Critical Contextualization Research Articles

Shifting cultures: managerialism and the rise of “performance”

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the consequences that followed the introduction of a performance measurement regime that is introduced into a subdivision of an English police force. The police force under consideration is located in a county that covers over 1,500 square miles and envelops areas as diverse as large urban conurbations, small villages and considerable rural expanses.Design/methodology/approachPart of this research utilised semi‐structured interviews to gauge officers' reactions to the new system and the impact on their occupational behaviour.FindingsThe research found widespread resistance to the new system, due to a perception that the performance indicators did not fully reflect the breadth of the officer role. Similarly, evidence emerged to suggest that performance indicators can play a key role in focussing officers' attention on those core behaviours being measured and encouraging presentational and working styles which, whilst satisfying scoring criteria, might, arguably, be deemed inappropriate.Research limitations/implicationsThe research is limited by its focus upon officers working under a pilot project in a solitary subdivision. Further research might seek to draw on the views of larger numbers of officers working under a variety of police performance measurement mechanisms. Such an approach would facilitate the development of guides to best practice in both the formulation and implementation of such regimes and would, conceivably, help overcome officer resistance to such systems.Originality/valueThe paper is original in that acknowledges, and focuses upon, the cultural dynamics of the police officer and uses this approach to chart the challenges of effective implementation of such strategies. As such, the paper should be of interest to middle and senior police managers tasked with implementing effective performance measurement. Furthermore, this paper, although originating from evaluation research, represents a more critical contextualisation of the interviews, which are conducted with officers. In doing so, it seeks to locate the practicalities associated with the introduction of “performance measurement” against the reality of police work.

El docente de hoy en la Universidad Franciscana

This article aims to show the being mode being and should be teachers today in a Franciscan college, but this is critical contextualization with the environment experienced by the university today, and not just stay in this, but while wondering if responding to what is the true ethos of the university in all it means their commitment to society. To the extent that the university teacher discovers the sense of being in college, anger also discovering parallel its mission as such, considering that their commitment is more substance, if the mission is oriented by the Franciscan philosophy and worldview, not it is understood as a stream among others, but primarily as a way to build thought, to create culture, to live life; being fundamental issues: dialogue, brotherhood, freedom, respect for life, healthy relationship between faiths and cultures however different and respect and admiration for all creation

Rhetorical Readings, Dark Comedies, and Shakespeare’s Problem Plays (review)

Reviewed by: Rhetorical Readings, Dark Comedies, and Shakespeare’s Problem Plays Christopher Crosbie Ira Clark. Rhetorical Readings, Dark Comedies, and Shakespeare’s Problem PlaysGainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. Pp. 160. $59.95. Ira Clark’s Rhetorical Readings, Dark Comedies, and Shakespeare’s Problem Plays examines the function of specific rhetorical structures within Measure for Measure, All’s Well That Ends Well, and Troilus and Cressida. Reacting against the “predisposition [in prevailing criticism] to preferred sociopolitical and ideological results” present in readings where there is a “predetermination of confirming conclusions by the method of approach” (2), Clark proffers rhetorical analysis as [End Page 246] a corrective methodology—not simply as a replacement for more theoretically informed readings but rather as a more neutral (and, consequently, for Clark, a more reliable) grounding for readings of all stripes. Clark intends to “embed history within the forms whereas most tend to embed the formal discussions within their histories” (3). This desire to “embed history within the forms” leads to a useful, if brief, overview of rhetorical education in early modern England at the end of the first chapter and to a second chapter that “sets a historical critical context for the formal ones to come” (1). While the historical and critical contextualization signaled in these early chapters rarely reappears in succeeding ones (each essay almost exclusively focuses on one play and its rhetorical devices), Clark’s lucid and accessible review of the criticism would prove useful for the classroom or one seeking an entry point into the problem plays. Beginning his critical review with Alfred Harbage’s Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions, Clark revisits Harbage’s claim that the “public theater” wielded greater influence than the “private theater” in the development of English nationalism (11). Clark rereads Harbage through more recent criticism that situates problem plays within a variegated network of influences (including the rise of satiric city comedy, interest in Continental skepticism, and intensified competition among rival companies during the Poetmachia), and he does so in order to nuance our understanding of the stage’s role in the development of national identity. While this critical survey adds little by way of new insight, it sets up Clark’s reminder that, in some respects, “problem plays succeed history plays in helping determine what constituted England” (19). The complex role of the theaters in the development of English nationalism, however, remains a subtext in Clark’s study, not a principal focus of investigation, since he wishes to “return to a more formal questioning of the predicaments and tensions, resolutions and irresolutions of these dark comedies that were modulating into tragicomedy’s resolving formulae of miraculous grace and forgiveness” (23). This project, Clark signals, is particularly pertinent since “no comprehensive stylistic study of the problem plays yet exists” (23). As part of his effort to provide just such a study, Clark proposes a taxonomy of five particular rhetorical modes characteristic of problem plays. Such plays, Clark avers, remain preoccupied with “a neologistic and polysyllabic diction that collides with a vulgar … punning diction”; “a showy rhetorical high style … generally in verse juxtaposed against an abrupt, jarringly irregular, suggestive colloquial low style customarily in prose”; “a density of figurative language that is involved, mixed, elliptical”; “a frequency of brief satiric characterizations”; and “a high incidence of sententious, analytic, and self-serving proverbs” (23). Although one may reasonably wonder how other plays (perhaps Love’s Labor’s Lost, for instance) might complicate these devices as markers of problem plays, [End Page 247] the schema remains useful for this study and accords well with the satiric, urbane turn of early Jacobean theater outlined by Clark in the first part of his work. In his third chapter, Clark exclusively focuses on chiasmus as a rhetorical device crucial (as it were) to Measure for Measure’s presentation of “social, political, sexual, theological, and legal relationships” (32), a device particularly suited for encouraging yet frustrating engagement with social matters. “Chiasmus,” Clark argues, “lends itself to the expression of problems” yet concomitantly “compels us to measure the intractability of problems” (33). Less concerned with where exactly that leaves us in rethinking the broader cultural implications of Measure for Measure, Clark, after a...

Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon (review)

Reviewed by: Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon Jane Chance Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon, by Brian Rosebury . Basingstoke, England, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. x, 246 pp. $59.95 (hardcover) ISBN 1403915970; $19.95 (trade paperback) ISBN 1403912637. The refusal of some contemporary critics and scholars to confirm the popular assessment of Tolkien as a major modern writer has consistently annoyed Tolkien readers in America and Great Britain over the past twenty-five years. Subsequently, following Tom Shippey's lead in papers and lectures since 1992 and in his J. R. R. Tolkien, Author of the Century (2000), Brian Rosebury attempts to persuade these nay-sayers of Tolkien's writerly eminence once more in Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon, an expanded version of his earlier book Tolkien: A Critical Assessment (1992). In this revised edition, Rosebury's basic argument is not new: he adds to the four shorter chapters of the original (167-page) version of Tolkien: [End Page 262] A Critical Assessment two new chapters, along with a brief critical contextualization on Shippey's assessment of Tolkien as a writer. The first four chapters center (here as in the 1992 version) on the style (chapter 1) and form (chapter 2) of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien's other fiction and poetry (chapter 3), and his biography and his place within the literary pantheon of the twentieth century (chapter 4). Nearly identical to the chapters in the prior edition, these four contain a few added references in the notes to recent publications by Shippey, Verlyn Flieger, and a few other critics. The two new chapters center on Tolkien's range as a thinker (chapter 5) and the reception of The Lord of the Rings (chapter 6), including its filmic adaptations. At the end, Rosebury also supplies a brief recommended reading intended for the general or new reader of the epic. Rosebury's use of Shippey at the beginning of his book is strategic. Although Rosebury praises Shippey's understanding of Tolkien's philological ingenuity, he also acknowledges Shippey's limitation: that such ingenuity "does not in itself demonstrate that the works produced are of high quality" (7). Through this clever deployment of Shippey himself as a red herring, Rosebury then proceeds in the remainder of his book to look at The Lord of the Rings aesthetically, as he previously has looked at modern fiction in Art and Desire: A Study in the Aesthetics of Fiction (1988). However, because The Silmarillion and The History of Middle-earth are posthumously published works—unfinished and often containing immature work—according to Rosebury they simply do not maintain the high quality of style and form found in the major work, as attested by the paucity of reviews and, of those, unfavorable ones (3). The difference between Shippey's and Rosebury's comparison of Tolkien and his peers is that, while Shippey leans toward fantasy as the predominant twentieth-century mode of Tolkien and other writers (particularly George Orwell, William Golding, Kurt Vonnegut, T. H. White, and C. S. Lewis), Rosebury turns instead to the modernists to find aesthetic parallels. Even though Rosebury notes that Tolkien is younger than the modernist principals—for example, James Joyce—Tolkien is older than George Orwell and therefore, Rosebury concludes, in the spirit of anti-modernist social realism, Tolkien seems to belong to the dead war poets or the war survivors Robert Graves and Edmund Blunden. Rosebury's analysis of Tolkien's style, form, and narrative in the best Leavisite fashion—and with comparison to writers such as Proust, Joyce, and Eliot—reaffirms that The Lord of the Rings is a major work. He argues that Tolkien has evolved as an artist from a "derivative archaicism" to a formal narrative design and style accessible to modern readers (147). This archaicism is rooted not so much in medieval literature proper as in a "nineteenth-century romantic antiquarianism" (147). The modernity of Tolkien's epic romance, especially, is witnessed in its parallels with the [End Page 263] novel, its realism, and its non-archaic diction and syntax (147). Rosebury elaborates by example of Tolkien's "derivative archaism" in his earliest poems and fiction (in chapter 3) and through his stylistic and formal...

Avoiding Comfortable Syncretism by Doing Critical Contextualization

Avoiding Comfortable Syncretism by Doing Critical Contextualization

Reabilitação psicossocial no campo da reforma psiquiátrica: uma reflexão sobre o controverso conceito e seus possíveis paradigmas

O texto parte de uma contextualização crítica da reabilitação psicossocial no Brasil, discutindo sua controversa concepção no processo de reforma no setor público da Saúde Mental. Em seguida, apresenta uma proposta que reúne três possíveis paradigmas na orientação do trabalho de inserção social com psicóticos, para, enfim, apresentar dois casos que retratam a inventividade nesse campo ainda em construção.

Realizing Critical Geographies of the University

This paper argues that current changes underway in the daily lives of faculty at US research universities need to be understood contextually. A critical contextualization is a first step in realizing critical geographies of and in the university. This argument is elaborated in a consideration of three situations the author has faced: teaching undergraduate economic geography in an era of globalization; the professionalization of graduate students, and universities' indifference to the fuller lives of (in this case) faculty.

Ritual Process and Christian Discipling: Contextualizing a Buddhist Rite of Passage

The study of ritual process has shown that the liminal phase of a typical rite of passage suspends social structures and provides an anti-structure or sense of community in which formation is facilitated or effected. One such rite accompanying the passage from childhood to adulthood effects this “bonding to meaning” in a particularly striking way. As such it represents a ritual structure particularly useful for the discipling of new or immature believers, particularly, though not exclusively, those from traditional religious backgrounds. The Buddhist Shin Byu ceremony in which Burmese children are formed into adult Buddhists by following the Buddha's own transition from wealth to enlightenment provides a test case for critical contextualization. Can a similarly structured rite of passage for Christian discipling be modeled after some inaugural events in the life of Jesus?

The Ethiopian Orthodox Church: A Study in Indigenization

The Ethiopian Orthodox Church is a fascinating study in indigenization. Its deep rootage in the lives of the people is evidenced by the way in which the Church has been preserved since the fourth century in spite of repeated threats from enemies within and outside of Ethiopia. The church has Christianized important aspects of Old Testament and Hebrew culture as well as certain remnants of primal religion. It adapted beliefs and symbols which reflected and reinforced African traditions, and either absorbed or transfigured that which suited its purposes. The Ethiopian Church is an indigenous church, not an indigenized one. The process of its indigenization is described and important lessons from this rather natural development are identified that help in understanding the importance of critical contextualization. The successes and failures of the Ethiopian Church provide perspective for contemporary attempts at contextualization. This study is significant for understanding African Christianity but also has missiological implications for the wider world.