Greatest Failure Research Articles

GATT and Global Order in the Postwar Era

In this interesting book, Francine McKenzie writes about an institution that was central to the making of a new international order after World War II: the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Through a concise, well-structured series of topical chapters, we learn about the political history of GATT from its origins in 1948 to its eventual dissolution within the World Trade Organization in 1994. McKenzie relies on an approach that is rich in primary sources and focuses on the links between international trade and international political relations. This allows her to provide a vivid description of “the way people have thought and talked about trade” (236).Readers of Agricultural History will be primarily interested in the last chapter, about “the agriculture challenge to GATT” (232). McKenzie portrays agriculture as “GATT's greatest failure” (232). Her analysis of agriculture in GATT goes back to the 1950s and 1960s, when first the United States and later the newly created European Economic Community (EEC) succeeded at implementing agricultural policies opposed to GATT's liberal principles. This gives McKenzie the chance to show us how difficult it would become to reintroduce agriculture in the pro-trade agenda, which eventually happened during the turbulent Uruguay round of the late 1980s and early 1990s.As elsewhere in the book, the analysis is finely nuanced. The United States and the EEC (and, within the latter, France in particular) are given the major roles that they deserve, but this does not prevent us from perceiving the important role that other states played in some critical junctures, for instance Australia as a promoter of the “Cairns group” that pressed for agricultural liberalization from the mid-1980s onward. McKenzie credibly portrays GATT as a flexible organization. Quite often we find it unable to impose its agenda on states, but it manages to establish a certain kind of normative authority: even those countries that deviated from GATT principles wanted GATT to certify their deviation as a justifiable exception to the rule. This is one of the ways in which trade liberalization came to be widely accepted as the default policy.Some of the limitations of the book are, in this reviewer's opinion, transparently presented by the author when she explains her purposes. The focus is on international governance, not on its economic and social effects. The epistemology borrows some concepts from political science but not much, since the author is focused on those forces that really mattered to policy makers. This imposes some limits. In the “clash between those who had faith in free trade and those who feared it,” the author seems to be on the believers' side, but the foundations of her position are not very explicit (290). A long tradition in political economy, from Friedrich List in the nineteenth century to Ha-Joon Chang today, has questioned the classical position that free trade must always be the default policy. It would have been interesting to assess which of the pro-trade arguments defended by GATT were solid and which were not, as well as the way in which different contexts probably required different recipes. It would have also been interesting to see the author engage with the historical institutionalist approach to political science that has been fruitfully applied to the history of agricultural policy by Adam Sheingate. Yet it would be unfair to criticize McKenzie for not doing what she is transparently saying that she will not do. In social science (as in trade policy), one size does not fit all.Perhaps a different kind of issue is the bias toward Anglo sources. These are sources that allow McKenzie to capture perspectives from the Anglo world and from GATT itself, but not as much from other countries and organizations. I am thinking of France and the European Economic Community in particular. How different would the international history narrated in this book have been if French- and German-language sources, for instance, had been used more extensively?Notwithstanding these drawbacks, the book will undoubtedly be of great interest to agricultural historians. Alongside its general virtues, it provides researchers interested in agricultural policy with something that is fundamental: the bigger picture. The world of agricultural politics is so complex and multifaceted that specialists are always in danger of losing themselves in the maze. But the maze can be understood in a better way if, as McKenzie consistently does in this book, agriculture is positioned within a more general view of collaboration and conflict between states and emerging patterns of international governance.

Magnum Opus: The Cycle Plays of Eugene O'neill

Magnum Opus: The Cycle Plays of Eugene O'neill

The Founder of the International Taekwon-Do Federation (ITF) Choi Hong Hi: An Exploration of Fiction and Fact

Although Choi Hong Hi was the principal inventor of the name ‘taekwondo’, he is often confused with, or misrepresented to be, the actual founder of taekwondo. As a result of his break with the South Korean taekwondo community in 1965, he founded the International Taekwon-Do Federation (ITF), which became the archnemesis of the 1973 established World Taekwondo Federation (WTF). Subsequently, the struggle over worldwide taekwondo supremacy by these organizations accelerated greatly after Choi introduced his style of taekwondo to North Korea in 1980. In the course of the ITF’s global expansion, Choi and his followers created and propagated an idolized and glorified image of him, which is still resonating today. Thus, a reassessment of Choi’s image is long overdue. In reality, Choi’s martial art skills were very rudimentary, and he was not highly regarded by the much more experienced other leaders of the early Korean martial arts community. Numerous accounts about Choi are full of misinformation, propaganda, and outright falsehoods; partly, because Choi often exaggerated or bluntly falsified his martial arts record and personal history. Yet, his alliance with the brutal North Korean regime should be considered his greatest failure, and for this reason, history is unlikely to be kind to him.

Monuments Women and Men: Rethinking popular narratives via British Major Anne Olivier Popham

AbstractIn recent years, the work of the American Monuments Men has been celebrated in popular histories and culture, such as bestselling books by Robert Edsel and a feature film directed by George Clooney (The Monuments Men, 2014). While public awareness of Nazi art looting and the courageous work of American cultural officers is long overdue, these popular narratives elide the role played by women and other Western Allies and fail to address the corps’ greatest failure: the incomplete restitution of Jewish assets. This article explores these factors through a case study of British Major Anne Olivier Popham (1916–2018), who served the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFA&A) division in Bünde from November 1945 to October 1947. Drawing on Popham’s diaries held at the Imperial War Museum in London, the author’s interview with her, and British and American archives, the case study yields important insight into personnel recruited by the MFA&A, gender relations among the officers, methodological dilemmas presented by the use of first-hand accounts, and the ongoing need for transnational restitution efforts.

The Iceman Cometh

The Iceman Cometh

The Iceman Cometh: “An unique dramatic achievement” (Tennessee Williams, letter to Eugene O'Neill, November 6, 1946)

<i>The Iceman Cometh</i>: “An unique dramatic achievement” (Tennessee Williams, letter to Eugene O'Neill, November 6, 1946)

The Best Disparity, or Lack Thereof, That Money Can Buy

This research examines the complex interactions underlying disparity studies. While communities do frequently encounter disparity in public procurement, the commissioning of a disparity study may not ultimately solve the pressing challenges that hinder access to public contracts. Instead, disparity studies promise a politically palatable “quick fix” for a societal problem. In doing so, disparity studies may satisfy a legal basis, but their content and recommendations may fail to achieve their intended rationale. This failure ultimately raises serious questions about the legal merit of these studies and their methods, the growth of a cottage industry, and the benefit of the study for underserved groups. The greatest failure is that disparity studies may ultimately exacerbate, rather than resolve, a government’s ability to reduce chronic, and often historical, challenges to inclusion.

Bird Strike Analysis on 19 Passenger Aircraft Windshield with Different Thickness and Impact Velocity

Abstrct - A Windshield is a component that must be tested to comply with the certification requirements in the bird strike phenomenon based on Civil Aviation Safety Regulations (CASR) subpart 23.775. The purpose of this study is to obtain the thickness of 19 passenger aircraft windshield that meets the certification requirements and determine the dynamic response of the windshield to impact velocity variations. The finite element is used to simulate bird strike phenomena. The elastic-plastic polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) material with the maximum principal strain failure criterion is used to model the dynamic response of the windshield. Numerical modeling is validated, both with analytical and experimental results which are then used to investigate the effect of variations in windshield thickness and impact velocity. The results obtained that with a thickness of 9 mm, the windshield is able to withstand bird strikes based on cases that have been determined by the regulation. In addition, the impact velocity that causes the dynamic response of the windshield in the elastic, plastic deformation, and the greatest failure is the velocity of 87.5 ms-1(cruising phase). The uppermost of the windshield (fixed) is the weakest part due to the stress concentration.

Winemaking performance: whether the crisis is over

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to find how much the efficiency of winemaking has changed since the crisis of 2008 and what are the main determinants of winemaking performance in the recent decade.Design/methodology/approachThis study applied a three-stage approach to explore productivity, efficiency and profitability changes. At the first stage of the empirical study, the Malmquist Total Factor Productivity indexes based on the data envelopment analysis are used to reveal tendencies of wineries’ productivity and the reasons for its changes. At the second stage, productivity indexes were used to find out the main exogenous and endogenous factors. At the final stage, the profitability change after the crisis in the context of the wine types and a size of wineries is explored.FindingsThe main trends and factors of winemaking performance after 2008 were defined. It was found that a crisis in winemaking in Ukraine has been going on for almost decade with the greatest failure in 2014 that led to the falling overall efficiency. This failure was caused mainly by the military and political factors regarding the annexation of Crimea by Russia, the changes in consumer behaviour with a tendency to reduce overall alcohol consumption, and the government regulation increased excise duties on wines. Despite the efficiency crisis in Ukrainian winemaking, the positive contribution of technological progress provides its productivity growth. The small- and medium-sized enterprises in winemaking have a high resistance to the crisis and fiscal pressure. Despite it losing a half of value-added and being unprofitable, the small wine business has managed to increase the labour and capital productivities and overtake big wine business on these indicators.Research limitations/implicationsThis study is limited to one country and the relatively small sample of the wineries. However, it can be a starting point for a series of research on the development of anti-crisis winemaking strategy.Practical implicationsThe findings of the study can be helpful for the Ukrainian Government to prevent crisis continuation in the winemaking sector. This case may be instructive for other countries, faced with a protracted crisis of efficiency in winemaking.Originality/valueThis is the first study that examines the winemaking performance and its factors after the world financial crisis, based on the case of Ukraine.

Progress: Its Glories and Pitfalls.

Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist and linguist at Harvard and a savant of big ideas, is one of the latest to take on the idea of progress. He does it under the aegis of "enlightenment," which comes down to a kind of holy trinity of reason, science, and humanism. His new book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, is ambitious and cantankerous and heady with hope. On the whole, Pinker makes a good case for the benefits of progress, but with an overdose of feel-good prose. His greatest failure comes in exaggerating the threats to science and in avoiding some problems altogether. He ignores its complexity, its shadows, its creation of new problems raised by its solutions to old ones. Pinker has a particular animus against bioethics, and he misses what has been, I would argue, at the heart of bioethics from its beginning fifty or so years ago. Bioethics was prompted by a new class of medical dilemmas that require a difficult balancing of harms and benefits. Most of them are still with us, and most of them are the result of the progress of postwar medical research and fast-changing clinical practices.

Designing Life after the Storm: Improvisations in Post-Disaster Housing Reconstruction as Socio-Moral Practice

If there is any endeavor so demanding of human creativity, it is the remaking of lives and property after disaster. However, post-disaster recovery is considered the greatest failure in disaster management, and within this field, post-disaster housing reconstruction is the most insufficiently investigated practice. Furthermore, studies of disaster management attribute failure to top-down and technocratic approaches that often overlook the agency, capacities, and moral priorities of those directly affected. In contrast, this paper attends to those displaced by disaster as creative and moral agents who manage to carry on with life despite their socio-economic and political vulnerabilities by drawing from theory in anthropology, disaster studies, and cognitive psychology. Through examining how inhabitants of a post-Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) resettlement site transform their housing to negotiate multiple and vague rules and regulations, I entangle myself with literature that assumes that the creativity of design lies in the capacity of individuals to improvise according to their values and in response to those of others, within a world that is continually unfolding. I also assume that improvisation is contingent upon processes of cognitive innovation in which social relations operate as indispensable intellectual resources for grasping and mobilizing knowledge that would give inhabitants of resettlement housing the best possible chance of attaining their hopes, dreams, and ambitions. Consequently, I propose that viewing creativity as an improvisational process highlights the agentic potential of design in even the bleakest and most quotidian of settings. My own hope is to extend the possibilities for correspondence between built environment practitioners and those who, because of their subaltern positionalities, tend to be overlooked by the field of post-disaster housing reconstruction and yet must live through the consequences of its practice.

The European Revolutions of 1848 and the Transnational Turn in Civil War History

The European Revolutions of 1848 and the Transnational Turn in Civil War History Patrick J. Kelly (bio) Since the turn of the twenty-first century, historians have increasingly adopted a transnational approach to the Civil War. They situate America’s sectional conflict within a larger and exceptionally violent contemporary process: the worldwide consolidation of liberal nationalism in the nineteenth century. One recent thread in transnational histories of the Civil War connects the rise and fall of Europe’s 1848–49 democratic uprising and America’s sectional crisis and the development of liberal nationalism on both continents. This essay examines the links historians have made between the European revolutions of 1848 and the U.S. Civil War and points out research opportunities for scholars seeking new ways to examine this well-trodden period of American history. Far more than most U.S. historians, Thomas Bender embeds his historical narratives within an expansive global framework. In his discussion of the links between 1848—the scholarly shorthand used to describe the rise and fall of the continent’s democratic revolutions—and the Civil War, Bender argues the worldwide development of liberal government and nationalist sentiment that started in Europe played a central role in shaping the next two decades of world history. The American Civil War, he concludes, “cannot be separated from these larger movements.” Framing the Civil War within the larger global processes of the time, he suggests, offers historians far greater “explanatory power” than histories framing this conflict as an exceptional nation-bound event separated from the flow of larger international developments.1 The recent antiwar turn in Civil War scholarship, for example, does not take into account the fact that violent conflict was a tragic but strikingly commonplace component of the worldwide process of liberal nation-building during the mid-nineteenth century. The “new revisionists” such as David Goldfield, Harry Stout, and Michael Fellman argue that the Civil War could have been avoided if, somehow, the polarizing influence of [End Page 431] sectional politics, fueled by evangelical Christian fervor, had been replaced by calm and rational discussion about contentious issues such as the future of American slavery.2 Goldfield, for instance, declares that the Civil War was “America’s greatest failure.”3 For transnational historians, however, the American experience of war was anything but exceptional. The years between 1840 and 1880 were, as Michael Geyer and Charles Bright have shown, a period of extraordinary international violence. They have counted 177 “war-like confrontations” during these decades.4 Among the most violent of these global conflicts, including Europe’s 1848 and America’s Civil War, were struggles for economic development, national unification and democratic government, a nineteenth-century ideology Enrico Dal Lago has termed “progressive nationalism.”5 The transnational turn in Civil War history, then, does not regard the Civil War as a unique national “failure” that could have been avoided if only cooler heads had prevailed. The concurrent rebellions occurring in China, Europe, South America, and the United States during this era were, in this view, global in their origins and consequences and must be seen as interconnected events embedded within a bloody worldwide process that existed outside the control of historical actors in any one nation. Historians of the post-1848 transatlantic links between Europe and the United States echo an insight David M. Potter offered nearly fifty years ago. In a landmark essay published in 1968, he argued that “in both Europe and America, the forces of tradition and privilege tended to be arrayed against nationalism, while the forces of liberalism and democracy tended to support it.” Yet, as Potter noted, his insight into the connections between the political turmoil in Europe and the age of the Civil War was largely speculative. In a bibliographical discussion at the end of his article, he commented that while the number of books written on the Civil War was “enormous, the bibliography strictly applicable to this essay is composed largely of books that are yet to be written. It is in fact one point of the essay that the significance of the Civil War for world history … has been generally neglected by historians.”6 His call for a greater number of...

Intersectional Politics

Intersectional Politics

More Than This by Patrick Ness (review)

Reviewed by: More Than This by Patrick Ness Kate Quealy-Gainer Ness, Patrick . More Than This. Candlewick, 2013. [480p]. Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-7636-6258-5 $19.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-7636-6767-2 $19.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 9-12. A broken heart has led sixteen-year-old Seth to suicide, but ending his life doesn't necessarily put an end to his problems. After drowning himself off the coast of his Pacific Northwest home, Seth wakes up across the world in the small English town where he spent his childhood. To be returned to the scene of his greatest failure and his family's deepest grief surely indicates that he's in hell, and the charred, desolate landscape, without a soul in sight, is only further proof—in Seth's mind—that he has been sentenced to a doomed and painful afterlife. Even when he does finally encounter two other living people, he remains unconvinced by their explanations that his "death" was merely his waking up from a computer program and that the entire world—and essentially reality—has gone online. This complex, genre-bending book opens with Seth's violent drowning death at sea, described in such spare but devastating detail that readers may feel themselves gasping for a breath as Seth draws his last. The tone remains quietly but deeply unsettling throughout the first half, with flashbacks to both Seth's childhood mistake and his more recent relationship with his boyfriend often providing more questions that answers in regards to Seth's present situation. Several early hints point toward the Matrix-like premise that is introduced in the latter part, but Ness subverts familiar sci-fi/survival tropes and storytelling conventions, leaving readers with an ambiguous ending that [End Page 107] is either incredibly frustrating or deliciously disturbing. The thematic explorations of the nature of reality and the afterlife offer some heady discussion fodder, while the nail-biting tension and high-stakes action sequences make this an easy sell to the legions of dystopia fans as well. Copyright © 2013 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Cultural Materialistic Reading of Eugene O’Neill’s the Iceman Cometh

This paper examines one selected play of Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) in Cultural Materialism. His selected play, The Iceman Cometh, is interwoven with the political and socio-economical conditions of the American capitalistic society. O’Neill was highly under the influence and inspiration of his contemporary events and the traces of those events are reflected in his works. He prefers to deal with the authentic American types and backgrounds in his social dramas. The main characters of his plays under the tyranny of dominant power turn into dissidents and resist against the authority or control of the dominant system. They struggle to subvert the dominant order, and since they would be a threat for absolute power they are consequently condemned to harsh punishment. O’Neill represents the conflict between the marginalized group and the central one. His sympathetic tone indicates his intention in supporting the dissidence in social and political activities. The Iceman Cometh is the depiction of the World War’s impact on American community. All of the desperate typical characters of this play belong to the dissident group that resist against the dominant order in various manners. O'Neill held out little hope for man in The Iceman Cometh during the Second World War. O'Neill confessed that the United States instead of being the most successful country in the world is the greatest failure because of the foreign policy of the United States during the Wars. The Iceman Cometh is the symbolic and artistic picture of the US policy which brings disillusionment and death for Americans. DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2013.v2n9p74

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, and the Watch for Spots of Time

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, and the Watch for Spots of Time

A First-Hand Account of the Wukan Elections

Abstract From September 2011, in the village of Wukan, Lufeng City, Guangdong, large-scale villagers’ demonstrations broke out as a result of problems related to land and village affairs. The demonstrations attracted attention both within and outside of China. The Guangdong Provincial Government was later to become directly involved, and worked to support the villagers of Wukan in hosting a new round of elections for their Village Committee. With the guidance of experts, systemic innovations were made, for example, the use of ‘combined self-nomination and nomination by others’ to elect the Villagers’ Election Committee; the use of a ‘one person, one vote’ system to elect villagers’ representatives, and so on. These innovations also gained attention both in China and abroad. The greatest failure of the Wukan elections was that the attempt to introduce innovations to put in place a ‘convener’ for the villagers’ meetings was unsuccessful. The failure to establish an independent system for convening villagers’ meetings and villagers’ representatives meetings has led to the difficult situation within which Wukan finds itself today.

Ties That Bind: Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the Quest for Economic Justice

Ties That Bind: Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the Quest for Economic Justice

Adapting to Change

It has been said that the only people who like change are babies with wet diapers. This statement rings true whether it involves designing and building a new hospital, an additional tower, or even renovating an existing unit. It seems that we have great difficulty letting go of what is familiar even when the familiar does not work well. In a recent article, one chief nursing officer expressed surprise that physicians and staff who were heavily involved the design of a new children's hospital were voicing discontent about the design once the building was open and functional (Stichler, 2008). How could this be? Some were the very same people who met with the design teams, participated the design decisions, and even signed off on documents indicating their approval of the design.Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident. Even with the excitement of opening a new building, people resist change. It is likely that there are few organizational initiatives that can compare to the change process that occurs with the design and opening of a new hospital, yet few organizational leaders provide the same due diligence to the change process as they do to structural change. The change associated with individual and organizational adaptation to moving into a new environment is complex and convoluted, and the change process must be as carefully orchestrated as the design process as a whole. Organizational leaders must guide physicians and staff through the process of discarding their current realities, introduce new practice patterns, and encourage the adoption of new behavioral paradigms. Moving into a new facility forces organizational culture change even when such change is not anticipated.Leading Change Using Classic Change TheoriesLeading change is one of a leader's most important and difficult roles. Although there are many excellent change theories that can be used to guide the change process, not all change is alike, nor can all organizational changes be approached the same way to yield expected results. Perhaps the greatest failure is not addressing the change process at all and expecting everyone to be excited about a new facility. Using change theories as a framework for developing the structure and process of organizational change can enhance positive adaptation to a new patient care environment.Lewin's Change TheoryLewin was the first to develop the notion that change should be planned rather than allowing unintentional or accidental processes to occur, and he first described three levels of change: unfreezing, changing, and refreezing (Lewin, 1951). This classic theory still guides many planned organizational processes with great success. Using this theory, an organization's leaders would first demonstrate the need to change and explain why maintaining the status quo would be detrimental to patients, employees, the organization, and even the community. Kotter (1995) would describe this as creating a of urgency. At the same time, leaders must assess an organization's readiness for change and identify those who may be resistant to the vision and trench in to the current status, situation, or even care delivery models.Applying the unfreezing stage of Lewin's theory, physicians and staff must be motivated to change by means of exposure to new ideas and creating a sense of urgency around the shared vision of how patient care outcomes and the work environment could be enhanced by the proposed change. The critical step of developing a shared vision is not only important the design process, but it is also a critical part of the change process that must be orchestrated concurrently with the design and construction phases of a new facility. In the unfreezing stage, leaders at the departmental level must begin to examine existing work flow processes and design new processes the context of the new building, equipment, or departmental relationships. Some healthcare professionals might need orientation to new equipment or have to be certified to perform new procedures or patient care activities that result from the changes facility design or processes. …

The Ethics Examiner and Media Councils: Improving Ombudsmanship and News Councils for True Citizen Journalism

The debate over news ombudsmen remains at a seemingly irreconcilable impasse, and less relevant as journalism shifts away from print and traditional newsroom structures in the new-media age. There are fewer than 30 ombudsmen at U.S. media outlets today, according to the Organization of News Ombudsmen (Ombudsmen, 2010). We argue that the greatest failure of ombudsmanship is that it does not go far enough in giving voice and visibility to the ombudsman's work, including interacting with community. Media news outlets can best serve the public trust by fulfilling the journalistic mission of civic transformation through empowerment advocated by Christians, Ferre, and Fackler (1993). As the vanguard of the communitarian approach of “person-in-community,” the ideal ombudsman would be just that: a person in the community. The ethical goal of ombudsmanship should be not to promote an apologist from within the ranks but rather to facilitate a community conversation. We propose integrating the ideal ombudsman (which we redefine and rename as the ethics examiner) with the best practices of successful news councils (hereafter called media councils in a return to their original name and to encompass a broader universe of information outlets).