The last two and a half years of my life have been like that scene in Cape Feare where Sideshow Bob keeps stepping on rakes and getting hit in the face and never learning to look down/up/wherever he is supposed to look, whatever he is supposed to do. It's a scene they deliberately hold for... Continue Reading →
So, public policy theories talk about tipping points/sudden eruptions. I'm thinking of Baumgartner and Jones 'Punctuated Equilibrium Theory' (the clue is in the name) and also Multiple Streams Approach and 'policy windows'. And then there's Bill Moyer and the "Movement Action Plan" (abused and mis-used by some so-called activists, but that's not his fault.) Then,... Continue Reading →
“Resources can be tangible (e.g. equipment, machinery, finance, human resources) as well as intangible. Intangible resources include assets such as technological know-how, the status or reputation of an actor, its social contacts and network ties. Moreover, resources are conceptualized to be controlled not only by organizations but also by entire industries or emerging technological fields.”... Continue Reading →
Finding the Woman Who Didn’t Exist Nineteenth-Century French Studies Volume 42, Numbers 1-2, Fall-Winter 2013-2014 Laure Katsaros Hawthorne, Melanie C. Finding the Woman Who Didn’t Exist: The Curious Life of Gisèle d’Estoc. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. Pp. 216. isbn: 978-0-8032-4034-6 Who was the woman hidden behind the name “Gisèle d’Estoc”? The pseudonym suggests a strange... Continue Reading →
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 →
“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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
