Christianity and political thought: Augusto Del Noce and the ideology of Christian Democracy in post-war Italy

This article engages with the thought of Augusto Del Noce (1910–1989), the most important Italian Catholic philosopher and political thinker of the 20th century. The focus is on how Del Noce came to elaborate a Catholic ‘modernity,’ bridging a positive encounter between Catholicism, democracy and freedom. This philosophical project had a considerable impact on modern Italian culture and politics. At the theoretical level, the argument is embedded within the larger aim of recognizing attempts within Catholic philosophy to articulate an Italian political trajectory that does not simply accept the tale of a singular path to modernity based on the Enlightenment model but instead tries to articulate an alternative vision of the modern, grounded within a transcendental perspective.     

Cultural Policy and Governance: Reviewing Policies Related to Cultural and Creative Industries Implemented by the Central Government of Taiwan Between 2002 and 2012

Cultural and creative industries have exhibited rapid changes in recent years, and public sectors worldwide have expanded interest in policies related to these industries as a means of promoting culture, innovation, and economic vitality. This article argues that the cultural values promoted by and economic significance of cultural and creative sectors are essential to the formation of policy and to the development of new industries. This article offers insight into cultural policy that has governed regional and local development, and addresses academic debates about policy related to cultural and creative industries based on several cultural, economic, and geographical factors. In addition, this article presents the results of analyzing various theories and case studies, based on how the Central Government of Taiwan (CGT) has adopted policies to promote cultural and creative industries. The research results link areas of cultural and economic development with policies enacted by the CGT. Ideas concerning the cultural ministry, industrial development, civic boosterism, subsidies, regional development, creative clusters, tourists and tourism businesses, and export markets are areas of emphasis in this study.     

What Does Credibility Look like? Tweets and Walls in U.S. Presidential Candidates’ Visual Storytelling

This study considers the social media visual messaging of four candidates in the 2012 U.S. Republican presidential primary campaign. The analysis is guided by symbolic convergence theory, its method of fantasy theme analysis, and visual rhetoric theory. Using a schema of visual attributes, this study analyzes a rhetorical strategy of candidates' campaigns: the pictorial “public diary” found on their official Facebook and Twitter pages. It reveals how the credibility character traits of trustworthiness and expertise appear in the candidates' visual narratives, what messages dominate, and how candidates differ in succeeding or failing to visually communicate credibility. This study has important implications for how political management can use images in crafting and assessing messaging strategies in a competitive environment.     

Lines of sight: on the visualization of unknown futures

This article considers the specific mode of visualization that is at work in contemporary border security practices. Taking inspiration from art historian Jonathan Crary's genealogies of attention, it situates homeland security visuality in a particular economy of attention or attentiveness to the world. How is it that we come to focus on some elements of our way of life, establish them as normal and designate deviations from the norm? How does this algorithmic attentiveness break up the visual field, ‘pixelating’ sensory data so that it can be reintegrated to project a picture of a person? The pre-emptive lines of sight emerging in contemporary security practice become precisely a means of visualizing unknown futures. The article concludes with reflections on the creative artistic forms of attention that flourish even where the lines of sight of the consumer, the citizen, the border guard, the traveller, the migrant appear ever more directed and delimited. It is in these more creative modes of attention that we find one of the most important resources to contemporary political life – the capacity to question the ‘better picture’, to disrupt what we see as ordinary or out of the ordinary and confront the routines of our lives anew.     

Childhood,Biosocial Power and the “Anthropological Machine”

Abstract

This article examines how childhood has become a strategy that answers to questions concerning the (un)governability of life. The analysis is organized around the concept of “biosocial power,” which is shown to be a particular zone of intensity within the wider field of biopolitics. To grasp this intensity it is necessary to attend to the place of imagination in staging biosocial strategies, that is the specific ways in which childhood is both an imaginary projection and a technical project, and to this end Agamben’s concept of the “anthropological machine” is used to examine how biosocial power has been assembled and deployed. The paper begins with the question of childhood as it was posed towards the end of the nineteenth century, focusing on how this positioned the figure of the child at the intersection of zoē and bios, animal and human, past and future. It ends with a discussion on how the current global obesity “epidemic” has transformed this one-time vision of mastery into a strategy of survival.     

Liberal Justifications for Local Government in Britain: The Triumph of Expediency over Ethics

It is shown in this article how theories justifying local government in Britain are largely based on the expedience of providing administrative efficiency or stable democracy for the central state rather than ethical grounds that justify local government as an independent entity in its own right. The article critically reviews the development of theories justifying local government within Britain and argues that it is possible on the basis of Mill's arguments within On Liberty to establish a strong ethical justification for local government. It is shown how Mill did not develop this line of thought but established substantive arguments concerning the value of local government for securing a stable liberal democracy and how successive mainstream theorists have modified but not substantially departed from this approach.     

Neo-liberal Citizenship

The government of populations within states and the government of states themselves within the international arena are intimately connected. Thus, in order to understand the character of citizenship in the modern world, it is necessary to locate it as part of a supra-national governmental regime in which the system of states, international agencies and multinational corporations play a fundamental role. A brief history of the modern system of states is followed first by an account of liberalism as a project of government emerging within that system, and secondly by an examination of how twentieth-century changes in the system of states have impacted on that liberal project. Where the liberal government of non-Western populations was once predicated on a denial of citizenship it is now channelled through the promotion of citizenship in states that are themselves increasingly subject to the rigours of the market.     

Inclusive Democracy and its Prospects

ABSTRACT Takis Fotopoulos' inclusive democracy project has generated one of the most interesting and ambitious undertakings within contemporary political philosophy. Fotopoulos synthesises what he regards as the principal contributions of five discrete traditions, retrieves classical Athens as democratic exemplar, thinks through and extrapolates the implications of his vision for daily life, and seeks to anticipate and resolve conundrums likely to follow. Any one of these dimensions would render his project noteworthy. Nonetheless, his project occurs within a historic moment that limits its prospects of consideration beyond its own political constituency. However unfairly, Fotopoulos' proposals will struggle for mass attention for reasons not principally of his creation. A leading reason for this is the widespread and probably reasonable leeriness toward large-scale alternatives borne of the pathological nature of much 20th century political radicalism.     

Spanish-language print media in the USA: A social semiotic analysis of ideological representations in photojournalism

Although Spanish-language media in the USA have grown rapidly since the turn of the century, little scholarship has been dedicated to the semiotic characteristics of these media. This study examines the visual representation of ideologies in 15 news photographs published in Spanish-language print media in the Midwest of the USA with the goals of understanding how ideologies are expressed visually in a culture that has received little treatment in the previous literature and of determining the potential for these photographs to challenge the negative semiotic treatment of Latin@ immigrants in the USA. Following a critical social semiotic approach, the analysis demonstrates how ideologies pattern around the inclusion and exclusion of Latin@s. These ideologies challenge and perpetuate the hegemonic structure, respectively, and as such, indicate the potential for local Spanish-language print media to challenge the negative semiotic representation of Latin@s in the USA while pointing to the need for future research of minoritized media using the social semiotics framework.     

Meritocracy,Elitism and Inequality

The appeal of meritocracy is plain to see, because it appears to promote equality of opportunity. However, in this paper we argue that meritocracy is also a deeply elitist project. Firstly, we place Michael Young in context to show how his critique of meritocracy should be understood as a socialist vision to ameliorate class divides. Secondly, we show how economic inequality in the UK has not generated systematic resistance: in fact, inequality and belief in meritocracy have gone hand in hand. Thirdly, we argue that people see their own lives as meritocratic rather than ascribed, and that such values are deeply embedded in popular life. We offer two explanations for how such views have come about, and show how they have helped construct a more unequal society.     

Contested meanings,myths and hyperimages of the apocalypse: the Bakhtin Circle and the politicisation of catastrophism

This article considers the depoliticising effects of current images and myths of apocalyptic visions, such that the world faces a catastrophe whether this emerges from environmental degradation, mass migration, terrorism, or global financial collapse. In our digital media age, apocalyptic images are now also captured through the raw footage of actual disaster events. In the article we call such footage, “hyperimages”. The power of the hyperimage is not, as Baudrillard once said, that reality is “just like the movies”, rather, hyperimages demonstrate that the image captured and shown to others is all too real because they depict actual everyday disasters. Importantly, such is the power of hyperimages that they are often employed by the political right to help them construct a hegemonic project aiming to win state power and to influence state policies. Drawing on the Bakhtin Circle, however, we show that hyperimages are also mediated and circulated through a multitude of social groups and voices in society, which contain seeds of radical heteroglossic alternatives to that of the right. Following this, the article then examines how responses to apocalyptic hyperimages can be politicised in a progressive direction.     

State of the Arts and Innovation: Before and After the Review of the National Innovation System

This article examines the relationship between the arts and national innovation policy in Australia, pivoting around the  Venturous Australia  report released in September 2008 as part of the Review of the National Innovation System (RNIS). This came at a time of optimism that the arts sector would be included in Australia's federal innovation policy. However, despite the report's broad vision for innovation and specific commentary on the arts, the more ambitious hopes of arts sector advocates remained unfulfilled. This article examines the entwining discourses of creativity and innovation which emerged globally and in Australia prior to the RNIS, before analysing  Venturous Australia  in terms of the arts and the ongoing science-and-technology bias to innovation policy. It ends by considering why sector-led policy research and lobbying has to date proved unsuccessful and then suggests what public policy development is now needed.     

Introduction: The dynamics of ideas

Abstract

Participants in today's financial markets confront a sea of data. While the availability of market data has benefits it also creates problems, notably those relating to questions of meaning, judgement and intervention: how to make sense of these flows – how to see the ‘market’, its futures, and thus act pre-emptively. Over more recent years financial organizations have been turning to new technologies of representation, in particular the design and application of visualization software in an effort to enable better visual imagination of and interaction with markets as they unfold in real time. ‘What you see is what you risk’ in many respects captures the thinking or at least the desire underlying the employment of the latest visualization software. The more powerful one's vision the better able one is to participate in increasingly complex financial markets, at least in theory.

Based on recent interviews with those involved in developing and using the latest visualization software within some of the key markets of global finance, and developing the influential work of Daniel Beunza and David Stark, and Karin Knorr Cetina, in particular, this paper adopts a cultural-economy-of-finance perspective to examine the implications of these new techniques of representation. The paper argues that the latest visual turn within finance should be afforded a more central position in the study of contemporary financial market practices.     

对农民科技致富观教育的内容浅析

农民科技致富是目前社会各界非常重视的问题之一。要如何将农民科技致富落在实处却是众说纷纭。从科学发展观的高度、思想政治教育的视觉,较深入地探讨了农民科技致富观教育的内容,即使农民思想观念上领先、农村经济发展找准项目、农村科学管理是关键、农民的教育普及是基本。     

Letter to the Editor

Postcolonialism is now an extensive body of knowledge that draws on Edward Said's Orientalism, the Subaltern Studies collective, and other critical anti-colonial scholarship. While postcolonial scholars have significantly shaped humanistic disciplines such as history, comparative literature, and anthropology, their impact on political science has been limited. The resistance to postcolonialism is strongly associated with the perpetuation of Eurocentric perspectives on ex-colonial territories. Dominant theories of democracy and civil wars, for example, remain trapped in outdated Eurocentric theory that sheds scarcely any light on postcolonial realities. The case for a postcolonial approach to the study of politics is thus stronger than ever before. Such an approach calls for a sustained engagement with specific non-Western contexts as well as an openness to anthropological, historical, and area studies knowledge about them. Decolonizing knowledge within political science, in sum, ought to be seen as part of a wider project of decentering the discipline by undermining what is seen today as “mainstream.”     

The Budget‐Minimizing Bureaucrat? Empirical Evidence from the Senior Executive Service

In a representative democracy, we assume the populace exerts some control over the actions and outputs of government officials, ensuring they comport with public preferences. However, the growth of the fourth branch of government has created a paradox: Unelected bureaucrats now have the power to affect government decisions (Meier 1993; Rourke 1984; Aberbach, Putnam, and Rockman 1981).
In this article, I rely on two competing theories of bureaucratic behavior-representative-bureaucracy theory and Niskanen's budget-maximization theory-to assess how well the top ranks of the federal government represent the demands of the citizenry. Focusing on federal-spending priorities, I assess whether Senior Executive Service (SES) members mirror the attitudes of the populace or are likely to inflate budgets for their own personal gain. Contrary to the popular portrayal of the budget-maximizing bureaucrat (Niskanen 1971), I find these federal administrators prefer less spending than the public on most broad spending categories, even on issues that fall within their own departments' jurisdictions. As such, it may be time to revise our theories about bureaucratic self-interest and spending priorities.     

“Our biggest killer”: multimodal discourse representations of dementia in the British press

A recent (2016) Office for National Statistics report stated that dementia is now “the leading cause of death” in England and Wales. Ever fixated with the syndrome (an unfailingly newsworthy topic), the British press was quick to respond to the bulletin, consistently headlining that dementia was the nation’s “biggest killer,” while (re)formulating other aspects of the report in distorting and emotive metaphorical terms. In this paper we examine how the media, through use of a recurring set of linguistic and visual semiotic tropes, portrayed dementia as an agentive entity, a “killer,” which remorselessly attacks its “victims.” Such a broadly loaded and sensationalist representation, we argue, not only construed dementia as a direful and pernicious disease, but also, crucially, obscured the personal and social contexts in which the syndrome is understood and experienced (not least by people with dementia themselves). This intensely lurid type of representation not only fails to address the ageist misinformation and common misunderstandings that all too commonly surround dementia, but is also likely to exacerbate the stress and depression frequently experienced by people with dementia and their families.     

Representing teachers as criminals in the news: a multimodal critical discourse analysis of the Atlanta schools’ “Cheating Scandal”

On 1 April 2015, 11 Atlanta teachers accused of changing answers on their students’ standardized tests were convicted of racketeering and sentenced to 5–20 years in prison. Despite ample news coverage, few sources investigated teachers’ motivations for altering students’ responses or explored what the consequences would have been if student scores had not been changed to passing. Moreover, the fact that the teachers’ actions resulted from systemic problems associated with working within a high-stakes testing environment is glossed over and all but lost in the reporting of the “Cheating Scandal” events. The authors conduct a critical multimodal analysis of how semiotic resources were used to represent teachers in the Atlanta “Cheating Scandal” and show how the media's framing of teachers both reflects and conceals specific interests of the powerful educational reform movement and the corporations that benefit from it, such as Pearson, Inc. Data sources included four online news sources from April 2015 that covered the teachers’ sentencing, and the authors analyzed the visual and verbal transformations that occurred during the process of recontextualization. Analysis revealed the construction of a moral narrative that depicted the teachers as selfish and incompetent, reinforcing the dominant paradigm driving school reform in the USA. The authors conclude by calling for more counter-narratives that expose how dominant representations reify negative public perceptions of teachers.     

Cultural theory in use: the intersection of structure,process and communication in business practice

• Examining and understanding the culture of 200+ countries to determine how business is conducted in those countries is a daunting and overwhelming prospect. By combining theories of culture, it is possible to create a Classification Of Cultures Model using Time, Task and Relationship concepts. However, this model does not suggest how to adapt when conducting business in a particular political/economic environment. Continua of cultural elements related to conducting business are created based upon structural elements, process elements and communication elements. Combining the continua with the Classification of Cultures Model creates the Global Business Process Model. This framework is a way to capture the array of cultures, identify similarities and differences in business practices, and provide a starting point for creating adaptive strategies and behaviours.

Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.