Dealing With Breast Cancer： The Journals of Audre Lorde

This paper analyzes how Caribbean-American poet and activist Audre Lorde textualizes the experience of breast cancer in her journals. Lorde confronts the narrative of the female body provided by the biomedical approach and challenges the passive role she is expected to play as a sick person. She deplores misinformation to patients and the insistence on reconstructive surgery after a mastectomy. Lorde denounces the discursive aggression toward women that is the result of the hidden patriarchal impositions insidiously operating within medical practices. She believes medical discourse has often been used to implement many of the precepts that underlie a male-centered society, shaping the gendering of women in line with a patriarchal worldview. This paper examines how Lorde faced with such a hostile situation, managed to overcome it, by speaking up and putting her fears and her hopes into words. Her personal diaries, The Cancer Journals （1980） and A Burst of Light （1988）, constitute today a fundamental point of reference and an important contribution to the feminist cause.     

“ 金蝉”不再“ 脱壳”——论营业转让中债权人的利益保护

营业转让中债务人通过“金蝉脱壳”之计逃废债务的现象频发,为了改变债权人所处的不利地位,需要从法理上澄清现行债务承担规则存在的迷乱,同时梳理国内外的相关制度,在比较借鉴的基础上,全面建构债权人利益保护机制：一是完善债权人知情权的实现程序,建立债权保护的事前防范机制;二是夯实债务承担规则的法理基础,重构债权保护的事后救济机制。     

Business Process Re-Engineering and Balanced Scorecard in Swedish Public Sector Organizations: Solutions for Problems or Problems for Solutions?

This article analyzes and discusses the adoption and implementation of Business Process Re‐Engineering (BPR) at a hospital and Balanced Scorecard (BSC) at a local government. At the hospital, BPR was adopted as a solution to problems, but became de-coupled from operations, and later used for legitimacy reasons. At the local government, without having identified clear problems, BSC was adopted as an attractive solution but became coupled, rather than de-coupled, to operations. Our study shows that de-coupling does not follow the path proposed by neo-institutional theory, and that legitimacy from popular management concepts can be obtained both by coupling and by de-coupling the concepts from operations.     

Buried voices: Mexican migrants’ views on the question of illegality

How do immigrant Mexican workers perceive the policies and social discourses that regulate their insertion into American society as noncitizens and illegals? Using ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews, evidence is presented that unauthorized Mexican migrants do not consider themselves lawbreakers but rather moral actors responding to difficult socioeconomic conditions. Informed by a keen understanding of the social forces oppressing them, these migrants articulate a discourse of social justice that works as a powerful counterpoint to the hegemonic ideas of citizenship, belonging, and illegality. A careful analysis of migrant social reflexivity offers a much-needed corrective to the prevailing top-down perspective typically offered among contemporary scholars. By looking at the ways in which migrants make sense of immigration policies and articulate their right to have rights, this examination departs from the widespread tendency among scholars and policy makers of analyzing the migrant’s social and civic status as a matter of assimilation and immigration control.     

The power of “small business” as pending narrative: an ideograph in UK politics 2004–2013

This paper explores utilisation of the term small business in contemporary politics in the United Kingdom. First, the policy and practice implications of the term small business are examined, through the lens of political rhetoric. Use of the term over the period from 2004 to 2013 is examined, drawing upon the DataArt Guardian NewsTraces platform as both a method of initially visualising an overall pattern of the term’s use during the 10-year period, and a medium for facilitating data collection for analysis. The research question is: how is the term “small business” used in political rhetoric in the UK, in the identification of policy problems and solutions, and the creation of pending narrative? It is determined that the term small business is an ideograph with different and often competing meanings for various interest groups, and suffers from serious imprecision despite policy efforts which strive for legitimacy. Even with spikes in use reflecting election cycles and periods of economic stress, the term’s power is in its mutable but appealing vagueness, and its enduring quality as pending narrative. This leaves open obvious questions of both policy efficacy and the sufficiency of ideographic-laced rhetoric as a substitute for meaningful policy.