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Images of the future, with hindsight, turn out to be either right or wrong. In this article, past images of the impact of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) on traffic and transportation are investigated. Informed by the field of technology studies, seven key features are formulated that point at pitfalls and neglected aspects in many future expectations on technological developments and their societal impact. It is also argued that the evolution from broad sweeping promises to more down-to-earth assessments is inherent in technological developments, because expectations and diffuse scenarios also play a performative role in technological developments. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

During the last years, smart cities have attracted considerable attention because they are considered a response to the complex challenges that modern cities face. Smart cities provide new solutions in the domains of mobility, environment, economy, governance, quality of life, and education thanks to the innovative use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). However, smart cities often do not optimally reach their objectives if the citizens, the end-users, are not involved in their design. This article investigates how the citizens can transform a city into a smart city by being involved in the democratic process, by cocreating the smart city projects, and by proactively using the city's ICT infrastructure.This article contributes to the smart city domain in several ways. Firstly, a literature review from different research fields is performed in order to identify the different means to enable citizen participation in a smart city. Secondly, a framework to compare and evaluate smart cities as enablers of citizen participation is proposed, based on the findings of the preceding section. Finally, the framework is applied to the ongoing smart city design of Namur (Belgium), allowing drawbacks and flaws in citizens' participation to be discovered and improved.

Following the theorisation of museums as agonistic spaces and drawing on a comparative analysis of war museums located in various European countries, this paper argues that these institutions play complex and multi-layered roles beyond their obvious educational function. These not easily reconcilable roles act as major constraints upon the form and content of exhibitions and work against the adoption of an agonistic approach. However, the paper also argues that war museums are especially apt to become sites of political contestation able to engage with agonistic memory and unsettling counter-narratives. This is due in large part to the nature of the subject matter they deal with, as war and conflict lend themselves to being represented in ways that emphasise patriotic consensus but can also highlight dissent, contestation, multiple perspectives and alternative visions of society. Agonistic practices emerge when windows of opportunity open through a combination of top-down and bottom-up agency able to take advantage of particular socio-political circumstances or cultural developments. The paper also discusses a new exhibition on war memory planned for late 2018 in Essen, Germany and conceived as a strategic political intervention, which aims to communicate in an agonistic fashion with its audiences.

Set in the context of an expansion of scrutiny by local authorities of local service provision, this article explores the key challenges ahead for managers and politicians in this area of local governance. Drawing on an evaluation of the development of health scrutiny, it outlines the different types of activities health scrutiny committees are engaging in to fulfil their legislative commitments and suggests lessons for the expansion of external scrutiny. © 2009 CIPFA.

This paper explores the paradoxical relationship between MNE current strategies and economic development. There is evidence that positive developmental impacts of FDI flows are conditional on high levels of human capital and thus on the existence of 'good' infrastructure in recipient countries. In this paper we suggest that current MNE strategies have a negative impact on the development of infrastructure in LDCs. The justification for this argument arises from the low developmental impact of current FDI patterns and from rising costs of attracting increasingly footloose investment. The overall effect is to aggravate government financial constraints on the development of basic infrastructure. We develop propositions for future empirical research. We also consider implications for MNE strategy and argue that current MNE strategies are not only ineffective for delivering poverty reduction but that current strategies in developing countries do not necessarily serve the interest of MNEs either. © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

System-wide change is often challenging to achieve due to complex and fragmented institutions, dispersed and diffused power structures, confidence sapping histories of failure and the influence of multiple and over-lapping fields. This study examines how a large complex system wide problem such as the Northern Ireland Conflict and Peace Process was paradoxically opened up and made more receptive to change by widening of the way the problem was framed. We demonstrate how and why the framing enables the mobilisation of cooperation and the delivery of contextually appropriate collective action critical to the achievement of outcomes in system wide change processes. More specifically, we examine how and why such complex and precarious processes emerge over extended timescales through four mechanisms: frame contesting, reframing, frame reproduction and frame defending. Each of these mechanisms is agentic, dynamic, purposive and politically charged. The time series analysis of these interlinked mechanisms is a crucial and innovative feature of the study. We encourage management and organizational scholars to elevate their gaze to system-wide changes so emblematic of contemporary society and offer an outline agenda for research.

Using time diary data to examine practices of reading, this article examines trajectories of change within five countries in the last quarter of the 20th century. It employs a conceptual framework derived from theories of practice to illustrate their application in a quantitative and comparative analysis of change in patterns of consumption. Analysing recruitment and defection, the multiplication and diversification of reading-related practices, and the presence of distinct enthusiast groups leads to the rejection of popular claims that the practice of reading is in decline and that this might be a universal process across societies characterized as having 'advanced reading cultures'. Critiques of cultural homogenization in the context of global consumer cultures are also corroborated. Also, a conceptual and methodological framework for the application of practice theories to the analysis of consumption and social change is advocated. © 2012 The Author(s).

Positive ignorance is the putting in to question of, and sometimes moving on from, the knowledge we think we have, and asking where it might be just or helpful to do so. Drawing primarily on the work of Barbara Johnson, this article shows how the notion of positive ignorance might be offered as a tool in the context of education and educational research. Partly a critical development of Richard Smith's argument in 'The Virtues of Unknowing', I attempt to understand 'unknowing' as an active rather than passive form of 'not knowing', in a manner that challenges some aspects of 'the virtues of unknowing' and its concomitant epistemological and ethical positions, not least those tied to Smith's advocacy for what he calls the 'well-stocked mind'. Unknowing, in my reading, is not a dispositional acceptance of the desirability of nonknowledge, instead, unknowing is a means of epistemological resistance, especially against that which, often with very real social and political consequences, is presented as self-evident.

Can a more collaborative form of public management correct for the historical link between social and economic status (SES) and political participation? New initiatives to involve the citizen directly in public decision making - citizen governance - aim to include a wider representation of groups in society because they draw from service users and seek to recruit hard-to-reach groups. To test the claim that citizen governance may be more representative than other acts of political participation, this essay reports data from the 2005 English and Welsh Citizenship Survey. Using descriptive statistics and regression analysis, it finds evidence that citizen governance is more representative than civic activities, especially for young people and ethnic minority communities. Policy makers can fine-tune their interventions to reach underrepresented groups without believing the citizen governance is a panacea for long-running biases in civic participation. © 2009 The American Society for Public Administration.

This paper deals with the role of research and development (R&D) managers in shaping the landscape of public research in Europe. These R&D managers work in the sphere of public research within national government laboratory services. The case we present is of the reconfiguration of metrology research. Metrology is the science of measurement. We examine why scientists and research managers in nationally embedded institutes, which are performing R&D in support of national policy and local industry needs, have chosen to co-operate in a shared research programme. This means giving up, in part, their national sovereignty over funds and decision making. Furthermore, we examine how they have achieved the shared programme, which was launched as a European Commission (EC) programme through the Article 185 initiative, which allows the European Union to participate in research programmes undertaken jointly by several Member States. © 2012 The Authors R&D Management © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Parenthood contributes substantially to broader gender wage inequality. The intensification of gendered divisions of paid and unpaid work after the birth of a child create unequal constraints and expectations such that, all else equal, mothers earn less than childless women, but fathers earn a wage premium. The fatherhood wage premium, however, varies substantially among men. Analyses of linked workplace-employee data from Canada reveal how organizational context conditions educational, occupational, and family-status variation in fatherhood premiums. More formal employment relations (collective bargaining and human resource departments) reduce both overall fatherhood premiums and group differences in them, while performance pay systems (merit and incentive pay) have mixed effects. Shifting entrenched gendered divisions of household labour is thus not the only pathway to minimizing fathers' wage advantage.

Identity work is widely regarded as a process through which people strive to establish, maintain or restore a coherent and consistent sense of self. In the face of potential disruptions of, or threats to, their identities, people seek to salvage their sense of self by resolving tensions and restoring consistency. In contrast to the current identity work literature, this research indicates that identity work is not always about seeking resolution and moving on, but sometimes about continuing struggles which do not achieve a secure sense of self. This article seeks to elaborate the understanding of unresolved identity work by exploring three contexts of the everyday practice of indie musicians. An analysis of how they struggle to construct acceptable versions of their selves as songwriter, bandleader and front(wo)man allows us to develop the conceptualization of self-questioning (as opposed to self-affirmative, resolution-oriented) identity work.

This article shows how an analysis of job types can deepen our understanding of job quality and how job quality varies across 27 European countries. First, using the European Working Conditions Survey 2005, a taxonomy of six job types is developed and their quality established. This taxonomy suggests that there are different types of high- and low-quality jobs. Second, institutional theory is drawn on to examine why job quality varies cross-nationally. The results of a multilevel analysis indicate that national differences in institutional regimes (social democratic, continental, liberal, southern European, transitional) result in cross-national variation in both the level of job quality (i.e. the overall proportions of high- and low-quality jobs) and the nature of job quality (i.e. the particular types of high- and low-quality jobs found). It is concluded that institutional theory is able to explain the level but not the nature of cross-national variation in job quality. © The Author(s) 2013.

The creative industries have recently been hailed as presenting a liberating model for the future of work and a valuable terrain on which to examine purported new regimes of workplace control. This article, based on the empirical examination of a Canadian video game development studio, traces the modes of control which operate on and through project teams in creative settings. The impact of the adoption of an 'emancipatory', post-bureaucratic project management technology, 'Agile', is critically examined through interviews and non-participative observation of management, technical and artistic labour within one project team. The potential for autonomy in such 'Agile' teams is critically assessed within the managerial regime of creative production and the broader power relations implied by the financial, organizational and institutional context. © The Author(s) 2013.

I explore theoretical conceptions of the use and exchange values of mathematics education within cultural-historical activity theory perspectives. The case of education in England is compared with that of health care (due to Engestrom). Then I draw on Lave and McDermott's study of estranged learning from the early Marx, and from Marx's later analyses in Capital. They deduced the source of learners' alienation from learning in the enforced conditions of education, run by the educational establishment. However, I find their analogy limiting and hence erroneous. I turn to Capital to find the Marxian analysis of the peculiar commodity: Enhanced labor power. I conclude that the use-value of mathematics education derives from (a) learners' immediate consumption, and (b) their enhanced (mental) labor power. Although this explains the root, economic contradictions, cultural systems of exchange explain how these are symbolised in cultural forms of use and exchange value. Copyright © Regents of the University of California.