Hope labour and the psychic life of cultural work

How do we understand the psychic life of cultural workers under neoliberalism? ‘Hope labour’ is a defining quality of a cultural worker’s experience, practice and identity. Hope labour is unpaid or under-compensated labour undertaken in the present, usually for exposure or experience, with the hope that future work may follow. Hope labour is naturalised by neoliberal discourses but not fully determined by them. Drawing upon empirical research investigating the ‘creative industries’ in the North East of England, we ask how hope labour is made meaningful and worthwhile for cultural workers positioned as entrepreneurial subjects, despite its legitimisation of power asymmetries. We develop Foucauldian studies of governmentality by addressing how cultural work is lived through neoliberal categories, demonstrating the conflicting discourses and relations to self involved in the constitution of entrepreneurial subjectivity. We make a novel contribution to an understanding of hope and precarity by illustrating how cultural workers begin to occupy the site of the entrepreneurial subject amidst conflicting configurations of hope, desire, anxiety and uncertainty

Getting together, living together, thinking together: Management Development at Tata Sons 1940-1960

This paper analyses internal management development activities at Tata Sons during the 1940s and 1950s in India. The existing literaturehas concentrated on the establishment of management education programmes at Universities, and our understanding of in-company managerial training and development activities remains very limited. The paper challenges the commonly held assumption that the American influence on Indian higher education in the post-war period was decisive in shapingmanagement education in general. After 1947, Tata Sons continued to look to Great Britain for management development models to build the internal capacities and management culture that would make governing a diversified business group practical

Strategic responses to low-cost competition; technological lock-in in the Dundee jute industry

This paper examines path dependency and technological lock-in in the evolution of the Dundee jute industry, from its beginnings in the 1860s to its demise in the 1970s. The evolution of the industry is explored using the resource-based view of the firm (RBV). The results suggest that the nature and construct of jute fibre was the root cause of a lack of sustainable strategic responses in the sector. Path dependent decisions and technological lock-in meant that many firms were not able to make successful strategic switches, although the capabilities of their engineering skills allowed some firms to endure for longer. Thus, the paper extends the RBV to a deeper firm capability level and complements cognate literature on the UK textile sector with a finer specification of the phases in jute’s evolution

Perspectives on metropolitan governance

To complement Zack Taylor’s paper on Regionalism from Above: Metro Governance in Canada, the journal commissioned four short ‘perspectives’ from Commonwealth countries grappling with similar issues – Australia, England, New Zealand and South Africa. The purpose was not in any way to ‘review’ Taylor’s work, but rather to establish a broader picture of issues and trends in metropolitan governance, and to identify common threads. The perspectives from Australia, England and South Africa focus on recent developments and governance issues in particular metropolitan areas. These are respectively the fast-growing outer metropolitan sub-region of Western Sydney; the long-established conurbation of Greater Manchester; and the vast, emerging ‘multi-nodal sprawl’ of South Africa’s Gauteng City Region, centred on Johannesburg. The New Zealand perspective takes a different approach, exploring the implications of shifts in national policy towards a focus on wellbeing and the quality of life in communities, with significant implications for the future of local government and the way metropolitan areas are governed. Nevertheless, all four perspectives reveal similar underlying concerns that metropolitan governance frameworks and practices often struggle to keep pace with global trends, urban growth, community needs and national priorities. Effective inter-government relations are crucial, but local governments may not be at the table, or their views may be largely ignored. The governance of metropolitan regions becomes increasingly fraught, a battleground between the forces of devolution and centralisation. How can meaningful and effective collaborative governance be realised? Who should take the lead and do we have the right tools and skills? In such a complex and fluid environment, can we realistically expect anything more than brief periods of clarity and consensus that at least enable agreement on the next few steps

"Ethics means respect, ethics is to consider that what is written really will happen and that way is right"

No contexto em que vivemos, torna-se cada vez mais necessário discutir um tema como o da ética em pesquisa. Para isso, convidamos o coordenador do Comitê de Ética em Pesquisa do Instituto Nacional do Câncer (Inca), o médico, com formação em cirurgia oncológica, Dr. Carlos Henrique Debenedito Silva

The ties that bind us: networks, projects and careers in British TV

The dominant view of careers is that they have been transformed by the emergence of ‘post-bureaucratic’ organizations. ‘Neo-bureaucratic’ structures have emerged, retaining centralized control over strategy and finance while outsourcing production, creating employment precarity. British television epitomises a sector that has experienced long-run deregulation. Producing television content is risky highly competitive. How do broadcasters minimise the risks of television production? Broadcasting neo-bureaucracies avoid relying on fragmented labour markets to hire technically self-disciplining crews. Control regimes are enacted through activating social networks by broadcast commissioners, green-lit to trusted creative teams who recruit key crew, through social networks which complement diffuse forms of normative control. Social networks and the self-discipline of crews are mutually constitutive, (re)producing patterns of labour market advantage/disadvantage. Younger freelancers prove vulnerable, exposed to precariousness inherent in freelance employment; to build a career they must access and sustain their social network membership. We locate individual decisions around career narratives in the context of specific social networks and industry structures. Careers are not boundaryless, individual constructs. We introduce the concept of ‘mosaic-career’, capturing the complexity of individual work histories, composed of fragmented employment in organisations/projects. How do neo-bureaucracies, then, intervene in labour markets? What are the consequences of those interventions

High-sensitivity troponin in the evaluation of patients with suspected acute coronary syndrome: a stepped-wedge, cluster-randomised controlled trial.

BACKGROUND: High-sensitivity cardiac troponin assays permit use of lower thresholds for the diagnosis of myocardial infarction, but whether this improves clinical outcomes is unknown. We aimed to determine whether the introduction of a high-sensitivity cardiac troponin I (hs-cTnI) assay with a sex-specific 99th centile diagnostic threshold would reduce subsequent myocardial infarction or cardiovascular death in patients with suspected acute coronary syndrome. METHODS: In this stepped-wedge, cluster-randomised controlled trial across ten secondary or tertiary care hospitals in Scotland, we evaluated the implementation of an hs-cTnI assay in consecutive patients who had been admitted to the hospitals' emergency departments with suspected acute coronary syndrome. Patients were eligible for inclusion if they presented with suspected acute coronary syndrome and had paired cardiac troponin measurements from the standard care and trial assays. During a validation phase of 6-12 months, results from the hs-cTnI assay were concealed from the attending clinician, and a contemporary cardiac troponin I (cTnI) assay was used to guide care. Hospitals were randomly allocated to early (n=5 hospitals) or late (n=5 hospitals) implementation, in which the high-sensitivity assay and sex-specific 99th centile diagnostic threshold was introduced immediately after the 6-month validation phase or was deferred for a further 6 months. Patients reclassified by the high-sensitivity assay were defined as those with an increased hs-cTnI concentration in whom cTnI concentrations were below the diagnostic threshold on the contemporary assay. The primary outcome was subsequent myocardial infarction or death from cardiovascular causes at 1 year after initial presentation. Outcomes were compared in patients reclassified by the high-sensitivity assay before and after its implementation by use of an adjusted generalised linear mixed model. This trial is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, number NCT01852123. FINDINGS: Between June 10, 2013, and March 3, 2016, we enrolled 48 282 consecutive patients (61 [SD 17] years, 47% women) of whom 10 360 (21%) patients had cTnI concentrations greater than those of the 99th centile of the normal range of values, who were identified by the contemporary assay or the high-sensitivity assay. The high-sensitivity assay reclassified 1771 (17%) of 10 360 patients with myocardial injury or infarction who were not identified by the contemporary assay. In those reclassified, subsequent myocardial infarction or cardiovascular death within 1 year occurred in 105 (15%) of 720 patients in the validation phase and 131 (12%) of 1051 patients in the implementation phase (adjusted odds ratio for implementation vs validation phase 1·10, 95% CI 0·75 to 1·61; p=0·620). INTERPRETATION: Use of a high-sensitivity assay prompted reclassification of 1771 (17%) of 10 360 patients with myocardial injury or infarction, but was not associated with a lower subsequent incidence of myocardial infarction or cardiovascular death at 1 year. Our findings question whether the diagnostic threshold for myocardial infarction should be based on the 99th centile derived from a normal reference population. FUNDING: The British Heart Foundation