Resistance to centralisation in the Ottoman periphery: the Kurdish Baban and Bohtan emirates

Modern Kurdish historiography, which examines resistance to provincial centralisation in Ottoman Kurdistan, focuses largely on Bedir Khan’s Bohtan emirate and his revolt in the 1840s, while ignoring the rest of the other Kurdish emirates such as Baban emirate. While both states, Qajar Iran and Ottoman Empire, were endeavouring to solve their conflicts in the 1840s (a process which culminated in the treaty of Erzurum in 1847) the future of the Baban emirate and its territories emerged as one of the major issues during the course of negotiations. The Baban emirate was the last emirate to give up its struggle against the Sublime Porte’s centralisation reforms. The legacy of the Kurdish emirates is important to understand better the relations between the centre of the Ottoman Empire and its eastern periphery, a much less studied subject in Ottoman historiography. This article will highlight the impact of the centralisation policies in Kurdistan, more specifically on territories of the Bohtan and Baban emirates. It will be demonstrated that the changes wrought by the Tanzimat reforms were partially successful in transforming the Kurdish notables, who later became a part of the state bureaucracy. However, the reform-minded officials, who were appointed after the Kurdish emirs were removed from the region, failed to persuade the locals in favour of the new administration thus transforming their lives.     

The diffusion of e-government innovations in Turkey： A conceptual framework

This paper aims to draw a conceptual framework about combining the diffusion of innovations literature with the use of e-government applications that are being used newly in Turkey. In recent years, their development still continues to grow rapidly. Thus, these applications can be accepted as innovations. In order to understand the patterns of diffusion that depend on a time process, we argue that the characteristics of e-government applications have effects on diffusion and rate of diffusion itself. With the combining efforts of literature and characteristics of e-government applications, some propositions are suggested with the help of diffusions of innovations literature and the validity of the conceptual framework that is drawn by the study that is aimed to be tested empirically for Turkey in further studies.     

President or Predator? The Social Construction of Donald Trump in a Divided America

ABSTRACT

During the presidential election, numerous women accused Donald Trump of sexual harassment and/or assault. Then a presidential candidate, he denied these complaints and said the women were all untruthful – a position he has continued to espouse. To explore “who the public believes,” we commissioned YouGov to conduct an opt-in online survey of a national sample of 1,000 Americans. Notably, half of Americans (51.0%) believed that “the women are telling the truth when they reported that Mr. Trump sexually harassed or assaulted them” versus 23.1% who sided with the president. Nearly two-thirds (64.9%) stated that it was unlikely that all the women were lying, and 3 in 5 Americans (60.5%) supported President Trump’s impeachment by the U.S. Congress if these accusations could be proven. Informed by research on political psychology (especially Haidt’s The Righteous Mind), the data are explored to see why Americans embrace divergent moral narratives – with some seeing Mr. Trump as a truthful president and others seeing him as a predator unworthy of the office he holds.     

Stability and change in the public’s policy agenda: a punctuated equilibrium approach

Much research within the punctuated equilibrium framework demonstrated that policy agendas are invariably punctuated, due in part to cognitive and institutional frictions that constitute barriers to change in attention. While the bulk of past scholarship explored the extent to which institutional friction varies by organizational design, little scholarly attention has been devoted to the empirical examination of the cognitive aspect of disproportionate information processing. In an attempt to close this gap, I utilize a newly available dataset that codes nearly a million Americans’ responses to the ‘most important problem’ question from 1939 to 2015 to analyze the distribution of annual changes in the policy priorities of the American public. Drawing on the punctuated equilibrium theory literature, I argue and show that punctuations in the public’s policy priorities are more severe and frequent than those in institutional agendas. These results emphasize the need for a more subtle treatment of disproportionate information processing within the public, calling for relaxing the implicit assumption that cognitive friction is constant within organizations and across issues.

     

Correlates of procrastination and performance at work: The role of having “good fit”

Abstract

Occupational research often emphasizes the importance of workplace characteristics for understanding job stress and employee well-being, but the role of personal characteristics and having a good match with the job is mostly neglected. We explored how job crafting and feelings of being authentic at work were related to work engagement, work engagement of performance, and procrastination. A structural equation model analyzed self-reports from 380 Dutch office employees. Job crafting and authenticity were positively related to work engagement, and high work engagement predicted? better in-role and extra-role performance and less work procrastination. Moreover, performance and procrastination were negatively related. Results emphasize the importance of having a “good fit” between the employment settings and employees to promote engagement. By improving employee’s work engagement, organizations might improve the likelihood that personnel respond favorably with organizational goals and reduce the chances of engaging in workplace procrastination.     

Violence and nationalist mobilization: the onset of the Kurdish insurgency in Turkey

According to theories of nonviolent resistance, violence is counterproductive and undermines the ability of a movement to achieve mass support. At the same time, studies of ethnic insurgencies suggest that violence is the only available method of mobilization in political systems characterized by entrenched ethnic hierarchies. Engaging with these arguments, this article addresses a historical puzzle: What factors explain the timing and ability of the PKK's (Partiye Karkerên Kurdistan) rise as the hegemonic Kurdish nationalist organization in Turkey between the late 1970s and 1990? The article argues that studies that identify Kurdish nationalism as a reaction to repressive policies of the Turkish state without paying attention to prevailing social conditions and oppositional strategies fail to provide a satisfactory response. It argues that the rise of the PKK was primarily a function of its ability to gain support among the peasantry in deeply unequal rural areas through its strategic employment of violence. It also identifies four causal mechanisms of PKK recruitment based on rich archival and field research: credibility, revenge, social mobility, and gender emancipation.