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Few people living in informal settlements in the Global South spontaneously claim that they are “resilient” or “adapting” to disaster risk or climate change. Surely, they often overcome multiple challenges, including natural hazards exacerbated by climate change. Yet their actions are increasingly examined through the framework of resilience, a notion developed in the North, and increasingly adopted in the South. To what extent eliminate’ do these initiatives correspond to the concepts that scholars and authorities place under the resilience framework?

Three longitudinal case studies in Yumbo, Salgar and San Andrés (Colombia) serve to investigate narratives of disaster risks and responses to them. Methods include narrative analysis from policy and project documents, presentations, five workshops, six focus groups and 24 interviews.

The discourse adopted by most international scholars and local authorities differs greatly from that used by citizens to explain risk and masks the politics involved in disaster reduction and the search for social justice. Besides, narratives of social change, aspirations and social status are increasingly masked in disaster risk explanations. Tensions are also concealed, including those regarding the winners and losers of interventions and the responsibilities for disaster risk reduction.

Our findings confirm previous results that have shown that the resilience framework contributes to “depoliticize” the analysis of risk and serves to mask and dilute the responsibility of political and economic elites in disaster risk creation. But they also show that resilience fails to explain the type of socioeconomic change that is required to reduce vulnerabilities in Latin America.

The aim of this paper is to add a new dimension to urban resilience by exploring how representations of disasters, reconstruction and human settlements are made, and how, by shaping plans and programs, they ultimately influence resilience.

The paper draws on James Scott's notion of “legibility” to ask how different representations simplify complex realities and how they are transformed into plans and programs. The paper first outlines the various broad analytic lens used to examine legibility to portray post‐disaster reconstruction, drawing on international literature and policies. The paper then focuses on post‐earthquake Haiti and analyzes eight reconstruction plans and reviews design proposals submitted for the Building Back Better Communities program to explore how different stakeholders portrayed the disaster, identified the reconstruction challenges and proposed to address human settlements.

Representations of the disaster, the reconstruction challenge and the housing problem were quite varied. While the plans assumed a very broad view of the reconstruction challenge (one that goes beyond the representations found in the literature), the BBBC program adopted a very narrow view of it (one that the literature condemns for failing to achieve sustainable resilience).

The empirical research is exploratory, suggesting an approach that throws a new light on the analysis of plans and programs for improved resilience.

The study suggests that the representations that decision makers, institutions and organizations make of the world ultimately establish the framework in which resilience is constructed.

The lens of legibility confirms that the expression of different representations makes the world legible in different ways and therefore transforms the way in which resilience can be improved.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an update of the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) campaign on Making Cities Resilient.

An opinion piece written by the Director a.i. of UNISDR and the Editors of the International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment.

The campaign will continue and the focus will shift to more implementation support, city‐to‐city learning and cooperation, local action planning and monitoring of progress in cities.

Continued advocacy will seek to commit more cities and increase the support by national governments to support city resilience and local capacities.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the dynamics of marketing practice and theory in arguing that much of the dislocation between strategy and practice is due to the inheritance and internalisation of often impractical but persistently dominant, tacit Cartesian assumptions.

This paper uses case methodology to examine the marketing theory into practice/marketing practice into theory conundrum and explores: their separation (marketing theory and marketing practice); their flows (context to text to context: theory into practice/practice into theory); their symbiosis (the praxis of marketing); and the dynamic and static (in situ/in aspic) nature of their duality. This work is an exploratory empirical study undertaken in what is a very under-researched area.

In this paper, marketing theory and marketing practice are recognised as occupying different epistemes. The lifeworld of marketing theorising appears as characterised by a relatively homogenous and mostly cognitive world dominated by rationality and empirical rigour. By contrast, the embodied practitioner inhabits a more highly segmented, fragmented, heterogeneous and frequently improvised landscape.

The authors propose that the all-consuming clamour for reliance and relevance of theory to practice dictates that the form, function and philosophy of marketing must be co-created in the practical pragmatism of praxis. Praxis is practice informed by theory and theory informed by practice, a cyclical process of experiential, contextual learning.

The paper appears to be the first to bring together Cartesian thought and the practice-theory divide in B2B marketing theory.

What difference, if any, does it make to appeal to the ordinary and the everyday, the situated and always-already-in-relation, the emergent and the quasi-event (Povinelli, 2011), as simultaneously sites, objects and frames? The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Through a focus on epistemological and methodological reflection, this paper asks: what is the relation between the biopolitical and necropolitical terrain in and through which experience unravels and the conceptual apparatuses which hold the promise of analysis and critique? What analytics, methods and ethics do contemporary life and death formations and intersecting precarious modes of existence elicit?

In this paper, I approach these questions ethnographically, with reference to debates in social and cultural theory and drawing on long-term anthropological research in Guatemala.

This paper aims to make contribution to debates on biopolitical and necropolitical processes and dynamics, by reflecting on the implications for epistemologies, methods and infrastructures.

The twofold aim of this theory-building article is to raise questions about the ability of queer cinema to transform market culture and ideologies around gender and sexuality. First, the authors examine how the very capitalization of queer signifiers may compromise the dominant order from within. Second, the authors address how brands possibly can draw on these signifiers to project authenticity.

Through visual methods of film criticism and the semiotic analysis of three films (Moonlight, Call Me By Your Name and Portrait of a Lady on Fire), the authors outline some profound narrative tensions addressed by movie makers seeking to give an authentic voice to queer lives.

Brands can tap into these narrative attempts at “seeing the invisible” to signify authenticity. False sublation, i.e. the “catch-22” of commodifying the queer imaginaries one seeks to represent, follows from a Marcusean analysis.

In more practical terms, “seeing the invisible” is proposed as a cultural branding technique. To be felicitous, one has to circumvent three narrative traditions: pathologization, rationalization and trivialization.

In contrast to Marcuse's pessimist view emphasizing its affirmative aspects, the authors conclude that such commodification in the long term may have transformative effects on the dominant ideology. This is because even if something is banished to the realm of imagination, e.g. through aesthetic semblance, it can still be enacted in real life.

This monograph contains abstracts from the 2005 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, 6‐7th September 2005

This study aims to examine the role of organisational dynamic capabilities (strategic flexibility and employee empowerment) in mediating the relationship between management control systems (MCSs), in particular the interactive and diagnostic approaches to using controls, with organisational change and performance.

Data were collected based on a mail survey of public sector organisations in Australia and analysed using structural equation modelling (SEM).

The findings indicate that strategic flexibility and employee empowerment mediate the association between the interactive approach to MCSs with organisational performance, and strategic flexibility mediates the relationship between the interactive approach to MCSs with organisational change.

The study’s findings inform public sector practitioners as to how to enact change within and enhance the performance of public sector organisations. Specifically, managers are advised to focus on the use of interactive controls and the development of two dynamic organisational capabilities, strategic flexibility and employee empowerment.

The study provides an initial empirical insight into the relation between controls and dynamic capabilities and their role in enacting change and performance within the public sector. The findings suggest that the achievement of new public management ideals is reliant upon the organisational environment, with change and performance facilitated by the interactive use of controls and strategic flexibility and employee empowerment.

This paper aims to explore what impact the recent economic recession and ongoing economic difficulties experienced in the UK might have on crime in Greater Manchester.

In this paper, we summarise existing literature on the relationship between crime trends and economic trends. Then, drawing on data on crime, the economy and other relevant socio‐demographic trends in Greater Manchester some broad conclusions are drawn about likely crime trends in Greater Manchester over the coming years.

The paper concludes that recent reductions in crime might not be sustained, with crime rates in Manchester City's most vulnerable council area levelling out or even rising. This is particularly likely of the rate of violent crime.

This work is part of an ongoing project based at Manchester Metropolitan University to predict future crime trends in Greater Manchester.

This paper will be of value to police forces and local authorities, principally when conducting their strategic assessments.