Political consumerism and the participation gap: are boycotting and ‘buycotting’ youth-based activities?

Does age predict political consumerism (boycotting or ‘buycotting’) among Canadian youth and adults? To what extent might political consumerism reduce inequities in civic participation? Using data from the 2008 Statistics Canada GSS on Social Networks, a multi-variate logistic regression analysis was conducted to investigate the relationship between age and politically motivated consumer behavior. Findings indicate that political consumerism is less likely among youth and the elderly than it is among middle-aged and young adults; however, education – rather than age – is found to be the strongest predictor. These results suggest that (a) popular beliefs/stereotypes about youths’ propensity toward non-traditional ‘consumer-activism’ may exaggerate the reality of the situation, and (b) notions that political consumerism can effectively narrow participatory inequalities among citizens may be overly optimistic. In evaluating two competing perspectives on youth political consumerism, this study argues that political consumerism does not by itself resolve issues of political marginalization faced by young Canadians; although consumer activism may offer an ‘alternative’ means of asserting political agency, it retains many of the same demographic ‘participation gaps’ as more traditional activist tactics.     

90后大学生思想政治理论课教学实效性的再思考

随着90后大学生的出现,高校思想政治理论课教学面临着越来越严峻的形势,实现教学内容生活化、教学方法艺术化、教学过程情感化和依托校园文化,提高教学针对性、渗透力、感染力和后继力,成为当前增强高校思想政治理论课教学实效性的必然选择。     

我国非政府组织在政治发展中的积极作用

20世纪80年代以来,我国非政府组织得到了迅猛的发展,数量和种类逐年递增。近些年来,作为公民社会的重要组成部分的非政府组织,在政治发展中发挥着积极的作用,如推进政治民主化;培育公民社会;维护社会的政治稳定;推动政府职能转变等,逐渐成为我国政治发展中一支不可或缺的力量。     

Information happenings: Performing reflexive organizational research 1

This article is an experiment in organizational narration. The adoption of a novel literary form enables the author to address certain contemporary themes in the reflexive presentation and reporting of organizational research. In pursuit of an alternative mode of expression, the notion of the ‘Happening’ is found to be a helpful rhetorical device. ‘Happenings’ serve as a vehicle for the theatrical reframing of important epistemological issues concerning the nature of ‘organization’, ‘research’ and ‘reporting’. This textual strategy is not, however, an end in itself. In substantive terms, it is used to explore and give voice to key thematic elements of the author's ethnographic study of a high technology project. The work of literary critic Kenneth Burke and his method of Dramatism, reflexively reframed, is employed to examine the social motives which inform ‘computer identity’, ‘information Utopias’ and ‘technicism’.     

中国哲学研究的新领域

通过对中国有没有哲学的讨论,列举了中国古代经济管理、政治哲学,以说明中国哲学研究应该开拓新领域,达到古为今用、综合创新、为现实社会服务的目的。     

对印投资的政治风险及其法律应对措施

印度独立后,总体上对外资持欢迎态度,1991年实行自由化改革以来尤其如此。印度的政治制度、法律制度和经济制度有助于避免大规模政治风险的发生,但国有化和征收风险、汇兑风险、政府违约风险、战争和内乱风险在一定范围内仍然存在。外国投资者对印度投资,有必要采取适当的法律应对措施,以防止和消除政治风险,进而确保投资利润和目标的实现。     

Choreographing Resistances: Spatial–Kinaesthetic Intelligence and Bodily Knowledge as Political Tools in Activist Work

Abstract

Bodies have been used as a political tool in activism, but many scholars have ignored activists’ highly sophisticated and intelligent ways of using their moving bodies. This paper focuses on analysing three choreographies of resistance: the group crawling performance for striking nurses in Helsinki in 2007, the protest by Greenpeace at a nuclear construction site in 2007 and a protest in the 1989 Chinese student movement. The purpose is to shed light on how resisting choreographies can generate interactions and relations between agents keeping these interactions dynamic by the motivations and affections of these agents. I will apply Edmund Husserl’s and Edith Stein’s phenomenological method of analysing movement and their notion of kinaesthesia. One of the keywords here is ‘the kinaesthetic field’ that offers a new perspective to account for resisting choreography and its dynamics in socially, politically and emotionally complex environments. Drawing on Howard Gardner’s notion of kinaesthetic intelligence, I suggest that the core element of kinaesthetic intelligence is not only control of one’s bodily motion but also capabilities for working with kinaesthetic fields. The paper argues that the activists can operate gestures, the vulnerability of the body and timing by drawing various agents into their choreography. When activists are able to express their political ideas as concrete gestures, postures or kinaesthetic relations, it also supports their capabilities of articulating their moral intuitions. Even when witnesses disagree with protesters’ positions, protests frequently force them to reconsider their own.     

Exact and approximate algorithms for the loop layout problem

Control parameters, such as order frequency, safety stock and safety time, are important tools to improve the logistic performance in material planning. In practice, the adjustment of control parameters appears to be very difficult. One of the reasons is the lack of relevant tactical control information: a simple, periodical and per-commodity integrated feedback of performance and process information often is not available to the logistic operator. Therefore, the material planner is offered a fairly limited overview and insight of the processes to be controlled. This problem has been investigated in several plants in the Netherlands. A solution to this problem is first to measure the performance, the frequency of process disturbances and the effect of the parameters on performance for all commodities involved. And second, to integrate this information and provide feedback to the responsible material planner. In this article a design for decision support is presented to integrate and give feedback of relevant tactical control information. Prototype information systems are now being tested in practice and in the laboratory. The expectation is that this type of decision support will help the operator to make more systematic and effective diagnoses.     

AUSTRIFYING EUROPE: ULTRARIGHT POPULISM AND THE NEW CULTURE OF RESISTANCE

The article investigates the political and cultural causes of the emergence of right-wing coalitions throughout the European Union, taking Austria as a symptomatic case of this return of political antagonism within a culture of consensus. It is argued that, methodologically and theoretically, a valid analysis of the phenomenon of xenophobic populism can only be achieved with the combined effort of both political and cultural theory,respectively of both political discourse analysis and cultural studies. Two axes of analysis have to be taken into account: the first being the relation between culture (or the popular) and politics (or the ‘people’), and the second concerning the even more fundamental relation or difference between politics and the political.     

Political Economy of Redistribution

It is often argued that additional constraints on redistribution such as granting veto power to more players in society better protects property from expropriation. We use a model of multilateral bargaining to demonstrate that this intuition may be flawed. Increasing the number of veto players or raising the supermajority requirement for redistribution may reduce protection on the equilibrium path. The reason is the existence of two distinct mechanisms of property protection. One is formal constraints that allow individuals or groups to block any redistribution that is not in their favor. The other occurs in equilibrium where players without such powers protect each other from redistribution. Players without formal veto power anticipate that the expropriation of other similar players will ultimately hurt them and thus combine their influence to prevent redistributions. In a stable allocation, the society exhibits a “class” structure with class members having equal wealth and strategically protecting each other from redistribution.