NGO Networks,the Diffusion and Adaptation of NGO Managerialism,and NGO Legitimacy in Latin America

Nongovernmental organization (NGO) networks have become key instruments used by NGOs in Latin America. Because these networks have important roles to play in advocating for the sector, earning public support, and improving the provision of public goods and services, understanding these networks is important to understanding the NGO sector more broadly. The article examines how NGO networks use collective texts to diffuse and adapt managerial practices. NGO networks use elements of managerialism and their adaptations to signal quality, secure recognition in social development, identify strengths and weaknesses of the sector, and define civil society in order to garner sector legitimacy. While looking at managerialism from a critical perspective, the article finds that understanding NGOs networks and the diffusion and adaption of NGO practices can further pinpoint effective sources of sector legitimacy and help to strengthen the sector’s role in social development.     

Weibo use and political participation: the mechanism explaining the positive effect of Weibo use on online political participation among college students in contemporary China

This study examines the various aspects of Weibo use, including the number of people users follow; the number of fans they have; the frequency with which they read friends’, celebrities’, and opinion leaders’ Weibo; and the number of Weibo group memberships on youth online political participation in contemporary China. The study also investigates the underlying mechanisms explaining the positive effects of Weibo use on youth online political participation using survey methods. Chinese users mainly use Weibo to satisfy their needs for information and connectedness. As an alternative source of information, Weibo indeed functions as an ‘online school of political participation’ to foster political interest, a sense of belonging to an online community, and civic virtue among Weibo users. As a new platform for Chinese to form online civic groups, memberships in Weibo groups significantly increases users’ likelihood of being politically mobilized, which is essential for online collective participation. Our study shows that Verba, Schlozman, and Brady’s [(1995). Voice and equality: Civic voluntarism in American politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press] civic voluntarism model can be extended to the online environment in an authoritarian system.     

NGO2.0 and social media praxis: activist as researcher

This article tracks the emergence of a particular brand of ICT activism that promotes the use of social media as a means of helping Chinese NGOs break out of their communication bottleneck. The author starts by introducing NGO2.0, an activist project targeting China's rural regions, using it as an entry point to examine the practice of “social media for social good” and shed light on the ecosystem of social media usage by Chinese NGOs. The author also deliberates on the explanatory value of the binary paradigm of “rural vs. urban,” looks into the methodological implications of undertaking “social media action research,” and articulates what it means to be engaged in the hybrid practice of “activist as scholar” in the specific context of Cultural Studies.     

Anti-muslim sentiment on social media in China and Chinese Muslims’ reactions to hatred and misunderstanding

This study documents the extensive online anti-Muslim sentiment in China as well as the use of social media by Chinese Muslims from various backgrounds to engage with the online public sphere and respond to this hostile discourse. We analyzed more than 10,000 social media posts on Weibo relating to Muslims and Islam and conducted in-depth interviews with 34 Chinese Muslims who were active users of social media. Our findings reveal an anti-Muslim online frame, and we detail the ways in which Chinese Muslims have sought to influence public policy in order to protect their rights. The participants in this study responded to hateful posts and worked to increase the understanding of their religion and culture by providing glimpses of their daily lives and by discussing Islam. Nevertheless, owing to government censorship and to the prevailing Han-centric discourse, Chinese Muslims continue to face numerous risks and challenges, particularly in coping with the ideological conflict between their religion and the atheistic ruling party.     

微博崛起：围观就是力量

日前全球最大中文百科网站——互动百利发布了2010年互联网十大热词,微博名列榜首,《中国新闻周刊》也称微博为2010年中国最有势力的新兴传媒。     

Nonprofit Product Placement: Human Rights Advocacy in Film and Television

As non-governmental organizations attempt to gain influence, membership, and funds in an increasingly crowded field, they are turning to popular culture as a way to spread both their brand and their message. This article examines Amnesty International USA’s use of what has traditionally been a corporate advertising technique: product placement in popular film and television. It argues that NGOs engage in product placement as a form of strategic communication with three interrelated goals: brand management, issue advocacy, and social norms marketing. This overlap creates theoretical outcomes and ethical considerations which, while not unique to second-order forms of communication, have not yet been explored with relation to human rights advocacy. This article first defines and gives examples of such product placement and concludes with a discussion of ethics considerations for advocacy organizations contemplating using this strategy.     

Same Bed,Different Dreams? The Divergent Pathways of Foundations and Grassroots NGOs in China

The rapid rise of high-wealth individuals and foundations in China should be good news for China’s grassroots NGOs whose continued growth depends critically on their ability to mobilize domestic resources. As a number of Chinese philanthropy practitioners have noted, Chinese foundations and NGOs should be natural allies and strategic partners. Yet the reality is very different as foundations currently provide very little support to NGOs, particularly the more independent, grassroots NGOs that have few ties with the government. This paper examines the disconnect between Chinese foundations and grassroots NGOs, and whether progress is being made in closing the gap between them. It argues that one of the main reasons for the gap has to do with their very different development paths, which have engendered significant structural and cultural differences between the two.     

NGOs’ transnational advocacy networks: from ‘legitimacy’ to ‘political responsibility’?

NGOs that operate as part of transnational advocacy networks face a number of ‘legitimacy challenges’ concerning their rights to participate in the shaping of global governance. Outlining the legitimacy claims that development NGOs make, the article argues that ‘legitimacy’ is a socially constructed quality that may be ascribed to an NGO by actors and stakeholders with different viewpoints. NGOs operating transnationally link disparate communities and conceptions of legitimacy, and undermine the discourse and practice of sovereignty. Therefore such NGOs will find it difficult to be universally regarded as legitimate, especially by states that hold a sovereignty‐based conception of legitimacy. However, relationships are the building blocks of networks, and efforts to improve them should not be abandoned simply because ‘legitimacy’ is too closely connected with sovereignty. In particular, NGOs ought to improve their relationships with the poor and marginalized communities whose interests they claim to promote. To this end, the concept of ‘political responsibility’ is suggested as a pragmatic approach to understanding power relations as they arise in transnational advocacy networks and campaigns.     

Carrots and Sticks: A Case Study of Government-Caused Danwei Tradition in Chinese NGOs

With the abolition of the double registration regime, on paper Chinese NGOs are more independent from the Government’s bureaucratic commands than ever. Nevertheless, in reality the Chinese Government’s control over Chinese NGOs remains heavy-handed. Through giving NGOs bianzhi and purchasing services from NGOs, the Chinese Government caused and continues to cause the Chinese NGOs to adopt certain attributes of the danwei tradition. Specifically, the Government strives to embed the CPC into the Chinese NGOs and make the Chinese NGOs financially dependent on the Government. The danwei tradition is not merely a lingering legacy of China’s Communist past but also a result that the Government today actively seeks to bring about.

     

NGOs in the News: The Road to Taken-for-Grantedness

The proliferation of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) since the 1970s has generated a wealth of research as to the causes and implications of the rise of this sector. Public awareness of NGOs and their activities has grown as well, at least in part due to increased media coverage of the organizations and the situations to which they respond. Although NGOs are not new to global polity, media attention to them as a sector only really began to take off in the 1990s. Using quantitative and qualitative analysis of two international newspapers from 1985-2010, this study explores the legitimation process of NGOs and examines the role of categorization and labeling in this process. The results show that the establishment of a distinct label in the media served to propel cognitive recognition of NGOs, and that media coverage reflects changes in cognitive legitimacy over time.     

Reading European football,critiquing China: Chinese urban middle class fans as reflexive audience

ABSTRACT

This essay explores European football’s cross-cultural appeals in China by focusing on Chinese fans’ active readings of this globalized cultural text. Using analytical tools from both sport sociology and transnational reception studies, I understand Chinese urban middle-class supporters as a reflexive audience whose meaning-making of European football is contextualized in their local urban experience. The in-depth interviewing reveals that these fans’ interpretations of their favourite European football teams as symbols of ‘collective cooperation’ and ‘beautiful football’ produce critical reflections on the discourses of ‘competitive individualism’ and ‘utilitarian commercialism’ which are part of the rising ideology during China’s neoliberal reform. Through the comparison among European football, Chinese football, and popular ‘national’ sports in China, the participants further contest the prevalence of these discourses in China’s broader economic and social arrangements over which they are engaged in constant material struggles. I further discuss how the transnational consumption of European football offers the Chinese urban middle-class a symbolic space to project their reflexivity on the reforming process.     

Relationship-building by Chinese ENGOs’ websites: Education,not activation

This study extends previous public relations research that has evaluated how the websites of Northern NGOs facilitate relationship-building (Taylor, Kent, & White, 2001), affect the media agenda (Reber & Kim, 2006), and gather and disseminate information about civil society activities (Brophy & Halpin, 1999). The study explores the relationship-building functions of Chinese ENGOs. The content analysis suggests that Chinese ENGOs’ websites reflect the realities of activism in China. They provide information to members, the public, and the media but these organizations do little to organize their publics to participate in environmental social movements. The findings provide a picture of the early years of the Chinese environmental movement and the use of the Internet in their public relations and advocacy.     

Perspektiven der Politischen Soziologie

On the basis of a concept of politics as social action and conflict, which focuses on the institutionalisation and deinstitutionalisation of power, the article argues for a political sociology which is interdisciplinary, methodology pluralistic, ‘eurodecentric’, and which focused on seven areas of research: the invention of non-state forms of power and their relations to the state, war, representation and legitimacy, the relationships between religion and politics, globalisation, and the rise of ‘subpolitics’, NGOs and the local.     

Public diplomacy networks: China’s public diplomacy communication practices in twitter during Two Sessions

This study illustrates the Two Sessions and proposes the concept of public diplomacy network to investigate the effect of China’s public diplomacy communication on Twitter. Twitter data comprising 14,874 tweets and 7773 users was collected during March 5 to March 20 in 2018, the combination of social network analysis and content analysis were employed from a holistic, relational and networked approach. The results present public diplomacy networks’ structural characteristics, key participants’ networking patterns, communication strategies, issue participation, and homophily effect that participants who take the same attitude towards China (negative & neutral or positive) are clustered in each group. In conclusion, although China’s state-owed media takes the lead in public diplomacy communication, foreign practitioners dominate the NGOs, researchers, correspondents, and generally take negative attitude towards China. China’s media outlets underperform in allying closely, and China is entrenched in traditional one-way monologue. The theoretical, methodological and practical implications are addressed.     

Affective networks: how WeChat enhances Tencent’s digital business governance

An emerging body of literature has revealed that social media enhance digital business governance to facilitate Internet companies in generating profit throughout regulating the everyday lives of users. However, although existing debates are often contextualized in the West, little attention has been paid to China, where social media are widely used. To fill this knowledge gap, this article investigates the digital business governance practiced by Chinese Internet companies such as Tencent. Specifically, I employ an affective lens to analyze how WeChat, the most popular social media application launched by Tencent, allows this Internet company to influence users for its own business purposes. Chinese college students, which constitute a representative group of young people, were early adopters of WeChat, and they have led the trend of social media use in China. Based on a yearlong netnographic study of Chinese college students, the results reveal that the affective design of WeChat captured their attention and influenced their everyday practices. These results provide insight into how digital business governance operates in the Chinese context, in which authoritarianism and capitalism work closely together.     

Crisis collective memory making on social media: A case study of three Chinese crises on Weibo

Social media users collectively (re)construct narratives to create memories surrounding past crises. In this study, we connect the concept of collective memory with a public-oriented approach to crisis communication to examine how crisis response frames and collective memory narratives were displayed by different social actors (government, organizations, and publics) on one of China’s social media platforms, Weibo. Findings from a content analysis of 9238 unique posts on three national crises (the 2010 Yushu Earthquake, the 2015 Tianjin Explosions, and the 2018 Vaccine Scandal) reveal that Chinese publics tended to adopt social issue and blaming frames, while the government and organizations were more prone to using informing and corrective action frames. When recalling and reconstructing crisis memories, Chinese publics used more power and contestation narrative, while the government frequently adopted the nationalism narrative; with trauma being the predominant narrative displayed across the three crises and social actors. Crisis response frames of blaming, crediting, and corrective action were significantly associated with narratives of power and contestation, heroism, and nationalism, respectively. Theoretical implications for future research on crisis collective memory making on social media and suggestions for governmental crisis communication are discussed.     

社会性别视域下高校美女文化现象解析

高校美女文化面临着泛化的倾向。造成这种现象的深层次原因与市场经济中女性地位的衰落直接相关。而高校社会性别教育的缺失削弱了女性的独立意识,大众文化的勃兴则强化着社会性别的刻板印象。高校美女文化的泛滥弱化了女大学生独立意识的形成,造成社会资源的浪费．也加剧了社会文化中男女不平等的局面,促使女性向传统价值观回归。为了重塑高校社会性别平等文化,应该使社会性别意识纳入政府决策主流,推动社会性别平等教育进入高等教学体系并实现学科建设主流化,培养大众传媒的社会性别意识。     

Dynamic preference revelation and expression of personal frames: how Weibo is used in an anti-nuclear protest in China

This study explores the use of Weibo in a protest against a nuclear fuel processing plant in China. This study argues that social media play an important role in the development of protests in non-democratic societies through the mechanism of preference revelation, which blurs the boundary between offline protests and the individualized expression of preferences on social media. Of Weibo tweets which were posted prior to the occurrence of the offline protest, 11,788 protest-related were examined with the aid of a supervised machine learning technique. The results showed that the revelation of personal preferences in the form of individualized expressions of opposition were more common than mobilization and coordination, and such preferences were legitimized by the personal frames of risk and the distrust in government. The use of Weibo to mobilize potential opponents to the project, primarily by calling for the expression of opposition, was less frequent than the use of Weibo to express personal frames. Furthermore, the prevalence of Weibo usage changed dramatically. In the first few days of the protest, the revelation of personal preferences and personal frames of risk were prominent, whereas personal frames of distrust in government were common in the days leading to the street protest.     

Chinese youth performing identities and navigating belonging online

This paper examines the experiences of belonging of young Chinese internet users through an analysis of their online identity practices. Drawing on a qualitative research project about online citizenship practices of 31 young Chinese citizens from mainland China, I explore their experiences of belonging on two online platforms (Weibo and WeChat) and the identities formed and sustained through these experiences. The results show that young people experience different senses of belonging in different social media spaces. Their strategies in navigating these experiences are informed by (a) their perceptions of online spaces as private or public, and (b) using online identity performance as a supplement to or escape from identities in physical life. I argue that young Chinese internet users experience different senses of belonging by flexibly appropriating the affordances of social media platforms for communication and networking; these senses of belonging play a key role in forming and sustaining their identities, and are crucial for their wellbeing.     

Stakeholder influence,government power,and new opportunities for Chinese Internet companies: A multilevel network analysis of cross-sector networks

In recent decades, Chinese Internet companies have experienced exponential growth. As the Internet industry increasingly commends tremendous financial resources, they also face growing stakeholder expectations for corporate social responsibility (CSR) actions. One way through which Chinese Internet companies conduct CSR is by building cross-sectoral collaborations with nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and governmental agencies. Aiming to understand Internet companies’ strategic relationship building on CSR issues, the researchers drew from stakeholder influence theory and research on a network approach to stakeholder influence, and applied multilevel network analysis to model three networks related to Chinese Internet companies’ CSR collaborations. Specifically, we found that power and urgency are significant predictors of the structure of Internet companies’ cross-sector CSR alliance network. Organizations affiliated or endorsed by the central Chinese government are the most desirable CSR stakeholders. Additionally, the study also revealed that for Internet companies, devoting their attention to Internet-related social issues could increase their desirability as strategic stakeholders from other sectors and among Internet companies.