Market governmnet and orgainzations Article Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Market governmnet and orgainzations - Article Example The company’s board of directors’ decision to fire the CEO was not prudent since it led to the disintegrating of the entire board team. Merging with another firm and coming up with unique services would an ideal way out for the beta corp. company. The radical approach is quite pragmatic. The government’s decision to keep the company afloat is important in ensuring that all the obligations of the company are met. In the event f failure to meet such obligations, normally, the citizens that had subscribed to the insurance scheme would suffer losses. This would increase lead to depreciation in the economic growth, as the citizens would be struggling to bear the loss of insurance investment. The mixed liberal theoretical dimension also offers a good perspective of the situation. The government needs to keep the company afloat to ensure that all the company obligations are met. However, on the same note, the company ought to put in place a good and compete team of board of governors to oversee the management process of the company. Firing of the company’s CEO may not have been a prudent idea, but it offered a perfect chance for the government to appoint new members into the team of the board of directors. Such a team would develop a strategy to efficiently maintain the company and keep things working perfectly. According to this perspective, the board of directors appointed for this company ought to competent and capable of critically analyzing a situation in place. The board members should be people with experience and skills on the management of companies of this nature. The members should be professionals capable of making independent decisions. Ideally, the board must fulfill its primary role of strategic planning for the company. Such plans should be made on long term basis, and should be aimed at uplifting the company and making it emerge among the topmost companies. The radical approach may also adopt a

Operations management of the Virgin Atlantic airways Essay

Operations management of the Virgin Atlantic airways - Essay Example The intention of this study is an operations management as a concept that emphasises on the management of the process concerned with production and distribution channels of organisations. Operations management often deal with the internal environment of the organisation. The process of the operations management is totally dependent upon the nature of the manufactured goods along with the organisational processes such as retail, manufacturing and wholesale. Operations management, if implied with efficiency, can reward the organisation with enhanced competency and profitability on the whole. Operations management is implemented in every industry to maintain proper co-ordination in the organisational system. Hence, it can be said that implication of operations management can be highly beneficial. Operations management has a wide concept and therefore is quite complex to be implemented. This requires an effective and comprehensive planning. Virgin Atlantic is an airway services provider. Richard Branson had established this company in the year 1984 with a single aircraft. Presently, Virgin Atlantic is one of the leading airlines service providers. Virgin Atlantic also serves with global satellite stores, telecom services and air buses. The mission statement of virgin Atlantic is â€Å"To grow a profitable airline, that people love to fly and where people love to work†. Their services are far better as compared to the other airline services. They offered highly trained staff. Hence, the aim of this paper is to analyze the operations management of the Virgin airline services. ... Literature Review It is important to understand the concept of operations management. It is generally the business purpose which sets, coordinates, organises and manages the required resources that is needed by a company to produce services or goods. Operations management engages the management of all the factors such as personnel, technology, equipment, information along with the other existing resources. Thus, it is said to be the central function for every individual company (Scribd, n.d.). The practice of operations management is different depending on the category of the organisation. Organisations can be classified into two extensive categories and they are the service organisations and the manufacturing organisations. The nature and application of the operations management would differ according to the nature of the organisations. It needs to be noted that these two categories of organisations have two basic differences. The first one is that the manufacturing organisations ar e involved in producing goods that are physical and also tangible in nature and has storing facility whereas service organisations are involved in the creation of products that are intangible in nature and does not have the facility of storage which means that production cannot be initiated before time. The second point of distinction is that in case of manufacturing organisations there is hardly any direct contact between the operations and the customers. The only way of developing contact with customer is through retailers and also through distributors. However, in service oriented organisations, it is the customer around whom the service is centred and thus direct interaction between the customer and the operation is immensely important (Scribd, n.d.). According to Johnston

Poem ulysses Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Poem ulysses - Essay Example In stanza 2, line 23 in the poem, Ulysses says, â€Å"To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!†, denoting that spirit to feel worthwhile even at an age where people would redeem them useless. It is Ulysses perseverance that makes him wants to make this dangerous journey in his old age and admits better to die during such an adventure than to store in his boring kingdom (Tennyson). The main character in the poem is Ulysses. Ulysses is an old King whom has good memories of his young age and a vast kingdom to rule. Ulysses appears to be bored staying in one place as the spirit of adventure keeps calling him, â€Å"It little profits that an idle king† (Stanza 1, line 1). He opts to leave the kingdom to his son and make a journey to a distant land with his crew of old men. At an old age, many would expect Ulysses to stay in one place and die in peace, but the old man is determined to die while happy on an adventure (Tennyson). Ulysses is seen as a person who does not give up in life, but is determined to hold on onto the one thing that makes him happy. He even makes a move to leave his wife behind and go to the seas with his old crew with whom he has had several adventures

Luxury and the Montblanc brand Essay Example for Free

Luxury and the Montblanc brand Essay It is generally acknowledged that western consumption of luxury in the 1980s and 1990s was motivated primarily by status-seeking and appearance. This means that social status associated with a brand is an important factor in conspicuous consumption. The baby boom generation luxury consumer has a passion for self-indulgence while maintaining an iconoclastic world view, which is transforming the luxury market from its ‘ old ’ conspicuous consumption model to a totally new, individualistic type of luxury consumer one driven by new needs and desires for experiences ’ . The expression of ‘today’s luxury’ is about a celebration of personal creativity, expressiveness, intelligence, fluidity, and above all, meaning. LUXURY AND POSTMODERNISM Recent arguments have been sounded that aspects of contemporary luxury consumption have reflected the phenomenon of postmodernism. Postmodernity means very different things to many different people’. Postmodernism is essentially a western philosophy that ‘refers to a break in thinking away from the modern, functional and rational’. In terms of experiential marketing, two aspects of the postmodern discourse are most relevant: hyper-reality and image. Hyper-reality refers to ‘the blurring of distinction between the real and the unreal, in which the prefix ‘hyper’ signifies more real than real. When the real that is the environment, is no longer a given, but is reproduced by a simulated environment, it does not become unreal, but realer than real’. The example of Bollywood to illustrate the so-called ‘Disneyfication’ of reality within the context of contemporary Indian society: ‘Bollywood captures not only the imagination in the form of song, music and dance but fairy tale settings, romantic melodrama and heroic storylines immerse the viewer in ‘simulated reality’. Traditional marketing was developed in response to the industrial age, not the information, branding and communications revolution we are facing today. In a new age, with new consumers, we need to shift away from a features- and-benefits approach, as advocated by traditional approaches to consumer experiences. One such approach is experiential marketing, an approach that in contrast to the rational features-and-benefits view of consumers takes a more postmodern orientation, and views them as emotional beings concerned with achieving pleasurable experiences. EXPERIENTIAL LUXURY MARKETING When a person buys a service, he purchases a set of intangible activities carried out on his behalf. But when he buys an experience, he pays to spend time enjoying a series of memorable events that a company stages to engage him in a personal way. Experiential marketing is thus about taking the essence of a product and amplifying it into a set of tangible, physical and interactive experiences that reinforce the offer. Experiential marketing essentially describes marketing initiatives that give consumers in-depth, tangible experiences in order to provide them with sufficient information to make a purchase decision. It is clear that the fact that many luxury goods are almost always experiential puts luxury marketers in a unique position to apply the principles of experiential marketing to their activities. Dimensions of the luxury experience The term ‘involvement’ refers to the level of inter-activity between the supplier and the customer. Increased levels of involvement fundamentally change the way in which services are experienced, that is, suppliers no longer create an experience and pass it to the customer; instead, the supplier and customer are interactively co-creating the experience. The term ‘intensity’ refers to the perception of the strength of feeling towards the interaction. The four experiential zones are not intended to be mutually exclusive; the richness of an experience is, however, a function of the degree to which all four zones are incorporated. Those experiences we think of as Entertainment, such as fashion shows at designer boutiques and upmarket department stores, usually involve a low degree of customer involvement and intensiveness. Activities in the Educational zone involve those where participants are more actively involved, but the level of intensiveness is still low. In this zone, participants acquire new skills or increase those they already have. Many luxury goods offerings include educational dimensions. For example, cruise ships often employ well-known authorities to provide semi-formal lectures about their itineraries – a concept commonly referred to as ‘edutainment’. Escapist activities are those that involve a high degree of both involvement and intensiveness, and are clearly a central feature of much of luxury consumption. This is clearly evident within the luxury tourism and hospitality sector, characterised by the growth of specialised holiday offerings. The launch of the Royal Tented Taj Spa (Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces) at the Rambagh Palace in Jaipur (India) recreates the mobile palaces used by the Mughal emperors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with chandeliers, royal pennants and Indian love swings. When the element of activity is reduced to a more passive involvement in nature, the event becomes Aesthetic. A high degree of intensiveness is clearly evident within this activity, but has little effect on its environment such as admiring the architectural or interior design of designer boutiques. The six-storey glass crystal design of the Prada store in Tokyo conceptualised by the architects Herzog and de Meuron has become a showcase for unconventional contemporary architecture.

Analysing Biopower And Agency Linked To Euthanasia Philosophy Essay

Analysing Biopower And Agency Linked To Euthanasia Philosophy Essay Human life can be perceived as a way of being that ensures autonomy upon the physical body. However, state authority, surveillance and law are moderating this individual freedom and moral decision-making. Nowadays, euthanasia remains a highly controversial and sensitive medical and ethical issue. My research and final thesis for the master will focus on the narratives of people, residing in houses for the elderly in Antwerp, Belgium. Emphasis is placed on whether upcoming media interest in euthanasia influences elderly thoughts and decision making regarding assisted suicide. Wishes about end-of-life decisions, opinions of relatives and law interpretations of medical practitioners are being investigated in this study. And finally the way governments authority influences peoples agency in end-of-life decision making. With this paper, I intend to widen my knowledge of two main anthropological topics linked to the subject of euthanasia, namely biopower and agency. Biopolitics concern the political implications of social and biological facts and phenomena, with political choice and action directly afflicting all aspects of human life. Agency, on the other hand, can be seen as an alternative attempt to maintain autonomy in ones own life and death, under the influence of the states disciplining interference. Both forms of power are studied in this paper, and their interrelationship is critically viewed. Keywords: Biopolitics, Agency, Power, Health, Ethics 2. The history of biopower In Foucaults The Birth of Biopolitics (Lectures at the College de France, 1978-1979), an analysis of liberalism and neoliberalism as forms of biopolitics is presented. According to Foucault, biopower can be perceived as a technology of power, intending to manage individuals as a group. This political technology differentiates because of its ability to control populations as a whole, and is thus essential to the development of modern capitalism (Foucault, 2008). This shift from the managing and micro-controlling of individuals to disciplining a population emerged in the eighteenth-century. Even though this seems as an opportunity to gain more natural rights and liberty for individuals, this liberal government no longer limits state power because of the incompatible tension between freedom and security (Foucault, 2008, McSweeney, 2010). As Foucault argued, liberalism concerns the biopolitical. For liberalism promotes an imagined self-governing of life through a certain capture and disc iplining of natural forces of aggression and desire within the framework of a cultural game, governed by civil conventions and instituted laws (Foucault, 2004). In this conception, life is as much of a cultural construct as is law, although the naturalness of life, thought of as innately self-regulating, is always insinuated. Both in economics and in politics, liberalism rejoice in an order that is supposed to emerge naturally from the clash of passions themselves (Milbank, 2008: 2). Rabinow and Rose seek to enlighten the developments in Foucaults concept of biopower, which serves to bring into view a field comprised of more or less rationalized attempts to intervene upon the vital characteristics of human existence (Rabinow, 2006: 196-197). Foucault distinguishes two poles of biopower: the first one focuses on an anatomo-politics of the human body, seeking to maximize its forces and integrate it into efficient systems. The second pole entails biopolitics of the population, focusing on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanisms of life: birth, morbidity, mortality and longevity (Rose, 2007: 53). Thus, according to Rabinow and Rose, we can use the term biopolitics to embrace all the specific strategies and contestations over problematizations of collective human vitality, morbidity and mortality; over the forms of knowledge, regimes of authority and practices of intervention that are desirable, legitimate and efficacious (Rabinow, 2006: 197). In order to clarify the concept of biopower, three elements must be included. The first one comprises one or more truth discourses about the vital character of living human beings, and an array of authorities considered competent to speak that truth. Secondly, the strategies for intervention upon collective existence in the name of life and health, and lastly, modes of subjectification, through which individuals are brought to work on themselves, under certain forms of authority. Biopolitical analyses also explore how poverty, body commodification, and notions of risk and control are lived and shaped by the intersections of state imperatives, local traditions, and the global reach of medicine (Kaufman, 2005: 320). It is been inextricably bound up with the rise of the life sciences, the human sciences and clinical medicine. It has given birth to techniques, technologies, experts, and apparatuses for the care and administration of the life of each and of all, from town planning to heal th services (Rose, 2007: 54). Nevertheless, we need to be untrammeled by obligations to authoritative states and international bureaucracies, as most crimes against humanity are committed by powerful states (Farmer, 2004: 242). 2.1 Criticism Rabinow and Rose are critical of Agamben (1995, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2005) and Negri (2000), who suggest that contemporary biopower takes the form of a politics that is fundamentally dependent on the domination, exploitation, expropriation and, in some cases, elimination of the vital existence of some or all subjects over whom it is exercised (Rabinow, 2006: 198). The following fallacies in Agamben and Negris work are mentioned. Firstly, their use of biopower as a totalizing term in which biopower serves to secure the dominion of a global form of domination that they term Empire (ibid.: 198). Rabinow and Rose agree that it is necessary to extend the scope of traditional analyses of economic exploitation and geopolitics in order to grasp the way in which the living character of human being is being harnessed by biocapital. However, this expanded concept of biopower leaves little room for analytical work. Therefore, Rabinow and Rose agree that this version of the concept of biopower is an tithetical to that proposed by Foucault because it can describe everything but analyse nothing. Secondly, Agambens view of the Holocaust as the ultimate exemplar of biopower and use of the obscure metaphor of homo sacer. According to Rabinow and Rose: the power to command under threat of death is exercised by States and their surrogates in multiple instances, in micro forms and in geopolitical relations. But this does not demonstrate that this form of power commands backed up by the ultimate threat of death is the guarantee or underpinning principle of all forms of biopower in contemporary liberal societies. Nor is it useful to use this single diagram to analyse every contemporary instance of thanatopolitics (ibid.: 201). And lastly, Agambens interpretation of contemporary biopolitics as the politics of a State modelled on the figure of the Sovereign, and of all forms of biopolitical authority as agents of that Sovereign. Rabinow and Rose believe that this interpretation fails to notice the dependence of sovereign rule on a fine web of customary conventions, reciprocal obligations and the like in a word, a moral economy [] sovereign power is at one and the same time an element in this moral economy and an attempt to master it (ibid.: 200). States can only rule because of the ways in which they manage to connect themselves to the ever-growing apparatuses of knowledge collection and problematization that formed alongside the state apparatus since the 19th century. Furthermore, in the analysis of biopower, Rabinow and Rose focus on three topics that they believe condense some of the biopolitical lines of force active today. The first one embraces race. At one point, the link between biological understandings of distinctions among population groups and their socio-political implications seemed broken and race was crucial as a socio-economic category, a mark of discrimination and a mode of identification that remained extremely salient socially and politically, from the allocation of federal funds to the manifestations of identity politics. However, at the turn of the new century, race is once again re-entering the domain of biological truth, viewed now through a molecular gaze (ibid.: 206). A new molecular deployment of race has emerged seemingly almost inevitably out of genomic thinking. Funding for research in DNA sequence variations has been justified precisely in biopolitical terms, as leading towards and ensuring the equal health of the pop ulation in all or some of its diversity (ibid.: 207). Rabinow and Rose believe that new challenges for critical thinking are raised by the contemporary interplay between political and genomic classifications of race, identity politics, racism, health inequities, and their potential entry into biomedical truth, commercial logics and the routine practices of health care (ibid.: 207). The second topic entails reproduction. Since the 1970s, sexuality and reproduction have become disentangled, and the question of reproduction gets problematized, both nationally and supra-nationally, because of its economic, ecological and political consequences. Reproduction has been made into a biopolitical space in which an array of connections appear between the individual and the collective, the technological and the political, the legal and the ethical (ibid.: 208). According to Rabinow and Rose the economy of contemporary biopolitics operates according to logics of vitality, not mortality: while it has its circuits of exclusion, letting die is not making die (ibid.: 211). They argue that changes are about capitalism and liberalism and not eugenics. And lastly; genomic medicine. Rabinow and Rose narrate how the first biopolitical strategies concerned the management of illness and health and how these provided a model for many other problematizations operating in terms of the division of the normal and the pathological. This model was popular in liberal societies because they establish links between the molecular and the molar, linking the aspiration of the individual to be cured to the management of the health status of the population as a whole (ibid.: 212). Whether or not genomic medicine will lead to the creation of a new regime of biopower depends on both the uncertain outcome of genomic research itself, and on contingencies external to genomics and biomedicine. If the new model of genomic medicine were to succeed, and to be deployed widely, not only in the developed but also in the less developed world, the logics of medicine, and the shape of the biopolitical field, would be altered. New contestations would emerge over acc ess to such technologies and the resources necessary to follow through their implications. Additionally, as the forms of knowledge generated here are those of probability, new ways of calculating risk, understanding the self and organizing health care would undoubtedly emerge (Rabinow, 2006: 214). It is important to see that in this, the political and social implications are shaped more by the political side of biopolitics than the medical side, which is also mentioned by Vaughn (2010). Milbank (2008) is discussing this topic from an alternative point of view. Laws typically proceed from sovereign power granted legitimacy through a general popular consent as mediated by representation. In so far as such a procedure is taken to be normative, it can be seen as embodying a natural law for the origin of legitimate power from the conflicts in human life (Milbank, 2008: 5). To conclude; within the field of biopower, the term biopolitics is used to embrace all the specific strategies and contestations over problematizations of collective human vitality, morbidity and mortality, and can therefore be linked to the implementation of the euthanasia law. It includes a form of power expressed as a control that extends throughout the depths of the consciousnesses and bodies of the population (Rose, 2007: 54). At the end of life, ethnographers have focused their attention in the distinction between the social and biological death of the person and the practical and ethical quandaries created by the late modern ability and desire to authorize and design ones own death, and the ways in which death is spoken, silenced, embraced, staved off, and otherwise patterned (Kaufman, 2005: 319). The policy of euthanasia can thereby be seen as an array of authorities considered competent to judge a humans quality of life. In one sense, to say that the sovereign has a right of life and death means that he can, basically, either have people put to death of let them live, of in any case that life and death are not natural or immediate phenomena which are primal or radical, and which fall outside the field of power. [à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦] In any case, the lives and death of subjects become rights only as a result of the will of the sovereign (Foucault, 1997: 24). 3. Agency In the previous chapter it has become clear that biopolitics can be perceived as an empowered discipline which reduces humans to mere life and biological statistics and processes. But has a human being no other destiny then to be at the mercy of the puppet master called the state? According to Mahmood (2005), it is quite clear that the idea of freedom and liberty as the political ideal is relatively new in modern history. Nor, for that matter, does the narrative of individual and collective liberty exhaust the desires with which people live in liberal societies? How do we then analyze operations of power that construct different kinds of bodies, knowledges, and subjectivities whose trajectories do not follow the entelechy of libratory politics? It encourages us to conceptualize agency not simple as a synonym for resistance to relations of domination, but as a capacity for action that specific relations of subordination create and enable (Mahmood, 2005, 22). Ortner believes agency and social power are very closely linked. In her article Power and Projects: Reflections on Agency (2006), she agrees with Ahearn that oppositional agency is only one of many forms of agency and that domination and resistance are not irrelevant, but that human emotions, and hence questions of agency, within relations of power and inequality are always complex and contradictory (Ortner, 2006: 137). She also mentions Giddens viewpoint that the concept of action is logically tied to that of power because of its transformative capacity, but that the transformative capacity of agents is only one dimension of how power operates in social systems. Ortner sees agency as part of her theory on serious games. The concept of serious games is grounded in practice theory, because as in practice theory social life in a serious games perspective is seen as something that is actively played, oriented toward culturally constituted goals and projects, and involving both routine practices and intentionalized action (129). However, it moves beyond this in looking at more complex relations, namely power, and more complex dimensions of subjectivity, those involving intentionality and agency. Although agency is considered universal, the agency exercised by different persons is far from uniform and differs enormously in both kind and extent. At the ethnographic level, however, what is at stake is a contrast between the workings of agency within massive power relations. In the most common usage agency can be virtually synonymous with the forms of power people have at their disposal, thereby implying that people in positions of power have a lot of agency. On the other hand, Ortner notes that the dominated too also have certain capacities, and sometimes very significant capacities, to exercise some sort of influence over the ways in which events unfold. Resistance is then also a form of power-agency (ibid.: 144). Thus, Ortner believes that the less powerful seek to nourish and protect by creating or protecting sites on the margins of power. These cultural projects can be simple goals for individuals, related to intention and desire, but many projects are full-blown serious games, involving the intense play of multiply positioned subjects pursuing cultural goals within a matrix of local inequalities and power differentials (ibid.: 144). Agency becomes the pursuit of (cultural) projects, but it is also ordinary life socially organized in terms of culturally constituted projects that infuse life with meaning and purpose. Hence, the agency of projects is not necessarily about domination and resistance; it is more about people having desires that grow out of their own structures of life. Ortner views this as people playing their own serious games in the face of more powerful parties seeking to destruct these. So this is not free agency, as the cultural desires or intentions [] emerge from structur ally defined differences of social categories and differentials of power (ibid.: 145). To Ortner, the point of making the distinction between agency-in-the-sense-of-power and an agency-in-the-sense-of-(the pursuit of) projects is that the first is organized around the axis of domination and resistance, and thus defined to a great extent by the terms of the dominant party, while the second is defined by local logics of the good and the desirable and how to pursue them (ibid.: 145). She considers that the agency which is involved in significant cultural end, is inevitably involving internal power-relations. Consequently, the agency of project intrinsically hinges on the agency of power. 3.1 The free individual? The ultimate purpose of the serious games theory is always to understand the larger forces, formations, and transformations of social life. The way Ortner sees social agents is that they are always involved in, and can never act outside of, the multiplicity of social relations in which they are enmeshed (ibid.: 130). Thus while all social actors have agency, because of their engagement with others in the play of serious games they can never be free agents. This social embeddedness of agents takes two forms; the first one being relations of solidarity among friends and family. The second form involves relations of power, inequality and competition. Ortner emphasizes that agency is never a thing in itself but is always a part of a process of what Giddens calls structuration, the making and remaking of larger social and cultural formations (ibid.: 134). Ortner admits the dangers of overemphasizing agency as this gives precedence to individuals over context and that too much focus on the agency of individuals and/or groups results in a gross oversimplification of the processes involved in history, thereby ignoring both the needs and desires of human beings and the pulse of collective forces and losing sight of the complex, and highly unpredictable, relationship between intentions and outcomes. However, Ortner believes the solution is the framework of practice theory within which neither individuals nor social forces have precedence, but in which nonetheless there is a dynamic, powerful, and sometimes transformative relationship between the practices of real people and the structures of society, culture, and history (ibid.:133). Furthermore, Ortner believes that agency can be said to have two fields of meaning, one being about intentionality and the pursuit of (culturally defined) projects), the other about power, about acting within relations of social inequality, asymmetry, and force (ibid.: 139). However, agency is never merely one or the other. Intentionality refers to a wide range of states, both cognitive and emotional, and at various levels of consciousness, that are directed forward toward some end (ibid.: 134). There exists a continuum between both soft and hard definitions of agency. In soft definitions, intentionality is not taken into account or not seen as being consciously held in the mind. However, what is then the distinction between agency and routine practices? On the other end of the spectrum, and Ortner shares this viewpoint, are those definitions of agency that emphasize the strong role of active intentionality in agency that differentiates agency from routine practices. Pre-modern thought did not conceive of agency solely in terms of individual freedom or else in terms of explicit representative sovereign action leaving a consequent problem of the apparent spontaneous patterning of the unplanned. This was because it did not think of an act as primarily an expression of freedom or as something owned by the individual or the sovereigns will or motivation. Instead, it paid more attention to the fact that every act is always pre-positioned within a relational public realm and in turn cannot avoid in some way modifying that realm, beyond anything that could in principle be consented to by the other, since the full content of any act is unpredictable (Milbank, 2008: 23). In conclusion, Ortner advocates that a distinction should be made between agency as a form of power (agency of power) and agency as a form of intention and desire, as the pursuit of goals and the enactment of projects (agency of projects). While they form two distinct fields of meaning, they are also interrelated as both domination and resistance are always in the service of projects. Thus, agency is a complex term whose senses emerge within semantic and institutional networks that define and make possible particular ways of relation to people, things, and oneself. Yet, intention , which is variously glossed as plan, awareness, willfulness, directedness, or desire is often made to be central to the attribution of agency. Although the various usages of agency have very different implications that do not all hang together, cultural theory tends to reduce them to the metaphysical idea of a conscious agent-subject having both the capacity and the desire to move in a singular historical d irection: that of increasing self-empowerment and decreasing pain (Asad, 2003: 78-79). 4. Conclusion After thoroughly having examined both the subjects of biopower and agency, and following the course Theory and Practice, awareness has grown once again in realizing how much ones been lived. Disciplining of the state interferes in such a wide array of human life; consisting of for example the school system, employment, medicines and ultimately death. It becomes clear that agency, performed in ways we have discussed in class, simply does not exist, because of the dominant and prevailing power of the state. It is not owned by social actors, but interactively negotiated and best seen as a disposition toward the enactment of projects. Despite of this negotiating, individuals never become free agents. This and other research shows that the law and the policy of euthanasia influencing peoples right to determine their own life. Today, most requests for euthanasia to end a life with dignity are denied, because people do not fit into the criteria and the so-called carefully requirements the l aw states. But to what extend do such institutions of power have the moral right to determine and monitor personal decisions of individuals? As Foucault (2003) states: the very essence of the right of life and death is actually the right to kill: it is at the moment when the sovereign can kill that he exercises his right over life. In my opinion people should maintain autonomy over their own life and death, and that the government should not intervene from above into such personal, subjective and fundamental choice. However, apart from the awareness of the fundamental mediation of the state, we remain political animals. In the end, everyone wants to pursuit personal goals in life, and in order to accomplish those, we cannot do much more than just put up with the fate of being obliged well-behaved citizen.

German People Benefit From The Nazi Rule History Essay

German People Benefit From The Nazi Rule History Essay The National Socialist Workers Party (Nazi Party) ruled Germany between 1933 and the end of World War 2 in 1945. Adolf Hitler was the leader of the Nazi party and imposed many new laws in Germany during this period. The impact of the Great Depression was still present in Germany at this time, and the German people were still being humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler was willing to provide Germany with a new beginning. The unemployment rate in Germany decreased significantly during the Nazi Rule and Germans finally felt as if they lived in a stable society. However, these advantages to the German people came at a high cost. The Jewish race was discriminated, imprisoned, tortured and killed, woman lost their jobs, any opponents of the Nazis were persecuted, and the people of Germany were under complete control by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. The effect of the Great Depression and the Treaty of Versailles left Germans economy in grave danger of bankruptcy. Prior to the Nazi Party becoming elected in 1933, the number of unemployed German people had reached 6 million.  [1]  However, uring the years of the Nazi rule, and by January 1939, the unemployment in Germany went down to only 302,000  [2]  . This was a result of Hitlers plans to recreate Germany into an autarky and self-sufficient nation  [3]  , where Germany would no longer depend on other nations to aid in the re-building of the German economy. The National Labour Service sent men on public work projects to build motorways and autobahns. On the 9th June 1933 Hitler introduced an Employment Law  [4]  that would focus on a major program of public works to create further jobs for the German men. An example of this was the recreation of the railways in Germany. Also, one of Hitlers most sought after plan for Germany was rearmament. Hitler introduced a re armament programme and commissioned the building of the first autobahns (motorways). In 1935 Hitler introduced conscription into Germany  [5]  . This further reduced unemployment and opened up additional work opportunities. Due to the need for weapons, equipment and uniforms, more jobs were created. Also, when Hitler decreed that Germany would have a world-class air force (Luftwaffe), engineers and designers gained new job opportunities. Although living standards were still low, the German population was grateful of the new job opportunities that the Nazi Party had created in Germany. As well as bringing employment and economic recovery to Germany, these benefits of the Nazi rule boosted Hitlers popularity because they encouraged national pride. The German people began to feel that their country was finally emerging from the humiliation of World War 1 and the Treaty of Versailles, and putting itself on an equal footing with the other great countries. To gain further popularity in the Germany economy Hitler arranged for many German families to go on cheap holidays. He wanted to be seen as rewarding those who worked hard. The German historian, Albin Gladen wrote in his book Geschichte der Sozialpolitik in Deutshlandà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦ Hitlers accession to power improved the psychological climate incredibly, exerting beneficial influences on the propensities to consume and invest  [6]   Gladens By 1939 the German people had benefitted from the reduction of unemployment; however it came at great consequences. Trade unions throughout Germany were banned, as well as the right to strike. By 1938 unemployment was almost vanished from Germany, but workers no longer had the right to quit. Labour books were introduced in 1935 and only allowed men to be hired by a new employer if their previous employer approved.  [7]  The working men of Germany benefitted from the new job opportunities that the Nazi party had provided, because it led to a higher income, and gave hope to Germany. However the consequence was their right of freedom being taken away. Although many German people advantaged greatly from the rapid decrease of unemployment, not all Germans benefitted. Woman and Jews were put out of work. One of the most respected principals of the Nazi regime was to return German woman to their proper place in society. This was associated with the famous three Ks: Kinder, Kà ¼che, Kirche.(Children, Cooker, Church).  [8]  In 1933 woman were forced out of their careers, some of whom were professionals, such as lawyers or doctors. For women, the Nazi rule in Germany didnt benefit the needs of the women. Through the Nazi Partys plan to build a greater Aryan Germany, German woman were demoted to the kitchen, going to church, and producing blonde, blue-eyed Aryan German babies to spread the glory of the 1000-year Reich  [9]  . As an incentive, if women were to produce eight children, they received a gold medal of honour from the Nazi party  [10]  . During the Nazi rule in Germany throughout the 1930s, the woman benefitted in t hat they were able to be stay-at-home mothers and look after the family home. However, for the women that previously had prestigious careers, they did not benefit from the Nazi reign as it took away their freedom and rights. Although the women were harshly prejudiced against, the Jewish Germans were widely discriminated against throughout the entire Nazi rule. Throughout the Nazi rule of Germany, the Jewish race was a group of people that had no benefit of the Nazi control. In 1925 Adolf Hitler wrote his well-known book Mein Kampf. In this novel Hitler spoke about how Germany should be one Aryan race, and that the Jews were trying to take over Germany with any means possible. He wrote: Was there any form of filth or crimewithout at least one Jew involved in it. If you cut even cautiously into such a sore, you find like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light a Jew.  [11]   As written throughout Mein Kampf Adolf Hitler blamed the Jews for all the misfortunes that Germany had suffered through. Hitler believed that Germanys loss in World War 1 was because of a Jewish conspiracy, the Treaty of Versailles was a conspiracy set by the Jews to bring Germany to its knees, and the hyperinflation in 1923 was a result of the international Jewish race attempting to destroy Germany  [12]  . During the Nazi Rule Hitler began to gain the publics agreement with his hatred towards Jews. Hitler ideologies that the Jews were to blame for Germanys economic problems spread throughout Germany and Jews began to become isolated from the rest of Germany. At first the Nazis destroyed Jewish owned shops, but leading up to 1939 the Jewish persecutions became more violent. On April 1st 1933  [13]  members of the Nazi party stopped Germans shopping in Jewish shops, and by 1934 all Jewish shops were marked with a yellow Star of David to indicate which shops were part of the J ewish conspiracy  [14]  . These small, but significant steps taken by the Nazi Party discontinued the economic flow of the Jewish people, as they were forced out of their jobs and lost all income. The hatred inflicted onto the Jewish race continued in school, and the Jewish children were no longer able to receive the same education that the German children were. Jewish children were ridiculed by teachers and beaten by other students and anti-Semitic ideas were taught to all school children  [15]  . These measures against the Jewish race significantly disadvantaged the German Jews and continued to lead them towards total isolation. On September 15th 1935 the Nazi party enforced the Nuremberg Law which legally isolated the Jews from the rest of Germany, and deprived them of their German citizenship  [16]  . The Nuremberg Law did not benefit the German Jews as it allowed Hitler to completely remove all Jewish rights of freedom. The night of the 9th of November 1938 (known as Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass) started the destruction of Jewish shops, homes, cemeteries, schools and hospitals  [17]  . In two days, over 250 synagogues were burned, over 7,000 Jewish businesses were trashed and looted, dozens of Jewish people were killed, and Jewish cemeteries, hospitals, schools, and homes were looted while police and fire brigades stood by.  [18]   This began the violent behavior of the Nazi party against the Jewish population in Europe. The outbreak of World War 2 in 1939 allowed Hitler the freedom of bringing death and annihilation to all Jewish communities throughout Europe. Over the period of the Nazi rule in Germany, just under 6 million Jews were murdered.  [19]   Under the Nazi rule the unemployment was significantly decreased and the economy was stabilized, but it was at a cost to minority German groups. Many German people did benefit from the Nazi rule and preferred the stability offered by the Nazi rule compared to the instability of the Weimar Republic  [20]  . The Nazi party fixed the economic problems that Germany had encountered through the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression. Hitler was responsible for decreasing the unemployment rate from 6 million to only 300,000. However, the Nazi rule involved much persecution and rule through state terror and the loss of personal freedom. The woman, Jews and many other minority groups suffered throughout the reign of the Nazis. The positive achievements that Hitler and the Nazi party produced in Germany between 1933 and 1945 were a great accomplishment and benefit for the German people, however the terror, persecution, murder and deaths that were accounted at the Nazis hand outweigh ed the success of economic growth. When comparing these factors, the German people did not benefit from the Nazi rule to quite a significant extent. Word Count 1,517

Feminist Pedagogy: Not Just for Women Anymore Essay -- Education, Femi

Your responsibilities as teachers at this community college are very important in educating the dedicated students that attend your school. As an aging baby-boomer approaching retirement, no doubt like some of you in this room today, I recognize the importance of providing opportunities for growth and experiential learning in our young adults that will affect not only their lives, but those of everyone else around them. It is this distinguished group of graduates that will become our leaders, policy makers, doctors, lawyers and business people. The focus on learning moving towards a learner-centered approach and away from a teacher based will become increasingly important to this new generation of learners. Critical pedagogy is defined by philosophical education scholar Henry Giroux (Critical Pedagogy, 2011), as â€Å"an educational movement, guided by passion and principle, to help students develop consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, and connect knowledge to power and the ability to take constructive action†. Many of us who were students of days gone by only know of traditional methods of schooling. What a critical pedagogy approach can do is create a learning environment for those individuals who have been disenfranchised by a traditional teaching methods because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, religious beliefs or cultural beliefs. Such an environment fosters the capacity for critical thinking and reflection. One method of critical pedagogy is the feminist approach. I will explain the root of critical pedagogy in the feminist approach. I will then discuss feminist pedagogy and its practical applications in the classroom. Lastly, I will demonstrate that it is not exclusively for or about w... ...gress: Education as the practice of freedom, London: Routledge. Hudalla, J. (2005). Transforming My Curriculum, Transforming My Classroom. EdChange and the Multicultural Pavilion. Retrieved December 1, 2011 from http://www.EdChange.org/multicultural Shrewsbury, C. (1997). What is feminist pedagogy? Women’s studies quarterly, 25 (1,2), pp.166-173. Smith, M.K. (2002). Paulo Freire and informal education. The encyclopedia of informal education. Retrieved December 1, 2011 from http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-freir.htm Stage, F., Muller, P., Kinzie, J, Simmons, A. (1998). Creating learning centered classrooms: What does learning theory have to say? George Washington Univ. Washington, DC. Waller, A. (2005). What is feminist pedagogy and how can it be used in CSET education? Retrieved November 27, 2011 from http://fie-conference.org/fie2005/papers/1585.pdf Feminist Pedagogy: Not Just for Women Anymore Essay -- Education, Femi Your responsibilities as teachers at this community college are very important in educating the dedicated students that attend your school. As an aging baby-boomer approaching retirement, no doubt like some of you in this room today, I recognize the importance of providing opportunities for growth and experiential learning in our young adults that will affect not only their lives, but those of everyone else around them. It is this distinguished group of graduates that will become our leaders, policy makers, doctors, lawyers and business people. The focus on learning moving towards a learner-centered approach and away from a teacher based will become increasingly important to this new generation of learners. Critical pedagogy is defined by philosophical education scholar Henry Giroux (Critical Pedagogy, 2011), as â€Å"an educational movement, guided by passion and principle, to help students develop consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, and connect knowledge to power and the ability to take constructive action†. Many of us who were students of days gone by only know of traditional methods of schooling. What a critical pedagogy approach can do is create a learning environment for those individuals who have been disenfranchised by a traditional teaching methods because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, religious beliefs or cultural beliefs. Such an environment fosters the capacity for critical thinking and reflection. One method of critical pedagogy is the feminist approach. I will explain the root of critical pedagogy in the feminist approach. I will then discuss feminist pedagogy and its practical applications in the classroom. Lastly, I will demonstrate that it is not exclusively for or about w... ...gress: Education as the practice of freedom, London: Routledge. Hudalla, J. (2005). Transforming My Curriculum, Transforming My Classroom. EdChange and the Multicultural Pavilion. Retrieved December 1, 2011 from http://www.EdChange.org/multicultural Shrewsbury, C. (1997). What is feminist pedagogy? Women’s studies quarterly, 25 (1,2), pp.166-173. Smith, M.K. (2002). Paulo Freire and informal education. The encyclopedia of informal education. Retrieved December 1, 2011 from http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-freir.htm Stage, F., Muller, P., Kinzie, J, Simmons, A. (1998). Creating learning centered classrooms: What does learning theory have to say? George Washington Univ. Washington, DC. Waller, A. (2005). What is feminist pedagogy and how can it be used in CSET education? Retrieved November 27, 2011 from http://fie-conference.org/fie2005/papers/1585.pdf