Language, discourse and politics

After discussing the meaning of the word politics, this paper shows that there are four possible approaches to the issue of the relationships between language, discourse and politics: a) the intrinsic political nature of language; b) the relations of power between discourses and their political dimension; c) the relations of power between languages and the political dimension of their usage and; d) linguistic policies. This paper addresses only the first two of these items. Languages have an intrinsically political nature because they subject their speakers to their order. The acts of silencing operationalized in discourse manifest a relation of power. The spread of discourses in the social space is also subject to the order of power. The use of language may be the space of pertinence, but is also that of exclusion, separation and even the elimination of the other. Therefore, language is not a neutral communication tool, but it is permeated by politics, by power. Because of the dislocations that it produces, literature is a form of swindling language, unveiling the powers that are imprinted on it.

Labour flexibility and gender in the service sector: A study of employment practices in law and accounting firms

In seeking to increase the flexibility of their use of employee time, employers can pursue strategies based on the employment of casual and part-time workers (numerical flexibility) or strategies based on ad hoc variation of the working hours of permanent employees (working time flexibility). Patterns of flexibility strategies and their implications are examined in the context of a highly feminised sector of work-clerical and administrative employment in law and accounting firms. We consider whether, as is often assumed, working time flexibility strategies are generally better for employees because they avoid the substitution of core, high quality jobs with the peripheral, relatively insecure employment often associated with casualisation. Analysing data drawn from a survey of law and accounting firms, we argue that there are three distinct flexibility strategies adopted by employers, and that the choice of strategy is influenced by the size of the firm and the extent of feminisation. The quality of employment conditions associated with each strategy is investigated through an analysis of the determinants of training provision for clerical and administrative workers. Rather than an expected simple linear relationship between increasing casualisation and decreasing training provision, we find that firm size and feminisation are implicated. Larger firms that tend to employ at least some men and use a combination of working time and numerical flexibility strategies tend to provide more training than the small, more fully feminised firms that tend to opt for either casualisation or working time flexibility strategies. This suggests that, from an employee perspective, working time flexibility may not be as benevolent as is often thought.

Power law and entropy analysis of catastrophic phenomena

Catastrophic events, such as wars and terrorist attacks, tornadoes and hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, floods and landslides, are always accompanied by a large number of casualties. The size distribution of these casualties has separately been shown to follow approximate power law (PL) distributions. In this paper, we analyze the statistical distributions of the number of victims of catastrophic phenomena, in particular, terrorism, and find double PL behavior. This means that the data sets are better approximated by two PLs instead of a single one. We plot the PL parameters, corresponding to several events, and observe an interesting pattern in the charts, where the lines that connect each pair of points defining the double PLs are almost parallel to each other. A complementary data analysis is performed by means of the computation of the entropy. The results reveal relationships hidden in the data that may trigger a future comprehensive explanation of this type of phenomena.

KM and politics at the highest level: an exploratory analysis

This paper analyzes Knowledge Management (KM) as a political activity, made by the great political leaders of the world. We try to inspect if at the macro political level KM is made, and how. The research is interesting because given that we live in a Knowledge society, in the Information Era, it is more or less obvious that the political leaders should also do KM. However we don’t know of any previous study on KM and world leaders and this paper wants to be a first step to fill that gap. As a methodology we use literature review: given this one is a first preliminary study we use data we found in the Internet and other databases like EBSCO. We divide the analysis in two main parts: theoretical ideas first, and an application second. The second part is it self divided in two segments: the past and the present times. We find that rather not surprisingly, KM always was and is pervasive in the activity of the world leaders, and has become more and more diverse has power itself became to be more and more disseminated in the world. The study has the limitation of relying on insights and texts and not on interviews. But we believe it is very interesting to make this kind of analysis and such studies may help improving the democracies in the world.