In the late 2000s, campaigns arose in the Netherlands and the United States advocating for the legal residency of immigrant youths with precarious legal status. In spite of differences between the campaigns, advocates argued that youths possessed certain cultural attributes and that these attributes made them deserving of permanent residency status. These two campaigns had very different histories, were made up of very different stakeholders, and drew upon different action repertoires to assert claims. Yet they both centered on immigrant youth, and they both stressed that the possession of specific cultural attributes made this subgroup uniquely deserving of exceptional consideration by the public and government authorities. The aim of this article is to highlight and explain similarities in discursive strategies across seemingly different national contexts. We suggest that the similarities in mobilizing strategies reflect responses to increasingly similar "rules of the game" in national citizenship regimes, whereby culture has become an increasingly effective lever in pressing the claims of certain subgroups of undocumented immigrants.
This article explores the competing policy imperatives within and between tiers of government and policy makers’ perceptions of the relative "deservingness" of undocumented children, which contribute to an uneven geography of entitlements to public services across the European Union. While scholars have contrasted the formal exclusion of undocumented migrants with their informal inclusion, the article explores the tension between formal exclusion and formal inclusion: where the state, through granting legal entitlements to services, contradicts the logic of its own enforcement paradigm. The analysis presents the findings of a comprehensive mapping of entitlements to health care and education for undocumented children across the European Union’s 28 member states and draws on interviews with policy makers across 14 member states to explore the justification for entitlements granted at national and substate levels. It finds that competing policy imperatives are most acute in relation to children where the logic of immigration control faces competing social and humanitarian imperatives within the national administration and in regional and municipal tiers of government. That tension reflects the social construction of undocumented children as both "illegal" and vulnerable, negative perceptions among policy makers of the deservingness of undocumented migrants countered, to a degree, by positive perceptions of the deservingness of children.
Each year, approximately 1,500 youth migrate alone and clandestinely from China to the United States. If apprehended and placed in removal proceedings, these individuals and their legal advocates often prioritize specific narratives of family and age to qualify for legal relief. Such narratives are not new, of course. Shaped and arguably demanded by the law and broader ideologies of race, childhood, and citizenship, in many ways these accounts reflect both the intent and the constraints of an earlier subset of migrants, the Chinese "paper sons" who purchased family stories and identity papers to circumvent the Chinese Exclusion Act. Yet, as this article demonstrates, a meaningful divergence exists—one chiefly dependent on contemporary migrants’ status as "children." For Chinese youth designated Unaccompanied Alien Children, establishing the vulnerability worthy of protection largely relies on a complex tale of cultural obligation and coercive, exploitative parents. As a result, instead of selecting one family over another as a century ago, today a specific and considerably more damaging image of the migrant’s family is put forth. Moving between the "paper sons" at the start of the 20th century and those daughters and sons at the end, this article critically explores the role that relatedness, either fictitious or filtered, plays in establishing legal relief in the United States. It likewise examines the unsettling of valued ties that occurs when actual, intimate relationships are silenced or diminished in the process.
This study examines the ways in which liminally legal young immigrants respond to shifting policies that either legitimize or delegitimize their presence within state and national boundaries. Borne out of two larger studies that rely on ethnographic and in-depth interview data in Massachusetts and North Carolina, we primarily focus on longitudinal interviews with individuals responding to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). We examine the ways in which federal and state policies interact to affect access to membership for young adult immigrants in states with very different political climates. In Massachusetts, young adults felt more legitimacy and were more optimistic in their abilities to redirect their life pathways after DACA. In contrast, in the more hostile environment of North Carolina, state policies continued to impede mobility pathways and differentiate previously undocumented youth as outsiders even after the passage of DACA. Instead of characterizing the transition to adulthood for liminally legal youth as a unidirectional transition to exclusion, we emphasize the interactive influence of state- and federal-level policies and illustrate how incorporation can occur on multiple levels and even in opposite directions simultaneously. Moreover, we discuss how hostile policies in one state appear to reverberate outward, suggesting spillover effects for respondents in other states.
This article asks whether parents’ legal status as noncitizens or undocumented migrants leads U.S.-born youth to engage in active, compensatory political and civic participation or whether parents’ legal exclusion generates apolitical, even alienated views of citizenship. Drawing on 54 in-depth interviews conducted over a 2-year period with 40 teenagers from Mexican-origin immigrant families living in the San Francisco Bay area, we find no evidence of widespread apathy or disengagement. Many youth participated in rallies on behalf of immigrant rights, and many were engaged in community groups, volunteer efforts, or even political action, irrespective of parents’ status. However, youths’ views on "good citizenship" did hint at community-level effects of illegality: Some young people have internalized a "don’t rock the boat" notion of citizenship as staying out of trouble. At the same time, others redefined citizenship to include noncitizen parents. We conclude that the children of immigrants—especially those with unauthorized parents—face dual demands: There is pressure to "stay out of trouble" and stay quiet to protect their families, but these young people’s birthright citizenship also provides rights and standing to make claims on behalf of family members lacking formal voice in the political system.
The implementation of restrictive immigration laws in 1997 in the United States has led to the deportation of hundreds of thousands of legal permanent residents—denizens who had made the United States their home. Mass deportations of denizens have given renewed importance to territorial belonging and legal citizenship for theories of citizenship, a relatively neglected area of scholarship in this field. This article draws from interviews with 30 deported Jamaicans who were once legal permanent residents of the United States to argue that denizens often feel "like citizens" based on their family and community ties to the United States, yet that their allegiance and sense of belonging is primarily to their family and community—not to the state. In this sense, there is a disconnect between the law—which privileges legal citizenship—and the daily lives of denizens—in which they can experience a profound sense of belonging in their communities.
In the strategic communication field, native advertising has been hailed as the next big trend. However, this type of marketing technique may negatively affect the perceptions of brands as well as media outlets that provide such content due to its obscurity of persuasive intent and ambiguity of the content source. The current study examined these issues by conducting a 2 (priming: presence vs. absence) x 2 (media credibility: high vs. low) x 2 (corporate credibility: high vs. low) factorial between-subjects experiment. A total of 500 participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk completed the online experiment. Findings suggested that priming of native advertising information would significantly improve users’ ad recognition and change their content perception. In addition, a series of three-way interaction effects suggested that the interaction between the two types of source credibility (media and corporate) tend to work as a function of priming of native advertising information, which could completely change individuals’ perception of the ad content and evaluation of the media source in the future, but not their future corporate evaluation. Important theoretical as well as practical implications have also been discussed in this article.
Using a pretest and posttest online experiment (N = 105), this study empirically explored the impact of native advertising sponsorship disclosure on organization–public relationships (OPR), credibility, brand attitude, and attitude toward the advertisement. Credibility and brand attitude predicted the two OPR factors; however, OPR was not affected by participants’ cognizance of ad sponsorship/disclosure. Brand attitude for obviously sponsored (e.g., ad disclosed) content decreased slightly. However, the presence or absence of sponsorship did not significantly influence either credibility or attitudes toward the advertisement itself. The study also examined perceived information utility.
Sponsored news is a form of native advertising that has engendered much hope as a solution for digital publishing revenue woes, but also much concern about whether the average consumer can discern its advertising nature. Recent U.S. federal guidelines and industry recommendations preach clear and conspicuous labeling of sponsored news articles, but little is known about how individual readers interpret these labels, and how their interpretation shapes their understanding of article content. The present study contributes knowledge to the former areas by presenting the results of a between-subjects experiment (N = 343) that tested the effects of four disclosure characteristics (proximity, visual prominence, wording clarity, and logo presence) on recognition of the sponsored content as advertising, and by analyzing the psychological process through which such recognition influences perceptions of the article and the sponsor. The results show that while logo presence and visual prominence increase the odds of recognition, logo presence also increases misperception of the disclosure label as a stand-alone display advertisement. Recognition of the article as advertising led to decreased perceptions of article quality, attitude toward the sponsor, and intent to share the article. A serial mediation analysis shows that the effects of recognition on attitudes and intent to share are primarily mediated through conceptual persuasion knowledge activation and perceived deceptiveness of the article. Implications of these findings for practitioners and for the application of persuasion theories to covert advertising are discussed.
This article presents two studies examining the effects of disclosing online native advertising (i.e., sponsored content in blogs) on people’s brand attitude and purchase intentions. To investigate the mechanisms underlying these effects, we integrated resistance theories with the persuasion knowledge model. We theorize that disclosures activate people’s persuasion knowledge, which in turn evokes resistance strategies that people use to cope with the persuasion attempt made in the blog. We tested our predications with two experiments (N = 118 and N = 134). We found that participants indeed activated persuasion knowledge in response to disclosures, after which they used both cognitive (counterarguing) and affective (negative affect) resistance strategies to decrease persuasion. The obtained insights do not only advance our theoretical understanding of how disclosures of sponsored blogs affect persuasion but also provide valuable insights for legislators, advertisers, and bloggers.
Researchers have repeatedly demonstrated that consumers respond to commercial messages based on the advertising techniques through which they are delivered. One growing technique is product placement advertising, generally defined as the inclusion of products and brands in media designed with a similar form and appearance to nonadvertising content. Importantly, consumer opinions of product placement as an advertising technique have gone relatively unexamined. A model is therefore proposed to outline factors that influence consumers’ attitudes toward product placement advertising. Results across two studies indicate (a) product placements play a role in consumers’ narrative enjoyment, which positively influences attitudes toward product placement advertising, (b) consumers’ awareness of the persuasive intent of product placement negatively influences attitudes toward product placements, and (c) perceptions of product placements along these narrative enjoyment and persuasion awareness dimensions affect brand evaluations of placed products. Managerial implications, theoretical contributions, and directions for future research are discussed.
Despite the increasing popularity and advantage of native advertising on social media, advertisers are concerned about the possibility of native ads misleading consumers, resulting in boomerang effects. This study attempts to address this concern by comparing the predictive role of native ad nonintrusiveness with that of native ad manipulativeness in consumers’ attitude toward and sharing intention of native advertising. Findings from an online survey of 550 U.S. adult consumers showed that native ad nonintrusiveness was positively related to attitude toward and sharing intention of native advertising, whereas native ad manipulativeness was not. Consumers’ ad skepticism and persuasion knowledge were negatively related to attitude toward and sharing intention of native advertising; but persuasion knowledge became nonsignificant when native ad nonintrusiveness and manipulativeness were included in regression models. Additionally, those with stronger information-seeking motivation showed more positive attitudinal and behavioral responses. This study advances the knowledge of native advertising by examining the possibility of its being a double-edged sword. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
Native advertising’s effectiveness lies in its ability to look like content produced by journalists. The potential for deceiving readers and proliferation of native advertising threaten journalism’s credibility along with its core boundary: the separation between editorial and advertising. For the press to function in a normative manner, as a watchdog, contributing to the public’s ability to self-govern, it simply cannot participate in deception. Therefore, 56 qualitative interviews were conducted with journalists, advertising, and public relations executives to examine the extent to which native advertising impedes on the social responsibility of the press. Perspectives revealed that all three professions agreed native advertising raises ethical concerns. Native advertising potentially deceives audiences who are unaware that native advertising is paid, persuasive content versus editorial, thus contributing to the diminishing credibility of journalism. Furthermore, if native advertising is done well, it is undetectable from traditional editorial content. Based on these findings, authors discuss how native advertising threatens several tenets of social responsibility theory.
The essay examined a commonly stated but rarely elaborated assumption in stigma theories: Stigma must be socialized to engender community-level marginalization and discrimination. Existing research has focused on intrapersonal processes and structural factors that promote stigma socialization, but much less is known about how interpersonal sharing messages that induce stigmatization (i.e., stigma appeals) contributes to the diffusion and adoption of stigma throughout a community. Drawing from theories and research on rumor transmission, the essay explored three questions: Why do people share stigma appeals with others; what do they say; and with whom do they share them? The essay highlighted directions for future research on interpersonal sharing of stigma appeals and provided a heuristic foundation for research into mechanisms through which stigma is created and becomes persistent.
This study investigated perceptions of stigma stemming from food insecurity experienced by residents of an inner-city community described as a food desert. Sixty inner-city residents were interviewed about their difficulty in providing healthy food for their families. The study measured four kinds of structural barriers which contributed to the experience of stigma. Participants agreed that welfare created a barrier and reported experiencing health disparities, neighborhood stigma, and welfare stigma. Participants who read high-stigma messages agreed more with health-stigma beliefs compared with participants who read low-stigma messages. Low-income White residents perceived more nutritional and neighborhood barriers compared with other racial groups. In spite of these perceptions of being stigmatized, the people included in this study engaged in stigma resistance in their efforts to secure nutritious food for their families.
Despite recent theorizing on stigma management relevant to interpersonal settings and health communication, few studies have considered how people make sense of and discursively manage stigma in daily interaction. Burn survivors and relational partners present a unique population of potentially stigmatized individuals. Using in-depth interviews from participants across the United States, this study used Meisenbach’s stigma management communication model to explore the stigma management experiences of both burn survivors and relational partners. Results indicated that survivors managed stigma using four patterns of strategies: Accepters, Situational Adopters, Challengers, and Dissembling Challengers. Relational partners employed a distinct fifth pattern of strategies to manage their partner’s burn stigma. Furthermore, survivors made strategic choices about stigma management strategies based on relational and contextual factors, including prior stigma exposure or compounding stigmas. Overall, these findings have implications for the practical management of stigma, advancement of the stigma management communication model, and consideration of the interpersonal context.
Homelessness is an important social problem in many countries, including the United States. The plight of the homeless is compounded by a high level of stigma associated with the homeless. This study examines the effects of humorous and nonhumorous signs used by the homeless to attract donations. Study 1 shows that nonhumorous signs attracted 10 times as much money as humorous signs. Study 2 shows that subjects felt more comfortable in the presence of homeless not holding a sign and perceived them more positively compared with homeless holding a humorous sign. Positive perceptions of them led to more comfort, which led to more donations. Study 3 shows that subjects perceived homeless not holding a sign more positively compared with homeless holding a nonhumorous sign. These findings suggest that signs make potential donors feel uncomfortable, potentially resulting in diminished donations.
This article examined the extent to which residents living in the Midland–Saginaw–Bay City area in Eastern Michigan felt stigmatized due to industrial contamination. Seventy in-depth interviews were conducted with local residents, focusing on the extent to which they experienced three aspects of stigma—affective, cognitive, and behavioral. Results indicated that although some participants were not concerned with living in a contaminated community, local residents largely perceived dioxin as a risk to individual health and the local environment. Concern, shock, and irritation were typical affective responses at the time participants learned of the contamination. Several participants indicated a feeling of embarrassment and fear of being rejected by others because of the stigma associated with industrial contamination. Instead of actively seeking information about dioxin contamination and remediation, participants often relied on information provided to them by government officials. Behaviorally, participants avoided eating locally caught fish and prepared fish more carefully in order to avoid exposure to contaminants. As a whole, this study provided insight to understand affective, cognitive, and behavioral responses to environmental stigma.
This study investigated whether the leadership competence of an overweight candidate is affected by exposure to weight-stigmatizing and nonstigmatizing messages. Participants read one of four messages—a weight stigma, a health stigma, a competence, or a stigma-reducing message. Fat phobia, weight controllability, partisanship, political activism, and voting behaviors were also measured. Weight controllability bias interacted with the weight stigma message to produce lower evaluations of political leadership competence. Weight controllability also correlated with higher levels of fat phobia regardless of message exposure. The evidence suggests making stigmatizing comments in print/online against a candidate based on a physical characteristic like large size negatively biases public perceptions of political leadership competence. This study of negative competence evaluation directed toward a real politician confirms the findings of earlier experimental studies with fictitious fat politicians.
In this article, we analyze the relationship between social disadvantage and crime, starting from the paradox that most persistent offenders come from disadvantaged backgrounds, but most people from disadvantaged backgrounds do not become persistent offenders. We argue that despite the fact that social disadvantage has been a key criminological topic for some time, the mechanisms which link it to offending remain poorly specified. Drawing on situational action theory, we suggest social disadvantage is linked to crime because more people from disadvantaged versus affluent backgrounds develop a high crime propensity and are exposed to criminogenic contexts, and the reason for this is that processes of social and self-selection place the former more frequently in (developmental and action) contexts conducive to the development and expression of high crime propensities. This article will explore this hypothesis through a series of analyses using data from the Peterborough Adolescent and Young Adult Development Study (PADS+), a longitudinal study which uses a range of data collection methods to study the interaction between personal characteristics and social environments. It pays particular attention to the macro-to-micro processes behind the intersection of people with certain characteristics and environments with certain features – i.e., their exposure – which leads to their interaction.
Scholars have long noted how migration streams, once initiated, obtain a self-feeding character. Studies have connected this phenomenon, called the cumulative causation of migration, to expanding social networks that link migrants in destination to individuals in origin. While extant research has established a positive association between individuals’ ties to prior migrants and their migration propensities, seldom have researchers interrogated how multiple social mechanisms—as well as exposure to common environmental factors—might account for these interdependencies. This article uses a mixed-methods strategy to identify the social mechanisms underlying the network effects in Mexico–U.S. migration. Three types of social mechanisms are identified, which all lead to network effects: (a) social facilitation, which is at work when network peers such as family or community members provide useful information or help that reduces the costs or increases the benefits of migration; (b) normative influence, which operates when network peers offer social rewards or impose sanctions to encourage or discourage migration; and (c) network externalities, which are at work when prior migrants generate a pool of common resources that increase the value or reduce the costs of migration for potential migrants. The authors first use large-sample survey data from the Mexican Migration Project to establish the presence of network effects and then rely on 138 in-depth interviews with migrants and their family members in Mexico to identify the social mechanisms underlying these network effects. The authors thus provide a deeper understanding of migration as a social process, which they argue is crucial for anticipating and responding to future flows.
In this article, we study the effects of the 2004 terrorist bombings in Madrid on ethnic segregation in Spain. Using large-scale Spanish register data consisting of information on 5.4 million international migration events on a monthly basis and 13.9 million intermunicipal migration events, of which 3.8 million events concern the foreign-born population’s internal migration within Spain, the analyses show that ethnic segregation increased (i.e., the average geographical distance) between Arab immigrants and native Spaniards shortly after the terror bombing, but that no such effect was found for other immigrant groups. The analysis also shows that this was a relative short-term effect: After about 1 or 2 years, ethnic segregation started to decline again (and thus resumed the declining trend that was observed during the years before the terrorist bombing). We interpret these results in terms of belief formation mechanisms. Because of priming and framing effects, the terrorist bombings accentuated the salience of ethnic categorizations and induced threat-attributing ethnic stereotypes, which were influencing migration behaviors. However, not only did native Spaniards become more reluctant to live in close proximity to Arab immigrants, Arab migrants also became more inclined to move closer to coethnics, possibly because of a perceived threat to become victims of discriminatory behaviors of the majority population. Priming and framing affects abated after a while, and migration behaviors started to return to normal again. Finally, we discuss a variety of survey data to substantiate the argument that belief formation mechanisms played an important role in these processes.
This article addresses the emergence of "lowest-low" fertility in some countries, primarily in Southern Europe and East Asia, and poses the question of why we find such large differences in birth rates across postindustrial societies. A set of macro–micro mechanisms are identified, which are examined empirically using comparative data for seven countries from the Gender and Generations Survey. Social norms, and in particular social norms related to gender roles, are at the center of the analysis as a mechanism that conditions the translation of intentions into behavior. Societies that discourage gender equity in the private sphere of the household tend to be characterized by a strong breadwinner ideology. In these societies, the valorization of women’s role as household manager and mother is mirrored by the valorization of men’s role as breadwinner for the household. In these societies, there is a strong norm that a young man should be able to support a family prior to getting married and becoming a parent, that is, that males should prove themselves to be adequate breadwinners. When combined with changing structural conditions, such as high unemployment rates, prolonged periods of education, and increasingly insecure terms of employment in flexible labor markets, this norm will lead to declining birth rates. Hence, norms work as a mechanism that filters the effect of structural conditions so that structural constraints on fertility, such as limited labor market opportunities for young men, will affect fertility outcomes via the mechanism of gender-role norms.
This article offers a contribution to the broader theoretical goal of increasing our systematic understanding of the social mechanisms that underlie collective behavior. Specifically, we ask how it is possible that equity can arise in a market situation. Even though fair outcomes can be observed across a wide range of social situations that are not centrally coordinated, we argue that there is scant understanding of how these outcomes are facilitated and what impact they have on interaction patterns. We use experimental game theory to test two mechanisms of preferential association, which is defined as a situation where there is competition for partners and in which two actors have a preference for each other. The first mechanism, committed partnership, is abundant in social life and is exemplified by friendships. The second mechanism, competitive altruism, is the intuitive idea that to secure a desirable matching, one must display desirable behavior. To test the mechanisms, we use a laboratory experiment in which participants play a version of the well-known repeated Ultimatum Game. In our version of the game, players either (a) play each other randomly, (b) according to reputation, or (c) according to preferential association in which players are matched according to a preferred ranking of past player histories. The results suggest that fairness can arise from the reduced risk associated with committing to a desirable partner. This is a study of micro-to-micro mechanisms, investigating the micro-level conditions that produce a particular type of social action, namely, a sustainable equitable division of offerings.
Previous studies indicate the importance of experience for the performance of teams. Theory suggests that working together allows individuals to (a) improve their knowledge about who knows (and can do) what and (b) facilitates learning to combine individual resources efficiently. Yet it remains elusive how experience translates into interaction patterns in teams. Drawing on unique data of career histories of 800 players and 283,259 passes between these players in 760 English Premier League soccer matches, I propose a new measure for network experience and demonstrate how it relates to network intensity and decentralization in teams. Soccer teams exhibit a higher passing rate when players know each other from before. At the same time, network experience has no effect on the decentralization of team play. Further dyadic analyses confirm these findings. Controlling for selection effects, two players are more likely to pass the ball between each other when they know each other more. Network experience affects the way team members interact and ultimately leads to performance outcomes.
Stadia have reemerged as a preferred jihadist target. The Islamic State (IS) targeted a friendly soccer match between France and Germany in its November 2015 attacks in Paris. (Martinez 2015) German police said days later that they had foiled a plot against a stadium in the German city of Hannover barely an hour before the German national team was scheduled to play. Similarly, Belgium cancelled a friendly soccer match against Spain (Ryan 2015). The list of targeted stadia is long. It dates back to an Al-Qaeda plan to strike against the 1998 World Cup and includes sporting grounds in among others Iraq and Nigeria. The targeting of stadia spotlights jihadists’ often convoluted relationship to soccer. Many jihadists see soccer as an infidel invention designed to distract the faithful from fulfilling their religious obligations. Yet others are soccer fans or former, failed or disaffected players who see the sport as an effective recruitment and bonding tool. Men like Osama Bin Laden, Hamas’ Ismail Haniyeh, and Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah base their advocacy of the utility of soccer on those Salafi and mainstream Islamic scholars who argue that the Prophet Mohammed advocated physical exercise to maintain a healthy body as opposed to more militant students of Islam who at best seek to rewrite the rules of the game to Islamicize it, if not outright ban the sport. Self-declared IS Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi embodies the jihadists’ double-edged attitude toward soccer. A passionate player in his pre-IS days (McCant 2015) Al-Baghdadi’s IS and its affiliates take credit for scores of attacks on stadia. A successful attack on a major soccer match in Europe would go a long way to achieve IS’s goals of polarizing communities, exacerbating social tensions, and driving the marginalized further into the margins. In targeting the sport and stadia, jihadists focus on the world’s most popular form of popular culture and the one fixture that evokes the kind of deep-seated emotion capable of rivalling passions associated with religion and sectarianism. Yet the relationship between militant Islam and soccer is one that has barely been researched by scholars in multiple disciplines, including Islamic, Middle Eastern, and sports studies. This article constitutes a first stab at trying to fill the gap.
Much of the recent literature on sport, political violence, and terrorism has been focused on security issues and, more critically, their potentially damaging implications for civil liberties. Far less attention, however, has been paid to the place of sport in the lives of the so-called terrorists themselves. This article draws heavily on personal experience of interaction with loyalist and republican prisoners in the Maze between March 1996 and October 1999. The main focus of the article is on the ways in which these prisoners talked about and related to sport and the insights that discussions with them offered in terms of their wider political views. Sport was never dismissed by any of the prisoners I met as being of secondary importance to other matters—a diversion from the real world of politics. In fact, as our discussions revealed, politics was often presented as being intimately bound up with and embodied in sport cultures. On the other hand, their interest in sport also highlighted the fact that these were rather ordinary men, some of whom had shown themselves to be capable of committing seemingly extraordinary crimes.
Qatar’s successful bid for hosting the 2022 soccer World Cup is regarded as one in a series of attempts to change Qatar’s image as a terror-sponsoring state. To understand the power of hosting megasport events to rebuild a country’s international image, the present study compares the coverage of Qatari sport affairs with concurrent terror-sponsoring allegations, via a sentiment analysis of coverage of Qatari affairs by three international networks (SKY, CNN, and ITV) between August 20, 2013 and December 31, 2014. Surprisingly, the analysis found that terror-related articles contained significantly more positive sentiment than articles on other issues, whereas the tone toward Qatar in sport-related articles was significantly less positive than other topics. The study illustrates the limits of using sport as a soft power strategy, and underscores the superiority of on-the-ground efforts to deflect terror allegations as a strategy for improving a country’s image.
The world is becoming largely interconnected. This notion has thought-provoking implications due to the fact that this interdependence affords terrorist organizations opportunities to perpetrate attacks. It is inevitable that an increased risk of terrorism, especially on the forefront of megasporting events, is on the rise due to the global publicity such attacks receive. This article focuses on the Boston Marathon Bombing and the Islamic State and illustrates how high-profile news coverage and coverage on social media (through user-generated content or "terrorist organization"–generated content) advance terrorist groups’ attempts to use large-scale sporting events to leverage their agenda and ideology.
The authors of this article engage in a commentary regarding broad thematic areas identified within the special issue on sport and terrorism. The commentary begins with the authors situating themselves within the field of sport psychology, and as critical scholars more specifically within the emerging cultural sport psychology genre. To further contextualize certain aspects of criticality outlined from a sport psychology vantage, a brief story is offered where one of the authors shares his experience as a volunteer during the 1996 Olympics as a volunteer, where he was first exposed to sport and terrorism. Next, discussions are taken up in relation to four themes that we identified as relevant from the foregoing sport psychology vantage: (a) sport events and terrorism as mainstream, (b) terrorism and the media as conduit, (c) sport as a recruitment tool toward and away from terrorism, and (d) sport as an antidote to terrorism. The commentary authors conclude with a summation followed by parting critical reflections in relation to the current and future status of this emerging area.
This article considers the growing emphasis countries hosting major sporting events place on the implementation of security and counterterrorism measures and the impact this approach has on the civil liberties of their citizens. From the seminal, and ultimately tragic, events of the Munich Olympics in 1972 until the most recent terrorist attack witnessed at a major sporting event—that which marred the close of the Boston marathon of April 2013—this piece reflects on the full extent of the impact counterterrorism measures have had on the activities of wider society, including the creation of an abnormal host setting prior to and during the sporting event in question, not to mention its legacy long after it has ended and focus is drawn to a new location. It suggests that there is a real danger that international sporting events create a convenient setting within which the impositions of security measures, which are only marginally justifiable in the context of the event in question, continue to be unquestioningly implemented.
The article follows the voyage of the concept of "essential practices of religion," which was created in India and later borrowed by judges in Pakistan and Malaysia. It explores whether concepts and the way they are used by judges transnationally, can be identified systematically to illluminate types of contestations over the nature of constitutional identities. It uses a tool of conceptual history, onomasiology, which refers to the tracing of all names and terms for the concept of "essential practices" in these judgments, to identify the network of concepts in the constitution within which "essential practices" is situated by each judgment to create a particular meaning and outcome for religious freedom in that country. State, religion, and rights are the three pivots for the debates. It demonstrates that it is possible to transcend the problem of translatability, by asking not whether "essential practices" (or any other concept) has the same meaning in all contexts (it does not), but whether a judge who wants to privilege a particular constitutional identity uses essential practices in a particular way within a network of concepts. This approach treats judges as interpreters who are embedded within specific social, historical, and political contexts, and who strategically use foreign case-law to impose their vision of the nation’s constitutional identity. The article’s conclusions problematize the transferability of concepts such as democracy, religious freedom, authority, and so on to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, among others.
This article analyzes the inputs and constituencies (funding, founders, trustees, and experts) of the most influential group of think tanks in Spain during the great recession (2008-2015) in order to assess how far these think tanks were connected to other interest groups providing support for neoliberal policies. The aim of the article is to advance knowledge on think tank theory and it addresses three research goals: (a) assessing how far Spanish think tanks are affected by political clientelism and financialization, (b) identifying those actors who direct Spanish think tanks and collaborate with them, and (c) assessing the think tanks’ connections with international lobbying networks. Our results show that the think tanks studied are consistently related to three types of actor—political, economic, and academic—while also maintaining strong ties with the media. In this regard, their main traits are a pluralism biased toward right and center-left stances, state and party clientelism, the financial and political instrumentalization of party tanks, and the superior ability of conservative tanks to build network coalitions.
The entire span of animal research from captivity to death causes immense suffering for hundreds of millions of nonhuman animals every year. Their suffering also disturbs the public, which is increasingly aware—due to animal advocacy, scientists’ testaments, and growing direct evidence—that animals’ use in biomedical research is more a matter of tradition than any proven superiority of vivisection over other modes of experimentation. Yet in response, the vivisection industrial complex lobbies against animal welfare regulation and animal rights activism. This article discusses how the political economy of the vivisection industry supports the speciesist business of animal testing by mimicking the language of animal welfare to increasingly obstruct the public’s compassion.
Outsiders’ views of a person’s race or Hispanic origin can affect how she sees herself, how she reports her race/ethnicity, and her social and economic experiences. Social processes of constructing race are complicated for people whose identity is not reflected back to them in interactions, and mismatched identification gives insight into social assumptions. Using unique linked data from the 2000 and 2010 censuses, we find that in 90% of our 3.7 million cases, proxy reports (e.g., neighbors) of a person’s race/ethnicity match responses given by the household. Match rates are high for non-Hispanic Whites, Blacks, and Asians and for Hispanic ethnicity. Matches are much less common for other groups (American Indian/Alaska Native, Pacific Islander, Some Other Race, multiracial, and the race(s) of Hispanics). Proxies often report biracial Black-Whites as Black, but tend to report biracial American Indian-Whites, Asian-Whites, and Pacific Islander-Whites as non-Hispanic White rather than as people of color. Proxies frequently report children as multiple race and elders as single race, whether they are or not, potentially lowering the average age of the multiracial population. Proxies tend to report the person’s race and Hispanic origin as consistent with others in the tract, potentially increasing measured residential segregation.
The majority of social science research uses a single measure of race when investigating racial inequality. However, a growing body of work demonstrates that race shapes the life chances of individuals in multiple ways, related not only to how people self-identify but also to how others perceive them. As multiple measures of race are increasingly collected and used in survey research, it becomes important to consider the best methods of leveraging such data. We present four analytical approaches for incorporating two different dimensions of race in the same study and illustrate their use with data from the U.S. National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. The approaches range from tests of specific hypotheses to the most exploratory description of how different measures of race relate to social inequality. Although each approach has its strengths and weaknesses, by accounting for the multidimensionality of race, they all allow for more nuanced patterns of advantage and disadvantage than standard single-measure methods.
The essay examines various communication strategies for advocating acceptance of climate science in the face of psychological and ideological impediments. It surveys some key literature, offers case studies of Lego, Shell, Greenpeace, Edelman, and public relations, and culminates with a hortatory logic based on the recent Papal encyclical. The focus is on issues pertaining to the United States but with examples and ideas from elsewhere.
Race and ancestry are both popularly viewed in the United States as different but intertwined reflections on a person’s essentialized identity that answer the question of "who is what?" Despite this loose but well-understood connection between the two concepts and the availability of ancestry data on the U.S. census, researchers have rarely used the two sources of data in combination. In this article, drawing on theories of boundary formation, I compare these two forms of identification to explore the salience and social closure of racial boundaries. Specifically, I analyze race-reporting inconsistency and predict college completion at multiple levels of racial ancestry aggregation using Census data. The results suggest that, while much of the variation in these measures corresponds to popular "big race" conceptions of difference, considerable variation remains among individual ancestries.
In this article, I propose a methodological framework to analyze international NGO advocacy campaigns to examine the use or abuse of their discursive power, which in itself could then lead to reflect on the use or abuse of power in their practice. The methodology is based on a reconceptualization of critical discourse analysis, where I propose an epistemological approach according to Freirean understanding of power, cultural, and dialogic structures on one hand, and a methodological approach, which introduces Arnold and Amy Mindell’s concept of deep democracy as awareness of diversity, rank, and privilege in discursive interactions. I examine the case of Amnesty International, and results yield an urgent need to question the identity that lies behind the existence of transnational NGOs in themselves.
Although race-based discrimination and stereotyping can only occur if people place others into racial categories, our understanding of this process, particularly in contexts where observers categorize others based solely on appearance, is limited. Using a unique data set drawn from observers’ assessments of photos posted by White, Black, Latino, and multiracial online daters, this study examines how phenotype and observer characteristics influence racial categorization and cases of divergence between self-identities and others’ classifications. I find that despite the growth in the multiracial population, observers tend to place individuals into monoracial categories, including Latino. Skin color is the primary marker used to categorize others by race, with light skin associated with Whiteness, medium skin with Latinidad, and, most strongly, dark skin with Blackness. Among daters who self-identify as Black along with other racial categories, those with dark skin are overwhelmingly placed solely into a Black category. These findings hold across observers, but the proportion of photos placed into different racial categories differs by observers’ gender and race. Thus, estimates of inequality may vary depending not only on how race is assessed but also on who classifiers are. I argue that patterns of racial categorization reveal how the U.S. racial structure has moved beyond binary divisions into a system in which Latinos are seen as a racial group in-between Blacks and Whites, and a dark-skin rule defines Blacks’ racial options.
Arms companies in European Union play an important role in the definition of security and defense policies, but not related to their knowledge but because of their economical interests. Military lobbies, which are part of the military-industrial complex, are created to influence security and defense in European institutions. Some of these lobbies are mostly composed of members from arms companies. Military lobbies have an effect on the European Union by promoting military responses to security and defense challenges.
Scholars are increasingly employing skin color measures to investigate racial stratification beyond the dimensions of self- or other-classification. Current understandings of the relationship between phenotypic traits, like skin color, and racial classification are incomplete. Scholars agree that perceptions of phenotypic traits shape how people classify others; it remains to be seen, however, whether racial classification in turn shapes people’s perceptions of phenotypic traits. The present study is based on an original survey experiment that tests whether assessments of others’ skin color are affected by a subtle racial cue, a name. Results indicate that skin color ratings are affected by the presence of a racially distinctive name: A significant share of people will rate the same face darker when that face is assigned a distinctively Hispanic name as opposed to a non-Hispanic name. In addition, ratings of male faces are more sensitive to racially distinctive names. The findings bear important lessons for our understanding of the social construction of race and its role in producing inequalities.
We address long-standing debates on the utility of racial categories and color scales for understanding inequality in the United States and Latin America, using novel data that enable comparisons of these measures across both broad regions. In particular, we attend to the degree to which color and racial category inequality operate independently of parental socioeconomic status. We find a variety of patterns of racial category and color inequality, but that in most countries accounting for maternal education changes our coefficients by 5% or less. Overall, we argue that several posited divergences in ethnoracial stratification processes in the United States, compared with Latin America, might be overstated. We conclude that the comparison of the effects of multiple ethnoracial markers, such as color and racial categories, for the analysis of social stratification holds substantial promise for untangling the complexities of "race" across the Americas.
Tax havens are the legal framework for today’s Potemkin villages, like letterbox companies and virtual residences. Despite the relevance of the issue it has widely been ignored by academics, and political regulation lacks behind the announcements. Drawing on literature studies on the rise of tax havens and a case study on the tightening and softening of Austrian banking secrecy, this article concludes that besides globalization, and "marketization," there is a permanent tendency of "offshorization" due to the offshore coalition, consisting of economic elites building coalitions with wider parts of society, besides tactical interventions through lobbies.
Climate change denial (i.e., organized attempts to downplay, deny, or dismiss scientific consensus on the extent of global warming, its significance, and its connection to human behavior) has been a recurrently researched topic in the United States, but is far less studied in Europe, where it is currently gathering force. The truth is that, as in the United States, climate deniers are a tiny minority in Europe. Their numbers contrast starkly with the overwhelming majority of scientists who agree on the reality of man-made climate change and the urgent need for action. However, the voices of climate deniers in Europe are amplified by a handful of influence groups, mainly think tanks, which consistently conceal their sources of funding and final interests. This situation can be approached from a strategic communication perspective, specifically within the framework of the situational theory of publics. From this standpoint, the knowledge of different variables relating to publics in a given situation regarding a public issue (like climate change) can determine the communication strategies chosen by deniers to amplify climate change denial arguments and will introduce their main communication strategies and messages.
Although "rule of law" is often regarded as a solution for religious conflict, this article analyzes the role of legal processes and institutions in hardening boundaries and sharpening antagonisms among religious communities. Using case studies from Sri Lanka, India, Malaysia, and Pakistan, we highlight four specific mechanisms through which legal procedures, structures, and instruments can further polarize already existing religious conflicts. These mechanisms include the procedural requirements and choreography of litigation (Sri Lanka), the strategic use of legal language and court judgments by political and socioreligious groups (India), the activities of partisan activists who mobilize around litigation (Malaysia), and the exploitation of "public order" laws in contexts framed by antagonism targeting religious minorities (Pakistan).
A contested racial identity refers to incongruence between personal racial identification and external racial categorization. For example, an individual may self-identify as White, but be perceived by most others as non-White. Documenting racial contestation is important because racialized experiences are shaped not only by the racial classification that individuals claim for themselves but also the external racial attributions placed on them by others. Focusing solely on monoracial identifying adults, this study answers three key questions about racial contestation: (a) How common is it? (b) Who is most likely to report experiencing it? and (c) How is it related to aspects of racial identity such as racial awareness, racial group closeness, and racial identity salience? Employing the 2006 Portraits of American Life Study, results suggest that reports of racial contestation among monoracial identifying adults are more common than some studies suggest (6% to 14%)—particularly among the fastest growing racial groups in the United States, including Latina/os and Asians—and that experiences of racial contestation are often associated with immigrant generation, ancestry, and phenotypical characteristics. Ordinal logistic regression analyses indicate that individuals who report experiencing racial contestation are no more aware of race in everyday life than other U.S. adults, but they feel less close to other members of the self-identified racial group and report lower levels of racial identity salience than their noncontested counterparts. These results point to a thinning of racial identity among the racially contested.
In multiethnic nation-states experiencing new flows of immigrants, political officials and citizens alike have expressed hostility in the form of demonstrations, campaigns, vandalism, and even policies. Yet local communities have also displayed public support for immigrants in the form of protests and advocacy efforts. Past literature has almost exclusively focused on anti-immigrant activity, using theories of group threat and competition, which suggest that new influxes or large concentrations of immigrants should prompt dominant groups to protect their interests, leading to anti-immigrant attitudes and behaviors. We extend the literature by focusing on pro-immigrant behavior, which we define as efforts initiated by established local residents and organizations to include immigrants in the larger community and/or to improve the lives of immigrants. In contrast to theories of group threat, we put forth the group inclusion model, and contend that demographic and political "threats" operate to break down rather than bolster group boundaries. We also find that when the increasing demographic and political presence of immigrants is coupled with the visibility of immigration, immigrant inclusion thrives. Using a data set of pro-immigrant collective action across 52 U.S. metropolitan areas, we generally find support for our model, and discuss the broader implications for immigrant–native relations.
Symbolic boundaries, understood as the conceptual distinctions used to demarcate in-groups and out-groups, are fundamental to social inequality. While we know a great deal about how groups and individuals construct and contest symbolic boundaries along lines of class, race, ethnicity, religion, and nationality, less attention is given to (a) national belonging as a component of symbolic boundaries distinct from citizenship and (b) comparing how distinct symbolic boundaries shape individuals perceptions of, and reactions to, instances of stigmatization and discrimination. To examine these issues we compared two marginalized groups in Israel, Arab Palestinian citizens and Ethiopian Jewish immigrants. Analyzing 90 in-depth interviews, we find that exclusion based on boundaries of nationality engenders different ways of interpretating and responding to stigmatizing and discriminatory behavior, compared with exclusion based on racial and ethnic boundaries. While Ethiopians see everyday stigmatizing encounters as part of their temporary position as a recently immigrated group from a developing country, and react accordingly with attempts to prove their worth as individuals and ultimately assimilate, Palestinians view the line between them and the Jewish majority as relatively impermeable and attempts to fully integrate as mostly useless, viewing solidarity and education as a means to improve their group’s standing.
Building on substantive yet neglected foundations provided by classical sociological theorists—theorists who emphasized the experiential conditions of work in structuring ideology—we examine in this article the impact of job authority tasks on levels of support for policy to redistribute income. Such a focus contributes to a broader sociological understanding of the links between status, ideology, and political action. With data drawn from the 2010 and 2012 National Election Studies, we find that workplace experiences and tasks involving sanctioning/organizational responsibility as well as the hierarchical patterning of interactions on one’s job help structure generalized views regarding inequality and policy orientations ultimately enacted outside of the workplace. In this regard, the number of authority tasks is inversely related to support for redistributive policy. Subsequent analyses, however, reveal this general pattern does not hold on the basis of race: less variation in policy support as well as greater levels of policy support is expressed by African Americans than Whites across all authority task levels. We conclude by discussing how our findings inform broader conceptions regarding the link between work, ideology, and politics, as well a deeper sociological sense of the attitudinal consequences of work and the underpinnings of tenets of American stratification ideology.
In the Pacific Northwest, control over lucrative and dwindling salmon fisheries have served as the primary source of contention between Native Americans and non-Indians for nearly 200 years. Despite the lopsided power dynamics favoring the states, and the commercial and recreational stakeholders whose interests are championed by State authority, fishing tribes have successfully infiltrated prevailing decision-making bodies and have taken a leading role in efforts to save the salmon from the perils of overfishing and habitat destruction utilizing a combination of scientific methods and traditional knowledge. This study examines the efforts of fishing tribes in Washington State to protect their customary and commercial fishing rights as a key project in a broader process of decolonizing state institutions that have historically controlled Indigenous resources as well as the entrenched ideological foundations that have historically devalued Native American culture. Examined through the lenses of racial formation, state-building and environmental justice theories, this case provides broader lessons for how scholars of social inequality can investigate the mechanisms through which racial inequality is both produced and resisted. Our findings contribute to undertheorized areas in the social inequality literature by taking history seriously, while paying particular attention to the ways that legal, political, and cultural mechanisms interact to reinforce systems of stratification or to reveal opportunities for meaningful resistance. Our analyses also foreground the role of human agency in successfully challenging long-standing legal and cultural foundations of racial inequality.
Social science research has denoted the role that exclusionary and divisive ideologies play in fortifying group boundaries and shaping inequality, including what is arguably its most extreme form—genocide. We know little, however, about where and why such ideologies emerge. This article analyzes 159 countries between 1955 and 2009 to assess the factors that influence the emergence and presence of exclusionary ideologies. Doing so informs broader social science conceptions of the role of culture and politics in the production of inequality and violence. I find that certain critical junctures, including independence and irregular regime change, are associated with the onset of exclusionary ideologies. Colonial histories and threats to political elites are also consequential. I conclude by discussing exclusionary ideologies relative to genocide as well as the general importance of cultural and political dynamics for future analyses of inequality.
Over the past decade, social science researchers in the area of feminism, labor, immigration, and family have written extensively on the care work crisis and globalized care work. Depending on how broadly care work is conceived, these writings emphasize unique aspects of gender, race, class, and/or citizenship inequalities. Second wave of feminist perspectives, for instance, identify housework and most work culturally defined as "women’s work"—including all paid health occupations dominated by women, such as nurses, direct care workers, and hospital workers but also possibly even health, education, and social service occupations—as central to gender subordination. Another important research stream, focusing on domestic labor as women’s work, but recognizing its traditional outsourcing to slaves, servants, and later employees, highlights the complexities of the inequality generated, not only in terms of gender but race, class, and citizenship as well. Bringing these two bodies of literature together in conversation initially pointed to the inaccurate assumption that care work was valued when it became wage labor. The paid labor of domestics, nannies, and elderly care workers, however, remains deeply devalued, most often with those with limited options entering the profession. This article both assesses contradictions within dominant approaches to care work and highlights the cultural and political foundations of the very inequalities that domestic care workers experience.
Theoretically guided by communication infrastructure theory and theory of planned behavior, this study has two aims: to assess the experiences and intentions of Seoul residents with regard to their localized use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and to identify the factors influencing those experiences and intentions. Online survey data (n = 901) were collected from adult residents of Seoul in the summer of 2013. The results indicate that various ICT channels (especially websites, online news sites, blogs, online cafés, and smartphone apps) could potentially be customized to serve urban neighborhoods. Positive attitudes and subjective norms related to localized ICT use behavior were significant factors for use of almost all ICT channels considered in the current study. Individuals’ integrated connectedness to community storytelling network was a consistently significant and positive factor in relation to both experience and intention of localized uses of ICTs. Among four community engagement variables included in the current study, community activity participation was associated with the experience (but not with the intention) of localized ICT uses.
Constrained access to the Internet and new communication technologies is commonly associated with social disparities related to income, education, immigration status, age, and geography. Policymakers in many sectors—and particularly, in education—have placed their bets on increased technology access having the potential to mitigate broader social disparities. In the context of a national digital equity initiative, this study examines how parents and children of low-income Latino families incorporate new technologies into their everyday lives. Through a comparison of three demographically similar communities where discounted broadband is being offered to low-income families with school-age children, we take a bottom-up, communication-centered perspective on a top-down technology policy. Our ecological approach considers the intersection of macro- and meso-level factors that influence Latino families’ perceptions of technology and that shape their consequent adoption and integration decisions.
The paradigmatic focus on global and individual networks in communication has suppressed the Chicago tradition of understanding the city as a network of places. But the social ecology of the city continues to structure all aspects of urban communication networks including personal, institutional, and civic life. This article critically examines four major theorists of networked urban communication—Castells, Wellman, Fischer, and Sampson—and argues that the field of urban communication should return to a revitalized ecological tradition, while taking full account of the networked transformation of social life and social structure.
This article makes the case that street life is characterized by its flow online and offline. Such change requires a new way of doing street ethnography that holds great promise for urban and digital scholars alike. I walk through a set of empirical cases drawn from years of participant observation on the ground and in the network with the same set of teenagers in Harlem. The fieldwork modeled also shifts concepts of public space, reworking Elijah Anderson’s Code of the Street through digital study and grounding the concept of networked publics in urban ethnography. This article bridges urban and digital approaches to ethnography to keep pace with the social life of the street.
The Chicago School’s use of ecological metaphors has much to offer scholars interested in the complexities of the contemporary media environment. This article considers how the use of ecological metaphors enabled the Chicago School to build an empirical approach to the study of human forms of organization and traces how the use of ecological metaphors has evolved in subsequent scholarship on media and communication. It examines the interest of media ecology scholars in the environment created by technologies, and discusses how proponents of actor network theory have expanded the view of networked actors to encompass technologies, objects, and human agents. The article subsequently traces a more recent proliferation of ecological metaphors as a way of understanding globalized and networked media practices. This approach, in turn, enables the reconfiguration of questions around the relationship between media, democracy, and citizenship. This article suggests that the use of ecological approaches enables scholars to pay attention to the complexities of networked interactions in communities that are geographically bounded but globally connected. This, in turn, points the continued importance of grounded, nitty-gritty empirical work tracing the variety of communicative practices within particular communities, and the ways in which these practices are shaped by relationships between a variety of actors within and beyond these communities.
Two affordances of digital communication technologies, persistent contact and pervasive awareness, are ushering in fundamental change to the structure of community. These affordances break from the mobility narrative that has described community since the rise of urban industrialism, including accounts of networked individualism and a postindustrial or a network society. In contrast to images of late modernity, which suggest that mobility will be maximized to the point where people are nearly free from the constraints of time, space, and social bonds, persistent–pervasive community renews the constraints and opportunities of premodern community structure. As a result of persistence—a counterforce to mobility—relationships and the social contexts where they are formed are less transitory than at any time in modern history. Through the ambient, lean, asynchronous nature of social media, awareness supplements surveillance with the informal watchfulness typified in preindustrial community. It provides for closeness and information exchange unlike what can be communicated through other channels. Social media and the algorithms behind them generate not only context collapse but an audience problem that, when managed through a dynamic balance between broadcasting and monitoring content, enhances indicators of awareness and availability of social ties. Persistent–pervasive community represents a period of metamodernity. It is a hybrid of preindustrial and urban-industrial community structures that will affect the availability of social capital, the success of collective action, the cost of caring, deliberation around important issues, and how lives are linked over the life course and across generations.
With the introduction of quasimarket principles in the mid-1990s, the German social service sector faced several challenges from above (the state), within (the organizations), and outside (new competitors and "players"). Within the social services, considerable differences prevail between subsectors; although all reforms have been oriented at the principle of (quasi)markets, the governance arrangements implemented have been rather divergent across subfields. This article compares the effects of the introduction of quasimarket principles in two subfields with very different governance architectures: youth welfare and old-age care. Basic findings include different degrees and variants of hybridity at the meso-level of local welfare arrangements as well as at the micro-level of the organizations in the field. The analysis shows a considerable effect of different governance regimes on the openness of the subfields to new competitors (profit-oriented and voluntary), the reactions of established third sector organizations (internal reforms and hybridization), and the modes of political steering (with varying degrees of informality and oversight).
The economic crisis has had an earth-shattering effect in Spain at all levels: economic, political, institutional, and social. There are different interpretations about the causes of the crisis. Most of the analyses on the economic crisis in Spain have concerned themselves with phenomena like mismanaged banks, excessive debts, the bubble in the real estate sector, or the loss of competitiveness. Others have sought to explain the crisis as a byproduct of European Monetary Union integration. This article moves beyond those explanations and argues that a fundamental reason for the crisis is rooted in the process of institutional degeneration that preceded the crisis.
This article deals with the problem of the increasing distrust in institutions in European democracies, paying special attention to countries such as Spain and Portugal, which are being severely harmed by the current economic crisis and the austerity measures imposed by supranational organizations such as the European Union and implemented by their respective national governments. Contrary to the purely political-economic paradigm, the present article, based on panel survey data gathered during the years 2011 and 2012 in Spain and Portugal, shows that this deterioration is due principally to the negative perception of the political responsiveness of representative institutions and aggravated by the increasing perception of political corruption. Multilevel governance and the present economic crisis are challenging representative institutions, but their functioning and elite misbehavior during the crisis are the main explanations of increasing citizen distrust in such institutions.
International economic crises are critical periods for any political regime. The 2008 global financial crisis brought to the surface several weak spots in the institutional performance of various southern European democracies. Portugal was no exception. Government attempts to tackle its negative externalities through a series of austerity measures did not prove successful on various grounds. Poor scoring in the economy generated social unrest. This article tries to assess the reaction of the Portuguese citizenry to the symptoms of failure in economic governance, particularly in what concerns their attitudes vis-à-vis the political realm by using different survey data sets. The analysis reveals that the decline in economic performance and in quality of governance is clearly reflected in citizens’ rising discontent with the performance of democracy and suggests even negative spillover effects for regime support. The available data also suggest that any expectations that the economic crisis might have ignited in citizens’ engagement in political issues seem only partially fulfilled.
In this article, the authors present new empirical data on highly skilled emigrants from two southern European countries, Italy and Greece, which have been particularly hit by the global financial and Eurozone crisis. The data have been generated by an e-survey conducted in late spring and summer 2013. Through analyzing the responses of Greek and Italian citizens who have chosen to emigrate, the authors present new insights on their educational backgrounds, the conditions that have motivated their decision to emigrate, and the way in which they have defined their migration project. It is argued that the decision to migrate is driven by a sense of severe relative deprivation as a result of the crisis and a deep frustration with the conditions in the home country. The crisis seems to have magnified the "push" factors that already existed in Italy and Greece and that now nurture this migration wave. At the same time, however, this migration is also framed within a more general perspective of a vision of life in which mobility and new experiences are valued positively and also seen as part of one’s professional identity.
When badly hit by the same global financial and economic crisis in the early 2000s, the Irish and the Greek societies reacted in quite different ways. Whereas Ireland remained largely acquiescent and displayed a high degree of civil compliance, Greeks took massively to the streets using violence and attacking specifically the state and the state personnel, a phenomenon we refer to as "political Luddism." It is shown that the two countries are quite similar in terms of their economic condition, cultural background, social composition, ideological profiling, and party system dynamics, among other factors. What, then, explains the two countries’ dissimilar reactions to crisis? Through a detailed analysis of the cases, the article offers evidence that the most compelling explanation relates to the varying ability of the Greek and Irish states to continue providing basic public goods and other state-related services to their respective societies.
We explore the rise of social enterprises, particularly, work integration social enterprises (WISEs), their particular hybrid organizational form, and their impact on their clients. We propose that WISEs are an expression of a neoliberal welfare logic that challenges social rights by emphasizing market solutions to social needs and by devolving and privatizing social services to the local level and the private sector. We show that as a hybrid organizational form, WISEs must balance between two conflicting institutional logics: market and social services. Our research demonstrates that when the WISEs are dominated by a market logic, they commodify their clients as production workers. We suggest that WISEs, as a hybrid organizational form, contribute to the neoliberal project of blurring the boundaries between the market and the welfare state.
This paper explores the changing governance of education in two distinct contexts: England and Peru. While there are major differences between these two cases, the paper argues that a common agenda can be identified where an increasing degree of organizational hybridity is patent—where the traditionally distinct goals and rationales of public and private sectors are being recombined. Although this agenda has been very differently enacted in the two contexts, it has generated similar outcomes, which include an increasing degree of fragmentation of educational services and a consequent depolitization of education. In this process, education has been transformed from a contested space of knowledge and identity formation to a commodity bought, sold, and administered through the rules of the market and has been recast as a private rather than public good. This, it is argued, is contributing to the emergence of more segregated education systems and to the rise of equally segregated societies.
The emergent research on hybrid organizations is complicated by three circumstances: (a) the assertion that every organization possesses traits of hybridity, (b) the difficulty of operationalizing sector intersections in research, and (c) the alienation of the research field from nonprofit theory. This article proposes a research agenda for the study of hybridity that relates more strongly to the latter. It results in questions of significant explanatory potential, for instance, How does hybridity relate to market failure? How are legitimacy, trust, and accountability ensured if the nondistribution constraint is being abandoned? Which form transitions and innovations are being produced by hybridity? These questions have to be reflected against a variety of welfare state concepts and policy tools, such as tax credits or contracts, that may be used to govern hybridity. This article furthermore suggests that research on hybridity would benefit from relating nonprofit theory to disciplinary approaches, such as institutional theory or organizational life cycles.
This article analyzes hybridity in third sector organizations (TSOs) in relation to the coproduction of public services. It begins by discussing hybridity in terms of the overlap between the third sector and other social institutions like the state, market, and community, illustrated by the welfare triangle. Then, it briefly introduces three different public administration regimes. It argues that changing from one area of overlap to another may place TSOs in an unfamiliar, or even alien, environment, resulting in increased hybridity and complexity. After it turns to coproduction and notes, it can refer to a variety of phenomena at various levels that contribute to the growing hybridity and complexity for TSOs and their leaders. It concludes that TSOs can orient themselves toward one of two main kinds of hybridity. A number of hypotheses are presented and some preliminary conclusions about the importance of coproduction for the governance of hybrid organizations are reached at the end of the article.
This study examines the behavior of influential political blogs (conservative and liberal) in reference to external viral content during March 2007 and June 2009. We analyze homophily and cross-ideological (heterophily) practices. We propose a multidimensional model that employs both qualitative and quantitative methods for examining homophily behaviors by looking at three dimensions: blog-to-blog, blog-to-video, blog post-to-video. Findings show that while homophily patterns prevail, some limited occurrences of cross-ideological practices exist. The cross-linking practices may include deliberative motives, but in essence they are not created for the purposes of discourse. Instead, these cross-linking practices strengthen previously held political stances of the users who create them and negatively portray and reframe content of alternative views. This represents homophily in the guise of cross-linking.
This study compares six metrics commonly used to identify influential players in two of Canada’s largest political Twitter communities based on the users, and ranking order of users, identified by each metric. All tweets containing the hashtag #CPC, representing the Conservative Party of Canada (government), and #NDP, representing the New Democratic Party of Canada (official opposition), were collected over a 2-week period in March 2013 and a follower network graph was created. Social network analysis and content analysis were employed to identify influentials. Kendall’s was the primary quantitative measure for comparison. Categorization of Twitter profiles of users found within the top 20 most influential lists, according to each metric of influence, made up the qualitative portion of analysis. The authors find that measures of centrality—indegree and eigenvector centrality—identify the traditional political elite (media outlets, journalists, politicians) as influential, whereas measures considering the quality of messages and interactions provide a different group of influencers, including political commentators and bloggers. Finally, the authors investigate the possibility of using the local clustering coefficient of nodes to identify those who are both aware of the traditional elite and embedded in tightly knit communities, similar to the "opinion leader," described in the Two-Step Flow Hypothesis.
In this article, the authors synthesize 3 years of social technologies research, including studies of Facebook, Twitter, and GitHub, to present a theory driven framework to guide future social scientific research using "Big Data." They connect levels of analysis derived from empirical study of influence to the electronic trace data generated by social technologies. Specifically, the authors outline a relationship between social media technology platforms, individual goals for participation, and emergent small groups to inform future research on influence in social technologies. They incorporate theory from small group literature, communities and networks of practice, and media theory to explicate a contextual framework for measuring influence. In their discussion, the authors build on the contrast between influence indicators in Facebook, Twitter, and GitHub to argue for a greater focus on the influence abstractions of articulation and affiliation.
The authors designed and ran an experiment to measure social influence in online recommender systems, specifically, how often people’s choices are changed by others’ recommendations when facing different levels of confirmation and conformity pressures. In this experiment, participants were first asked to provide their preference from pairs of items. They were then asked to make second choices about the same pairs with knowledge of other people’s preferences. The results show that other people’s opinions significantly sway people’s own choices. The influence is stronger when people are required to make their second decision sometime later (22.4%) rather than immediately (14.1%). Moreover, people seem to be most likely to reverse their choices when facing a moderate, as opposed to large, number of opposing opinions. Finally, the time people spend making the first decision significantly predicts whether they will reverse their decisions later on, whereas demographics such as age and gender do not. These results have implications for consumer behavior research as well as online marketing strategies.
Social media communication is characterized by reduced anonymity and off-to-online social interactions. These characteristics require scholars to revisit social influence mechanisms online. The current study builds on social influence literature to explore social network and gender effects on online behavior. Findings from a quasi-experiment suggest that both network-related variables and gender are significantly associated with online behavior. Perceived social environment, measured by personal network exposure rate, is more significant than objective reality, measured by frequency of received social messages, in determining behavior. We discuss the implications of social contagion effects on web-based strategic communication—including advertising, political campaigns, and social mobilization. Data limitations and the difficulty of measuring social network influence via social media are also discussed.
News organizations’ online commenting tools have been touted as a boon for the deliberative process, yet only to the extent that they are used by a diverse group of participants who are civil and who provide information that enriches dialogue. The researchers in this study analyzed the degree to which posts in newspaper forums originated from frequent contributors and the civil and informational characteristics of those contributions. A content analysis of comments (N = 2,237) within forums adjacent to opinion articles on websites of 15 U.S. newspaper dailies was conducted to assess their civility (uncivil character attacks and uncivil language) and informational attributes. Frequent contributors—people who post often on a forum in a short period—were less likely to be civil and informational.
Internet forums are theorized to be important social platforms for peer influence. Current research tends to conceptualize peer influence as adoption processes, investigating whether information received from network contacts stimulate the adoption of a product, service, taste, or attitude. Accordingly, research interest is focused on the first time a product is used. In contrast, the present study investigates mutual and recurrent adaptation between users of an internet forum. This adaptation is theorized to signal engagement in the discussion, which is part of a bonding process. It is essential to internet forum use because this social medium offers no facilities for selecting and evaluating your discussion partners. Using communication accommodation theory, linguistic style matching, and a statistical network model, we analyze style adaptation on an internet forum for the Moroccan minority in the Netherlands. Our results show that posters adapt their style to the style of previous posters within the same thread (discussion) as well as previous posts in other threads within the same section (topic), especially in the case of style elements related to a shared identity. Significant others on the forum—other posters quoted or referenced directly at least two times—also function as style examples provided that they are present in the current discussion. We argue that these effects have wider significance for research into gratifications of online forums for participants and practical relevance for monitoring and moderating discussions on online forums.
This study employs content and network analysis techniques to explore the predictors of opinion leadership in a political activism network on Twitter. The results demonstrate the feasibility of using user-generated content to measure user characteristics. The characteristics were analyzed to predict users’ performance in the network. According to the results, Twitter users with higher connectivity and issue involvement are better at influencing information flow on Twitter. User connectivity was measured by betweenness centrality, and issue involvement was measured by a user’s geographic proximity to a given event and the contribution of engaging tweets. In addition, the results show that tweets by organizations had greater influence than those by individual users.
The 2012 election was marked by discussions of women’s issues from abortion to equal pay, and both presidential candidates employed strategies designed to win female voters. Since women vote in larger numbers than men and are more likely to be swing voters, it was imperative that the candidates win support among women. This study draws from group identification theories to better understand the process of gender socialization that influences young women’s perceptions of candidates and the effect of targeted advertising. The findings of this study build upon existing group identification theory and suggest the need for more nuanced theories of female voters that take into consideration identification with one’s gender group as well as beliefs about women’s roles in society. Specifically, this study found that strong gender group identification was associated with higher favorability ratings of Obama. Women holding more egalitarian gender role beliefs were also more likely to rate Obama favorably. Gender group identification did not influence ratings of Romney, but women with more traditional gender role beliefs rated Romney more favorably. No direct support was found for an effect of targeted political advertising in this study, however, we argue that additional research is needed in this area.
This report details the steps involved in setting up a polling club as part of related classes in political communication, public policy, and civic engagement among college students. It also examines an extracurricular activity that provides students with the opportunity to assess public opinion on policy matters at the local, state, and national levels. Insights as well as challenges from professors and students involved in such pertinent themes as web analytics, aggregate polling, and the internal and external constraints and biases inherent in such a project will be explored, as well as the need to focus on an integrated strategic communication perspective that bridges the frequent silos of marketing, advertising, public relations, journalism, and political communication.
This research tested the conventional wisdom that interactive voice recognition (IVR; also known as robocalls or auto calls) are not listened to by receivers. The study found that three out of four people (75%) listen to over 19 s of a message, which equates to over 40 words. The vast majority of people, 97%, listen to at least 6 s. This innovative, unobtrusive field approach for measuring actual listening time eliminates self-report bias. The unique data set, provided by a third-party vendor, consisted of 156 call projects with a total of 389,588 live answered phone calls from the last week of the 2012 election.
In 2007, the Illinois General Assembly passed the College and Career Readiness Pilot Act that supported the initial implementation of college readiness programming by community colleges and their high school partners. This study uses mixed-methods research to examine program implementation and student outcomes associated with two of seven college and career readiness (CCR) partnerships in Illinois. Our analysis of the local models is guided by Conley’s four dimensions of CCR, and the results shed light on how different programmatic approaches contribute to short-term student outcomes in mathematics and English. This study has implications for Illinois’ efforts to move CCR forward, including for the state’s new Race to the Top (RttT) grant that is attempting to scale up CCR programming associated with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education.
As an online experiment with a 2 x 3 factorial design, this study manipulates participants’ (N = 441) exposure to a candidate’s (Barack Obama or Mitt Romney) post-election speech along with additional messages about bipartisanship (supporting bipartisanship, challenging bipartisanship, no message). Results showed main and interaction effects on all relationship factors based on experimental cell. In addition, data indicate that assessment of candidate sincerity was most strongly affected by ideological strength, more so than relationship or exposure support messages calling for bipartisanship. The study focuses on first-time voters and is framed through the lens of political public relations.
Using experimental design, this study compares first-time voters’ gratifications and uses of a traditional News1 format with the increasingly popular fake news format. The data here found that while indeed young people may have initially assessed a greater level of gratification associated with the fake news genre, the group was significantly "let down" after exposure to such a program. Though first-time voters understand that traditional surveillance-type information-seeking activities are better associated with traditional News, they were ambivalent about approaching and avoiding both traditional News and fake news genres.
This study explores the effects of televised presidential debate viewing on young citizens’ candidate evaluations and normative democratic attitudes, including political cynicism and political information efficacy. Findings revealed that debate viewing decreases young citizens’ political cynicism and strengthens political information efficacy. Longitudinal analysis tracked young citizens’ democratic attitudes from pre-debate to post-election, finding that one’s political information efficacy intensifies throughout the course of the ongoing campaign, but debates’ immediate effect of reducing political cynicism is not sustained as the campaign progresses.
Using an actionable research approach, researchers and practitioners can collaborate in research to inform advocacy for and development of interventions that seek to reduce inequality in educational outcomes. This process was used at an elite public university to examine the limitations of a summer bridge program and inform the development of an intervention model that provided comprehensive academic and social support for underrepresented students enrolled in engineering and, after a pilot test, other programs at the Midwest University (MU). This article discusses the process leading to the Engineering Academy bridge program, summarizes the research on the pilot test, and describes how the results were used by administrators to advocate for the continuation of the Engineering Academy. Currently, support from the National Science Foundation and MU’s general fund is being used to adapt the intervention for biology, math, and other fields at MU’s College of Liberal Arts.
Studies of political consumerism among young citizens are a relatively recent development. In this study, the authors use Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory of child development as a first attempt to build an explanatory model of teens’ socialization into political consumption behaviors. Structural equation modeling indicates that certain cultural factors (e.g., church attendance, parent education) influence micro-level systems within which children might acquire political consumer behaviors (including parent-child interaction, school activities related to politics, and online media use). Implications are discussed.
The authors examine whether predictors of adult political consumerism (i.e., boycotting and buycotting) and factors associated with youth civic and political participation also predict youth political consumerism. Data from a national mail survey of adolescents ages 12 to 17 years and their parents (n = 876) conducted in October 2012 are used to examine predictors of youth political consumerism. Factors analyzed include youth political and civic participation, parental modeling of boycotting and buycotting, and parental encouragement of following news and politics. Other factors examined include youth civic education, extracurricular participation, and youth social or civic attitudes. In addition, the authors assess differences between youth who boycott and those who buycott. The findings show that parental modeling is the most important predictor of youth political consumerism, and young political consumers also engage in civic and political activities. Moreover, youth boycotters and buycotters appear to exhibit differences in political ideology and motivations for political consumerism.
This article considers the importance of ownership of learning as a key component of college readiness. The article is organized around two conceptual models. The first is a four-part model of college readiness that includes key cognitive strategies, key content knowledge, key learning skills and techniques, and key transition knowledge and skills. The second is a five-part model of ownership of learning that consists of the following elements: motivation and engagement, goal orientation and self-direction, self-efficacy and self-confidence, metacognition and self-monitoring, and persistence. Finally, the article concludes with a discussion of the role and importance of ownership of learning and makes the case that these elements can and should be taught to all students, and particularly in settings where an achievement gap exists.
A common interpretation of the low levels of electoral turnout among young voters is that they are apathetic and part of a generation that does not care about political issues—indeed, a selfish and materialistic generation. In this article, the authors question this common perception and test this claim against an important alternative: that the limitations to youth participation in Europe are due not to a lack of interest in the public good but rather to a combination of contextual and psychosocial factors, including the real as well as perceived inadequacy of the existing political offer. The authors assessed young people’s attitudes toward democratic life in the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Austria, Finland, and Hungary. A mixture of a comparative mass survey, stakeholder interviews, an experiment, and focus groups was used. The data suggest that young people are willing to engage politically but are turned off by the focus and nature of existing mainstream political discourse and practice, which many believe excludes them and ignores their needs and interests. Contrary to the assumptions of the disaffected and apathetic citizen approach, there is a strong desire among many young Europeans to participate in democratic life, but this desire is not met by existing democratic institutions and discourses.
Given the number of students who enter postsecondary education not ready for college, many universities have instituted summer bridge programs to better transition students to their freshman year. These programs occur during the summer before a student’s freshman year and are considered a bridge from high school to college. Yet despite the prevalence of these interventions across postsecondary institutions—community colleges and 4 years, public and private—few empirical studies exist evaluating these programs. The objectives of this article are to (a) provide a characterization of the breadth of summer bridge programs, (b) review the extant literature on summer bridge programs, and (c) discuss implications of these reviews for the future of summer bridge programs.
College readiness is a national policy priority in the United States, yet relatively little is known from large national samples about the factors and experiences that determine college readiness for historically underrepresented minorities at 4-year colleges and universities. The purpose of this study is to identify the factors and experiences that influence various measures of college readiness for historically underrepresented or underserved minorities (URMs) at 4-year colleges and universities using data from the Education Longitudinal Study (ELS:2002). Using multivariate statistics and hierarchical linear regression techniques, the author examines the following questions: (a) Are there differences among historically underrepresented groups in their level of college readiness? and (b) What factors significantly predict URMs’ college readiness as measured by high school GPA, 12th grade National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) standardized math score, and 12th grade highest math level? Implications for future policy, practice, and research are highlighted.
Promotion of the DREAM Act during the 2012 campaign presented an opportunity to examine how social media might cast youth as information leaders in the promotion of voting in Latino families. To identify opportunities and barriers to enactment of the information-leading role, we triangulate findings from a post-election survey of young adults and an analysis of campaign strategies focused on access to higher education. We find that young Latinos lagged behind non-Latinos in voting and in discussion about politics with parents and that campaign messaging typically ignored the family as a context for the cultivation of aspiration through information exchange. We conclude with recommendations for how mobilization efforts in future elections can harness new media by recruiting youth as information leaders.
A national mail survey of adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17 (n = 876) was conducted immediately before the U.S. presidential election (October 2012) to investigate socialization agents that may correlate with political and civic engagement. The relative importance of potential correlates of engagement including demographics, parents, peers, schools, religion, traditional media, social networks, and digital communication were evaluated. Regression analysis revealed that civically engaged youth identify with a religion, participate in civic education activities at school and extracurricular activities, take action (e.g., boycotting or buycotting), develop attitudes about citizenship, and engage in online/social media political activities. Politically engaged youth come from higher income households, discuss news and politics, take action, and are very prone to engage in online/social media political activities. While a wider range of activities appear to be related to civic engagement, those who are politically engaged appear to have a strong interest in online media usage. Implications are discussed.
News media play a key role in informing young citizens about politics and cultivating a sense of political efficacy. Online news media, in particular, are expected to have a positive impact due to their interactivity and new opportunities to share and discuss information. This study analyzes the impact of online and offline news media use on the growth in internal efficacy among adolescents, based on data we collected in a three-wave panel survey in the Netherlands (N = 729). Additionally, we test the impact of internal efficacy on turnout using a fourth wave of the same sample (N = 612). The results show that while newspaper reading has the strongest effects among traditional news sources, actively participating in the communication process of political information online has the strongest impact on internal efficacy. Internal efficacy in turn is found to be a significant predictor of first-time voters. The article concludes with a discussion of media use as a pathway to political participation through internal political efficacy.
For this article, we tested whether and to what extent young people’s rates of informed voting are influenced by laws and policies that regulate the electoral system and by civic education policies. Education policies and state voting laws vary widely and are in rapid flux; their impact is important to understand. Immediately after the 2012 election, a sample of 4,483 youth was surveyed that included at least 75 respondents in each of the 50 states and national oversamples of African Americans and Latinos. Their experiences with civic education and support from their families predicted their informed political participation as young adults, but variations in the existing state policies did not matter. This may suggest that the kinds of policies that states have enacted—such as allowing early voting or requiring one course on government in high school—are not helpful but policies that promote extracurricular participation and discussion of current issues in schools could be much more effective.
Most public policy related to college readiness occurs at the state level, but as with any state-level policy, significant variation exists across the 50 states. To make sense of this variation and advance our empirical knowledge surrounding state college readiness policy, we pose two questions in this study: How do states group together based on their commonalities (or lack thereof) across several college readiness policies? What underlying themes emerge across college readiness policies in the context of variation across states? We find that states cluster around three distinct types of college readiness policy. We also find a significant number of states are best described not by a single college readiness policy but rather by the states’ overall low college readiness policy effort. We review how these findings align with extant research on state-level college readiness policy and discuss possible factors that may drive the variation we observe across states.
Many students arrive at college unprepared to do college-level work, facing a host of college readiness assessments and developmental education coursework. In this article, we examine how a student’s readiness to take college classes upon entry to the university is related to four longer term postsecondary outcomes. We utilize a unique longitudinal dataset of the census of first-time freshmen at the nation’s largest public 4-year state postsecondary system to describe differences by campus and across college majors. In addition we explore the use of one measure that the system does not currently use to determine readiness—high school grade point average—and its relationship with both the existing readiness measure and postsecondary outcomes. Our results indicate that grade point average can be a useful predictor of college success above and beyond the readiness measure.
This article identifies a marked difference in the type of race-based appeals that dominated Barack Obama’s presidential reelection contest in 2012 from his inaugural campaign in 2008. Racist appeals by Mitt Romney and the right in 2012 supplanted the racial appeals by Obama and the left in 2008. We focus our attention on a particularly salient form of racist appeal, one based on the long-standing stereotypes of black laziness and taking advantage. Specifically, we outline the historical underpinnings of these stereotypes. We then demonstrate how Romney and the right wove these underlying stereotypes into a seamless racist narrative—through political advertisements, online messaging, political speeches and debate statements—beginning with the Republican primary and continuing through the general election.
This article brings an insight into Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign, taking into account the Portuguese political reality. From our observation and participation in Obama’s 2012 grassroots campaign in Philadelphia, we aim to understand how relevant, and feasible, it would be to implement a political campaign with the same type of strategy in Portugal.
The aim of this article is to analyze the influence level and boundaries that media have on politics. Specifically, we study the power of media to set the public agenda, to set the political agenda determining the decision-making process, and to generate political disaffection through the politicians’ and journalists’ perceptions. We have used a methodology based on in-depth interviews applied to a wide sample of 45 individuals. The analysis is focused on the European context; the case study is based specifically on Spain. Results show a high level of mediatization of politics, but also reveal limits to the political influence of the media. These boundaries of the media influence on politics affects political agenda setting and its ability to generate civic engagement. Moreover, we have detected four media engagement boundaries that boost the citizens’ political cynicism.
Here, we track the language patterns of Mitt Romney and other Republican candidates during 2008 and 2012 and contrast them with their Democratic counterparts to better understand the language of partisanship in the U.S. We employ DICTION (www.dictionsoftware.com), an automated text-analysis tool, to process some 8,000 campaign documents. We find (a) that Mitt Romney was an unconventional Republican in 2012 (but not in 2008); (b) that Romney employed both "Republican" and "Democratic" language and did so to good effect (both in the primaries and in the general election); (c) that Barack Obama matched Romney in these ways, departing sharply from his own 2008 campaign style; and (d) that the candidates increasingly resembled one another as election day approached. We conclude that, no matter what their party of origin,
The cross-pressured citizen—a person who affiliates with one political party but plans to vote for the nominee of another—embodies the complicated nature of political decision making. Enduring considerable scrutiny since the pioneering campaign studies of the 1940s and 1950s, the role of the cross-pressured partisan in a presidential election campaign is still not fully understood by scholars. First, this study explores who the cross-pressured partisan was in the 2012 presidential campaign by examining the formative factors that influenced the likelihood of prospective defection from one’s "home" party. Second, we explain how cross-pressured citizens behaved when seeking out news media compared to their consistent counterparts. Using national survey data collected at the midpoint of the 2012 campaign, we find that approval of President Barack Obama was a critical factor in understanding cross-pressured partisanship. Furthermore, cross-pressured Republicans were significantly less likely to attend to conservative cable programming compared to consistent Republicans. The results present a compelling extension of over seven decades of work examining the cross-pressured citizen.
Recent studies show that women running for vice president or president of the United States as major political party candidates often are covered differently than their male opponents by the media. This study examines Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann’s television news coverage compared to her male opponents in the months leading up to the primary stage of the 2012 campaign. Our analysis shows that Bachmann received less coverage, which was more often written in the game than issue frame. She was more likely to be associated with masculine than feminine issues. However, Bachmann received less image and negative coverage than her male opponents.
Mitt Romney’s work at Bain Capital became a centerpiece of the primary campaign in January, 2012. Because its portfolio and practices are so diverse, talking points about Bain were at first unpolished. Such inconsistent and haphazard discussion provided an excellent opportunity to study the refinement of campaign messages to their most politically effective and palatable forms. Furthermore, because private equity is so complex, its net effect is fairly debated—among economists, politicians, and voters alike. Thus, conversations about Bain Capital were often disjointed, allowing politicians a great deal of freedom to frame the issue however they wanted regardless of their opponents’ statements. Value appeal strategies of reconstructing, bypassing, counterblocking, overriding, and undermining, as defined by Cook, are central to this study, which examines the Republican primary debates and the deliberations surrounding Bain Capital as a representation of free market enterprise. The goal of the article is to explore the dynamics of politic debates within primary contests in which there are shared common values.
The U.S. presidential campaign in 2008 signified a change on the paradigm of how the political parties deal with local communities. This means that grassroots techniques arose as a key factor for the triumph of Barack H. Obama. After the election, European political parties—even social movements—also adapted some strategies inspired by the U.S. presidential campaigns. The main objective of this article is to analyze how these grassroots techniques have been adapted in a specific scenario: the process of self-determination of Catalonia, an Autonomous Community of Spain that claims to be an independent country after the failing of Estado de las Autonomías (state of autonomies) model. Our method is to explore the parameters that drove the Obama’s first presidential campaign and how they have been applied into the self-determination campaign of Catalonia, such as the creation of local opinion platforms, media spin doctoring, social networking, and the social involvement of foreign actors. We realized that the social commitment with the self-determination process by regional community organizations has had a stronger leadership than the political parties. As a result, we state that political spin doctors in Catalonia could neither drive nor control the framing process of the last parliamentary regional campaign.
In this article, the author researches the coverage of the U.S. and Russian presidential campaigns of 2012 in terms of media endarkenment, a process of media influence that ultimately shrinks the potential for a vibrant public sphere where informed citizens debate crucial issues. Using the works of Herman and Chomsky as well as McQuail, the study reveals the methodology of a process of media influence (intended or unintended) by which both the intellectual level of the viewers and the number of informed citizens decrease. A textual analysis of election coverage by national TV channels of both countries uncovers some of the different forms that media endarkenment takes, including the construction of a false reality, intimidation, and simplification.
On November 28 and 29, 2012, ten scholars of political parody and satire and six parody/viral video producers met at the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania to share their expertise, discuss the democratic uses of parody, and develop a set of strategies to guide the successful use of political parody in generating positive democratic outcomes. The symposium, P6: Professors and Practitioners Pontificate on Political Parody and Persuasion, was cosponsored by the Center for Political Communication at the University of Delaware and funded in part by a grant from the Omidyar Network’s Democracy Fund. The meeting served as a follow-up to the yearlong Annenberg Public Policy Center online project, FlackCheck.org. FlackCheck.org, the sister site to its companion FactCheck.org, is an educational site that uses entertaining visual formats and humor to inform the public and debunk false political claims. The November conference began with a keynote from Trevor Potter, former head of the FEC and lawyer to Stephen Colbert and his satirical—though very real—super PAC, Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow.
Consistent with other media covering the 2012 presidential campaign, political cartoons attended to the events surrounding the three presidential debates between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. While political cartoons offer a humorous visual commentary, they are part of the campaign media narrative, and are perhaps more memorable than many stories or columns themselves. This analysis discusses the attention to and portrayal of particular candidate performance in the 2012 presidential debates, and how particular statements or behavior was visually demonstrated in political cartoons, and also discusses the implication of such portrayals and attention in cartoons.
This essay reports the results of an analysis of undecided swing state voters during the six presidential debates of the 2008 and 2012 elections. Combining Real Time Response with a pretest-posttest design, the researchers identify the overall impact of the debates on undecided voters, both successful and unsuccessful message strategies, and changes in the overall perception of the candidates.
Scholars and practitioners agree that referrals provide firms with better workers. Economists and sociologists debate whether the underlying mechanism behind such relations is a better match between workers and firms or an advantage conferred by social relations. Building on insights from network theory and cognitive psychology, we offer a new approach to the debate, arguing that network relations can also create evaluative bias. We reexamine the connection between social ties and workers’ performance using unique data on the actual productivity of sales employees and their evaluations in a large global firm. Results suggest that the preexistence of ties between an incoming employee and insiders in the firm creates an evaluative advantage—an advantage that is unrelated to workers’ concrete performance. We discuss the implications of these results for a relational approach to social stratification, organizations and work, as well as social networks.
In 2012, only the GOP had a contested primary. As of March 2012 none of the four candidates remaining in the race (Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum) had secured enough delegates to claim the nomination, indicating that this primary season would drag on (McCain clinched the 2008 Republican nomination on March 4, 2008). This protracted primary meant that the Republicans had to devote most of their efforts to their immediate opponents, rather than concentrating on President Barack Obama. Obama did not have to worry about attacks from his own party. This study applies Benoit’s functional theory to 143 primary television spots from this campaign. This sample of ads broke with tradition by attacking as much as they acclaimed. The topic of utterance was split about evenly between policy and character.
Focusing on the psychological underpinnings of partisanship, this study asks whether there is a difference in the personality profile for self-described Democrats and Republicans. Using a survey of young voters (N = 610), psychological measures such as the Big Five personality dimensions and locus of control were measured in conjunction with standard political interest variables such as political cynicism and political information efficacy. The results indicate supporters for the two major parties are wired differently, in line with previous findings about ideology. Democrats were driven by an external locus of control and Republicans by an internal locus. This research finds self-identified Independents as truly being somewhere in between.
Unprecedented numbers of negative political advertisements aired in battleground markets during the 2012 primaries, the first presidential campaign since the 2010 Citizens United decision. Grounded in theories of involvement, this investigation parses the influence of partisanship and political expression on the affective effects of negative Super PAC ads. Based on a pretest–posttest design with two experimental conditions and 585 participants, the results indicate both enduring and situational involvement exerted significant main and interaction effects on viewers’ affect toward the general election candidates and the political parties. Driven by Independents who did not engage in political expression, these Super PAC ads evoked significant net decreases in affect toward Mitt Romney and the Republican Party and net increases toward Barack Obama and the Democratic Party. These results suggest enduring and situational involvement moderate the affective effects of negative Super PAC advertising in primary contests.
This report explores the variables related to partisan selective media exposure, a process by which people select media outlets and content consistent with their political predispositions. This study employs national survey data (N = 876) during the month of October 2012 immediately prior to the U.S. presidential election. Political orientation (i.e., liberal, moderate, or conservative) served as the dependent variable. The analysis revealed that political orientation was related to gender, race, and religion. The civic engagement variables of participation in a church project and participation in volunteer work within one’s community were also related. Finally, the results suggest that conservatives were most prone to use conservative talk radio, Christian radio and TV, and Fox News. Liberals were more prone to use PBS and Facebook. As such, the data indicate that audience members appear to seek out partisan media and messages consistent with their political leanings. The implications of partisan selective media exposure concerning the development of political knowledge are discussed.
This study examines the "Twitter election of 2012," and specifically young citizens’ "social watching" behaviors while live-tweeting a 2012 nationally televised Republican primary debate. We find several important relationships between key demographic, social, and political engagement variables and participants’ social watching activity (frequency of tweeting while watching the debate). We also find important links between tweet content (frequency of candidate mentions in tweets) and debate viewers’ candidate evaluations.
Since 2009, the countries that form the southern part of the European Union (EU) have been experiencing a grave economic, political, and social crisis that has had repercussions throughout the whole of the EU and has especially called into question its fragile system of governance. It has also resulted in Chancellor Angela Merkel imposing upon the rest of the EU her neoliberal political policies as the remedy to the crisis. Germany’s power at the center of the EU has created tensions between the north and the south of Europe and has revealed the precariousness and the inefficiencies of the institutions of government of the European Community. In the American presidential election, the crisis in southern Europe was brought up by the Republican candidate in order to try to show that the economic policies of President Obama would lead the United States down the same road as Greece, Italy, or Spain. At no point was there any analysis of the gravity of this crisis or of its impact on the future of the EU. For the southern countries of the EU, the economic policies of President Obama are what they hoped for. His victory was greeted with relief. A strong, stable, and integrated EU is in the interests of the United States. The alliance between the United States and the EU is more and more important in a multipolar and global world.
We argue that market failure is a major and growing source of income inequality in the United States and in liberal market economies (LMEs) more generally. This market failure takes the form of occupational, educational, managerial, and capital rents that are generated by institutional barriers that restrict the free flow of capital or labor. We suggest that these four forms of rent can partly account for (a) the extreme income inequality at the very top of the LME income distribution as well as (b) the extreme income inequality that is also observed beneath the highest percentiles of the income distribution. The sharp increase in these forms of rent, when coupled with rent destruction at the bottom of the labor market, may well explain much of the takeoff in LME inequality in the past four decades. We conclude by outlining the empirical research agenda and policy prescription implied by a rent-based account.
Research on workplace inequality focuses largely on gender and racial disparities at work and contributing factors, while those who study diversity interventions tend to ask how these might be remedied. This article takes a different tack, asking the following: What ideals and cultural assumptions about social progress undergird workplace diversity programs, and with what consequences? Drawing from neoinstitutionalism and workplace ethnography, I examine diversity management in a multinational company based on a year of field research. At this company, diversity programs are for high-status women and people of color. Findings advance the study of workplace inequality and, more generally, the relational study of meaning making in real-life institutional contexts. They show that diversity management programs attempt to minimize gender and racial boundaries by codifying egalitarian ideals in organizational structures, and those definitions can reify class-based hierarchies. The findings also push social scientists to conceptualize inequality and equality as cultural constructs and to consider the biases of scientific measurements of inequality.
In recent years, theorists of social inequality have increasingly rejected analytic models using the individual as the unit of analysis, favoring "relational" models centered on the dynamic, group-level interactions that can account for disparities in the distribution of job rewards. In this article we scrutinize three distinct strands of relational thinking: categorical theories, analysis of symbolic boundaries, and theories of intersectionality. Our goals are twofold: first, to identify some of the major conceptual and methodological limitations in this field and, second, to begin the task of conjoining insights from each strand of thinking, fostering conceptually richer and more powerful theoretical formulations of organizational inequalities. The article sketches some potential avenues for empirical analysis that seem likely to advance relational models and highlight their advantages—advantages that provide rich sociological guideposts—compared to more individually centered or even aggregate descriptive models that have governed the field since World War II.
Predominantly White workplaces are environments in which Whiteness is privileged in numerous ways. Studies show workers of color doing self-presentation, emotion work, and other forms of social interaction intended to help ease the difficulties associated with being in the minority. In addition to the expectation that they smooth interactions with White peers, workers of color are assigned positions and tasks which reinforce that racial status quo. In this theoretical article, we attempt to place these various processes under an umbrella term we define as "racial tasks." We examine the ideological, interactional, and physical labor racial minorities perform in mostly White work settings, and the ways these racial tasks vary at different levels of the organizational structure. We consider the ways that the tactics and requirements associated with racial tasks maintain the racial hierarchy of predominantly White organizations and conclude by examining the implications of this work for racial minorities.
Immigration scholars have made great strides in documenting the role of labor agents in connecting immigrant workers with jobs, though less attention has centered on whether such brokerage exacerbates existing workplace inequalities. Based on participant observation and in-depth interviews over 15 months in seven workplaces, I examine power dynamics and relations between brokers and immigrant workers. My analyses show that temporary agencies and embedded brokers play a complementary role in incorporating undocumented immigrants into jobs. Yet important power imbalances develop within these relationships, with implications for the inequalities that the most vulnerable workers experience.
Drawing on a year of fieldwork in Heartland Community, a "culture-change" nonprofit nursing home, this article investigates dynamics of worker-client power relationships across departments. The analysis raises questions about power and inequality that invert the usual way of thinking about it: Rather than trying to explain why some workers or customers are treated better or worse than others, this article explores why the same people were treated very differently at different times of the day by staff in different departments of the same organization. The divergence in power relations across departments, I contend, flowed from the nursing home’s attempts to manage cross-cutting pressures to humanize care relationships without increasing costs. I suggest that that Heartland’s "solution" to these tensions preserves the routinely inhumane treatment of nursing home residents in the day-to-day activities of the nursing department while presenting a much different face to visitors, family members, policy makers, and the public. The article concludes by suggesting that these ethnographic findings may point not only to a widespread strategy in the nursing home industry but also more generally to the organizational impression management functions served by efforts to "humanize" worker-client relationships.
This article investigates how complex combinations of control contribute to class variations in the experience of work through their impacts on relational aspects of workplace dignity. Analysis of content-coded data on 154 work groups suggests that control structures vary by class and have significant implications for levels of abuse and shame, but exert little direct impact on hostility toward management or coworker conflict. Abusive treatment rooted in coercion, however, generates hostility toward management and intensifies feelings of shame associated with coercive control. Contrary to expectations, a pattern of abuse does not tend to generate coworker conflict. Reimmersion in the case studies suggests that when it does, the cause is often favoritism—a correlate of abuse.
Most research on earnings adopts economist’s human capital model. In doing so, social scientists, explicitly or implicitly, cede primacy to the labor supply and demand mechanisms of neoclassical economics. In contrast we develop a model that treats actors’ claims as the central mechanism generating inequalities. In this model earnings are most proximately a result of negotiation between actors embedded in a set of social relations within organizations, a process we refer to as relational claims-making. Institutional and competitive aspects of organizational environments, as well as social distinctions within organizations themselves, provide resources and constraints on the persuasiveness and plausibility of wage claims by actors. Market mechanisms are not causally proximate to the production of wage inequality, but rather are an aspect of actor’s environments with the potential to influence the plausibility of particular claims.
Previous research, building on Hodson’s concept of management citizenship behavior (MCB), has shown that managers’ operational and relational competence are positively related to important employee outcomes. In this article, we suggest and show how such behaviors vary by the race-specific character of manager–subordinate dyads. Drawing on organizational demography literature (that emphasizes ascriptive differences between superiors and subordinates) and literatures on racial stereotyping (that suggest ways in which minority supervisors are viewed as less competent than White supervisors), we test hypotheses that minority and White employees have different responses to minority and White managers’ MCBs. Analyses of the 2002 National Survey of the Changing Workforce reveal that in cross-race dyads managers’ relational competence significantly increases subordinates’ commitment and job satisfaction. Managers’ technical competence, in contrast, increases subordinates’ commitment, satisfaction, and (to a lesser extent) mental health, but only in same-race dyads. Our findings suggest that managers who competently organize the workplace and show respect for workers’ rights can potentially transcend racial differences in the workplace. In the process, worker well-being and employee commitment can be enhanced.
Discrimination remains integral to understanding both how inequality is produced and how it can be remedied in employment settings. Yet like many sociological concepts, the notion of discrimination involves an uneasy mapping of theory to practice. Traditional conceptualizations of discrimination as differential treatment are ill-fitted to the structural and relational nature of much discrimination in the contemporary era. The disparate impact doctrine, which recognizes policies or practices that systematically disadvantage protected groups, picks up some of the theoretical slack, but offers little in the way of conceptualizing individuals’ complex and entangled experiences with inequality at work. In this article, I provide a conceptual reorganization of theories of discrimination, underscoring recent calls to move beyond the confines of the current disparate treatment and disparate impact binary by recognizing the structurally and culturally embedded nature of bias and discrimination. Drawing on recent sociological research as well as my own analysis of legal records and interviews with plaintiffs involved in high-profile sex and race lawsuits settled in the past decade, I illustrate how differential treatment emerges in the context of and enabled by systems of vulnerability and privilege, workplace culture, and compositional asymmetries. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of this framework for antidiscrimination enforcement efforts.
We explore one way family caregiving shapes inequality at work by analyzing the evaluations of men and women who took employment leave to care for a newborn or elderly parents or to recover from a personal injury. Roughly 500 undergraduate students evaluated the employability, qualifications, responsibility, and adherence to leave policies of a fictitious applicant for a professional job. Evaluators rated fathers and male elder caregivers as the most employable. This advantage was not explained by evaluators’ thinking that fathers and male elder caregivers were qualified, responsible, and policy abiding, suggesting the operation of taste discrimination. Likewise, accounting for these factors widens the gap in perceived employability between male and female noncaregivers. We discuss what these findings reveal about the family-work link as well as their methodological and policy implications.
The skill-biased technological change (SBTC) theory of rising inequality rests on assumptions that are challenged by a relational perspective. This article develops a historical case study of the design and implementation of technologies to automate white-collar work at the General Electric Company (GE) starting in the 1950s in order to interrogate the assumptions on which the SBTC thesis rests. Executives at GE resisted framing computer technologies as automation and sought to neutralize the class-based implications of the term. Yet they actively pursued white-collar automation technologies designed to prevent the industrial relations of the heavily unionized manufacturing sector from being replicated in the growing service sector. A new conception of productivity that locates managers as the core productive workers of the firm is embedded in the company’s internal definition of white-collar automation as information handling, lending legitimacy to the changing distribution of earnings in the following decades. By embedding the history of white-collar workplace computers in an analysis of the labor relations and other business administration problems the technologies were designed to address, this article lends a critical perspective to the SBTC theory of rising inequality.
Recently, learning analytics (LA) has drawn the attention of academics, researchers, and administrators. This interest is motivated by the need to better understand teaching, learning, "intelligent content," and personalization and adaptation. While still in the early stages of research and implementation, several organizations (Society for Learning Analytics Research and the International Educational Data Mining Society) have formed to foster a research community around the role of data analytics in education. This article considers the research fields that have contributed technologies and methodologies to the development of learning analytics, analytics models, the importance of increasing analytics capabilities in organizations, and models for deploying analytics in educational settings. The challenges facing LA as a field are also reviewed, particularly regarding the need to increase the scope of data capture so that the complexity of the learning process can be more accurately reflected in analysis. Privacy and data ownership will become increasingly important for all participants in analytics projects. The current legal system is immature in relation to privacy and ethics concerns in analytics. The article concludes by arguing that LA has sufficiently developed, through conferences, journals, summer institutes, and research labs, to be considered an emerging research field.
In this study I examined examples of implementation of conservation policies initiated by the adoption of the Convention on Biological Diversity (1992). I focused on the 101 conservation initiatives conducted during the period of 2002-2012 on the territories of groups classified by the international law as indigenous peoples. I assessed a degree to which conservation benefited indigenous communities as means to combat poverty and ecological degradation. I focused on the connections between the provisions of the CBD Article 8(j) that specified the importance of protecting indigenous and local communities’ traditional knowledge and practices (TK) to conservation, and the actual realities of conservation initiatives in which indigenous expertise was used. I learned that despite the wide use of elements composing TK in the projects examined, only certain communities benefited from the conservation initiatives, with a predominant part of beneficiaries located in the states that insured greater degree of legal and social protection to indigenous individuals as citizens of those states. For the most part conservation was imposed upon indigenous groups; some communities suffered displacement and poverty loosing the lands and resources to the conservation authorities. At the same time in other cases conservation projects offered an opportunity for indigenous individuals to advance their perspectives on managing traditional lands and natural environments and thus, to some degree, advanced underlining these groups’ interests. I concluded that collaborative work between indigenous groups and the outside agencies remains the key means toward improving the indigenous economies and relations with external actors while also serving as a means to care for the environment across geo-political boundaries.
During the 1850s and 1860s, white settlers perpetrated genocide against California Indians. Militia and regular troops supported by the state and federal governments committed acts of genocide as defined by the United Nations. Government officials, newspaper editors, and pioneers documented the genocide. History and social science textbooks ignore or barely mention murders, rapes, kidnappings, and enslavement of California Indians during the Gold Rush era. The California State Department of Education denies the genocide and textbook companies are silent of Indian genocide in spite of overwhelming evidence.
At this particular historical conjuncture, human-made crises—from ecological disasters such as the BP oil spill or the Fukushima nuclear accident, to food shortages and national economic calamities—have rightly gained attention, and the prospect of real limits to consumption seem ever present on the horizon. According to David Harvey, such "[c]rises are moments of paradox and possibility out of which all manner of alternatives . . . can spring." It is these moments, or encounters, of paradox and possibility that I address in this article. I specifically consider novel ecological political articulations that have emerged out of indigenous movements that unmask the material foundations of world history and demonstrate cracks in a dominant ideology that commoditizes all matter—living and otherwise.
The originator of cognitive dissonance theory, Leon Festinger, and those who have followed him in revising, expanding, and clarifying his theories over the past five decades provide historians investigating cases of genocide a useful lens for viewing some of the social and psychological forces acting within and upon its perpetrators. This essay takes the contemporary findings of behavioral scientists on dissonance theory and applies their theoretical models to look at the case of genocide in California. Specifically, how did the perpetrators of genocide resolve the cognitive dissonance created by their conflicting attitudes and behaviors? How could one believe that murder was wrong, particularly the murder of defenseless persons such as children or the aged, yet commit the mass murder of Native American populations, or at least allow such to be committed in their communities? Part of the answer appears to be through the dissonance-reducing strategy of trivialization in the form of humor. What the confluence of behavioral theory and historical evidence reveals is that mid-19th-century Euro-Americans—mostly White males from the United States—living in California used forms of humor to trivialize Indian humanity, to achieve a state of psychological consonance even while being the perpetrators of or bystanders to a very visible and brutally effective campaign of genocide.
Mexican-origin indigenous migration to the United States has a long history, overlapping colonialisms contribute to it, and dialectical systems of racial, class, and gender oppression shape its magnitude and form of incorporation, as equals or nonequals. This article specifically seeks to illuminate how the continuous colonial logics and acts shape indigenous migrants’ incorporation and emergent migrant identities in a global context of social inequalities. I provide a social-historical context of Mexican-origin indigenous migration and of the melting-pot concept that obfuscates the internal diversity and indigenous makeup of this long-historical migration rooted to European colonialism and its emergent forms.
Relying on archival research and an historical sociological approach, this essay argues the Navajo–Hopi land dispute demonstrates the highly uneven and porous character of what the author calls the "net of incorporation." As capitalism expands into new regions, people and economic processes are "captured" and altered, while some also evade such incorporation. As such, the argument envisions capitalism’s expansion as a net, highly porous but also effective over time. Struggles over mineral royalties and leasing in the 1950s and later also displayed tribal leaders’ heightened awareness of land as commodity, as capital. Juxtaposed against these leaders, many Diné (Navajo) who faced relocation held fast to "traditional" values concerning the land that provided them with resources to resist incorporation. The discussion utilizes a rethought incorporation to link the history of the land dispute with the broader, contested origins of the Navajo Reservation and its people.
Photographs are powerful vehicles of ideology. Rather than simply documenting and reflecting a lived, material reality, photos express and retain traces of the belief systems that structure a time and a place. Photographs from American Indian boarding schools document a time and a place, but they also express the shifting ideological landscape of what Gerald McMaster calls "colonial alchemy"—the conversion of children from different sovereign indigenous nations into (U.S.) citizens. This article analyzes photographs from the Thomas Indian School located on the Cattaraugus Reservation in western New York taken between the 1890s and 1950s to illustrate the changing terrain of U.S. racial ideology. The photographs show how the goal of colonial alchemy remained consistent, but the knowledge systems that defined Indianness, citizenship, and the humanitarian mission of American Indian boarding schools changed over time.
It has been argued that the United States did not receive California from Mexico by "right of conquest" or by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo because the majority of California was not under the control of the Mexican government. In eastern portions of Southern and Central California, few or no Spanish occupants were present. Northward from Santa Rosa to what would become the Oregon border, no Mexican governmental institutions were to be seen. This area was the aboriginal homelands of the Pomo, Wiyot, Yurok, Hupa, Karuk, Modoc peoples, just to name a few. They had lived there for thousands of years, and their aboriginal rights and supreme entitlement to their land and natural resources were undeniable. Therefore, the settlement of California must be reviewed and reevaluated.
Since mid-1990s, scholars of Indian education have placed increasing emphasis on indigenous approaches to federal Indian boarding schools during the early 20th century. Where earlier studies emphasized the design and operation of boarding schools, more recent literature often examines how Native students, families, and communities sometimes used the schools to access employment, offset financial hardship, and gain new skills and perspectives. To some, scholarly emphasis on "the brighter side of boarding schools" covers over the hardship and loss brought about by institutions created to eradicate Native American cultures and identities. In this article, I address a central question: How can scholars of Indian education illuminate Native approaches to boarding schools without underplaying the tremendous cultural loss they inflicted on indigenous communities? Drawing on the expansive secondary literature on federal Indian education and primary source documents from Sherman Institute, a federal Indian boarding school in Riverside, California, I argue that studies of Indian education can benefit from deeper consideration of the concept of "cultural genocide" and careful attention to Native voices of the past and present.
The explanatory principles of understanding and consistency are used to detail the past, present, and future of individual-level political communication media effects research. It is argued that the field of political communication is at a crossroads, with preferences for a dominant explanatory principle shifting from understanding back to consistency. In addition to understanding and consistency, it is argued that political communication researchers need to begin introducing additional explanatory principles (e.g., hedonism) to the field for the generation of new lines of inquiry. A call for embracing a diversity of explanatory principles is offered, and the utility of such an approach is explored within the context of the 2012 U.S. presidential election.
The empty chair used by actor-director Clint Eastwood during his headline-grabbing speech at the Republican National Convention is a particularly compelling example of a widely circulated image that resonated for the balance of the 2012 presidential campaign. Eastwood had criticized and mocked the empty chair as if the Democratic president were sitting in it. Following the convention, at least two incidents were reported where an empty chair was hung from a tree by a rope, interpreted by many as racially offensive displays meant to symbolize the lynching of President Barack Obama. Analyzing publicly recognizable images is an important endeavor for rhetorical scholars because images have the capability of embodying public identity and contributing to the formation of public culture. This study investigates how the circulation of particular images, such as the empty chair, during a political campaign may develop verbally unspoken arguments and provide additional insight about American identity as it relates to issues of race.
Recent presidential elections have seen the rise of the candidate memoir or manifesto. Using nine of these books authored by presidential hopefuls in the 2012 election, this article argues that this emerging genre plays an important role in what Judith Trent has called the surfacing stage of political campaigns. In addition to tracing the history of the genre, the article explains the function of such books and draws examples from the 2012 GOP primary to identify their recurring formal characteristics. The article concludes by discussing the study’s implications.
Considerable scholarly attention has been paid to the putatively corrosive power of negativity on American politics and culture. This article focuses, instead, not on the ethics of negativity but on the less studied distinctions between simpler and complex negativity strategies, rhetorically and performatively. Negativity strategies are examined across a continuum from the conventional (i.e., simple, credibility-damaging attack) to more complex negativities marked by irony, inspiration, and poetics. The article’s frame of reference includes, but is not limited to, the 2012 U.S. presidential campaign that matched incumbent Democrat Barack Obama against his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney.
Obama’s ceremonial (i.e. convention speeches and inaugurals) discourse from 2004 to 2012 constitutes an evolving polyphony. The voices of the polyphony shift from offering the Biblically-rich, personal story of Obama as an African-American to the rather partisan story of Obama as a public policy leader. Obama remains the hero in the story the polyphony presents; however, the opposition shifts from being those who doubt the dream to those who oppose policy initiatives. The voices sustain Obama’s inspiring story throughout the discourse; however, the personal fades and is replaced by an emphasis on the people he is trying to serve, the policies he is advocating on their behalf, and the partisan turmoil those policies have become entangled in. Grounded in the theoretical work of Mikhail Bakhtin, the account treats Obama’s discourse as a non-finalizable orchestration of voices.
This article analyzes how Barack Obama and Mitt Romney discussed electoral participation in campaign 2012 and compares their statements to those made by presidential nominees over the past 16 elections. Findings show that, overall, presidential candidates have depicted voting as a choice (not a right, duty, or value) and as harmful and divisive (as opposed to helpful or honorable). The data also reveal significant differences over the years, as candidates in the 1950s and 1960s were more likely to talk about voting as a value than transpires today and as candidates prior to the 1980s largely refrained from describing voting as a negative act. The article concludes by addressing how the campaign process has sharpened and politicized discussions of electoral participation over the years and what these shifts might mean for the contemporary campaign context.
During the 2012 United States election the prevalence of political campaigning permeated throughout social network sites. It was not uncommon for political candidates on all levels of government to integrate an array of social network sites in their campaign communication strategies. Despite their vast use in elections and the recognition of their significance in the media, there is a lack of empirical research that examines the complex relationship between political campaigns and social network sites. The present research responds to this gap in the literature as it seeks to understand how two congressional campaigns employed social network sites to facilitate campaign communication. Following the collection of data from qualitative interviews with campaign staff, analysis revealed that social network sites were used to improve the effectiveness of their campaigns’ messages, to generate online engagement and offline activism, and to improve understanding the needs and opinions of the electorate.
Political image is a transactional process between candidates’ actions and speech and how voters assess them with their own individual ideas of the ideal presidential candidate. This 24-year longitudinal study of political communication serves to address the following four research questions. First, what attributes do voters find most important or desirable for a candidate to possess—in other words, what makes him or her an ideal presidential candidate? Second, how do these evaluations of ideal characteristics change across time and a different field of candidates? Third, how important are the candidates’ demographic variables? Fourth, how do the evaluations of ideal characteristics differ across the age, gender, and political party affiliation of the voters? These questions are posed and answered across 1988 to 2012 presidential campaign cycles in one of the longest research studies in the discipline of political communication.
The ubiquitous media landscape today is reshaping what it means to be an engaged citizen. Normative metrics for engagement—voting, attending town meetings, participation in civic groups—are eroding in the context of online advocacy, social protest, "liking," sharing, and remixing. These new avenues for engagement offer vast opportunities for new and innovative approaches to teaching and learning about political engagement in the context of new media platforms and technologies. This article explores digital media literacy as a core competency for engaged citizenship in participatory democracy. It combines new models of engaged and citizenship and participatory politics with frameworks for digital and media literacy education, to develop a framework for media literacy as a core political competency for active, engaged, and participatory citizenship.
Social media sites have become the new battleground in U.S. presidential politics. In helping to create an identifiable image for candidates, photographs on Facebook have become a convenient outlet for displaying both advertising and candid images of the candidate. While scholars have begun to recognize the impact of photographs on political campaign, Grabe and Bucy have identified potential frames that news photographs enable campaigns to use in hopes of casting candidates in a particular light. This essay utilizes a close semiotic analysis to understand how Internet images convey meaning that helps to create those frames. The essay concludes with a discussion of the utility of semiotic analysis in understanding campaign images and the potential for Internet images for framing campaigns.
The new media environment raises two questions: Will campaign deceptions have traveled around the web before journalism has the fact-checking in place to ensnare them? And if diligent checking of claims does exist, will it fall on an audience too enmeshed in its own biases to see past them? This essay draws on evidence from the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s 2012 Institutions of Democracy Political Knowledge Survey to argue that long-form political fact-checking can increase the accuracy of voters’ perceptions of both candidate stands on issues and the background facts of the presidential race.
Much academic debate has centered on the impact of new technologies on democracy. This study examines the effects of social media on political participation and candidate image evaluations in the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses. Multivariate analyses show that social media have no effects on likelihood of caucus attendance but influence perceptions of candidate traits among the sample of Iowans drawn here. The study also addresses the role of traditional media as channels for political information during the caucuses.
This study examines Twitter use by presidential candidates during the 2012 primary election. The Twitter feeds and activity levels of candidates from the Republican, Democratic, Libertarian, and Americans Elect parties and their campaigns were gathered over a 3-month span. Variables examined include the number of tweets posted, followers gained, and followers added as well as the occurrence of hashtags, user mentions, hyperlinks, and content categories within tweets. Results showed candidates’ presence on Twitter was not uniform. Tweet frequency did not necessarily result in followers gained. Interestingly, the candidates who tweeted the most were not major party nominees. As the Republican primary campaign progressed, the amount of daily tweeting by the candidates was not higher than it had been earlier in the primary season.
The 2012 election season provided increased opportunities for the collaboration among citizens, new media, and democracy. The "social media election" saw a rise in online user-generated political content posted to YouTube. These videos, often satirical in nature, were viewed by millions, making the potential impacts from this new form of political communication deserving of inquiry. Using experimental design, this study explored the relationship between user-generated political satire and "normative" political attitudes. The results revealed that viewing satirical representations of political candidates did not affect individuals’ level of political cynicism or political information efficacy; however, perceptions of candidate credibility and favorability were altered.
Using a newly launched U.S. tourism commercial as a stimulus, this pre/post quasi-experimental study empirically tests the bleed-over effect of tourism advertising on public diplomacy measures. Metrics for both tourism and public diplomacy objectives were obtained after the commercial was viewed by a large, nationally representative sample of Australian adults. Confirmation of the bleed-over effect was found. Subgroup analysis further explains how the commercial affected various audience segments. Practical and theoretical implications for the use of tourism advertising as a tool for mediated public diplomacy are explored.
This research proposed that social media use in public diplomacy should first be a strategic issue management (SIM) process. Using two case studies, the research identified four phases of the SIM process, namely the issue fermenting and going viral phase, the proactive phase, the reactive phase, and the issue receding and new issue fermenting phase. Social media are largely tactical tools in the first and the last phases. But they may become strategic tools in the proactive and reactive phases, in which diplomats may use them to reinforce a favorable viral trend, to build an agenda, and to respond to a conflict. In addition, the SIM approach argues that engagement, the Obama administration’s diplomatic doctrine, should be reassessed in a mixed-motive framework instead of being narrowly equated to dialogue.
The constant media coverage of the Middle East in terms of conflicts, terror attacks, and wars affects the media and public image of countries in this area. In analyzing marketing initiatives, media policy, public relations crisis techniques, and the components of advertising campaigns, the goal of this article is to uncover the strategies used by Middle Eastern marketers to restore a positive image to bring back tourism after crises during the past decade. Based on the multistep model for altering place image, the study used qualitative content analysis of advertisements, press interviews with Middle Eastern officials and marketers, national tourism board websites, and reports about marketing initiatives that appeared in the press and on global tourism news websites. The analysis shows that Middle Eastern marketers employed three types of strategies to restore a positive image: source, message, and audience.
Media attention accorded to foreign countries constitutes a crucial facet of public diplomacy. Studies have shown that proximity in values is a key factor that determines such media attention. Models of media interest generally assume that the impact of value proximity is universal across countries with different societal value orientations. Yet this study shows that the effect of societal value orientation on media attention to foreign countries is more complex. It is argued here that the societal value orientation in different countries primes different sets of values, which are then applied as a criterion for assessing the importance of foreign states. Our empirical examination is based on the visibility of foreign countries gauged by searching web portals in 57 countries. It shows that in line with our theoretical argument, countries systematically differ in recognizing proximity, such that democracies base their judgment on similarity in shared democratic principles, whereas authoritarian countries focus on the affinity in religious culture. We discuss the strategic implications of this finding for the study of mediated public diplomacy.
The use of international broadcasting, a tool of public diplomacy since World War I, can be divided into two chronological periods. The first, which began during World War I and declined in the post–Cold War era, was characterized by international government-sponsored radio broadcasters. The second began with the emergence of privately owned global news networks (e.g., CNN, Sky News, and MSNBC) in the 1980s and 1990s, which were deemed more credible than government-sponsored stations. Based on an 8-year study of Al-Jazeera’s coverage of Saudi affairs throughout the Qatari–Saudi conflict, which revealed a strong correlation between Al-Jazeera Arabic’s tone toward Saudi affairs and the development of the Qatari–Saudi conflict, the article argues that Qatar invented a new model of public diplomacy by operating Al-Jazeera as a hybrid state-sponsored/private network, effectively transforming the network into a highly potent public diplomacy tool. Accordingly, the article discusses the interplay among news networks, ownership, and use of public diplomacy tactics in contemporary international broadcasting.
The current study builds on previous knowledge of international public opinion by examining the role that the evaluation of a nation’s leader may have on evaluations of the nation by a foreign public. More specifically, the study examines the impact of the so-called Obama effect on attitudes toward the United States in the nation of Pakistan. The study analyzed a large subset of data (N = 1,254) from the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project. The results of the analysis point to significant relationships among confidence in Obama’s leadership, approval of Obama’s foreign policies, U.S.–Pakistan relations, and favorability toward the United States. The study discusses the theoretical implications of the findings along with the contextual implications on U.S. public diplomacy.
This article considers the developing field of learning analytics and argues that to move from small-scale practice to broad scale applicability, there is a need to establish a contextual framework that helps teachers interpret the information that analytics provides. The article presents learning design as a form of documentation of pedagogical intent that can provide the context for making sense of diverse sets of analytic data. We investigate one example of learning design to explore how broad categories of analytics—which we call checkpoint and process analytics—can inform the interpretation of outcomes from a learning design and facilitate pedagogical action.
This article presents results from an investigation of the association between student academic performance and social ties. Based on social capital and networked learning research, we hypothesized that (a) students’ social capital accumulated through their course progression is positively associated with their academic performance and (b) students with more social capital have significantly higher academic performance (operationalized as grade point average). Both hypotheses were supported by results of an empirical study that analyzed 10 years of student course enrolment records (N = 505) in a master’s degree program offered through distance education at a Canadian university. These results are consistent with previous studies that looked at social networks built through student interaction in classrooms or computer-mediated communication environments. The significance of this research lies in the simplicity of the method used to establish student social networks from existing course registration records readily available through an institution’s student information system. Direct implications of this research are that (a) study plans for students should consider investment in building new social ties in each course during degree programs and (b) readily available data about cross-class networks can be used in software systems supporting study planning.
In recent years, an increasing number of analyses in learning analytics and educational data mining (EDM) have adopted a "discovery with models" approach, where an existing model is used as a key component in a new EDM or analytics analysis. This article presents a theoretical discussion on the emergence of discovery with models, its potential to enhance research on learning and learners, and key lessons learned in how discovery with models can be conducted validly and effectively. We illustrate these issues through discussion of a case study where discovery with models was used to investigate a form of disengaged behavior (i.e., carelessness) in the context of middle school computer-based science inquiry. This behavior was acknowledged as a problem in education as early as the 1920s. With the increasing use of high-stakes testing, the cost of student carelessness can be higher. For instance, within computer-based learning environments, careless errors can result in reduced educational effectiveness, with students continuing to receive material they have already mastered. Despite the importance of this problem, it has received minimal research attention, in part because of difficulties in operationalizing carelessness as a construct. Building from theory on carelessness and a Bayesian framework for knowledge modeling, we use machine-learned detectors to predict carelessness within authentic use of a computer-based learning environment. We then use a discovery with models approach to link these validated carelessness measures to survey data to study the correlations between the prevalence of carelessness and student goal orientation.
Informal learning has become an important driver for professional development and workplace learning. Yet, however powerful informal learning may be, there is a problem when it comes to making it a real asset within organizations: Informal learning activities are spontaneous and mostly invisible to others. The aim of this study is to develop a method that helps raise awareness about these activities using a learning analytics approach. This method concentrates on detecting and visualizing informal professional social networks and finding ways in which their presence and accessibility can be improved. This study shows that the presented methodology is a promising research-driven intervention. With this methodology we can detect multiple (isolated) networks in organizations, connect ideas, and facilitate value creation. Using this approach, organizations can link with existing informal networks of practice and unlock their potential for organizational learning by giving them a voice and making their results more explicit within the organization.
The field of learning analytics has the potential to enable higher education institutions to increase their understanding of their students’ learning needs and to use that understanding to positively influence student learning and progression. Analysis of data relating to students and their engagement with their learning is the foundation of this process. There is an inherent assumption linked to learning analytics that knowledge of a learner’s behavior is advantageous for the individual, instructor, and educational provider. It seems intuitively obvious that a greater understanding of a student cohort and the learning designs and interventions they best respond to would benefit students and, in turn, the institution’s retention and success rate. Yet collection of data and their use face a number of ethical challenges, including location and interpretation of data; informed consent, privacy, and deidentification of data; and classification and management of data. Approaches taken to understand the opportunities and ethical challenges of learning analytics necessarily depend on many ideological assumptions and epistemologies. This article proposes a sociocritical perspective on the use of learning analytics. Such an approach highlights the role of power, the impact of surveillance, the need for transparency, and an acknowledgment that student identity is a transient, temporal, and context-bound construct. Each of these affects the scope and definition of learning analytics’ ethical use. We propose six principles as a framework for considerations to guide higher education institutions to address ethical issues in learning analytics and challenges in context-dependent and appropriate ways.
The ability to capture large amounts of data that describe the interactions of learners becomes useful when one has a framework in which to make sense of the processes of learning in complex learning environments. Through the analysis of such data, one is able to understand what is happening in these networks; however, deciding which elements will be of most interest in a specific learning context and how to process, visualize, and analyze large amounts of data requires the use of analytical tools that adequately support the phases of the research process. In this article, we discuss the selection, processing, visualization, and analysis of multiple elements of learning and learning environments and the links between them. We discuss, using the cases of two learning environments, how structure affects the behavior of learners and, in turn, how that behavior has the potential to affect learning. This approach will allow us to suggest possible ways of improving future designs of learning environments.
This article introduces learning analytics dashboards that visualize learning traces for learners and teachers. We present a conceptual framework that helps to analyze learning analytics applications for these kinds of users. We then present our own work in this area and compare with 15 related dashboard applications for learning. Most evaluations evaluate only part of our conceptual framework and do not assess whether dashboards contribute to behavior change or new understanding, probably also because such assessment requires longitudinal studies.
This article develops a minimal dynamic model for the acquisition and loss of network contacts in ego networks. The model shows a simple relationship between the rate at which contacts are gained, the rate of loss, and the number of contacts observed in cross-section. The model produces a novel interpretation for the characteristics of tie strength in ego networks. Some conclusions based on the analysis of the model are (a) any theory of ego networks must have a model of both the creation and destruction of ties, (b) the dynamics of tie strength are underspecified at present, (c) current methods of gathering data on ego networks provide virtually no information on weak ties, and (d) specifying the absence of ties is both more important and more problematic than previously recognized. The article concludes with some applications of the model of relevance to work on social capital.