Geoff Lightfoot
Biographic Data
| ID | 3975980 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Geoff Lightfoot |
| GIVEN NAMES | Geoff |
| FAMILY NAME | Lightfoot |
| SIGNATURE | LIGHTFOOT G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Leicester |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 28 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 22 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Bernard Stiegler and the necessity of education is the hammer broken and so what
There has been an excellent series of formative articles centring on Bernard Stiegler (1952-2020) as an inspiration to pedagogical thought; this is a summative article written from the perspective of after his death. Stiegler argued that education is ontologically crucial to human development, wherein technics or the ‘not-experienced-condition(s)-necessary-for-experience’ are crucial to humanity’s ability to create its own existence. Technics mak…
Are we living in a time of particularly rapid social change? And how might we know
In an editorial for this journal a decade ago, then-Editor-in-Chief Fred Phillips asserted that social change was proceeding at hyper-speed and, moreover, that it had consequently come to outpace technological change. This paper submits these claims to empirical assay. In so doing, we address the myriad problems attendant upon determining and interpreting the sort of data that might support us in our cause. Notwithstanding the innumerable caveats…
Using derivative logic to speculate on the future of the social investment market
This article pries open the black box of the social impact bond (SIB), the novel financial instrument at the heart of social investment. We discover that concrete information is currently limited and our method is thus more speculative. We address the obfuscation of the nomenclature of the instrument and explore the mechanics of SIBs to suggest that they are not simple bonds but rather also bear properties akin to those associated with derivative…
Organising destruction
In this article, we attempt to better understand war’s preponderance by exploring its relation to something we commonly see as ever present: the economy and the institutions of finance through which it is enacted. We delineate histories of warfare and finance, rendering our present as one of ‘war amongst the people’, in Rupert Smith’s words, in which finance is exemplified by the logic of the derivative. Through detailed examination of an infamou…
Comparative Study of the Non-Profit Sectors of Pakistan and India
This is a theoretical paper that has analysed more than 55 publications to draw comparison between Pakistan and India non-profit sectors. The two countries share their history under British rule before 1947 partition. Before the partition the non-profit sector saw a rise under different religious umbrellas, however after the partition the sectors saw a rise in nonreligious, non-political organizations in both countries. The paper draws the simila…
Information Asymmetry and Power in a Surveillance Society
Finance past, finance future
As we work our way through the latest financial crisis, politicians seem both powerless to act convincingly and unable to craft from the welter of diverse and antagonistic narratives a coherent and convincing vision of the future. In this article, we argue that a temporal lens brings clarity to such confusion, and that thinking in terms of time and reflecting on privileged temporal structures helps to highlight underlying assumptions and distingu…
The Embodiment of Neoliberalism
How has neoliberalism achieved its sway? We address this question by tracing an alternative history of the economic theorization of 'entrepreneurship' that reveals the extent to which sociological transformation is attendant upon the construction, dissemination and change of the concepts of economy. Surveying the theoretical works of luminaries such as Kirzner, Mises and Simmel and reading them alongside ethnographies of the practices that instan…
Publisher, be damned! From price gouging to the open road
All four authors are members of the Leicester school of critical management and have previously written together on academic publishing. David Harvie lectures in finance and is interested in ethical issues related to this and other matters. He is a member of The Free Association writing collective. Geoff Lightfoot lectures in entrepreneurship and has particular interests in the ideology of markets and critical accounting. Simon Lilley works on in…
Trading Belief
The question of what is it that traders actually do seems endlessly present in the emerging sociology of finance. For Hardie (2004, p. 251), joining, clarifying and critiquing Shleifer, the question is important but misplaced. Misplaced because it distracts attention onto particular types involved in financial markets to the detriment of a more general analysis of ‘what investors actually think and do’ (Shleifer, 2000, p. 183; our emphasis). For …
What are we to do with feral publishers
This article examines the profits and practices of commercial journal publishers and argues for an appropriate response from the academic community
The man in the black hat
A century after the American Frontier was closed, the cowboy remains an iconic figure. A sturdy individualism, a steely disregard for convention and the bravery to do what’s gotta be done: these are powerful tropes that seemingly define a particular type of heroism. One that seems ageless despite the disappearance of the border environment in which the fictive cowboy operated. Our aim in this paper is to explore the mythology of the cowboy as dep…
The glass beads of global war
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to subject the short lived “Policy Analysis Market” (PAM) – “a Pentagon betting market on terror attacks” – and media and academic reactions to it, to some critical analysis. Design/methodology/approach The paper engages sustained invocation of the relationship between simulation and representation, for the story of the Policy Analysis Market (PAM) and its demise is replete with the tension between the two. It…
The ideology of markets and the practice of policy
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to briefly explore some recent curious interlocking of the ideology of markets and the practice of policy. Design/methodology/approach This particular discursive combine has most visibly been apparent in the concatenated birth and death of the US Defense Department's so‐called “Policy Analysis Market” (PAM). Yet PAM is but the most notorious example of a more sustained and pervasive attempt to use the technolo…
Running to Stand Still
That we live in a time of unprecedented and ever-increasing change is both a shibboleth of our age and the more-or-less explicit justification for all manner of “strategic” actions. The seldom, if ever, questioned assumption is that our now is more ephemeral, more evanescent, than any that preceded it. In this essay, we subject this assumption to some critical scrutiny, utilizing a range of empirical detail. In the face of this assay we find the …
Trading Narratives
This paper is not particularly about trade in goods, nor specifically about trade in the different forms of money that allow us to purchase those goods. Rather, it examines trade in those derivatives of goods and money that attract and enable the activities of three types of traders: hedgers, speculators and arbitrageurs. And it is in these traders themselves that the paper shows greatest interest. Hedgers apparently use derivatives markets to av…
A Parable of Parodies
Stages of busi(-)ness and identity
This article explores how space gets mobilised in the performance of “family business”. The very concept of the “family business” collapses some deeply entrenched distinctions in Western modern societies, those between home and work, private and public, family life and business rationality, distinctions that are mapped over space through the creation of boundaries between work space and family space, home and office. The “family business”, especi…
Science Fiction and Organization
Organising (Writing) in Our Post-Industrial Society'Imaginations of the future, like imaginations of the past, are devices for living in the present (March, 1995, p.427).' 'I don't accept the judgement that in using images and metaphors of other worlds, space travel, the future, imagined technologies, societies, or beings, science fiction escapes from having human relevance to our lives.Those images and metaphors used by a serious writer are imag…
Moments, Monuments and Explication
The construction of the Millennium Dome near the origin of Greenwich, at a cost of something in the order of one billion pounds to the British taxpayer, 1 see, for example, Nick Mathiason 'Downturn hits Dome sale,' The Observer , Sunday October 21, 2001. provides an excellent, if somewhat expensive, opportunity to reconsider the interrelations of time and space. For the Dome seeks to monumentalise and celebrate a moment of time as it simultaneous…
Writing Utopia
Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept tr…
Organizational and individual identities in transition
It is wisely recognised that the sector of small and medium enterprises is, at present, the only source of new jobs [in Romania] ... However, to focus upon SMEs solely as a means for absorbing excess unemployment is grossly to understate their role in the economy and the society. SMEs help to foster a culture of competitiveness based on higher flexibility and productivity. From a wider point of view, SMEs promote change in both the organisational…
Amazing Tales
TEST 02 - Elsevier's Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Search and access research from the science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts and humanities fields
Science Fiction and Organization
Organising (Writing) in Our Post-Industrial Society'Imaginations of the future, like imaginations of the past, are devices for living in the present (March, 1995, p.427).' 'I don't accept the judgement that in using images and metaphors of other worlds, space travel, the future, imagined technologies, societies, or beings, science fiction escapes from having human relevance to our lives.Those images and metaphors used by a serious writer are imag…
Using derivative logic to speculate on the future of the social investment market
This article pries open the black box of the social impact bond (SIB), the novel financial instrument at the heart of social investment. We discover that concrete information is currently limited and our method is thus more speculative. We address the obfuscation of the nomenclature of the instrument and explore the mechanics of SIBs to suggest that they are not simple bonds but rather also bear properties akin to those associated with derivative…
The Embodiment of Neoliberalism
How has neoliberalism achieved its sway? We address this question by tracing an alternative history of the economic theorization of 'entrepreneurship' that reveals the extent to which sociological transformation is attendant upon the construction, dissemination and change of the concepts of economy. Surveying the theoretical works of luminaries such as Kirzner, Mises and Simmel and reading them alongside ethnographies of the practices that instan…
Running to Stand Still
That we live in a time of unprecedented and ever-increasing change is both a shibboleth of our age and the more-or-less explicit justification for all manner of “strategic” actions. The seldom, if ever, questioned assumption is that our now is more ephemeral, more evanescent, than any that preceded it. In this essay, we subject this assumption to some critical scrutiny, utilizing a range of empirical detail. In the face of this assay we find the …
Organizational and individual identities in transition
It is wisely recognised that the sector of small and medium enterprises is, at present, the only source of new jobs [in Romania] ... However, to focus upon SMEs solely as a means for absorbing excess unemployment is grossly to understate their role in the economy and the society. SMEs help to foster a culture of competitiveness based on higher flexibility and productivity. From a wider point of view, SMEs promote change in both the organisational…
Bernard Stiegler and the necessity of education is the hammer broken and so what
There has been an excellent series of formative articles centring on Bernard Stiegler (1952-2020) as an inspiration to pedagogical thought; this is a summative article written from the perspective of after his death. Stiegler argued that education is ontologically crucial to human development, wherein technics or the ‘not-experienced-condition(s)-necessary-for-experience’ are crucial to humanity’s ability to create its own existence. Technics mak…
Comparative Study of the Non-Profit Sectors of Pakistan and India
This is a theoretical paper that has analysed more than 55 publications to draw comparison between Pakistan and India non-profit sectors. The two countries share their history under British rule before 1947 partition. Before the partition the non-profit sector saw a rise under different religious umbrellas, however after the partition the sectors saw a rise in nonreligious, non-political organizations in both countries. The paper draws the simila…
Finance past, finance future
As we work our way through the latest financial crisis, politicians seem both powerless to act convincingly and unable to craft from the welter of diverse and antagonistic narratives a coherent and convincing vision of the future. In this article, we argue that a temporal lens brings clarity to such confusion, and that thinking in terms of time and reflecting on privileged temporal structures helps to highlight underlying assumptions and distingu…
The man in the black hat
A century after the American Frontier was closed, the cowboy remains an iconic figure. A sturdy individualism, a steely disregard for convention and the bravery to do what’s gotta be done: these are powerful tropes that seemingly define a particular type of heroism. One that seems ageless despite the disappearance of the border environment in which the fictive cowboy operated. Our aim in this paper is to explore the mythology of the cowboy as dep…
Moments, Monuments and Explication
The construction of the Millennium Dome near the origin of Greenwich, at a cost of something in the order of one billion pounds to the British taxpayer, 1 see, for example, Nick Mathiason 'Downturn hits Dome sale,' The Observer , Sunday October 21, 2001. provides an excellent, if somewhat expensive, opportunity to reconsider the interrelations of time and space. For the Dome seeks to monumentalise and celebrate a moment of time as it simultaneous…
Writing Utopia
Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept tr…
Amazing Tales
TEST 02 - Elsevier's Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Search and access research from the science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts and humanities fields
Organizational and individual identities in transition
It is wisely recognised that the sector of small and medium enterprises is, at present, the only source of new jobs [in Romania] ... However, to focus upon SMEs solely as a means for absorbing excess unemployment is grossly to understate their role in the economy and the society. SMEs help to foster a culture of competitiveness based on higher flexibility and productivity. From a wider point of view, SMEs promote change in both the organisational…
Moments, Monuments and Explication
The construction of the Millennium Dome near the origin of Greenwich, at a cost of something in the order of one billion pounds to the British taxpayer, 1 see, for example, Nick Mathiason 'Downturn hits Dome sale,' The Observer , Sunday October 21, 2001. provides an excellent, if somewhat expensive, opportunity to reconsider the interrelations of time and space. For the Dome seeks to monumentalise and celebrate a moment of time as it simultaneous…
Writing Utopia
Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept tr…
Stages of busi(-)ness and identity
This article explores how space gets mobilised in the performance of “family business”. The very concept of the “family business” collapses some deeply entrenched distinctions in Western modern societies, those between home and work, private and public, family life and business rationality, distinctions that are mapped over space through the creation of boundaries between work space and family space, home and office. The “family business”, especi…
Science Fiction and Organization
Organising (Writing) in Our Post-Industrial Society'Imaginations of the future, like imaginations of the past, are devices for living in the present (March, 1995, p.427).' 'I don't accept the judgement that in using images and metaphors of other worlds, space travel, the future, imagined technologies, societies, or beings, science fiction escapes from having human relevance to our lives.Those images and metaphors used by a serious writer are imag…
Trading Narratives
This paper is not particularly about trade in goods, nor specifically about trade in the different forms of money that allow us to purchase those goods. Rather, it examines trade in those derivatives of goods and money that attract and enable the activities of three types of traders: hedgers, speculators and arbitrageurs. And it is in these traders themselves that the paper shows greatest interest. Hedgers apparently use derivatives markets to av…
A Parable of Parodies
The glass beads of global war
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to subject the short lived “Policy Analysis Market” (PAM) – “a Pentagon betting market on terror attacks” – and media and academic reactions to it, to some critical analysis. Design/methodology/approach The paper engages sustained invocation of the relationship between simulation and representation, for the story of the Policy Analysis Market (PAM) and its demise is replete with the tension between the two. It…
The ideology of markets and the practice of policy
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to briefly explore some recent curious interlocking of the ideology of markets and the practice of policy. Design/methodology/approach This particular discursive combine has most visibly been apparent in the concatenated birth and death of the US Defense Department's so‐called “Policy Analysis Market” (PAM). Yet PAM is but the most notorious example of a more sustained and pervasive attempt to use the technolo…
Running to Stand Still
That we live in a time of unprecedented and ever-increasing change is both a shibboleth of our age and the more-or-less explicit justification for all manner of “strategic” actions. The seldom, if ever, questioned assumption is that our now is more ephemeral, more evanescent, than any that preceded it. In this essay, we subject this assumption to some critical scrutiny, utilizing a range of empirical detail. In the face of this assay we find the …
The man in the black hat
A century after the American Frontier was closed, the cowboy remains an iconic figure. A sturdy individualism, a steely disregard for convention and the bravery to do what’s gotta be done: these are powerful tropes that seemingly define a particular type of heroism. One that seems ageless despite the disappearance of the border environment in which the fictive cowboy operated. Our aim in this paper is to explore the mythology of the cowboy as dep…
Trading Belief
The question of what is it that traders actually do seems endlessly present in the emerging sociology of finance. For Hardie (2004, p. 251), joining, clarifying and critiquing Shleifer, the question is important but misplaced. Misplaced because it distracts attention onto particular types involved in financial markets to the detriment of a more general analysis of ‘what investors actually think and do’ (Shleifer, 2000, p. 183; our emphasis). For …
What are we to do with feral publishers
This article examines the profits and practices of commercial journal publishers and argues for an appropriate response from the academic community
Publisher, be damned! From price gouging to the open road
All four authors are members of the Leicester school of critical management and have previously written together on academic publishing. David Harvie lectures in finance and is interested in ethical issues related to this and other matters. He is a member of The Free Association writing collective. Geoff Lightfoot lectures in entrepreneurship and has particular interests in the ideology of markets and critical accounting. Simon Lilley works on in…
Information Asymmetry and Power in a Surveillance Society
Finance past, finance future
As we work our way through the latest financial crisis, politicians seem both powerless to act convincingly and unable to craft from the welter of diverse and antagonistic narratives a coherent and convincing vision of the future. In this article, we argue that a temporal lens brings clarity to such confusion, and that thinking in terms of time and reflecting on privileged temporal structures helps to highlight underlying assumptions and distingu…
The Embodiment of Neoliberalism
How has neoliberalism achieved its sway? We address this question by tracing an alternative history of the economic theorization of 'entrepreneurship' that reveals the extent to which sociological transformation is attendant upon the construction, dissemination and change of the concepts of economy. Surveying the theoretical works of luminaries such as Kirzner, Mises and Simmel and reading them alongside ethnographies of the practices that instan…
Organising destruction
In this article, we attempt to better understand war’s preponderance by exploring its relation to something we commonly see as ever present: the economy and the institutions of finance through which it is enacted. We delineate histories of warfare and finance, rendering our present as one of ‘war amongst the people’, in Rupert Smith’s words, in which finance is exemplified by the logic of the derivative. Through detailed examination of an infamou…
Comparative Study of the Non-Profit Sectors of Pakistan and India
This is a theoretical paper that has analysed more than 55 publications to draw comparison between Pakistan and India non-profit sectors. The two countries share their history under British rule before 1947 partition. Before the partition the non-profit sector saw a rise under different religious umbrellas, however after the partition the sectors saw a rise in nonreligious, non-political organizations in both countries. The paper draws the simila…
Using derivative logic to speculate on the future of the social investment market
This article pries open the black box of the social impact bond (SIB), the novel financial instrument at the heart of social investment. We discover that concrete information is currently limited and our method is thus more speculative. We address the obfuscation of the nomenclature of the instrument and explore the mechanics of SIBs to suggest that they are not simple bonds but rather also bear properties akin to those associated with derivative…
Are we living in a time of particularly rapid social change? And how might we know
In an editorial for this journal a decade ago, then-Editor-in-Chief Fred Phillips asserted that social change was proceeding at hyper-speed and, moreover, that it had consequently come to outpace technological change. This paper submits these claims to empirical assay. In so doing, we address the myriad problems attendant upon determining and interpreting the sort of data that might support us in our cause. Notwithstanding the innumerable caveats…
Bernard Stiegler and the necessity of education is the hammer broken and so what
There has been an excellent series of formative articles centring on Bernard Stiegler (1952-2020) as an inspiration to pedagogical thought; this is a summative article written from the perspective of after his death. Stiegler argued that education is ontologically crucial to human development, wherein technics or the ‘not-experienced-condition(s)-necessary-for-experience’ are crucial to humanity’s ability to create its own existence. Technics mak…
Sociology (17 works) · Political science (16 works) · Economics (14 works) · Law (14 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Aesthetics (6 works)