Public Policy in the Party City: The Spectacle of Culture,Gender, and Locality

The article explores the bidding process for the European Capital of Culture (ECOC) award, an aspect of local regeneration policy reliant upon a specific conception of culture. The process is examined in terms of changes in urban layout, manifestations of cultural and community identity, media representations, and the spectacle of culture, gender, and locality. The process is viewed as an urban managerialist project, driven by private and public sector elites in pursuit of economic rather than cultural goals. A narrow and particular view of culture was employed in the bidding process to achieve essentially managerial goals, and cut adrift from significant issues of gender, identity, and class. “Culture,” as conceived within the ECOC process, is viewed as a policy product of local government, regeneration partnerships, government agencies, and business interests, in contrast to culture as a way of life or lived urban experience. As an elite process, the voices of local culture were largely excluded.     

Revelation and Rhetoric: A Critical Model of Forensic Discourse

Over the past thirty years or so, theoretical work in such fields as legal semiotics and law and literature has argued that the legal process is profoundly rhetorical. At the same time, a number of communication-based disciplines such as semiotics, sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology have provided, particularly in interdisciplinary combination with law, a wealth of empirical evidence on, and insight into, the micro-contexts of language and communication in the legal process. However, while these invaluable nitty-gritty analyses provide empirical support for a rhetorical thesis, work in these areas has tended to ignore rhetoric as an explanatory principle. This article introduces an overarching rhetorical framework for the discursive construction and management of cases in contemporary Anglo-American legal processes. Taking ‘forensic’ as relating to the conduct of cases and ‘discourse’ as semiosis-in-practice, I argue that the practices within which forensic discourse is embedded are not, as the received legal view would have it, aimed at revealing an impartial truth but are deeply rhetorical practices aimed at persuading decision-makers to provide a remedy for a claimed wrong. By looking across forensic texts and contexts, I identify common elements of forensic discourse that can be found both in classical forensic orations and throughout the modern legal process and consider how these intersect with critical forces of agency and structure and the particularities of semiosis in situated context. An awareness of commonalities across forensic discourse can help sharpen our focus on the critical causes and consequences of individual and structural difference and point to consequential suggestions for reform.     

Soft power,ideology and symbolic manipulation in Summer Olympic Games opening ceremonies: a semiotic analysis

This paper is a semiotic analysis of Summer Olympic Games Opening ceremonies as performative texts. Owing to massive media attention, these events have become eagerly awaited global spectacles. However, with such a wide audience, the challenge is to convey both an Olympic welcome and something truly unique about the host city and nation. This creates a communication challenge and some interesting questions in terms of symbolism. Research into the content of Olympic Games ceremonies reveals an exercise both in forging internal cohesion and in projecting soft power. Soft power is an increasingly valuable currency in a multipolar world and opening ceremonies are a prime soft power opportunity. The paper seeks to uncover the ways successive Olympics Games organising committees have sought to balance the competing communicational objectives of opening ceremonies through double coding. The author considers every ceremony from Moscow 1980 to London 2012 in this comparative semiotic analysis.     

Shall the law set them free? The formal and actual independence of regulatory agencies

Regulation by independent agencies, rather than ministries, is believed to result in better policy outcomes. Yet this belief requires one to accept a complex causal chain leading from formal independence to actual independence from politics, to policy decisions, and, ultimately, to policy outcomes. In this study, we analyze the link between the formal and actual independence of regulatory agencies in Western Europe. New data on the appointment of chief executives of these agencies is used to create a proxy for the actual independence of agencies from politics. The analysis demonstrates that formal independence is an important determinant of actual independence, but the rule of law and the number of veto players matter as well.     

‘Everyone Now is Concentrating on the Mining’: Drivers and Implications of Rural Economic Transition in the Eastern Region of Ghana

Artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) is replacing smallholder farming as the principal income source in parts of rural Ghana. Structural adjustment policies have removed support for the country's smallholders, devalued their produce substantially and stiffened competition with large-scale counterparts. Over one million people nationwide are now engaged in ASM. Findings from qualitative research in Ghana's Eastern Region are drawn upon to improve understanding of the factors driving this pattern of rural livelihood diversification. The ASM sector and farming are shown to be complementary, contrary to common depictions in policy and academic literature.     

Sexual Attitudes and Behaviors Among Adolescents

The purpose of this article is to examine the self-reported sexual attitudes and behaviors of adolescents living in the Midwest. A survey was administered to 463 African American youths ages 11–19. The results indicate that intent to have sexual intercourse, reported likelihood toward having sexual intercourse, and whether participants felt that they would have sex in the next 3 months were predictors of whether they had sexual intercourse at the 3-month follow-up. The results also revealed that the opinions of referent others did not predict sexual intercourse at 3 months. Negative attitudes toward condoms did predict condom use at 3 months and the opinions of referent others also predicted condom use at 3 months. Limitations as well as future research are also discussed.