Information-Age Populism: Higher Education as a Civic Learning Organization

Viewing higher education as an environment "ripe for change," Harry Boyte makes the case for colleges and universities to forsake their traditional bastions of cloistered scholarship to become "civic learning" organizations. Many faculty members are willing and able to pursue their interests in the public relevance of teaching and research. What is needed to undertake the democratization of the production and diffusion of knowledge, Boyte says in this report from the Council on Public Policy Education, is to stress the need for disciplines to interact across porous boundaries with the wider world

The case against the democratic influence of the internet on journalism

Book synopsis: Web Journalism: A New Form of Citizenship provides a much-needed analytical account of the implications of interactive participation in the construction of media content. Although web journalism is a fast-changing technology this book will have sustained appeal to an international readership by seeking to critically assess Internet news production. … With the rise of blogging and citizen journalism, it is a commonplace to observe that interactive participatory media are transforming the relationship between the traditional professional media and their audience. A current, popular, assumption is that the traditional flow of information from media to citizen is being reformed into a democratic dialogue between members of a community. The editors and contributors analyse and debate this assumption through international case studies that include the United Kingdom and United States. … While the text has been written and designed for undergraduate and postgraduate use, Web Journalism: A New Form of Citizenship? will be of use and of interest to all those engaged in the debate over Web reporting and citizen journalism

The Democratization of Data in Higher Education: A Case Study of the Challenges that Institutions Face as They Seek to Improve Student Success

In the current climate of increased external accountability and increased internal pressure to improve student performance, many colleges and universities are grappling with how to broaden access to data and information so as to improve decision-making -- a trend this report refers to as the democratization of data. In the past decade, advances in user-friendly information technology are enabling faculty, administrators, and staff to retrieve and analyze a host of information themselves, right from their desktops. For example, they can perform data searches, track student performance, monitor section enrollments in real-time, and estimate various budgetary impacts. By equipping people at all organizational levels with the data and information they need, colleges can enable them to make better decisions about how to reach and serve students. Colleges and universities are finding, however, that the democratization of data brings with it cultural as well as technical or procedural transformations. For example, it requires having departments work together to agree upon the kinds of information to track and to whom to make it available; changing channels of information flow; rewarding efforts to share information and knowledge rather than hoard it; being transparent about budgetary impacts; and valuing a culture of inquiry that identifies areas for improvement and supports analysis that pursues real change over time. Given the robust technological capabilities now available, colleges and universities that seek to understand and improve their rates of student success will inevitably confront, either deliberately or unwittingly, their own institutional practices and attitudes concerning access to and use of data. This report, in describing some of the major challenges that one higher education institution faced as it reconsidered its use of data and information in decision-making, outlines an investigative process to consider when seeking to improve student success and organizational effectiveness through the democratization of data. The report presents findings and identifies several important policy implications, at the campus and state levels, that could improve student outcomes by enhancing the use of data and information in decision-making

Spontaneous order and relational sociology:from the Scottish Enlightenment to human figurations

If viewed from a long-term and large-scale perspective, human interdependencies today can be seen as approaching species integration on a worldwide level. However, emergent worldwide processes of integration and differentiation tend to be reduced to static conceptthings such as “governmentality”, “globalization”, “cosmopolitanization”, “mobilities”, and“networks”, helping to obscure the mundane processes of institution formation, in particular the tenacious endurance of the nation-state. This paper argues that the pathological realism of neoliberal globalization today can be more adequately approached by engaging with the historical precursors of the so-called “relational turn” in contemporary sociology. The earlier relational sociology of the Scottish enlightenment, particularly Adam Ferguson (1767), Adam Smith (1776) and David Hume (1739) developed ideas of spontaneous order and such related concepts as “the invisible hand” and “unintended consequences” in an attempt to understand and control the rapid transformation of Scotland, a relatively under-developed economy on the edge of Europe. The Scottish spontaneous order tradition is compared to Elias’s idea of “figuration” as an unplanned but patterned process of increasingly complex and opaque social interdependencies and functional democratization. This process appears to have reached definite limits. Humanity is ensnared in a compelling global double-bind process of armed states that continue to threaten, endanger and fear each other, and a pervasive elite belief in the spontaneous efficiency and self-correcting mechanisms of the global “magic market”.<br/

The Historical Turn in Democratization Studies: A New Research Agenda for Europe and Beyond. CES Working Paper Series No. 177, 2010

The paper lays the theoretical and methodological foundations of a new historically-minded approach to the comparative study of democratization, centered on the analysis of the creation, development and interaction of democratic institutions. Historically, democracy did not emerge as a singular coherent whole but rather as a set of different institutions, which resulted from conflicts across multiple lines of social and political cleavage that took place at different moments in time. The theoretical advantage of this approach is illustrated by highlighting the range of new variables that come into focus in explaining democracy's emergence. Rather than class being the single variable that explains how and why democracy came about, we can see how religious conflict, ethnic cleavages, and the diffusion of ideas played a much greater role in Europe's democratization than has typically been appreciated. Above all, we argue that political parties were decisive players in how and why democracy emerged in Europe and should be at the center of future analyses

Backlash Against Democracy: The Regulation of Civil Society in Africa

This paper builds on TrustAfrica funded research regarding the legislative environment for non-governmental organizations. The first section of this paper provides a brief overview of the recent history of state-civil society relations in Africa. The second section examines the current trend in repressive NGO legislation in Zambia, Ethiopia, and Zimbabwe, which include: (1) barriers to entry; (2) barriers to operational activity and free speech; and (3) barriers to resources. The third and final section frames this trend within the history of democratization in Africa and identifies new directions for research and analysis

The multi-layered nature of the internet-based democratization of brand management

The evolution of the internet, including developments such as Web 2.0, has led to new relationship realities between organizations and their stakeholders. One manifestation of these complex new realities has been the emergence of an internet-based democratization of brand management. Research about this phenomenon has so far mainly focused on investigating just one or more individual themes and thereby disregarded the inherent multi-layered nature of the internet-based democratization of brand management as a holistic, socio-technological phenomenon. The aim of this paper is to address this limitation through an investigation of the various socio-technological democratization developments of the phenomenon. To achieve this aim, a balanced and stakeholder-oriented perspective on brand management has been adopted to conduct an integrative literature review. The review reveals three key developments, which together form the essential parts of the phenomenon: (I) the democratization of internet technology, (II) the democratization of information, and (III) the democratization of social capital. The insights gained help to clarify the basic structures of the multi-layered phenomenon. The findings contribute also to the substantiation of a call for a new brand management paradigm: one that takes not only company-initiated but also stakeholder-initiated brand management activities into accoun

Achieving Access: Professional Movements and the Politics of Health Universalism

[Excerpt] This book examines efforts to expand access to health care and AIDS medicine in Thailand, Brazil, and South Africa. Although these countries are geographi­cally far apart, they share many similarities as newly industrializing countries engaged in processes of democratic opening. Scholars have often suggested that expansionary social policy is the product of left-wing parties and labor unions or bottom-up people’s movements. From a strictly rational perspective, that these groups would be at the forefront of such change makes perfect sense. After all, expanding access to health care and medicine would seem to be in their interest, and they would appear to have a lot to gain. While this book recognizes the role they often play, it focuses on a different, more puzzling set of actors whose actions are sometimes even more decisive in expanding access to health care and medicine: elites from esteemed professions who, rationally speaking, aren’t in need of health care or medicine themselves and who would otherwise seem to have little to gain from such policies. This group includes doctors like Sanguan Nitayarumphong and Paulo Teixeira, whose work with the poor and needy informed their advocacy for universal health care in Thailand and Brazil while also putting them into conflict with the medical profession of which they were a part. How is it that these people would play such an important and active role in making change happen

Political strategies of external support for democratization

Political strategies of external support to democratization are contrasted and critically examined in respect of the United States and European Union. The analysis begins by defining its terms of reference and addresses the question of what it means to have a strategy. The account briefly notes the goals lying behind democratization support and their relationship with the wider foreign policy process, before considering what a successful strategy would look like and how that relates to the selection of candidates. The literature's attempts to identify strategy and its recommendations for better strategies are compared and assessed. Overall, the article argues that the question of political strategies of external support for democratization raises several distinct but related issues including the who?, what?, why?, and how? On one level, strategic choices can be expected to echo the comparative advantage of the "supporter." On a different level, the strategies cannot be divorced from the larger foreign policy framework. While it is correct to say that any sound strategy for support should be grounded in a theoretical understanding of democratization, the literature on strategies reveals something even more fundamental: divergent views about the nature of politics itself. The recommendations there certainly pinpoint weaknesses in the actual strategies of the United States and Europe but they have their own limitations too. In particular, in a world of increasing multi-level governance strategies for supporting democratization should go beyond preoccupation with just an "outside-in" approach