faulker031

Among the spate of movies inspired by the ongoing financial crisis, ‘The City Below’ (German: ‘Unter dir die Stadt’ ) is definitely one exceptional voice. While many of those – think ‘ Too big to fail ’ or ‘ Margin Call ’ - provide us with a tension filled account of the inner workings of events that led to the crash of banks and markets in 2008 this movie is anything but a thriller. Technically it is a romance, but it is essentially a portrait of the ‘sociotop’ which is the world of the ‘one percent’, the top echelons of a global bank in Germany’s banking capital Frankfurt. As such the movie – rather than adding to feelings of anger, rage and disgust about greedy bankers – provides us, as it were, with a clinical diagnosis of the de-humanized, de-emotionalized and fake rational world which steers our contemporary version of capitalism. We enter a world actually devoid of glamour or anything to aspire to – and the film leaves us wondering whether the working life of the ‘one percent’ a...

Following on from the earlier guest post f rom our York colleague Dawn Bazely regarding the Globe and Mail plagiarism case, we asked Dawn to tie up the loose ends by identifying some of the positives that have emerged from the whole affair. This is what she has to say.... ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- There was a lot of learning to be had from following the Margaret Wente story last week. All in all, last week was important if you have ever written an assignment (e.g. essay or laboratory report), or have taught any form of writing or have read a newspapers or magazine. This covers pretty much most of the Canadian population! Questions were raised by mainstream journalists, bloggers and hundreds of the readers of online stories, about whether Wente was guilty of plagiarism, and the behaviour of a number of Globe and Mail staff in responding to this allegation. These stories came out in publications that included Maclea...

After our recent discussion of IKEA's role as a public institution  it was interesting to see this week that the company has been in hot water over the last few days after revelations that it removed images of women in its Saudi Arabia catalogue . The evidence, on the face of it, is pretty damning. As you can see in the pictures here , it really is a case of disappearing women. No doubt about it. There is a feel of something ethically troubling here, with critics arguing that   IKEA should be upholding its values of equality. The Swedish trade ministerhas kicked in by criticising the company while IKEA itself has offered an apology, saying that the practice is "in conflict with company values" . The question we have to ask though is whether IKEA really is doing anything much wrong here? After all, isn't it up to them what pictures they want to put in their own catalogues? And don't they have a responsibility to meet local cultural norms as long as no ones f...