Diplomatic negotiation in an international organisation: an exploration of expert status and power

This paper will explore the status and characteristics of ‘expert’ membership within an international organisation and its influence on the development of ‘exosomatic resources’. Invoking the framework of the ‘Community of Practice’ (Wenger, 1998), it is argued that status and power are realised in the development and interpretation of policy and conventions within the organisation, through the ‘negotiation of meaning’ and through the ‘politics of participation and reification’. Negotiations and decisions may take place over a period of time but are also situated within plenary debates. As such it is argued that power and hierarchy are not fixed structures but are emergent and fluid discursively over time and space. The paper defines the characteristics of ‘expert’ membership encompassing a consideration of the command of participatory and interactional norms, as well as knowledge of the status and content of reified products. To illustrate these characteristics a critical analysis of the discourse of one delegate is provided. This exemplifies how expert knowledge is applied within a debate to influence and inform the development and interpretation of texts and subsequently to contribute to the (re)production of shared meaning and agreement on issues under debate. It is argued that in considering both the forms of asymmetry in organisations and the practice of decision-making, research should focus on: the type of knowledge that is required and valued in any context; how this knowledge is accessed, enacted and exploited; and which members are instrumental in its construction, representation and reproduction

Skills, Capabilities and Inequalities at School Entry in a Disadvantaged Community

Socioeconomic inequalities in children’s skills and capabilities begin early in life and can have detrimental effects on future success in school. The present study examines the relationships between school readiness and sociodemographic inequalities using teacher reports of the Short Early Development Instrument in a disadvantaged urban area of Ireland. It specifically examines socioeconomic (SES) differences in skills within a low SES community in order to investigate the role of relative disadvantage on children’s development. Differences across multiple domains of school readiness are examined using Monte-Carlo permutation tests. The results show that child, family and environmental factors have an impact on children’s school readiness, with attendance in centre-based childcare having the most consistent relationship with readiness for school. In addition, the findings suggest that social class inequalities in children’s skills still exist within a disadvantaged community. These results are discussed in relation to future intervention programmes.School readiness, Socioeconomic inequalities, Monte-Carlo permutation tests

More Transparency, Please

Transparency comes in many forms, from data to documents. Yet what matters most is what transparency does. It reveals. Through revelation, transparency can reduce information asymmetry to help markets, policymakers, and even decisionmakers at the institutions subject to scrutiny. It exposes blind spots and signals opportunities for change. As such, transparency is not a final step in progress—it is an early step. Whatever transparency reveals, the value is severely limited without action because progress is not inevitable. Progress depends on what people and institutions do with what is revealed. (p. 465) The proposals in this article are the product of discussions with young lawyers, law students, legal academics, and leadership in various sections and divisions in the ABA. Part A outlines transparency proposals related to student debt, scholarships, and diversity. Part B considers the costs to law schools and the Section from additional data collection and reporting. Part C considers constraints related to making the resultant datasets public. Finally, Part D provides concluding remarks about the balance between the costs and benefits of these proposals. (p. 468

Pynchon\u27s Age of Reason: Mason & Dixon and America\u27s Rise of Rational Discourse

By drawing upon astronomer Charles Mason and surveyor Jeremiah Dixon for the unlikely protagonists of Mason & Dixon (1997), Thomas Pynchon develops a revisionist history of these two Englishmen as they come to terms with America in the so-called Age of Reason, which was informed by a European philosophical movement with its roots in rational discourse aimed at cultural and political intellect that eventually served as the foundation for American independence and democracy. But as Thomas Paine suggests, time wields a stronger power than does reason, and what history calls the Age of Reason may remind one of an ideal time in America when, in theory, rational discourse converted people into better citizens. However, as Mason and Dixon create their Line, recognizing that it will, in effect, divide North from South, they begin to realize that America consumes them with irrational discourse

The Immediacy of Narrated Combat: Operation Iraqi Freedom as Public Spectacle

From the Vietnam War to Operation Desert Storm to Operation Iraqi Freedom, Americans have seen a dramatic shift in the ways they see combat - countless, and often dubious, images certainly impact how they interpret their warriors\u27 actions. Iraqi Freedom presents an interesting shift in the immediate availability of numerous fiction and non-fiction narratives often stemming from the accounts of the soldiers themselves. I refer to this shift as the immediacy of narrated combat. Iraqi Freedom, unlike Vietnam and Desert Storm, has seen an almost immediate response in terms of the narratives we see and read, including movies, television programs, CD-ROM compilations, video games, numerous videos brought back with, and blogs posted by, our men and women serving in, and subsequently returning from, Iraq, and literary non-fiction accounts of combat. Much as the Bush I Administration used a mass-mediated, pro-war narrative to spin a decisive Gulf War victory into a restoration of national zest for armed combat, the Bush Il Administration, despite its efforts to create, deliver, and maintain a mass-mediated, pro-war narrative, has seen this narrative beset by counter-narratives that have eroded its credibility and ultimately revealed more rational and sober accounts of Iraqi Freedom

‘The Future’s Not Ours to See’: How Children and Young Adults Reflect the Anxiety of Lost Innocence in Alfred Hitchcock’s American Movies.

Introduction: In The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), the Ambassador, while plotting to kill the Prime Minister, orders the kidnapped American child Hank McKenna killed, telling his would-be gunman, Edward Drayton: “Don’t you realize that Americans dislike having their children stolen?” Earlier in the movie, Jo McKenna entertains her son and husband by singing “Que Sera Sera,” and its playfulness becomes darkly ironic when she sings “the future’s not ours to see” on the eve of her son’s kidnapping.The movie unfolds as a cat-and-mouse game in which the McKennas desperately try to locate and save their kidnapped son, revealing a recurring Hitchcock narrative device in his American movies: He often situates children and young adults in perilous situations that render adults as powerless to provide protection. This essay examines four of Hitchcock’s American movies for how they reflect, through their use of children and young adults, a collective societal anxiety of lost innocence during the so-called era of “Victory Culture”: The United States, from the end of WWII to the early onset of Vietnam, saw itself as an emerging and subsequently established world superpower. While Hitchcock is certainly not the first and only filmmaker to use children and young adults as reflections of societal anxiety, he demonstrates a unique ability to utilize them as vessels to mirror societal anxiety about the morally-dubious future of the Western “superpower” state even as that state clings to its morally-righteous “Victory” identity. These four movies—Shadow of a Doubt (1943), The Trouble with Harry (1955), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), and The Birds (1963)—reveal the heart of this anxiety as a glaring inability to protect or shield children and young adults from the horrors of the modern world—horrors that render an “un-seeable” future, which for the American is contradictory to the nation’s mythological vision of shaping and controlling the future.While an extended critical dialogue concerning Hitchcock’s treatment of children and young adults is, for the most part, non-existent, many critics point to Shadow of a Doubt (1943) as a turning point for Hitchcock the social commentator. It is his first movie to fully showcase both a child and a young adult in imminent danger. Robin Wood writes that Hitchcock overcame a “cautious” approach to filmmaking in America to hit full stride “with Shadow of a Doubt and Lifeboat (the sixth and seventh Hollywood films) [where he] begins to grapple with the realities and mythologies (material, cultural, spiritual, and ideological) of ‘America. He uses children and young adults as symbols of social anxiety for lost community and as representations of communal stability and as progenitors of human existence. And when the community can no longer protect its children, the community’s (or nation’s or world’s) very existence is jeopardized. As Hitchcock frames them, children and young adults in peril become symbolic of something much larger: Inscribed on their beings are the anxieties of a culture at large—anxieties about murder, war, terrorism, apocalypse, and so forth—and how these anxieties are meant to reflect audiences’ own proximity to the horrors of the modern world.The American period (particularly the late-WWII to late-1960s period) of Hitchcock’s filmmaking can be considered his “Modern” period. While American attitudes shifted quite radically from post-WW II victory euphoria to Cold War anxiety to Vietnam-era (and after) loss of innocence, so, too, does Hitchcock’s attitude toward his narratives’ children and young adults (and, of course, the adults who are often rendered powerless to keep them out of harm’s way). David Trotter argues that “Hitchcock’s films continued to represent human experience from the point of view of representation; while acknowledging, in a manner we might call Modernist, that the nature and scope of representation’s ‘point of view’ had become, more urgently than ever before, the issue. Not surprisingly, then, given the social climate of the United States, this is the period in which Hitchcock “gets serious,” and in which he further complicates the elements of claustrophobia seen in his British movies by drawing upon the events of his childhood to inform the work, such as his infamous jail cell experience: “[Hitchcock] ‘recalled a story about his childhood when his father sent him, aged four or five, to the police station with a note asking the sergeant to lock him into a cell for five or ten minutes. Hitchcock was indeed locked in the cell for five minutes, and that incident, along with a parental “abandonment” incident when he has very young (his parents left him alone with a maid), contributed to his fascination with suspense narratives, the conventions of which would make him famous, including: “the unexpected complication,” “the subjective camera,” “claustrophobia,” and “the mind of the murderer. Hitchcock’s childhood, as many have argued, shaped his artistic vision, including his “obsession with the detail of suffering—perhaps because of his oversensitive and protected childhood” as well as his “general British interest in crime,” most notably murder.Hitchcock’s emigration to the United States was in fact couched in his desire for more artistic “freedom” in his filmmaking, a direct result of his antagonistic relationship with the British film industry; in the late 1930s, he “began to believe that American audiences would permit him more freedom in his films.” Indisputably, Hitchcock’s films during the American period do adhere to certain genre conventions (suspense, psychological thriller, comedy, and even horror). To showcase his children and young adults in peril, Hitchcock often works with genre conventions more commonly associated with the psychological thriller and horror genres, in that he utilizes a threatening, monstrous presence which often serves as the major focus of the narrative. Beyond that, both the source of the monstrous threat and the nature and character of those who combat it and are pursued by it are foregrounded to varying degrees, often leading to a plot sequencing that relies on the stages of “order, disorder, order.” Finally, many of his movies (including the four films under investigation in this essay) reflect his (and society’s) changing attitudes about Americans’ ability to shield their children and young adults from the potential harm of the monstrous presence, including a long-standing American film tradition that children must survive. But certainly viewers will remember Hitchcock’s British film Sabotage (1936), with its terrorist plot leading to the inadvertent death of the child Stevie. Stevie, while unknowingly delivering a bomb for a terrorist, becomes distracted long enough (while petting a puppy, no less) to be killed when it detonates. Hitchcock was not afraid to place the child in harm’s way in Sabotage, foreshadowing a thematic trend he would continue in his American filmmaking

Bovine Vibriosis

Vibriosis of cattle is a widespread venereal disease which causes considerable financial loss to the dairy and beef cattle industries. When the disease is first introduced into a herd the breeding program may be set back 6 months or more. Repeat breeding is the primary manifestation of the infection in heifers and cows. Many of the infected females return in heat 27 or more days after service. These prolonged estrus cycles are probably the result of embryonic death caused by vibrionic endometritis. The estrual mucus is often cloudy in recently infected cattle. The inflammatory lesions in the reproductive organs are not severe enough to produce alterations which can be detected by rectal palpation. Recognizable abortions may occur at any stage of pregnancy, but they are not as prominent a manifestation of the disease as repeat breeding. The majority of cows recover within a few months but bulls appear to harbor the Vibrio fetus organism indefinitely. There are no clinical signs of the presence of the organism in the bull