213 research outputs found
Organizing resistance movements: contribution of the political discourse theory
The main purpose of this paper is to explore the possibility of articulating Political Discourse Theory (PDT) together with Organizational Studies (OS), while using the opportunity to introduce PDT to those OS scholars who have not yet come across it. The bulk of this paper introduces the main concepts of PDT, discussing how they have been applied to concrete, empirical studies of resistance movements. In recent years, PDT has been increasingly appropriated by OS scholars to problematize and analyze resistances and other forms of social antagonisms within organizational settings, taking the relational and contingent aspects of struggles into consideration. While the paper supports the idea of a joint articulation of PDT and OS, it raises a number of critical questions of how PDT concepts have been empirically used to explain the organization of resistance movements. The paper sets out a research agenda for how both PDT and OS can together contribute to our understanding of new, emerging organizational forms of resistance movements.</jats:p
Institutionalisation of Social Movements: Co-option And Democratic Policy-making
Over the past 30 years, urban policy in Brazil has undergone a major transformation, both in terms of regulatory frameworks and the involvement of citizens in the process of policy-making. As an intense process of institutional innovation and mobilisation for decent publicservices took place, academics started to consider the impact of institutionalisation on the autonomy of social movements. Using empirical evidence from a city in the northeast of Brazil, this article addresses the wider literature on citizen participation and social movements to examine specifically the problem with co-optation. I examine the risks linked to co-optation, risks that can undermine the credibility of social movements as agents of change, and explore the tensions that go beyond the âco-optation versus autonomyâ divide, an issue frequently found in the practices of social movements, in their dealings with those in power. In particular, this article explores the learning processes and contentious relationships between mainly institutionally oriented urban movements and local government. This study found that the learning of deliberative skills not only led to changes in the objectives and repertoires of housing movements, but also to the inclusion of new components in their objectives that provide room for creative agency and which, in some cases, might allow them to maintain their autonomy from the state
Participatory-deliberative processes and public policy agendas:Lessons for policy and practice
open access journalParticipatory and deliberative processes have proliferated over
recent decades in public administration. These seek to increase
the effectiveness and democratic quality of policy making by
involving citizens in policy. However, these have mainly operated
at local levels of governance, and democratic theorists and practitioners
have developed an ambition to scale these up in order to
democratize higher tiers of government. This paper draws policy
lessons from research on a âmulti-levelâ process that held a similar
ambition. The Sustainable Communities Act sought to integrate
the results of various locally organized citizen deliberations within
the policy development processes of central UK government. In
doing so, it aimed to democratize central government problem
definition and agenda-setting processes. The paper distinguishes
between achievements and failures explained by process design,
and more fundamental obstacles to do with broader contextual
factors. As such, it identifies lessons for the amelioration of design
features, while recognizing constraints that are often beyond the
agency of local practitioners. The findings offer practical insights
for policy workers and democratic reformers seeking to institutionalize
participatory and deliberative innovations
Experience with model-based performance, reliability and adaptability assessment of a complex industrial architecture
In this paper, we report on our experience with the application of validated models to assess performance, reliability, and adaptability of a complex mission critical system that is being developed to dynamically monitor and control the position of an oil-drilling platform. We present real-time modeling results that show that all tasks are schedulable. We performed stochastic analysis of the distribution of task execution time as a function of the number of system interfaces. We report on the variability of task execution times for the expected system configurations. In addition, we have executed a system library for an important task inside the performance model simulator. We report on the measured algorithm convergence as a function of the number of vessel thrusters. We have also studied the system architecture adaptability by comparing the documented system architecture and the implemented source code. We report on the adaptability findings and the recommendations we were able to provide to the systemâs architect. Finally, we have developed models of hardware and software reliability. We report on hardware and software reliability results based on the evaluation of the system architecture
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Globalisation from Above? Corporate Social Responsibility, the Workers' Party and the Origins of the World Social Forum
In its assessment of the origins and early development of the World Social Forum this article challenges traditional understandings of the Forum as representing âglobalisation from belowâ. By tracing the intricate relations among elements of business, civil society, and the Workersâ Party in the first years of the Forum, this article reveals the major role played by a corporate movement stemming from the Brazilian democratisation process in the 1980s, and how this combined with the transformed agenda of the Workersâ Party as it gained higher political offices to constrain the Forumâs activities from the outset. In so doing, this article challenges not only widespread conceptions of the Forum as a counterâhegemonic alternative but also current critiques concerning its subsequent limitations. Furthermore, it reveals how traditional understandings of the World Social Forum and of global civil society are underpinned by flawed assumptions which typecast political activities in the global âSouthâ
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