Manchester Tyndall Centre today hosted a provocative and highly interesting seminar. Professor Andy Stirling, who spent the 80s in the trenches for Greenpeace, had schlepped up to deliver a seminar on “Emancipating Transformations.” What they? Read on for an (almost) blow by blow account. [My multiple two centses are in square brackets like these.] Stirling... Continue Reading →
For reasons we don't particularly need to go into, failure fascinates me. Especially that of individuals and organisations that think they are 'all that.' When life is less "horrible (#firstworldproblems) I want to write about the differences between the 1977 Tenerife disaster and United Airlines 232 in 1989. But for now, this article I read while walking... Continue Reading →
Ooh yeah!!! Academia that is useful!! Zollo, M and Winter, S. 2002. Deliberate learning and the Evolution of Dynamic Capabilities. Organization Science, Vol. 13, (3), pp.339-351. This fantastic article talks about "the role of (1) experience accumulation, (2) knowledge articulation, and (3) knowledge codification processes in the evolution of dynamic, as well as operational, routines." (Zollo... Continue Reading →
Just read this - Elliot, D., Smith. D. and McGuinness, M. 2000. Exploring the failure to learn: crises and the barriers to learning. Review of Business, 21, 3/4 pp.17-24. Dead useful for something I am investigating at the moment. There are lots of juicy bits. Though the authors don't use the term, they are basically... Continue Reading →
So, I have been writing cynically about the "smugosphere" - that place where normal rules of performance assessment to not apply because people are Doing Good For The Cause. And I just kind of stumbled on a very very interesting paper by one Wolfgang Seibel; Seibel, W. 1996. Successful Failure: An Alternative View on Organizational... Continue Reading →
Mikler, J and Harrison, N. 2013. Climate Innovation: Australian Corporate Perspectives on the Role of Government. Australian Journal of Politics and History, Vol. 59, (3), pp.414-428. Nothing I have learnt in the last two years of reading a lot (no, even by my OCD*-ish standards) has so much as grazed - let alone dented -... Continue Reading →
Public policy for fun and ... profit? I've been on a major reading binge over the last month or so (Policy Studies Journal, I'm looking at you). Most of that has been around three theories/frameworks/models - Advocacy Coalitions Framework, Punctuated Equilibrium and Multiple Streams. Why? To try to test/extend the Dialectical Issue LifeCycle Model, especially... Continue Reading →
What follows is in no way an “official” (nor even necessarily entirely accurate) account of the two day event for PhD students at the Science and Policy Research Unit (SPRU), University of Sussex. First off, thanks and congratulations to the 1st year cohort of students who organised it. The Monday started with brief opening... Continue Reading →
Wow. It's almost as if there is a long-running class war where the rich try to demoralise and demean the poor, kick them in the teeth and then blame them for not having a nice smile. I know, I know, crazy conspiracy theory... "Bringing a condition under human control often poses a challenge to old... Continue Reading →
Four papers here, the fourth of which doesn’t quite ‘fit’, but never mind… The TL;DR is that Discursive Institutionalism is a pretty powerful (too powerful?) way of looking at policy change/lack of change. Schmidt, V. 2010. Taking ideas and discourse seriously: explaining change through discursive institutionalism as the fourth ‘new institutionalism’. European Political Science Review,... Continue Reading →
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