Many Clicks but Little Sticks: Social Media Activism in Indonesia

Drawing on empirical cases from Indonesia, this article offers a critical approach to the promise of social media activism by analysing the complexity and dynamics of the relationship between social media and its users. Rather than viewing social media activism as the harbinger of social change or dismissing it as mere “slacktivism,” the article provides a more nuanced argument by identifying the conditions under which participation in social media might lead to successful political activism. In social media, networks are vast, content is overly abundant, attention spans are short, and conversations are parsed into diminutive sentences. For social media activism to be translated into populist political activism, it needs to embrace the principles of the contemporary culture of consumption: light package, headline appetite and trailer vision. Social media activism is more likely to successfully mobilise mass support when its narratives are simple, associated with low risk actions and congruent with dominant meta-narratives, such as nationalism and religiosity. Success is less likely when the narrative is contested by dominant competing narratives generated in mainstream media.     

?Klassengesellschaftlichkeit�� nach dem Ende der Klassengesellschaft?

The new attention for (long time ??invisible??) social classes is related to an increase in the inequalities between rich and poor. Especially in Germany it seemed that (reinforced by sociological theories) the class structures were replaced by a ??middle-class society?? (Helmut Schelsky), by individualized social positions (Ulrich Beck) or by varying milieus. However, the class structures are also made invisible statistically. The structural role of the persisting dominant (even if often not experienced directly)??the distribution of the ownership of means of production??is manifested in the economic growth imperative, in the increasing concentration of capital, in the application of capitalist principles in other social contexts and in limited agency of non-economic fields, especially in politics. The existence of classes??contrary to popular perceptions??requires neither a collective class consciousness or class struggles, nor is it explained by the mere fact of social inequalities. A theoretical socio-economic analysis of the production and appropriation of values as a basic theory of social inequality is still missing.     

Unvermeidbare Ungleichheiten? Alltagsweltliche Ungleichheitsdeutungen zwischen sozialer Konstruktion und gesellschaftlicher Notwendigkeit

The article sketches a tacit ??enlightened common sense?? within stratification research according to which citizens in modern societies regard inequality as being caused by social factors and therefore in need of legitimation. The paper asks whether this is a plausible assumption about lay interpretations of stratification. Based on qualitative interviews with interviewees in privileged and disadvantaged social positions, the article reconstructs an interpretive scheme of the ??inevitability of inequality?? which regards inequality as an inescapable necessity of every social order and not as a contingent societal construct. Yet, another interpretive scheme exists that emphasizes the influence of social origin and thereby points to the social roots of stratification. Empirically, however, both interpretive schemes coexist within the consciousness of the interviewees. The potential for the criticism of inequality is thus circumscribed.     

传媒监察力——以澳门报刊为例的分析

传媒监察力体现了在社会运行中传媒与政府的互动关系 ,传媒对政府的有力监察有助于一个社会的良性发展。本文选取了澳门报刊作为案例 ,通过对其回归前后监察力状况的分析 ,讨论了传媒监察力不足的原因 ,并展望了它的前景。     

Schönheitschirurgie-Patientinnen als „ugly dopes“? Zur Medialität der Entscheidungsfindung für plastisch-chirurgische Eingriffe

The mass media’s view on the current practices of aesthetic surgery is typically negotiated in the social sciences within the realm of ideology critique: The claim is that the mass media culture industry encourages particularly female consumers to undergo surgical interventions in order to optimize their body and thus instructs them to better market themselves (their entrepreneurial self). Furthermore, this process is not sufficiently reflected by the patients; according to the discourse in social science, they mutate to “ugly dopes” who are not truly aware of the conditions to which their decision for physical optimization is subject. This paper proposes a different reading of the mediality of plastic surgery, based on an empirical analysis of interviews with plastic surgery patients. The media certainly play a crucial role as carriers of format templates for body images, but they also are being translated in particular practical contexts. There is no continuum between the body images that are displayed by the media and their individual acquirement. The medial format templates must be actively incorporated into the conflictual everyday contexts of decision making. The effect of the media is therefore accounted for by their connectivity to life-world and has a permanent, continuous irritation as a result, caused by body images.     

Im Auftrag des Staates. Die geheime Gesellschaft der Folterer

Torture is an extreme act of collective violence that is secretly executed in the name of a state. In order to explain the reasons why people torture others, individualist approaches concentrate on individuals?? motives or interests. Contrary to that, the article argues that torture should be understood as a social relation. Thus, it takes the social relations of the group of torturers as a starting point. Firstly, following Georg Simmel??s analysis of the secret society the paper argues that the group of torturers can adequately be conceptualized as a secret society; secondly, against this background the article reconstructs the conditions which structure torturers?? agency; finally, this article offers an outline of the processes and dynamics that allows for explaining the phenomenon of torture. The thesis of the article argues that a relational sociology helps better explain and understand the social phenomenon of torture.     

Representing China in the South Pacific

Chinese diplomacy, aid, economic interactions and manifestations of soft power have increased the country??s influence in the South Pacific region. By some accounts, China??s influence is already approaching that of traditional stakeholders Australia and New Zealand. In Africa and other regions state-led and private activities in established powers?? perceived spheres of influence has caused concern and inspired particular narratives about China??s motivations. In this article we examine how media discourses in Australia and New Zealand have represented China??s role in the South Pacific. We find that China??s role has been constructed using multiple negative frames, which seek to establish China as unequivocally ??different??. More than being unencumbered by the constraints of public opinion and a free press, China is portrayed as operating in a different moral universe, in which the cold hearted exploitation of vulnerable island nations (often in cahoots with venal island elites) is entirely normal. The article shows how such constructions reveal some of the complex issues involved in Australia and New Zealand??s relationships both with China and other South Pacific nations.     

Das Individuum und die Vermischung der Genres

By considering cultural practices and preferences in terms of intra-individual behavioral variation it is possible to construct a model of the social world which does not neglect individual singularities and avoids the cultural caricature of social groups. Thus, it becomes clear that the boundary between ??cultural legitimacy?? and ??cultural illegitimacy?? does not only separate different social classes, but divides up the cultural practices and preferences of individuals themselves across all classes. Without challenging the existence of social inequalities in terms of the most legitimate forms of culture, such a scientific point of view allows to establish the marked statistical frequency of individual cultural profiles composed of heterogeneous or dissonant elements. The article considers the socio-historical conditions that produce heterogeneous cultural profiles and shows that these frequent cultural dissonances allow to reinterpret the social functions of culture and to highlight the importance of the study of intra-individual behavioral variations within the framework of a sociology of dispositional and contextual plurality.     

Jenseits von Zentrum und Peripherie

The central question for Karl Marx concerning the specific role of symbolic domination in capitalism challenges us down to the present day. We continue to improperly perceive the symbolic and immaterial structure subjacent to capitalism that is responsible for its peculiar ??symbolic violence.?? This article analyzes two interrelated issues: first, the racism implicated by concepts that articulate central and peripheral capitalism; and secondly, its principal consequence, which is the absence of broad and encompassing concepts in modern social theory. This eliminates a chance to articulate universal contexts??at least as universal as capitalism in its global expansion. The reach of contemporary critical theory is therefore limited in terms of central questions. Among the concepts that are abandoned by the fragmentation and contextualization is that of social class and that of the symbolic violence produced by structural changes that encompass capitalism as a whole. The following article draws on empirical studies concerning under class and the ??new?? middle class conducted in Brazil to illustrate its thesis.     

Rollen und Institutionen als symbolische Ordnung von Netzwerken

Roles and institutions lead to the reduction of uncertainty in communication, and to a particular pattering of social networks. Cultural patterns for actorhood, for social relationships, and for patterns of relationships are conceptualized as ??relational institutions?? that structure social networks as cultural models. Roles mediate between the structure of social networks and institutionalized cultural patterns: On the one hand, they can emerge in small-scale network contexts and crystallize as long as the network structure persists. On the other hand, communication draws on institutionalized models to reduce its own complexity and uncertainty. Thus, relational institutions imprint social networks through role categories. In order to elaborate on this relational conception of institutions and roles, the text combines arguments from social network research, from the normative and the interpretive role concept, from philosophical anthropology and neo-institutionalism with the general perspective of relational sociology.     

Landnahme, das Wachstumsdilemma und die ?Achsen der Ungleichheit“

This contribution analyzes relations between capitalistLandnahme*, the current twofold??economic and ecological??crisis of capitalism and social inequality. The core assumption is that capitalist societies need to constantly seize non-capitalist social environments in order to safeguard processes of dynamic self-stabilization. At present however, a tipping point seems to have been reached as conventional economic growth, set to overcome economic crisis, inevitably increases ecological dangers. Advanced capitalist societies thus face a growth dilemma and it seems necessary to readjust the ??axes of inequality??. To this purpose a theory of capitalistLandnahme is essential, as this approach encapsulates an extended concept of exploitative relations, which allows for a pluralistic understanding of social antagonisms and relations of domination. This article offers a topical analysis of finance capitalism in order to exemplify this approach. It argues that theLandnahme theorem can be brought to bear fruitfully as an analytical link between a theory of capitalism and research in intersectionality.     

Wie entstehen Preise?

How are prices made? From the perspective of economic price theory prices are determined by supply and demand, while from an economic sociology point of view they result from the embeddedness of market transactions in institutions, networks or cultural frames of meaning. In order to build a price, the value of a good has to be transformed into economic value, i.e. a price. The paper analyses the process of transformation from value to price on the market for the rating of structured finance products. On this market, with the help of calculative practices, the abstract value of ??creditworthiness?? is converted into a concrete rating which determines credit costs. As the subprime crisis has shown, the credit bureaus and rating agencies responsible for this translation process have not been able to draw the price near to the value to which it refers. The article describes the divergence between value and price as the ??social space?? where price building is influenced by social factors that may distort prices and lead to a breakdown of the market.     

Critical social media information flows: political trust and protest behaviour among Kazakhstani college students

ABSTRACT

In political regimes where traditional mass media are under state control, social networking sites may be the only place where citizens are exposed to and exchange dissident information. Despite all the attempts, complete control of social media seems to be implausible. We argue that the critical information that people see, read and share online undermines their trust in political institutions. This diminishing trust may threaten the legitimacy of the ruling regime and stimulate protest behaviour. We rely on original survey data of Kazakhstani college students to confirm these expectations. The data are unique in that they directly measure exposure to critical/dissident information, as opposed to simply assuming it. The analysis leverages Coarsened Exact Matching to simulate experimental conditions. This allows us to better identify the consequential mechanism and the attitudinal precursor by which social media influence protest in an authoritarian context.     

Laufbahnklassen. Zur empirischen Umsetzung eines dynamisierten Klassenbegriffs mithilfe von Sequenzanalysen

Based on Bourdieu??s notion of trajectory-classes, the article proposes a dynamic concept of social class that accounts for typical patterns of intra-generational mobility. The hypothesis is that social class trajectories cluster into stable as well as upward and downward mobile trajectory-classes. This assumption is tested empirically by applying sequence analysis to individual trajectories of class positions measured by means of the Goldthorpe class scheme. The data are drawn from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study and cover 15 years of individual occupational histories for four different age cohorts of men and women. In addition to a striking stability of class positions, there are also specific patterns of class mobility for men that point to institutional mechanisms of social closure and career paths. Women??s trajectory-classes are shaped by class-specific patterns of labor market (re-)entries and exits. Furthermore, analyzing the process of capital accumulation based on various indicators of economic, cultural and social capital, the trajectory-classes can be interpreted as a result of investment strategies.     

Cross-Border Families in Hong Kong: The Role of Social Class and Politics

The massive relocation of industrial activities from Hong Kong to mainland China that followed in the wake of China's acceptance of foreign investment has given rise to two different sets of cross-border familial relations. In the first case, middle-class managers and technicians from Hong Kong have taken “second wives” during their stay in southern China. Hong Kong's mass media have been generally tolerant of this second-wife phenomenon, seeing it merely as a case of funglau (sexually potency), justifying it in terms of middle-class men's “soft spot,” and blaming the first wives for neglecting their duties. In the second case, workers from Hong Kong have crossed into the mainland in search of spouses because they believe that women in China are more affordable than those in Hong Kong. Hong Kong's restrictive immigration policies result in these mainland wives and children having to wait for ten years or more before receiving a one-way permit to migrate to Hong Kong. When they do arrive in Hong Kong, they have been discriminated against and condemned as causing Hong Kong's social and economic problems. This article examines how social class and politics have affected the way in which the mass media and the Hong Kong government have dealt with these two sets of cross-border families.     

Die Produktion sozialer Sicherheit.

In the current public discourse the phenomenon of insecurity is widely discussed since various kinds of social risks are becoming more widespread throughout European societies threatening biographical stability and status security. Given this there is a quest for a realignment of state interventions aiming at the (re-)production of stability and security. It is assumed that institutional arrangements and interventions such as employment protection, income maintenance schemes and healthcare provision not only contribute to objective but also to subjective security. Using data from the European Social Survey 2008 for the labor force in 20 European nations, we test this assumption by scrutinizing three kinds of perceived social risks: the risk of job loss, the risk of lack of monetary means and the risk of insufficient healthcare provision. We take on a cross-national perspective and conduct ordinal multi-level regression analyses in order to measure the extent to which different levels of social policy interventions can be accounted for differences in subjective insecurity. We find that a high degree of employment protection??astonishingly??does not enhance the perceived employment security significantly, whereas higher levels of social security spending and healthcare expenditure indeed go along with higher levels of subjective security. This relationship is moderated by the general level of economic development.     

Unifying voices,creating publics: the uses of media form in contemporary Jordanian radio

ABSTRACT

Questions of media form have not received sufficient attention in recent studies of Arabic-language media. In Jordanian radio today, however, media form is a highly relevant discursive resource for broadcasters, who strategically invoke the ways in which different types of media communication are conceived and framed, in a metapragmatic manner that goes beyond the impact of merely technical distinctions between media forms. This article examines two examples of this process: the ‘unification’ of radio station voices in a memorial programme for a martyred fighter pilot broadcast in February 2015, where radio’s limitation to sound was used ideologically to assert national unity; and references to digital media on morning talk show programmes, which allow hosts to define audiences and forms of participation in radio conversations. These metapragmatic framings of media form, further, produce specific publics for Jordanian radio: groupings that include, and legitimize, certain segments of listenership—such as ‘true’ Jordanians or ‘the Jordanian people’—while implicitly excluding others. Grounded firmly in discursive data, this article thus provides much-needed nuance to our understanding of mass media in the Arabic-speaking Middle East today—and, ultimately, the genuine significance of media form in its social and cultural context.     

Transformationstheorie auf neuen Pfaden?

The article explores the theoretical debates on postcommunist transformations since 1998 with a focus on substantial reorientations and innovations. After identifying important novel or discursively strengthened approaches, three of them are presented and critically discussed in more detail: the post-communism approach, the steering or governance approach, and the Europeanization approach. The examination leads to the result that, indeed, a ??second generation?? has emerged. It has largely overcome universalistic assumptions and gained explanatory power by more complex theoretical architectures as well as systematic time-space-embeddings or contextualizations. The new generation also demonstrates an intensive exchange with the field of general theories of social change. A final consideration makes the case for interdisciplinary and general theories of societal transformations as a necessary step in the advancement of the theoretical debate.     

Einkommensreich – verm?gensarm? Die Zusammensetzung von Verm?gen und die Bedeutung einzelner Verm?genskomponenten im europ?ischen Vergleich

Recently, a growing number of researchers claim that income is only one dimension of social inequality. Neglecting wealth as a more profound measure of an entity??s financial situation can lead to a misleading or even wrong understanding of social inequalities. This article examines the relationship between income and wealth among elderly people in 13 European countries and tries to answer the following two research questions: Are the income-rich also the asset-rich? And what is the composition of wealth within different income groups? The analyses show that higher wealth often goes along with higher income, whereas a high income does not necessarily correlate with high wealth. Instead, in relation to the amount of wealth they possess, the asset-rich do not dispose of a high income. This may be an indicator that income is not the most important mechanism for the accumulation of wealth in the upper part of the wealth distribution. In general the wealth portfolio of asset-rich households is much broader and therefore less ??crises-prone?? than of the asset-poor. Homeownership is the central component in the wealth portfolio of households. For the lowest income quartiles it is often the only meaningful asset. Summing up, the previous income-based definition of poverty and wealth proves to be inadequate. Analyzing wealth in addition to income, it may turn out that the often proclaimed problem of old-age poverty has been either under- or overestimated.     

Unternehmertum jenseits des Normalunternehmertums: Für eine praxistheoretisch inspirierte Erforschung unternehmerischer Aktivit?ten

Using the example of the present casualization of labor the following article demonstrates the ??surplus value?? of a perspective on corporate activities that is enriched by insights gained from the field of the sociology of labor. Beginning with a reconstruction of the state of the art on casualization processes of dependent labor it is shown that there has indeed been an intense discussion about the erosion of the so-called standard employment relationship (Normalarbeitsverh?ltnis) and the advancing casualization of dependent labor. The question regarding the casualization of the corporate activities, however, has hardly been recognized. The article will demonstrate that there actually is an ongoing casualization of corporate activities. Moreover, the vital factors for casualization processes in corporate activities will be elaborated. Subsequent to these points, the text raises the question of the implications of a ??twofold?? casualization of labor and its social mediations. In a final step, the article focuses on the systematic-methodological potential of founding research in a theory of practice.