Suchergebnisse

"Novelists Against Social Change shows how the writing of the best-selling novelists John Buchan, Dornford Yates and Angela Thirkell expressed their conservative fears and anxieties by politicizing their fiction and characters, from 1920 to 1960. Buchan's focus on national and European politics of the 1920s and 30s was embedded in his trademark adventure fiction for Establishment heroes. Yates's stylistic exuberance decorated his fierce defence of retrogressive social codes with an almost modernist attention to language. Angela Thirkell's Barsetshire social comedies were an elegy to Victorian values and a passionate defence of upper-class civilization as she conceived it. Resisting the threat of change in social class, political action, the freedom of women, and professionalization produced some of their strongest works. This book pays particular attention to Buchan's novels Huntingtower, Castle Gay and A Prince of the Captivity, to Yates's 'Berry' novels and short stories and his thrillers, and Thirkell's wartime and postwar fiction. "--

"The Politics of Global Supply Chains analyses the changing politics of power and distribution within contemporary global supply chains. Drawing on over 300 interviews with farmers, workers, activists, businesses and government officials in garment and coffee sector supply chains, the book shows how the increased involvement of non-state actors in supply chain governance is re-shaping established patterns of global political power, responsibility and accountability. These emerging supply chain governance systems are shown to be multi-layered and politically contested, as transnational governance schemes interact with traditional state governance arrangements in both complementary and conflicting ways. The book's analysis of changes to the relationship between state and non-state actors within transnational governance processes will be of particular interest to scholars and students of globalisation, global governance and regulation. The Politics of Global Supply Chains also suggests some practical ways by which the effectiveness and accountability of supply chain governance could be strengthened, which will interest both scholars and practitioners in fields of global business regulation and corporate social responsibility. Conclusions are relevant to the business and civil society actors who participate directly in non-state governance schemes, and to state regulators whose distinctive governance capacities could play a much greater role than at present in supporting transnational, non-state governance processes."--EBSCO

The first part of this essay examines how John Buchan (1875-1940) wrote imperial fiction, which he largely did before the First World War in the first part of his writing career. He did this in different texts and forms: the short stories 'The Far Islands' (1899), 'The Kings of Orion' (1906), 'The Grove of Ashtaroth' (1910a), 'A Lucid Interval' (1910b) and 'The Green Wildebeest' (1927); the novels The Half-Hearted (1900), A Lodge in the Wilderness (1906), Prester John (1910); in political analysis in The African Colony (1903); and in journalism, in 'An Imperial Club for London' (1903). The second part of the essay will analyse 'A Lucid Interval' , with pedagogical material on its publishing and metahistory.

John Buchan was a noted novelist of Empire, yet his short stories on Imperial subjects and settings have rarely received critical attention. A careful reading of his shorter fiction reveals an alternative commentary on Empire that has been ignored. The works discussed problematize the common assumption that Buchan's views on Empire in his fiction are Victorian, by showing that he replaced the nineteenth-century model of Imperial rule by military force with the importance of the administrator and the knowledgeable man on the ground. The first part of this essay will survey Buchan's trajectory as a writer of Empire, in fiction and journalism, and discuss two key Edwardian short stories, 'The Kings of Orion' (1906) and 'The Grove of Ashtaroth' (1910), to illustrate how Buchan used Imperial themes to advocate the benefits of colonial rule. An extended analysis of Buchan's short story 'A Lucid Interval' (1910) and its publishing, political and social history forms the second part of the essay, since this story offers an unusual insight into the complexity of British imperial ideology in the early twentieth century. Buchan's political narrative uses the then common assumption of racial superiority to engage with complex ideas about the ethics of state politics and the feudal relationships that Imperialism promoted. It is his only attempt to write from the perspective of a non-white character, deploying the Indian Ram Singh's legitimate objections to make a party-political point against Liberalism in favour of Imperialist Conservatism. The story associates 'civilisation' with Imperial values, making anti- Imperialist thinking a form of anarchism. Its plot enacts anarchist views in the heart of the political establishment, to show their effect on the Imperial project as a whole. 'A Lucid Interval' is read as an investigation into the ethics of Imperial politics, and the essentially feudal basis for Imperial power relationships, today one of the principal objections to Imperialism as a system of governance. Buchan's use of humour undercuts the extremes of ideological arrogance that he assigns to the politicians. They utter expressions of their own power and position without truly comprehending what they are saying.

It is now commonplace for the language of accountability to be invoked in debates about transnational power and governance. Yet there is little agreement on whether 'accountability' takes an analogous form between national and transnational governance domains, and thus whether transnational extension of the concept overstretches the term – blurring or distorting our analysis of meanings and purposes of accountability. This paper suggests that although the same core meaning of accountability is equally relevant at transnational as at national scale, there are some notable differences in how questions about accountability 'for what', 'to whom' and 'through what means' are answered in a transnational governance setting. Nonetheless, analysing transnational accountability can enhance our understanding of important but often overlooked purposes of accountability – focusing our attention on accountability not only as a means of legitimizing and stabilizing public governance processes, but also as a vehicle for political contestation and institutional change.