The propaganda model and sociology : understanding the media and society

This article unpacks reasons why the Propaganda Model represents a critical sociological approach to understanding media and society, explores the model’s potential within the sociological field, and considers the trajectory of its reputational reception to date. The article also introduces the three central hypotheses and five operative principles of the Propaganda Model and suggests that the model complements other (competing) approaches that explore the relationship between ideological and institutional power and discursive phenomena

The anti-chain store movement and the politics of consumption

This essay examines the anti-chain store movement of the 1920s and 1930s in order to contribute to debates about the origins and nature of modern US consumer politics. It argues that this movement of independent merchants and their followers is best understood as an expression of populist antimonopolism. Opponents of the chains saw themselves as speaking for ‘the people’ and were virulently hostile to large aggregations of economic and political power. Concerned about the likely impact of chain stores on their communities, merchants lobbied their trade associations, wrote to their congressmen, and launched local grassroots campaigns. They also worked through the courts, securing anti-chain tax legislation in most states, and attracting the support of Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis. The essay has a comparative dimension, comparing the anti-chain crusades of the 1920s and 1930s with the protests against ‘big-box’ retail which have proliferated in the US and elsewhere since the 1980s. Reflecting on the recurrence in the age of globalization of a form of protest historians once thought dead, the essay questions the assumption—deep-rooted in US historiography—that antimonopoly ceased to be a significant feature of the US politics of reform after the New Deal. Accordingly the final part of the essay traces connections between pre-New Deal anti-chain campaigners and post-New Deal consumer activists, noting the centrality of antimonopoly to the careers of leading consumer politicians of the post-war era, Estes Kefauver and Ralph Nader. Arguing that the anti-chain store movement of the 1920s and 1930s was constitutive of the modern US politics of consumption, the study concludes by considering the implications of the persistence of the antimonopoly tradition for current and future scholarship. It suggests that the study of the politics of consumption is still in its infancy, and that given the important role antimonopoly thought has played in the US politics of reform, the temptation to dismiss out of hand as necessarily futile and reactionary anti-chain store movements past and present should be resisted

Governing by internet architecture

In the past thirty years, the exponential rise in the number of Internet users around the word and the intensive use of the digital networks have brought to light crucial political issues. Internet is now the object of regulations. Namely, it is a policy domain. Yet, its own architecture represents a new regulative structure, one deeply affecting politics and everyday life. This article considers some of the main transformations of the Internet induced by privatization and militarization processes, as well as their consequences on societies and human beings.En los últimos treinta años ha crecido de manera exponencial el número de usuarios de Internet alrededor del mundo y el uso intensivo de conexiones digitales ha traído a la luz cuestiones políticas cruciales. Internet es ahora objeto de regulaciones. Es decir, es un ámbito de la política. Aún su propia arquitectura representa una nueva estructura reguladora, que afecta profundamente la política y la vida cotidiana. Este artículo considera algunas de las principales transformaciones de Internet inducida por procesos de privatización y militarización, como también sus consecuencias en las sociedades y en los seres humanos

Rhetorical Democracy: An Examination of the Presidential Inaugural Addresses

Despite the fact that there is nothing in the Constitution requiring it, nor prescribed by any other federal law, the President\u27s delivery of an inaugural address has become a de facto requirement of the official Presidential inauguration. The Presidential inaugural address is an anticipated feature of all inaugural ceremonies because it is where the newly elected president outlines, among other things, his perspective on the manner, conduct and overall form of the American government. Within this outline, the rhetoric utilized by the President during inaugural addresses shapes the way in which the American people understand our system of government on both a theoretical and functional level. This research examines the utilization of the term “democracy” in presidential inaugural speeches as a rhetorical device and the impacts of this terminology upon conceptions of American governance. This rhetorical analysis provides a lens to view the changing dynamics of American political thought

From Seers to Sen: The Meaning of Economic Development

inequality, poverty, employment, growth, neoclassicism, entitlement, famine

Legal Russian in Legal - Linguistic Research

Artykuł traktuje o kształtowaniu i rozwoju języka rosyjskiego prawa oraz o metodologii stosowanej w studiach legilingwistycznych w Rosji i za granicą. Autor ilustruje tendencje dominujące w badaniach legilingwistycznych i badaniach zbliżonych do nich koncentrując się na problemach dotyczących identyfikacji materiałów zródłowych oraz metod stworzonych w Rosji dla potrzeb analiz legilingwistycznych. Autor charakteryzuje również kontynuację i dyskontynuację w metodyce badań legilingwistycznych mającą w Rosji znaczny dorobek historyczny. Poniższy przegląd problemów i metod badań legilingwistycznych w Rosji wykazuje cechy charakterystyczne dla europejskiej tradycji legilingwistycznej, szczególnie transformację zainteresowań badaczy począwszy od analizy terminologii w izolacji od innych implikacji lingwistycznych do dyskursywnych aspektów prawa.  The article focuses upon the emergence and the development of the legal Russian language and the methodology used for its scrutiny in the legal-linguistic research in Russia and abroad. It shows some of the dominant tendencies in the legal-linguistic and related research in a perspective that combines material issues concerning the work on textual sources and their identification as well as methods developed in Russia to deal with legal- linguistic problems. The author aims to portray methodological continuity and discontinuity in a research area with a relatively long history. The overview of topics and methods demonstrates that the development in the area of the legal-linguistic research in Russia displays all characteristic features of the European legal-linguistic tradition, and especially the shift in the attention of scholars from isolated terminological issues to discursive aspects of law.

The Biopolitical Economy of Anti-Essentialism

If we are to understand the nature of the relationship between a culture and its economy it is necessary to trace out the logic that informs the apparently disparate currents that make up that culture and its economy. There are any number of loci by reference to which this relationship might be discerned, but none are so important or profound, or for that matter so telling, than our body. Following on from two previous articles this essay approaches the subject by way of Foucault’s understanding of the ‘biopolitical’.[1] Through the issues of sexuality and eugenics we see how the logic informing early modern liberal philosophy worked itself out, coming to its full realisation in what is today referred to as ‘anti-essentialism’. The rise of anti-essentialism is concomitant with, if not identical with, the rise of capitalism proper. Anti-essentialism, both as a cultural and economic phenomena, is necessary for the rise to global dominance of capitalism. Although anti-essentialism is often thought of in terms of postmodernism and performance theory something of its logic was understood in the early modern period. And it was so by way of opposition to the growing defence and acceptance of free-market economics, which acceptance went hand in glove with a free market in credit and debt, which is to say in the liberalisation of anti-usury laws

The “return” of performance art from a glocal perspective

Various authors have characterized the contemporary world through the notion of "structural hybridization" (Pieterse 2001; Canclini 2001, among others). This notion refers to the mixing of different times and spaces that gives rise to "spatiotemporal" hybrid configurations. One of the factors of this process is usually translated by the term "hybrid cycles" (Stross 1999), through which a new cycle recovers historical and social characteristics of previous cycles, sometimes distant in time. Through this theoretical framework, which combines concepts such as hybridity, cyclicality, mimesis, reflexivity and performativity, this paper intends to problematize issues such as the so-called "social turn" (Bishop 2006)or "return to the real" (Foster 2001) in art or, more generally, the "performative turn" (Alexander 2006), with the aim of analyzing the cyclical dynamic of performance (social) art (an art that relies on notions of participation and even performative intervention in a public space) from a global perspective – from Portugal to the world and vice versa