The English Riots of 2011: Misreading the signs on the road to the society of enemies

Most of the riots that occurred in England throughout modernity were associated with symbolic protests and fuelled by an underlying sense of injustice about specific, objective grievances related to the position of the agrarian or industrial working classes in the socioeconomic and political structure. In the period that stretched from the 1880s to the 1930s, however, it is possible to discern a significant shift in form. Perhaps the most important aspect of this shift was the gradual emergence and development of coherent, unifying political discourses amongst the popular classes (Thompson, 1991). To be specific, the motivation and symbolism that underpinned both protests and riots became increasingly shaped by the related but competing political visions of communism, socialism or Labourite social democracy. These discourses did not incorporate populations en masse, and indeed many individuals remained apolitical or conservative in outlook despite their continued economic exploitation and political marginalization. However, the influence exerted by these discourses was most certainly on the rise and, between the two World Wars, it could be seen at the forefront of most protests and riots

Testing the leadership and organizational change for implementation (LOCI) intervention in substance abuse treatment: A cluster randomized trial study protocol

© 2017 The Author(s). Background: Evidence-based practice (EBP) implementation represents a strategic change in organizations that requires effective leadership and alignment of leadership and organizational support across organizational levels. As such, there is a need for combining leadership development with organizational strategies to support organizational climate conducive to EBP implementation. The leadership and organizational change for implementation (LOCI) intervention includes leadership training for workgroup leaders, ongoing implementation leadership coaching, 360° assessment, and strategic planning with top and middle management regarding how they can support workgroup leaders in developing a positive EBP implementation climate. Methods: This test of the LOCI intervention will take place in conjunction with the implementation of motivational interviewing (MI) in 60 substance use disorder treatment programs in California, USA. Participants will include agency executives, 60 program leaders, and approximately 360 treatment staff. LOCI will be tested using a multiple cohort, cluster randomized trial that randomizes workgroups (i.e., programs) within agency to either LOCI or a webinar leadership training control condition in three consecutive cohorts. The LOCI intervention is 12months, and the webinar control intervention takes place in months 1, 5, and 8, for each cohort. Web-based surveys of staff and supervisors will be used to collect data on leadership, implementation climate, provider attitudes, and citizenship. Audio recordings of counseling sessions will be coded for MI fidelity. The unit of analysis will be the workgroup, randomized by site within agency and with care taken that co-located workgroups are assigned to the same condition to avoid contamination. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) will be used to analyze the data to account for the nested data structure. Discussion: LOCI has been developed to be a feasible and effective approach for organizations to create a positive climate and fertile context for EBP implementation. The approach seeks to cultivate and sustain both effective general and implementation leadership as well as organizational strategies and support that will remain after the study has ended. Development of a positive implementation climate for MI should result in more positive service provider attitudes and behaviors related to the use of MI and, ultimately, higher fidelity in the use of MI. Trial registration: This study is registered with Clinicaltrials.gov ( NCT03042832 ), 2 February 2017, retrospectively registered

Neoliberalism, consumerism and the end of the Cold War

As the Berlin Wall fell, the American academic Francis Fukuyama declared that state socialism had collapsed because it was on the wrong side of History in two respects: its rejection of liberal democracy had failed to grant the mass of people the ‘dignity’ they demanded; and its hostility to the market had prevented it from providing decent living standards for populations that had been living under it. 1 And while Fukuyama’s thesis on the inevitable victory of liberal capitalism has come under a great deal of criticism, his analysis of the reasons for communism’s failure has become commonplace – and especially its economic side. Some scholars may want to stress the importance of the American military build-up in the 1980s to the defeat of state socialism, and others emphasize political issues, such as loss of faith in the ideology on the part of elites, or popular hostility to communist high-handedness and corruption. 2 But it is probably more common in the popular historical literature to see state socialism’s fatal flaw as economic, rather than military or political, and to assume that the struggle between capitalism and communism was a simple one between the ‘market’ and the ‘plan’, which communism was inevitably going to lose. As the historian Martin Malia put it, the history of the USSR in essence consisted of the implementation of ‘Marx’s fantasy of socialism as noncapitalism’; this could be achieved only through Leninist totalitarianism and Stalinist terror, and the foundations of this ‘impossible utopia’ were so fragile it was bound to collapse, thus forcing Moscow to concede defeat in the Cold War