An ethical turn in African mining: voluntary regulation through fair trade

In recent decades there has been an ethical turn in expectations of how African mineral production and trade should be conducted. Good labour conditions, the absence of conflict and mining’s potential for securing economic, social and environmental benefits are being demanded in the jewellery trade. As a consequence the quality of precious and semi-precious metals and gemstones is now being judged on their ethical credentials in addition to their aesthetic and mineral qualities. Mineral production for industrial manufacture, particularly in the electronics industry, is also coming under scrutiny. Adding value through ethics is closely associated with the use of voluntary (non-state) regulation. This includes standards and associated certification and labels, which have been widely adopted by the minerals and metals sector in efforts to ensure improvements in the social and environmental conditions of production and to enable access to the profitable and expanding global ‘ethical market’. In this chapter, we focus on ethical trading schemes that incorporate voluntary regulation, by using artisanal gold mining in Tanzania and the sale of gold through international fair trade markets as an exemplar to consider the development dynamics that emerge from ethical schemes.

Anti-Slavic imagery in German radical nationalist discourse at the turn of the twentieth century: a prelude to Nazi ideology?

By applying methods of cognitive metaphor theory, Jaworska examines metaphorical scenarios employed in the discourse of anti-Slavism, which featured prominently in radical nationalist propaganda in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century. She does so by analysing metaphorical expressions used to refer to the Polish population living in the eastern provinces of Prussia, in the so-called Ostmark. Her article is based on an analysis of a range of pamphlets and newspaper articles written by some of the leading figures of two nationalist organizations: the Pan-German League (Alldeutscher Verband) and the Eastern Marches Society(Ostmarkenverein). The main research questions it addresses are: What kind of metaphoric scenarios were used to depict the Polish minority, and to what extent were the metaphorical patterns of anti-Slavic imagery similar to those employed in the antisemitic propaganda of the Nazi era? Is there a discursive continuity between the radical nationalism of imperial Germany and the National Socialism of the Third Reich at the level of metaphorical scenarios? Ultimately, Jaworska attempts to contribute to a better understanding of the cognitive mechanisms underlying radical and essentially racist attitudes.

Ethical turn in international development

The ethical turn in international development relates to a tendency to question the deleterious impact of international development action on local populations and environment. As a consequence, new courses of action are proposed in order to generate socially just and environmentally sustainable global change. This tendency is most prominent in relation to the development impacts of globalization of production and trade but also appears across a wide range of development sectors.

The calculative turn in land value capture: lessons from the English planning system

For over three decades, negotiated planning obligations have been the primary form of land value capture in England. Diffusing and evolving over the last decade, a significant policy innovation has been the use of financial calculations to estimate the extent to which policies on planning obligations for actual, proposed development projects and in plan making affect the financial viability of development. This paper assesses the extent to which the use of financial appraisals has provided a robust, just and practical procedure to support land value capture. It is concluded that development viability appraisals are saturated with intrinsic uncertainty and that land value capture that is based on such calculations is, to some extent, capricious. In addition, clear incentives for developers and land owners to bias viability calculations, the economic dependence of many viability consultants on developers and land owners, a lack of transparency, contested or ambiguous guidance and the opportunities created by input uncertainty for bias are further failings. It is argued that how viability calculations are applied has been, is being and will continue to be shaped by power relations.

Can experiential learning improve emotional intelligence and can that, in turn, improve the work performance of middle managers?

A group of middle managers in the Australian arm of a large Global company participated in a program of experiential leadership training over a period of one year. One aim of the program was increased interpersonal skills and awareness. Change was measured using a mixed quantitative and qualitative longitudinal design. Pre and post-training measures of emotional intelligence were obtained using the EIQ (Dulewicz & Higgs, 2000) and compared with content analysis of journals kept by participants during the program. The dependent variable was measured by pre and post training measures of work performance. Findings are discussed in terms of their implications for management development as well as for further research.

Kant, or the crack in the universal : Slavoj Zizek's politicising the transcendental turn

This paper examines Slavoj Zizek’s reading of Immanuel Kant. Its undergirding argument is that Zizek’s work as a whole- up to and including his politically radical statements, which have become more and more prominent since 1997- is conceivable as a project in the rereading of the Kantian ‘Copernican Revolution’ via Lacanian psychoanalysis. Critics now agree that Zizek’s orienting aim is to write a philosophy of politics, as more recent texts, like The Ticklish Subject make clear. (Kay, 2003; Sharpe, 2004; Dean 2006) If Zizek’s philosophy is ultimately a philosophy of politics, however, Zizek’s political philosophy is grounded in a wider post or ‘neo’-Kantian philosophy of subjectivity.
The essay has three major parts. Part I gives Zizek’s reading of Kant on the subject of apperception. Part II recounts Zizek’s pivotal reading of Kant on the sublime, which he ties closely to the problematics of the ‘Transcendental Dialectic’ of the first Critique. Part III then examines Zizek’s conception of subjectivity in terms of the faculties (and especially the faculty of imagination) that Kant argues are involved in the transcendental constitution of objects in the first half of The Critique of Pure Reason.
In the Conclusion, the force of the paper’s subtitle—‘Politicising the Transcendental Turn’—will become manifest. I lay out three principles of Zizek’s ‘neoKantian/Hegelian’ ontology. These also make clear how his philosophy of political agency is grounded in this apparently suprapolitical or solely philosophical reading of Kant.

New world orders and the dystopian turn : transforming visions of territoriality and belonging in recent Australian children's fiction

Through the 1990s and into the new millennium, Australian children's literature responded to a conservative turn epitomised by the Howard government and to new world order imperatives of democracy, the market economy, globalisation, and the IT revolution. These responses are evidenced in the ways that children's fiction speaks to the problematics of representation and cultural identity and to possible outcomes of devastating historical and recent catastrophes. Consequently, Australian children's fiction in recent years has been marked by a dystopian turn. Through an examination of a selection of Australian children's fiction published between 1995 and 2003, this paper interrogates the ways in which hope and warning are reworked in narratives that address notions of memory and forgetting, place and belonging. We argue that these tales serve cautionary purposes, opening the way for social critique, and that they incorporate utopian traces of a transformed vision for a future Australia. The focus texts for this discussion are: Secrets of Walden Rising (Allan Baillie, 1996), Red Heart (Victor Kelleher, 2001), Deucalian (Brian Caswell, 1995), and Boys of Blood and BOlle (David Metzenthen, 2003).

Only Agamben can save us? Against the messianic turn recently adopted in critical theory

In this paper, I offer a strong criticism of Giorgio Agamben’s recent political texts. I argue that these texts bring to fruition a larger, contentious trend in the theoretical academy coupling one-dimensional, pessimistic accounts of modernity with strands of messianism. Since the political prospects of messianism, as Agamben’s analyses show, are very thin indeed, I reflectively question the presuppositions that lead him to this prescriptive juncture. In Part I, recurring to Scholem’s classic analyses of Jewish messianism, I show how Agamben’s messianism borrows more or less directly (in The Open) from kabalistic, antinomian, utopian messianism. Having established this exegetical point, I argue two theses in parts II and III. The first, specifically theoretical thesis is that Agamben is driven into his political messianism by the transcendental logic of his analyses of ‘the political’, one which by its nature occludes meaningfully political distinctions by instead seeking out their ontological grounds. The second, specifically political thesis is that the widespread embrace of ontological messianism by thinkers in the post-Marxian academy is a symptom of, rather than a cure for, the wider malaise of the political left in the first world. If critical theory is serious about engaging with progressive praxis, one thing it must do is recall the difference between politics and prima philosophia, so that it does not continue to seek out ‘redemption’ – or at least an apology – in the bowels of the latter.