Organisation Development has played a significant role in the renewal of Catholic religious orders since the Second Vatican Council (1962‐5). Religious orders have used consultants in their change processes. As religious orders are a unique form of non‐profit organisation and have a particular culture based on their vocational service nature, consultants must be sensitive to this culture. This article describes OD interventions on four levels of apostolic religious ministry.
A review essay on a book by Troy Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics (New York & London: Routledge, 1990 [see listing in IRPS No. 65]). Examining eugenics in the 1990s, Duster finds that genetic screening is initially framed in voluntaristic, public health, community-participation-based, & seemingly innocuous terms. Duster focuses on current concrete practices of genetic intervention, & argues that a social construction of the nature of heritability is created at the meeting point of the current constructions of inherited genetic disorders & inherited social orders. An organizing theme of the book is how contemporary social concerns, rather than the scientific status of genetics, shape intervention in human heredity. A warning of the dangers of genetic intervention, Duster's book delineates the inherent contradictions in constructing a genetic-disorder-control policy, & makes a strong argument about the power of organizations. 8 References. W. Howard
State intervention in empty properties strengthened in England during the 2000s. Reasons included housing need, planning dilemmas, and a policy discourse associating vacant properties with wasted resources. Empty dwelling management orders (EDMOs) were adopted to enable local authority management of empty properties, with associated legislation endeavouring to uphold the rights of different interests and tasking a tribunal with approval. EDMOs nevertheless proved controversial, leading to adopted policy changes. Drawing on case transcripts and a conceptualisation of the abstract spaces of tribunals, recent EDMO applications are examined to investigate applications submitted and the basis for judgments reached. The paper acknowledges that behind notions of disinterested property owners were a diversity of lived situations, and that, in contrast to prevailing statements about heavy handedness, alternative implementation perspectives were evident, including a limited number of applications and approaches that were both considered and supportive. Not without broader relevance, the basis for policy (re)formulation must be carefully examined because of the potential for such disjuncture to exist.
Abstract Walter Benjamin's critique of violence assumes that violence is deeply intertwined with the division of time and space. Niobe serves as an example that allows Benjamin to give an account of the violent conditions of the order of time that is constituted under the rule of law. The example of Korah helps to illustrate the difference between divine violence and legal violence and to underscore the centrality of time's passage for the moral world. Unlike in the example of Niobe, whose children are condemned to death as punishment for her guilt, the children of Korah receive a new life and do not have to make amends for the guilt of their parents. Bearing in mind Niobe's guilt and her serving as "a stone marking the border (Grenze) between human beings and gods," and given that Korah's children are spared after Moses has received the commandments, we can think of the boundless destruction of boundaries as opening a new historical order of time and the hope for an overcoming of the anthropocentric logic according to which the positing of law is the positing of power.
The structure of the optimal order should be found by scientific analysis. State of the art shifts over time. Marx's scientific socialism was based on science a century ago; it must be adapted accordingly. Laissez faire was based on too simple assumptions. Collective goods and marginal welfare equality require State intervention. Level of decision-making must be supranational in some fields. Controversial points and the 'research needed to reduce controversies are listed.
Wissenschaft ist zwangsläufig Teil der bestehenden Ordnung. Dennoch bieten sich Räume des Widerstands. Aber wie ist die Beziehung zwischen Wissen, Normativität und Macht in der Wissenschaft ausgestaltet? Neben der kritischen Analyse der Machtbeziehungen im akademischen Alltag liegt ein weiterer Fokus des Bandes auf künstlerischen Formen der Wissensproduktion, die danach streben, mit den gängigen wissenschaftlichen Ausdrucksformen zu brechen.
This book analyzes United Nations (UN) interventions in the process of constitution making in states undergoing political change. It combines theoretical considerations of democracy and constitutionalism with empirical experiences and takes a critical perspective on the interventions developed by the United Nations in the processes of re-democratization. Presenting new empirical evidence on the substantive and procedural way in which the UN undertakes constitution building in Cambodia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Afghanistan, and East Timor, the book illustrates difficulties of these practices such as the promotion of popular participation, as well as an increasing Westernization, and to meet local needs. In consequence, the authors call for reforms of the actions and structural methods the UN to better align a legitimate constitutional order with the rule of law and democratic values. This book is aimed at scholars and students of politics and law who are interested in the prerequisites and conditions for further democratization in states undergoing political transformation.
