Reinventing political subjectivities: studying critical documentaries on the war on terror

This paper casts a look on media aspects of the anti-war-on-terror struggle in western countries. A peculiar warfare, the “war on terror” that officially begun in 2001, is a low-density global warfare, fought in different internal and external fronts . Within a liberal, increasingly post-political social terrain, where social affairs are objects of expert management lacking public accountability and legitimacy, the role, status and the identity of the contemporary citizen is in decline. New media “affordances” offer critical possibilities for challenging hegemonic political discourses, and addressing political alternatives for a broad range of social problems; a re-invention of citizenship through the construct of a new (collective) political subject is central in the reinvention of democracy today. Discourse analysis, drawing reflexively on post-structuralist discourse theory and critical discourse analysis, is deployed in the study of counter-war-on-terror discourses in different documentaries critical to the “war on terror”. Analysis looks at different constructions of “us” and “them” in the context of counter-hegemonic discourses today. Identity is central in the engagement, participation and orientation of citizens today. Identity is central in organising a collective centre and in initiating subjectivity to fragmented liberal, postmodern individuals.     

Minority Matters: 12 Angry Men as a Case Study of a Successful Negotiation against the Odds

In his famous book, Social Influence and Social Change , celebrated social psychologist Serge Moscovici contended that minorities influence change by creating conflict. Because people wish to avoid conflict, they will often dismiss the minority position. But when the minority refuses to be dismissed by remaining committed to its position and maintaining a well-defined and coherent point of view, then the minority can make the majority reconsider its beliefs and consider the minority's position as a viable alternative. Moscovici identified five key aspects of the minority's influential behavior: consistency, investment, autonomy, rigidity, and fairness.
In this article we analyze the negotiation process depicted in the 1957 film 12 Angry Men . This critically acclaimed film powerfully illustrates the dynamics of bargaining and the use of informal authority with a focus on the role of personality. The film illustrates how, by adopting the five behavioral strategies described by Moscovici, the minority — in this case a lone dissenting juror — is able to successfully negotiate and, against the odds, influence the overwhelming majority comprising the other eleven jurors.     

Constructions of the opposition to ‘structural adjustment reforms’ in the German mass-media

This article analyses Germany’s Der Spiegel weekly journal, and its discursive constructions of the oppositional voices against the so-called structural reforms imposed on Greece in the context of the Eurozone crisis. The analysis is focused on relevant articles published by Der Spiegel between late 2009 and early 2015, during important, crisis-related socio-political events. Drawing on discourse theory and critical discourse analysis, the article concludes that Der Spiegel (along with other mainstream media in Germany and elsewhere) publicly legitimizes the elites’ hegemonic crisis-narratives and -policies, while discrediting oppositional voices. The study further foregrounds the ways Der Spiegel and other German mainstream-media reproduce a nationalistic ‘victimization’ of Germany, which advances Germany’s own national branding-strategy of positive self-representation in the EU and in the world.     

Conditionally-mediated effects of scale in collaborative R&D

This paper reports the results of an empirical investigation into the role of project scale, as reflected in consortium size, on the impacts obtained by partners participating in publicly-funded collaborative R&D projects. I argue in this study that scale may affect performance indirectly rather than directly. Specifically, I model the influence of scale as being mediated by a set of intervening variables that may be said to ??transmit?? both positive and negative effects through (i) complementarity of resources, (ii) learning, and (iii) transaction costs in project implementation. Moreover, I hypothesize that these indirect effects are conditional on certain moderators that include resources committed, project management mechanisms, and project uncertainty and scope. The results offered in this study largely confirm the proposition of conditionally-mediated effects of scale on performance. They indicate that a number of conditional indirect effects are indeed significant, and surprisingly, that these effects are mostly negative.