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Reflecting on the myriad instances where juridical recognition demands a story, confession, testimony on suffering, or evidence of trauma – this chapter considers the role of storytelling and narrative in constituting the legal person, their persona, and relationship they have to a community or the state. What are the forces that drive the demand to give an account of oneself? What are the reasons for, and implications of, resisting the injunction to reveal all? Going beyond the usual bounds of juridically recognised testimony and evidence – the author considers how memory moves across time and space in human and non-human material formations. These questions are posed to open discussion of a wider concern about the autonomy and heteronomy of law. Looking beyond the separation of law and morality in positivist jurisprudence – the autonomy/heteronomy distinction is a means of getting at the co-constitution of the human and non-human. The discussion thus ranges across the philosophies of history that constitute autonomy/heteronomy – examining the tension between confidential stories of those who have suffered abuse, and the state’s archival drive to preserve such material; literary and metaphorical devices for narrating the past; and a consideration of nature and destruction where the human plays an infinitesimal part in making history.

The article conceptualizes the dilemma between exploration and exploitation for flexible knowledge workers. At a time when work is fragmented and society is individualized, we consider, besides the strategies of organizations, also those of workers and the ways in which they move among organizations in an attempt to ‘get by’ between increased margins of autonomy and a lack of the resources necessary to pursue their passions and to fulfil their projects. Through analysis of the life stories of flexible knowledge workers and their relationships with the organizations for which they work, the article illustrates how flexible knowledge workers handle the tension between exploration and exploitation and how organizations resist their attempts. The purpose is to interpret the pervasiveness of individualization processes that prompt individuals to think of themselves as organizations, while human resource management claim that people are their most valuable resource but treat them as disposable workers.

In this paper, we present and apply a new framework – the Poles of Production for Producers/Poles of Production for Users (PFP/PFU) model – to empirically study how one particular group of academic scientists has responded to neoliberal changes in science policy and funding in Canada. The data we use are from a qualitative case study of 20 basic health scientists affiliated with a research-intensive university in a large Canadian city. We use the PFP/PFU model to explore the symbolic strategies (the vision of scientific quality) and practical strategies (the acquisition of funding and production of knowledge outputs) scientists adopt to maintain or advance their own position of power in the scientific field. We also compare similarities and differences among scientists trained before and after the rise of neoliberal policy. The PFP/PFU model allows us to see how these individual strategies cumulatively contribute to the construction of dominant and alternate modes of knowledge production. We argue that the alignments and misalignments between quality vision and practice that scientists in this study experienced reflect the symbolic struggles that are occurring among scientists, and between the scientific and political field, over two competing logics and reward systems (PFP/PFU).

Background: The political participation of children and adolescents provided for in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and Brazil’s Statute of the Child and Adolescent adopted in July 1990 has been proposed to ensure the effectiveness and guarantee of citizenship with regard to children and adolescents in adult-centered and adult-normative cultures.

Methods: This study aimed to understand the meaning of recognition in relation to the child as a subject of rights in the context of political participation in Brazil from 2001 to 2017 through the accounts of two adolescents who have been activists since childhood. The narratives were interpreted in light of the identity theory based on the critical social psychology and the sociology of childhood.

Results: This helped identify (1) the systemic unpreparedness when dealing with adolescents as persons who advocate for the civil rights of children and adolescents; (2) the attempts by education professionals to restrict adolescent activists to schools and family institutions to delegitimize them from their representative potential; and (3) that political participation could help raise the interviewed adolescents’ awareness of the power relations inherent in the social structure.

Conclusions: The effectiveness of political participation is considered a challenge, regardless of official documents being made use of, given the need for a paradigm shift with regard to the universalist theories that consider the institution of childhood exclusively as a progressive preparation for the adult world.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how the field of strategic communication is shaped and driven by several different logics that not only simply underpin each other, but also and simultaneously oppose each other and point in many different directions.

The authors address the multiple logics in strategic communication and their interplay by drawing on Edgar Morin’s theory of “dialogics.” According to Morin, complex systems are characterized by multiple logics that are at once complementary, competitive and antagonistic with respect to one another.

The authors present and discuss five dialogics that challenge conventional notions of managerial control: deliberate vs emergent perspectives on communication strategy; top-down vs participatory approaches; bounded vs unbounded notions of communication; consistency vs inconsistency in organizational messages; and transparency vs opacity in organizational practices.

While the dialogical perspective defies the ideal of strategic communication as a unitary discipline, the authors argue that the field can only develop by acknowledging, embracing and bringing to the fore of analysis principles that are at once complementary, competitive and antagonistic.

Cultural intermediaries define the standards many consumers use when evaluating cultural products. Yet, little research has focused on whether cultural intermediaries may systematically differ from each other with regard to the standards they emphasize. The purpose of this paper is to build on Bourdieu’s theory of cultural production to examine how the type of subfield reviewed and/or the cultural intermediary’s expertise (or “field-specific cultural capital”) affect the standards an intermediary uses.

This paper employed a computer-aided content analysis of the full corpus of “Rolling Stone” music album reviews (1967-2014).

Critics with lower field-specific cultural capital reflect the same logic as the subfield they are critiquing. Critics with higher field-specific cultural capital reflect the opposite logic.

Bourdieu was ambivalent about whether cultural intermediaries will reflect the logic of a subfield. Results show that the answer depends on the intermediary’s field-specific cultural capital. The results also reinforce previous findings that individuals with high field-specific cultural capital are more likely to break with the logic of a field.

Not all intermediaries are created equal. Producers and consumers who rely on cultural intermediaries should understand the intermediary’s critical analysis within the context of his/her experience.

This is one of the first studies to examine how a cultural intermediary’s field-specific cultural capital impacts his or her work. The findings are based on a large review sample and include reviewers’ analyses as they developed from having lower to higher field-specific cultural capital.

Against the various literatures asserting that myths serve administrators well in varying ways, this paper takes a decidedly skeptical stance. While myth is a tool that may be well or poorly used, its use to fashion administrative theory, or to construct an administrative order, or to enhance administrative thought is most often a poor use indeed. What serves Public Administration best involves the much more difficult effort of constructing theories of historical causation that derive directly from the experiences that practitioners have with the problems they find it necessary or desirable to solve.