'On the side of the Angels': community involvement in the governance of neighbourhood renewal

Community involvement in regeneration is far from easy, and is difficult to define. The New Deal for Communities programme has directly involved residents in the governance of neighbourhood renewal with some success. However, community capacity has proved to be limited, adequate representation is difficult to achieve and there has been friction with local government. Community empowerment has to be enabled and supported by getting the structures and processes right, and supporting community representatives.     

Employers,trade unions and environmental problems in Europe

This article reports the results of a comparative EU study, showing that there is evidence that the social partners in some countries have begun to discuss environmental protection as part of their industrial relations agenda, but such discussions are limited in scope and are restricted to a small number of countries, particularly Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands.     

Growth and Transition: Why Has China''s Performance Been So Different?

This paper explains the differences in performance between the Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) since 1989 and China since its 1978–1979 reforms by the differing goals of economic reformers in China and in the CEECs. In China reforms were intended to promote growth rather than to create a market-based economy. Eastern European reformers’ main goal has been the creation of a market-oriented economy. The paper focuses on policies toward foreign trade, foreign investment, and foreign exchange since these highlight the differences in goals.J. Comp. Econom.,December 1997,25(3), pp. 422–440. University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia 5005, Australia.     

MANAGEMENT BY PANACEA: ACCOUNTING FOR TRANSIENCE

The cyclical nature of much consultant-led activity designed to improve managerial effectiveness is explored through three consultant-driven approaches to organizational improvement - management by objectives, organization development and total quality management. Such packaged programmes seem to proceed through phases of high enthusiasm and much activity followed by a period of disillusionment, to be replaced by the next stage panacea. an attempt is made to offer some explanation of the transitory nature of much managerial activity which is believed to lie fundamentally in cultural and psychodynamic phenomena. Such an analysis may provide some clues to the search for remedial steps which might be taken to find more enduring ways to bring about increased managerial effectiveness in organizations, although by the very nature of our diagnosis we remain pessimistic.     

Places and Spaces: The Role of Metonymy in Organizational Talk

Cultural meaning making as reflected in, and constituted by, organizational talk is an established field of interest in organizational analysis. However, the discursive mechanics of the process whereby this cultural meaning making is created and maintained are less well understood. The premise of this paper is that taken‐for‐granted assumptions embedded in organizational talk can be explored through the analysis of metonymy, a trope which is under explored in the linguistic turn in organization studies. This lack of focus on metonymy is, we believe, related to the fundamentally conventional nature of the trope in use, which expresses ideas, values and relationships that seem natural, normal and routine but which are culturally bound. We address this gap and carry out a metonymical analysis of organizational talk about physical places and spaces in one organization, to show how cultural norms and meanings are reflected, maintained, and potentially changed in these figures of speech. We show how metonymic chains based on buildings can reflect, reify and simplify the symbolic order of the organization, how these symbolic meanings can be transferred on to other inanimate objects and the constructions thereby spread, how people can be constructed within this symbolic chain, and how these metonymic chains can be invoked to potentially confirm, challenge or change the organizational order.     

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