Making The Policy-Makers: Askesis, Or To Continuously Work On Oneself

This paper uses a Foucauldian discursive approach to shed light into how organisational actors are ‘made’ to act as strategists, incorporating into their work practices the demands and expectations of what it means to be a strategist in a specific context at a specific time. It draws on a Foucauldian understanding of governing and self formation to explore the ways in which actors work on themselves in order to act meaningfully as strategists. I argue that, rather than organisational identities being static or finished, organisational actors actively say and do things in their continual attempts to attain a more complete, acceptable and congruent identity. In contexts with high degrees of uncertainty and heavily power- and conflict-laden relationships, both discourses of how strategy is made and the practices involved in it can be seen as exercises (askesis) which strategists actively perform to better embrace their responsibility of rendering the future governable for others. The paper brings together the literatures on identity and on strategic practices to show the dialectic relationship between them

Millimeter-Wave Aperture Synthesis Imaging of Vega: Evidence for a Ring Arc at 95 AU

We present the first millimeter-wave aperture synthesis map of dust around a main sequence star. A 3'' resolution image of 1.3 mm continuum emission from Vega reveals a clump of emission 12'' from the star at PA 45 deg, consistent with the location of maximum 850 micron emission in a lower resolution JCMT/SCUBA map. The flux density is 4.0+/-0.9 mJy. Adjacent 1.3 mm peaks with flux densities 3.4+/-1.0 mJy and 2.8+/-0.9 mJy are located 14'' and 13'' from the star at PA 67 deg and 18 deg, respectively. An arc-like bridge connects the two strongest peaks. There is an additional 2.4 +/-0.8 mJy peak to the SW 11'' from the star at PA 215 deg and a marginal detection, 1.4+/-0.5 mJy, at the stellar position, consistent with photospheric emission. An extrapolation from the 850 micron flux, assuming F_{1.3mm-0.85mm} proportional to lambda^{-2.8}, agrees well with the total detected flux for Vega at 1.3 mm, and implies a dust emissivity index, beta, of 0.8. We conclude that we have detected all but a very small fraction of the dust imaged by SCUBA in our aperture synthesis map and that these grains are largely confined to segments of a ring of radius 95 AU.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, 1 table, accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal Letter