Please cite the published version. This Accepted Manuscript is deposited under a CC-BY-NC-ND license.Family business literature has noted the nature and presence of socioemotional wealth (SEW) in family firms. One method of observing SEW is by a five-dimension approach, collectively termed FIBER. While the dimensions are well defined, they have been critiqued, as have the theoretical foundations of SEW. Regardless, given the concept of SEW is about a decade old and the FIBER dimensions less so, it is reasonable to argue more research is needed. One potentially useful research approach is an historical one, which we will here term SEW history – the use of historical research to support (or question) the development of SEW as a concept. We undertake a content analysis of corporate disclosures through the Chairman’s Statement of two Irish family breweries over a period of about two decades. To conduct the analysis, we develop a coding scheme based on the FIBER dimensions and offer some research propositions around these dimensions of SEW being stable (or not) over time. Our findings reveal that the Chairman’s Statement does include FIBER dimensions in both breweries and they do change over time. Subsequent statistical analysis reveals significant differences in the FIBER dimensions between the two breweries and context is revealed as a key issue in the assessment of SEW, something prior research has noted. The study also raises some questions on the nature of some FIBER dimensions, in particular the “I” dimension. This is the Accepted Manuscript of the article published in Journal of Family Business Strategy, 2019, 10(2), pp. 119-132, available online: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfbs.2018.11.002. Please cite the published version. This Accepted Manuscript is deposited under a CC-BY-NC-ND license