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This paper will challenge normative disaster studies and practice by arguing that thriving communities require the pursuit of imperfection and solidarity. The authors use Lewis Carroll’s Looking-Glass World as a lens to critique both how disasters are understood, and how disaster researchers and practitioners operate, within a climate-change affected world where cultural, political and historical constructs are constantly shifting.

The paper will undertake an analysis of both disasters and disaster studies, using this unique (and satirical) critical lens, looking at the unfolding of systemic mistakes, oppressions and mal-development that are revealed in contemporary disasters, that were once the critiques of Lewis Carroll’s Victorian-era England. It shows how disaster “resilience-building” can actually be a mechanism for continuing the status quo, and how persistent colonizing institutions and systems can be in reproducing themselves.

The authors argue the liberation of disaster studies as a process of challenging the doctrines and paradigms that have been created and given meaning by those in power – particularly white, Western/Northern/Eurocentric, male power. They suggest how researchers and practitioners might view disasters – and their own praxis – Through the Looking Glass in an effort to better understand the power, domination and violence of the status quo, but also as a means of creating a vision for something better, arguing that liberation is possible through community-led action grounded in love, solidarity, difference and interconnection.

The paper uses a novel conceptual lens as a way to challenge researchers and practitioners to avoid the utopic trap that wishes to achieve homogenized perfection and instead find an “imperfect” and complex adaptation that moves toward justice. Considering this idea through satire and literary criticism will lend support to empirical research that makes a similar case using data.

The rise of a performativity discourse in education in England emanates from the importation of an economic ‘market’ structure for schools in order to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the outputs of learning and to increase the opportunity of choice for the ‘consumers’ of education (Ball, 1998). Institutions focus their policies and practice, on improving performance and survival to maintain and develop their market share. This is due to the competitive nature of a market structure. The performativity criterion of efficiency and effectiveness is an optimisation of the relationship between input and output (Lyotard, 1979). In the case of education this means both ensuring a favourable qualitative award from a national inspection service and raising the achievement levels of pupils in national tests to ensure a high position in published tables of educational performance. High ratings on these two performativity indicators improve a school’s attraction to parents and students in the educational market place. This results in improved resources, increasing the opportunity for the school to be more selective about the students it accepts and the quality of the teachers it employs.

The purpose of this paper is to review the current state of survey-based SCM research that employs a multiple-informant perspective. Recommendations on how to rigorously conduct such research are developed, strengths and limitations discussed, and opportunities for advancing the discipline through this approach identified.

A systematic literature review (SLR) of 1,048 articles published in five leading SCM journals within a seven-year time frame is conducted.

The review shows that multiple-informant studies are still largely under-represented. Yet this approach more accurately depicts the multi-faceted nature of SCM. Specific requirements of this approach need to be considered throughout the research process, from unit of analysis, sampling frame, and data collection to analytic strategy.

Taking into account the often complex, dynamic actor networks in which SCM phenomena are embedded may provide new insights, especially when controversial results have been found. This approach may also enrich the understanding of phenomena that have previously been examined only from a monadic perspective.

The paper examines the low incidence of multiple-informant survey research in SCM, discusses how its application can advance the field, and provides guidance on how to effectively apply this approach to more fully understand complex SCM phenomena. It further shows that studies using multiple informants yield novel theoretical insights and valuable recommendations for decision makers on how to use the interfaces between different actors across functional and organizational borders.

Arthur Schlessinger (1983) suggested that the contradictions and paradoxes of American foreign policy reflected contradictions and paradoxes in the underlying character of the people. We would go further to suggest that the early years of colonial life, much like the early years of a person's life, had major consequences ever since. The intersection of Puritanism, available land, and eventually the rise of a commercial culture would forge a unique trajectory of what would be called “American Exceptionalism”, reflecting an “American character”, which itself is subject to three paradoxes or polarities, individualism vs. community, toughness vs. compassion, and moralism vs. pragmatism. The effect of this legacy and the dialectical aspect of American character were first evident when Winthrop proclaimed the city on the hill as the new Jerusalem. The legacy of that vision is taking place today in Iraq.

Geertz is well known for his methodology. Many Symbolic Interactionists refer to his notion of “thick description.” They may not know his work on Indonesia in general, but they often know his famous essay on the Balinese cockfight: “Deep Play” (Geertz, 1972, 1973). That essay is often held up as an exemplary “model” of ethnographic fieldwork. But we need to examine what he calls “thick description” more carefully. After the first few pages of the essay there is actually very little “idiographic description” per se. Much of the paper concerns general description and analysis. We do not get a blow-by-blow account of a cockfight as viewed by Geertz. Instead we get an analysis that is based on Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarianism (Parekh, 1998). There is a good deal missing from the broader analysis as well. Much of that can be found in other work (Geertz, 1959, 1966, 1980, 1995). Students who only read “Deep Play” often form a superficial impression of the method of “thick description” and a distorted sense of Balinese culture (Howe, 2001; Vickers, 1996 [1981]; Warren, 1993). This essay supplements Geertz’s essay with a discussion of a religious ceremony of far more importance than the largely secular cockfight. I touch on a central feature of Balinese society not emphasized by Geertz: the temple anniversary festival. It is called an odalan (Belo, 1966 [1953a]; Eiseman, 1990; Geertz, 2004). But the problem is not just restricted to the “Deep Play” essay. Geertz’s other work is often also not based primarily on ethnographic thick description. It concerns historical and sociological generalizations. Those are often based on archives and general fieldwork. Geertz also benefits from reading of Dutch research not available in English. The celebrations which take place at a temple are “deeper” than more immediate, largely secular games like a cockfight. Geertz’s oeuvre is well worth reading, but his notion of “thick description” needs to be seen in a broader, comparative historical sociological context. That involves Interpretive research paradigms that Geertz, as a symbolic anthropologist, distanced himself from, including Symbolic Interactionism and Weberian verstehende Soziologie.

The purpose of this paper is to question the taken for granted assumptions that underpin a liberal or lay view of consumer empowerment implicit to this special edition. In particular, the idea that it benefits consumers to have more choice is questioned.

The key constructs of Michel Foucault – disciplinary power, governmentality and technologies of self – are used to argue that people can never escape from the operation of power. Rather it is shown how power operates to produce consumers.

The liberal view of the empowerment of consumers through choice is questioned. Rather we suggest the opposite; that choice is a disciplinary power and that more and more choice can lead to choice paralysis. The contemporary phenomenon known as blogging is described as a Foucauldian technology of self. Managerial implications are discussed.

The value of a Foucauldian inspired theory of empowerment is that it represents a more sophisticated understanding of the fluidity of power relationships between producers and consumers than can be captured by a liberal view of power and empowerment.