An experiment using ICT to investigate pure voting power

We present an experiment to evaluate the accuracy of power indices by measuring the political power embodied in blocks of votes per se. The experiment incorporates several players interacting in lCT chat rooms under supervision. The chat rooms and the selection process reduce or eliminate other political forces leaving logroIIing as the primary political force.

A preliminary examination of public opinion in Australia on the use of biometric devices or identifiers in everyday life

Since the September 11,2001 terrorist attacks in New York City, many countries including Australia have been able to justify the use of biometric devices for identification and surveillance of their own citizens and others in the name of national security.

This paper reports on the preliminary findings of a survey that examined Australians' views and experiences with the use of biometric devices in everyday situations in the context of their potential to serve as a 'Panopticon' to keep the nation's citizenry under surveillance. It discusses the adoption of the new communication technology from the point of view of the Justification model that sees technology choice as social
gambling and the pluralist view of technology that sees technology as neutral in itself but as having negative or positive effects on society based on how It is used.

The paper proposes the need for Australian society to balance citizens' right to privacy and civil liberties with the right to stay alive and safe from terrorism and how it may be done with the necessary legal and regulator)' safeguards.

Functionalism, co-operation, good faith, and the making of the "daily-preventive justice" in contract law theory and practice. A contribution to a rational understanding of good faith and to its future reseasonable developments. Evaluations from

The thoughts and observations contained in this paper were first presented in a preliminary form at the Staff Seminar that I gave at the University of Cape Town (UCT) - Department of Private Law, on Tuesday May 8 2012. The organizers generously offered me a free choice of subject. Such an offer always poses a problem to imaginative people like myself. I finally chose as my subject the role of good faith in contract law theory and practice and then entitled the Seminar “Good Faith & Contracts - Brothers in Arms”. The aim of the talk was to briefly describe what I see behind the doctrine of good faith (and, more broadly, behind the general course of the parties’ behavior before and after the conclusion of an agreement), to then explain the need of its protection and future reasonable developments by challenging the limitations of both traditional and current legal approaches to contract law theory and practice. By adopting a comparative modus investigandi, it emerged that especially in the area of contract law a new law-finding process is emerging in the European continent and it is leading to re-conceive the meta-national legislative interventions by challenging the limits of Hobbes’s Leviathan. As asserted, we ought to not take this process for granted because although there are many forms of social organization, contract is the most pervasive and the law of contract still is the most important vehicle to support and supplement private arrangements. However, the point of departure for theorizing about private law is based on experience. Consequently, despite the growing emphasis on the convergence of national legal systems in Europe, conducting research on private law theory and practice requires that imagination and creativity be matched with prudence. Proficiency has to be aligned with what we have learned from history.

Excess and mimesis in organization theory: emancipation from within?

In organizational analysis it can be argued that 'radical separatism'—in the guise of the original 'agenda' for Radical Organization Theory (see Benson, 1977a; Burrell and Morgan, 1979; Clegg and Dunkerley, 1980) or more recently that for Critical Management Studies (see Alvesson and Willmott, 1992; Fournier and Grey, 2000; Casey, 2002; Grey, 2004)—has failed to breach the hegemony of functionalist orthodoxy, and notably so when it comes to practice. Given this failure, we speculate, upon the potential for a different emancipatory approach, one based theoretically on the fluid process of 'undecidability'. Unusually our approach attempts to undermine the conventions of functionalist organization theory from within. In brief, we speculate upon the adoption and enactment of Luce Irigaray's (1985, 1991) strategy of mimicry as a means to illuminate the notion of 'excess' in organization theory. To liberate the feminine, Irigaray mimics the symbolic representation of the female body to excess so as to expose the contradictions of phallocentric discourse. When applied to organization theory, this sees a deliberate mimicking of critiques of radical separatism so as to make explicit the latter's imprisonment within functionalism. Through excessive mimicking of the functionalists' critique, the radical/critical organization theorist may become cognizant of, but perhaps not so subjugated by, the hegemony of functionalist discourse.