Ideological Themes Research Articles

Exploring the Everyday 'Philosophies' of Physical Education Teachers from a Sociological Perspective

This paper presents the findings from semi-structured interviews with 35 physical education (PE) teachers in secondary schools in the north-west of England. The principal aim of the study was to examine teachers' everyday 'philosophies' of PE, from a sociological perspective, in an attempt to identify the existence of philosophical - or, more accurately, ideological - themes therein and to explore the socio-genesis of such 'philosophies'. Analysis of the interview data revealed several prominent ideological themes - sport, health, academic value, education for leisure and 'sport for all'. These themes bore little resemblance to the more academic conceptions of PE to be found in PE theory and documentation. In this vein, teachers' commitment to particular notions, such as enjoyment, begged questions regarding the ostensibly educational element of physical education. Having identified the existence of what might be termed a 'theory-practice' gap between academic philosophy of PE and the ideological themes in PE teachers' 'philosophies', the paper suggests that a sociological, specifically figurational, approach to PE teachers' 'philosophies' in particular, as well as epistemological issues in general, may hold out the promise of a more adequate explanation of the pre-eminence of particular ideologies.

Religions in Conflict: Ideology, Cultural Contact and Conversion in Late-Colonial India

This is the story of a conflict between a highly confrontationalist Protestant mission in the mid-nineteenth century and Indian religions, which opens out a wider debate on the nature of imperialism and proto-nationalism. It does so around the themes of ideology, cultural contact and conversion. The text should be of interest to students of modern Indian history, the history of religions and of missionary organizations in India.

AAACE: Its Legacy and Future Direction

In a 1982 issue of Lifelong Learning: Adult Years, Howard Y. McClusky, the first president (1951-52) of the Adult Education Association, reflected on the early condition of adult education in the United States. He observed that it was largely an ad hoc scattered, amorphous, and segmented phenomenon. There was no dominant and pervasive ideological theme to give it substantive identity and no networks or institutional structures to guide its implementation and development. This condition laid the groundwork for what ultimately became the definitive role for AAACE and its antecedent organizations -- its role as the organization. Membership would provide the means for agencies, institutions, and individuals to develop a primary identification with the field. umbrella organization has taken many forms and structures over the years starting with the American Association for Adult Education, founded by the Carnegie Corporation in 1926. Change continued with the merger of the Adult Education Association of the USA and the National Association of Public and Continuing Education into the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education in 1982. Since organizations can be thought of as organisms, as living systems existing in a wider environment that they depend upon for the satisfaction of various needs, we would expect such adaptation. In fact, if organisms don't change with the external open systems, they become extinct. AAACE is currently in such a process of adaptation and transformation. Predictive of an organization trying to adapt to a turbulent, rapidly changing environment and in a stage of its life cycle, attention has been placed on general issues of survival, on organization-environment relations and on organizational effectiveness. While examination of such issues can become contentious to some and unsettling to many, these discussions and modification have long been a part of the adult education democratization. Curiously, although the context has changed radically, some of the organizational issues have not. We will highlight four that have been pervasive through the years. Importance of Volunteers In his 1982 article, Dr. McClusky stressed the role of volunteers by stating, The loyalty, service, and expertise of dedicated volunteers ... will be equally important for the viability of the new AAACE. From the beginning, a highly significant portion of AEA's work has been contributed as a voluntary service. This may account for AEA's ambitious program ... despite a modest budget with limited staff, he said. In looking back at our writings as presidents, both of us called for -- and put in place -- mechanisms for widespread enthusiastic volunteer participation. However, such efforts typically fell short of their promise. Like many volunteer professional membership associations, AAACE and other such organizations in recent years have noted a significant change in the pattern of volunteer service to shorter term, highly task-specific assignments that enhance career and individual positions. Further, volunteers often lack the resources or other support mechanisms such as graduate student assistance, travel dollars, mailing budgets, or release time that were, at one time, more available from agencies or base institutions. Given the more specialized and limited role of current volunteers, AAACE, like AEA, has had a very ambitious program of membership services and advocacy despite a modest budget with limited staff. Affiliation with a private association management firm was tested for nearly eight years. Such an arrangement decreased operating costs but led to a feeling of elitist and centralized external control -- interestingly, an indictment noted by McCluskey about AEA in years past. Realistic Goals with Sound Fiscal Controls Due to a global, grand agenda serving a large, diverse, decentralized constituency (many of whom do not have organizational underwriting), organizational finances have been a historical concern for adult education associations. …

Unum and pluribus: ideological underpinnings of interethnic communication in the United States

The present analysis examines everyday public discourse on issues of interethnic relations to demonstrate how the ideals of the founding ideology, “classical liberalism”, play out in contemporary American society. Guiding this analysis is a systemic conception in which an individual’s interethnic communication behavior is reciprocally linked to the ideological milieu. The analysis utilizes Billig’s ( Billig, M. (1991) Ideology and opinions: studies in rhetorical psychology. London: Sage; Billig, M., Condor, S., Edwards, D., Gane, M., Middleton, D., & Radley, A. (1988) Ideological dilemmas: a social psychology of everyday thinking. London: Sage.) articulation of the inherently dilemmatic nature of the Western ideology to describe the underlying ideological themes captured in various publicly communicated messages addressing issues of interethnic relations. A qualitative-interpretive method is employed to examine a wide range of messages voiced in recent years by politicians, community and civic leaders, intellectuals, and ordinary citizens. Results reveal four types of messages: (1) messages of assimilationism reflecting the traditional liberal themes of “individual identity” and “procedural equality”; (2) messages of pluralism emphasizing the counter-themes of “group identity” and “status equality”; (3) messages of reconciliation that seek to accommodate and balance both liberal themes and counter-themes; and (4) messages of extremism that take “group identity” beyond realms that most Americans deem “unreasonable”.

Hidden Agendas

Modem democratic society is a mixture of centralized state power, a powerfulcorporate/finance sector, a virtually monopolized media network, and variouscivil institutions, the underlying ideological themes of which are the freedomof an individual to participate in the decision-making process and toexpress alternative viewpoints in the political, economic, and social spheres.Freedom has always been a cherished ideal, and freedom of thought a hardfought-for reality which today symbolizes one of the outward hallmarks ofmodem, particularly Western, societies. Pilger's book highlights the fact thatwhen this ideal - in essence the ability of a citizen to think, understand, andplay a meaningful role in managing the public affairs of his own society - coexistsalongside the reality of a set of powerful groupings working toward adifferent agenda within the same society, then true participatory citizenshipbecomes meaningless and democracy a sham. In other words, privileged elitesworking for their own wealth and self-interests become the leading orchestratorsof plans or "agendas" to maintain skewed power distributions, keeping thereality of matters so "hidden" from the public that a smoke screen of half-truthsand propaganda is created, preventing those outside from understanding reality,and therefore, acting in their own interests. These hidden agendas can takethe fonn of direct concealment or by the manufacture of consent (as defined byNoam Chomsky) whereby facts are manipulated and presented in such a guiseas to obtain the firm support of the individuals making up society.To the general reader, the title and subject matter of the book will undoubtedlyhave an almost conspiratorial ring about it, enough at least for most ...

The Galileo legend as scientific folklore

The legend of Galileo's persecution by the Roman Catholic Church is treated here as an example of scientific folklore. By examining the various ways in which this legend diverges from scholarly readings of the Galileo affair, we can assess the part that folklore plays in building and sustaining a professional ideology for the modern scientific culture. The forty treatments of the Galileo episode that are examined here were found in sources, such as textbooks and popular histories, which are presumably intended as socializing rhetorics. An examination of these narratives suggests five distinct themes of the scientific ideology.

Refiguring the Past in the Post-Franco Fiction Film: Fernando Trueba's Belle Époque

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeBSS Subject Index: BELLE ÉPOQUE [FILM DIRECTED BY F. TRUEBA]HISTORY [AS LITERARY, CULTURAL & IDEOLOGICAL THEME]TRUEBA, FERNANDO [FILM DIRECTOR] (b. 1955)

Ethnographic film and the popular imagination

Ethnographic Film and the Popular Imagination Brenda Jo Bright (bio) The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle. By Fatimah Tobing Rony. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 1996. 328 pages. $49.95 (cloth). $17.95 (paper). What is it to see oneself as one is seen—as a landscape, a museum display, or ethnographic spectacle? The experience of being the subject of the ethnographic gaze and seeing oneself through first world eyes is what Fatimah Tobing Rony calls the third eye. This gaze, the experience of being its subject, and the “third eye” critique such subjectivity engenders, are all under analysis in The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle. Rony argues that in the popular imagination, “ethnographic film is still by and large racially defined” (7). To trace how this has come to be, Rony brilliantly weaves together case studies in early cinema and ethnography. Her analysis of such seemingly disparate sources such as Félix-Louis Regnault’s photographic movement studies of West Africans in a 1895 Paris ethnographic exposition, Robert Flaherty’s much acclaimed Nanook of the North (1922), and the 1933 ethnographic expedition/monster thriller, King Kong reveals the central ideological themes and modes of looking at “others” at the core of early ethnographic films and ethnographic themes in popular films. Through historical contextualizations as well as close readings, Rony examines how the mutually inflected discourses and visualizations of early cinema and ethnography have so embedded the “ethnographic” in the popular imagination in the form of racialized images of natives. [End Page 183] The project of The Third Eye is to provide a critical vision of ethnographic spectacles. The book bears witness to the processes by which people were taught to see native peoples, processes that were fully institutionalized in museums and in cinema in the early part of this century. The Third Eye elegantly moves between ethnographic representations of native peoples, native peoples’ responses to the experience of seeing themselves being seen, and their self-representations. The third eye takes DuBois’s idea of “double consciousness” one step further. For subordinated populations, the sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others can induce one to see “the very process which creates the internal splitting, to witness the conditions which give rise to double consciousness” (4). Rony argues that ethnographic cinema has historically situated indigenous peoples in a displaced temporal realm in which they are observed as objects on display for their comparative “otherness.” As she shows, non-natives have looked at natives to “see” a separate world. Yet, the fiction of the “separate world” is based upon erasing, effacing, or mythologizing the power imperial nations exert on the conditions of indigenous lives. The displacing descriptions of conquered indigenous peoples were, and continue to be, highly racialized. However informative they might be, they are ultimately presented in narratives of the “not us” to non-natives. Subject position is central to the book. Witness Rony’s introduction, which begins with the personalized subheading, “How I became a Savage: Seeing Anthropology,” where she links seeing herself as savage with an emergent critical vision of anthropological seeing. In a subtle confirmation of the importance of popular culture, how she became a “savage,” how she came to see herself being seen, did not begin with an ethnographic film. It began with seeing King Kong, the central plot of which unfolds on an island off the coast of Sumatra. Rony was born of Sumatran parents. Because the islanders, the “Savages,” were speaking her language, because the native “bride” of King Kong was someone she might have been, Rony could not enter the film’s illusion of entering another time, another space, another experience. That experience belonged to those for whom the Savages were “other.” In order to work against the silences imposed upon ethnographic objects, Rony structures The Third Eye so that all considerations of ethnographic film foreground the “chain of looks” involved in making ethnographic film. The Third Eye provides both institutional and experiential analyses of cinematic cultural representation. Recent anthropological critiques of [End Page 184] ethnographic representation have sought to challenge the eurocentric and displacing narratives of turn of the century anthropology, and...

A Kinder, Gentler British Army: Mid-Victorian Experiments in the Management of Army Vice at Gibraltar and Aldershot

In the early 1860s,one of the first practical fruits of what Chaplain General George Robert Gleig had once called instilling the 'moral discipline' of the British army took shape in behaviour control experiments with troops stationed at Aldershot.1 These experiments, made in the context of Crimea-era reforms and based on earlier efforts made in much smaller garrisons, explored the application of a secular ethic of the 'home' and 'respectability' to problems of army discipline. During the 1840s and 1850s,military religious reform increased official toleration of denominational plurality and religious practice in the army. Public scrutiny of the army after Crimea also drove a reform of service conditions. By the later 1850s, even the hardest and most secular officers had to work with the intangibles of 'character building' rather than with the older disciplinary methods of jail and lash. There also emerged a civilian parallel in a missionary drive among the army. That effort later enjoyed gre9-tsuccess by relying upon tenets of 'home' and 'motherhood' in the context of vital Christianity. This article will concentrate, however, upon the military social reform in the army and its themes of public sexual ideology and controlling the power of the 'home'.

Social Security and the myth of the entitlement "crisis".

Although public support for Social Security remains high, confidence in the viability of the program has declined. The decline in confidence reflects confusion generated by public dialogue about various crises, the most recent being the "entitlement crisis." This article discusses two central ideological themes of the entitlement crisis, that entitlement spending is crowding out funds for other social needs and that current trends are unsustainable. It questions the substantive basis of these themes and then critically evaluates two proposals for the restructuring of Social Security, means-testing and privatization.

Revolution and Rank in Tamil Nationalism

From the 1920s to the late 1960s, Tamil nationalism in India was characterized by elements of radical innovation which made the Dravidian movement a mobilization for cultural revolution, in Tamil terms, as well as for the defense of Tamil interests vis-à-vis the central government. In the last twenty years concern for the ordinary person has manifested itself in extravagant displays of state largess and the encouragement of personality cults directed toward Chief Ministers of Tamil Nadu. I delineate below major ideological themes of the nationalist cultural revolution and argue that these ideological elements, while representing change in Tamil political culture, were in many ways deeply anchored in prerevolutionary political concerns supported by institutions and symbolic systems with precolonial antecedents. I link these ideological elements to the dissolution of radicalism in Tamil nationalism and to the emergence of a style of governance which has undermined standards of public administration.

The Ideological Construction of Risk in Mining: A Case Study

This paper identifies five ideological themes constructed within a mining company's health and safety discourse. While recognizing the contradictory aspects of these themes, it is argued that each theme operates in different ways, both in isolation and in various combinations, to reproduce labor consent to risk. The key to understanding the discourse as a whole is that the various themes provide miners with the parameters and means of understanding who controls which risks, how, why and with what limitations. The discourse also contributes to consent by placing the specific understandings of occupational hazards within a broader conception of work, employment and economic "realities," which explain and justify the persistence of accidents, disease, and risk-taking.

The Dominant Ideology and Brazilian Tabloids: News Content in Class-Targeted Newspapers

A content analysis of the press in a middle-sized city in Brazil finds that the news agenda and local scope of the tabloid dailies are oriented to the working classes. Working-class-oriented tabloids tend to be the strongest ideological supporters of capitalist legitimacy and continued elite control in the midst of rapid industrialization and newspaper competition in the provincial capital of Curitiba. More serious papers oriented toward the middle classes tend to allow for less hegemonic points of view in the period after the end of the military dictatorship. Ideology variables are shown to be empirically powerful, second only to agenda-setting in explaining run-of-the-paper news content and second only to news values in predicting the most prominent news content for all sampled papers. Stories with dominant ideological themes are played prominently in all newspapers and, in addition, are run more frequently throughout the tabloids.

Romantic Struggles: The Bildungsroman and Mother-Daughter Bonding in Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John

Shortly after its publication in 1983, Jamaica Kincaid's John received high praise from critics who welcomed the verve and strength of this new, black female voice. Even though reviewers differed in regard to the novel's political, cultural, and ideological themes, a clear majority of them agreed on the central importance of Kincaid's conflictual presentation of the mother-daughter relationship. And for good reason. Kincaid's involved descriptions of familial alliances generate provocative psychological interpretations. For example, in the novel's earliest full page review, Susan Kenny announces how John provides valuable insight about the complex relationship between mothers and daughters (6). Roni Natov simply states that Annie John is a fully developed psychological study (1). Much of this fascination comes from the intensity, range, and paradoxical quality of Kincaid's mother-daughter bond. In particular, the psychoanalytical essays attempt to understand how John, the lead character, could at the same moment both love and hate her mother with equal intensity.1 And yet, such a singular approach fails to address other pertinent issues. Even though motherchild concerns do seem to call for developmental readings, the novel's concern with self-identity also brings it into a second arena: the Bildungsroman. Of course, this coming of age literary convention differs significantly among nationalities and periods, but some broad characteristics do seem to cross cultural lines. A sensitive child-hero begins his life in a provincial area where he quickly perceives constraints on his natural development. He grows frustrated with his family, school, and friends. Finally, at a fairly early age, he leaves the repression of home for the real education that occurs in a sophisticated, worldly, and often urban setting.2 John more or less follows this romantic scheme. I invoke the metaphor of romanticism here because the

A Repertoire of Interpretations: Master Frames and Ideological Continuity in U.S. Agrarian Mobilization

Despite significant contributions, movement frame analyses have tended to focus on ideological construction within and between social movement organizations at single moments in time or during protest cycles. By integrating framing and abeyance concepts, this article extends the framing perspective to examine historical continuities, transformations, and interweavings of ideological themes in U.S. agrarian mobilization. We develop the concept of a “repertoire of interpretations” as a means of analyzing the persistence and variable alignments of three master frames: agrarian fundamentalism, competitive capitalism, and producer ideology. Relationships between these master frames are considered in terms of constitutive and ancillary salience and are explored with reference to abeyance processes.

Un trésor d'époque impériale à Mytilène

Abstract. - The Mytilène hoard (Sourlanga, 1988) consists of 50 Greek and Roman coins minted between 138 and 253 AD. The circumstances of the burial of this hoard remain unknown, but may be a result of the monetary depreciation of the mid 3rd century and of insecurity linked to the raids of the Goths. The presence of Roman silver coins and four bronze coins from Asian cities may be related to legionary movements in the East. The majority of coins of Lesbos date from the Antonine period. They continued to circulate because of the absence of newer issues, which would have been expensive to strike. The iconography of the issues minted by the koinon of Lesbos contributes additional information about the architecture of the koinon temple and its consecration to the Imperial cult. The iconography of two bronze medallions (from Mytilène and Julia Gordos) reflects ideological themes important to the cities and the Imperial authority.

Ideological Themes in Family Policy

In this exploration of family policy, the author identifies the basic assumptions that shape differing perspectives on such policies. Focus is on the definition of the family, the privileging of certain definitions, the state-family relationship, the valuing or devaluing of the family, and the tension between familism and individualism. The social worker's role in shaping family policy to reflect social work values is examined.

Videology: Video‐Games as Postmodern Sites/Sights of Ideological Reproduction

As new technologies, video‐games are becoming increasingly popular among today's pre‐teens and teenagers. Relying on systematic observation of videogames found in public arcades, participation in them, and engagement with the relevant literature, I explore eight central assumptions of “videology”: the ideology which organizes these games. While suggesting that these assumptions articulate and exaggerate problematic ideological themes, I also explore the relationship between videology and a postmodern culture or moment.

Today's City Managers: A Legacy of Success-Becoming-Failure

The theme here is commonplace: failure of success. You know how it goes. Some innovation suits times; sweet memories live on, often tenaciously; and paradoxically, greater initial success, greater likelihood of failure, in face of change. City has requisites. The concept has a heritage that attracts, but concerns are building. Alan Kiepper put his finger on issue in late 1970s. There has to be something fundamentally wrong with a profession, we paraphrase him closely, when it begins to lose so many of its best people just at time of their greatest successes. Two challenges dominate in this article and its companion, Tomorrow's City Management, in a future issue. Is success leading to failure for city management? And what mid-course corrections seem reasonable? In this article, we deal with first challenge, and follow-on article addresses second. How Success Is Becoming Failure Six themes carry brunt of present argument, and their time-line extends from yesterday to today, as it were. Many of problematic features have been recognized, but their combined effects require attention. The six themes are: 1. making too much of once-useful distinction between politics/administration, 2. failing to aggressively reject conventional management seen as only or mostly implementation in bureaucratic contexts, 3. continuing to try to separate facts from values, and hence acting on impossible, or at least seriously limiting, 4. tolerating city managements conceptual rooting in narrow efficiency and economy, 5. limiting city by an awkward style of interaction trending toward distance and depersonalization, and 6. settling for, perhaps even glorifying, a sense of single and solitary manager. Frustrations of Dichotomizing Increasingly Seamless Following fashion in political science and public administration, city profession at start-up deeply incorporated a sharp separation of politics from administration. In short, policy making was said to reside in elected officials, and implementation remained firmly in hands and minds of professionals. This distinction worked well enough for a while, even famously, but has come increasingly undone. Conceptually, it is rare student of public who has gone untutored in many ways in which reality never did - nor should - approximate a dichotomy featuring politics and administration. Indeed, city literature contains a fair share of such revisionism (Svara, 1985), for reasons that seem clear enough. Old electoral coalitions lose power new contenders demand greater roles in administration, along with greater citizen access, and hence city managers must spend more time in encouraging cooperation or even civility among stakeholders, coordinating efforts, and playing policy-making roles (Blubaugh, 1987; Nalbandian, 1991). However, neither city literature nor practice have given up old or invented new. Hence, need for such reminders: |City Managers Don't Make Policy': A Lie, Let's Face It (Ammons and Newell, 1988). Indeed, a recent ICMA Green Book notes that one article rejects the popular politics/administration dichotomy... (Newell, 1993; 230, our emphasis). Why can one still find ample signs of old gospel alive and well, cheek-by-jowl with revisionist rhetoric (Anderson, Newland, and Stillman, 1983; 76-78, 88-106, 128-129)? Perhaps paramountly, traditional distinction left city a large and unfettered administration. Politics dominated in principle, but in practice substantial scope existed for administration. The underlying ideological themes were comfortable - of professionals as arbiters of public interest, of managers as so competent and public-spirited as to earn great discretion, and of once-conventional middle-class values as constituting something approaching a summum bonum consensus (Goldman, 1952; 161-187). …

Regulated Enterprises: Natural Gas Pipelines and Northeastern Markets, 1938–1954 by Christopher J. Castaneda

TECHNOLOGYAND CULTURE Book Reviews 879 for husbands and fathers to build the necessary additions to the house. But since nearly all the buyers were veterans in the same age group, these newer models exhibited a limited response to concerns offamilies whose children would soon be approaching adolescence. The intensely gendered domesticity of togetherness embedded in the design of the house reinforced the preciousness of the idealized nuclear family whose very existence within the home would serve to combat the external threats of the Cold War. This book has a major structural flaw. Too much of Kelly’s supporting evidence is contained within the surfeit ofendnotes. Ninety-two pages of notes support 172 pages of text. For example, Kelly reveals in an endnote (p. 229, n. 22) the startling fact that the U.S. Treasury Department funded an episode of “Father Knows Best” in which the Andersons’ hometown falls under Communist rule. Kelly fails to make explicit the obvious connection between this government effort to reinforce middle-class values as a bulwark against Communism and government support of postwar suburban housing developments. In another endnote (p. 240, n. 21), Kelly states, “It is the underlying thesis of this book that the redefinition in class which resulted from the housing policies of the FHA and the GI Bill is among the most important contributions of the Roosevelt/Truman years.” A statement such as this demands to be part of the text. While drawing on the familiar literature of postwar social history, Kelly offers a fresh approach to the suburban entity that focuses on the continuity ofAmerican ideological themes. Kelly reconstructs a cultural context from such diverse sources as basal readers (remember Alice and Jerry?), movies, radio, novels, television, government documents, neigh­ borhood newspapers, oral histories, and the 1956 Women’s Congress on Housing. By looking at the houses as material artifacts within this context, Kelly examines and articulates just exactly what Levittown meant to those who designed, built, funded, and criticized it, and, most important, to those who lived there. While technology is not the focus of this study, historians of technology will profit from an approach that not only seeks to understand the social context but can extricate cultural meaning from design and artifactual evidence. Molly W. Berger Ms. Berger is a Ph.D. candidate at Case Western Reserve University, writing a techno­ logical and cultural history of 19th- and early 20th-century American hotels. Regulated Enterprises: Natural Gas Pipelines and Northeastern Markets, 19381954 . By ChristopherJ. Castaneda. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993. Pp. xiv+203; tables, notes, index. $30.00. From when I was little I remember riding at night between Houston and Lake Charles, Louisiana, on old “Bloody (U.S.) 90.” In many places 880 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGYAND CULTURE it was bright as day from the gas flares in the oil fields alongside the highway. Fifteen years later, by the time the first sections of I-10 were opened, the flares were mosdy gone: what had been a dangerous nuisance, good only to light up the night or to make carbon black in plants that billowed towering clouds of black smoke into a crystalline blue Texas sky, by then was heating houses in Boston and firing boilers in Philadelphia. Long-distance natural gas pipelines perfecdy exemplify Nathan Rosenberg’s thesis that technological progress transforms, in­ deed redefines, “natural” resources. What Rosenberg’s hopeful eco­ nomic thesis does not do is tell exacdy how that transformation takes place—in fashionable language, how historical actors make that new world. This book doesjust that. It is a meticulously researched account of how groups of entrepreneurs, working within an also-evolving regulatory environment, built, bought, financed, and created the net­ work of long-distance pipelines and business relationships that still supply Gulf Coast and mid-continent natural gas to the Northeast. Christopher Castaneda’s thesis is simple and direct: Between the Natural Gas Act of 1938 and the travesty of the 1954 Phillips decision, the Federal Power Commission (FPC), in the pluralistic process by which it awarded the “certificate of public convenience and necessity” prerequisite to interstate transport of natural gas, effectively guided underlying market forces (potential supply of natural gas in the...