Observatory's linguistic landscape: semiotic appropriation and the reinvention of space

Using a longitudinal ethnographic study of the linguistic landscape (LL) in Observatory's business corridor of Lower Main Road, the paper explores changes brought about by the influx of immigrant Africans, their artefacts and language practices. The paper uses the changes in the LL over time and the development of an “African Corner” within Lower Main Road, to illustrate the appropriation of space and the unpredictability, which comes along with highly mobile, technological and multicultural citizens. It is argued that changes in the LL are part of the act of claiming and appropriating space wherein space becomes summarily recontexualized and hence reinvented and “owned” by new actors. It is also argued that space ownership can be concealed through what we have called “brand anonymity” strategies in which the identity of the owner is deliberately concealed behind global brands. We conclude that space is pliable and mobile, and that, it is the people within space who carve out new social practices in their appropriated space.     

Networks and campaigns but not movements: collective action in the disciplining Chinese State

Popular protest, civil society organizing, and non-governmental organizations have become notable features in China’s socio-political development. A mounting body of research has documented both opening opportunity structures and remaining restrictions when it comes to collective action within the authoritarian state. However, given the wide range of definitions and interpretations that are at play in the literature, it can be difficult to distinguish between different forms of collective action and determine which actions represent actual movements. This article argues that a refocus towards the basic components that constitute movement action can provide more clarity and help explain the limitations, as well as the opportunities, that surround collective action within authoritarian states. To illustrate, the article studies the organizational growth, networking, and collective action that have occurred in connection with AIDS in China. It finds that political restrictions and other coordination challenges prevent the mobilization of actual social movements.     

The double-edged sword: the political appropriation of the concept of populism

ABSTRACT

The concept of populism has been in use in political debate for over a century. Because ‘populist’ is often used in a pejorative sense today, those to whom it is applied to tend to reject it. However, a closer look at the history of the concept reveals that while its meaning may fluctuate and even be dismissed as irrelevant, its use can become a political tool. This study of the use of ‘populism’ refrains from making value judgments on the actual populist nature of certain parties or political tendencies. Instead, it analyzes uses of the concept from a historical perspective. Special emphasis is placed on politicians who chose to define themselves as populist, or accept the label imposed by others, with particular focus on the Finns Party of Finland. Such self-identified populists draw their conceptions of populism from the ever-growing field of populism research, striving to appropriate and realize what scholars have only hypothetically described as a professed ideal. A closer look at the uses of populism as a political self-identity forces us to rethink its uses as a pejorative, or as an analytical, concept.     

Objects and Spaces of Aid: An Introduction

ABSTRACT

Lisa Smirl (1975–2013) was a scholar of international relations and former aid worker who brought a deep understanding of the business and practice of aid alongside a rich appreciation of theories and concepts to make sense of them. Her life was ended by cancer a few years after completing her PhD and taking up a lectureship at the University of Sussex (UK). Despite the brevity of her academic career, she had acquired a burgeoning reputation amongst colleagues studying humanitarian aid, conflict resolution and post-conflict reconstruction. Lisa was fascinated by the social world of aid and how its objects and spaces shaped humanitarian and development practice. Many of the questions which Lisa addressed in her academic work are now the subject of lively inter-disciplinary debate across anthropology, sociology, development studies and political science. This set of papers by contributors to a workshop as part of the International Studies Association annual convention held in Toronto in March 2014 is a direct engagement with Lisa's work and constitutes a series of studies of the objects and spaces of international aid. One of the papers is a posthumously published paper of Lisa's whilst the other three papers are written by peers who worked with and knew Lisa during her career.     

Creative appropriation: academic knowledge and interventions against sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo

ABSTRACT

Recent academic research has questioned assumptions about sexual violence in (post-) conflict contexts. Gender norms rather than military decision-making have been found to constitute a major underlying reason for wartime sexual violence. In this contribution, we investigate whether international organisations seeking to prevent sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo have accordingly changed their analytical perspectives and modified policies and programming. We find that many, but not all, such organisations creatively appropriate new academic work in their policy and project documents. However, incentives for continuity in the humanitarian field have slackened the pace of any substantive practical changes.     

The New Urban Governance: Processes for Engaging Citizens and Stakeholders

The new urban governance requires not only tools (like tax incentives and contracts for privatizing government functions), but also new processes to carry the tools into effect, including deliberation and dialogue for making policy and dispute resolution (like negotiation, mediation, and voluntary monitoring) for implementing and enforcing it. The processes vary with their application in the policy process, from upstream identification of policy preferences to downstream enforcement. These processes share certain characteristics. All empower citizens and stakeholders to exercise their voice and become more engaged in their communities. All can substitute for or supplement traditional governance processes such as rulemaking or adjudication. They make it possible for leaders to collaborate with community stakeholders, and together to consider a broader and perhaps different set of ideas and proposals. These processes may permit participants to develop a consensus on priorities based on community values and interests rather than simply legal rights.     

Review essay: Spaces of political possibility

Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. David Harvey, 1996. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 468 pp. £12.99 paperback. ISBN: 1 55786 681 3     

Displaying Garbage: Installations as Spaces of Domination and Resistance

Abstract

Contemporary artistic installations presenting the detritus of everyday life are an increasingly popular method of raising awareness of what we produce, consume, and throw away. As social critique, these displays examine the political and economic causes and consequences of waste production and resulting ecological degradation. Drawing on Herbert Marcuse’s conceptions of aesthetics, liberation, and ecology in capitalism, this article attempts to discern where we might find hope, encouragement, and active imagination of another possible future through artistic installations. This article cautions that garbage art may both open and close off creative and imaginative spaces for transformation to a liberated society. Differentiating between two categories of art installations, this article explores how installations can reflect back to us our complicated relationship with waste and consumer culture, raising questions as to how the aesthetic realm might serve as a springboard for critique of capitalism.     

Working together: Building capacity for community development

Abstract

Community development partnerships (CDPs)—local intermediaries that gather support from foundations, corporations, and the public sector—are giving increased attention to building the capacity of community development corporations (CDCs). This article evaluates CDPs’ efforts to help nonprofit CDCs increase their capacity to revitalize low‐income communities. We identified five types of capacity and conducted interviews and focus groups with CDPs and CDCs across the nation. The nature of capacity and capacity building among CDCs, the ways partnerships help increase CDC capacity, what the partnerships and CDCs learn from each other, and how they could better gauge the effectiveness of capacity‐building support were discussed.

We learned that CDCs and CDPs have forged an effective alliance and continue to work together: Community organizations require help in building capacity, and local partnerships provide the requisite funding, technical assistance, and other elements to help them grow and serve their neighborhoods.     

The mutuality of risk and community: the adjudication of community notification statutes

Although it has drawn significant attention in the legal literature, the adjudication of community notification statutes (often referred to as 'Megan's Law' in the United States) demonstrates a centrality of both risk and community that deserves attention from a governance perspective. In this paper, I focus on the ways in which concepts of risk and community are mutually constitutive, and how the adjudication of community notification statutes relies on particular visions of 'community' to engage particular ways of conceiving of 'risk', much of which relies on a rejection of expertise and a focus on 'common sense'. This focus on 'common sense', opens up new problematics of government: courts adjudicating community notification cases are working to define the particular mechanics of a state-civil society partnership, and thereby operationalize the preventive state without rendering the state redundant or obsolete, and without opening the state to new forms of legal and political accountability. While providing a case study in the move to advanced liberal governance in the area of criminal law, this adjudication also reveals the contingent nature of risk, and the ways in which judicial invocation of 'risk' and its management can constitute liberal subjects who continue to rely on the state, while no longer expecting the state to be accountable for crime or its control.     

Spaces of Informalisation: Playscapes,Power and the Governance of Behaviour

Geographers have contributed a great deal towards an understanding of social control across different spaces and the ways in which power is exercised in the interests of élite groups to the detriment of marginalised ‘others’. Little attention however, has been given to decontrolled spaces: spaces where the standard of conduct expected of previous generations is no longer as rigid and formalised as it once was. This paper draws on the work of Norbert Elias and Cas Wouters in exploring how previously prohibited behaviours become admissible within particular social situations, groups and settings: a process known as informalisation. The informalisation thesis posits that a long-term perspective can elucidate the ways in which gradual changes in expected standards of behaviour are linked to corresponding changes in social habitus and the power differentials that characterise the social relations between élite and outsider groups. The paper contends that a revision of the sociological concept of informalisation, emphasising spatial context and difference, can contribute a great deal to debates in human geography. It is argued that the spatialisation of Elias' work could provide a useful theoretical framework with which to enhance the geographer's understanding of the relationship between group identities, power, social change and governance. Conversely, a focus on the spaces of informalisation may also advance the theory from a sociological perspective. The theory is applied to specific playscapes and highlights the uneven, problematic nature of contemporary governance projects and the related problem of social misdiagnoses in the quest towards the ‘non-antagonistic’ city.     

State Budgetary Processes and Reforms: The California Story

This paper analyzes state budgetary processes and reforms to inform California budgetary policy. We consider key institutional provisions, including budget periodicity, tax and expenditure limitations, balanced budget and reserve requirements, and supermajority vote requirements, and analyze the extent to which changes are likely to advance procedural norms. Our analysis suggests that empirically unproven assumptions and poorly articulated linkages between budgetary processes and outcomes have undermined the state's ability to understand the budgetary problem and identify effective reforms. We recommend a focus on procedural norms and related reforms that promote effective budgeting processes as a less partisan framework for reform.     

Transformational Leadership and Organizational Processes: Influencing Public Performance

Leaders are essential actors in public performance improvement and organizational change. However, a key question has not been adequately addressed in prior literature on the topic: how do leadership processes make a difference? Using data on New York City public schools, this article explores the organizational mechanisms by which a specific form of principal's leadership—transformational leadership—influences objective organizational outcomes as measured by standardized test scores. The empirical results indicate that a principal's transformational leadership style affects student test scores through the mediating effects of purposeful performance information use and stakeholder engagement.     

Design Thinking in Policymaking Processes: Opportunities and Challenges

Design thinking has the potential to improve problem definition and mechanism design in policymaking processes. By promoting greater understanding of how citizens experience government services, design thinking can support public managers who desire to enhance public value. In Australia, as elsewhere, design thinking currently remains separated from mainstream policymaking efforts. This article clarifies the essence of design thinking and its applicability to policy development. Five design thinking strategies are discussed, all of which have lengthy histories as social science methodologies. They are (1) environmental scanning, (2) participant observation, (3) open‐to‐learning conversations, (4) mapping, and (5) sensemaking. Recent examples from Australia and New Zealand are used to illustrate how these strategies have been incorporated into policymaking efforts. The article concludes by considering how design thinking might be more broadly applied in policymaking, and the training and resourcing requirements that would entail.     

Beyond Hierarchies and Networks: Institutional Logics and Change in Transboundary Spaces

In almost all subfields of political science in the last third of the twentieth century, it was claimed that we are witnessing a transformation of political order from hierarchies to networks. This paper traces institutional change during the twentieth century by examining structures and modes of interaction in transboundary regions in Europe and North America. First, it challenges functionalist explanations of institution-building and institutional change. Instead, the impact of general discourses and ideas is highlighted. Second, it takes a closer look at the hierarchies-to-networks transformation thesis. Whereas this thesis can be confirmed if we define hierarchies and networks as patterns of interaction, if we define hierarchies and networks in terms of modes of interaction this is less certain. De jure, institutional elements implying a "hierarchical order" have been supplanted in newer institutions by provisions allowing for "majority voting." De facto, nothing has changed, since these modes of interaction have never actually been used. In practice, the only way to achieve joint action has always been and still is through "agreement" or "consent." What has changed over the years, though, is the institutionalized approach to reaching "agreement." The older approach uses a technocratic-deductive logic. In recent years, we have been able to observe various new approaches in cross-border regions: a symbolic-inductive logic in Western Europe, a utilitarian-evolutionary logic along the U.S.-Mexican border, and a normative-constructivist logic along the U.S.-Canadian border. Based on the empirical findings, I conclude that institutional theory should pay more attention to the fact that many political institutions provide orientation, shape identities, and mobilize activities through emotional symbols.     

The New Governance: Practices and Processes for Stakeholder and Citizen Participation in the Work of Government

Leaders in public affairs identify tools and instruments for the new governance through networks of public, private, and nonprofit organizations. We argue the new governance also involves people—the tool makers and tool users—and the processes through which they participate in the work of government. Practitioners are using new quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial governance processes, including deliberative democracy, e-democracy, public conversations, participatory budgeting, citizen juries, study circles, collaborative policy making, and alternative dispute resolution, to permit citizens and stakeholders to actively participate in the work of government. We assess the existing legal infrastructure authorizing public managers to use new governance processes and discuss a selection of quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial new governance processes in international, federal, state, and local public institutions. We conclude that public administration needs to address these processes in teaching and research to help the public sector develop and use informed best practices.