From Communities of Practice to Communities of Resistance: Civil society and cognitive justice

Maja van der Velden looks at how knowledge and power are played out in development literature and practice examining the role of knowledge, public goods and the new information communications technology (ICT) in managing and sharing knowledge. She discusses the World Bank's knowledge-for-development paradigm arguing that the paradigm of knowledge management on which it is based will lead to a grave loss of knowledge. She concludes that civil society can further its social justice and developments objectives by protecting knowers and their physical and cultural environments and by facilitating the dialogues of different knowledge. Development (2004) 47, 73–80. doi:10.1057/palgrave.development.1100004

Why metaphor and other tropes? Linguistic approaches to analysing policies and the political

The articles in this special issue on linguistic approaches to analysing policies and the political share the goal of taking language seriously, achieved through detailed attention to linguistic usage in its respective contexts. They reflect a stance common to both cognitive linguistic and interpretive/ constructivist approaches, namely a view of language as integrally constituting the world it presents, reflecting, at least in part, its users' experiences of that world. One key form of language use discussed is that of metaphor. Rather than being seen as merely a poetic device, metaphor is viewed in several of the articles as playing a pivotal role in the framing of policy or political issues, which it does by casting one idea in terms of the imagery of another. For example, talking about a political entity, such as a country, in terms of it being a kind of container can invite certain inferences about how political states function-in this case, reasoning about inclusion of members within the state 'container' vs. exclusion from it. The research shows that metaphors often have important ties with categorisation, the categories used being determined in part by the words we use to name concepts. In addition to metaphor, metonymy also plays a significant role. The articles show the intimate relationship between political language and political acts. © 2013 Macmillan Publishers Ltd