Speak Truth Research Articles

Edward Said: The Paradox of Identity, and: Edward Said and the Work of the Critic: Speaking Truth to Power, and: Edward Said: A Critical Introduction (review)

Edward Said: The Paradox of Identity, and: Edward Said and the Work of the Critic: Speaking Truth to Power, and: Edward Said: A Critical Introduction (review)

COMMENTARY—Beyond Reductionism in Critical Accounting Research

The increasing colonization of public spaces by organized corporate interests and the neoliberal discourses advanced by them poses a major challenge to the possibilities of democratic dissent. Under the influence of corporate interests, governments continue to retain and legitimize tax cuts for the rich, accelerate economic growth, reduce welfare rights, liberalize trade, deregulate, hire more police, undertake more prison building, and advocate tougher action against dissenters as solutions to social inequality, unemployment, crime, environmental degradation, religious intolerance, ageism, racism, gender discrimination, and other social problems (Chomsky 1999). In effect, governments routinely act as recruiting sergeants for organized corporate interests (Monbiot 2000). They invite and facilitate major corporations, aided by an army of accountants and lawyers, to descend upon local communities, make their money, and move on. Those bearing the cost of corporate profits, power, and laissez-faire economics struggle to develop the resources and organization to call political parties, governments, and corporations to account. Despite the rhetoric there is little effective social accountability. The institutions of accountancy and accountancy calculations have played an active role in fostering and legitimizing social problems through their role in the payment of poverty wages, discrimination, privatization of public assets, environmental degradation, organized crime (money laundering), loss of pensions, jobs, homes, and the shifting of tax burdens from the rich to the poor, just to name a few (Mitchell et al. 1998a, 1998b; Sikka et al. 1999; Cousins et al. 2000). A recognition of the complicity of accountants in such effects contributed to the emergence of “critical accounting” as a respectable, middle-class, European academic discipline. During the past 25 years, a large number of critical accounting papers and books have been published. Yet, there is little evidence to suggest that critical accounting has had any significant impact upon public policies and discourses. Perhaps the situation would be even bleaker in their absence. Nonetheless, for academics concerned about the contribution of their work to change, in addition to knowledge, it is a disappointing and frustrating outcome. It is not surprising, therefore, that some (e.g., Tinker 2001) are advocating a more “resolute” or “hard-line” approach founded upon a version of Marxism. Such an environment poses major questions about the tactics and strategies that critical accounting academics can mobilize to deepen the crisis of liberal democracies and speak “truth” to power.

Speak Truth to Power: Voices from Beyond the Dark

Speak Truth to Power: Voices from Beyond the Dark

Researching the Learning Society

Frank Coffield (ed.), 1: Learning at Work, Bristol: Policy Press, 1998, paper £13.99, v+69 pp. Frank Coffield (ed.), 2: Why's the Beer always Stronger up North?: Studies in Lifelong Learning in Europe, Bristol: Policy Press, 1999, paper £13.99, v+81 PP Frank Coffield (ed.) 3: Speaking Truth to Power: Research and Policy on Lifelong Learning, Bristol: Policy Press, 1999, paper £13.99, v+85 pp. Frank Coffield (ed.) 4: The Necessity of Informal Learning, Bristol: Policy Press, 2000, paper £13.99, v+8opp.

Australian Universities in Crisis

That this book, having been recommended for publication by the editors of Melbourne University Press, was subsequently rejected through the intervention of the University authorities, is a symptom of the very malaise which the contributors address. Since the Dawkins 'reforms' to Australian higher education the university system has come under increasing surveillance by government functionaries, and university 'managements' have been subverted through their desire to win favour from government and to display their 'competitive edge' against other 'institutions'. The 'reforms' have mandated the wholesale introduction of business techniques, and a pervading business ethos, which is quite inappropriate to the traditional function of universities. The very word 'traditional' is rejected as contrary to the commitment to change required of expanding businesses. That universities have a role in conserving and transmitting a public culture is all but repudiated by university managements in their desire to appear at the 'cutting edge' of government privatization agenda. The authors of this book affirm a public role for universities, and reassert the conviction that they must protect a threatened independence in the search for truth, and in the responsibility to 'speak truth to power'. Since 'managements' are now unlikely to uphold these duties, it becomes the responsibility of the members of the community of scholars to maintain independence of thought and to expound the truth.

“Speaking Truth To Power?”: American Usage, Canadian Literary Studies, and Policies for the Public Good in Canada

“Speaking Truth To Power?”: American Usage, Canadian Literary Studies, and Policies for the Public Good in Canada

Speak Truth to Power: Black Professional Class in United States History.

Speak Truth to Power: Black Professional Class in United States History.

Heroes, Martyrs, and Other Choices

Previous articleNext article No AccessHeroes, Martyrs, and Other ChoicesJohn C. Fletcher and Maxwell BovermanJohn C. FletcherUniversity of Virginia School of Medicine, Charlottesville, Va. Search for more articles by this author and Maxwell BovermanGeorge Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Washington, D.C. Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 7, Number 4Winter 1996 Published on behalf of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/JCE199607403 Views: 1Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref © 1996 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: Judith Andre Speaking Truth to Employers, The Journal of Clinical Ethics 8, no.22 (Dec 2022): 199–203.https://doi.org/10.1086/JCE199708212

Mixing the Waters: Environment, Politics, and the Building of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway by Jeffrey K. Stine

technology and culture Book Reviews 687 minding us that there would be no machines in the garden had not the garden been there first. Martin Reuss Dr. Reuss is a senior historian in the Office of History, Headquarters, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He is working on several projects dealing with the politics and technology of water-resources development and anticipates that some of these projects will actually be completed. Mixing the Waters: Environment, Politics, and the Building ofthe TennesseeTombigbee Waterway. ByJeffrey K. Stine. Akron, Ohio: University of Akron Press, 1993. Pp. xiv + 336; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95 (cloth); $21.95 (paper). The story of the Tennessee-Tombigbee (“Tenn-Tom”) waterway is a distressingone. Envisioned as early as the 18th century, authorized by Congress in 1946, analyzed repeatedly in the 1950s and 1960s, funded initially in 1970, and completed in 1985, the Tenn-Tom was to be a great shortcut for barge traffic. By linking the Tennessee River Valley and western flank of the southern Appalachians with the Gulf of Mex­ ico at Mobile, it would obviate a long trip north to the Ohio, and then back south down the Mississippi. It was an Army Corps of Engineers project: the corps not only designed the canal and oversaw its construc­ tion but engineered its very feasibility by regularly generating benefits projections that were always slightly greater than projected costs. This was no mean feat: during the fifteen years of construction, costs rose from $323 million to $2 billion. It was also an achievement of classic southern politics, a measure of the power of a few long-serving Missis­ sippi and Alabama legislators—Stennis, Eastland, Sparkman, Whit­ ten—who chaired key congressional committees. Their achievement is all the more remarkable since the project was almost constantly under attack in the courts, in the press, or in Congress. Its very survival re­ quired a prodigious coalition-building effort each year at appropria­ tions time. By most measures it was a failure; it came nowhere near generating the projected barge traffic, and the economic development it was to bring to depressed counties in western Alabama turned out to be garbage—the waterway did allow cheap transport of urban trash to places too politically weak to say no. The central issue of this book is whether, as one proponent put it, the Tenn-Tom was “a creditable project with a realistic prospect of substantive benefits to the region and Nation if completed, or . . . just a boondoggle conceived by the Corps of Engineers and rail­ roaded through Congress by a few powerful Southern lawmakers” (p. 234). Jeffrey Stine suggests the latter: an objective observer could have foreseen failure. While it shortened the route to the Gulf, the Tenn-Tom could only accommodate tows one-fifth the size (eight 688 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE barges per towboat vs. forty) that the Mississippi could accommodate. Ultimately it was built for political reasons, he argues: this grand­ daddy of pork-barrel legislation was politically useful because it ap­ peared to contribute to regional “development” and to bring federal money into the states (much in fact went to outstate contractors). Only a few, Stine tells us, “dared speak truth to power” (p. 245). Stine tells this story as the history of a public work. A third of the book deals with the “work” end of things: the conception of the proj­ ect, various constraints on design, the methods and problems of con­ struction. Two-thirds addresses the “public” aspect of the project: the endless stratagems, both of those who would kill it—“environmen­ talists,” railroads that would compete with the canal, and a few budg­ etary watchdogs in Congress—and of its promoters: the congres­ sional delegations and state governments of Mississippi and Alabama, and various quasi-public local booster groups, such as the TennesseeTombigbee Waterway Development Authority. Stine’s is the kind of political history that searches for motives and “interests” underlying what the actors say in public, where invariably they justify their views in terms of public good, wise use of funds, fairness, and progress. The southern congressmen apparently see a federal project mainly as a means to reelection. In public they cham...

Political Realism as an American Tradition: A Comparison of Hans Morgenthau and the Federalists

For most Amcricans--be they scholars or laymen--Hans Morgenthau exemplifies what sympathetic commentators call political realism and less friendly critics Realpolitik. To the former as much as to the latter, Morgenthau's political philosophy appears as a turning point in the political tradition of the United Stales because of his reliance on national interest and his propensity to "speak truth to power" To be sure, Morgenthau's conspicuous german origin lent weight to the argument. Yet few critics have paid attention to the equally conspicuous fact that among the first advocates of realism in contemporary America.

Hot pacifism and cold war: The American friends service committee's witness for peace in 1950s America

The 1955 pamphlet, Speak Truth to Power, written by a working party of the American Friends Service Committee, stands as one of the most important pacifist statements of the twentieth century. The authors of the pamphlet faced rhetorical dilemmas particular to an American audience in the mid‐1950s, which led them to adopt rhetorical strategies that have come to be characteristic of the discourse of New Class social movements.

Essay Reviews : SPEAKING TRUTH TO POIVER: THE ART AND CRAFT OF POLICY ANALYSIS. Aaron Wildavsky. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1979. 419 pages. Reviewed by Max G. Abbott, Professor of Educational Administration. University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon

Essay Reviews : SPEAKING TRUTH TO POIVER: THE ART AND CRAFT OF POLICY ANALYSIS. Aaron Wildavsky. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1979. 419 pages. Reviewed by Max G. Abbott, Professor of Educational Administration. University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon

Some Profane Variations on a Tragic Theme

I PROPOSE TO DISCUSS in this paper' two plays which give, in very different ways, non-tragic, even profane, treatment to themes derived from the most profound of all Greek tragedies, Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus. The fate of Oedipus, doomed by Apollo's oracle before his life begins to commit in ignorance (before his play begins) his dreadful deeds of parricide and incest, is too well-known to need elaboration here. So, too, is the terrible cohesion of that Sophoclean plot in which the all-too-probable decisions and reactions of the King mesh with the helps, the hindrances, the chance (or it is chance?) appearances of other characters, to lead inexorably to the necessary, Apollo-driven discovery of what he is. I repeat a few of its major features now only to draw attention to certain basic elements from which our two other plays take their source . .. and their departure. The plague on Thebes is to be lifted only when the murderer of Laius is found. King Oedipus, riddle-reader and city-saviour par excellence, first among men in matters human and divine (33-34), takes on his people's cause. His imperious personality drives the action of the play before it: insults to the reluctant, close-mouthed Teiresias lead to the prophet's accusation that Oedipus himself is the murderer; fury and fear lead Oedipus to the hasty accusation of Creon as the suborner of Teiresias and this, in turn, leads to the appearance of mother-wife Jocasta to make the peace between them. Sympathy, maternal and protective, leads Jocasta to tell a tale which she thinks must assuage forever Oedipus' fear that prophets and oracle speak truth. There was an oracle to Laius (I will not say from Phoebus) that he would die by his own son's hand... (711-713), and so she tells the oracle-refuting tale that Laius was slain by robbers long after that son was exposed to die. A detail in that story -a quite gratuitous detail-triggers Oedipus' memory and soon he is telling Jocasta (the one most worthy, above all, to hear it, 772-773) not only how he himself slew a man at the place where the three roads meet but also (gratuitously again!) how he came to be at such a place: how he had left his royal home in Corinth in fear of an oracle that he would slay his father and marry his mother. And so Oedipus tells Jocasta his oracle as Jocasta has told him hers: the two halves of the same truth are there, confronting mother and son, drawn from each by the sympathetic bond between them. But each gazes at his own half only, and only the audience connects.

Ernest John Maskell, 1895-1958

Ernest John Maskell was born in Cambridge on 1 February 1895. He went to the Cambridge County School (now Cambridgeshire High School for Boys) with a scholarship. His brothers recall that he was very studious, generally preferring a book to games, in which, however, he played his part. His studious inclination, aided by a retentive memory, reaped its reward of prizes. He became a school prefect, in which capacity he showed a quality he retained throughout his life: a marked ability to get on with his juniors, his equals, and his seniors. He had the privilege of being taught by Dr M. Dawson who later became H.M. Inspector of Schools. She encouraged and stimulated his early interest in botany, and Maskell always, and rightly, held her in high regard. When he reached the Sixth Form, or a little later, he, with nine others, formed ‘The Honourable Order of the Upper Ten’ whose motto was ‘Speak truth, live pure, right wrong, follow the Christ the King’. One of their rules was ‘That it be incumbent upon every Knight to correspond with every other and with the Rev. C. J. N. Child at least every Christmas’. Many did so maintain contact. Another rule was ‘That the Order continue until the death of the last Knight’—Maskell’s was the first death. He maintained his connexion with his old school by serving on the Old Boys Society, of which he became President. He was also, for a long time, one of the members of the Governing Body of the school appointed by Cambridge University. At the age of eighteen he went to Emmanuel College as an Entrance Scholar. In 1915 he was placed in the First Class of Part I of the Natural Sciences Tripos and was awarded the Frank Smart Prize in Botany. At this stage his academic studies were interrupted by his joining the Friends’ Ambulance Unit. In this service he formed a close friendship with a Fellow of his college, Mr L. H. G. Greenwood, who writes: ‘I first came to know him when he was an undergraduate here before 1914, but I remember little about that time. We became close friends during the war at the military hospital in York, mainly staffed by the Friends’ Ambulance Unit, of which we were both members. In the often trying conditions of service there, his unselfish and co-operative friendliness, together with his complete efficiency, did much to make things go smoothly and happily. Later, for a shorter time, we were together at the hospital in Courtrai also run by the Unit, and the same remarks apply to his service there.’

Book Review: Speak Truth to Power

Book Review: Speak Truth to Power

Speak Truth to Power, a Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence

Speak Truth to Power, a Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence