Collective memory and reputational politics of national heroes and villains

The politics of memory plays an important role in the ways certain figures are evaluated and remembered, as they can be rehabilitated or vilified, or both, as these processes are contested. We explore these issues using a transition society, Georgia, as a case study. Who are the heroes and villains in Georgian collective memory? What factors influence who is seen as a hero or a villain and why? How do these selections correlate with Georgian national identity? We attempt to answer these research questions using a newly generated data set of contemporary Georgian perspectives on recent history. Our survey results show that according to a representative sample of the Georgian population, the main heroes from the beginning of the twentieth century include Zviad Gamsakhurdia, Ilia Chavchavadze, and Patriarch Ilia II. Eduard Shevardnadze, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, and Vladimir Putin represent the main villains, and those that appear on both lists are Mikheil Saakashvili and Joseph Stalin. We highlight two clusters of attitudes that are indicative of how people think about Georgian national identity, mirroring civic and ethnic conceptions of nationalism. How Georgians understand national identity impacts not only who they choose as heroes or villains, but also whether they provide an answer at all.     

Popular Financial Reports as Fiscal Transparency Mechanisms: An Assessment Using the Fiscal Transparency Index for the Citizen User

Popular financial reports (PFRs) are intended to increase transparency by providing financial information to a non-technical, citizen audience. We examine the extent to which PFRs are meeting the goal of transparency by developing a 23-criteria fiscal transparency index for the citizen user (FTI-CU) and applying it to a sample of PFRs (popular annual financial reports and citizen-centric reports) issued by local governments in the U.S. These criteria are organized into five areas: comprehension, access, financials, appearance, and community-focused. The analysis finds that, while there are areas for improvement, the PFRs rated the highest in the access and appearance criteria.     

Support for Democracy in Times of Crisis: Diffuse and Specific Regime Support in Portugal and Greece

In the context of a cross-national economic crisis, questions about democratic legitimacy are again topical. We explore the question of democratic legitimacy in Portugal and Greece by employing the conceptual differentiation between diffuse and specific regime support. Our findings indicate that while specific support has fallen in both countries, only Greece has experienced a precipitous fall in diffuse support, suggesting a link between regime performance and support for democracy. Individual-level analyses do not reveal any clear patterns concerning the impact of long-term societal factors or short-term economic considerations. Due to data quality limitations the paper has a predominately exploratory nature.     

论电视节目的网络推广

当今是以数字化为基础、解放受众使用时空限制的＂融媒体＂时代,是强调用户创造内容和互动交流的W eb2.0时代,电视节目必须在媒介融合中有意识地、积极主动地利用各种网络途径和技术手段推广电视节目,才能达到提高知名度、提升收视率的目的。     

Managing Performance at Local Government Level: The Cases of the City of Brisbane and the City of Melbourne

Local governments have been involved in a continuous reform process during recent decades. In many cases, this process has focused on the introduction of performance measurement and management. Reforms have evolved from the mere use of indicators to integrated management systems. In this article, the Balanced Scorecard, a system designed to answer the need for integrated management systems, is used as the framework to analyse how local governments have managed the use of performance management systems. The demands for better public performance, for greater customer focus, for enhanced decision-making and for increased responsiveness have an important role in the design of performance management systems. In addition, a perceived crisis in the area of management can act as catalyst for the implementation.     

Impermanent Apologies: on the Dynamics of Timing and Public Knowledge in Political Apology

Political apologies are commonly imagined as gestures of finality and closure: capstone moments that summate public knowledge. One manifestation of these assumptions is the position that apologies should be timed to come only after appropriate investigation into the wrongdoing has been completed. This article takes a different view, for two reasons. First, even apologies that seem based on robust knowledge can come to seem incomplete or inadequate in the light of subsequent learning and knowledge. Second, because apologies are complexly embedded in longer-term processes of activism and response, they can contribute to their own unravelling by encouraging further consideration and inquiry. We develop these arguments by considering two Canadian cases that illustrate these dynamics: apologies that addressed, respectively, the wartime internment of Japanese Canadians and the policy of forcing Indigenous children to attend residential schools.     

Political Ambivalence as Praxis: The Limits of Consensus in Habermas's Theory of the Public Sphere

This paper argues that ambivalence can serve as a proxy for consensus-based debates in public discourse as it allows for individuals to maintain flexible and analytic perspectives on matters that otherwise appear contradictory. In particular, an affirmative understanding of ambivalence will be presented to supplement the highly influential Habermasian approach by drawing from sociological theories of ambivalence found in the work of Simmel, Bauman and Ko?akowski. While the theme of ambivalence is not completely absent from Habermas’s work on the public sphere, it is typically described as a structural consequence of contradiction rather than a form of action that is capable of working with and around inconsistencies in ethics, knowledge and social values. This allows for participation to be sustained through contradiction, rather than being withdrawn in frustration, while also encouraging open-minded judgements capable of avoiding forms of fanaticism.     

Organising Everyday Resistance: An Ethnographic Study of Rickshaw Drivers in Bogotá

Workers in the informal transport sector are often exposed to multiple forms of workplace violence, for instance by the police and their colleagues. Through a collection of rich ethnographic stories and using the concept of popular resistance, this article investigates how and under what conditions rickshaw drivers in Bogotá resist violence in their workplace. The results reveal that rickshaw associations have been essential in articulating acts of everyday resistance to the legal ban on this activity, such regulating routes, fees and stops. However, associations have created new forms of oppression, being labelled as mafia-like organisations, showing that resistance can also translate into new forms of domination. Contrary to the argument that everyday resistance is uncoordinated, this article shows that acts of everyday resistance can be organised by actors that switch between different individual and collective strategies. Thus, organisations can provide a framework to resist the law on an everyday basis.     

COVID-19 Pandemic and Social Unrest: The Social Protest by Other Means. Reflections on the Argentinian Case

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments around the world have implemented exceptional measures aimed at restricting people's mobility or banning public spaces used, among other things, for protest, thus causing the expected regressive effects in the socioeconomic sphere. What happens with social protest when the public space is banned? Does it stop, is it displaced, does it occur in any other form? In this article we present a map of protest in Argentina since the beginning of the pandemic. We conclude that the levels of participation remain high and that, given the features of the protest itself, its claims may be channelled into the institutions.     

When is Parental Monitoring Effective? A Person-centered Analysis of the Role of Autonomy-supportive and Psychologically Controlling Parenting in Referred and Non-referred Adolescents

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Over the last few years, the protective role of parental monitoring on adolescent adjustment (i.e., active parental efforts aimed at setting limits and tracking...