Deliberate Project Research Articles

Managing material shortages in project supply chains: Inventories, time buffers, and supplier flexibility

We consider a two‐stage project supply chain with a downstream project firm producing an engineer‐to‐order (ETO) complex product or a make‐to‐order (MTO), low‐volume, customized industrial product as a project, and an upstream contract supplier supplying a key material to the project. The project faces two uncertainties: project activity time uncertainty and material consumption uncertainty, which may be positively or negatively correlated. In anticipation of these uncertainties, the project firm has to carefully decide its promised project due date to its project customer, against which harsh penalties will be assessed, and his material order quantity to commit to the contract supplier in advance. In most practical settings, project firms order from contracted suppliers via a flexible wholesale price contract consisting of a discounted advance order price and a risk‐premium adjusted expedite order price. The discounted advance order price encourages the project firm to take more inventory risk in the supply chain, and the expedite order price incentivizes the supplier to bear more inventory risk by carrying safety stock in excess of the project firm's advance material order. We formulate an optimization model that solves the project firm's project due date and material order problem, which takes into account the supplier's strategic reaction to the project firm's material order under the flexible wholesale price contract. We show that for MTO projects, risk‐sharing with suppliers on project materials is less important to the project firm, with the project firm assuming ownership of all material inventory in the channel and setting a deliberate project due date being the key. On the other hand, for ETO projects, risk‐sharing with contracted suppliers assumes critical importance. Project firms managing ETO projects should fully exploit the flexibility in the material supply contract to optimally drive the supplier's safety stock level and set the project due date reflecting the shared risk in the supply chain.

Review: Food Routes: Growing Bananas in Iceland and Other Tales from the Logistics of Eating, by Robyn Metcalfe

Review: <i>Food Routes: Growing Bananas in Iceland and Other Tales from the Logistics of Eating</i>, by Robyn Metcalfe

The Alchemy of Conquest: Science, Religion, and the Secrets of the New World

This book has been an intellectual adventure to read, all 600-plus pages of it. The Scientific Revolution, Ralph Bauer argues, carries a connotation of “the discovery of new worlds” in nature. In historiography, the early modern revolution in cosmology has long been connected to the Age of Discovery in cosmography. Yet the two things remain conceptually distinct. We can indict Christopher Columbus for the violence of conquest but not Galileo for the discovery of spots on the sun. Yet what if discovery and conquest were conceptually intertwined from the very beginning? The Alchemy of Conquest completely reframes the concept of the Scientific Revolution by taking medieval nominalism and alchemy seriously.Bauer traces the origins of the categories of discovery and conquest back to the thirteenth-century Renaissance, particularly to the rise of Franciscan nominalism, artisanal alchemical experimentation, and the late medieval spiritual conquest of pagan and heathen souls. Both the alchemical-atomistic conception of matter and the nominalist interpretation of nature led to a voluntarist understanding of divine and human creation. Nature and thus God could be understood not through Aristotelian logic and Scholastic syllogism but through a painstakingly empirical exploration of randomly assembled matter. Universal law could only be known though the careful empirical codification of myriad local laws. The discovery of the secrets of nature happened through violent artisanal extraction and alchemical fire. Artisanal tinkering, in turn, could improve nature.Such a voluntarist understanding of God's power and human knowledge of nature led to a voluntarist understanding of religious conversion and to Franciscan global chiliastic religious missions of spiritual conquest. The empirical conquest of both nature and souls (religious transformation) began with William of Ockham, Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Ramon Llull, Arab Aristotelians, and dozens of other artisan alchemists.By remapping the medieval conceptual history of discovery and conquest, Bauer's The Alchemy of Conquest does a number of things. First, it shows the deep alchemical, Franciscan, Llullian roots of Columbus's ideas of discovery as the artisanal conquest of the occult. Second, it presents New World missionary Franciscan notions of conversion as tied to alchemical notions of material and spiritual transformations and to demonology and apocalyptic chiliasm. In colonial Spanish America, there was a science of conversion. Religious reducciones (the congregation of Natives in towns and missions) did not merely mean social reengineering, as the scholarship on colonial missions and Indian cabildos seems to suggest. Reducción meant a craft, artisanal, and alchemical transformation of the soul via an empirical science of ethnography. Third, it radically reframes the origins of early modern Epicurean atomism. As Bauer shows, atomism as a commentary on the structure of matter and as a moral-religious discourse of disorderly teleologies first began as a commentary on American cannibalism. Fourth, the book squarely connects English discourses of colonization to Spanish Franciscan and Spanish Neoplatonic humanist ones (not Spanish Scholastic Dominican ones). English and Spanish interpretations of conquest were connected to alchemical nominalism, demonology, and the natural right to reshape American humans and religious landscapes through craft and conquest. The similarities arose despite the obfuscating English rhetoric of negative contrast (the Black Legend) and England's outright denial of conquest (the White Legend). Finally, Bauer completely reframes Francis Bacon's new revolutionary empiricism as a deliberate project of applying Spanish alchemical discourses of American colonialism not to peoples but to objects.This book will remain an enduring accomplishment of scholarship and erudition.

Rome and the Invention of the Papacy: The Liber Pontificalis by Rosamond McKitterick

Reviewed by: Rome and the Invention of the Papacy: The Liber Pontificalis by Rosamond McKitterick Carmela Vircillo Franklin Rome and the Invention of the Papacy: The Liber Pontificalis Rosamond McKitterick Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 288. ISBN: 978-110-883682-1 In this multifaceted and wide-ranging book, eminent historian of Carolingian Europe Rosamond McKitterick brings together her studies on early medieval Rome and its Liber pontificalis, the series of papal biographies composed in the early sixth century, and continued into the papacy of Stephen V (885–891). Rome and the Invention of the Papacy interprets the Liber pontificalis as a deliberate project originating within the papal court and with the full participation of the popes, a response to the political map put in place after the fall of the western Roman Empire. The Liber's primary goal was to consolidate Rome's new image as a Christian capital, constructed both visibly and intellectually over the pagan city, whose bishops replaced the emperors in power. The story of this text as told in McKitterick's narrative begins with a discussion of its much-debated origins, its pagan and Christian models, and the foundational biography of the Apostle Peter. McKitterick continues then to the chronicle's representation of the physical city renovated by Constantine's building program, and the chronicle's role in the creation of doctrine and liturgy, and of legal and ecclesiological institutions. The final chapter (Chapter 6) investigates how, through its various redactions and abbreviations, and its extensive manuscript transmission, the Liber pontificalis served as a crucial instrument by which the new image of Rome and of its popes [End Page 542] was communicated and exploited in the rest of Italy and abroad. This brief overview is but a meager summary of the rich variety of topics covered in this book. McKitterick joins scholars such as Hermann Geertman, Lidia Capo, Andrea Verardi and Clemens Gantner, who, since the late twentieth century, began to challenge the consensus on the Liber pontificalis's origins and development enshrined in the critical editions published by Louis Duchesne and Theodor Mommsen in the last decade of the nineteenth century. McKitterick's perspective, as she states clearly, departs from earlier approaches which have considered the papal chronicle as an outgrowth of local concerns, of ecclesial and doctrinal controversies and schism, such as the Laurentian and Acacian schisms of the late fifth and early sixth centuries, and of the establishment of Rome's episcopal primacy and the correct order of the apostolic succession. While Mommsen's approach to the Liber pontificalis was completely philological (tellingly, he offered no commentary), Duchesne, a Roman Catholic priest, was keenly invested in the political and ecclesiological implications of the text and its reception even into modern times, as his massive edition and extensive publications illustrate. McKitterick's book, in its attention to the origins and transmission history of the text of the Liber and its impact on a comprehensive range of subjects, continues Duchesne's tradition. McKitterick's strategy utilizes a double approach. One is to interpret the Liber pontificalis from its own internal narrative, as illustrated, for example, by her novel consideration of the role of the people of Rome as a key protagonist of the chronicle (Chapter 2). The other approach is from perspectives provided by the historical contexts of its varied reception, as, for example, in her account of Carolingian liturgists' appreciation of Rome's historical position in liturgical development (Chapter 5). While painting a fuller panorama of the historical and political contexts in which the papal chronicle was composed and received, the details of the text and of its manuscript transmission are sometimes inaccurate. Thus, the oldest surviving member of the E-class of manuscripts, Biblioteca apostolica vaticana, Vat. lat. 3764 (E1), is wrongly attributed to the scriptorium of the Abbey of Farfa, rather than to Rome as shown by Paola Supino Martini, Roma e l'area grafica romanesca. Secoli X-XII (1987). Additionally, the oldest surviving complete manuscript of the A-class manuscripts, Lucca, Biblioteca Capitolare, MS 490, is not, as asserted here, the source of the other manuscripts of this class, as illustrated in both Duchesne's...

Empire and Eugenics

Abstract This essay offers an overview of trans studies in the United Kingdom in the current climate of transphobia in both academia and the public sphere. This report outlines how trans-exclusionary radical feminist scholars have co-opted the language of victimization and academic freedom following proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act in 2018. The production of ignorance about trans issues and trans studies is a deliberate project abetted by the UK media even on the left. In response, the authors organized an interdisciplinary trans symposium to affirm trans lives and trans studies for students, scholars, and the wider community. The authors reflect on the successes and failures of the event in light of their institution's past as the origin of eugenics founded by Frances Galton and the broader scope of the legacies of the British empire.

Entangled Pasts: Land-Grant Colleges and American Indian Dispossession

Land-grant colleges were created in the mid-nineteenth century when the federal government sold off public lands and allowed states to use that money to create colleges. The land that was sold to support colleges was available because of a deliberate project to dispossess American Indians of land they inhabited. By encouraging westward migration, touting the “civilizing” influence of education, emphasizing agricultural and scientific education to establish international strength, and erasing Native rights and history, the land-grant colleges can be seen as an element of settler colonialism. Native American dispossession was not merely an unfortunate by-product of the establishment of land-grant colleges; rather, the colleges exist only because of a state-sponsored system of Native dispossession.

From a Christian World Community to a Christian America: Ecumenical Protestant Internationalism as a Source of Christian Nationalist Renewal

Christian nationalism in the United States has neither been singular nor stable. The country has seen several Christian nationalist ventures come and go throughout its history. Historians are currently busy documenting the plurality of Christian nationalisms, understanding them more as deliberate projects rather than as components of a suprahistorical secularization process. This essay joins in that work. Its focus is the World War II and early Cold War era, one of the heydays of Christian nationalist enthusiasm in America—and the one that shaped our ongoing culture wars between “evangelical” conservatives and “godless” liberals. One forgotten and admittedly paradoxical pathway to wartime Christian nationalism was the world ecumenical movement (“ecumenical” here meaning intra-Protestant). Protestant ecumenism curated the transformation of 1920s and 1930s Christian internationalism into wartime Christian Americanism. They involved many political and intellectual elites along the way. In pioneering many of the geopolitical concerns of Cold War evangelicals, ecumenical Protestants aided and abetted the Christian conservative ascendancy that wields power even into the present.

Jews in Church: Rethinking Jewish-Christian Relations in Nineteenth-Century America

Studies of Jewish-Christian relations in the nineteenth century have largely centered on anti-Semitism, missionary endeavors, and processes of Protestantization. In this literature, Jews and Judaism are presented as radically separate from Christians and Christianity, which threaten them, either by reinforcing their difference or by diminishing it, whether as a deliberate project or as an unconscious outcome of pressure or attraction. And yet, Jews and Christians interacted with one another’s religious traditions not only through literature and discussion, but also within worship spaces. This paper will focus on the practice of churchgoing by Jewish individuals, with some attention to Christian synagogue-going. Most Jews went to church because of curiosity, sociability, or experimentation. Within churches, they became familiar with their neighbors and with Christian beliefs but also further clarified and even strengthened their own understandings and identities. For Jews, as for other Americans, the relationship between identification and spatial presence, belief and knowledge, worship and entertainment, were complicated and religious boundaries often unclear. The forgotten practice of Jewish churchgoing sheds light on the intimacies and complexities of Jewish-Christian relations in American history.

The Mysteries of Rereading

The Mysteries of Rereading Dawn Potter (bio) On Rereading by Patricia Meyer Spacks (Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2011. 304 pages. $26.95) Readers fall into two general but very uneven categories: those who read a book once and then rarely return to it and those who regularly reread. At least among adults this second category is far less common, and most of those who belong to it have some scholarly or pedagogical reason for revisiting books. Almost all "pure" rereaders—those insatiable consumers who crave stories like a drunk craves whiskey, who will finish a novel and then turn back to the beginning and read it straight through again—are children. The author Patricia Meyer Spacks is no exception to the rule. A retired professor of English who has taught at institutions such as Wellesley, Yale, and the University of Virginia, she is without question a professional rereader. Yet on page 1 of On Rereading, a memoir of her deliberate project to reread a variety of books she had read at least once, she quotes one of those rare adult rereaders who has allowed himself to revert to a childlike companionship with books: "Consider Larry McMurtry, writing in his early seventies: 'If I once read for adventure, I now read for security. How nice to be able to return to what won't change.' McMurtry reports that publishers keep sending him new books to comment on. He sends them back, preferring the books he already knows. 'When I sit down at dinner with a given book,' McMurtry writes, 'I want to know what I'm going to find.'" Spacks finds McMurtry's behavior appealing but unsatisfactory. To her his comment "suggests that a book reread offers what will not change— but for most rereaders, rereading provides, in contrast, an experience of repeated unexpected change." She seems, in this remark, to assume that McMurtry's preference for "know[ing] what I'm going to find" implies that he has a static relationship with what he reads. And that assumption, like her phrase for most rereaders, is telling; for Spacks almost entirely overlooks the existence of another small but important group of adult rereaders: people who reread because an intense nonanalytical relationship with a handful of books is essential to their own creative enterprises. This disconnect may seem subtle, but it influences nearly every element of this book—from the rereading project itself, to Spacks's analysis of her results, to the tone of her prose. Yet her gentle memoir has a great deal of charm, and the author is an appealing narrator who conveys on every page her deep, respectful, and abiding love for the way in which rereading affects our moral and emotional comprehension of the world. "Rereading," she notes, "is a way of paying attention. It takes books seriously and allows them to do their work: work that includes the changing of one's self and consequently of one's life, although in the nature of things we never quite glimpse the changes as they occur." As one might expect from a longtime teacher, Spacks planned her project carefully. She chose books [End Page lxxix] such as L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz and Munro Leaf's The Tale of Ferdinand that she had loved as a child but had not read since. She revisited books such as Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook and Saul Bellow's Herzog that she had strongly liked or disliked as a young adult. She considered "guilty pleasures"—books she had formerly found herself reading for relaxation, such as P. G. Wodehouse's stories and novels. Usually she had read her chosen book just once before, or years had elapsed since her last rereading. Only occasionally does she discuss novels such as Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice that she continues to reread regularly. Since Spacks has already published scholarly works addressing many of the novels that might have fallen into this last category, her choice of books is logical, for it provides a fresh way to note how time and memory can distort or clarify our relationship to literature. But the methodical rationales she lays out for her choices, the...

Participation, deliberate learning and discourses of learning online

This paper uses a study of the photo-sharing website Flickr to examine new online spaces for writing. On this site, people write titles and descriptions for their photos, they annotate their photos with semantic tags, they provide profiles of themselves and they comment on other people's photos. In these activities, people are engaging in new forms of writing and are extending their vernacular practices into new areas. This paper reports on a study which has analysed more than 100 Flickr sites and carried out interviews with 20 multilingual users of Flickr about their online practices. The paper investigates how people learn to participate in these new vernacular writing practices and contributes to theories of situated learning by developing them to take account of learning in online spaces. It focuses in particular on the ways in which Web 2.0 sites provide new spaces for learning and how people undertake deliberate projects of learning. The paper examines the ways in which people talk about the learning they are involved in and the specific discourses of learning they commonly draw upon. This changes over time as people identify new possibilities for themselves on Flickr.

Nature’s drawing: problems and resolutions in the mathematization of motion

The mathematical nature of modern science is an outcome of a contingent historical process, whose most critical stages occurred in the seventeenth century. ‘The mathematization of nature’ (Koyre 1957, From the closed world to the infinite universe, 5) is commonly hailed as the great achievement of the ‘scientific revolution’, but for the agents affecting this development it was not a clear insight into the structure of the universe or into the proper way of studying it. Rather, it was a deliberate project of great intellectual promise, but fraught with excruciating technical challenges and unsettling epistemological conundrums. These required a radical change in the relations between mathematics, order and physical phenomena and the development of new practices of tracing and analyzing motion. This essay presents a series of discrete moments in this process. For mediaeval and Renaissance philosophers, mathematicians and painters, physical motion was the paradigm of change, hence of disorder, and ipso facto available to mathematical analysis only as idealized abstraction. Kepler and Galileo boldly reverted the traditional presumptions: for them, mathematical harmonies were embedded in creation; motion was the carrier of order; and the objects of mathematics were mathematical curves drawn by nature itself. Mathematics could thus be assigned an explanatory role in natural philosophy, capturing a new metaphysical entity: pure motion. Successive generations of natural philosophers from Descartes to Huygens and Hooke gradually relegated the need to legitimize the application of mathematics to natural phenomena and the blurring of natural and artificial this application relied on. Newton finally erased the distinction between nature’s and artificial mathematics altogether, equating all of geometry with mechanical practice.

Sounds of the Borderland: Popular Music, War and Nationalism in Croatia since 1991 (review)

Sounds of the Borderland: Popular War and Nationalism in since 1991. By Catherine Baker. (Ash - gate Popular and Folk Series.) Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate, 2010. [xi, 266 p. ISBN 9781409403371. $114.95.] Playlist, bibliography, index. In her thought-provoking monograph on the shifting relationships between politics and popular music in between 1991 and 2008, Catherine Baker investigates the complexities, conundrums, contradictions, and varying cultural practices inherent in the topic. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates historical sources, cultural theory, textual analysis, oral history, and reception history, her study details how explicit and implicit political narratives in a newly independent affected cultural production. (Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1991.) As someone who is not Croatian, Baker provides an outsider perspective, all the while integrating the work of Croatian scholars and journalists into her prose. Her exploration of national in music concerns the various roles of politicians, political parties, artists, the media industry, and the public in the construction and dissemination of various ideologies through the medium of popular music. Throughout, she pays careful attention to the language politics surrounding various Croatian dialects and their roles in shaping popular music discourse. Most helpful is the playlist she includes as an appendix that lists representative YouTube videos of the music under consideration. The narrative is divided into three large sections: Croatia under Tudman, 1991- 2000; Croatia after Tudman, 2000-2008; and Croatia in a Regional Context. The first part concerns the newly formed government's interventionist cultural policy, the goals of which were to separate from socialism, Serbia, and the Balkans. The focus shifts in the second part to events in the 2000s, following the death of President Franjo Tudman, when more homogenized entertainment formats emerged and the state withdrew from deliberate projects to construct a new national musical identity (p. 211). The third part offers insights on relationships between and its geographic neighbors in terms of cultural production. Croatia under Tudman includes two substantial chapters, each of which focuses on an especially influential approach to popular music and national during the 1990s. The first, Music at Arms: The Presidential Narrative of the War, details patriotic-themed songs while the second, Music for the Nation: Creating a 'Croatian' Popular Music, concerns the creation of an ethno (as opposed to a folk) style. Patriotic-themed popular music endorsed an overt and deliberate political agenda to promote as an independent with a unique history and culture. The communicative role of popular music was strongest during the Homeland War in the first part of the 1990s, and was subsequently employed to support ideological goals of the new government. Baker describes how music programs constituted a large part of programming on HRT (Hrvatski Radiotelevizija [Croatian Radio - television]), the state-run television, in the 1990s. HRT's iconic project Stop the War in was in English and intended for an international audience, while Moja domovina (My Homeland), produced in association with Hrvatski Band Aid (Croatian Band Aid), emphasized Croatia's natural beauty and the righteousness of the Croatian cause (p. 20). Other patrioticthemed songs followed with lyrics about soldiers, enemies, religion, land, gender, and history. The rocker-soldier myth was also developing at this time as images showing soldiers either listening to rock or emulating its iconography infused the media. It is in this context that Baker introduces Marko Perkovic Thompson, an army volunteer whose guttural voice and political messages played a major role in Croatian popular music, politics, and ideas about identity. …

Public Health Genomics (PHG) and Public Participation: Points to Consider

Large-scale population biobanks, which aim to collect biological tissues, personal health information, and genomic data, are being introduced worldwide with the promise of increasing knowledge on chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease. Experts recognize the need for public participation to address the many social, legal and ethical complexities raised by the introduction of biobanks for public health research. However many researchers and decision makers struggle with how to promote public participation. This paper presents six issues that public participation must address. These issues are then applied to three large scale genetic biobank projects: CARTaGENE, Generation Scotland, and the United Kingdom Biobank. Finally, the efforts of these biobanks will be compared to the British Columbia Biobank deliberation project, which implemented a deliberative public participation experiment on biobanking.

Teaching ethics in the clinic. The theory and practice of moral case deliberation

A traditional approach to teaching medical ethics aims to provide knowledge about ethics. This is in line with an epistemological view on ethics in which moral expertise is assumed to...

Implementing moral case deliberation in a psychiatric hospital: process and outcome

Clinical moral case deliberation consists of the systematic reflection on a concrete moral case by health care professionals. This paper presents the study of a 4-year moral deliberation project. The objectives of this paper are to: (a) describe the practice and the theoretical background of moral deliberation, (b) describe the moral deliberation project, (c) present the outcomes of the evaluation of the moral case deliberation sessions, and (d) present the implementation process. The implementation process is both monitored and supported by an interactive responsive evaluation design with: (a) in-depth interviews, (b) Maastricht evaluation questionnaires, (c) evaluation survey, and (d) ethnographic participant observation. In accordance with the theory of responsive evaluation, researchers acted both as evaluators and moderators (i.e. ethicists). Both qualitative and quantitative results showed that the moral case deliberations, the role of the ethics facilitator, and the train-the-facilitator program were regarded as useful and were evaluated as (very) positive. Health care professionals reported that they improved their moral competencies (i.e. knowledge, attitude and skills). However, the new trained facilitators lacked a clear organisational structure and felt overburdened with the implementation process. The paper ends with both practical and research suggestions for future moral deliberation projects.

Seeing a State: National Commemorations and the Public Sphere in India and Turkey

Through a comparative discussion of public rituals of national commemoration in India and Turkey, this essay examines the relationship between the formation of the public sphere, the production of national identity, and the establishment of state sovereignty. The central organizing principle is the notion of the “creation of the public” as a historically specific political and cultural project. This departs from the evolutionary understanding of the public sphere as a derivative byproduct or “unintended, rolling effect”1 of social, economic, and political “structural transformations” that took place in the course of the longue durée of European history.2 By theorizing the formation and reproduction of the Indian and Turkish public spheres as deliberate projects or strategies of nationalization and étatization,3 I draw attention to several significant aspects of political modernity that have been obscured in prevailing theories of public sphere formation and transformation.

Moreel beraad en goede zorg voor ouderen veronderstellen &lt;f"TimesAigu"&gt;e&lt;f"TimesNRMT"&gt;n versterken elkaar

Caring is inherently a moral practice. Those who are involved in the care for the elderly give meaning to their views on good (organisation of) care, implicitly or explicitly. The meaning of good care is directly attached to a specific context and a specific moment; it is neither fixed nor static. In this paper, good care is understood as dialogic: the meaning of good care arises out of and by means of dialogue between the stakeholders. Ethics can play a crucial role in shaping this dialogue. Unfortunately, many people see ethics primarily as a discipline which develops abstract moral theories and generate ethicists for formal ethics committees in order to prescribe protocols and guidelines. Dialogical ethics, with its theoretical bases in pragmatic hermeneutics, is opposed to this view of ethics. Moral Case Deliberation is a good example of dialogical ethics in which the ethicist applies various conversation methods in order to support health care professionals to reflect on their moral questions. Starting point is the moral expertise of the health care professionals themselves; the ethicist functions as a facilitator. Moral Case Deliberation contributes both to reflect as to shape good care (executed by good professionals within a good health care organisation). This paper describes the meaning of a Moral Case Deliberation and a Moral Deliberation Project. Additionally, it reflects on the underlying view on dialogical ethics, the justification of Moral Deliberation and some possible goals of Moral Deliberation. With this paper, the authors argue that Moral Case Deliberation both presupposes and strengthens good elderly care.

Editorial

Editorial

Engaging with Globalization: A Matter of Life and Death?

This article explores the way in which language is being used in current debates about the process known as ‘globalization’. It draws upon the work of Anthony Giddens, Norman Fairclough and Roland Barthes, as well as literature produced for an e-conference of the World Bank. Assessing first different visions of globalization—from the purely economic to those which embrace communication and human relationships—the article pays attention to the narratives of self and of human relationship that underpin these visions. In particular the article focuses on the concepts of human ‘agency’ expressed through and in these visions: is globalization conceived as a ‘deliberate project’ or as a process which is simply out of human control? Finally, this article returns us to the theological imperative of ‘transformation’ and to the question put by Bonhoeffer: ‘How is the next generation to live?’, concluding that it would be a terrible tragedy if the church were to be so concerned about how it could survive in this new world order that it proclaimed a Christ and therefore life itself as subjects of that order.