Exploring leadership in multi-sectoral partnerships

This article explores some critical aspects of leadership in the context of multi-sectoral partnerships. It focuses on leadership in practice and asks the question, `How do managers experience and perceive leadership in such partnerships?' The study contributes to the debate on whether leadership in a multi-sectoral partnership context differs from that within a single organization. It is based on the accounts of practising managers working in complex partnerships. The article highlights a number of leadership challenges faced by those working in multi-sectoral partnerships. Partnership practitioners were clear that leadership in partnerships was more complex than in single organizations. However, it was more difficult for them to agree a consensus on the essential nature of leadership in partnership. We suggest that a first-, second- and third-person approach might be a way of better interpreting leadership in the context of partnerships

The Anthropocene monument:on relating geological and human time

In the Parthenon frieze, the time of mortals and the time of gods seem to merge. Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued that with the advent of the Anthropocene the times of human history and of the Earth are similarly coming together. Are humans entering the ‘monumental time’ of the Earth, to stand alongside the Olympian gods of the other geological forces? In this paper I first look at the cultural shifts leading to the modern idea of separate human and Earth histories. I examine the changing use of monuments to mediate between human and other temporalities. I explore the use of ‘stratigraphic sections’ as natural monuments to mark transitions between the major time units of Earth history, and the erection of intentional monuments nearby. I suggest that the Anthropocene, as a geological epoch-in-the-making, may challenge the whole system of monumental semiotics used to stabilise our way of thinking about deep time

The silence of the archives:business history, Postcolonialism and archival ethnography

History as a discipline has been accused of being a-theoretical. Business historians working at business schools, however, need to better explicate their historical methodology, not theory, in order to communicate the value of archival research to social scientists, and to train future doctoral students outside history departments. This paper seeks to outline an important aspect of historical methodology, which is data collection from archives. In this area, postcolonialism and archival ethnography have made significant methodological contributions not just for non-Western history, as it has emphasized the importance of considering how archives were created, and how one can legitimately use them despite their limitations. I argue that these approaches offer new insights into the particularities of researching business archives

The elusive archaeology of Kongo urbanism: the case of Kindoki, Mbanza Nsundi (Lower Congo, DRC)

We present here results, analyses and an in-depth historical contextualisation of the fieldwork undertaken in 2012 and 2013 at the Kindoki site in the Lower Congo (DRC). This site is linked with Mbanza Nsundi, one of the Kongo Kingdom's provincial capitals, which turns out to be archaeologically 'elusive'. Pinpointing its location proved to be particularly challenging. To this end, a historically-informed excavation methodology was developed that was never implemented in Central Africa before. We combined a strategy of systematic test pits with a large-scale 50 m grid approach. A cemetery was identified on Kindoki Hill with distinct but contemporaneous quarters of a 16th-17thcenturies settlement on both sides. The cemetery itself contains mainly 18th-century burials, in all likelihood of successive Nsundi rulers. The foreign, especially Portuguese, ceramics excavated on the hilltop and the hundreds of Venetian and likely Bavarian beads found in the graves are indicative of Mbanza Nsundi's connection to trade routes linking the Atlantic coast with the Pool region. The most striking discovery is that of a previously unknown type of comb-impressed pottery, from a pit with a calibrated radiocarbon date AD 1294-1393 (2 sigma). This suggests that a settlement had been developing at Kindoki since at least the 14th century, which allows us, for the very first time, to spatially bridge Kongo history and 'prehistory'. For the entire Lower Congo region only three 14C dates posterior to AD 1000 were available before the start of the KongoKing project, twelve have been added for just Kindoki

Using oral history to investigate police culture

This article focuses upon the use of oral history methodology in relation to studying the work of the police and, particularly, the culture or cultures of the police. An overview of oral history is followed by a discussion of the application of such techniques to investigating police work. This, in turn, is followed by an assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of such methodological techniques when used in a piece of research which investigated the culture of the Metropolitan Police Force between the 1930s and 1960s