Is there a cannibal in organization studies? Notes on anthropophagy and organization (Recipe included)

This article draws out cannibals and cannibalism to elaborate issues of boundaries and consumption in theorizing organization. The logic(s) of cannibalism highlight some of organization’s inherent tensions, stimulating our understanding via the manifold movements of the cannibal. In a moment of reflection—the negotiation of who should and who should not be consumed—the cannibal appears, a figure at the precise point of passage between the organized and primordial chaos, chronologically hybrid, an affecting shadow in a melancholy economy.     

Regression models for binary longitudinal responses

Some conditional models to deal with binary longitudinal responses are proposed, extending random effects models to include serial dependence of Markovian form, and hence allowing for quite general association structures between repeated observations recorded on the same individual. The presence of both these components implies a form of dependence between them, and so a complicated expression for the resulting likelihood. To handle this problem, we introduce, as a first instance, what Follmann and Wu (1995) called, in a different setting, an approximate conditional model, which represents an optimal choice for the general framework of categorical longitudinal responses. Then we define two more formally correct models for the binary case, with no assumption about the distribution of the random effect. All of the discussed models are estimated by means of an EM algorithm for nonparametric maximum likelihood. The algorithm, an adaptation of that used by Aitkin (1996) for the analysis of overdispersed generalized linear models, is initially derived as a form of Gaussian quadrature, and then extended to a completely unknown mixing distribution. A large scale simulation work is described to explore the behaviour of the proposed approaches in a number of different situations.     

Political Economy,Social Movements and State Power: A Marxian Perspective on Two Decades of Resistance to the Narmada Dam Projects*

Abstract In this article, I put forward a Marxian analysis of the conflict over dam-building on the Narmada River in central and western India, which seeks to bring out how in this specific conflict it is possible to discern the workings of the master change processes that have moulded the Indian trajectory of postcolonial capitalist development. I start by showing how the concrete case of dispossession in the Narmada Valley is expressive of how the development strategies that defined the postcolonial nation-building project have been moulded in such a way as to create a de facto transfer of productive resources to the country's dominant proprietary classes. I then move on to argue that these features of the political economy of India's postcolonial development project can be understood as the sediment of struggles between social movements from above and below in the decades immediately prior to Independence. Arguing that the postcolonial development project has unravelled, I outline the fundamentals of an analysis of the characteristics of social movements from below in the conflictual field of force which is emerging in its wake. Finally, I draw on the trajectory of resistance to dam-building on the Narmada to articulate a series of reflections on the nature of state power in India and the possibilities that might exist for the state to function as an enabling space for the struggles of subaltern social groups.