Models of Crisis Decision Making and the 1990–91 Gulf War

The 1991 Persian Gulf War is a “most likely” case for several crisis decision-making models. It commanded presidential attention, arose when bureaucrats were fighting over post-Cold War budgets, and evoked the strong organizational cultures of the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. We use this case to assess the contexts, decision stages, and issue areas in which alternative crisis models have the most explanatory power. We find that presidents are most powerful in agenda setting, choosing among options, crises, and high-politics issues. Bureaucratic politics diminishes in crises and best explains the behavior of mid-level careerists, the formulation of options, and the shaping of post-war budgets. Most striking, even in crises organizational cultures strongly shape tactical military decisions, choices among weapons systems, and the willingness of officials to risk their careers on behalf of their organizations’ values. Overall, these findings argue for greater attention to the influence of organizational cultures in crises.     

Introduction: Communication and Civic Engagement in Comparative Perspective

The present era is defined by sweeping changes in economies, social institutions, political party systems, and communication processes in many nations. These changes go by various names from globalization to poststructuralism. The impact of these tectonic shifts in the political foundations of nations is greatly debated. In particular, considerable uncertainty surrounds the effects of various changes on the importance of politics for individual citizens and for the kinds of civic activities that people engage in and even regard as political. This is an important time for communication scholars to develop comparative frameworks that bring conceptions of social change together with how people located in various cultural, demographic, and audience groups define their relations to government and, more broadly, to civil society. At stake is our understanding of the role of communication in shaping these political relations, and in shaping the attitudes of citizens about politics, government, and society itself.     

Late-Night Comedy as a Gateway to Traditional News: An Analysis of Time Trends in News Attention Among Late-Night Comedy Viewers During the 2004 Presidential Primaries

Recent reports published by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press (2000 Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. (2000). Audiences fragmented and skeptical: The tough job of communicating with voters. http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=46  [Google Scholar], 2004 Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. (2004). Cable and Internet loom large in fragmented political news universe. http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=200  [Google Scholar]) propose that young audiences are abandoning traditional news as a source of election information in favor of late-night comedy programs. However, additional evidence (Young & Tisinger, 2006 Young, D. G. and Tisinger, R. 2006. Dispelling late-night myths: News consumption among late-night comedy viewers and the predictors of exposure to various late-night shows. Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, 11(3): 113–134. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) suggests that exposure to late-night comedy programming is positively correlated with traditional news exposure. This study extends this body of research by offering evidence that exposure to late-night comedy is associated with increases in attention paid to the presidential campaign in national network and cable news. The analysis uses data collected via the National Annenberg Election Survey during the 2004 National Annenberg Election Survey (2004). Daily Show viewers knowledgeable about presidential campaign. http://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/Downloads/Political_Communication/naes/2004_03_late-night-knowledge-2_9-21_pr.pdf (Accessed: 7 February 2008).  [Google Scholar] presidential primary season, between October 30, 2003, and June 4, 2004. Cross-sectional results demonstrate that viewers of late-night comedy programs—specifically viewers of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and The Late Show with David Letterman, as well as Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart—pay more attention to the campaign in national network and cable news than nonviewers, controlling for a variety of factors. An analysis of time trends also reveals that the rate of increase in news attention over the course of the primary season is greater for viewers of Leno or Letterman than for those who do not watch any late-night comedy.     

Chav-spotting in Britain: the representation of social class as private choice

The word chav is a relatively new one in British English, used to describe a supposed social group defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “a young person of a type characterised by brash and loutish behaviour and the wearing of designer-style clothes … usually with connotations of a low social status”. Discourse on chavs in contemporary Britain has been widely implicated in the reinforcement of social inequalities. This article argues that a central element of such discourse is the representation of “everyday” British public experience as a practice of chav-spotting, of reading materials as signs of the private characteristics of those with which they are associated. This means reading class as a privately motivated phenomenon, as the product of the “choice incompetence” of chavs. This chav-spotting practice is viewed from two perspectives: (1) as a recontextualisation of class as the result of private choice; and (2) as a practice of sign-making by which meanings are articulated for publicly observable materials in accordance with (1).     

Regulated restlessness: museums,liberal government and the historical sciences

The ways citizen participation and democracy are changing are poorly understood due to the dominance of theories inherited from the eioghteenth centruy: Democratic citizenship can be better understood if critical reflection is re-oriented around the games of concrete freedom here and now as recommended by Hannah Arendt, Ludwing Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault and Quentin Skinner. This orientation brings to light two distrinctive types of citizen freedom in the present: diverse forms of citizen participation and diverse practices of governance in which citizens participate.     

Photovoice as a Pedagogical Tool in the Community Psychology Classroom

Constructivist perspectives contend that individuals actively extract and make meaning from the world around them. In the classroom this means that students are not passive recipients or repositories for our theories and empirical findings; instead, they actively redefine and relate to (or not) the concepts presented. To simultaneously stimulate and build on this process, I adopted Photovoice as a pedagogical tool to situate students as observers of their own community and create space for them to engage in participatory, community-focused meaning making activities. By employing strategically crafted framing questions, students generated Photovoice data that served as a powerful jumping off point for discussing key community psychology concepts. In addition, the Photovoice process provided students the opportunity to directly experience a participatory research process as well as engage in basic qualitative data analysis. This article presents the general process my class undertook as well as qualitative feedback from students.     

Sexual Assault within Intimate Partner Violence: Impact on Helpseeking in a National Sample

Within intimate partner violence (IPV), sexual assault is often subsumed under the heading of physical abuse, but evidence suggests qualitative differences in outcomes when both types of abuse occur. This study explores the cumulative effect of sexual assault and physical abuse by a current or former intimate partner on helpseeking. Using a dataset of 1,072 IPV victims from 8 states, we found that women who had experienced sexual assault in addition to physical abuse (44%) used more help, but were also more likely to say that they did not seek help when they needed it. Among those who were aware of services, fear was the greatest obstacle to reaching out for help. Implications include the need for information on best practices in addressing the sequelae of both physical and sexual assault in victim service agencies.     

Developing a University-Wide Institutional Response to Sexual Assault and Relationship Violence

SUMMARY

Students may be predisposed to benefit from mandatory service-learning programs based on their gender and upon whether their parents serve as models of helping. The role of each of these variables was examined in a survey of seventh grade students (n = 86) who were required to complete service during the school year. Results demonstrated that girls felt more positively about the specific program and were more likely to intend to help in the future than boys. Students with parental helping models were also more likely to intend to help in the future. Girls with parental models were more likely to have altruistic self-images than girls without parental models whereas the presence of parental helping models had no effect on boys' altruistic self-image. These results are discussed with regard to socialization of prosocial behavior in both boys and girls.