How Social Movements Do Culture

While much social science literature has analyzed the cultural bases of social movement, activity, and the content of cultural production by social movements, relatively little has been written about the concrete social relations within which social movements do culture. This paper addresses the issue of what social movements are doing when they produce culture. Four dimensions of social relations within which culture is enacted are identified: the division of labor, the relations of power, tuning in, and embeddedness. A contrast between the how the People's Songsters Movement of the 1930s and 1940s and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s used American folk music illustrates how variation in these dimensions affects the effects that cultural production had on social movement outcomes.     

The Use of Social Media Policies by US Municipalities

As the use of social media technologies becomes ever more ingrained in the day-to-day functions of public organizations, it is important to develop relevant social media policies to guide their effective use and enable increasingly transparent engagement with citizens. Analyzing the content of such policies can inform scholars about the intended purpose of government’s use of social media. Hence, to build the foundation for a research agenda focused on the role of policy in government’s ability to effectively engage citizens, this exploratory study first identified 156 US cities with a recognizable social media presence and then employed a content analysis to analyze the key elements of their social media policies. Based on our findings, most cities have integrated social media into daily operations, however, many do not provide effective social media policies to guide such use.     

Introduction: the Political Consequences of Non-state Social Welfare in the Global South

Throughout the Global South, diverse non-state actors have historically played critical roles in enabling populations to meet their basic needs, whether by providing or mediating access to social benefits and programs. To date, little research explores non-state social welfare, particularly in the Global South, and existing studies tend to focus on technical and administrative concerns while neglecting the potential political ramifications. This introductory essay aims to conceptualize and theorize the politics of non-state social welfare. We highlight three dimensions of the political consequences of non-state social welfare, including the implications for state capacity, equity of access to social welfare, and experiences of citizenship. Based on this framework as well as the findings of the empirical contributions to the special issue, the essay concludes that non-state provision may pose more political challenges than proponents recognize, but its effects are ultimately contingent on the types of relationships between state and non-state providers.     

Social Media Use in Local Government: An Australian Perspective

Social media offers governments extensive opportunities to engage with citizens, particularly at the local level. This study investigates the issues that local governments face in implementing social media initiatives. It builds on existing literature by using an interpretive approach to examine the perceptions of public employees and elected officials of local councils in an Australian context. The article reports on the issues that inhibit a move to a more interactive use of social media and examines how these may be addressed. Implications for research and practice are given.     

社会保护底限在全球的发展及其作用评析

为应对2008年爆发的全球经济危机、加速恢复和构建公平且包容的全球化,2009年4月,联合国系统行政首长协调理事会发起社会保护底限（SPF）倡议。     

Tensions Within the Public Intellectual: Political Interventions from Dreyfus to the New Social Media

Drawing loosely on positioning theory, this article proposes two new claims about intellectuals and their public engagement. Firstly, we argue that the modern notion of the intellectual incorporates four core tensions or contradictions. Those four tensions centre round the following axes: hierarchy versus equality, generality versus expertise, passion versus distance, and the individual versus the collective. We show how these four tensions were present at the outset of the modern notion of the intellectual, and have regularly come to the surface in the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. Secondly, we contend that the same four tensions have taken on new forms, potentially affecting how intellectuals engage with the public. To develop this point, we focus on recent technological developments that enable novel intellectual interventions in the public sphere, in particular interactive online blogging and micro-blogging platforms.     

部分国际大都市处理社会分化的经验与启示

改革开放近三十年来,中国城市面临着全球化背景下城市职能的分工与协作,不断走向国际化.城市社会已从简单一元化向复杂多元化进行社会分化,社会利益结构发生了变动,形成了不同的利益群体.     

Welfare as Warfare: How Violent Non-State Groups Use Social Services to Attack the State

Several violent non-state groups also administer social services. Although earlier works stress the effects of social service provision on support and sympathy for violent groups, this article emphasizes a broader challenge. Namely, social welfare organizations threaten to rob the state of the legitimacy it derives through the social contract. Abolishing these organizations can cause humanitarian crises, radicalize populations, and erode domestic and international policy support. Ignoring them invites the continued erosion of state power. The way out of this dilemma is through a strategy of “displacement,” whereby the state eradicates non-state social services while concurrently extending its own welfare capacity.     

全球经济一体化对西欧社会民主党的影响与挑战

全球经济一体化对西欧社会民主党的影响与挑战是全方位的:首先,随着产业结构和就业结构的大调整,社会民主党的传统支持者受到冲击,对社会民主主义的认同感降低;其次,跨国公司大量的投资和生产基地的海外迁移,导致投资国税基缩小,税收减少,影响社会民主党对社会福利制度的维系与改革;再次,资本的自由流动和欧洲一体化的推进,使社会民主党的经济政策越来越丧失其独立性,而与保守党政策日益趋同;第四,在全球经济一体化进程中,社会民主党的经济民主与社会伙伴关系政策难以落实;最后,社会民主党的意识形态和价值观受到后物质主义价值观的冲击。     

Rebalancing the Global Economy

The United States accuses China of subsidizing its entire export economy through artificially undervaluing its currency. China accuses the United States of fiscal profligacy while flooding the world with easy credit to keep its economy afloat. This dispute reflects the reality that the world's two largest economies are built on opposite dynamics of production and savings vs. consumerism and debt. In Europe, the wages of unsustainable debt that financed the welfare state have also come due. Rebalancing the global economy in this context is not only a matter of fixing exchange or interest rates and extending the retirement age. It must also involve a recalibration of democracy in both East and West. Two Nobel economists, the Greek prime minister, a ranking Chinese economist and the former chief economist of the IMF address these issues.     

How Movement Strength Matters: Social Movement Strength and the Implementation of Ethnodevelopment Policy in Ecuador and Peru

Why has Ecuador been much more successful at implementing participatory policy than Peru despite the similarity between the two countries’ policies and despite their similarly low state capacity? To answer this question, this article draws on insights from implementation literature that point to factors such as incentives written into policy, the commitment of administrations and bureaucratic agencies, and few veto points in the chain of implementation. While this article does not challenge such findings, it suggests that we must look further back in the causal chain to understand what brings such facilitating conditions about. Through an examination of ethnodevelopment policy in Ecuador and Peru, I find that the strength of social movements is most responsible for creating the conditions that foster implementation. Neither civil society nor the state alone can bring about successful participatory policy implementation. Rather, strong social movements can make the state comply with its own laws.     

"Global Civil Society" and the Political Depoliticization of Global Governance

Activists, officials, and academics alike have often linked observations about an emerging global civil society to an incipient democratization of world politics. Global civil society is assumed to bring public scrutiny and "bottom-up" politics to international decision making "from outside" formal political institutions. Based on an analysis of uses of the concept of global civil society in 1990s global governance discourse (especially related to the major UN world conferences), this paper argues that the presumed democratization of world politics is better understood in terms of a double movement: on the one hand, "global civil society" depoliticizes global governance through the promotion of "human security" and "social development"; on the other hand, the emerging international public sphere (in the UN context) operates as a subsystem of world politics rather than opposing the system from outside. Practices of depoliticization are thus part of the political logic of (neo-)liberal global governance. The argument draws on Luhmann's systems theory and Foucault's analysis of governmentality.