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Global Injustice Symbols and Social Movements theorizes how transnational social movements create symbols of injustice in order to foster and sustain the solidarity necessary for their success. Olesen examines our collective moral and political maps, dotted with symbols shaped by political dynamics beyond their local or national origin, and offers the first systematic sociological treatment of this important phenomenon. Using empirical data collected from media archives, official documents, and internet sources, Olesen seeks to answer how global injustice symbols are formed, how they are employed by political actors, and to what ends

This book focuses on global activism and uses a power perspective to provide an in-depth and coherent analysis of both the possibilities and limitations of global activism. Bringing together scholars from IR, sociology, and political science, this book offers new and critical insights on global activism and power. It features case studies on the following social and political issues: China and Tibet, HIV/AIDS, climate change, child labour, the WTO, women and the UN, the global public sphere, regional integration, national power, world social forums, policing, media power and g.

On July 17, 2021, the CDU's chancellor candidate Armin Laschet was photographed laughing during a speech by the German Federal President in the flood-stricken city of Erftstadt. The photographic images caused an uproar and contributed to the CDU's defeat in the September 23 election. The paper analyzes why these images resonated with such damaging effects. Theoretically, it sets the analysis on the background of the moralization and personalization of politics and argues that photography, with its ability to capture behavior at a distance, plays a prominent role in these processes. While this condition explains why an image of a laughing politician can generate such indignation in the first place, the paper discusses how this effect was amplified in the case of Laschet by a range of contextual features: (a) the timing of the images in the middle of an election period where politicians come under intense scrutiny; (b) their appearance in a crisis situation (the German flooding disaster) where politicians are surrounded by other role expectations than in routine periods; (3) Laschet's new, insecure position as leader of the CDU; (d) his history of scandals and poor political judgment; and (e) the frivolous and boisterous manner of his laughter. At a general theoretical level, the paper's insights caution us to avoid prima facie conclusions about the autonomous power of photographs. Instead, they encourage analytical sensitivity to the importance of timing and context as explanatory elements in our understanding of photographic exposés.

Greta Thunberg's meteoric rise from lonely school striker in August 2018 to global icon is one of the most remarkable political phenomena in recent decades, and one full of paradoxes. Thunberg started out with no resources, a child of 15 with limited experience and a history of Asperger's. Thunberg's iconic performance seems to have been able to turn these weaknesses into strengths. To understand how this happened, we must situate her analysis within the social media ecology. Two things distinguish this environment from previous phases: iconic protagonists now have wide degrees of control over their own performance, and audiences are no longer mere receptors of iconic performance, but active co-performers. Greta Thunberg is one of the first major political icons to have been fully formed within the new social media ecology. This article provides the first systematic analysis of this dynamic.

Whistleblower research is understandably focused around the protagonists of the practice. We still know surprisingly little about how whistleblowing is perceived in the wider population. Drawing on a representative survey of Danish employees (N = 1,709), this paper analyses how whistleblower public support is distributed along variables such as political preference, political interest and job type, and tests whether it is conditional on whistleblower motivation and type of wrongdoing. The paper finds that public support is strong but also ambivalent. It shows that support is evenly distributed along party preference. It also demonstrates that support is not uniform but conditional on the characteristics of the whistleblower situation. These insights are important for both social and political reasons in the present situation where whistleblowing seems to be on the rise. From a policy perspective, it offers policymakers an important evidence‐based navigation tool in devising whistleblower legislation.

The article analyses two contrasting photographs that powerfully shaped Danish debates about the refugee crisis in September 2015. In the first, a civilian man is seen spitting at a group of refugees from a highway bridge. In the other, a police officer sits on the highway as he plays with a young refugee girl. Politicized photographs such as these offer unique and rarely utilized sociological prisms to probe the narratives and binary codes that define national value complexes and categories of 'inside–outside', 'us–them' and 'civil–uncivil'. The spitting man and gentle cop photographs are particularly forceful in this regard as they do not simply portray refugees/migrants in isolation, but rather the reactions they generate in the host country. The article explores why and how these photographs became so resonant in stimulating affective public debates about refugees, Danish identity, and solidarity with strangers. Methodologically, the article focuses on debates occurring on Facebook, Twitter and in newspaper commentary tracks. This choice reflects a wider trend where the media ecology of Web 2.0 is transforming the way photographs are being politicized in affective publics. Finally, interviews were conducted with the journalists behind the photographs.

Works on whistleblowing are overwhelmingly found within disciplines such as business ethics, law, and the professions. Despite its undeniable political and social effects, it is surprisingly understudied in political science and sociology. Recent cases such as those of Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Christopher Wylie, and the Panama Papers should prompt political scientists and sociologists to engage systematically with the phenomenon. This article offers a theoretically driven discussion of three complementary questions. (1) What kind of political action is whistleblowing? (2) What are its historical, social, and political roots? (3) How is the practice shaped by digitalization and big data? In relation to the third question, the article argues that digitalization amplifies social complexity and challenges democratic steering. Building on Niklas Luhmann, Ulrich Beck, and Jeffrey Alexander, it lends theoretical weight to the argument that whistleblowers are likely to play an increasingly pronounced political role as digitalization accelerates.

While major cases of whistleblowing may not be an everyday occurrence, their effects are often wide-ranging, celebrated, and controversial. Given this potent cocktail, the whistleblower is conspicuously undertheorized within sociology and social theory. Research today takes place mainly within management, business, psychology, law, and public administration studies. While some of this work does draw on sociological theory, we lack a general theory that combines attention to the historical context of whistleblowing, the nature of its critique and intervention, and the democratic meanings with which it is associated. This article offers such a framework. The argument consists of three components. First, whistleblowing is historically tied to the decline of authority in the 1960s and the 1970s. Second, building on field and systems theory, the whistleblower is seen as a field transgressor who, with a democratic intent, exposes information 'belonging' to a specific field in the public sphere. Third, in doing so, he/she is cast as both a hero and a villain in a democratic drama about the moral-political foundations of society.

The article does two things. On the one hand, it provides a theoretical and conceptual framework for understanding global injustice symbols: i.e. events, situations and individuals infused with collective injustice meanings in a global public sphere. On the other hand, it offers a critical discussion seeking to identify aspects of power and politics in their formation and employment. The goal is to demonstrate the relevance of Durkheim's late work in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life for global analysis as well as to point to some limitations in the way it has been employed by contemporary cultural sociologists. A core limitation is a tendency to balance theorization away from issues of power and politics. Three themes of power and politics of/in global injustice symbols are treated: (1) the way symbolic processes involve amnesia and idolization; (2) how they revolve around meaning adaptation and self-celebration on the part of symbolizing agents; and (3) their implication in de-symbolizing and re-symbolizing activities. Studying globality through the lens of global injustice symbols allows research to combine an emphasis on culture and ideas with a focus on power and politics.