Social media teams as digital vanguards: the question of leadership in the management of key Facebook and Twitter accounts of Occupy Wall Street,Indignados and UK Uncut

Recent protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street in the US, the indignados/15M movement in Spain, and UK Uncut have witnessed the rise of social media teams, small activist groups responsible for managing high-visibility and collective activist social media accounts. Going against dominant assertions about the leaderless character of contemporary digital movements, the article conceptualises social media teams as ‘digital vanguards’, collective and informal leadership structures that perform a role of direction of collective action through the use of digital communication. Various aspects of the internal functioning of vanguards are discussed: (a) their formation and composition; (b) processes of internal coordination; (c) struggles over the control of social media accounts. The article reveals the profound contradiction between the leadership role exercised by social media teams and the adherence of digital activists to techno-libertarian values of openness, horizontality, and leaderlessness. The espousal of these principles has run against the persistence of power and leadership dynamics leading to bitter conflicts within these teams that have hastened the decline of the movements they served. These problems call for a new conceptual framework to better render the nature of leadership in digital movements and for new political practices to better regulate the management of social media assets.     

MARKET DISTORTIONS AND GOVERNMENT TRANSPARENCY

In this paper, we investigate how government transparency depends on economic distortions. We first consider an abstract class of economies in which a benevolent policy maker is privately informed about the exogenous state of the economy and contemplates whether to release this information. Our key result is that distortions limit communication: even if transparency is ex ante Pareto superior to opaqueness, it cannot constitute an equilibrium when distortions are sufficiently high. We next confirm this broad insight in two applied contexts, in which monopoly power and income taxes are the specific sources of distortions.     

A New Look at the Public Wage Premium in Italy: The Role of Schooling Endogeneity

This paper uses a sample of male workers to estimate public and private wage structures and the public wage premium for Italy. Results from a model with endogenous sector and schooling suggest that public employees have on average lower unobserved wage potentials in both sectors than private employees, but work in the sector where they benefit from a comparative wage advantage. Schooling is positively correlated with wages in both sectors, and controlling for that is crucial to get more reliable estimates and predictions. The associated average unconditional public wage premium is 12 per cent. The net premium is 9 per cent, but not statistically significant.     

Suspended Sorrow: The Crisis in Understanding the Diagnosis for the Mothers of Children with A Disorder of Sex Development

ABSTRACT.Objectives: We conducted a survey to obtain information concerning how mothers of children with DSD represent the diagnosis. Methods: We examined our findings through IPA methodology. Results: We observed a crisis of meaning, based on the inability to classify their child with a milestone of the social experience: the gender category. That risks of slipping into adempitive adherences to medical knowledge or hasty decisions about the health of the child. Conclusions: It's necessary to structure spaces with medical-psychological teams, for allowing these families to manage the condition in relation to the choices, and the daily context, of their children.