scholarly journals Interpreting planners’ talk about change: An exploratory study

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 605-627 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca S Sartorio ◽  
Huw Thomas ◽  
Neil Harris

Talk by planners about major changes (‘reform’) in a particular planning regime is the focus of this article. Change in planning in the United Kingdom has been a recurrent theme in planning practice and research. However, there is little looking at practitioners both in the public and the private sectors in relation to change. Also, theory development has been limited and the interpretive link between institutional change, organisational change and planners’ situated agency could be strengthened. This article aims to add new dimensions to the current debate by looking at planners in both the public and the private sectors in Wales; by adopting a more open-ended approach requiring planners to generate ideas and display a perspective on planning; and by linking theories of institutional and organisational change with the model of actors’ agency developed by Bevir and Rhodes to form an interpretive frame. With reflections stemming from an exploratory case in Wales, the article seeks also to contribute to debates on planning in the United Kingdom and beyond, reaching to new-institutionalist theory and interpretive ontologies.

Author(s):  
Bernardo Bátiz-Lazo

Chapter 3 (‘The British Are Coming!’) explains the origins of the technology in the United Kingdom. It is widely assumed that the operation of a machine in the Enfield branch of Barclays was the ‘prime mover’ in this industry. However, the historical record fails to identify a hero inventor; rather multiple independent versions of the cash machine were launched at more or less the same time in different countries. Yet in spite of the great fanfare, there was no real race to market. There is no evidence the engineers responsible for them knew of each other’s existence before this launch (but many bankers did). Four years later, very few members of the public knew the cash machine existed, even less had used them and only a handful found them convenient.


2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diarmuid McDonnell ◽  
Alasdair C. Rutherford

Charities in the United Kingdom have been the subject of intense media, political, and public scrutiny in recent times; however, our understanding of the nature, extent, and determinants of charity misconduct is weak. Drawing upon a novel administrative dataset of 25,611 charities for the period 2006-2014 in Scotland, we develop models to predict two dimensions of charity misconduct: regulatory investigation and subsequent action. There have been 2,109 regulatory investigations of 1,566 Scottish charities over the study period, of which 31% resulted in regulatory action being taken. Complaints from members of the public are most likely to trigger an investigation, whereas the most common concerns relate to general governance and misappropriation of assets. Our multivariate analysis reveals a disconnect between the types of charities that are suspected of misconduct and those that are subject to subsequent regulatory action.


Author(s):  
Ratnaria Wahid ◽  
Ida Madieha Abdul Ghani Azmi

While education is considered a basic human right, the copyright system however seems to hamper public access to information and knowledge. This is especially so when information that largely comes from developed countries are used as commodities that have to be bought by developing countries. This paper compares the international and national laws in Malaysia, United Kingdom and Australia on the copyright exceptions to materials used for teaching purposes. It analyzes the different ways countries manage and balance between copyright owners and copyright users’ interest and shows that in many circumstances, copyright owners are over-protected by national copyright systems although this is not required by international copyright law. This paper also shows that international treaties governing copyright law do allow some flexibility for member countries to implement copyright systems based on their own needs and circumstances but such opportunity is not fully utilized by member countries for the benefit of the public.  


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Lucas Gutsche

Ex gratia is an integral part of the practice of private insurers. In the public perception, it is predominantly seen in a positive light. This work shows that ex gratia can neither always be reconciled with the legal principles of private insurance law, nor is it always unobjectionable from an economic perspective. The relevant German actors have so far remained inactive in this regard. A comprehensive legal comparison with the United Kingdom provides insightful guidance on how to enforce the legal conformity of ex gratia. The developments in the United Kingdom suggest that a future change in the approach in Germany is conceivable.


Author(s):  
Paige Austen ◽  
Nusrat Ahmed ◽  
Monika Adaemic ◽  
Shan Ahmed ◽  
Travis Aithawaite

Foxes have been hunted for decades in the United Kingdom due to it being an essential part of British culture. However, nowadays the public are strongly against fox hunting. This is evident from The Hunting Act 2004 (Act 04) being enforced to protect wild mammals. Despite the Act being in effect there have been cases where suspected hunters have gotten away with being convicted of hunting as a result of loopholes within the current legislation. Therefore in order to improve the effectiveness of the Act it must be built upon. Through analysing the Act itself alongside cases, ethical issues of hunting and changing social attitudes, we will consider whether the Act can be altered so that it can adequately prevent the killing of foxes.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luisa Massarani ◽  
Luiz Felipe Fernandes Neves

The search for an effective solution to control the COVID-19 pandemic has mobilized an unprecedented effort by science to develop a vaccine against the disease, in which pharmaceutical companies and scientific institutions from several countries participate. The world closely monitors research in this area, especially through media coverage, which plays a key role in the dissemination of trustful information and in the public’s understanding of science and health. On the other hand, anti-vaccine movements dispute space in this communication environment, which raises concerns of the authorities regarding the willingness of the population to get vaccinated. In this exploratory study, we used computer-assisted content analysis techniques, with WordStat software, to identify the most addressed terms, semantic clusters, actors, institutions, and countries in the texts and titles of 716 articles on the COVID-19 vaccine, published by The New York Times (US), The Guardian (United Kingdom), and Folha de São Paulo (Brazil), from January to October 2020. We sought to analyze similarities and differences of countries that stood out by the science denialism stance of their government leaders, reflecting on the severity of the pandemic in these places. Our results indicate that each newspaper emphasized the potential vaccines developed by laboratories in their countries or that have established partnerships with national institutions, but with a more politicized approach in Brazil and a little more technical-scientific approach in the United States and the United Kingdom. In external issues, the newspapers characterized the search for the discovery of a vaccine as a race in which nations and blocs historically marked by economic, political, and ideological disputes are competing, such as the United States, Europe, China, and Russia. The results lead us to reflect on the responsibility of the media to not only inform correctly but also not to create stigmas related to the origin of the vaccine and combat misinformation.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document