Search results

This paper explores diverse practices of the giving and demanding of democratic accountability within a case of conflict around deep-sea petroleum exploration in Aotearoa New Zealand. These practices include submissions and consultations, partnership between Indigenous Peoples and a settler-colonial government and dissensus. These are theorised through the political thought of Jacques Rancière.

A single case study approach is employed that seeks to particularise and draws on interview, documentary and media materials.

By examining a case of conflict, the authors find that as opportunities for participation in democratic accountability processes are eroded, political dissensus emerges to demand parts in the accountability process. Dissensus creates counter forums within a wider understanding of democratic accountability. In this case, individuals and organisations move between police (where hierarchy counts those with a part) and politics (exercised when this hierarchy is disrupted by dissensus) to demand parts as police logics become more and less democratic. These parts are then utilised towards particular interests, but in this case to also create additional parts for those with none.

This study privileges demands for accountability through dissensus as fundamental to democratic accountability, rather than just account giving and receiving. That is, who is or who is not included – who has a stake or a part – is crucial in a broader understanding of democratic accountability. This provides democratic accountability with a radical potential for creating change. The study also advances thinking on democratic accountability by drawing from Indigenous perspectives and experiences in a settler-colonial context.

Contradictory accounts in empirical material are often perceived as deliberate “lies” or “misleading deceptions” performed in acts of impression management, or they are simply neglected. When observed in the material collected empirically, methods have been developed in order to identify and remove them from the analytical work. The purpose of this paper is to re-visit and re-introduce a dissensus-based management research strategy in order to analytically be able to work with what appear to be contradictions and misinformation in qualitative research accounts, and give them a more profound role in the understanding of management ideas, work and practices.

A literature review is presented on consensus and dissensus orientated theories on contradictions and multiple and conflicting identities in a single individual in an ethnographic inquiry. The purpose is to analyse and reflect upon the contradictory information gathered, and how it can shed light upon important aspects of the management work and practices performed by the informant. This is done by focusing on apparent contradictions in a single interview situation from an ethnographic case study through, respectively a consensus and a dissensus perspective.

The findings indicate that dealing with contradictions and inner conflicts between self-view and external demands and conditions, led the informant to the production of multiple narrative self-identities imaging multiple realities that all appeared real to the informant. Each of these realities had different and contradictory impacts on the ideas and management work and practices he presented and performed in the organisation. These findings challenge the notions of “lies”, “deception” and “misinformation” in management research, and call for a more reflexive approach to analysis work in ethnographic accounts.

By applying consensus and dissensus-oriented theories to a single account the authors point to conditions, phenomena and relations, which most current and historic management research streams fail to see. Multiple and conflicting identities surface in a single respondent during an interview situation, creating clearly self-contradictory and conflicting narratives and practices, that all appear to be oblivious to the respondent. These multiple and contradictory narrative identities all have significant impact on the management work performed by the respondent.

Handler's genealogy of postmodernism recounted in his address recognizes its origin in aesthetic disciplines and its somewhat viral transcription into social jurisprudence: “the postmodern concept of subversion developed first in language and literary theory, art, and architecture and then spread into politics and law” (1992a, p. 698). Although Handler's rejection of deconstruction stems from what he sees to be its political quiescence, its association with aesthetic critiques of modernism haunts his claims as one source of its essential conservatism. Aesthetic values, he implies, remain distant or distinct from pressing issues of political and social inequality.

Most theories and strategies of educational change are based on organizational models which assume a high level of goal consensus among organizational members. Current developments in organizational theory suggest that the degree of goal consensus within many organizations may be problematic. This study explores the implications of goal dissensus for the process of educational innovation. An intensive case study was made of the introduction of a four day teaching week into a Western Canadian high school. Particular attention was paid to the perceptions held by school staff concerning the objectives of the innovation; the patterns of communication, involvement and social relationships among the staff; and the interrelationship between the two classes of phenomena. In conclusion, the study questions the universal appropriateness of innovation strategies based on a rational problem‐solving theory of change, and suggests some implications of goal dissensus for administrators attempting to introduce change.

Drawing from televised debates over capital punishment on CNN’s Crossfire from February 2000 to June 2002, I argue that Teles’s (1998) theory of “dissensus politics” is useful in understanding the U.S.’s preservation of capital punishment as well as current divisions in death penalty sentiment within the U.S. I pose the retention of capital punishment as the product of rival elites who are unwilling to forsake capital punishment’s moral character (and often the political benefits it offers), and who consequently ignore an American public that appears to have reached a measured consensus of doubt about the death penalty.

Sterilization is endorsed as a method of family planning by international governmental organizations; abortion is not. Focusing on policy development for these two issues in a single country, Peru, we ask how power and inequality operate under conditions of global consensus or dissensus. The case of sterilization unfolded the way many previous research studies would predict, with Peruvian state actions corresponding to a global diffusion process. We find that global consensus provided cover for top-down actions that violated the human rights of indigenous women in the country, who were predominantly poor, non-Spanish speakers, and residents of the mountainous, sparsely populated parts of the country. With respect to abortion in Peru, in the absence of global consensus, the state resisted calls for change, advocacy networks have worked at cross-purposes, and a powerful local actor, the Catholic Church, has effectively blocked liberalization efforts. As with sterilization, however, marginalized indigenous women and their interests were rendered invisible.

The purpose of this paper is to report the findings of research which explores how the concept qualitative management research is variably constructed and defined by those who have a direct interest in, and influence upon, important aspects of qualitative management research.

Information was gathered through the use of semi‐structured interviews conducted with 44 individuals who were drawn from four observer‐identified types of “expert” informant who were taken to generally represent key groups of stakeholders in the conduct, evaluation and dissemination of qualitative management research. Interview data from these individuals were analysed though an iterative process using the NVivo software package to inductively generate definitional categories and explore aspects of their interrelationships.

From data analysis it was apparent that there are eight different, but often interrelated, ways in which interviewees define qualitative management research. The philosophical dimensions of each of these variable definitions are outlined and their relationships to the methodological literature are explored. The variety identified amongst informants, indicates how there is a potential dissensus possible regarding what qualitative management research might entail, as well as regarding its provenance and its academic status. This dissensus potentially can create problems with regard to its evaluation.

So whist there is little evidence to suggest any systematic relationship between the variable institutional backgrounds of informants and how they variably define and perceive qualitative management research, philosophical influences upon this contested terrain are explored and the implications of the identified dissensus for how qualitative management research is perceived and evaluated is discussed. The implications of this evidently contested terrain are discussed with particular reference to the future constitution of qualitative management research and its evaluation.

The purpose of this paper is to show that the wide acknowledgement of the association between innovation and economic and social development and of the importance of innovation policies has formed a kind of “misty consensus” hardly contested in Brazil. However, the innovation policies adopted in the country lack an institutional framework to support their implementation, marking what is called in this paper a “messy dissensus”.

It is argued that the reasons why the science, technology and innovation (ST&I) policies have failed to contribute more effectively increasing Brazilian technological efforts have less to do with the policies themselves and more to do with their detachment from the institutional framework used to implement them.

It is shown that this institutional framework: (i) is barely adherent to the perception of the systemic nature of the innovation process; (ii) does not create enough incentives for bureaucrats in public institutions to allocate resources in the industrial sector; (iii) encourages the pulverization of resources and the consequent loss of focus, which may reduce the efficiency of the adopted policies; (iv) encourages the replication of models and priorities usually adopted in contexts that fail to match the Brazilian reality.

In this paper, the focus is on the obstacles that undermine the potential of ST&I policies to contribute more effectively to the improvement of the Brazilian innovation indicators. It is argued that these obstacles have less to do with the innovation policies themselves and more to do with their detachment from the institutional framework used to implement them. This institutional framework includes not only the formal and legal rules but also informal social norms that govern individual behavior and structure social interactions.

The paper aims to examine the potential feminist politics of teaching: is there a clear connection between feminism and teaching, and is there a particular feminist way of teaching? Through notions of engaged political pedagogy (as developed by bell hooks Jacques Rancière), it proposes an intersectional and dissensual approach to teaching, as a primary way of practising feminist politics within academia.

The paper sets out to explore the possibility of a feminist pedagogy of teaching. Drawing on works by social and feminists theorists as well as by radical pedagogues, it negotiates these various standpoints, finding similarities and differences, in order to formulate ways in which we can more fruitfully conceive of teaching as politics.

The paper proposes that the classroom proves one of the most radical spaces for possibility within academia. Through an engaged, dissensual pedagogy, in which both students and teachers work together in mutual recognition of each other's knowledge, the feminist teacher can enthuse political change both within and outside of the classroom.

Teaching is often viewed as a less important part of academic work. This paper, in contrast, proposes the classroom as one of the spaces where we as feminist academics can have the most impact. Providing a theoretical methodology of a potential feminist teaching pedagogy, this paper adds a well‐needed exploration of the relation between teaching and feminism, and a defence of teaching as politics.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the exercise of administrative authority to suspend the Muslim Student Association (MSA), an affinity group at a suburban Midwestern high school, was experienced and perceived by affected students. Notably, it traces the mobilization of the MSA students to challenge the principal’s authority through formal channels within the district to reopen the affinity group. In doing so, the students’ activism represents an example of dissensus, or mode of political engagement that challenges top-down models of fostering equity and diversity in schools.

The data are drawn from a nine-month ethnographic case study at an inner-ring suburban school in a large Midwestern metropolitan area. Data include participant observation of classrooms and affinity group meetings, semi-structured individual and group interviews, informal conversation and analytical memos synthesizing ethnographic fieldnotes.

Though the school and district have made different investments in strengthening equity and diversity at the school, transnational and minoritized Muslim students report a school climate that is characterized by exclusion and racialized surveillance. The principal’s decision to suspend the MSA was characterized by a narrow understanding of the purpose of the group and the identities of the student members. The decision to suspend the MSA, however, produced conditions centering the agentive potential of marginalized and minoritized students.

This paper opens up the tensions challenges of incorporating student voice into educational decision making. Notably, it highlights important possibilities for political action students when their voices cannot or will not be heard by those who make decisions on their behalf.