Suchergebnisse

Political prisons are not only places of violence and silence. They are also productive. Building on recent literature that pays close attention to prisoners' social and political projects, the article argues that significant, often hidden, aspects of political work take place within the prison, and reach beyond its walls. A focus on the writings and oral histories of political prisoners reveals a remarkable range of imagination and practice within the tight embrace of a hostile state, and shows also its post-colonial reverberations. Through a focus on settler-ruled Rhodesia, I explore the projects and possibilities of nationalists in detention and guerrillas in maximum security prisons, noting their varied and shifting modes of story telling, and the political charge of these stories in the present.

New plant breeding techniques such as CRISPR/Cas have the potential to improve sustainability in agriculture. Genome editing techniques can increase yields while reducing the use of pesticides. Researchers around the world are working on improving the nutritional value of plants. However, whether the new technologies will be used in Europe is uncertain at present. Should genome editing be regulated like the 'old' genetic engineering techniques used on plants? What might a responsible interpretation of the precautionary principle look like? The political discussion on the evaluation of new plant breeding technologies is in full swing. The contributions in this anthology present the legal, social and ethical aspects of the topic that were discussed at a summer school of the Institute of Technology-Theology-Natural Sciences (TTN) at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich.

The article focuses on a current trend in office design: Activity Based Work (ABW). This is an office solution that instead of providing employees with designated places, it provides them with a variety of spaces in the office that offer different functionalities. A case study is presented of the ongoing effort of a multinational technology company in the software industry to implement ABW at a local site in Sweden. Based on an analysis of the individual and focus group interviews of company employees, the article argues that the non-territorial foundation of ABW is seen as a threat to the work-related identity among certain groups within the company. The findings presented comprise specific insights into how the material aspects of organizational life interact with social identity construction.

The paper examines the impact of fake news on the relationship between companies and their strategic audiences. The text is structured into two parts. The focus in the first part is on the structure of corporate communications and the model of successful corporate policy presented as a projection of the idea of the business of trust. The second part highlights the main aspects of the development of the cosmetic giant "L'Oreal", which has preserved its image as a strong brand and an ethical company in the conditions of hypercompetitiveness and fake news. The study is based on Van Rieland Fombrun's theory of corporate communications as a polyfunctional concept and on Kotler's idea of market-oriented strategic planning, providing an advantage to firms in situations of risk and dynamic social transformations.

AbstractBack in 2009, the Labour British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was attacked for "bad spelling" in a condolence letter written personally by him to the mother of a soldier who died in combat, and publicised by The Sun newspaper. "Spelling" here acts as a leveller of hierarchical differences in the national political culture, with ruler and subject both publicly disciplined by the same standard language ideology. Previous research on orthography as social practice has tended to focus on deliberate manipulation of fixed spellings; this article extends the approach to unconventional spellings that have come about 'by mistake', and also widens it, to consider aspects of orthography other than spelling, focusing on the look of the Prime Minister's handwriting. At issue, semiotically, are meanings such as 'the personal touch' and 'respect'.

AbstractThe introduction of this issue goes back over the history of the creation of the Lusotopie journal. It also questions the scope of the concept of lusotopy in the social sciences. The intellectual project of the journal, published from 1994 onwards, was complex and ambitious. Lusotopie is not a review of "cultural-area" studies, but a generalist review of political analysis, in the broadest sense, from an empirically-delimited research field: that of the area drawn by Portuguese history and colonization. It was both to escape the contemporary neo-imperial approach of "Lusophony" and to overcome the simply negative criticism of the ideology of Lusophony (in its literary, political and economic aspects), which as such does not provide a tool for understanding the realities produced by history.

ABSTRACTThis research investigates various firm motives for practicing corporate social responsibility (CSR). More precisely, it examines whether a firm's primary motive for undertaking CSR is related to the type of actions performed. Such exploratory research is overdue following more than 40 years of scholarly contention on the financial rewards of doing (and looking) good. By uncovering and measuring specific aspects of CSR, I offer an initial understanding of interactions within firm CSR operations. Theory on types of CSR have surfaced, yet empirical studies are few. In this research, I address this disparity by using original quantitative measures of both motive and type. The outcomes of this investigation challenge certain extant notions of CSR, while introducing a measure of objectivity in some long‐standing debates among scholars and corporate stakeholders.

The article centers on the political aspects of international news making, i.e. the coverage of major political news by global media. Nowadays we are witnessing rising interest towards the modus operandi of global media, its newly-acquired functions and its role as a world politics actor. In this study new empirical data is used to assess the role global media plays in the representation of major civil conflicts and to revisit the commonly-accepted understanding of its political functions. With the help of discourse analysis, the authors investigate the realities of the civil wars in Libya and Syria through the lens of their representations in international news, the aim being to unveil the influence of the existing social frames on the pertinent media content.

Abstract
We present how working with text in the classroom can promote civic literacy aims by adapting and studying a well-known instructional method in Social Studies classrooms called Structured Academic Controversy (SAC). Not only do SACs give students an opportunity to engage in this form of deliberation, it also requires students to first become well informed on the topic (an important aspect of civic literacy) through close reading of text. Such text-based discussion is even more important in promoting comprehension when the texts are dense and complex (e.g. the US Constitution, SCOTUS decisions). In this paper, we propose that to obtain civic literacy, students need to gain a deeper understanding of crucial civic knowledge and information through texts and to evaluate how the information might best serve a democratic society.

As participatory budgeting (PB) processes proliferate around the globe and within the United States, there remain questions regarding PB's contested role as an empowering, pro-poor tool for social justice. This analysis of the New York City PB process focuses on the interactions between everyday participants in PB and city agency representatives, the bureaucrats involved in the process. In New York, PB has successfully broadened notions of stakeholdership for many constituents. Still, the agencies' micropolitical practices—especially regarding contested politics and local versus technical knowledge—help to forward a model of managed participation, sidelining deliberative aspects of the process. Combined with a context of austerity, these practices limit the ability of such participatory institutions to retain volunteer participants, as well as the ability of constituents to substantively shape state priorities.

L'approche développée par Vincent Pouliot dans son article d'International Organization ouvre des pistes fructueuses afin de repenser le fonctionnement des communautés de sécurité, en l'occurrence l'Otan, à partir des pratiques sociales et plus précisément de la logique du praticable (des savoirs non réfléchis sur lesquels repose l'action). L'objet de cet article vise à discuter deux aspects de cette approche. Le premier tient au modèle de Bourdieu qui sert de matrice à l'intelligibilité des pratiques. Il consiste à intégrer des éléments non utilisés par Vincent Pouliot comme le capital informationnel, les rites, la logique du don et contre-don, ou encore la nature du champ diplomatique comparé à celle du champ politique. Le deuxième relève des analyses alternatives qui relèvent de la théorie normative et qui sont également des sentiers possibles pour aborder cet objet, notamment la pensée d'Arendt.

The present paper deals with some main aspects of the work of two communist revolutionary: A. Gramsci and V. Lenin. Furthermore, it copes with the concept of 'Hegemony', its historical recognition and its subversive re-signification in the contemporary lecture of the Italian Marxist. As the phenomenology of autonomous class institution, the 'Soviet Power', in the work of Lenin, can be used to reconfigure a set of practices for the conflicts, in the process of subjectivation in the class war as well as in the process of collective self-government. The former part of the essay will be focused on the genealogy of this concepts, whereas the latter will analyze the possibility of a social transformation embodied in the General Intellect, based on the theoretical and political practices of the two Marxist philosophers.

'Leather and Latex: Materials, Morals and Subcultural Style' is a one-day workshop focused on the subject of material as a means to approach histories of subcultural style. Involving archivists, conservators, theorists and practitioners the day expands upon the social meanings and political potentialities surrounding these two materials and how they might be historicised and preserved. HommAges presented key aspects of their research interests relating to the historical context of latex fetishism in British and European subcultures. This was illustrated by slides as well as a selection of costumes from the Neu Pneumatik! collection. These contributions were extended through a table discussion with fashion designer Theresa Coburn, synthetics conservator Dr Anita Quye, fashion anthropologist Ted Polhemus and archivist Grace Biggins, chaired by Dr. Fiona Jardine.

The European refugee crisis has become one of the most puzzling aspects of European society and politics. The continent's worst humanitarian crisis since World War II has prompted a novel political and social labyrinth. As European leaders struggle to respond to the increasing number of refugees crossing their countries' borders, divisions tend to become more visible in the public debate. This paper explores the different positions of European public intellectuals: from French intellectuals, such as Finkielkraut, Houellebecq and Onfray, who tend to show sympathy with right-wing Islamophobic populism, to Jürgen Habermas, Zygmunt Bauman, Slavoj Zizek, among others, who appeal to relieve the refugee emergency.Whereas some still condemn war and imperialism, oppression and the violation of universal values, others appear to be embedded in national parochialism and dangerous radical positions.

Like elsewhere in Nigeria and Africa, the imposition of colonial rule on Batombuland and the incursion of western ideas produced profound socio-cultural, economic and political changes in the Batombu society. However, unlike several Nigerian and African peoples whose histories have received extensive scholarly attention, the history of the Batombu has attracted very little scholarly attention. Thus virtually neglected, the Batombu occupies a mere footnote position in the extant historiography of Nigeria. This is the gap this article seeks to fill. It examines the impact of colonialism and western civilisation on Batombu's political, social, economic and cultural institutions and concludes that as profound and far-reaching as these changes were some important aspects of the indigenous institutions and traditional practices of the people survived.