Taxes, Welfare and Democratic Discourse: Mainstream Media Coverage and the Rise of the American New Right

Research demonstrates that news media can shape mass opinion on specific public policy issues in politically consequential ways. However, systematic and critical empirical analysis of the ideological diversity of such news coverage is rare. Scholars have also illuminated how and why U.S. economic and social welfare policy has shifted rightward in recent decades, but they have failed to consider media\u27s role in shaping public opinion to democratically legitimate this major reorientation of political economy to favor business and upper-income constituencies. I combine neo-Gramscian theorizations of hegemony, popular common sense and articulation with social scientific research on framing, priming and psychological ambivalence to examine mainstream news coverage of two key policy debates during the neoliberal era: 1) the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and 2) the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. Quantitative content analyses of network television and mass-market print news indicates that: 1) coverage focused on a procedural, strategic and tactical narrative that relied overwhelmingly on official sources and included little policy substance. This discourse normalized an elite-centered politics that resonates with and confirms strands of American common sense that support popular civic disengagement, and 2) neoliberal-New Right themes valorizing market imperatives and demonizing social provision dominated alternative frames. Qualitative textual analyses of key artifacts of political discourse shows how such hegemonic messages deployed a conservative-populist rhetoric to effectively obscure corporate and upper-income prerogatives by depicting these policy moves as commonsensical projects that advanced ordinary people\u27s material interests and cultural values. Potentially counter-hegemonic interpretations that drew on culturally resonant fragments of common sense to offer strong challenges to the center-right elite consensus were propagated, but mainstream news virtually ignored these messages. As a result, citizens lacked effective access to a diverse range of messages and to critical information that might have generated more opposition to the right turn in opinion polls. In an experiment, I show that exposure to strongly hegemonic news treatments can cause even low- and middle-income people and those with egalitarian tendencies to express support for neoliberal-New Right economic policies, and that less strongly hegemonic coverage can prompt significantly more opposition

Knowledge and Management Models for Sustainable Growth

In the last years sustainability has become a topic of global concern and a key issue in the strategic agenda of both business organizations and public authorities and organisations. Significant changes in business landscape, the emergence of new technology, including social media, the pressure of new social concerns, have called into question established conceptualizations of competitiveness, wealth creation and growth. New and unaddressed set of issues regarding how private and public organisations manage and invest their resources to create sustainable value have brought to light. In particular the increasing focus on environmental and social themes has suggested new dimensions to be taken into account in the value creation dynamics, both at organisations and communities level. For companies the need of integrating corporate social and environmental responsibility issues into strategy and daily business operations, pose profound challenges, which, in turn, involve numerous processes and complex decisions influenced by many stakeholders. Facing these challenges calls for the creation, use and exploitation of new knowledge as well as the development of proper management models, approaches and tools aimed to contribute to the development and realization of environmentally and socially sustainable business strategies and practices

Research on Teaching and Learning In Biology, Chemistry and Physics In ESERA 2013 Conference

This paper provides an overview of the topics in educational research that were published in the ESERA 2013 conference proceedings. The aim of the research was to identify what aspects of the teacher-student-content interaction were investigated frequently and what have been studied rarely. We used the categorization system developed by Kinnunen, Lampiselkä, Malmi and Meisalo (2016) and altogether 184 articles were analyzed. The analysis focused on secondary and tertiary level biology, chemistry, physics, and science education. The results showed that most of the studies focus on either the teacher’s pedagogical actions or on the student - content relationship. All other aspects were studied considerably less. For example, the teachers’ thoughts about the students’ perceptions and attitudes towards the goals and the content, and the teachers’ conceptions of the students’ actions towards achieving the goals were studied only rarely. Discussion about the scope and the coverage of the research in science education in Europe is needed.Peer reviewe

CEO PRACTICE: TOWARDS A FRAMEWORK OF PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

This qualitative inquiry makes a credible contribution to knowledge by considering the past, the present and the future a small cadre of CEOs as they dwell, transition and manoeuvre within emerging sociomaterial practices. The researcher, who has taken a similar path and is largely an invisible participant, gives this inquiry a particular, if biased, piquancy. Essentially, the work examines, why and how CEOs engaged and learn to play the business game and lead. It unveils, in its visceral animus, something of what really goes on and what-it-is-like-to-be-there withiin the dynamics of strategic conduct. Ontologically, the inquiry takes a process stance on being and becoming and, in epistemology, a practice-based, temporal framework. It is not overly concerned with theory development, but rather with embodied, sociomaterial practices, where it emphasises CEO dwelling and continuing doings in the temporal, lived -‘felt’- world. The findings suggest the essential impact of contingent interruptions and their affordance in business. The CEO must sense, make sense of, clarify, give meaning to and manage these opportunities as they unfold. This draws attention to how the past and future are brought into the present, where suffused in identities, sensibilities and emotions this temporality culminates in ‘know how’. Put otherwise, a practical intelligibility and understandings that combine in unaware routines and deliberate intentions, creating teleoeffective performance. Here, and in the functionalities of their job, despite their idiosyncratic backgrounds, CEOs share more than divides them. The CEOs are revealed as competitive, combative, somewhat self-centred, yet caring works in progress. They are often besieged by capricious and captious doings, when entangled within anticipated but unknowable outcomes. What is certain is that there is no such thing as a subjective or emotionally free space in strategic conduct