scholarly journals Theresa May’s disjunctive premiership: Choice and constraint in political time

Author(s):  
Chris Byrne ◽  
Nick Randall ◽  
Kevin Theakston

Theresa May’s premiership is widely acknowledged to have been a failure, but political commentators and the scholarly literature have, thus far, tended to focus on May’s misuse of her agency. This article argues that May’s premiership presents a particularly powerful example of the need to disentangle structure and agency when assessing prime ministerial performance. Drawing upon the work of Stephen Skowronek, it sets out a framework of evaluating prime ministerial agency in ‘political time’. This is then used to show how the conditions and circumstances in which May governed limited the feasibility, increased the costs, and compromised the effectiveness of her actions in office. We argue that this confirms that May was a victim of circumstances as much as a victim of her own agency.

2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 202-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Byrne ◽  
Nick Randall ◽  
Kevin Theakston

This article contributes to the developing literature on prime ministerial performance in the United Kingdom by applying a critical reading of Stephen Skowronek’s account of leadership in ‘political time’ to evaluate David Cameron’s premiership. This, we propose, better understands the inter-relationship of structure and agency in prime ministerial performance than existing frameworks, particularly those based on Greenstein’s and Bulpitt’s approaches. We identify Cameron as a disjunctive prime minister, but find it necessary significantly to develop the model of disjunctive leadership beyond that offered by Skowronek. We identify the warrants to authority, strategies and dilemmas associated with disjunctive leadership in the United Kingdom. We argue that Cameron was relatively skilful in meeting many of the challenges confronting an affiliated leader of a vulnerable regime. However, his second term exposed deep fractures in the regime, which proved beyond Cameron’s skills as a disjunctive leader.


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Zachary Nowak ◽  
Bradley M. Jones ◽  
Elisa Ascione

This article begins with a parody, a fictitious set of regulations for the production of “traditional” Italian polenta. Through analysis of primary and secondary historical sources we then discuss the various meanings of which polenta has been the bearer through time and space in order to emphasize the mutability of the modes of preparation, ingredients, and the social value of traditional food products. Finally, we situate polenta within its broader cultural, political, and economic contexts, underlining the uses and abuses of rendering foods as traditional—a process always incomplete, often contested, never organic. In stirring up the past and present of polenta and placing it within both the projects of Italian identity creation and the broader scholarly literature on culinary tradition and taste, we emphasize that for so-called traditional foods to be saved, they must be continually reinvented.


2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 75-96
Author(s):  
Mohammed Rustom

This article offers the first comprehensive survey of scholarly literature devoted to the Qur??nic works of the famous Muslim philosopher, Mull? ?adr? (d. 1050/1640). While taking account of the merits and shortcomings of studies on ?adr?’s Qur??nic writings, we will also be concerned with highlighting some of the methodological problems raised by the diverse range of approaches adopted in these studies. Chief amongst them is the tendency to pit ?adr? the philosopher against ?adr? the scriptural exegete. Such a dichotomy is not entirely helpful, both with respect to painting a clearer picture of ?adr?’s religious worldview, and to addressing broader questions pertaining to the intimate relationship shared between the “act” of philosophy and the “act” of reading scripture.


2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-49
Author(s):  
Philip Harrison

Abstract The bulk of the scholarly literature on city-regions and their governance is drawn from contexts where economic and political systems have been stable over an extended period. However, many parts of the world, including all countries in the BRICS, have experienced far-reaching national transformations in the recent past in economic and/or political systems. The national transitions are complex, with a mix of continuity and rupture, while their translation into the scale of the city-region is often indirect. But, these transitions have been significant for the city-region, providing a period of opportunity and institutional fluidity. Studies of the BRICS show that outcomes of transitions are varied but that there are junctures of productive comparison including the ways in which the nature of the transitions create new path dependencies, and way in which interests across territorial scales soon consolidate, producing new rigidities in city-region governance.


Mousaion ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-100
Author(s):  
Solomon Bopape

The study of law focuses, among other aspects, on important issues relating to equality, fairness and justice in as far as free access to information and knowledgeis concerned. The launching of the Open Access to Law Movement in 1992, the promulgation of the Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarshipin 2009, and the formation of national and regional Legal Information Institutes (LIIs) should serve as an indication of how well the legal world is committed to freely publishing and distributing legal information and knowledge through the Internet to legal practitioners, legal scholars and the public at large aroundthe world. In order to establish the amount of legal scholarly content which is accessible through open access publishing innovations and initiatives, this studyanalysed the contents of websites for selected open access resources on the Internet internationally and in South Africa. The results of the study showed that there has been a steady developing trend towards the adoption of open access for legal scholarly literature internationally, while in South Africa legal scholarly literature is under the control of commercial publishers. This should be an issue for the legal scholarship which, among its focus, is to impart knowledge about the right of access to information and knowledge.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 117
Author(s):  
Main Ud-din

This paper is about the transformation in the patriarchal structure of Rashidpur village in Munshiganj district, Bangladesh following overseas migration of men leaving their women in the village. In doing so, the study explores the continuity and changes in the discourse and practices of traditional gender roles in a patriarchal Muslim society considering the perspective of both men and women. The study pays especial attention to transnational communication of the villagers, the changes in their gender based mobility and its contribution to the changes in patriarchal ideology. The study is based on ethnographic fieldwork, which examines whether the changes are sustainable or temporal for a period when the husbands are abroad and what happens to the practices when the husbands permanently return. Though the findings of the study indicate the diversity and complexity of practices, migration of men increases the mobility of the left behind women. Again, the entrance of cell phone, TV and satellite channels and transnational communication of women have significantly changed their agency as individuals. Consequently, many young wives like to come out of the domination of their in-laws and live in separate households instead of previous joint arrangement. The overall findings of the study show a remarkable change in the traditional pattern of village life. The study contextualizes structure and agency to understand how patriarchal structure influences individuals and how individuals play a role to transform the structure in exchange through their mobility, activities and resistance when the migrants are abroad.


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