Failure of Leadership Case Study: The Donkeys and For the Sake of Example

This is an article which explores catastrophic failures of leadership and error in the history of the armed forces.  I draw together verbatim quotations from Alan Clark’s book ‘The Donkeys’, and Anthony Babington’s ‘Capital Courts Martial 1914-18, The Truth’.  Alan Clark was a British Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) and Anthony Babington was a former circuit judge. Whilst these esteemed critiques were authored into military history, they offer vital understandings and insights into the failures we are seeing in civilian life. Read more…

Mad Studies: The Identitarian Problem

This piece of work although situated in the context of Mad Studies as an academic discipline, is part of work which extends beyond the boundaries of Mad Studies in all directions. These notes are partly a way of talking through various fragments and ideas in order to organise and coordinate a larger study which intersects class, community, gender culture and identity; it is work which is coordinated in a study I am calling ‘Sub-legal Violence’ as a working title. Read more…

Action Research: Critical Evaluation of Superstructures

This is the final installment of the first phase of an action research project interrogating the activities of administrative structures (like the Outcomes Star) in the lives of people who lack agency in the UK cultural context.  As a project it has triggered an investigation of administrative systems with a particular view to asking what a healthy bureaucracy looks like, and also what do the deadweight costs of dysfunctional bureaucracy look like. Read more…