Tawney and the third way

From the 1920s to the 1950s R. H. Tawney was the most influential socialist thinker in Britain. He articulated an ethical socialism at odds with powerful statist and mechanistic traditions in British socialist thinking. Tawney's work is thus an important antecedent to third way thinking. Tawney's religiously-based critique of the morality of capitalism was combined with a concern for detailed institutional reform, challenging simple dichotomies between public and private ownership. He began a debate about democratizing the enterprise and corporate governance though his efforts fell on stony ground. Conversely, Tawney's moralism informed a whole-hearted condemnation of market forces in tension with both his concern with institutional reform and modern third way thought. Unfortunately, he refused to engage seriously with emergent welfare economics which for many social democrats promised a more nuanced understanding of the limits of market forces. Tawney's legacy is a complex one, whose various elements form a vital part of the intellectual background to current third way thinking

The intellectual capital of schools: analysing government policy statements on school improvement in light of a new theorization

"Ideology without competence is a dangerous vice. But competence without ideology is a limited virtue." (D. Miliband, Minister of State for School Standards, DfES).Opportunistic attempts have been made by successive governments to establish - some would say impose - sets of criteria against which the effectiveness of not-for-profit organisations like schools can be gauged. Most have been subjective: the extent of staff involvement in decision making, the appropriateness of the leadership shown by senior managers, the percentage of inspected classes regarded as ‘good’, and so on. Lately, UK government rhetoric, using a lexicon borrowed from Business and Economics, suggests a willingness to move to new systems of reportage; centred on improvement rather than blame, on critical friendship more than on confrontation. There appears no longer to be the puritanical tendency among policy-makers to adopt measures that cause pain in the belief that they alone can be right, but do they constitute (as critics like Thrupp suggest) a random collection of well-intentioned but poorly theorised policies, or can they be cogently conceptualised into a whole? Previously, improvement measures judged schooling simply, in terms of external stakeholder outcomes, but failed to capture the essence of what it was to be (or what it took to become) a successful improving school. This paper suggests that current government policy, whether knowingly or not, is essentially describing improvement from a different perspective - an internal perspective of ‘Intellectual Capital’. The paper knits together government policy statements on school improvement with a re-conceptualisation of Intellectual Capital specifically designed for schools, offering an imposed coherence to government policy that could potentially change the way we think about inspection

Germ Cell Recovery, Cryopreservation and Transplantation in the California white sturgeon, Acipenser transmontanus

The white sturgeon (Acipenser transmontanus) is the largest freshwater fish in North America. Because of the unique life history characteristics of sturgeon, including longevity, late maturation and long spawning intervals, their aquaculture can be a significant investment of resources. As a result of habitat loss and overharvesting, natural populations of white sturgeon are threatened and there is a growing effort to improve conservation aquaculture programs. Germ cell transplantation is an innovative technology previously demonstrated in a variety of fish species to be able to produce a surrogate broodstock. The technique relies upon optimal donor germ cell recovery and transplantation into a recipient fish. In this study, we developed and optimized the harvest of donor cells for germline transplantation and evaluated methods for ovary cryopreservation for the first time in the white sturgeon. We found that harvesting gonads from juveniles between the ages of 1.5 and 2.5-years resulted in reliably high proportions of pre-meiotic cells regardless of sex, a critical feature for using white sturgeon for transplantation studies since the species shows no distinguishing external sex characteristics. From the viable cells, we identified germline cells using immunolabeling with the antibody DDX4, a marker specific to the germline. For in vivo tracking of donor cells during transplantations, gonadal cells were stained with a long half-life non-toxic cell membrane dye, PKH26, and microinjected into the peritoneal cavity of newly hatched white sturgeon larvae. Larvae were reared until 3 months post-transplantation to monitor for colonization and proliferation of PKH26-labeled cells within the recipient larval gonads. Furthermore, viable cell detection, assessment of germline-specificity, and transplantation was determined for cells recovered from cryopreserved ovarian tissue from sexually immature females. Transplantations using cells cryopreserved with media supplemented with dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) rather than ethylene glycol (EG) demonstrated the highest number of PKH26-labeled cells distributed along the gonadal ridges of the larval recipient. Determining optimal methods of tissue cryopreservation, and germ cell recovery and transplantation are foundational to the future development of germ cell transplantation as a strategy to improve the aquaculture and conservation of this species. Our study demonstrates that conservation actions, such as surrogate breeding, could be utilized by hatcheries to retain or improve natural gamete production without genetic modification, and provide an encouraging approach to the management of threatened sturgeon species

miRNAs regulate SIRT1 expression during mouse embryonic stem cell differentiation and in adult mouse tissues

SIRT1 is increasingly recognized as a critical regulator of stress responses, replicative senescence, inflammation, metabolism, and aging. SIRT1 expression is regulated transcriptionally and post-transcriptionally, and its enzymatic activity is controlled by NAD+ levels and interacting proteins. We found that SIRT1 protein levels were much higher in mouse embryonic stem cells (mESCs) than in differentiated tissues. miRNAs post-transcriptionally downregulated SIRT1 during mESC differentiation and maintained low levels of SIRT1 expression in differentiated tissues. Specifically, miR-181a and b, miR-9, miR-204, miR-199b, and miR-135a suppressed SIRT1 protein expression. Inhibition of mir-9, the SIRT1-targeting miRNA induced earliest during mESC differentiation, prevented SIRT1 downregulation. Conversely, SIRT1 protein levels were upregulated post-transcriptionally during the reprogramming of mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs) into induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. The regulation of SIRT1 protein levels by miRNAs might provide new opportunities for therapeutic tissue-specific modulation of SIRT1 expression and for reprogramming of somatic cells into iPS cells

Distributive justice with and without culture

Academic treatments of distributive justice normally adopt a static approach centred on resource allocation among a set of individual agents. The resulting models, expressed in mathematical language, make no allowance for culture, as they never engage with the society’s way of life or the moulding of individuals within society. This paper compares the static approach to distributive justice with a cultural one, arguing that a case for redistribution should rest upon its cultural effects in assisting well-being and social cohesion. Unless we recognise culture, we can have little understanding of why inequalities matter, where they come from, and how they might be reduced. Redistribution may be motivated by universal value judgements taken from external sources, but it also entails internal cultural changes that refashion social relations through cumulative causation. In practical terms, it has to penetrate beyond reallocating resource endowments to bring revised attitudes in a society less tolerant of unequal outcomes. Egalitarian reforms will flourish only if they generate and reflect an egalitarian culture

A tale of two capitalisms: preliminary spatial and historical comparisons of homicide rates in Western Europe and the USA

This article examines comparative homicide rates in the United States and Western Europe in an era of increasingly globalized neoliberal economics. The main finding of this preliminary analysis is that historical and spatial correlations between distinct forms of political economy and homicide rates are consistent enough to suggest that social democratic regimes are more successful at fostering the socio-cultural conditions necessary for reduced homicide rates. Thus Western Europe and all continents and nations should approach the importation of American neo-liberal economic policies with extreme caution. The article concludes by suggesting that the indirect but crucial causal connection between political economy and homicide rates, prematurely pushed into the background of criminological thought during the ‘cultural turn’, should be returned to the foreground

Raising the participation age in historical perspective : Policy learning from the past?

The raising of the participation age (RPA) to 17 in 2013 and 18 in 2015 marks a historic expansion of compulsory education. Despite the tendency of New Labour governments to eschew historical understanding and explanation, RPA was conceived with the benefit of an analysis of previous attempts to extend compulsion in schooling. This paper assesses the value of a historical understanding of education policy. The period from inception to the projected implementation of RPA is an extended one which has crossed over the change of government, from Labour to Coalition, in 2010. The shifting emphases and meanings of RPA are not simply technical issues but connect to profound historical and social changes. An analysis of the history of the raising of the school leaving age reveals many points of comparison with the contemporary situation. In a number of key areas it is possible to gain insights into the ways in which the study of the past can help to comprehend the present: the role of human capital, the structures of education, in curriculum development and in terms of preparations for change

Economic immorality and social reformation in English popular preaching, 1585-1625

Popular preachers, often drawing crowds of hundreds, frequently attempted to reform the relationship between rich and poor in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Rather than accepting economic oppression as part of the divinely-ordained social order, many tried to convince their audiences that the extortions of merchants, landlords and creditors were crimes which should be punished severely by England’s earthly authorities. This paper demonstrates how the language of popular homiletics opened up a space for plebeian action with concrete socioeconomic consequences. By analysing the connotative idiom of social complaint found in homilies and other widely-heard sermons, the important but historiographically neglected role of ‘godliness’ in the early modern ‘moral economy’ is revealed