Broader Social Discourses Research Articles

At Home in Singaporean Sitcoms

At Home in Singaporean Sitcoms

“It Is Love”

This article investigates the Lewis Carroll Society of Great Britain, suggesting parallels between popular media fandom and the “high cultural” literary society: the need for community, the obsession with close reading, the pleasures of pilgrimage, and the importance of defending the chosen text from criticism. However, the Lewis Carroll Society diverges from popular fandom in its comparatively greater cultural power, its potential to guide meanings in broader social discourse, and its blurring of the lines between amateur and academic publishing. Through these points of sameness and difference, it offers new insight into practices common to both popular and high cultural fandom.

Reception, Identity, and the Global Village

Reception, Identity, and the Global Village

Air canada vs. canadi>n: competition and merger in the framing of airline culture*

This paper is concerned with airlines, metaphors and organizational cultures. Specifically the paper seeks to answer the question, ‘why, when so many political and economic commentators are agreed that Canada has only room for one viable airline, has it proven impossible to merge the country's two main commercial airlines?’ To answer the question we draw upon Jenkin's (1994) critical historiographic approach, focusing on the development of the organizational cultures and associated discourses of each airline over time. In the process the paper traces the metaphorical use of the concept of competition in the development of the commercial airline business in Canada. We conclude that the culture of an organization may not, of itself, be enough to explain certain organizational outcomes (e.g., a failure to form a merger or alliance) - particularly organizations that are, in large part, dependent on broad policy concerns, but that broader social discourses (e.g., government policy), mediated by specific organizational cultures, may be the major influence.

Learning the language of the market: Information systems strategy formation in a UK district health authority

In this paper we seek to show that the process of strategy formation may be viewed at four different “levels,” that of strategic resources, of the strategy process, of the discourse of strategy and of broader social discourses. The mainstream strategy literature addressed only the first of these. Processual approaches to strategy research extend the analysis to consider the second level, but have recently been criticized as neglecting the role of strategy as a form of social discourse. Explanations at the third level address the specific power effects of this discourse and its role in constituting the subjectivity of strategic actors and the problems to which it is applied. We also suggest, however, that strategic discourse may itself be considered a part of the broader social discourses of entrepreneurialism and managerialism. A case study of information systems strategy formation in the UK National Health Service is used to illustrate this argument and to show that the strategy process may be seen as involving learning in terms of each of the perspectives.

Lawyers, Liberalism, and Procedure: The German Imperial Justice Laws of 1877–79

AlthoughFranz Schnabel described the nineteenth century as the “century of the formalRechtsstaat,” most political and social historians of the GermanKaiserreichhave paid surprisingly little attention to the legal aspect of the development of society and polity. Textbooks in German history contain only brief mention of the enactment of legal reforms, either naming them without comment or subsuming them under administrative initiatives of the National Liberal party. More importantly, even standard works on the history of liberalism give precious little space to the important legislative reforms that are the focus of this essay; James J. Sheehan devotes only a paragraph to the adoption of the Imperial Justice Laws of 1877–79, and Dieter Langewiesche stresses the importance of legal unity and these reforms to liberals, but also in only one paragraph. In general, historians of German liberalism have left efforts to examine the development and unification of the German legal system after 1848 to legal historians, who are housed in Germany in the separate legal faculties and focus their work primarily on the history of legal doctrine. By failing to examine law as a historical artifact, however, political and social historians have also overlooked the Weberian message that law is a crucial analytical entry point into any understanding of modem society. Contemporary legal scholars stress that legal and social systems are inextricably intertwined, and that neither can be understood without a grasp of the other. Understanding legal discourse helps historians understand broader social discourse.