Search results

This paper seeks evidence of implicit regulation of executive pay. The implicit regulation hypothesis suggests highly visible companies will constrain their behavior to avoid potential reprisals from constituents, politicians and potential regulators. We extend this literature using a measure of corporate visibility based on the number of news stories about each firm in a balanced panel of 242 public companies.

Unbecoming: Visibility Politics and Queer Rurality critically analyzes calls for LGBTQ people to be "out, loud, and proud" through examining representations, discourses, and experiences of LGBTQ women in the rural Midwestern United States. Drawing from cultural representations and interviews I conducted with fifty-one women in rural South Dakota and Minnesota, I suggest that an estrangement exists between the desires, logics, and strategies of LGBTQ women in the rural Midwest and those of gay rights movements. This estrangement points to the need to consider the ideologies undergirding and the ramifications of LGBTQ visibility politics. I make three interventions in the interdisciplinary study of visibility: I argue that calls for visibility are symptomatic of and enable metronormativity, that visibility politics reproduce both post-racial and what I term post-spatial ideologies, and, finally, that becoming recognizable as visible is a labored process, and, as such, calls for LGBTQ visibility, which relentlessly demand constant laboring, are a reflection of and benefit to capitalist logics. In doing so, I revise assumptions about the ostensible relations among gay community, identity, and visibility, question the notion that visibility leads to rights or justice, and challenge dominant conceptions of the nature of rural communities. Beyond examining the unbecoming-ness of visibility discourses, I suggest that an interrogation of visibility discourses explicates how one becomes (and might un-become) a sexual subject and can broaden possibilities for actualizing alternate subjectivities--sexual or otherwise.

In the digital age, calls for transparency and openness as well as for privacy and confidentiality prevail: Struggles for visibility occur simultaneously with conflicts regarding invisibility and hidden battles for power and privileges of interpretation. Concerns about a loss of digital self-determination exist, just like those regarding the "right to be forgotten" or the right to become invisible and unseen. While the idea of a "transparent user" – as the ultimate notion of (in)voluntary visibility – has caused a broad outcry in society and in scientific debates a few years ago (Palfrey & Gasser, 2008), the discussion has shifted toward considerations of Internet governance and regulation (Camenisch, Fischer-Hübner, & Hansen, 2015). Brighenti (2010, p. 109) has pointed out that visibility has long been one of the key aspects "associated with the public sphere" and that in today's digitized publics, the "project of democracy can no longer be imagined without taking into account visibility and its outcomes" (Brighenti, 2010, p. 189). Visibility and invisibility, along with their societal outcomes, are increasingly being discussed and analyzed, as they are becoming important dimensions in the accurate description and explanation of digital communication.