1,721,074 research outputs found
The Shapeshifting Crown: Locating the State in Postcolonial New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the UK
No full textThe Crown stands at the heart of the New Zealand, British, Australian and Canadian constitutions as the ultimate source of legal authority and embodiment of state power. A familiar icon of the Westminster model of government, it is also an enigma. Even constitutional experts struggle to define its attributes and boundaries: who or what is the Crown and how is it embodied? Is it the Queen, the state, the government, a corporation sole or aggregate, a relic of feudal England, a metaphor, or a mask for the operation of executive power? How are its powers exercised? How have the Crowns of different Commonwealth countries developed? The Shapeshifting Crown combines legal and anthropological perspectives to provide novel insights into the Crown's changing nature and its multiple, ambiguous and contradictory meanings. It sheds new light onto the development of the state in postcolonial societies and constitutional monarchy as a cultural system
Broker Capitalism, Pandemic Profiteering, and UK Financial Scandals: How Consultancy Firms Leverage Public Money, Defy Regulation, and Help the Rich
No full textBritish governments frequently profess commitment to fighting corruption yet the UK’s financial services industry facilitates crony capitalism and London remains a leading global centre for money laundering. This contradiction arises partly from the growing influence of private consultancy firms over government. Using two case studies of scandals during the Covid-19 pandemic, I illustrate how private firms leverage public funds. The first concerns the supply chain finance company Greensill Capital and its lobbyist, former UK Prime Minister and Foreign Minister David Cameron. The second concerns the government’s ‘fast lane’ procurement policy which saw vast sums of money lost, stolen, or wasted on contracts awarded to Conservative Party allies. Strangely, none of these actions were technically illegal. Drawing on anthropological approaches to corruption and theories of broker capitalism I ask, what made these scandals possible? I conclude that performative anti-corruption combined with weak regulations and deliberate blurring of the public/private boundary effectively legalise corrupt financial practices
Social welfare and democracy in Europe: what role for the private and voluntary sectors?
No full textParadoxes of ‘public diplomacy’: Ethnographic perspectives on the European Union delegations in the antipodes
No full text‘Public diplomacy’ is a term increasingly used among policy makers and academics, yet its meaning is ambiguous and contested. Advocates proclaim it as a new approach to statecraft entailing a participatory approach of shared meaning‐making between politicians and the public markedly different from the elitist, Machiavellian inter‐governmental practices of traditional (‘Westphalian’) diplomacy. The European Union (EU) has embraced these ideals, proclaiming public diplomacy a cornerstone of European external relations policy. We examine these claims in the context of the EU's delegations to Australia and New Zealand. Using three ethnographic case studies, we highlight discrepancies between official discourses on public diplomacy and its practice. The participatory ideals of EU public diplomacy, we argue, are undermined by the EU's preoccupation with image and branding, public relations and marketing techniques, and continuing reliance on traditional ‘backstage’ methods of diplomacy. We conclude by outlining the implications of these paradoxes for both anthropological research and EU external relations
Privatizing welfare. Changing the face of social protection and democracy in Europe
No full textIn their publication entitled ëA Done Deal? The EUís Legitimacy Conundrum Revisitedí, Eriksen and Fossum (2007, p._17) conclude by outlining the profound challenges that are haunting contemporary Europe. These range from ëovercoming nationalism without doing away with solidarityí and ëestablishing a single market Ö without abolishing the welfare stateí, to ëachieving unity and collective action without glossing over difference and diversityí and ëachieving efficiency and productivity without compromising rights and democratic legitimacyí.This chapter takes up the last of these conundrums by exploring the democratic challenges for Europe raised by attempts to reconcile European welfare systems with the dictates of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and the European Single Market. It also examines the intractable and often contradictory goals of those European welfare regimes themselves. The principle objective of welfare has traditionally been to provide basic economic security for citizens by protecting them from market risks associated with unemployment, old age and sickness. However, norms about the need for protection have shifted significantly since the 1980s and new risks have emerged, particularly with the global financial crisis of 2008. ëSocial inclusioní or the ability to participate and be fully included in society has also become an important objective for the EU and many of its member states. Yet the extent to which these different goals are achievable, or indeed compatible, remain issues for debate.This study analyses some of the unanticipated consequences of the increased role of the private and voluntary sectors in the welfare regimes of OECD countries
Broker Capitalism, Pandemic Profiteering and UK Financial Scandals: How Consultancy Firms Leverage Public Money, Defy Regulation and help the Rich
No full textBritish governments frequently profess commitment to fighting corruption yet the UK’s financial services industry facilitates crony capitalism and London remains a leading global centre for money laundering. This contradiction arises partly from the growing influence of private consultancy firms over government. Using two case studies of scandals during the Covid-19 pandemic, I illustrate how private firms leverage public funds. The first concerns the supply chain finance company Greensill Capital and its lobbyist, former UK Prime Minister and Foreign Minister David Cameron. The second concerns the government’s ‘fast lane’ procurement policy which saw vast sums of money lost, stolen, or wasted on contracts awarded to Conservative Party allies. Strangely, none of these actions were technically illegal. Drawing on anthropological approaches to corruption and theories of broker capitalism I ask, what made these scandals possible? I conclude that performative anti-corruption combined with weak regulations and deliberate blurring of the public/private boundary effectively legalise corrupt financial practices.Peer reviewe
The Crown and Constitutional Reform
No full textThe Crown and Constitutional Reform is an innovative, interdisciplinary exchange between experts in law, anthropology and politics about the Crown, constitutional monarchy and the potential for constitutional reform in Commonwealth common law countries.
The constitutional foundation of many Commonwealth countries is the Crown, an icon of ultimate authority, at once familiar yet curiously enigmatic. Is it a conceptual placeholder for the state, a symbol of sovereignty or does its ambiguity make it a shapeshifter, a legal fiction that can be deployed as an expedient mask for executive power and convenient instrument for undermining democratic accountability? This volume offers a novel, interdisciplinary exchange: the contributors analyse how the Crown operates in the United Kingdom and the postcolonial settler societies of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In doing so, they examine fundamental theoretical questions about statehood, sovereignty, constitutionalism and postcolonial reconciliation. As Queen Elizabeth II’s long reign approaches its end, questions about the Crown’s future, its changing forms and meanings, the continuing value of constitutional monarchy and its potential for reform, gain fresh urgency.
The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs
Management consultants and university futures: Academic capitalism and the capture of UK public higher education
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This article shows how management consultancy firms, particularly the Big Four, leveraged their position to become key brokers in English higher education, expanding their influence across multiple areas of governance and management. Aided by legislative changes designed to promote competition and enable for-profit providers to capture the rents provided by public higher education, these firms promote forms of marketization and privatization that are radically re-purposing the mission of the public university. Unbundling and financialization of university assets is central to that project. The article reveals how consultancy firms used the Covid 19 crisis not only to increase their influence but, through a series of ‘crisis narrative’ reports, to advocate strategies for fundamentally altering the entire public university system, locking in permanent changes and structures of managerialism that are anathema to the principles of public higher education. The article is a warning to policy-makers to beware the free-market fantasies and self-serving scenarios that these consultancy firms advocate.
ABSTRACT
This article examines the extraordinary growth of private management consultancy involvement in UK higher education. Analysing a series of ‘thought-leadership’ reports on university futures published between 2012 and 2023 it examines how these firms have embedded themselves in universities and cemented their expertise, profitability and power. Examining the future scenarios they imagine, the author suggests that these reports reflect a new phase in the evolution of academic capitalism, one characterised by consultancy-driven strategies for market-making and unbundling. Finally, the author asks, what are the implications of these interventions for the future of public higher education
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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