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

The socialist blues? Citizenship, class and civil society

This article seeks to explore the relationship between the British labour movement, the Left and the Labour party. It does so through the intellectual prism of debates around citizenship and civil society. In this respect, I seek to recover a critical politics around questions of class from the New Left who were always critical of more mainstream ideas of citizenship. However, I also point to the limitations of those who have argued that meaningful forms of citizenship can no longer be connected to political parties and only occurs outside of state organizations. Political parties continue to need intellectual narratives to legitimate their role in society and to connect with the broader civil order.The Labour Party in this respect has seemingly broken with ‘New Labour’ and is searching for a new narrative. The rise of an intellectual grouping around ‘Blue Labour’ has made considerable headway recently and I seek to take a critical view of some of their ideas and ethical frameworks. Here I argue that changing class formations and a more pluralistic society potentially ask difficult questions of those who seek to revive the labour movement in troubled times

Dealing with communist past: The case of Romania

This article analyzes the significance of the activity of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania (PCACDR) and the impact of its report on the basis of which the communist regime was condemned as criminal and illegitimate. The author also situates the Romanian case within the larger discussions on the role of overcoming a traumatic past in post-authoritarian democracies. PCADCR rejected outright the practices of institutionalized forgetfulness and generated a national debate about long-denied and occulted moments of the past. The Commission’s Final Report answered a fundamental necessity, characteristic of the post-authoritarian world, that of moral clarity. It set the ground for the revolutionizing of the normative foundations of the communal history, imposing the necessary moral criteria of a democracy that wishes to militantly defend its values

Conceptualizing historical organization studies

© 2016 Academy of Management Review. The promise of a closer union between organizational and historical research has long been recognized. However, its potential remains unfulfilled: The authenticity of theory development expected by organization studies and the authenticity of historical veracity required by historical research place exceptional conceptual and empirical demands on researchers. We elaborate the idea of historical organization studies-organizational research that draws extensively on historical data, methods, and knowledge to promote historically informed theoretical narratives attentive to both disciplines. Building on prior research, we propose a typology of four differing conceptions of history in organizational research: History as evaluating, explicating, conceptualizing, and narrating. We identify five principles of historical organization studies-dual integrity, pluralistic understanding, representational truth, context sensitivity, and theoretical fluency-and illustrate our typology holistically from the perspective of institutional entrepreneurship. We explore practical avenues for a creative synthesis, drawing examples from social movement research and microhistory. Historically informed theoretical narratives whose validity derives from both historical veracity and conceptual rigor afford dual integrity that enhances scholarly legitimacy, enriching understanding of historical, contemporary, and future-directed social realities

New localism, old retrenchment: the Big Society, housing policy and the politics of housing reform

This article considers the ideology underpinning the 2010 UK Government’s welfare reform agenda in order to foreground what we see as the contradictions of new localism and the ‘Big Society’ programme as it relates to housing policy. The article has three sections. It begins by discussing some of the methodological challenges that arise in interpreting contemporary policy and the value of an historically informed approach to understand the wider ‘politics’ underpinning the ‘Big Society’ programme. To support our argument, the second part of the article traces the ‘localist’ agenda (mainly focused on England and Wales) back from the 1960s to the defeat of Labour in the 2010 general election to show how both Conservative and Labour administrations deployed localism as a justification for welfare reform and in the process created opportunities to extend the marketisation of social policy. The third section of the article considers the contemporary period, in particular reforms presented to parliament in 2011 that, if enacted, will provide new avenues for powerful interest groups to influence decisions that hitherto have been mainly the preserve of local government. The conclusion provides a summary of the key policy implications and theoretical issues that arise from the analysis

Adaptive isogeometric analysis for phase‐field modeling of anisotropic brittle fracture

The surface energy a phase‐field approach to brittle fracture in anisotropic materials is also anisotropic and gives rise to second‐order gradients in the phase field entering the energy functional. This necessitates C 1 continuity of the basis functions which are used to interpolate the phase field. The basis functions which are employed in isogeometric analysis (IGA), such as nonuniform rational B‐splines and T‐splines naturally possess a higher order continuity and are therefore ideally suited for phase‐field models which are equipped with an anisotropic surface energy. Moreover, the high accuracy of spline discretizations, also relative to their computational demand, significantly reduces the fineness of the required discretization. This holds a fortiori if adaptivity is included. Herein, we present two adaptive refinement schemes in IGA, namely, adaptive local refinement and adaptive hierarchical refinement, for phase‐field simulations of anisotropic brittle fracture. The refinement is carried out using a subdivision operator and exploits the Bézier extraction operator. Illustrative examples are included, which show that the method can simulate highly complex crack patterns such as zigzag crack propagation. An excellent agreement is obtained between the solutions from global refinement and adaptive refinement, with a reasonable reduction of the computational effort when using adaptivity

Narrative, metaphor and the subjective understanding of identity transition

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the publisher via the DOI in this record.This paper examines the relevance of employing an oral history method and narrative interview techniques for business historians. We explore the use of oral history interviews as a means of capturing the expression of subjective experience in narrative and metaphor. We do so by analysing interviews concerning the transition of East German identities following reunification with West Germany. Self-expression emerges as critical to the vital identity work required for social integration following transformation, metaphor providing a means of articulating deep-rooted patterns of thought. We demonstrate that employing an oral history methodology can benefit business historians by affording access to the human dimension of a research project, unlocking the subjective understanding of experience by low-power actors among the non-hegemonic classes. Hence, employing an oral history methodology provides a valuable means of countering narrative imperialism, exemplified here by the dominant West German success story grounded in Western-style individual freedom