John Roberts
Biographic Data
| ID | 3594145 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John Roberts |
| GIVEN NAMES | John |
| FAMILY NAME | Roberts |
| SIGNATURE | ROBERTS J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Wolverhampton |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0059-430X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 120 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 332 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 117 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1964 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Socially Engaged Art, Direct Democracy, and Artistic Autonomy
The article analyzes the global context of socially engaged art, through focusing on the critical relationship between the Zapatista and Rojava insurgencies, post-alter globalization politics and socially engaged art in period of unipolar American imperialism, and the planetary consolidation of neoliberalism. In what ways does socially engaged art globally derive its production of modes of direct democracy from the ‘enclave politics’ of the Zapat…
Revolution and Improvement
Introduction
Copyright © The Author(s) 2022. Since its establishment in 1977, Capital and Class has provided a critical space for scholars and activists to explore existing and new forms of socio-political struggles and movements in and against capital. A range of theoretical perspectives have also been employed by Capital and Class authors to make sense of these movements, which, among others, include Open Marxism, social movement theory, critical urban appr…
Ethics of split liver transplantation
Split liver transplantation (SLT) provides an opportunity to divide a donor liver, offering transplants to two small patients (one or both could be a child) rather than keeping it whole and providing a transplant to a single larger adult patient. In this article, we attempt to address the following question that is identified by the Organ Procurement and Transplant Network and United Network for Organ Sharing: ‘Should a large liver always be spli…
What is Radical
What does it mean to think and act radically, and how does this relate to forms of radicalism connected to earlier moments, for example, in the 20th century? What can be the role of radical art and scholarship under the conditions of late capitalism? More generally, how can art and artists serve the ongoing struggle for social justice and the agendas of emancipatory social change? Finally, what kinds of art criticism and art historical scholarshi…
After Moscow Conceptualism
Conceptual art is not only subject to a striking unevenness and a range of diverse forms across national territories during its emergence, but each national-cultural context in which it emerges is also exposed to the general belatedness of conceptual art’s relationship to its own avant-garde past. Each national-cultural formation was working with, and through, very different cultural and historical materials on the basis of very different kinds o…
Personalising screening of sight-threatening diabetic retinopathy - qualitative evidence to inform effective implementation
Implementing variable-interval screening into clinical practice is generally acceptable to PWD and HCP with important caveats, and misconceptions must be addressed. Clear safeguards against increasing non-attendance, loss of diabetes control and alternative referral pathways are required. For risk calculation systems to be safe, reliable monitoring and clear communication is required
A Philosophical Memoir
In this philosophical memoir I trace out the part that Roy Bhaskar's philosophy of science played in the development of a non-reductive account of realism in art and cultural theory in the 1970s and 1980s in the UK, and the part his Dialectic (1993) played in the theorization of the concept of the philistine developed by myself and Dave Beech between 1996 and 1998. Our de-positivization of the concept as a symptomatic negation of the bourgeois ‘a…
Ideation and Photography
In Concept of Non-Photography (2011) and Photo-Fiction (2012), François Laruelle, outlines a theory of photographic abstraction that breaks completely with the debate on realism in photographic theory. Refusing to see photographic representation as involving any concession to resemblance (photographs have more in common with other photographs than with the objects they depict, he declares), he inflates the notion of the photograph as a symbolic e…
Organizational Economics
Organizational economics applies the theoretical and empirical methods of economics to study the nature, roles and performance of organizations, especially managed ones like business firms. In this essay we trace the development of this field, survey the questions it addresses, point to recent work that we find especially germane and offer suggestions for promising future directions.
The ‘subject’ of corruption
The political economy of the image
This article analyses the political economy of the image today, a historical conjuncture in which art contributes its meanings (even its critiques and negations) to a process of socialization through consumption. This analysis is pursued in light of the reception of an idea of the image drawn from a world before capitalism - or certainly on the edge of capitalism and modernity - as found in Novalis's unfinished and posthumous novel Henry von Ofte…
Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment
A rising share of employees now regularly engage in working from home (WFH), but there are concerns this can lead to “shirking from home.” We report the results of a WFH experiment at Ctrip, a 16,000-employee, NASDAQ-listed Chinese travel agency. Call center employees who volunteered to WFH were randomly assigned either to work from home or in the office for nine months. Home working led to a 13% performance increase, of which 9% was from working…
Does Management Matter? Evidence from India
A long-standing question is whether differences in management practices across firms can explain differences in productivity, especially in developing countries where these spreads appear particularly large. To investigate this, we ran a management field experiment on large Indian textile firms. We provided free consulting on management practices to randomly chosen treatment plants and compared their performance to a set of control plants. We fin…
Debate Dialectic and Post-Hegelian Dialectic (Again)
Looking at the emergence recently of a New Hegelianism (Badiou, Bhaskar, Jameson, Žižek), in which Hegel’s dialectic is variously reassessed for its political and philosophical resistance to the prevailing ‘weak nihilisms’ of left and right, I argue with Žižek and Jameson against Badiou and Bhaskar for Hegel as, essentially, a philosopher of the ‘productive return’ and failure. In this sense, what emerges is a picture of Hegel as a profoundly non…
In search of corporate social responsibility
This introduction to the special issue aims to contextualize and critically comment on the current trajectory of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in both scholarly inquiry and business practice. It suggests that we must place it within the milieu of the ongoing economic crisis and the failure of a number of important opportunities to make business ethical (e.g. the 2012 Rio + 20 Earth Summit). It then suggests possible future terrain for ten…
Complementarity in Organizations
Leadership and Corporate Culture
Chance without Credence
It is a standard view that the concept of chance is inextricably related to the technical concept of credence. One influential version of this view is that the chance role is specified by (something in the neighborhood of) David Lewis's Principal Principle, which asserts a certain definite relation between chance and credence. If this view is right, then one cannot coherently affirm that there are chance processes in the physical world while reje…
Solidarity and form
The Handbook of Organizational Economics
In even the most market-oriented economies, most economic transactions occur not in markets but inside managed organizations, particularly business firms. Organizational economics seeks to understand the nature and workings of such organizations and their impact on economic performance. This landmark book assembles the leading figures in organizational economics to present the first comprehensive view of both the current state of research in this…
Agency without Agents
In this chapter I want to use the Buddhist notion of agency without agents to explore the relationship between identity and ethical conduct. At one level the notion of agency without agents seems simply nonsensical; the two terms require and imply each other such that there could not be agency without an agent. Arguably what makes humans capable of ethical conduct – capable of agency rather than mere behaviour – is precisely our awareness of the …
Handbook of Organizational Economics
The Intangibilities of Form
This book looks at the dialectical relationship between skill and deskilling in art after the ‘readymade.’ Focusing on Marcel Duchamp in the first half of the book it challenges the idea that the readymade constitutes an act of anti-art nihilism or is a simple stylistic turn. On the contrary the use of the readymade represents the basis for the transformation of art’s relationship with what Roberts calls “general social technique” (the relationsh…
Philosophizing the everyday
Price and Advertising Signals of Product Quality
We present a signaling model, based on ideas of Phillip Nelson, in which both the introductory price and the level of directly "uninformative" advertising or other dissipative marketing expenditures are choice variables and may be used as signals for the initially unobservable quality of a newly introduced experience good. Repeat purchases play a crucial role in our model. A second focus of the paper is on illustrating an approach to refining the…
Trust and Control in Anglo-American Systems of Corporate Governance
This article reformulates the problem of corporate governance through a shift of analytic focus, away from the problems of securing the interests of remote owners, to an understanding of processes of accountability and their effects, both objective and subjective, within Anglo-American systems of corporate governance. In place of the essentialist assumptions about human nature upon which both agency theorists and their organizational critics buil…
The Boundaries of the Firm Revisited
Both transaction cost-economics and property-rights theories offer explanations of the boundaries of the firm based on ideas of ex post bargaining and holdup. These theories are quite distinct in their empirical predictions, but neither offers a satisfactory account of a large variety of observed practices. The authors discuss a number of such examples, where the boundaries of the firm seem to be determined by factors other than the need to prote…
Ceteris Paribus, There Is No Problem of Provisos
A Puzzle about Laws, Symmetries and Measurability
I describe a problem about the relations among symmetries, laws and measurable quantities. I explain why several ways of trying to solve it will not work, and I sketch a solution that might work. I discuss this problem in the context of Newtonian theories, but it also arises for many other physical theories. The problem is that there are two ways of defining the space-time symmetries of a physical theory: as its dynamical symmetries or as its emp…
The Power of Organization or the Organization of Power
This article presents some of the problems that need to be resolved if organization is to be developed to its full potential. Our central argument is that both management and staff typically act on the basis of a false understanding of the nature of power. Power is typically treated as if it were an individual possession, rather than as a relationship between people. Consequently, managers ignore or attempt to deny their ultimate dependence on st…
Judgment, Oversight, and Skill
Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation John Roberts, Thomas Golder, Garry Chick; Judgment, Oversight, and Skill: A Cultural Analysis of P-3 Pilot Error. Human Organization 1 March 1980; 39 (1): 5–21. doi: https://doi.org/10.17730/humo.39.1.j61232uu788n2410 Download citation fi…
The Simple Economics of Optimal Auctions
The authors show that the seller's problem in devising an optimal auction is virtually identical to the monopolist's problem in third-degree price discrimination. More generally, many of the important results and elegant techniques developed in the field of mechanism design can be reinterpreted in the language of standard microtheory. They illustrate this by considering the problem of bilateral exchange with privately-known values. Copyright 1989…
Expressive Self-Testing in Driving
The automobile is a cultural trait diagnostic of a cultural pattern which is so important and pervasive in contemporary American life that it may well be one of the foci of the total culture. This driving pattern has long merited more anthropological attention than it has received. The exploratory study described here, however, deals only with a limited aspect of the general pattern, namely expressive self-testing in driving, on the basis of a si…
Contact with the Nomic
This the first part of a two-part article in which we defend the thesis of Humean Supervenience about Laws of Nature (HS). According to this thesis, two possible worlds cannot differ on what is a law of nature unless they also differ on the Humean base. the Humean base is easy to characterize intuitively, but there is no consensus on how, precisely, it should be defined. Here in Part I, we present and motivate a characterization of the Humean bas…
Dialogue, Positionality and the Legal Framing of Ethnographic Research
The question of positioning between the research Self and the research Other is a much discussed issue within qualitative research, especially within ethnographic approaches. Yet what is distinctive about many of these accounts is that they begin their respective analyses from a concrete level. In other words, many who champion placing their Self in the research process do so by focusing upon face-to-face encounters between their Self and the Oth…
Mad for it
Owners or traders? Conceptualizations of institutional investors and their relationship with corporate managers
We draw on a series of in-depth interviews with senior managers from institutional investors and large listed corporations to explore how different conceptualizations of institutional investors, their role in the corporate governance process, and their interactions with corporate management, are reflected in the accounts of the actors concerned. We find that the conceptualizations in terms of ownership and agency that dominate both academic and p…
Helping the family’
This article explores the nature and process of non-executive director (NED or non-executive) influence in quoted, familycontrolled firms (FCFs) through two company case studies in Singapore. Existing views of the non-executive role in such firms have been derived from theory, with traditional and ‘new’ agency approaches and resource dependence theory each offering differing prescriptions of the role. The article reviews this literature and sugge…
Lathe Craft
Craftsmanship on the engine lathe in the context of four small western Pennsylvania machine shops is examined in terms of behaviors associated with lathe operation, the technological specialization of machinists, and some cognitive and expressive qualities of parts produced on a lathe. A comparison of the categorizations and rankings of lathe produced parts for samples of machinists and non-machinists indicates that machinists judge parts primari…
Contact with the Nomic
In Part I, we presented and motivated a new formulation of Humean Supervenience about Laws of Nature (HS). Here in Part II, we present an epistemological argument in defense of HS, thus formulated. Our contention is that one can combine a modest realism about laws of nature with a proper recognition of the importance of empirical testability in the epistemology of science only if one accepts HS
Collaboration as a problem of art's cultural form
Collaboration in art is fundamentally a question of cultural form. By this, I mean that the decision to teamwork with other artists and/or with non‐artists directly involves shaping the ways in whi
Buying leisure
Introduction
Copyright © The Author(s) 2022. Since its establishment in 1977, Capital and Class has provided a critical space for scholars and activists to explore existing and new forms of socio-political struggles and movements in and against capital. A range of theoretical perspectives have also been employed by Capital and Class authors to make sense of these movements, which, among others, include Open Marxism, social movement theory, critical urban appr…
Laws of Nature” as an Indexical Term
David Lewis's best-system analysis of laws of nature is perhaps the best known sophisticated regularity theory of laws. Its strengths are widely recognized, even by some of its ablest critics. Yet it suffers from what appears to be a glaring weakness: It seems to grant an arbitrary privilege to the standards of our own scientific culture. I argue that by reformulating, or reinterpreting, Lewis's exposition of the best-system analysis, we arrive a…
Philosophy, culture, image
Jacques Rancire's theory of the sensible is an attempt to frame and secure the relationship between politics and aesthetics, art and design on the same surface. Accordingly, the reconstruction of the sensible appearances of the world of the built environment, of the dcor of the sensible, as Rancire describes it is more than the negation of bourgeois appearances in the name of either a radical aesthetics or a radical politics; it is, rather, the c…
The State, Empire and Imperialism
This article aims to develop a Marxist account to explain the more informal practices of imperialism today. In this respect the article agrees with those Marxists who argue that capitalists and politicians have sought to impose the hegemonic economic project of financial neoliberalism across the globe. However, unlike some Marxist accounts which tend to explore imperialism primarily through socioeconomic relations, this article argues that financ…
Introduction
This article looks at developments in post‐Stalinist communist theory in recent continental political philosophy (Félix Guattari, Jean‐Luc Nancy, Antonio Negri, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek) and the emergence of utopian ‘enclave’ theory and practices (spaces of autonomous cultural resistance) as they relate to new forms of sociability and criticality in contemporary art. As such it connects a discussion of key notions of the ‘new communist’ theo…
African American Belief Narratives and the African Cultural Tradition
In earlier folklore research, the term folk was applied, first, to peasant groups in culturally homogeneous societies of Europe and, later, to minorities in the pluralistic American society. In this paper, I argue that the study of African American folklore has been particularly disadvantaged by this approach because that folklore is the product of a continuous tradition of creative cultural production that began in Africa. To illustrate how it c…
The 'Returns to Religion
The central strength of the Hegelian dialectical tradition is that reason is not divorced from its own internal limits in the name of a reason free from ideological mediation and constraint. This article holds onto this insight in the examination of the recent (and widespread) returns to religious categories in political philosophy and political theory (in particular Agamben, Badiou, Negri and Žižek). In this respect the article follows a two-fol…
Léon Blum
Journal Article Léon Blum: Theorie und Praxis einer sozialistischen Politik. Band I. 1872–1934 and Front Populaire: Révolution manquée Get access Léon Blum: Theorie und Praxis einer sozialistischen Politik. Band I. 1872–1934. By Gilbert Ziebura. Berlin: De Gruyter. 1963. 526 pp. Illus. Maps. Tables. Bibliog. Index. DM 68.Front Populaire: Révolution manquée. Témoignage. By Daniel Guérin. Paris: Julliard. 1963. 320 pp. Illus. 18.50 F. John M. Rober…
Short Notice
Journal Article SHORT NOTICE Get access John M. Roberts John M. Roberts Merlon CollegeOxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume LXXXI, Issue CCCXVIII, January 1966, Pages 201–202, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/LXXXI.CCCXVIII.201 Published: 01 January 1966
Expressive Self-Testing in Driving
The automobile is a cultural trait diagnostic of a cultural pattern which is so important and pervasive in contemporary American life that it may well be one of the foci of the total culture. This driving pattern has long merited more anthropological attention than it has received. The exploratory study described here, however, deals only with a limited aspect of the general pattern, namely expressive self-testing in driving, on the basis of a si…
Teaching behavioural science to medical students in some U.S. medical schools— A report
The natural history of attempted suicide in Bristol
Psychological disorder and training for pastoral care
Engineering consultancy, industrialization and development
Engineering consultancy by specialists in designing and building operational units has become an established and growing feature of the economic scene in industrialized countries. We examine here the place of engineering consultancy in the industrialization of developing countries and more especially the value, to those developing countries which have an industrial base, of mastering some or all of the skills associated with consultancy work; the…
Goldschmiot, Roberts and Voegelin Run for Presidency‐elect
Revolution and improvement
Abbott and Klein Receive 1978 Stirling Award
changes concerning methodology, theory, curriculum and other information essential to wider mutual understanding and fruitful collaboration.Fellows also took part in an ethnographic film workshop at the University of Southern California, which was heid prior to the annual meeting of the Association.The the annual meeting, the Fellows attended sessions of interest and participated in a closing workshop on personnel training in culture policies.The…
Mules and Men
Judgment, Oversight, and Skill
Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation John Roberts, Thomas Golder, Garry Chick; Judgment, Oversight, and Skill: A Cultural Analysis of P-3 Pilot Error. Human Organization 1 March 1980; 39 (1): 5–21. doi: https://doi.org/10.17730/humo.39.1.j61232uu788n2410 Download citation fi…
Predation, reputation, and entry deterrence
Rational cooperation in the finitely repeated prisoners' dilemma
The Power of Organization or the Organization of Power
This article presents some of the problems that need to be resolved if organization is to be developed to its full potential. Our central argument is that both management and staff typically act on the basis of a false understanding of the nature of power. Power is typically treated as if it were an individual possession, rather than as a relationship between people. Consequently, managers ignore or attempt to deny their ultimate dependence on st…
Playing at work
Most of the few investigations of workplace sport in the United Kingdom are either not fully published, or are in theses which are rather inaccessible. The study reported here was commissioned by the English Sports Council and carried out by Terrestrial Environment Studies (TEST). It sought both to widen knowledge of the subject and to see whether sports facilities adjacent to a place of work proved convenient to employees; the employees' satisfa…
Playing With Money
In the UK, the commercial sector in leisure includes firms of all sizes, but is dominated by the multinationals. The commercial sector provides facilities or equipment for most leisure activities. Some of these, for example tourism or going out for a meal or drink, are catered for, solely by the commercial sector. Relationships between this sector and other leisure providers are outlined. The article concludes with a critical look at the type of …
Relying on the Information of Interested Parties
We investigate the conventional wisdom that competition among interested parties attempting to influence a decisionmaker by providing verifiable information elicits all relevant information. We find that, if the decisionmaker is strategically sophisticated and well informed about the relevant variables and about the preferences of the interested party or parties, competition may be unnecessary to achieve this result. If the decisionmaker is unsop…
Price and Advertising Signals of Product Quality
We present a signaling model, based on ideas of Phillip Nelson, in which both the introductory price and the level of directly "uninformative" advertising or other dissipative marketing expenditures are choice variables and may be used as signals for the initially unobservable quality of a newly introduced experience good. Repeat purchases play a crucial role in our model. A second focus of the paper is on illustrating an approach to refining the…
Sonia Boyce
Buying leisure
Barry Gustafson, From the Cradle to the Grave
Barry Gustafson, From the Cradle to the Grave: A biography of Michael Joseph Savage. (Auckland: Reed Methuen, 1986).." Political Science, 39(2), pp. 193–194
Lathe Craft
Craftsmanship on the engine lathe in the context of four small western Pennsylvania machine shops is examined in terms of behaviors associated with lathe operation, the technological specialization of machinists, and some cognitive and expressive qualities of parts produced on a lathe. A comparison of the categorizations and rankings of lathe produced parts for samples of machinists and non-machinists indicates that machinists judge parts primari…
The Simple Economics of Optimal Auctions
The authors show that the seller's problem in devising an optimal auction is virtually identical to the monopolist's problem in third-degree price discrimination. More generally, many of the important results and elegant techniques developed in the field of mechanism design can be reinterpreted in the language of standard microtheory. They illustrate this by considering the problem of bilateral exchange with privately-known values. Copyright 1989…
Rationalizability, Learning, and Equilibrium in Games with Strategic Complementarities
The authors study a rich class of noncooperative games that includes models of oligopoly competition, macroeconomic coordination failures, arms races, bank runs, technology adoption and diffusion, R&D competition, pretrial bargaining, coordination in teams, and many others. For all these games, the sets of pure strategy Nash equilibria, correlated equilibria, and rationalizable strategies have identical bounds. Also, for a class of models of dyna…
Political science (59 works) · Sociology (54 works) · Law (48 works) · Philosophy (39 works) · Art (33 works) · Economics (29 works) · Epistemology (29 works) · Aesthetics (27 works) · Law (26 works) · Politics (25 works)