Traditional Orthodoxies Research Articles

An operational audit for a change model in the hospitality industry

Various models are adopted in the change process for a hotel group: Lewin’s Force Field model, Handy’s Shamrock structure, Hiatt change model, Classic Change Curve, Kotter’s model, Gap Analysis model and McKinsey Seven “S” model. The change model aims to strengthen the hotel's profitability. Traditional orthodoxies are challenged, new paradigms of change and operational audits are implemented.

Gender research in hospitality and tourism management: time to change the guard

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explain the problem with how gender is positioned in hospitality and tourism management studies. It recommends critical theories to investigate how gender is researched in the sector’s academic and institutional systems.Design/methodology/approachThe conceptual study explains contemporary gender theories and gives examples of relevant hospitality and tourism management studies. A four point critical agenda for researching gender is proposed and justified.FindingsThe study highlights how the focus on “female leadership” as different from the male norm and the use of traditional theoretical framings reinforce stereotypes about the primacy of women’s domestic commitments to their detriment.Research limitations/implicationsA limitation of this academy focussed study is that it has not recommended specific initiatives to combat specific issues of gender discrimination in hospitality and tourism employment. A further limitation is that the primary focus was on critical management theory to explain heteronormative based gender discrimination. It did not discuss queer theory.Practical implicationsIn addition, a new research agenda, steps are proposed to change the masculine culture. Hospitality and tourism universities and research institutions should review men’s/women’s/gender diverse representation at leadership levels. Critical gender research approaches may also be fostered by sectorial conference streams and journal special issues and university graduate research students should be taught to design such studies.Social implicationsThe use of contemporary approaches in gender studies will enable researchers to propose more targeted equality and diversity management actions for industry. They will also assist educators to better design curricula that protect and promote the interests of women studying a hospitality, tourism or events degree and those who identify as gender diverse.Originality/valueThe paper challenges the masculine status quo in hospitality and tourism management gender studies, arguing that adherence to traditional orthodoxies has stifled the development of critical paradigms and methodologies. Its key contribution is to reveal the advantages that critical gender theorising can bring to further the aim of gender equality by showing practical applications.

1. “Bringing to Presence That Which Is Other”: Religious Discourses, Public Pedagogy, and the University Classroom

<?page nr="11"?>Abstract The relationship between religion and higher education is often characterized by anxieties around religion in the university classroom. These concerns frequently leverage around the assumption that religion is necessarily contentious for the public university, either because of the need to resist the exclusionary privileging of religions in public spaces, or because of sensitivities around the preservation of traditional religious orthodoxies in increasingly pluralist times. Interestingly, both approaches to the relationship between religion and university education rest on the assumption that religion is fundamentally immutable, incapable of contestation, re-interpretation, or change. With the view to moving past the limits of such perspectives, I suggest that religious language and symbol (as two features of religious discourse) are far more poetic, fluid, and open-ended than is often assumed, and that it is precisely this open-endedness that underscores the possibility of engaging pedagogically with religion in the context of the university classroom. In this regard, I trace the affinities between the open-endedness of religious discourses and the “publicness” of pedagogy, suggesting that both registers open up possibilities for new ways of existing and relating in the world that are at once activist, experimental, and demonstrative. I conclude by reflecting on how these affinities offer resources for recalibrating what we mean by student “becoming” at the interface between religion and the university <?page nr="12"?>classroom. I forward the view that the poetry of religious discourses offers students the chance to “become” in ways that unpredictably expand and disrupt the limits of religious identity and tradition, and in this way undermine the inevitable alignment of religion with either exclusion or preservation in the context of university life. Student becoming, understood in these terms, becomes less a matter of forming students into a streamlined understanding of religious identity in the context of the university, and more a matter of providing spaces for students to relate to such identities in potentially interruptive and public-facing ways.

Abe Lazarus and the Lost World of British Communism

Researching the life of Abe Lazarus, a leading Communist Party figure in 1930s Britain, raises important wider questions about how to investigate ‘mass leaders’ in the era after the Cold War. With the availability of more archives, including ‘official’ Security Service (MI5) files and ‘unofficial’ personal memoirs, there is now the possibility of exploring past communist lives in greater depth and free from traditional orthodoxies. In the case of Lazarus, while there has been some recognition of the leading role he played in the Pressed Steel and Cutteslowe Walls disputes and anti-fascist politics in interwar Oxford, the later period of his political career has remained something of a mystery. Arthur Exell, former Morris Motors worker and Communist Party comrade of Lazarus, began a biography in the early 1980s under the supervision of Raphael Samuel, who prompted him to consider not only what Lazarus’s political activism achieved in the thirties but also more difficult times later and the ways in which Lazarus’s later life might be said to reflect the wider predicaments of the Communist Party. Exell never completed his work. This article addresses those questions with the aid of new material and, with the purpose of exploring Lazarus’s political life in its widest context, it draws on Samuel’s The Lost World of British Communism.

Socio-legal Studies in France: Beyond the Law Faculty

This article is the third in an occasional series dealing with the development, current status, and future of socio-legal studies in selected countries. It follows articles by Kim Economides (Aotearoa/New Zealand) and Harry Arthurs and Annie Bunting (Canada). In this article we argue that in France one can identify work that corresponds to the key strands of socio-legal research in Anglo-American societies but that ‘socio-legal’ as a category of research and scholarship does not have the presence it has in the United Kingdom. French law faculties continue to be strongly shaped by a traditional disciplinary orthodoxy rooted in a highly and distinctively structured form of doctrinal analysis. In the first part, we explain the relatively limited presence of socio-legal studies in French law faculties in terms of the historical and institutional mechanisms by which disciplinary closure has been created and maintained around traditional orthodoxies. But in the second part we will trace the presence – predominantly outside law faculties – of significant fragments of socio-legal practice in the scholarship of law and allied disciplines.

Coarse cloth and clerical tailoring: negotiating Boston-Irish cultural imperatives in the Famine era

Recent calls for updated approaches to the Irish-American historical experience recommend more systematic attention to complexities inherent in Irish immigration and settlement. They also seek further contextualisation of the history of the Irish in the USA within broader North American, transatlantic and global frameworks. The need to review and potentially reappraise longstanding, essentialist perspectives on Irish arrival and assimilation is equally evident. This article expands on foundational narrative histories of the Boston Irish to re-examine Famine-era settlement and contending agendas within spheres of religious affiliation and political activism. The character and evolution of Irish-American ethnic identity, and the tragic imprint of the Famine under consideration here pave the way for new readings of traditional orthodoxies. Collectively, they reveal Boston's Irish historical terrain to be more complex than the record currently suggests.

The Familiar Made Strange: An Orientation to Biblical Study in Vancouver

Abstract. This paper originated in a Wabash‐funded colloquium organized by Richard Ascough and Leif Vaage, on the theme: “Teaching the Bible for Leadership in the United Church of Canada.” Professors teaching biblical studies at United Church seminaries and theological schools met over three years to share pedagogy, things that have worked and not worked in the classroom, changes in teaching Bible over the years, and the role of context in shaping teaching. In the final year they presented their philosophy of teaching to one another; this paper arose from that meeting. The paper describes an orientation to teaching New Testament Studies at Vancouver School of Theology, a theologically liberal school in the context of Vancouver, Canada – paradoxically one of the most secular and multi‐religious cities in the world. Guided by Denise Levertov's poem, “Overland to the Islands,” it explores the promises and challenges of biblical study grounded in the material reality of the world, amidst older students who bear the marks of secularity, who are impatient with traditional orthodoxies, and who long more for life before the grave than after it. Adopting ideas from Roland Barthes, Paul Ricoeur, and Julia Kristeva, it explores teaching the Bible in a way that promotes the polyvalence, strangeness, and irreducibility of biblical texts, in order to move students away from exegetical and hermeneutical theories content with recovering authorial intent and reconstructing historical origins as the primary tasks of biblical study. The paper describes a model of teaching that celebrates the materiality of the New Testament together with its textual, social, theological, and historical complexity, as well as a tradition‐constituted means of apprehending the world, and which treasures students as living texts who in the course of interpretation awaken ever‐fresh meanings relevant to their own communal and personal identities.

Tensions in the Marketplace

The survival of jazz has to be seen in the context of today’s increasingly complex infrastructure of profitmaximizing multinationals whose homogenizing tendencies are at odds with the music’s inherent complexity. Jazz no longer has the kind of mass market appeal that is attractive to the majors so in order for the music to survive in a niche market where audiences appreciate instrumental creativity, it has to evolve beyond the jazz tradition and embrace the kind of radical processes of evolution which musical forms undergo. Unless contemporary musicians move beyond the paradigm of traditional orthodoxies they could well, by most definitions at least, be participating in something that is closer to a folk form rather than an art form - interesting to witness live, but, as the 1990s return to the certainties of hard bop demonstrated, when the music is in competition with the past, the past will always win because the original artists are seen to be the source of ‘authenticity.’ When music - or any art form - becomes a refuge from the present, from facing up to the world today, then its force is diminished; it becomes an embalmed corpse, beautiful to behold but ultimately inert.

Tensions in the Marketplace: Reflections on the Major Recording Companies Documentation of Jazz in the late 1990s and New Millennium Years

The survival of jazz has to be seen in the context of today’s increasingly complex infrastructure of profitmaximizing multinationals whose homogenizing tendencies are at odds with the music’s inherent complexity. Jazz no longer has the kind of mass market appeal that is attractive to the majors so in order for the music to survive in a niche market where audiences appreciate instrumental creativity, it has to evolve beyond the jazz tradition and embrace the kind of radical processes of evolution which musical forms undergo. Unless contemporary musicians move beyond the paradigm of traditional orthodoxies they could well, by most definitions at least, be participating in something that is closer to a folk form rather than an art form - interesting to witness live, but, as the 1990s return to the certainties of hard bop demonstrated, when the music is in competition with the past, the past will always win because the original artists are seen to be the source of ‘authenticity.’ When music - or any art form - becomes a refuge from the present, from facing up to the world today, then its force is diminished; it becomes an embalmed corpse, beautiful to behold but ultimately inert.

Corporate Sustainability: Challenge to Managerial Orthodoxies

ABSTRACTThis paper addresses the issue of corporate sustainability. It examines why achieving sustainability is becoming an increasingly vital issue for society and organisations, defines sustainability and then outlines a set of phases through which organisations can move to achieve increasing levels of sustainability. Case studies are presented of organisations at various phases indicating the benefits, for the organisation and its stakeholders, which can be made at each phase. Finally the paper argues that there is a marked contrast between the two competing philosophies of neo-conservatism (economic rationalism) and the emerging philosophy of sustainability. Management schools have been strongly influenced by economic rationalism, which underpins the traditional orthodoxies presented in such schools. Sustainability represents an urgent challenge for management schools to rethink these traditional orthodoxies and give sustainability a central place in the curriculum.

Corporate Sustainability: Challenge to Managerial Orthodoxies

ABSTRACTThis paper addresses the issue of corporate sustainability. It examines why achieving sustainability is becoming an increasingly vital issue for society and organisations, defines sustainability and then outlines a set of phases through which organisations can move to achieve increasing levels of sustainability. Case studies are presented of organisations at various phases indicating the benefits, for the organisation and its stakeholders, which can be made at each phase. Finally the paper argues that there is a marked contrast between the two competing philosophies of neo-conservatism (economic rationalism) and the emerging philosophy of sustainability. Management schools have been strongly influenced by economic rationalism, which underpins the traditional orthodoxies presented in such schools. Sustainability represents an urgent challenge for management schools to rethink these traditional orthodoxies and give sustainability a central place in the curriculum.

Traditional Orthodoxies and New Approaches: An Editor's Perspective on the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation

Before I begin to offer my analysis of what the Encyclopedia of the Reformation tells us about Reformation studies, I should first explain my role in its production. I have been one of six senior editors, responsible for what was loosely termed “social history and popular religion.” Four of the other editors have been in charge of specific geographic areas, and David Steinmetz has been in charge of theology, so I have generally thought of my role as the editor for “other.” That meant “my” articles began with “alchemy” and ended with “women,” including in between entries on such topics as capitalism, death, divorce, drama, Jews, miracles, music, polygamy, printing, science, sexuality, and time. I was in charge of fewer entries than most of my coeditors–102 out of 1200–but more words, as I ended up with nearly all the longest articles. That alone, I think, indicates the clear acceptance of one “new approach,” an approach picked up by the marketing department at Oxford, whose banner head describes the Encyclopedia as “the definitive reference on society in early modern Europe.” It was also noted at a very early editors' meeting, where one of the consulting editors commented—not exactly with dismay, but not exactly with triumph either—“do you realize we've given witchcraft more words than Luther?”

Postmodernist Perceptions of Islam: Observing the Observer

We are living in times of change; structures that have held for half a century are being pulled down. Changing, too, are concepts both of the self and of the other, although the nature and depth of these are debatable. A perception that we may be entering a distinct phase of human history, tentatively called postmodernism, is forming. The contemporary formulation of postmodernism as a distinct phase succeeding modernism is rooted in, and explained by the recent history of the West, broadly defined as Europe and the United States. For the West, much of the last half-century has been a period of prosperity and tranquility unmatched in history. It is characterized by a strong and widening economic base, unassailable democracy, and increasing sense of possibilities. Plague, starvation, and war seem features of a distant, almost medieval past. To understand the postmodernist age is to presuppose a questioning of modernity; it is to turn toward a spirit of pluralism, increased assertiveness of local or folk identity; it involves exposure to a plethora of discourses and the consequent dangers of culture schizophrenia, a heightened skepticism of traditional orthodoxies, and finally a rejection of looking at the world as a universal totality, of final solutions and complete answers. Postmodernism is to look for the richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning, to avoid choices between black and white, to evoke many levels of meaning and combinations of focus. It is an enigmatic and troubling

Ethnocentric Orthodoxies vs. Text as Cultural Action: Some Issues in Latin-American Literature

The study of modern Latin-American literature in British Universities and Polytechnics has tended to locate itself, in the past two decades at any rate, at a certain distance from the various traditional orthodoxies which have dominated British Hispanism, such as Leavisism, New Criticism, Stylistics, as well as from the various recent gestures in the direction of Formalism and Structuralism gestures which have not prevented the original figure showing through.1 There seem to be two main reasons for this. Spanish-American writers and critics have on the whole participated more directly and influentially than their Spanish counterparts in the European debates on literary theory. And Spanish-American literature is connected with Third World experiences such as the presence of native cultures which have resisted colonialism or dependency upon the metropolitan Capitalist countries. Both of these sets of factors have stimulated more radical approaches than those offered by the mainstream of British literary criticism in the Universities.

Nature and Paganism in Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles

The sun, on account of mist, had a curious sentient, personal look, demanding masculine pronoun for its adequate expression. His present aspect, coupled with lack of all human forms in scene, explained old-time heliolatries in a moment. One could feel that a saner religion had never prevailed under sky. The luminary was a golden-haired, beaming, mild-eyed, God-like creature, gazing down in vigour and intentness of youth upon an earth that was brimming with interest for him.2 The impulse that Hardy perceived in himself and that characterizes this passage-the tendency to perceive sentience in an inanimate environment, and particularly in nature-arises, in Hardy's view, from an innate and inescapable human need to make sense of universe in humanly understandable terms, a need that ran counter to Hardy's own intellectual understanding of things. Hardy invests his characters, particularly those in his later novels, with same inexorable need to discover in universe a moral significance and a system of value capable of replacing traditional orthodoxies that no longer satisfy them. Angel Clare, having rejected untenable redemptive theolatry of his parents' faith (153), arrives at Talbothays Dairy suffering from what Hardy calls the ache of modernism, what David DeLaura has described as the distress and rootlessness of those whose intellectual honesty forces them to live without a sense of Providence.3 At Talbothays Angel seems to find a satisfying alternative to Chris