Suchergebnisse

The gathering pace of IT innovation has, or ought to have had notable methodological repercussions for the social-science community (and beyond). Where yesterday the researcher could unhurriedly unlock the social-scientific significance of a chosen medium, secure in the knowledge that his or her work would have bearing for many years, by now there is every reason to confront a fear that the prodded IT implementation may in fact be gone or at least heavily altered by the time such comprehensive research is concluded. This paper will propose a complementing systematic "interface-centric" research model capable of interconnecting a non-finite variety of IT implementations and social science studies in a coherent way. The paper also outlines how users "downstream", whether political actors or technology operators can use the proposed framework to more easily approach and weight academic input when evaluating complex IT effects.

This work has two main ambitions. First, we will develop a generic framework which, properly used, can drastically reduce the intrinsic complexity of the continually evolving IT-environment, making it less unwieldy. That should prove advantageous for anyone trying to analyse social aspects of the moving target that is classified as "IT". Using (and at the same time demonstrating) his framework, we will then theoretically study and reformulate one aspect that has been extensively, but not always fruitfully, discussed with specific reference to the emergence of new communications technologies: privacy. Itself an ambiguous concept, privacy will be contemplated from a democratic-theoretical position. The eventual theoretical product will be a privacy subset labelled democratic privacy, which is considered an indispensable ingredient in a liberal-democratic society. Relevant aspects of the concept will be connected to the framework developed in part one to facilitate future analytical efforts. Democratic privacy is intended to be used as a benchmark and an analytical tool in its own right, and this will be demonstrated in a brief empirical study focusing on Swedish integrity legislation.

Citizenship education is a popular and contested phenomenon in liberal democratic societies. It is difficult to imagine a school system that does not contribute to the preservation and improvement of society through education of democratic, responsible and tolerant citizens. On the contrary, the execution of such education is full of caveats, controversy and resistance. This special issue examines the inherent tensions of citizenship education in a variety of national contexts (France, England, Sweden and Quebec) and from several theoretical and empirical perspectives. In this introductory article, we present an overview of the debates on citizenship education in academia and the media and propose a conceptual framework for the categorisation and comparison of the diversity of practices that relate to citizenship education. This model is then used to guide a brief presentation of the remaining articles in the special issue.