And here is the script that I more or less stumbled through. So, what is absorptive capacity? According to the seminal 1990 article by Cohen and Levinthal it's "a firm's ability to recognize the value of new information, assimilate it, and apply it to commercial ends" Extending this, Zahra and George (2002) say it is... Continue Reading →
Passive Revolution and the imperial way of living + digital repression etc, #isa47 #isaforum2016
After lunch on Tues 13th I ended up – after being approached by someone who had been at the last session who wanted to recommend “Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery,” - at the second half (i.e. 180 degrees) of a roundtable on “Emerging Research in Environmental Sociology (Part 2)." Of particular... Continue Reading →
Bragging: Published in a Routledge collection #activism #climate
Whoop. Whoop. WHOOP!!! I am published!! Emergent Possibilities for Global Sustainability: intersections of race, class and gender, edited by Phoebe Godfrey and Denise Torres, Routledge 2016. Chapter 22 is "Pathological and ineffective activism - what is to be done?" by Marc Hudson and Arwa Aburawa. Whoop!! A physical copy just arrived. It looks fantastic, and... Continue Reading →
Social Movement Learning: Partisan Collective and “Activist Skills and Knowledge”
How do we know what skills and knowledge we have? How do we know who else in the group can help us, or would benefit from our help? How do we spot “single points of failure”? What do we do about burn out – before, during, and after? All these (good) questions were on the... Continue Reading →
Glossaries and my undiagnosed CDO
CDO? That's OCD, in the correct alphabetical order, dammit. So, it's been an interesting couple of weeks. Quite stressful. And one of the ways I cope with stress (a displacement activity, perhaps) is to try to categorise information. It somehow soothes me. Go figure. Here are five glossaries that I've worked on (some I started quite a... Continue Reading →
Deliberate Learning and the Evolution of Dynamic Capabilities
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 →
#Awalkinthepark – discursive institutionalism yet again
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 →
#Awalkinthepark – climate denialism, “sticky v path contingent” historical discursive institutionalism and comparative institutionalisms
So, read Weart in bed and Bell/Schmidt as I walked around the park with the 50lb backpack Weart, S. 2011. Global warming: How skepticism became denial. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol.67(1), pp.41-50. Bell, S. 2012. Where are the Institutions? The Limits of Vivien Schmidt’s Constructivism. British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 42, pp.714-719. Schmidt,... Continue Reading →
“The responsibility of intellectuals” Or “After I get shot in the head”
Some guy, I forget who, said that it was the responsibility of intellectuals to expose lies and tell the truth. Meh, as far as it goes, sure. Which truths to who gets more interesting…. If I get shot in the head (and given my deteriorating relationship with Manchester City Council, this is not impossible), and... Continue Reading →
Professor Kevin Anderson on #Paris #Climate #hope and much more
This post originally appeared on Manchester Climate Monthly. Climate scientist Professor Kevin Anderson spoke to Manchester Climate Monthly on Monday 23rd November. In the two separate videos that follow, you can see him outlining what is at stake in the upcoming Paris climate conference - the nature of the individual nations' pledges (INDCs) and how... Continue Reading →
