Local Identity, Cultural Commodities, and Development in Rural Japan: The Potential as Viewed by Cultural Producers and Local Residents

Abstract:  This paper considers the development potential of rural and highly peripheral areas of Japan, focusing on local factors of development, together with local identity and cultural commodities, as these are incorporated into what has been called the culture economy. Based on a survey of informed local residents and another of local cultural commodities producers, the paper alludes to what constitutes a culture economy for rural settings and identifies several key aspects related to the process of such a cultural commodities-based approach to development. While confirming the importance of identity and cultural commodities in the local development profile of rural settings, the paper sets the groundwork for further research concerning the complex process for how such development can be achieved. The main themes identified for further research include both the nature and role of residents' solidarity together with the combinative nature of government support and local entrepreneurship in the local culture economy on the one hand, and the character of the advertising and media representation by which cultural commodities are created and maintained on the other.     

NEWS ABOUT MURDER IN AN AFRICAN AMERICAN NEWSPAPER: Effects of Relative Frequency and Race and Gender Typifications

Previous scholarly research on selection bias in news about murder indicates that race and gender stereotypes and, to a much lesser extent, the relative frequency of particular murders explain why some homicides are made into news and others are not. However, previous research has directed nearly exclusive attention to white newspapers. The present research remedies this omission by directing attention to the factors that shape selection bias in news about murder in a big-city African American newspaper. The results indicate that the relative frequency dimension of newsworthiness is a weak and inconsistent explanation of selection bias in news about murder in the black newspaper examined. Race, however, has profoundly different effects in white and African American newspapers. Whereas white newspapers use long-standing race stereotypes to filter news about murder, the data from the African American newspaper signal a firm rejection of the black image in the white mind (Entman and Rojecki 2000). Newspaper images of women and men are another matter. In both black and white newspapers, gender stereotypes uniformly filter news about murder and fundamentally distort gender effects. The implications of these findings are discussed including the clear need and ample scholarly room for replicative analyses of news about murder in other African American newspapers, with a keen eye on both "raced ways of seeing" (Hunt 1999, pp. 181–215) and gendered ways of seeing.     

Standardization as a Means for Globalizing a Commodity: The Case of Rapeseed in China*

Abstract Not all commodities are things, nor are all things available in society commodities. Then, what are commodities? Using the case of rapeseed and its products in China, this paper examines the role of grades and standards (G&S) in simultaneously determining the life of things as commodities and the position of humans as market participants. In the first section, we summarize our conceptual understandings of commodities. Next, the paper examines tests and trials to which rapeseed in China were subjected by the mid 1990s. We then discuss how G&S represent political processes among commodity chain actors for creating, legitimizing and maintaining the social relations between things and people. Lastly, we discuss our conclusion that the analysis of tests and trials helps us understand the process of commodification as simultaneous transformations of humans and things in a commodity chain while reorganizing linkages among these actors.     

Newspaper Coverage of People with Disabilities in Canada and Israel: an international comparison

In this research study we compared how three Canadian and three Israeli newspapers wrote about people with disabilities over a 3-month period. The comparison included structural variables, such as the length of the articles, where they appeared, whether photographs were used, etc. We also examined content variables, such as who the main character was, the details used to describe this individual or group, and what governmental agencies, service providers and problems were mentioned. Finally, we looked at whether the article was progressive, traditional or mixed in its perspective. Our findings showed a number of significant differences between Canada and Israel. Equally noteworthy, however, were the considerable similarities, such as frequent problems with finances and services, and most of the articles being traditional in focus. The paper concludes with an analysis of the newspaper business and the implications of this for altering the image of disabled people in the media.     

Media competition and information disclosure

This paper analyzes an election game where self-interested politicians can exploit the lack of information that citizens have about candidates’ preferred policies in order to pursue their own agendas. In such a setup, we analyze the incentives of newspapers to acquire costly information and that of politicians to make informative speeches, as well as how competition among the media affects such incentives. We show that the higher the number of potential readers and/or the lower the cost of investigating, the more the candidates tend to reveal their motives. We also show that the readers’ purchasing habits play a crucial role in the model. More specifically, we show that if readers always buy a newspaper, media competition favors information disclosure; whereas if they are opportunistic and just buy a newspaper in case news are uncovered, competition is not so desirable. An erratum to this article can be found at     

The Ideological Convergence of Civil Society Organizations and Newspapers in Turkey

This study investigates the extent to which newspapers are polarized in representing civil society organizations in Turkey. In examining the news in 15 printed newspapers and 2 online newspapers in 2017, we found that (1) 1499 associations and 499 foundations were mentioned but not equally distributed across the newspapers, (2) Turkish newspapers’ coverage of associations/foundations was affected by the type of association/foundation (religious/conservative vs. secular) and newspaper (pro-government vs. anti-government), (3) when news about an association/foundation appeared in pro-government newspapers, it did not appear in anti-government newspapers, and vice versa, and (4) secular associations/foundations were covered more often by anti-government newspapers than by pro-government newspapers. We therefore argue that in countries such as Turkey, where civil society organizations have historically been closely allied with state or political ideologies, newspapers’ political stances affect the media coverage of civil society organizations.

     

"The responsibility to inform, the power to act": a conference for New England college newspaper editors on the role of the campus press in addressing substance use issues.

College newspapers are a powerful but underutilized medium for educating students on health issues, including those related to drug and alcohol use on campus. Editors of these publications are in a position to wield significant influence among their readers. In addition to communicating factual information about the prevalence and impact of substance use among college students, editors can use the press to advocate changes in students' attitudes and behaviors and in college or community policies that affect substance use. A pilot conference was held to help New England college newspaper editors perceive the importance of their role in educating their peers about substance use and other health-related issues, and to offer concrete suggestions as to how they can incorporate these topics into an "activist" campus press.     

The Effects of Public Ownership on Newspaper Companies: A Preliminary Inquiry

The trend toward ownership of major newspaper groups by companieswhose stock is publicly traded raises questions about the impactof investor influence on the management of the affected newspapers.A hypothesis is developed and tested: that the managers of publiclyheld newspaper companies will hold attitudes more like thoseof financial analysts than will their counterparts in privatecompanies. Although the hypothesis is not sustained, the circumstancesjustify a watch for further opportunities to test it in thefuture.     

Distinguishing how elite newspapers and A-list blogs cover crises: Insights for managing crises online

Through a content analysis of 887 blog posts and online newspaper articles about five political crises, this study helps crisis managers negotiate the blogosphere by answering a fundamental question: How, if at all, do blogs and newspapers cover crises differently? Significantly, the study extends existing knowledge by examining both structural and content attributes that distinguish how blogs and newspapers cover crises.     

Covering the Dawsons: Racial Variation in Newspaper Framing of Urban Crime

This article uses newspaper coverage of a case from Baltimore, Maryland, to explore racial variation in the rhetorical framing of urban crime. In October 2002, seven members of the Dawson family were murdered in a house fire. The murders became an expression of Baltimore’s character and the lives of its residents. After analyzing 206 newspaper articles about the case, we find stark differences in the way the case, its causes, and its consequences are presented to readers. Newspapers with primarily white audiences—both “mainstream” and “alternative” papers—present the case as a horrific, singular instance, placing responsibility on the perpetrator. In contrast, articles in African American newspapers offer a complex web of explanation, calling attention to the structural inequalities and disparate access to state resources. Whereas white newspaper portray the Dawson family as martyrs in the drug war, black newspapers position the family as part of a wider of community of African Americans who are victims of slack policing, racial discrimination, and negligent social policy. We argue that these rhetorical differences are more than cosmetic. Rather, they provide a framework for better understanding the relationship between the press and policy makers. Differences in coverage of the case also contribute to our understanding of why blacks and whites have fundamentally different understandings of race in the United States.     

Standards and the Form of Agreement 2002 Presidential Address Western Economic Association

Contract stipulations tend to be subject to commodity standards. Standards make it clearer what transactors have agreed upon. They also bring stipulations from different contracts under a common denominator. The lower the cost of measuring an attribute and the wider the range of its application, the higher the likelihood that the attribute will become subject to new standards. New standards are predicted to increase the role of contracts in agreements and to reduce that of long-term relations; to lower the prices of the commodities that use the standards; to increase the rate of theft of these commodities; and, by making it clearer what it is that parties exchange, to reduce the level of vertical integration. Finally, new standards propel markets toward perfect competition.     

Exploring the validity of electronic newspaper databases

Do electronic newspaper databases contain all of the stories that appear in the print edition? And does this depend on the database used? To explore these questions, we collected print copies of newspapers from cities across the USA and Canada. We compared coverage of two topics in these newspapers with the coverage obtained from keyword searches in three electronic newspaper databases. We conclude that the stories obtained through electronic searches are consistent across databases but can vary from the print source. Importantly, national and international coverage is more likely to be missing than local or statewide/provincial coverage.     

Commodification of rural places: A narrative of social fields,rural development,and football

One of the most significant recent elements of restructuring in rural areas is the transition from an economy based on agricultural production to an economy based on the countryside as a form of commodity. In this transition process, different narratives or images of an area are produced to promote villages and other places in the countryside as commodities. Much of the literature takes it for granted that outsiders control the processes of branding rural areas, but our case study demonstrates that the producers (as well as potential consumers) of the countryside as a commodity can be insiders within a community. In this paper, we demonstrate how a local football club can take a leading role in the process of commodification of rural places in the post-modern era. Football clubs are presented as commodities to attract investors, sponsors, and expertise from private businesses. In both commodification of rural places and football, the challenge is to construct narratives or images that correspond to the pre-existing expectations of consumers, whoever they might be. Our theory-informed empirical analyses illustrate the way in which the Norwegian football club Sogndal Football has been instrumental in the restructuring of the Sogndal community.     

Advertising as payment: Information transactions in the South Korean newspaper market

The present study attempts to examine how market-driven journalism and a decrease in newspaper readership have affected information subsidy patterns between public relations practitioners and journalists in South Korea. Findings suggest that newspaper journalists have become dependent on information subsidies more than ever before, especially advertising as a payment, which play a significant role in the negotiation of favorable relationships between sources and newspapers. Thus, the study suggests that under the economic constraints that the newspaper industry faces, advertisement as a payment seem to be more influential than the more conventional information subsidies.     

Talking Yiddish at the boundaries

This essay uses the contemporary urban consumption practice of speciality coffee as a means to explore the complex ways in which global brands seek to enhance the promotional currency of their products through the mobilizing of local ‘commodity biographies’. It begins by outlining the place-specific strategies of promotion employed by speciality coffee retailers such as Starbucks and the Seattle Coffee Company, examining the range of ways in which Seattle as centre of US ‘coffee culture’ was deployed as the locus of ‘origin’ in order to create lucrative distinctions between speciality coffee and homogenized, mass-market coffee products. It then places this symbolic geography of coffee within the long history of coffee as a global commodity, tracing the recent emergence of speciality coffee as a ‘niche’ product, and situating it in the context of restructuring urban economies geared towards service-sector, consumption-oriented activities. The essay then moves on to consider the difficulties encountered by Starbucks, the market leader in speciality coffee, in monitoring and manipulating the symbolic geographies of its coffee commodities as they migrated from the coffee shop and into other realms of representation. In particular it explores the issue of Starbucks’ product placement in the a number of motion pictures in the 1990s, arguing that such placements were embraced by the company as an opportunity to defuse criticism of the company's activities that amplified as the decade evolved. Finally, the essay looks at the high profile targeting of Starbucks coffee shops by protestors at the anti-globalization protests that accompanied the hosting of the 1999 WTO Ministerial Conference Meeting in Seattle, arguing that this moment can be seen to capture much of the complexity of mobilizing circumscribed place-specific ‘commodity biographies’ for a global product in an era characterized by increased scrutiny of the international division of labour.     

Reflections on “the looking glass war” photography,espionage and the cold war

The article focuses on a syndicated newspaper photograph which was used in 1996 to illustrate an espionage story involving British and Russian diplomats. The photograph appeared on the front pages of two British newspapers. Following an exploration of the formal aspects of the photograph, the paper explores the different editorial agendas of the two newspapers. This leads to a questioning of the documentary value of the image as well as its broader historical, political and literary setting. It not only shows how the photograph alludes to the spy thriller, but the structure of article itself draws upon and aims to mimic this literary genre.     

Commodity Fetishism and Consumer Senses: Turn‐of‐the‐Twentieth‐Century Consumer Activism in the United States and England

At the turn of the twentieth century, the National Consumers’ League, the Co‐operative Wholesale Society, and the Women's Co‐operative Guild encouraged people to become ethical consumers. I argue that we can explain their common strategies by invoking commodity fetishism. By casting their consumer activism as a practical response to the fetish of commodities, we explain: 1) activists’ use of sensory techniques – both figurative and literal – to connect producers, commodities, and consumers and 2) their commitment to the ethical power of the senses. This account reveals the virtues of commodity fetishism as a tool for understanding the dynamics of consumer activism.     

Newspapers, Television and Political Reasoning

Adults' use of newspapers is found to correlate positively withhaving reasons for preferring one U.S. senatorial candidateover another. Television exposure is negatively related to politicalreasoning to a nearly significant degree. Data were providedby a 1974 nationwide, postelection survey. Analysis was conductedat the aggregate level, examining media behavior and politicalknowledge in 67 news markets. News markets with competitionamong daily newspapers show greater levels of information thanmonopoly areas, controlling for education and interest in politics.Results suggest that a decline in newspaper penetration, lessenedcompetition, or shift toward use of television for news wouldweaken peoples' understanding about partisan candidates.     

Representations of disability in print news media in postsocialist Ukraine

This article examines the narrative discourses that shape representations of disability in newspapers in postsocialist Ukraine, arguing that narratives about disability are linked to a meta-discourse of ‘transition’ that emphasizes disorder. Further, newspaper coverage prescribes competing and contradictory models of citizenship and personhood for postsocialist subjects living with disabilities. The article offers recommendations for improving press coverage of disability issues.     

Nation speaking unto nation? Newspapers and national identity in the devolved UK

There are two problems with the existing account of the relationship between newspapers and national identity in the UK. The first is that although it is widely assumed that the mass media are central to the reproduction and evolution of national identity this has never been empirically demonstrated. The second is that exactly what comprises the relevant ‘national’ context in the UK is unclear. Content analysis of 2,500 sampled articles, together with qualitative comparison of different editions of the same newspaper titles and interviews with editors and journalists are used to show the extent and nature of ‘national’ frames of reference in newspapers in England and Scotland. Paradoxically, devolution may have reduced the spatial diversity of news stories in the press in England and Scotland.