Recovering from Scandals: Twitter Coverage of Oxfam and Save the Children Scandals

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - We examine Twitter data to assess the impact of media exposes on the reputations of two international nonprofits, Oxfam...     

Social assistance in Austria: regulating the poor as in-between

Not only the concept of social inclusion is widely recognized as an important basis today for making social policy, but it also provides a platform for the policing of the poor. Thinking uncritically about social inclusion prevents us from seeing how it operates to re-inscribe subordination even as we help the poor overcome their marginalization. With an awareness of the paradox of inclusion, it is possible to examine how welfare policy today operates to discipline the poor as people who must accept their plight at the bottom of the socioeconomic order. While formal policy may not make this paradox apparent, the disciplinary effects of an inclusionary social assistance policy are starkly visible when we examine its implementation, where we can see how the excluded become included in ways that perpetuate their subordination. Social assistance recipients obtain a benefit, but the way they are treated does not correspond with full social rights, which is reminiscent of Georg Simmel's discussion of the poor. As exemplified by research at one local social assistance office in Austria, welfare recipients are ultimately neither included nor excluded. Welfare, as administered today, upholds the system of social stratification by perpetuating an ‘in-between’ status for the claimants of social assistance benefits at the frontline.     

Family-Enterprise Initiatives as a Response to Socioeconomic and Political Change in Eastern and Central Europe

It is argued that family business enterprises can be an adaptive response to the transformations that recently have characterized Eastern and Central Europe. Family-centered initiatives are important for sustainable socioeconomic development. In this article, a family-enterprise incubator scheme for the stimulation of family and socioeconomic development is discussed. This approach incorporates resources, services, and supports beyond those conventionally offered.     

Disturbing Binaries in Political Thought: Silence as Political Activism

‘Keeping silent’ can be a meaningful political event, a form of political activism that generates new political subjectivities and alters existing realities by reconfiguring power relations. To flesh out this argument, this paper attends to a particular silent protest and affirms it as a tactic employed by an emergent political collectivity to make itself perceptible, declare an injustice and challenge institutional power. As such, the silent event under scrutiny does not merely invite a turning of our attention to a practice that breaks the association of the political subject with the speaking subject; it also invites a reconsideration of what we are accustomed to accept as political activism. ‘Keeping silent’ is a critical practice, indeed, because it manifests an alternative possibility of being and acting; in so doing, it disrupts established patterns of thought and practice, and more specifically the rigid distinction between speech and silence.     

Television Exposure and Attitude Change: The Impact of Political Interest

A number of media effects studies have speculated that politicallyuninvolved individuals are susceptible to attitudinal or behavioralchange as a result of media exposure. This possibility is investigatedby testing a causal model of change in attitude toward PresidentNixon during the Watergate period (1972–1974). The initialanalysis suggested that political interest was a source of interactionin the model; it was thus treated as a specifying variable bytesting separate models for high and low interest respondents.Though exposure to Watergate-related television had no discernibleimpact on attitude toward Nixon for high interest individuals,it was the only significant predictor of 1974 Nixon attitudefor persons with low political interest.     

Collective Power to Create Political Change: Increasing the Political Efficacy and Engagement of Social Workers

Because social workers are called to challenge social injustices and create systemic change to support the well-being of individuals and communities, it is essential that social workers develop political efficacy: belief that the political system can work and they can influence the system. This study explored the impact of an intensive political social work curriculum on political efficacy and planned political engagement among social work students and practitioners. The findings suggest this model of delivering a political social work curriculum effectively increases internal, external, and overall political efficacy, and that increasing political efficacy has promise for increasing future political engagement.     

Scandalous Care: Interpreting Public Enquiry Reports of Scandals in Residential Care

ABSTRACT

This article reviews an earlier study written for the Wagner Committee (1988) on scandals in residential care. That review was based on a study of ten enquiry reports, only two of which were about homes for older people. The main events that were described are grouped as: institutionalised practices, indifference and neglect, physical cruelty, humiliation, too authoritarian a life-style, a dull and depressing life-style, an overcrowded and run down environment, disharmony amongst the staff team, and staff misappropriating goods or money. Now, more weight should be given to: residents' abuse of residents and of staff, an improper influence on the life-style of others, and sexual abuse. Explanations proposed are: structural, environmental, and individual and worker style. Abuse is considered in the context of the nature of direct care and the acts of intimate caring of others.     

2010～2011年突尼斯变革:起因与现状

2010年12月17日,突尼斯茉莉花革命爆发后,总统本.阿里带家人离境,飞抵沙特阿拉伯,结束了其长达23年的统治。随后,在突尼斯变革的雪球效应的影响下,埃及、利比亚、也门、叙利亚以及其他阿拉伯国家相继发生了反政府的变革。本文着重探讨导致2010～2011年突尼斯变革的内外原因,阐述变革后突尼斯的政局现状并展望其未来走向。     

Brexit and the Economics of Political Change in Developed Countries

The economic forces underlying Brexit—and the election of Donald Trump in the US—are similar, but they are also well advanced in many European countries, where much of the population faces similar material insecurity and stagnation. These frustrations can easily be channelled by right-wing xenophobic forces. To combat this, the EU needs to undo some of its design flaws and particularly its adherence to fiscal austerity rules. Only a more progressive and more flexible union based on solidarity of peoples is likely to survive.     

A Fall from Grace: Women,Scandals, and Perceptions of Politicians

ABSTRACT

While political scientists have researched explanations for the dearth of women in elected office for decades, no consistent account has emerged. We enter the discussion using an original experimental survey on an adult sample at the national level to examine whether gender stereotypes affect the evaluation of candidates running for office. We specifically look at situations where there is alleged wrongdoing to explore whether evaluations are asymmetrically applied to men and women. We find that voters treat candidates differently, exhibiting a general preference for women. When malfeasance is alleged, however, women suffer greater consequences for wrongdoing under certain conditions, potentially as a result of a “backlash” effect for violating gender norms.     

Stories and the Rhetoric of Contrariety: Subtexts of Organizing (Change)

Stories are an important part of organizational life that scholars have studied from many different perspectives. In this paper, we contribute a new way of exploring the meaning of stories. We use a concept from classical rhetoric, the enthymeme, to help reveal the particular underlying "logic" contained in the story form, and we show that the construction of this logic accounts, in part, for the engaging nature of the stories. We show that storytellers use enthymemes in the construction of their stories and also that scholars can use enthymemes to analyze stories. Understanding the enthymeme and its use in the story form enables interpreters to disentangle the argument often embedded in a story and to surface meanings that are implicit and powerful. In this paper, we focus attention on and examine such implicit meanings in four organizational stories of change in two city administrations, in order to illustrate the role of enthymeme in organizational rhetoric.     

Political Oppression,Social Change and the Family: A View from South Africa

The obvious continuities between the political and the personal, the public and the private, dominate South African life in a way which may not be familiar to those in the Australian context. South African clinical work with families, much of it in the form of mediated interventions, cannot but operate at the edges of our definitions of both what a family is and what it means to be a mental health worker. In this article I argue that thinking broadly about politics and about our work is essential in the service of developing family and personal growth.     

Art, Nationalism and War: Political Futurism in Italy (1909–1944)

Futurism was launched as a revolutionary, iconoclastic movement encompassing the arts, politics and society. It rejected all ties with the past and preached with missionary zeal the advent of a new man and the total reconstruction of society. Despite its powerful impact on Italian politics, the importance of Futurism has scarcely been addressed in the social sciences. Yet, it continues to attract the interest of historians, literary critics and art historians. In fact, the major methodological hindrance for a more articulated research remains the latter's unchallenged hegemony, with their selective propensity to eulogistic accounts. The result is the neglect of Futurism's political dimension as a fully fledged nationalist movement. Aiming to redress this imbalance, the article analyzes Futurist politics through the movement's actions, proclaims and manifestos. It distinguishes early Futurism's anti-establishment ultra-nationalism (1909–1915) from the more institutionalized 'muscular' patriotism adopted after its merger with Fascism (1924–1944). In a global context of mounting nationalist state-building and spiralling inter-state rivalries, Italy's unitary, homogenizing nationalism provided a congenial matrix for the advent of war-mongering patriotism and irredentism. Here, Futurism found an ideal structure of political opportunities, in which it could articulate its unique repertoire of action. The futurists' peculiar talent in 'manufacturing consent' through the media was put to test in their marketing of war as adventurous boundary-building enterprise, a vision subsequently appropriated by Fascism.     

The Road Through Paris: Climate Change,Carbon, and the Political Dynamics of Convergence

Abstract

This article tracks the key events that set the stage for the 21st Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21) in Paris, particularly as they relate to politics of convergence. One side of this coming together is an intersection of issues, where new terrestrial and aquatic carbon sequestration programs have blurred the margins of climate change mitigation and resource grabbing. These programs, enclosing forests, farmlands, and oceans, are likewise fused together in what can be described as an emerging ‘carbon complex’ that is part of the wider blue/green economy. On the reverse side, the clear intersection of issues as witnessed by radical, and historically sectoral, agrarian/social justice movements is causing them to intertwine in resistance. The realm of climate change has proven to be an exceptional space of struggle and countermovement building. Political interactions between movements have become increasingly sophisticated—requiring frameworks that address environmental, agrarian, and oceanic issues at once, as the issues have become ever more complex. Agrarian/social justice movements maintain that their agendas for food sovereignty and climate justice hinge upon exposing fault lines in the system and advocate overall system change. COP21 and its parallel side events were together a landmark moment, but part of a much more involved process, ‘the road through Paris’, along which movements had carved out transnational and local spaces of convergence against the backdrop of a global carbon complex.