Power, agency, deference and difference Examining the politics of composer–performer relationships in the wake of recent innovations

With a view to uncovering the political implications of notational, technological and musical innovation in composer–performer relationships within Western art music, this paper examines three disparate works: Christian Wolff’s Duo for Pianists II (1958); Brian Ferneyhough’s Unity Capsule (1975); and Georg Hajdu’s Schwer… unheimlich Schwer (2009). By first exploring two innovative 20th century works, Duo for Pianists II and Unity Capsule, the paper establishes a framework for a discussion of the political and ethical dimensions of composer–performer relationships in relation to the 21st century innovation manifest in Schwer… unheimlich Schwer (2009). This multidimensional examination draws on Warren’s (2014) examination of the relationships between ethics and music, Godlovitch’s (1998) philosophy of performance, and research carried out by practitioners such as Couroux (2002), Schick (2006) and Eigenfeldt (2011; 2014). The paper concludes that all three pieces demonstrate the potential for notation to have strong political implications, and that composers are ultimately responsible for the political implications of the performance experience

From Citizen Participation to Participatory Governance

This paper identifies types of citizen participation in local government in Australia, in particular focusing on the past two decades when local government systems have been the focus of intense reform. The paper considers the extent to which contemporary views of participatory governance have taken root at local and sub-local levels and concludes that despite reforms intended to engage local citizens more in local government activity, citizen participation has yet to develop significantly into arrangements that reach the level of participatory governance. It also argues that for participatory governance to be further developed, leadership may often have to come from organisations outside institutional local government

Book review: antipolitics in Central European art by Klara Kemp-Welch

Spanning a period punctuated by landmark events from the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 to the birth of the Polish Solidarity movement in 1980 Antipolitics in Central European Art aims to anchor art historical analysis within a robust historical framework. Jim Aulich is impressed by Klara Kemp-Welch’s articulation of how small groups of artists and their audiences openly converged in a public cultural realm parallel to the intellectual and political opposition

Airport Privatisation in Australia: A Tale of Three Cities

This article addresses the performance of three Australian airports since they were privatised by divestment. They represent cases of divestment in a monopoly environment, with ownership arrangements for each airport varying markedly. The performances of the divested airports are considered using both financial and non-financial data. There are significant implications for future divestment policies, including the value of divestment as a policy response of governments in less competitive environments, the use of particular infrastructure investment models, and the nature of the linkage between ownership structure and financial performance

The role of effective communication in the construction Industry: a guide for education and health clients

The construction industry operates primarily as a system of sub-contracting and purpose built alliances. There is a wide spread of stakeholders involved in conceiving a building project through typical stages such as design, finance, build,  manage, upgrade and, ultimately, replacement and a corresponding need for communication and cooperation. Specialists who can prevent bridges falling down or who build 20 storey buildings are seen as the hard-nosed, action people who have helped bring us into the modern era. However, there are intuitive activities and disciplines which help us to achieve the type of construction achievements that have been the hallmarks of the 19th, 20th and now the 21st centuries. Most of these so called soft disciplines are about how one helps people, often highly skilled, achieve those construction and engineering goals. The key components are consultation and communication. Communication strategies should be based on a thorough understanding of the ways that humans co-operate in joint undertakings, the key principles of social dynamics and learning theory plus the ways in which people deliver, accept and understand words and pictures. The disciplines of organisational and environmental psychology have become a basic fundamental of modern business activities from management and organisational strategy to marketing and customer relations and to the improvement of working, recreational and living environments. However it is rare for a mature industry such as construction to adopt or examine those disciplines for guidance about either strategies or operations. This is despite the fact that the construction industry is almost entirely based on the principle of sub-contracting, business and professional alliances, all of which require understanding of environmental psychology and social dynamics in order to build trust, reputation, teamwork and client satisfaction. There is therefore a major need for communications to be systematic, understood by all stakeholders and intelligently applied. This paper concentrates on the need for the client to become a more confident and better informed stakeholder in the construction project, and seeks to provide high level management guidance for traditional centralized systems. The ultimate goal of the paper is to provide a systematic guideline for stakeholders to address early in the life of a project to ensure that industry professionals, clients and sub-clients are “working from the same page

Der Mensch als Ursache für suboptimale Ergebnisse: Kann das HRM gegensteuern?

Führen bestimmte menschliche Verhaltensweisen zu betriebswirtschaftlich schlechten Entscheidungen? Sind Fehler- quellen, die in der Natur des Menschen liegen, ursächlich für die Finanzkrise? Fünf Studierendengruppen der Universität Zürich gingen diesen und anderen Fragen auf den Grund. Ihre Ergebnisse präsentieren wir in einer neuen Serie

The Acoustic Ecology of the Fin Whale in Eastern Antarctic and Australian Waters

Utilising ~360,000 hours of underwater sound recordings, this thesis presents a broad-scale study of the acoustic ecology of the Southern Hemisphere sub-species of fin whale in Eastern Antarctic, Sub-Antarctic, and Australian waters. The thesis results outline the seasonal migratory presence and song repertoire of the animals, suggesting two separate sub-populations of fin whale in these regions. Further, this thesis investigated diel patterns and environmental drivers of the animals’ presence in Eastern Antarctic water

Ghost Stories for Grown-Ups: Pictorial Matters in Times of War and Conflict

This introduction takes as its central armature Karen Barad’s agential realism to provide a framework for understanding the essays brought together in this Special Issue under the rubric of pictures of conflict. The intention is to move the discussion with regard to picture making forward to more fully embrace the pictorial and the physical, the historical and institutional processes within apparatuses of picture-making. The attempt in ‘Ghost stories’ through the concept of a visual apparatus, is to shed new light and thinking on pictures as material objects; how they act and feed into our subjectivities, experiences and realities and to account for their currency, duration, affectivity and authority beyond transparent representation or symbolic meaning. In order to achieve this, Barad’s agential realism is inflected by insights from Malafouris’s (2013) material engagement theory; W.J.T. Mitchell’s (2005) image theory; Jens Eder and Charlotte Klonk’s (2017) image operations; Mondzian’s (2005) understanding of the economy of the image, as well as the ontological concerns of new German art history and image science exemplified in the work of Hans Belting (1996, 2011) and Horst Bredekamp (2017), for example. In this framework, the worlds pictures create, and the subjectivities they produce, are not understood to precede the phenomena they depict. The picture, as the outcome of the apparatus which produces it, makes an ‘observational cut’ that simultaneously excludes and includes certain elements from its frame. As such, it has to be comprehended as party to processes which are both ethical and political. A fact which is particularly important during times of conflict and war