Saturday, December 28, 2019

Sea Cliffs - Habitats of High, Rocky Coastlines

Sea cliffs are high, rocky coasts that plunge down to the seas edge. These harsh environments are subject to the battering of waves, wind, and salt-laden sea spray. Conditions on a sea cliff vary as you move up the cliff, with waves and sea spray playing larger parts in shaping the communities at the base of a sea cliff while wind, weather, and sun exposure are the driving forces that shape the communities towards the top of a sea cliff. Sea cliffs provide ideal nesting habitat for many species of sea birds such as gannets, cormorants, kittiwakes, and guillemots. Some cliff-nesting species form large, dense nesting colonies that stretch across the face of the cliff, taking advantage of every inch of available rock. At the base of the cliff, the pommeling by the surf prohibits all but the most tenacious of animals from surviving there. Mollusks and other invertebrates such as crabs and echinoderms occasionally find shelter behind rocky outcrops or tucked within tiny crevices. The top of the sea cliff is often more forgiving than its base and can be frequented by wildlife from surrounding terrain. Often, the craggy edges at the top of a cliff provide ideal habitat for small mammals, reptiles, and birds. Habitat Classification: Ecozones: Terrestrial / Marine Ecosystem: Beaches / Coasts Habitat: Sea Cliffs Wildlife: Birds, mammals, invertebrates, reptiles. Where to See: Sea cliffs are located along rocky coastlines throughout the world.

Thursday, December 19, 2019

The Work Ethics Of The United States, Malaysia, And Singapore

Works ethics guides the behavior of the work force. All firms and businesses have a set of rules or guidelines influencing or guiding their organizational behavior. Further, policies that provide guidance on ethical behaviors in are influenced by different factors across nations. Thus, the workforce of nations subscribes to work ethics which possesses or exhibits some similarities as well as differences. The differences could be brought about by the uniqueness in the cultural background of workers in different countries (Beng-Huat 200). Furthermore, the political systems that form the foundation of governance in the respective countries have far-reaching effects on ethical policies enacted in the country. In summary, intuitional, political, economic, religious, societal and philosophical notions influence the evolution and emergence of a business enterprise in any country. The interaction of these factors brings about the various similarities and differences in work ethics in differe nt countries. Hence, the United States, Malaysia, and Singapore possess some similarities and differences in their work ethics. There is a similarity in the way people view work ethics in the three countries. Human rights are taken as a priority in the implementation of these set of values. Every individual worker, in whichever firm, is tasked with the responsibility of respecting human rights. The attitudes held by all individuals towards ethics have a common goal of making sure that the clientsShow MoreRelatedEnvironmental Regulations in Thai and Singapore Essay1012 Words   |  5 PagesRunning head: UNIT 5 INDIVIDUAL PROJECT LAW AND ETHICS INT’L BUSINESS Kelly Camara Unit 5 Individual Project International Business Law amp; Ethics AIU Online January 4, 2011 Abstract In this paper I will be describing the levels of environmental regulations in Thailand and Singapore. 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Wednesday, December 11, 2019

The Theme of Leadership in the Lord of the Flies free essay sample

Throughout the novel, ‘Lord of the Flies’, William Golding is able to link the many aspects of our own world through the various characters he creates. One of these aspects is leadership, which plays a vital role in the novel’s microcosmic society, as it does in our own society. Golding uses leadership to convey his ideologies about human nature. Golding believes that all humans are fundamentally flawed, that all humans are evil and are capable of inflicting evil upon others. Only the law and order of our society hold back the flaws that all humans inherently possess. Golding uses the mixed feelings that he has about leadership to reveal his philosophy about human nature and other flawed aspects of our society. The Second World War, which Golding was a part of, brought about his pessimism of human nature. He was horrified at what himself and others did during the war. He gradually learned to see all human nature as savage and unforgiving, the darkness of mans heart; it is in all of us. The qualities of a good leader are universally accepted. The leader has to have control over his followers. He has to demand respect. The leader also has to be able to persuade his followers to follow him without taking away from his beliefs and views. A good leader also has to be able to be strong, mentally more than physically. He needs to be able to stand his ground and strongly believe in what he feels is right. A good leader also has to believe in himself. If a leader does not believe in himself, then who will? A leader has to be assertive and does not need to back down from anything. The two main characters in this novel express some of these characteristics, one character more than the other. There are always people, when in a group, who show and possess superior leadership attributes than others. The strongest, mentally and physically, tend to have the greatest influence over others. Sometimes the strongest person is not necessarily the best choice. Authors, including Golding, often show how humans select the strongest person, to give us an understanding of the influence people can possess over others. Golding has two stand out characters in the beginning of the novel who each show their own, but very different leadership skills. However Golding believes that there is no such thing as a perfect leader, and that every type of leadership is flawed in some way. Golding intends to use these two characters to highlight the two types of leadership that he tries to present in the novel. The first character introduced to us is Ralph, who in my opinion is presented as the better leader. His capacity for leadership is evident from the beginning, â€Å"Shut up,† said Ralph absently. He lifted the conch. â€Å"Seems to me we ought to have a chief to decide things. He then proceeds to be voted as the group leader, over Jack, mainly due to the fact that he was the one that initially blew the conch, â€Å"They obeyed the summons of the conch, partly because Ralph blew it, and he was big enough to be a link with the adult world of authority†¦. †It is obvious from the offset that Golding has made Ralph the symbol of democracy in the novel. Golding shows his feeling about democracy as describing democratic voting as a ‘toy’. The other little’uns follow Ralph as he is the only link they have left to the civilised world. At the beginning and throughout the novel, Ralph is the primary representative of order, society and leadership among the group. Ralph starts off well at attempting to make a new society; he firmly believes that the most important thing in this situation is being rescued. He creates a fire beacon, for cooking, heat and rescue. The signal fire can be viewed as a sign of hope the hope the boys have to return to society. When the flames dance brightly, it shows the enthusiasm they hold for the idea of being rescued. However, as the fire grows dim, it reflects the attitude of the boys and their loss of morale. The signal fire can also be viewed as the boys link to the civilized world. As long as the fire continues burning, it suggests not only that the boys want to return to society, but also that they are still using their common sense. He understands the essentials that a society must have to keep afloat and he knows what must be done in order for the survival of the boys. He works vigilantly to keep the groups focus on the hope of rescue. It is at the second assembly that we see Ralph firmly asserting his authority, â€Å"except by me†. It is also the first time that Jack struggles with Ralph’s authority. As the tension between Ralph and Jack continues to increases, we see more obvious signs of a potential struggle for power. Although Jack has been deeply envious of Ralph’s power from the moment Ralph was elected, the two do not come into open conflict until the fourth chapter, when Jack’s irresponsibility leads to the failure of the signal fire. When the fire—a symbol of the boys’ connection to civilization—goes out, the boys’ first chance of being rescued is thwarted. Ralph flies into a rage, indicating that he is still governed by desire to achieve the good of the whole group. But Jack, having just killed a pig, is too excited by his success to care very much about the missed chance to escape the island. Indeed, Jack’s bloodlust and thirst for power have overwhelmed his interest in civilization. Whereas he previously justified his commitment to hunting by claiming that it was for the good of the group, now he no longer feels the need to justify his behaviour at all. Instead, he indicates his new orientation toward savagery by painting his face like a barbarian, leading wild chants among the hunters, and apologizing for his failure to maintain the signal fire only when Ralph seems ready to fight him over it. However, Ralph still has his shortcomings as a leader and isn’t always perfect as Golding is trying to show. One of his first mistakes was giving more control to Jack by making him leader of his hunters. This allows Jack and the choir boys to make their own rules and encourage the choir boys to stray away from Ralph’s lead. When the beast is first introduced, Ralph doesn’t do a very good job of convincing the younger boys that there isn’t a beast on the island. He just say’s â€Å"but there isn’t a beast. † Whereas Jack assures the younger boys that if there is a beast, he’d find it and kill it. The weight of leadership becomes oppressive for Ralph as the story continues; he is dutiful and dedicated, but his attempts to instil order and calm among the boys are decreasingly successful. Golding develops Ralphs particular concerns and insecurities. By showing him worrying over his perceived failures, Golding highlights Ralph’s responsible, adult nature. Ralphs concern about his appearance, and particularly his grown-out hair, indicate his natural inclination toward the normality of civilization. Although Ralph demonstrates a more than sufficient intelligence, he also worries that he lacks Piggys genius, â€Å"if only I could step inside that fat head of his†. Ralph eventually understands the importance of thought and how it can help him as a leader, â€Å"thought was a valuable thing, that got results †. The second type of leadership that Golding conveys through a character is the Dictator, Jack. Ralph treats all the boys with dignity and tries to work with them for the betterment of the society. On the opposite side of the scale, Jack does not treat any of the boys with the dignity that Ralph does. In chapter three Golding writes, in comparing Jack’s and Ralph, They walked along, two continents of experience and feeling, unable to communicate. This shows how Golding is trying to tell us how Ralph and Jack’s motives are completely different; one is focused on hunting and the other on the society. Jack immediately shows qualities of a good leader, but are different qualities than Ralph shows. Jack has a very commanding presence from the beginning; he arrives on the island having some success in exerting control over others by dominating the choir with his militaristic attitude. At the first assembly he believes that he should be chief, â€Å"I ought to be chief†, but is humiliated when he loses the vote to Ralph. Jack is chauvinistic, stating that, I agree with Ralph. Weve got to have rules and obey them. After all, were not savages. Were English, and the English are best at everything. So weve got to do the right things. Golding believes that Nationalism and chauvinism are the causes of wars on our society and is putting this across in the microcosm. This is a hint that there would be eventually conflict on the island. Golding also uses the theory of Darwinism to relate to Jack, as Jack puts down the weaker in society, Piggy and Simon, like most dictators do. Jack represents evil and violence, the dark side of human nature. He is the character that regresses the most throughout the novel. It starts with him hunting in the Jungle, when Golding uses animal imagery to show his regression, ‘ape-like’ and ‘half naked†¦walking on all fours’. Jack attempts to dominate the group, rather than working with Ralph to benefit it. The conch does not mean anything to Jack, for him, the conch represents the rules and boundaries that have kept him from dominating others. Their entire lives in the other world, the boys had been moderated by rules set by society. The dictator in Jack becomes dominant in his personality during the panic over the beast sighting on the mountain. In trying to put Ralph down, he uses his rhetorical skills to twist Ralphs words. In defence, he offers to the group an excuse that Hed never have got us meat, asserting that hunting skills make for an effective leader. Jack assigns a high value only to those who he finds useful or agreeable to his views and looks to silence those who do not please him. Denouncing the rules of order, Jack declares, We dont need the conch any more. We know who ought to say things. As Jack strives to establish his leadership, he takes on the title of chief and reinforces the illusion of station and power by using the other boys ceremoniously as standard bearers who raise their spears together and announce The Chief has spoken. Jack works closely with Roger, as Ralph does with Piggy and Simon, to help him form his new dictatorship at Castle Rock. Though Roger does not possess any sort of leadership skills, he does have a forced authority over others. This role is no game for him, though; by the night of Simons death, Jack has clearly gone power-mad, sitting at the pig roast on a large log painted and garlanded . . . like an idol while power . . . chattered in his ear like an ape. His tribe addresses him as Chief, ind icating a form of more primitive tribal leadership. Jack’s leadership in the macrocosm would not work, it would just lead to war. Whereas on the island Jack promises food and fun, so everybody follows him. Jack’s savage, primitive society murders the two outcasts, Piggy and Simon. The next on their list is Ralph, who is finding himself running away from a line of Jack’s group across the island. In the midst of the chaos, the forest is set on fire. As Ralph is running away, he unselfishly thinks, ‘The fools! The fire must be almost at the fruit trees- what would they eat tomorrow. Even though Jack’s tribe is hunting him down, all he cares about are the others. At the end of the novel, a naval officer comes onto the island. When he asks who is in charge, Jack steps forward and then steps back. He finally realizes that what he was doing was wrong and cowers away from the naval officer, thinking that Ralph would take all of the blame. Ralph loudly proclaims the he is the leader. They had all finally come to realize what they had done. They soon discovered that if they had followed Ralph, none of this would have happened. hen the naval officer appears on the island, all the boys who were moments ago behaving savagely, come to a halt and suddenly return to their senses. This suggests that the appearance of the naval officer symbolizes the return of both adult supervision and civilization. Ralph was the best leader in the novel, he puts the society over himself at all times. Jack has the better leadership skills, but chooses to use them for the wrong reasons. The fact that he came to be the leader was because of humanitys sinful tendency towards savagery.

Wednesday, December 4, 2019

Public admin as an art or science free essay sample

I think public administration is a science because it involves the study of government decision making and policies, which can help to produce more policies. Science is also defined as the study of something or the pursuit of knowledge on public administration. http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Public_administration has more details on public administration. Public administration is not a science or an art. Public administration is known as a craft for many reasons. It is not science because there isnt an entirely correct way of doing it, there are no equations that will constitute efficiency or effectiveness for sure. Science is all about facts, The Study of Administration Woodrow Wilson November 1, 1886 An Essay I suppose that no practical science is ever studied where there is no need to know it. The very fact, therefore, that the eminently practical science of administration is finding its way into college courses in this country would Top of Form Bottom of Form MSGManagement Basics At a first glance it seems easier to accept public administration as an art. We will write a custom essay sample on Public admin as an art or science or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page It is just the administration of Government affairs and for most part it does not follow the laws of Science like absence of normative value, predictability of behavior and universal application. So, does that mean we cannot list it into a respectable category of scientific subjects? There are many authors who ferociously defended it and argued that public administration as an area of study is indeed a Science. The earliest of them was Lorenz von Stein an 1855, a German professor from Vienna who said that public administration is an integrated Science and viewing it just as administrative laws was a restrictive definition. In modern times, categorizing public administration as Science found favor with many, the most important one being the father of American public administration, President Woodrow Wilson. We shall read more about the Wilsonian view of public administration in the next article, however he mainly emphasized that the objective of administrative study is to discover what government can properly and successfully do and how it can do those things with utmost efficiency with least possible cost of money or energy. After Wilson another important argument came from Frederick Taylor who wrote a book called The Principles of Scientific Management (1911) in which he proposed to discover one best way of doing things/operation and thus save on cost on time and energy. Luther Gulick and L Urvick collectively published, Papers on the Science of Administration which reaffirmed its status as a Science. W F Willoughby stated that public administration like Science has certain fundamental principles which can be generally applied and therefore it is a Science. However, there still remain certain aspects to be established before public administration can be actually and in real terms, be classified as a Science. The places of normative values in public administration should be clearly defined. More efforts should be put in to understanding the human nature and dynamics at play in public administration. Lastly, the principles of public administration should derive references from across the worlds, cultures, type of states etc to make them more universal and free of cultural, religious and political biases. The advent of the modern welfare state itself has added, to the changing approach to public administration. The kind of activities and sphere of works have never been more varied and dynamic and there has been a never before interest in actually improving the efficiency of the government. Subject matter experts like Frederick Taylor have opened ways to exploration, experimentation, observation, collection of data and analysis based on which principles and laws can be made. There are increasing number of authors like Metcalfe, Fayol, Emerson, Follett, Mooney, and more recently Drucker etc who have written on the subjects of administration. In-fact Drucker wrote a book called â€Å"The Age of Discontinuity† and one of the chapters of the book called The Sickness of Government became the basis of the New Public Management theory popular in 1980s which emphasized the market oriented management of the public sector. So, one can safely say that with the changing times and more and more studies carried out in the field of social sciences, administration and human relations, the subject of public administration can no longer take the shelter of art and would have to emerge stronger with relevant and fundamental principles like that of Science. I think public administration is a science because it involves the study of government decision making and policies, which can help to produce more policies. Science is also defined as the study of something or the pursuit of knowledge on public administration (myschoolcomm reply) Hassan Raza Lyndall Urwick (1891-1983) was a British army officer turned theorist and consultant whose work integrated the ideas of scientific management with the ideas of classical organization theory. Luther Gulick (1892-1970) served on President Franklin D. Roosevelts Committee on Administrative Management during the 1930s, and his major interests were political science and public service. Urwick and Gulick edited a 1937 publication titled Papers on the Science of Administration, Kelly Gathered these Facts Email Since the earliest days of bureaucratic infrastructure, governments have employed individuals on a hierarchical basis to carry out the numerous functions associated with government services and the implementation of policy in public life. These individuals are known as public servants, and the infrastructure to which they belong is called public administration. Public servants, or public administrators, have traditionally been either hired or appointed, but not elected. Public administrators are responsible for carrying out the functions which result from and are stipulated by lawmakers at the executive, legislative and judicial levels of government. To this extent, government administrators include government ministers, law enforcement personnel, municipal managers and economic analysts and strategists. These individuals work in government at all levels from federal to state to municipal and represent the hierarchical manner by which public power is delegated as a means to ensure the effectiveness of public policy as well as the efficient distribution of its benefits to those governed. As a discipline, public administration came to the fore in the late 1800s when academics including Woodrow Wilson, then a professor at Wesleyan University prior to his ascension to the U. S. presidency, proposed a model of government bureaucracy that closely followed large businesses and corporations in terms of infrastructure and cost effectiveness. Up to this time in the late 1800s, roles in government were available not necessarily on the basis of aptitude or skill, but rather by virtue of connections, word-of-mouth and nepotism. The emerging model of public administration encouraged greater fairness of opportunity to participate in public administration through the use of written civil service examinations. These exams would indicate an individual’s understanding of the bureaucratic infrastructure as well as the theoretical bases of public policy implementation, public finance and the extent of the authority of a public administrator’s role. Such measures were first initiated by the Pendleton Act of 1883, requiring that candidates for roles in the federal government undergo testing as a prerequisite for being hired. In 1978, the Civil Service Reform Act took additional steps to ensure fairness of opportunity and fair treatment for candidates as well as those currently employed as public administrators at the federal level. Between the 1880s and the early 1900s, public administration developed in academia as an interdisciplinary approach to the effectiveness of public policy between the bureaucratic system and the population it is meant to serve. As a discipline, public administration further seeks to reform the existing bureaucratic system so that it may more effectively adapt to the public’s changing needs. Numerous colleges and universities now offer undergraduate- and graduate-level degree programs in public administration, integrating such subjects as history, economics, public finance, political science and sociology. These component parts illustrate the multitude of perspectives required for effectively implementing public policy. The educated public administrator understands how his or her role differs from that of a politician, the distinction between public and private enterprises and the benefits of superimposing business fundamentals on the management of a bureaucratic framework. The question of whether public administration should be classified as an art or a science has been the subject of much speculation in terms of its multidimensional approach. Many believe that the effective implementation of public policy where maintaining good relations with the public is concerned is, in and of itself, an art. However, the role of public administration as both a profession and as an academic discipline worthy of quantifiable examination and review classifies it unequivocally as a science. See more at: http://www. thefreeresource. com/is-public-administration-a-science-or-an-art#sthash. 9MGc5vtM. dpuf which included articles on organization theory and public administration. Gulick isolated the responsibilities of the chief executive and enumerated them according to the acronym POSDCORB, which stands for planning, organizing, staffing, directing, coordinating, reporting, and budgeting. One of his main points was that well-managed, self-contained organizations or departments are nearly always headed by a single top manager such as a CEO. For his part, Urwick believed that the activities necessary to achieve organizational goals should be grouped and assigned to individuals in an impersonal way, echoing the impartial detachment of Max Webers bureaucracy. Urwick also wrote about the problems of managing large numbers of employees, identified multiple levels of supervisory management, and used a formula to determine the minimum and maximum number of subordinates a manager can effectively supervise. His work was an important step in synthesizing the principles of scientific management with the thinking of Weber and Fayol. Art is skillful and systematized practice. It comes to a person partly as a matter of natural endowment and partly from effort to learn and master its techniques. For a long time public administration has been assumed as an art. It has been repeated often that administrators are born and not made. Gifted administrators like Kautilya, Akbar, Todarmal, Bismarck and Sardar Patel worked wonders with their administrative skill and were hailed as the greatest artists in their own field by an admiring world. This was the reason why training had no role in preparing an administrator for his future job. However, there is difference of opinion among the thinkers on whether public administration is an art, science or craft. Before we decide whether there is a science of administration or not, it is necessary to understand the meaning of the term â€Å"Science†. If by science is meant a conceptual scheme of things in which every particularity covered may be assigned a mathematical value, and then administration is not a science. If on the other hand, we rightly use the term in connection with a body of systematized knowledge, derived from experience and observation, then public administration is a science. Public administration knowledge is increasing and public administration study is being approached through the scientific method. Luther Gullick is of the view that, â€Å"Science of administration is a system of knowledge whereby men may understand relationship, predict results and influence outcomes in any situation where men are organized at work together for a common purpose†. Science is characterized by precision and predictability. A scientific rule is one that works all the time. As a matter of fact rules in science are considered to be so rigid and final that they are not called rules at all but laws. Two parts of hydrogen combined with one part of Oxygen will always give us Water or steam or ice, depending on the temperature regardless of where and when the amalgamation of the two elements takes place. Of course, if the apparatus combining them is dusty or if some one switches it off at the wrong time, or if any of countless thousands of other things happen, the formation of H20 may not occur. But this does not invalidate the formula. So nor sciences or some aspects of science, achieve such a 100 percent level of predictability. Many of the scientific aspects of the social science similarly deal with expectations that govern only a portion of the elements being scrutinized, not all of them. For example many social scientists feel that they have established pretty much as a scientific law, the theory that political participation correlates with education and affluence. But more explicitly they feel that their research has proved that the more educated and/ or the more affluent people are, the more they will tend to participate in the political participation, will almost invariably be greater in those communities or neighborhoods where education and affluence is greater. However one cannot automatically assume that any person who has a Ph. D and one having Rs. 50,000 per month salary-the two do not always go together will be a feverish participant in the political process. In similar fashion, one cannot single out an individual at the bottom rung of the education-affluence ladder and automatically assume that he or she is estranged from or antagonistic to, politics; obviously some low income and less educated people participate quite intensively in politics, while some of the well educated rich have never been bothered registering to vote. Yet, with it all, the latter are much more likely to take a more active role in politics than are the former. Science here reigns, although somewhat imperfectly, by establishing degrees of probability. Administration makes or should make great use of scientific data, laws, and theories. The use of mathematics and computer sciences in some aspects of budgeting is a fairly obvious example. The utilization is personnel work of somewhat less definitive but nevertheless statistically valid material developed by psychologist is another. Thus administration uses these types of scientific data, but is it a science itself? In attempting to answer this question we should note that the utilization of science is not confirmed to the sciences themselves. Music, for instant, bases itself on law of harmony that are quite mathematical. Painting depends on laws dealing with the colours of the spectrum. Yet both music and painting are arts, not sciences. In a sense, the same holds true for administration. Administrators made use of scientific laws, techniques and data. But they do so in ways that allow a great deal of free rein to the individual imagination and temperament. Practically every social discipline, finds itself confronted with the question whether it can be a science? It is obvious that social sciences cannot produce such results with the same certainty as it can in the physical sciences like physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, Astronomy etc. Politics has no principles by following which a political leader or party can win a majority or prevent revolution with absolute certainty. Economics has no sure recipe for making individual or nation prosperous. Same way, public administration too has no sure principles by which desired results can always be obtained. And on his ground the physical scientists and others of their way of thinking during the claim of these studies to be sciences. We are proud that man thinks fie has a will of his own and acts in accordance with the dictates of his will not two persons-not even real brothers are completely identical in their attitudes, perceptions, orientations, and responses. Even the same person doe? not make, identical response to identical situations. A subject which studies human behaviour is, as a result, certainly much more complex and should in no way, be regarded as existing on a level lower than that of physical sciences. Robert Dahl has argued that public administration is not a science because it does not have principles that are of Universal applicability. He says that there can be no truly universal generalization about public administration without a social characteristic impinging on public administration. Can we determine what aspects of public administration of any, are truly independent of nation and social setting? Are these principles of public administration that are of universal applicability or valid only in terms of special environment public administration have had its growth in the cultural framework of the west. As such, its findings and principles may not necessarily hold valid in other parts of the world, where different cultures prevail. As public administration has vital interaction with its social setting, an institution or principle of public administration is unlikely, to be transplanted in another society. Public administration is culture bound. Until principles of public administration are either derived or varied from cross-cultural studies, they cannot lay claim to universal validity. In short, public administration can be entitled to be called science only after its principles are directly derived from studies and investigations made in the different societies of the world-in Asian, satin American and African Countries. No social science including public administration, which studies human behaviour, can claim the degree of precision and in fallibility characteristic of physical science. Dahl says, â€Å"We are long away from a science of public administration† No science of public administration is possible unless: (a) The place of normative value is made clear. (b) The nature of men in the area of administration is better understood and his conduct is more predictable. (c) There is a body of comparative studies from which it may be possible to discover principles and generalities that transcend national boundaries and peculiar historical experiences. There is much validity to the criticism of Dahl. But it must he remembered that he wrote this in 1957. Since then much advancement has been made. Increasing research has been initiated to discover the place of man in different administrative settings and to understand the compulsions of social environment of public administration. Comparative studies today form the core of the discipline. Thus, great effort is being made in studying public administration in scientific direction. Public administration must be understood to be science because a scientific approach to its study can be used. It is not a science to the extent that it has preciseness or universal validity of laws or principles. To this extent there is no social science that can claim the pre-requisites of a physical science. Public administration is primarily a science of observation rather than experiment. Public administration is a progressive science whose generalization or ‘Principles’ are bound to be constantly revised and restated in the light of fresh discovery of facts and new experience. There can be no absolute liability about the lessons it teaches, although various points of view put forward from time to time may give the student a truer and truer insight into the problems involved. With a view to encroaching the science of public administration and discover new techniques and principles of administration special institutions have been established in all the advanced countries of the world. For example, in Great Britain there is renounced Institute of Public Administration, in the U. S. A. there is the famous Max Well Graduate School of Public Administration at Syracuse, and in India, there is the Indian Institute of Public Administration in New Delhi. Now we focus our discussion to the last category, that of craft, we find a more suitable or at least a more comfortable classification. The woman who paints a picture that hangs in a museum is an artist. The man who brings his easel and palette into the museum to copy this picture is a craftsman. The later has an objective stands for the goal he is trying to meet and against which he can be judged. He may use a variety of techniques and materials in his effort to achieve this goal. But the goals remain the same. Another painter-craftsman with the same aim may mix paints differently, shade light differently, or do a host of other things which the former craftsman did not do. But he or she is striving for the same end and outside observer can usually determine who was the most successful. A more persistent hypothetical problem will further point up the ability of viewing administration as neither a science nor an art but as a craft. Let us assume that a city is divided for the purpose of garbage collection into two distinct and equal sections. One team of sanitation workers under an assistant sanitation commissioner is assigned to each section, with the objective of keeping the streets clean. The ways in which each team goes about; its work may differ depending on the personalities of workers, and a variety of other factors. But an objective standard exists for comparing the relative efficiency of each which produces cleaner streets? Most administrative activity does not lend itself to such an easy evaluation as the example just given. When it comes to assessing the efficiency of a foreign policy operation-to take just one example, assessments and judgments can become very tricky. The administration of a policy often becomes hard to separate from the policy itself. Furthermore, there is not always agreement on the critical or the objective against success or failure is to be measured. And in many cases, varying conditions will complicate our comparison. In the street cleaning case, for instance, one team may excel another team only because its streets are in a lower density section of the city which has less garbage. Or it may outperform the other team only because its district is closer to the incinerator, thereby cutting down the travel times needed to send its dump trucks back and forth. Nevertheless, despite all these complicating factors, in most administrative situations there is an objective standard lurking somewhere, shadowy and illusive and hard to apply through it. At the same time, there is almost never a precise formula that will invariably work best in all situations. The situations not only change but the ideas that may be applied to handling them are almost as infinite as the human mind. Another example, this one from history will provide further support for our contention that administration may be more easily categorized as a craft than as an art or a science. President Roosevelt used a great deal of artistry and imagination in dealing with various problems faced in the particular situation. Yet he was not creating a work of art but resolving a difficult problem. The same time, however, scientist, for what he did not lend itself to easy formalization. His solution, although it might provide some ideas for other administrators faced with similar dilemmas, certainly does not lend itself to an all-embracing equation. Such a solution, for instance, would not have proved of much use of George Washington when he confronted the somewhat similar challenge of dealing with the bitter fight between his two top aides, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. For one thing, there were no conservation projects to inspect, no trains to transport the visiting party

Wednesday, November 27, 2019

Lickity Inc. Company analysis

Background Lickity Inc. is one of the foods producing companies in Malaysia dealing with supply of variety cakes. The company was founded in the year 1990 and operated a number of franchised stores within Kuala Lumpur. The stores were strategically located near major tourist shopping market segments in Kuala Lumpur. Lickity attracted a number of investors in the 1990s who desired to acquire franchise store with the company since the brand dominated food market (Wood et al 26).Advertising We will write a custom assessment sample on Lickity Inc. Company analysis specifically for you for only $16.05 $11/page Learn More Description of the Company The company’s supply chain management ensured incorporation of limited product line for the purposes of reducing unnecessary wastes during manufacturing and marketing processes. Their product cakes were recognized for high quality ingredients sold at affordable proportions depending on consumer need. The cake s were full of cream and served all social classes and considered fit for all occasions including birthday parties. Lickity’s product portfolio comprised of twenty variety cakes including portable three-slice-cake served and eaten instantly since the pack contained required cutlery. Traditional moon cake was prepared specially for patrons who preferred enjoying in store eating within various shopping centres. The company experienced financial problems owing to increased rates in operational activities. Such expenses included rent payments across all stores as well as increase in cost of raw materials and other resources required due to high level of taxes (Wood et al 26). Lickity did not apply modernized system within their international market communication mix. They relied on traditional means of using retailers as the only means through which they reach customers. They heavily depended on distributions through franchised stores to generate revenue. Another problem was on t he composition of labour force where even students were considered for employment. Such strategy was used for the purposes of reducing cost of production. The company did not invest much in training and development of its staff and therefore experienced poor management strategies within the food and beverage market. Due to lowered costs of production and quality products, their brand was well positioned in the market attracting multitude of customers. However, the profit levels decreased since the year 2000, this was due to stagnation experienced within various segments of the supply chain (Wood et al 26).Advertising Looking for assessment on business economics? Let's see if we can help you! Get your first paper with 15% OFF Learn More Their products were based on unique qualities such as distinctive taste and shape of which sufficiently attracted customers. However, the stated objectives and mission statement are capable of driving any company when applied and implem ented appropriately. This should have enabled Lickity revive company’s marketing strategies based on global brand management within the segments it had experienced worst performances (Wood et al 26). Review of main ingredients should have been done on a monthly basis, the same to use of modern equipment and application of computerized technology in monitoring of supply chain. This should have been preceded by careful evaluation on market size, consumer behaviour towards food products within the different international market segments (Wood et al 26). Problem Lickity’s popularity before financial woos of 2000 was based on excellent services and prime quality products. The company benefited from market monopoly where its dominance was felt in most market segments (Wood et al). There were no competent competitors from the initial stages of operation hence Lickity enjoyed supplying customers with products at will. There was lack of properly organized sales and marketing te am with profound strategies capable of capturing significant customer base within Malaysian market. Global market had adopted the use of internet in dispatching products, most consumers found it easier to place orders via company’s websites. However, Lickity still relied on their manual system of delivery which experienced drastic fall on customers (Wood et al 26). Lickity was associated with poor management style especially on resources within supply chain stores. The results could be noticed on the drastic drop on sales over the last ten years since the year 2000. Effects of economic downturn further added to the company’s financial woo. Marketing team did not recognize the importance of company’s brand name within the market. Customers usually purchase products based on brand position within the market, brands within the food industry associated with healthy products appear more attractive to consumers since health is a priority. Lack of thorough inspection b y the management on franchises is also considered as great contributor towards Lickity’s financial problems (Wood et al 26).Advertising We will write a custom assessment sample on Lickity Inc. Company analysis specifically for you for only $16.05 $11/page Learn More At the same time adjustments on consumer tastes was not easy owing to different consumer preferences towards their health. This calls for the need for robust management team capable of making profitable adjustments within the core strategies. Inexperienced labour force is at times the mother of adversity within such companies (Pride et al). Competition was stiff within the food and beverage industry with such aggressive moves and strategies applied by competitors such as Maxims and queens. This was attributable to the nature of healthy products they offer consumers compared to Lickity. Consumers became health conscious hence preferred light low-fatty cakes as well as fruit cakes. This led to mass exodus of customers from in-store purchase of cakes. The operations from franchise stores recorded low sales leading to hefty overheads which contributed towards the company’s instability. Most consumers preferred making their purchases on-line hence worked with sophisticated companies. Reduction in the purchase of birthday party cakes was attributed to the fact that most customers organized such events in fast food restaurants. The competitors operated on strategic marketing where they target working class within the upper-market since most of them were usually loyal to the brand. Growth of other coffee-houses alongside baked products such as Starbucks uses branded products creating easy recognition and at the same time reward loyal customers (Starbucks Corporation 1). Level of hygiene matters since consumers’ value quality despite the kind of pricing mechanism used (Johlke and Dale 265-277). Problem Analysis Majority of the problems discussed could be at tributed to poor management principles and use of unqualified workforce. There was great competition from within food industry and international market. There was possibility of lack of workable strategies owing to lack of serious management team (Johlke and Dale 265-277). Lickity experienced its first financial drawback in the year 2000 leading to reduction of stock price to below $10 per share. The other problem was based on consumer health concerns; the products had high carbohydrate content considered harmful to health hence making consumers avoid Lickity cakes. Such incidences of closure affected the company’s profitability negatively (Johlke and Dale 265-277). Financial support can be obtained through varied activities including from financial institutions. There is opportunity for the company to generate more through on-premise sales. Lickity can also utilize fees and royalties from the Franchises, arguably organization of the supply chain determines to a greater exten t level of success attained by business companies (Johlke and Dale 265-277).Advertising Looking for assessment on business economics? Let's see if we can help you! Get your first paper with 15% OFF Learn More Alternative Solutions One of the possible solutions to Lickity is to consider forming partnership with other modernized company’s for the purposes of technology improvement. This should be accompanied by incorporating ways on product modification for the purposes of satisfying current consumer needs and tastes. At the same time Lickity requires recruitment of professionals with the ability of predicting and analysing market trends (Johlke and Dale 265). Use of internet in advertising should be considered by the company since majority of the clients use internet and social sites for communication based on purchases and deliveries (Johlke and Dale 265-277). There is profound need to work out on the company’s business models with change of strategy on working within recommended market segments which would enable positive experiences despite expected market uncertainties. Extensive training of marketing professionals is required especially within the international market. Diversification of product portfolio should be considered since consumers prefer to purchase from one-stop shop. Pricing techniques used by the company requires change since they deal with both domestic and international clients, such pricing as geographical pricing techniques should be used in this case. Nature of product’s quality, pricing and marketing strategies should vary depending on the demands of the market supplied with the products. Service marketing plays a vital role in making or breaking an organisation (Johlke and Dale 265-277). Excellent services tend to be remembered for all the good reasons which leave customers with a sense of delight, hence they remain loyal. On the other hand, a poor experience always leaves a bitter feeling which deters customers. Therefore satisfaction, value and quality are essential for a successful marketing service venture (Services Marketing). Works Cited Johlke, Mark Dale, Duhan. â€Å"Testing Competing Models of Sales Force Com munication.† Journal of Personal Selling Sales Management, 21 (2000): 265-277. Pride, Rundle-Thiele, Waller, Elliot Palandino, Ferrell. Marketing. Milton:John Wiley, 2007 Starbucks Corporation 2009, Company Profile: Reproduced in Business Source  Premier EBSCOhost. 18 Nov 2012. https://www.starbucks.com/ Services Marketing. 2010. Web. Wood et al. Management Problem Solving Frameworks- Tools Techniques. Sydney, McGraw-Hill, 2009. p 26. This assessment on Lickity Inc. Company analysis was written and submitted by user BenGr1mm to help you with your own studies. You are free to use it for research and reference purposes in order to write your own paper; however, you must cite it accordingly. You can donate your paper here.

Sunday, November 24, 2019

Pro- Choice essays

Pro- Choice essays Over the last forty years, the question over abortion rights has been a highly debated social issue in our country. The Pro-choice movement began with a primary goal of legalizing abortion, and after this was achieved, continued to defend itself against the counter movements that rose in the late 70s. This movement enjoyed a level of successes that was not felt by other movements of the time. As highlighted in The Pro-Choice Movement: Organization and Activism in the Abortion Conflict, Suzanne Staggenborg examines the many factors contributing to the movement. While reading and researching this book and other pro-choice movement materials, some themes have arose that give insight into the successes of this movement despite its turmoiulous road. Devoted leadership, strong organizations and grass-root support, combined with motivation from the threats of the anti-abortion counter movement, enabled the pro-choice movement to remain an active force before and after legalization. The emergence of the pro-choice movement did not occur via the usual social movement roots. The early pro choice movement emerged from concerned physicians who wanted to help legalize abortions and keep the practice safe. Published articles began to appear in the 1950s and early 60s that roused public attention on the need for the abortion law reforms. Two major events were specifically covered; the case of Sherri Finkbine who had taken a drug that could cause fetal defects and attempted to get an illegal abortion, and the epidemic of rubella measles that could also cause fetal defects. This forced doctors to confront their different views over abortion. The earliest organization to develop was the Association for the Study of Abortion (ASA). Although it began small, the ASA was important in lending credibility and authority to the early years of the abortion movement. The ASA was a major player in developing other organizations for abortion ...

Thursday, November 21, 2019

Telecommuting Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Telecommuting - Essay Example There are various benefits that have been attained by firms that have adopted this method as part of their human resources management strategy. While some have had success other firms have experienced a negative effect with their bid to try and adopt telecommuting policies. A recent incidence may have brought the issues that are raised by telecommuting to the fore and this was with the recently appointed chief executive (CEO) of Yahoo banning the telecommuting policy of the company. Discussions have been raised on whether this was a good move or not? What may have called for her action? How does this affect the future productivity of Yahoo as a company? There are a number of advantages that a company may stand to gain from adopting a telecommuting policy. The positives To begin with are the environmental advantages that are to be gained by this policy. The increase in the number of people who are telecommuting means that there are fewer people on the roads driving. This reduces the amount of emissions that are released into the atmosphere and that contribute to green house gases. The other advantage that is provided by telecommuting is that of a social nature and this is as concerns the family unit. Telecommuting is beneficial to parents especially mothers who are accorded the ability to juggle taking care of their young ones while still being able to attend to their office duties. This makes for a stronger family unit and also there is the provision of the needed amount of care given to the children. All this though point to the individual advantage of telecommuting. The idea though is to look at the whole picture from the perspective of the company and how beneficial or otherwise this will be to the company. Though it should be mentioned at the e arliest that there exists different schools of thought on whether telecommuting is beneficial to a company or not but the overall opinion infers to it being more of beneficial. Improving performance Various different studies have been conducted that have looked at the improvements that a firm may get from having a section of its workers telecommuting to work. Some of these studies have found that telecommuting helps boost the performance of the workers and this has been attributed to a number of factors. One of these factors is the amount of time that is saved by workers who do not have to commute to work every day. Each day there is an increasing number of hours that workers spend on the road on their way to and from work. These hours can be better spent working on their various tasks if they telecommute. This savings are also in the fact that a large percentage of the workers are now not forced to endure traffic jams that also consume a lot of the time which limits the workers pro ductivity. If this time is spent doing company related tasks and assignments they can help improve greatly on the output of the company (Johnson, 2001, 169). The other idea is in the fact that those who telecommute to work have been found to have an increased amount of productivity as compared to their colleagues who do not telecommute. One of these studies was done by Staples of which 93% of the surveyed employee agreed to the fact that telecommuting does a good job as far as improving productivity is concerned. This point was supported by over half of the decision makers in the company (Nina, 2013). This has been attributed to there being improved employee morale, lower employee absenteeism and reduced employee stress. All these factors worked to improve the performance o

Wednesday, November 20, 2019

Construction Economics Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Construction Economics - Research Paper Example Strategy of Barratt is to acquire land for establishing houses such as standalone and more for greater sustainability in the market (Barratt Developments PLC, 2015). In this context, the paper intends to plan for the next two years where the company needs to analyse the situation best suited. The paper will analyse whether Barratt should construct smaller houses or rely on the land bank for the future two years. Success of business depends on various aspects such as the macro and micro scenario the company is operating in. With regard to the housing industry, it can be stated that the success and efficient decision making with regard to the performance of business depends on several aspects. Building of houses depends on the potential of the market and the capabilities of the company. It is witnessed that Barratt is a large house builder having high potential in the market, as it understands the market requirements. Micro factors that lead to the success of the housing builders are the location, plans, orientation as well as building layout and size. On the other hand, the macro factors affecting the industry include the government policies, financing, labour cost and market potential. The conditions of the UK market have been identified to be unstable to a certain extent due to the rise in prices and potential political uncertainty (KnightFrank, 2015; Bunn & Rostom, 2014). Housing prices d epend on factors such as economic growth, rate of interest, employment, consumer confidence and important aspect of supply and demand. Construction of large houses depends on various facets of the economy. With regard to Barratt, if the company decides to construct new large buildings, then the opportunity cost will be considerably high. The reason being for the construction of the large building, that company has to increase their land bank and need more financial aids. Furthermore, as per the market situation, it is

Sunday, November 17, 2019

Vertical and Horizontal Mergers in Apparel Industry Essay

Vertical and Horizontal Mergers in Apparel Industry - Essay Example The essay "Vertical and Horizontal Mergers in Apparel Industry" talks about the vertical and horizontal mergers in the apparel industry. A merger is a company that is formed when two or more companies come together to form a single company. These companies may be dealing with the same or different lines of products but with a common finished product.If they deal in a similar line of product, a horizontal merger is formed. If they deal in a different line of products but with a common finished product, a vertical merger is formed. In the illustrations below, the paper shall focus on vertical merger and a horizontal merger in the apparel industry. To begin with a vertical merger, an analysis of study two clothing industries shall be done. That is the VF Corporation and the Timberland Company. The VF Corporation is an American clothing industry that deals in work wear, jeanswear, underwear, and daypacks. On the other hand, the Timberland Company is equally an American retailer and whole saler of outdoors wear, but with a focus on footwear. As it can be noticed, the two companies deal with different lines of product, but with a common finished product of outdoors wear. In June 2011, the VF Corporation acquired the Timberland Company thus forming a vertical merger. The primary objective of this merger was to make the production process and the distribution process more efficient and cost effective. In the agreement, VF was confident of keeping Timberland going by adding Timberland’s strong brands to its brands.

Friday, November 15, 2019

A postcolonial critique of liberal peacekeeping theory

A postcolonial critique of liberal peacekeeping theory Northern Statism at the Margins:   A postcolonial critique of liberal peacekeeping theory. Today, ‘humanitarian intervention or so-called ‘muscular peacekeeping occurs in contexts known as ‘complex emergencies, which combine elements of civil war, state collapse, human rights violations, ‘criminality and humanitarian crisis.   Often, local agents have formed vested interests connected to external powers, which induce them to reproduce situations of emergency.   Mark Duffield aptly refers to the ‘security-development nexus, in which global assemblages of crisis management are connected to the local reproduction of crisis.   This nexus deploys peacekeeping and peacebuilding as alternatives to recognising the impact of neoliberalism and imperialism on development (****).   Duffields analysis resonates with the idea of crisis-management in the work of Gayatri Spivak (1990: 97-8), who portrays crisis as a constant situation in a postcolonial world where the North constantly wards off the traumatic effects of colonialism.   While clear fro m official documents, this status of responses to the South as crisis management is not apparent in the fantasmatic discourse of public pronouncements and media coverage.   In this context, it becomes crucial to the critique of colonial power to simultaneously see the process of crisis management and its ideological construction to repress the colonial trauma.   An examination of liberal theories of peacekeeping must show their complicity in both these processes. This paper will pursue an approach of ‘seeing together in relation to liberal theory, by reading this theory together with the intervention in Somalia.   It will thus seek to draw out the complicities between false and oppressive assumptions in theory and colonial actions (and failures) in practice.   The main purpose of this paper will be to establish that liberal and instrumentalist peacekeeping theorists share a number of colonial assumptions.   While drawing on postcolonial studies, the approach will also engage with ethnography, anarchism and cultural studies as means of providing multiple angles from which to see situations.   Multivocity is deployed to approximate a complex situation by viewing it from a number of different directions at once, each viewpoint being taken as an incomplete perspective.   Postcolonial theory will here be shadowed firstly by Richard J.F. Days anarchist critique of liberalism, to demonstrate the complicity and interchangeability of c olonial and statist standpoints.   Secondly, it will be traced through reflections on the intervention in Somalia by anthropologists and postcolonial theorists.   While recognising the danger of epistemological violence in the Northern anthropologists representation of the Other, such accounts are useful in exposing the structural gap between the theoretical framing of the situation and the situation as it appears from a more nuanced engagement.   There are doubtless also gaps between the anthropologists reconstruction and the immanent discourse of everyday life, but for the purposes of this paper it is necessary only that the anthropological account be closer to this discourse than is that of the normative theorists.   The article focuses on three related liberal theorists: Nicholas Wheeler, C.A.J. Coady and Fernando Tesà ³n.   The theorists discussed here are similar in their general frame, though varying in the degree of subtlety with which they express it.   Coady offers a more subtle theory that the other authors, but his subtlety supplements rather than overriding the performative effectivity of liberal discourse.   In this article, we treat them as part of a single discourse, and trace their colonial logic through a series of five interlinked assumptions which can be traced through all the theorists discussed. 1. Northern privilege as universalism The first problematic assumption is the view that a desituated Northern agent can assert and establish the content of a universal ethics.   Most often this is constructed in opposition to a straw-man of relativism.   It is not, however, the universalist stance which is most crucial to their colonial status.   Rather, it is the fact that they believe universally true positions can be established by reference solely to Northern experiences and values.   Their approach is thus colonial in foreclosing the need for dialogue with difference.   Northern standpoints are privileged by means of a separation between marked and unmarked terms.   The unmarked term of the civilised world becomes the exclusive referent for justifications of approaches to the ‘uncivilised other.  Ã‚   Hence, the ‘civilised world is ethically tautological: its relation to its Others is justified by its own values, which are the relevant referent because it is ‘civilised, a status it po ssesses by virtue of its values.   This reinforces the view that, despite the tenuousness of its moral realism, liberal cosmopolitanism is a paradigmatic ‘royal science, seeking to give a certain Law to its readers to provide a stable basis for moral order.   As Richard Day writes of Kymlicka, liberal theory produces ‘an utterance that does not anticipate a rejoinder (78).   The construction of monologism takes different forms in each theory.   Wheeler rests his account of the normative force of the duty to intervene on a liberal international relations (IR) perspective which is pitted mainly against the Realist view that states are incapable of normative concern.   His main concern is thus to show that normative restrictions, even if used or formulated in self-interested ways, can still be binding on states (2004: 4, 7, 24).   This sidesteps the question of how ethical positions should be reached, but has a symptomatic side-effect.   This construction of international normativity thus focuses on the emergence of normative communities among states (e.g. 2004: 23, 44).   Stateless societies can be the objects of intervention, but are excluded from the formation of the normative community which legitimates it, effectively relegated to terra nullius by the absence of a relevant international claimant not empty of people as ‘bare life, but e mpty of morally relevant agents, people who ‘matter as normative voices.   Things get no better when Wheeler briefly enters the field of discussion of how positions should be reached, rendering this process the exclusive province of the ‘values of civilized societies (2002: 303).   Hence, ‘civilised societies ask themselves if they are entitled to intervene; nobody thinks to ask the recipients.   In practice, this leads to a situation where the   UN believed that no consent was needed to intervene in Somalia due to the absence of a state able to give such consent (Wheeler 2002: 183).   Fernando Tesà ³n offers the most unreconstituted variant of the universalist global-local.   He adopts a strongly realist moral ontology in which moral truths are absolutely independent of their origins (Tesà ³n 2001:12).   Having asserted ontologically that such truths exist, he nevertheless provides no clear guide to the epistemological means by which they can be known.   But what he does not say, he shows by his performance as speaker of ethical ‘truths.   His reference is to a Northern in-group connected to the dominant fantasy frame, as for instance when he writes of ‘the shock we felt over the Srebrenica massacre (2001: 44).   The type of subject who felt shock at this juncture is of a certain type: tuned into the global media, experiencing the events of Bosnia from the outside, contained in a sphere of safety in which such events are shocking rather than horrifically quotidian and predictable.   This ‘we excludes by gradations the Srebrenica vic tims themselves, whose emotions were likely much sharper than mere shock; the solidarity activists, Muslim and secular, who would be angry but unsurprised at the Serbian atrocity and the UN betrayal; and the other recipients of intervention, the Somalis, Rwandans and so on, whose reactions remain opaque.   Like Tesà ³n, Coady is a moral realist who views ethics as a form of knowledge allowing universal claims and derived from human nature (2002: 13-14, 18).   This position is counterposed to a simplified view of relativism (2002: 14), and again, its ontological firmness is undermined by its silence on epistemology.   No method is provided for distinguishing in practice between relative and universal positions, though such judgements are most definitely made in practice (2002: 16).   Again, it seems that the universal truth is established solely by Northern agents.   One establishes truth through the ‘courts of reason, feeling, experience and conscience, which may or may not produce an obvious answer (2002: 14).   Being internal to the desituated Northern observer, these ‘courts do not require any accountability to non-Northern Others, or any kind of reflexivity.  Ã‚   A Northern subject-position is introduced performatively.   Hence for instance, reactions of Northern media viewers are deemed facts of human nature (2002: 29, 36).   Hence it is clear that, while Others are allowed to make claims in these courts, but the judge remains resolutely Northern.   In practice, such universalism, operating as a global-local, provides space for linguistic despotism.   Deleuze and Guattari have argued that the persistence of despotism after the end of absolutist states relies on the despotic functioning of transcendentalist language (Anti-Oedipus 207).   In peacekeeping discourse, this transcendentalism is expressed especially in the binary between civilised and uncivilised, which creates the conditions for sovereignty and states of exception.   One can thus think of peacekeeping violence in terms of law-founding violence, a suspension of ethics in the creation of a statist order.   Hence, Hardt and Negri are right in arguing that ‘[m]odern sovereignty†¦ does not put an end to violence and fear but rather puts an end to civil war by organizing violence and fear into a coherent and stable political order.   Peacekeeping in the dominant discourse is the violence which forms a bridge between ‘anarchy (the demonised Other) and liberal-democracy, cutting through complexity with the simplicity of brute force (Debrix 110).   The effects of this discursive asymmetry are made clear in Sherene Razacks investigation of peacekeeping violence.   Razacks book focuses on instances of torture and murder by Canadian peacekeepers in Somalia, and accounts for such violence as expressions of discourses of superiority (10).  Ã‚   Razack argues that Canadian peacekeepers in Somalia committed atrocities because of their identity as agents of a civilised nation operating in a hostile, otherworldly context.   They use such categories to construct an ‘affective space of belonging (24).   The identity of Canadian peacekeepers as citizens of a civilised nation lead to the denial of personhood to Somali Others (Razack 9).   The stance as civilised outsiders leads to violence through the operation of a binary of civilised versus savage which is inherently racialised (13).   The civilisers are counterposed to the ‘dark corners of the earth in a narrative which places Northern peacekeepers outside history (12).  Ã‚   They are assigned the task of sorting out problems of Southern others at some risk to themselves (32).   ‘History is evacuated and the simplest of stories remains: more civilized states have to keep less civilized states in line (48).   Sites such as Somalia thus become viewed as utterly hostile, sites of absolute evil in which anarchy blurs with terrain and climate (15, 84).   Since the South is constituted as an inferior category, peacekeepers enter a space where their ability to relate to others humanity is impeded (54, 155).   Such black holes, or extraordinary spaces, become sites of exception and emergency (44).   Excluded from dialogue by the myth of its absolu te evil, the Other is taken to understand little but force (38-9, 93).   Canadian peacekeepers involved in abuses were acting on a narrative bearing little resemblance to their actual situation in a largely peaceful town (73).   They in effect went looking for enemies, scheming to lure and trap Somalis who were then assumed to fit stereotypes (79-81).   The narrative of imposing order amidst chaos creates conditions in which peacekeepers initiate conflict to provide a context in which to respond overwhelmingly and brutally.   Paradoxically, peacekeepers thereby often become unable even to keep the peace between themselves and their local hosts, let alone to impose it among locals.   2.   State as necessary; social order The second problematic grouping of assumptions concern the social role of the state.   Liberal theorists view the state as identical with or essential to society, and as something without which a decent life is impossible.   This is taken as a truism.   As Richard Day argues, liberal scholars systematically ignore arguments that stateless life might be preferable to life under the state, in an intellectual doubling of the move of liberal states to ruthlessly suppress movements aspiring to stateless life.   Despite their criticisms of particular state policies, liberals consistently think about social life from the standpoint of the state.   As Day writes, liberalism identifies with the state by adopting its subject-position (79).   This fixation on the state expresses itself normatively in the attachment of overriding significance to themes of order, security and stability.   For instance, the UN resolution on Somalia called for action ‘to restore peace, stability and law and order (cited Lyons and Samatar 34).   On the other side, metonymic slippage is established between terms like statelessness, lawlessness, anarchy, chaos and barbarism.   This conceptual conflation combines into a single concept at least four distinct phenomena:   state collapse as such, the collapse of society (such as everyday meanings and relations), the existence of a situation of civil war, and the existence of a set of ‘lawless actions similar to criminality (such as murder, torture, rape, armed robbery and extortion).   This runs against the warnings of more informed empirical scholars who emphasise the need to disaggregate these phenomena (Menkhaus State Collapse 405, 407).   On an explanatory level, statist authors tend to attribute the other aspects of a complex emergency, particularly social conflict and ‘lawless actions, to the absence of a state (or of the right kind of state).   Hence, they fail to distinguish between peaceful and warring stateless societies, or between ‘lawless stateless societies and those with some degree of diffuse ‘governance.  Ã‚   A society such as Somalia is stateless, hence necessarily beset by civil war and social predation.   As a result, it is assumed that the response to problems related to civil war and ‘lawlessness must be resolved by the restoration or construction of a proper state.   An absence is taken as the explanation for various effects, with no sense of what specific forces cause these effects.   The possibility that the worst problems in complex emergencies could be mitigated instead by moving towards a more peaceful and less predatory type of statelessness a possibility at the forefront of the empirical literature on Somalia for example is simply ruled out in advance.   Also excluded from the frame is the need to establish and engage with contingent causes of intergroup conflict.   These themes can be traced through the work of the authors under discussion.   Wheeler deems ‘state breakdown and a collapse of law and order a sufficient cause for intervention (2002: 34).   In referring to situations in which ‘the target state had collapsed into lawlessness and civil strife (2002: 2), he clearly conflates statelessness, ‘lawlessness and civil war: state collapse itself means ‘lawlessness and civil strife; this is what a society becomes when a state collapses.   Furthermore, ‘lawlessness and the ‘breakdown of authority are taken to be the cause of famine in Somalia (2002: 176, 206), notwithstanding the continued absence of state authority in the famine-free years since 1994.   Wheeler also rather strangely refers to state-building as the removal of ‘the gun from political life (2002: 306).   States are not known for their lack of guns.   Writing in 2002 by which time Somalia had experienced a stateless peace for nearly a decade   Wheeler argues that ‘[d]isarming the warlords and establishing the rule of law were crucial in preventing Somalia from falling back into civil war and famine (2002: 190).   What Somalia needed, he decided, was a ‘law-governed polity (2002: 173).   To this end, he advocates ‘the imposition of an international protectorate that could provide a security framework for years, if not decades, to come (2002: 306), effectively the recolonisation of the country.   In constructing criteria for the success of an intervention, Wheelers position is again ambiguous.   His exact demand is that a successful intervention establish ‘a political order   hospitable to the protection of human rights (2002: 37).   Yet when he discusses Somalia, and faces the problem that humanitarian relief and state-building were contradictory goals, he takes a pro-statebuilding position (2002: 189-90).   This can be interpreted to mean that he assumes that only a statist order could possibly be hospitable to human rights, notwithstanding the appalling human rights record of the previous Somali state.   Yet there is no reason why local polities could not be assessed in terms of human rights (Menkhaus and Pendergast, 2).   In Tesà ³ns account, a Hobbesian position on state collapse, including the identity of state collapse, societal collapse, ‘lawlessness and civil war, is explicitly advocated.   ‘Anarchy is the complete absence of social order, which inevitably leads to a Hobbesian war of all against all (2001: 7).   People are thus prevented from conducting ‘meaningful life in common (2001: 7).   It is clear that state and society are so closely linked here as to be indistinguishable; it is left unclear if the ‘absence of social order means the absence merely of the state or of other forms of social life.   Given that contexts such as Somalia do not in fact involve the collapse of all social life, it must be assumed that the former is being inferred from the latter.   We see once more the reproduction of the conflation of statelessness with a range of problems, in apparent ignorance of the possibility of other kinds of statelessness.   The solution is taken to be pervasive imposition of liberal social forms.   Humanitarian aid simply addresses ‘the symptoms of anarchy and tyranny, whereas building ‘democratic, rights-based institutions addresses a central cause of the problem and does ‘the right thing for the society (2001: 37).   As a result, situations of anarchy necessarily lead to barbaric interpersonal behaviour which is seriously unjust, causing a ‘moral collapse of sovereignty and a loss of the right to self-government (2001: 2-3).   The difference between statist societies and stateless societies is not, he tersely declares, a matter of legitimate dispute.   The difference is a matter of what all ‘reasonable views will accept and what they will not (2001: 13-14).   This boundary reproduces the tautological ethical stance of the Northern agent.   While emotively related to the extreme effects of civil war and predatory violence, this position in effect declares any stateless society to be beyond the pale regardless of whether it displays these characteristics.   The gesture of Schmittian sovereignty, deciding on the exclusion of those deemed unreasonable, is particularly dangerous given that intervention happens in contexts where the majority of local agents show such characteristi cs.   Peacekeepers primed to enter situations deemed uncondonable are doomed to violent contact with local agents (including ‘victims who do condone them, because their very frame is constructed to exclude engagement.   Again in Coadys work, the assumption that states exist for benevolent purposes is prominent.   States are viewed as responsible for the protection of citizens (2002: 11-12).   Intervention can legitimately be aimed at ‘failed or profoundly unstable states (2002: 21), and has the goals of ‘ensuring political stability and enduring safety (2002: 30), liberal code for state-building.   It is not unusual in peacekeeping theory to find a distinction drawn between ordinary human rights (identified with concrete violations) and extraordinary human rights (identified with the collapse of legitimate state power), a binary which ethically voids the very concept of rights by identifying its actualisation with a particular social order.   In other varieties, one finds it in distinctions between truly shocking and merely wrong forms of violation, between ‘extremely barbarous and mundane abuses, or between law and order as a primary goal of intervention and human security as a secondary luxury (see Coady 2002: 16, 28, Tesà ³n 2001: 37, Walzer Just and Unjust Wars 108, Lund 2003: 28-9, 47-8, Paris 2004: 47-8).   This serves to put the denial of rights, or of the state, in the South (or rather, its crisis-points) in an incommensurable category distinct from human rights abuses in and by the North (and its Southern allies).   With human rights deemed impossible in a stateless society, rights-violation is excused as ‘law-creating violence, the creation of an order where rights become possible, but which does not require prefigurative recognition of rights in the present, a position not dissimilar to the telos of socialism in Stalinist ideology.   The declaration of justice and rights as the purpose of the state sits uncomfortably with the kind of state likely to result in practice from statebuilding in contexts such as Somalia.   Clearly, Tesà ³n has transmuted his normative position on what states should do into an essentialist position on what states are, which leaves him with a project of building a state per se, without regard for whether the project or the resultant state serves the ascribed goals.  Ã‚   In the meantime, the patently obvious existence of customary rights in societies such as Somalia is conveniently ignored.   Presumably, as rights of the ‘uncivilised, these rights do not count as fully ‘human.   In practice, the effects of such a statist frame are to disengage peacekeepers from populations they are supposed to be rescuing, constructing them as epistemologically-privileged bearers of a project of social reconstruction which is in the interests, regardless of the wishes, of the locals.   This framework produces a paradigmatically colonial arrogance.   Peacekeepers misperceived unfamiliar institutions as an absence of institutions, leading to racist effects.   Empirical scholars have approached Somalia with a frame distorted by such statism, as when Lyons and Samatar portray the country as a ‘Hobbesian world without law or institutions, divided between ‘the most vulnerable and ‘the most vicious (Lyons and Samatar 7; c.f. Makinda ****).   In practice, the Somali intervention was framed by Northern insecurities about ‘disorder in the context of global neoliberalism.   According to one cultural analyst, the intervention was an attempt to suture th e field of global disorder, acting out a predetermined script in an attempt to create an appearance of fixed order, namely, neoliberalism as the end of history (Debrix 97-9).   This suture is necessary because of the gap separating neoliberal ideology from the actuality of global disorder (107).   It was to fail because an excess of uncontrollable images arising from local difference began to disempower the global order (Debrix 126).   In Somalia, peacekeepers found themselves in a society with very different assumptions about state power. According to Menkhaus, ‘there is perhaps no other issue on which the worldviews of external and internal actors are more divergent than their radically different understanding of the state (Menkhaus State Collapse 409).   ‘For many Somalis, the state is an instrument of accumulation and domination, enriching and empowering those who control it and exploiting and harassing the rest of the population (Menkhaus Governance 87).  Ã‚   Hence, statebuilding was misconceived as necessary for peacebuilding in a setting where it was virtually impossible.   Menkhaus and Pendergast argue that the ‘radical localization of politics in Somalia is often misunderstood as disorder and crisis, when in fact it is part of the functioning of local social life.  Ã‚   ‘The challenge to the international community is to attempt to work with this â€Å"stateless† pol itical reality in Somalia rather than against it.   It is a myth to see the intervention as rebuilding a state, since an effective state has never existed in Somalia (Menkhaus State Collapse 412).   Somalia has historically been resistant to the implantation of the state-form, and previous colonial and neo-colonial states, arising mainly as channels for global patronage flows, were caught between the extractive and despotic use of concentrated power by the clan which dominated the state and moves to balance against this excessive power by other clans.   Even such an artificial state has been made impossible by changing conditions (Menkhaus and Pendergast 2-3).   Attempts to rebuild a centralised state have exacerbated conflict between clan militias, which compete for the ‘potential spoils of such a state (Menkhaus and Pendergast 13).   With the capital viewed as the site or ‘house of state power, the battle for the state encouraged clan conflicts for control of the capital (Jan 2001: 81; )    Where state-building has occurred in postwar Somalia, it has been similarly marked by strong extractive and divisive tendencies (Lewis 81-3).   Hence, to favour stateb uilding in Somalia is to contribute to exacerbating conflict by taking stances between diffuse forces which favour some and disempower others.   In seeking local collaborators in building the state, the UN ended up favouring some clan militias against others (Rutherford 16, 23, 40-1).   On the other hand, empirical evidence does not confirm the view that peace required a strong state.   Statelessness as such did not cause civil war or social problems.   Until the 1980s, Somalia was extremely safe, despite or because of its weak state; the source of security was communal, not juridical (Menkhaus State Collapse 412).   Similarly, Somalia rapidly returned to peace after the UN departure, with conflict infrequent between 1995 and 2006 (Menkhaus Governance 87-8).   In part, this was due to the declining local influence of warlords inside their own clans.   Ameen Jan analyses the post-UN scenario as a revival of processes frozen by the intervention, which were already moving national power towards clans and clan power towards civilians (2001: 53-5).   Another apparent anomaly is that the de facto independent northwestern region of Somaliland successfully constructed peace and local political institutions with meagre resources, at the same time that expensive U N peace conferences were failing (Lewis ix-x).   This process succeeded because it arose from the grassroots and started with reconciliation on issues of contention, many of which were social issues such as buying off militia members and resolving land disputes (Lewis 91, 94-5; Menkhaus, Governance 91).   Hence, the causes of the civil war in parts of Somalia were contingent products of circumstances which are unlikely to recur (Menkhaus and Pendergast 7, 15).   Having started from the wrong premises, it is no surprise that the wrong conclusions were reached.   Successful peacebuilding in Somalia would involve a transition from a violent diffuse acephalous society to a peaceful diffuse acephalous society, whereas the colonial assumptions of peacekeepers instead sought to override the entire structure of Somali society as a means to construct their preferred form of order.   In practice, this obsession with order and interpellation of otherness as disorder expresses itself in reliance on hard power.   The UN and US sought to rely on technical and military power as a substitute for engagement in the context (Debrix 115, Wheeler 2002: 181, 205).   This tends to reproduce the very context posited by the Northern discourse.   Pieterse has argued that the emphasis on hard power in interventions reinforces or even creates rigid ethnic categories and authoritarian institutions, hence creating the conditions for humanitarian crisis. The emphasis on hard power stemming from the problematic of sovereignty effectively rendered peacebuilding impossible.   While local clan reconciliation conferences were more effective in practice, the UN approach focused on militia leaders, a process which tended to entrench their power and disaggregate them from their support-base (Jan 2001: 63).   This misrepresented their power through the frame of sovereignty.   Clan militias, like Clastrean chiefs, did not hold stable power.   They were speculative and temporary, and subject to rapid decomposition (Lewis 80, Menkhaus and Pendergast 4-5).   Lewis views the Somali militias as clan militias involved mainly in territorial conflicts (Lewis 75).   Far from dominating the context, militias depended on soft power within clans to a great degree, and were unable even to implement accords among themselves due to their limited influence over their clans (Menkhaus and Pendergast 4-5).   Clastres theory of warfare in indigenous societies, the source of the Deleuzian theory of war-machines, emphasises the role of intergroup alliances and balancing as quasi-intentional means of warding off concentrated power and transcendentalism. Intergroup feuding expresses ‘the will of each community to assert its difference,‘[t]o assure the permanence of the dispersion, the parcelling, the atomization of the groups.   Such a situation of centrifugal forces is indeed typical of the kind of conflict settings which peacekeeping interventions target.   Somalis are predominantly nomads, and form the archetypal nomadic war-machines carrying out the diffusion of social power.   The frame applied from the North is, however, rather dangerous: the logic of the war-machine is misunderstood as a primal Hobbesian violence.   This sets peacekeepers up for colonial warfare.   The terminal crisis of the UN intervention arose from the redefinition of one of the two major allia nces of clan militias as an enemy.   Focused unduly on the person of General Aidid, the escalation arose following an attack on UN troops which was interpreted as a violation of transcendental sovereignty, an attack on protected bodies of exceptional value.   In the local frame, however, it was reconfigured as horizontal warfare rather than vertical enforcement, and the UN became seen as the ‘sixteenth Somali faction (Jan 2001: 72).   Hence, it seems that an incapacity to think outside a narrowly statist frame was the source both of a violently colonial intervention, and of the constitutive unrealisability of the goals of the intervention.   It would seem that statism and colonialism intersect, with certain Southern societies judged as inferior for their lack of state forms.   This expresses the promotion of the Northern state, in spite of its increasing authoritarianism and colonial legacy, as an unmarked term to which the world should aspire.   Although it is outside the scope of this paper, it is also apparent that Southern states are typically pathologised as the wrong ‘type of state too corrupt, too contaminated by the dirty world of social life, insufficiently able to mobilise uncontested concentrated power or authority.   It is possible that the club of ‘real democracies, or ‘successful states, is actually a repetition of Fanons club of the civilised, held up as a goal for those w ho are constitutively excluded from it.   3.   Victims The third set of assumptions of such theories are concentrated in the figure of the victim.   The victim is a contradictory figure, for, while she is the quasi-absolute ethical referent of peacekeeping theory, the figure on whose behalf other ethical principles may be suspended, whose call is the source of an imp

Tuesday, November 12, 2019

Slavery as an Attack on Domestic Life in Uncle Toms Cabin by Harriet B

Slavery as an Attack on Domestic Life in Uncle Tom's Cabin      Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   The Compromise of 1850 included The Fugitive Slave Law, a law forcing non-slave owners in the free Northern states to return escaped slaves to their Southern masters and participate in a system they did not believe in. Jehlen notes the reaction to this cruel governmental act by stating that "[t]he nation's growing guilt and apprehension is tangible in the overwhelming response to Uncle Tom's Cabin" (386). It seems hard to believe that people could find no wrong in making it a law to return humans as if they were property. In fact, Stowe wrote her most famous work, Uncle Tom's Cabin, at a most opportune time; indeed, she wrote it in response to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law.  Ã‚  Ã‚      Knowing her audience would be primarily white women, Stowe played on their feelings of uneasiness and guilt over the treatment of slaves, especially those of the Northern white women who could help with the Abolitionist movement, by introducing her readers to seemingly real characters suffering from the injustice of slavery. This can be seen even in the style in which Uncle Tom's Cabin was written; Stowe directly addresses her readers, forcing them to consider slavery from the point of view of the enslaved. "Expressive of and responsible for the values of its time, it also belongs to a genre, the sentimental novel, whose chief characteristic is that it is written by, for, and about women" (Tompkins 124-25).   Uncle Tom's Cabin is a sentimental novel; it was meant to appeal   to the unsettled emotions that existed in the reader's mind, creating and sense of   guilt and injustice, making them see how slavery destroys human lives and families. Through the introduction of ... ... of California P, 1990.   39-60.   Brown, Gillian. "Getting in the Kitchen with Dinah: Domestic Politics in Uncle Tom's Cabin." American Quarterly 36 (Fall 1984):   503-523.   Davidson, Kathy N. "Preface: No more separate spheres!" American Literature 70   (September 1998):   443-454.   Jehlen, Myra. "The Family Militant: Domesticity Versus Politics in Uncle Tom's Cabin." Criticism 31 (Fall 1989):   383-400.   MacKethan, Lucinda H. "Domesticity in Dixie: The Plantation Novel and Uncle Tom's Cabin." Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts. Ed. Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1997.   223-239.   Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin or, Life Among the Lowly. New York: Penguin Books, 1981.   Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.   Slavery as an Attack on Domestic Life in Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet B Slavery as an Attack on Domestic Life in Uncle Tom's Cabin      Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   The Compromise of 1850 included The Fugitive Slave Law, a law forcing non-slave owners in the free Northern states to return escaped slaves to their Southern masters and participate in a system they did not believe in. Jehlen notes the reaction to this cruel governmental act by stating that "[t]he nation's growing guilt and apprehension is tangible in the overwhelming response to Uncle Tom's Cabin" (386). It seems hard to believe that people could find no wrong in making it a law to return humans as if they were property. In fact, Stowe wrote her most famous work, Uncle Tom's Cabin, at a most opportune time; indeed, she wrote it in response to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law.  Ã‚  Ã‚      Knowing her audience would be primarily white women, Stowe played on their feelings of uneasiness and guilt over the treatment of slaves, especially those of the Northern white women who could help with the Abolitionist movement, by introducing her readers to seemingly real characters suffering from the injustice of slavery. This can be seen even in the style in which Uncle Tom's Cabin was written; Stowe directly addresses her readers, forcing them to consider slavery from the point of view of the enslaved. "Expressive of and responsible for the values of its time, it also belongs to a genre, the sentimental novel, whose chief characteristic is that it is written by, for, and about women" (Tompkins 124-25).   Uncle Tom's Cabin is a sentimental novel; it was meant to appeal   to the unsettled emotions that existed in the reader's mind, creating and sense of   guilt and injustice, making them see how slavery destroys human lives and families. Through the introduction of ... ... of California P, 1990.   39-60.   Brown, Gillian. "Getting in the Kitchen with Dinah: Domestic Politics in Uncle Tom's Cabin." American Quarterly 36 (Fall 1984):   503-523.   Davidson, Kathy N. "Preface: No more separate spheres!" American Literature 70   (September 1998):   443-454.   Jehlen, Myra. "The Family Militant: Domesticity Versus Politics in Uncle Tom's Cabin." Criticism 31 (Fall 1989):   383-400.   MacKethan, Lucinda H. "Domesticity in Dixie: The Plantation Novel and Uncle Tom's Cabin." Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts. Ed. Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1997.   223-239.   Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin or, Life Among the Lowly. New York: Penguin Books, 1981.   Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.Â