Images of regulation: Travel agent legislation and the deregulation debate

During the last two years travel agents have changed from being relatively unregulated (outside New South Wales) to regulated in terms of licensing and compensation fund membership requirements. Why has this happened during a period when political debate has centred on deregulation? It is a premise of this paper that arguments in favour of deregulation rest on an image of the State as a prison for private entre‐preneurship; and arguments in favour of regulation rest on an image of the State as a protector of the consumer and public interest Both images are superficial and belie the nature of State‐capital‐consumer relationships and ideologies. Underlying each are rationalist assumptions which suggest that the State and industry are static, ahistorical objects; that governments have unambiguous intentions; and that regulation and deregulation are always successful. Each of these assumptions is questioned. By focusing on a history of travel agency regulations, this paper endeavours to uncover that which these images obscure in the deregulation debate.     

DOMESTICATING POSTMODERNISM

This paper proceeds in three steps. First, it gives more focus and rigor to the geographic reception of "postmodernism," through an investigation of the problem of representation as it has evolved from Kant through de Saussure and Wittgenstein to Derrida. Second, it arranges historical materialist encounters with the problem of representation along a spectrum of increasing seriousness leading from Palmer through Jameson to Adorno. Third, the various geographic responses to and avoidances of the key issues involved in postmodernism are read against the backdrop of possible seriousness opened up by the first two sections of the paper. The essay concludes by considering implications, for both social science and politics, not limited to questions about the possibility of disciplinary legitimacy.     

Theorising the anti-nation: George Woodcock,anarchism, and Canadian nationalism

George Woodcock was anarchism's most influential historian and an important public intellectual in Canada. This article focuses on his engagement with Canadian nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that a ‘philosophical anarchism’ was at the heart of his intellectual project, and this informed his reading of Canadian cultural development and subsequent political challenge to Pierre Elliott Trudeau's civic nationalism. Woodcock decoupled the concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘state’ in order to develop a radically different model for Canada—the ‘anti-nation’—defined by regionalism, federalism and direct democracy. His reading of Canada's cultural history supporting this position was therefore part of a strategy to repurpose nationalist rhetoric towards anti-state ends.