Stonking paper, that has helped me understand the various theoretical options available for understanding/describing transitions, (evolutionary, relational and durational), and some of their strengths and weaknesses. Yes, the paper does underplay that the MLP is shot through with durational perspective to make a cleaner (if not clearer) distinction, but nonetheless, hugely impressive and useful. Garud,... Continue Reading →
“Powerpoint and Strategy” #afterthethesis
So, gonna use this site to bookmark stuff I will read After The Thesis. First up, this Kaplan, S. 2011. Strategy and PowerPoint: An Inquiry into the Epistemic Culture and Machinery of Strategy Making. Organization Science, Vol. 22 (2), pp.320-46. PowerPoint has come to dominate organizational life in general and strategy making in particular. The... Continue Reading →
Coal, snow and the desert of the real #auspol
Scott Morrison, Australian Treasurer, brought a lump of coal to the show-and-tell at school today. Sorry, I mean, to the House of Representatives. It was a big lump of coal, metaphorically if not literally in the shape of a wedge. Because this was about trying to make the Labor Party look weak/green/out-of-touch. Meanwhile, in the... Continue Reading →
Emergent, emergency, urgency. “Properties for sale…”
Hmm, am puzzling over the distinction between synergy and emergent properties. I found this - “Today, unfortunately, the term emergence is used in a bewildering variety of ways, often as a synonym for synergy. However, I side with the early theorists; emergence should properly be confined to those forms of synergy in which different parts... Continue Reading →
Sokal so good; on targets, reports, fantasies…
The "keeping anthropogenic global warming (global average) to less than 1.5 degrees above pre-Industrial levels" at COP21 was never a serious proposal, surely? I mean, you'd have to be totally fricking scientifically illiterate to... oh, wait. But look, even if the policy-makers put it in there to keep the AOSIS (fn1) crowd from vetoing... Continue Reading →
(Wind) Power to the People – Denmark, Tvind and bricolage
So, two years ago I read this Hendry, C. and Harborne, P. 2011. Changing the view of wind power development: More than “bricolage.” Research Policy 40,, pp. 778-789. and wrote this about it - This was mentioned in a reading group/symposium yesterday by one of my supervisors. It’s a response/elaboration to a paper by Garud and... Continue Reading →
Bloody compassion and the bloody smugosphere
We talk about “carbon capital”, “fossil fuel historical bloc”, ‘technological lock-in’. Yep, them corporations and states sure are sclerotic, ain't they? But, aside from talking about foundations and how NGOs take their money and sell a fake rebellion, we don’t talk about social movement hegemonies and blocks or ‘social lock-in’. This bores me. Descriptions of how... Continue Reading →
Crash test dummies and movement building
Do you ever feel you're strapped into a car that almost deliberately, wilfully, crashes into a wall? Sort of a Groundhog Day/Source Code mash-up, with Camus ruefully driving a Facel Vega and getting hit by a boulder that some clown had let roll down a hill? I do. It's like we in the 'social movement... Continue Reading →
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