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Understanding Limerick: Social Exclusion & Change

Edited by Dr. Niamh Hourigan March 2011

Understanding Limerick is an edited collection featuring contributions from leading Irish scholars in the fields of Sociology, Social Policy, Criminology and Urban Geography. Limerick city has some of the most severely disadvantaged neighbourhoods in the Republic of Ireland. The city has also experienced a range of problems in relation to organized crime, gangland feuding and community violence. This collection seeks to explore how profound social exclusion and poverty-related criminality emerged in Limerick city. The success of criminal justice, child protection and Regeneration based responses in tackling these problems is examined. Contributors assess what lessons can be learned from Limerick in terms of broader debates about social exclusion, crime and inequality in Irish society.

Organization in Play

by D.Kavanagh,K.Keohane & C.Kuhling

Play is a foundational concept that animates life, work, creativity and organization; and while play is essential, it also dislodges the very meaning of these terms. Organiazation in Play expores difference meanings, usages and understandings of play to present novel and insightful perspectives on capitalism, management, markets, bureacracy and other organizational phenomena. It traces how early capitalism, with its ethos of austerity and distaste for recreation, has given way to a more ludic version in recent times. At the same time, children - those playmakers supreme - have been, curiously excluded from scholarly conversation about organization. The authors examine this and other paradoxes useding a wide range of sources - from Weber to Sesame Street, from Star Trek to Lacan, from Riverdance to Beckett - that shed light on the capriciosu boundaries between wok and play, rationality an dfollishness, sense and nonsense.

Power, Politics and Pharmaceuticals

ed. Kathy Glavanis Grantham and Orla O'Donovan 2008

Public concerns about the regulation of the pharmaceutical industry have intensified in recent years, not least because of a series of controversies about drugs such as those used in the treatment of depression, arthritis, and AIDS. Paradoxically, these concerns centre on the over-consumption of medicines of dubious benefit in Western societies, and lack of access to essential medicines in the Global South. Central questions that are explored include: what are the implications for health of existing systems of pharmaceutical drug regulation?; and what do existing systems of drug regulation reveal about the power of transnational pharmaceutical corporations to shape regulatory and other policies?

Cosmopolitan Ireland Globalisation and Quality of Life

Ireland is going through a period of unprecedented economic and cultural growth and renewal. These changes are due in part to neoliberal policies that have attracted foreign investment. The globalization of Ireland’s economy has had major social consequences. Living standards are rising quickly. Emigration has reversed. Catholicism has been secularized, laws on divorce and sexuality have been liberalized. Ireland has become an urban society for the first time. But there is stark inequality and social exclusion; epidemics of depression, alcoholism, and obesity; traditional values and community are declining; and there is deep ambivalence towards immigrants. Ireland’s economy is globalized, but is Irish society cosmopolitan? Wealth has increased, but has quality of life improved? The authors explore the developments of the last 15 years, capturing the intensity of the debates that make up the new cosmopolitan multi-cultural Ireland.