Modernization and Culture in García Márquez’s Caribbean

Gabriel García Márquez offers rich accounts of the Colombian Caribbean’s experience with the historical forces of progress that test traditional societies and their predominant values and attitudes. Colombian historiography identifies various broad stages of secular change in the Caribbean since independence: (1) the emergence of enclave economies, (2) the arrival of people fleeing violence, (3) the foundation of new settlements in the hinterland, (4) the rapid industrialization of Barranquilla, and (5) the region’s full integration into the national project. García Márquez’s fictional towns and generations exist in phases 1–4, which roughly correspond with one hundred years of postindependence history. His Caribbean, like the real one, follows a messy path to modernity where traditional values are tested. It has fuzzy political, cultural, and economic borders and is governed by overlapping elites who, unintentionally, leave vacuums of power for the reproduction of morally loose, intercultural, and miscegenated societies. These societies see the dominant civilization and are familiar with its technologies and social projects. News of progress comes to them in leaf storms, books of knowledge brought by gypsies, trains arriving out of nowhere, or the speeches of shady politicians. This article argues that such broad changes shape values and attitudes as people adapt to new patterns of organization. In the standard modernization account, traditional values (i.e., survival/family orientation) give way to secular values (i.e., self-expression/trust in anonymous institutions). But this cultural transition is neither smooth nor complete. Rather, traditional and secular values coexist in constant tension, and García Márquez shows how.

What the Listeners Want

In 1942, Val Gielgud and John Dickson Carr wrote and produced a pair of plays: Inspector Silence Takes the Air and Thirteen to the Gallows. Both are set in the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) studios during wartime, and both dramatized dead air and dead bodies. Gielgud, as a high-level radio-producer, feared that the BBC was broadcasting into a void. The emergence of the Listener Research Department, a unit designed to assess listener sentiment about BBC programming, promised to usher in an institution with a more responsive relationship to its audience. But these plays, featuring BBC technicians as villains, criticize the BBC’s Reithian self-conception as an unliteral force to produce and manufacture public taste, a tendency in constant tension with the burgeoning science of listener research. This chapter traces the ambivalent responses to the wireless as both a method of controlling public opinion and a medium with the potential to facilitate psychographic congruity across populations. Those outside the BBC expressed equal parts concern and optimism about the ability of wireless technology to shape its audiences. Recognizing the BBC’s power to move listeners, Olaf Stapledon’s short story “A World of Sound” is the first of his works to theorize the sonic sphere as a means of transcending individual consciousness; radio-centric telepathy would later become a crux to his aesthetic project, with novels like Star Marker imagining radio waves as a means of decentralizing authority and enabling individuals to access the public consciousness directly and make collective decisions.

March’s foolish views on leadership, or how to fail optimistically, pursue ethical authenticity, choose mindful resilience and enable ambiguous innovation

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to refract March’s views on leadership to re-frame them within an authentic model that understands optimistic failure and mindful resilience as likely byproducts of enabling ambiguous innovation. An analysis of March’s theories of slack, and the concepts of exploration and exploitation, as well as that of foolishness, are used to support the adoption of authentic and ethical leadership as an intelligent practice and, more concretely, to portray the leader as a resilient “juggling fool.” Design/methodology/approach This paper makes use of primary data by focusing on March’s published works, as well as on interviews and other materials written about him, or those discussing his contributions. A post-hoc practice of “appreciation” facilitated a fresh refraction of the “evidence” to identify or recognize new perspectives and/or challenges to March’s conceptualization of leadership, while relying on literature and metaphor to engage in “polymorphic research.” Findings This paper presents March as a complex thinker, whose thoughts on leadership have received, perhaps, less attention for being thought to be more refractive and less empirical. Nonetheless, his reflections on leadership re-discover him as a solid leadership philosopher. His use of literature, his theories of slack and the concepts of exploration and exploitation, as well as that of foolishness, may help leadership scholars to understand the essence of authentic and ethical leadership as an intelligent practice. Practical implications This paper proposes to extrapolate March’s vast insights about organizational theory to further develop the framework of authentic leadership. This re-framing of the leader as a “juggling fool” constitutes an empowered view of leadership that comes closer to balancing the complementary purposes of leadership and management; an effort that rests at the core of the future of leadership. Originality/value Despite the ostensible popularity of leadership over management as a desired organizational outcome, March’s phenomenal insights remind current and developing leaders of just how much the two fields must overlap in constant tension. It is, perhaps, the conceptualization of a leader as an authentic and resilient “juggling fool” what adds depth of meaning to March’s contributions to the field of leadership beyond that of management.

On Particularism and Peculiarities Within

This paper aims at examining the meta-ethical doctrine of particularism in light of its constant tension with ethical absolutism.

Catalan editions in resistance: The publication of testimonial narrative about French concentration camps in Catalan during Franco’s dictatorship

As part of its repressive programme, Franco’s regime significantly limited the publication of literature in Catalan, a language that was pejoratively reduced to the category of dialect. In that context, the decision of writing and editing books in Catalan during the military dictatorship (1939–75) was itself an act of resistance. This article studies a series of testimonial narratives that were published in the late 1960s and early 1970s in Spain about French concentration camps, including Crist de 200.000 braços. Refugiats catalans als camps de concentració francesos (1968), by Agustí Bartra; El desgavell (1969), by Ferran Planes; and Cartes des dels camps de concentració (1972), by Pere Vives i Clavé. Testimonial narratives about French concentration camps already circulated in the countries where Spanish intellectuals were exiled. However, writers such as Bartra, Planes, Vives i Clavé (survivors of Argelès-sur-Mer, Saint-Cyprien and other French concentration camps) and some Catalan editors committed to the Republican cause were interested in telling their traumatic experiences to Spanish and Catalan readers living in Spain. Therefore, they undertook the task of editing these works although in many cases they were strongly censored. Taking this into account, the purpose of this article is to analyse some aspects of these editions in order to consider how their testimonial narratives remain in constant tension between two forces: Republican writers’ intention to show their own version of recent history and the Spanish government’s imposition of its own institutional and conservative official discourse.

Regulatory Autonomy under the WTO Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Agreement: Implications of Korea–Import Bans, and Testing and Certification Requirements for Radionuclides

The recent WTO dispute case, Korea–Import Bans, and Testing and Certification Requirements for Radionuclides, illustrates complex legal issues and significant political implications associated with the regulatory autonomy of a sovereign country under the WTO Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Agreement (SPS Agreement). There has been constant tension between the sovereign right of a WTO member state to determine its own appropriate level of protection (ALOP) and the regulatory constraints imposed under the SPS Agreement to prevent abuse and disguised trade protection. The case emerged from this tension and raises questions on the extent of the regulatory autonomy in the application of an SPS measure. This article addresses these questions and examines the criteria for the qualitative standards for the ALOP, the question that the Appellate Body decision did not fully resolve. The criteria for the qualitative ALOP standards affect the regulatory autonomy significantly under the current SPS rules as they determine the manner and the extent to which a Member may meet the sensitive public interests in the application of an SPS measure. The article proposes a rational basis test to restrain abuse of SPS measures while preserving the regulatory autonomy protected under the SPS Agreement.

Political Theology Without Religion

There is a constant tension that exists within each individual. This is the struggle between the hidden ideologies and fixed ideas which enslave the individual and the need to rid themselves of them. It is through these that implicit religion forms. We require, in order to counteract this, a new theology, a secular theology – one which emphasizes the individual. In order to bring about a new theology, it is necessary to reconsider the philosophies of Adam Weishaupt, Louis Althusser, and Max Stirner and bring them into the modern discussion of implicit religion. This paper aims to bring together these understudied philosophers as well as contemporary leaders in political theology in order to reimagine the potential of the individual to rid themselves from fixed ideas and to realize their potential.