5 research outputs found
Rumor, gender, and authority in English Renaissance drama
The dramatic works of Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson register a certain type of male character who is capable of discerning listening, an action that becomes an agent of specific masculine authority and identity. However, rumor\u27s inherent ambiguity and indeterminacy poses the greatest threat to discerning listening. The paradox that emerges is that while the drama posits men as superior authors of information, it is men---and not women---who are responsible for the circulation of unauthorized information and rumor on the stage. Early modern literary and cultural discourses repeatedly pointed to the dangers of loose tongues and transgressive speech, and such idle chatter was consistently gendered female. Male characters continually attempt to disown their own loose speech by placing women and their gossip as the true threat to informational authority. As early modern drama exposes transgressive male talk and a male anxiety of informational access, men must seek to maintain their informational authority from male unauthorized speech. This dissertation traces a shift in concerns about the female tongue to the male tongue and how discerning listening became a necessary component in the establishment and maintenance of authorial identity on the early modern stage.
I claim that rumor is an omnipresent and diffuse cultural, social, political, and theatrical issue with extreme consequences for male sovereignty. As certainty and truth break down through the workings of rumor, so too do the received notions of masculine identity. Furthermore, female characters with their authorizing ears are often seen exercising agency on the early modern stage in what I call female aural environments, where careful listening, rather than excessive speech and gossip, becomes a vehicle for uncovering truth. I contend that the early modern theater is a theater of rumor and early modern drama exposes the cultural reality of male speech gone astray, making the case for the necessity of becoming a discerning earwitness amid the buzz of the realm
Disinformation and Fact-Checking in Contemporary Society
Funded by the European Media and Information Fund and research project PID2022-142755OB-I00
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Isomorphic effects of managerial and directoral career paths
The extensive array of interlocking directorate research remains near-exclusively cross-sectional or comparative cross-sectional in nature. While this has been fruitful in identifying persistent structures of inter-organisational relationships evidence of the impact of these structures on organisational performance or activity has been more limited. This should not be surprising because, by their nature, relationships have strong longitudinal and dynamic qualities that are likely to be difficult to isolate through cross-sectional approaches. Clearly, managerial practice is inevitably strongly conditioned by the specific contingencies of the time and the information available through networks of colleagues and advisers (particularly at board level) at the time. But managerial and directoral capabilities and mental sets are also developed over time, particularly through previous experiences in these roles and the formation of long-lasting 'strong' and 'weak' relationships. This paper tests the influence of three longitudinal dimensions of managers and directors' relationships on a set of indicators of financial performance, drawing from a large dataset of detailing historic board membership of UK firms. It finds evidence of isomorphic processes through these channels and establishes that the longitudinal design considerably enhances the detection of performance effects from directorate interlocks. More broadly, the research has implications for the conception of collective action and the constitution of 'community'