The Winter of Discontent Thirty Years On

Thirty years on, and in the context of our own crisis, it is perhaps useful to take stock of the last Winter of Discontent. The industrial strife that beset the Callaghan government in the winter of 1978/79 was seen at the time as a key factor in Labour's defeat in the general election of 1979; but its legacy is considerable and its significance enduring. These four themed essays come from a public seminar at the British Academy to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Winter of Discontent. Colin Hay argues that the Winter of Discontent was, in key respects, a manufactured crisis lived, experienced and responded to through a very particular construction of the events that is difficult to reconcile with the evidence itself. Reponses by Lords Baker, Lea and Lipsey follow and the section concludes with a transcribed and edited version of the lively discussion which ensued.     

Laughter and Liability: The Politics of British and Dutch Television Satire

Contemporary politicians face immense rhetorical and communicative challenges. Performing on the intertwined stages of politics, media (including Internet) and everyday life, they need to master diverse and contrasting repertoires of talk. Political communication research, at present, has ignored the question of how politicians face and experience these challenges, and how they reflect on the new communicative field. In this article, we begin to redress this situation by analysing and comparing the motives, experiences and reflections of politicians who appeared in the British satirical TV show, Have I Got News for You, and its Dutch adaptation, Dit was het Nieuws. Based on in-depth interviews with seven Dutch and 14 English MPs, we conclude that they draw from three repertoires to legitimise and reflect on their participation: a strategic, indulgent and anti-elitist repertoire. The first repertoire is predictable in the context of current political communication research, whereas the latter two add new dimensions of pleasure and bottom-up representation to it.     

无固定期限劳动合同若干问题的法律探讨

我国的<劳动合同法>对无固定期限劳动合同制度做了重大改变,引起许多争议,有必要对其进行法律探讨.无固定期限劳动合同制度符合社会法理念,在强制续签、解雇保护、违约责任等制度设计上应区别固定期限劳动合同,同时在相关法条的可操作性方面仍需要加强.     

Territorial reforms in Europe: effects on administrative performance and democratic participation

Territorial reform is the most radical and contested reorganisation of local government. A sound evaluation of the outcome of such reforms is hence an important step to ensure the legitimation of any decision on the subject. However, in our view the discourse on the subject appears to be one sided, focusing primarily on overall fiscal effects scrutinised by economists. The contribution of this paper is hence threefold: Firstly, we provide an overview off territorial reforms in Europe, with a special focus on Eastern Germany as a promising case for cross-country comparisons. Secondly, we provide an overview of the analytical classifications of these reforms and context factors to be considered in their evaluation. And thirdly, we analyse the literature on qualitative performance effects of these reforms. The results show that territorial reforms have a significant positive impact on functional performance, while the effects on participation and integration are indeed ambivalent. In doing so, we provide substantial arguments for a broader, more inclusive discussion on the success of territorial reforms.     

Expo afterlife: corporate performance and capitalist futurity in the Carousel of Progress

This article discusses a theatrical spectacle created by Walt Disney and General Electric for the 1964 New York World’s Fair that has run for the last five decades: the Carousel of Progress, a history pageant that stages the evolution of domestic technology in the twentieth century. As a spectacle dedicated to celebrating tools that bolster women’s participation in the social reproduction of capitalism, the author argues, the Carousel shows how expos utilize theatricality in order to inscribe industrial technologies within corporate ideologies. By apprehending the Carousel of Progress as a site of corporate performance, the author demonstrates how the Carousel’s afterlife in theme park entertainment has enabled Disney to theatricalize disparate modes of capitalist futurity in response to shifting cultural sensibilities. The author situates the Carousel within an economy that has consistently presented female domestic labor as subordinate to corporate capital, culminating with its late-1990s staging of an illusory prefeminism, which fantasizes a twentieth century in which no feminist movement took place. Engaging with theories of corporate performance, this article takes up the Carousel of Progress’s production history as an indication of theatricality’s longstanding utility to corporate capitalism.     

The nonarrival of black freedom (c. 12.6.84)

This article seeks to mark the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Saidiya V. Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America through a series of meditations on questions of time, embodied performance, the political concept of emancipation, and Oliver L. Jackson’s painting, Untitled 12.6.84, which graces the cover of this seminal work. This effort to recall Hartman’s argument regarding the nonevent of emancipation moves in the service of developing an understanding of the nonarrival of black freedom as a conceptual frame for addressing the recursive and untimely dimensions of black self-making. Ultimately, this article argues that Scenes of Subjection allows us to glimpse the making of worlds within the historical archive that fall outside of the normative horizons and expectations of political emancipation. Neither durable nor everlasting, neither verifiable nor guaranteed, such worlds take shape and dissolve within the mysterious rapport between the “could be” and the “not yet” and leave traces on the broken flesh of the black body.     

This is your afterlife: gender,slavery, and televisual subjection

In 1957 Arries Ann Ward, who was formerly enslaved, appeared on the classic television interview-entertainment program, This Is Your Life. Despite Ward’s practices of refusal, the rare interview enacts an idealization of black female servitude and indebted obligation through performances of affection and racial benevolence. Ward’s appearance effectively works to resolve national crisis produced by widespread images of civil-rights protest and counterinsurgent violence, reifying discourses of American exceptionalism in Cold War context.     

Living in the Past or Living in the Future? Analyzing Parties’ Platform Change In Between Elections,The Netherlands 1997–2014

Do parties change their platform in anticipation of electoral losses? Or do parties respond to experienced losses at the previous election? These questions relate to two mechanisms to align public opinion with party platforms: (1) rational anticipation, and (2) electoral performance. While extant work empirically tested, and found support for, the latter mechanism, the effect of rational anticipation has not been put to an empirical test yet. We contribute to the literature on party platform change by theorizing and assessing how party performance motivates parties to change their platform in-between elections. We built a new and unique dataset of >20,000 press releases issued by 15 Dutch national political parties that were in parliament between 1997 and 2014. Utilizing automated text analysis (topic modeling) to measure parties’ platform change, we show that electoral defeat motivates party platform change in-between elections. In line with existing findings, we demonstrate that parties are backward-looking.     

Legitimacy and post-conflict state-building: the undervalued role of performance legitimacy

Legitimacy is essential to state-building after conflict. Yet, the prescribed path to gaining legitimacy is often a narrow one that borrows heavily from the experiences of Western states. Elections are prescribed as an essential first step on the logic that this means gaining process legitimacy can rebuild a social contract between citizens and the state, a social contract that is rooted in democratic norms and values. This article proposes an alternative path, one that emphasises the critical role of performance legitimacy and its non-exclusive nature. Performance legitimacy is granted when citizens perceive that some or all of their basic needs are being met. The article offers a new analytical framework for understanding a state’s potential source of performance legitimacy, how non-state actors may vie with the state to seize this form of legitimacy, and what consequences this has for processes of state institution-building after conflict. In this respect, this article seeks to reorient theory and practice to a broader view of legitimacy and its critical role in post-conflict state-building.     

Conceptualising a Framework for Effective Performance Measurement in Cultural Precinct Development and Operation

The purpose of this paper is to firstly identify and synthesise critical measurement themes in extant academic literature concerning performance measurement in cultural precincts. Secondly, the paper posits for consideration a holistic and systematic framework (which embraces those themes) for developing appropriate performance measures for cultural precincts. The outcomes in this paper (a) confirm and clarify the complexity of performance measurement needed, (b) furnish a framework for practitioners embarking on the development of such measures, and (c) indicate the conceptual and pragmatic challenges faced in developing and enacting appropriate and meaningful measures for cultural precincts. Consequently, this paper serves as a conceptual positioning paper and a practical embarkation point for practitioners willing to engage with and pursue this phenomenon. Thereby, it endorses more dialogue on and further research and analysis of performance measurement in government operated cultural precincts.