Directing democracy : competing interests and contested terrain in the John Lewis Partnership

The John Lewis Partnership is one of Europe’s largest models of employee ownership and has been operating a form of employee involvement and participation since its formation in 1929. It is frequently held up as a model of best practice (Cathcart, 2013) and has been described as a ‘workers’ paradise’ (Stummer and Lacey, 2001). At the beginning of 2012, the Deputy Prime Minister of the UK unveiled plans to create a ‘John Lewis Economy’ (Wintour, 2012). As John Lewis is being positioned at the heart of political and media discussions in the UK about alternatives to the corporate capitalist model of enterprise, it is vital that more is known about the experience of employee involvement and participation within the organisation. This article explores the ways in which the practice of employee involvement and participation has changed in John Lewis as a result of competing employee and managerial interests. Its contribution is a contemporary exploration of participation in the John Lewis Partnership and an examination of the ways in which management and employees contested the meaning and practice of employee involvement and participation as part of a ‘democracy project’, which culminated in significant changes and degeneration of the democratic structures.

Getting published — and cited in entrepreneurship : reflections on ten papers

I grew up in academic heaven. At least for me it was. Not only was Sweden in the late 1980s paradise for any kind of empirical research, with rich and high-quality business statistics being made available to researchers without them having to sign away their lives; 70+ percent response rates achieved in mail surveys to almost any group (if you knew how to do them), and boards of directors opening their doors to more qualitatively orientated researchers to sit in during their meetings. In addition, I perceived an environment with a very high degree of academic freedom, letting me do whatever I found interesting and important. I’m sure for others it was sheer hell, with very unclear career paths and rules of the game. Career progression (something which rarely entered my mind) meant that you tried as best you could and then you put all your work – reports, books, book chapters, conference papers, maybe even published articles – in a box and had some external committee of professors look at it. If you were lucky they liked what they saw for whatever reasons their professorial wisdom dictated, and you got hired or promoted. If you were not so lucky you wouldn’t get the job or the promotion, without quite knowing why. So people could easily imagine an old boys club – whose members were themselves largely unproven in international, peer review publishing – picking whoever they wanted by whatever criteria they choose to apply. Neither the fact that assessors were external nor the presence of an appeals system might have completely appeased your suspicious and skeptical mind, considering the balance of power.

Application of GIS in understanding and communicating interaction between environmental parameters and sewer blockages

Sewer main chokes (blockages) are a key performance indicator for Australian water utilities. Blockages caused by tree roots often result in wastewater overflow posing an environmental and health risk and also requiring service interruptions to repair asset. The purpose of the research project outlined in this paper was to understand the role of environmental parameters, in particular soil type and tree density, in determining the propensity of a sewer to become blocked. The paper demonstrates the application of spatial analysis to inform and communicate the results of the analysis. GIS was used to explore the relationship between tree density and previously recorded sewer blockages for a Melbourne utility. Initial results from the research reveal a relationship between increased tree densities and occurrence of sewer blockages. An improved understanding of the influence of environmental parameters on the inherent risk of sewer blockage will enable asset managers to identify those assets requiring proactive management in order to minimise service interruptions, repairs and environmental impacts.

Architecture in the South Pacific : the Ocean of Islands

Architecture in the South Pacific: The Ocean of Islands recounts the recent developments of the South Pacific and its fascinating architecture. This volume traces the European architectural overlay onto this scattered group of islands as well as the transition of these same islands towards a regional identity that has been fashioned by the remoteness of each location, the incomparable setting, and the distinctive ethnic mix of its inhabitants. A series of themed essays present the story of architectural development in the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji, Wallis and Futuna, Tonga, the Cook Islands, Samoa and American Samoa, and French Polynesia. Recent architecture typifies the evolution of the islands as they have been subjected to the transformative waves of alien trade, religion, colonization, war and tourism, followed by post-colonialism and revived nationalism. As with the Pacific region itself, the most prominent characteristic of the architecture is its diversity. The blending of the universal and the local sets the stage for a fresh vision of the South Pacific across a wide range of building types, from spectacular mission churches to sensational resorts in paradise. This book, in full colour, will appeal to architects, armchair-tourists, students and all those for whom the South Pacific is the idyll of their dreams.

From Catch Up to Innovation: A History of occupational Health and Safety Regulation in Queensland

From Queensland’s inception as a self-governing colony in December 1859 the issue of labour relations has preoccupied governments and shaped the experiences of its working men and women. However, despite the often turbulent nature of labour relations in Queensland there has, prior to this book, been no attempt to provide an overview of the system as a whole. This important addition to Queensland’s sesquicentenary celebrations redresses this failure, looking at the diverse range of experiences that, together, made up a unique system of labour relations – including those of employers, women workers, indigenous workers, unions, the Queensland Industrial Relations Commission, labour law, industrial disputation, the workings of health and safety system and life in regional areas. It is argued that, overall, Queensland’s system of industrial regulation was central to its economic and social development. Despite past emphasis on the large-scale strikes that periodically raked the state this book finds that consensus normally prevailed.

"Four Ways of Writing the City" : St. Petersburg-Leningrad as a Metaphor in the Poetry of Joseph Brodsky

The present study discusses the theme of St. Petersburg-Leningrad in Joseph Brodsky's verse works. The chosen approach to the evolving im-age of the city in Brodsky's poetry is through four metaphors: St. Petersburg as "the common place" of the Petersburg Text, St. Petersburg as "Paradise and/or Hell", St. Petersburg as "a Utopian City" and St. Petersburg as "a Void". This examination of the city-image focusses on the aspects of space and time as basic categories underlying the poet's poetic world view. The method used is close reading, with an emphasis on semantical interpretation. The material consists of eighteen poems dating from 1958 to 1994. Apart from investigating the spatio-temporal features, the study focusses on exposing and analysing the allusions in the scrutinised works to other texts from Russian and Western belles lettres. Terminology (introduced by Bakhtin and Yury Lotman, among others) concerning the poetics of space in literature is employed in the present study. Conceptions originating from the paradigm of possible worlds are also used in elucidating the position of fictional and actual chronotopes and heroes in Brodsky's poetry. Brodsky's image of his native city is imbued with intertextual linkings. Through reminiscences of the "Divine Comedy" and Russian modernists, the city is paralleled with Dante's "lost and accursed" Florence, as well as with the lost St. Petersburg of Mandel'shtam and Akhmatova. His city-image is related to the Petersburg myth in Russian literature through their common themes of death and separation as well as through the merging of actual realia with the fictional worlds of the Petersburg Text. In his later poems, when his view of the city is that of an exiled poet, the city begins to lose its actual world referents, turning into a mental realm which is no longer connected to any particular geographical location or historical time. It is placed outside time. The native city as the homeland in its entirety is replaced by another existence created in language.

A Decentralized Session Management Framework for Heterogeneous Ad-Hoc and Fixed Networks

Wireless technologies are continuously evolving. Second generation cellular networks have gained worldwide acceptance. Wireless LANs are commonly deployed in corporations or university campuses, and their diffusion in public hotspots is growing. Third generation cellular systems are yet to affirm everywhere; still, there is an impressive amount of research ongoing for deploying beyond 3G systems. These new wireless technologies combine the characteristics of WLAN based and cellular networks to provide increased bandwidth. The common direction where all the efforts in wireless technologies are headed is towards an IP-based communication. Telephony services have been the killer application for cellular systems; their evolution to packet-switched networks is a natural path. Effective IP telephony signaling protocols, such as the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and the H 323 protocol are needed to establish IP-based telephony sessions. However, IP telephony is just one service example of IP-based communication. IP-based multimedia sessions are expected to become popular and offer a wider range of communication capabilities than pure telephony. In order to conjoin the advances of the future wireless technologies with the potential of IP-based multimedia communication, the next step would be to obtain ubiquitous communication capabilities. According to this vision, people must be able to communicate also when no support from an infrastructured network is available, needed or desired. In order to achieve ubiquitous communication, end devices must integrate all the capabilities necessary for IP-based distributed and decentralized communication. Such capabilities are currently missing. For example, it is not possible to utilize native IP telephony signaling protocols in a totally decentralized way. This dissertation presents a solution for deploying the SIP protocol in a decentralized fashion without support of infrastructure servers. The proposed solution is mainly designed to fit the needs of decentralized mobile environments, and can be applied to small scale ad-hoc networks or also bigger networks with hundreds of nodes. A framework allowing discovery of SIP users in ad-hoc networks and the establishment of SIP sessions among them, in a fully distributed and secure way, is described and evaluated. Security support allows ad-hoc users to authenticate the sender of a message, and to verify the integrity of a received message. The distributed session management framework has been extended in order to achieve interoperability with the Internet, and the native Internet applications. With limited extensions to the SIP protocol, we have designed and experimentally validated a SIP gateway allowing SIP signaling between ad-hoc networks with private addressing space and native SIP applications in the Internet. The design is completed by an application level relay that permits instant messaging sessions to be established in heterogeneous environments. The resulting framework constitutes a flexible and effective approach for the pervasive deployment of real time applications.

Das paradies in der politik ein kapitel negativer kosmologie

Abstract: The idea of a “paradise in politics” is an answer to the cosmogonic- anthropogonic problem that, through their bodies, the life of human beings has been shaped politically from the very beginning: all creation is a creation of bodies and bodies are power. All creation, furthermore, means separation, it emerges through a multiplicity of things and beings only. The conventional solution for the problem, in the realm of human beings, consists in forming societies out of a multiplicity of indivuals that remains as such. The solution of a “paradise in politics”, however, envisions a “healing” of creation through a bodily transmutation by which a world of bodies emerges that is freed from the problem of bodies: separation, power. The article discusses the negative cosmology with which all tales on a paradise in politics start. It shows the essential role of phantasy in the constitution of these tales, and elucidates the principal structural elements through which visions of a paradise in politics are built. A special attention is given to the parallelism between these visions and known religious thought, as in the case of the concepts of apokatastasis or perichoresis, for instance. Methodically, the article achieves a demonstration of its subject by an extensive presentation and analysis of two case studies: Rousseau’s vision of a “terrestrial paradise” and the attempt at “bodily redemption” put on the stage in 1968-69 by the “Living Theatre” Group with its performance “Paradise Now”.

¿Actores o consumidores de imágenes?

Revista con LCC: Reconocimiento – NoComercial – SinObraDerivada (by-nc-nd)

Que paraíso é esse?: a turismização da Ilha Grande

A Ilha Grande (Angra dos Reis, RJ) apresenta dois acontecimentos que marcam a história recente do lugar: a instituição de leis ambientais com a criação de quatro unidades de conservação da natureza (entre 1971 e 1990); e a intensificação do fluxo turístico após a implosão do Instituto Penal Cândido Mendes - IPCM (1994), que marcou o fim de cerca de 100 anos de um sistema penitenciário. A Ilha, sempre associada às belezas naturais e à ideia de paraíso, a partir desse momento, deixa de ser referida como o paraíso-inferno e passa a ser reconhecida predominantemente pelas potencialidades paisagísticas, voltando-se para o turismo, que se torna um componente central da vida no lugar. Reconstituindo a trajetória do turismo na Ilha, e considerando o quadro atual das atividades turísticas (a partir da minha participação em fóruns para discussão e resolução dos problemas da Ilha, de pesquisa em jornais, e de entrevistas com moradores e participantes desses fóruns), mostro os significados e visões sobre o paraíso Ilha Grande e o turismo o que se tem e o se quer , tanto no nível dos discursos e das representações, quanto no nível das práticas e das relações sociais instituídas. Revela-se aí um campo de disputa entre diferentes atores sociais com interesses diversos para salvar e explorar a Ilha Grande; onde a natureza e o turismo se apresentam como dois elementos utilizados como estratégias para sobrevivência de grande parte da população e como estratégia política do poder público; um paraíso marcado pelo turismo e um paraíso para o turismo. Faço uma leitura da ocorrência e das implicações do turismo na Ilha Grande através da ideia de turismização, em analogia com o pensamento de Norbert Elias sobre processo civilizador e de J. S. Leite Lopes sobre ambientalização, e reconhecendo o diálogo e os embates entre o processo turismizador e o processo ambientalizador na Ilha Grande.

Caio no abismo do paraíso: o gênero romanesco e a ficção autobiográfica em Os dragões não conhecem o paraíso, de Caio Fernando Abreu

Seguindo a ideia exposta por Caio Fernando Abreu em nota introdutória presente em todas as edições de Os dragões não conhecem o paraíso de que o livro pode ser lido não apenas como um exemplar de contos, mas também como um romance-móbile (ou espatifado) e considerando que, por meio do conhecimento de dados biográficos de um escritor, é possível construir a biografia de um escritor através de sua obra, a presente dissertação busca analisar Os dragões não conhecem o paraíso sob a ótica de uma nova perspectiva de leitura, entendendo o livro como um romance de ficção autobiográfica e formação