Frank Roche – fiddler, dancer, and music collector : a musical life in turn-of-the-twentieth-century rural Ireland

Publisher PD

The silent witness : the fiddle manuscripts of John ‘Boss’ Murphy (1875–1955)

Publisher PD

Is political marketing new words or new practice in UK politics?

This review of the literature on political marketing and the party most associated with it in the UK, New Labour, suggests that the relationship is not straightforward. Politicians are, for example, hesitant to use marketing language in public. The relationship is problematised along the three dimensions of: partial or total import into some or all of politics; functional or instrumental use by leading politicians, and the roles of transformer of politics, or transfer agent for techniques. The results suggest two responses. The first is more fieldwork into political marketing outside of electoral campaigning and inside policy making. The second is a reconceptualising of the relationship away from the transformation or transfer dimension, and towards political marketing as a methodology for understanding a very different, and very separate activity, namely politics

Politics and public relations - should they hang together?

I argue that it is hard to distinguish between public relations and much of modern politics in the UK and that an important part of this conflation is a thoroughly bad thing. The working styles and job contents of spin doctor, lobbyist, event manager, corporate re-brander, special adviser and politician are merging, and making the distinctions of former, less presentationally conscious times harder to grasp. The merging has been given the mightiest of shoves by the behaviour of New Labour and has been much encouraged by the Mountfield Report (1998) on government communications

Can theories of power help us understand public relations better?

After thanking James Grunig for providing an architecture for thinking about public relations (PR) for 25 years, more academics should now consider questions of reassessing his formidable intellectual legacy. This seems timely, for with his retirement there is a generational change among PR thinkers and some colleagues, especially American and Australasian, have started the reassessment. I am drawn to the feasibility of putting ideas of power relations, instead of concepts of communicative symmetry, at the heart of a descriptive explanation of PR in pluralist, liberal democracies with competitive markets and vigorous civil societies. Grunig’s paradigm has turned the academic gaze too quickly towards communication studies. The task is to turn it, instead, to political studies, particularly towards pluralism and interest intermediation

Promoting global Internet freedom: policy and technology

This report provides information about US government and private sector efforts to promote and support global Internet freedom and a description of Internet freedom legislation and hearings from the 112th Congress. Modern communication tools such as the Internet provide a relatively inexpensive, accessible, easy-entry means of sharing ideas, information, and pictures around the world. In a political and human rights context, in closed societies when the more established, formal news media is denied access to or does not report on specified news events, the Internet has become an alternative source of media, and sometimes a means to organize politically. The openness and the freedom of expression allowed through social networking sites, as well as the blogs, video sharing sites, and other tools of today’s communications technology, have proven to be an unprecedented and often disruptive force in some closed societies. Governments that seek to maintain their authority and control the ideas and information their citizens receive are often caught in a dilemma: they feel that they need access to the Internet to participate in commerce in the global market and for economic growth and technological development, but fear that allowing open access to the Internet potentially weakens their control over their citizens. Internet freedom can be promoted in two ways, through legislation that mandates or prohibits certain activities, or through industry self regulation. Current legislation under consideration by Congress, the Global Online Freedom Act of 2011 (H.R. 3605), would prohibit or require reporting of the sale of Internet technologies and provision of Internet services to “Internetrestricting countries” (as determined by the State Department). Some believe, however, that technology can offer a complementary and, in some cases, better and more easily implemented solution to ensuring Internet freedom. They argue that hardware and Internet services, in and of themselves, are neutral elements of the Internet; it is how they are implemented by various countries that is repressive. Also, Internet services are often tailored for deployment to specific countries; however, such tailoring is done to bring the company in line with the laws of that country, not with the intention of allowing the country to repress and censor its citizenry. In many cases, that tailoring would not raise many questions about free speech and political repression. This report provides information about federal and private sector efforts to promote and support global Internet freedom and a description of Internet freedom legislation and hearings from the 112th Congress. Three appendixes suggest further reading on this topic and describe censorship and circumvention technologies