This article starts from the observation of current changes in the nature of a globalizing public sphere for which older structural boundaries have lost much of their relevance. Though the public sphere has traditionally been a topic for social scientists, a redefinition in terms of the realm of publicly accessible meaning, and of struggles over socially and politically important meaning, necessitates a contribution from the humanities. In particular, linguistic pragmatics, providing tools for an analysis of the way in which explicit (...) and implicit forms of meaning interact in the process of generating meanings, is argued to be a useful instrument. The argument is supported with an analysis of the differences in meaning landscapes that emerge even in different-­language versions of the ‘same’ text, illustrating how dependent publicly available meaning is on basic pragmatic processes. The article concludes that a maturing science of language use is therefore needed to understand variations in the accounts of social and political reality that people in a globalizing public sphere live by. (shrink)

The article analyses presuppositions in higher education policy documents of the OECD and the European Union from the point of view of their persuasiveness. Presuppositions set the assumed common ground, which in turn sets the frame of interpretation of texts. However, by presenting something as common ground, presuppositions also shape our views of the reality. Used in this way, presuppositions can be used to present contested views, which would be open to criticism if they were asserted explicitly. The analysis does (...) not evaluate the actual success of persuasion, but rather how policy documents are construed in a persuasive way. (shrink)

One of the challenges to studying the media in non-‘Western’ locations is to decide on appropriate and relevant theoretical framings for such work. Moreover in African contexts there is a call for African scholarship. In this paper I propose that two very different sets of theories are relevant to theorising the media in a southern African context. First I draw on Foucauldian understandings of governmentality and subjectivities, in spite of the fact that Foucault and his commentators make frequent reference to (...) the ‘Western’ world and the ‘Western subject’. In addition to Foucauldian insights, I also draw on African scholar, Mamdani's theories. He argues that colonial power was effected through indirect rule to constitute people as either ‘citizen’ or ‘subject’. The bifurcated nature of the state thus proposed different sets of identities and has resulted in a particular ‘history of the present’. From a position that argues that Foucault's and Mamdani's insights are fundamental to understanding this postcolonial context and the media constructions that result, I relate them empirically to a case study of the coverage and the accompanying popular responses in the South African press of the controversial rape trial of former South African deputy president, Jacob Zuma.1 If a rights-based discourse informed much of the reporting, it did this by constituting the discourse of ethnicity as other. At the same time both patriarchal and gender rights discourses were in unequal contestation. (shrink)

This article maps the emergent field of Islamophobia Studies through a discussion of recently published monographs, representing the broad spectrum of theoretical and analytical approaches to the phenomenon. Strengths and deficiencies in recent works of Nathan Lean, Deepa Kumar, Chris Allen, David Tyrer and Anne Norton are discussed. I argue that in different ways, a more thorough engagement with critical and Marxist theories of racism could contribute to a more accurate understanding of the phenomenon. This, however, is predicated on recognising (...) and theorising Islamophobia as racism – albeit one ‘without races’ – and a discussion about its differences from and similarities to other kinds of racism. (shrink)

Since 2013, several social actors of the Federal University of Santa Catarina community have formed a public sphere in order to deliberate and decide on the University Hospital’s affiliation to the Brazilian Hospital Services Company, a public company set up in accordance with a private law which has been created by the Brazilian federal government in order to set up a management body for public university hospitals. Underpinned by critical discourse analysis, our purpose is to analyze the embedded ideologies in (...) discursive practices within the UFSC/ebserh public sphere, especially those perpetrated by the federal government’s bureaucratic means as to mystify reality, and also promote and legitimize dominant interests and actions with regard to the UH/ufsc’s affiliation to the EBSERH. We organized this analysis in five main categories: staff shortage and the ideological use of the double standard policy, the ideology of neo-liberalism and managerialism, blame avoidance behavior and the ideological dispute between ideology and pragmatism, the policy of terror and the fallacy of choice and ideology of participationism. (shrink)

In this essay I seek to re?examine the ?what is ideology?? question in the light of recent developments in ideology theory. We see that contemporary ideology theory tends to employ either a ?restrictive? or an ?inclusive? conception of ideology. Most theorists operating in the field of ideology study see these two approaches as both rival and exclusive. Furthermore the relationship between the analyst of ideology and the ideological field is at issue in both cases. I argue that the concept/conception distinction (...) allows us to discern that these two approaches do not merely employ rival conceptions of the same concept. There are two concepts of ideology at work here, which perform such radically different roles that their coexistence can be seen as unproblematic, reflecting the presence of both normative and interpretative work in social science. (shrink)

The authors identify a pervasive tendency, especially in the world of development and humanitarian response, to hierarchize or prioritize certain types of victims of sexual violence in armed conflict over others. Within this broader context, they focus on what a considered feminist acknowledgement of male victims of conflict-related sexual violence should look like. On the one hand, they emphasize that one and the same patriarchal template is used to humiliate and shame male and female victims of sexual violence alike. On (...) the other, they urge that in light of the pervasiveness of patriarchal ideology and its harmful and wide-reaching social effects, the time is not yet ripe to endorse a gender-blind approach to CRSV. (shrink)

A feature of recent social science theorizing has been a revival of interest in the concept of culture. While always fundamental to the discipline of anthropology, the culture concept is now commonly employed in other fields as well. Since the end of the Cold War in particular, theories of international politics have been in search of fresh explanatory categories and the culture concept has been adopted in some influential approaches to serve this purpose. As with other social science concepts, however, (...) culture may serve various causes: liberal, socialist, conservative, and so on. Among its uses is the construction of political community in narrow and exclusionary terms, thereby reinforcing, among other things, atavistic forms of nationalism. Such exercises depend very heavily on the idea of cultural difference as constituting the ?natural? political and moral boundaries between communities. This article critically reviews some of these ideas about culture and nationalism and their implications for normative theories of international politics. (shrink)

The Islamist critique of the post-1923 regime in Turkey centres around the deconstruction of the Republic's civilizing mission. Here the modernization of the rump of the Ottoman Empire undertaken in the name of the universality of western civilization (with the consequent attributing of backwardness to Islam) is problematized: Islamist discourse converges with other postmodern critiques in proclaiming the exhaustion of modernity as a project of emancipation. Islamist politics celebrate the return of the Muslim actor and identity. And yet the making (...) of an Islamist movement is threatened by the mobilization of other political identities similarly suppressed by the Turkish state's modernizing project. This includes in particular Kurdish subjectivity, long a target of assimilation in the name of the universality of the greater Turkish nation. This paper examines the fragmenting of the Islamist movement in Turkey, as well as Islamist attempts to head off Kurdish nationalism. The Islamist suppression of difference within its own ranks in the name of an Islamic universalism betrays it too as a descendant of Enlightenment discourses and a modernizing movement in its own right. (shrink)

A 20th-century discipline in American universities, communication has struggled with questions of academic identity: generically, as to whether it is a 'humanities' or a 'social science', a 'practice' or a 'technology', and theoretically, as to what sorts of axioms, theorems, research methods or logics, and problems should form its core. This article explores some of the frames that have been borrowed and built to guide theorization of and research on communication practices. It then examines briefly the efforts to institutionalize communication (...) studies academically, professionally, and economically as an American case-study of the rhetoric of inquiry: the ways in which the knowledge industries form species, divide the intellectual universe, and defend knowledge claims. (shrink)

-Este artículo se centra en el análisis de los estudios teóricos y empíricos sobre la sociología del cómic durante los siglos XX y XXI. Aunque en la actualidad el cómic está ampliamente aceptado en el ámbito académico, tanto en publicaciones periódicas como en monografías especializadas, esto no ha sido lo habitual en el pasado. Los primeros estudios fueron excepciones en el ámbito más amplio de la sociología de la comunicación, y no será hasta los años 50 cuando se popularicen en (...) la academia. Uno de los catalizadores de la sociología del cómic fue la obra de Umberto Eco (1968), a partir de la cual llegarían estudios más profundos como los de Dorfman y Mattelart (1971) o Luc Boltanski (1975). Finalmente, se analizan trabajos empíricos que toman como base el lenguaje del cómic. (shrink)

With Xi Jinping’s consolidation of political power in China, a personality cult has increasingly emerged. In this article, we analyze online documents and state news media to argue that this phenomenon is driven in part by local government officials and traditional media but most significantly by individual Chinese ‘netizens’. The current personality cult phenomenon is thus primarily society-driven and bottom-up rather than state-driven and top-down. We argue that the rise of this personality cult around Xi has its roots in national (...) anxiety in an important transitional period in China. While some worry about a possible return to the politics of the Cultural Revolution by encouraging this personality cult, others are responding to economic anxieties and to the social anxieties created by social injustice greatly due to official corruption. We conclude that the possibility of society-driven personality cults will increase over time, as a paradoxical corollary of the potential of new media to allow for the democratization and opening up of politics and culture to new voices. (shrink)

This study provides empirical evidence in relation to a growing body of literature concerned with the ‘socialisation’ effects of accounting and business education. A prevalent criticism within this literature is that accounting and business education in the United Kingdom and the United States, by assuming a ‘value-neutral’ appearance, ignores the implicit ethical and moral assumptions by which it is underpinned. In particular, it has been noted that accounting and business education tends to prioritise the interests of shareholders above all other (...) stakeholder groups. This paper reports on the results of a set of focus group interviews with both undergraduate accounting students and students commencing their training with a professional accounting body. The research explores their perceptions about the purpose of accounting and the objectives of business. The findings suggest that both university and professional students' views on these issues tend to be informed by an Anglo-American shareholder discourse, whereby the needs of shareholders are prioritised. Moreover, this shareholder orientation appeared to be more pronounced for professional accounting students. (shrink)

This study provides empirical evidence in relation to a growing body of literature concerned with the ‘socialisation’ effects of accounting and business education. A prevalent criticism within this literature is that accounting and business education in the United Kingdom and the United States, by assuming a ‘value‐neutral’ appearance, ignores the implicit ethical and moral assumptions by which it is underpinned. In particular, it has been noted that accounting and business education tends to prioritise the interests of shareholders above all other (...) stakeholder groups. This paper reports on the results of a set of focus group interviews with both undergraduate accounting students and students commencing their training with a professional accounting body. The research explores their perceptions about the purpose of accounting and the objectives of business. The findings suggest that both university and professional students' views on these issues tend to be informed by an Anglo‐American shareholder discourse, whereby the needs of shareholders are prioritised. Moreover, this shareholder orientation appeared to be more pronounced for professional accounting students. (shrink)

The article deals with race relations in Brazil, analyzing how adult and children’s literature in Brazil has worked to maintain and update the "complex prosperous." The article is guided by the hypothesis that the main challenge is to mover narratives, literature and textbooks which go beyond the homogeneity of a single story based on white as representative "natural" discourse of the human species that places the "other" as "deviant", from the hegemony of the white hierarchy for plural discourses. In Brazilian (...) racial hierarchies are profuse and profound. An analysis of "the Negro as an object" indicate the presence of some striking black characters as tending to be subordination and inferiority. The alternatives are linked to the "black literature" that demonstrates richness and strength but at the same time, this literature is maintained as "marginal." In children’s literature the process is very similar, observing continuous forms of hierarchy of whites as superior and blacks as inferior. I discuss the need for teacher training and the production of alternatives and other new literary discourse. (shrink)

The main purpose of this paper is to better understand how sustainability rating agencies, through discourse, promote an “ideology of numbers” that ultimately aims to establish a regime of normalization governing social and environmental performance. Drawing on Thompson’s (Ideology and modern culture: Critical social theory in the era of mass communication, 1990 ) modes of operation of ideology, we examine the extent to which, and how, the ideology of numbers is reflected on websites and public documents published by a range (...) of sustainability rating agencies. Our analysis indicates that the ideology of numbers promotes a relatively narrow vision of corporate social and environmental responsibility. That is, it establishes some areas of visibility while leaving in the shadow certain aspects of the ways in which companies fulfill, or fail to meet, their social and environmental responsibilities. The ideology of numbers also exerts power by identifying those companies that are deemed to be worthy of inclusion, or not, in a supposedly socially responsible corporate elite. (shrink)