Valerie Fournier

Escaping from the economy: the politics of degrowth

Purpose – Whilst there is a growing recognition of environmental degradation, the policies of sustainable development or ecological modernisation offered by national governments and international institutions seem to do little more than “sustain the unsustainable”. By promising to reconcile growth with the environment, they fail to question the economic principle of endless growth that has caused environmental destruction in the first place. In this context, alternatives based on critiques of growth may offer more promising grounds. The aim of this paper is to explore how the degrowth movement that emerged in France over the last decade resonates with, and can contribute to, green politics.Design/methodology/approach – After locating the movement within environmental politics and providing a brief account of its development, the paper focuses on its core theme – escaping from the economy.Findings – Here it is argued that the movements main emphasis is not merely on calling for less growth, consumption or...

Too Much, Too Little and Too Often: A Critique of du Gay's Analysis of Enterprise

In recent years, organizational and political debates have accorded a privileged position to enterprise as holding the promise for both corporate and individual development. In several publications, Paul du Gay has articulated a persuasive analysis and critique of the enterprise discourse; he and a number of collaborators have analysed the various managerial discourses and techniques through which employees are reimagined as entrepreneurs, and organizations are to move from dysfunctional bureaucracies to models of excellence. Whilst we share du Gays critical position towards enterprise and the Foucauldian tradition upon which he draws, we feel that his analysis suffers from several flaws which we articulate around three themes. Firstly, we argue that du Gays analysis claims too much for enterprise, and relies on a flawed dualism between enterprise and bureaucracy; secondly, we feel that his analysis is over-deterministic and makes too little space for resistance and alternative discourses to enterprise; finally, we suggest that du Gay has presented the same arguments too often and that his work is implicated in the constitution of the enterprise discourse as an accomplished fact within the academic community.

The Crafting of Community: Recoupling Discourses of Management and Womanhood

The construction of organizations around images of masculinity makes the position of ‘women managers’ a problematic one which calls for ‘remedial work’ (Gherardi 1995). Women managers have sought to reconcile their dualistic positions by deploying various individual and collective coping strategies typically articulated within the boundaries of their organizations. In contrast, we research a group of senior women from a British city in the Midlands who attempt to renegotiate their conflicting identities as ‘female’ and ‘senior managers’ by creating a collective forum outside their organizations. Through the construction of a ‘learning set’, they created a space where members could explore their terms of participation, as women and as managers, in their respective work organizations and in the local community. This space was articulated implicitly and explicitly around values typically associated with ‘community’ (e.g. sharing, support, trust, loyalty), a controversial concept in feminist politics. The article documents the (fragile and contested) processes by which these women mobilize the imagery of community in order to create a safe space where ‘remedial work’ could be performed. The conclusion stresses the ambivalent effects of the learning set in both reproducing and transgressing gendered positions.

As condições no cotidiano organizando rotinas em negócios familiares

Este artigo se baseia em uma abordagem etnografica para capturar as complexidades que envolvem o trabalho em empresas familiares. Tal abordagem nos permite concentrar na forma pela qual os gestores-proprietarios sao habilitados a construir as narrativas de suas vidas diarias, referindo-se a eventos mundanos; como eles tecem os relatos em que figuram imagens das rotinas cotidianas, como a refeicao familia, o tempo de abertura e fechamento, o trajeto da escola ou mesmo fazer livros.

Comparative Study of the Non-Profit Sectors of Pakistan and India

This is a theoretical paper that has analysed more than 55 publications to draw comparison between Pakistan and India non-profit sectors. The two countries share their history under British rule before 1947 partition. Before the partition the non-profit sector saw a rise under different religious umbrellas, however after the partition the sectors saw a rise in nonreligious, non-political organizations in both countries. The paper draws the similarities and differences among the types of organizations, funding sources, giving, and legal framework. The paper debates the reasons for different evolutions of the sectors in post-independence era and its reasons. The findings show that both sectors evolved different due to differences in religious influence, political instability, and check and balance systems. The paper aims to contribute in depth analysis of the both sectors in the literature.

The Sense of Violence and the Absence of Consolation

The paper is an attempt to engage with our contemplations of violence and the failure of familiar explanations to capture these contemplations. We begin our explorations of these familiar accounts by examining contemporary debates on media violence but find these problematic. By reducing media violence to mere spectacle or, on the contrary, by seeing such violence as desensitising and destructive, the various positions in the debates deprive violence of meaning and fail to address our fascination with violence. Other explanations that seek to attach meaning or utility to violence, be it economic, symbolic or moral, equally fail to convince. There is always an excess that transcends these explanations, an excess that is ill-captured by the notion of ‘gratuitous violence’ often deployed to condemn violence that does not make sense. Furthermore, the various accounts of violence we review tend to consider violence only in terms of its victims and perpetrators rather than the (fortunately) more common position of the observer. In the remaining of the paper, we try to say something about the sense of violence without investing it with deterministic or moralistic implications. This leads us to re-interpret the notion of desensitisation; for the observer, desensitisation indexes a lack of sensation of violence. This lack of sensation, our inability as observers to sense and make sense of violence, we argue, brings about moral questioning and acuity rather than moral indifference.