Changing the rules in use? An examination of social enterprise in local governance

As multi-stakeholder entities that explicitly inhabit both social and economic domains, social enterprises pose new challenges and possibilities for local governance. In this paper, we draw on new institutional theory to examine the ways in which locally-focused social enterprises disrupt path dependencies and rules in use within local government. Rather than examining the more commonly asked question of the influence of the state on social enterprise, our purpose here is to examine the impacts of social enterprise on governmental institutions at the local level. Our discussion is based on a mixed-methods study, including an online survey of 66 local government staff, document analysis, and in-depth interviews with 24 social enterprise practitioners and local government actors working to support social enterprise development in Victoria, Australia. We find that, in some instances, the hybrid nature of social enterprise facilitates ‘joining up’ between different functional areas of local government. Beyond organisational relationships, social enterprise also influences local governance through the reinterpretation and regeneration of institutionalised public spaces.

Deceit and Bruno Taut's Glashaus

The historical context surrounding Bruno Taut's Glashaus has been established through work of authors like Reyner Banham, Dennis Sharp and Ian Boyd-Whyte. However, these English language translations, are mostly derived from secondary sources such as Adolf Behne and Paul Scheerbart. Surprisingly, Taut's own writings largely do not feature in this prevailing account of his work. Since 1990, strong doubts have arisen about this conventional picture of Taut's Glashaus. Manfred spiedel, for instance, minimizes Paul Scheerbart's contribution to the design by arguing that Scheerbart met Taut only a few months before the construction of the Glashaus, that is, after Taut had finished his preliminary sketches. Kurt Junghanns goes further and asserts that the Glashaus design was complete beefore Taut and Scheerbart ever met. In 2005, Kai Gutschow published The Culture of Criticism: Adolf Behne and the Development of Modern Architecture in Germany, 1910 - 1914. Most startling, Gutschow asserts that Behne acts as the propagandist for the Glashaus by fabricating its link with Expressionism. This is particularly troubling because nobody contributed more to establishing the link between the Glashaus, Bruno Taut and Expressionism than Behne. As a result of this new evidence, this paper concurs that the established historical understanding of the Glashaus is flawed. By returning to Taut's own writings, a reinterpretation can be offered that strongly links the Glashaus to the Victoria regia lily and Strasbourg Cathedral. The significance of this approach is that it re-establishes Taut's own rational behind the design of the Glashaus, and thus contributes to the re-evaluation of the generally accepted histories of the Modern movement.

Maroochydore House

The reinvention of existing housing stock to suit current and future needs within the suburban beachside context was the contextual background for this project. Adaptation, consolidation, understanding and reinterpretation of existing and potential architectural possibilities were demonstrated in this work to enhance the discussion and perceptions of value through enhancement of the existing suburban fabric.

Client intentions and Bruno Taut’s Glashaus

An often overlooked aspect concerning the Glashaus is the significant influence exerted by the client in the design of the building. In an intentional endeavour to create an exhibition pavilion that best showcased their glazed products and construction technologies, the German Luxfer Prism Syndicate both commissioned and majority financed the Glashaus. It would therefore seem strange that the official histories of the Glashaus would rather record the utopian, romanticised and arguably imagined intentions of Bruno Taut as the architect, as opposed to the reality of the client’s intentions. This paper offers a reinterpretation of the Glashaus from the perspective of German Luxfer Prism Syndicate. This reinterpretation is achieved through an investigation that primarily concentrates on the glazed areas of the Glashaus where the German Luxfer Prism Syndicates products were most evident. Using the arguments initially presented by Dietrich Neumann as a foundation, this research is additionally interwoven with inquiry into diverse aspects such as patents filed by the Luxfer group of companies and a close examination of the original black and white photographs of the Glashaus. A dramatically different understanding emerges when the Glashaus is argued from the perspective of the client; an understanding that is cold, hard and commercial as opposed to utopian and romanticised. As a result, this research makes a contribution to the current debate concerning the Glashaus and the re-evaluation of the histories of the modern movement.

Resilient Maroochydore 2029 : Urban Design Futures

Resilient Maroochydore 2029 This exhibition showcases the work of 4th year undergraduate Landscape Architecture students in response to issues of sustainability in Maroochydore on the Queensland Sunshine coast. The projects comprising this exhibition all investigate possible design futures for the Maroochydore Centre, in the light of a series of new disturbance scenarios. Specific disturbances upon the landscape have been imagined, and design resolutions developed based on resilience to these disturbances. The proposals investigate how the Maroochydore Centre might respond to these scenarios, and how future components of the Centre might be designed for greater ‘resilience’. The Exhibition Five groups of students (32 in total) produced five strategic planning and design options toward this future: Team Transect: “What happens to a region following a sustained period of economic prosperity, with affordable property and negligible unemployment? This proposal investigates the effects on a community of massive population explosion, land shortages and inadequate planning regulations following an extended boom period.” The Foodfighters: “This proposal considers the scenario of massive food shortages and of escalating prices, and the possibility of government intervention to stabilise food supply. Strategies based upon simplified, collaborative approaches to food production are investigated.” The TTMKG: “This proposal explores the scenario of Peak Oil and the subsequent effects on society of homelessness, large scale unemployment, food shortages and global financial and political instability. Individual opportunities are restricted by the limitations of bicycle transportation.” Team Peak: “Peak Oil has restricted private vehicle transport to only the most wealthy, while public transport systems are under immense pressure. Rising unemployment drives localised trade initiatives, and the global import/export market has collapsed. This proposal considers the transition of a community from its position in a global economy to that of a relocalised economy, where basic needs are secured as close to home as possible.” After the City: “A rapid population decline as a result of the region’s failing economy has resulted in a fragmented urban fabric. This proposal investigates the possibility of new suburbanisation, reinterpretation and reinvention of space through phased processes.”

Feature overlap slows lexical selection: Evidence from the picture–word interference paradigm

How does the presence of a categorically related word influence picture naming latencies? In order to test competitive and noncompetitive accounts of lexical selection in spoken word production, we employed the picture–word interference (PWI) paradigm to investigate how conceptual feature overlap influences naming latencies when distractors are category coordinates of the target picture. Mahon et al. (2007. Lexical selection is not by competition: A reinterpretation of semantic interference and facilitation effects in the picture-word interference paradigm. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33(3), 503–535. doi:10.1037/0278-7393.33.3.503) reported that semantically close distractors (e.g., zebra) facilitated target picture naming latencies (e.g., HORSE) compared to far distractors (e.g., whale). We failed to replicate a facilitation effect for within-category close versus far target–distractor pairings using near-identical materials based on feature production norms, instead obtaining reliably larger interference effects (Experiments 1 and 2). The interference effect did not show a monotonic increase across multiple levels of within-category semantic distance, although there was evidence of a linear trend when unrelated distractors were included in analyses (Experiment 2). Our results show that semantic interference in PWI is greater for semantically close than for far category coordinate relations, reflecting the extent of conceptual feature overlap between target and distractor. These findings are consistent with the assumptions of prominent competitive lexical selection models of speech production.

After virtue and accounting ethics

Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue presented a reinterpretation of Aristotelian virtue ethics that is contrasted with the emotivism of modern moral discourse, and provides a moral scheme that can enable a rediscovery and reimagination of a more coherent morality. Since After Virtue’s publication, this scheme has been applied to a variety of activities and occupations, and has been influential in the development of research in accounting ethics. Through a ‘close’ reading of chapters 14 and 15 of After Virtue this paper considers and applies the key concepts of practices, institutions, internal and external goods, the narrative unity of a human life and tradition, and the virtues associated with these concepts. It contributes, firstly, by providing a more accurate and comprehensive application of MacIntyre’s scheme to accounting than available in the existing literature. Secondly, it identifies areas in which MacIntyre’s scheme supports the existing approach to professional accounting ethics as articulated by the various International Federation of Accountants pronouncements as well as areas in which it provides a critique and challenge to this approach. The application ultimately provides an alternative philosophical perspective through which accounting can be examined and further research into accounting ethics pursued.

Developing an evolutionary/ecological approach in enterprise education

This paper presents an ecological/evolutionary approach to enterprise education. Ecological approaches are used at the University of Tasmania to heighten the awareness of students to a raft of difficult to observe environmental factors associated with developing enterprising ideas. At Sheffield University, the discovery and exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities is viewed as a co-evolving system of emerging business ideas, and routines/heuristics respectively. It is argued that using both approaches enables students to develop a greater awareness of their situated environment, and ultimately the degree of fit between their learning process and a changing external world. The authors argue that in order to improve the chances of longer-term survival what is needed is a new level of organisation where the individual is capable of developing a representation of the external world that he or she can use to sense the appropriateness of local decisions. This reinterpretation of events allows individuals to step back and examine the broader consequences of their actions through the interpretation and anticipation of feedback from the environment. These approaches thus seek to develop practice-based heuristics which individuals can use to make sense of their lived experiences, as they learn to evolve in an increasingly complex world.

Reconstituting identity and history in post-war Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina

This paper by Carl Grodach demonstrates the careful unravelling of complexity, diversity, contestation and contradictions involved in the reconstruction of symbolic urban spaces after violent conflict, and the allied processes of cultural reinterpretation, political reconfiguration and material revaluation which accompany it. The paper analyses the reconstruction and redevelopment of the 16th-century historic centre of Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina, following the Bosnian Wars of 1992–1995. Reconstruction efforts centre around Stari Most, the 16th-century Ottoman bridge destroyed by Bosnian Croat military in 1993. In Mostar, both international and local organizations are in the process of reinterpreting Bosnia’s legacy of Ottoman city spaces. This research and analysis illuminates how such spaces can be central to contemporary projects to redefine group identities and conceptions of place. It provides insight into the ways various groups are attempting to reshape outside perceptions of the city—and Bosnia’s ethnic conflict—to articulate a new definition of local identity and ethnic relations and to remake a stable tourist economy through Mostar’s urban spaces.