Techniques of disinformation: Constructing and communicating “soft facts” after terrorism

Informed by social media data collected following four terror attacks in the UK in 2017, this article delineates a series of “techniques of disinformation” used by different actors to try and influence how the events were publicly defined and understood. By studying the causes and consequences of misleading information following terror attacks, the article contributes empirically to the neglected topic of social reactions to terrorism. It also advances scholarship on the workings of disinforming communications, by focusing on a domain other than political elections, which has been the empirical focus for most studies of disinformation to date. Theoretically, the analysis is framed by drawing an analogy with Gresham Sykes and David Matza's (1957) account of the role of “techniques of neutralization” originally published in the American Sociological Review. The connection being that where they studied deviant behaviour, a similar analytic lens can usefully be applied to disinformation cast as “deviant” information.     

The Solidary Relationship’s Consequences for the Ebb and Flow of Activism: Collaborative Evidence from Life-History Interviews and Social Media Event Analysis,

Acting in solidarity with deprived others has become a central topic in social movement research. The explanations of solidarity activism or political altruism are few. However, social movement researchers have claimed that solidarity with out-of-group others is a by-product of in-group interaction. In contrast, we argue that out-group interaction with the deprived other and the formation of a solidary relationship is central to the ebb and flow of solidarity activism. We investigate the Danish refugee solidarity movement and show that the meeting with the deprived other 1) brings about an interaction order which makes an ethical demand on the activists to care for the other both within the bounds of the situations and in the future; 2) enacts and amplifies activists’ values and beliefs because the deprived other becomes an exemplar of the injustice and the need to help the broader group of people in the same fragile situation. We develop and test this theory drawing on 42 life-history interviews and a social media dataset containing a panel of 87,455 activists participating in refugee solidarity groups.     

Developing Country Debt Research: Where Do We Go From Here?

Book reviewed in this article: Managing World Debt. Edited by S . Griffith-Jones International Capital Markets: Developments and Prospects. By an IMF Staff Team Multilateral Official Debt Rescheduling: Recent Experience. By P.M. Keller with N.E. Weerasinghe African Debt: The Case for Relief for Sub-Saharan Africa. By P.S. Mistry The International Debt Crisis of the Third World. By P. Nunnenkamp. The African Debt Crisis. By T.W. Parfitt and S.P. Riley Developing Country Debt: the Budgetary and Transfer Problem. By H. Reisen and A. van Trotsenburg Latin American Debt and the Adjustment Crisis. Edited by R. Thorp and L. Whitehead Voluntary Approaches to Debt Relief. By J. Williamson     

Labour Market Realism and the Global Compacts on Migration and Refugees

The Global Compacts on Migration (GCM) and Refugees (GCR) include policy recommendations that aim to increase opportunities for legal labour migration, improve protections for migrant workers, and provide refugees with ‘complementary pathways’ to enhanced protection via labour mobility. This paper explains why there are large gaps between these policy recommendations and the labour market policies and realities in the countries that host most of the world’s migrant workers. These gaps between ideals and realities are likely to limit the effective implementation of the GCM/GCR recommendations on labour migration. More ‘labour market realism‘ is needed to incrementally but effectively improve protections for migrant workers.     

Industrial relations and adjustments to the crisis: A comparative micro‐statistical analysis of France and Great Britain

In this comparative study, the authors analyse the relationships between industrial relations and workforce or wage adjustments in response to the 2007–08 crisis, using two highly comparable establishment‐level surveys conducted in Great Britain (WERS) and France (REPONSE) in 2010–12. Notwithstanding contextual differences in the countries’ productive systems and the timing and impact of the crisis, the relationships between industrial relations and adjustment strategies appear to have been similar (trade union presence not preventing adjustments). Differences in industrial relations are therefore not found to provide an explanation for the different modes of adjustment observed at the macroeconomic level.     

Clinical and Supervisory Considerations for Transgender Therapists: Implications for Working with Clients

Transgender therapists have unique and valuable perspectives into how gender organizes the therapeutic process. Currently, in the MFT field, there is discussion of the cisgender therapist's experience in the therapy room, but no known articles on the transgender therapist's experience. This article provides insight into the experiences of transgender therapists around issues of self‐disclosure, social locations of both therapist and client, and clinical supervision. Drawing from our clinical experiences as transmen, we highlight special considerations for working with cisgender, queer, and transgender clients. Implications for supervision of transgender therapists are also discussed. As more gender diverse students seek MFT training, there is an urgent need to acknowledge their perspectives. This article is a call for beginning conversations in this direction.     

Celebrating Joan Acker: Sociologist,fearless feminist,friend

Joan Acker's life reflects a time when middle‐class women were expected to be satisfied with maintaining the home front, serving husbands and children, not having paid‐work careers. After living “the ideal” for 37 years, Acker took a new path by earning a Ph. D. and producing path‐breaking scholarship that challenged taken‐for‐granted beliefs about gender, family, work, and organizations. Acker spoke “truth to power” and was an academic heroine in posing feminist challenges to injustices involving gender, social class, and race/ethnicity, particularly (but not solely) related to the workplace. This overview lets Joan tell her story and offers reflections on her milestone publications as seen by Pat Martin.     

Developing a Cross-National Comparative Framework for Studying Labour Market Segmentation: Measurement Equivalence with Latent Class Analysis

Social Indicators Research - This article proposes a novel measurement model of labour market segmentation in Europe for cross-national comparisons, tackling three drawbacks of current approaches:...     

Comment: there may be compositional effects,but they do not work that way*

This analysis joins the debate on how declines in marriage have shifted the composition of the unmarried and married populations in the United States, and how compositional shifts have affected nonmarital birth rates. Gray, Stockard, and Stone (2006) presented one model for compositional effects that Ermisch (2009) challenged with alternative statistical tests. I propose an alternative model for compositional shifts based not on theory but on observed marriage and fertility patterns. The results from this alternative model are consistent with Ermisch’s findings yet support Gray et al.’s general case that compositional effects have had an important infiuence on nonmarital birth rates.