Smoke gets in your eyes: re-reading gender in the "nostalgia film"

Upon its release, American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973) was much admired by critics and audiences alike. Yet, in subsequent years, the film became known for its supposed “flattening of history,” and celebration of patriarchal values. This article demonstrates that such a judgement owes much to Fredric Jameson’s historically contingent work on postmodernism, which argues that American Graffiti constitutes the paradigmatic nostalgia film. In contrast, using close textual analysis, I demonstrate that American Graffiti provides a more complex construction of the past, and of gender, than has hitherto been acknowledged. Far from blindly idealising the early 1960s, the film interrogates the processes through which the period and its gender relations come to be idealised. This article has consequences not only for our understanding of Lucas’ seminal film, but also for the American New Wave, and the “nostalgia” text

E-government implementation: A bird’s eye view of issues relating to costs, opportunities, benefits and risks

NoAfter more than a decade of comprehensive research work in the area of electronic government (e-government), no attempt has yet been made to undertake a systematic literature review on the costs, opportunities, benefits and risks that influence the implementation of e-government. This is particularly significant given the various related challenges that governments have faced over the years when implementing e-government initiatives. Hence, the aim of this paper is to undertake a comprehensive analysis of relevant literature addressing these issues using a systematic review of 132 studies identified from the Scopus online database and Google Scholar together with a manual review of relevant papers from journals dedicated to electronic government research such as Electronic Government, an International Journal (EGIJ), International Journal of Electronic Government Research (IJEGR) and Transforming Government: People, Process, and Policy (TGPPP). The overall review indicated that although a large number of papers discuss costs, opportunities, benefits and risks, treatment of these issues have tended to be superficial. Moreover, there is a lack of empirical studies which can statistically evaluate the performance of these constructs in relation to the various e-government systems. Therefore, this research would help governments to better analyse the impact of costs, opportunities, benefits and risks on the success of e-government systems and its pre-adoption from an implementation perspective