The All Our Yesterdays project is doing (at least) a blog post a day to show that the climate policy battles of today are repeats/mash-ups of the last thirty years. We have always been ignoring the scientists, blowing hot and cold on carbon pricing, blowing hot and cold on support for renewables, pretending mother nature... Continue Reading →
Inscribed capacity described
“As Allen (1997) has shown, power can be conceptualized in a variety of ways – as an ‘inscribed capacity’, a collectively produced resource mobilized by groups to achieve particular ends, or as a mobile and diffuse phenomenon realized as a series of ‘strategies, techniques, and practices’.” (Lawhon and Murphy, 2011: 367) Who does the inscribing?... Continue Reading →
“Bel-Ami” – brilliant brilliant book about journalism, life, image, etc
How did I not know about this book? Why was I not told? Eh? This is up there with The Wire as "cultural artefacts that everyone will have to engage with when I am chief fascist dictator". It's by Guy de Maupassant, a French writer (mostly of short stories) who died from syphilis in the... Continue Reading →
“Metrologies” – can you relate?
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 →
marchudson.net 