Reactions to globalisation by the television industry in post-apartheid South Africa

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the different ways in which the South African television industry has reacted to globalisation forces during the post-apartheid era that started in the early 1990s. Of particular interest is how the local television industry initially planned political and economic reforms aimed at bringing the industry more in line with global trends, but then later reacted mainly to protect the local television production industry against foreign competition and to protect local viewers against perceived cultural imperialism impacts of foreign programs. These protective actions were however not as successful as was intended with regard to promoting local television content production. The paper discusses the underlying dynamics of the globalisation and the various localisation processes that occurred (varying chronologically from primary, to secondary, to tertiary localisation), as well as the ways in which television industries in other parts of the world have reacted to similar global forces. It is contended that the local South African television production industry stands to benefit most in future if broadcasting policy makers respond more pro-actively to opportunities offered by global technological forces operating upon the industry. This is in agreement with the thrust of the latest broadcasting policy process of the Department of Communication. It is concluded that a recent joint initiative by the country's two major broadcasters in which an increased number of both locally produced and other “African” programs are being broadcast via satellite to prospective geo-cultural markets in the rest of Africa, holds promise for the future viability of the South African television industry.     

The politics of war and debt relief in Uganda

This article analyses the politics behind Uganda's relations with its multilateral creditors, particularly the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, in the context of the country's military intervention in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Ugandan officials exploit the anxieties of creditors, which want the country to be considered a successful case of debt relief and reform to justify similar policies in other states around the world. In reality, however, multilateral creditors help to sustain patronage politics that is increasingly based on access to plunder in a neighbouring state. Positive economic-growth figures and social indicators mask the underlying vulnerability of Ugandan state institutions, as the country's military officers pursue private interests. As a result, creditors face real dilemmas in deepening their support for the regime of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, which is increasingly reliant on its external backers. Creditors are indirectly subsidising a patronage-based political strategy and the war in the DRC. Alternatively, if they decide to abandon Uganda, they may have to accept a dramatic rise in internal instability.     

Framing Controversies: Television and the 2002 Presidential Election in Brazil

This article investigates the role of television in the first round of the 2002 Brazilian presidential election. Content analysis and survey data are used to show that TV news and political advertising led to important framing effects. On the one hand, exposure to the most watched newscast, TV Globo's Jornal Nacional, led voters to support the interpretive frame that was promoted by President Fernando Henrique Cardoso's administration and by financial markets. This frame emphasized the need to keep inflation under control and to protect the stability of the economy. On the other hand, exposure to political advertising led voters to reject this frame, since opposition candidates used their programs to emphasize Brazil's social problems, especially poverty, hunger, and social inequality, as the most important issues.     

From Women of the Year to “Soccer Moms”: The Case of the Incredible Shrinking Women

In the 1992 U.S. election year, mainstream print and television news coverage was replete with hosannas for female politicians, praised as strong and politically powerful figures during this so-called ''Year of the Woman.'' Just 4 years later, 1996 election news reports relied upon a very different image to describe women vis-à-vis electoral politics: soccer moms. Soccer mom was the term used most recurrently in mainstream television and print media to refer to an aggregate of women, vis-à-vis electoral politics, who were described as crucial to the success of either presidential candidate: President Clinton or Robert Dole. This period of time represents a dramatic shift in news discourse: from discussing women as political power wielders (Women of the Year) to discussing women as a group of swing voters defined primarily by their filial obligations. This article considers some possible implications of this shift and argues that it represents a discursive connection between women voters reduced to a demographic category characterized by womens relationships to their children and an ideology of consumerism that reduces electoral politics to personal choices around product consumption and lifestyle.     

Presidential Agenda-Setting of Traditional and Nontraditional News Media

The president’s ability to influence the news agenda is central to the study of American politics. Although there is a large literature that examines presidential agenda-setting vis-à-vis traditional news sources, such as newspapers or broadcast television networks, there is little research that explores the effects of presidential agenda leadership of nontraditional media whether online or cable television. This study remedies this state of affairs by examining the relationship between the president’s daily agenda and traditional and nontraditional daily news agendas. I argue that although the president should find similar space on all news for topics he raises in his speeches, nontraditional sources are more likely to cover other stories that reference the president. Analysis of 748 stories on the presidency for 63 days in early 2012 from 7 traditional, cable, and online news sources provides support for my argument, with cable news providing the most presidential news coverage. I conclude with some implications about what my findings mean for presidential leadership of nontraditional media.     

Zimbabwean Indigenisation and the Shadow Economy of Cinematic Production

ABSTRACT

In recent years, Zimbabwe has suffered a political and economic crisis, which has generated impulses that have traumatised the country's film industry, among many other sectors. Resultantly, Zimbabwe's cinematic context of production has been reimagined and reconfigured in recent years. The southern African country's ruling elite, during former president Robert Mugabe's tenure, championed controversial policies of indigenisation in economic sectors, partly as a way of countering external economic and political hostilities. This article explores how the Zimbabwean film economy has responded to postcolonial indigenisation impulses and how the production context has developed parallel to or in tandem with this reality. It teases out the challenges and prospects posed by impulses of indigenisation in Zimbabwe to the country's fledgling film production industry by analysing the video-film production value chain post-2000, when the indigenisation agenda emerged and was consolidated. Informed by the theorisation of the shadow economies of cinema, the study employed in-depth interviews to collect data from purposively selected Zimbabwean filmmakers and policymakers. Thematic analysis was used to analyse this data. The study shows that indigenisation has been a pragmatic response to the economic trauma facing the film industry, although it has, in turn, sent out its own traumatic impulses that continue to affect the industry's structure and aesthetic.     

Grassroots Civil Groups: The Potential and Limits of Democratic Change in Argentina's Interior Provinces

While the current crisis in Argentina has many facets--economic, political and social--it originated and has been fuelled by the unfulfilled promise of a democracy in which political leaders are accountable to society. In the 1990s it was widely hoped that the growing number of grassroots civil groups would contribute to democratisation, particularly in the interior provinces where clientelism and patronage have long been thought to hamper local development and the country's progress as a whole. Those hopes faded as social unrest broke out in Argentina's interior provinces in the mid-1990s and the country began its slide towards collapse by the end of the decade. Yet the problem of political change in the interior provinces remains a central issue in Argentina's current crisis, and its future prospects. The ability of civil groups to contribute to democratic change in the interior provinces is constrained in different ways, depending on whether clientelism or patronage prevail in social relationships. Clientelistic and patronage-based societies differently condition the types of grassroots groups that arise, the scope of their activities and their potential for contributing to democratic change. Exploring these differences offers important insights into Argentina's current crisis and the potential and limitations of change in the interior.     

Marketization,Class Structure,and Democracy in China: Contrasting Regional Experiences

After two and half decades of market reforms in China, the question of whether reforms have created favourable social conditions for democracy and whether the country's emerging entrepreneurial class will serve as the democratic social base have become hotly debated issues in both academic and policy circles. Based upon an analysis of two regions – Sunan and Wenzhou, the two prototypical local development patterns in China – the article argues that different patterns of economic development have produced distinct local level social and political configurations, only one of which is likely to foster the growth of democratic practices. It suggests that China's political future is largely dependent upon the emerging class structure and class relations that reform and development have produced. If the market reforms and economic development only enrich a few (like the Sunan case), then the possibility of democratic transition will likely be very bleak. Nonetheless, the possibility of a brighter alternative exists, as demonstrated by the Wenzhou case. These arguments thus link China's political transition to critical social conditions, echoing Barrington Moore's influential work on the social origins of democracy and dictatorship.     

The Friendly Media Phenomenon: A Cross-National Analysis of Cross-Cutting Exposure

We hypothesize that in the real world, as opposed to the lab, the norm is for people to experience friendly media that favor their political predispositions when political favoritism is perceived at all. For this reason, media are generally limited in their ability to create cross-cutting exposure. We test this hypothesis using representative survey data drawn from 11 different countries with varying media systems. We further hypothesize that television will contribute more to cross-cutting exposure than newspapers. Finally, and most importantly, we test the hypothesis that the more the structure of a country's media system parallels that of its political parties, the more that country's population will be dominated by exposure to like-minded views via mass media. We find confirmation for all 3 of these hypotheses and discuss their implications for the role of mass media in providing exposure to cross-cutting political perspectives.     

Islamic radicalisation and violent extremism in Nigeria

This article examines the issues underlining Islamic radicalisation and violence in Nigeria, a phenomenon whose latest manifestation through the activities of the Jamā'atu Ahlis Sunnah Lādda'awatih wal-Jihad (widely known as Boko Haram), has attracted considerable concern. It traces the evolution of the phenomenon and identifies the key issues that have explained its pattern of expression. The paper advances three main arguments: first, that Islamic radicalisation and its link to violence in Nigeria is, contrary to the often-held opinion, a phenomenon that transcends socio-economic deprivation and the mutual suspicion that underlines inter-group relations in the country, but also extends to a string of external considerations that intertwine with religion and identity in Nigeria; second, that there are aspects of the country's historical past, including the link with colonialism, that explain aspects of Islamic radicalisation and violence; and third, that greater clarity will come into the understanding of the Boko Haram phenomenon when considered against the background of the country's radicalisation history.     

The impact of bureaucratic openness on public trust in South Korea

In this study, I assess whether administrative procedural openness, via administrative procedure acts (APAs) enhances public confidence in the civil service. I argue that APAs increase governmental transparency, predictability and accountability. Consequently, APAs ought to enhance public confidence in a country's democratic institutions, ceteris paribus. To substantiate this prediction, I investigate trends, pre- and post-APA passage, in the attitudes of Korean citizens regarding their country's democracy in general and civil service in particular (as well as with a second, brief case study of Taiwan). The evidence supports my argument both cross-sectionally and over time, suggesting that passage of Korea's APA laws in the mid-1990s did enhance the Koreans’ confidence in their country's civil service. Attitudes toward the bureaucracy, in turn, are powerful predictors of satisfaction with Korea's democracy, measured both absolutely and relative to attitudes toward the state of the nation 10 years prior. Several key findings replicate for Taiwan.     

World views in peace building: a post-conflict reconstruction challenge in Cambodia

This article explores post-conflict reconstruction in Cambodia through an analysis of both the dangers of liberal peace building and the positive role that training in capacity building plays in war-torn societies. The central question addressed is how insider–outsider dynamics influence Cambodia's post-conflict reconstruction projects; and what assumptions do international workers and Cambodian NGO staff make about ‘the good life’ that will be constructed? The article offers an overview of Cambodia's history and cultural context to situate its analysis of liberal peace building and foreign donors, as well as the behavioural characteristics of international peace builders operating within Cambodia. It assesses the potency of elite capture of insider–outsider partnership, specific NGO management practices, and the role of gender to better illuminate the challenges for post-conflict reconstruction. The article concludes with recommendations for improving future partnerships between insiders and outsiders in Cambodian peace-building projects.     

Democratic transition and social spending: the case of Pakistan in the 1990s

The article assesses the social consequences of the democratic transition that began in Pakistan in 1988 and ended in 1999 by analysing public spending for health and education and changes in human development indicators. Available information indicates that the return to democracy did not lead to greater spending in these two sectors. It is argued that the key internal factors that hampered government commitment to social welfare were the pre-eminence among elected representatives of social groups unwilling to invest in the human capital of the majority and the dominance of the armed forces in the country's power politics.     

Why this institute

Turkish democracy passed its “maturity” test in 2007. The massive shift of power from the Kemalist establishment to the rising, mostly provincial elites and their allies culminated in the landslide victory of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the summer, which increased and consolidated its electorate after its first electoral victory in 2002. One of the main fault lines of the Turkish social and political order, secularism, took centre stage in the military's interference in the presidential election debacle, the ensuing massive demonstrations and the parliamentary and presidential elections that followed. At the same time, xenophobic nationalism, the dark side of democracy, raised its ugly head, fed further by the exacerbation of PKK violence. With the AKP's monopolisation of power, Turkey's politics are in uncharted waters and many of the givens of the republican era are being questioned. Unable to cope with the profound economic and social transformations and changing composition of the population due to massive migration, the old political structures are crumbling, yet the new political leadership, so adept at municipal government and so pragmatic in its approach to problem solving, has yet to offer the country a comprehensive vision of its politics.     

The Effect of Security Alliances on Exchange-Rate Regime Choices

Because an exchange-rate arrangement by nature involves more than one country and because it has various economic and political implications, it is affected inevitably by interstate political relations. Most previous research explains the exchange-rate regime choice as a function of individual country attributes, ignoring the role of interstate political relations and the anchor-currency choice. In this paper, I examine how security alliances influence a country's choices over the flexible-fixed regime and the anchor currency. Alliances increase the ex ante attractiveness of pegging to one's ally, because security ties can reduce concerns over relative gains, motivate active collaboration by the anchor-currency ally to defend the regime, and signal to the currency market the durability of the regime. Hence, a country is biased toward pegging to its ally, relative to either pegging to a nonally or choosing the flexible regime. I test the argument for both the Bretton Woods and the post- Bretton Woods periods. I find that alliance ties affect both the anchor currency and the flexible-fixed regime choices, as expected. But these effects appear to function through the defense-pact alliance alone and are most pronounced for the developing countries.     

Exploring the representation of xenophobia in a South African television drama series: A Zimbabwean audience's perspective

Abstract

A great deal of research has been conducted on minorities and their representation in the media in various parts of the world (Evra 2004: 67; Miller 1996; Vicsek & Markus 2008: 124). Fundamentally, the reason for this is political, as ‘the cohesion or rupture of a social world depends on relations among groups who perceive themselves as disadvantaged either as groups or as individuals’ (Staiger 2005: 13). Television programmes, as elements of the media, are a source of information that contributes to these perceptions. Many scholars are of the view that television creates, reflects and reinforces social relations and functions as a mediation of the social world (Evra 2004: 13). In South Africa relatively little research has been conducted on the representation of minorities in local media. Particularly the representation of black immigrants and their representation on South African television has been largely ignored (Kiguwa 2008: 67; Nyamnjoh 2006). The focus of this article is not on the analysis of the representation of foreigners on television, but rather on how a specific group of viewers perceives the representation of Zimbabwean immigrants in the drama series Usindiso (Redemption), broadcast on the South African Broadcasting Corporation's SABC1. The central research question posed by this article is: How does a selected group of Zimbabwean immigrants living in Hillbrow in South Africa perceive the representation of Zimbabwean immigrants in Usindiso?     

The role of non-timber forest products in poverty reduction in India: prospects and problems

The vast natural resources of India's forests, including non-timber forest products (NTFPs), such as medicinal and aromatic plants, leaves, fruits, seeds, resins, gums, bamboos, and canes, offer employment that provides up to half the income of about 25 per cent of the country's rural labour force. However, poor harvesting practices and over-exploitation in the face of increasing market demand are threatening the sustainability of these resources, and thus the livelihoods of forest-dependent tribal communities. This article analyses the role of NTFPs in livelihoods-improvement initiatives and considers recent initiatives intended to enhance their conservation and sustainable management. It recommends policies to optimise the potential of NTFPs, both to support rural livelihoods and to contribute to India's social, economic, and environmental well-being.     

The tone of laughter and the strangely warm comedy of Hagimoto Kin'ichi

Featuring the comedian Hagimoto Kin'ichi as on-screen father, the hybrid drama-variety show Kinchan no doko made yaru no! (How far will Kinchan go! 1976–1986) won a loyal following of viewers and critics who praised the ‘warmth’ of its parodic television family, describing it as affectively more real and compelling than depictions of the family in traditional dramatic portrayals. Through close readings of scenes from the show and the critical discourse surrounding it, I consider how the show created a consensus that its laughter was tonally warm, and thus well fitted to the domestic space in which television would be viewed. Further, I argue that the show's producers created this impression by inserting the show and Hagimoto's public persona within contemporary discourses on laughter, domesticity, and normative femininity. In doing so, my analysis highlights the ascendant role commercial television played in shaping and harnessing these discourses, and re-assesses, through the lens of the affective experience of 1970s and ’80s media culture, the cultural shifts taking place in Japan during these decades.     

Frozen political liberalization in Jordan: The consequences for democracy

Prompted by serious economic difficulties, in 1989 the Jordanian government launched a series of political liberalization measures aimed at rejuvenating the country's parliament and party politics, and restoring freedom to the media. Despite much initial enthusiasm, the liberalization process has become frozen and there have been few substantive moves toward a meaningful transition to democracy. Two developments have combined to result in this democratization freeze. One is the reluctance of the state to give up many of its powers in relation to the forces of civil society. A second is the inability of professional associations and the emerging parliamentary opposition bloc to formulate and institute viable links within themselves and with other social actors in an attempt to pressure the monarchy for more political concessions. The hybrid, semi‐democratic, absolutist monarchy that has emerged in the process has enhanced its popular legitimacy by adopting certain democratic trappings, which, in the short run at least, appear detrimental to a more meaningful transition to democratic rule.