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Since its emergence as a field of study, law and society scholarship has grown to encompass an array of disciplines, perspectives, methods, and political orientations. A consequence of this disciplinary hypostatization has been to produce a scholarly goulash which, while at times nourishing, now faces the dual dangers of institutional fracture and intellectual incoherence. The aim of this essay is to map a way to embrace the eclecticism that characterizes the field and yet avoid the dangers of dilettantism and to cultivate the interdisciplinarity its founders envisioned without sacrificing a sense of shared purpose or abandoning the possibility of collectively producing a better understanding of law.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the internal historical forces that shaped national identity in New Zealand and how state-sponsored ideographs and cultural narratives, played out in nation branding, government–public relations activity, film and the literature, contributed to the rise of present days’ racism and hostility towards non-Pakeha constructions of New Zealand’s self-imagining.

The paper takes a cultural materialist approach, coupled with postcolonial perspectives, to build an empirical framework to analyse specific historical texts and artefacts that were supported and promoted by the New Zealand Government at the point of decolonisation. Traditional constructions of cultural nationalism, communicated through state-sponsored advertising, public information films and national literature, are challenged and re-evaluated in the context of race, gender and socio-economic status.

A total of three major groupings or themes were identified: crew, core and counterdiscourse cultures that each projected a different construction of New Zealand’s national identity. These interwoven themes produced a wider interpretation of identity than traditional cultural nationalist constructions allowed, still contributing to exclusionary formations of identity that alienated non-Pakeha New Zealanders and encouraged racism and intolerance.

The research study is empirical in nature and belongs to a larger project looking at a range of Pakeha constructions of identity. The article itself does not therefore fully consider Maori constructions of New Zealand’s identity.

The focus on combining cultural materialism, postcolonial approaches to analysis and counterdiscourse in order to analyse historical national narrative provides a unique perspective on the forces that contribute to racism and intolerance in New Zealand’s society. The framework developed can be used to evaluate the historical government communications activity and to better understand how nation branding leads to the exclusion of minority communities.

Academic freedom is often constrained by self-censorship. Measurement of this constraint is difficult because it is often unconscious, so it is useful to explore the underlying motivations. Greater-good arguments are an important motivator of self-censorship. Humans are social creatures who fear being accused of harming the greater good. When a scholar’s findings conflict with a paradigm alleged to serve the greater good, self-censorship is tempting. However, the greater good is not necessarily served by paradigms that invoke it. Discrepant data often lead to truths that a dominant paradigm obscures. Thus, the greater good is better served by a free flow of evidence than by conforming to a paradigm that evokes the greater good. This chapter presents an example in the Social Sciences. The paradigm of social harmony in the state of nature appears to serve the greater good, and evidence of aggression in the state of nature is often dismissed. But understanding the conflict in the state of nature can help people manage aggression today. This example can help scholars recognize and transcend the natural tendency to self-censor.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a critical reflection on ideas that have been published in the Journal of Educational Administration over the last 50 years that present perspectives on the nature of educational administration and its various aspects, that are alternatives to the mainstream systems‐scientific view of educational administration.

The paper employs a standard analytic philosophy methodology with a focus on argument structures found in epistemology. The approach is to argue that the content and structure of administrative theories is shaped significantly by background epistemologies that determine the nature and justification of administrative knowledge

Epistemologies for both the traditional systems‐science approach to educational administration and a range of alternatives are identified and specified, and the most characteristic features of these approaches that follow from their epistemologies are described. The paper permits inferences about theory choice, and what approach is best, based on a discussion of the merits of the different epistemologies.

The principal value of the paper is to classify and demonstrate the most general features of the arguments that have been behind the large‐scale theoretical differences in the field of educational administration.

There have recently been considerable changes in the British Chamber of Commerce system, leading to the creation of a network of Approved Chambers and Chambers of Commerce, Training and Enterprise (CCTEs). However, the question of whether British Chambers of Commerce should move further towards the dominant Chamber model of mainland Europe, based on public law status, continues to be debated in academic and practitioner circles. This paper assesses the case for and against such a move, in order to contribute to the understanding of the likely impact of recent changes and possible future reforms to the British Chamber system. Various aspects of British, French and German Chambers are discussed, compared and contrasted in order to consider whether a move to public law status on the part of British Chambers would be in Britain’s best interests.

The recent House of Lords decision in Carmichael v. National Power plc decided that a casual/zero‐hours worker was self‐employed and thus excluded from most of the basic employment statutory rights. The aims of this article are to note the incidence and characteristics of the casual workforce in the UK and EU; to explore the current legal framework applying to casual workers, including the decision and implications of Carmichael; to note recent and intended legal measures which have particular relevance for casual workers; to evaluate the likely effectiveness of those recent or proposed legal measures; and to consider possible alternative strategies to establish an appropriate framework for casuals.

A new international orthodoxy has developed on health sector reform. The dominant theme of the orthodoxy is the alleged benefits of market style reforms for health development. This is shaping changes formulated, and being implemented, in the British NHS and other European health services (including Central and Eastern Europe), Latin America and a number of developing health systems in Africa and Asia. Sets out a ten‐point description of the orthodoxy. Contends that the orthodoxy is showing distinct signs of restricting the analysis and development of health management and planning. This is a matter for considerable concern as the adoption of market‐style reforms can generate unforeseen and, in some cases, negative consequences. There is clearly a need for strengthening management research and development as a basis for effective health sector reform.

In the 1980s and 1990s enthusiasm for Japanese or “lean” manufacturing methods swept through Western industry. At the time, commentators argued that these methods represented a new paradigm of manufacturing, a radical break with traditional methods. The purpose of this paper is to explore the process of conversion from one paradigm to another, drawing on Kuhn's ideas on the structure of scientific revolutions.

The paper uses a critical‐incident approach to illustrate the conversion to, and defence of, a particular view of the world. Two incidents are used. The first is a one‐day seminar by a leading proponent in the field, in which the author acted as a participant observer. The second is the response of the UK engineering community to the publication of a report questioning the financial benefits of Japanese or lean manufacturing methods.

Although the introduction of new management methods is typically justified on rational grounds, this paper argues that, in common with the scientific paradigm shifts identified by Kuhn, enthusiasm for lean methods is based on non‐rational criteria as well as on their apparently superior efficiency. The language used to discussion of lean ideas in the two critical incidents is reminiscent of that used in religious conversions, and the responses to criticism of the methods are analogous to responses to blasphemy in a religious context.

The research is based on analysis of conversion to, and defence of, lean ideas, but it carries implications for many other types of organisational change as well. The findings draw attention to how non‐rational criteria can shape the direction of major programmes of change, and hence the direction and strategies of organisations.

The paper carries implications for the process by which change can be engendered and managed. It identifies the processes by which conversion to new ideas can occur, identifying critical conditions on the part of the purveyors of the ideas (expertness, trustworthiness and personal dynamism) as well as features of the ideas themselves, such as the availability of local demonstrations of applicability, their aesthetic appeal and their ability to predict events and/or solve problems previously considered to be intractable.

The paper represents a novel perspective on processes of organisational change, by likening the process of change to that of scientific revolutions and demonstrating the non‐rational aspects of the change process.

The electronic document and records management system model (EDRMS) served for most of the noughties (the decade from the year 2000) as an orthodoxy that united the records management profession. The purpose of this paper is to address two questions: “Does the stagnation and retreat of the EDRMS model towards the end of the noughties call into doubt the theory that lay behind that model, namely DIRKS and the records continuum?”, and “Is a new records management orthodoxy likely to emerge over the course of the next five years, and if so what form might it take?”.

The paper looks back at the author's readings of DIRKS and the records management continuum at different times over the period 1993‐2010, and links those readings with the prevailing fortunes of the EDRMS model that was build on top of that theory. It gives a personal perspective of a consultant/practitioner on the chances of a new records management orthodoxy arising in the course of the next five years.

The loss of momentum of the EDRMS model does not invalidate the insights of DIRKS and the records continuum. Both frameworks support alternative readings from those that underpinned the EDRMS model. But any future orthodoxy is likely to be less directly derived from theory. One possible future orthodoxy is the “records repository model” – where a business classification scheme is held in a back end system, and applied to content held in the various applications used by colleagues. However this model has not yet received sufficient practitioner attention, and there are unanswered questions as to how it would work in practice.

The paper looks at the ways in which the records management community has used orthodoxies in both theory and implementation models to keep itself united during an extended period of upheaval and change since the commencement of the networked digital age. It outlines the challenge of finding a records management orthodoxy that is both consistent with record keeping theory and also workable and sustainable in the rapidly changing world of enterprise computing.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, a “new orthodoxy” in explaining homelessness had emerged in the field of homeless research. Combining structural and individual factors, the consensus is that people with personal problems are more vulnerable than others to the structural conditions of becoming homeless.

Drawing on a three-year ethnographic study of older homeless people (aged 50 years and above) in Singapore, this chapter highlights three issues with this new orthodoxy. The first is the continued reliance on a strict dichotomy of structural and individual factors. This strict dichotomy does not reflect the realities in people’s lives. The “individual vulnerabilities” of older people in the study had structural dimensions that must be considered as well. The second is the framing of individual vulnerabilities as individual pathologies. This way of framing homelessness results in the assumption that there is something deficient with all people who are homeless that requires correction. Such a view is encapsulated in the compulsory institutionalisation and rehabilitation of rough sleepers in Singapore. The final and most fundamental issue is the problematic association of individual vulnerabilities with one’s heightened risk of becoming homeless. Older people in the study did not become homeless solely because they had more personal problems or issues than others. Rather, multiple pathways (or life events) that encompass both structural and individual factors weakened their ability to draw resources from work, family and friends and government assistance. Homelessness occurred when older people in the study ran out of all these three options.