A Better Modernity Is Possible

This article mainly elaborates the relations between Russia and the West during and after the Cold War. Both sides saw each other as a security threat during the Cold War. After 1990s when the Soviet Union collapsed, this antagonistic relation ended for a short period. Once Vladimir Putin came to power, Russia once again revealed security concerns in the post-Soviet space. The iconic symbol of this concern was the Colour Revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine. The Kremlin saw the Revolutions as a Western threat to Russia’s identity formation in the region. On the other hand, the West saw the Revolutions as a call for democratic liberation for the peoples of the region. Hence, this study looks deeply into both sides of concerns about the Revolutions through the concepts of identity politics and security concerns.

A friend of mine once tried to capture the feeling that one gets from a new thing. He decided that there was no word to describe the sensation of having an unblemished eraser when you were in primary school, but nevertheless it produced a kind of fascinating awe in the apparent perfection of the new. A similar feeling captures the new car owner in smelling the interior's recently minted plastic. Used car dealers would doubtless love to bottle that smell because it produces the momentary pleasure of new ownership. And I am sure there are certain people who are addicted to that smell, and go test drive new cars with no intention of buying just for the experience of the "new" smell. New clothes produce that same sensation: most of us ignore the label which says "wash before wearing" because we want to experience the incredible stiff tactile sensation of a new shirt. My friend called this gle-gle, and it is a pervasive relationship to New in a variety of guises. New implies two kinds of objects or practices: it implies either the replacement of the old or it points to the emergence of something that has not existed before. In both cases, new always heralds change and has the potential for social or cultural transformation. As a result, popular writers and ad copy editors often link new with revolution. For example, the advent of the computer was seen to be revolutionary. Similarly a new detergent which worked in cold water promised cataclysmic change in the 1960s. But these promises of revolution through some innovation have not necessarily led to massive social upheaval; rather they have identified a discursive trope of contemporary culture which links new with rejuvenation. The claim that something is new is the mantra of modernity and the kitsch of the postmodern. This double-play of the concept of the new is best untangled through thinking how a once new object becomes the contemporary way of expressing the former hope of progress and change -- with raised and knowing eyebrow. I recently stumbled into one of these double-plays. While searching for bedding for yet another birthday slumber party, I picked up an old mattress which still had its 1950s label, where it proudly announced that the cushioning was the wonderful new revolutionary foam system called the Dunlopillo. The Dunlopillo system was certainly trademarked and no doubt patented for its then unique system of troughs and cones of army green foam; but in its current incarnation the foam was weak and the bed easily crumpled in half. All that was left of the sentiment of newness was the label, which in its graphics expressed the necessary connection to science as the future, and authoritative zeal in its seriousness of its revolutionary potential. But seen from 1998, the claims seemed bombastic and beautifully optimistic. Modernity's relationship to the new is to celebrate the potential for change. It is a cultural project that has enveloped the sentiments of capitalism and socialism from their origins in the 18th and 19th centuries, and manifested itself in what Schudson labelled "capitalist realism" in advertising, and what is known as socialist realism as a state-sanctioned artistic movement in the Soviet Union. Both representations provided their systems with the capacity to repaint the cultural canvas with each new product such as Dunlopillo, or in the Soviet system with each new five-year productivity plan for the collective. Maintaining the unity of the cultural project was a challenge to each system's representational regime; sustaining the power of the new as a revolutionary force is the fundamental link between capitalist and socialist systems throughout the twentieth century. These representational regimes were in fact connected to the production of new phenomena, new materials, new social formations. However, the message of the new has gradually weakened over the last thirty years. Think of the way in which the Space Race produced all sorts of new technologies of computing, calculation and the integration of electronics into the running of the automobile. It also produced the breakfast orange-juice substitute, 'Tang'. Indeed, the first advertisements for Tang intoned that it was the drink that astronauts enjoyed in space. Tang and its flavour crystals provided the ultimate form of efficiency and convenience, and provided a clear link between the highly ideologically driven space program and the everyday lives of citizens of the "free" world. In the 60s and 70s the link between the general project of modernity and improving everyday life was made evidently clear every time you added water to your Tang flavour crystals. One has to ask: where is Tang today? Not only is it difficult to find in my supermarket, but even if it were available it would not operate as the same representation of progress and the project of modernity. Instead, it would have little more than a nostalgic -- or, kitsch -- hold on a generation that has seen too many representations of the new and too many attempts at indicating improvement. The decay of the cultural power of the new is clearly linked to consumer culture's dependence on and overuse of the concept. The entire century has been enveloped by an accelerating pattern of symbolic change. Symbolic change is not necessarily the same as the futurologist Toffler claiming that we are in a constant state of "future shock"; rather it is much more the introduction of new designs as if there were not only transformed designs, but fundamentally transformed products. This perpetually 'new' is a feature of the fashion industry as it works toward seasonal transformation. Toothbrushes have also been the object of this design therapy, which produces both continual change over the last twenty years, and claims of new revolutionary designs. Central to this notion of symbolic change is advertising. Advertising plays with the hopes and desires of its audience by providing the contradictory symbolic materiality of progressive change. The cultural and political power of the new is the symbolic terrain that advertising has mined to present its "images of well-being". What one can now detect in the circulation of advertising is at least two responses to the decay of the power of the new. First, instead of advertising invoking the wonders of science and its technological offspring providing you with something revolutionary, advertising has moved increasingly towards personal transformation, echoing the 30-year-old self-help, self-discovery book industry. In Australia, GM-Holden's Barina television ads provide a typical example. No technical detail about the car is given in the ads, but a great deal of information --- via the singing, the superimposed dancers, and the graphics employed -- signifies that the car is designed for the young female driver. Symbolically, the car is transformed into a new space of feminine subjectivity. Second, advertising plays with the cynicism of the cognoscenti. If the new itself can no longer work to signify genuine change and improvement in contemporary culture, it is instead represented as a changed attitude to the contemporary world that only a particular demographic will actually comprehend. The level of sophistication in reading the new as a cultural phenomenon by advertisers (or by proxy, their agencies) is sometimes astounding. A recent Coca-Cola radio ad played with a singing style of ennui and anger that embodied punk, but only as punk has been reinvented in the mid-90s through such groups as Green Day. The lyrics were identical to the rest of the "Always Coca-Cola" campaign that has been circulating internationally for the last five years; however, the cynicism of the singers, the bare tunefulness, and even the use of a popular culture icon such as Coke as the object of a song (and ridicule), tries to capture a particular new cultural moment with a different audience. Advertising as a cultural discourse on its own expresses a malaise within the transforming promise of the new that has been so much a part of modernity. However, the myths of modernity -- its clear association with social progress -- have never completely dissipated. In contemporary culture, it has fallen on new computer technologies to keep the ember of modernity and progress glowing. Over the last two decades the personal computer has maintained the naiveté of the new that was central to mid-twentieth century advertising, if not post-war culture in general. Very much like the Space Race stitched together an ideological weave that connected the populace to the interests of what Eisenhower first described as a military-industrial complex, the computer has ignited a new generation of optimism. It has been appropriated by governments from Singapore and Malaysia (think of the Multimedia Super Corridor) to the United States (think of Vice President Al Gore's NII) as the rescue package for the organisation of capitalism. Through Microsoft's hegemony there is a sense of c

Revolution simultaneously legitimises and denies the coordinate centre of the political order of Modernity. It is difficult to describe the historical evolution from the early industrial, class-national forms of political organisation to late or global Modernity other than in terms of a low-intensity revolution in the rate of social change. On the other hand, this permanent modernisation is not revolutionary in the sense that the periodic splits of elites, colour revolutions, coups and national liberation movements do not in and of themselves make demands for fundamental change in the value-institutional core of the political order of Modernity. The potential for a new revolution can be consequent only on a repudiation of Modernity in favour of an alternative political project having a greater capability for universalisation and totalisation. If, in legitimising its liberal consensus and nation-state models as the dominant political format of their synthesis, capitalism is the value-institutional quintessence of the political order of Modernity, it is precisely in challenges to capitalism, the liberal consensus and nationalism that provide the most obvious means for crystallising revolutionary movements. From such a perspective, capitalism increasingly comes up against the global limits of its expansion, with class ideologies degenerating into a fragmented, technologically intermediated populism, and nation-states experiencing increasing pressure from alternative political formats (city networks, multinational corporations, etc.) as they attempt to preserve the model of the social state. While various discourses and social groups profess to play the role of revolutionary utopias and subjects, in essence, their ability to present a totalising alternative to late Modernity remains an open question. A utopian systemic challenge to Modernity, connected with a morally more justified configuration and associated hierarchy of legitimate violence, is yet to emerge, whether from within Modernity or some source external to it. It is demonstrated that in the long term a serious (and possibly revolutionary) correction of the political order of modern societies will be capable of producing a rental transformation of capitalism and an expansion of the rent-class stratification mechanisms associated with precarisation, along with a reduction of social mobility trajectories and the prospects of active social groups.

The purpose of this study is to explain the conflict between Russia and the West through the phenomenon of strategic culture. The article identifies two opposing types of strategic culture: realist and liberal. In societies where both the population and elites feel an internal or external threat to their existence, a realist strategic culture tends to prevail. In the absence of such threats, a liberal strategic culture develops. Interaction between states with opposing strategic cultures is fraught with challenges such as deadlocks in dialogue due to incompatible fundamental values, misunderstandings, and aberrant decoding of signals from the counterpart. Russia’s strategic culture is predominantly realist, while the strategic culture of the West is largely liberal, albeit with elements of realism. The results of the study indicate that Russia’s realist strategic culture clashes with the liberal strategic culture of Western countries, leading to divergent positions on key issues such as the preferred structure of the international system, interpretations of “color revolutions,” NATO open door policy, and the emergence of aberrant decoding effects in discussions on Russia’s spheres of influence and domestic policy, and NATO’s eastward expansion. The study suggests that a complete resolution of the contradictions in foreign policy values and perceptions is possible only through a transformation of the strategic culture of one or both sides, which would require changes in socio-economic and geopolitical conditions.

The aim of the proposed research is to analyze the works of Russian specialists devoted to the issue of color revolutions. The authors state that the overthrow of S. Milosevic as a result of the first such “revolution” in Serbia in 2000 was not promptly reflected in Russian historiography, and that issue really became relevant only after the orange revolution in Ukraine. In general, for a series of color revolutions in the post-Soviet space in 2003–2005 Russian science responded with a series of articles in which researchers, mainly based on the political science concepts of transitology and democratization, focused on the analysis of the internal causes and prerequisites for regime change in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. Since then, the understanding of color revolutions in Russian scientific discourse has evolved significantly, serious monographs have appeared, touching upon various aspects of that geopolitical phenomenon. In the course of the analysis of the most significant scientific articles and monographs, the authors of the article come to the conclusion that at the moment Russian scientific view has accumulated a significant amount of knowledge in the field of studying color revolutions, but the possibilities for further development of the direction in Russia are far from exhausted.

In his 1934 essay, "The Author as Producer," Walter Benjamin discusses the fraught relationship between ideology and aesthetics—between "tendency" and "quality" in literature—and asserts that there is a direct correlation between "politically correct tendency" and "literary quality." 1 According to Benjamin, an author must recognize that his or her work serves "certain class interests"; the "more advanced type of writer" recognizes this choice and chooses to side with the proletariat (768). But it is not enough to pass through a "revolutionary development" in one's attitude toward contemporary relations of production: the author must become a producer—who rethinks his own work, his relation to the literary means of production, in a "really revolutionary way" (772). His mission, like that of the Soviet writer and photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Tretiakov, is not merely "to report, but to struggle; not to play the spectator but to intervene actively" (770). Quoting Brecht, Benjamin explains that such an author should no longer focus on individual experience, [End Page 816] but should work toward the transformation of institutions and of the "productive apparatus" of literature (774). In fact, this cultural transformation was already well underway at the time: as Benjamin writes, "we are in the midst of a mighty recasting of literary forms, a melting down in which many of the opposites in which we have been used to think may lose their force" (771). Citing examples from journalism, photography, music, and theater, Benjamin traces the current, ongoing evolution of new, hybrid genres, cast from the "molten mass" of traditional forms and a concordant "literarization" of life. 2 One desired outcome of this evolution is the revision of the relationship between author and reader.

County Governments in Kenya were established to decentralize governance and enhance the delivery of public services, development projects, and equitable resource distribution. Despite these objectives, several counties continue to register low employee performance, often attributed to limited cultural transformation. This study examined the relationship between cultural transformation and employee performance in Kenyan County Governments. Anchored on the Resource-Based View (RBV) theory, the study adopted a cross-sectional and correlational research design. The target population comprised 470 County Executive Committee (CEC) members, from which a sample of 216 was selected using stratified sampling techniques. Primary data were collected through structured questionnaires, and instrument validity was ensured through expert review. Reliability testing yielded a Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of 0.735, indicating acceptable internal consistency. Descriptive statistics (mean and standard deviation) were used to summarize the data, while simple linear regression analysis was employed to test the study objective. Findings revealed that cultural transformation had a significant positive effect on employee performance (β = 0.589, p < 0.05), indicating that a unit increase in cultural transformation is associated with a 58.8% improvement in employee performance. The study concludes that fostering a culture of innovation, digital readiness, and adaptive leadership is essential for enhancing employee productivity and achieving public service effectiveness. It recommends that County Governments prioritize cultural transformation initiatives that promote a shift from legacy practices inherited from the National Government toward more agile, citizen-centric, and innovation-driven cultures. Keywords: Cultural Transformation, Employee Performance, Resource-Based View Theory, Cross-Sectional Design, Correlational Research Design, Kenya.

Misty G. Anderson. Imagining Methodism in 18th-Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief & Borders of Self. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012. 296 + xii pages. $65.Misty Anderson's study of how Methodism was represented in eighteenth century, Imagining Methodism in 18th-Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief & Borders of Self, opens up her subject into broad historical narratives about gender, sexuality, relationship between Christianity and secular, and, indeed, very nature of identity itself, all without losing its grounding in dense, evidential detail drawn from a dazzling array of diverse sources. In book, close readings work dialectically with important theoretical and political concepts instead of being driven and constrained by them. While focused on answering a very specific question-not what Methodism was but how Methodism was imagined in eighteenth century-Anderson's analysis of print texts from novel to hymn, of visual representations, and of embodied performances presents new ways of thinking about just religion but also gender, sexuality, and such bedrock modern concepts as the self. This is a book with its telos in any one theoretical camp or subdivision of cultural studies, though it has its roots in many. Imagining Methodism starts with an openeyed, honest interest in figuring out what Methodism and Methodists meant to eighteenth-century British publics and individuals. In process of that investigation, Anderson contributes invaluable, field-changing insight to queer, feminist, materialist, and performance-oriented work on early modern Britain and its place in history of the modern.Of course, as introduction amply documents, Anderson's focus on Methodism is hardly random but rather places her book in midst of historical debates over social relationships between various types of Christianity and alleged secularism emergent with European Enlightenment. There is a real need for good, historical, materialist work in this area. As Anderson points out, work of Marxist cultural historians such as E. P. Thompson and Max Weber tends to subsume religion into capitalist ideology as the Protestant ethic while Marxist literary critics like Ian Watt edge it out of their readings altogether to focus on an emergent, secularly motivated middle class and its realist aesthetic. Much otherwise excellent work in literary and historical cultural studies has been limited by this implicit alignment between secularism and progressive politics. Anderson joins cultural critics who are skeptical about dominance of skepticism by taking seriously proposition that Methodism, largest new religious movement in period and at heart of modern evangelicalism, might be intrinsic to our understanding of eighteenth-century culture and its active negotiation of religion in 'a secular age,' which redefines rather than destroys modern belief (6). This is to say that Anderson embraces religion over secularism as key to understanding formation of modern identities. As she puts her argument, it is not that secular and religious capture complete horizon of possibility in project of modernity, but that their opposition achieves a cultural dominance that defines era (11).The concept of self is central to Anderson's cultural analysis, a turn back to an older term and away from well-theorized, post-structuralist preference for subjectivity. Of course, Anderson has strong methodological backup in Dror Wahrman's The Making of Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England on historical formation of modern gender identities, but her choice is primarily historical; she takes her definition of term back to John Locke's conscious, thinking thing, individual consciousness. The Lockean self links this consciousness with sensation, opening itself up to feeling as well as thought. …

The development of „Religionspädagogik“ („Religious Education“) as an independent theological approach is often located in cultural transformations during the era of enlightenment. Apparently, “Religionspädagogik” seems to be a project of modernity and closely linked with the ongoing extension of individuality and subjectivity. Using Michel Foucault’s “concept of discourse” this article deals with the ancient “Gregoriusfest” (St. Gregor’s Day). Celebrated especially in the prospering cities since the 11th/12th century this liturgical and pedagogical practice can be understood as an event which initially shows “The Discovery of the Individual” (C. Morris)

This chapter continues my treatment of the relationship between the idea of modernity and the form of sociological argument, a relationship that arises with the very emergence of sociology as I argued in the previous chapter. With the development of this paradigmatic concern with modernity, the future was no longer seen as being about the reproduction of the present, but was considered to be a space for the further development of projects and trends (Burke 1992). These trends and projects were to be the trends and projects of modernity itself where modernity could also be understood, in Habermas’s (1996) words, as an unfinished project — one that was not yet realized, but could be used as a normative framework to address global processes. The ‘unfinished project’ in general terms, however, is the bringing to fruition of what is already predicated in the Western experience. Ideas of evolution and progress are central to the concern with the future and, for most writers, as I have argued, the history of the West is seen as a precursor of the future of the non-West. In this chapter, I will address theories of modernization and the recent idea of multiple modernities, which is argued by its proponents to escape the Eurocentrism that is finally allowed to be a characteristic of modernization theory.KeywordsIdeal TypeModernization TheoryTraditional SocietyMental ConstructModern InstitutionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Ecological Civilization and the New Enlightenment

This article reviews recent literature on indigenous people and the legal systems in colonial Mexico and the Andes, with special emphasis on legal engagement as a form of politics and the making of legal culture. Through mastery of alphabetic writing systems, literacy, and Spanish language, native peoples used colonial courts as an arena in which to resolve conflict within and among Indian municipalities, and with Spanish officials, both civil and ecclesiastical. In this way, the legal system facilitated the negotiation of colonial rule, including the growth and transformation of legal institutions and practices, and the relationship between Indian and Spanish jurisdictions. The legal system also provided an arena for cultural encounter in which Spanish and native forms of law and knowledge were circulated and constructed. Scholarship on these topics is growing fast, putting ethnohistory into an exciting dialogue with comparative studies of law and empire.

The role of school headteachers/principals has evolved significantly, particularly as the demand for high performing schools has become a political imperative globally and so the question of how educational leaders should be educated is a central concern. However, this question of the development of educational leaders is contentious because the nature of professional learning is itself complex, particularly the relationship between leadership development and practice in schools. This chapter examines one specific area of leadership development, that of headship preparation. There is, as Davies, S. et al. (School leadership study: Developing successful principals, Stanford Educational Leadership Institute, Stanford, 2005) argue, only limited evidence about how to prepare and develop school leadership or headship and the role and scope of educational leadership continues to evolve. The chapter considers how this relationship between leadership and learning (Macbeath, J. and Dempster, N., Connecting leadership and learning: Principles for practice, Routledge, London, 2009) might best be forged in headship/principalship preparation programmes. Approaches to leadership development can be characterised as three broad models: apprenticeship models, knowledge-based programmes and experiential learning programmes. This chapter begins by examining critically a number of different approaches to the development of leadership in education. Then the chapter sets one educational system – that of Scotland, UK – as a case study and draws from a number of recent research and development projects on headship preparation. In this final section the discussion focuses on the tension between individual transformation and institutional transformation and the construction and place of knowledge in the preparation of headteachers/principals.

Sustainability in higher education is dominated by practical ‘greening the campus’ programs and initiatives. This paper examines sustainable university research and development projects as part of the ‘greening the campus’ spectrum, yet distinct in their specific holistic and scientific orientation. Sustainable university projects seek institutional transformation in strategic and systematic ways; they perceive universities as open, dynamic systems capable of learning and change. Within this system, the two interlocking subsystems of academia and operations provide many leverage points for sustainable development; when utilized together, synergies for sustainability in higher education emerge which may quicken whole‐systems transformation. Sustainable university research and development not only describes and monitors such opportunities and processes of institutional transformation, it also directs institutional development toward a more sustainable university.

Europe's demography has significantly changed in the last decade with older adults (defined here as those aged 65 years or more) in the EU-27, rising from 90.5 million at the start of 2019 to reach 129.8 million by 2050. The ageing population is driving significant transformations in culture, institutions, and communities.