Search results
21 – 30 of over 1000Zoë Smith, Karenza Moore and Fiona Measham
Commonly known as ecstasy, MDMA has been central to the British acid house, rave and dance club scene over the last 20 years. Figures from the annual national British Crime Survey…
Abstract
Commonly known as ecstasy, MDMA has been central to the British acid house, rave and dance club scene over the last 20 years. Figures from the annual national British Crime Survey suggest that ecstasy use has declined since 2001. This apparent decline is considered here alongside the concurrent emergence of a ‘new’ form of ecstasy ‐ MDMA powder or crystal ‐ and the extent to which this can be seen as a successful rebranding of MDMA as a ‘premium’ product in the wake of user disenchantment with cheap and easily available but poor quality pills. These changes have occurred within a policy context, which in the last decade has increasingly prioritised the drugs‐crime relationship through coercive treatment of problem drug users within criminal justice‐based interventions, alongside a focus on binge drinking and alcohol‐related harm. This has resulted in a significant reduction in the information, support and treatment available to ecstasy users since the height of dance drug harm reduction service provision pioneered by the Safer Dancing model in the mid‐1990s.
Details
Keywords
Suggests that, although the potential value of network analysis to aid marketing decisions has been recognised, there is a need for a reappraisal of the procedure in a marketing…
Abstract
Suggests that, although the potential value of network analysis to aid marketing decisions has been recognised, there is a need for a reappraisal of the procedure in a marketing environment, in particular the distinction between the planning and control possibilities of networks. Includes an examination of the reasons why some disenchantment exists with the technique and presents the fundamentals of the approach. Weighs up that the marketing function is an area into which inflexible techniques of management do not fit easily, but has attempted to demonstrate network analysis may be used in a way making it relevant to the marketing decision – particularly at the planning stage.
Details
Keywords
The purpose of this paper is to address the concern for prosumption, created by Alvin Toffler’s work, and its fusion with Marx’s ideas to create the view that the people now live…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to address the concern for prosumption, created by Alvin Toffler’s work, and its fusion with Marx’s ideas to create the view that the people now live in an era of prosumer (rather than producer or consumer) capitalism. As a social theorist, the author routinely studies the ideas of classical (and contemporary) theorists not only to understand their thinking, but also for ideas that he can use, and expand upon, to better understand contemporary society, especially the economy. The author has used the ideas of Max Weber on rationalization – to develop his thinking on McDonaldization, and his ideas on enchantment and disenchantment – in the development of the author’s thinking on the cathedrals of consumption. The latter can also be seen as means of production from the perspective of Karl Marx’s theories. Georg Simmel’s theorizing about money led the author to insights on credit cards, especially the greater temptation to imprudence associated with them in comparison to cash. More recent postmodern theory helped the author understand the mechanisms (e.g. simulations) by which the cathedrals of consumption have undergone a process of enchantment.
Design/methodology/approach
This is a work in historical theory and metatheory.
Findings
The careful review of classical (and contemporary) social theories could, when adapted, help us to better understand contemporary society, especially, in this case the economy.
Research limitations/implications
This is not a piece of research, but rather a theoretical exploration of contemporary prosumer culture based on classical ideas in social theory. It implies a radical change in the thinking about the modern economy.
Originality/value
This essay brings together some of the author’s ideas – and their classical roots – to offer an original perspective on the contemporary economy.
Details
Keywords
Liberalisation of Vietnam's electricity sector.
Details
DOI: 10.1108/OXAN-DB203270
ISSN: 2633-304X
Keywords
Geographic
Topical
This chapter reconsiders commonly held views on the ownership and management of private property, contrasting capitalist and simple property, particularly in relation to how a…
Abstract
Purpose
This chapter reconsiders commonly held views on the ownership and management of private property, contrasting capitalist and simple property, particularly in relation to how a firm shareholder governance model has shaped society. This consideration is motivated by the scale and scope of the modern global crisis, which has combined financial, economic, social and cultural dimensions to produce world disenchantment.
Methodology/approach
By contrasting an exchange value standpoint with a use value perspective, this chapter explicates current conditions in which neither the state nor the market prevail in organising economic activity (i.e. cooperative forms of governance and community-created brand value).
Findings
This chapter offers recommendations related to formalised conditions for collective action and definitions of common guiding principles that can facilitate new expressions of the principles of coordination. Such behaviours can support the development of common resources, which then should lead to a re-appropriation of the world.
Practical implications
It is necessary to think of enterprises outside a company or firm context when reflecting on the end purpose and means of collective, citizen action. From a methodological standpoint, current approaches or studies that view an enterprise as an organisation, without differentiating it from a company, create a deadlock in relation to entrepreneurial collective action. The absence of a legal definition of enterprise reduces understanding and evaluations of its performance to simply the performance by a company. The implicit shift thus facilitates the assimilation of one with the other, in a funnel effect that reduces collective projects to the sole projects of capital providers.
Originality/value
Because forsaking society as it stands is a radical response, this historical moment makes it necessary to revisit the ideals on which modern societies build, including the philosophy of freedom for all. This utopian concept has produced an ideology that is limited by capitalist notions of private property.
Details
Keywords
This chapter explores the timeline of Lieutenant Colonel Myer’s year in military command and how the culture was significantly impacted by her reign of terror and toxic leadership…
Abstract
This chapter explores the timeline of Lieutenant Colonel Myer’s year in military command and how the culture was significantly impacted by her reign of terror and toxic leadership (Reed, 2004). A once jovial and productive organization, quickly after Myer’s assumed command the military squadron took on an appearance of disenchantment and mistrust of authority. Eventually, due to Myer’s toxic leadership practices, organizational cohesiveness and performance eroded, and new employee groups formed in an effort to feel less vulnerable and attempt to find solidarity in numbers and neutralize Myer’s destructive leadership (Konopaske, Ivancevich, & Matteson, 2018; Milosevic, Maric, & Loncar, 2019). In the end, and after several horrific events, many groups pushed upwards, broke the chain of command, and demanded that Myers be removed from command.
Details
Keywords
The liberal wing of accounting research has taken some peculiar turns into postmodernism in recent years; gyrations that are echoed elsewhere in social science (Petras, 1991)…
Abstract
The liberal wing of accounting research has taken some peculiar turns into postmodernism in recent years; gyrations that are echoed elsewhere in social science (Petras, 1991). Such circumlocutions are also prevalent in Gallhofer and Haslam’s book. The fingerprints of Laclau (1992, 1996), Laclau and Mouffe (1985), Lyotard (1984), Nederveen (1992), etc. are all over these sections, and this is where the book alerts us to the first troubles that beset postmodernist accounting research. We begin with the uncritical embrace of the ‘philosophical critique of modernity…[specifically Laclau’s desire to go beyond]…totalizing perspectives’ (p. 19).“Totalizing,” in Laclau’s sense, is the key that gives away the punch-line. Laclau’s thesis springs directly from French disenchantment with Soviet Communism and its satellite: the French Communist Party. The red-baiters lump these “communisms” (and their progenitor, Marx) into the same dock as Totalitarianism and modern capitalism. The conclusion is that both are equally despotic.
The greatest danger for radical social theory in an age of empire is not its own hidden imperial ambitions – though these are never to be discounted – but rather its search for…
Abstract
The greatest danger for radical social theory in an age of empire is not its own hidden imperial ambitions – though these are never to be discounted – but rather its search for consolation in reactivity, that is, in efforts to escape from the hegemony of imperial discourses. Long accustomed to reign, these discourses suck up all available light, leaving as openings only the will to darkness. Such contrariness has led to the self-medicating backwater of post-modern ahistoricism and anti-narrativism, the end of meaning, the celebration of discord and disenchantment, of trauma and tear, where “noise too has its pleasures” and we can wonder “what Empire?” For those unable to bear this metasilence, there is a further flight to theory, any theory, that would cushion the trauma, quiet the questioning, in particular the dark wisdoms of Freud, Augustine, Leo Strauss, Thucydides. Too often, even the Frankfurt School – note the incomplete label “Critical Theory” – has been conjoined to counterhegemonic enterprises, and to what in its analysis of alienation and reification could too easily result in the resolution to bear the agonies of empire in an inevitably fallen world.
It is possible to raise a question as to the appropriateness of Carlyle's famous designation of political economy as “the dismal science” without in the least implying that…
Abstract
It is possible to raise a question as to the appropriateness of Carlyle's famous designation of political economy as “the dismal science” without in the least implying that political economy is not dismal. The quarrel may well be rather with the use of the definite article and not the adjective dismal. In a very fundamental sense all science is dismal, and one is not justified in thus specifically picking on political economy; the only question would be which science is the most dismal, and this question might start a considerable argument. The connection between wisdom and sadness is more or less proverbial; who cares to look through a microscope at his cheese and beer, or the complexion of his dear. ‘Tis distance lends enchantment to the view; and love is blind; he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.1 The poet and the preacher have always seen that science is dismal, that joy is based on illusion and knowledge means disenchantment, and have been wise in fighting the advancement of science, which they have done ever since an early member of their tribe blamed human curiosity with the fall from bliss and the first introduction of evil into the world. “Knowledge of good and evil! Knowledge of good lost and evil got!” as Milton makes Adam say. It will be worthwhile looking a little at this general proposition of the dismalness of science before inquiring into the narrower question of the dismalness of political economy in comparison to other claimants for the use of the superlative. It happens to be the writer's daily toil to look at this science through the microscope as it were, and yet in spite of this special advantage for seeing its dreary aspects and the beauties of its competitors, it is not clear at once that the palm should be awarded precipitately to political economy. We should insist on something much larger than a fig-leaf at least for physiology, and are reminded that Nietzsche thought physics “intolerable.”2
Contemporary sociologists implicitly assume or explicitly state that classical social theorists shared the Enlightenment’s optimistic vision that society would become more…
Abstract
Purpose
Contemporary sociologists implicitly assume or explicitly state that classical social theorists shared the Enlightenment’s optimistic vision that society would become more rational, free, ethical, and just overtime. I reexamine the primary works that laid the foundation for sociology and resituate them in their neo-Romantic origins.
Design/methodology/approach
Close readings of formative texts are provided to revisit modernist critiques of social progress in turn of the century sociology. The works of Ferdinand Tönnies, Thorstein Veblen, Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber exemplify this tradition.
Findings
Insights from social theory written during and around the neo-Romantic period mirrored the Zeitgeist, a time fascinated with irrationality, moral decay, unconsciousness, decadence, degeneration, cynicism, historical decline, and pessimism. However, classical sociology’s pessimism should not be interpreted as anti-modern. Rather, it contributed to the Enlightenment’s maturation.
Research limitations/implications
Contemporary sociologists should recover the spirit of classical sociology’s gloomy extension of the modern project and bring societal processes to consciousness through human reason, untainted by the fable of progress. Without rational grounds for optimism, the most honest and sincere way to preserve the hope for alternatives and emancipation is through the continuation and advancement of the pessimistic tradition. To formulate new disillusioned theories of society, sociology ought to draw from its ignored tragic legacy.
Originality/value
Rather than accept accounts of classical sociologists as believers in progress, the tradition reveals a world of increasing disenchantment, atomization, anomie, alienation, confusion, quarrel, rationalization devoid of value, and unhappiness. Providing society thoughtful, systematic accounts of its own estrangement advances the project of modernity.
Details