Progress and Peril in the Championing Process

This paper explores the process of championing, as it occurs over the course of an information technology (IT) innovation implementation. It begins by describing the case of a championed IT project, and goes on to identify three championing behaviors that emerge from it: inoculated persistence, limited leveraging and discriminating outreach. While most previous work has described championing behaviors which are unequivocally positive, we find that each of these behaviors are primarily positive, but come with caveats. We suggest that the primarily positive nature of these behaviors accounts for the commonly held view that champions help an innovation’s progress, while the perils posed by the behaviors could explain why champions are sometimes implicated in spectacular innovation project failures

Troubling Settled Waters: The Opportunity and Peril of African-American Reparations

This Article explores the theme of troubling settled waters, which represents the impact of African-American reparations on the current landscape of race relations in America. The Article outlines the current and historical debate over reparations, addressing the arguments of opponents who contend that reparations dialogue and action wastes intellectual and monetary resources, unnecessarily resurrects painful memories, and creates racial division. It also takes note of contemporary reparations efforts in the courts. as well as the theories and bases for this litigation. The Article concludes that, given the continuing pervasiveness of race and race issues in modern America, reparations are a welcome and important opportunity for achieving civil rights goals

Growing Environmental Activists: Developing Environmental Agency and Engagement Through Children’s Fiction.

We explore how story has the potential to encourage environmental engagement and a sense of agency provided that critical discussion takes place. We illuminate this with reference to the philosophies of John Macmurray on personal agency and social relations; of John Dewey on the primacy of experience for philosophy; and of Paul Ricoeur on hermeneutics, dialogue, dialectics and narrative. We view the use of fiction for environmental understanding as hermeneutic, a form of conceptualising place which interprets experience and perception. The four writers for young people discussed are Ernest Thompson Seton, Kenneth Grahame, Michelle Paver and Philip Pullman. We develop the concept of critical dialogue, and link this to Crick's demand for active democratic citizenship. We illustrate the educational potential for environmental discussions based on literature leading to deeper understanding of place and environment, encouraging the belief in young people that they can be and become agents for change. We develop from Zimbardo the key concept of heroic resister to encourage young people to overcome peer pressure. We conclude with a call to develop a greater awareness of the potential of fiction for learning, and for writers to produce more focused stories engaging with environmental responsibility and activism

REVERSE EMULATION AND THE CULT OF JAPANESE EFFICIENCY IN EDWARDIAN BRITAIN

ABSTRACTThis article considers a particular moment in world history when an instant of epoch-making triumph in the non-West – Japan's defeat of Russia in 1905 – coincided with a period of intense national anxiety in Britain in the wake of the South African War (1899–1902). One outcome of this historical intersection was the emergence in Britain of a euphoric ‘cult of Japan’ that saw many Edwardians, obsessed with the idea of ‘efficiency’, deploy Japan as both a referent for British shortcomings and a model for reform. The article asks why proponents of ‘efficiency’ – most of them ardent imperialists – deemed it acceptable, even strategically advantageous, in such domestic debates to draw upon examples from Japan – an ‘Oriental’ race and former protégé – in apparent contradiction of Western supremacism. The article contends that Britain's emulative attitudes were underpinned by an emergent plural conception of ‘civilization’, which appraised Japan's attainment of civilization as consistent with Western standards whilst at the same time recognizing elements of Japanese particularity – an outlook that justified reciprocal learning.</jats:p

Information policy for a new millennium

Previous revolutions, the Agrarian and Industrial, are examined and their features compared with the Information Revolution. Lessons are drawn from the comparison and a range of global issues identified. The nature of the Internet is considered and its pretensions argued to be inflated. The role of the state in developing an information society is discussed. A national information policy is identified as a feature and its application in and implications for Scotland are considered. Key features of an Internet culture are indicated and discussed, with lessons and conclusions for social development within the information society presented

The rites of man: The British Museum and the sexual imagination in Victorian Britain

In the nineteenth century, the British Museum possessed a locked store of erotic objects. However, this did not serve to sanitize the rest of the collection. I use the evidence of an anonymous tract, Idolomania, set in the context of other literary productions of the time, to show how a wave of anti-Catholic agitation led to claims that the public displays of the British Museum were saturated with morally dangerous material. A wide range of objects, images and motifs were interpreted as evidence of pagan fertility cults, thus throwing into question the seemliness of the Museum's public displays. However, I use the evidence of an anonymous early Victorian tract, Idolomania, set in the context of other literary productions of its times, to show that the early Victorian wave of anti-Catholic moral panic led to claims that the public displays of the British Museum were saturated with morally dangerous material. Although I cannot and do not claim that this was a mainstream view, I do use this tract to emphasise that there is a ongoing tradition of eroticised readings of sculpture galleries, even ones supposedly purged of explicitly sexual material. That this fact is not widely recognised may be to do with dominant conceptualisations of the separation between art and pornography that date from the Victorian age. Much classical and Hindu statuary may indeed have been intended indirectly if not directly to produce erotic responses. And it we want to fully engage with the power of bodily representations in museum collections it may be sensible to openly acknowledge sexual fetishism as a social construction and, therefore, the diversity and unpredictability of arousal

Rejecting Religious Intolerance in South-East Asia

This article is going to discuss religious intolerance in Myanmar and Indonesia. Religious intolerance in these two countriesis driven by extreme ideologies which reject tolerance and diversity. These ideologies influence society and generate a culture of discrimination. In Myanmar, Muslims and Christians face a&nbsp;campaign of hatred&nbsp;led by a militant ultra-nationalist Buddhist movement which has resulted in several outbreaks of violence in the past five years. The predominantly Muslim Rohingya people have been the most severely victimized, enduring grave human rights violations which some international experts describe as ‘ethnic cleansing’, ‘crimes against humanity’ and potentially genocide.In Indonesia, a country with a tradition of religious tolerance, radical Islamism has become an increasing threat to non-Sunni Muslim minorities, particularly the Ahmadiyya and Shi’a communities, as well as Christians and other religions and to Sunni moderates who work to preserve Indonesia’s pluralism. To challenge the pervasive influence of intolerance, a variety of imaginative strategies are necessary.Recommendations will call state actors, media and civil society to work together to combat hate speech narratives through all available channels: education, the judiciary, campaigning platforms, the media, legislation and international diplomacy