Search results

Work has historically been an important basis of identity, but the sharp decline in the availability of stable attachments to jobs, organizations, or occupations jeopardizes paid work’s capacity to sustain identity. If available work opportunities are increasingly precarious and short-term, can the same be said for identities? Analysis of the efforts of members of an unusual occupational group – stage actors – to support an identity based on unstable work provides insights into the variability and indeterminacy of responses to structural employment uncertainty. Despite manifold identity threats, actors struggle to maintain identity as actors both in others’ eyes and in their own.

Despite certain studies in the given sphere, the issues of systemic organization of management of business decisions, aimed at increase of competitiveness of products of the studied sphere, are not elaborated in the Russian theory and practice. At present, the task of formation of a completely new theoretical and methodological basis of production management, improvement of existing and development of modern mechanisms, methods, and technologies of design and efficiency management of business decisions, which allow increasing competitiveness, becomes a top priority in activities of any company. This is confirmed by active development in international practice of the systems of management and support for products’ life cycle. These technologies are oriented at flexible high-tech production with wide usage of automatized systems of production and complex technological processes. A special role in scientific development of the issue of increase of effectiveness of management of industrial companies belongs to studies on creation of integrated production systems and application of new technologies of management, which are based on increase of products’ quality. These issues are especially topical for domestic manufacturer. The key components of competitiveness of an industrial company are innovational and technological development of productions, creation, and development of new organizational and institutional forms, strategic partnership of participants of production and technological chain, and emphasis on quality and safety of manufactured products.

This chapter sets out to examine the topic of a spatial analysis of urban crime through an analysis of David Simon’s seminal television series The Wire. By developing an analysis of the issues that are presented in the series, issues such as race, ethnicity and representation will be addressed in order to add to the understanding of these topics in relation to race and media representations. Each section will address a set of themes which are evident in The Wire. The chapter highlights the idea of race in the series and how characters are presented on screen. The research is also concerned with economic issues depicted in the series and the effect of the economy on the characters in Baltimore, the U.S. city in which The Wire was set.

The conclusion of the chapter addresses poverty class and inequality as topics and sets out to document these themes in relation to race. The third chapter also discusses the racism and discrimination that is apparent in The Wire. By contextualising the series, the book is attempting to theorise relevant issues surrounding race, gender and power through an examination of relevant literature and the development of a theoretical framework from which key issues will be addressed.

This paper seeks to identify in Philip Selznick’s earliest predominantly organizational writings the germs of a strong and unifying temper – or better perhaps, because the concept plays a significant role in the works, a coherent intellectual and moral character. It infuses Selznick’s work in all the domains he entered. It was evident in his earliest political writings and contributions to organization theory, and remained so in his later contributions to the sociology of law and social and public philosophy.

At one level each of his works had a different subject, at another they all were pondered within a common frame of concerns, intellectual and moral, and approached with a distinctive manner and tone. At a general level, this involved a conception of social science as a “humanist science,” the central concern of which was the fate of values in the world. His specific posture in relation to this subject was underpinned by a commitment to moral realism, or what I call “Hobbesian idealism.”

Selznick began, like Thomas Hobbes as a threat expert, and never lost regard for that expertise. He is alert to fragility, vulnerability, and the need to guard against them. Moreover, his normative reflections are sustained and deepened by his understanding of social processes in general, and of the dangers to which organizations and institutions, but also human personalities and groups, are susceptible. He has a lot to tell us about ways in which those dangers might be avoided. However, Selznick resists stopping where Hobbes stops. Though he stresses the presence and resilience of evil and the need for strenuous efforts to contain it, he holds out for more. Indeed, though recognizing danger might be the beginning of wisdom, it is only half – over time less than half – of the story.

He emphasized the importance of attending both to Hobbesian insights and idealistic ambitions in relation to organizational leadership, to law, to justice, to human achievement of all kinds. To see him, as the earliest critics of his organizational theory did, as a voice of unadulterated melancholy, or as his later ones tended to, as altogether too programmatically sunny and full of hope, is to miss the real core of the intellectual and moral sensibility that pervaded his life of scholarship in the social sciences. The paper concludes by commending this uncommon sensibility, both at the general level of advocacy of “humanist science” and in its specific “Hobbesian idealist” posture.