Introduction

On reading Philip Selznick's “Sociology and Natural Law” (1961), Philippe Nonet wrote him to ask if he could come from Belgium to UC Berkeley to study with him. He went on to become for a long time his closest collaborator. Nonet (2002, 50) later observed, somewhat Delphically but insightfully, that “those who look to Philip's work for contributions to this or that ‘field’— ‘sociology of organization,’ ‘industrial sociology,’ ‘sociology of law’— will doubtless find something, indeed a great deal, but they will miss all that matters.” This observation, perhaps overheated but in the right direction, resonated with me since I too have long thought that much that was most distinctive and distinguished about Selznick's thought is not well captured within conventional frames or characterizations. I have speculated about what is missed ever since I heard Nonet's remark. I have several candidates but here will focus on matters of sensibility.

In Philip Selznick: Ideals in the World, I claimed that

In the main, in that book and other essays (e.g., Krygier 2002d), I approached these matters indirectly, interstitially, and implicitly, as they appeared in Selznick's treatments of the particular subjects of his published writings. I am here interested in the sensibility that shaped, framed, and infused those works and gave them their distinctive contours and tones.

In a way, this chapter serves, and not only by its placement, as the other bookend to Paul van Seters's introduction, between which the other chapters discuss Selznick's treatment of particular subjects.

In a draft for the preface to The Moral Commonwealth (TMC), Philip Selznick wrote that his book was intended as a “reaffirmation of American pragmatism: to help revive John Dewey's social and moral theory, especially his naturalist view of ethics.” And in correspondence while writing the book, he sometimes used the phrase “my own (Dewey’s) understanding.” This chapter discusses how Dewey figured into Selznick's thinking— and sometimes did not.

Selznick admits that Dewey would not have agreed with everything he says. But they shared a common goal— to infuse the public sphere with the aspirations (and constraints) of the moral life. This included a robust conception of the common good and of what can be achieved through strong institutions. In TMC, specifically, he describes in detail the contours of a person-centered, collaborative, and communal life. That was the instruction he got from Dewey— or the turn he gave to Dewey's humanistic naturalism.

The guiding spirit of Dewey was evident during the year I spent in Berkeley at the Center for the Study of Law and Society, 1972–73. The timing was fortunate, for in that year Selznick drafted and shared the central ideas that set the agenda for the rest of his life. There were three documents, in particular, that he worked up: an extended summary of “Law and Society in Transition,” the Moses lecture on humanism as science, and a prospectus of TMC. They became the focus of our continuing discussion over the next 40 years and set an agenda for me as well.

The Central Question of the Age

Selznick's work is a return to the early years of sociology, when it was conscious of its origins in moral philosophy (Bryson 1932). Sociology in this tradition is a capacious enterprise, addressing large questions about social and political life, “articulating a moral philosophy as an integral part of the natural science of mind, self, and society” (Selznick 1992, 80, original emphasis).

For many participants in this tradition, the central question was: In an intellectual environment dominated by the language and methods of science, does morality any longer have a secure foundation? Or, in Dewey's words, “How is science to be accepted and yet the realm of values to be conserved?

Introduction

In 2002, Philip Selznick gave a lecture in Beijing (Selznick 2005). In that lecture, he revisits the theme of the rule of law, which had retained his attention over the years, and rearticulates core features of his understanding of the rule of law. Crucially, he highlights the notion that the rule of law is an ideal, here explained as “something that we look to as a criterion or standard of good conduct, especially but not exclusively official conduct” (ibid., 30). It is good to note that this is an explanation given to a general audience, since Selznick's concept of ideals is much richer than this (Selznick 1961, 1969; Taekema 2003). In the context of the lecture, it allows him to highlight the dual nature of the rule of law: something that can be seen as a basic fulfilment of institutional criteria to prevent arbitrariness and as something that demands a commitment to realizing larger values such as equality and dignity (Selznick 2005, 32). It is this two-faced conceptualization of the rule of law that is the focus of this chapter.

In the lecture, Selznick discusses this under the heading “Two Concepts of the Rule of Law” (ibid., 30) as the negative and the more positive conception, but there are numerous reasons to doubt whether the idea of two concepts is really an adequate representation. Throughout his work, he uses the combination of basic and more demanding versions of an idea as related and interconnected rather than two separate concepts. In particular, he distinguishes “baseline” and “flourishing” as forms of realization of an ideal. Crucially, he connects the two when he discusses the move to a more demanding rule of law: “In this process there is or should be a dual focus on baselines and flourishings. We hold fast to the vital minimum even as we reach for the more subtle, more elaborated, more problematic ideal” (Selznick 1999, 34, original emphasis). Although this almost sounds like a matter of common sense, in practice it is not so easy to have a “dual focus.”

Introduction

The tale of Philip Selznick's profound influence on organizational theory has been told many times (Blau and Scott [1962] 2003; Scott and Davis 2007; Ansell, Boin, and Farjoun 2015; Hinings and Greenwood 2015). In the conventional telling, his contributions follow a dual trajectory closely tied to his two most-cited works, TVA and the Grass Roots (1949, hereafter TVA), and Leadership in Administration (1957, hereafter Leadership). One trajectory emerged from TVA, inspiring scholars to explore organizations as sites of political struggles among different interest groups vying for control. A second trajectory flowed from Leadership and laid the conceptual foundations for institutional organizational theory. As Scott (2014, 24) notes, “The leading early figure in the institutional analysis of organizations was Philip Selznick.” Contemporary organizational scholars often relegate the first trajectory to “old” institutional analysis while elevating the second as the historical backdrop to “new” institutional analysis in organizations (DiMaggio and Powell 1991; Selznick 1996; Hirsch and Lounsbury 1997; Scott and Davis 2007).

In the first part of this chapter, I sketch Selznick's earliest forays into organizational theory and trace his ideas into TVA and Leadership. The dualtrajectory narrative of Selznick's influence belies an underlying theoretical unity in these books. This unity rests in Selznick's concern with what Krygier (2012, 85) calls the “real practical significance” of the “continuity of means and ends.” In no context is this practical significance more important than in organizational power relations and institutionalization, for the way organizations and their leaders exercise influence is inextricably bound up in the goals they hope to achieve. Selznick (1948, 1949) identified co-optation as a pernicious method through which organizational leaders invite power sharing and cooperation, yet seek to reproduce entrenched power while signaling legitimacy. I build on Selznick's concepts of co-optation and institutionalization to suggest a theoretical framework for studying what I call “institutionalized cooptation.”.Such a framework can facilitate understanding how organizational power is actively reproduced in contemporary democratic, authoritarian, and transitional political contexts.

At first I was planning to stay not more than eight or nine days in London, but, not having enough time to see all the interesting sights in detail, I decided to extend my visit for another couple of days. To force myself to leave on the appointed date, however, I purchased, in advance, a seat in a diligence all the way to Paris. It costs 4 p. st., 8 shill., that is 110 rubles ass. Unbelievably cheap! The price includes everything: the fee for the seat in a diligence in England and in France, the fee for the sea crossing, the fee for vodka, etc., etc. I had to pay only five francs more for extra luggage. My departure was scheduled at ten o’clock in the morning on the 27th of May. I got my things ready and was waiting for this time, I have to confess, without much regret; I saw a lot of interesting, memorable things in London, but my life there was boring, and with the exception of two dinners at Count Pozzo di Borgo's and another three or four quarters of an hour spent with people I knew from Petersburg, I can say that for the rest of the time, I was only a staring machine. The company and conversation with Count Ugarte brought me some pleasure; otherwise, it seems, I would have fled from this great Carthaginian capital on the third day. On the day of my departure, the count said goodbye to me early—very early, according to London time, i.e., at nine o’clock in the morning: he left for the horse race at Ascot. But right before my departure, two of my acquaintances visited me and left in my soul the most pleasant memory of the last minutes of my stay in London. The first of them was Allan, and the other—my good countryman, Nikolai Kuzmich Ivanov, a singer of the local Italian Opera, a graduate of our St. Petersburg Singing Chapel, who had been in my house when he was still a young singer. In foreign lands, he perfected his musical talent and now stands second only to the famous Rubini.

Introduction

Slovenia is a country variously described as part of Central, Eastern or Southern Europe or the Western Balkans, depending on the writer's perspective, ideology or reference book. An EU member state since 2004, it has only been independent since 1991, having previously been part of, among others, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenians (later the Kingdom of Yugoslavia), and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is perhaps understandable that, without a nation state to rely on, Slovenian national awareness and identity have had to rely primarily on the Slovenian language, culture and literature, although their role and actual impact in the nation-building processes have been debated (Dović 2017).

When Slovenian lands were still part of larger state unions, ‘unnatural fornication’ was penalized in accordance with the states’ penal codes. Slovenia's specific development began when – together with some other, but not all, republics of SFR Yugoslavia – it decriminalized sexual acts between men in 1977. The 1930 Penal Code of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia had punished homosexual acts between men and women, whereas Yugoslavia's 1951 Penal Code kept the provision, with an amended penalty, for men only.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked a turning point in the development of LGBTQ+ movements in Eastern Europe, but in Slovenia it had started a little before that – in 1984 with the six-day festival Homosexuality and Culture. Since Slovenia's independence, LGBTQ+ activism has diversified and worked towards greater social and legal inclusion of LGBTQ+ people. The first Ljubljana Pride Parade was organized in 2001 as a protest against a homophobic incident during which the poets Brane Mozetič and Jean-Paul Daoust were denied entry into a café. In terms of LGBTQ+-specific legislation, 2005 saw the introduction of the Civil Partnership Registration Act, granting LGBTQ+ people only a handful of rights, while 2011 brought a new Family Code (same-gender couples were granted all the rights enjoyed by heterosexual couples except for joint adoption and artificial insemination). The Code was rejected by a referendum called for by conservative groups supported by the Catholic Church.

In all the other capitals and large European cities I am familiar with, there is usually a center, that is, the main part—the heart of the city; thus, for example, in Paris, the center comprises all the area from the Tuileries Palace to the Place de l’Etoile; in Berlin—from the royal palace to Friedrich Street; in Hamburg—Jungfernstieg with its environs; in St. Petersburg—the First Admiralty district. In London, there is no such thing: you cannot name one section of the city superior to others; you find several big towns, of different character, merged into one whole. One more thing: in other cities, there is a kind of focal point; here everything is merged into one inorganic mass of heterogeneous objects. Geographies and ancient travel accounts describe London as consisting of three main parts: Westminster, the City, and Southwark; but from those times, it overflowed and swallowed up many surrounding areas, occupied vast wastelands, and developed them into magnificent quarters. Such, for example, is the part of London called Pimlico, stretching to the southwest of St.-James's Park and the new royal palace, situated in what was until recently merely neglected open space. In this area, there are two beautiful garden squares (Belgravia and Eaton) lined with stately homes; the streets are broad; the sidewalks are wide; the air is clean, with few shops, and with less noise than in other parts of London. The streets running to Regent's Park which were laid out about fifteen years ago on a marshy and otherwise unusable space, also seem very pleasant for living; Portland Street, or Portland Place, with a public garden called Park Crescent: everything there is quiet, fresh, clean, and comely. But other neighborhoods are quite a different matter …. I passed one such quarter on the way to the British Museum. Slovenly, poor, barbaric Irish dwell there in filth, stuffiness, congestion, clamor!

The most fashionable part of town is Regent Street, stretching for several versts, like Nevsky Prospekt—from the Admiralty to Znamenye.

Introduction

Through children's books we can fly away, if the story lets us do it, and talk about topics – even controversial ones – that open a door to reflection. If we look back, we will easily find some stories in children's literature that are about being different in a generic way, as in The Ugly Duckling: after feeling different from his brothers, because he is grey and bigger, the ugly duckling realizes that he is actually a gorgeous swan. In this fairy tale, we can see that difference in a homogeneous world usually comes with being rejected by those who do not treat you as an equal. In another way, in Swimmy, the writer and illustrator Leo Lionni also describes difference: its colourful pages tell the story of a little black fish that lives in a community of only little red fish. In this case, the differently coloured fish is the fastest, the bravest and the smartest, skills that will help him to save the whole group. To survive the tuna fish attack, the fish follow the idiom ‘strength in numbers’ and build a big fish shape with little red fish put together; the protagonist, the black one, is the eye. So I will start from here, with the baby duck that becomes a beautiful swan and the brave little fish that is the important eye, in order to think about the LGBTQ+ subject in literature for children, especially in Spanish picturebooks.

In this chapter, I will analyse some issues related to homosexuality, non-traditional family models and gender identity in picturebooks for children produced in Spain in the country's four official languages: Basque, Castilian, Catalan and Galician. I have used a selection of children's picturebooks that are in some way representative within the panorama of LGBTQ+ children's literature in Spain, and I will focus on fiction. For the selection, first I considered that the books described in the chapter should have a minimum standard of literary quality. However, in some cases, as we will see, the value of a book does not depend so much on its literary and/or artistic quality, but rather on the values it represents.

I originally intended to postpone the description of the locale and functions of Parliament and its chambers until the publication of my travel notes in full, but because of curious debates in the English Parliament going on at present due to the king's death, I decided to present my readers with a brief survey of the two most famous legislative estates in Europe. On this occasion, I beg pardon beforehand for some repetitions in my notes: I am writing on the road, almost without any books, without corrections or erasures, writing, so to speak, off the cuff, and do not leave any copies for myself: is it surprising, then, that some thought, some remark, might appear two or three times? Of course, I could have polished these notes considerably at leisure in my study, but then they would lose their distinguishing character—freshness of observation and greater vivacity of narration resulting from it. I wanted to write them in such a way as if I were telling my friends conversationally about what I happened to see. — One more remark: I am not an Anglophile; I read English books and newspapers but do not know English as well as I would like to; I felt quite bored in London and was not sorry to leave it; on the contrary, I know French thoroughly and speak it quite fluently and clearly so that sometimes I am taken for a Frenchman here; I am having a much better time in Paris than in London, and yet I lean towards the Englishmen with my soul and heart, with my logical mind and all fervor of imagination. This nation is worthy of, if not unconditional imitation in the rest of Europe, then the genuine respect of all honest and sensible people.

Both Houses of the English Parliament, the Upper and the Lower (House of Lords and House of Commons), are located in an ancient building on the bank of the Thames, not far from Westminster Bridge, which is separated from Westminster Abbey by a small courtyard.

This book stems from what might seem like a simple question: What sort of LGBTQ+ books for young readers are being written around the world? To develop this initial query further, we wondered how different languages and different cultures approach LGBTQ+ topics, especially in works for children and young adults. We had seen little written about this in English, which is not a surprise given how myopic English-speaking cultures tend to be about literature from other countries (Post suggests that the number of translations to English is holding steady at 2 to 4 per cent (2019, n.p.)), and we felt it was time to rectify this gap in knowledge and to bring a comparative approach to a growing field of study, namely LGBTQ+ children's literature.

As the academic study of children's literature has developed over the past few decades (see, among many other examples, work such as Coats 2017; Hunt 1994, 2005; Lerer 2008; Lurie 1990; Maybin and Watson 2009; Nikolajeva 1996; Nikolajeva and Scott 2006; Nodelman and Reimer 2002; Reynolds 2005, 2007, 2011; Reynolds and Tucker 1998; Rose 1993; and Townsend 1990), more attention has been paid to topics such as the depiction of gender identity and sexuality (for example, Abate and Kidd 2011; Bruhm and Hurley 2004; Cart and Jenkins 2006; Epstein 2013; Flanagan 2008; Gillis and Simpson 2015; James 2009; Jenkins and Cart 2018; and Naidoo 2012). Furthermore, there has been an increased focus on diversity and multicultural literature more generally (Gopalakrishnan 2011; Nel 2017; O’Sullivan 2005; Ramdarshan Bold 2019; Sands-O’Connor 2017); the translation of children's books (Epstein 2012; Lathey 2006, 2010; Oittinen 2000); the roles of authors, illustrators, publishers, editors, translators, librarians, teachers and others in the production and usage of books for children (which is touched on in many of the works already cited here); and the interaction of words and images (Hamer et al. 2017; Kummerling-Meibauer 2018; Nodelman 1988), among many other issues relevant to the discussions in this book.

Today, on July 3rd, I traveled to the eastern part of London to see the Tower fortress, the underwater tunnel, and to take a ride on the railway from London Bridge to Deptford.

The Tower, the London fortress built by William the Conqueror in the 11th century, is located on the bank of the Thames, at the edge of the City, and is separated from the other parts of London by a rather wide moat. The fortress is surrounded by multiple buildings, and inside, the grounds are built up with so many structures that it could not be defended if attacked; but all the regulations for fortifications are sacredly performed in it: in the evening at sunset, the gates are locked, and a yeoman warder sergeant passes the keys to the commandant until the next morning. During the day, the entrance into the fortress is open to the public. The warders, or stewards, dressed in red tunics on which the royal crown and coat of arms are embroidered in gold and in multicolored silks, take the curious sightseers to all the wards of the fortress for a fixed fee. Some travelers find it improper to have to pay a fee to visit a certain building, monument, etc., but I find it very convenient: I know in advance how much I need to pay, will not spend more than necessary, will not offend my guide in giving him, by ignorance, less than he should receive. I paid five shillings and was able to see everything I wanted.

On the grounds of the fortress, as I have already said, there are some secondary structures: the most notable and the oldest, the White Tower, built in 1070, sits in the middle; it is irregularly shaped and supplied with four corner towers. We entered into the fortress through the ancient, black, crumbling Traitors’ Gate: the gate got its name because state prisoners were brought through it. Inside the gate, we were shown the Bloody Tower, in which the children of Edward IV were slain by the order of Richard III. — Rare is the history of a country that presents (almost until the accession to the throne of the reigning House of Hanover) so many scenes of horror, bloodshed, and atrocity as the English one.