Night Crawler You should see this film. Especially if you care about understanding noeliberalism and its consequences for those who perpetrate it and those on the receiving end. Jake Gyllenhal is brilliant as “Lou Bloom” (the name is a joke – there is nothing fertile about this guy, he drops toxic leaves all around him).... Continue Reading →
Video: Professor Clive Hamilton on the “Anthropocene”
Interview with Professor Clive Hamilton on the "Anthropocene", in the startlingly noisy cafe at the John Rylands Library (the first few minutes are the worst - it gets easier to hear as time goes on).
Of oil companies and #climate – let’s party like it’s 1997…
Some not-yet-jaded climate activists are getting quite excited that six European Oil companies recently wrote a letter to the United Nations requesting a carbon price and emissions trading scheme. Ever-so-kindly,they even offered to help design it… This is part of the general flurry of activity in the lead up to the Paris climate change talks... Continue Reading →
And yet it moves: Social movements for/against institutional change
So, the latest symposium is almost here. The three papers under discussion are – Schneiberg, M. and Lounsbury, M., 2008, Social movements and institutional analysis, in: Greenwood, R., Oliver, C., Andersen, S.K. and Suddaby, R. (eds.), The Sage Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism, CA: Sage, 650-672 Lounsbury, M., Ventresca, M., and Hirsch, P.M., 2003, 'Social movements,... Continue Reading →
Medical hubris and arrogance leads to “iatrogenic” agony…
“There was a period of about three years (1987-1990), however, when it became fashionable for physicians to reduce the rather long MR imaging times by using anisotropically shaped (i.e., non-square) imaging pixels in studies of the spine. As it turned out, this resulted in a prominent dark line appearing within the spinal cord. The dark line was a Gibbs... Continue Reading →
Methodology (process tracing), empirics (Kyoto) and theory (corporate power)
My academic background is, um, interesting. I have the lumpy landscape of the autodidact who has fossicked here and there, but never built a proper opencast mine, with draglines and dumptrucks and so on. For my thesis (and possible future career?) I am going to need more methodology (how do we find out reliable and... Continue Reading →
Of dinosaurs, Gramsci, Aussie polluters and #climate change: 5 easy pieces
I appear to be Learning. Instead of 13 articles to synthesise, this one only goes up to five. They’re listed below, and I’ll take them in the order I read them, which is mostly chronological. Dobel, A., Westberg, K. Steel, M. and Flowers, K. (2014) An Examination of Corporate Social responsibility Implementation and Stakeholder Engagement: A... Continue Reading →
Misognynist pop lyrics, no comment required
It ain't rappers who invented misogyny in popular music, is all I'm saying- Who wants yesterday's papers Who wants yesterday's girl Who wants yesterday's papers Nobody in the world Rolling Stones “Yesterdays News” and that "happy" In the Summertime - You got women, you got women on your mind Have a drink, have a drive... Continue Reading →
13 academic articles on corporate political strategy and … #climate change
[Update: I got it down to five papers for the next one, and four for the one after that!] Hmm, let this be a lesson to me. Nobody, probably even me, is going to read all of this. I need to do write-ups every three or four articles (which, given the amount I read, means... Continue Reading →
Remington Steele and Carbon Capture and Storage. No, honestly.
There was an episode of the 80s guilty-pleasure private eye show "Remington Steele" (starring Pierce Brosnan avant la 007) that has something to say about neo-institutional theory and economic sociology. Sort of. The episode, called "Steele Knuckles, Glass Jaws" (the titles always had a pun on steel/still) has a boxer is trying to stay in... Continue Reading →
