Mary Ann Farquhar

Action learning, action research and process management (ALARPM): a personal history

This paper is an edited version of an interview that presents information and insight into the background of ALARPM (action learning, action research and process management) not only as a field but also as a worldwide network association, thus facilitating understanding of the evolution and nature of these three concepts. The interviewee’s responses reflect her personal perspective, informed by both life experience and a theoretical framework that conceives of ALARPM first as a philosophy, a theory of learning and a methodology, and second as a method and technique.

Jackie Chan: a new dragon for a new generation

Abstract Jackie Chan is a dragon of the Hong Kong cinema. Certain life experiences mould his star image as narrative, such as his childhood operatic training, his cheeky brand of kung fu comedy, and the high-risk on-screen stunts that he performs himself. But star images are made, not born. This essay looks at Jackie Chans rise to stardom through two key texts: the film Drunken Master/Zuiquan (1978) and his English-language autobiography, I am Jackie Chan (1998). Both narrate a rite-of-passage story that defines Chan on and off the screen in terms of a painful transition from kung fu kid to dragon through his operatic training and translated into martial arts lessons on screen. This training is crucial to his brand of comic genius. Chan acknowledges these aspects of his image when he sees his operatic training — ten years of hell — as the foundation of his stardom. He writes that his blood father is ‘the father of Chan Kong-sang’ but his opera school master is ‘the father of Jackie Chan’.

Blood in the Bathroom: Shanghai Triad as Gangster Noir

Shanghai Triad (Yao a yao, yaodao waipo qiao, 1995) is Zhang Yimou’s only gangster film. The gangster genre is a vital Hollywood staple, which foregrounds violence. In its noir form—gangster noir—the violence holds a “dark mirror” to modern society (Cook 1990, 471). In Shanghai Triad, Zhang manipulates the conventions of the Western gangster film and film noir to tell a story of Chinese triads, where gang law governs society from generation to generation. He juxtaposes the city as a dark, criminal space against images of the countryside as a place of past innocence, now invaded by gang wars. The film therefore talks about modernity but turns on a premodern sense of Chinese law, which pits punitive rules against a remembered but vanishing space of virtue.