Unravelling bibliophiles' preference on the basis of bestseller lists in India

This study investigates different genres in Indian book market to establish a clear understanding of dominating genres in the market. The focus of the study is in tandem with two groups: fiction and non‐fiction books on the basis of 52 weeks' bestsellers list. The model employs a point system constructed by mapping performance score of different genres. By using these performance scores, Kruskal‐Wallis H test and Mann–Whitney U test are performed. The results show that there is a significant difference between each genre but one particular genre stands out the most in both the categories. Romance in Fiction category and Self‐help in non‐fiction category dominates the Indian book market as shown by the study. This evidence has a far‐reaching implication toward the understanding of the dynamics of genre preferences in India.     

Radical exclusions,empty signifiers and an anti-war genre

Ernesto Laclau argues that Saussurean structural linguistics is one framework necessary for a post-Marxist understanding of political identities and new social movements. Disrupting the distinction between the discursive and the political, he provides insight into the formal properties of identity, difference, universality and particularity. However, this disruption means that his work is relevant not only to political theory per se but has retroactive value for understanding semiotics and signification. By considering methodological problems encountered during an analysis of an anti-war poster genre, this essay suggests that Laclau's concept of empty signifiers enables a novel understanding of genre. His schema complements approaches that emphasize the analysis of content and the analysis of audience reception, broadly conceived. Between the poles of content and reception, there are structural or relational properties enabling the contingent stability and meaningfulness of genre. These properties include the differential nature of a genre's identity, and a genre's discursive reliance on a radical exclusion.     

Constructions of the opposition to ‘structural adjustment reforms’ in the German mass-media

This article analyses Germany’s Der Spiegel weekly journal, and its discursive constructions of the oppositional voices against the so-called structural reforms imposed on Greece in the context of the Eurozone crisis. The analysis is focused on relevant articles published by Der Spiegel between late 2009 and early 2015, during important, crisis-related socio-political events. Drawing on discourse theory and critical discourse analysis, the article concludes that Der Spiegel (along with other mainstream media in Germany and elsewhere) publicly legitimizes the elites’ hegemonic crisis-narratives and -policies, while discrediting oppositional voices. The study further foregrounds the ways Der Spiegel and other German mainstream-media reproduce a nationalistic ‘victimization’ of Germany, which advances Germany’s own national branding-strategy of positive self-representation in the EU and in the world.     

Comparative partitions

Genre is often conceptualised as a product or text. Such a view, however, seems to downplay the dynamism of textual production encouraging a hermeneutics with rigid, formulaic tendencies. This is clearly evident in the contribution of many structural linguists such as Martin and Hasan to the study of genre. While semioticians, notably Kress, Threadgold and Freadman, have critiqued this position there is still considerable work to be undertaken in reconceptualising notions of genre to give emphasis to the pragmatic play of language use.

This paper uses a TV current affairs interview of the controversial author Helen Demidenko‐Darville as the basis for examining approaches to the study of genre. The analysis is framed by Deleuze and Guattari's metaphor of ‘the map’ which it is argued captures the fluidity and generative nature of the interpretation of genre espoused in this article. It is presented as an alternative to metaphors such as ‘the frame’, ‘the recipe’, ‘the game’, and ‘the template’ which form the basis of theorisations of genre that tend to focus on the stability of form and, as such, have difficulty in accounting for the rupturing of boundaries which is evident in the Demidenko interview.

What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real ... the map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation ... A map has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes back “to the same”;. The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged ‘competence’.     

Integrating Values into Public Service: The Values Statement as Centerpiece

The public administration community needs to focus more attention on how values can be integrated into the structures, processes, and systems of public organizations. In particular, greater emphasis should be placed on the values statement as the central component of a values regime. This article examines the content and format of values statements in four Westminster-style governments, initiatives to make values a pervasive influence in public-service operations, and learning points for other countries. Each government's values statement should capture the essence of public service. Leaders must serve as both exemplary models of values-based behavior and skillful practitioners of the art of values management. A values statement expressing values that are shared at all organizational levels—combined with the dispersal of leadership roles throughout the organization—provides an especially strong foundation for integrating values into public service.     

Understanding Leadership in Public Administration: The Biographical Approach

This essay reviews the range of literature that uses a biographical approach to probe leadership in public administration. What are the variations in this approach? What have we learned? What should be done in the future? The genre is examined through several books and articles that have studied agency leaders and government departments.     

The Comparative Study of Jokes

Jokes can only properly be studied comparatively and in relation to differences in the social structure and culture of the two or more countries where they are told. This is best done by looking at how joke cycles, large aggregates of jokes, change as they move between two countries that have the same language. American stupidity jokes about Poles and blondes changed significantly when they came to be told in Britain about the Irish and about Essex Girls, even though the same themes were employed. The changes can be related to the greater British willingness openly to acknowledge and to joke about class distinctions and to their not sharing the American obsession with hygiene, purity and physical perfection. American lawyer jokes are told in Britain not as local jokes about lawyers but as specifically American jokes about American lawyers. In Britain power and decision making lie with Parliament not judges and lawyers, a utilitarian not a rights political philosophy prevails and there is no sacred written constitution. In America there is far more respect for ‘the law’ and lawyers can not possibly live up to these expectations. In Britain to be a lawyer is just one more job and the lawyers do it honestly and unremarkably.     

Three Sorries and You’re In? Does the Prime Minister’s Statement in the Australian Federal Parliament Presage Federal Constitutional Recognition and Reparations?

Then newly elected Labor Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, made a historic statement of “Sorry” for past injustices to Australian Indigenous peoples at the opening of the 2008 federal parliament. In the long-standing absence of a constitutional ‘foundational principle’ to shape positive federal initiatives in this context, there has been speculation that the emphatic Sorry Statement may presage formal constitutional recognition. The debate is long overdue in a nation that only overturned the legal fiction of terra nullius and recognised native title to lan with the High Court’s decision in Mabo in 1992. This article explores the implications of the Sorry Statement in the context of reparations for the generations removed from their families under assimilation policies (known since the Bringing Them Home Inquiry as the Stolen Generations). We draw out the utility of recent human rights statutes—such as the Human Rights Act 2004 (ACT)—as a mechanism for facilitating justice, including compensation for past wrongs. Our primary concern here is whether existing legal processes in Australia hold further capacity to provide reparation for Australian Indigenous peoples or whether their potential in that regard is already exhausted. We compare common law and statutory developments in other international jurisdictions, such as Canada, as an indication of what can be achieved by the law to facilitate better legal, economic and social outcomes for Indigenous peoples. The year 2008 also saw Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper express his apology to residential school victims in the Canadian Parliament, providing thematic and symbolic echoes across these two former colonies, which, despite remaining under the British monarchy, both forge their own path into the future, while confronting their own unique colonial past. We suggest that the momentum provided by the recent public apology and statement of “Sorry” by the newly elected Australian Prime Minister must not be lost. This symbolic utterance as a first act of the 2008 parliamentary year stood in stark contrast to the long-standing recalcitrance of the former Prime Minister John Howard on the matter of a formal apology. Rather than a return to a law enforcement-inspired “three strikes and you’re out” approach, Australia stands poised for an overdue constitutional and human rights-inspired “three ‘sorries’ and you’re in”.     

The Federal Government's Response to the Banks Report: An Assessment of its Recommendations and the Government Response

The aim of this article is to assess the Report of the Commonwealth Government's Taskforce on Reducing the Regulatory Burden on Business (the Banks Report), released in April 2006, and the government's response to the Report ( AG 2006a,b ). It focuses on the report's recommendations in regard to the system for making regulation in regard to business, particularly the regulation impact statement process (RIS), contained in chapter seven. This focus is chosen since it is the chapter in the report that addresses the underlying causes of over‐regulation.     

From book to stage to screen: semiotic transformations of Gothic horror genre conventions

ABSTRACT

This paper adopts a multimodal social semiotic approach for exploring the semiotic changes involved in the transformation of a novel into stage and screen productions. It examines how semiotic resources are deployed in each medium through elements of mise-en-scène, such as speech, music, sound, lighting, props, staging, and cinematographic techniques, and the viewing perspectives that are thus established for audiences. The genre of Gothic horror is selected for this purpose, given how this form of performance has transfixed audiences for centuries and has been adapted for both the stage and the screen. In order to demonstrate how each performance medium has produced its own unique set of foregrounding devices to enthral and captivate audiences, a comparative analysis of excerpts from the novel The Woman in Black by Susan Hill, a videotaped theatrical performance, and the 1989 British television film of the same name is undertaken. The paper discusses the implications of the multimodal semiotic approach for developing a better understanding of the semiotic transformations that horror genre conventions undergo in different media and the viewership positions that are thus re-drawn for audiences. The paper concludes with a view of multimodal recontextualisation processes which form the underlying basis of human sociocultural life.     

On the Politics of Judicial Selection: Lawyers and State Campaigns for the Merit Plan

This article investigates the supportof lawyers' groups for the merit plan, a form ofselecting and retaining state judges. Although thatsupport is justified on the grounds of improvedadministration of justice, this analysis links it tothe self-interest of lawyers. First, merit planprocedures involve lawyers and bar associationsprominently in the selection process. Second, byreducing a judge's susceptibility to politicalpressure, the procedures increase the amount oflitigation in the state. This article finds thatmerit plan procedures are associated with betweeneighteen and thirty-two percent more filings in statesupreme courts between 1985 and 1994.     

The legal environment of planned urban growth

The part that law as a skill and as a discipline can and should play in urban development and in the work of an urban development agency is discussed on the basis of recent experience in three countries. Emphasis is given to the importance of involving lawyers from the start of any programme for planned urban growth, and the disadvantage of bringing lawyers in only for specific legal jobs is stressed. The article surveys the range of work in which a lawyer is necessarily involved where planned urban development proceeds within a framework of law.     

Exposing the War on Women: The Limits of Law and Power of Care to Address Sexual Violence in Contemporary Crime Drama

A comparative reading of two recent crime dramas, The Fall (TF) and The Bletchley Circle (BC), demonstrates the limits of law and potential of care to address violence against women. TF, a Nordic noir, moves beyond a gender-blind account of crime yet relies on a liberal, state-centric response that blunts its political critique. BC, a hybrid cozy-period-detective genre piece set in post-World War II London, offers a new perspective on violence against women in crime dramas. First, juxtaposing men’s and women’s post-war experiences, BC frames violence against women as an ongoing war in which women remain comrades-in-arms. Second, it suggests that while the state has a necessary role to play as a coordinator of spaces, skills, and citizens, state action alone cannot end violence against women. Rather, citizen engagement through an ethic of care may offer a new way to address such harms.     

Museum Outreach Programs to Promote Community Engagement in Local Environmental Issues

Ideas of ‘community’ and ‘community voice’ have been mobilised in collaborative programs developed between the National Museum of Australia and the Murray‐Darling Basin Commission since 1992. This collaboration is set within a broader context of changing ideas and practice around governance, community and environmental issues. The recent Murray‐Darling Outreach Project (MDOP), a series of museum outreach projects with regional communities aiming to increase community engagement in local environmental issues in the Murray‐Darling Basin, is specifically examined. Evaluation research on the MDOP found that the approach to program development significantly shaped the types of voices, range of issues presented and the nature of the communicative forums established. The potential impacts on online audiences are discussed along with broader implications for government agencies involved in community partnerships.     

House organ

Red green theory and practice in the world today take a wide variety of forms that eschew leftist dogmatism and “time‐honored, time‐worn” slogans, on the one hand, and “mere utopianism,” on the other. The Alternative Rouge et Verte (AREV) movement in France is one of these, as a reading of this statement of their general political views, written for CNS, will reveal. The publication of the AREV movement is: Alternative Rouge et Verte, 40 rue de Malti, 75011 Paris, France.     

The Need to Build Administrative Capacity in the Age of Rapid Globalization: A “Modest” Prescription or a Major Blueprint?

Most scholars would agree that we are in an age of rapid globalization. The phenomenon of “globalization” is well documented and thoroughly discussed by many. What is missing among scholarly work is a clear statement as to what needs to be done in terms of public administration in order to meet the challenges of rapid globalization. What should the new public administration for the twenty‐first century look like?     

Optimization and its discontents in regulatory design: Bank regulation as an example

Economists and lawyers trained in economics tend to speak about regulation from a perspective organized around the basic norm of optimization. In contrast, an important managerial literature espouses a perspective organized around the basic norm of reliability. The perspectives are not logically inconsistent, but the economist's view sometimes leads in practice to a preoccupation with decisional simplicity and cost minimization at the expense of complex judgment and learning. Drawing on a literature often ignored by economists and lawyers, I elaborate the contrast between the optimization and reliability perspectives. I then show how the contrast illuminates current discussions of the reform of bank regulation.     

Evidence and Contestation in the Indigenous Policy Domain: Voice,Ideology and Institutional Inequality

There is a tension in the evidence‐based policy paradigm as it concerns Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, particularly with regard to their standing as evidence providers. Aboriginal people in Australia have primarily been seen as a ‘problem to be solved’ and racialised views of Aboriginal competence have allowed for past policy, now recognised as harmful, to be justified as being ‘for their own good’. This article considers some of the complexities of the evidence‐based policy paradigm as it applies to the Indigenous policy domain, arguing that in such a turbulent field the use of evidence is inevitably ideological and selective. The article concludes that, in light of persistent institutional inequalities, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices and perspectives in genuine dialogue about policy is the only way to navigate this difficult terrain with any chance of success.