Britain's Invisible Dividends

This article argues that the left is generally right in its claim that Britain is important and should be valued. However, it fails to consider two important arguments. The first is theoretical and draws broadly on discourse theory. It argues that Britain's value lies in the fact that it is an artificial and contingent entity. It is this that allows it to accommodate such a broad range of ethnicities and identities. This is related to my second argument. This proposes that the benefits of English regional authorities – citizenship, democratisation and greater economic prosperity – can only be realised fully in the context of a unified British state committed to the principles of inclusion and tolerance.     

Invisible decisive coalitions in large hierarchies

This paper examines the extent to which organizational hierarchies are democratic or (in the more usual language of administrative studies) participative, in the sense that the views of a large proportion of organizational membership are taken into account when an organizational choice is made. We view organizations as making choices in a “bottom-up” manner: subordinates recommend options to their superior, and if subordinates are in sufficient agreement their superior accepts their advice. We prove that as the number of levels in the hierarchy increases, organizational choices can be dominated by a smaller and smaller proportion of the total organizational membership. In the limit, a vanishing small proportion of the membership can dominate policymaking.     

Invisible Populations and the #MeToo Movement

The #MeToo movement has done a great deal to address sexual abuse and violence. There is no doubt that justice may occur when the right person speaks out. However, what happens when the wrong people—that is, people of color, the working class women, and transgender people— speak out on the same issue? When these “wrong people” do speak out, they are discredited, marginalized, and silenced by being ignored. This Viewpoint essay addresses two populations that have been overlooked by the #MeToo movement: women of color and transgender people. The essay concludes with recommendations for how the movement can move forward given the criticisms around the absence of diversity and transparency.     

The Invisible Hand and the Wisdom of the Hive

Self-interest is required for survival and reproduction and lies at the foundation of economic theory. But the presence of social groups with functional internal structure is incompatible with unmitigated self-interest. This essay compares the control of self-interest in humans and honey bees, showing the reasons for different evolutionary outcomes. The less effective checks of self-interest in humans lead to familiar forms of social discord, and in our capitalistic democracy, negative economic and ecological consequences of growing scope. Change will require moderating some firmly held political beliefs.     

Invisible Business: The Unregulated World of Political Party Commerce

This article explores an area of British political party funding that is overlooked, under-researched and under-regulated: party commerce. A comparison of the trading activities of five large and five small political party headquarters units is presented using audited political party accounts made public by the Electoral Commission in 2003, the first year in which such data became available. The anomalies in party funding transparency arising from the lack of regulation of political party commerce are discussed. The dangers of allowing party commerce to continue unregulated, or of inappropriate regulation, are debated.     

Invisible Labour: The Political Economy of Reintegration in South Sudan

This article considers the 2005–12 Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) programme in South Sudan. Current DDR practice centres on ex-combatants' reintegration through encouraging entrepreneurship and self-employment and thereby their willingness to take risks and responsibility. However, South Sudan's DDR programme invisibilizes and obscures the ex-combatants' endogenous capacity to adapt and generate an income. Based on in-depth interviews with participants of the DDR programme and key stakeholders, the article argues that DDR interventions seldom capture the labour market experience of demobilized combatants. The article concludes that self-employment is the solution to the process of reintegration, empowerment and ultimately a key to statebuilding.     

无形利刃刺破“铁幕”的思考——以80年代中后期美国对波兰的舆论战为例

上世纪80年代中后期,波兰由于国内反对派势力逐渐强大、债台高筑以及政治改革方面存在满洞而被美国选定为打破铁幕的突破口.美国的战略进攻主要是通过操控舆论的力量来进行的,包括强化舆论工具优势、以经济手段牵引舆论变化、与盟国合力宣传、争取苏联默许等主要方面.以这场无形之战为鉴,要认识到掌握舆论主动权的重要性;要认识到这场无形之战的历史局限,汲取教训,防止在把握和获取舆论主动的过程中落入历史的窠臼.     

Communicating Party Labels and Names on Twitter During the 2016 Presidential Invisible Primary and Primary Campaigns

This study investigated the use of party and ideological labels and candidate names in major party candidate tweets (N?=?94,310) during the 2016 presidential preprimary and primary campaigns to understand the extent to which candidates focused on intraparty and interparty themes as a part of their marketing strategies. The results show that the candidates and their campaigns did not engage in heavy partisan labeling to cultivate their social media identities. Outsider candidates were not more likely to use party or ideological labels in their tweets than insider candidates were. The candidates focused on self-advocacy in their tweets.     

Stolen Children,Invisible Mothers and Unspeakable Stories: The Experiences of Non-Aboriginal Adoptive and Foster Mothers of Aboriginal Children

One of the measures of the cultural, if not political, success of sustained Aboriginal activism on the issue of the forced removal of children from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, leading up to the instigation of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's inquiry into the issue and the widely disseminated publication of its findings in 1997, is that it now appears nearly impossible to tell the story of indigenous child removal in terms other than those provided by the powerful Aboriginalised tropes and narrative modes that have come to shape both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal understandings of issue. I do not wish to take issue with the long-overdue emergence of Aboriginal voices and an Aboriginal discourse on this issue. However, as the older ways of understanding the meaning of removing indigenous children from their communities ‘for their own good’ (Link-Up & Wilson 1997) have lost their provenance and are replaced by Aboriginal stories with the critically revised meanings of cultural loss, ethnocide, grief and harm, which are expressed in a wide range of discourses (see, for example, Ward 1988; Edwards & Read 1989; Roach 1990; Huggins & Huggins 1994; Smallacombe 1996; Harrison 1997), it becomes apparent that there are still more stories to be told about how Australian's high assimilationist policies of forced child removal and placement played out on the lives of the men, women and children of the nation. From a (non-Aboriginal) feminist perspective, a particular case in point is the stories of the non-Aboriginal women who, both knowingly and unknowingly, came to adopt and foster these children, raising them as their own?a task in which many have been engaged for upwards of 30 or 40 years. These women, who must on any estimate number in their thousands across the nation, remain all but invisible in both the former and now discredited accounts of indigenous child removal and placement, and in more recent Aboriginal revisions of this appalling history. This paper presents preliminary analysis of research undertaken with a small group of these women in 1997 and 1998.