New rules, no rules, old rules or our rules : women designing mixed-orientation relationships with bisexual men

This chapter draws from an Australian semi-structured interview project with seventy-eight culturally, sexually and geographically diverse women, aged nineteen to sixty-five, who were in monogamous, open and polyamorous marital and de facto relationships with bisexual men, abbreviated as MOREs (mixed-orientation relationships).
For the purposes of this chapter, I will provide an overview of the shifting subjectivities, agency and resistance of those women and their male partners who stated that, without coercion or repression, they undertook processes of ‘designing’ their long-term MOREs.
I wiIl explore what every woman stated as being an essential component of consensually and creatively entering or being in a relationship with a bisexual man: designing, negotiating and maintaining some “ground rules” and “boundaries”.
There appear to be three overall groups of ‘rules’ within which specific ‘designs’ are created:
1. ‘Old Rules’: Monogamy is considered the only workable or desirable rule, and a partner’s inability to adhere to monogamy would mean the end of the relationship.
2. ‘New Rules’: A range of negotiations and design-specifications establish non-monogamous boundaries and operational strategies.
3. ‘Our Rules or His and Her Rules’: Decisions are made regarding to what extent the rules will be equitable to both, or there are separate regulations for each partner.

East and West, past and present: rekindle old principles for new management practices

This paper explores the sayings and stories of the ancient Chinese philosophers Guanzi, Hanfeizi, Xunzi and Yanzi. Their way of ruling the state and managing the people are analysed and discussed in line with thoughts from the mainstream and modern Western management gurus, such as Warren Bennis, Peter Drucker, Mary Parker Follett, Douglas McGregor, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Elton Mayo, and Jeffrey Pfeffer. Striking similarities call for addressing key issues in human resource management. East and west thinkers across 3000 years are identified. The principles-based ruling and management were found difficult to be taken seriously in ancient times as it is today. However, these principles must be rekindled to protect organisations and the world from mischievous behaviour that has caused much human suffering.

Knowledge, spirit, law: book 1: radical scholarship

Knowledge, Spirit, Law is a de facto phenomenology of scholarship in the age of neoliberal capitalism. The eleven essays (plus Appendices) in Book 1: Radical Scholarship cover topics and circle themes related to the problems and crises specific to neoliberal academia, while proposing creative paths around the various obstructions. The obstructions include metrics-obsessed academia, circular and incestuous peer review, digitalization of research as stalking horse for text- and data-mining, and violation by global corporate fiat of Intellectual Property and the Moral Rights of Authors. These issues, while addressed obliquely in the main text, definitively inform the various proscriptive aspects of the essays and, via the Introduction and Appendices, underscore the necessity of developing new-old means to no obvious end in the production of knowledge — that is to say, a return to forms of non-instrumentalized intellectual inquiry. To be developed in two concurrent volumes, Knowledge, Spirit, Law will serve as a “moving and/or shifting anthology” of new forms of expression in humanistic studies. Book 2: The Anti-Capitalist Sublime will be published in Autumn 2016.