Moral economy versus political economy: provincializing Polanyi

This theoretically focused chapter by John Holmwood adopts a strategy of conceptual ‘provincializing’ and thereby reveals race as a lacuna in Polanyian and neo-Polanyian scholarship. Alongside its wide-ranging theoretical engagement, including innovative postcolonial reflections, Holmwood’s discussion is extraordinarily timely, engaging with US ‘race relations’ and the current ‘asylum crisis’ in large parts of Europe, as well as with wider currents of marketization. Racism is thereby analysed in both its deeper historical and current socioeconomic contexts

Non-affirmative Theory of Education as a Foundation for Curriculum Studies, Didaktik and Educational Leadership

This chapter presents non-affirmative theory of education as the foundation for a new research program in education, allowing us to bridge educational leadership, curriculum studies and Didaktik. We demonstrate the strengths of this framework by analyzing literature from educational leadership and curriculum theory/didaktik. In contrast to both socialization-oriented explanations locating curriculum and leadership within existing society, and transformation-oriented models viewing education as revolutionary or super-ordinate to society, non-affirmative theory explains the relation between education and politics, economy and culture, respectively, as non-hierarchical. Here critical deliberation and discursive practices mediate between politics, culture, economy and education, driven by individual agency in historically developed cultural and societal institutions. While transformative and socialization models typically result in instrumental notions of leadership and teaching, non-affirmative education theory, previously developed within German and Nordic education, instead views leadership and teaching as relational and hermeneutic, drawing on ontological core concepts of modern education: recognition; summoning to self-activity and Bildsamkeit. Understanding educational leadership, school development and teaching then requires a comparative multi-level approach informed by discursive institutionalism and organization theory, in addition to theorizing leadership and teaching as cultural-historical and critical-hermeneutic activity. Globalisation and contemporary challenges to deliberative democracy also call for rethinking modern nation-state based theorizing of education in a cosmopolitan light. Non-affirmative education theory allows us to understand and promote recognition based democratic citizenship (political, economical and cultural) that respects cultural, ethical and epistemological variations in a globopolitan era. We hope an American-European-Asian comparative dialogue is enhanced by theorizing education with a non-affirmative approach

Cybersecurity, Bureaucratic Vitalism and European Emergency

Securing the internet has arguably become paradigmatic for modern security practice, not only because modern life is considered to be impossible or valueless if disconnected, but also because emergent cyber-relations and their complex interconnections are refashioning traditional security logics. This paper analyses European modes of governing geared toward securing vital, emergent cyber-systems in the face of the interconnected emergency. It develops the concept of ‘bureaucratic vitalism’ to get at the tension between the hierarchical organization and reductive knowledge frames of security apparatuses on the one hand, and the increasing desire for building ‘resilient’, dispersed, and flexible security assemblages on the other. The bureaucratic/vital juxtaposition seeks to capture the way in which cybersecurity governance takes emergent, complex systems as object and model without fully replicating this ideal in practice. Thus, we are concerned with the question of what happens when security apparatuses appropriate and translate vitalist concepts into practice. Our case renders visible the banal bureaucratic manoeuvres that seek to operate upon security emergencies by fostering connectivities, producing agencies, and staging exercises

Developing immunity to flight security risk: prospective benefits from considering aviation security as a socio-technical eco-system

Since 9/11, preventing similar terrorist disasters has been the predominant goal of aviation security. Yet, in this paper we seek to explore why it is that despite our increased knowledge of disaster causation - aviation security systems still remain vulnerable to future exploitation by adaptive terrorists and other threat groups. We adopt a novel approach, and present early directions of how we apply the benefits of high level appreciations of socio-technical and biological eco-systems to existing complex aviation transportation security systems. We propose that by approaching aviation security as a complex socio-technical eco-system, it offers an opportunity to think beyond conventional methodologies to improve system performance in a way that, hitherto, would not have been possible. The paper concerns itself with the ability for aviation socio-technical eco-systems to hold the capacity to proactively identify and mitigate pathogenic errors and violations. This narrow view is juxtaposed with identifying methods of reducing error creation ‘before’ they become system vulnerabilities. To address this problem, the paper concludes that a fresh approach, both conceptually and operationally, is required to understand that ‘true’ foresight of latent vulnerabilities can only be achieved by a system which is ‘intelligent’ and ‘self-aware’, in other words to identify and modify hostile pathogens before they are exploited. The development of true foresight in aviation security systems is critical to the prevention of future terrorist attacks

Toward an Analytical Understanding of Domination and Emancipation in Digitalizing Industries

In this introduction, the editors position the volume in the resurgent debate around the relationship between digitalization in industry and emancipation/domination. They argue that much of that debate suffers from three problems. First, it subscribes to a techno-deterministic logic of a string of technological revolutions and direct social consequences. Second, many of the most notable accounts operate on a binary logic which depicts the current wave of digitalization as either the technical realization of emancipation or as the final victory of domination. Third, critical social scientific analysis is hampered by the vague and indiscriminate use of central terms such as emancipation/domination, industry, and digitalization. The authors begin from tackling the latter issue by exploring these concepts and suggesting frameworks for reclaiming them as analytical categories. Finally, they introduce the contributions to the volume and sketch out, how these collectively address the remaining two problems by intervening into debates around digitalization in the workplace, the promises of digital fabrication, and the producing, configuring, and infrastructuring of users