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This groundbreaking volume uses the media to show how questions of gender and economics are inextricably linked to issues of power in Western capitalist societies. Integrating political economy and feminism, it offers a new understanding of communication at the personal, experiential, institutional, and structural levels--and exposes all the subtle and complex ways in which sex and money are sutured into individuals' daily lives

The democracy-science relationship has traditionally been examined through philosophical conjecture and country case studies. There remains limited global-scale empirical research on the topic. This study explores country-level factors related to the dynamics of the global research collaboration network, focusing on structural associations between democratic governance and the strength of international research collaboration ties. This study combines longitudinal data on 170 countries between 2008 and 2017 from the Varieties of Democracy Institute, World Bank Indicators, Scopus, and Web of Science bibliometric data. Methods include descriptive network analysis, temporal exponential random graph models (TERGM), and valued exponential random graph models (VERGM). The results suggest significant positive effects of democratic governance on the formation and strength of international research collaboration ties and homophily between countries with similar levels of democratic governance. The results also show the importance of exogenous factors, such as GDP, population size, and geographical distance, as well as endogenous network factors, including preferential attachment and transitivity.

AbstractCommunities are the foundation of our society and of our overall well‐being. Unfortunately they are experiencing rapid transformations that may significantly erode their capacity to remain viable and sustainable both domestically and internationally. Issues of empowering communities are examined in regard to social justice, challenges to democracy, and globalization of the economy and other sectors of society. It is argued that the ways in which we view and structure work, generate and disseminate knowledge through science and technology, and produce, distribute, and consume food are essential factors affecting our self‐identity and the empowerment of our communities. How we shape decisions and actions around work, science and technology, and food, as well as other key factors affecting our communities, is crucial to achieving a just and sustainable agenda for the future. Finally, it is proposed that all citizens be engaged in a procedural process called discourse ethics, which is guided by the principles of justice, recognition, respect, and accountability.

Economic development has consequences for many aspects of social life. Some of these social consequences, in turn, have an impact on a nation's political life. Studies of social mobilization, for example, have demonstrated that economic development is associated with sharp increases in the general level of political participation. These studies report strong relationships between aggregate socio-economic measures such as per capita income, median level of education, and percentage of the population in urban areas, on one hand, and aggregate measures of political participation, such as voting turnout, on the other. Simultaneously, scholars conducting surveys of individual political participation consistently have reported that an individual's social status, education, and organizational memberships strongly affect the likelihood of his engaging in various types of political activities.In spite of the consistency of both sets of findings across many studies and although the findings appear frequently in analysis of political stability, democracy, and even strategies of political growth, we know little about the connections between social structure and political participation. With few exceptions the literature on individual participation is notable for low level generalizations (the better educated citizen talks about politics more regularly), and the absence of systematic and comprehensive theory. While the literature on the growth of national political participation has been more elaborate theoretically, the dependence on aggregate measures has made it difficult to determine empirically how these macro social changes structure individuals' life experiences in ways which alter their political behavior.

The unemployment among arts, humanities and social sciences graduates has been a significant phenomenon in many countries in the world including Sri Lanka, which has received intense attention from policymakers in recent times in which the fault is often directed at the universities that produce these graduates. According to the Labor Force Survey of Sri Lanka, overall unemployment remained at 5.1% while the youth unemployment rate remained at 23.3% in 2019, which included more than 50,000 unemployed graduates, most of whom were humanities and social sciences graduates. In this backdrop, this paper reviewed the causes of unemployment and the issues of the employability of humanities and social sciences graduates in Sri Lanka. The study revealed that the graduates in humanities and social sciences have not been employable mainly due to the fact that there has been a significant skills mismatch as graduates lack employable skills and attributes. Moreover, unemployment of humanities and social sciences graduates is caused by a number of factors including skills deficiency, occupational immobility, geographical immobility, technology change, a lack of sufficient jobs growth and various structural constraints in the economy. The study suggests that there is a need for significant structural reforms on both the supply side and the demand side to make graduates more employable and employed. While the government is required to play a leading role in these structural reforms to create more jobs for the graduates in humanities and social sciences, the higher education institutes need to undertake a major structural reform of study programmes through a vision that enables them to produce intellectually rich, and highly skilled graduates in humanities and social sciences.

Democratic school systems are expected to equip students with the knowledge, abilities, and attitudes needed for life as citizens, particularly through social science education. Disciplinary knowledge, derived from the academic counterparts to school subjects, is essential in developing these skills. However, research has also emphasized the importance of life-world perspectives, where students' experiences are included and taken seriously in teaching. This study suggests that the theory of (civic) narrative competence can function as a bridge between the disciplinary domain and the life-world domain in its focus on how students' civic reasoning can be developed through teaching. The article uses narrative theory to explore how the students' civic narratives changed and became more nuanced after a teaching segment focusing on social and political trust. In the article, we demonstrate how the students' personal experiences colored their interpretations and orientations before the teaching segment and how their civic narratives were developed through the implemented teaching, which provided them with concepts, a theoretical model, and empirical examples. We found that the students did not discard previous perceptions after the teaching segment, but integrated them into their new knowledge and orientations, thus integrating the life-world and disciplinary domains.

For the past decade, a new form of paternalism has been emerging on the policy stage. Unlike 'traditional paternalism', which sought to make people conform to religious or moralistic notions of goodness, this form of 'new-paternalism' seeks to make people better off by their own judgement. For the better part of fifty years, behavioural sciences have been challenging assumptions of human behaviour and rationality. As such, the neo-paternalists seem to use behavioural economics and psychology's insights to justify and legitimize their paternalistic interventions. Behavioural Law and Economics are now involved in the process of policymaking, contributing to the relatively new field of Behavioural Public Policy. Libertarian Paternalism has become one of the most famous forms of this so called 'new-paternalism'. Its advocates claim their proposal of soft paternalism is libertarian, in the sense that it does not restrict freedom of choice and action, it does not coerce nor force, but rather it "nudges" citizens on their subjectively preferred path. The purpose of this dissertation is to analyse these claims by assessing the 'new' paternalistic assumptions, by studying some of their proposed initiatives and the possible implications that those might have on political liberty and decisional autonomy focussing on some liberal ideas from John Stuart Mill and Isaiah Berlin.

Britain's nineteenth-century railway companies traditionally play a central role in histories of the spread of standard Greenwich time. This relationship at once seems to embody a productive relationship between science and capitalism, with regulated time essential to the formation of a disciplined industrial economy. In this narrative, it is not the state, but capitalistic private commerce which fashioned a national time system. However, as this article demonstrates, the collaboration between railway companies and the Royal Greenwich Observatory was far from harmonious. While railways did employ the accurate time the Observatory provided, they were also more than happy to compromise the astronomical institution's ability to take the accurate celestial observations such time depended on. Observing astronomical transits required the use of troughs of mercury to reflect images of stars, but the construction of a railway too near to the Observatory threatened to cause vibrations which would make such readings impossible. Through debates over proposed railway lines near the Observatory, it becomes clear how important government protection from private interests was to preserving astronomical standards. This article revises our understanding of the role of railway companies in the dissemination of standard time and argues that state intervention was essential to preserving Victorian British astronomical science. ; ERC