The pharmaceutical industry, in its marketing efforts, often turns to “key opinion leaders” or “KOLs” to disseminate scientific information. Drawing on the author's fieldwork, this article documents and examines the use of KOLs in pharmaceutical companies’ marketing efforts. Partly due to the use of KOLs, a small number of companies with well-defined and narrow interests have inordinate influence over how medical knowledge is produced, circulated, and consumed. The issue here, as in many other cases of institutional corruption, is (...) that a few actors have accumulated the power to shape the information on which many others base their decisions. Efforts to address this corruption should focus on correcting large imbalances in the current political economy of medical knowledge. A sequestration of pharmaceutical research and development on one hand from pharmaceutical marketing on the other, though difficult to achieve, would address this and many other problems. (shrink)

The lingering controversy concerning the usefulness and safety of antidepressants for children and adolescents is likely to confuse clinicians. Recent papers perpetuate the claim that antidepressants are shown to be safe and effective in randomised controlled trials. Others claim that antidepressants have been shown to prevent suicides. In this editorial we address the manipulation of outcomes that result from academics’ alliance with industry. We explain how industry and key opinion leaders have distorted the clinician’s perception of the safety (...) and usefulness of antidepressants for the treatment of depression in children and adolescents through publication bias, poor methodology, and selective reporting. (shrink)

The knowledge of opinion leaders to a certain extent has always been taken for granted by communication scholars. This article investigates what opinion leaders really know. Two studies will be presented to answer the above question. Participants of the first study were assessed according to ratings on three scales of opinion leadership, personality strength and political knowledge. In the second study, respondents were assessed according to ratings of opinion leadership and political knowledge. In both (...) studies, it was found that opinion leaders can be divided into ‘informed opinion leaders’, who know a lot in their area of interest, and ‘uninformed opinion leaders’, who are ill-informed about the field they claim as theirs. In both studies ‘informed opinion leaders’ read newspapers approximately one hour longer per week than ‘uninformed opinion leaders’. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine how a research institution’s social structure and academic opinion leaders’ presence shaped the early adoption of a scientific innovation. Our case considers the early engagement of mathematical economists at the Cowles Commission with John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. We argue that scholars with administrative leadership functions who were not only scientifically but also organizationally central – in our case the director of research Jacob Marschak – played (...) a crucial role in promoting the adoption of the Theory of Games. We support our argument with a scientometric analysis of all acknowledgments made in 488 papers published from 1944 to 1955 in the two main paper series at Cowles. We apply blockmodeling techniques to the acknowledgments network to reconstruct the formal and informal social structure at Cowles at the time. Our findings suggest that studies of the early adoption of scientific theories benefit from complementary perspectives on the role of academic leaders and scientists. Our study reveals the importance of formal and informal social structures and the agenda of administrative leaders in these structures to explain their adoption. (shrink)

Opinion leaders within the community may lead debate on animal welfare issues and provide a path for information to their social networks. However, little is known about OLs’ attitudes, activities conducted to express their views about animal welfare and whether they are well informed, or not, about husbandry practices in the red meat industry. This study aimed to identify OLs in the general public and among producers and compare OLs and non-OLs’ attitudes, knowledge and actions to express their (...) views about the red meat industry. Two questionnaires, one for the Australian general public and one for Australian red meat producers, were developed to identify general attitudes. From these questionnaires, OLs were identified using a two-step cluster analysis. Subsequently, a sub-sample of 19 OLs participated in a follow-up phone interview. Results disclosed some clear OLs’ characteristics. Public OLs held more negative perceptions of the red meat industry and perceived they had more knowledge about husbandry procedures. However, their actual knowledge about animal husbandry was not different from non-OLs. Public OLs also used and trusted social and internet media more than did non-OLs. In the producer group, a large percentage of OLs were identified. Producer OLs had more actual knowledge about animal husbandry and engaged in more behaviours to express dissatisfaction with the industry than non-OLs. Unlike the public respondents, this group used conventional media more than social and internet media, and their levels of trust in all kinds of media were low. While there were clear differences, both groups believed that is important to increase communication and educate about farm practices. This may present an opportunity to develop an opinion leader intervention strategy where informed OLs could later disseminate accurate information to their social networks. Further studies should test if sustained and facilitated educational sessions between public and producer OLs can assist in increasing communication, knowledge and perhaps, may assist in achieving convergence of concerns and expectations between both groups. (shrink)

This article considers the government, opinion leaders, and Internet users to be a system for correcting false information, and it considers the problem of correcting false information that arises in the aftermath of major emergencies. We use optimal control theory and differential game theory to construct differential game models of decentralized decision-making, centralized decision-making, and subsidized decision-making. The solutions to these models and their numerical simulations show that the government, opinion leaders, and Internet users exercise cost-subsidized (...) decision-making instead of decentralized decision-making. The equilibrium strategies, local optimal benefits, and overall optimal benefits of the system achieve Pareto improvement. Given the goal of maximizing the benefits to the system under centralized decision-making, the equilibrium results are Pareto-optimal. The research here provides a theoretical basis for dealing with the mechanism of correcting false information arising from major emergencies, and our conclusions provide methodological support for the government to effectively deal with such scenarios. (shrink)

Social networks can influence people’s behaviour and therefore it is assumed that central individuals in social networks, also called “opinion leaders”, play a key role in driving change in agricultural and food systems. I analyse the outcomes of an intervention (that encouraged Sulawesi smallholder farmers to take a specific action toward improving the health of their cocoa trees) to assess the impact of engaging opinion leaders in agricultural programs that aim to change farmers’ practices. The intervention (...) has been implemented through (a) 18 opinion leaders identified by interviews and a social network survey of 1885 cocoa farmers; and (b) 18 randomly selected farmers who were not central in local social networks. The obtained social networks and statistical data were quantitatively analysed and the results were interpreted with input from the field staff. Contrary to expectations, the highly socially central opinion leaders were not more effective in promoting the initiative in their communities. On average, randomly selected low-centrality farmers convinced almost twice as many of their peers to take the recommended action as compared to the identified opinion leaders (17.1 versus 8.6) but the variation within the random group was also significantly higher. Importantly, while the identified opinion leaders were mostly senior men, women performed better in influencing others into taking action even when their centrality in local social networks of agricultural advice was lower. I discuss the implications of the conventional selection of perceived opinion leaders as model farmers for achieving sustainable and equitable change at scale in agriculture and propose practical alternatives. (shrink)

The need for those who govern to be accountable to the governed often conflicts with the right of an individual, albeit a public leader, to privacy. This survey found that most Ohio residents believe job performance can be affected by what goes on in private lives, but most don't believe scrutiny of private matters is a media responsibility and find such coverage excessive and unfair. Belief in importance of accountability was related to support for media's responsibility to provide scrutiny, but (...) not to concern with excessiveness and fairness. (shrink)

Media has paid more attention recently on environmental issues caused by construction companies which imposes public opinion pressure on construction companies and could potentially impact their decision-making processes for green innovations. However, research on the relationship between public opinions pressure and construction company green innovation behavior is still limited. To understand how such public opinions pressure can impact construction companies' green transition and formulate advice accordingly, it is necessary to use empirical data to find the correlations. Therefore, this research (...) has gathered questionnaire data of the construction companies in Chengdu-Chongqing economic circle of China to study the influencing mechanism of environmental public opinion pressure on enterprise green innovation behavior, analyzes the realization path of leaders' environmental intention as a mediating variable in the impact of environmental public opinion pressure on enterprise green innovation behavior, and reveals the role boundary of environmental regulation as a moderating variable in the impact of environmental public opinion pressure on enterprise green innovation behavior. The results show that environmental public opinion pressure has a significant positive impact on enterprise green innovation behavior. More specifically, enterprise green innovation behavior is affected by leaders' environmental intention and the latter plays a partial mediating role between environmental public opinion pressure and enterprise green innovation behavior. Environmental regulation also enhances the sensitivity of companies to environmental public opinion pressure, and therefore can significantly strengthen the relationship between environmental public opinion pressure and enterprise green innovation behavior. Further research find that, compared with incentive-based environmental regulations, mandatory environmental regulations make companies more sensitive to environmental public opinion pressure and has a more significant positive moderating effect. The research conclusions could be used to provide theoretical reference with empirical data for accelerating the green innovation transformation and promoting the high-quality development in the construction industry. (shrink)

Opinion leaders are informal leaders who have the ability to influence others' decisions about adopting new products, practices or ideas. In the healthcare setting, the importance of translating new research evidence into practice has led to interest in understanding how opinion leaders could be used to speed this process. Despite continued interest, gaps in understanding opinion leadership remain. Agent‐based models are computer models that have proven to be useful for representing dynamic and contextual phenomena (...) such as opinion leadership. The purpose of this paper is to describe the work conducted in preparation for the development of an agent‐based model of nursing opinion leadership. The aim of this phase of the model development project was to clarify basic assumptions about opinions, the individual attributes of opinion leaders and characteristics of the context in which they are effective. The process used to clarify these assumptions was the construction of a preliminary nursing opinion leader model, derived from philosophical theories about belief formation. (shrink)

This paper offers a new insight on the Condorcet Jury Theorem (CJT) in the theory of epistemic democracy. This theorem states that democratic decision-making leads us to correct outcomes under certain assumptions. One key assumption is the ‘independence condition’, which requires that voters form their beliefs independently when they vote. This paper examines the role of an opinion leader as an informational source, which potentially violates independence. We demonstrate that voters’ beliefs may be correlated in the presence of the (...) leader, and that the CJT can fail if the leader’s opinions are reliable. This leads us to the following paradoxical observation: for epistemic democracy, good leaders may be bad, while bad leaders may be good. (shrink)

Social media platforms have become an important tool for travel advertisement. This study constructs the bounded confidence model to build an improved cross-platform competitive travel advertising information dissemination model based on open and closed social media platforms. Moreover, this study examines the evolution process of group opinions in cross-platform information dissemination with simulation experiments. Results reveal that based on strong relationships, the closed social media platform opinion leaders better guide in competitive travel advertising and can bring more potential (...) consumers to follow. However, being an opinion leader on an open social media platform will not result in more consumer following. (shrink)

Opinion surveys and popular media suggest that American workers are disillusioned with their employers and bosses. Governance in organizations is becoming a recognized problem. Classical works on governance call for more virtuous leaders, less selfish followers, and closer attention to the common good. These works were rejected as a basis for governing nations in the 18th century. They are unlikely to provide a basis for governing organizations in the 21st century. This article outlines a liberal-democratic approach to governing (...) corporations, applies this approach to debates over shareholder-stakeholder accountabilities, and proposes specialaccountabilities to employees. (shrink)

Opinion surveys and popular media suggest that American workers are disillusioned with their employers and bosses. Governance in organizations is becoming a recognized problem. Classical works on governance call for more virtuous leaders, less selfish followers, and closer attention to the common good. These works were rejected as a basis for governing nations in the 18th century. They are unlikely to provide a basis for governing organizations in the 21st century. This article outlines a liberal-democratic approach to governing (...) corporations, applies this approach to debates over shareholder-stakeholder accountabilities, and proposes specialaccountabilities to employees. (shrink)

Management literature has repeatedly shown that an absence of voice can have serious negative influences on team and organization performance. However, employees often withhold suggestions or advices when they have ideas, concerns, or opinions. The present study proposes leader behavioral integrity as a key antecedent of employee voice, and investigates how and when leader behavioral integrity influences employee voice. Specifically, we argue that leader behavioral integrity affects employee voice via team independence climate. In addition, we propose a moderating effect of (...) corporate ethical values. The results from a study of 134 managers and 408 employees provide support for this moderated mediation model. Leader behavioral integrity positively affects employee voice via team independence climate, but only when ethical values are emphasized in organizations. These results suggest that leader behavioral integrity, along with team independence climate and corporate ethical values, is very important for fostering employee voice. (shrink)

“What characterizes the act of justice is not resort to a court and to judges; it is not the intervention of magistrates (even if they had to be simple mediators or arbitrators). What characterizes the juridical act, the process or the procedure in the broad sense, is the regulated development of a dispute. And the intervention of judges, their opinion or decision, is only ever an episode in this development. What defines the juridical order is the way in which (...) one confronts one another, the way in which one struggles. The rule and the struggle, the rule in the struggle, this is the juridical.” - Michel Foucault Penal Theories and Institutions is the title Michel Foucault gave to the lectures he delivered at the Collège de France from November 1971 to March 1972. In these lectures Michel Foucault presents for the first time his approach to the question of power that will be the focus of his research up to the writing of Discipline and Punish (1975) and beyond. His analysis starts with a detailed account of Richelieu’s repression of the Nu-pieds revolt (1639-1640) and then goes on to show how the apparatus of power developed by the monarchy on this occasion breaks with the system of juridical and judicial institutions of the Middle Ages and opens out onto a “judicial State apparatus”, a “repressive system”, whose function is focused on the confinement of those who challenge its order. Michel Foucault systemizes the approach of a history of truth on the basis of the study of “juridico-political matrices” that he had begun in the previous year’s lectures (Lectures on the Will to Know) and which is at the heart of the notion of “knowledge-power”. In these lectures Foucault develops his theory of justice and penal law. The appearance of this volume marks the end of the publication of the series Foucault’s courses at the Collège de France (the first volume of which was published in 1997). (shrink)

If we want to understand how extremist group ideologies are established, we have to comprehend the social processes which form the basis of the emergence and distribution of such beliefs. In our chapter, we present an innovative approach to examining these processes and explaining how they function: with the method of computer-based simulation of opinion formation, we develop heuristic explanatory models which help to generate new and interesting hypotheses. The focus is thereby not on individuals and their idiosyncrasies but (...) on the dynamic mutual adaptation of beliefs in a group. These dynamics can produce an incremental establishment of “charismatic” opinion leaders and an increasing radicalization and alienation. A prototype of such a simulation model has produced promising first results which are presented and discussed. (shrink)

Are there significant variations across major religious faiths about the proper political roles of religion? Using recent WorldValues/EuropeanValues data from 63 countries we study the attitudes of mass publics on two separate aspects of this question. First, should religious beliefs be used as a criterion for selecting political leaders (dimension I)? Second, should religious leaders use their position for political influence (dimension II)? For dimension I we find that Muslims are somewhat more likely than followers of other faiths (...) and denominations to say that religious beliefs are important in selecting leaders. The remaining results of our investigation somewhat weaken or modify this result. On dimension II we find that Muslims do not stand out as comparatively favorable towards the view that religious leaders shall use their position for political influence. Finally, we find a negative, albeit weak and somewhat irregular effect of education on attitudes towards a close link between religion and political leadership (dimension I). However, this effect holds up equally well for Muslims as for other denominations, suggesting that Muslims are not immune to the effects of secularization. (shrink)

RATIONALE: The concept of evidence-based medicine is important in providing efficient health care. The process uses research findings as the basis for clinical decision making. Evidence-based practice helps optimize current health care and enables the practitioners to be suitably accountable for the interventions they provide. Little work has been undertaken to examine how allied health professionals change their clinical practice in light of the latest evidence. The use of opinion leaders to disseminate new evidence around the management of (...) low back pain into practice has been proposed. AIMS: The aim of this study was to investigate if physiotherapists' clinical management of patients with low back pain would change following an evidence-based education package, which utilized local opinion leaders and delivered the best evidence. METHOD: Thirty musculoskeletal physiotherapists from a Community Trust in North Staffordshire were cluster randomized by location of work, to two groups. The intervention group received an evidence-based programme on the management of low back pain, including advice regarding increasing activity levels and return to normal activity and challenging patients' fears and beliefs about their pain. The control group received a standard in-service training package on the management of common knee pathologies. The physiotherapists' clinical management of patients with low back pain was measured prior to training and 6 months post training. Outcome measures were based on physiotherapists completing 'discharge summary' questionnaires, which included information relating to the use and importance of therapies for treating their low back pain patients. RESULTS: There were few significant differences in treatment options between the intervention and control groups post training. Whilst there was some indication that physiotherapists were already utilizing aspects of psychosocial management for patients with low back pain, there was little change in what physiotherapists perceived to be important to patient recovery and actual clinical practice following the intervention. CONCLUSIONS: Psychosocial factors have been identified as an important factor in the recovery of patients with low back pain. This project incorporated the latest evidence on the management of low back pain and utilized the theory of opinion leaders to disseminate this evidence into clinical practice. Whilst there were some limitations in the overall size of the study, the results help to give an insight into the challenges faced by the health care system and researchers alike to ensure quality evidence is actually utilized by practitioners for the benefits of patient care. (shrink)

Background Little is known about the attitudes and practices of intensivists working in Lebanon regarding withholding and withdrawing life-sustaining treatments. The objectives of the study were to assess the points of view and practices of intensivists in Lebanon along with the opinions of medical, legal and religious leaders regarding withholding withdrawal of life-sustaining treatments in Lebanese intensive care units. Methods A web-based survey was conducted among intensivists working in Lebanese adult ICUs. Interviews were also done with Lebanese medical, legal (...) and religious leaders. Results Of the 229 survey recipients, 83 intensivists completed it, i.e. a response rate of. Most respondents were between 30 and 49 years old, Catholic Christians, anesthesiologists, working in Beirut. Ninety-two percent of them were familiar with the withholding and withdrawal concepts and 80% applied them. Poor prognosis of the acute and chronic disease and futile therapy were the main reasons to consider withholding and withdrawal of treatments. Ninety-five percent of intensivists agreed with the “Principle of Double Effect”. The main withheld therapies were vasopressors, respiratory assistance and CPR. Most of the respondents reported the decision was often to always multidisciplinary, involving the family, and the patient, or his advance directives or his surrogate and the nurses. The interviewees agreed there was a law governing withholding and withdrawal decisions/practices in Lebanon. Christians and Muslim Sunni leaders declared accepting those practices. Conclusion Withholding and withdrawal of LSTs in the ICU are known concepts among intensivists working in Lebanon and are being practiced. Our results could be used to inform and optimize therapeutic limitation in ICUs in the country. (shrink)

The Supreme Court decided Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky in 2019. Justice Clarence Thomas’s opinion in the case claimed there was a direct connection between the legalization of abortion, in the late 20th Century, and the beginnings of the birth control movement a full three quarters of a century earlier. “Many eugenicists,” Thomas argued, “supported legalizing abortion.”Justice Samuel Alito highlighted similar claims in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, citing a brief entitled “The Eugenic Era Lives on (...) through the Abortion Movement.” That brief was an echo of Justice Thomas’ misguided attempt at history in the Box opinion. Similar claims reoccur in Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s opinion in the Texas mifepristone case, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration.These false claims are the focus of this article. There is no evidence that early leaders of the eugenics movement supported abortion as part of the movement for birth control. It is accurate to describe those leaders as anti-abortion, and their followers as people who condemned abortion for moral, legal, and medical reasons. (shrink)

Based on the theory of the transference of meanings by Grant McCracken, this study aims at analyzing the way evangelical opinion leaders are able to transfer cultural meaning to the evangelical retinue products to the Holy Land. As any consumer good, this religious product is filled with cultural significance which comes from the culturally built world, in this case, the religious universe of evangelical people. Such meanings come to inhabit the good through two paths, which are, publicity and (...) trend system. Within the trend system, an important source of meanings is the opinion leaders, which are capable of not only edify, but also reform the senses concerning a good. In order to demonstrate this process, at the end, the study presents the case of apostle Renê Terra Nova, a paradigmatic concerning the evangelical retinues to the Holy Land. It is a study of qualitative and explicative nature realized through documental, bibliographical and ethnographic research accomplished in-person or over virtual ways. (shrink)

Traditional just war doctrine holds that political leaders are morally responsible for the decision to initiate war, while individual soldiers should be judged solely by their conduct in war. According to this view, soldiers fighting in an unjust war of aggression and soldiers on the opposing side seeking to defend their country are morally equal as long as each obeys the rules of combat. Revisionist scholars, however, maintain that soldiers who fight for an unjust cause bear at least some (...) responsibility for advancing an immoral end, even if they otherwise fight ethically. This article examines the attitudes of the American public regarding the moral equality of combatants. Utilizing an original survey experiment, we find that the public's moral reasoning is generally more consistent with that of the revisionists than with traditional just war theory. Americans in our study judged soldiers who participate in unjust wars as less ethical than soldiers in just wars, even when their battlefield conduct is identical, and a large proportion supported harsh punishments for soldiers simply for participating in unjust wars. We also find, however, that much of the American public is willing to extend the moral license of just cause significantly further than revisionist scholars advocate: half of the Americans in our survey were willing to allow an unambiguous war crime—a massacre of innocent women and children—to go unpunished when the act was committed by soldiers fighting for a just cause. Our findings suggest that incorporation of revisionist principles into the laws of war would reinforce dangerous moral intuitions encouraging the killing of civilians. (shrink)

Press Release: Terrorism in Southeast Asia: An Interview with Abu Bakar Ba'asyir 10/03/2005 - In August, Dr. Scott Atran travelled to Southeast Asia and conducted extensive research on terrorist groups operating in the region. This interview with Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, alleged leader of the Jemaah Islamiyah organization, was conducted on August 13 and 15, 2005 from Cipinang Prison in Jakarta. Questions were formulated by Dr. Atran and posed for him in Behasa Indonesian by Taufiq Andrie. The interview took place in (...) a special visitor's room, where Ba'asyir had seven acolytes acting as his bodyguards, including Taufiq Halim, the perpetrator of the Atrium mall bombing in Jakarta, and Abdul Jabbar, who blew up the Philippines ambassador's house. Excerpts from the interview are below; click here to read the full interview. Q. In your personal view, what do you think of bombings in our homeland, namely the Bali, Marriott and Kuningan bombings? A. I call those who carried out these actions all mujahid. They all had a good intention, that is, Jihad in Allah's way, the aim of the jihad is to look for blessing from Allah. They are right that America is the proper target because America fights Islam. So in terms of their objectives, they are right, and the target of their attacks was right also. But their calculations are debatable. My view is that we should do bombings in conflict areas not in peaceful areas. We have to target the place of the enemy, not countries where many Muslims live. Q. What do you mean by “wrong calculation,” that the victims included Muslims? A. That was one them. In my calculation, if there are bombings in peaceful areas, this will cause fitnah [discord] and other parties will be involved. This is my opinion and I could be wrong. Yet I still consider them mujahid. If they made mistakes, they are only human beings who can be wrong. Moreover, their attacks could be considered as self-defense. (shrink)

Although undergraduate students are exposed to ethical issues through class assignments, discussions, and readings, they typically do not have first hand experience with business dilemmas. Student opinions on ethical standards and behavior in American business have received scant attention in the literature. The purpose of the study is to provide additional information to both educators and organizations about the ethical perceptions of students. Furthermore, the study contrasts student responses to business and community leaders' responses obtained in a prior study (...) conducted by Touche Ross (1988). The findings from this study are based on an opinion survey about ethics in American business, completed by 476 liberal arts and business students attending a private, religiously affiliated college in New York State. The data indicate numerous differences in perceptions between students and business and community leaders. Differences were also found when students were classified by school (Arts & Science versus Business) and by gender. Overall, students appear to place a strong value on education. Students are the source of new entrants to the business world and the foundation for ethical structures being built by organizations. The findings from this study should assist both educators and employers in the development of necessary programs to maximize the ethical potential of their constituents. (shrink)

Scientific-technological innovation (particularly in the field of transgenic foods and cloning), scientific journalism and public opinion all share a complex relationship. The rupture of internal consensus among the scientific community, the role played by scientific journalists as "mediators" and the differentiation between what can be referred to as the "informed public" or "epistemological leaders" and the rest of the population were the starting point for our research on the impact of news related to biotechnological advances. In this paper (...) we will show the principal characteristics of the discourse on this type of news among what we can call the "informed public". From there, we will establish a set of strategies for improving the level of scientific-technological alphabetisation in our complex societies. (shrink)

Respondents in a southern state telephone survey agreed that media coverage of public leaders' private lives is an important news media responsibility, with agreement greater for legacy media than for online media, and differing depending on hypothetical scenario. The data also suggest increasing tolerance for such coverage and growing belief in responsibility of media to report on private indiscretions relative to previous studies.

Both the Kevelson Seminar topic, ‘Lawyers as Makers of Meaning,’ and the appearance of a highly-publicized television series in the United States dedicated to the life of President John Adams (1735–1826) invite inquiry into Adams’ role as a lawyer who shaped the meaning of the American Revolution (and his role in bringing it about). Three trials from Adams’ early legal career illustrate that he presented both himself and fellow resistance leader James Otis, Jr., as heroic loners struggling for the rights (...) of Americans against British injustice. Although he did not call it that, in 1970 lawyer and future Massachusetts Superior Court Justice Hiller Zobel, in his book The Boston Massacre, undertook what we would consider a semiotic approach that investigated the relevant codes and contexts—both the legal complexities and the audiences, other lawyers, judges, and posterity about which Adams spoke, simplifying and minimizing their roles as he maximized his own (and Otis’s). Zobel’s own relationship with Adams’ legal career appeared in his own tenure on the bench, especially in the famous ‘Nanny’ (discussed by Denis Brion, in this issue) case in which he explicitly presented the Boston Massacre Trials as a relevant precedent. Despite Adams’ willingness to subordinate his clients’ welfare to the patriot cause early in his career, it can be argued that HBO television and historian David McCullough, by presenting him to the public only flawed by his outspoken, stubborn honesty, have nevertheless performed a public service. Their version of Adams offers Americans in the twenty-first century an alternative role model to the dishonest, ill-informed politicians who use public opinion polls rather than political theory, moral philosophy, and historical knowledge as the basis of their decisions. (shrink)

This study examines Japanese reactions to neighboring countries’ behavior by addressing possible micro-motives, such as patriotism, the rational demand for national defense, and retrospective policy evaluation. This theoretical development leads to distinctive hypotheses from different motivations and directly tests them using macro-data . This research will apply this framework to Japanese politics and will show that foreign threats stimulate patriotism in the public mind and enhance political support for national leaders. It will also demonstrate that the Japanese public has (...) no optimistic view of the new prime minister and that the honeymoon effect in previous research may be confounded with the patriotic effect because the new leader is less experienced and is often challenged by foreign countries. (shrink)

Larry Bartels is one of the most prominent political scientists in the areas of democracy, electoral politics, and public opinion. He is the May Werthan Shayne Chair of Public Policy and Social Sci...

Many factors contribute to the inappropriate use of medicines, including not only a lack of information but also inaccurate and misleading promotional information. This review examines how the promotion of pharmaceuticals directly affects the prescribing and use of medicines. We define promotion broadly as all actions taken directly by pharmaceutical companies with the aim of enhancing product sales. We look in greater detail at promotion techniques aimed at prescribers, such as sales representatives, pharmaceutical advertisements in medical journals and use of (...) key opinion leaders, along with the quality of information provided and the effects thereof. We also discuss promotion to the public, through direct-to-consumer advertising, and its effects. Finally, we consider initiatives to regulate promotion that come from industry, government and nongovernmental organizations. (shrink)

The best studies on the relationship between pharmaceutical corporations and medicine have recognized that it is an ambiguous one. Yet most scholarship has pursued a simpler, more saleable narrative in which pharma is a scheming villain and medicine its maidenly victim. In this article, I argue that such crude moral framing blunts understanding of the murky realities of medicine's relationship with pharma and, in consequence, holds back reform. My goal is to put matters right in respect to one critical area (...) of scholarly interest, the medical journal publication.Pharma relies on peer advocacy to sell its wares to prescribing doctors. This is an arrangement in which clinicians’ qualified colleagues, including “key opinion leaders,” are recruited by pharmaceutical corporations and marketing agencies to deliver commercially expedient content to their professional fellows. Precisely how this practice works in the setting of publications is not well understood because ethicists studying the problem have made too much of the narrative of corporate villainy and medical victimhood. Accordingly, criticism of industry publications has been preoccupied with the crudely dishonest practices of ghostwriting, ghost authorship, and “ghost management,” vices condemned as “dirty little secrets” perpetrated from “behind the scenes” with the connivance of academic “shills” or “guest authors,” in contempt of standards set by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. This account is appealing, and yet it is wrong or, at the very least, seriously incomplete, with only limited relevance to the actualities of contemporary industry practices. In truth, many commercial publications are not developed in secret but fashioned within a culture of open collaboration, where academic authors make substantial, independent contributions; pharmaceutical companies are showcased rather than hidden; and medicine's editorial standards assist rather than impede the workings of commerce. (shrink)

Since the late 1980s, the human genetics and genomics research community has been promising to usher in a “new paradigm for health care”—one that uses molecular profiling to identify human genetic variants implicated in multifactorial health risks. After the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003, a wide range of stakeholders became committed to this “paradigm shift,” creating a confluence of investment, advocacy, and enthusiasm that bears all the marks of a “scientific/intellectual social movement” within biomedicine. Proponents of this (...) movement usually offer four ways in which their approach to medical diagnosis and health care improves upon current practices, arguing that it is more “personalized,” “predictive,” “preventive,” and “participatory” than the medical status quo. Initially, it was personalization that seemed to best sum up the movement's appeal. By 2012, however, powerful opinion leaders were abandoning “personalized medicine” in favor of a new label: “precision medicine.” The new label received a decisive seal of approval when, in January 2015, President Obama unveiled plans for a national “precision medicine initiative” to promote the development and use of genomic tools in health care. (shrink)

This chapter discusses some strategies pharmaceutical companies employ to establish influence and even hegemony over domains of medical knowledge: marketing products via medical research and education. The chapter thus contributes to understanding the political economy of knowledge in this industry. As a counterpart to traditional epistemology, studying the political economy of knowledge shifts attention from individual claims and their justifications to some of the forces available to shape terrains on which claims are produced, distributed, and consumed.Of pharmaceutical companies’ clinical research, (...) 70–75% is performed by contract research organizations. CROs conduct trials with one eye to the drug approval process and the other to the marketing of products. On the basis of trial data, analyzed by pharmaceutical company statisticians and scientists, publication planners design suites of scientific manuscripts and hire ghostwriters to write them. These are then given to academic authors, who generally have had little prior connection to the research, analysis, or writing. The manuscripts are published in medical journals appropriate for the audiences the companies wish to reach.The doctors and researchers with whom companies engage most closely are generally termed key opinion leaders. In addition to authoring manuscripts, KOLs serve companies in a number of roles, but most prominently as speakers—at professional meetings, in after-dinner and similar settings arranged by sales representatives, and in continuing medical education courses, which doctors must take to keep their licenses. Research, education, and marketing, then, are often fused. (shrink)

The precarious rights of senior citizens, especially those who are highly educated and who are expected to counsel and guide the younger generations, has stimulated the creation internationally of advocacy associations and opinion leader groups. The strength of these groups, however, varies from country to country. In some countries, they are supported and are the focus of intense interest; in others, they are practically ignored. For this is reason we believe that the creation of a network of all these (...) associations is essential. The proposed network would act as a support for the already-existing policies of the United Nations’ High Commission for Human Rights, of independent experts, and of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Older People. All three have long ago recommended the creation of a recognized instrument for uniting presently scattered efforts. The proposed network, therefore, will seek to promote the international exchange of relevant expertise, and it will reinforce the commitments and actions that single countries are currently taking to meet these objectives. For example, informative public events can be organised to promote particular support initiatives and to provide an opportunity for new members of the network to be presented. The network will promote health for senior citizens, disease prevention, senior mobility, safe free time for seniors, alimentary education, protection against new risks and dangers, as well as equity in the services necessary for seniors to adopt new information and communication technologies. In the case of retired academic members, the network will promote equality with respect to continuing use of digital technologies (particularly email), continuing access to research libraries, and the guaranteed ability for seniors to fund their own research programs and to deliver free seminars. (shrink)

Roughly 40% of the sizeable medical research and literature on recently approved drugs is “ghost managed” by the pharmaceutical industry and its agents. Research is performed and articles are written by companies and their agents, though apparently independent academics serve as authors on the publications. Similarly, the industry hires academic scientists, termed key opinion leaders, to serve as its speakers and to deliver its continuing medical education courses. In the ghost management of knowledge, and its dissemination through key (...) opinion leaders, we see the pharmaceutical industry attempting to hide or disguise the interests behind its research and education. (shrink)

Procedural justifications of democracy emphasize inclusiveness and respect and by doing so come into conflict with instrumental justifications that depend on voters’ competence. This conflict raises questions about jury theorems and makes their standing in democratic theory contested. We show that a type of no-regret learning called meta-induction can help to satisfy the competence assumption without excluding voters or diverse opinion leaders on an a priori basis. Meta-induction assigns weights to opinion leaders based on their past (...) predictive performance to determine the level of their inclusion in recommendations for voters. The weighting minimizes the difference between the performance of meta-induction and the best opinion leader in hindsight. The difference represents the regret of meta-induction whose minimization ensures that the recommendations are optimal in supporting voters’ competence. Meta-induction has optimal truth-tracking properties that support voters’ competence even if it is targeted by mis/disinformation and should be considered a tool for supporting democracy in hyper-plurality. (shrink)

This paper represents a case study interpretation of the political and media discourses in Romania referring to Islam and the threat of Muslim refugees. Using a selection of media narratives from the public debates that took shape immediately after the Brussels attacks on March 22, 2016, this study uses a critical discourse analysis approach as an interpretative tool to understanding how in Romania the opinion leaders, the political elites and the media are building an anti-Islam propaganda. By applying (...) a textual and ideological analysis of a selection of media discourses that refer to the terrorist attacks and the implicit threat of Islam, the author describes the dominant rhetorics of conflict between the West and the Muslim world. By elaborating a list of Islamophobic stereotypes used in the Romanian mainstream media and by discussing the negative narratives propagated in the public sphere, a case is made against the artificial growth of intolerant attitudes. The central argument of the author is that we are witnessing a generalized anti-Islam propaganda, where a specific religion and its followers are demonized by politicians, cultural figures and opinion leaders. This paper's conclusion is that in the Romanian media and the political discourses a form of unjustified Islamophobia is cultivated for ideological purposes. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIlya Somin's case for smaller government and “foot voting” rests on at least two questionable assumptions. The first is that voter ignorance is based on rational calculation. This assumption requires arbitrary stipulations about the degree of voter altruism and the low values voters assign to the victory of their candidates. The second is that voter ignorance betokens bad public policy. But there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. How can this be the case? One explanation is that individually ignorant (...) voters are small pieces of a large system that divides intellectual labor through discussions among elites, opinion leaders, and ordinary citizens. This system may entitle voters to trust in the opinions of others, sparing them the need to be well informed. (shrink)

False information is always produced after the outbreak of major emergencies. Taking this into consideration, this paper discusses the behavior of multiple parties in relation to false information dissemination after major emergencies. First, a game model is constructed, using relevant knowledge of evolutionary game theory, between three parties: regulatory institutions, opinion leaders, and ordinary Internet users. Second, the model equations are solved, and the evolutionary stability strategies of each game party under different circumstances are analyzed. Third, a numerical (...) simulation is applied to the evolutionary trends under different strategy combinations with varying parameters. The results show that the probability of each game party making ideal decisions is positively correlated with the degree of punishment imposed by regulatory institutions on opinion leaders who release false information, the reward provided by regulatory institutions on opinion leaders who release positive information, the degree of participation and satisfaction gained by Internet users in adopting positive information, the richness of authentic content released by opinion leaders, and the psychological identification of Internet users with opinion leaders. Meanwhile, the probability of each game party making ideal decisions is negatively correlated with investigation and evidence collection costs borne by opinion leaders who release positive information, the additional income for opinion leaders who have false information adopted by Internet users, the costs of Internet users’ time and energy when they adopt information released by opinion leaders, and the costs of independently judging the accuracy of information by Internet users. (shrink)

Sexual violence of various forms, be it sexual harassment or sexual abuse, perpetrated by male professors against their female students has gained societal visibility through media broadcasts. This article tells the tale of the 2013 recruitment to the University of Iceland of a former political party leader, minister and ambassador. He was publicly called out in 2012 for his alleged sexual offences, perpetrated some years earlier. The story is told from two different viewpoints: from that of the media and from (...) the article author’s own standpoint as assistant professor in gender studies with co-responsibility for his de-recruitment. In the media story, opinion leaders from the political, judicial and media spheres take centre stage. The author thus utilizes the concepts patriarchal homosociality and influencers. Based on the findings from the media analyses, the author lays out her defence and justification, using embodiment as the core of her argument. She draws on black feminist knowledge validation processes, more specifically, the ethic of caring and personal accountability. Furthermore, she explores affective feminist pedagogy, i.e. connecting mind and body through self-actualization. By contrasting the two accounts, that of the media and her own feminist standpoint, the author sheds light on the role that influencers play in preserving patriarchal power and the status quo against ‘fire-raising feminists’ in academia and society at large. (shrink)

The system of higher education always has a significant place in national political affairs. Politically indifferent academics may legitimately ignore this. Those concerned with the welfare of the system of higher education, however, cannot afford this luxury. Further, intellectuals, including academics, are a significant political factor even when passive. Even were all of them to ignore all politics, including the ever-present political importance of the educational system for national politics, they would still play a particularly significant role in national politics (...) as what Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld call the opinion leadership. This way the maintenance of responsible government, and the maintenance of democracy, much depends on what intellectuals demand of the system. Any regime may be endangered by the negative attitudes that opinion leaders may have towards public affairs -- even if it is merely passively negative. (shrink)

The formation of public opinion in different countries of the world is important for the formation of global media discourse, since ambiguous opinions are produced in the Asian media, it is worth investigating and studying the linguistic nature of journalistic methods of influencing the audience and the peculiarities of communication with readers. The study aimed to decipher the explicit and implicit linguistic techniques employed to construct political narratives in the media domains of China and Japan, while also examining existing (...) research in the realm of media language. The methodological basis of the work is analytical-synthetic, comparative, contextual and lexical-semantic analysis, which were used in a complex. In this study, the peculiarities of the media discourse of China and Japan were determined based on the analysis of the objectivity of the depiction of events related to the war in Ukraine, and an idea was formed about the characteristics of the narratives that were laid at the level of explicit and implicit meanings, decoded using the study of linguistic means. Attention is focused on the contrast between the Chinese and Japanese positions regarding the war in Ukraine in the media discourse and the peculiarities of information coverage (neutrality or stylistic marking, the choice of lexical-semantic means, the level of artistic imagery). A contextual analysis of Chinese and Japanese online newspapers, which form the modern Asian media field, was carried out, which journalistic techniques are used and which linguistic means are used to achieve the basic communicative goal. This research can be used for further linguistic investigations regarding the formation of political narratives in different regions and countries of the world, in particular regarding the war in Ukraine, conducting a comparative analysis of the rhetoric of public opinion leaders and their influence on the general media discourse. (shrink)

Abstract When the Meiji government allowed Christianity to be proclaimed in Japan in 1873, there aroused heated controversy about how to deal with religion including Christianity. Fukuzawa Yukichi, the most influential thinker and opinion?leader among Japanese intellectuals in those days, participated in the controversy and wrote more than 80 articles concerning religion. At first, he took a critical standpoint against Christianity from the Utilitarian viewpoint. Then he changed his viewpoint of religion and came to admit a Unitarian Christianity for (...) a little while. But he gradually came to be familiar with Pure Land Buddhism and developed his original phibsophy of religion in his later years. In this article I trace the process of change in Fukuzawa's religious viewpoint and clarify his philosophy of religion in his later years, by examining his writings in chronological order. (shrink)

Background:As a highly contagious disease, the COVID-19 pandemic has become a serious health threat and psychological burden for the global communities. From the conceptual perspective of affordances, this research examined the role of social media for health campaign and psychological support during the global crisis.Methods:Data from both social media and a nationwide survey were collected and analyzed. Face mask-related posts on Sina Weibo from January 1, 2020, to June 30, 2020, were retrieved and studied. Face mask wearing as a well-established (...) preventive measure was identified and examined from hashtag topics. A nationwide survey with a randomized experiment embedded was conducted to further investigate the mobilizing dynamics.Results:During the escalation phase in the first half of 2020, the hashtag topic “#national mask campaign#,” initiated by a celebrity, topped the ranking of mask-related topics on Weibo. The findings indicated that prevention activities, solidarity expression, and names of celebrity idols were frequently discussed. With celebrity idols as opinion leaders, millions of fandom publics actively participated in this hashtag health campaign. Results of the nationwide survey show the popularity of fan identity, and the experiment results demonstrate the strong mobilizing power of celebrity idol and fandom community in civic engagement and participation among young Chinese.Conclusions:The research demonstrates how the affordances of social media, such as liking, commenting, reposting, and hashtagging can be influential in promoting health behaviors and expressing solidarity. Implications for public health professionals and policymakers to raise awareness and understanding about health campaigns via social media are discussed. (shrink)