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In this chapter, we focus on the stabilizing functions of public bureaux and examine some of the consequences attendant upon attempts to make them less hierarchical and more ‘flexible’. In so doing, we seek to evidence the ways in which what are represented as anachronistic practices in the machinery of government may actually provide political life with particular required ‘constituting’ qualities. While such practices have been negatively coded by reformers as ‘conservative’, we hope to show that their very conservatism may serve positive political purposes, not the least of which is in the constitution of what we call ‘responsible’ (as opposed to simply ‘responsive’) government. Through a critical interrogation of certain key tropes of contemporary programmes of modernization and reform, we indicate how these programmes are blind to the critical role of bureaucracy in setting the standards that enable governmental institutions to act in a flexible and responsible way.

Ridley Scott’s 1982 cinematic production of Blade Runner, based loosely on a 1968 story by Philip Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), is read within a general context of critical theory, the purpose being twofold: first, to highlight the film’s fit with, and within, several issues that have been important to critical theory and, second, to explore some questions, criticisms, and extensions of those issues – the dialectic of identity/difference most crucially – by speculations within and on the film’s text. The exploration is similar in approach to studies of specific films within the context of issues of social, cultural, and political theory conducted by the late Stanley Cavell. Interrogations of dimensions of scenarios and sequences of plotline, conceptual pursuit of some implications, and assessments of the realism at work in cinematic format are combined with mainly descriptive evaluations of character portrayals and dynamics as these relate to specified thematics of the identity/difference dialectic. The film puts in relief evolving meanings of prosthetics – which is to say changes in the practical as well as conceptual-semantic boundaries of “human being”: what counts as “same” versus “other”? “domestic” versus “foreign”? “integrity” versus “dissolution”? “safety” versus “danger”? And how do those polarities, understood within a unity-of-opposites dialectic, change, as human beings are confronted more and more stressfully by their own reproductions of “environment” – that is, the perspectival device of “what is ‘text’ and what is context’?” – and variations of that device by direct and indirect effects of human actions, as those actions have unfolded within recursive sequences of prior versions of perspectival device, a device repeatedly engaged, albeit primarily and mainly implicitly, as a “prosthetic that could not be a prosthetic.”

The academic literature that addresses the creation and transformation of large law firms seldom mentions the presence of legal secretaries. The absence of legal secretaries, the vast majority of whom are women, reproduces law firm hierarchies in which attorneys are important in understanding the legal profession and law firm dynamics while secretaries remain invisible. Given the lack of secondary literature on legal secretaries, much of this chapter is based upon legal secretaries' responses to a nationwide survey, which I conducted in Spring 2009. Using such data, along with other primary sources, the chapter examines how legal secretaries' roles and work have changed during the past 50 years, how legal secretaries view themselves and their roles in law large law firms, and the material conditions under which legal secretaries work. Moreover, the most significant scholarship on secretaries has depicted the secretary/boss relationship as one of personal and domestic nature – what we might call the “second-wife syndrome.” The chapter explores whether such a description remains accurate and the complicated gender dynamics that exist between legal secretaries and attorneys.

Focusing on the relatively unstudied status of women in classical political economy, this important collection of essays will inform, delight, and even surprise the reader. The essays provide testimony both to the intellectual richness of the period, as well as the extraordinary social and political events of the time. The most striking unifying theme of the work is how social and political contexts served to generate the economic ideas of and about women.

This essay uses Reeves-Ellington's discussion of the timescape as a departure point for describing one way in which marketing managers have responded to consumers’ lived experience of time. It focuses on the retail theatrics of the retroscape as a source of meaning for beleaguered consumers. It then extends the notion of the liminal to account for the temporal orientation that consumers display with regard to both clock time and cosmic time. It concludes with some observations on pluritemporality in postmodern culture.

Review essay on Birck, L. V. (1922), The Theory of Marginal Value, George Routledge & Sons, London; E. P. Dutton, New York; and Henderson, Hubert D. (1922), Supply and Demand, Harcourt, Brace, New York.