Shared Services: Lessons from the Public and Private Sectors for the Nonprofit Sector

Shared services arrangements in the Australian third sector are becoming more common. Notably, however, there is a lack of information to guide nonprofit organisations through the development and engagement of shared structures. This article reviews the lessons that have been recorded from the public and private sectors with respect to the engagement of shared services arrangements. Additionally this article explores the different types of shared services structures that can be adopted. Overall, this article highlights the need for further research and analysis of issues relating to shared services arrangements in order to assist the increasing number of Australian nonprofit organisations engaging these collective arrangements and structures.     

The Internet,alternative public sphere and political dynamism: Korea's non-gaek * (polemist ) websites

Abstract

This paper explores the development of Korea's online alternative public sphere and illuminates the characteristics of this space, ‘activated’ by non-gaek websites. These websites host highly partisan discourses which are produced and disseminated by a focused political agenda that aims at political reform. Such a method of conducting discourse has led to the dissimilitude of the alternative public sphere, resulting in the birth of a multiplicity of spheres that represent divergent political views. This paper argues that although the overall extent of the alternative public sphere is expanded by non-gaek websites, it is becoming at the same time an exclusive and intolerant space. Furthermore, it is argued that to facilitate functional operation of the alternative public sphere, an institutionalization of rules and norms that can solve such problems is necessary.     

Gay fathers,gay citizenship: on the power of reproductive futurism and assimilation

Edelman's new ethics of queer theory is focussed on the all-pervasive image of the child, which he argues provides the foundation for the hegemonic politics of ‘reproductive futurism’ (L. Edelman, 2004. No future: queer theory and the death drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press). His searing criticism raises important questions for sexual citizenship, and particularly for the gay parent as citizen. Edelman's argument that queers should abandon accommodation and instead embrace their position as the figure of negativity offers a challenge to all those gay men that seek to be fathers. In this article, I critically engage with Edelman's arguments and explore the implications of a queer rejection of reproductive futurism and parental privilege through an empirical investigation of young gay men's stories about the possibility of becoming fathers. I argue that whilst Edelman's uncompromising stance serves to open a space for gay men embracing the jouissance that is increasingly being abandoned through an assimilationist desire for citizenship, it also, more problematically, closes down possibilities for gay men and thus further reinforces present inequalities in citizenship. Is negativity the only option in the face of the onslaught of reproductive futurism or might there be a dialectical solution that is at once radically queer but also reflective of the variety of claims for sexual citizenship?     

Reinventing cyberfeminism: cyberfeminism and the new biology

This article argues for the reinvention of cyberfeminism in the context of the convergence between biology and computer science. Initially a response to cyberpunk and the colonization of the new final frontier by cyberspace cowboys, cyberfeminism was always already more than the essentialist and apocalyptic versions which gained popular appeal during the 1990s. Donna Haraway’s more strategic cyberfeminism is articulated in relation to biotechnology and her conviction that biology – in its symbiotic relation with information systems – is an increasingly hegemonic discourse. The new biology extends its influence from health and food industries to environmentalism, management and intellectual property law and it is subsuming theories of life, mind and culture such as artificial life and evolutionary psychology. Through an analysis of these neo-biological discourses, I argue for a renewed cyberfeminist engagement with biology which does not rehearse familiar oppositional arguments but which recognizes that biology itself is a complex and by no means unified field.     

Outer Space Religion and the Overview Effect: A Critical Inquiry into a Classic of the Pro-Space Movement

The Overview Effect by Frank White (1987) aims at creating a “philosophy of space” for the American space program and the pro-space movement. As such, it has become something of a classic. It describes an evolutionary process set in motion by the first astronauts venturing into space and seeing Earth from an extraterrestrial perspective. According to White, this process is guided by universal forces and ultimately leads to the universe becoming intelligent and self-aware. However, The Overview Effect has not only found readers among space enthusiasts; it has also been cited in various literature, some of it academic and dealing with historical and societal aspects of spaceflight. This article examines White's overview thesis and demonstrates that it is fundamentally religious. Thus, evidence of the presence of religion in the American pro-space movement is presented, while at the same time the use of White's thesis in academic literature is put into question.     

Book Reviews

Ben Agger, Fast Capitalism: A Critical Theory of Significance (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 191 pp.

Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 1991, New York: Routledge, ISBN 0–415–90387–4

Timothy W. Luke, Screens of Power. Ideology, Domination, and Resistance in Informational Society: (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), pp. 265.

Andre Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason. London: Verso. 1989. pp. 250.     

From government to governance: External influences on business risk management

The influence of external organizations and pressures on business risk management practices has hitherto been examined through the influence of state regulatory regimes on businesses. This article concentrates on key socio‐legal concerns about the influence of the law in social and economic life. We know that the sources of regulation and risk management are diversifying beyond the state. What we do not have is much empirically informed research about the range of sources influencing the business world and in particular the weighting of influence exercised by them. In this paper we explore the understandings regulatory actors have of the different external pressures on business risk management through an empirical study of the understandings of those in the food retail sector about the management of food safety and food hygiene risks. A broader objective is to throw some further light onto the debate about regulation within and beyond the state.     

Of “other” histories and identities: partition novels from the Indian subcontinent

Ever since the Partition, novelists on either side of the India–Pakistan border have used fictional space imaginatively to formulate discourses on a humanistically-centred, multiplistically-defined Other identity, which writes itself into existence through the prism of the novelists’ contextual present. In this article, I will focus on three partition narratives: Salman Rushdie's Midnight's children (1980), Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice candy man (1988) and Amitav Ghosh's The shadow lines (1988). By employing different modes of knowledge, the novelists draw out the micro-history embedded within the historical event, and resonate the voice of the Other, a creation of partisan politics. Bapsi Sidhwa appears as a social historian who perceives the event through the eyes of an eight-year-old Parsi girl Lenny; Amitav Ghosh, akin to a modern historian, focuses on rigid and illusory territorial divisions from Thamma's (grandmother's) perspective; while Salman Rushdie emerges as a postmodern historian who draws attention to the ambiguity and opacity of both historical and fictional knowledge through Saleem Sinai, born on the day India won her independence. History, as it is perceived by the Other – each belonging to a different generation – is a palimpsest: it is always in a state of becoming, of being lived, evaluated and rewritten. Fiction, as it interprets the historical knowledge, fills in the fissures and absences between the history of the past and that of the present. The article will eventually study how fiction and history inform each other, and how the rhetoric of fiction and history together constitute a dialectical discourse on identity – mapped by borders – which sees a convergence of private and collective memories.     

Pierre Bourdieu: From Neo-Kantian to Hegelian Critical Social Theory

Abstract

This paper challenges the commonly made claim that the work of Pierre Bourdieu is fundamentally anti-Hegelian in orientation. In contrast, it argues that the development of Bourdieu's work from its earliest structuralist through its later ‘post-structuralist’ phase is better described in terms of a shift from a late nineteenth century neo-Kantian to a distinctly Hegelian post-Kantian outlook. In his break with structuralism, Bourdieu appealed to a bodily based logic of practice' to explain the binaristic logic of Lévi-Strauss' structuralist analyses of myth. Effectively working within the tradition of the Durkheimian approach to symbolic classification, Lévi-Strauss had inherited Durkheim's distinctly neo-Kantian understanding of the role of categories in experience and action—an account that conflated two forms of representation—‘intuitions’ and ‘concepts’—that Kant himself had held distinct. Bourdieu's appeal to the role of the body's dispositional habitus can be considered as a retrieval of Hegel's earlier quite different reworking of Kant's intuition-concept distinction in terms of distinct ‘logics’ with different forms of ‘negation’. Bourdieu commonly acknowledged the parallels of his analyses of social life to those of Hegel, but opposed Hegelianism because he believed that Hegel had remained entrapped within the dynamics of mythopoeic thought. In contrast, Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss, he claimed, by instituting a science of myth, had broken with it. This criticism of Hegel, however, relies on an understanding of his philosophy that has been rejected by many contemporary Hegel scholars, and without it, the gap separating Hegel and Bourdieu narrows dramatically     

Social capital as a policy resource

Existing studies of social capital have provided ample evidence of its pervasiveness and offered useful impressions of its political, economic, and social influence. That it can be also a resource for the implementation of public policies is less well understood. This paper considers how leaders use it to accomplish objectives that are exogenous to the purposes of those that originally contributed to it. Since social capital is usually a by-product of group behavior, its existence should be observed as a separate feature of a groups assets. It is most frequently observed indirectly through its influence on social systems and their policies, but it may also perform the reverse role by becoming an instrument of policy. This paper examines some of its uses in mobilizing public support through appeals to unrelated loyalties.     

The significance of signs

In Camera Lucida, Barthes makes a distinction between a semiological approach and a phenomenological approach to the sign. While semiotic theory has usually focused on signs that work through mediation and representation, in this article we investigate the possibility of a sign that is immediate, experienced as a presence. This is not a sign of, or even the impossibility of a sign of; rather, it is a sign that just is, without an elsewhere to refer or defer to. This form of sign means nothing and is gratuitous, yet it has significance ? or, more accurately, it is significance. We investigate these ideas through Buber's account of the religious sign.     

Approaches to Understanding the Inaugural CIA Covert Operation in Italy: Exploding Useful Myths

The Italian election of April 1948 represented the first occasion on which the CIA intervened to influence events abroad. Understanding of the operation has been shaped by three dissimilar approaches that have been critical, celebratory, and stressed continuity. These approaches have, in turn, fuelled a series of useful myths around the episode. Agency declarations of greater ‘openness’ after the Cold War promised to advance historiographical debates on this – and other – interventions through the declassification of records, although proved a false dawn. This article offers an alternative method to analyse the case through a broader international frame of inquiry that considers CIA action in the context of both American and Italian efforts during the election. In so doing, it challenges the useful myths around 1948.     

Coming to Grips with Realism

Retrieving Realism renders the joint philosophical goals of Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor into what is probably their final and most concise form. It has two main objectives: first, it aims to deconstruct the mediationalism that undergirds Western philosophy, and second, it endorses contact theory, or embodied/embedded coping, as an alternative. In this essay, I present the book’s most salient themes and reveal areas that are ripe for further philosophical consideration. I also direct the reader to the work’s genuine ontological challenge: how to come to grips with contact theory beyond the borders of epistemology.     

Assessing Public Procurement of Innovation as a Cross‐Domain Policy: A Framework and Application to the Chinese Context

Despite the fact that public procurement of innovation (PPI) has become an increasingly popular policy tool, there has been a lack of holistic approaches to assessing policies promoting PPI. This article attempts to address this gap by proposing a framework which links the multiple levels and aspects related to the design and implementation of PPI policies. By adopting a systemic understanding of “public procurement” as well as “innovation policies,” this article positions PPI as a cross‐domain policy which is inherently a mix of procurement and innovation‐related interventions. The article develops an assessment framework using “vertical coherence” and “horizontal coherence” as criteria. It then illustrates the use of the framework by applying it to PPI policies in China. The framework can aid the conduct of ex ante as well as ex post assessment of PPI policies, which can further inform policy design, implementation, and learning.     

Digital citizenship and neoliberalization: governing digital citizens in Denmark

Digital citizenship is becoming increasingly normalized within advanced democratic states. As society and governmental institutions become reliant on digital technologies, citizens are expected to be and act digitally. This article examines the governance of digital citizens through a case study of digitalization efforts in Denmark. Drawing on multiple forms of data, the article showcases how digital citizens are governed through a combination of discursive, legal and institutional means. The article highlights the political, but also institutional work that goes into making citizens digital. Providing this case study, the article contributes to current critical perspectives on the digital citizen as a new political figure. It adds new insights into digital citizenship by connecting this figure to wider processes of neoliberalization and state restructuring, pushing for a more pronounced focus on governmental practices.     

State borders as defining lines of justice: why the right to exclude cannot be justified

This paper seeks to answer the question of what we, according to justice, owe to immigrants. The answer to this normative question is extracted by providing an analysis of Michael Blake’s jurisdictional theory presented in Immigration, Jurisdiction, and Exclusion and elaborated upon in other articles in which he argues for states’ right to exclude immigrants based on states’ jurisdictional nature. I regard this theory as unjustified since it rests on a weak basis, which is further problematised by weighing the moral claims of residents above those of immigrants. In this way, my criticism serves to provide argumentative support in a negative manner for weighing the moral claims of immigrants on an equal footing with those of residents.     

Towards a new semiotics of landmark knowledge

This paper proposes to reconsider the relation between language, truth and knowledge, based on an integrational semiology as developed by Roy Harris: at its centre of interest is the question of what it is to know the name of a landmark, and how that in turn relates to the general concept of landmark knowledge. It is claimed here that previous research interested in referential talk involving landmarks adopted a “mythological” view of language and communication, which leads to conflating knowledge with verbal displays of knowledge. Taking the present author's fieldwork in Bellinzona, the capital of Italian-speaking Switzerland, as a case in point, it is argued that by generating communicational situations where informants are unaware of being objects of study and can no longer rely on an “ideal” (and idealized) name–referent relationship (i.e. for each object there is one “proper” name), it becomes possible to understand reference as an integrational process (rather than as a form of linguistic knowledge), which in turn lends further support to the notion of knowledge as integration.     

Symbolic and pseudo policies as responses to diffusion of power

Democratic welfare states are increasingly characterized by uncertainty, complexity and often changing divisions of labor between actors and agencies. The main functional answer to such diffusion of power is an increase of symbolic and pseudo policy ingredients. This means that many policies are either not intended to be fully implemented or are characterized by unsatisfactory usage of available knowledge regarding preconditions for implementation. Politicians often have to make decisions even when they are unsure of what to do and pressured by lack of economic resources, time or relevant knowledge. This is not something they alone should be blamed for but a rather problematic feature of modern politico-economic systems. Decentralization of symbolic and/or pseudo type is a strategy often used to muddle through the present difficulties. Because of the extension of the public sphere, real decentralization might be the only alternative to complexity and difficulties in governing. The form in which it occurs is, however, crucial for the future of democratic mechanisms.     

Cooperative justice and English as a lingua franca: the tension between optimism and Anglophones free riding

In Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World, Philippe Van Parijs proposes three principles of linguistic justice. The first one applies to the fair conditions of the creation of a lingua franca understood as a common good enabling global communication. According to Van Parijs, the actual situation is unfair. The benefits are distributed evenly among speakers mastering English, but the costs are born entirely by those investing resources in learning English as a second language. I want to challenge this argument and point to a dilemma in Van Parijs’ proposition. He can either accept that English as global lingua franca (EGLF) is a done deal such that only ‘‘apocalyptical events’’ could prevent English from becoming the first global lingua franca, in which case he will have to make peace with the fact that Anglophones can enjoy the benefits this produces without having to make any kind of contribution. Or, he can temper his optimism, find reasons why natural interactions could fail at producing EGLF so as to convince native Anglophones that without their contribution, without some form of an investment in the creation of EGLF, it will not happen, or at least, it will not happen in a way that is maximally beneficial to them. I propose some arguments pointing to some benefits that would only be accessible to native Anglophones through cooperation and therefore through contributing to the creation of EGLF. Without such an argument, native Anglophones are free to benefit from the impressive by-product of the decisions to learn English of all those interested to improve their social and economic prospects: a global lingua franca.     

From Virtue to Competence: Changing the Principles of Public Service

Virtue has long been a central principle in the tradition of public service—to what extent is it still relevant today? Focusing on the role of the monitoring officer, a key official in the ethical framework of local government in the United Kingdom, this essay asks which virtues, if any, are still needed for public service and whether these virtues have been displaced by managerial notions of technical competence as the principles of public service delivery. The authors draw an initial distinction between virtue and competence that, upon further investigation, does not appear to be sustainable. Despite being drawn from two different academic perspectives—moral philosophy and management development—the concepts of virtue and competence are, in practice, very similar. This theoretical convergence is reflected in the practical concerns of monitoring officers and their perspective on public service ethics.