Search

To be legitimate, research needs to be ethical, methodologically sound, of sufficient value to justify public expenditure and be transparent. Animal research has always been contested on ethical grounds, but there is now mounting evidence of poor scientific method, and growing doubts about its clinical value. So what of transparency? Here we examine the increasing focus on openness within animal research in the UK, analysing recent developments within the Home Office and within the main group representing the interests of the sector, Understanding Animal Research. We argue that, while important steps are being taken toward greater transparency, the legitimacy of animal research continues to be undermined by selective openness. We propose that openness could be increased through public involvement, and that this would bring about much needed improvements in animal research, as it has done in clinical research.

This paper presents a critical assessment of current initiatives to deepen democracy and seeks to examine why they often fail. By analysing their various, and conflicting, conceptions of participation and associational life, it argues that many of the difficulties they encounter can be attributed to a usually unexamined set of organisational assumptions. These assumptions are then inspected in order to analyse the breakdown of communication that can occur between incumbent social engineers trying to institutionalize more democracy, and those more critical and grassroots initiatives which emanate from the periphery of power. With this distinction in view, a series of recurrent problems around the institutionalization of democratic processes are investigated. Finally, the paper explores the implications of the distinction for how we can aid and deepen democracy more effectively.

This paper inspects our understanding of recent organizational innovations taking place at the margins of radical theory and practice. Its central argument is that political science, in its reaction to such innovations, evinces a hierarchical organizational paradigm that both distorts evidence and hampers further research. The paper then explores the nature of this perceptual failure, tries a variety of conceptual resources which might overcome it and concludes with a re-assessment of the organizational innovations themselves.

Analyse des arguments normatifs et anti-normatifs developpes par les nouvelles theories discursives de la democratie en vue de justifier l'interaction comme une source de la legitimite democratique. L'A. montre que les theories discursives de la democratie n'echappent pas a l'utopisme et qu'elles souffrent de deficience concernant le statut theorique des participants a la deliberation

This paper introduces the critical theory of Jürgen Habermas by presenting it as a response to the problems of relativism. While relativism offers a critique of power abuse, it has the additional effect of undermining the use of reason in political and moral action. Habermas seeks to preserve its strengths, and at the same time to defend a role for reason. Following an exploration of the gains offered by his approach, it is suggested that, though his treatment for relativism is effective, it too has a side-effect.