Camera as sign: on the ethics of unconcealment in documentary film and video

When we look at a documentary, what do we see? Probably not the apparatus that gives us images to view. If we did, then perhaps questions about the ethics of documentary cinema would be easily answered. The goal of this article is to broaden the moralistic purview of image ethics debates with a semiotic phenomenology of the visual mode of address of documentary. I describe how “doubling” and “redoubling” the visual mode of address undermines the authority of documentary and helps to overcome debates about two main ethical issues – participant consent and the audience's right to information. Unconcealing the viewpoint of documentary also broadens media ethics debates by bringing attention to the implied viewer, asking of it to reflect on the consequences of the communicative act of looking. Examples of widely available documentary film and video are discussed.     

Financial Management Development in Spain: Who is Playing Sancho Panza?

“What giants?” said Sancho Panza. “Those thou seest there,” answered his master, “with the long arms, and some have them nearly two leagues long.” “Look, your worship,” said Sancho, “what we see there are not giants but windmills, and what seem to be their arms are the sails that turned by the wind make the millstone go.” “It is easy to see,” replied Don Quixote, “that thou are not used to this business of adventures; those are giants; and if thou art afraid, away with thee out of this and betake thyself to prayer while I engage them in fierce and unequal combat.” So saying, he gave the spur to his steed Rocinante, heedless of the cries his squire Sancho sent after him, warning him that most certainly they were windmills and not giants he was going to attack. He, however, was so positive they were giants that he neither heard the cries of Sancho nor perceived, near as he was, what they were, but made at them shouting.     

Lobbying: An art and a science—Five golden rules for an evidence‐based lobbying strategy

In the battle for influence, public affairs professionals make crucial strategic decisions every single day. “Should we go public with this case?” “Who are we going to lobby, and how?” “Should we form a coalition with other organisations?” Public affairs professionals often make these decisions based on their experience or their gut feeling. In practice, lobbying is often more of an art than a science. It is an intuitive and creative process, rarely involving any insights rooted in science. And yet many public affairs professionals are faced with uncertainty about the added value of their activities. “Does what we do really matter?” “What kind of impact do we have?” “Are we making the right strategic decisions?” Some colleagues seek to compensate for these doubts with an overwhelming dose of self‐confidence. An experienced lobbyist recently said during a lecture: “The day I can measure my influence is the day I can double my rates.” Other public affairs professionals are a little more modest and try to assess their impact with key performance indicators. They systematically review the lobbying tactics used. This systematic approach has gained a lot of traction in recent years. The smoky back rooms, the cigars, and whisky of the past are now giving way to evidence‐based lobbying, based on facts, building a bridge between art and science of lobbying.     

Sleeping Beauties of Political Science: The Case of AF Bentley

Recognition is what makes science move forward. Yet, late recognition has been an existing phenomenon in the scientific community for centuries. Does this phenomenon of “Sleeping Beauties”, as these works are sometimes called in academic literature, exist in Political Science? The bibliometric analysis we applied showed a positive answer. Our paper is the first case study of “Sleeping Beauty” that is not an article but a book. The book by A. F. Bentley, The Process of Government, serves as an example of “Sleeping Beauty” in the Political Science domain. What put this work to “sleep”? And why, at some point, it has been suddenly “awakened” by a large number of citations? Although it has been discussed previously as a neglected classic, no bibliometric analysis has been applied to examine it and assumptions for its neglect and rediscovery presented by previous authors differ from our bibliometric findings.     

Tele-Reality: How Space Technology Transforms Human Perceptions of Space,Time, and Self

With the introduction and development of space techniques, three types of remote reality, or tele-reality, have emerged: (1) the Earth, its environments, and its inhabitants have been brought closer to each of us; (2) the planets in the solar system are now “at hand's reach”—a robotic hand, that is; and (3) deep space is brought to our screens in three dimensions. But remote reality raises questions: What connection does it make between the perceptible and the intelligible; and what confusion does it maintain between what is real and what appears on the screen? New practices are challenging the way we handle the relationship between seeing, knowledge, and power, and questioning our ethical values. It is time and essential that we redefine the conditions and boundaries of our “tele-techniques.”     

A novel understanding of experimentation in governance: co-producing innovations between “lab” and “field”

What do experiments do for governance? Along with pragmatist and performative conceptions, we argue that they do not test already existing conditions of governing, but actively transform such conditions. Experiments help to realize specific models of governance by co-producing collective knowledge and material practices. We analyze a series of experiments with “emissions trading” in the USA between 1968 and 2000. The historical perspective shows how different types of experiments worked together: experiments in the laboratory and in the field supported each other in creating epistemic and political authority. This “ping-pong between lab and field” produced subjects and objects, facts and values, knowledge and power and aligned them in a new socio-material configuration, thus realizing emissions trading as a new form of governance.     

Donald and Winston at the Ministry of Alternative Facts

Sales of Nineteen Eighty-Four and other dystopian classics have risen in response to the audacious attempts of President Donald Trump to manipulate public opinion by circulating “alternative facts” throughout the presidential campaign and since his November 2016 election victory. Various statements by Trump and his advisors that exemplify what has come to be known as the “post-factual world” account for the meteoric rise and final breakthrough of Nineteen Eighty-Four to the top of the bestseller lists in spring 2017.     

Five Questions: An Integrated Research Agenda for Public Choice

All societies, political or academic, must choose among alternatives; these choices can be good, or bad. The worst choice may be looking for“answers” before there is consensus, or at least a debate, on what the real questions should be. Five “real” questions are offered here, in an integrated research agenda for Public Choice. My premis is that there is a single, fundamental human problem: Construct or preserve institutions that make self-interested individual action not inconsistent with group welfare. All social science research is either a distraction, or a step toward understanding at least one of five questions: (1) What are Preferences? (2) What are feasible Alternatives? (3) How much does the form of Implementation affect the way alternatives are valued? (4) How do alternatives chosen Today affect the Menu of alternatives available in the Future? (5) What is Good? How would we know if some outcomes are better than others?

     

The Need to Build Administrative Capacity in the Age of Rapid Globalization: A “Modest” Prescription or a Major Blueprint?

Most scholars would agree that we are in an age of rapid globalization. The phenomenon of “globalization” is well documented and thoroughly discussed by many. What is missing among scholarly work is a clear statement as to what needs to be done in terms of public administration in order to meet the challenges of rapid globalization. What should the new public administration for the twenty‐first century look like?     

THE QUALITY OF LIFE IN THE GROWING CITY

When the stranger says: “What is the meaning of this city? Do you huddle close together because you love each other?” What will you answer?“We all dwell together to make money from each other” or “This is a community”?     

Escaping Earth: Human Spaceflight as Religion

What if we viewed the history of human spaceflight somewhat less through the lens of Cold War politics, which admittedly was central to the race to the Moon, but more as an expression of what might be called a religion of spaceflight? There seems to be a deeply religious quality to advocacy for the investment in and support for human space exploration, lending to the endeavor of a “higher purpose” that helps to explain both the generous nature of the actual investment and the ultimate unwillingness of Americans to eviscerate space budgets despite less than full support for space exploration. This article examines religious conceptions as a means of analyzing what might be termed a “space gospel.” I lay out here the proposition that human spaceflight may be viewed as a religion with similar attributes to those present in mainstream religious denominations. This approach to exploring the history of human spaceflight offers a different and useful frame of understanding that broadens basic conceptions about this aspect of the human past.     

Socratic Political Philosophy in Xenophon's Symposium

This interpretative commentary recovers the largely overlooked significance of a work that illuminates, by portraying in a subtle comic drama, the new perspective on existence, the new way of life, that Socrates introduced in and through his founding of political philosophy. The famous “problem of Socrates” as a turning point of world history (Nietzsche) remains a cynosure of controversy and puzzlement. How did Socrates understand the character of, and the relation between, civic virtue and his own philosophic virtue? What is the meaning of Socratic “eros”? What kind of educative influence did Socrates intend to have, on and through his varied followers and associates? And what diverse effects did he actually have? Xenophon's Symposium, viewed in the context of his other writings, affords a playful, but thereby deeply revealing, perspective—from the viewpoint of a slightly skeptical intimate.     

Policy simulation for crude oil production of OPEC countries

This paper presents a policy simulation study for the behavior of crude oil production of OPEC countries, especially oil exporting countries in the Middle East, and its influence on the world energy situation. The policy questions to be examined include: What kind of policy could avoid or postpone the occurrence of “creeping cutback” by OPEC countries, without creating an “eye for eye” type policy? What priorities exist among alternative policies? For this purpose, a policy simulation model written in DYNAMO II has been developed. Policy analyses using this simulator are presented, and the methodological limitations of this approach are discussed.     

The Art of Not Being Quite So Governed: An Examination of the Work of the “Critical” Journal

Michel Foucault in his lecture “What is Critique?” argues that criticism offered a response to the state's developing art of governing in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Instead of accepting the state's way of governing, critics presented alternative visions of not being quite so governed or of not being governed thusly. Similarly, in the latter half of the twentieth century, factions within academic disciplines also rejected their disciplines' mode of governing and created alternatives. In response to the desire to make political science more relevant and visible, the Caucus for a New Political Science formed as an alternative to the American Political Science Association. A similar trend occurred in other disciplines. Over the next few decades a number of academic journals were founded that included the word “critical” in their titles or explicitly stated a “critical” aim or approach. However, even dissenting academic groups, like the Caucus for a New Political Science, began to be reabsorbed within their disciplinary homes. With time, many of these groups succumbed to a degree of professionalization that perhaps inhibited their larger aspirations. As Foucault argues, the critical attitude does not reject governing altogether; it is not a call for anarchy. Rather, it demands an alternative to the current governance. The question becomes how to maintain the critical attitude while also building alternative institutions. Does institution building attenuate critique? And what then is critique? This article reflects on these questions by providing a brief study of “critical” disciplinary reorganizations, with greater attention to the Caucus for a New Political Science and its journal, New Political Science.     

Autocracy and coups d’etat

In this paper I first briefly survey Tullock’s contributions to the study of autocracy and coups d’etat. Tullock’s analysis of the coup d’etat is insightful. He suggested that those at the top could control those at the bottom with a proper system of incentive payments. Here I expand on that idea by asking the reverse question, not what keeps those at the bottom from rebelling, but what keeps those at the top from looting the regime? I begin by noting that shareholders of the modern widely held corporation face a similar problem: what keeps the CEO from looting the company when the market for corporate control is flawed, shareholders are too weak to exercise discipline, and the board is in the CEO’s pocket? I suggest the answer is provided by “internal governance”: the old need the young for good performance. I explain the financial crisis of 2008 as in part the result of the failure of this mechanism. I also explain the success of modern China this way: The Communist Party facilitates growth because its structure provides a way for superiors (the “old”) to trade with subordinates (the “young”). I have also expanded on Tullock’s analysis to ask what conditions might prevent the dictator from implementing his solution to the coup d’etat problem, thus explaining why coups d’etats actually occur. The basic reason is the weakness of the state. Japanese history provides two interesting illustrations of this: first the Tokugawa regime, where the people were over-controlled, and second, the Meiji constitution, implemented after the fall of the Tokugawa state. The Japanese problem after Meiji was that the military (the young) had no incentive to offer their loyalty to the old (the civilian regime), so the young acted on their own. The problem was the reverse of the Tokugawa regime’s: the Meiji constitution left the bottom with too much control over the top. There was no formal coup d’etat but a number of coup attempts were made and de facto the military increasingly constituted a state within a state. This reversal of authority apparently continued down the chain of command, ultimately with tragic consequences, most notably the invasion of Pearl Harbor.     

The domestic origins of human rights trials: A case study of the Second Boer War

What explains decisions taken by states around the world to prosecute members of their own armed forces for human rights violations? The dominant trend in existing literature suggests that a “justice cascade” best explains the growing prevalence of human rights trials. However, while norm diffusion offers some explanatory power in the contemporary era, other mechanisms are necessary to explain many early human rights trials. Through an analysis of one of the first recorded instances of what we now term “human rights trials” — the court-martials of six British Empire officers for the murder of POWs, civilians, and a missionary in the Second Boer War — this article identifies other crucial mechanisms driving prosecutions that retain relevance in the contemporary era. I find that signaling to domestic audiences, both at “home” and in recently conquered territories, can be critical motivators in elite or government decisions to pursue human rights trials.     

Recipes for Pork and Other Delicious Offerings for the New Administration

Is pork produced by feeble budgetary processes? By fixing weak budgetary procedures, can wasteful spending and opportunities for corruption be reduced? This essay looks at three varieties of pork: earmarked, ad hoc, and presidential. What can be done to curb the excesses of each one? By examining the problem of congressional earmarking, this timely article proposes a new process for controlling “earmarked” pork by supporting a new (constitutional) presidential line‐item veto/reprogramming. “Ad hoc pork,” generated by emergency or stimulus bills, is also analyzed. Its downsides can be fixed, according to the essay, by creating a preapproved roadmap for the appropriations process, thereby enhancing the quality of spending oversight. Finally, “presidential pork” derives from chief executives rewarding congressional allies and from government agencies allocating program resources so as to engender support from congressional members. This third variety of pork can be controlled if agencies improve their operational transparency plus strengthen their procedures for selecting projects. What happens when you put good people in a bad place, good apples in a bad barrel? Do the apples change the barrel, or does the barrel change the apples? —Philip Zimbardo, 2008     

Integration to What? Marginalization from What?: Keynote Address at 19th Nordiske Sociologkongres, 13–15 June 1997, Copenhagen: “Integration and Marginalization.”

The modern world-system has created considerable confusion about what we can mean by integration and marginalization into our societies/states. One of the principles of most sovereign states in the last two centuries is that they are composed of “citizens.” Once there were citizens, there were non-citizens as well. Citizenship became something very valuable, and consequently not something one was very willing to share with others. Despite the fact that citizenship is a cherished good, which gives rise to “protectionist” sentiment, migration is a constantly recurring phenomenon in the modern world, which leads to the issue of national integration. The world revolution of 1968 put into question, for the first time since the French Revolution, the concept of citizenship. What was different about me world revolution of 1968 was that it was an expression of disillusionment in the possibilities of state-level reformism. The post-1968 movements added something new. They insisted that racism and sexism were not merely matters of individual prejudice and discrimination but that they took on “institutional” forms as well. What these movements seemed to be talking about was not overt juridical discrimination but the covert forms that were hidden within the concept of “citizen” The concept of citizenship is, in its essence, always simultaneously inclusionary and exclusionary. We should begin to conceive whether we can go beyond or dispense with the concept of citizen, and if so, to replace it with what?     

Drivers of natural resource-based political conflict

Policy Sciences - Why are some natural resource-based political conflicts so controversial, acrimonious and intractable? What factors drive these conflicts? And what turns the common political...     

From disguised protectionism to rewarding regulation: The impact of trade‐related labor standards in the Dominican Republic

Policymakers in the Dominican Republic have responded to foreign pressure by rewriting their labor laws and revitalizing their labor ministry. What are the likely consequences? Is aggressive labor law enforcement more likely to protect vulnerable workers from abuse and exploitation or to undermine their ability to compete for labor‐intensive employment in an unforgiving world economy? And what are the broader implications of the answer? I address these questions by analyzing qualitative as well as quantitative data on workplace regulators empowered by the Dominican Republic in response to trade‐related labor standards imposed by the United States and find that they reconcile social protection with economic adjustment by simultaneously discouraging “low road” employment practices like informality, union‐busting, and the exploitation of child labor, and encouraging “high road” alternatives that link firms, farms, and families, on the one hand, to public educational, training, and financial institutions, on the other. The result is a potentially inclusive alternative to the repressive industrial relations regime that fueled export‐led development – and the East Asian “miracle” in particular – in the late twentieth century.