Suchergebnisse

THE AUTHOR PRESENTS A CRITIQUE & AN EXTENSION OF WEISSBERG'S (1978) THEORY OF COLLECTIVE REPRESENTATION. SHE REDEFINES COLLECTIVE REPRESENTATION AS EXTENT TO WHICH POLICY OUTPUTS REFLECT NATION-WIDE PUBLIC PREFERENCES. SHE USES DATA FROM SRC/CPS ELECTION SURVEYS IN 1978 & ROLL-CALL DATA OF 85TH CONGRESS. UNDER REDEFINITION, COLLECTIVE REPRESENTATION HAS ADVANTAGE OVER DYADIC ON ONLY 2 HOUSE VOTES OUT OF 7.

This special issue of Transfer concerns the analytical frameworks we use to understand trade unions and their actions. Focusing on the conditions for union renewal, it explores key ideas that might stimulate our thinking about union revitalization and future forms of collective representation. The challenge to each set of authors is to put forward a conceptual framework that will help readers to rethink their own understanding and narratives about collective representation. These concepts include politics, power, legitimacy, democracy, individualism and collectivism, the framing of gender and womanhood, and climate change.

This paper explores in particular the source of the feelings expressed in sport contexts and the processes of their amplification. Sport activities acquire their significance as collective representations through which people represent to themselves in symbolic form the power of the social groups in which they live, their structures and their moral codes. In so doing, they help to create and sustain and, at the same time, become subject to the influence of the social arrangements to which such symbolic structures relate. The emotions engendered may be amplified through processes of ritual and taboo and the excitement generated by sport encounters, thus leading to an experience of sport as sacred and radically separate from the flow of profane or'normal' life.

In practice, democracies privilege plurality parties. Theories of the democratic process challenge the democratic credentials of this practice. Abstract social choice theory wonders whether an electoral majority even exists. A more optimistic line of argument, prominent in research on collective representation, assumes that the policy position of the median voter embodies the majority electoral preference. The conflict between what democracies actually do and what two leading theories of the democratic process say calls for a comparative inquiry into electoral majoritarianism. For each of a dozen countries, the authors ask whether any political party commands a predominant majoritarian position among voters—that is, is a Condorcet winner—and, if so, which party it is. They find that a Condorcet winning party exists in all 12 countries and that the plurality party can lay more claim to representing the popular majority than the left—right median party. These findings have important implications for the study of democratic representation, which the authors consider in their conclusions.

In race‐centered societies dominant racial populations create and maintain society through constructing collective representations of The Other Races. These collective representations of racial subordinates by the dominant are cultural commodities produced through typification and stereotypical processes and structures. They became powerful sources of socialization which institutionalize race‐centerness in societies through normalizing cultural interpretations of social and political stratification categories defined as races.

In the spirit of solidarity, critical activist scholarship and collaborative critical inquiry, this article calls for adoption of a counterhegemonic, transformative education strategy by proposing the development of an alternative vision to current neoliberal education projects and standardization. The political economy of education is driven by the economic imperatives of neoliberalism promoting new modes of governance in the university space. Education, once positioned in the public domain and constructed as a place of intellectual thought and progressive pedagogy, is reframed and reconstituted into the knowledge economy and social enterprise. The article draws on Thomas Piketty's concepts of educational convergence, institutional change, and collective representation to embed transformative strategies that reclaim democratic academic thought and collective action. Piketty's concepts are supplemented by narratives from service users from a large non-government organization helping people transition out of poverty, which has an early childhood center as part of the support. Such an emancipatory strategy through the use of critical pedagogy helps reconnect links between learning, knowledge, and social change.

PurposeThis paper seeks to examine the intriguing juxtaposition of a bona fide independent union for journalists in the UK, which is vocal about editorial standards and interference, yet has seldom taken collective action to respond to such instances.Design/methodology/approachA grounded approach to this phenomenon is used by way of examining the intersection of the nature and influence of journalistic professionalism, the journalists' material and economic interests and the particular approach of the union to both these matters. The data are based on qualitative fieldworks supplemented by secondary sources.FindingsThe journalists and their union have yet to identify and articulate the conditions, which give rise to this situation and a strategy for defending their professional interests which is compatible with and supportive of strategies for defending their material interests.Practical implicationsThere is a need to develop a strategy by which journalists can collectively exert more influence over editorial content.Originality/valueThe quality of content of newspapers could be enhanced by the greater influence of journalists as a collective body.

▪ Abstract  I first argue that religion partakes of the symbolic order of the nation-state and that contemporary nationalisms are suffused with the religious. I then suggest that religious nationalism calls into question the theoretical duality of the social and the cultural, a divide variously identified with the material and the symbolic, class and status, economy and civil society. Religious nationalism, I suggest, requires an institutional approach to the project of collective representation. Religious nationalism offers a particular ontology of power, an ontology revealed and affirmed through its politicized practices and the central object of its political concern, practices that locate collective solidarity in religious faith shared by embodied families, not in contract and consent enacted by abstract individual citizens. Understanding the institutional basis of religious nationalist discourse allows us to understand its affinities with socialist politics. If religious nationalism derives from religion's institutional heterology with the capitalist market and the democratic state, then it suggests the limits of a social theory that occludes that heterology. In the remainder of the paper, I argue that religious nationalism cannot be adequately understood either through Pierre Bourdieu's theory of habitus and field, nor through Jeffrey Alexander's theory of civil society. Bourdieu's theory of fields imports the logic of dominant institutions and thereby culturally homogenizes the institutional diversity of contemporary society, making the stake of politics a culturally empty space of domination. Alexander's theory of civil society, while rich in cultural substance, identifies civil society with democratic political culture and thereby makes unnecessarily restrictive assumptions about the institutional sources of collective representation in modern society.

In research on non‐Western populations there is a tendency to limit analysis to only gross demographic differences. This has resulted in the serious misconception of an ethnically homogenous population in countries such as Japan and thus masks a critical dimension of the diversity truly extant. This article examines Western research on Japanese views of people of African descent evident prior to 1945. The argument by Western researchers that Japanese are inherently ethnocentric/racist is examined through primary and secondary sources dealing with Japanese contact with Africans. The alternative explanation offered suggests that while the basic structure of ethnocentrism existed before Western contact, there are indications that this structure was given direction and focus (i.e. became racial) with and through that contact. It is suggested that the view acquired by the Japanese of Africans was based in large part on the collective representations presented to them by Euro‐Americans.