Line Of Critique Research Articles

The political implications of state neutrality as a range concept

ABSTRACT The idea that the state ought to be neutral towards different conceptions of the good life has been an influential principle in liberal theory since the 1970s. It has, however, been subject to criticism by communitarians, multiculturalists and liberal perfectionists. Recently, Peter Balint has attempted to defend state neutrality against its liberal critics as the adequate interpretation of the liberal project by redefining it as a range concept. By arguing that neutrality always occurs within a specific range of permissible conceptions of the good life, Balint provides a convincing rebuttal of neutrality’s critics. In this paper I argue that while neutrality as a range concept provides an adequate account of state neutrality, it also makes it vulnerable to a new line of critique. Since the range of neutrality cannot be deduced from the principle of neutrality itself, neutrality is subject to political developments beyond its own control. I will start by clarifying the notion of neutrality as a range concept. Secondly, I will demonstrate that Balint’s notion of the range concept finds ample support in the wider literature on neutrality. Thirdly, I will argue that, as a range concept, neutrality ultimately depends on politically constituted value judgments.

Divergent theoretical trajectories in Game Studies: a bibliographical review

Video games have become important objects of study for different academic disciplines. From the birth of the medium in the mid-twentieth century to the present, video games have offered new and creative ways of approaching reality and fiction, and not only serve as entertainment, but also have significant cultural, social, and technological implications. The formal study of this medium is the purview of the field of game studies, which brings together the contributions of various disciplines. This paper presents a bibliographical review of several theoretical trajectories in game studies, reflecting on the relevance of early debates on narratology and ludology, and examining the ways these initial divisions of the field have branched beyond that debate. Over the past several years, the narratological line of critique has established links with other theories such as cognitivism, the theory of fictional worlds and the contributions of unnatural narratology to the analysis of new technologies; ludology, for its part, has grown through its adaptations to postcolonial and decolonial theories in cultural studies, as well as through its connections to critical race and gender studies. We conclude that as game studies has evolved as a discipline, its initial theoretical debates have undergone profound transformations that have brought depth to the analysis of games’ meaning and diversified to the tools and techniques we have for analysing games as digital and cultural artefacts.

The Historical and Its Discontents: Nietzsche and Benjamin Against “Historicism”

ABSTRACT Representations of historicism as the loss of meaning in history and critiques of historicism as the critique of such a loss had been pervasive from the late nineteenth century until World War II. Among historicism’s most powerful and representative critics were the young Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin in his Parisian exile. This essay seeks to trace from Nietzsche to Benjamin an unbroken yet growing line of critique of historicism—as the “sickness of time” from which modernity both suffers and has been trying to recover. Two attempts at such a recovery will be examined and juxtaposed: Nietzsche’s “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” and Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” By thus situating both historicism and its critiques within the desires and anxieties of modernity, this essay tries to delineate and to understand the peculiarly modernist shapes assumed by the historical and its discontents.

Subverting the Ethics of Crime Fiction in Dževad Karahasan’s Noćno vijeće (The Night Council)

This article explores the crisis of modernity using the example of Dževad Karahasan’s novel Nocno vijece (The Night Council), a work of literature thematising war crimes committed in the name of nationalism during the 1990s in Yugoslavia. By comparing the specific compositional features of this novel with the general formal and ideological tendencies of crime fiction as such, our analysis establishes that the ethical foundations of contemporary civilisation along with the modern notion of justice as mirrored by the genre of the detective novel are, in the case of Nocno vijece (The Night Council), treated as questionable. Belonging to the line of critique that observes modernity as a state of permanent crisis, this novel betrays the standard conventions of the criminalist genre, thereby contesting the modern era’s prevalent idea of justice by reflecting on the complexity of ethical order in human society.

Do epistemic reasons bear on the ought simpliciter?

AbstractAre epistemic reasons normative in the same sense as, for instance, moral reasons? In this paper I examine and defend the claim that epistemic reasons are normative only relative to an epistemic standard. Unlike moral reasons they are not substantially normative, because they fail to make an independent contribution to obligations or permissions simpliciter. After presenting what I take to be the main argument for this view, I illustrate that the argument has often been defended by examples which controversially presuppose strong epistemic obligations or pragmatic reasons for belief. Opponents of the argument often deny the existence of obligations and reasons of these kinds. I therefore examine whether the argument can withstand that line of critique by employing new examples.

The Politics of Undeserved Happiness

The Politics of Undeserved Happiness Zahi Zalloua (bio) In this essay, I want to critically engage with privilege theory and the now widespread liberal activist slogan "check your privilege" so prevalent on U.S. college campuses. Feminists were arguably the first to criticize unearned privilege, and in particular male privilege, as well as resistance on the part of the privileged to recognizing that privilege as exclusionary. American feminist Peggy McIntosh looks for example at the ways some men react negatively to the critique of male privilege, illustrating their reluctance to give up their power (McIntosh 2001, 95-105). Even when men acknowledge the historical discrimination of women, according to McIntosh, they often fail to see privilege as divisive: they fail to see, that is, how the notion of privilege is governed by a logic of exclusion. In discovering her own white privilege, McIntosh comments, "I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was 'meant' to remain oblivious" (94-95). To correct such shortcomings, privilege theory teaches that there is no privilege without the unprivileged. What comes out of the analysis of McIntosh and others, then, is the imperative to self-analyze, to check one's privilege. But what does it mean to check privilege? What is its critical force? Is it adequate to the task at hand? Simply stated, what is privilege theory questioning and what is it leaving intact? I counter here what could be described as privilege theory's liberal critique of unearned privilege on two fronts.1 On the first front, I draw on Herbert Marcuse's claim for "the need for 'undeserved' happiness" from his 1967 essay, "The End of Utopia." The "happiness" in "'undeserved' happiness" here should not be conflated with complacent satisfaction, with the attainment of a happy state—a view of happiness that psychoanalysis consistently questions—but should be understood instead as referring to modes of enjoyment, to unruly acts of libidinal gratification and [End Page 371] self-cultivation incongruous with the capitalist maxim, happiness as the deserved fruits of social productivity. Moreover, Marcuse's formulation throws a wrench in the logic of reward and punishment that often informs the contemporary discourse of privilege, a logic that unwittingly transforms the critique of structural inequalities into a matter of individual conscience: you should be verbally punished for assuming your unearned privilege (visible in the act of calling out someone's privilege in the accusatory charge, "your privilege is showing"), and rewarded for confessing your given privilege (whether or not that confession leads to a deeper engagement with the structural problems at work). On the second front, I scrutinize further privilege theory's under-theorized account of subjectivity. In this effort, I turn to Slavoj Žižek's Lacanian musings on the postmodern superego to demonstrate how the compulsory call "to check your privilege" at best provides a limited critical value and, at worst, is hegemonic and complicit with the very racist and sexist ideologies it seeks to undermine. Finally, I reread Marcuse's call for undeserved happiness along Žižekian lines as effecting a shift from privilege to fantasy: from the liberal imperative to "check your privilege" to the psychoanalytic injunction to "check our fantasy." The critique of privilege theory has emanated from two main camps: the Right condemns privilege theory for creating a victim industry and helping to legitimize a stifling atmosphere of political correctness (one in which marginalized groups—the unprivileged—are seen as exempt from criticism while white, Christian, heterosexual males are fair game), while the Left questions and complicates privilege theory's approach for its failure to truly get at oppression, seeing it as reformist rather than revolutionary. Both Marcuse and Žižek gesture toward a third line of critique. Their objections to privilege theory share much with the Left's verdict that this approach does not go far enough—and, at least in the case of Žižek, the Right's suspicion of political correctness, of tolerant liberal multiculturalism more generally—but, as we shall see, they converge here for significantly different reasons. Again, in its best forms, privilege theory...

Bodies, Biopolitics, and Mushrooms Once Again

In this short essay, I respond to Donovan Schaefer's response to my paper, "Do Mushrooms Have Religion, Too?" Continuing the line of critique originally formulated, I suggest that Schaefer's exclusion of non-animal life from the realm of bodies conceals a biopolitical decision.

Bayesian prediction intervals for assessing P-value variability in prospective replication studies

Increased availability of data and accessibility of computational tools in recent years have created an unprecedented upsurge of scientific studies driven by statistical analysis. Limitations inherent to statistics impose constraints on the reliability of conclusions drawn from data, so misuse of statistical methods is a growing concern. Hypothesis and significance testing, and the accompanying P-values are being scrutinized as representing the most widely applied and abused practices. One line of critique is that P-values are inherently unfit to fulfill their ostensible role as measures of credibility for scientific hypotheses. It has also been suggested that while P-values may have their role as summary measures of effect, researchers underappreciate the degree of randomness in the P-value. High variability of P-values would suggest that having obtained a small P-value in one study, one is, ne\tvertheless, still likely to obtain a much larger P-value in a similarly powered replication study. Thus, “replicability of P-value” is in itself questionable. To characterize P-value variability, one can use prediction intervals whose endpoints reflect the likely spread of P-values that could have been obtained by a replication study. Unfortunately, the intervals currently in use, the frequentist P-intervals, are based on unrealistic implicit assumptions. Namely, P-intervals are constructed with the assumptions that imply substantial chances of encountering large values of effect size in an observational study, which leads to bias. The long-run frequentist probability provided by P-intervals is similar in interpretation to that of the classical confidence intervals, but the endpoints of any particular interval lack interpretation as probabilistic bounds for the possible spread of future P-values that may have been obtained in replication studies. Along with classical frequentist intervals, there exists a Bayesian viewpoint toward interval construction in which the endpoints of an interval have a meaningful probabilistic interpretation. We propose Bayesian intervals for prediction of P-value variability in prospective replication studies. Contingent upon approximate prior knowledge of the effect size distribution, our proposed Bayesian intervals have endpoints that are directly interpretable as probabilistic bounds for replication P-values, and they are resistant to selection bias. We showcase our approach by its application to P-values reported for five psychiatric disorders by the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium group.

Race and Interpretive Possibility

Race and Interpretive Possibility Kinohi Nishikawa (bio) How to Read African American Literature: Post-Civil Rights Fiction and the Task of Interpretation Aida Levy-Hussen New York University Press wwwnyupress.org/books/9781479884711/ 224Pages; Print, $26.00 In 2011 Kenneth W. Warren sparked controversy by positing that the demise of state-sponsored segregation had sundered the unity of the African American literary project, effectively bringing it to an end. The very title of the book in which he advanced this claim, What Was African American Literature?, provoked seasoned scholars and first-year graduate students alike to take sides. The ensuing field-wide debate compelled African American literary studies to reckon with its own version of Fredric Jameson’s famous dictum “Always historicize!” At issue then, and still today, is not whether to historicize—Warren and his detractors all agree it must be done. Rather, it comes down to whose historicity one elects to follow. Since 2011, a handful of critics, including Walter Benn Michaels, Stephen M. Best, and Douglas A. Jones, have published work that generally accords with Warren’s claim. Their line of critique is to reject the idea that past common experience—not only segregation but, more profoundly, slavery—should be a continuous, if not perpetual, organizing principle of black literary and cultural production. Citing Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) as a touchstone, these critics diagnose a troubling yet pervasive nostalgia for conditions that once compelled racial unity as a matter of social oppression. In their view, such nostalgia bespeaks a regrettable state of false consciousness, whereby one’s imaginary relation to group identity can only be achieved by living in the past. Unsurprisingly, the other side of the debate has endorsed practically the opposite philosophy of history. With far more critics represented on this side, what might be called the field’s commonsense position is to insist on the enduring legacy of slavery and Jim Crow in contemporary America. Less an explicit model of periodization than an assertion that race matters in comparable ways across the centuries, this line of critique more or less echoes Beloved’s narrative strategy: namely, identify those connections to the past that bind present-day subjects to the departed and thereby affirm the coherence of the black experience. History, in this account, is what hurt and what continues to hurt. Aida Levy-Hussen enters into this debate with a sophisticated analysis not only of each side’s critical orientation but also of the entire debate’s investment in the question of historicity. Surveying how both sides in the debate are equally committed to their version of history, Levy-Hussen encourages us to step back from the fray and take stock of the field’s interpretive protocols. She, for one, is not convinced that historicity should be the grounding theory behind the task of interpreting race. The very title of her book, How to Read African American Literature, announces the novelty of her approach. On one hand, it provides an implicit rejoinder to Warren in that it implies there is still an object called “African American literature” to read in the late twentieth century and beyond. On the other, it promises a bold rethinking of the field’s normative claims in that it makes the “how” of interpretation its explicit object of study. For Levy-Hussen, the controversy over Warren’s claim has begged not for a definitive periodization of the field but for a wholesale accounting of the field’s interpretive protocols. The book is theoretically grounded in Levy-Hussen’s characterization of both sides of the debate. The dominant interpretive mode is described as a “hermeneutic of therapeutic reading,” whereby the “twin gestures of historical reclamation and psychic conversation” align professional criticism with “the fictions of racial remembrance that dominate today’s black literature.” This mode, according to Levy-Hussen, “speaks to the desire to make sense of an unredeemed past and its painful legacy and to locate agency and a capacity for social change in the act of reading.” The interpretive mode associated with Warren, meanwhile, is simply called “prohibitive reading.” Levy-Hussen is careful to point out that...

Heidegger’s “produktive Logik”

Beginning especially in the 1930s, Heidegger’s ontology famously and frequently used a great deal of obscure technical terminology. His use of this terminology has contributed to confusion in Heidegger scholarship and has been a target for many analytically minded philosophers. In this paper, I have two correlated goals. First, I hope to establish certain elements of a reconceived methodology for interpreting Heidegger, such that a consistent reconstruction of many of his seemingly bizarre concepts becomes possible. Rather than the dominant chronological approach according to which Heidegger’s various renditions of the ontological problematic are understood in relation to their position on the timeline of his career, I argue that these renditions should be arrayed along an axis of ground or what I call a “diagenic axis.” Making good sense of Heidegger’s obscure concepts requires reconstructing them in terms of their position in the methodological evolution of his project along a diagenic axis. Second, I hope to show why on the basis of this methodology a particularly obstinate line of critique of Heidegger goes wrong – the Carnapian critique, which captures the spirit of many who dismiss Heidegger on the basis of his difficult terminology. Accomplishing both of these goals, I argue, is dependent upon clarifying the methodological operation by which Heidegger’s ontology evolves and the role of the concept of ground in this evolution. In his early work, Heidegger provides a way of making sense of this evolution in terms of a “produktive Logik” characterizing his ontology.

Governing the system: Risk, finance, and neoliberal reason

The 2007/2008 financial crisis was widely expected to usher in a shift toward a post-neoliberal regime that would be more actively concerned with system-level risk and impose restrictive regulations on financial institutions and markets. Such a shift, it is now widely recognized, has failed to materialize. Commentators have tended to point to the “capture” of policymaking processes by financial elites to account for the failure of reform. This argument represents the continuation of a problematic trend in critical perspectives on neoliberalism — namely, to rely on an instrumentalist understanding of institutional power and to view the survival of neoliberalism as dependent on external interventions. That line of critique, it is argued, is rather one-sided in downplaying the internal sources of cohesion that neoliberalism commands. Taking its cue from Foucault’s comments on neoliberalism in his late lectures at the Collège de France and the methodological innovations that he introduced in that context, the article explores the logic of governance through risk and the specific way in which neoliberalism intervenes in this relationship. In this way, it moves beyond an understanding of neoliberalism that views it in terms of the neglect of system-level governance and offers an account of the distinctive modalities of neoliberal financial governance. The article suggests that we should not view developments since the crisis in purely negative terms (the failure of progressive reform), but consider the ways in which they represent a continuation of the distinctive rationality of neoliberal financial governance.

The Breakthrough: Human Rights in the 1970s (Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights Series) edited by Jan Eckel & Samuel Moyn (review)

The Breakthrough, as the title suggests, is a kind of sequel to the provocative work of human rights history’s current enfant terrible, Samuel Moyn. He co-edits this volume of contributed works with a kindred colleague, Jan Eckel, who teaches modern and contemporary history at the University of Freiburg, Germany. In an early footnote, Moyn recognizes the similarity of the project he and Eckel share: “[Eckel and I] propose somewhat different interpretations of why the decade [of the 1970s] was so pivotal.” Moyn, until this year a professor of history at Columbia University, and who is also trained in law, joined the faculty of his alma mater, Harvard Law School, in the fall of 2014 as a professor of law. Moyn’s earlier work, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010), has become something of a bellwether in the field, the volume that must be responded to, whether by friend or foe, and the yardstick by which support for a certain view of human rights history, indeed of human rights themselves, must be engaged. The Breakthrough, in many ways, continues the same line of critique; in others, it challenges the revisionist project.

Anselm and Berkeley on God’s Necessary Existence

In this paper, after outlining some general remarks on the nature of faith and reason in Anselm, I will proceed to explore a key aspect of his thought concerning the necessity of God’s existence. In particular, I will concentrate on his Proslogion, and subject his ‘ontological argument’ for the existence of God to a line of critique directed mainly at its Neo-Platonic pre-suppositions. In the second part of my paper, I turn my attention to the thought of George Berkeley. I argue that, appearances notwithstanding, there are some interesting parallels to be drawn in a comparison of these two thinkers. Both are orthodox Christians and seek to understand the Christian God as a God of Faith and Reason. Berkeley, as with Anselm, wishes to argue for the necessary de re existence of the Christian God by the use of reasoned lines of argumentation. Berkeley sees his task as offering a proof for the existence of God, accessible to the plain man, a variation on the Fool of the Psalms. Contra Berkeley, I will argue that his immaterial realism ultimately fails in its quest to justify the necessary existence of the Christian God. His ‘universal perceiver’ is gravely undermined by the specter of solipsism and by the implausibility of his notion of spiritual substance.

Bare Life, Interstices, and the Third Space of Citizenship

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben s enigmatic treatise on the intricacy of sovereign power and the state of exception in his Homo Sacer has received wide critical attention from and social theorists in the past decade. In gesturing to the condition of the modern concentration as a paradigmatic case of what he calls - human subjects reduced to a naked depoliticized state without official status and juridical rights - Agamben identifies a similar form of totalitarian power operating in the juridical realm of contemporary liberal democracies (Agamben 1998). Extending upon Agamben, critical migration scholars have recently taken up his conception of bare life to delineate the plight of refugees and unauthorized migrants floating in the global economy, who live in an indefinite and suspended state of noncitizenship (Rajaram and GrundyWarr 2004; Salter 2008). The move in paralleling Homo Sacer s caricature of the juridico -political space of camp with the geopolitical condition of undocumented migration corresponds with Agamben s call to examine the ways in which citizen-subjects of our age have all appear [ed] virtually as hominess sacri (Agamben 1998, 111). Agambens transhistorical call notwithstanding, to what extent is the space of camp (and by implication, the largely suppressed agency of bare life caught within the camp) an adequate depiction of the social condition of undocumented migrants? Examining the workspace of private households where female migrants work as domestic workers and where labor laws and regulations are indefinitely suspended, in this essay I argue that, while these laboring spaces relate to as the undocumented workers are stripped of juridico -political rights and reduced to a state of exploited bare life, the conception of lacks a dynamic account of power relations to address the complex agency of migrant subjects as they negotiate their daily workspace. Significantly what begins for Agamben as a space of interstitiality posited in - a zone between life and death; inside and outside - ultimately slides into an immobile binary between the beings of citizens and the excluded bodies of bare life. Yet if the space of is interstitial in nature, what preempts the possibility of the abject manifesting an agency that is also interstitial in character? If the sovereign power occupies a space that is simultaneously inside and outside the juridical order, so does the undocumented in navigating a terrain of resistance/negotiation inside and outside the normative arrangement of citizenship. As I will argue, this negotiated resistance does not fundamentally alter the structured materiality of modern liberal juridical order and the economy of irregular migration that Agamben and his migration studies followers so powerfully portray. However, at the point when Agamben declares the death of life for the bare subjects, he omits a crucial spectrum of ambiguous and interstitial practices mounted by the abject - mediating between the two extreme ends of and nonpolitical - that actually extends and reanimates the life of from the very margins of abjection. In the following, I will first address the relevance of Agamben s work for studies of undocumented migration. Two elements in his conception of are particularly compelling for the condition of refugees and undocumented migrants: the immanence of interstitiality and the depoliticized state of bare life.1 In turn, I look at how critics have problematized Agamben s thesis and its connection to unauthorized migration by raising issues such as location and agency in an effort to resurrect the political for the abject. In particular, they point to of refugee antideportation campaigns and undocumented-worker protests as counterexamples of acts of citizenship or noncitizen citizenship that defy the image of as bodies of victims. Yet while chronicling such resistant constitutes an urgent intervention that counters the state of abjection, by understanding as solely visible and audible acts, this line of critique actually falls into Agamben s rigid binary that divides humanity into life (citizenship) and bare life (no rights, nonparticipation) - with the only difference being that the latter, byway of her citizen-like acts, can now transform and elevate into the position of the former. …

TWO TALES OF A CITY

Since the early 1980s, novels by Indians in English have become the site of a transnational publishing ‘boom’ made possible by the opening of Anglo-American literary markets to non-white writing. This essay begins by illuminating the disconnect between the postcolonial versus transnational framings of Indian English fiction. It shows how this literature has gone from being grounded in the politics of particular places to being framed as a de-territorialized literary flourishing, thereby denuding it of its political relevance in an era of transnational literary production. In an effort to ‘re-territorialize’ the history of and the issues at the heart of Indian writing in English, the essay argues that the social and political contours of English in India have come to be about much more than ‘writing back to empire’ or offering a ‘window to the world’ for Indians looking ‘out’ or westerners looking ‘in’. Instead, through a reading of two canonical Indian English texts about the death of Urdu in Delhi, the essay points to the limitations of the postcolonial framework itself. Indian English literature has outgrown the line of critique and politics that casts English as the language of colonization and structures the analysis of Indian English as an oppositional stance and peripheral discourse. This essay dwells instead on the place of English in the multilingual Indian consciousness and the work it does as mediator in India's linguistic landscape. What is remarkable is not that Indians write in the language of the colonizer, but that they write in an English that has been infused with the social and political consequences of its own indigenization.

Theological and Political Liberalisms

Several highly critical theological responses to political liberalism have appeared in recent years. John Milbank, continuing his onslaught on all things modern, complains that political liberalism's “empty heart” suffers from a “totalitarian drift” toward “an increasingly joyless and puritanical world.” For Oliver O'Donovan, liberalism is “a false posture of transcendence” and modernity is “conceived as Antichrist, a parodie and corrupt development of Christian social order.” Robert Song warns against “the partial and limited character” of liberalism's freedoms and proclaims that “a responsible theology will learn to articulate its ‘No’” to liberal political society. Other commentators offer critiques of particular aspects of political liberalism, often suggesting revisions based on their own theological perspectives. These critical voices join others such as Stanley Hauerwas, one of liberalism's most outspoken theological critics for more than a quarter century, and they continue a line of critique that extends back through Reinhold Niebuhr and Karl Barth.Not all the theological voices are critical. Christophe Insole, for example, finds that “politically liberal principles are compatible with a full-blooded and theologically main-stream Christian commitment.” Several Roman Catholic theologians have commented on the increasing mutuality between liberal democracy and Roman Catholic political and social teachings. Paul Sigmund notes that “the relation between Catholicism and liberal democracy has now become a positive and, one would hope, a mutually reinforcing one, even if there are a number of continuing tensions between them.” And Daniel Dombrowski offers a general defense of Rawlsian liberalism against claims that it is hostile to religion.

X‐engineering: ex cathedra?

This paper offers a critical analysis of X‐engineering – an approach to management, which it is claimed refines and extends business process reengineering (BPR) to offer sustainable benefits to business and to the various communities, which constitute modern business organizations. Noting that academic critiques of guru theorising in general and academic critiques of BPR in particular have done little to exercise the minds of practitioners, the paper offers two critical accounts of X‐engineering. The first follows a familiar concern with the production of X‐engineering as it seeks to debunk the ideas and concepts, which constitute this body of knowledge. The second offers an alternative account of guru theorising, which focuses upon the nature of managerial work and on the consumption of management knowledge as it attempts to develop a line of critique, which can reflect and yet intrude upon the complexities of managerial work. Building upon this analysis of the consumption of guru theorising, the paper seeks to provide counter‐arguments and analysis for the constituencies, which can be expected to bear the brunt of X‐engineering.

Karpin and Hilmer: classic cases of ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time’

This paper pursues a line of critique that was put forward by Cooksey and Gates (1995a,b). Our approach reviews, critically, the recent reports of Karpin and Hilmer. In particular we examine some of the basic assumptions underlying the approaches taken in these reports with specific emphasis on contemporary human resource management theory. We first explore the conditions under which these reports were generated and how these conditions may have impacted on report recommendations. In addition this exploration points to significant difficulties with the quality of the reports themselves. We then examine the lack of critical attention given by the reports to the vagaries of the 'human condition' which are complex and unpredictable and which tend to lead the reports to produce overly simplistic and unrealistic recommendations and expectations for business. Finally, the implications for SMEs are considered.

Foucault, Docile Bodies and Post-Compulsory Education in Australia

Abstract Australian post-compulsory education policies have been subjected to theoretical critiques which question assumptions behind the articulation of policy. One line of critique derives from Foucault's analysis of power, and makes particular use of the theme of ‘docile bodies’. A limitation of these critiques is the adoption of a ‘top-down’ model of policy which fails to test the model against empirical evidence. This article draws upon recent research evidence ‘at the extremities’ to test the applicability of Foucault's ideas within the Australian context. The research challenges the monolithic image that results from a Hop down’ analysis and counteracts untested assumptions about the inevitability of current policies. While it suggests ways in which Foucault's ideas might enables us to lay bare the disjunctures between policy and its plurality in practice, it also highlights the limitations of Foucault's imagery of power.