Abstracts
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW id:404
TI: Administrative Easing: Rule Reduction and Medicaid Enrollment ab: Administrative burden is widely recognized as a barrier to program enrollment, denying legal entitlements to many potentially eligible individuals, Building on recent research in behavioral public administration, this article examines the effect of voluntary state reductions in administrative burden (administrative easing) on Medicaid enrollment rates using differential implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Using a novel data set that includes state-level data on simplified enrollment and renewal procedures for Medicaid from 2008 to 2017, the authors examine how change in Medicaid enrollment is conditioned by the adoption of rule-reduction procedures. Findings show that reductions in the administrative burden required to sign up for Medicaid were associated with increased enrollments. Real-time eligibility and reductions in enrollment burden were particularly impactful at increasing enrollment for both children and adults separate from increases in Medicaid income eligibility thresholds. The results suggest that efforts to ease the cognitive burden of enrolling in entitlement programs can improve take-up.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC POLICY id:319
TI: Agency rulemaking in a separation of powers system ab: Rulemaking gives agencies significant power to change public policy, but agencies do not exercise this power in a vacuum. The separation of powers system practically guarantees that, at times, agencies will be pushed and pulled in different directions by Congress and the president. We argue that these forces critically affect the volume of rules produced by an agency. We develop an account of agency rulemaking in light of these factors and test our hypotheses on a data set of agency rules from 1995 to 2007. Our results show that even after accounting for factors specific to each agency, agencies do, in fact, adjust the quantity of rules they produce in response to separation of powers oversight. Further analysis shows that the president's influence is limited to those agencies that he has made a priority.
PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE id:659
TI: Discussion structures as tools for public deliberation ab: We propose the use of discussion structures as tools for analyzing policy debates in a way that enables the increased participation of lay stakeholders. Discussion structures are argumentation-theoretical tools that can be employed to tackle three barriers that separate lay stakeholders from policy debates: difficulty, magnitude, and complexity. We exemplify the use of these tools on a debate in research policy on the question of responsibility. By making use of discussion structures, we focus on the argumentative moves performed by the parties involved in this debate. We conclude by discussing advantages and limitations of discussion structures and we trace several opportunities for further research on these instruments.
TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY id:718
TI: Durable Research, Portable Findings: Rhetorical Methods in Case Study Research ab: Case studies have been a central methodology employed by scholars working in the rhetoric of science and technical communication. However, concerns have been raised about how cases are constructed and collected, and what they convey. The authors reflect on how rhetoricians of science and technical communication researchers can - and do - construct a variety of case-based mixed-methods studies in ways that may make our research more portable and durable without undercutting the important and central role of case-based analysis.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:748
TI: From Above and Below: Surveillance, Religion, and Claim-Making at Jerusalem's Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif ab: This article explores the development and negotiation of colonial surveillance practices and technologies at religious sites. In this article I posit that colonial surveillance at religious sites is different-that, unlike in other colonial spaces, the particularities of holy sites as arenas of contestation can enlarge the scope of worshippers' negotiation of state surveillance technologies and practices, while enabling new modes of claim-making of rights and resources articulated through surveillance. I draw on the case study of Haram-al-Sharif/Temple Mount, a site in occupied East Jerusalem holy to both Muslim and Jewish worshippers, to explore how different surveillance policies and practices are articulated and contested at religious sites in a (settler) colonial setting. I examine three facets of surveillance employed at this holy site: Israeli digital surveillance, Palestinian grassroots surveillance, and internationally prescribed adjudicating surveillance. Through an examination of these different facets, this article investigates how particular religious, national, and citizenship claims emerge when surveillance is leveraged in order to balance, mitigate, or resolve conflicts.
SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY id:108
TI: The regulation of risk: the case of fracking in the UK and the Netherlands ab: The precautionary principle was developed in environmental politics as a guiding mechanism for governments where new technologies, products, and processes produced potential health or environmental problems but where scientific evidence could not explain why. Anecdotal evidence of fracking suggests that it might cause water pollution or subsidence, but the scientific evidence to support this proposition is not yet in place. This paper examines the actions of the UK and Dutch governments toward fracking. Although both governments have adopted the precautionary principle into national law, neither has directly invoked it in the field of fracking, relying instead on more conventional scientific understandings of risk. In line with other papers in Science and Public Policy, this article provides a comparative analytical analysis of scientific policy regulation. It does so by arguing that while notionally subscribed to the precautionary principle, the UK and Dutch authorities have been reluctant to use it.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:9
TI: The small, disloyal fake news audience: The role of audience availability in fake news consumption ab: In light of the recent US election, many fear that fake news has become a force of enormous reach and influence within the news media environment. We draw on well-established theories of audience behavior to argue that the online fake news audience, like most niche content, would be a small subset of the total news audience, especially those with high availability. By examining online visitation data across mobile and desktop platforms in the months leading up to and following the 2016 presidential election, we indeed find the fake news audience comprises a small, disloyal group of heavy Internet users. We also find that social network sites play an outsized role in generating traffic to fake news. With this revised understanding, we revisit the democratic implications of the fake news crisis.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:81
TI: Nonprofit Spending and Government Provision of Public Services: Testing Theories of Government-Nonprofit Relationships ab: Empirical studies and theories of government-nonprofit relationships have assumed a unidirectional funding flow from governments to nonprofits and therefore focusing on the impact of governments on nonprofits. By articulating multiple mechanisms of how nonprofits may influence government spending and utilizing a unique panel dataset that contains nonprofit and local government spending on parks, this article tests several prominent theoretical models of government-nonprofit relationships to answer the question of how spending by park-supporting charities influences the level of public spending on parks and recreation services. The findings indicate that spending by park-supporting charities spending has a decreasing effect on the level of public operational spending on parks, which supports the supplementary model. However, there is a net gain in total community support for parks and recreation services. Finally, this article suggests that government-nonprofit relationships are not identical when funding sources for public service provision differ in subsectors. A two-way understanding is essential for the theory building and testing in government-nonprofit relationships.
AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW id:209
TI: Political Consequences of Survival Strategies among the Urban Poor ab: Combining ethnographic and statistical methods, this study identifies interlocking mechanisms that help explain how disadvantaged neighborhoods influence their residents' political capacity. Support systems that arise in low-income neighborhoods promote social interaction that helps people make ends meet, but these systems also expose residents to heavy doses of adversity, which dampens perceptions of collective political capacity. For the poorest residents of these neighborhoods in particular, the expected positive effect of informal social support is suppressed by the negative effect of perceived trauma. These findings present a micro-level account of poverty, social interaction, and political capacity, one that holds implications for scholarship and public policy on participatory inequality.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW id:642
TI: Poverty, Policy, and Federal Administrative Discourse: Are Bureaucrats Speaking Equitable Antipoverty Policy Designs into Existence? ab: Non-elected, non-appointed federal employees, referred to as "bureaucrats," are among the many policy actors that participate in policy discourse. This article investigates whether bureaucrats' administrative discourse promotes economic equality, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned. Based on a qualitative analysis of data from congressional testimonies (n = 34) before and after the enactment of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, this study discusses the role of public administrators as contributors to welfare policy discourse and the resulting implications for the fight for equality and equal citizenship. It finds that bureaucrats' welfare policy discourse marginalized vulnerable populations, particularly African American women.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE id:331
TI: Preventing Prevention ab: Preventing climate change and damage from natural disasters typically requires policies with up-front costs that promise a flow of benefits over time. Why has obtaining such policies in a competitive electoral democracy proved so intractable? We develop a formal model of electoral accountability in this context, in which politicians have private information about their motivations. The model shows why fully rational voters, though certain that incumbents spend less on disaster prevention than is good for them, reelect incumbents at very high rates. In addition, in such equilibria, voters would punish incumbents who spent more on disaster prevention. This equilibrium is consistent with (and implies) some of the major empirical regularities observed in the literature on voting and disaster prevention. We discuss some implications of our analysis for advancing public debates about disaster and climate change mitigation.
DISASTERS id:489
TI: Reconstruction under siege: the Gaza Strip since 2007 ab: This paper examines the siege of the Gaza Strip, a self-governing Palestinian territory, since 2007. Research on sieges tends to concentrate on the coping strategies of besieged communities, humanitarian issues associated with the impacts, humanitarian access, and the prioritisation of needs, with little or no attention paid to reconstruction. However, Gaza is unusual as a siege environment within which reconstruction has become a high priority in the aftermath of its three destructive wars with Israel. Following an overview of research on sieges in contemporary warfare and a brief contextualisation of Gaza, this paper examines why reconstruction outcomes have varied over time through the application of a theoretical framework that stipulates the importance of four key factors: time; needs; scarcity; and political context. Based on an analysis of these variables, Gaza was found to be a most-likely case for reconstruction under siege. Nonetheless, the large-scale reconstruction necessary to transform Gaza has not been actualised.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC POLICY id:720
TI: Redistributing under fiscal constraint: partisanship, debt, inequality and labour market regulation ab: Labour market regulation varies significantly, both within and between developed democracies. While there has been extensive research and debate in economics on the consequences of labour market regulation, the political causes for levels and changes in labour market regulation have received less scholarly attention. This article investigates a political economy explanation for differences in labour market regulation building on a theoretical argument that labour regulation can be used as a nonfiscal redistribution tool. Consequently, partisanship, the demand for redistribution and government budget constraint jointly determine whether labour market regulation will increase or decrease. Consistent with this argument, panel analyses from 33 Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development countries reveal that labour market regulation increases under left-wing governments that face increased market inequality and high government debt.
SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY id:737
TI: Research funding's 'endorsement effect' on scientific boundary work and research production: Government legitimization of alternative medicine ab: This article demonstrates how science and technology policy can have an 'endorsement effect' that legitimizes and increases the salience of scientific research areas. The validation and increased attention provided by state funding policies can support the discursive boundary work of interested parties as they seek to situate research fields within mainstream science. Increased validity and attention can subsequently lead to increased research activity, above and beyond that funded by the state. This article demonstrates the endorsement effect by examining how the founding of the NIH's Office of Alternative Medicine affected both the discourse surrounding the legitimacy of alternative medicine, and the production of alternative medicine-related patents. The existence of this endorsement effect suggests that policymakers should consider both the direct effects that innovation policy might have on researchers' incentives as well as the endorsement effects it can have on the research system.
TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY id:773
TI: Story/Telling with Data as Distributed Activity ab: Based on a workplace ethnography of an organization referred to as the "Metro Data Cooperative," this article unpacks the multiple approaches to "storytelling with data" held by research subjects. The research suggests that "storytelling" is more than a discursive form that writers break into. Instead, because there are always multiple statistically supportable stories available, researchers and practitioners should understand storytelling as a malleable activity taking place with regard to multiple organizational and technical influences.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:761
TI: Fraught claims at the intersection of biology and sociality: Managing controversy in the neuroscience of poverty and adversity ab: In this article, I examine how a subfield of researchers studying the impact of poverty and adversity on the developing brain, cognitive abilities and mental health respond to criticism that their research is racist and eugenicist, and implies that affected children are broken on a biological level. My interviewees use a number of strategies to respond to these resurfacing criticisms. They maintain that the controversy rests upon a fundamental misunderstanding of their work. In addition, they use what I term plasticity talk', a form of anti-determinist discourse, to put forth what they believe is a hopeful conception of body and brain as fundamentally malleable. They draw attention to their explicit intentions to use scientific inquiry to mitigate inequality and further social justice - in fact, they believe their studies are powerful evidence that add to the literature on the social determinants of health. Though they may be interested in improving lives, they argue that their aims and means have little in common with programs trying to improve' the genetic stock of the population. I argue that theirs is a fraught research terrain, where any claims-making is potentially treacherous. Just as their studies of development refuse dualistic models, so too do their responses defy dichotomous categorization.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:45
TI: The end of media logics? On algorithms and agency ab: We argue that algorithms are an outcome rather than a replacement of media logics, and ultimately, we advance this argument by connecting human agency to media logics. This theoretical contribution builds on the notion that technology, particularly algorithms are non-neutral, arguing for a stronger focus on the agency that goes into designing and programming them. We reflect on the limits of algorithmic agency and lay out the role of algorithms and agency for the dimensions and elements of network media logic. The article concludes with addressing questions of power, discussing algorithmic agency from both meso and macro perspectives.
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY id:31
TI: The mismeasure of science: Citation analysis ab: For several decades we, among others, have criticized the use of citations for evaluative purposes. Although these criticisms have been noted, they have been largely brushed aside or ignored, not addressed head on. This may be for a number of reasons, but we believe the main one is that these criticisms undermine the desire to have an easy scientificthat is, quantitativemethod of evaluation. Consequently, we continue and update our criticism of the use of citations for evaluation.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC POLICY id:639
TI: Choosing lobbying sides: the General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union ab: Despite the impressive amount of empirical research on lobbying, a fundamental question remains overlooked. How do interest groups choose to lobby different sides of an issue? We argue that how groups choose sides is a function of firm-level economic activity. By studying a highly salient regulatory issue, the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and using a novel data set of lobbying activities, we reveal that a group's main economic sector matters most. Firms operating in finance and retail face unique costs and are incentivised to lobby against the GDPR. However, these groups are outgunned by a large, heterogeneous group of firms with superior lobbying firepower on the other side of the issue.
SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY id:719
TI: Combat Experience and the Foreign Policy Positions of Veterans ab: Objective Prior work on the effect of combat on veterans typically measures combat experience as a dichotomous event. I extend work in this area by theorizing and empirically accounting for the number of unique combat experiences a veteran endures and how that associates with the veteran's outlook on foreign policy. Methods I utilize an original survey that asks for multiple types of military combat experience, as well as foreign policy positions. Findings Consistent with previous research, I find that veterans tend to be more hawkish than civilians. When I account for veterans' number of unique combat experiences, however, I find that the more combat experiences that veterans endure, the less hawkish their foreign policy positions are. Moreover, consistent with literature from military psychology, this association only holds for veterans who express more regret about their time in the military. Conclusions The results should encourage public opinion scholars to consider the effects that the number of individual combat event experiences and regret have on veterans' issue positions more broadly.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:73
TI: #Islamexit: inter-group antagonism on Twitter ab: While analyses of Twitter have shown that it holds democratic potential, it can also provide a venue for hate speech against minorities. The articulation of opinion-based identities, the tendency to homophily, and the use of emotional discourses can indeed help spread verbal violence on Twitter. This paper discusses group polarization on Twitter through Mouffe's distinction of agonistic and antagonistic politics, as elaborated in the 2013 book Agonistic: Thinking the World Politically. The theory is supported by a practical example: a qualitative analysis of Islamophobic tweets sent in the aftermath of the 2016 British referendum on European Union membership, which is commonly referred to as Brexit'. Following the UK's decision to leave the EU, there was a surge of Islamophobic attacks on Twitter. My analysis reveals that anti-Islamic sentiments were articulated in terms of complex identities referring not only to religion but also to ethnicity, politics, and gender. The paper shows that these tweets are antagonistic in character because they prevent the dialogic participation of Muslims and propagate symbolic violence rather than engaging in constructive conflicts.
DISASTERS id:305
TI: Coordination in theory, coordination in practice: the case of the Clusters ab: The atomised nature of the humanitarian system has led to frequent and repeated attempts to coordinate humanitarian activity. Since 2005, some of the best resourced, and arguably most successful, coordination mechanisms have been the humanitarian Clusters, groups of UN (United Nations) and non-UN actors that engage in sectoral coordination of humanitarian response (such as the provision of healthcare and water) at the global and country level. Nevertheless, it is not clear exactly what coordination' means in the context of a Cluster. Formal guidance suggests that they should be aiming to create a single, joint strategy to guide the activities of members. Actual experience of the Clusters, however, indicates that looser forms of coordination are more effective. This finding resonates with organisational theory, and with the experience of emergency management professionals beyond the international humanitarian sector. To capitalise fully on the success of the Clusters, policymakers may need to rethink their attitudes to, and expectations of, coordination.
DISASTERS id:456
TI: Control or rescue at sea? Aims and limits of border surveillance technologies in the Mediterranean Sea ab: The matter of boat migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea, seeking to reach Europe, is interchangeably defined as a security issue', requiring stricter border controls, and as a humanitarian issue with corresponding rescue and protection requirements. This paper seeks to understand what role various surveillance technologies, such as radar, satellites, and unmanned aerial vehicles, can play in this respect (legally and technically), in comparison to the role that they are assigned (that is, political expectations). To unravel what surveillance technologies can and cannot do vis-a-vis the aims of control and rescue, there is a need to comprehend what information can be collected and what information is needed to fulfil these objectives. The paper contends that there is a mismatch between the information sought to control' borders, but which cannot be gathered effectively by or processed using surveillance technologies, and the valuable information needed to perform rescue operations, which these surveillance technologies can supply.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:119
TI: Evaluation in Nonprofit Organizations: An Empirical Analysis ab: Many factors influence the extent to which nonprofit organizations engage in evaluation. Drawing on organization theory, nonprofit scholarship, and public administration research, we propose a set of hypotheses concerning the interrelationships between organizational characteristics and various aspects of nonprofit evaluation. We test these hypotheses using combined data from an original national survey and IRS Forms 990. Analysis reveals that although higher levels of staff compensation support many aspects of evaluation, higher levels of executive compensation exert negative effects. Additionally, evaluation culture mediates the effects of several variables on evaluation rigor and frequency. Practical implications are discussed for scholars and practitioners.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:725
TI: Explaining Gun Deaths: Gun Control, Mental Illness, and Policymaking in the American States ab: Seeking to test two commonly proposed solutions to gun deaths in the United States, we examine the extent to which (1) tougher gun control laws, (2) greater access to mental health services, and (3) a combination of both approaches affect the rate of gun deaths in American states. We find that tougher gun control laws, as well as a combination of both approaches, are associated with a lower overall rate of gun deaths, and with a lower rate of nonsuicide gun deaths, while only tougher gun control laws are significantly associated with a reduction in the rate of gun-related suicides. Our findings serve as an initial guide to policymakers seeking to reduce the rate of gun deaths in their states.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE id:751
TI: For Safety or Profit? How Science Serves the Strategic Interests of Private Actors ab: Science is central to the regulation of risk. But who provides the science on which risk regulations are based? Through an in-depth empirical analysis of domestic health and safety standards, this article shows how private actors use scientific information to acquire preferential outcomes. I develop a formal model delineating conditions under which firms will seek stricter standards on their own products, and I reveal how companies can acquire these outcomes through the strategic provision of information. To test the theory, I track changes to U.S. agrochemical standards over a two-decade period. I also introduce firm-level petition data and historical evidence to test the mechanism directly. My findings provide new insight into the strategies companies use to benefit from regulations, while also forcing us to reevaluate what it means for regulations to be based on science.
DISASTERS id:777
TI: From concept to practice: the long road to operationalising protection ab: For the past two decades, humanitarian actors have been grappling increasingly with the complex issue of protecting civilians. The definition of protection adopted by humanitarians is considered to be too broad to provide effective operational direction. This paper aims to contribute to recent initiatives to operationalise protection. Teasing out a broad typology of humanitarian protection through an examination of the scope, objectives, and strategies of a range of humanitarian actors, it suggests, would result in better identification of gaps and the channelling of efforts to support a system-wide protection response. Emphasising recent calls for collective analysis as a means of eventuating protection, the paper also draws attention to the contested understanding that may arise concerning solutions to protection crises. Closely entwined with politics, protection defies neat technical solutions. The paper concludes that deepening knowledge of how communities conceive their own interests may provide the basis for a collective protection response.
TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY id:626
TI: Peering into the Internet Abyss: Using Big Data Audience Analysis to Understand Online Comments ab: This article offers a methodology for conducting large-scale audience analysis called "big data audience analysis" (BDAA). BDAA uses distant reading and thin description to examine a large corpus of text data from online audiences. In this article, that corpus is approximately 450,000 online reader comments. We analyze this corpus through sentiment analysis, statistical analysis, and geolocation to identify trends and patterns in large datasets. BDAA can better prepare TPC researchers for large-scale audience studies.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW id:526
TI: Seeing Transparency More Clearly ab: In recent years, transparency has been proposed as the solution to, and the cause of, a remarkable range of public problems. The proliferation of seemingly contradictory claims about transparency becomes less puzzling, this essay argues, when one appreciates that transparency is not, in itself, a coherent normative ideal. Nor does it have a straightforward instrumental relationship to any primary goals of governance. To gain greater purchase on how transparency policies operate, scholars must move beyond abstract assumptions and drill down to the specific legal, institutional, historical, political, and cultural contexts in which these policies are crafted and implemented. The field of transparency studies, in other words, is due for a "sociological turn."
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC POLICY id:702
TI: Crashing the party: advocacy coalitions and the nonpartisan primary ab: California and Washington recently replaced traditional partisan elections with nonpartisan "top-two" election procedures. Some reform advocates hoped that voters would behave in a way to support moderate candidates in the primary stage; the limited evidence for this behaviour has led some scholars to conclude that the reform has little chance to change meaningful policy outcomes. Yet we find that the nonpartisan procedure has predictable and disparate political consequences: the general elections between two candidates of the same party, called copartisan general elections, tend to occur in districts without any meaningful crossparty competition. Furthermore, copartisan elections are more likely to occur with open seats, when a new legislator will begin building a network of relationships. The results, viewed through the lens of the Advocacy Coalition Framework, suggest that opportunities exist for coalitional rearrangement over time.
DISASTERS id:622
TI: The Syrian refugee crisis: how local governments and NGOs manage their image via social media ab: This study, based on situational crisis communication theory and set in the context of the Syrian refugee crisis, seeks first to conduct a comparative analysis of the management of online citizen engagement by local governments and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Second, it aims to examine the relationship between certain factors pertaining to the types of responses submitted by citizens via the social media of the aforementioned actors. The sample is composed of several Spanish local governments and NGOs belonging to Red de Municipios de Acogida de Refugiados (Local Government Network for Refugee Allocation). The main findings are that NGOs' online engagement with citizens is more than that of local governments. Notably, NGOs are much more active on their Facebook pages than are local governments. The two actors converge, though, in terms of disseminating instructive information and paying less attention to 'basic crisis response options'. Moreover, the factors 'content type', 'reputation', and 'woman' affect the type of response messages sent by citizens.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:704
TI: Whistleblowing in a time of digital (in)visibility: towards a sociology of 'grey areas' ab: There are currently no concerted attempts to understand the role of whistleblowers in the new social and political environment created by digital ICTs. Digital ICTs drive an acceleratingvisibilitywhere elites and citizens constantly acquire new tools to track, surveil, and scrutinize each other. Moreover, these technologies make possible a new kind ofinvisibility. Increasingly complex modes of digital data production and usage generategrey areasthat seem to escape legal jurisdiction and democratic oversight. With their privileged accessinsidethese grey areas, conscientious employees-turned-whistleblowers are likely to become key sources for the disclosure of serious wrongdoing in the coming years. The argument is empirically illustrated through three cases that represent different types of grey areas in advanced democracies: big data surveillance (Edward Snowden), tax havens (Antoine Deltour and the Panama and Paradise Papers), and digital political profiling (Christopher Wylie).
DISASTERS id:80
TI: How emergency managers (mis?)interpret forecasts ab: Emergency managers who work on floods and other weather-related hazards constitute critical frontline responders to disasters. Yet, while these professionals operate in a realm rife with uncertainty related to forecasts and other unknowns, the influence of uncertainty on their decision-making is poorly understood. Consequently, a national-level survey of county emergency managers in the United States was administered to examine how they interpret forecast information, using hypothetical climate, flood, and weather scenarios to simulate their responses to uncertain information. The study revealed that even emergency managers with substantial experience take decision shortcuts and make biased choices, just as do members of the general population. Their choices vary depending on such features as the format in which probabilistic forecasts are presented and whether outcomes are represented as gains or losses. In sum, forecast producers who consider these decision processes when developing and communicating forecasts could help to improve flood preparation and potentially reduce disaster losses.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:241
TI: Information before information theory: The politics of data beyond the perspective of communication ab: Scholarship on the politics of new media widely assumes that communication functions as a sufficient conceptual paradigm for critically assessing new media politics. This article argues that communication-centric analyses fail to engage the politics of information itself, limiting information only to its consequences for communication, and neglecting information as it reaches into our selves, lives, and actions beyond the confines of communication. Furthering recent new media historiography on the information theory of Shannon and Wiener, the article reveals both the primacy of communication in midcentury information theory, and also a striking resonance between these postwar communication theories and Habermas's more recent communicative theory of democracy. To achieve a critical perspective beyond communication, the article proposes a media genealogy of the politics of subjects as a methodology for developing an analysis of how information formats us as subjects of data.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:363
TI: Managing the Gaps: How Performance Gaps Shape Managerial Decision Making ab: Much literature provides insights on the effect of managerial decisions on organizational performance. This research has given less attention to the determinants, rather than the effects, of variance in managerial decisions. This study seeks to determine whether decisions vary when performance gaps are based on subjective clientele ratings or more objective performance output information. By combining data from an original survey of hospital CEOs, the American Hospital Association and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, we find that multiple managerial decisions are explained by both historical and social aspirational gaps, but that shifts in priorities vary depending on how performance is defined.
TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY id:638
TI: Matters of Form: Questions of Race, Identity, Design, and the U.S. Census ab: This case examines how functionalist approaches manifest culturally based on users' contexts. The authors conduct a critical visual semiotic analysis of the race and Hispanic origin questions on the 2010 U.S. Census form, demonstrating how incongruities in design potentially harm people. This demonstrates a need for adding critical analyses to design and research and it refocuses the Society for Technical Communication's value of promoting the public good on to design and documentation in order to fight injustice.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:346
TI: Red Tape, Rule Burden, and Legitimate Performance Trade-Offs: Results from a Vignette Experiment ab: Goals in the public sector are complex and managers can face situations in which pursuing one legitimate goal necessitates performance trade-offs in other areas. This study tests how knowledge of legitimate performance trade-offs shapes the perception of red tape. Using a vignette experimental design and a sample of university students, between group t-tests and regression analyses suggest that, when evaluating increased rule burden, individuals that are provided with information about how objectively burdensome rules serve alternative values such as equity and effectiveness associate them with lower levels of red tape. A series of Monte Carlo simulations suggest that this effect is substantial.
PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE id:20
TI: Scientists' views about communication objectives ab: This study looks at how United States-based academic scientists from five professional scientific societies think about eight different communication objectives. The degree to which scientists say they would prioritize these objectives in the context of face-to-face public engagement is statistically predicted using the scientists' attitudes, normative beliefs, and efficacy beliefs, as well as demographics and past communication activity, training, and past thinking about the objectives. The data allow for questions about the degree to which such variables consistently predict views about objectives. The research is placed in the context of assessing factors that communication trainers might seek to reshape if they wanted get scientists to consider choosing specific communication objectives.
PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE id:522
TI: Stakeholder relations in Australian science journalism ab: This study explores the relationships between scientists, science communicators and science journalists in Australia. Building upon a smaller previous study, this article provides an overview of the science media landscape across a nation through the use of semi-structured interviews with members of stakeholder groups. Although relationships between each of the groups are generally positive, a lack of clear understanding of the professional practice and cultures of the different groups sometimes appear to hinder positive interactions. Many scientists continue to lament the need for journalists to understand more science, yet very few make similar comments about the need for scientists to know more about media. Refocusing on sharing the responsibility for science reporting may be a means of bridging the identified cultural divide.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:114
TI: Activating the past in the Ferguson protests: Memory work, digital activism and the politics of platforms ab: This article analyzes the Facebook page Justice for Mike Brownset up during the 2014 Ferguson protestsin order to rethink the role of memory work within contemporary digital activism. We argue that, as a particular type of discursive practice, memory work on the page bridged personal and collective action frames. This occurred in four overlapping ways. First, the page allowed for affective commemorative engagement that helped shape Brown's public image. Second, Brown's death was contextualized as part of systematic injustice against African Americans. Third, the past was used to legitimize present action, wherein the present was continually connected to the past and future. And fourth, particular discursive units became recognizable symbolic markers during the protests and for future recall. Based on this typology, we show that memory work, although multidirectional and in flux, is stabilized by the interactions between the page administrator, users, and Facebook's operational logic.
TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY id:608
TI: Visualizing Certainty: What the Cultural History of the Gantt Chart Teaches Technical and Professional Communicators about Management ab: Using a cultural-historical genre analysis of the Gantt chart, the author describes how, when a project's progress and scope are being considered, this popular project management visualization evokes managerial values of certainty and simplicity. These values, instantiated in early 20th-century scientific management philosophy, are made visually manifest in Henry L. Gantt's popular chart. These charts require technical and professional communicators to gauge the rhetorical implications of using them when providing their expertise in communicating project management.
RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS id:586
TI: DOCUMENTING DEATH BY POLICY: PUBLIC GRIEVABILITY, MIGRANT LIVES, AND COMMONPLACE DENIALS ab: Documentary mediums have been called upon to refute denials of mass suffering throughout the twentieth century. This essay argues that refutation is a documentary impulse as definitive as the mission to amplify marginalized voices. Moreover, patterns in refuting denials of harm and moral responsibility indicate shifting conditions of public grievability. Comparing over a dozen documentaries about Prevention through Deterrence-a border control strategy nationalized under the Clinton administration-the analysis shows that migrant fatality maps and forensic lab footage not only document death but also refute commonplace denials of migrant human rights.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:557
TI: 'Every expression is watched': Mind, medical expertise and display in the nineteenth-century English courtroom ab: The growing presence of medical experts in the English courtroom during the early nineteenth century presented new challenges with regard to how those experts would exert their authority in an adversarial setting. This article examines the ways in which mental science practitioners responded when confronted with the need to testify as to the soundness or unsoundness of mind of an individual in the context of a legal proceeding. It argues that they often engaged in 'a double act of self-fashioning'. On the one hand, they attempted to fashion their personae into representations of truth-telling beings; on the other hand, they sought to present testimony in such a way that the judge or jury could diagnose the individual's alleged soundness or unsoundness of mind for themselves, and they sought to do this without leaving any trace of their own efforts. The procedures and presumptions of the English courtroom thus created an epistemic space in which physicians (and other scientific experts) were frequently presented with the puzzle of how to translate determinations arrived at on the basis of often recondite professional knowledge and years of experience into manifestations that could be made visible to a lay audience. Moreover, they had to do this in a setting in which every significant claim was likely to be disputed by adversary counsel and rival experts.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF DISASTER RISK REDUCTION id:111
TI: A critical analysis of vulnerability ab: Vulnerability is a concept fundamental to the theoretical and practical dimensions of disasters. Paralleling, and sometimes diverging from, the dominant physicalist discourse in disaster studies, disaster management and engineering-oriented studies, the conceptualisations of vulnerability and their application have undergone several transformations. In this paper, I critically examine the naissance, use and critiques of a structural understanding of vulnerability in the context of disasters. I contend that a structural understanding of vulnerability is less problematic than its physicalist predecessor from both theoretical and practical perspectives, but it is not unassailable. In fact, not only does structural vulnerability have an Achilles heel, but its potentially fatal flaws are shared by the physicalist paradigm. Instead of rejecting the structural vulnerability paradigm or being paralysed by the apparent impasse, I argue that scholars, practitioners and policy-makers should focus on the ways in which structural vulnerability benefits disaster theory and practice, and foreground the relational character of vulnerability.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:206
TI: Angels versus Devils: The Portrayal of Characters in the Gun Policy Debate ab: This research examines the role of the devil shift and angel shift in interest group rhetoric using the case of gun policy. The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) suggests that the devil shift-whereby political actors characterize their opponents as more malicious and powerful than they actually are-is common in intractable policy debates. Through an analysis of e-mails and press releases by two gun control organizations and two gun rights organizations, I examine how groups portray themselves and their opponents. I identify two dimensions relevant to these portrayals: (1) whether a character in a policy narrative is portrayed as good or evil, and (2) whether a character is portrayed as strong or weak. The findings indicate that while the devil shift is present, the angel shift-that is, the glorification of one's own coalition-is more common in gun policy groups' communications. Two alternative characterizations, which I call the angel in distress and the devil diminished, are also present. The use of these character portrayals varies significantly across political coalitions and as a function of communication purposes. The results suggest a need to reconceptualize character portrayals to better understand how they operate as narrative strategies in the NPF.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:411
TI: Becoming the expert constructing health knowledge in epistemic communities online ab: From a discourse analytic framework, the article analyses health blogs and patient's forum discussions in which parents to children with congenital heart defects recontextualize medical professional knowledge and share their own experiences. The study show how the two types of online media may serve as a means for parents to attain expert status in their own case by sharing lay knowledge expressed as an amalgamation of the two key perspectives - professional and experienced - as an indivisible unit. Monological discourses, such as narrating, in blogs and more direct and immediate responses in forum discussions are noted as examples of differences in how medical facts are explained and negotiated, how advice is provided and how patient expertise is created. The study also show how blogs and especially forum discussions are used to problematize the validity of actions and opinions of medical staff. The role of developing patient expertise in epistemic communities online may therefore come with a risk of spreading misrepresentation of medical cases.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW id:102
TI: Corporatization in the Public Sector: Explaining the Growth of Local Government Companies ab: The creation of companies by local governments to provide public services-referred to as "corporatization"-is an example of systemic public entrepreneurship that is popular across the world. To build knowledge of the antecedents of public sector entrepreneurship, the authors investigate the factors that lead local governments to create companies for public service delivery. Using zero-inflated negative binomial regressions to analyze secondary data from 150 major English local governments for 2010-16, the authors find that governments with higher levels of grant dependence and debt dependence are more involved in the creation and operation of companies, as are larger governments. Further analysis reveals that very low and very high managerial capabilities are strongly associated with more involvement in profit-making companies, while local government involvement in companies is more prevalent in deprived areas. At the same time, government ownership of companies is more common in areas with high economic output.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:192
TI: Datafication, development and marginalised urban communities: an applied data justice framework ab: The role of data within international development is rapidly expanding. However, the recency of this phenomenon means analysis has been lagging; particularly, analysis of broader impacts of real-world initiatives. Addressing this gap through a focus on data's increasing presence in urban development, this paper makes two contributions. First - drawing from the emerging literature on data justice' - it presents an explicit, systematic and comprehensive new framework that can be used for analysis of datafication. Second, it applies the framework to four mapping initiatives in cities of the global South. These initiatives capture and visualise new data about marginalised communities: residents living in slums and other informal settlements about whom data has traditionally been lacking. Analysing across procedural, rights, instrumental and structural dimensions, it finds these initiatives deliver real incremental gains for their target communities. But it is external actors and wealthier communities that gain more; thus, increasing relative inequality.
PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE id:641
TI: Defeating Merchants of Doubt: Subjective certainty and self-affirmation ameliorate attitude polarization via partisan motivated reasoning ab: Informed by uncertainty-identity theory, this study tested the polarizing effect of partisan-led politicization of science and ways to combat it. Using a national sample of South Koreans (N = 840), our online experiment found that when partisan elites, as opposed to scientists (or civic activists), spearheaded politicization, attitude polarization emerged via partisan motivated reasoning. Such polarizing effects of party cues did not persist when subjective certainty and self-affirmation enhanced the level of certainty partisans felt about their surroundings and themselves. These patterns proved consistent across multiple scientific issues, including climate change, genetically modified foods, and algae blooms. The implications of the findings are discussed in light of how to attenuate the polarizing effect of partisan-led politicization through the lens of social identity approaches. Given that this study provides one of the first pieces of evidence on the topic outside the Western context, the advantages of using a South Korean sample are noted.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW id:434
TI: Designing to Debias: Measuring and Reducing Public Managers' Anchoring Bias ab: Public managers' decisions are affected by cognitive biases. For instance, employees' previous year's performance ratings influence new ratings irrespective of actual performance. Nevertheless, experimental knowledge of public managers' cognitive biases is limited, and debiasing techniques have rarely been studied. Using a survey experiment on 1,221 public managers and employees in the United Kingdom, this research (1) replicates two experiments on anchoring to establish empirical generalization across institutional contexts and (2) tests a consider-the-opposite debiasing technique. The results indicate that anchoring bias replicates in a different institutional context, although effect sizes differ. Furthermore, a low-cost, low-intensity consider-the-opposite technique mitigates anchoring bias in this survey experiment. An exploratory subgroup analysis indicates that the effect of the intervention depends on context. The next step is to test this strategy in real-world settings.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:507
TI: Digital Sousveillance: A Network Analysis of the US Surveillant Assemblage ab: This paper introduces a new methodological approach to the study of surveillance that I call digital sousveillance-the co-optation of digital data and the use of computational methods and techniques to resituate technologies of control and surveillance of individuals to instead observe the organizational observer. To illustrate the potential of this method, I employ quantitative network analytic methods to trace the changes in and development of the vast network of public and private organizations involved in surveillance operations in the United States-what I term the "US surveillant assemblage"-from the 1970s to the 2000s. The results of the network analyses suggest that the US surveillant assemblage is becoming increasingly privatized and that the line between "public" and "private" is becoming blurred as private organizations are, at an increasing rate, partnering with the US government to engage in mass surveillance.
JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION id:524
TI: Dismantling Respectability: The Rise of New Womanist Communication Models in the Era of Black Lives Matter ab: Legacy media coverage of the Civil Rights Movement often highlighted charismatic male leaders, such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., while scores of Black women worked quietly in the background. Today's leaders of the modern Black Lives Matter movement have turned this paradigm on its face. This case study explores the revamped communication styles of four Black feminist organizers who led the early Black Lives Matter Movement of 2014: Brittany Ferrell, Alicia Garza, Brittany Packnett, and Marissa Johnson. Additionally, the study includes Ieshia Evans: a high-profile, independent, anti-police brutality activist. In a series of semi-structured interviews, the women shared that their keen textual and visual dismantling of Black respectability politics led to a mediated hyper-visibility that their forebearers never experienced. The women share the advantages and disadvantages of this approach, and weigh in on the sustainability of their communication methods for future Black social movements.
POLITICS & POLICY id:388
TI: Encouraging Action in the Private Sphere: Demand-Side Practices in the Depoliticization of Economic Policy in Israel ab: The neoliberal depoliticization of economic policy is commonly seen as consisting of "supply-side" practices of removing, denying, and closing avenues for public action of politicians and societal actors. I argue that this view overlooks "demand-side" practices that actively encourage action in the private sphere through constructing and legitimating private action channels for societal actors to attend to their economic needs and wants. These channels are crucial for the depoliticization of economic policy since their declining effectiveness can stimulate processes of repoliticization. This article focuses on higher education in Israel as a case study of such a channel. Higher education has been constructed institutionally and legitimated discursively by politicians and bureaucrats as a channel for action in the private sphere, by employing the logic of education as human capital. The declining effectiveness of this private action channel contributed to the eruption of mass protest in 2011 which repoliticized economic policy.
COMPUTER SUPPORTED COOPERATIVE WORK-THE JOURNAL OF COLLABORATIVE COMPUTING id:165
TI: From Work to Life and Back Again: Examining the Digitally-Mediated Work/Life Practices of a Group of Knowledge Workers ab: This paper presents the results of a qualitative study exploring the technologically-mediated practices of work/life balancing, blurring and boundary-setting of a cohort of professionals in knowledge-intensive roles in Sheffield, a regional city in Northern England. It contributes to a growing body of CSCW research on the complex interweaving of work and non-work tasks, demands and on the boundaries that can be supported or hindered by digital technologies. In the paper, we detail how a cohort of 26 professionals in knowledge-intensive roles devise diverse strategies for handling work and non-work in light of a set of interconnected forces, and we argue that boundary dissolving and work-life blurring, and not just boundary setting and "balancing", are essential resources within such strategies. We also show how boundary sculpting pertains not only to work pervading personal spheres of life, but also the opposite, and that establishing, softening and dissolving boundaries are practiced to handle situations when the personal seeps into professional life.
DISASTERS id:204
TI: Humanitarian governance and resilience building: Ethiopia in comparative perspective ab: Humanitarian governance is usually understood according to the classic, Dunantist paradigm that accords central importance to international humanitarian agencies. However, this is increasingly paralleled by 'resilience humanitarianism' that focuses, among other things, on including national actors in humanitarian governance. This article views humanitarian governance as emerging through interactions between authorities, implementing agencies and communities. It is based on interactive ethnography in five countries by Partners for Resilience (PfR). Using the Theory of Change (ToC) tool, it analyses the various interpretations and priorities of actors involved in humanitarian problems, solutions and programme governance. For example, PfR had a 'software' focus, aiming to unlock communities' potential for resilience, whereas communities and authorities preferred to receive tangible 'hardware' support. The findings highlight the crucial role of local authorities in shaping humanitarian aid. This is especially pertinent in view of the international agenda to localise aid, which requires the understanding and support of national actors in order to responsibly protect the vulnerable.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:540
TI: Hyperconnectivity and (Im)mobility: Uber and Surveillance Capitalism by the Global South ab: Apart from governments' increased opportunities to monitor citizens, businesses, civil servants, and services, companies are mobilizing personal data to build profitable, algorithmically based business models with profound ramifications. With companies that have rapidly become giants in this sector, such as Uber, the phenomenon is spreading to various services at the same overwhelming speed as many companies bet on what is known as Uberization. In this paper, we aim to use one example of such a phenomenon from the Global South to show how a potential hyperconnected society is, in fact, creating the possibility for expanded patterns of immobilization for certain groups. We aim to show how highly indirect corporate surveillance involved in businesses such as Uber can run in parallel with a specific direct form of worker surveillance that, without any legal or social safeguards, increases the vulnerability of the weakest link in this chain.
SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY id:732
TI: Involving stakeholders in policymaking: tensions emerging from a public dialogue with knowledge-based entrepreneurs ab: The aim of this article is to discuss the tensions that are created between Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) communities during the dialogue process. The main argument revolves around the idea that public participation in STI is a complex process where communities with different expectations, logics, language codes, and dynamics of power relations participate. As a result, diverse tensions emerge during the dialogue process. To deal with these tensions, it is necessary to identify them, and appropriate and contextualize the methods of public participation in a flexible way to have instruments that allow overcoming such tensions and reaching better results. This article draws on and expands current empirical efforts to discuss public participation methods. It is based on a case study of a public dialogue experience between knowledge-based entrepreneurs with policymakers to identify the most important challenges that they face and the implications for STI policy in Mexico.
SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY id:168
TI: It Takes Three: How Mass Media Coverage Conditions Public Responsiveness to Policy Outputs in the United States ab: Objective Democratic governance requires that policy outcomes and public demand for policy be linked. While studies have shown empirical support for such a relationship in various policy domains, empirical evidence also indicates that the public is relatively unaware of policy outputs. This raises a puzzle: Why do policy outputs influence public attitudes if the public knows little about them? Methods This study seeks to address this paradox by examining the conditioning role of media coverage. We rely on data derived from the Policy Agendas Project in the United States, allowing us to analyze the relationship between policy outcomes, public preferences, and newspaper content across a long span of time (1972-2007). Results Our results indicate that public policy preferences respond to policy outputs, and that this relationship is strengthened by greater media attention to a policy area. Importantly, our findings also indicate that without media attention to a policy area, there is no direct effect of policy outputs on public demand for policy. Conclusions Media coverage appears to be a key factor for public responsiveness to occur. In the absence of policy coverage by the media, public responsiveness to policy outputs is greatly reduced.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC POLICY id:463
TI: Lawmaking in American Legislatures: an empirical investigation ab: Given pervasive gridlock at the national level, state legislatures are increasingly the place where notable policy change occurs. Investigating such change is difficult because it is often hard to characterise policy change and use observable data to evaluate theoretical predictions; it is subsequently unclear whether law-making explanations focusing on the US Congress also apply to state legislatures. We use several measures of state policy outcomes to examine lawmaking in state legislatures across nearly two decades, and we argue for using simulation studies to connect theoretical predictions to empirical specifications and help interpret the theoretical relevance of estimated correlations. Doing so reveals that the observed law-making outcomes we study are most consistent with law-making models emphasising the importance of the chamber median and the powers of the governor rather than those that focus on the preferences of the majority party.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:779
TI: Mainstreaming Colonial Experiences in Surveillance studies ab: Decolonizing surveillance studies is an urgent task, needed to comprehend the unequal impacts of surveillance technologies in the past, present, and future. I discuss three aspects of research in comparison: technological novelty versus past experience, nation building versus colonization, and test versus initial operation of technology. Overall, I argue for the significance of colonial narratives that illustrate the early and severe, often violent experiences of surveillance that tend to be historically underestimated or politically concealed. First, scholarly work has been attracted to technological novelties of digital surveillance. But to grasp the social implications of surveillance, the historical background of technology offers a genealogical thread, and the past awaits as a rich repository to be discovered. Second, previous studies have drawn plural origins of modern surveillance from Western civilization. But modern nation building and colonialism should be examined together in research, rather than separating them and placing nation building as central to modernization while placing colonialism as a side effect or exception of modernization. Such a separation fails to grasp the experiences of modern surveillance as a whole because nation-state is all too often colonial nation-state. Lastly, I question the prevailing concept of a "boomerang effect," meaning that Western countries first test out harmful techniques on colonies, but soon these techniques come home. This boomerang effect view centers on the West. A "test" of surveillance technology targeted a group of people for its own purpose, and the systematic practice of surveillance left irreversible effects in colonies. Those effects immensely contributed to today's foundation of global political economy as an ongoing process of technological dominance of the Global North over the South. To decolonize surveillance studies, it would be better to discuss the global experiences of surveillance in the frame of unequal distribution and outcome of technology.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:706
TI: Managerial Friction and Land-Use Policy Punctuations in the Fragmented Metropolis ab: Despite the portrayal of bureaucratic organizations as resistant to change, public managers have some ability to strategically move land-use processes out of incrementalism, even when bureaucratic lethargy acts as a drag. This article examines managerial influence in land-use policy by synthesizing theories of political markets and punctuated equilibrium. An information-processing logic is developed to explain why local government managers shift from "inward" to "outward" land-use management strategies in periods of environmental change. "Managerial friction" is defined as a strategic managerial adjustment producing punctuated land-use policy change in the face of environmental changing conditions. Hypotheses are tested using data on Florida local government comprehensive plan amendments and a Bayesian methodological approach. The evidence suggests managerial friction can be distinguished from the effects of environmental and political complexity as well as other forms of institutional friction, including management turnover, legislative institutions, and bureaucratic structure.
DISASTERS id:539
TI: Monitoring and reporting attacks on education in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Somalia ab: The United Nations' Monitoring and Reporting Mechanism is charged with documenting six grave violations against children in a time of conflict, including attacks on schools. Many of these incidents, however, remain unreported across the globe. This study explores whether or not a local knowledge base of education and child protection actors in North and South Kivu Provinces, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and in Mogadishu, Somalia, could contribute to a more complete record of attacks on education in those areas. Hundreds of semi-structured interviews were conducted with key informants across the three settings, and in total 432 attacks on education were documented. Purposive samples of these reports were verified and a large majority was confirmed. Local non-governmental organisations and education institutions were most knowledgeable about these incidents, but most never reported them to a monitoring authority. The study concludes that attack surveillance and response were largely insufficient, and recommends investing in mechanisms that utilise local knowledge to address these shortcomings.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW id:563
TI: Path-Dependent Public Servants: Comparing the Influence of Traditions on Administrative Behavior in Developing Asia ab: This article compares the motivations and attitudes of public servants in Kazakhstan (n = 627) and Pakistan (n = 207) by analyzing quantitative and qualitative survey data. A comparison of these two developing Asian countries with distinct administrative traditions and path dependencies contributes to the public administration literature on developing countries. This literature often treats public servants in developing countries as a single category, with little contextualization of findings. This study finds that despite an overlap in Islamic societal values, public servants' motivations and attitudes differ: lower prosocial proclivity and more aspiration for money in Kazakhstan may be partly explained by the Soviet administrative tradition, while prosocial propensity and lower concern with pay in Pakistan may be attributed to the South Asian tradition. The authors conclude that historical legacies help explain cross-country differences in employee motivation and attitudes. The findings also improve our knowledge about the potential of reforms within the examined conditions.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:278
TI: Perceptions of Discretion in Street-Level Public Service: Examining Administrative Governance in Romania ab: Street-level bureaucrats have long been seen as key figures in program and policy implementation, often occupying unique positions that encompass executive, legislative, and judicial functions. Osborne's concept of the New Public Governance addresses concepts of policy implementation and interpretive activities that characterize street-level bureaucracy. Current understanding of street-level bureaucracy is, however, dominated by research focused on the United States and the United Kingdom, both of which demonstrate differences from countries in Eastern Europe. This study uses survey data to examine street-level bureaucracy in Romania, with attention to the determinants of bureaucratic perceptions of discretion. Results indicate that proactive personality, prosocial motivation, autonomy, job satisfaction, and years of experience are related to individual perceptions of discretionary latitude among front-line workers.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC POLICY id:454
TI: Political control and policy-making uncertainty in executive orders: the implementation of environmental justice policy ab: Environmental justice (EJ) has represented an important equity challenge in policymaking for decades. President Clinton's executive order (EO) 12898 in 1994 represented a significant federal action, requiring agencies to account for EJ issues in new rulemakings. We examine the impact of EO 12898 within the larger question of how EO are implemented in complex policymaking. We argue that presidential preferences will affect bureaucratic responsiveness and fire alarm oversight. However, EJ policy complexity produces uncertainty leading to bureaucratic risk aversion, constraining presidential efforts to steer policy. We utilise an original data set of nearly 2,000 final federal agency rules citing EO 12898 and find significant variation in its utilisation across administrations. Uncertainty over the nature of the order has an important influence on bureaucratic responsiveness. Our findings are instructive for the twin influences of political control and policy-making uncertainty and raise useful questions for future EJ and policy implementation research.
PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE id:529
TI: Predefined criteria and interpretative flexibility in legal courts' evaluation of expertise ab: This study examines two different approaches in empirical analysis of judges' evaluation of expertise in court: first, an analyst-based approach that employs predefined normative criteria to measure judges' performance, and second, an actor-based approach that emphasizes interpretative flexibility in judges' evaluation practice. I demonstrate how these different approaches to investigating judges' adjudication lead to differing understandings about judges' abilities to evaluate scientific evidence and testimonial. Although the choice of analytical approach might depend on context and purpose in general, I contend that in assessing judges' competence, an actor-based approach that adequately describes the way in which judges relate to and handle expertise is required to properly understand and explain how judges evaluate expertise. The choice of approach is especially important if the resulting understanding of judges' competence is subsequently used as a basis for making normative and prescriptive claims with potential consequences for trial outcomes.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:591
TI: Recovering critique in an age of datafication ab: This article starts out from the need for critical work on processes of datafication and their consequences for the constitution of social knowledge and the social world. Current social science work on datafication has been greatly shaped by the theoretical approach of Bruno Latour, as reflected in the work of Actor Network Theory and Science and Technology Studies (ANT/STS). The article asks whether this approach, given its philosophical underpinnings, provides sufficient resources for the critical work that is required in relation to datafication. Drawing on Latour's own reflections about the flatness of the social, it concludes that it does not, since key questions, in particular about the nature of social order cannot be asked or answered within ANT. In the article's final section, three approaches from earlier social theory are considered as possible supplements to ANT/STS for a social science serious about addressing the challenges that datafication poses for society.
PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE id:284
TI: Scientific networks on Twitter: Analyzing scientists' interactions in the climate change debate ab: Scientific issues requiring urgent societal actions-such as climate change-have increased the need for communication and interaction between scientists and other societal actors. Social media platforms facilitate such exchanges. This study investigates who scientists interact with on Twitter, and whether their communication differs when engaging with actors beyond the scientific community. We focus on the climate change debate on Twitter and combine network analysis with automated content analysis. The results show that scientists interact most intensively with their peers, but also communication beyond the scientific community is important. The findings suggest that scientists adjust their communication style to their audience: They use more neutral language when communicating with other scientists, and more words expressing negative emotions when communicating with journalists, civil society, and politicians. Likewise, they stress certainty more when communicating with politicians, indicating that scientists use language strategically when communicating beyond the scientific community.
SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY id:739
TI: Structural Inequality and Ethnic Bloc Voting ab: ObjectiveA large body of ethnic politics literature suggests that horizontal inequalities exacerbate ethnic conflict. However, the relationship between intergroup inequality and ethnic bloc voting behavior has escaped empirical analysis. We test the relationship between ethnic bloc voting and horizontal inequality by examining how relative disparity affects individuals' probability of supporting the same political party as other co-ethnics. MethodsThis project uses data from the Integrated World and European Values Survey to test the relationship between relative disparity and ethnic bloc support in ethnically polarized states from 1981 to 2006. ResultsOur findings indicate that the probability of supporting the same party as other co-ethnics is influenced by within-group as well as between-group inequality, while being relatively unaffected by individual-level income. ConclusionWe conclude that increasing horizontal inequality, and not individual resources, leads to higher rates of ethnically polarized voting, which may lead to greater levels of ethnic conflict.
POLITICS & POLICY id:733
TI: The Interaction of Policy Narratives, Moral Politics, and Criminal Justice Policy Beliefs ab: Criminal justice reform is one of the many contentious issues we face in an increasingly polarized political climate. Differing perceptions of issues like these may be explained by underlying belief systems and expressed through narratives. This study employs the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) by Moral Politics Theory as the theoretical underpinning for policy narratives. Moral Politics Theory states that policy beliefs are shaped by either a Strict Father (individual responsibility) or Nurturant Parent (societal responsibility) worldview. Visitors to Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site read one criminal justice narrative from each worldview and selected which was more persuasive. Worldview and policy beliefs predicted which narrative was found persuasive; however, the analysis revealed there may be bilateral support for a combination of individual and societal responsibilities. Finally, this study supports and expands the NPF to a new context and population.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:143
TI: The Nexus of Public and Nonprofit Management ab: The fields of public administration and nonprofit management have experienced convergence over the past decades, particularly as academic programs, conferences, and journals in public administration have increasingly embraced nonprofit management. Given the significance of this development, the lack of a formal theoretical basis for convergence is surprising and potentially problematic. This article attempts to formalize such a basis by expositing the shared constitutive features of public and nonprofit management. These features include social goods provision, outcome ambiguity, delegation, and surplus nondistribution. Analysis of these features-and consideration of alternative explanations-demonstrates that a consolidated field of "public and nonprofit management" may be warranted by definite theoretical principles. The existence of this theoretical basis may provide stakeholders with opportunities to approach and manage the process of convergence more strategically.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:495
TI: The Surveillance Dimensions of the Use of Social Media by UK Police Forces ab: This paper explores the various surveillance practices involved in the use of social media for communication and investigation purposes by UK police forces. In doing so, it analyses internal policy documents and official guidance obtained through freedom of information (FOI) requests sent to 46 police forces in the United Kingdom. This analysis finds that UK police forces advise their staff to simultaneously engage in both surveillance and counter-surveillance strategies in their use of social media as a policing tool.
PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE id:710
TI: The contribution of supply and demand factors to the reproduction of hierarchies online: The case of crowdfunding of scientific research ab: We conceptualize mechanisms that explain how social uses of media technologies, especially online platforms and crowds, reproduce, or modify inequalities, and explore these in the context of the crowdfunding of science. We distinguish between "supply side" factors related to the ability of actors given their institutional standing to use this funding approach, and "demand side" factors related to the crowd's sensitivity to the institutional standing of those actors. We collected data on scientists requesting funding for their studies on , arguably the most popular scientific crowdfunding platform, and investigated the factors contributing to initiation and success. Supply side factors were important: crowdfunding appeals tended to come from scientists affiliated with larger, wealthier, and more active and prestigious institutions. However, demand side factors were not as important at the institutional level. Crowdfunding projects' success was not predicted by the institution's status, but rather by the number of appeals from an institution.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:513
TI: The disconcerting potential of online disinformation: Persuasive effects of astroturfing comments and three strategies for inoculation against them ab: This study is the first to scrutinize the psychological effects of online astroturfing in the context of Russia's digitally enabled foreign propaganda. Online astroturfing is a communicative strategy that uses websites, "sock puppets," or social bots to create the false impression that a particular opinion has widespread public support. We exposed N = 2353 subjects to pro-Russian astroturfing comments and tested: (1) their effects on political opinions and opinion certainty and (2) the efficiency of three inoculation strategies to prevent these effects. All effects were investigated across three issues and from a short- and long-term perspective. Results show that astroturfing comments can indeed alter recipients' opinions, and increase uncertainty, even when subjects are inoculated before exposure. We found exclusively short-term effects of only one inoculation strategy (refutational-same). As these findings imply, preemptive media literacy campaigns should deploy (1) continuous rather than one-time efforts and (2) issue specific rather than abstract inoculation messages.
DISASTERS id:786
TI: The future of disasters studies: new disasters and the case of the Horn of Africa ab: Past disasters have been well studied, but the challenge of using the findings to improve the management of future events remains a daunting task. This paper argues that there are new and complex disasters of which the state itself has become the main source, as reflected in the Horn of Africa. This region is characterised by increasing vulnerability owing to the alarming decline of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism. These new disasters are less researched because of the hazard of conducting fieldwork in such environments. However, there is mounting evidence to highlight the possibility of performing research in these settings, but not by employing traditional methods; rather, these tools may need to be customised for use. One key policy implication here is that donors may need to invest more money in analysing these new disasters and they may need to consider building and strengthening genuine partnerships between Northern and Southern research institutions
DISASTERS id:408
TI: The moral sense of humanitarian actors: an empirical exploration ab: This paper examines humanitarianism's moral positioning above private and political interests to save lives and alleviate suffering. It does not aim to assess the legitimacy of this stance, but rather to probe the way in which humanitarian actors relate to this moral dimension in their everyday work. It investigates empirically humanitarian ethics from the perspective of humanitarian actors, drawing on interviews conducted in Beirut, Lebanon, in 2014. As it is exploratory, three key conceptual innovations were required. The first of these is the introduction of the tools developed to consider a neglected reality: humanitarian actors' moral sense' vis-a-vis the humanitarian sector's moral culture'. Second, the study shows how the sector's moral culture is structured around the notion of concern for persons in need'. Third, it analyses the way in which the sector and its actors handle the asymmetrical relationships encountered daily. Ultimately this paper seeks to valorise humanitarian actors' creativity in their common practices and explore potential challenges to it.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:492
TI: The will of Congress? Permissive regulation and the strategic use of labeling for the anti-influenza drug Relenza ab: Through an analysis of the FDA's approval of the controversial anti-influenza drug Relenza (zanamivir), we interrogate distinct social scientific theories of pharmaceutical regulation. We investigate why, despite internal negative opinions and an Advisory Committee's non-approval recommendation, the FDA approved Relenza in the late 1990s. Based on a close reading of FDA documents, we show how agency officials guided the manufacturer's analyses and participated in constructing a tenuous argument for approval. We show how regulators may strategically design drug labels that can justify their permissive regulation. We consider the explanatory power of official accounts and alternative, partially overlapping, theories of pharmaceutical regulation in the Relenza case, and develop new insights into the institutional dynamics of regulator-industry relations. We find little or no evidence that the FDA was primarily driven by public health concerns, pressure from disease-based patient activism, or a consumerist and neoliberal regulatory logic, although some of these explanations provided managers with convenient rhetoric to rationalize their actions. Rather, we argue that the Relenza case highlights contradictions between a scientific culture at FDA, conducive to rigorous product evaluations, and the agency's attempts to accommodate higher-level political (i.e. Congress) and industry demands conducive of permissive regulation - consistent with some aspects of reputational and capture theories, as well as with corporate bias theory.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE id:668
TI: To Repress or to Co-opt? Authoritarian Control in the Age of Digital Surveillance ab: This article studies the consequences of digital surveillance in dictatorships. I first develop an informational theory of repression and co-optation. I argue that digital surveillance resolves dictators' information problem of not knowing individual citizens' true anti-regime sentiments. By identifying radical opponents, digital surveillance enables dictators to substitute targeted repression for nonexclusive co-optation to forestall coordinated uprisings. My theory implies that as digital surveillance technologies advance, we should observe a rise in targeted repression and a decline in universal redistribution. Using a difference-in-differences design that exploits temporal variation in digital surveillance systems among Chinese counties, I find that surveillance increases local governments' public security expenditure and arrests of political activists but decreases public goods provision. My theory and evidence suggest that improvements in governments' information make citizens worse off in dictatorships.
WORLD DEVELOPMENT id:242
TI: To diversify or not to diversify, that is the question. Pursuing agricultural development for smallholder farmers in marginal areas of Ghana ab: Many smallholder farmers in developing countries grow multiple crop species on their farms, maintaining de facto crop diversity. Rarely do agricultural development strategies consider this crop diversity as an entry point for fostering agricultural innovation. This paper presents a case study, from an agricultural research-for-development project in northern Ghana, which examines the relationship between crop diversity and self-consumption of food crops, and cash income from crops sold by smallholder farmers in the target areas. By testing the presence and direction of these relationships, it is possible to assess whether smallholder farmers may benefit more from a diversification or a specialization agricultural development strategy for improving their livelihoods. Based on a household survey of 637 randomly selected households, we calculated crop diversity as well as its contribution to self-consumption (measured as imputed monetary value) and to cash income for each household. With these data we estimated a system of three simultaneous equations. Results show that households maintained high levels of crop diversity: up to eight crops grown, with an-average of 3.2 per household, and with less than 5% having a null or very low level of crop diversity. The value of crop species used for self-consumption was on average 55% higher than that of crop sales. Regression results show that crop diversity is positively associated with self-consumption of food crops, and cash income from crops sold. This finding suggests that increasing crop diversity opens market opportunities for households, while still contributing to self-consumption. Given these findings, crop diversification seems to be more beneficial to these farmers than specialization. For these diversified farmers, or others in similar contexts, interventions that assess and build on their de facto crop diversity are probably more likely to be successful. (C) 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY id:125
TI: Towards evidence-based industrial research and innovation policy ab: Calls for better use of scientific evidence to inform policy decisions stem from the belief that enhanced outcomes for the society can be expected. Yet, the introduction of evidence-based practices in innovation policymaking has not come without criticism. This introductory article sets the scene for the short collection of papers that address specific issues regarding the prospect of better evidence-based policy in the area of industrial research and innovation (IRI). It identifies and discusses key challenges for the transition towards evidence-based IRI policy. It then introduces the three papers, which build upon and depart from related assumptions or narratives reflecting the current state of practices in IRI policy.
PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE id:240
TI: Visual brokerage: Communicating data and research through visualisation ab: Researchers increasingly use visualisation to make sense of their data and communicate findings more widely. But these are not necessarily straightforward processes. Theories of knowledge brokerage show how sociopolitical contexts and intermediary organisations that translate research for public audiences shape how users engage with evidence. Applying these ideas to data visualisation, I argue that several kinds of brokers (such as data collectors, designers and intermediaries) link researchers and audiences, contributing to the ways that people engage with visualisations. To do this, I draw on qualitative focus groups that elicited non-academic viewers' reactions to visualisations of data about UK migration. The results reveal two important features of engagement: perceptions of brokers' credibility and feelings of surprise arising from visualisations' content and design. I conclude by arguing that researchers, knowledge brokers and the public produce - as well as operate within - a complex visualisation space characterised by mutual, bi-directional connections.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW id:296
TI: When Will Public Officials Listen? A Vignette Experiment on the Effects of Input Legitimacy on Public Officials' Willingness to Use Public Participation ab: Public officials can be reluctant to use citizens' input in decision-making, especially when turnout is low and participants are unrepresentative of the wider population. Using Fritz Scharpf's democratic legitimacy approach, the authors conducted a survey-based vignette experiment to examine how the input legitimacy of participatory processes affects (1) public officials' willingness to use public participation in administrative decision-making, (2) their assessment of the quality of the policy decision, and (3) their anticipation of popular support for the policy outcome. The study shows that turnout and participants' representativeness have a positive and significant effect on public officials' attitudes toward public participation. Specifically, participants' representativeness influences public officials' willingness to use citizens' inputs more than turnout.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:159
TI: Where ?fake news? flourishes: a comparison across four Western democracies ab: How does the content of so-called ?fake news? differ across Western democracies? While previous research on online disinformation has focused on the individual level, the current study aims to shed light on cross-national differences. It compares online disinformation re-published by fact checkers from four Western democracies (the US, the UK, Germany, and Austria). The findings reveal significant differences between English-speaking and German-speaking countries. In the US and the UK, the largest shares of partisan disinformation are found, while in Germany and Austria sensationalist stories prevail. Moreover, in English-speaking countries, disinformation frequently attacks political actors, whereas in German-speaking countries, immigrants are most frequently targeted. Across all of the countries, topics of false stories strongly mirror national news agendas. Based on these results, the paper argues that online disinformation is not only a technology-driven phenomenon but also shaped by national information environments.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:149
TI: Who Deserves Solidarity? Unequal Treatment o Immigrants in Swiss Welfare Policy Delivery ab: Rising immigration rates in Western Europe concur with increasing anti-immigrant attitudes. While assessments of welfare eligibility in the United States demonstrably hinge on how public servants perceive different racial groups as deserving, we know less about ethnically motivated discrimination in the European context. This paper argues that Switzerland is a critical case for studying such developments. It combines social construction theory and the deservingness heuristic to analyze how social constructions of Swiss natives and immigrants influence 90 disability benefits insurance procedures. Findings reveal that immigrants are perceived as less deserving and less powerful than Swiss applicants. Thus, Swiss welfare workers do not allocate welfare benefits independently of an applicant's nationality. Our results raise fundamental questions about the equal treatment of welfare applicants in times of rising immigration and anti-immigrant attitudes. The feed-forward effects of social constructions imply longer-term consequences for good administrative practices and society that require scholarly attention.
AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW id:547
TI: Who Gets the Benefit of the Doubt? Performance Evaluations, Medical Errors, and the Production of Gender Inequality in Emergency Medical Education ab: Why do women continue to face barriers to success in professions, especially male-dominated ones, despite often outperforming men in similar subjects during schooling? With this study, we draw on role expectations theory to understand how inequality in assessment emerges as individuals transition from student to professional roles. To do this, we leverage the case of medical residency so that we can examine how changes in role expectations shape assessment while holding occupation and organization constant. By analyzing a dataset of 2,765 performance evaluations from a three-year emergency medicine training program, we empirically demonstrate that women and men are reviewed as equally capable at the beginning of residency, when the student role dominates; however, in year three, when the colleague role dominates, men are perceived as outperforming women. Furthermore, when we hold resident performance somewhat constant by comparing feedback to medical errors of similar severity, we find that in the third year of residency, but not the first, women receive more harsh criticism and less supportive feedback than men. Ultimately, this study suggests that role expectations, and the implicit biases they can trigger, matter significantly to the production of gender inequality, even when holding organization, occupation, and resident performance constant.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW id:169
TI: A Norm of Evidence and Research in Decision-making (NERD): Scale Development, Reliability, and Validity ab: Evidence-based management is on the rise as a strategy to promote more rational decision-making and effectiveness in governance and public service delivery. To understand how widespread the use of evidence is among managers in various settings, and why evidence is emphasized more in some settings than others, it is necessary to have a good measure of the use of research and evidence in management decision-making. This article reports on the development and testing of a new multi-item scale, Norm of Evidence and Research in Decision-making (NERD), that can be used across organizational and functional settings to assess evidence-based management practices within an agency. The results indicate that the scale is internally consistent (reliable) and that it correlates with criteria of the underlying construct (valid). The article concludes with a discussion of the potential utility of the scale for advancing research and understanding about the use of evidence by public and nonprofit managers.
DISASTERS id:329
TI: Academic publishing in disaster risk reduction: past, present, and future ab: Nowadays there are approximately 80 Anglophone journals that deal primarily with disaster risk reduction (DRR) and allied fields. This large array signals a sustained, if uneven, growth in DRR scholarship but also competition between the offerings of different publishers and institutions. The purpose of this article is first to summarise the development of academic publishing on DRR from its early beginnings to the present day. The paper then evaluates the current state of publishing in this field and discusses possible future trends. Next, it identifies some possible opportunities, challenges, expectations, and commitments for journal editors both within DRR and academia more broadly, including those that refer to changes in the use of terminology, the relentless increase in the number of papers submitted, the expansion and dangers of predatory journals, different peer review models, open access versus paywalls, citations and bibliography metrics, academic social networks, and copyright and distribution issues.
ORGANIZATION SCIENCE id:597
TI: After the Storm Has Passed: Translating Crisis Experience into Useful Knowledge ab: This virtual special issue (VSI) collects together 19 papers published in Organization Science that explore how organizations learn from crises. The objective is to discuss insights that can help us understand the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, implications that existing research carries for organizations' abilities to keep hard-earned lessons after the storm passes, and opportunities that the current phenomenon offers for future inquiry in this domain. Organizations, large and small, in scores of countries, have suspended normal operations. To survive, many organizations have adapted by shifting almost all human-to-human interactions online while facing an ethical dilemma and a tense tradeoff between public health and economic well-being. We take stock of the research on organizational learning from crises, summarize useful knowledge for managing the current crisis, and provide directions for future research.
DISASTERS id:356
TI: Ambivalence towards discourse of disaster resilience ab: This paper investigates empirically how the international aid community (IAC)-donors and practitioners-considers and implements disaster resilience in a specific country setting, Nepal, and throughout the rest of the world. A key finding is that there is ambivalence about a concept that has become a discourse. On a global level, the IAC utilises the discourse of resilience in a cautiously positive manner as a bridging concept. On a national level, it is being used to influence the Government of Nepal, as well as serving as an operational tool of donors. The mythical resilient urban community is fashioned in the IAC's imaginary; understanding how people create communities and what type of linkages with government urban residents desire to develop their resilience strategies is missing, though, from the discussion. Disaster resilience can be viewed as another grand plan to enhance the lives of people. Yet, regrettably, an explicit focus on individuals and their communities is lost in the process.
SCIENCE AS CULTURE id:129
TI: Anticipatory Uncertainty: How Academic and Industry Researchers in the Life Sciences Experience and Manage the Uncertainties of the Research Process Differently ab: The institutional contexts of research increasingly require researchers to anticipate their productivity and the uncertainties inherent in their research. This applies to both academic researchers and to researchers in start-up companies. This creates a specific kind of uncertainty, anticipatory uncertainty, that we define as the state of being uncertain as to whether research processes will be productive in a specific time frame and along situated definitions of good performance. In the life sciences, this anticipatory uncertainty is experienced and managed differently, depending on how research is organized and the cultural resources available in specific institutional contexts. In biotechnology companies, there is a readiness to embrace dynamic changes in both research strategies and the organization of work in response to new developments in the progress of the overall research agenda. In academia, the ability of research groups to react with similar flexibility seems significantly constrained by the individual attribution of research work and credit, and the correspondingly high level of individual anticipatory uncertainty. This raises questions about how far the current organization of academic research allows epistemic uncertainty to be embraced and corresponding risks to be taken, rather than safe questions to be pursued.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:27
TI: Attention and amplification in the hybrid media system: The composition and activity of Donald Trump's Twitter following during the 2016 presidential election ab: Building on studies of the hybrid media system and attention economy, we develop the concept of amplification to explore how the activities of social media-based publics may enlarge the attention paid to a given person or message. We apply the concept to the 2016 US election, asking who constituted Donald Trump's enormous Twitter following and how that following contributed to his success at attracting attention, including from the mainstream press. Using spectral clustering based on social network similarity, we identify key publics that constituted Trump's Twitter following and demonstrate how particular publics amplified his social media presence in different ways. Our discussion raises questions about how algorithms read metrics to guide content on social media platforms, how journalists draw on social media metrics in their determinations of news value and worthiness, and how the process of amplification relates to possibilities of citizen action through digital communication.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW id:714
TI: Being a Public Manager in Times of Crisis: The Art of Managing Stakeholders, Political Masters, and Collaborative Networks ab: The COVID-19 pandemic is seen as the biggest crisis since World War II. What started out as a public health issue has quickly morphed into a political, economic, and societal crisis of epic proportions. Administrative capacity is a major factor in determining whether societies will emerge from this unprecedented situation with resilience and optimism or despair and disconnectedness, and whether trust in government will increase or decrease. Autonomous and competent public managers are key producers of such administrative capacity. This essay addresses those public managers, the unsung administrative heroes leading us through times of crisis from behind the scenes. Translating the state of the art in public administration literature, with a particular emphasis on publications in this journal, into accessible practitioner recommendations, it identifies three key competencies paramount to public managers in times of crisis: managing stakeholders, political masters, and collaborative networks.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE id:414
TI: Building Cooperation among Groups in Conflict: An Experiment on Intersectarian Cooperation in Lebanon ab: Societies divided along ethnic or religious lines suffer from persistent conflict and underprovision of public goods. Scholarly understanding of how to strengthen intergroup cooperation remains limited. In this study, we set out to test the effectiveness of two interventions on intergroup cooperation: cross-group expert appeal and participation in a cross-group discussion. The laboratory-in-the-field experiment is set in Lebanon's capital, Beirut, and involves interactions between 180 Shia and 180 Sunni Muslim participants. We find that the expert appeal increases intersectarian cooperation in settings that do not entail reciprocal exchange. On average, cross-sectarian discussions do not improve cooperation, but those discussions in which participants delve deeply into the conflict's causes and possible remedies are associated with greater cooperation. Neither intervention diminishes the effectiveness of sectarian clientelistic appeals. The policy implication of our study is that intergroup cooperation can be strengthened even in regions as bitterly divided as the Middle East.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:372
TI: Caring for data: Value creation in a data-intensive research laboratory ab: Drawing upon ethnographic observations of staff working within a research laboratory built around research and clinical data from twins, this article analyzes practices underlying the production and maintenance of a research database. While critical data studies have discussed different forms of 'data work' through which data are produced and turned into effective research resources, in this paper we foreground a specific form of data work, namely the affective and attentive relationships that humans build with data. Building on STS and feminist scholarship that highlights the importance of care in scientific work, we capture this specific form of data work as care. Treating data as relational entities, we discuss a set of caring practices that staff employ to produce and maintain their data, as well as the hierarchical and institutional arrangements within which these caring practices take place. We show that through acts of caring, that is, through affective and attentive engagements, researchers build long-term relationships with the data they help produce, and feel responsible for its flourishing and growth. At the same time, these practices of care - which we found to be gendered and valued differently from other practices within formal and informal reward systems - help to make data valuable for the institution. In this manner, care for data is an important practice of valuation and valorisation within data-intensive research that has so far received little explicit attention in scholarship and professional research practice.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:287
TI: Central Government Strategies to Promote Local Governments' Transparency: Guidance or Enforcement? ab: The push to make governments more transparent extends worldwide, as transparency is expected to boost citizens' trust in government and participation in public affairs. Recent transparency laws and open-government initiatives have encouraged local governments to share more information with their constituents. A growing number of recent studies have investigated the drivers of local governments' transparency, but have not yet addressed the role of higher levels of government in making local governments more transparent. In light of implementation scholarship arguing the success of centrally designed programs is a function of higher-level involvement, this study contributes to the transparency literature by approaching local governments' transparency as an intergovernmental implementation process. We assess the explanatory power of two central government strategies: enforcement mechanisms and central government guidance on Chilean municipalities' transparency levels. Results show that both types of central government strategies can have a substantial impact on transparency over time.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:54
TI: Citizen Satisfaction and the Kaleidoscope of Government Performance: How Multiple Stakeholders See Government Performance ab: Performance assessment is a central issue for modern governments; however, little attention has been paid to the similarities and differences among various performance indicators. This study investigates how different performance assessments relate to each other by incorporating multiple stakeholders' perspectives on performance at the individual level. Combining three different surveys and archival data on secondary education, we analyze how academic performance indicators are associated with service users' (parents' and students') and service providers' (teachers') judgments of school quality. Our findings suggest that parents, students, and teachers provide similar assessments of school performance, and these assessments reflect the actual quality of the schools. Their evaluations are more closely aligned to archival performance indicators in high-performing schools than low-performing schools. In addition to the convergent validity of the various performance measures, we also find indirect evidence that the perceptual measures have discriminant validity relative to archival measures. The consistency of performance indicators in a centralized regime (South Korea) also contributes to the generalizability of existing theory.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:459
TI: Common Source Bias, Key Informants, and Survey-Administrative Linked Data for Nonprofit Management Research ab: In this study, we examine the increasingly popular strategy of supplementing survey data with administrative/archival data as a strategy to overcome common source bias. As the strategy does not present a cure-all solution, we argue it is a questionable recommendation and provide advice on how to approach this issue with due consideration. Focusing on the nonprofit sector, we compare the data drawn from a survey of financial estimates completed by nonprofit leaders and the IRS 990 forms-based financial data of corresponding nonprofit organizations. After presenting the evidence of some differences between the two data sources, we identify a set of key informant characteristics that are correlated with the level of differences. We echo George and Pandey (2018)'s claim that the criticisms toward common source bias have been somewhat exaggerated and urge public and nonprofit management researchers to be aware of other pitfalls they might face when trying to address common source bias.
SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY id:723
TI: Dehumanization of the Opposition in Political Campaigns ab: Objective This article documents dehumanization in the 2016 presidential contest. Methods Using a mixed-method approach, I analyze dehumanized portrayals of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in visual campaign rhetoric and on common survey measures of dehumanization. Results Images from the campaign discourse reflect animalistic and mechanistic dehumanization of the presidential candidates. The survey data reveal that voters dehumanize opposition candidates and party members in both subtle and blatant ways that also reflect this animalistic-mechanistic distinction. Conclusion The findings affirm the external validity of measurement strategies for dehumanization by showing the correspondence between campaign imagery and common survey-based measurement tools. This work situates dehumanization as a psychological process relevant to the study of campaigns and elections.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE id:330
TI: Does Direct Democracy Hurt Immigrant Minorities? Evidence from Naturalization Decisions in Switzerland ab: Do minorities fare worse under direct democracy than under representative democracy? We provide new evidence by studying naturalization requests of immigrants in Switzerland that were typically decided with referendums in each municipality. Using panel data from about 1,400 municipalities for the 1991-2009 period, we exploit Federal Court rulings that forced municipalities to transfer the decisions to their elected municipality councils. We find that naturalization rates surged by about 60% once politicians rather than citizens began deciding on naturalization applications. Whereas voters in referendums face no cost of arbitrarily rejecting qualified applicants based on discriminatory preferences, politicians in the council are constrained to formally justify rejections and may be held accountable by judicial review. Consistent with this mechanism, the increase in naturalization rates caused by switching from direct to representative democracy is much stronger for more marginalized immigrant groups and in areas where voters are more xenophobic or where judicial review is more salient.
WORLD DEVELOPMENT id:544
TI: Environmental urgency versus the allure of RCT empiricism ab: Environmental impact mitigation and conservation projects have also come under the ambit of Randomized Control Trials (RCTs) usage by economists to ascertain the efficacy of specific interventions. However, there are several concerns about the usage of this technique for environmental decision-making which go beyond the usual methodological critiques raised within economic discourse. Environmental planning has established methods of gauging behavioral effectiveness through deliberative processes and collective policy design such as participatory GIS and charrettes. Given the expediency of environmental action when dealing with ecological degradation as well as a normative need to infuse learning about natural resource scarcity and quality, such deliberative methods are far more cost-effective and help to build community relationships and social capital as well. RCT application in environmental policy thus deserves more critical appraisal and should be applied in concert with deliberative planning techniques. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:442
TI: Evolution as a fact? A discourse analysis ab: Since the middle of the twentieth century, there has been a heated debate between evolutionists and antievolutionists regarding whether or not evolution is a fact'. The debate has spawned a number of court cases involving antievolutionists describing evolution as a theory, not a fact'. An analysis of the fact of biological evolution' discourse reveals several overarching agreements among its advocates, but also a contradictory morass of positions regarding how scientific theories, hypotheses and facts interrelate, how these terms are related to biological evolution, what a scientific fact is, and how science popularizers use the scientific and public vernaculars. The formation, structure and development of the discourse is assessed through a Foucauldian discourse analysis, as well as through the lens of Gieryn's conceptions of public science and cultural cartography.
JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION id:483
TI: Experts at Coordination: Examining the Performance, Production, and Value of Process Expertise ab: This paper argues that coordination among domain experts can be viewed as a distinct form of knowledge in itself, and an area in which an individual may become an expert. We discuss why domain experts may be ill-equipped to coordinate their knowledge with the knowledge of others, and why individuals with process expertise may be better equipped to facilitate coordination between domain experts. Drawing on a qualitative study of nurses organizing emergency pediatric transfers, we demonstrate how process expertise is established, maintained, and enacted through situated communicative practices. The analysis characterizes process expertise as operating interdependently with, but distinct from, domain expertise, and shows how process expertise can aid in settings that demand complex coordination. This work challenges assumptions that coordination among domain experts is best addressed through supporting network connections or overcoming interpretive obstacles, and offers an alternative way to support coordination by cultivating process experts.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC POLICY id:479
TI: Income inequality and the growth of redistributive spending in the United States (US) states: is there a link? ab: Prominent public policy models have hypothesised that rising income inequality will lead to more redistributive spending. Subsequent theoretical advancements and empirical research often failed to find a positive relationship between inequality and redistributive spending, however. Over the last few decades both income inequality and redistributive spending have been growing in the United States states. In this work, we consider whether temporal variation in inequality can explain variation in redistributive spending, while controlling for a number of factors that covary with redistributive spending in the states. In an analysis of data for 1976-2008, we find that higher levels of inequality are associated with greater redistributive spending, offering empirical evidence that fiscal policy at the state level responds to growing levels of income inequality. Considering the growing role of state governments in welfare provision during the past several decades, this finding is relevant for policy researchers and practitioners at all levels of government.
TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY id:688
TI: One Word of Heart is Worth Three of Talent: Professional Communication Strategies in a Vietnamese Nonprofit Organization ab: This article reports findings from a month-long research project in Vietnam working with the Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange (VAVA). The authors found that VAVA did not always abide Western prescriptions for "good" technical and scientific communication yet were extremely effective technical communicators among victims and families. This article reports findings that call for an expanded definition of what it means to practice good technical communication, especially in understudied cultural contexts.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:106
TI: Understanding a digital movement of opinion: the case of #RefugeesWelcome ab: Recent work on digital political engagement has extensively shown that social media platforms enhance political participation and collective action. However, the idea that citizen voice through social media can give rise, under given conditions, to a specific digital force combining properties of social movements and public opinion has received less attention. We fill this gap by analysing the digital discussion around the Twitter hashtag #RefugeesWelcome as a case of digital movement of opinion' (DMO). When the refugee crisis erupted in 2015, an extraordinary wave of empathy characterized the publics' reactions in key European hosting countries, especially as a result of viral images portraying refugee children as the main victims. Using a triangulation of network, content and metadata analysis, we find that this DMO was driven primarily by social media elites whose tweets were then echoed by masses of isolated users. We then test the post-DMO status of the hashtag-sphere after a potentially antithetical shock such as the November 2015 Paris terrorist attacks, which polarized the network public. Overall, we argue that the concept of DMO provides a heuristically useful tool for future research on new forms of digital citizen participation.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:366
TI: Uniform multilingualism: A media genealogy of Google Translate ab: This article applies a media geneaology perspective to examine the operative logic of Google Translate. Tracing machine translation from post-World War II (WWII) rule-based methods to contemporary algorithmic statistical methods, we analyze the underlying power structure of algorithmic and human collaboration that Translate encompasses. Focusing on the relationship between technology, language, and speakers, we argue that the operative logic of Translate represents a new model of translation, which we call uniform multilingualism. In this model, the manifest lingual plurality on the user side is mediated by lingual uniformity on the system side in the form of an English language algorithm, which has recently given way to an artificial neural network interlingual algorithm. We conclude by considering the significance of this recent shift in Translate's algorithm.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:61
TI: Visual social media and affectivity: the impact of the image of Alan Kurdi and young people's response to the refugee crisis in Oslo and Sheffield ab: This article focuses on the reception of the image of Alan Kurdi by a group of young volunteers in Oslo and Sheffield, and their understanding of the subsequent civic and political engagement. Methodologically, the study draws on a series of in-depth interviews conducted with a group of young volunteers who saw the photograph when it went viral on Twitter and who had followed the media coverage and participated in on-and offline activities related to the case. To analyse the views of the research participants on the Alan Kurdi case, I draw on feminist theoretical perspectives on affectivity, theoretical literature relating to news images and iconic photography, and online social movement theories. The study shows that the iconic image of Alan Kurdi offered a way of transforming complex and unsettled aspects of the refugee crisis into something concrete and understandable, contributing to galvanize affective resonance and immediate public response among the involved subjects. The infrastructure of social media, enabling the rapid global circulation of the image, contributed to shaping social assemblages to which connective emotions and common meanings were ascribed.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC POLICY id:181
TI: The importance of salience: public opinion and state policy action on climate change ab: How does the salience of environmental issues influence climate policy adoption in the American states? This article considers how two aspects of public salience, issue problem status and issue attention, work with environmental interest group membership to influence climate policy adoption in the American states. We contribute to the theoretical development of issue salience and offer alternative measures that capture differences in salience across subnational units. We find evidence that states where climate change is perceived to be a problem, and where attention to environmental issues is high, are more likely to adopt relevant policies. Furthermore, states with Republican majorities in either legislative chamber are less likely to adopt climate policies. Our findings have implications for the impact of salience on the policy process.
RESEARCH POLICY id:6
TI: Defining and measuring innovation in all sectors of the economy ab: This paper combines general definitions of innovation applicable in all economic sectors with a systems approach, to develop a conceptual framework for the statistical measurement of innovation. The resulting indicators can be used for monitoring and evaluation of innovation policies that have been implemented, as well as for international comparisons. The extension of harmonised innovation measurement to all economic sectors has implications for innovation research and for policy learning.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:365
TI: The Ethical Implications of Altering Public Sector Accountability Models: The Case of the Atlanta Cheating Scandal ab: Outcome based policies promote the use performance accountability models. However, the impact these policies have on the ethical culture of public sector organizations has not been adequately assessed. This research examines performance accountability reforms by examining the City of Atlanta's implementation of federal and state performance policies. The analysis reveals the use of performance models in vulnerable organizations negatively impact employees' ethical behavior. Teachers and administrators altered test results, delivered threats, misled parents and students about performance outcomes, and were dishonest with state investigators to give the illusion that performance goals had been met or exceeded.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:14
TI: What is platform governance? ab: Following a host of high-profile scandals, the political influence of platform companies (the global corporations that that operate online platforms' such as Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, and many other online services) is slowly being re-evaluated. Amidst growing calls to regulate these companies and make them more democratically accountable, and a host of policy interventions that are actively being pursued in Europe and beyond, a better understanding of how platform practices, policies, and affordances (in effect, how platforms govern) interact with the external political forces trying to shape those practices and policies is needed. Building on digital media and communication scholarship as well as governance literature from political science and international relations, the aim of this article is to map an interdisciplinary research agenda for platform governance, a concept intended to capture the layers of governance relationships structuring interactions between key parties in today's platform society, including platform companies, users, advertisers, governments, and other political actors.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:684
TI: 'We see more because we are not there': Sourcing norms and routines in covering Iran and North Korea ab: Based on interviews and newsroom visits, this study explores an epistemological hierarchy of sources and sourcing channels that differs substantially from the norms of more traditional forms of journalism. Two niche outlets covering North Korea and Iran are chosen for analysis. Because these countries are notoriously hostile to foreign correspondents, trustworthy news is often difficult to come by. Journalists working for these new outlets prefer digital platforms to firsthand observation, arguing the former are more capable of fending off misinformation prevalent "on the ground." Also, there is extensive global collaboration that takes advantage of distance and time differences in order to produce more credible news about Iran and North Korea. Without having to worry about getting their access revoked, journalists can focus on issues that they consider important. Findings are consistent with what journalists have long known: It can be advantageous to see things with the added perspective of distance.
DISASTERS id:345
TI: A disaster diplomacy perspective of acute public health events ab: Conceptions of acute public health events typically assume that they are tackled exclusively or principally through technical and medical solutions. Yet health and politics are inexorably linked. To better understand this link, this paper adopts a disaster diplomacy perspective for analysing and assessing the impacts of acute public health events on diplomatic outcomes. Two gaps in understanding disaster-health-politics connections are addressed: (i) how health interventions can impact diplomatic endeavours, especially for (ii) acute public health events. Three diverse case studies are interpreted from a disaster diplomacy perspective: Cuba's medical diplomacy, China and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), and polio vaccination. Disaster diplomacy permits deeper investigation and analysis of connections amongst health, disaster, and diplomatic activities by viewing efforts on acute public health events as being political through disaster risk reduction (beforehand) and disaster response (during and afterwards). Understanding improves how health interventions affect diplomacy and on disaster diplomacy's limitations.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE id:385
TI: Are Biased Media Bad for Democracy? ab: This article assesses the normative and positive claims regarding the consequences of biased media using a political agency framework that includes a strategic voter, polarized politicians, and news providers. My model predicts that voters are always better informed with unbiased than with biased outlets even when the latter have opposite ideological preferences. However, biased media may improve voter welfare. Contrary to several scholars' fears, partisan news providers are not always bad for democracy. My theoretical findings also have important implications for empirical analyses of the electoral consequences of changes in the media environment. The impact of left-wing and right-wing biased outlets depends on the partisan identity of officeholders. Empirical findings may, thus, not be comparable across studies or even over time within a study. Existing empirical works are unlikely to measure the consequences of biased media, as researchers never observe and can rarely approximate the adequate counterfactual: elections with unbiased news outlets.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:279
TI: Association Between Organizational Capacity and Scope Among Lebanese Nonprofits ab: Nonprofits' capacity and scope can impact organizational performance, separately and jointly. Yet, the relationship between the two constructs remains unexplored. In this article, we examine the association between organizational capacity and scope. Relying on a dataset of environmental nonprofit organizations in Lebanon, we find that, when examined separately, human resources and external relations capacities are significantly associated with single-domain organizations while strategic planning and financial capacities are significantly associated with multiple-domain organizations. When considered together, however, external relations lose such association. Implications for practice and future research on the effect of organizational scope and capacity on nonprofit performance are discussed.
SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY id:432
TI: Barriers and facilitators of access to biological material for international research: The role of institutions and networks ab: In recent years, international and national policies have intensified monitoring and control over the access, exchange, and use of biological materials. New regulative institutions addressing concerns about ownership and safety, as well as fairness and equity, are increasingly intermingled with informal practices and norms of exchange, raising the barriers to access biological materials that scientists face. Drawing from unique survey-based ego-centric network data collected from US and non-US scientists engaged in international collaborative research at the USAID Feed the Future Innovation Labs, this article investigates how regulative institutions, organizational and regional norms (meso-level institutions), and interpersonal networks facilitate or challenge access to biological materials for research. Our results show that while regulative institutions hinder access, meso-level institutions are important access facilitators in an international context. Network ties reduce the delays and blockages to access of biological material, but they do not eliminate them.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:120
TI: Best Practice Recommendations for Replicating Experiments in Public Administration ab: Replication is an important mechanism through which broad lessons for theory and practice can be drawn in the applied interdisciplinary social science field of public administration. We suggest a common replication framework for public administration that is illustrated by experimental work in the field. Drawing on knowledge from other disciplines, together with our experience in replicating several experiments on topics such as decision making, organizational rules, and government-citizen relationships, we provide an overview of the replication process. We then distill this knowledge into seven decision points that offer a clear set of best practices on how to design and implement replications in public administration. We conclude by arguing that replication should be part of the normal scientific process in public administration to help to build valid middle-range theories and provide valuable lessons to practice.
JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION id:436
TI: Chinese Newspaper Groups in the Digital Era: The Resurgence of the Party Press ab: This article reviews the impact of digital technologies on Chinese newspapers. The diffusion of the smartphone has precipitated severe economic problems for the printed press. There have been falls in both readership and advertising revenues, which have had an effect on the structure of provincial-level press groups. The decline in economic viability has been felt most acutely by the commercially-oriented titles, while the more politically-oriented papers have led the way in finding new sources of funding. These sources tend to tie journalism more tightly to political and economic power, and lead to commercial goals replacing journalistic ones. This shifting balance of economic power has important consequences for the possibility of independent and critical journalism. The empirical material is specific to China, but it highlights more general theoretical questions as to the political economy of the media.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:629
TI: Citizen engagement and the illusion of secrecy: exploring commenter characteristics in censored online news articles ab: We address the conflict between citizenship engagement through news commenting, and censorship needs. News articles often contain forms of censorship to maintain security, with non-identification of individuals a means of information protection. Commonly used is the replacement of a name with a supposedly non-identifying initial, protecting the identity of military personnel, witnesses, minors, victims or suspects who need to be granted anonymity in the public sphere. We seek to understand the characteristics of commenters including awareness of the potential for social media to circumvent censorship, and attitudes towards censorship in news articles. Our study of censored articles collected from online news pages on Facebook, presents insights into participant characteristics including a strong correlation between personal network size and censorship support.
SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY id:746
TI: Co-produced legitimacies: Parliamentary technology assessment and nuclear waste management in France ab: In this article we question the roles and engagement of the French Parliamentary office of Technology Assessment (PTA) in governing Nuclear Waste Management (NWM) over an extended timeframe (1990-2017). We argue that the trajectories of the PTA and the NWM programme are so intertwined that we gain analytical purchase from understanding them together. Our empirical analysis looks at three episodes of co-production of technological and political practices: (1) the PTA as an independent assessor (1990), (2) the PTA as a regular follower (1996-2005); (3) the PTA as a whistle-blower (2007-17). We find that maintaining or redrawing boundaries between science and policy have increasingly been necessary but difficult in the course of the PTA's mainstreaming into the policymaking landscape and the nuclear establishment. We conclude by examining the implications for PTAs of a possible shift from concerns about democratizing expertise to politicizing knowledge for policy.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE id:482
TI: Congress and Administrative Policymaking: Identifying Congressional Veto Power ab: The ability of presidents to unilaterally shape administrative policymaking challenges a foundation of congressional power: Rarely can Congress statutorily veto administrative actions over presidential opposition. Consequently, Congress has turned to other means of influence, including the appropriations and oversight processes, although questions remain about the degree to which they have been effective. To investigate, I study a spatial model of administrative policymaking that assumes Congress can execute a legislative veto, as well as a baseline model in which congressional influence requires a coalition with the president. I compare the two models and develop empirical tests that exploit instances when their implications differ. Applying the tests to data on federal regulatory policymaking shows consistent evidence that Congress exerts veto power over administrative activity, even over those actions endorsed by the president. I conclude by discussing some broader implications, including the extent to which existing studies understate the constraints on presidential power.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:142
TI: Counter-surveillance and alternative new media in Turkey ab: This study, drawing on alternative media and networked social movements, explores the counter-surveillance practices and oppositional imaginaries of activist citizen journalists (ACJs) in Turkey to combat the surveillance strategies of the authoritarian Turkish government. After the failed coup attempt in July 2016, the ruling party has become more suspicious of dissent of any kind. However, the ACJs who use mobile communication and social media as channels for journalism and counter-surveillance continue their critical journalistic work in this context. Using ethnographic data collected from interviews with these media activists, this study focuses on oppositional imaginaries regarding the surveillance culture as well as counter-surveillance tactics, both offensive and defensive. To do so, we conducted 22 in-depth interviews with the representatives of alternative new media (ANM) initiatives and ACJs who were gathering, producing and disseminating news at the time of the study (between January and July 2017). Backed by the available literature on interdisciplinary approaches, data were gathered from the interviews, thematically coded and critically analysed. The whole process of news-making that criticises the authoritarian surveillance state stands out as an offensive tactic. On the other hand, defensive tactics are very closely related to the safety of journalists, their sources and data. The paper argues that the variety of offensive and defensive tactics should be increased and they should be substantially improved. The study also sheds light on the need for more detailed and extensive interdisciplinary research.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:310
TI: Cultures of caring: Healthcare "scandals', inquiries, and the remaking of accountabilities ab: In the UK, a series of high-profile healthcare scandals' and subsequent inquiries repeatedly point to the pivotal role culture plays in producing and sustaining healthcare failures. Inquiries are a sociotechnology of accountability that signal a shift in how personal accountabilities of healthcare professionals are being configured. In focusing on problematic organizational cultures, these inquiries acknowledge, make visible, and seek to distribute a collective responsibility for healthcare failures. In this article, I examine how the output of one particular inquiry - The Report of the Morecambe Bay Investigation - seeks to make culture visible and accountable. I question what it means to make culture accountable and show how the inquiry report enacts new and old forms of accountability: conventional forms that position actors as individuals, where actions or decisions have distinct boundaries that can be isolated from the ongoing flow of care, and transformative forms that bring into play a remote geographical location, the role of professional ideology, as well as a collective cultural responsibility.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:258
TI: Datafying anti-poverty programmes: implications for data justice ab: This paper seeks to illuminate the significance of datafication for anti-poverty programmes, meaning social protection schemes designed specifically for poor people. The conversion of beneficiary populations into machine-readable data enables two core functions of social protection, those of recognising entitled beneficiaries and assigning entitlements connected to each anti-poverty scheme. Drawing on the incorporation of Aadhaar, India's biometric population database, in the national agenda for social protection, we unpack a techno-rational perspective that crafts datafication as a means to enhance the effectiveness of anti-poverty schemes. Nevertheless, narratives collected in the field show multiple forms of data injustice on recipients, underpinned by Aadhaar's functionality for a shift of the social protection agenda from in-kind subsidies to cash transfers. Based on such narratives the paper introduces a politically embedded view of data, framing datafication as a transformative force that contributes to reforming existing anti-poverty schemes.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:291
TI: Deconstructing the data life-cycle in digital humanitarianism ab: The role that technologies have historically played in producing and reproducing global inequalities is well documented. Although technological innovation is associated with progress that does not mean that it necessarily narrows the gap between rich and poor, instead technological inequalities tend to exacerbate other inequalities. This applies also to information and communication technologies (ICT) and Big Data, which play an increasingly important role in humanitarianism. In this article, we address the socio-technical work that is necessary to acquire, process, store and use data and study the power relations that are embedded in these processes. We focus in particular on the use of Big Data in digital humanitarianism and argue that at each stage of the digital data life-cycle (data acquisition, data processing, data storage, and data usage and decision making) different resources are required. These include not only access to hardware, software and connectivity but also the ability to make use of the affordances of digital technologies. We posit that in the context of humanitarianism, ICT and Big Data are a particularly intriguing to study due to their ambivalent position of seeking to address inequalities while at the same time perpetuating them.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:147
TI: Defiant Innovation: The Adoption of Medical Marijuana Laws in the American States ab: Diffusion research often characterizes the role of the federal government in innovation adoption as a supportive one, either increasing the likelihood of adoption or its speed. We examine the adoption of medical marijuana laws (MMLs) from 1996 to 2014 to shed light on what motivates states to adopt innovations that are in explicit defiance of federal law. Furthermore, we examine whether federal signals have any influence on the likelihood of adoption. In doing so, we utilize implementation theory to expand our understanding of how the federal government's position impacts state policy innovation adoption. We find mixed evidence for the influence of federal signals on the adoption of MMLs. The results suggest that medical marijuana policies are much more likely to be adopted in states when proponents have the political or institutional capital, rather than a medical or fiscal need. Moreover, this political capital is sufficient independent of the federal government's real or perceived position.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:707
TI: Discretionary Authority and Prioritizing in Government Agencies ab: Government agencies have a certain freedom to choose among different possible courses of action. This article studies agency decision making on priorities in a principal-agent framework with multiple tasks. Agency leadership has discretion over part of the agency's budget to incentivize staff in the pickup of cases. The head is concerned not only with society's benefits from the agency's overall performance, but also with the organization's public image. Based on their talent and the contracts offered by the head, staff officials choose which type of task to pursue: complex major cases with an uncertain outcome or basic minor and simple cases with a higher probability of success. We show how the size of the agency's discretionary budget influences both the scale and type of tasks it will engage in. Small changes in the budget can cause extensive restructuring from major to minor tasks, or vice versa, causing social welfare jumps. The mechanism provides overhead authorities with some control over the priorities of supposedly independent agencies. It applies generally to government bureaus with the formal and informal discretion to choose their tasks. Antitrust authorities serve as one illustration of implications for institutional design.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:155
TI: Distinction recapped: Digital news repertoires in the class structure ab: This article mobilizes Pierre Bourdieu's full theory-method to study how class shapes our news orientations in a digital, high-choice media environment. An online survey (N=3850) was used to create a statistical representation of the contemporary Swedish social space with variables measuring access to economic, cultural, social, and cosmopolitan capital. A range of digital news preferences and practices were then given co-ordinates in that space. Results highlight the importance of class habitus for the formation of digital news repertoires. Since different groups form altogether different news repertoiresand distaste the preferences of the groups most different to themselves (in terms of access to capitals)news practices and preferences solidify the positions of groups in the social structure. The study sheds light on the relationship between social and digital inequality and challenges the psychological and individualistic bias in contemporary research on news media use.
POLITICS & POLICY id:182
TI: Does the Narrative Policy Framework Apply to Local Policy Issues? ab: To what extent does the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) apply to local policy issues? The scholarship developing the NPF as a theoretical framework has focused on national, state, or regional policy problems with very little attention to local ones. This article contributes to the literature on policy narratives, finding that the use of narrative elements by coalitions is more nuanced in highly localized policy settings than the current theory suggests. In particular, the depiction of characters and assignment of blame differs more in local settings than the NPF would indicate. Hypotheses about key narrative elements of characters, causal mechanisms, narrative story type, and policy solutions are tested using data from a content analysis of 202 policy narratives about the residential water shutoffs in Detroit during 2014. Findings support the use of the NPF for local policy issues and the importance of depicting characters as beneficiaries rather than villains or victims.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC POLICY id:615
TI: Dynamics of policy change in authoritarian countries: a multiple-case study on China ab: Using evidence from China, this study proposes the conflict expansion model to explore how pressure for policy change can build up to overcome resisting force and stimulate a response from decisionmakers in an authoritarian context. Tracing the policy change processes of four national policies, this study finds that the social pressure mobilised by media reports focused on specific events is a major force for facilitating policy change in China. However, owing to institutional constraints, the influences of societal actors are sporadic, incident-based and varied by population. The policy change process is protracted and difficult when it encounters resistance from state actors who have multiple institutional access channels for influencing the decision-making process. The power distribution between the facilitating and resisting forces determines whether policy change proceeds quickly or arduously.
ADMINISTRATIVE SCIENCE QUARTERLY id:551
TI: Election Cycles and Organizations: How Politics Shapes the Performance of State-owned Enterprises over Time ab: This study develops a dynamic perspective on how elected state officials' political incentives shape the behavior and performance of organizations, particularly state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Drawing on theoretical views about the relationship between politicians and firms, I argue that state officials seeking votes manipulate SOEs to boost employment before elections. As a result, SOEs exhibit both higher employment levels and lower financial performance in election years. The positive relationship between elections and SOE employment, however, is not uniform across firms and geographic communities: it is likely to be stronger in economically disadvantaged communities and weaker for SOEs with private investors. Data from Brazil's water sector-an industry managing a crucial societal resource-support these predictions. These results shed light on the mechanisms linking officials' political incentives and SOE behavior and show that SOE performance is politically contingent and thus varies systematically over time. More broadly, this study reveals how firms' responses to political pressures depend on both organizational and community attributes and highlights how the interplay of election cycles, organizations, and communities shapes the performance of organizations in state capitalism.
SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY id:270
TI: Environmental science and policy: A meta-synthesis of case studies on boundary organizations and spanning processes ab: We conducted a meta-synthesis of published qualitative articles to better understand how features and strategies of boundary organizations and spanning processes influence whether environmental science was utilized in politically oriented outcomes. Meta-synthesis is a peer-reviewed research technique which is becoming more prolific as disciplines compare qualitative research studies and generalize qualitative knowledge. In this work, thirty-nine published case studies were analysed through a systematic grounded theory approach and thirty-nine structured interviews were performed with authors to validate the results. Overall, forty-seven boundary spanning variables were evaluated using disaggregated statistics to determine correlation with policy outcomes. Our results develop the possibility that successful boundary spanning linkages may be less about utilizing formal boundary organizations and more about fostering the process through which science and policy are intermingled.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:528
TI: Eyes on You while Your Eyes Are on God: State Surveillance of Religion in Ghana under the Provisional National Defence Council Regime ab: This paper discusses Ghana's erstwhile Religious Bodies Registration Law (PNDC Law 221) passed by the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) in 1989 and the associated bans placed on the Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormon sects. First, the paper analyzes how the state's surveillance moves engendered lateral and anti-surveillance practices. Second, Eric Stoddart's concept of (in)visibility is used as an analytical framework to track how both the surveilling entity (the state and community surveillers) and the surveilled (religious bodies and their members) actively partook in constructing the visibility and invisibility of the surveilled. The paper concludes that the state's theoretical ambition of religious surveillance was not fully matched in practice, as implementation was mediated by a pragmatic blend of "seeing" and "unseeing." Also, the response of the religious sects to the surveillance involved a strategic pursuit of simultaneous visibility and invisibility.
PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE id:202
TI: Framing genetically modified mosquitoes in the online news and Twitter: Intermedia frame setting in the issue-attention cycle ab: We investigate how the online news and Twitter framed the discussion about genetically modified mosquitoes, and the interplay between the two media platforms. The study is grounded in the theoretical frameworks of intermedia agenda setting, framing, and the issue-attention cycle and combines methods of manual and computational content analysis, and time series analysis. The findings show that the Twitter discussion was more benefit-oriented, while the news coverage was more balanced. Initially, Twitter played a leading role in framing the discussion about genetically modified mosquitoes. When the public learned about the issue, online news gained momentum and led the Twitter publics to discuss the risks of genetically modified mosquitoes. Based on the findings, we argue that the intermedia frame setting may change its direction over time, and different media outlets may be influential in leading different aspects of the conversation.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:376
TI: Heralds of global transparency: Remote sensing, nuclear fuel-cycle facilities, and the modularity of imagination ab: How has commercial remote sensing influenced the framing of public narratives about nuclear programs and weapons of mass destruction? This article examines an early and formative case: In 2002, a Washington-based nongovernmental organization used commercial satellite images to publicly identify the Natanz nuclear facility in Iran. The episode helped inaugurate the 'Iran nuclear crisis' as we have known it since. But it also played a role in fomenting a commercial market for remote sensing, adjusting the role of 'citizen scientist' in the nuclear arms-control community, visualizing a new television journalism beat of 'covering the intelligence community', legitimizing a transforming role of nuclear safeguards inspectors at the International Atomic Energy Agency, and solidifying Iran's nuclear program as 'clandestine'. This article follows the images as they pass through these social worlds and examines how heterogenous actors incorporated remote sensing into their identities and commitments to global transparency.
SCIENCE AS CULTURE id:481
TI: How Civil Society Organisations Changed the Regulation of Clinical Trials in India ab: In 2005 India changed its pharmaceutical and innovation policy that facilitated a dramatic increase in international clinical trials involving study sites in India. This policy shift was surrounded by controversies; civil society organisations (CSOs) criticised the Indian government for promoting the commercialisation of pharmaceutical research and development. Health social movements in India fought for social justice through collective action, and engaged in normative reasoning of the benefits, burdens and equality of research. They lobbied to protect trial participants from structural violence that occurred especially in the first 5-6 years of the new policy. CSOs played a major role in the introduction of new regulations in 2013, which accelerated a decline in the number of global trials carried out in India. This activism applied interpretations of global social justice as key ideas in mobilisation, eventually helping to institutionalise stricter ethical regulation on a national level. Like government and industry, activists believed in randomised controlled trials and comparison as key methods for scientific knowledge production. However, they had significant concerns about the global hierarchies of commercial pharmaceutical research, and their impact on the rights of participants and on benefits for India overall. Pointing to ethical malpractices and lobbying for stricter ethical regulations, they aimed to ensure justice for research participants, and developed effective strategies to increase controls over the business side of clinical research.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE id:316
TI: Identity as Dependent Variable: How Americans Shift Their Identities to Align with Their Politics ab: Political science generally treats identities such as ethnicity, religion, and sexuality as "unmoved movers" in the chain of causality. I hypothesize that the growing salience of partisanship and ideology as social identities in the United States, combined with the increasing demographic distinctiveness of the nation's two political coalitions, is leading some Americans to engage in a self-categorization and depersonalization process in which they shift their identities toward the demographic prototypes of their political groups. Analyses of a representative panel data set that tracks identities and political affiliations over a 4-year span confirm that small but significant shares of Americans engage in identity switching regarding ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and class that is predicted by partisanship and ideology in their pasts, bringing their identities into alignment with their politics. These findings enrich and complicate our understanding of the relationship between identity and politics and suggest caution in treating identities as unchanging phenomena.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:571
TI: Ignorance loops: How non-knowledge about bee-toxic agrochemicals is iteratively produced ab: In this article, I examine the knowledge politics around pesticides in the United States and the role it plays in honey bee declines. Since 2006, US beekeepers have lost an average of one-third of their colonies each year. Though a number of factors influence bee health, beekeepers, researchers and policymakers cite pesticides as a primary contributor. In the US, pesticide registration is overseen by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), with the required tests conducted by chemical companies applying for registration. Until 2016, the EPA only required chemical companies to measure acute toxicity for non-target species, which means that many pesticides with sublethal toxicities are not labeled bee-toxic, and farmers can apply them without penalty while bees are on their farms or orchards. In addition, California state and county regulators will typically only investigate a bee kill caused by a labeled bee-toxic pesticide, and so emergent data on non-labeled, sublethal pesticides goes uncollected. These gaps in data collection frustrate beekeepers and disincentivize them from reporting colony losses to regulatory agencies - thus reinforcing ignorance about which chemicals are toxic to bees. I term the iterative cycle of non-knowledge co-constituted by regulatory shortfalls and stakeholder regulatory disengagement an 'ignorance loop'. I conclude with a discussion of what this dynamic can tell us about the politics of knowledge production and pesticide governance and the consequences of 'ignorance loops' for stakeholders and the environment.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:252
TI: Institutional Dimensions of Open Government Data Implementation: Evidence from the Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK ab: This article investigates the institutional dimensions that shape Open Government Data (OGD) implementation in three developed countries: the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Thirty-two expert interviews and document analysis were used to research OGD implementation practices. The results reveal that OGD implementation as such is not enough to ensure the sustainability and success of OGD adoption in a country. Five different dimensions should be distinguished: policy and strategy, legislative foundations, organizational arrangements, relevant skills, public support and awareness. The approach to the institutional dimensions differs between the countries. Centralized OGD governance is shown to yield better results and a higher level of OGD implementation. The contribution of the present study is twofold: first, the article introduces institutional dimensions for explaining OGD implementation; second, it presents a comparative analysis of best practices in the three developed countries.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE id:501
TI: Is Temperature Exogenous? The Impact of Civil Conflict on the Instrumental Climate Record in Sub-Saharan Africa ab: Research into the effects of climate on political and economic outcomes assumes that short-term variation in weather is exogenous to the phenomena being studied. However, weather data are derived from stations operated by national governments, whose political capacity and stability affect the quality and continuity of coverage. We show that civil conflict risk in sub-Saharan Africa is negatively correlated with the number and density of weather stations contributing to a country's temperature record. This effect is both cross-sectional-countries with higher average conflict risk tend to have poorer coverage-and cross-temporal-civil conflict leads to loss of weather stations. Poor coverage induces a small downward bias in one widely used temperature data set, due to its interpolation method, and increases measurement error, potentially attenuating estimates of the temperature-conflict relationship. Combining multiple observational data sets to reduce measurement error almost doubles the estimated effect of temperature anomalies on civil conflict risk.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:604
TI: Journalistic epistemology and digital news circulation: Infrastructure, circulation practices, and epistemic contests ab: The digital media environment provokes many questions about the state of journalism as a knowledge producing practice. As a means to better assess how changing digital news practices connect to journalists' epistemic authority, this article combines Ekstrom's emphasis on journalistic epistemology as a social practice of knowledge production with Bodker's conceptualization of circulation both as a form of information transmission and as a site for producing shared meanings about journalism. To develop a model for analyzing the epistemic consequences of digital news circulation, three components of circulation are explored: infrastructure, circulation practices, and epistemic contests. These components consider, respectively, the materiality of digital media, various usage patterns that arise, and public struggles over what news as a form of knowledge ought to look like and who should produce it.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:647
TI: Killing secrets from Panama to Paradise: Understanding the ICIJ through bifurcating communicative and political affordances ab: This Machine Kills Secrets is how Greenberg explains the widespread adoption of digital encryption and anonymity tools in practices of disclosure. We consider how that machine works, to the extent that new and sustained political practices in society have emerged through digital disclosures. We offer the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) as a paradigmatic case to inform new metaphors of what disclosure is and what it does in democratic governing. The empirical work focuses on how ICIJ's data mining, manipulation and visualisation interface with traditional governing institutions of accountability. The article relates the affordances present in the ICIJ to modes of societal control that are available through Brighenti's consideration of visibility as a social category and governmentality scholarship through three theoretical moves: bifurcating affordance theory on communicative and political planes, relaying a complimentarily delineated model of media apparatus and considering how such apparatuses shift towards proto-institutions.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:623
TI: Localizing landscapes: a call for respectful design in Indigenous counter mapping ab: The increasing use of digital platforms (for example geo referencing, Indigenous counter mapping) to capture Australian Indigenous culture risks adopting tools ontologically based in settler colonial cartographies and thus, unwittingly, can recreate a universal view of empire. Platforms are never neutral spaces and globalized narratives continue to diminish local ontologies. Respectful design of future counter mapping could be based inside local ontologies and epistemologies of differing cultural groups. Respect is shown in engaging with local communities and privileging Indigenous mapping processes. Such engagement would aim to develop counter mapping practices incorporating the principles guarded by the Elders and the protocols by which knowledge itself may be communicated. This paper seeks to demonstrate the different methods by which such respect may be practiced and an approach which emphasizes collaboration and deep listening. Such methods and approach allow for emerging digital landscapes (counter maps) that respect, value, and protect the local epistemological and ontological sources of Indigenous Knowledge.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:555
TI: Making heart-lung machines work in India: Imports, indigenous innovation and the challenge of replicating cardiac surgery in Bombay, 1952-1962 ab: In 1962, surgeons at two hospitals in Bombay used heart-lung machines to perform open-heart surgery. The devices that made this work possible had been developed in Minneapolis in 1955 and commercialized by 1957. However, restrictions on currency exchange and foreign imports made it difficult for surgeons in India to acquire this new technology. The two surgeons, Kersi Dastur and PK Sen, pursued different strategies to acquire the ideas, equipment, and tacit knowledge needed to make open-heart surgery work. While Dastur tapped Parsi networks that linked him to local manufacturing expertise, Sen took advantage of opportunities offered by the Rockefeller Foundation to access international training and medical device companies. Each experienced steep learning curves as they pursued the know-how needed to use the machines successfully in dogs and then patients. The establishment of open-heart surgery in India required the investment of substantial labor and resources. Specific local, national, and transnational interests motivated the efforts. Heart-lung machines, for instance, took on new meanings amid the nationalist politics of independent India: Even as surgeons sought imported machines, they and their allies assigned considerable value to indigenous' innovation. The confluence of the many interests that made Sen and Dastur's work possible facilitated the uneasy co-existence of conflicting judgments about the success or failure of this medical innovation.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:118
TI: Management and Performance in US Nursing Homes ab: Accountability pressures have generated complex performance measurement regimes to evaluate and improve public or publicly funded services. Performance management, however, faces many challenges including the tradeoffs posed by numerous dimensions of performance and a lack of consensus on which organizational and environmental factors can improve these results. This study seeks to understand the effect of management and other factors on different dimensions and measures of performance in US public, nonprofit, and for-profit nursing homes. Using a hybrid data set that combines archival government data on performance in nursing homes with a recent nursing home administrators' survey, we find that innovative management significantly(1) improves the quality of care. In addition, more innovation and less power sharing in management are associated with serving fewer Medicaid-funded clients. Significant differences in performance exist across public, nonprofit, and for-profit organizations. These differences are notable across both the archival and perceptual models of performance.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:514
TI: Networked publics as agents of accountability: Online interactions between citizens, the media and immigration officials during the European refugee crisis ab: This study examines how citizens made use of online platforms to direct diverging critiques and demands at the Finnish Immigration Service during what has come to be known as the refugee crisis in Europe. Focusing on peak periods of debate, identified using big data, we closely observe how public scrutiny of the immigration service occurred in the interactions between online users, the news media and the agency itself. Our analysis indicates that networked publics can be regarded as influential drivers of accountability for government agencies, which often feel obligated to justify their actions to these publics. However, the operation of networked publics as accountability agents remains heavily dependent on the broader public debate, which is still largely shaped by news media organisations, political elites and the officials themselves.
WORLD POLITICS id:582
TI: Networks, Informal Governance, and Ethnic Violence in a Syrian City ab: In cross-national studies, ethnic exclusion is robustly associated with the onset of violent challenge to incumbent regimes. But significant variation remains at the subnational level-not all members of an excluded ethnic group join in challenge. This article accounts for intra-ethnic group variation in terms of the network properties of local communities, nested within ethnic groups, and the informal ties that regimes forge to some segments of the ethnically excluded population. Mobilization within an excluded ethnic group is most likely among local communities where members are densely linked to one another and lack network access to state-controlled resources. Drawing on a case study of the Syrian city of Homs in the 2011 uprising, this article demonstrates how the Syrian regime's strategies of managing the Sunni population of Homs shaped patterns of challenge. On the one hand, the state's toleration of spontaneous settlements on the city's periphery helped to reproduce dense network ties. On the other hand, the regime's informal bargains with customary leaders instrumentalized those ties to manage local populations. These bargains could not withstand the regime's use of violence against challengers, which meant that these same local networks became crucial factors in impelling and sustaining costly antiregime mobilization.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:141
TI: No Fracking Way vs. "Drill Baby Drill": A Restructuring of Who Is Pitted Against Whom in the Narrative Policy Framework ab: Narratives are highly consequential in policy processes because they shape public perception of policy issues. The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) seeks to predict the extent to which narratives are strategically used to influence policy outcomes. Its core hypotheses center around a winning vs. losing dichotomy, in which winning and losing narratives employ distinct sets of strategies. Due to the newness of the theory, there are few empirical tests of its components, and their results are inconclusive. We posit that the winning-losing paradigm does not accurately predict narrative strategy use. To test this hypothesis, we examine a policy dilemma where contextually similar jurisdictions adopted multiple different policy solutions over a common time period. From 2008 to 2012, more than 260 New York municipalities passed policies related to hydraulic fracturing (fracking). We analyze editorial content from two local newspapers in central New York whose distribution covers municipalities that adopted anti- and pro-fracking policies. Our findings reveal that narrators consistently use narrative strategies that correspond to the side of the issue they support, regardless of whether they are winning or losing the policy debate. This suggests the NPF's winning-losing dichotomy may not be not well suited to predicting narrative strategy use or policy outcomes.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW id:416
TI: Nudging the Neoliberal Agenda: Administrative Opportunities in the Deregulated State ab: The current climate of neoliberalism in the executive branch is attended by active deregulation and distrust of the administrative state. As protections are rolled back, there is concern that individuals may be susceptible to information asymmetries that will influence their decision making, leading to detrimental outcomes for both their own and the general welfare. Behavioral public administration-the bureaucratic conception of "nudge" theory-offers ways to counter the pitfalls that come with greater freedom of choice, as promoted by the neoliberal agenda. Public administrators may employ alternative mechanisms, such as choice architecture, to help people make better decisions in the absence of explicitly protective regulations. After laying out the argument for a behavioral approach, this article analyzes several neoliberal agenda issues with potential nudge responses for practical implementation, as well as a justifiable call for action to protect the public welfare in the absence of policy guidance.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW id:153
TI: Politics of Disclosure: Organizational Transparency as Multiactor Negotiation ab: Transparency is in vogue, yet it is often used as an umbrella concept for a wide array of phenomena. More focused concepts are needed to understand the form and function of different phenomena of visibility. In this article, the authors define organizational transparency as systematic disclosure programs that meet the information needs of other actors. Organizational transparency, they argue, is best studied as an interorganizational negotiation process on the field level. To evaluate its merit, the authors apply this framework to a case study on the introduction of open data in the Berlin city administration. Analyzing the politics of disclosure, they consider the similarities and differences between phenomena of visibility (e.g., open data, freedom of information), explore the transformative power of negotiating transparency, and deduce recommendations for managing transparency.
SCIENCE AS CULTURE id:594
TI: Pedophilia Screening in Technosecurity Culture The Construction of Dangerous Sub-populations in the Name of Security ab: Pedophilia numbers among the prominent fears of western societies. Politicians have argued in favor of mass surveillance, claiming it is required to catch pedophiles, while a growing commercial market exists for 'pedophilia screenings'. Sexology defines pedophilia as a sexual preference for prepubescent children, meaning that prior sex offenses are not essential for a diagnosis. The diagnostic criteria have changed little since pedophilia was first described as a psychiatric phenomenon, but there have been vast changes in the ways in which pedophilia is diagnosed. One aspect that has however remained the same is the persistent belief that pedophilia is an innate trait of an individual; this makes pedophilia discourses compatible with current risk discourses. Today's diagnostic tools include a range of technological procedures. This trend of deploying technologically enhanced diagnostics is indicative of a shift towards a technosecurity logic within the project of seeking physical evidence to demonstrate sexual desire. At the same time, this shift is co-constitutive of current risk discourses regarding child abuse. Technosecurity-based attempts to identify pedophiles may re-normalize the notion that 'dangerous sub-populations' exist that deserve only limited rights, thus paving the way for erosion of the legal system and of democratic principles.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW id:406
TI: Political Embeddedness of Public Pension Governance: An Event History Analysis of Discount Rate Changes ab: State governments are frequently said to manipulate the discount rate assumption to make pension funding look better, reduce employers' and employees' pension contributions, or relieve fiscal stress. Building a model from the political embeddedness perspective and applying an event history analysis to the 81 largest state-administered pension plans in the United States, the authors found that more politically embedded pension boards were actually more likely to reduce their plan's discount rate. Public union coverage and government political ideology, however, had no significant impact on discount rate changes. These findings reveal the effect of political embeddedness on pension planning decisions and provide useful insights into the intricate process of setting pension discount rates in a new era of more muted investment return expectations. This article points to both political and financial pressures facing pension boards and state governments for many years to come.
POLITICS & POLICY id:249
TI: Poor Quality of Data in Africa: What Are the Issues? ab: One of the problems that scholars encounter when conducting research is that data from Africa are poor. Indeed, they either do not exist in a complete sense or they are not of good quality in the sense of lacking validity and reliability. Using various sources of available data on corruption and tourism, we show that lack of quality data in Africa not only limits the continent's ability to generate a pertinent body of knowledge but also prevents analysts from generating the evidence that policy makers need to make proper decisions in influencing the development of the continent. We go on to argue that the problem of data quality in Africa is due to the lack of research culture rather than just scarcity of resources, as argued in the literature. It is in this context that we advocate for inculcation of research culture in Africa for development of the continent.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW id:450
TI: Pragmatic Municipalism: US Local Government Responses to Fiscal Stress ab: This article updates cutback management theory and challenges austerity urbanism theory by showing that local governments practice pragmatic municipalism-protecting services with a balanced response to fiscal stress. Using a 2017 national survey of 2,341 U.S. municipalities and counties, the authors identify four responses-no specific action, cuts, revenue supplements, and deferrals. Structural equation models show that cuts are higher in places with older infrastructure and more unemployment but not in places with more poverty. Supplemental responses are higher in places with professional management and higher education. Deferrals are higher in places with more debt but lower in places with older infrastructure. Localities with less fiscal stress take no specific action. Most governments combine cuts, supplements, and deferrals; this balanced response is associated with more fiscal stress, more citizen engagement, and higher levels of unionization. These results show that local governments practice pragmatic municipalism, not austerity urbanism, when responding to fiscal stress.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:531
TI: Predictive Policing and the Platformization of Police Work ab: Although the revolutionary potential of predictive policing has often been exaggerated, this novel policing strategy nonetheless implies something substantially new: the underlying methods of (crime) data analysis. Moreover, these police prediction tools matter not only because of their capacity to generate near-term crime predictions but also because they have the potential to generally enhance police-related data crunching, ultimately giving rise to the comprehensive datafication of police work, creating an ongoing drive for extensive data collection and, hence, surveillance. This paper argues that because of its enablement of crime data analysis in general, predictive policing software will be an important incubator for datafied police work, especially when executed via data mining platforms, because it has made police authorities aware that the massive amounts of crime data they possess are quite valuable and can now be easily analyzed. These data are perceived to be even more useful when combined with external data sets and when processed on the largest possible scale. Ultimately, significant transformative effects are to be expected for policing, especially in relation to data collection practices and surveillance imperatives.
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY id:500
TI: Quality, impact, and quantification: Indicators and metrics use by social scientists ab: The use of indicators and metrics for research evaluation purposes is well-documented; however, less is known about their use by individual scholars. With a focus on the social sciences, this article contributes to the existing literature on indicators and metrics use in fields with diverse publication practices. Scholars in Australia and Sweden were asked about their use and reasons for using metrics. A total of 581 completed surveys were analyzed to generate descriptive statistics, with textual analysis performed on comments provided to open questions. While just under half of the participant group had used metrics, the Australians reported use in twice the proportion of their Swedish peers. Institutional policies and processes were frequently associated with use, and the scholars' comments suggest a high level of awareness of some metrics as well as strategic behavior in demonstrating research performance. There is also evidence of tensions between scholars' research evaluation environment and their disciplinary values and publication practices.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:464
TI: Regulatory brokerage: Competitive advantage and regulation in the field of regenerative medicine ab: This article concerns the roles of entrepreneurial scientists in the co-production of life science research and regulation. Regulatory brokerage, defined as a mode of strategic planning and as the negotiation of regulation based on comparative advantage and competition, is expressed in scientific activities that take advantage of regulatory difference. This article is based on social science research in Japan, Thailand, India and the UK. Using five cases related to Japan's international activities in the field of regenerative medicine, I argue that, driven by competitive advantage, regulatory brokerage at lower levels of managerial organization and governance is emulated at higher levels. In addition, as regulatory brokerage affects the creation of regulation at national, bilateral and global levels, new regulation may be based on competition in regulatory advantage rather than on ethical and scientific values. I argue that regulatory brokerage as the basis for regulatory reform bypasses issues that need to be decided by a broader public. More space is needed for international and political debate about the socio-political consequences of the global diversity of regulation in the field of the life sciences.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:722
TI: Relational agility: Visualizing near-real-time Arctic sea ice data as a proxy for climate change ab: This ethnographic study at the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) follows a group of scientists and communications specialists as they compose visualizations and analyses of near-real-time Arctic sea ice data. Research participants collectively make scientific judgments about near-real-time data in a highly visible public venue with 'relational agility'. They balance multiple phenomena including knowledge of how sceptics attack climate science, reflexivity about the conventions through which sea ice data is gathered, the needs of journalists working in a news cycle paced by Twitter, and the liveliness and vitality of sea ice itself. Relational agility, understood as a way of coordinating the social in relation to this plurality of contingent practices and processes, provides insight into the science and politics of nonlinear climate change.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:128
TI: Religious live-streaming: constructing the authentic in real time ab: From the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem to the Kaaba of Mecca, many religious sites are webcasting in live-streaming. This study inquires how religious institutions act to shape users' worldviews and negotiate meanings via live-streaming-mediated communication. Ethnographic fieldwork accompanied a case study of 25 in-depth interviews of the CancAo Nova and the Franciscan Order's recent media operation in the Holy Land. Findings uncovered three facets: (1) Evangelizing youth. (2) Establishing affinity towards the Holy Land. (3) Maintaining constant presence of the transcendental. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, proximity between believers and the divine via live-streaming is discussed and its implication for transforming the religious experience, establishing secondary authority in the Catholic world and propelling religious change in the information society.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:176
TI: Researching far right groups on Twitter: Methodological challenges 2.0 ab: The Internet poses a number of challenges for academics. Internet specificities such as anonymity, the decontextualisation of discourse, the misuse or non-use of references raise methodological questions about the quality and the authenticity of the data available online. This is particularly true when dealing with extremist groups and grass-root militants that cultivate secrecy. Based on a study of the far-right on Twitter, this article explores these methodological issues. It discusses the qualitative indicators we have developed to determine whether a given Twitter account should be included in the sample or not. By using digital traces drawn from profiles, interactions, content and through other visual information, we recontextualize user's profile and analyze how digital traces participate in providing far right ideas with a wider representation.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:122
TI: Strategies of Policy Advocacy Organizations and Their Theoretical Affinities: Evidence from Q-Methodology ab: Policy advocacy is an increasingly important function for many nonprofit organizations, yet their advocacy activities have largely escaped theoretical grounding. The literature on nonprofits has described how they engage in policy advocacy, without linking them to theories of policy change. The policy studies literature, on the other hand, has explained how various forms of influence result in policy change, but has largely ignored organizational perspectives on those processes. These two literatures remain largely disconnected. Drawing upon interviews with a purposive sample of policy advocacy directors at 31 nonprofit organizations, this study applies Q-methodology to identify and describe six distinct policy advocacy strategies employed by the organizations, and their resonant theoretical views of policy processes. These findings suggest strategic approaches for nonprofits seeking to influence policy processes. They also enhance the academic literature on policy processes by adding the advocates' views and expectations. Implications for further research are also identified.
DISASTERS id:690
TI: Supply chain and logistics competencies in humanitarian aid ab: The continuing incidence of disasters and their associated challenges has increased the demand for humanitarian logisticians. However, there is a dearth of research on their essential competencies. This paper proposes, therefore, a humanitarian logistics competency framework (HlCF) to assist with the professional development of humanitarian logisticians. In creating the HlCF, nine competency domains containing 29 specific competencies across four levels (entry to senior management) were identified. This study makes two key contributions to the literature: (i) it extends the discussion of competency frameworks in humanitarian logistics; and (ii) it presents a framework designed to support the human resource plans and practices of aid agencies. The HlCF allows not only individual humanitarian logisticians to develop the competencies necessary for career success, but also humanitarian organisations to map their own competency frameworks to a common standard. This will, in turn, facilitate workforce mobility and support the overall concept of a certified humanitarian logistics professional.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:290
TI: Text as Policy: Measuring Policy Similarity through Bill Text Reuse ab: The identification of substantively similar policy proposals in legislation is important to scholars of public policy and legislative politics. Manual approaches are prohibitively costly in constructing datasets that accurately represent policymaking across policy domains, jurisdictions, or time. We propose the use of an algorithm that identifies similar sequences of text (i.e., text reuse), applied to legislative text, to measure the similarity of the policy proposals advanced by two bills. We study bills from U.S. state legislatures. We present three ground truth tests, applied to a corpus of 500,000 bills. First, we show that bills introduced by ideologically similar sponsors exhibit a high degree of text reuse, that bills classified by the National Conference of State Legislatures as covering the same policies exhibit a high degree of text reuse, and that rates of text reuse between states correlate with policy diffusion network ties between states. In an empirical application of our similarity measure, we find that Republican state legislators introduce legislation that is more similar to legislation introduced by Republicans in other states, than is legislation introduced by Democratic state legislators to legislation introduced by Democrats in other states.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:235
TI: The Impact of Performance Measurement on the Selection of Enforcement Targets by Competition Authorities: The Russian Experience in an International Context ab: This article provides evidence about the influence of performance measurement criteria on the choice of enforcement targets by law enforcement authorities, utilizing a rich dataset of decisions by the Russian competition authority in the period 2008-2015. The authors provide a comparative analysis of performance measurement by several competition authorities throughout the world. Then a hypothesis is tested suggesting that a competition authority, motivated by the criterion of "enforcement success," tends to select relatively easy implemented enforcement targets, which lead to decisions with relatively low probability of being annulled if appealed. This is so, even though other enforcement targets would generate superior welfare effects. Thus, our analysis indicates that putting undue emphasis on "enforcement success" as a performance criterion may not lead to desirable welfare outcomes.
COMPUTER SUPPORTED COOPERATIVE WORK-THE JOURNAL OF COLLABORATIVE COMPUTING AND WORK PRACTICES id:532
TI: The Missing "Turn to Practice" in the Digital Transformation of Industry ab: This paper reports on a "Industry 4.0" project supported by the government through the French public investment bank. This project was launched by a major industrial actor in the gas domain and aims at equipping its factories with digital technologies, and at connecting all these factories through a centralized supervision center, named Operational and Optimization Remote Center (OORC). Based on our observation in production sites and the OORC, we present the new organization of work that takes place in this context, and the digital artifact that was introduced to support it. We analyze its use and identify some failures related to the gap between its features and the existing documentation practice in the factories. We then claim that industry has to "turn to practice" to accomplish its digital transformation. This paper contributes to what we foresee as a research agenda for CSCW researchers wishing to contribute to the fourth industrial revolution and the related digital transformation of work in industrial settings.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:790
TI: The Triad of Colonialism, Anti-Communism, and Neo-Liberaiism: Decolonizing Surveillance Studies in South Korea ab: This paper critically examines three intersectional hegemonic forces of maintaining a surveillance regime-the triad of colonialism, anti-communism, and neo-liberalism-that I argue are necessary for decolonizing surveillance studies in South Korea. I discuss South Korea's Resident Registration System (RRS) as the contemporary incarnation of modern colonial power's control over its colonial subjects, calling into question the maintenance of the colonial legacies within RRS policy innovations. I critically examine the way in which the legitimacy of neo-liberal surveillance is embraced by the anti-privacy scheme entrenched in the colonial and anti-communism legacies that relentlessly allows state power to control and intervene in individual realms. Questioning the triad of colonialism, anti-communism, and neo-liberalism can recast a critical work for decolonizing surveillance studies in South Korea.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:350
TI: The biggest legal battle in UK casino history': Processes and politics of cheating' in sociotechnical networks ab: Previous literature on cheating has focused on defining the concept, assigning responsibility to individual players, collaborative social processes or technical faults in a game's rules. By contrast, this paper applies an actor-network perspective to understanding cheating' in games, and explores how the concept is rhetorically effective in sociotechnical controversies. The article identifies human and nonhuman actors whose interests and properties were translated in a case study of edge sorting' - identifying minor but crucial differences in tessellated patterns on the backs of playing cards, and using these to estimate their values. In the ensuing legal controversy, the defending actors - casinos - retranslated the interests of actors to position edge sorting as cheating. This allowed the casinos to emerge victorious in a legal battle over almost twenty million dollars. Analyzing this dispute shows that cheating is both sociotechnically complex as an act and an extremely powerful rhetorical tool for actors seeking to prevent changes to previously-established networks. Science and Technology Studies (STS) offers a rich toolkit for examining cheating, but in addition the cheating discourse may be valuable to STS, enlarging our repertoire of actor strategies relevant to sociotechnical disputes.
WORLD DEVELOPMENT id:762
TI: The evolution of poor food access over the course of the conflict in Yemen ab: Yemen has undergone a profound transformation following the escalation of conflict in March of 2015 that has resulted in widespread food insecurity and the threat of famine. Given the lack of physical access to much of the country and the pressing need for humanitarian assistance, one of the manners in which assistance is targeted is according to the proximity of households to the ongoing violence. However, the temporal and regional patterns of poor food access suggest that there is little correlation between the geographic location of violence and food insecurity. Rather, we demonstrate that violence can affect supply chains and have an impact on food security beyond the location where the violence occurs. Although violence has a strong effect on food security, the lack of a relationship between geographic location of violence and poor food access contrasts with the rationale underpinning portions of the humanitarian and development assistance currently being delivered in the country. (C) 2020 The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:509
TI: The logics of digital advocacy: Between acts of political influence and presence ab: A growing body of research highlights how the Internet and social media offer new platforms for advocacy. This article contributes to the debates on digital advocacy by combining interest group and social media studies and present the notions of digital access politics, digital information politics, and digital protest politics for a comprehensive analysis of digital advocacy. Based on a netnographic study of two highly different advocacy groups working with workers' rights in a Swedish context, we find that online and offline activities are highly interconnected. While previous studies have largely focused on how groups gain political influence, present digital advocacy is much more oriented towards gaining political presence through social media. The article proposes that future studies into advocacy in the digital era needs to study acts for political influence and acts for political presence as intertwined or even as two sides of the same coin.
PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE id:326
TI: The problems of increasing transparency on uncertainty ab: Public regulators (such as European Food Safety Authority, European Medicines Agency, and European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control) are placing increasing demands on scientists to make uncertainties about their evidence transparent to the public. The stated goal is utilitarian, to inform and empower the public and ensure the accountability of policy and decision-making around the use of scientific evidence. However, it is questionable what constitutes uncertainty around the evidence on any given topic, and, while the goal is laudable, we argue the drive to increase transparency on uncertainty of the scientific process specifically does more harm than good, and may not serve the interests of those intended. While highlighting some of the practical implications of making uncertainties transparent using current guidelines, the aim is to discuss what could be done to make it worthwhile for both public and scientists.
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY id:687
TI: Toward Community-Inclusive Data Ecosystems: Challenges and Opportunities of Open Data for Community-Based Organizations ab: The benefits of open data for helping to address societal problems and strengthen communities are well recognized, and unfortunately previous studies found that smaller communities are often excluded from the current data ecosystem because of existing technological, technical, cognitive, and practical barriers. This study aims to investigate the process of communities & apos; data use for community development and decision-making-focusing on the opportunities and challenges of data for communities. From the interviews with 25 staff from community-based organizations (CBOs) in nine small, medium, and large cities in the United States, the findings of this study describe data & apos;s role in supporting communities & apos; development while reporting several major challenges that hinder CBOs data use: difficulty accessing data, limitations of open data (un-local nature, excluding essential data from being open), limited data capacity (especially in data literacy skills), and difficulties using and accessing existing data infrastructures. Our findings suggest opportunities for addressing these challenges, particularly by creating educational programming, building partnerships within data ecosystems, and bringing community voices forward in current data ecosystems, which are critical to realizing data & apos;s potential for all citizens.
SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY id:395
TI: Towards making research evaluation more compatible with developmental goals ab: Research evaluation practices linked to social impact have important systemic effects on the prioritization and organization of research while at the same time leading to the delivery of higher social value. Amidst growing criticisms, global research evaluation has evolved in a different direction, characterized by quantitative metrics and mimetic behavior. The article deals with the forces that sustain the prevailing research evaluation system, asks why it has proven to be so resilient, and discusses alternative proposals. A new argument for building an alternative is put forward: the need for a developmental role for universities, introducing the notion of 'connected autonomy' allowing universities to productively and in a nonsubordinated way collaborate with a broad set of actors to achieve desirable social changes. An outline is presented for how to make research evaluation practices and the pursuit of developmental goals more compatible, an important issue for knowledge public policy.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:753
TI: Trace publics as a qualitative critical network tool: Exploring the dark matter in the #MeToo movement ab: The relationship between the daily practice of personal politics and digitally networked publics amplify a familiar shaping and reshaping of the social. This article expands on nascent critiques of nodocentrism as a contemporary representation of the social in new media research to begin to advance a digital methods multidisciplinary project. Trace publics as a qualitative critical network (QCN) approach considers how representations developed by big social data analysis are shaped by everyday practices. Using the #MeToo phenomenon as an analogous frame, I show how trace publics can be used as a theoretical and methodological device for deconstructing, co-constructing, and reconstructing representations in social media research. The goal of such a proposal is to encourage future critical network and data research to consider the ethical ramifications of nodocentric representations of the social and the methodological possibilities of trace publics.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:250
TI: Tracking the Coverage of Public Policy in Mass Media ab: The average citizen often does not experience government policy directly, but learns about it from the mass media. The nature of media coverage of public policy is thus of real importance, for both public opinion and policy itself. It nevertheless is the case that scholars of public policy and political communication have invested rather little time in developing methods to track public policy coverage in media content. The lack of attention is all the more striking in an era in which media coverage is readily available in digital form. This paper offers a proposal for tracking coverage of the actual direction of policy change in mass media. It begins with some methodological considerations, and then draws on an expository case-defense spending in the United States-to assess the effectiveness of our automated content-analytic methods. Results speak to the quantity and quality in media coverage of policy issues, and the potential role of mass media-to both inform and mislead-in modern representative democracy.
ADMINISTRATIVE SCIENCE QUARTERLY id:133
TI: What Is Dead May Never Die: Institutional Regeneration through Logic Reemergence in Dutch Beer Brewing ab: Through an in-depth, historically embedded study of the craft revolution in Dutch beer brewing that began in the 1970s, we illuminate how organizational fields may experience regenerative change through the reemergence of traditional arrangements. The remarkable resurgence of craft in this context, following the rapid industrialization of the twentieth century that left only industrially produced pilsner in its wake, serves as the basis of our process theory of regenerative institutional change through logic reemergence. The results of our qualitative analysis show that institutional logics that appear dead or decomposed may never truly die, as they leave remnants behind that field actors can rediscover, repurpose, and reuse at later stages. We show how, in the Netherlands, networks of individuals that had access to the remnants of craft brewing were regenerated, in part fueled by increasing exposure to British, Belgian, and German craft brewing, and how these networks ultimately succeeded in reviving traditional prescriptions for beer and brewing, as well as restoring previously abandoned brewery forms and technologies and beer styles. These activities led not only to a sudden proliferation of alternatives to the dominant industrial pilsner but also to fundamental changes in the meaning and organization of beer brewing, as they were associated with the reinvigoration of institutional orders that preceded those of the corporation and the market. Yet we also observe how, on the ground, remnants of traditional craft often needed to be blended with contemporaneous elements from modern industrialism, as well as foreign representations of craft, to facilitate reemergence. We thus argue that regenerative institutional change likely resembles a dualistic process of restoration and transformation.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:503
TI: When Tradition Feeds on Modern Accountability Mechanisms in Public Policy Implementation. The Case of "Imihigo" in Rwanda ab: African traditions and modernity were conceived by colonialists as polar opposites. This justified the dismissal of traditional ways of governing in modern states. Rwanda reinvestigated its precolonial roots in search of original mechanisms to cope with the consequences of the genocide. With regard to policy implementation, it reintroduced a traditional system labeled as "Imihigo." This Kinyarwanda word can be translated as a self-defined policy target one vows to achieve and accept to be held accountable in case of failure. Based on archival analysis and in-depth interviews with elected officials, professionals, districts council members, and local partners, this research examined how this new system positions itself vis-a-vis bureaucratic, peer, and democratic accountability. Findings suggest that far from being weakened, these three mechanisms even gained new vigor in the new system. While in the old bureaucracy, principals had no other possibility than to track the respect of procedures by agents, within Imihigo, bureaucratic accountability allows evaluators to track the origin of failure back to the specific responsibility of each individual. Peer accountability works in interinstitutional cooperation. As for democratic accountability, Imihigo promotes more transparency than it does for democracy understood in its capacity to allow competing views on the same choices.
ADMINISTRATIVE SCIENCE QUARTERLY id:211
TI: When the Fed Speaks: Arguments, Emotions, and the Microfoundations of Institutions ab: This study investigates what happens when a prominent leader explicitly reaffirms the taken-for-granted assumptions underlying an institution. While such efforts are usually made to reinforce the institution, I theorize that they actually destabilize the institution and create collective uncertainty by reopening the very considerations that people take for granted. Using speeches made by the chair of the United States Federal Reserve from 1998 to 2014, I demonstrate that reaffirming the taken-for-granted assumptions underlying the monetary policy framework creates uncertainty in the broader financial market. This market reaction is also influenced by emotions present at the time of the speech that shape how the event is interpreted. Speeches conveyed in an overall more positive tone suppress this reaction, while more fear in the business media amplifies it. Moreover, supplementary analyses conducted on speeches during the financial crisis suggest that when the taken-for-grantedness of these assumptions has weakened, reaffirming them no longer creates uncertainty to the same extent. This study expands our understanding of the consequences of communication in market contexts, raises important questions about the trade-offs between public transparency and market stability, and contributes new insights to research on the cognitive and emotional microfoundations of institutions.
PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE id:364
TI: Why Popper can't resolve the debate over global warming: Problems with the uses of philosophy of science in the media and public framing of the science of global warming ab: A notable feature in the public framing of debates involving the science of Anthropogenic Global Warming are appeals to uncritical positivist' images of the ideal scientific method. Versions of Sir Karl Popper's philosophy of falsification appear most frequently, featuring in many Web sites and broader media. This use of pop philosophy of science forms part of strategies used by critics, mainly from conservative political backgrounds, to manufacture doubt, by setting unrealistic standards for sound science, in the veracity of science of Anthropogenic Global Warming. It will be shown, nevertheless, that prominent supporters of Anthropogenic Global Warming science also often use similar references to Popper to support their claims. It will also be suggested that this pattern reflects longer traditions of the use of Popperian philosophy of science in controversial settings, particularly in the United States, where appeals to the authority of science to legitimize policy have been most common. It will be concluded that studies of the science of Anthropogenic Global Warming debate would benefit from taking greater interest in questions raised by un-reflexive and politically expedient public understanding(s) of the philosophy of science of both critics and supporters of the science of Anthropogenic Global Warming.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:79
TI: A Behavioral Model of Public Organizations: Bounded Rationality, Performance Feedback, and Negativity Bias ab: In this study, we examine organizational responses to performance management in the public sector by studying Korean public agencies responses to their annual performance feedback. In doing so, we employed a regression discontinuity design that exploits the relationship between performance grades and the numeric inputs that determine the grades to uncover the impact of performance management on performance. Evidence suggests that the social and historical aspirations of public organizations significantly influence their performance improvement, as predicted by behavioral theory. We also report evidence supporting the switching aspiration hypothesis; organizations performing below the mean performance of similar others aspire to the average, whereas organizations performing above the mean aspire to improve performance relative to their own historical positions. Overall, our findings provide broad support for the existence of negativity bias in public managers decision making as well as for the relevance of behavioral theory and bounded rationality in the context of public administration.
ORGANIZATION SCIENCE id:34
TI: A Self-Fulfilling Cycle of Coercive Surveillance: Workers' Invisibility Practices and Managerial Justification ab: In the past few decades, the growth of surveillance has become a fixture of organizational life. Past scholarship has largely explained this growth as the result of traditional managerial demands for added control over workers, coupled with newly available cheap technology (such as closed-circuit televisions and body-worn cameras). We draw on the workplace resistance literature to complement these views by suggesting that workers can also drive such growth. More specifically, we show that workers under surveillance can feel constantly observed and seen, but they can also feel largely unnoticed as individuals by management. This paradoxical experience leads them to interpret the surveillance as coercive and to engage in invisibility practices to attempt to go unseen and remain unnoticed. Management, in turn, interprets these attempts as justification for more surveillance, which encourages workers to engage in even more invisibility practices, thus creating a self-fulfilling cycle of coercive surveillance. Our study therefore offers one of the first endogenous explanations for the growth of surveillance while also isolating unique forms of resistance attached to such surveillance.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:650
TI: Working at the boundary: Making space for innovation in a NASA megaproject ab: This study shows how occupational, organizational and institutional boundaries can be reworked to enable innovation. Based on an historical case study of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, which spanned three decades and two dozen organizations, I show how megaproject members made boundaries a target of strategic action. Megaprojects, in particular, require us to think about boundaries at multiple levels as they commonly draw on expertise and resources from different disciplines, organizations, and institutional domains. This case reveals several mechanisms by which boundaries can be modified to coordinate diverse innovation partners, from reconfiguring the ways members relate to one another (splicing, fitting and channeling) to reshaping the environment they work in (softening, fusing and corralling). Overall, this study contributes to our understanding of how actors make room for new ideas and cause institutional change as part of innovation processes. By treating boundaries as malleable and multiplex, I extend organizational theory, which tends to view boundaries as given and things to be spanned. I extend the STS literature that takes boundaries as fluid, identifying several mechanisms of making and unmaking them. A more dynamic treatment of boundaries is called for in both innovation research and practice, and this study opens a path for research that looks not only at boundary objects but also boundary actions, and moves from boundary organizations to boundary organizing.
SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY id:199
TI: 'Aligning activities': coordination, boundary activities, and agenda setting in interdisciplinary research ab: This article examines the role of intermediary agencies in the coordination of interdisciplinary research programmes, basing on the case of the UK Global Food Security programme. Interpreting food security as a 'wicked problem', it shows that coordination is not so much a question of monitoring the implementation of a predefined research programme, as one of creating and maintaining research groups whilst at the same time ensuring a coextensive redefinition of a programme's objectives. Management of the competition between and the prioritisation of approaches of a complex problem require programme coordinators to develop activities that make it possible to manage the abundance of both existing knowledge and the issues to be examined. Finally, such coordination has an external impact, as part of a process of bringing food security onto the agenda in competitive arenas for global public policies.
TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY id:415
TI: Communicating Campus Sexual Assault: A Mixed Methods Rhetorical Analysis ab: This article reports on a mixed methods rhetorical analysis of a data set of news reports on campus sexual assault. A macro-level qualitative analysis of narratives combined with micro-level quantitative content analysis of verb voice offers insight into how news media shapes perceptions of power, blame, and agency in reporting. These findings offer implications for how public actors discuss campus sexual assault and implications for the teaching and practice of research methods in technical communication.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:187
TI: 'Civil skepticism' and the social construction of knowledge: A case in dendroclimatology ab: Early Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars recognized that the social construction of knowledge depends on skepticism's parasitic relationship to background expectations and trust. Subsequent generations have paid less empirical attention to skepticism in science and its relationship with trust. I seek to rehabilitate skepticism in STS - particularly, Merton's view of skepticism as a scientific norm sustained by trust among status peers - with a study of what I call 'civil skepticism'. The empirical grounding is a case in contemporary dendroclimatology and the development of a method ('Blue Intensity') for generating knowledge about climate change from trees. I present a sequence of four instances of civil skepticism involved in making Blue Intensity more resistant to critique, and hence credible (in laboratory experiments, workshops, conferences, and peer-review of articles). These skeptical interactions depended upon maintaining communal notions of civility among an increasingly extended network of mutually trusted peers through a variety of means: by making Blue Intensity complementary to existing methods used to study a diverse natural world (tree-ring patterns) and by contributing to a shared professional goal (the study of global climate change). I conclude with a sociological theory about the role of civil skepticism in constituting knowledge-claims of greater generality and relevance.
SCIENCE AS CULTURE id:700
TI: 'Everywhere Surveillance': Global Surveillance Regimes as Techno-Securitization ab: The Snowden leaks revealed how surveillance agencies conduct surveillance along all geographical scales, from the global to the local. A close look at National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance infrastructures demonstrates how these infrastructures have expanded globally. This expansion is based on technological advances, collaborations between domestic and foreign agencies and ambiguous liaisons between public and private actors. The emergence of global surveillance has to be seen in the context of the increasing techno-securitization of societies that has made surveillance technologies a key technique of government. State-led efforts to secure societies against global threats such as terrorism have turned everyone into a potential threat and therefore into a target of surveillance technologies. Hence, analyses need to take into account the globality of modern surveillance and give global surveillance a face and a name. Inspired by Derek Gregory's conceptualization of 'everywhere war', the here introduced notion of 'everywhere surveillance' provides a theoretical concept suitable for the study of global surveillance regimes. The concept allows for the analysis of complex surveillance apparatuses in all their intricacies, ruptures and interconnections and it allows for the study of the socio-technological and geographical characteristics and implications of global surveillance. 'Everywhere surveillance', the drawing together of heterogeneous, interoperable surveillance artefacts allows for surveillance to be carried out potentially everywhere and against everyone. This in turn is made possible by the capability of surveillance technologies to integrate global communication infrastructures. In the broader environment of techno-securitization the key characteristics of 'everywhere surveillance' lie in its globality, the production of heterogeneous geographies of surveillance, the blurring of lines between combatants and civilians as well as an alarming decline in transparency and accountability.
PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE id:281
TI: 'Globalist war against humanity shifts into high gear': Online anti-vaccination websites and 'anti-public' discourse ab: Online media has provided unprecedented opportunities for anti-vaccination groups to spread their message. An extensive scholarly literature has consequently emerged to analyse such discourse and develop strategies for countering it. In this article, I take a different approach. My contention is that it is no longer appropriate to approach anti-vaccination discourse as a stand-alone formation. Such sites, I argue, building on work by McKenzie Wark and Bart Cammaerts, are increasingly part of a wider proliferation of 'anti-public' discourse that contests fundamental democratic conventions, rules of argumentation and so on. The article uses a mixed methods approach based on a systematic content survey supplemented by the presentation of qualitative examples from 56 anti-vaccination websites. By locating anti-vaccination discourse in these broader contexts, I argue, it is possible to understand it as related to a more general transformation in public deliberation.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:717
TI: 'Nothing to do with the science': How an elite sociotechnical imaginary cements policy resistance to public perspectives on science and technology through the machinery of government ab: That policymakers adopt technoscientific viewpoints and lack reflexivity is a common criticism of scientific decision-making, particularly in response to moves to democratise science. Drawing on interviews with UK-based national policymakers, I argue that an elite sociotechnical imaginary of 'science to the rescue' shapes how public perspectives are heard and distinguishes what is considered to be legitimate expertise. The machinery of policy-making has become shaped around this imaginary - particularly its focus on science as a problem-solver and on social and ethical issues as 'nothing to do with the science' - and this gives this viewpoint its power, persistence and endurance. With this imaginary at the heart of policy-making machinery, regardless of the perspectives of the policymakers, alternative views of science are either forced to take the form of the elite imaginary in order to be processed, or they simply cannot be accounted for within the policy-making processes. In this way, the elite sociotechnical imaginary (and technoscientific viewpoint) is enacted, but also elicited and perpetuated, without the need for policymakers to engage with or even be aware of the imaginary underpinning their actions.
DISASTERS id:312
TI: 'That thing of human rights': discourse, emergency assistance, and sexual violence in South Sudan's current civil war ab: One of the most widely covered aspects of the current conflict in South Sudan has been the use sexual violence by rival factions of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) and other armed groups. While this has had the positive effect of ensuring that sexual violence is an integral component of intervention strategies in the country, it has also had a number of unintended consequences. This paper demonstrates how the narrow focus on sexual violence as a 'weapon of war', and the broader emergency lens through which the plight of civilians, especially women, has been viewed, are overly simplistic, often neglecting the root causes of such violence. More specifically, it highlights how dominant discourses on sexual violence in South Sudan's conflict have disregarded the historically violent civil-military relations that have typified the SPLM/A's leadership, and the structural violence connected with the local political economy of bride wealth and the associated commodification of feminine identities and bodies.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:351
TI: News cartography and epistemic authority in the era of big data: Journalists as map-makers, map-users, and map-subjects ab: Although the destabilization of journalism's epistemic authority has been widely discussed, one critical element has been underexplored-the role of place. For journalists, claiming provenance over "where" has enabled control over a domain of knowledge, and one key means for doing so has been through news cartography, now rendered digitally. However, digital news cartography (digital news maps) exposes journalists' epistemic authority to new challenges, from reliance on big data collected by others to maps about journalism itself that show journalists' diminished authority over place. The case of digital news maps offers a chance to interrogate how journalists know what they know and how they know it and, more broadly, begs the question of how place and mapping must be considered in new media research.
WORLD DEVELOPMENT id:661
TI: 'The struggle isn't over': Shifting aid paradigms and redefining 'development' in eastern Myanmar ab: In recent years, international optimism about Myanmar's fledgling democratization and peace process has contributed to a shift by many Western donors towards the 'normalization' of aid relations with the former pariah state, and from more 'humanitarian' to more 'development'-style approaches. Yet these shifts are not necessarily seen as progress by members of community-based health organizations, which operate under para-state governance systems in the borderlands. Instead, members of these organizations often describe the emerging 'development' paradigm in Myanmar as doing more harm than good. This article draws on long-term ethnographic research conducted over a decade-long period with ethnic minority health workers operating in Myanmar's eastern borderlands. It examines the meanings of 'humanitarianism' and 'development' - and of the 'humanitarian-development nexus' - from the perspective of local-level actors whose voices are still too often ignored in debates about international aid programs and their implementation. It finds that the reactions of the health workers to shifting aid paradigms and programs highlight what is at stake in an evolving politics of aid. These reactions are linked with a politics of suffering; with an ongoing struggle for recognition of non-state governance systems; and with impacts that international aid economies have in designating different socio-political actors as legitimate, and in territorializing border spaces in different ways, at different times. The health workers' attempts to advance an alternative model for 'development' in their communities in turn illustrate how different actors, who are brought together in an unequal 'aid encounter', are involved in an ongoing struggle over the legitimacy of competing systems of government and over the territorialization of border areas. Finally, the article contends that, without understanding local perspectives and engaging critically with the political implications of evolving aid interventions, international aid programs risk impacting negatively on conflict dynamics in contested and transitional states. (C) 2019 The Author. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SYSTEMS id:553
TI: A Framework for Validating Information Systems Research Based on a Pluralist Account of Truth and Correctness ab: Research in information systems includes a range of approaches that make varied contributions in terms of knowledge, understanding, and practical developments. In these days of "fake news" and spurious Internet content, scholarly research needs to be able to demonstrate its validity: Are its findings true and its recommendations correct? We argue that there are fundamental validation criteria that can be applied to all research approaches despite their apparent diversity and conflict. These stem from current views on the nature of truth and the related but wider concept of correctness within philosophy. There has been much debate about the nature of truth: Is it correspondence, coherence, consensual, or pragmatic? Current debates revolve around the idea of a pluralist view of truth-that there are different forms of truth depending on the context or domain Related to truth is the wider concept of correctness: propositions may be true, but correctness can also be applied to actions, performances, or behavior for which truth is not appropriate. We develop a framework for research validity and apply it to a range of research forms including positivist, interpretive, design science, critical, and action oriented. The benefits are: (1) a greater and more explicit focus on validity criteria will produce better research; (2) having a single framework can provide some commonality between what, at times, seem like conflicting approaches to research; (3) having criteria made explicit should encourage debate and further development. The framework is applied to a variety of empirical papers employing varied research approaches.
AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW id:545
TI: A Numbers Game: Quantification of Work, Auto-Gamification, and Worker Productivity ab: Technological advances and the big-data revolution have facilitated fine-grained, high-frequency, low-cost measurement of individuals' work. Yet we understand little about the influences of suchquantification of workon workers' behavior and performance. This article investigates how and when quantification of work affects worker productivity. We argue that quantification affects worker productivity viaauto-gamification, or workers' inadvertent transformation of work into an independent, individual-level game. We further argue that quantification is likely to raise productivity in a context of simple work, where auto-gamification is motivating because quantified metrics adequately measure the work being performed. When work is complex, by contrast, quantification reduces productivity because quantified metrics cannot adequately measure the multifaceted work being performed, causing auto-gamification to be demotivating. To substantiate our argument, we study implementation of an RFID measurement technology that quantifies individual workers' output in real time at a garment factory in India. Qualitative evidence uncovers the auto-gamification mechanism and three conditions that enable it; a natural experiment tests the consequences of quantification of work for worker productivity. This article contributes to the study of quantification, work games, technology, and organizations, and we explore the policy implications of further quantification of work.
SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY id:789
TI: A Protocol for Identifying and Sampling From Proxy Populations ab: Objectives Methods Increasingly it is more and more difficult for researchers to garner a robust response rate from their target population. In response, they often turn to more accessible proxy populations. However, guidance on how to identify and select a proxy population that reasonably mimics the target population is neither expansive nor systematic. Our objective is to fill this gap by offering a standardized protocol for selecting appropriate population. We introduce a proxy selection protocol that combines convenience with purposive nonprobability sampling. The protocol introduces a method following a step-by-step process to evaluate the suitability of a different potential proxy populations as a reasonable representation of the target population. Results and Conclusion Appendix We come to an conclusion that this proxy selection protocol can overcome low response rates and avoid contamination of a limited target population when conducting exploratory or early-stage explanatory research of potential causal relationships.
SCIENCE AS CULTURE id:300
TI: A Sea of Gamba: Making Environmental Harm Illegible in Northern Australia ab: Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholarship has often been suspicious of the role of scientific knowledge and scientists in environmental governance, notably through paying critical attention to the workings of calculative rationalities and techniques. However, recent reforms within certain extractivist regions and nations such as the United States of America and Australia suggest that calculative management and the environmental data on which it is based is no longer a given. Arguably, the politics of rendering the ecologies around us legible through measures and values has changed. This is apparent by examining the case of Gamba grass (Andropogon gayanus), an invasive and fire-promoting 'weed' which is threatening the lives and futures of humans and nonhumans alike in Australia's Northern Territory. After becoming a target of environmental regulation in 2008, the plant has continued to thrive and expand its reach. Interviews and fieldwork with a range of practitioners engaged in bushfire and weed management show that there are many challenges to interceding in forms of environmental harm when we are governed by a politics of environmental illegibility. Pragmatic empirical engagements by STS scholars and others are necessary if these intercessions are to succeed.
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SYSTEMS id:92
TI: A Tale of Two Deterrents: Considering the Role of Absolute and Restrictive Deterrence to Inspire New Directions in Behavioral and Organizational Security Research ab: This research-perspective article reviews and contributes to the literature that explains how to deter internal computer abuse (ICA), which is criminal computer behavior committed by organizational insiders. ICA accounts for a large portion of insider trading, fraud, embezzlement, the selling of trade secrets, customer privacy violations, and other criminal behaviors, all of which are highly damaging to organizations. Although ICA represents a momentous threat for organizations, and despite numerous calls to examine this behavior, the academic response has thus far been lukewarm. However, a few security researchers have examined ICA's influence in an organizational context and addressed potential means of deterring it. However, the results of these studies have been mixed, leading to a debate on the applicability of deterrence theory (DT) to ICA. We argue that more compelling opportunities will arise in DT research if security researchers more deeply study its assumptions and more carefully recontextualize it. The purpose of this article is to advance a deterrence research agenda that is grounded in the pivotal criminological deterrence literature. Drawing on the distinction between absolute and restrictive deterrence and aligning them with rational choice theory (RCT), this paper shows how deterrence can be used to mitigate the participation in and frequency of ICA. We thus propose that future research on the deterrent effects of ICA should be anchored in a more general RCT, rather than in examinations of deterrence as an isolated construct. We then explain how adopting RCT with DT opens up new avenues of research. Consequently, we propose three areas for future research, which cover not only the implications for the study of ICA deterrence, but also the potential motivations for these types of offenses and the skills required to undertake them.
AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW id:1
TI: A Theory of Racialized Organizations ab: Organizational theory scholars typically see organizations as race-neutral bureaucratic structures, while race and ethnicity scholars have largely neglected the role of organizations in the social construction of race. The theory developed in this article bridges these subfields, arguing that organizations are racial structures-cognitive schemas connecting organizational rules to social and material resources. I begin with the proposition that race is constitutive of organizational foundations, hierarchies, and processes. Next, I develop four tenets: (1) racialized organizations enhance or diminish the agency of racial groups; (2) racialized organizations legitimate the unequal distribution of resources; (3) Whiteness is a credential; and (4) the decoupling of formal rules from organizational practice is often racialized. I argue that racialization theory must account for how both state policy and individual attitudes are filtered through-and changed by-organizations. Seeing race as constitutive of organizations helps us better understand the formation and everyday functioning of organizations. Incorporating organizations into a structural theory of racial inequality can help us better understand stability, change, and the institutionalization of racial inequality. I conclude with an overview of internal and external sources of organizational change and a discussion of how the theory of racialized organizations may set the agenda for future research.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:504
TI: A flood of models: Mekong ecologies of comparison ab: In recent decades, scientists have developed a wide array of hydrological, hydrodynamic, and other models to understand the dynamics of the Mekong River Basin. Indeed, the area has been described as 'flooded' with models. Drawing on STS and the philosophy of modeling - which has described models as mediating instruments - the first half of this article discusses how and why this proliferation has occurred, focusing on the Cambodian context. Highlighting that models are developed comparatively, with reference to one another, the analysis shows how they have generated a partially connected ecology of comparisons. As each model makes its own image of the Mekong, the ecology as a whole creates a kaleidoscopic effect. In principle, this ecology is important for that of environmental policy-making. In practice, however, it is tremendously difficult for scientists to bridge the ecologies. Examining two cases of NGO-based modeling aiming to influence policy, the second half of the paper offers a comparative analysis of the challenges modeling knowledge faces in Mekong environmental politics.
WORLD POLITICS id:576
TI: ADVISER TO THE KING Experts, Rationalization, and Legitimacy ab: Do experts rationalize and legitimize authoritarian governance? Although research on expert actors in contexts of democracy and international governance is now extensive, scholarly work on their role in authoritarian settings remains limited. This article helps open the black box of authoritarian decision-making by investigating expert advisers in the Arab Gulf monarchies, where ruling elites have enlisted them from top universities and global consulting firms. Qualitative fieldwork combined with three experiments casts doubt on both the rationalization and legitimacy hypotheses and also generates new insights surrounding unintended consequences. On rationalization, the evidence suggests that experts contribute to perverse cycles of overconfidence among authoritarian ruling elites, thereby enabling a belief in state-building shortcuts. On legitimacy, the experiments demonstrate a backfire effect, with experts reducing public support for reform. The author makes theoretical contributions by suggesting important and heretofore unrecognized conflicts and trade-offs across experts' potential for rationalizing vis-a-vis legitimizing.
RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS id:600
TI: ALGORITHMS AND RHETORICAL INQUIRY: THE CASE OF THE 2008 FINANCIAL COLLAPSE ab: Algorithms have never been more influential, yet our collective understanding of how they transform massive networks of cultural power has not kept pace. This is especially true when it comes to economic algorithms, which operate as black boxes largely inaccessible to the majority of citizens whose worlds they continuously reshape. This essay offers a rhetorical approach to reading algorithms-not only to challenge the positivism and mathematical realism that naively apotheosizes algorithms and algorithmic culture but more importantly to become critical informants, scholars who can open up these black boxes for fellow citizens, examine the hidden assumptions therein, and study how they actively transform our social-material worlds. The essay's exemplar is the 2008 financial crisis and a little-known algorithm called the Li Guassian copula, which played a major role in the spread of subprime mortgages. I argue that this copula puts on spectacular display the power of algorithms as principles of composition-actants that materially expand our social collectives even as they marginalize human agency and practical judgment with forms of technological rationality that, in the case of the Li copula, concentrated the networks of structured finance around a single decision apparatus, rendering those networks both larger and, contra conventional wisdom, more fragile.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:161
TI: Acceptance or Disapproval: Performance Information in the Eyes of Public Frontline Employees ab: Public frontline employees are increasingly exposed to performance information, and their acceptance of this information as a valid, legitimate, and useful foundation for decision-making is central to the success of performance management systems. However, despite this, we know very little about what affects frontline employees acceptance or disapproval of performance information as well as their willingness to take causal responsibility for the information. We contribute to filling this gap by developing hypotheses claiming that frontline employees are more likely to accept and take causal responsibility for performance information when their organization is doing well on the performance indicators. Using a survey experiment including 1,988 public high-school teachers from 121 organizations, we offer evidence to support our hypotheses. The implication of our argument and results is an ironic problem: performance information has the least credibility as a management tool, among frontline employees, in poorly performing organizations.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:276
TI: Accounting for accountable care: Value-based population health management ab: Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) are exemplars of so-called value-based care in the US. In this model, healthcare providers bear the financial risk of their patients' health outcomes: ACOs are rewarded for meeting specific quality and cost-efficiency benchmarks, or penalized if improvements are not demonstrated. While the aim is to make providers more accountable to payers and patients, this is a sea-change in payment and delivery systems, requiring new infrastructures and practices. To manage risk, ACOs employ data-intensive sourcing and big data analytics to identify individuals within their populations and sort them using novel categories, which are then utilized to tailor interventions. The article uses an STS lens to analyze the assemblage involved in the enactment of population health management through practices of data collection, the creation of new metrics and tools for analysis, and novel ways of sorting individuals within populations. The processes and practices of implementing accountability technologies thus produce particular kinds of knowledge and reshape concepts of accountability and care. In the process, account-giving becomes as much a procedural ritual of verification as an accounting for health outcomes.
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SYSTEMS id:559
TI: Accumulating Design Knowledge with Reference Models: Insights from 12 Years' Research into Data Management ab: Over the past several decades, digital technologies have evolved from supporting business processes and decision-making to becoming an integral part of business strategies. Although the IS discipline has extensive experience with digitalization and designing sociotechnical artifacts, the underlying design knowledge is seldom systematically accumulated across different settings and projects, and thus cannot be transferred and reused in new contexts. Motivated by this gap in the research, we turn to the data management field, where reference models have become important sources of descriptive and prescriptive domain knowledge. To study knowledge accumulation in reference models, we analyze the revelatory and extreme case of a longitudinal DSR process involving more than 30 European companies and 15 researchers from three universities over 12 years. The insights into reference model development allow us to theorize about knowledge accumulation mechanisms from both a process perspective and an artifact perspective: First, we observe that knowledge accumulation occurs in stages in response to technology's evolving roles in business (problem space) and as a result of maturing design knowledge (solution space). Second, we find that reference models act as design boundary objects; they explicate and integrate knowledge from different disciplines and allow for the development of design knowledge over time-from descriptive (conceptual) models to prescriptive (capability or maturity) ones. To cope with fundamental changes in the problem space, these models require continuous updating as well as transfer/exaptation to new problem spaces. Our findings inform the IS community about the fundamental logic of knowledge accumulation in longitudinal DSR processes.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:508
TI: Acts of digital parasitism: Hacking, humanitarian apps and platformisation ab: The opacity of digital technologies has posed significant challenges for critical research and digital methods. In response, controversy mapping, reverse engineering and hacking have been key methodological devices to grapple with opacity and 'open the black box' of digital ecosystems. We take recent developments in digital humanitarianism and the accelerated production of apps for refugees following the 2015 Mediterranean refugee crisis as a site of methodological experimentation to advance hacking as critical methodological interference. Drawing on the work of Michel Serres, we propose to understand digital technologies as 'parasitic' and reconceptualise hacking as 'acts of digital parasitism'. Acts of digital parasitism are interferences that work alongside rather than work against. On one hand, this reworking of hacking advances an agenda for digital methods through reworking hacking for digital humanities and social science research. On the other, it allows us to show how the object of research - humanitarian apps - is configured through platformisation and incorporation within digital parasitic relations.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:109
TI: Adopt or Adapt? Unpacking the Role of Institutional Work Processes in the Implementation of New Regulations ab: Building on a longitudinal study of the implementation of a new regulation and a framework of institutional work, this article makes three contributions: first, it explains how nonpowerful regulatees, by engaging in mobilization and cultivation, can change the power balance in the field and adjust the regulation to their local setting. Second, it takes a processual view and develops a conceptual model of how the implementation process unfolds through four waves; initial impact, response, recovery, and stabilization. Third, it shows how the studied actors combine contradictory institutional logics to legitimize their practices and resolve institutional complexity. Thus, it adds new insights into how actors, by engaging in collective and discursive institutional work, can influence both the implementation process and the regulation itself.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:375
TI: Advancing the Narrative Policy Framework? The Musings of a Potentially Unreliable Narrator ab: Inspired by postmodernism and the seemingly contradictory charter of science, the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) was named in a 2010 issue of the Policy Studies Journal for the purposes of understanding the role of narrative in the policy process. Since its inception we have seen a proliferation of research applications. In this issue of the PSJ you will find some of the best representatives of those applications. Studies within show a productive merging of NPF with other theories, refinement of concepts, sophisticated methodologies, and an expanding list of policy areas to which the NPF is being applied. You will also see examples of the NPF being clear enough to be wrong and-at times-being wrong. Among other observations, I argue that findings herein illuminate gaps in our understanding of narrative's role in the policy process, including a need for more refined strategy theory, a better understanding of the intersection between framing theory and the NPF, and a need to directly address the NPF's ongoing struggle to deal with varied contexts. I argue that to develop more generalizable narrative concepts that the division between interpretive and scientific approaches to the study of policy must continue to be overcome.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:268
TI: Advocacy Coalitions, Policy Stability, and Policy Change in China: The Case of Birth Control Policy, 1980-2015 ab: This study used the advocacy coalition framework (ACF) to explain stability and change in China's national birth control policy from 1980 to 2015. We found that policy remained stable, despite internal and external changes to the relevant subsystem, from 1980 to 2013. The stability was explained by the dominant advocacy coalition's mobilization of considerable resources to defend its policy core beliefs. Policy changes in 2013 and 2015 were caused by a combination of external and internal perturbations, in addition to policy-oriented learning and advocacy by two expert-led minority advocacy coalitions. The case showed that the openness and plurality of China's policy processes had increased over time but were still limited in comparison with those in Western democracies. The case analysis confirmed two policy change hypotheses and suggested a mechanism for policy change: a hierarchically superior jurisdiction is more likely to impose a major policy change when it learns that the change is an adaptation to internal and external perturbations and that adopting the change will serve the jurisdiction's political interests.
WORLD DEVELOPMENT id:573
TI: Aid projects: The effects of commodification and exchange ab: International aid work has been increasingly oriented around the administrative form of the aid project. Aid projects are financial and temporal delineations used for the planning, implementation, and reporting of aid work. Originating as a budgetary reform, the project has grown to become an important unit of conceptualization for donors, subcontracting NGOs, aid workers, and the recipients of development projects. As the project has become the dominant form of disbursing aid, what effects does this administrative form have on contemporary humanitarian and development work? A growing literature on the project form combined with ethnographic research on humanitarian and development aid in Haiti demonstrates how the project is not only an administrative unit but has become a principal product of aid work. Framing the project as a commodity produced within the aid industry illuminates the centrality of exchange, rather than donation, at the heart of the aid industry. Project documents, produced in order to account for implementation, assume the form of a commodity as they are exchanged for aid funding. Accordingly, project documents have a particular exchange value within the aid industry. One of the more prevalent effects of project-based aid is that for NGOs and subcontractors, this exchange value can take precedence over services provided to beneficiaries. In order to compete in the market for projects, sub-contracting organizations seek visibility and documentation, which may come at the expense of service provision. This affects the way in which projects are both implemented and evaluated. By illustrating the impacts of the administrative form of aid, this research argues for a more focused line of research interrogating the politics of the project. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY id:743
TI: Aid, Intervention, and Terror: The Impact of Foreign Aid and Foreign Military Intervention on Terror Events and Severity ab: ObjectiveRelatively few empirical studies have analyzed the foreign policy options that leaders employ to counter terrorism, and the results have been mixed to date. This study takes a fresh look at two such policies: foreign aid and foreign military intervention. MethodUsing system generalized method of moments to control for endogeneity and a technique that identifies short- and long-term effects, we examine the impact of both policy options within a sample of 122 countries from 1970 to 2005. ResultsThe results suggest that foreign aid may be associated with an increase in the number of terrorist incidents, fatalities, and casualties. They also indicate that foreign military intervention increases terrorist incidents in the short term and may eventually reduce them in the long term. ConclusionThese findings should give pause to those who consider foreign aid to be a possible antidote for both transnational and domestic terrorism. Unfortunately, policymakers searching for ways to reduce terrorist activity will find little solace if they turn to foreign military intervention since a surge in terror incidents in the short term after a military intervention establishes a significantly higher baseline of terror activity and violence. It may take decades for terror activity to return to its preintervention level. Policymakers searching for options to combat international terror should consequently approach both foreign aid and foreign military intervention with caution.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:309
TI: Algorithmic resistance: media practices and the politics of repair ab: The article constitutes a critical intervention in the current, dramatic debate on the consequences of algorithms and automation for society. While most research has focused on negative outcomes, including ethical problems of machine bias and accountability, little has been said about the possibilities of users to resist algorithmic power. The article draws on Raymond Williams' work on media as practice to advance a framework for studying algorithms with a focus on user agency. We illustrate this framework with the example of the media activist campaign World White Web by the Swedish artist and visual designer Johanna Burai. We suggest that user agency in relation to algorithms can emerge from alternative uses of platforms, in the aftermath of algorithmic logics, and give birth to complicit forms of resistance that work through 'repair' politics oriented towards correcting the work of algorithms. We conclude with a discussion of the ways in which the proposed framework helps us rethink debates on algorithmic power.
POLITICS & POLICY id:407
TI: An Exploration of How Partisanship Impacts Council-Manager Systems ab: We examine whether the promise of the Council-Manager style of governance achieves the mix of electoral and professional representation that reformers originally envisioned. To explore this question, we analyze the political behavior of all 100 county managers in North Carolinaa position in the bureaucratic structure that requires professional expertise, but one that is subject to partisan oversight. We find two striking patterns. First, when a single party dominates an elected board of commissioners, they appear to prefer co-partisans as county managers. Second, we find that county managers are more likely to register as politically unaffiliated when they work in a competitive county. Our evidence implies that both partisan boards and county managers are incorporating politics as a part of their decision processes, suggesting that the Council-Manager form of government is far from apolitical.
ORGANIZATION SCIENCE id:438
TI: An Integrative Perspective of Organizational Responses: Routines, Heuristics, and Improvisations in a Mount Everest Expedition ab: Understanding how organizations operate in different environments has been at the core of organizational research for decades. Three distinct bodies of literature have emerged, with limited cross-pollination among them: routines, heuristics, and improvisation. We add to the existing literature by studying these three types of organizational responses simultaneously via an in-depth longitudinal study of an organization that encountered increasing levels of environmental dynamism. We pay particular attention to explaining how and why routines broke down, prompting the emergence of heuristics or improvisations, as well as when these three responses were used in tandem and when they interacted with each other. Our theoretical model identifies the triggers of heuristics and improvisations and the focal context that led to routines breaking down. We define "focal context" as a constructed temporary reality that encompasses both the objective traits of the environment experienced by the organization at a particular point in time, as well as the subjective perceptions that organizational members had of that reality. We also identify the mechanisms of cognitive search and social convergence that led to the creation of nonroutine responses. Finally, we use our insights to clarify the existing overlaps in the conceptualization of the three organizational responses. Our field study is based on a mountaineering expedition to climb one of the most difficult sides of Mount Everest, the Kangshung face, an archetypical case that is particularly well suited to the development of a new theory in which rich data are required to study the phenomena.
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY id:308
TI: An analysis of natural disaster-related information-seeking behavior using temporal stages ab: Since natural disasters can affect many people over a vast area, studying information-seeking behavior (ISB) during disasters is of great importance. Many previous studies have relied on online social network data, providing insights into the ISB of those with Internet access. However, in a large-scale natural disaster such as the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, people in the most severely affected areas tended to have limited Internet access. Therefore, an alternative data source should be explored to investigate disaster-related ISB. This study's contributions are twofold. First, we provide a detailed description of natural disaster-related ISB of people who experienced a large-scale earthquake and tsunami, based on analysis of written testimonies published by local authorities. This provided insight into the relationship between information needs, channels, and sources of disaster-related ISB. Also, our approach facilitates the study of ISB of people without Internet access both during and after a disaster. Second, we provide empirical evidence to demonstrate that the temporal stages of a disaster can characterize people's ISB during the disaster. Therefore, we propose further consideration of the temporal aspects of events for improved understanding of disaster-related ISB.
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY id:208
TI: An evaluation of US municipal open data portals: A user interaction framework ab: As an increasing number of open government data (OGD) portals are created, an evaluation method is needed to assess these portals. In this study, we drew from the existing principles and evaluation methods to develop a User Interaction Framework, with concrete criteria in five dimensions: Access, Trust, Understand, Engage-integrate, and Participate. The framework was then used to evaluate the current OGD sites created and maintained by 34 U.S. municipal government agencies. The results show that, overall, portals perform well in terms of providing access, but not so well in helping users understand and engage with data. These findings indicate room for improvement in multiple areas and suggest potential roles for information professionals as data mediators. The study also reveals that portals using the Socrata platform performed better, regarding user access, trust, engagement, and participation. However, the variability among portals indicates that some portals should improve their platforms to achieve greater user engagement and participation. In addition, city governments need to develop clear plans about what data should be available and how to make them available to their public.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW id:55
TI: Analyzing the Complexity of Performance Information Use: Experiments with Stakeholders to Disaggregate Dimensions of Performance, Data Sources, and Data Types ab: This article addresses important questions about the complex construct of underlying performance information use: public service performance. A between-subjects experimental vignette methodology was implemented to answer questions about the effects of emphasizing different dimensions of performance and the sources and types of performance information among internal and external stakeholders in two service arenas (secondary education and solid waste management) in Hong Kong. The findings indicate common attitudes and agreement across stakeholder groups and services on the merits of archival and external data types. Other results vary by service and between stakeholder groups. The effects of information about effectiveness can depend on its combination with information about efficiency or equity. This complexity needs to be considered when designing information communication to different stakeholder groups.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:583
TI: Anti-Kirishitan Surveillance in Early Modern Japan ab: From 1614 to 1873 Christianity was outlawed in Japan. The Tokugawa Shogunate, which ruled Japan for most of this period, built rigorous and complicated systems of surveillance in order to monitor their population's religious habits. This paper seeks to describe the evolution of Edo period (1603-1868) anti-Christian religious surveillance. The first two sections of the paper explore the development of surveillance under the first three Tokugawa leaders. The following sections focus on the evolution of these systems (the recruitment of informants, temple registration, the composition of registries, and tests of faith) in subsequent periods and includes some short passages from previously untranslated contemporaneous documents. Finally, the paper offers some thoughts on the efficacy of anti-Christian surveillance, arguing that the toleration of the existence of hidden communities resulted from changes in Christian behaviour that made them harder to discover and a willingness on the part of the authorities to tolerate illegal activity due to economic disincentive and a reduction in the threat that Christianity posed.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:362
TI: Are Public Sector Managers a "Bureaucratic Burden"? The Case of English Public Hospitals ab: Although managers are, globally, a central part of the new public management reform agenda, in recent years, policy makers and the media have raised concerns about their effectiveness and contribution. In some countries, notably the United Kingdom and the United States, this debate has been heavily influenced by Public Choice Theory (PCT), which depicts "bureaucrats" as rent seeking, self-serving individuals. In this study, focusing on the case of acute care hospital trusts in the English National Health Service, we formally test whether public sector managers represent a "bureaucratic burden." Using a longitudinal database spanning six years (2007-2012) and employing a dynamic panel data model, the findings reveal that, contrary to PCT assumptions, managers do not engage, in the main, in rent seeking behavior and, crucially, appear to have a positive impact on organizational performance. Implications for theory, policy, and practice are discussed.
SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY id:775
TI: Are the Sanctified Becoming the Pornified? Religious Conservatism, Commitment, and Pornography Use, 1984-2016 ab: Objectives Americans are generally increasing in their pornography viewership. While devout, theologically conservative Christians have been among the most ardent opponents to pornography's dissemination and use historically, there is a growing-but thus far untested-assumption that they too are following this same trend. This study examines (1) whether committed or conservative Christians are increasing in rates of porn viewership similar to other Americans and (2) when potential religious divergences in porn viewership started. Methods We fit a series of binary logistic regression models using data from the 1984-2016 General Social Surveys. Results Holding other variables constant, American evangelicals are indeed increasing in their reported porn viewership at rates identical to other Americans. Frequent church attendees and biblical literalists, however, show a divergent trend, with both remaining constant in their reported porn viewership across time. Analyses also show clear cutoff points for the divergence starting in the mid-1990s, roughly when Internet pornography became available. Conclusions Findings suggest that, all else being equal, Americans who merely identify with conservative Christianity are indeed increasing in their porn viewership, but among the most faithful and theologically conservative Americans, they are no more likely to report viewing pornography than they were over 30 years ago.
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY id:311
TI: Assembling Narratives: Tensions in Collaborative Construction of Knowledge ab: Scientific and scholarly research is heterogeneous in that divergent viewpoints, and different interests must be brought together to achieve coherent accounts of research. The tensions caused by this multiplicity of interests and singularity of output frame most collaborative research practice. The goal of present study is to identify areas of tension in such collaborative and heterogeneous efforts. To this end, the present study investigates the coconstruction of archeological narrative at one of the largest multinational archeological campaigns in the world, the catalhoyuk project in Turkey. This study conceptualizes archeological narratives as epistemic assemblages. Following Actor Network theorists, the archeological process is conceptualized as a series of translation processes (of heterogeneous engineering) that inscribe the found material remains of archeological investigation into a narrative. This complex process takes place within a heterogeneous sociotechnical network. This study decomposes this heterogeneous network to identify the areas of tension and struggle. Two sources of such tensions are identified as fragmentation and fault lines. Overcoming fragmentation and fault lines is key for the success of heterogeneous scientific work and maintaining productive scientific collaboration. The findings of this study have applications beyond archeology and can inform the design of cyberin-frastructure for heterogeneous collaborations.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:496
TI: Assembling airspace: The Single European Sky and contested transnationalities of European air traffic management ab: The Single European Sky (SES) encompasses a series of legislative and regulatory measures reflecting a vision for reforming Air Traffic Management (ATM) in Europe to ultimately transcend national control of airspace. This article considers SES via the conceptual framing of the sociotechnical imaginary, and finds that the embedded, distributed and interpretive character of European ATM invites further conceptualization around how actors may need to engage with infrastructural imaginaries. How is an imaginary perceived and interpreted across its spatial reach? How do the standpoints, interests and interpretations of different groups embedded within infrastructural space play a role in the construction of that spatiality and envisioned territorial assemblages? Do these standpoints and interpretations extend to the perceived imaginings of others, and what might this imply for how sociotechnical imaginaries and spatialities are co-produced? The article outlines the history of European ATM through to the current status of SES. By describing contested negotiations involving the European Union, Eurocontrol, state bodies and organized labour, SES is used as a case study to demonstrate how relations between national sovereignty and transnational governance can be imagined in different ways through ATM. The article identifies a series of interactions and tensions between interpretations of SES, involving instances of perceived appropriation by some stakeholders on the part of others and concerns over emergent risks and uncertainties. The study identifies how relations and interpretations between stakeholders, states and transnational bodies shape and are shaped by the discursive and material projection of assemblages of technology, data, space and political rationality. These projections map European airspace in different ways. Negotiating the SES imaginary has entailed a politics of suspicion and risk that reflects a certain instantiation of interpretive flexibility, involving concerns over how SES is imagined by others.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:655
TI: Assessing Dimensions of the Security-Liberty Trade-off in the United States ab: The trade-off between security and liberty has been a leading frame for understanding public opinion about domestic surveillance policies. Most of the empirical work explicitly examining whether individuals meet the trade-off framework's core attitudinal assumptions comes from European studies. This study uses a survey of US residents to assess the veracity of the assumptions embedded in the trade-off framework, namely whether domestic counterterrorism policies are simultaneously viewed as improving security and decreasing liberty. We find that the vast majority of US respondents do not meet the basic attitudinal assumptions of the trade-off frame. Next, we evaluate the source of these attitudes with a focus on whether attitudes toward surveillance policies merely relate to core political values or whether they also depend on the messages from political leaders. We find that both political values and opinion leadership shape these attitudes. Finally, because general attitudes towards surveillance and privacy often fail to have practical implications, we assess whether these attitudes matter for understanding the structure of policy support. Our results show that heightened terrorism threat positively associates with increased support for counterterrorism policies only when people believe these policies are effective security tools.
DISASTERS id:721
TI: Assessing the cost-effectiveness of interventions within a humanitarian organisation ab: Cost-effectiveness analysis is increasingly relevant in humanitarian action. The cost of response has increased exponentially in the past decade, alongside concurrent donor budget restrictions. However, there remains limited comprehension and application of these methods in this field. This paper documents methods developed for use within Action Against Hunger, an international humanitarian organisation, in response to a lack of understanding of this topic within the humanitarian community and limited evidence of the cost-effectiveness of humanitarian action. These methods encompass costs to both implementing institutions and participating communities. Activity-based cost analyses are conducted to assess resources per programme activity. Cost-effectiveness is evaluated using successful programme outcomes, and uncertainty is appraised via sensitivity analysis. This paper aims to advance knowledge, stimulate discussion, and promote the adoption of cost-effectiveness methods for building the evidence base for humanitarian action, including consideration of community costs, to enable analytical outputs that are useful for managers and policymakers alike.
DISASTERS id:188
TI: Assessing the impact of household participation on satisfaction and safe design in humanitarian shelter projects ab: Participation has long been considered important for post-disaster recovery. Establishing what constitutes participation in post-disaster shelter projects, however, has remained elusive, and the links between different types of participation and shelter programme outcomes are not well understood. Furthermore, recent case studies suggest that misguided participation strategies may be to blame for failures. This study analysed 19 shelter projects implemented in the Philippines following Typhoon Haiyan in November 2013 to identify the forms of participation employed. Using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, it assessed how household participation in the planning, design, and construction phases of shelter reconstruction led to outcomes of household satisfaction and safe shelter design. Participation was operationalised via eight central project tasks, revealing that the involvement of households in the early planning stages of projects and in construction activities were important for satisfaction and design outcomes, whereas engagement during the design phase of projects had little impact on the selected outcomes.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC POLICY id:237
TI: Assessing the validity and reliability of measurements when evaluating public policy ab: A substantial aspect of scientific research involves linking concepts to observations using measurements. This exercise has raised questions among researchers of whether or not measurements "truly" and "reliably" capture ideas and observations. We address this question by setting out a methodological standard on how to assess the validity and reliability of measurements. We do this by examining measurements that evaluate public policy, arguing that this topic is gaining increasing attention from political science researchers and policymakers. The analysis concerns measurements of the level of transparency and accountability of lobbying laws, central to recent regulatory policy research. We conduct convergent validation, content validation and reproducibility tests on four indices applied to 13 regulations found worldwide. By doing so, the article provides scholars with an evaluation of measurements of lobbying laws' robustness, while offering methodological and theoretical lessons of value to larger regulatory and public policy scholarship.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:736
TI: At the roots of media cultures. Social movements producing knowledge about media as discriminatory workspaces ab: In this article we aim to contribute to the study of social movement media cultures by paying specific attention to the practices through which collective actors build specific knowledge about media as workspaces. More precisely, we analyze how knowledge about media and tech companies as discriminatory workspaces is produced starting from the very lived experiences and situated understandings of women and LGBT workers. We investigate this set of media knowledge practices by exploring the case of Unicorns In Tech (UiT), a network of queer and straight people working in the media and technology sector, through the lens of movement knowledge repertoires', which has been recently pushed forward within social movement studies to illuminate the knowledge work pursued by collective actors. Our analysis of the UiT case sheds light on how women and LGBT workers experience media and tech companies as a vast space that is characterized by gender imbalances. In turn, this situated understanding of media as discriminatory workspaces grounds UiT endeavor to achieve more diverse and inclusive spaces, where dissonant subjectivities can be made visible together with technical expertise, and where synergies with media and tech companies can be created to produce welcoming cultures in and beyond the workspace.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:234
TI: Sticky technologies: Plumpy'nut((R)), emergency feeding and the viscosity of humanitarian design ab: Inspired by de Laet and Mol's classic article on the Zimbabwean Bush Pump and Peter Redfield's revival of fluidity as a central characteristic of humanitarian design, this paper argues that many humanitarian technologies are characterized not so much by fluidity as by stickiness. Sticky technologies lie somewhere between fluid technologies and Latourian immutable mobiles: They work precisely because they are mobile and not overly adaptable, yet they retain some flexibility by reaching out to shape and be shaped by their users. The concept is introduced through a detailed study of Plumpy'nut((R)), a peanut paste for therapeutic feeding that is materially sticky - much firmer than a fluid, yet still mutable - as well as conceptually sticky. Stickiness' can have wide utility for thinking through technology and humanitarianism.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:78
TI: Automating Surveillance ab: This article considers the changing logics of surveillance in the era of automated data collection and processing. It argues that automation results in the emergence of post-disciplinary forms of monitoring that no longer rely on the subject's internalization of the monitoring gaze. Such forms of monitoring do not displace other forms of surveillance but represent a new development made possible by the promise that comprehensive data collection will allow prediction and pre-emption to replace deterrence. In the context of predictive analytics, simulated futures serve as the basis for ongoing processes of intervention that take place in the present. The parsimony of the panopticon, which traded on the uncertainty provided by its partial gaze, is replaced by the tendency toward comprehensive monitoring associated with the proliferation of distributed, embedded, always-on sensing networks. The resulting forms of automated surveillance are characterized by post-representational logics that I describe in terms of operationalism, environmentality, and framelessness.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:17
TI: Automating judgment? Algorithmic judgment, news knowledge, and journalistic professionalism ab: Journalistic judgment is both a central and fraught function of journalism. The privileging of objectivity norms and the externalization of newsworthiness in discourses about journalism leave little room for the legitimation of journalists' subjective judgment. This tension has become more apparent in the digital news era due to the growing use of algorithms in automated news distribution and production. This article argues that algorithmic judgment should be considered distinct from journalists' professional judgment. Algorithmic judgment presents a fundamental challenge to news judgment based on the twin beliefs that human subjectivity is inherently suspect and in need of replacement, while algorithms are inherently objective and in need of implementation. The supplanting of human judgment with algorithmic judgment has significant consequences for both the shape of news and its legitimating discourses.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:248
TI: Be Safe or Be Seen? How Russian Activists Negotiate Visibility and Security in Online Resistance Practices ab: This paper examines how Russian opposition activists negotiate online visibility-their own and that of their messages and campaigns-and the security concerns brought on by the pervasive digital surveillance that the state resorts to in order to reinstate its control over the online discursive space. By examining the internet-based presence and activity of the members of Alexey Navalny's FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation) and other opposition activists, the paper traces connections between everyday security practices that these activists engage in online and the resistance tactics and repertoires they enact in an environment where the free and open exchange of information on the Russian internet is becoming increasingly difficult. The analysis finds that Russian opposition activists place a high value on digital, media, and security literacy and that navigating the internet using security tools and protocols such as VPN, two-phase authentication, and encrypted messaging is increasingly seen as the default modus operandi for those participating in organised dissent in Russia to mitigate growing state surveillance. Furthermore, the analysis reveals that Russian activists have to balance the need for security with growing visibility-a key factor for entering the mainstream political and social discourse. The tension between being secure and being visible emerges as a key aspect of resistance practices in an environment of near-constant state surveillance, as activists concurrently manage their safety and visibility online to minimise the risks posed by government spying and maximise the effect of their dissent.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW id:7
TI: Behavioral Public Administration ad fontes: A Synthesis of Research on Bounded Rationality, Cognitive Biases, and Nudging in Public Organizations ab: This article provides a comprehensive overview of how policy makers, practitioners, and scholars can fruitfully use behavioral science to tackle public administration, management, and policy issues. The article systematically reviews 109 articles in the public administration discipline that are inspired by the behavioral sciences to identify emerging research trajectories, significant gaps, and promising applied research directions. In an attempt to systematize and take stock of the nascent behavioral public administration scholarship, the authors trace it back to the seminal works of three Nobel Laureates-Herbert Simon, Daniel Kahneman, and Richard Thaler-and their work on bounded rationality, cognitive biases, and nudging, respectively. The cognitive biases investigated by the studies reviewed fall into the categories of accessibility, loss aversion, and overconfidence/optimism. Nudging and choice architecture are discussed as viable strategies for leveraging these cognitive traps in an attempt to alter behavior for the better, among both citizens and public servants.
SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY id:728
TI: Between 'Scientization' and a 'Participatory Turn'. Tracing shifts in the governance of policy advice ab: This study traces the claims of a 'scientization' and a 'participatory turn' in modern governance within the system of temporary policy advisory committees in Norway. It analyzes whether there is evidence of the two claims in these key governance institutions and to what extent these shifts are compatible with each other. As expressions of a participatory turn, a growing emphasis on citizen involvement and transparency in the committee system is searched for. A growing relevance of researchers and of science-based claims in the committees' reports are taken as indicators of scientization. The longitudinal study shows an overall shift both towards science- and expertise-based governance and towards an increasing openness and public engagement, as well as some variation between policy fields.
DISASTERS id:201
TI: Between international donors and local faith communities: Intermediaries in humanitarian assistance to Syrian refugees in Jordan and Lebanon ab: This paper explores the crucial part that faith-based organisations (FBOs) play in acting as intermediaries between international donors and local faith communities (LFCs) implementing humanitarian relief projects for Syrian refugees. Humanitarian responses to the mounting Syrian refugee crisis have coincided with greater collaboration between international donors and LFCs. This cooperation often is facilitated by a complex web of non-state intermediaries at the international, national, and local level. This study probes the breadth of roles of these intermediaries, drawing on primary data from case studies of two Christian intermediaries supporting Christian LFCs as they deliver aid primarily to Muslim Syrian refugees in Jordan and Lebanon. The results of the study are connected to the wider literature on LFCs in humanitarian response, revealing how intermediaries address issues of accountability, capacity-building, impartiality, neutrality, and professionalism. The paper concludes by offering suggestions for further research on intermediaries as key actors in the localisation of humanitarian assistance.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:227
TI: Beyond Policy Diffusion: Spatial Econometric Models of Public Administration ab: Interdependence in the decision-making or behaviors of various organizations and administrators is often neglected in the study of public administration. Failing to account for such interdependence risks an incomplete understanding of the choices made by these actors and agencies. As such, we show how researchers analyzing cross-sectional or time-series-cross-sectional (TSCS) data can utilize spatial econometric methods to improve inference on existing questions and, more interestingly, engage a new set of theoretical questions. Specifically, we articulate several general mechanisms for spatial dependence that are likely to appear in research on public administration (isomorphism, competition, benchmarking, and common exposure). We then demonstrate how these mechanisms can be tested using spatial econometric models in two applications: first, a cross-sectional study of district-level bilingual education spending and, second, a TSCS analysis on state-level healthcare administration. In our presentation, we also briefly discuss many of the practical challenges confronted in estimating spatial models (e.g., weights specification, model selection, effects calculation) and offer some guidance on each.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:223
TI: Beyond policy agenda-setting: political actors' and journalists' perceptions of news media influence across all stages of the political process ab: Although the relationship between politics and the media is a key topic in political communication research, the media's role during times of routine policy-making has rarely been addressed. Furthermore, studies of routine policy-making have generally focused on one policy stage, usually agenda-setting, whereas few have analysed the media's impact on the whole policy process. Still, the general view is that the news media matter in the early stages of the policy cycle but are non-influential during the formulation, implementation, and evaluation stages. This study queries these assumptions by taking a closer look at the news media's influence on all stages of the political process at both the theoretical and the empirical level. A quantitative survey explored how members of the German Bundestag, administration officers, associations and NGOs, researchers, PR staff, and journalists involved with energy policy (N=338) perceive the media's influence across all policy stages. The results confirm that media coverage does indeed strongly influence the political agenda. However, the subsequent formulation, evaluation, and termination of policy stages are also affected, with only the implementation stage being less susceptible to media influence. The different groups of political actors and journalists surveyed mainly agreed upon the estimations of the strength of the media effects.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:701
TI: Beyond the eye-catchers: A large-scale study of social movement organizations' involvement in online protests ab: Existing studies of social movement organizations (SMOs) commonly focus only on a small number of well-known SMOs or SMOs that belong to a single social movement industry (SMI). This is partially because current methods for identifying SMOs are labor-intensive. In contrast to these manual approaches, in our article, we use Twitter data pertaining to BlackLivesMatter and Women's movements and employ crowdsourcing and nested supervised learning methods to identify more than 50K SMOs. Our results reveal that the behavior and influence of SMOs vary significantly, with half having little influence and behaving in similar ways to an average individual. Furthermore, we show that collectively, small SMOs contributed to the sharing of more diverse information. However, on average, large SMOs were significantly more committed to movements and decidedly more successful at recruiting. Finally, we also observe that a large number of SMOs from an extensive set of SMIs, including Occupy Wall Street, participated in solidarity or even as leaders in BlackLivesMatter. In comparison, few SMIs participated in Women's movement.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC POLICY id:431
TI: Beyond the visible policy agenda: problem definitions disappearing from the agenda as nondecisions ab: In the agenda-setting process, prior to the decision-making process, there is a predecisional process whereby some issues are systematically blocked by powerful actors from being placed on the formal agenda. These issues are termed "nondecisions". This article argues that the predecisional process exists not only at the issue level but also at the level of problem definitions. Because of the empirical challenge of studying problem definitions that are not on the formal agenda, the article suggests examining problem definitions that were on the formal agenda and then disappeared from it. Such problem definitions can be termed nondecisions when their disappearance is due to latent power mechanisms, such as anticipated reactions or information control. The article tests these arguments using two American policy cases: prescription drug prices and child care. In so doing, it sheds light on the predecisional process and expands our understanding of the politics of problem definitions.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW id:368
TI: Biased Altruism: Islamophobia and Donor Support for Global Humanitarian Organizations ab: Providing humanitarian assistance to displaced individuals is a critical policy challenge. Many refugee camps are run by charities supported by Western donors. If refugees are predominantly Muslim, might Islamophobia suppress donations to these charities? Using a survey experiment conducted in the United States, the authors examine whether donors' willingness to support a charity is influenced by the dominant religion of the refugees, the regions in which refugee camps are located, and/or the religious affiliation of the charity. The authors find modest support for Islamophobia: while willingness to donate is not affected by the location of camps or the predominance of Muslim refugees,, it declines significantly for Islamic charities. Respondents overall tend to be especially willing to donate to a charity that serves Christian refugees in the Middle East. Among self-identifying Christians, respondents are more willing to donate to a charity serving Christian refugees than one serving Muslim refugees.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:680
TI: Breaking the Order: The Intended and Unintended Consequences of Countersurveillance on the West Bank ab: Countersurveillance has been acknowledged as an empowering act of civil society that can keep the government in check. With its increasing popularity in academic and popular circles comes a need to better understand when countersurveillance brings a positive outcome and when it backfires. This question is particularly important when countersurveillance is used to bring about a change in policy implementation. Using data from interviews, peace organizations' reports, and open sources, this paper examines peace movements' countersurveillance of West Bank checkpoints, exploring the intended and unintended consequences of countersurveillance in this setting. This paper argues that when countersurveillance breaks powerholders' understanding of social order, it can trigger a harsh response that can render it counterproductive. Contrarily, when countersurveillance operates within the boundaries of this understanding of order, the likelihood of a successful outcome increases.
SCIENCE AS CULTURE id:613
TI: Bioveillance: A Techno-security Infrastructure to Preempt the Dangers of Informationalised Biology ab: In 2011, a number of controversial experiments were conducted on the H5N1 flu virus. While the experiments illuminated growing biosecurity concerns regarding gain-of-function research, the controversy also signaled an evolving biosecurity threat landscape in which biological information, understood to be a latent and potential form of biological life, and the digital infrastructures that circulate this information, have also come to be seen as dangerous. This new threat landscape is informed by the technological framing of biological life as code. What kinds of biosecurity practices are called for when biological life is understood as code and what are the implications for life itself of developing such security practices? The United States has developed a techno-security infrastructure, which this article calls 'bioveillance,' in response to the dangers of mobile and mutable biological information. Collapsing biosecurity and cybersecurity into the emerging field of cyberbiosecurity and mirroring the networked life forms that it intends to prevent from proliferating, bioveillance is a vital component in a burgeoning global techno-security culture. The fact that biological life is not a code or information in any strict sense means that bioveillance will face significant challenges in its implementation not least because by using digital technologies to manage the communicability of informationalised biology, bioveillance also produces and proliferates that which it aims to forestall. This means that the more U.S. institutions do to generate biological information for biosecurity purposes, the more bioinsecurities they risk producing. Bioveillance and biological danger become one in the same.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:320
TI: Bottom-Up Identification of Subsystems in Complex Governance Systems ab: Theories of policymaking often focus on subsystems within a larger, overarching governance system. However, subsystem identification is complicated by the complexity of governance systems, characterized by multiple, interrelated issues, multi-level interactions, and a diverse set of organizations. This study suggests an empirical, bottom-up methodology to identify subsystems. Subsystems are identified based on bundles of similar observed organizational activity. The study further suggests a set of three elementary criteria to classify individual subsystems. In order to prove the value of the methodology, subsystems are identified through cluster analysis, and subsequently classified in a study of Swiss water governance. Results suggest that Swiss water governance can be understood as a network of overlapping subsystems connected by boundary penetrating organizations, with high-conflict and quiet politics subgroups. The study shows that a principled analysis of subsystems as the interconnected, constituent parts of complex governance systems offers insights into important contextual factors shaping outcomes. Such insights are prerequisite knowledge in order to understand and navigate complex systems for researchers and practitioners alike.
COMPUTER SUPPORTED COOPERATIVE WORK-THE JOURNAL OF COLLABORATIVE COMPUTING id:353
TI: Bottom-up Infrastructures: Aligning Politics and Technology in building a Wireless Community Network ab: Contemporary innovation in infrastructures is increasingly characterized by a close relationship between experts and lay people. This phenomenon has attracted the attention from a wide range of disciplines, including computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), science and technology studies (S&TS), organization studies and participatory design (PD). Connecting to this broad area of research, the article presents a qualitative case study concerning the building and maintenance of a grassroots, bottom-up information infrastructure in Italy, defined as wireless community network (WCN). Methodologically, the research is based on qualitative interviews with participants to the WCN, ethnographic observations and document analysis. The aim of the article is to understand the alignment between the technical work implied in building this bottom-up infrastructure and the political and cultural frameworks that move people to participate to this project. Relying on the field of science & technology studies, and in particular on the notions of 'inverse infrastructure' and 'research in the wild', we disclose the WCN's peculiar innovation trajectory, localized outside conventional spaces of research and development. Overall, the presentation of the qualitative and ethnographic data allows to point out a more general reflection on bottom-up infrastructures and to enrich the academic debate concerning bottom-up infrastructuring work and other similar typologies of collaborative design projects in the domain of infrastructures.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:177
TI: Bounded Stories ab: Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) and framing scholars share an interest in how the construction of policy arguments influences opinions and policy decisions. However, conceptual clarification is needed. This study advances the NPF by clarifying the meaning and function of frames and narrative, as well as their respective roles in creating policy realities. We explore sociological and psychological roots of framing scholarship and map these onto NPF's science of narratives philosophy, suggesting that narratives can reveal internally held cognitive schemas. We focus on issue categorization frames as boundaries for narrative construction. Within these bounds, narrative settings further focalize the audience by specifying where action toward a solution takes place. Based on 26 interviews with floodplain decision makers in Montana, we capture internally held cognitions through the assemblage of issue categorization frames and narrative elements. We find that settings can traverse issue categorization frames and policy solutions, with actions of characters that unfold within the setting being key. Similarly, we find that a single issue categorization frame can contain multiple different narratives and that individuals may simultaneously hold multiple different narratives internally. Overall, this study contributes to policy process research through establishment of connections among narratives, issue categorization frames, and cognitive schemas.
JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION id:536
TI: Breaking into Collaboration: Communicative Strategies for Gaining Entry When You Are Not Invited ab: Inter-organizational collaborations (IOCs) offer opportunities for organizations to share resources and address complex social problems. Although researchers have cast IOCs as a broadly-inclusive process in which organizations decide to join forces through mutual agreements, many IOCs are not equal partnerships, but are led by a single organization or a tight collection of organizations that have already been convened. This paper explores how new organizations that wish to join ongoing IOCs can navigate their entry when they are not seen as needed or important. Drawing on qualitative data collected through field research of regional planning, including interviews with conveners (urban planners who are the main organizers of IOCs and charged with vetting new potential members) and representatives of 12 different organizations that tried to break into ongoing IOCs, this paper proposes a process model inducted from the findings that describes the communicative practices that enabled and constrained organizations' entries into ongoing IOCs.
DISASTERS id:218
TI: Bridging international relations and disaster studies: the case of disaster-conflict scholarship ab: International relations and disaster studies have much to gain by thinking critically about their respective theoretical and epistemological assumptions. Yet, few studies to date have sought to assess the potential value of linking these two disciplines. This paper begins to address this shortfall by examining the relationship between disasters and conflict as a research sphere that intersects international relations and disaster studies. Through an analysis of whether or not disasters contribute to intra-national and international conflict, this paper not only provides a review of the state of the art, but also serves to invite scholars to reflect on related concepts from other fields to strengthen their own approaches to the study of disasters in an international setting. An evaluation of the conceptual and theoretical contributions of each subject area provides useful heuristics for the development of disaster-conflict scholarship and encourages alternative modes of knowledge production through interdisciplinarity.
WORLD DEVELOPMENT id:473
TI: Budgetary influence under information asymmetries: Evidence from Nigeria's subnational agricultural investments ab: With emerging recognition of changing climates' impact on agricultural productivity, a sharper lens is focused on how to target agricultural public investments for development. This paper contributes to an understanding of budget decision-making processes in agricultural development, by examining to what extent those with superior information and expertise on a sector have sway over how public resources to the sector are allocated. The empirical qualitative analysis of this paper employs process tracing with an embedded case study design, based on interviews of 79 senior public sector key-informants in Nigeria. We also analyzed quantitative public expenditure data in the study areas. We draw insights from theories of information asymmetries in the public sector along three dimensions. Within the first type of information asymmetry, we find that, despite the higher agricultural technical expertise that sector bureaucrats have vis-a-vis the elected non-sector-specific chief executives, it is the latter who heavily influence agricultural resource allocation. In the second form of information asymmetry, the benefits from superior lower-tier information are only exploited at one subnational (state) level but not at the other (local government) level. Within the third kind of information asymmetry, public leaders prioritize funding for those types of public investments that are more visible by their nature, and outputs of which materialize relatively rapidly; this disfavors agriculture. Going beyond the literature on the impact of information interventions, this study sheds light on the extent to which information already in the public sector is tapped into to guide the provision of public goods and services. (C) 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW id:298
TI: Budgeting Rules and Program Outcomes ab: It is not efficient for a budget system either to enable excessively frequent changes in programs and tax policies or to be rigid and unresponsive. Program durability is one measure of how a budget system weighs the competing goals of resoluteness and responsiveness. The federal budget has different processes-mandatory and discretionary spending and tax expenditures-each based in separate congressional committees and relying on separate procedures. This article examines the budget systems' durability. One finding is that mandatory spending programs and tax expenditures are more durable than programs backed by discretionary spending. However, while programs targeted to vulnerable populations and supporting long-term planning, such as in income support and health, might benefit from durability, these programs display shorter durability, not longer. While displaying greater durability, tax expenditures do respond to changes in different economic sectors, based on the changes in spending of other budget systems.
TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY id:521
TI: Building Better Bridges: Toward a Transdisciplinary Science Communication ab: In this article the authors envision a more durable and portable model of scholarship on public engagement with science through partnerships between rhetoricians of science and quantitative social scientists. The authors consider a number of barriers and limitations that make such partnerships difficult, with an eye toward discovering ways that researchers may overcome them. The authors conclude by articulating guidelines for reciprocal transdisciplinary work as well as specific recommended practices for such collaborations.
RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS id:422
TI: CALIPHATE AGAINST THE CROWN: MARTYRDOM, HERESY, AND THE RHETORIC OF ENEMYSHIP IN THE KINGDOM OF JORDAN ab: The execution of captured Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kasasbeh in February 2015 by Daesh (or ISIS) forces generated large public outcry in Jordan and thereby presented the regime of King Abdullah II with a moment of danger. In response to this rhetorical situation, the Abdullah regime engaged in rhetorics of enemyship based on appeals to religious orthodoxy, authoritarian ideology, and apocalyptic language. By examining these texts, this essay seeks to draw from contemporary rhetorical scholarship on terrorism, enemyship, and mass violence to expand the heuristic scope of the rhetoric of enemyship to include political rhetoric situated outside democratic contexts.
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SYSTEMS id:628
TI: Can Secure Behaviors Be Contagious? A Two-Stage Investigation of the Influence of Herd Behavior on Security Decisions ab: IT users often make information security-related decisions in complex and multidimensional environments, which could lead to phenomena like behavioral anomalies. For instance, under uncertain circumstances, users may discount their own limited information about a security technology and make their adoption decisions based on what the majority of users' decisions are in this regard. In this context, imitation can become a legitimate and rational strategy for making security-related decisions. Current behavioral security theories generally assume that users possess sufficient information about security technologies before making security-related decisions. This theory assumption limits our understanding of how security decisions are made in various real-world circumstances. Our research is focused on security behaviors under uncertain circumstances. We investigate how providing popularity information can trigger herd behavior and can subsequently influence security behaviors. We also provide insights into security-related decisions that are influenced by herd mentality and investigate whether they persist over time. Additionally, we conceptualize and operationalize two constructs that can be used in future research to better examine post-adoption security behaviors. The findings of this multistage experiment show that in uncertain circumstances, when users are aware of the widespread use of a certain security technology, they develop a significantly higher intention to engage in protection-motivated behaviors. Furthermore, the results show that at the post-adoption stage, users rely more heavily on their own information about their continuous use of security technologies and put less emphasis on herd-related factors.
WORLD DEVELOPMENT id:280
TI: Can information improve rural governance and service delivery? ab: In the context of an exponential rise in access to information in the last two decades, this special issue explores when and how information might be harnessed to improve governance and public service delivery in rural areas. Information is a critical component of government and citizens' decision-making; therefore, improvements in its availability and reliability stand to benefit many dimensions of governance, including service delivery. Service delivery is especially difficult in rural areas which contain the majority of the world's poor but face unique logistical challenges due to their remoteness. We review the features of the recent information revolution, including increased access to information due to both technological and institutional innovations. We then raise the question of why information often fails to support the goals of improved governance and service delivery. We argue that information alone is insufficient. To be impactful, the information must be deemed relevant, in the sense of being salient and having a high perceived signal-to-noise ratio, and individuals must have both the power and incentives to act on it. Bringing all three of these factors together in any setting is challenging, particularly for rural areas, where capacity to receive, understand, and act on information is relatively low. Research failing to find significant effects of greater access to information on rural governance and service delivery has largely failed due to one of these three factors not being in place. This interpretation is broadly supported by our review of 48 empirical studies on the impacts of information on governance and service delivery. We conclude by discussing broader lessons for both development research, including randomized control trials, and the development process itself. The goals of interventions to provide information may need to be more modest, and their design may merit more scrutiny. (C) 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC POLICY id:194
TI: Can policy forums overcome echo chamber effects by enabling policy learning? Evidence from the Irish climate change policy network ab: Research has repeatedly shown that individuals and organisations tend to obtain information from others whose beliefs are similar to their own, forming "echo chambers" with their network ties. Echo chambers are potentially harmful for evidence-based policymaking as they can hinder policy learning and consensus building. Policy forums could help alleviate the effects of echo chambers if organisations with different views were to participate and to use the opportunities that forums provide to learn from those outside their networks. Applying exponential random graph models on survey data of the Irish climate change policy network, we find that policy actors do indeed tend to obtain policy advice from those whose beliefs are similar to their own. We also find that actors tend not to obtain policy advice from the those that they encounter at policy forums, suggesting forums are not enabling policy learning.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:104
TI: Canada is #IdleNoMore: exploring dynamics of Indigenous political and civic protest in the Twitterverse ab: Social media have been playing a growingly important role in grassroots protest over the last five years. While many scholars have explored dynamics of political cyberprotest (e.g., the ongoing transnational Occupy movement, the 2012 Quebec student strike, the student-led protest movement in Chile between 2011 and 2013), few have studied sub-dynamics relating to ethno-cultural minorities' uses of social media to gain visibility, mobilize support, and engage in political and civil action. We fill part of this gap in the academic literature by investigating uses of Twitter for political engagement in the context of the Canada-based Idle No More movement (INM). This ongoing protest initiative, which emerged in December 2012, seeks to mobilize Indigenous Peoples in Canada and internationally as well as their non-Indigenous allies. It does so by bringing attention to their culture, struggles, and identities as well as advocating for changes in policy areas relating to the environment, governance, and socio-economic matters. Our study explores to what extent references to aspects of Indigenous identities and culture shaped INM-related tweeting and, by extension, activism during the summer of 2013. We conducted a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of 1650 #IdleNoMore tweets shared by supporters of this movement between 3 July 2013 and 2 August 2013. Our study demonstrates that unlike other social media-intensive movements where economic and political concerns were the primary drivers of political and civil engagement, aspects of Indigenous culture influenced information flows and mobilization among #IdleNoMore tweeters.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF DISASTER RISK REDUCTION id:327
TI: Capability assessments - How to make them useful for decision-making ab: Capability assessments are becoming increasingly common as part of risk management activities worldwide. Despite this, there is no consensus concerning how these assessments are best conducted and presented. Recent studies suggest that two factors may influence the usefulness of capability assessments for decision-making: namely, whether the assessment includes descriptions of the resources available to an actor, and how well this actor can accomplish specific tasks. The present study was carried out to investigate the importance of including information on these factors in capability assessments. The experimental study conducted involved four fictive versions of capability assessments, differing in whether they included information about resources and tasks. Over 200 risk management professionals rated how useful they perceived each version to be as the basis for decision-making. The results show that it is important to include specific information on resources and tasks in capability assessments, and that the assessments including both were most useful, from a decision-making perspective.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:361
TI: Cat-and-Mouse Games: Dataveillance and Performativity in Urban Schools ab: This paper focuses on the responses of teachers and students in a South Los Angeles public high school to dataveillance regimes that were meant to control specific behaviors. Over a period of two years, a newly deployed one-to-one tablet computer program supported the integration of dataveillance regimes with previously established modes of pursuing teacher and student accountability. As tablet computers achieved ubiquity, students, teachers, and administrators challenged the ambiguous relationship between digital data and the behavior of subjects putatively described by these data. Conflicts over digital data-what data could mean, what they could stand in for, and what could be deemed normal or aberrant-emerged between school authorities and targets of dataveilleance. Where school authorities often depicted their own surveillance capabilities as immediate, inescapable, and predictive, contests over the interpretation of data attenuated this power, showing it to be partial, negotiated, and retroactive, a dynamic this study refers to as interpretive resistance. This study uses a theoretical framework based on performativity of digital data to think through the implications of observed contestations around representation. Performativity conceptualizes digital data not as a set of objective, value-neutral observations but as the ability to produce statuses of norm and deviance.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:378
TI: Challenges in the Use of Performance Data in Management: Results of a National Survey of Human Service Nonprofit Organizations ab: Nonprofit organizations are increasingly pressured to measure their performance. Although several studies identify driving factors of measuring performance in public organizations, there is limited understanding of current performance management practices at nonprofit organizations. Drawing from an online survey of mid- to large-sized nonprofit human service organizations across the United States, this research examines: (1) the types of performance information human service nonprofits measure; (2) the frequency of using performance data; and (3) the challenges nonprofits commonly face integrating performance data into management. Our empirical evidence suggests that human service nonprofits must recognize that data collected to meet external accountability requirements, often mandated by government or funders, may not provide meaningful information that organizations can use to enhance performance. We also discuss the nuanced role tangible incentives play in nonprofit performance management. The article concludes by highlighting the need for nonprofit managers and grant makers to work together to develop measures that meet both accountability and performance improvement aims.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC POLICY id:757
TI: Change or stability in the structure of interest group networks? Evidence from Scottish Public Policy Consultations ab: Scholars have hotly debated the structure of group engagement in policymaking. Two aspects of this conversation are examined here. First, some claim that the "explosion" of organised interests brings with it increasing fragmentation but also policy "balkanisation". Others suggest increasing fragmentation, but with overlap between subsectors. A second area of this debate concerns the existence and number of "central" or "core" groups. Although existing studies show that, in aggregate, there is no more policy specialisation among United Kingdom organised interests, we do not know whether this means that there are fewer or more central groups. In this article, we utilise public policy consultations in Scotland over a continuous 25-year period, and the tools of network analysis, to examine the above propositions. We find that the expanding system of policy consultation is not associated with more balkanisation or with a decline of central policy actors that span policy communities.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:396
TI: Chemical warfare in Colombia, evidentiary ecologies and senti-actuando practices of justice ab: Between 1994 and 2015, militarized aerial fumigation was a central component of US-Colombia antidrug policy. Crop duster planes sprayed a concentrated formula of Monsanto's herbicide, glyphosate, over illicit crops, and also forests, soils, pastures, livestock, watersheds, subsistence food and human bodies. Given that a national peace agreement was signed in 2016 between FARC-EP guerrillas and the state to end Colombia's over five decades of war, certain government officials are quick to proclaim aerial fumigation of glyphosate an issue of the past. Rural communities, however, file quejas (complaints or grievances) seeking compensation from the state for the ongoing effects of the destruction of their licit agro-forestry. At the interfaces of feminist science and technology studies and anthropology, this article examines how evidentiary claims are mobilized when war deeply politicizes and moralizes technoscientific knowledge production. By ethnographically tracking the grievances filed by small farmers, I reveal the extent to which evidence circulating in zones of war - tree seedlings, subsistence crops, GPS coordinates and bureaucratic documents - retains (or not) the imprints of violence and toxicity. Given the systematic rejection of compensation claims, farmers engage in everyday material practices that attempt to transform chemically degraded ecologies. These everyday actualizations of justice exist both alongside and outside contestation over the geopolitically backed violence of state law. Rather than simply contrasting everyday acts of justice with denunciatory claims made against the state, farmers' reparative practices produce an evidentiary ecology that holds the state accountable while also senti-actuando' (feel-acting) alternative forms of justice.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:63
TI: Children of a Lesser God: Administrative Burden and Social Equity in Citizen-State Interactions ab: An important research agenda in public administration is to investigate how formal and realized public policy influences the lives of marginalized social groups. Recently, reinvigorated research on administrative burden can make useful contributions to this line of inquiry. Using ethnographic research methods, this article analyzes administrative burden experienced by the Khawaja Sira-individuals culturally defined as neither men nor women-of Pakistan in getting a legal ID. In doing so, this article contributes to a better understanding of the role played by third parties, administrative behavior and social factors play in influencing the level of administrative burden and social inequity for genderqueer groups.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:558
TI: Chinas Policy Processes and the Advocacy Coalition Framework ab: This review of 81 applications of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) in China between 2006 and 2017 finds that the ACF's hypotheses about the existence and stability of competing advocacy coalitions in policy subsystems, the occurrence of change across its three-tiered belief system, and the credence of its four pathways to policy change, which have been developed and mostly tested in Western democratic contexts, can be confirmed in China's authoritarian political system and transitional context. This review also finds some unexpected results, which have implications for studying China's policy processes and for future applications of the ACF. Adopting common vocabulary and theoretical foci, ACF applications have captured some of the complexity and evolving features of policy processes in China. Applications of the ACF to China have also enriched the discussions about how authoritarian governments, through interacting with other policy actors, adapt to external changes in transitional context.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:306
TI: Coming to Terms with Shame: Exploring Mediated Visibility against Transgressions ab: Shaming in a social context is necessarily assembled, as it depends on a loosely and often spontaneously arranged network of actors to convey denunciation. Digital tools further the expansion of such networks, a development that is of particular concern for surveillance scholars. This paper seeks to advance an account of user-led surveillance of peers that is centred on the enactment and experience of shame, notably as such practices can mobilise and be mobilised by press and state-led initiatives. Drawing on literature that considers shaming in criminological, journalistic, and digital media contexts, it considers tensions and other developments among a range of social actors who perform shaming. Recent examples in the Dutch context support an understanding of shaming as a process that enrols a set of social actors to stigmatise and exclude (categories of) individuals under scrutiny.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:130
TI: Chinese computational propaganda: automation, algorithms and the manipulation of information about Chinese politics on Twitter and Weibo ab: A 2016 review of literature about automation, algorithms and politics identified China as the foremost area in which further research was needed because of the size of its population, the potential for Chinese algorithmic manipulation in the politics of other countries, and the frequency of exportation of Chinese software and hardware. This paper contributes to the small body of knowledge on the first point (domestic automation and opinion manipulation) and presents the first piece of research into the second (international automation and opinion manipulation). Findings are based on an analysis of 1.5 million comments on official political information posts on Weibo and 1.1 million posts using hashtags associated with China and Chinese politics on Twitter. In line with previous research, little evidence of automation was found on Weibo. In contrast, a large amount of automation was found on Twitter. However, contrary to expectations and previous news reports, no evidence was found of pro-Chinese-state automation on Twitter. Automation on Twitter was associated with anti-Chinese-state perspectives and published in simplified Mandarin, presumably aimed at diasporic Chinese and mainland users who ?jump the wall? to access blocked platforms. These users come to Twitter seeking more diverse information and an online public sphere but instead they find an information environment in which a small number of anti-Chinese-state voices are attempting to use automation to dominate discourse. Our understanding of public conversation on Twitter in Mandarin is extremely limited and, thus, this paper advances the understanding of political communication on social media.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:158
TI: Citizen-Led Justice in Post-Communist Russia: From Comrades' Courts to Dotcomrade Vigilantism ab: This paper aims to provide a theoretical conceptualization of digital vigilantism in its manifestation in the Russian Federation where cases do not emerge spontaneously, but are institutionalized, highly organized, and systematic. Given the significant historical context of collective justice under Communism, the current manifestation of digital vigilantism in Russia raises questions about whether it is an example of re-packaged history backed with collective memory or a natural outspread of conventional practices to social networks. This paper reviews historical practices of citizen-led justice in the Soviet state and compares these practices with digital vigilantism that takes place in contemporary post-Communist Russia. The paper argues that despite new affordances that digital media and social networks brought about in the sphere of citizen-led justice, the role of the state in manifesting this justice in the Russian Federation remains significant. At the same time, with technological advances, certain key features of these practices, such as participants, their motives, capacity, targets, and audience engagement has undergone a significant evolution.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:139
TI: Citizens on Patrol: Understanding Public Whistleblowing against Government Corruption ab: Despite the importance of public whistleblowing, there has been little systematic inquiry into the topic. Combining objective and self-reported data, this study attempts to sort out the dynamics of public whistleblowing against government corruption, particularly distinguishing the antecedents of whistleblowing intention from those of actual whistleblowing acts and exploring anonymity decisions. A middle-range theory is proposed that highlights individual, situational, and institutional forces as they pertain to public whistleblowing. The results portray public whistleblowing to be driven by a complex array of competing motives and dynamics. The antecedents of whistleblowing intention are different in non-trivial ways than those of actual acts, with intention being prosocial motives and actual acts akin to voluntary provision of public goods. Institutional anti-corruption yields both complementary and substitute effects on public whistleblowing. The study concludes with discussing the implications for further theory development and practical guidance.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:663
TI: Civil society, the media and the Internet: changing roles and challenging authorities in digital political communication ecologies ab: The digital transformation has had a profound impact on political communication. It has lowered the access barrier for actors to become publicly visible and reconfigured predominantly vertical flows of information into horizontal communication networks. Media-centric studies hold that these 'hybrid media systems' do not subvert the analogue order tout court, as the media still occupy a central role in selection and distribution processes. In contrast to this, social movement scholars interested in digital forms of mobilization show that civil society actors can directly engage their base and the wider public. Because of this focus, the status and role of the media in these connective efforts has remained largely neglected. This study extends the view of both media-centric and social movement research by asking how the media are included in civil society mobilization efforts online and what status and role they have. Analysing the online communication around the UK climate change debate over a 30-month period, we show that while the media account for a substantial amount of the actors in the networks generated by civil society actors and bloggers, they become more marginal with respect to the authority they command. Not only are they replaced by bloggers as focal points in these digital political communication ecologies, they become next to irrelevant in allocating visibility and attention to other actors. This has ambivalent consequences for democratic discourse, as online debates become more inclusive but also more fragmented, lacking common points of reference.
SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY id:88
TI: Class, Race, Ethnicity, and Justice in Safe Drinking Water Compliance ab: ObjectivePast research yields inconsistent evidence of disparities in environmental quality by socioeconomic status (SES), race, and/or ethnicity. Since the political significance of race/ethnicity may be contingent upon SES, this study advances environmental justice research by examining interactively the effects of race, ethnicity, and SES on environmental quality. MethodsWe match 2010-2013 Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) compliance records with demographic and economic data for U.S. local government water utilities serving populations greater than 1,000. Statistical regression isolates direct and interactive relationships between communities' racial/ethnic populations, SES, and SDWA compliance. ResultsWe find that community racial/ethnic composition predicts drinking water quality, but also that SES conditions the effect; specifically, black and Hispanic populations most strongly predict SDWA violations in low-SES communities. ConclusionsOur findings highlight the importance of analyzing race, ethnicity, and SES interactively in environmental justice research. Results also carry troubling implications for drinking water quality in the United States.
SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY id:595
TI: Co-producing European knowledge and publics amidst controversy: The EU expert network on unconventional hydrocarbons ab: To date, social sciences have devoted little attention to the processes of expert knowledge production related to the exploitation of unconventional hydrocarbon resources. In this article, we examine an epistemic experiment led by the European Commission, the European Science and Technology Network on Unconventional Hydrocarbon Extraction, which was aimed at producing authoritative knowledge claims on shale energy development. By developing the idiom of 'co-production', the article provides a more fine-grained understanding of the processes through which competing knowledge claims, forms of epistemic authority, and new energy publics co-evolve in a situation of highly-politicized controversy. Drawing on our first-hand observations as participants representing the social sciences in the expert network, this article provides an in-depth ethnographic account of the struggles of the European Union authorities to manage and delimit the controversy. In this way, the analysis develops our understanding of the challenges in improving the deliberation of shale gas as a transnational energy policy issue.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:323
TI: Collaborating with the Machines: A Hybrid Method for Classifying Policy Documents ab: Governments produce vast and growing quantities of freely available text: laws, rules, budgets, press releases, and so forth. This information flood is facilitating important, growing research programs in policy and public administration. However, tightening research budgets and the information's vast scale forces political science and public policy to aspire to do more with less. Meeting this challenge means applied researchers must innovate. This article makes two contributions for practical text coding-the process of sorting government text into researcher-defined coding schemes. First, we propose a method of combining human coding with automated computer classification for large data sets. Second, we present a well-known algorithm for automated text classification, the Naive Bayes classifier, and provide software for working with it. We argue and provide evidence that this method can help applied researchers using human coders to get more from their research budgets, and we demonstrate the method using classical examples from the study of policy agendas.
COMPUTER SUPPORTED COOPERATIVE WORK-THE JOURNAL OF COLLABORATIVE COMPUTING id:124
TI: Collaborative Affordances of Medical Records ab: This article proposes the concept of Collaborative Affordances to describe physical and digital properties (i.e., affordances) of an artifact, which affords coordination and collaboration in work. Collaborative Affordances build directly on Gibson (1977)'s affordance concept and extends the work by Sellen and Harper (2003) on the affordances of physical paper. Sellen and Harper describe how the physical properties of paper affords easy reading, navigation, mark-up, and writing, but focuses, we argue, mainly on individual use of paper and digital technology. As an extension to this, Collaborative Affordances focusses on the properties of physical and digital artifacts that affords collaborative activities. We apply the concept of Collaborative Affordances to the study of paper-based and electronic patient records in hospitals and detail how they afford collaboration through four types of Collaborative Affordances; being portable across patient wards and the entire hospital, by providing collocated access, by providing a shared overview of medical data, and by giving clinicians ways to maintain mutual awareness. We then discuss how the concept of Collaborative Affordances can be used in the design of new technology by providing a design study of a 'Hybrid Patient Record' (HyPR), which is designed to seamlessly blend and integrate paper-based with electronic patient records.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:5
TI: Collaborative Platforms as a Governance Strategy ab: Collaborative governance is increasingly viewed as a proactive policy instrument, one in which the strategy of collaboration can be deployed on a larger scale and extended from one local context to another. This article suggests that the concept of collaborative platforms provides useful insights into this strategy of treating collaborative governance as a generic policy instrument. Building on an organization-theoretic approach, collaborative platforms are defined as organizations or programs with dedicated competences and resources for facilitating the creation, adaptation and success of multiple or ongoing collaborative projects or networks. Working between the theoretical literature on platforms and empirical cases of collaborative platforms, the article finds that strategic intermediation and design rules are important for encouraging the positive feedback effects that help collaborative platforms adapt and succeed. Collaborative platforms often promote the scaling-up of collaborative governance by creating modular collaborative units-a strategy of collaborative franchising.
SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY id:620
TI: Colonial Military Garrisons as Labor-Market Shocks: Quebec City and Boston, 1760-1775 ab: The military occupation of Boston in 1768 shocked the city's labor market. The soldiers, who were expected to supplement their pay by working for local businesses, constituted an influx equal to 12.5 percent of greater Boston's population. To assess the importance of this shock, we use the case of Quebec City, which experienced the reverse process (i.e., a reduction in the British military presence from close to 18 percent of the region's population to less than 1 percent). We argue that, in Boston, the combination of the large influx of soldiers and a heavy tax on the local population in the form of the billeting system caused an important wage reduction, while the lighter billeting system of Quebec City and the winding down of the garrison pushed wages up. We tie these experiences to political developments in the 1770s.
SCIENCE AS CULTURE id:166
TI: Colorado's Fracking Debates: Citizen Science, Conflict and Collaboration ab: Technological advancements in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling have spurred a controversial boom in oil and gas production. In Colorado, these debates take place directly in the suburban metro corridor, where local governments are turning to memorandums of understanding (MOU), negotiated directly with industry operators, to shape industry activity. We show that in Erie, the town that first pioneered this policy tool, these MOUs ostensibly welcome public participation in the planning and deliberation process but can unintentionally reinforce scientism-based governance. Citizen science challenged the local government's deficit model of the public, but it also shored up scientific authority and triggered a government imaginary of anti-fracking activists as an unruly public. Residents countered this imaginary by electing officials committed to public engagement and transparency, which opened up debates to encompass quality of life issues that had been sidelined by the original focus on competing scientific evidence about pollution. While fracking-related citizen science does not appear to be directly responsible for the government turnover and its attendant shift in governance, we suggest it did enhance civic engagement related to general issues of fiscal responsibility, ethics and transparency that did play a role in the election.
PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE id:160
TI: Comparing science communication theory with practice: An assessment and critique using Australian data ab: Scholars have variously described different models of science communication over the past 20 years. However, there has been little assessment of theorised models against science communication practice. This article compares 515 science engagement activities recorded in a 2012 Australian audit against the theorised characteristics of the three dominant models of deficit, dialogue and participation. Most engagement activities had objectives that reflected a mix of deficit and dialogue activities. Despite increases in scientific controversies like climate change, there appears to be a paucity of participatory activities in Australia. Those that do exist are mostly about people being involved with science through activities like citizen science. These participatory activities appear to coexist with and perhaps even depend on deficit activities. Science communication scholars could develop their models by examining the full range of objectives for engagement found in practice and by recognising that any engagement will likely include a mix of approaches.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:428
TI: Competition and Federal Contractor Performance ab: Contracts are increasingly used in government as a way to insert competition into public agencies and policy implementation. Competition among contractors is theorized to drive down costs, encourage innovation, and boost accountability. However, there have been few studies on whether competition actually leads to improved performance among contractors. This analysis examines nearly 25,000 federal contracts to determine how competition is related to performance. Findings indicate that competitively sourced contracts are more likely to suffer from performance problems. However, relationships between contractor and agency correlate with fewer performance problems. This suggests that competition may not be leading to the benefits that many might expect. Instead, relationships and shared experiences, along with other factors, may matter more when seeking to improve contractor performance.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:410
TI: Complex ecologies of trust in data practices and data-driven systems ab: Trust in data practices and data-driven systems is widely seen as both important and elusive. A data trust deficit has been identified, to which proposed solutions are often localised or individualised, focusing either on what institutions can do to increase user trust in their data practices or on data management models that empower the individual user. Scholarship on trust often focuses on typologies of trust. This paper shifts the emphasis to those doing the trusting, by presenting findings from empirical research which explored user perspectives on the data practices of the BBC. These findings challenge the assumption that localised or individualised solutions can be effective. They also suggest that conceptualisations of trust in data practices need to account for the complex range of factors which come into play in relation to trust in data and so move beyond the production of typologies. In this paper, we propose the concept of 'complex ecologies of trust' as a way of addressing all of these issues.
DISASTERS id:394
TI: Complexity, continuity and change: livelihood resilience in the Darfur region of Sudan ab: Darfur farming and pastoralist livelihoods are both adaptations to the environmental variability that characterises the region. This article describes this adaptation and the longer-term transformation of these specialised livelihoods from the perspective of local communities. Over several decades farmers and herders have experienced a continuous stream of climate, conflict and other shocks, which, combined with wider processes of change, have transformed livelihoods and undermined livelihood institutions. Their well-rehearsed specialist strategies are now combined with new strategies to cope. These responses help people get by in the short term but risk antagonising not only their specialist strategies but also those of others. A combination of factors has undermined the former integration between farming and pastoralism and their livelihood institutions. Efforts to build resilience in similar contexts must take a long-term view of livelihood adaptation as a specialisation, and consider the implications of new strategies for the continuity and integration of livelihood specialisations.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:505
TI: Concealment and discovery: The role of information security in biomedical data re-use ab: This paper analyses the role of information security (IS) in shaping the dissemination and re-use of biomedical data, as well as the embedding of such data in material, social and regulatory landscapes of research. We consider data management practices adopted by two UK-based data linkage infrastructures: the Secure Anonymised Information Linkage, a Welsh databank that facilitates appropriate re-use of health data derived from research and routine medical practice in the region, and the Medical and Environmental Data Mash-up Infrastructure, a project bringing together researchers to link and analyse complex meteorological, environmental and epidemiological data. Through an in-depth analysis of how data are sourced, processed and analysed in these two cases, we show that IS takes two distinct forms: epistemic IS, focused on protecting the reliability and reusability of data as they move across platforms and research contexts, and infrastructural IS, concerned with protecting data from external attacks, mishandling and use disruption. These two dimensions are intertwined and mutually constitutive, and yet are often perceived by researchers as being in tension with each other. We discuss how such tensions emerge when the two dimensions of IS are operationalized in ways that put them at cross purpose with each other, thus exemplifying the vulnerability of data management strategies to broader governance and technological regimes. We also show that whenever biomedical researchers manage to overcome the conflict, the interplay between epistemic and infrastructural IS prompts critical questions concerning data sources, formats, metadata and potential uses, resulting in an improved understanding of the wider context of research and the development of relevant resources. This informs and significantly improves the reusability of biomedical data, while encouraging exploratory analyses of secondary data sources.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:735
TI: Conceptualising critical data literacies for civil society organisations: agency, care, and social responsibility ab: This article develops a sociotechnical conceptualisation of data literacies in relation to citizens' data practices: highlighting the agentic, contextual, critical, and social aspects of data skills and competencies, it frames data literacies as both discursive and material. In order for civil society organisations to make sense of big, small, open and other data they need multiple skills, beyond the technical; it is, therefore, unhelpful to talk about a single form of data literacy. It is more helpful to consider how such literacies in the plural develop within the material social contexts of civic cultures, and how they can progress in tandem with critical awareness about the power aspects of data, so they can become central tenets of data advocacy. The primary purpose of the article is to move forward the debate around how to conceptualise data literacy - and to question how far the concept is useful in the first place. The article draws on empirical research and starts from the premise that it is imperative to develop frameworks and training schemes that enable civil society actors and publics more generally to use open data, to make data more relevant to stakeholders, and to support their engagement in policy debates around datafication.
SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY id:778
TI: Conducting a Street-Intercept Survey in an Authoritarian Regime: The Case of Myanmar ab: ObjectiveIn this research note, I share my experiences conducting a street-intercept survey in Yangon, Myanmar. The prestudy aimed to measure postmaterialism among Burmese using Roland Inglehart's four-item measure. The article discusses the key features and advantages of the street-intercept survey method in difficult sociopolitical environments, the design and implementation of the study, as well as the results of the survey. Moreover, the ethics one ought to consider in authoritarian regimes are emphasized. MethodsOriginal data were collected via a street-intercept survey in Yangon, Myanmar. ResultsThe prestudy confirmed the feasibility and the advantages of the street-intercept survey method in Myanmar. At the same time, in Myanmar, difficulties in the translation of Inglehart's items raise questions regarding the applicability of this particular measure. ConclusionThis note will be useful for researchers intending to collect survey data in Myanmar and other authoritarian regimes.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:755
TI: Conflicting Messages: Multiple Policy Experiences and Political Participation ab: Most Americans benefit from several policies, yet studies connecting policy receipt to political participation generally treat these interactions as isolated from each other. This article grounds itself in this reality by examining how multiple policy experiences interact to alter political participation. Focusing on policies that send conflicting messages to beneficiaries, I provide a political learning framework and set of quantitative findings that nuance conventional understandings of the relationship between the American welfare state and turnout behavior. The results demonstrate that politically mobilizing universal policies and demobilizing means-tested policies can cancel each other out, such that individuals benefitting from both exhibit no change in their participatory behavior. Thus, the political impact of policies within each tier are shown to be contingent on one's involvement in the other tier. In a counterintuitive finding, this analysis further shows that multiple policy experiences within the means-tested tier can combine to increase turnout rates due to the political lessons imparted by Head Start's uniquely democratic design. In advancing our understanding of the role public policies play in shaping American democracy, these findings demonstrate the importance of considering how policy feedback effects impact each other.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC POLICY id:747
TI: Congress as theatre: how advocates use ambiguity for political advantage ab: Ambiguity - the capacity to have multiple meanings - is endemic to politics. Ambiguity creates political opportunities, structures debates and provides leeway for political entrepreneurs to advance their interests. I use the 2012 passage and 2014 rollback of reforms to the National Flood Insurance Program to show how ambiguity enables political entrepreneurship. In this puzzling case, Congress enacted and rolled back changes that threatened to impose politically unpalatable costs. Using semi-structured interviews and congressional testimony, I show how political entrepreneurs engaged with ambiguity in the buildup to the reforms' passage. They used information strategically to interpret problems, solutions, rules, and goals; shape legislators' perceptions of the reforms' political implications; and adapt their arguments to the policy windows that opened. The case shows that ambiguity facilitates policy reform, but the direction of change depends on the priorities that are salient when a policy window opens and on the interests of political entrepreneurs.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF DISASTER RISK REDUCTION id:82
TI: Connecting theories of cascading disasters and disaster diplomacy ab: Disaster diplomacy examines how and why disaster-related activities (disaster risk reduction and post-disaster actions) do and do not influence peace and conflict processes, especially whether or not a causal chain can be established between dealing with disaster risk or a disaster and outcomes in peace or conflict. Cascading disasters might provide a useful theoretical framing for mapping out causal pathways for disaster diplomacy. In conceptually exploring the intersection between disaster diplomacy and cascading disasters, this paper concludes that both disaster diplomacy and cascading disasters have limitations because they try to develop focused causal chains which, when examined with respect to the root causes of disasters, are actually multiple, complex, intertwined causal chains. This situation does not obviate analysis or understanding of disaster diplomacy and cascading disasters. It emphasises the need to adopt and retain social perspectives from the root of disaster studies.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:476
TI: Constitutive invisibility: Exploring the work of staff advisers in political position-making ab: Although it is broadly acknowledged that democratic politics should operate through the public competition of binding positions, the careful development of these positions is commonly neglected. Providing ethnographic analysis of the work of staff advisers in parliamentary groups, the paper explores the invisible work invested into these competing positions. We argue that the invisibilization of work serves to accomplish a central tenet of democratic political discourse: the demonstration of resonance between constituents and elected politicians. The latter may be assisted by - but must not depend on - non-elected staff. Against this 'sacred' premise of representative democracy, the paper shows that and how political positions are based on invisible work and the work of invisibilizing. Building on laboratory and workplace studies, we specify the shape and function of invisibility by contrasting studies on invisible work in the natural sciences, in case law, and in party politics. In these instances, invisible work serves different discursive objects-in-formation: scientific facts, legal cases, and binding positions. Understanding invisible work, thus, leads us to consider different constitutive relevancies. In turn, these serve to specify established concepts in STS, such as 'controversy,' to better distinguish the day-to-day conduct of natural science from that of politics or law.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:387
TI: Constraining Bureaucrats Today Knowing You'll Be Gone Tomorrow: The Effect of Legislative Term Limits on Statutory Discretion ab: Do finite time horizons constrain a legislature's ability to control the bureaucracy? I argue that legislators subject to legislative term limits enact legislation with less statutory discretion today to ensure that their preferences are implemented by the bureaucracy tomorrow since most legislators will not be around to monitor the bureaucracy over the long term. Although past works suggest that legislative term limits decrease legislatures' rate of bureaucratic oversight, I find that term-limited legislatures use ex ante means of bureaucratic control to a greater extent by granting less statutory discretion to the bureaucracy.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:164
TI: Constructing audience quantification: Social influences and the development of norms about audience analytics and metrics ab: Audience analytics and metrics are ubiquitous in today's media environment. However, little is known about how creative media workers come to understand the social norms related to those technologies. Drawing on social influence theory, this study examines formal and informal socialization mechanisms in U.S. newsrooms. It finds that editorial newsworkers express receiving a moderate amount of training on the use of analytics and metrics, which is typically provided by their organization; primarily look to people within the organization, and especially superiors, to understand the social norms; learn about those norms mostly through observation and communication about others' experiences with the technology rather than their own; and that experiences are influenced by the organizational context and the individual's position in the editorial hierarchy. This leads to a broader intervention to our understanding of the social structures and individual dispositions that influence how emerging technologies are experienced across organizational and institutional environments.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:676
TI: Constructing contentious and noncontentious facts: How gynecology textbooks create certainty around pharma-contraceptive safety ab: Using critical discourse analysis, we examine how seven popular gynecology textbooks use sociolinguistic devices to describe the health effects of pharma-contraception (intrauterine and hormonal methods). Though previous studies have noted that textbooks generally use neutral language, we find that gynecology textbooks differentially deployed linguistic devices, framing pharma-contraceptive benefits as certain and risks as doubtful. These discursive strategies transform pharma-contraceptive safety into fact. We expand on Latour and Woolgar's concept of noncontentious facts by showing how some facts that are taken for granted by the medical community still require discursive fortification to counter potential negative accusations from outside the profession. We call these contentious facts. Our findings suggest that a pro-pharma orientation exists in gynecology textbooks, which may influence physicians' understanding of pharmaceutical safety. As such, these texts may affect medical practice by normalizing pharma-contraceptives without full considerations of their risks.
PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE id:711
TI: Constructing publics in museums' science communication ab: This article investigates how scientists at natural history museums construct publics in science communication and identifies four major constructions based on Braun and Schultz's categories: the general public, the pure public, the affected public, and the partisan public. This study draws on data from 17 research scientists at two natural history research museums in Norway who were interviewed about their public outreach activities focusing on practices, settings, designated outcomes, scientists' incentives to communicate science, and, finally, the speaking positions available for the different publics; the aim was to provide an understanding of the four constructed publics in museums' science communication. When scientists construct different publics, they emphasize relevance as an important quality assurance device.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:754
TI: Constructing visual policy narratives in new media: the case of the Dakota Access Pipeline ab: Increasingly, advocacy organizations are routing their communications through social media platforms. One notable difference from traditional communication outlets is the easy inclusion of visual elements within social media messaging. One such example of the turn toward the visual in online communication is the fight over the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), during which environmental groups livestreamed protests and posted images of demonstrators staring down police. This study examines the use and consequences of visual-based 'new media' platforms by applying the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to the case of DAPL. The NPF focuses our attention on the role of policy stories, acknowledging that narratives have impacts on policy beliefs and actions. I compare social media messaging that includes imagery to that which does not, exploring creation of policy narratives as defined through the NPF. I do so by drawing on a dataset of more than 580 Twitter posts by five environmental advocacy groups from July 2016 through October 2017. My findings speak to the ways in which images and accompanying text interact to form more robust narratives. Visual tweets are also more likely to stimulate greater sharing behavior. These results have implications for interest group communications strategy.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:403
TI: Content analysis across new media platforms: Methodological considerations for capturing media-rich data ab: Content analyses sway policy by describing the prevalence of mass media messages and implying effects. However, content-based research focusing ondynamic new media products such as websites, mobile applications, and video games presents methodological challenges. Our team recently conducted a large-scale content analysis exploring food marketing to children across media platforms, in which we captured and analyzed a variety of media-rich content. We consulted multiple sources to form our sampling frame, employed a complex sampling technique to allow for generalization of findings, used screen-capture software to record our exploration of media products, analyzed data using video coding software, and created a custom scale to determine the target audience of certain media products. We believe the steps we have taken may provide valuable insights into aspiring content analysts interested in studying media-rich content and address challenges that have been plaguing content analysts for the past two decades.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:355
TI: Contested credibility economies of nuclear power in India* ab: STS scholars studying anti-nuclear activism in the context of nations in the Global North have observed the critical role of science to mediate relations of domination and resistance. Through a historical examination of anti-nuclear activism in India, this article investigates the instrumentalization of science as a liberal democratic rationality. In doing so, the article shows how elite Indian activists - many of whom are scientists, engineers, journalists and academic professionals - will never be seen as scientifically knowledgeable in nuclear matters, because of their non-state educational pedigrees. If activists cannot hold the state accountable through science, they have attempted to anticipate what other kinds of arguments and modes of contention may gain traction. As such, they have deployed more 'guerilla' tactics grounded in bureaucratic rationalities in the hopes of installing themselves as alternate sources of expertise in India's nuclear landscape.
WORLD DEVELOPMENT id:421
TI: Contested terrain: International development projects and countervailing power for the excluded ab: Conventional international development project approaches to enable participation of the excluded often fall short of building countervailing power, which is key for accountability. This study analyzes possible exceptions `to identify causal pathways, as well as long-term effects beyond projects. The methodology combines the identification of positive outliers, process tracing and comparative analysis of five World Bank projects from the 1990s that were also the focus of subsequent academic research. Tangible openings from above that enabled countervailing power took two main forms: 1) institutionalized power-sharing over allocation of social funds - at local, subnational and national levels and 2) support for autonomous, multi-level social organizations, including collective titling of ethnic territories. Over the longer term, projects lacked strong national allies and their most innovative contributions were reversed, watered down or at best contained - though these differences mattered to social actors on the ground. The most analytically significant finding is that projects can have not only contested and uneven outcomes ("mixed results"), but also contradictory interaction effects. This poses the methodological challenge of how to measure and explain the relative weights of both countervailing power shifts and elite capture. (C) 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:317
TI: Context, visibility, and control: Police work and the contested objectivity of bystander video ab: This article examines how police officers understand and perceive the impact of bystander video on their work. Drawing from primarily qualitative data collected within two police departments in the Pacific Northwest, I describe how officers' concerns about objectivity, documentation, and transparency all manifest as parts of a broader politics of information within policing that has been amplified in recent years by the affordances of new media platforms and increasingly affordable surveillance-enabling technologies. Officers' primary concerns stem from their perceived inability to control the context of what is recorded, edited, and disseminated to broad audiences online through popular platforms such as , as well as the unwanted visibility (and accountability) that such online dissemination generates. I argue that understanding the effects of this `new visibility' on policing, and the role played by new media in this process, has become vitally important to our tasks of organizing, understanding, and overseeing the police.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:383
TI: Contingent Coalitions in Environmental Policymaking: How Civil Society Organizations Influenced the Chilean Renewable Energy Boom ab: This article analyzes the role of social movements and environmental organizations in crafting contingent coalitions to advance renewable energies in Chile. Until recently, Chile presented several conditions predicting the continuation of an arm's-length energy policy and a deregulated energy market heavily concentrated on environmentally and socially unfriendly sources. However, gradual but transformative policy change in the last decade has made the country a world leader in renewable energy development. Studying two key moments in energy policy reform, we argue that the contingency of the coalitions that social movements and environmental organizations forged was crucial to the advancement of renewable energy policy and the transformation of the energy sector in the country. The paper advances our understanding of policy change in contexts of high path dependency and status quo bias, and builds the concept of "contingent coalitions," unifying similar but scattered and under-theorized notions that capture the fluid dynamics of coalition formation and policy change in environmental policymaking.
COMPUTER SUPPORTED COOPERATIVE WORK-THE JOURNAL OF COLLABORATIVE COMPUTING AND WORK PRACTICES id:574
TI: Coordinative Entities: Forms of Organizing in Data Intensive Science ab: Scientific collaboration is a long-standing subject of CSCW scholarship that typically focuses on the development and use of computing systems to facilitate research. The research presented in this article investigates the sociality of science by identifying and describing particular, common forms of organizing that researchers in four different scientific realms employ to conduct work in both local contexts and as part of distributed, global projects. This paper introduces five prototypical forms of organizing we categorize as coordinative entities: the Principal Group, Intermittent Exchange, Sustained Aggregation, Federation, and Facility Organization. Coordinative entities as a categorization help specify, articulate, compare, and trace overlapping and evolving arrangements scientists use to facilitate data intensive research. We use this typology to unpack complexities of data intensive scientific collaboration in four cases, showing how scientists invoke different coordinative entities across three types of research activities: data collection, processing, and analysis. Our contribution scrutinizes the sociality of scientific work to illustrate how these actors engage in relational work within and among diverse, dispersed forms of organizing across project, funding, and disciplinary boundaries.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC POLICY id:768
TI: Corrective policy reactions: positive and negative budgetary punctuations ab: Punctuated equilibrium theory seeks to explain policy volatility and stability in government attention. In previous research into the temporal dynamics of punctuations, scholars found that punctuations occur in clusters - a recent budgetary punctuation increases the likelihood of a subsequent punctuation. This article examines the direction, positive or negative, of budgetary punctuations over time. Are budgetary punctuations corrective, grouping positive and negative changes? Or, do budgetary punctuations occur in cumulative trends of positive or negative changes? These questions address the heart of the theoretical metaphor for punctuated equilibrium. In an analysis of over 1,000 Texas school districts for nearly a 20-year-period, results support the notion of reactive patterns of budgetary punctuations - positive and negative budgetary punctuations pair up at a rate much higher than expected by chance. The findings demonstrate that even though it is likely to see consecutive positive and negative punctuations, they are not always fully corrective.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:785
TI: Symposium on political communication and social movements - the campfire and the tent: what social movement studies and political communication can learn from one another ab: In this symposium contribution, Dave Karpf offers three observations about the differences between the fields of social movement studies and political communication. He posits that the central difference between the two is the relative lack of a canonical literature in political communication. He discusses how this lack of a canon can be particularly freeing and generative during a time of rapid media change. He also examines the trend toward methodological pluralism and the rise of a robust experimental tradition in political communication. Finally, he discusses how cross-disciplinary research on movements and media as interacting systems can be further expanded and developed for the digital age.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:625
TI: Cost-benefit analysis at the floodgates: Governing democratic futures through the reassembly of Iran's waterways ab: A burgeoning scholarship has taken seriously the use and management of the world's fresh water as a site of critical investigation, highlighting the contribution of science and technology studies in making the infrastructural life of water visible. However, studies say little about the calculative terms of the decision-making process involved in infrastructural appraisal which are often taken for granted as something inevitable. This article examines the unexpected and remarkable role that cost-benefit analysis played in governing Iran's democratic future through the assembling of a dam in the mid-20th century. Indeed, cost-benefit analysis traveled the world via flows of water. I investigate the ways in which the calculation of risk generated by the device of cost-benefit analysis of neoclassical economics became over several decades the most influential language for explaining and organizing the relationship between humans and nature in southwest Iran. The waters of the Dez River and other major rivers of the world shaped the building of large-scale infrastructural projects around dams, but they were simultaneously entangled with the production of economic information about the costs and benefits to local areas, making possible the development of new methods of governing democracies in terms of risk. US-based government aid agencies, institutions of global economic governance, private American investors, engineers, and agricultural scientists converged in a small corner of Iran to transform the region, its water, and its farmers into a laboratory of grass-roots democracy for a profit.
JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION id:38
TI: Counter-messages as Prevention or Promotion of Extremism?! The Potential Role of YouTube ab: In order to serve as an antidote to extremist messages, counter-messages (CM) are placed in the same online environment as extremist content. Often, they are even tagged with similar keywords. Given that automated algorithms may define putative relationships between videos based on mutual topics, CM can appear directly linked to extremist content. This poses severe challenges for prevention programs using CM. This study investigates the extent to which algorithms influence the interrelatedness of counter and extremist messages. By means of two exemplary information network analyses based on YouTube videos of two CM campaigns, we demonstrate that CM are closely-or even directly-connected to extremist content. The results hint at the problematic role of algorithms for prevention campaigns.
PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE id:48
TI: Counting votes in public responses to scientific disputes ab: Publicized disputes between groups of scientists may force lay choices about groups' credibility. One possible, little studied, credibility cue is vote-counting (proportions of scientists on either side): for example, 97% of climate scientists believe in anthropogenic climate change. An online sample of 2600 Americans read a mock article about a scientific dispute, in a 13 (proportions: 100%-0%, 99%-1%, ... 50%-50%, ... 1%-99%, 0%-100% for Positions A and B, respectively)x8 (scenarios: for example, dietary salt, dark matter) between-person experiment. Respondents reported reactions to the dispute, attitudes toward the topic, and views on science. Proportional information indirectly affected judged agreement but less so topic or science responses, controlling for scenarios and moderators, whether by actual proportions or differing contrasts of consensus versus near-consensus. Given little empirical research with conflicting findings, even these low effect sizes warrant further research on how vote-counting might help laypeople deal with scientific disputes.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:24
TI: Creating energy citizenship through material participation ab: Transitions towards low-carbon energy systems will be comprehensive and demanding, requiring substantial public support. One important contribution from STS is to highlight the roles of citizens and public engagement. Until recently, energy users have often been treated as customers and passive market actors, or as recipients of technology at the margins of centralized systems. With respect to the latter role, critical or hesitant public action has been explained in terms of NIMBYism and knowledge deficits. This article focuses on the production of energy citizenship when considering public participation in low-carbon energy transitions. We draw upon the theory of material participation' to highlight how introducing and using emergent energy technologies may create new energy practices. We analyze an ongoing introduction of new material objects, highlighting the way these technologies can be seen as material interventions co-constructing temporalities of new and sustainable practices. We argue that artefacts such as the electric car, the smart meter and photovoltaic panels may become objects of participation and engagement, and that the introduction of such technologies may foster material participation and energy citizenship. The paper concludes with a discussion about the role of policies for low-carbon energy transitions on the making of energy citizenship, as well as limits of introducing a materially based energy citizenship.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:32
TI: Critical technocultural discourse analysis ab: Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) is a multimodal analytic technique for the investigation of Internet and digital phenomena, artifacts, and culture. It integrates an analysis of the technological artifact and user discourse, framed by cultural theory, to unpack semiotic and material connections between form, function, belief, and meaning of information and communication technologies (ICTs). CTDA requires the incorporation of critical theorycritical race, feminism, queer theory, and so onto incorporate the epistemological standpoint of underserved ICT users so as to avoid deficit-based models of underrepresented populations' technology use. This article describes in detail the formulation and execution of the technique, using the author's research on Black Twitter as an exemplar. Utilizing CTDA, the author found that Black discursive identity interpellated Twitter's mechanics to produce explicit cultural technocultural digital practicesdefined by one investor as the use case for Twitter. Researchers interested in using this technique will find it an intervention into normative and analytic technology analyses, as CTDA formulates technology as cultural representations and social structures in order to simultaneously interrogate culture and technology as intertwined concepts.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:645
TI: Critically assessing digital documents: materiality and the interpretative role of software ab: As a contribution to the ongoing tradition of critically assessing documents for research, this paper aims to highlight materiality as a key factor in the co-shaping of knowledge derived from digital documents. The paper first builds upon prior debates in document studies with work from the fields of Science and Technology Studies, and Communication Studies, to establish the role of document materiality in the interpretative process. By first establishing digital documents' material reality as electrical signal, the paper then discusses the interpretative role of software, in both the representation of that signal for human interpretation and the production of the document through software tools. Finally, the paper considers the implications for persistence and access to digital documents posed by their material reality and the private archival contexts in which they often reside.
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY id:441
TI: Curation as "Interoperability With the Future": Preserving Scholarly Research Software in Academic Libraries ab: This article considers the problem of preserving research software within the wider realm of digital curation, academic research libraries, and the scholarly record. We conducted a pilot study to understand the ecosystem in which research software participates, and to identify significant characteristics that have high potential to support future scholarly practices. A set of topical curation dimensions were derived from the extant literature and applied to select cases of institutionally significant research software. This approach yields our main contribution, a curation model and decision framework for preserving research software as a scholarly object. The results of our study highlight the unique characteristics and challenges at play in building curation services in academic research libraries.
RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS id:627
TI: DONALD J. TRUMP AND THE RHETORIC OF WHITE AMBIVALENCE ab: This essay examines how President Trump's vacillations between overt and colorblind racism represent the intensification of white racial anxieties in anticipation of an impending demographic shift toward a nonwhite majority. Trump's contradictory rhetoric on race becomes legible in the context of white ambivalence, a condition that entails that white identity, history, and culture be respected as morally superior but, at the same time, not be characterized as white supremacy. Examining a selection of Trump's campaign and postelection rallies, I show how white ambivalence constitutes a perverse mixture of overweening and explicit valorizations of people of color and, simultaneously, a forceful disavowal of racial conversations that might otherwise implicate white identity in the legacy of white supremacy.
AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW id:264
TI: Data Collection as Disruption: Insights from a Longitudinal Study of Young Adulthood ab: Research disrupts the social world, often by making respondents aware that they are being observed or by instigating reflection upon particular aspects of life via the very act of asking questions. Building on insights from the first Hawthorne studies, reflexive ethnographers, and methodologists concerned with panel conditioning, we draw on six years of research within a community in southern Malawi to introduce a conceptual framework for theorizing disruption in observational research. We present a series of poignant-yet-typical tales from the field and two additional tools-the refresher-sample-as-comparison and study-focused ethnography-for measuring disruption empirically in a longitudinal study. We find evidence of study effects in many domains of life that relate directly to our scope of inquiry (i.e., union formation, fertility) and in some that extend beyond it (i.e., health). Moreover, some study effects were already known and discussed in the broader community, which was also affected by our research in unintended ways. We conclude that the assumption of non-interactivity in observational research is shaky at best, urging data-gatherers and users to think more seriously about the role of disruption in their work.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:649
TI: Data and Obstacle: Police (Non)Visibility in Research on Protest Policing ab: The police, in particular the riot police, can be a rather inaccessible object of investigation, whose reservations towards research are analysed with reference to five barriers: 1) police control of access to the field, 2) the doubly asymmetric research relationship, 3) attempts by the police to steer the process, 4) the sceptical attitude of (potential) interviewees, and 5) the restrained discussion behaviour. However, what appears as a hurdle from a researcher's perspective allows structures of the object itself to be reconstructed. These include a prevalence of narratives of police "innocence" and "powerlessness" with which resistance against external aspirations for control is buttressed. The police view themselves as constantly being under public scrutiny and being unjustly publicly criticised. In this manner the predominant attitude towards research is reserved if not hostile. The police definitional power in its fields of action is thus partially transferred to research on the police. However, police interference has its limits, and counterstrategies will be set forth. Most data used are from a grounded theory methodology (GTM) project on video surveillance and countersurveillance of demonstrations, based primarily on group discussions and expert interviews with riot police.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:212
TI: Data as promise: Reconfiguring Danish public health through personalized medicine ab: 'Personalized medicine' might sound like the very antithesis of population science and public health, with the individual taking the place of the population. However, in practice, personalized medicine generates heavy investments in the population sciences - particularly in data-sourcing initiatives. Intensified data sourcing implies new roles and responsibilities for patients and health professionals, who become responsible not only for data contributions, but also for responding to new uses of data in personalized prevention, drawing upon detailed mapping of risk distribution in the population. Although this population-based 'personalization' of prevention and treatment is said to be about making the health services 'data-driven', the policies and plans themselves use existing data and evidence in a very selective manner. It is as if data-driven decision-making is a promise for an unspecified future, not a demand on its planning in the present. I therefore suggest interrogating how 'promissory data' interact with ideas about accountability in public health policies, and also with the data initiatives that the promises bring about. Intensified data collection might not just be interesting for what it allows authorities to do and know, but also for how its promises of future evidence can be used to postpone action and sidestep uncomfortable knowledge in the present.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:243
TI: Data craft: a theory/methods package for critical internet studies ab: Disinformation campaigns continue to thrive online, despite social media companies' efforts at identifying and culling manipulation on their platforms. Framing these manipulation tactics as 'coordinated inauthentic behavior,' major platforms have banned culprits and deleted the evidence of their actions from social activity streams, making independent assessment and auditing impossible. While researchers, journalists, and civil society groups use multiple methods for discovering and tracking disinformation, platforms began to publish highly curated data archives of disinformation in 2016. When platform companies reframe manipulation campaigns, however, they downplay the importance of their products in spreading disinformation. We propose to treat social media metadata as a boundary object that supports research across platforms and use metadata as an entry point for investigating manipulation campaigns. We illustrate how platform companies' responses to disinformation campaigns are at odds with the interests of researchers, civil society, policy-makers, and journalists, limiting the capacity to audit the role that platforms play in political discourse. To show how platforms' data archives of 'coordinated inauthentic behavior' prevent researchers from examining the contexts of manipulation, we present two case studies of disinformation campaigns related to the Black Lives Matter Movement. We demonstrate how data craft - the exploitation of metrics, metadata, and recommendation engines - played a prominent role attracting audiences to these disinformation campaigns. Additionally, we offer some investigative techniques for researchers to employ data craft in their own research of the disinformation. We conclude by proposing new avenues for research for the field of Critical Internet Studies.
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY id:455
TI: Data objects and documenting scientific processes: An analysis of data events in biodiversity data papers ab: The data paper, an emerging scholarly genre, describes research data sets and is intended to bridge the gap between the publication of research data and scientific articles. Research examining how data papers report data events, such as data transactions and manipulations, is limited. The research reported on in this article addresses this limitation and investigated how data events are inscribed in data papers. A content analysis was conducted examining the full texts of 82 data papers, drawn from the curated list of data papers connected to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Data events recorded for each paper were organized into a set of 17 categories. Many of these categories are described together in the same sentence, which indicates the messiness of data events in the laboratory space. The findings challenge the degrees to which data papers are a distinct genre compared to research articles and they describe data-centric research processes in a through way. This article also discusses how our results could inform a better data publication ecosystem in the future.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:344
TI: Data witnessing: attending to injustice with data in Amnesty International's Decoders project ab: The concept of witnessing has been used to explore the construction of evidence and experience in settings of law, religion, atrocity, media, history and science. Recent research has examined how digital technologies may multiply the involvement of remote, non-present and unanticipated actors in the witnessing of events. This paper examines what digital data practices at Amnesty International's Decoders initiative can add to the understanding of witnessing. It introduces the notion of data witnessing' with reference to four projects on (i) witnessing historical abuses with structured data from digitised documents; (ii) witnessing the destruction of villages with satellite imagery and machine learning; (iii) witnessing environmental injustice with company reports and photographs; and (iv) witnessing online abuse through the classification of Twitter data. These projects illustrate the configuration of experimental apparatuses for witnessing injustices with data. In contrast to accounts which emphasise the presence of an individual human witness at the scene, Amnesty's data practices are conspicuously collective and distributed, rendering the systemic scale of injustices at a distance, across space and time. Such practices may contribute to research on both (new) media witnessing and data politics, suggesting ways in which care, concern and solidarity may be constructed, structured, extended and delimited by means of digital data.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:568
TI: Database-Driven Empowering Surveillance: Definition and Assessment of Effectiveness ab: This article offers a definition and explores the dynamics of database-driven empowering surveillance. That is, it focuses on surveillance from below that is directed at powerful institutions or groups for the benefit of the marginalized, using a database as its main facilitator. By examining six Israeli NGOs working for the protection of Palestinian human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, I am able to break down the database-driven empowering surveillance process of amassing and disseminating information, to identify its mechanism of action, and to highlight its limiting and enabling factors. This scrutiny in turn helps shed light on the capacity of NGOs to effectively monitor powerful institutions: to surveil from below in spaces with pervasive top-down surveillance; to surveil in territories under the control of the surveillance subjects; to impact policy on polarized issues; and to enforce human rights. Empowering surveillance emerges from this article as a process that requires those carrying it out to maintain a delicate balance between using a forceful mechanism against those monitored and being highly dependent on third parties with coercive power-often from the same organizations being monitored-to exact the desired deterring effect.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:2
TI: Dealing with digital intermediaries: A case study of the relations between publishers and platforms ab: The rise of digital intermediaries such as search engines and social media is profoundly changing our media environment. Here, we analyze how news media organizations handle their relations to these increasingly important intermediaries. Based on a strategic case study, we argue that relationships between publishers and platforms are characterized by a tension between (1) short-term, operational opportunities and (2) long-term strategic worries about becoming too dependent on intermediaries. We argue that these relationships are shaped by news media's fear of missing out, the difficulties of evaluating the risk/reward ratios, and a sense of asymmetry. The implication is that news media that developed into an increasingly independent institution in the 20th centuryin part enabled by news media organizations' control over channels of communicationare becoming dependent upon new digital intermediaries that structure the media environment in ways that not only individual citizens but also large, resource-rich, powerful organizations have to adapt to.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:254
TI: Decentering technology in discourse on discrimination ab: Algorithmic discrimination has become one of the critical points in the discussion about the consequences of an intensively datafied world. While many scholars address this problem from a purely techno-centric perspective, others try to raise broader social justice concerns. In this article, we join those voices and examine norms, values, and practices among European civil society organizations in relation to the topic of data and discrimination. Our goal is to decenter technology and bring nuance into the debate about its role and place in the production of social inequalities. To accomplish this, we rely on Nancy Fraser's theory of abnormal justice which highlights interconnections between maldistribution of economic benefits, misrecognition of marginalized communities, and their misrepresentation in political processes. Fraser's theory helps situate technologically mediated discrimination alongside other more conventional kinds of discrimination and injustice and privileges attention to economic, social, and political conditions of marginality. Using a thematic analysis of 30 interviews with civil society representatives across Europe's human rights sector, we bring clarity to this idea of decentering. We show how many groups prioritize the specific experiences of marginalized groups and see through' technology, acknowledging its connection to larger systems of institutionalized oppression. This decentered approach contrasts the process-oriented perspective of tech-savvy civil society groups that shy from an analysis of systematic forms of injustice.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:26
TI: Deconstructing datafication's brave new world ab: As World Economic Forum's definition of personal data as 'the new "oil" - a valuable resource of the 21st century' shows, large-scale data processing is increasingly considered the defining feature of contemporary economy and society. Commercial and governmental discourse on data frequently argues its benefits, and so legitimates its continuous and large-scale extraction and processing as the starting point for developments in specific industries, and potentially as the basis for societies as a whole. Against the background of the General Data Protection Regulation, this article unravels how general discourse on data covers over the social practices enabling collection of data, through the analysis of high-profile business reports and case studies of health and education sectors. We show how conceptualisation of data as having a natural basis in the everyday world protects data collection from ethical questioning while endorsing the use and free flow of data within corporate control, at the expense of its potentially negative impacts on personal autonomy and human freedom.
RESEARCH POLICY id:3
TI: Deep transitions: Emergence, acceleration, stabilization and directionality ab: Industrial society has not only led to high levels of wealth and welfare in the Western world, but also to increasing global ecological degradation and social inequality. The socio-technical systems that underlay contemporary societies have substantially contributed to these outcomes. This paper proposes that these sociotechnical systems are an expression of a limited number of meta-rules that, for the past 250 years, have driven innovation and hence system evolution in a particular direction, thereby constituting the First Deep Transition. Meeting the cumulative social and ecological consequences of the overall direction of the First Deep Transition would require a radical change, not only in socio-technical systems but also in the meta-rules driving their evolution - the Second Deep Transition. This paper develops a new theoretical framework that aims to explain the emergence, acceleration, stabilization and directionality of Deep Transitions. It does so through the synthesis of two literatures that have attempted to explain large-scale and long-term socio-technical change: the Multilevel Perspective (MLP) on socio-technical transitions, and Techno-economic Paradigm (TEP) framework.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:343
TI: Defining "Talent": Insights from Management and Migration Literatures for Policy Design ab: Taking the case of defining "talent," a term that has been widely used but its definitions differ by discipline, organization, policy sector, as well as over time, we demonstrate how the basic definition of a policy subject may affect policy design and the assessment of policy outcomes. We review how "talent" is defined in two sets of literature, talent management and migration studies, and find that definitions fall under one of two categories: binary ("talent" as qualities) or composite ("talent" as a relational concept). The implications of our findings are epistemological and ontological; the findings point to diverse epistemological effects of definitions through developments of indicators, as expected, and they also reveal the policy designers' ontological starting points. Ontological perspectives are significant because they ultimately determine whether the policy assessments carried out differ in degrees or in kind. In the case of defining "talent," this means determining which objectives the designers would set (e.g., recruiting vs. cultivating vs. introducing competition), the policy instrumentation for achieving the goals (migration measures vs. education vs. lifelong learning vs. human resource policy), and the type of assessment for measuring policy outcomes (single vs. multiple indicators, qualitative vs. quantitative).
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY id:782
TI: Definitions of "Metadata": A Brief Survey of International Standards ab: A search on the term "metadata" in the International Organization for Standardization's Online Browsing Platform (ISO OBP) reveals that there are 96 separate ISO standards that provide definitions of the term. Between them, these standards supply 46 different definitions-a lack of standardization that we might not have expected, given the context. In fact, if we make creative use of Simpson's index of concentration (originally devised as a measure of ecological diversity) to measure the degree of standardization of definition in this case, we arrive at a value of 0.05, on a scale of zero to one. It is suggested, however, that the situation is not as problematic as it might seem: that low cross-domain levels of standardization of definition should not be cause for concern.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:230
TI: Executive Control and Turnover in the Senior Executive Service ab: If presidents wish to see their policy priorities implemented, they need control over key decision-making positions often occupied by career executives. This article examines whether political conflict with a new administration drives career executives from their positions. This can happen because presidents target specific individuals or because career professionals anticipate conflict and strategically exit before a new president takes office. To assess this dynamic, we use novel data that combine individual survey responses with personnel records to analyze the probability that an agency executive departs her position from March 2015 to July 2017. Given our findings that turnover is driven by both presidential marginalization and strategic exit by bureaucrats, we conclude with implications for presidential efforts to control the bureaucracy.
SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY id:16
TI: Demand, challenges, and innovation. Making sense of new trends in innovation policy ab: In recent years, the traditional rationale for innovation policy has been expanded to more explicitly contribute to tackling societal challenges. There is broad agreement that demand should be at the core of challenge-oriented innovation policy. Nevertheless, demand and demand conditions are poorly understood and not yet in the focus of challenge-oriented innovation policy. This article conceptualises demand-oriented innovation policies and their links to societal challenges. We differentiate demand and need, and highlight different forms of demand articulation. Then, we characterise three ideal-typical policies that relate to demand: traditional innovation policy, sector-specific policy, and challenge-oriented policy. These three ideal-types are discussed focussing on output legitimacy, input legitimacy, and operational requirements. This discussion highlights the specific challenges and opportunities of demand-oriented innovation policies and allows to derive a set of recommendations to increase the effectiveness of such policies.
SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY id:765
TI: Detecting Florida's Gerrymander: A Lesson in Putting First Things First ab: Objective We show that Florida's post-2010 congressional districts were an ex ante knowable gerrymander, which, if diagnosed as a factual matter before enactment, would have avoided both the 2012 and 2014 harm and the state's unnecessarily burdensome reliance on a showing of intent. Method We recount the legal focus on intent, apply the McDonald-Best equal vote weight effects test standard to the Florida facts, and use more than 25,000 simulated districting plans to check on whether there was a gerrymander effect. Results We find a pro-Republican gerrymander effect could have been detected in advance of enacting Florida's redistricting plan. Conclusion In specific reference to Florida, we conclude the enacted districts could have been identified as a gerrymander beforehand, allowing court proceedings to move expeditiously and with a clear focus. As a general matter, we conclude a comprehensive approach to gerrymandering is best served by following a two-part prescription: (1) set an effect standard for identifying a gerrymander and (2) know the intent by checking the facts against the standard.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:307
TI: Devicing future populations: Problematizing the relationship between quantity and quality of life ab: Taking as point of departure the claim that, in late modern societies, there has been shift from a focus on producing measures of life and death towards metrics of health and disability, this paper investigates how, through what means and processes was this transition achieved. It proposes that such questions can be addressed by analysing the transcripts and sociotechnical network of a meeting held at the United States Senate on July 15th 1983 to assess the validity and sensitivity of life expectancy forecasts. The paper analyses how members of the Hearing transformed a weakly articulated set of differing life expectancy projections into a controversy about the issue of vitality and health in populations. Analysis of the Hearing proceedings suggests that 'calculative devices' played a generative role in problematizing the relationship between forms of expertise, calculative procedures, data infrastructures and specific expectations of the effect of technology on health and longevity. The paper details empirically that this re-composition was possible through a collective investigation - an opening up - of key instruments in the management of populations in 'insurance societies'.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW id:286
TI: Different Shades of Gray: A Priming Experimental Study on How Institutional Logics Influence Organizational Actor Judgment ab: This article examines whether and how judgments made by individual organizational actors may be influenced by institutional logics-the historical patterns of cultural symbols and material practices, including assumptions, values, and beliefs, by which individuals and organizations provide meaning to their daily activity, organize time and space, and reproduce their lives and experiences. Using an experimental design, the authors prime three institutional logics in three independent groups of managers (n = 98) and assess the influence of the primes on individual-level judgment preferences. The results show that such priming affects participants' judgments in an ambiguous judgmental task, with each prime influencing judgment in a discernibly unique pattern. Consequently, a more nuanced account of larger patterns of behavior can be constructed. The findings highlight the potential of text as priming stimuli within institutionally complex work settings such as those in the public sector, an important yet underexamined issue.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:94
TI: Diffusion of Marketization Innovation with Administrative Centralization in a Multilevel System: Evidence from China ab: How does the vertical power structure of government shape innovation adoption? This study explores the relationship between administrative centralization and the adoption of local marketization innovation in China. In the centralprovincialcity hierarchical structure of China, political interactions across different levels of governments significantly influence the marketization reform process. We argue that, although the intervention policies from the central or provincial governments independently stimulate the city adoption of marketization innovation, their combined impact on city governments tend to be competitive rather than complementary. We empirically examine the diffusion of probusiness administrative licensing centers across Chinese cities between 1997 and 2012. Statistical findings supported by robustness checks confirm our theoretical hypotheses.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:724
TI: Digging Deeper: Considering the Marginalizing Experience of Homelessness in Developing Program Performance Objectives ab: Engaging citizens in performance work can be difficult and resource-intensive and may yield few instrumental benefits. Some argue it is still beneficial for democratic purposes as it enables government to be more responsive to community preferences and needs. This paper argues there is an additional layer to understanding citizen preferences that involves connecting citizens' lived experiences to their perspectives on performance objectives. This research explores this topic in the context of citizens with the lived experience of homelessness. Interviews with formerly homeless individuals and with professional administrators working in the affordable housing and homelessness fields reveal these citizens and administrators often assign different meanings to performance objectives associated with permanent supportive housing programs. In addition, findings indicate the stigma associated with being homeless, the lack of safety while homeless, and the lack of control over one's life while homeless inform citizen perspectives on performance objectives.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:255
TI: Digital political infographics: A rhetorical palette of an emergent genre ab: Information visualizations (infographics) have long been part of the production of knowledge, although the rise of digital media brought about a significant expansion in both their volume and their use for political purposes. This article provides a first overview and typology of the emergent genre we term digital political infographics. Informed by literature and theory about visualizations, political persuasion, interfaces, and digital sharing, we aimed to reveal the data-politics unique to this expression form. A grounded analysis of 200 politically oriented infographics on Twitter yielded a two-dimensional typology relating to the narrative strategies and the interfaces underpinning users' engagement with data in this discursive format. An integrative evaluation revealed that digital political infographics are hybrid communicative forms, characterized by three influence trajectories between political persuasion, infographic conventions, and digital environments: politicizing infographic traits, infographing political tactics, and creating a new common ground, featuring a rhetoric of tactile data experience.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:729
TI: Disappearing acts: Content moderation and emergent practices to preserve at-risk human rights-related content ab: Human rights groups, journalists, and "open source investigators" increasingly depend on social media platforms to collect eyewitness media documenting possible human rights violations and conflicts. And yet, this content-often graphic, controversial, even uploaded by perpetrators-is often removed by the platforms, for various reasons. This article draws on in-depth interviews to examine how practitioners reliant on human rights-related content understand, experience, and deal with platform content moderation and removals in their day-to-day work. Interviews highlighted that both the actual and anticipated removal of social media content complicated and added to practitioners' work. In addition, practitioners unevenly possess the technical, financial, and organizational resources to mitigate the risks and ramifications of removal by preserving content and appealing content moderation decisions. This article sheds light on the impacts of content moderation for stakeholders other than the primary account holders, and highlights platforms' affordances and shortcomings as archives of war.
DISASTERS id:734
TI: Disaster journalism: fostering citizen and community disaster mitigation, preparedness, response, recovery, and resilience across the disaster cycle ab: Natural and human-caused disasters pose a significant risk to the health and well-being of people. Journalists and news organisations can fulfil multiple roles related to disasters, ranging from providing warnings, assessing disaster mitigation and preparedness, and reporting on what occurs, to aiding long-term recovery and fostering disaster resilience. This paper considers these possible functions of disaster journalism and draws on semi-structured interviews with 24 journalists in the United States to understand better their approach to the discipline. A thematic analysis was employed, which resulted in the identification of five main themes and accompanying subthemes: (i) examining disaster mitigation and preparedness; (ii) facilitating recovery; (iii) self-care and care of journalists; (iv) continued spread of social media; and (v) disaster journalism ethics. The paper concludes that disaster journalism done poorly can result in harm, but done well, it can be an essential instrument with respect to public disaster planning, management, response, and recovery.
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY id:763
TI: Disaster privacy/privacy disaster ab: Privacy expectations during disasters differ significantly from nonemergency situations. This paper explores the actual privacy practices of popular disaster apps, highlighting location information flows. Our empirical study compares content analysis of privacy policies and government agency policies, structured by the contextual integrity framework, with static and dynamic app analysis documenting the personal data sent by 15 apps. We identify substantive gaps between regulation and guidance, privacy policies, and information flows, resulting from ambiguities and exploitation of exemptions. Results also indicate gaps between governance and practice, including the following: (a) Many apps ignore self-defined policies; (b) while some policies state they "might" access location data under certain conditions, those conditions are not met as 12 apps included in our study capture location immediately upon initial launch under default settings; and (c) not all third-party data recipients are identified in policy, including instances that violate expectations of trusted third parties.
DISASTERS id:347
TI: Disaster risk reduction amidst armed conflict: informal institutions, rebel groups, and wartime political orders ab: Extant research has explored the effect of natural hazards on the risk of armed conflict, but very few studies have examined how conflict dynamics affect disaster risk reduction (DRR), including climate change adaptation. This is surprising given the empirical evidence that indicates how often disasters and armed conflicts collide. To understand better the impact of armed conflict on DRR, this paper develops a conceptual typology that is based on rebel groups' territorial control and on the strength of informal institutions. It documents three main political orders amid conflict: rebel stability; informal stability; and fragmented landscape. These wartime political orders will have different effects on DRR and other development programmes, revealing the importance of desegregating armed conflict to facilitate tailor-made and more efficient interventions. The paper provides empirical evidence from Mali and the Philippines that illustrates the influence of these wartime political orders on DRR programmes.
DISASTERS id:379
TI: Disasters in conflict areas: finding the politics ab: Despite some 50 years of research, relatively little is known about how disasters in conflict areas are created and discursively framed, and how information on them is publicly consumed. The emphasis in disaster studies has remained on establishing causal linkages, demonstrating the way in which natural hazard-related disasters result in deepening conflict, or ushering in peace. Furthermore, it has been accepted that disaster risk reduction is the state's responsibility. The strengths and limitations of these approaches are examined prior to a political reimagining of disasters in conflict areas. The absence of politics' from the wider debate on disasters in conflict areas is not just a benign oversight, but is in fact the politics of disasters in conflict areas. A politics that does not engage with the processes and outcomes of pursuing dominant agendas, such as neoliberal orthodoxy and state imperial control, in areas and communities vulnerable to natural hazards and political conflict needs to be recognised and challenged.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:525
TI: Discipline and promote: Building infrastructure and managing algorithms in a "structured journalism" project by professional fact-checking groups ab: News organizations have adapted in various ways to a digital media environment dominated by algorithmic gatekeepers such as search engines and social networks. This article dissects a campaign to actively shape that environment led by professional fact-checking organizations. We trace the development of the Share the Facts "widget," a device designed to give fact-checks greater purchase in algorithmically governed media networks by driving adoption of a new data standard called ClaimReview. We show how "structured journalism" gave journalists a language for the social and technical challenges involved, and how this infrastructural technology mediates between fact-checkers, audiences, and platform companies. We argue that this standard-setting initiative exhibits both promotional and disciplining facets, offering greater distribution and impact to journalists while also defining their work in specific ways. Crucially, in this case, this disciplining influence reflects internal professional-institutional agendas in an emerging subfield of journalism as much as the demands of platform companies.
RESEARCH POLICY id:4
TI: Disentangling the antecedents of ambidexterity: Exploration and exploitation ab: We view ambidexterity as a paradox whereby its components, exploration and exploitation, generate persistent and conflicting demands on an organization. Drawing on the attention based view of the firm (ABV), we examine three antecedents of organizational ambidexterity that reflect ABV's three principles - the principle of focus of attention; the principle of situated attention; and the principle of structural distribution of attention. Specifically, we examine the influence of top management team (TMT) composition, whether or not the firm has a clear written vision, and the extent to which organizational attention is focused on investments in R&D, and continuous improvement. We empirically validate our model on a sample of 422 small and medium-sized enterprises in the UK and fmd that ambidexterity is supported by a blend of integration and differentiation approaches.
ADMINISTRATIVE SCIENCE QUARTERLY id:11
TI: Dismantling Knowledge Boundaries at NASA: The Critical Role of Professional Identity in Open Innovation ab: Using a longitudinal in-depth field study at NASA, I investigate how the open, or peer-production, innovation model affects R&D professionals, their work, and the locus of innovation. R&D professionals are known for keeping their knowledge work within clearly defined boundaries, protecting it from individuals outside those boundaries, and rejecting meritorious innovation that is created outside disciplinary boundaries. The open innovation model challenges these boundaries and opens the knowledge work to be conducted by anyone who chooses to contribute. At NASA, the open model led to a scientific breakthrough at unprecedented speed using unusually limited resources; yet it challenged not only the knowledge-work boundaries but also the professional identity of the R&D professionals. This led to divergent reactions from R&D professionals, as adopting the open model required them to go through a multifaceted transformation. Only R&D professionals who underwent identity refocusing work dismantled their boundaries, truly adopting the knowledge from outside and sharing their internal knowledge. Others who did not go through that identity work failed to incorporate the solutions the open model produced. Adopting open innovation without a change in R&D professionals' identity resulted in no real change in the R&D process. This paper reveals how such processes unfold and illustrates the critical role of professional identity work in changing knowledge-work boundaries and shifting the locus of innovation.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:494
TI: Dismissing the Vocal Minority: How Policy Conflict Escalates When Policymakers Label Resisting Citizens ab: This article investigates, through the theory of social construction and policy design, the feedforward effects of labeling on policy conflicts. It argues that such conflicts escalate when policymakers distinguish between more and less deserving and more and less powerful segments of the population. It draws on the empirical analysis of 32 narrative interviews with vital stakeholders in the conflict over the contested multibillion-euro Oosterweelconnection highway in Antwerp (Belgium), as well as on the media analysis of 739 articles. According to such analyses, Flemish policymakers became increasingly hostile toward action groups as the latter moved beyond conventional policy-making procedure, labeling them as a powerful but undeserving "vocal minority." Meanwhile, they endorsed the Oosterweel policy, claiming that it represented an increasingly powerless but deserving "silent majority." However, labeling action groups as powerful but undeserving and consequently dismissing them resulted in the escalation of a substantive policy conflict to a relational policy conflict, which became increasingly difficult to settle as parties fought each other rather than fighting over policies.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW id:294
TI: Do Politicians See Eye to Eye? The Relationship between Political Group Characteristics, Perceived Strategic Plan Quality, and Strategic Consensus in Local Governing Majorities ab: Although strategic consensus is a core concept in strategic management research, empirical evidence is lacking on (1) the degree of strategic consensus in public organizations, (2) how strategic consensus is impacted by group characteristics specific to public strategic decision-making groups, and (3) how strategic plans impact these relationships. An analysis of multisource data from 1,075 governing majority members nested in 256 Flemish municipalities (Belgium) indicates that within-group strategic consensus varies among governing majorities and is negatively impacted by political diversity and political power, but these relationships are mediated by perceived strategic plan quality. The results indicate that the idiosyncrasies of public decision-making groups can impede high levels of strategic consensus, but strategic plans can attenuate this effect by fulfilling a boundary-spanning role.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC POLICY id:449
TI: Do markets make good commissioners?: A quasi-experimental analysis of retail electric restructuring in Ohio ab: Empirical support for the purported benefits of retail electric deregulation is mixed at best. Prior studies that identify states as simply "retail deregulated" overlook complex policy environments in which deregulation is implemented by regulators with a high degree of discretion. Prior studies also rely on Energy Information Administration data that do not account for core regulatory interventions that can take place during the process of implementing deregulation. Using robust time series household final bill survey data from the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, this article provides a quasi-experimental analysis of the price impacts of retail electric restructuring in Ohio. The results suggest that residential electricity prices have increased following retail restructuring in all service territories in Ohio, with significant favourable welfare effects observed only in the Cincinnati area, where key policy implementation stages were not circumvented.
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY id:392
TI: Documenting provenance in noncomputational workflows: Research process models based on geobiology fieldwork in Yellowstone National Park ab: A comprehensive record of research data provenance is essential for the successful curation, management, and reuse of data over time. However, creating such detailed metadata can be onerous, and there are few structured methods for doing so. In this case study of data curation in support of geobiology research conducted at Yellowstone National Park, we describe a method of Research Process Modeling for documenting noncomputational data provenance in a structured yet flexible way. The method combines systems analysis techniques to model research activities, the World Wide Web Consortium Provenance (PROV) ontology to illustrate relationships between data products, and simple inventory methods to account for research processes and data products. It also supports collaborative data curation between information professionals and researchers, and is therefore a significant step toward producing more useable and interpretable research data. We demonstrate how this method describes data provenance more robustly than flat metadata alone and fills a critical gap in the documentation of provenance for field-based and noncomputational workflows. We discuss potential applications of this approach to other research domains.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW id:146
TI: Does Disclosure of Performance Information Influence Street-level Bureaucrats' Enforcement Style? ab: Governments use different regulatory instruments to ensure that businesses owners or "inspectees" comply with rules and regulations. One tool that is increasingly applied is disclosing inspectees' performance information to other stakeholders. Disclosing performance information has consequences for street-level bureaucrats because it increases the visibility of their day-to-day work. Using a survey (n = 507) among Dutch inspectors of the Netherlands Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority, this article shows that the disclosure of performance information has an impact on enforcement style at the street level. Findings show that perceived disclosed performance information positively enhances all three dimensions of street-level bureaucrats' enforcement style (legal, facilitation, and accommodation). This effect is strongest for facilitation and accommodation and weakest for the legal style. Perceived resistance by inspectees partly explains this effect. Contrary to expectations, more perceived disclosure does not result in more but in less perceived resistance of inspectees by street-level bureaucrats.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:669
TI: Does Partisan Conflict Lead to Increased Bureaucratic Policymaking? Evidence from the American States ab: Scholars of American politics debate the consequences of polarized and divided government on lawmaking but have largely neglected the impact of institutional conflict on the policy outputs of the bureaucracy. We argue that lawmaking gridlock creates opportunities and demands for governors and civil servants to pursue policy goals through rulemaking. To explore these dynamics, we draw upon a comprehensive dataset of over 150,000 proposed and adopted rules issued by US state agencies from 1994 through 2009 and compare differences in rulemaking output within states across periods of divided and unified party control. We find that policy conflict (measured by the presence of a party divided legislature) leads to a 3%-7% increase in the number of proposed and adopted rules. We then explore how variation in state powers of legislative oversight affect rulemaking, and find that these effects are concentrated in governments with weaker powers of legislative review. Our research speaks to debates in the literature regarding the nature of bureaucratic policymaking and highlights practical consequences of legislative gridlock and partisan polarization.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:148
TI: Does Policy Diffusion Need Space? Spatializing the Dynamics of Policy Diffusion ab: For decades, scholars in multiple disciplines have examined spatial diffusion, or the spatiotemporal properties associated with the diffusion of innovations. These properties include contagious, hierarchical, and relocation diffusion. Each of these refers to a spatial model that epitomizes how innovations spread among geographic locations. Policy diffusion, a separate but homologous research tradition, had its theoretical underpinnings in spatial diffusion. However, contemporary policy diffusion has focused largely on mechanism-based diffusion. This article demonstrates how exploratory spatial data analysis can be used to uncover spatial policy diffusion properties. In this study, municipal smoking regulation adoptions, religious-based initiatives, and bag ban and bag fees are examined. This study finds evidence that for each policy more than one property is occurring; therefore, this study proposes that a hybrid model best explains diffusion. This article demonstrates how examining spatial diffusion properties, in addition to diffusion mechanisms, can improve the conceptualization of diffusion theories, enhance mechanism or theory-based specification of diffusion models, and unravel the specific regional or neighboring causal pathways linking policies between adopting jurisdictions.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW id:52
TI: Does Strategic Planning Improve Organizational Performance? A Meta-Analysis ab: Strategic planning is a widely adopted management approach in contemporary organizations. Underlying its popularity is the assumption that it is a successful practice in public and private organizations that has positive consequences for organizational performance. Nonetheless, strategic planning has been criticized for being overly rational and for inhibiting strategic thinking. This article undertakes a meta-analysis of 87 correlations from 31 empirical studies and asks, Does strategic planning improve organizational performance? A random-effects meta-analysis reveals that strategic planning has a positive, moderate, and significant impact on organizational performance. Meta-regression analysis suggests that the positive impact of strategic planning on organizational performance is strongest when performance is measured as effectiveness and when strategic planning is measured as formal strategic planning. This impact holds across sectors (private and public) and countries (U.S. and non-U.S. contexts). Implications for public administration theory, research, and practice are discussed in the conclusion.
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SYSTEMS id:60
TI: Don't Even Think About It! The Effects of Antineutralization, Informational, and Normative Communication on Information Security Compliance ab: Organizations use security education, training, and awareness (SETA) programs to counter internal security threats and promote compliance with information security policies. Yet, employees often use neutralization techniques to rationalize noncompliant behavior. We investigated three theory-based communication approaches that can be incorporated into SETA programs to help increase compliance behavior: (1) informational communication designed to explain why policies are important; (2) normative communication designed to explain that other employees would not violate policies; and (3) antineutralization communication designed to inhibit rationalization. We conducted a repeated measures factorial design survey using a survey panel of full-time working adults provided by Qualtrics. Participants received a SETA communication with a combination of one to three persuasion statements (informational influence, normative influence statement, and/or an antineutralization), followed by a scenario description that asked for their intentions to comply with the security policy. We found that both informational (weakly) and antineutralization communication (strongly) decreased violation intentions, but that normative communication had no effect. In scenarios where neutralizations were explicitly suggested to participants, antineutralization communication was the only approach that worked. Our findings suggest that we need more research on SETA techniques that include antineutralization communication to understand how it influences behavior beyond informational and normative communication.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE id:523
TI: Donors, Primary Elections, and Polarization in the United States ab: I examine the influence of partisan donors on the district-level ideological polarization of congressional candidates in the United States. I use data from 2002-10 U.S. House elections, which provide for the placement of major party primary winners on the same ideological dimension as their primary, general election, and partisan donor constituencies. Using this unique data set, I find strong evidence that the influence of donors in nominating contests is a source of polarization in the United States. House nominees are more responsive to their donor constituencies than either their primary or general electorates. I also find some evidence that the lack of general election competition affects nominee extremity. In safer districts, Democratic incumbents appear more responsive to donors. However, Republican donors seem to demand proximity regardless of district competitiveness. Overall, the polarizing effects of donor constituencies dominate any moderating effects, resulting in ideologically extreme nominees and, ultimately, members of Congress.
DISASTERS id:282
TI: Effort-reward imbalance and burnout among humanitarian aid workers ab: This study sought to examine stress-related working conditions-defined in terms of effort-reward imbalance (ERI)-and their association with burnout among a large, international sample of humanitarian aid workers. Descriptive statistics were applied to cross-sectional survey data (N=1,980) to profile ERI and burnout and Pearson's chi(2) tests were used to characterise associated socio- and occupational-demographic factors. Associations between ERI and burnout were established using binary logistic regression to generate odds ratios and 95 per cent confidence intervals adjusted for potential confounding variables. For high emotional exhaustion, the prevalence rate was 36 per cent for women and 27 per cent for men, whereas the proportions for high depersonalisation and low personal achievement were 9 and 10 per cent and 47 and 31 per cent, respectively. Intermediate and high ERI was associated with significantly increased odds of high emotional exhaustion; the findings were mixed for depersonalisation and personal achievement.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:712
TI: Egypt's feminist counterpublic: The re-invigoration of the post-revolution public sphere ab: This study examines the current feminist counterculture movements which appears to be reinvigorating the Egyptian public sphere. The study argues women in particular have been able to find themselves alternative ways to develop a discourse focused on a desire for social changes around which they can unite. In focusing on lifestyle issues that normally are discussed only in small private spheres, they are able to challenge norms while not provoking the state or security apparatus and avoiding becoming part of the polarised political environment. This article explores the dynamics and motivations of these groups through a case study of three of the networked feminist movements. Our data from semi-structured interviews with the founders show that they grew from networks to movements which then evolved in order to be sustainable. This article argues that through the process of their evolution, these movements are helping strengthen the public sphere and enhance Egyptian democracy.
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY id:328
TI: Embedded, added, cocreated: Revisiting the value of information in an age of data ab: This article proposes that the value of information is a topic worth revisiting in the contemporary era. Although the topic has been of perennial interest to information professionals and others, since at the least the early 1980s, we believe that it is timely to revisit this question in the context of a more connected and networked environment of data, information, and knowledge. The principal argument is that existing models of information exchange and use do not sufficiently take account of the multiplicity of networked users as a source of value, for example, their implicit and explicit interactions with other users, and with the information system. We briefly review existing kinds of value that have been theorized, operationalized, and measured in the information science literature. Principally, these are the notions of information as embedded value; and information and information systems as adding value. To these notions we add the further notion of connected or cocreated value. We conclude our opinion article with a set of questions intended to orient future research into the question of the value of information in the contemporary era.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:251
TI: Framing human rights: exploring storytelling within internet companies ab: This article explores human rights storytelling within two of the dominant internet companies, Google and Facebook. Based on interview with company staff as well as analysis of publicly available statements, the article examines how human rights are framed, made sense of and translated into company norms, products, and governance structures. The paper argues that the companies' framing in many respects resembles that of the United States' online freedom agenda, celebrating the liberating power of the internet and perceiving human rights as primarily safeguards against repressive governments. The companies see freedom of expression as part of their DNA and do not perceive any contradiction between this standard and business practices that may impact negatively on users' freedom of expression, such as terms of service enforcement. Likewise, there is no sense of conflict between the online business model and their users' right to privacy.
WORLD DEVELOPMENT id:467
TI: Embracing complexity: A transdisciplinary conceptual framework for understanding behavior change in the context of development-focused interventions ab: Many interventions that aim to improve the livelihoods of vulnerable people in low-income settings fail because the behavior of the people intended to benefit is not well understood and /or not reflected in the design of interventions. Methods for understanding and situating human behavior in the context of development interventions tend to emphasize experimental approaches to objectively isolate key drivers of behavior. However, such methods often do not account for the importance of contextual factors and the wider system. In this paper we propose a conceptual framework to support intervention design that links behavioral insights with service design, a branch of the creative field of design. To develop the framework, we use three case studies conducted in Kenya and Zambia focusing on the uptake of new technologies and services by individuals and households. We demonstrate how the framework can be useful for mapping individuals' experiences of a new technology or service and, based on this, identify key parameters to support lasting behavior change. The framework reflects how behavior change takes place in the context of complex social-ecological systems - that change over time, and in which a diverse range of actors operate at different levels - with the aim of supporting the design and delivery of more robust development-oriented interventions. (C) 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
SCIENCE AS CULTURE id:83
TI: Enacting Actuarial Fairness in Insurance: From Fair Discrimination to Behaviour-based Fairness ab: In line with developments in the personalisation of risk, the idea that insurance products should above all be 'fair' to the policyholders is increasingly voiced by commentators. The performativity thesis in Science and Technology Studies usually used to study economic markets can be used to investigate different enactments of 'actuarial fairness' in insurance practice. Actuarial fairness functions as a technical economic concept and was coined by the neoclassical micro-economist Kenneth Arrow (1921-2017). Faced with anti-discrimination legislation, the insurance industry has, since the 1980s, advanced the principle of actuarial fairness to legitimise their medico-actuarial technologies to discriminate between risk groups. In the absence of this actuarial fairness, it is assumed that dynamics of adverse selection-derived from neoclassical assumptions about economic actors-will result in the bankruptcy of insurance providers. The paradigmatic case of Fairzekering, a showcase of contemporary behaviour-based personalisation in car insurance, demonstrates an important shift in how actuarial fairness is enacted through behaviour-based calculative devices. Here, policyholders are enacted as being personally in control of their driving style while an interactive discount-infrastructure is set up to provide real-time feedback to incentivize policyholders towards 'good behaviour.' This enactment of behaviour-based fairness simultaneously implies a shift in the enactment of the economic actors involved, constitutive of the making of new economic ideas in behavioural economics.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:226
TI: Encouraging the Collection of Performance Data in Nonprofit Organizations: The Importance of Organizational Support for Learning ab: This article provides insight into how to facilitate performance data collection within nonprofit organizations. Following research on organizational learning, we propose that nonprofits that provide higher support for employee learning and development activities are more likely to collect performance data than those that provide limited support to such activities. We assess this hypothesis with data collected from 154 employees in 26 nonprofits in the greater New York Capital region. We find that higher support for learning indeed has a positive relationship with performance data collection, but the strength of this relationship depends on the nonprofits' capacity to conduct performance assessment and clarity of their organizations goals. Implications of these results for research and practice on performance management in nonprofits are discussed.
JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION id:742
TI: Endure, Invest, Ignore: How French and American Journalists React to Economic Constraints and Technological Transformations ab: This paper explores journalists' reactions to economic constraints and technological transformations in two cities: Toulouse, France, and Seattle, United States. Through semi-structured interviews, we show that journalists in both places either endure these conditions, invest in them as professional opportunities, or ignore them altogether. Drawing on Bourdieu, we argue that these distinct responses are shaped in part by a journalist's position in the field: those in low positions tend to endure; those in intermediate positions generally invest; and those in high positions are likely to ignore. We also suggest that the meanings of these responses vary according to the distinctive fields in which journalists are embedded, with the reactions of Toulouse journalists generally less market-oriented than their Seattle counterparts. These findings, and the theoretical perspective that enables them, are positioned in relation to case studies that analyze journalists' reactions and comparative survey research that explores similarities and differences in such reactions.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:33
TI: Envisioning the power of data analytics ab: It could be argued that the power of data is located in what they are used to reveal. Yet we have little understanding of the role played by the emerging industry of data analytics in the interpretation and use of big data. These data analytics companies act as intermediaries in the digital data revolution. Understanding the social influence of big data requires us to understand the role played by data analytics within organisations of different types. This particular article focuses very specifically upon the way in which data and data analytics are envisioned within the marketing rhetoric of the data analytics industry. It is argued that to understand the spread of data analytics and the adoption of certain analytic strategies, we first need to look at the projection of promises upon that data. The way that data and analytics are imagined shapes their incorporation and appropriation into practices and organisational structures - what I call here the data frontiers. This article draws upon a sample of 34 data analytics companies in order to explore the way in which data analytics are envisioned within that increasingly powerful industry.
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY id:480
TI: Epistemic motivation, task reflexivity, and knowledge contribution behavior on team wikis: A cross-level moderation model ab: A cross-level model based on the information processing perspective and trait activation theory was developed and tested in order to investigate the effects of individual-level epistemic motivation and team-level task reflexivity on three different individual contribution behaviors (i.e., adding, deleting, and revising) in the process of knowledge creation on team wikis. Using the Hierarchical Linear Modeling software package and the 2-wave data from 166 individuals in 51 wiki-based teams, we found cross-level interaction effects between individual epistemic motivation and team task reflexivity on different knowledge contribution behaviors on wikis. Epistemic motivation exerted a positive effect on adding, which was strengthened by team task reflexivity. The effect of epistemic motivation on deleting was positive only when task reflexivity was high. In addition, epistemic motivation was strongly positively related to revising, regardless of the level of task reflexivity involved.
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY id:488
TI: Epistemology beyond the brain ab: Recent and emerging viewpoints in embodiment and knowledge necessitate a reexamination of epistemology within and beyond the brain. Taking a sociocultural approach, this article covers two main types of epistemology beyond the brain, namely, embodied epistemology and nonindividualist epistemology. Using citizen science and music to illustrate related concepts of intuition, experience, and embodiment, this article describes intuition as a cultural system, beyond a purely individual possession. We describe howin cultural practices such as musicintuition acts as mediator between knowledge and embodiment, and intuition is built and modified by experience over time. Building on Dick's () notion of holistic perspectivism, we pose a holistic epistemology approach that embraces knowledge that extends well beyond the purely cognitive, in both embodied situations and systemic manifestations. As information research becomes increasingly interested in the role of the body and its relationship to information, knowledge, intuition, and memory, we argue that such an approach will uncover further dimensions of nonindividualist, systemic, and embodied knowledge.
SCIENCE AS CULTURE id:44
TI: Ethics in Transnational Forensic DNA Data Exchange in the EU: Constructing Boundaries and Managing Controversies ab: Under EU Law, Member States are compelled to engage in reciprocal automated forensic DNA profile exchange for stepping up on cross-border cooperation, particularly in combating terrorism and cross-border crime. The ethical implications of this transnational DNA data exchange are paramount. Exploring what the concept of ethics means to forensic practitioners actively involved in transnational DNA data exchange allows discussing how ethics can be addressed as embedded in the sociality of science and in the way scientific work is legitimated. The narratives of forensic practitioners juxtapose the construction of fluid ethical boundary work between science and non-science with the dynamic management of controversies, both of which are seen as ways to lend legitimacy and objectivity to scientific work.Ethical boundary work involves diverse fluid forms: as a boundary between science/ethics, science/criminal justice system, and good and bad science. The management of controversies occurs in three interrelated ways. First, through a continuous process of reconstructing delegations of responsibility in dealing with uncertainty surrounding the reliability of DNA evidence. Second, threats to the protection of data are portrayed as being resolved by black-boxing privacy. Finally, controversies related to social accountability and transparency are negotiated through the lens of opening science to the public.
DISASTERS id:609
TI: Evaluator perceptions of NGO performance in disasters: meeting multiple institutional demands in humanitarian aid projects ab: Providing aid in times of increasing humanitarian need, limited budgets, and mounting security risks is challenging. This paper explores in what organisational circumstances evaluators judge, positively and negatively, the performance of international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) in response to disasters triggered by natural hazards. It assesses whether and how, as perceived by expert evaluators, CARE and Oxfam successfully met multiple institutional requirements concerning beneficiary needs and organisational demands. It utilises the Competing Values Framework to analyse evaluator statements about project performance and organisational control and flexibility issues, using seven CARE and four Oxfam evaluation reports from 2005-11. The reports are compared using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis. The resulting configurations show that positive evaluations of an INGO's internal and external flexibility relate to satisfying beneficiary needs and organisational demands, whereas negative evaluations of external flexibility pertain to not meeting beneficiary needs and negative statements about internal control concerning not fulfilling organisational demands.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:443
TI: Examining the Influence of Representative Bureaucracy in Public and Private Prisons ab: Representative bureaucracy theory suggests that demographic representation among street-level bureaucrats will improve outcomes for minority citizens receiving a given public service. Scholars of representation in public bureaucracies argue that the effect of bureaucrats' demographic profile on outcomes for minority citizens becomes particularly salient in contexts where bureaucrats exercise relatively high amounts of discretion. Empirical evidence has documented this relationship in education, policing, and a variety of public programs. We extend this literature to the context of prisons, where street-level corrections staff exercise considerable discretion over inmates' daily lives. Using prison violence and disciplinary actions to proxy for the potential effects of a representative staff on the experiences of prison inmates, we find that prisons with greater representation have fewer assaults and exercise fewer disciplinary actions. We offer evidence that the positive effects of demographic representation may not hold in privately managed prisons. We speculate that differential organizational socialization and managerial incentives may help to explain this result.
SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY id:391
TI: Expert views on innovation and bureaucratization of science: Semantic network analysis of discourses on scientific governance ab: This article analyzes and compares expert groups' (science policy experts and field researchers in engineering) perceptions of the national scientific agenda in South Korea. The national agenda seeks to identify the conditions necessary for creativity and innovation. In general, policy experts and field academics share a common notion that investment in human resources and increased interdisciplinary cooperation are prerequisites for global technological competence. However, comparison of semantic network analysis results reveals that policy officials and field scientists differ in their views of how the field of innovation, the academy and laboratory, should be governed and reformed. The analysis implies that more fundamental conditions need to be discussed in scientific governance, especially recognizing the importance of educational reform, encouraging collaborative culture in the academy and empowering a coordinative body in the government. However, these are yet to be included in the public deliberation.
ORGANIZATION SCIENCE id:689
TI: Explaining Heterogeneity in the Organization of Scientific Work ab: Prior studies of academic science have largely focused on researchers in life sciences or engineering. However, while academic researchers often work under similar institutions, norms, and incentives, they vary greatly in how they organize their research efforts across different scientific domains. This heterogeneity, in turn, has important implications for innovation policy, the relationship between industry and academia, the scientific labor market, and the perceived deficit in the relevance of social sciences and humanities research. To understand this heterogeneity, we model scientists as publication-maximizing agents, identifying two distinct organizational patterns that are optimal under different parameters. When the net productivity of research staff (e.g., PhD students and postdocs) is positive, the funded research model with an entrepreneurial scientist and a large team dominates. When the costs of research staff exceed their productivity benefits, the hands-on research approach is optimal. The model implies significant heterogeneity across the two modes of organizing in research funding, supply of scientific workforce, team size, publication output, and stratification patterns over time. Exploratory empirical analysis finds consistent patterns of time allocation and publication in a prior survey of faculty in U.S. universities. Using data from an original survey, we also find causal effects consistent with the model's prediction on how negative shocks to research staff-due to visa or health problems, for example-differentially impact research output under the two modes of organization.
SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY id:420
TI: Explaining Trump's Popular Support: Validation of a Nativism Index ab: Objective In this article, we describe the development of a Nativism Index and evaluate its validity in the U.S. context, a global sample, and over time. Our overall objective is to establish the Nativism Index as a valid and reliable measure of nativism for use in subsequent research. Method Using survey data from Ipsos Public Affairs in the United States and from the Ipsos Global Advisor for our global sample, we test the convergent and discriminate validity and reliability of the Nativism Index. Results The Nativism Index is correlated with but clearly distinct from related concepts, including populism, authoritarianism, and fear of others. The Nativism Index is also predictive of support for Donald Trump in the United States and UKIP in the United Kingdom. Conclusion Overall, our findings suggest that the Nativism Index represents a robust measure with strong internal consistency and high convergent and divergent validity in both U.S. and global samples.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW id:207
TI: Exploring How Institutional Arrangements Shape Stakeholder Influence on Policy Decisions: A Comparative Analysis in the Energy Sector ab: In recent years, there has been an expansion of efforts to include stakeholders in administrative policy making. Despite significant potential to improve policy decisions, empirical evidence suggests that not all participatory processes provide meaningful opportunities for stakeholders to shape policy and may even give the most powerful stakeholder groups disproportionate influence over policy decisions. This article argues that the institutional arrangements for stakeholder engagement-the rules and norms that determine which stakeholders can participate and how-affect stakeholders' influence on policy decisions. This article uses state energy efficiency policy making as a context in which to compare how different institutional arrangements shape the ways in which stakeholders engage in and influence the policy process across two states, Connecticut and Maryland. Findings highlight that institutional arrangements can be used to increase participation, mitigate undue influence of industrial stakeholders, and increase the influence of public interest stakeholder organizations.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW id:30
TI: Exploring the Role of Nonprofits in Public Service Provision: Moving from Coproduction to Cogovernance ab: This article investigates the determinants of nonprofits' involvement in cogovernance, or the planning and design of public services, using a unique data set of park-supporting nonprofit organizations in large U.S. cities. The results indicate that nonprofits are more likely to get involved in cogovernance when they are younger, larger, and operate in communities that are more resourceful and stable. In addition, the likelihood of nonprofits' involvement in cogovernance is negatively associated with the level of social capital and government capacity to provide corresponding public services. The article points to an emerging mode of government-nonprofit collaboration that goes beyond the production and delivery of public services. As public managers face extensive challenges in sustaining the desired level of public services, these findings have important policy implications for efforts to promote citizen participation and cross-sector solutions to complex social problems.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:179
TI: Friends or Foes? How Managerial Perceptions of the Political Opportunity Structure Shape Nonprofit Advocacy ab: Policy advocacy is an important tool that nonprofit managers use to build relationships with public officials and others in furtherance of their charitable missions. Through advocacy, nonprofits work to promote policies affecting their constituencies, maintain public funding, or strengthen the nonprofit sector as a whole. Scholarship on nonprofit advocacy often considers the organizational or resource environment, however, insufficient attention has focused on the policy environment as a factor shaping nonprofit advocacy. This article draws on the concept of political opportunity structure from the sociological study of social movements to understand nonprofit policy advocacy. The political opportunity framework focuses on how aspects of the political environment influence political action. Using data from a recent statewide survey of Massachusetts nonprofit organizations (n = 656, 55% response rate), we find evidence of a nonlinear relationship between managers' perceptions of the political opportunity structure and the likelihood that a nonprofit engages in policy advocacy.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:297
TI: Expose, debunk, ridicule, resist! Networked civic monitoring of populist radical right online action in Finland ab: This article analyses civic monitoring that targets online radical right populist anti-immigration activism in Finland to discuss whether outsourcing monitoring to platform users is a feasible means to respond to exclusionary-populist online communication. For several reasons, the widely discussed - and potentially harmful - phenomena related to the emancipation of radical right populist online counterpublics have proved difficult to control. First of all, using exclusionary and antagonistic rhetoric or spreading disinformation is not illegal, which makes policing it ineffective. Second, journalistic scrutiny tends to increase the salience of radical right agendas without significantly curbing their appeal. Third, social media companies have passed down responsibility for monitoring extremism on their platforms to users. As an option, it has been suggested that users could organize to push potentially harmful content to the margins of online publics. The study reveals that the materiality of online anti-immigration action allows it to be monitored by anti-racist activists to a certain extent, and that online action aimed at resisting online radical right activism ranges from civil counter-arguing and pursuing of deliberation to anti-racist hate speech and naming-and-shaming campaigns. There are notable caveats that undermine the efficacy and viability of civic monitoring as a means of watching over radical right populist online action. The main problems are related to the connective and potentially anti-populist nature of the civic monitoring - allowing it to be counter-surveilled and used as fuel for populist online communication - and potential danger and harm to the activists involved.
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SYSTEMS id:398
TI: Extending Digital Infrastructures: A Typology of Growth Tactics ab: Digital infrastructures enable delivery of information services in functional areas such as health, payment, and transportation by providing a sociotechnical foundation for partnership governance, resource reuse, and system integration. To effectively serve emerging possibilities and changing purposes, however, a key question concerns how an infrastructure can be extended to cater for future services in its functional area. In this paper, we approach such digital infrastructure growth as a challenge of aligning new partners whose digital capabilities spur innovative services that attract more users. We advance an initial typology that covers four growth tactics (i.e., adding services, inventing processes, opening identifiers, and providing interfaces) with the potential to set extension of infrastructures in motion. We then explore the proposed typology by investigating the ways in which its particular tactics successfully extended the scope of a digital infrastructure for public transportation in Stockholm, Sweden. Our insights invite IS scholars to engage more deeply in the development of growth tactics that achieve infrastructure extensions necessary for improving the durability of service delivery.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:193
TI: External Pressures and Internal Dynamics in the Institutionalization of Performance-Based Budgeting: An Endless Process? ab: The well-known practice of performance-based budgeting (PBB) is a relevant component of the New Public Management (NPM) reform agenda and has become widespread, with varying approaches and results across countries. However, its variation within specific countries has remained largely unexplored. This study analyzes three organizations operating within the same context-three ministries in Italy-to contribute to a new understanding of PBB variation by illustrating why the same PBB practice can or cannot be implemented and internalized similarly across these organizations and thus become (or not) fully institutionalized. The study adopts and enriches the institutional approach by extending beyond isomorphic convergence toward PBB and explaining practice variation, linking the interactions between external pressures and internal dynamics at the organizational level to PBB institutionalization. The empirical analysis shows how a lack of alignment between external pressures and internal dynamics contributes to an unfinished and apparently endless process of institutionalization.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:253
TI: Extra-activism: counter-mapping and data justice ab: Neither big data, nor data justice are particularly new. Data collection, in the form of land surveys and mapping, was key to successive projects of European imperialist and then capitalist extraction of natural resources. Geo-spatial instruments have been used since the fifteenth century to highlight potential sites of mineral, oil, and gas extraction, and inscribe European economic, cultural and political control across indigenous territories. Although indigenous groups consistently challenged maintained their territorial sovereignty, and resisted corporate and state surveillance practices, they were largely unable to withstand the combined onslaught of surveyors, armed personnel, missionaries and government bureaucrats. This article examines the use of counter-mapping by indigenous nations in Canada, one of the globe's hubs of extractivism, as part of the exercise of indigenous territorial sovereignty. After a brief review of the colonial period, I then compare the use of counter-mapping during two cycles of indigenous mobilization. During the 1970s, counter-mapping projects were part of a larger repertoire of negotiations with the state over land claims, and served to re-inscribe first nation's long-standing history of economic, social and cultural relations in their territories, and contribute to new collective imaginaries and identities. In the current cycle of contests over extractivism and indigenous sovereignty, the use, scope and geographic scale of counter-mapping has shifted; maps are used as part of larger trans-media campaigns of Indigenous sovereignty. During both cycles, counter-mapping as data justice required fusion within larger projects of redistributive, transformative and restorative justice.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY id:423
TI: Eyes on the Horizon? Fragmented Elites and the Short-Term Focus of the American Corporation ab: Recent scholarship expresses concerns that U.S. corporations are too focused on short-term performance, undermining their long-term competitiveness. The authors examine how short-term strategies and performance, or short-termism, results from the dissolution of the American corporate elite network. They argue that the corporate board interlock network traditionally served as a collective resource that helped corporate elites to preserve their autonomy and control, mitigating short-termism. In recent years, changing board-appointment practices have fractured the board network, undermining its usefulness as a platform for collective action and exposing corporate leaders to short-term pressures. The authors develop and apply a cohesion metric for network managerialism, derived from theory and evidence in social-network scholarship. Using three indicators that capture short-termism earnings management and shareholder returns, the authors identify a structural basis for short-termism that links network-based resources to managers' decisions. The results highlight the benefits of the corporate elite network and illustrate unforeseen consequences of the network's dissolution.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:59
TI: Fake news as an informational moral panic: the symbolic deviancy of social media during the 2016 US presidential election ab: A persistent story about the 2016 US presidential election was the preponderance of fake news stories on social media, and on Facebook in particular, that had no basis in fact but were wholly concocted to quickly amass clicks that could be converted into advertising revenues. This study steps outside of arguments about the spread or efficacy of fake news to instead interrogate its symbolic dimensions and its meaning for both journalism and the larger system of political communication. To conceptualize the role of fake news as a particular symbol, this paper approaches the journalistic condemnation of fake news as an 'informational moral panic.' This concept builds off Cohen's classic formulation of moral panics as public anxiety that a particular social threat will lead to declining standards. The ability to define a phenomenon as an informational moral panic is an exercise in cultural power that ascribes deviancy to particular actors while validating others. In the case of fake news, the anxiety is not so much directed toward a particular group but aimed at the larger transformation of informational spaces made possible by social media. An examination of journalists' responses in the US press during November 2016 reveals four domains of focus - production, platform, subsidy, and consumption - each with its own narratives of blame and remedy. Fake news becomes a particular signifier that condenses broader concerns surrounding the eroding boundaries of traditional journalistic channels, click-driven news, the extension of mediated voices, and the growing role of social media in news distribution.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:510
TI: Fake news practices in Indonesian newsrooms during and after the Palu earthquake: a hierarchy-of-influences approach ab: The viral dissemination of fake news threatens news organizations in Indonesia, with many social media users exhibiting a decrease in their trust of traditional media, as well as limited digital literacy. To investigate fake news during natural disasters, this mixed-methods study examines information patterns and journalistic practices of three news organizations during the 2018 Palu earthquake and tsunami. First, online observations of disaster-related fake news cases on social media provide insights into how fake news was handled by three types of news media. The results show that when fake news concerned factual scientific evidence, news organizations unanimously used the government statements to debunk disinformation. In contrast, political or religious fake news had long lifecycles of polarized debates between pro-government groups and opponents. Using the Hierarchy-of Influences Model, in-depth interviews showed that individual-level journalistic professionalism mattered when tackling fake news reports, with some local practices differing from Western journalism approaches. At the routine level, news professionals treated the government as the authority to debunk controversial, high-risk fake news by presenting news only after official clarifications, while independent media tended to present balanced reports with diverse views. Additionally, interviewees revealed that organizational policies in relation to media types greatly influenced the handling of fake news practices in Indonesian newsrooms.
POLITICS & POLICY id:630
TI: Father Knows Best: "Protecting" Women through State Surveillance and Social Control in Anti-Abortion PolicyPalabras Clave(sic)(sic)(sic) ab: Drawing on a feminist surveillance and social control framework, we conduct a manifest and latent content analysis of anti-abortion policies passed in the United States in either a state's House or Senate from 2010 to 2015 to systematically assess the scope, content, and implicit meaning of 282 anti-abortion bills. We find that out of the 727 anti-abortion measures contained in this legislation, 622 incorporate surveillance, and social control mechanisms that operate together to socially construct women as a dependent population in need of government protection on two fronts: protection for women and their "unborn," and protection from abortion providers. Fusing together womanhood and motherhood, these policies essentialize motherhood, depicting women as an uninformed group in need of protection from their own ignorance and the practices of abortion providers who are constructed as an unethical group of health-care practitioners.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:198
TI: Fictions and frictions: Promises, transaction costs and the innovation of network technologies ab: New network technologies are framed as eliminating transaction costs', a notion first developed in economic theory that now drives the design of market systems. However, the actual promise of the elimination of transaction costs seems unfeasible, because of a cyclical pattern in which network technologies that make that promise create processes of institutionalization that create new forms transaction costs. Nonetheless, the promises legitimize the exemption of innovations of network technologies from critical scrutiny.
DISASTERS id:466
TI: Fieldwork after conflict: contextualising the challenges of access and data quality ab: Despite sustained scholarly interest in post-conflict states, there has not been a thorough review and analysis of associated methodology and the challenges of conducting research in these contexts. Addressing this gap, this paper directs attention to the particular effects of these settings on access and data quality and their ramifications for the resulting scholarship. It assesses the intrinsic challenges of performing fieldwork in these environments, drawing on both relevant social science literature and the authors' experiences of carrying out research in Afghanistan and Timor-Leste. The study demonstrates that the post-conflict environment moulds research design and, consequently, influences how questions are answered as well as the questions asked. Moreover, it highlights ways to mitigate these issues. This work is of relevance to scholars planning to engage in field research and to researchers reflecting upon their work, as well as to policymakers who are considering undertaking programmes or commissioning research in post-conflict areas.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:614
TI: From Keyhole to Big Brother: The Legacies of Early Cold War Surveillance ab: Much of contemporary surveillance, with its reliance on remote sensors, big data, networks, and algorithmic simulations, has its origins in early Cold War technologies that were designed to provide air defense surveillance. Though the SAGE system has been examined by other historians of technology, this paper examines the origins of this system by applying a different interpretative approach by emphasizing the interdependence of epistemology (how human beings know something) with ontogeny (the emergence of things independent of whether human beings know it). The mediation between the two is identified as information, drawing attention to the importance of surveillance as a social and technical practice.
COMPUTER SUPPORTED COOPERATIVE WORK-THE JOURNAL OF COLLABORATIVE COMPUTING id:325
TI: Folksonomies to Support Coordination and Coordination of Folksonomies ab: Members of highly-distributed groups in online production communities face challenges in achieving coordinated action. Existing CSCW research highlights the importance of shared language and artifacts when coordinating actions in such settings. To better understand how such shared language and artifacts are, not only a guide for, but also a result of collaborative work we examine the development of folksonomies (i.e., volunteer-generated classification schemes) to support coordinated action. Drawing on structuration theory, we conceptualize a folksonomy as an interpretive schema forming a structure of signification. Our study is set in the context of an online citizen-science project, Gravity Spy, in which volunteers label "glitches" (noise events recorded by a scientific instrument) to identify and name novel classes of glitches. Through a multi-method study combining virtual and trace ethnography, we analyze folksonomies and the work of labelling as mutually constitutive, giving folksonomies a dual role: an emergent folksonomy supports the volunteers in labelling images at the same time that the individual work of labelling images supports the development of a folksonomy. However, our analysis suggests that the lack of supporting norms and authoritative resources (structures of legitimation and domination) undermines the power of the folksonomy and so the ability of volunteers to coordinate their decisions about naming novel glitch classes. These results have implications for system design. If we hope to support the development of emergent folksonomies online production communities need to facilitate 1) tag gardening, a process of consolidating overlapping terms of artifacts; 2) demarcate a clear home for discourses around folksonomy disagreements; 3) highlight clearly when decisions have been reached; and 4) inform others about those decisions.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:341
TI: Following the algorithm: How epidemiological risk-scores do accountability ab: Epidemiological risk scores are calculative devices that mediate and enact versions of accountability in public health and preventive medicine. This article focuses on practices of accountability by following a cardiovascular risk score widely used in medical counselling in Germany. We follow the risk score in the making, in action, and in circulation to explore how the score performs in doctor-patient relations, how it recombines epidemiological results, and how it shapes knowledge production and healthcare provision. In this way, we follow the risk score's various trajectories - from its development at the intersection of epidemiology, general medicine and software engineering, to its usage in general practitioners' offices, and its validation infrastructures. Exploring the translations from population to individual and back that are at work in the risk score and in the primary prevention of cardiovascular disease, we examine how versions and distributions of accountability are invoked and practiced as the score is developed and put to use. The case of a simple risk score used in everyday counselling brings into relief some key shifts in configurations of accountability with emerging versions of 'health by the algorithm'. While there is an increasing authority of algorithmic tools in the fabric of clinical encounters, risk scores are interwoven with local specificities of the healthcare system and continue to be in the making.
POLITICS & POLICY id:340
TI: Foreign Aid, Instability, and Governance in Africa ab: This article contributes to the attendant literature by bundling governance dynamics and focusing on foreign aid instability instead of foreign aid. We assess the role of foreign aid instability on governance dynamics in 53 African countries for the period 1996-2010. An autoregressive endogeneity-robust generalized method of moments is employed. Instabilities are measured in terms of variance of the errors and standard deviations. Three main aid indicators are used, namely: total aid, aid from multilateral donors, and bilateral aid. Principal component analysis is used to bundle governance indicators, namely: political governance (voice and accountability and political stability/no violence), economic governance (regulation quality and government effectiveness), institutional governance (rule of law and corruption control), and general governance (political, economic, and institutional governance). Our findings show that foreign aid instability increases governance standards, especially political and general governance. Policy implications are discussed.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:195
TI: Fracking Bad Guys: The Role of Narrative Character Affect in Shaping Hydraulic Fracturing Policy Preferences ab: Recent growth in unconventional oil and gas development is controversial, fueling an ongoing U.S. policy debate. Central to these discussions is hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," a well-stimulation technique that has become synonymous with unconventional oil and gas extraction methods. This research applies the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to explore how culturally nuanced narratives shape individuals' policy preferences toward fracking regulations. A census-balanced internet panel from Oregon and Arkansas (n = 1,145) is used to conduct a survey experiment where participants are randomly assigned to four groups and exposed to information regarding fracking practices. The control group receives a baseline fact list while three treatment groups are exposed to one of three culturally distinct narratives: an egalitarian narrative, a hierarch narrative, or an individualist narrative. Applying ANOVA and causal mediation analysis to this experimental data, we show that while there is no direct effect of narrative treatments on the formation of individuals' fracking policy preferences, culturally nuanced narratives do influence attitudes on fracking policies indirectly through their effects on individuals' reactions towards villain characters presented in the narratives. These findings describe a more complex cognitive interplay between narrative communication and policy preference formation than depicted in extant NPF scholarship, thereby challenging commonly held NPF assertions.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW id:29
TI: Framing Effects under Different Uses of Performance Information: An Experimental Study on Public Managers ab: Combining insights from public administration, accounting, and psychology, this article explores the microprocesses by which public managers use performance information, investigating whether the type of performance information use and the request to justify decisions affect the way in which information is processed. The study draws on data from a series of artifactual survey experiments with Italian municipal executives. Findings show that managers process information differently under ex post rather than ex ante performance information uses. More specifically, managers are more likely to be subject to framing bias under ex post than under ex ante uses of performance information. This interaction seems to be robust when subjects are asked to provide justification for their decisions.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:247
TI: Governing Government-Nonprofit Partnerships: Linking Governance Mechanisms to Collaboration Stages ab: How are government-nonprofit partnerships governed when nonprofits play significant roles in financing and creating public services? This article examines the linkage between governance mechanisms and various collaboration stages of government-nonprofit partnerships. Using a multiple case design of 10 government-nonprofit partnerships for public parks in major cities of the Ohio River Basin Region, four major mechanisms are identified: representing government on the nonprofit board, reaching a formal agreement, building relationships, and building leadership capacity. Several related propositions are presented to facilitate future theory testing.
SCIENCE AS CULTURE id:400
TI: From Public Engagement to Research Intervention: Analyzing Processes and Exploring Outcomes in Urban Techno-politics ab: Two years of observations and interviews provided evidence of injustices as state officials ignored calls for monitoring by residents at a toxic waste site in Phoenix Arizona. When federal investigators arrived, they found toxic vapours exceeded regulatory levels in 17 homes and businesses out of the 77 locations sampled. That prompted a shift among the research team from observation to research intervention. Two public engagements were designed to perturb routine interactions between residents living on contaminated urban land and the government officials and corporate agents managing the environmental remediation efforts. The framing of techno-politics offers insights about who was excluded from decisions by non-elected technical experts and why they were excluded. Techno-politics, when used to focus on the urban-scale, demonstrates how historical decisions and values continue to influence contemporary actions and behaviours. Further, the concept of infrastructuring reveals what social, legal and technical mechanisms were built and how those modules were woven into the complex socio-technical system. In this way, it questions underlying assumptions, calls attention to short-term decisions, and highlights the lack experimentation and rigidity of the techno-political regime. It became evident that government officials and corporate agents believe the current technology can contain contamination for a thousand years. Thus, the obduracy of infrastructure came into relief and the intervention research made transparent the ways in which power and authority were used to maintain the status quo and perpetuate injustices. While alternative visions can theoretically counteract techno-political arrangements, it remains to be seen if transformative changes will occur.
ADMINISTRATIVE SCIENCE QUARTERLY id:23
TI: From Synchronizing to Harmonizing: The Process of Authenticating Multiple Work Identities ab: To understand how people cultivate and sustain authenticity in multiple, often shifting, work roles, we analyze qualitative data gathered over five years from a sample of 48 plural careerists-people who choose to simultaneously hold and identify with multiple jobs. We find that people with multiple work identities struggle with being, feeling, and seeming authentic both to their contextualized work roles and to their broader work selves. Further, practices developed to cope with these struggles change over time, suggesting a two-phase emergent process of authentication in which people first synchronize their individual work role identities and then progress toward harmonizing a more general work self. This study challenges the notion that consistency is the core of authenticity, demonstrating that for people with multiple valued identities, authenticity is not about being true to one identity across time and contexts, but instead involves creating and holding cognitive and social space for several true versions of one-self that may change over time. It suggests that authentication is the emergent, socially constructed process of both determining who one is and helping others see who one is.
DISASTERS id:333
TI: From authoritarian enclave to deliberative space: governance logics in post-disaster reconstruction ab: One would be hard-pressed nowadays to find any practitioners and scholars in the field of post-disaster reconstruction who would argue against the virtues of community participation. In practice, however, the legacy of community participation has been mixed. This paper pursues this line of inquiry by examining the manifestations of participation in three communities affected by Typhoon Haiyan that struck the Philippines on 8 November 2013. The findings suggest that different governance logics emerge in each of the three case studies: authoritarian; communitarian; and deliberative. These logics promote particular understandings of who should participate in the reconstruction process and the appropriate scope of action for citizens to express discontent, provide feedback, and perform democratic agency. The paper contends that design interventions in participatory procedures, as well as contingencies in wider social contexts, shape the character and legacies of community participation. It concludes by comparing the legacies of these three governance enclaves' and imagining possibilities for participatory politics in post-disaster settings.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:163
TI: From connective to collective action: internet elections as a digital tool to centralize and formalize protest in Russia ab: Over the past decade, an extensive body of literature has emerged on the question of how new communication technologies can facilitate new modes of organizing protest. However, the extant research has tended to focus on how digitally enabled protest operates. By contrast, this study investigates why, how, and with what consequences a heavily digitally enabled 'connective action network' has transitioned over time to a more traditional 'collective action network' [Bennett, W. L., Segerberg, A. (2013). The logic of connective action: Digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 47]. Specifically, the article scrutinizes the trajectory of the Russian protests 'For Fair Elections.' This wave of street protests erupted after the allegedly fraudulent parliamentary elections of December 2011 and continued into 2013. As is argued, the protests were initially organized as an 'organizationally enabled connective action network.' However, after eight months of street protests, Russian activists reorganized the network into a more centralized, more formalized 'organizationally brokered collective action network.' In order to implement this transition, they deployed 'Internet elections' as a cardinally new digital tactic of collective action. Between 20 and 22 October 2012, more than 80,000 activists voted online in order to create a new leadership body for the entire protest movement, the 'Coordination Council of the Opposition.' As the study has found, activists implemented this transition because, within the specific Russian socio-political context, enduring engagement and stable networks appeared crucial to the movement's long-term success. With regard to achieving these goals, the more formalized collective action network appeared superior to the connective action form.
DISASTERS id:145
TI: From disaster to development: a systematic review of community-driven humanitarian logistics ab: A plethora of untapped resources exist within disaster-affected communities that can be used to address relief and development concerns. A systematic review of the literature relating to community participation in humanitarian logistics activities revealed that communities are able to form ad hoc networks that have the ability to meet a wide range of disaster management needs. These structures, characterised as Collaborative Aid Networks (CANs), have demonstrated efficient logistical capabilities exclusive of humanitarian organisations. This study proposes that CANs, as a result of their unique characteristics, present alternatives to established humanitarian approaches to logistics, while also mitigating the challenges commonly faced by traditional humanitarian organisations. Furthermore, CANs offer a more holistic, long-term approach to disaster management, owing to their impact on development through their involvement in humanitarian logistics. This research provides the foundation for further theoretical analysis of effective and efficient disaster management, and details opportunities for policy and practice.
SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY id:646
TI: From marginal to mainstream: The revival, transformation, and boom of plant medicine ab: This article examines how a scientific research institute can shape commercial development and medical practice in a developing country through the appropriation of the dialectical tensions and contradictions between traditional knowledge and practice, formal science, and commerce. Highlighting the dynamics of a complex inter-institutional cooperation and the role which indigenous knowledge comes to play in a national system of innovation, we identified knowledge production and protection, wealth creation, and normative control as quintessential outcomes driving the revival, transformation, and boom of plant medicine in Ghana. In highly differentiated contexts, where history, resources, and environment support public policy, our study suggests, inter-institutional cooperation serves as a quintessential mechanism to achieving far-reaching public policy objectives.
SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY id:462
TI: From pure science to participatory knowledge production? Researchers' perceptions on science-policy interface in bioenergy policy ab: There is a plea for dialogue and interaction between researchers and policymakers, particularly in relation to burning and complex societal problems. However, day-to-day science-policy interaction remains a challenge. By investigating researchers' perspectives on challenges and opportunities of evolving interaction between science and policy, this article contributes to the ongoing discussions on workable and effective science-policy interface. The analysis, based on twelve in-depth interviews with experienced forest bioenergy researchers working at different organizations in Finland, shows that researchers appreciate a variety of roles and contributions from pure scientist to participatory knowledge production. Paradoxically, researchers ideologically still adhere to objective and linear knowledge production, which is, however, associated with multiple challenges such as politicization of science, disuse or misuse of scientific knowledge and communication. The article concludes that more nuanced consideration and acknowledgement of science-policy context as well as researchers' role in it could create mutual benefits for research and policy.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC POLICY id:315
TI: Frontline uses of European Union (EU) law: a parallel legal order? How structural discretion conditions uses of EU law in Dutch and German migration offices ab: This article tackles the question of how bureaucratic structures condition frontline implementers' use of European Union (EU) migration law. Adopting an organisational perspective, the study expects that only under discretion do implementers draw independently on original EU law. Empirically, the article draws on qualitative interviews with migration law implementers in the Netherlands and the German Bundesland of North Rhine-Westphalia. The analysis reveals that in the nondiscretionary Dutch structure, frontline implementers only rely on EU law when receiving instructions from higher administrative levels. The use of EU law is more diverse in the German discretionary structure. Under legal tension, several German frontline implementers use EU law parallel to national law. However, not all German respondents feel comfortable in interpreting original EU law and jurisprudence. Although structural discretion conditions uses of EU law, the variation of the German case suggests that microlevel factors complement explanations for frontline uses of EU law.
SCIENCE AS CULTURE id:402
TI: Fukushima ETHOS: Post-Disaster Risk Communication, Affect, and Shifting Risks ab: ETHOS Fukushima is a risk communication (RC) program organized after the Fukushima nuclear accident by the International Commission on Radiological Protection and other international organizations supported by the Japanese government. ETHOS has been hailed as a model RC that is participatory and dialogue-based. Yet the critical and feminist literature has shown the need for analyzing the power relations in participatory projects, and for analyzing affect as a target of management by neoliberal governmentality. The affective work of ETHOS is characterized by narratives of self-responsibility, hope and anticipation, and transnational solidarity with Chernobyl victims. These resonate with the affective regime under neoliberalism that privileges self-responsibility, anticipation, maximization of emotional potential, and cosmopolitan empathy. This particular regime of affect has been integral in shifting risk from the nuclear industry and the government to individual citizens. ETHOS Fukushima has supported continued residence in contaminated areas. It has helped portray the reduction of government/industry responsibility as morally defensible, and the decision to stay in Fukushima as a free choice made by hopeful and determined citizens. At the same time, ETHOS has helped characterize the state's and the nuclear industry's roles in cleaning up and compensating the victims as restricting individual freedom and demoralizing the local people. The recent RC literature increasingly argues for a positive assessment of emotion, but this argument warrants careful analysis, as emotion is socially regulated and entangled in power relations. Moreover, deploying affective tropes is a crucial technique of neoliberal governmentality, especially because of affect's seemingly oppositional and external relationship to neoliberalism.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:637
TI: Fuzzy boundaries: Simulation and expertise in bushfire prediction ab: It is becoming apparent that changes in climatic and demographic distributions are increasing the frequency and social impact of many 'natural hazards', including wildfires (or 'bushfires' in Australia). Across many national contexts, the governmental agencies legally responsible for 'managing' such hazards been called upon to provide greater foresight into the potential consequences, occurrence and behaviour of these dynamic phenomena. These conditions, of growing occurrence and expectation, have given rise to new anticipatory regimes, tools, practitioners and expertise tasked with revealing near and distant fiery futures. Drawing on interviews with Fire Behaviour Analysts from across the fire-prone continent of Australia, this article examines how their expertise has emerged and become institutionalized, exploring how its embedding in bushfire management agencies reveals cultural boundaries and tensions. This article provides important insight into the human and nonhuman infrastructures enrolled in predicting and managing landscape fires, foregrounding the wider social and political implications of these infrastructures and how their 'fuzzy boundaries' are negotiated by practitioners. Such empirical studies of expertise in practice are also, we suggest, necessary to the continued refinement of existing critiques of expertise as an individual capacity, derived from science and serving established social orders.
DISASTERS id:581
TI: Gap or prehistoric monster? A history of the humanitarian-development nexus at UNICEF ab: Why has bridging the humanitarian-development divide been such a long-running endeavour, and why have so many frameworks to do so been proposed and picked apart over the years? Rather than contributing yet another 'mind the gap' approach, this paper seeks to articulate why such a lacuna emerged in the first place, and to explore how to exit a debate that has grown increasingly circular. To provide one possible answer to the questions above, the paper draws on the history of UNICEF (United Nations Children's Fund) in working across the 'humanitarian-development' nexus. Suggesting that the gap is more artefact than fact, derived from the institutionalisation of aid, the paper argues that focusing on the challenges and the concepts that inherently transcend humanitarian-development silos may enhance understanding of what it means-and what is needed-to operate at the intersection of humanitarian and development action on behalf of children.
DISASTERS id:289
TI: Gender and enterprise in fragile refugee settings: female empowerment amidst male emasculation-a challenge to local integration? ab: This paper examines gender and enterprise in fragile refugee settings. Building on previous research in Afghanistan, it analyses refugee women's evolving economic lives and enterprise initiatives and related social dynamics in refugee communities. Case studies look specifically at two Islamic refugee contexts: Nairobi, Kenya (Somali refugees), and Irbid and Zarqa, Jordan (Syrian refugees). The discussion spotlights the precarious nature of refugee women's new practices and work norms under forced and strained circumstances, without a process of negotiation with male family members. In the case of longer-term refugees (Somalis), it describes new collective agency among refugee women, boosting support for new practices. The paper reflects on emerging gender roles and relations in such hostile conditions, particularly as men remain excluded and struggle for their own identity and authority. In addition, it draws attention to the gap relating to refugee men and policymaking, and highlights ways to address better their needs for refugee resilience, inclusion, and local integration.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:154
TI: Genetic ancestry testing among white nationalists: From identity repair to citizen science ab: White nationalists have a genetic essentialist understanding of racial identity, so what happens when using genetic ancestry tests (GATs) to explore personal identities, they receive upsetting results they consider evidence of non-white or non-European ancestry? Our answer draws on qualitative analysis of posts on the white nationalist website Stormfront, interpreted by synthesizing the literatures on white nationalism and GATs and identity. We show that Stormfront posters exert much more energy repairing individuals' bad news than using it to exclude or attack them. Their repair strategies combine anti-scientific, counter-knowledge attacks on the legitimacy of GATs and quasi-scientific reinterpretations of GATs in terms of white nationalist histories. However, beyond individual identity repair they also reinterpret the racial boundaries and hierarchies of white nationalism in terms of the relationships GATs make visible. White nationalism is not simply an identity community or political movement but should be understood as bricoleurs with genetic knowledge displaying aspects of citizen science.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC POLICY id:769
TI: Going beyond dyadic consultation relationships: information exchange in multi-step participation procedures ab: For decades, political scientists have observed the diffusion of complex governance arrangements including public participation procedures to ameliorate the democratic deficit inherent in these often-opaque structures. This article asks how the information provided in consultation statements is used by the consulting actors. To account for the multi-step character, the article combines exchange theory with a principal-agent approach, acknowledging that several actors in a delegation chain might be interested in the provided information. We use a typical case of a multi-step procedure - participation in German grid development - to test both theories. Neither the private firms nor the regulator use information provided in their own consultations, contradicting exchange theory. But the regulator considers ecological submissions made in the firms' consultation, as the principal-agent approach suggests. Thus, a principal-agent approach allows us to find influence of consultation statements that exchange theory cannot detect.
POLITICS & POLICY id:678
TI: Golden Migrants: The Rise and Impact of Illegal Chinese Small-Scale Mining in Ghana(sic)(sic)(sic) ab: This article investigates factors that attract Chinese migrants into illegal small-scale mining in Ghana, their role in the supply chain, and the impact of their involvement. This is accomplished via mixed qualitative techniques involving interviews with illegal small-scale Chinese and Ghanaian miners, and relevant Ghanaian stakeholders. Although the majority of Chinese interests in African mining is state sponsored, the Ghana case demonstrates private Chinese agency that is mostly attracted to illegal small-scale mining in Ghana due to push factors in the homeland and pull factors associated with Ghanaian state weakness. The Chinese dominate the supply chain of illegal small-scale mining with their financial, technical, managerial acumen, the sale and transfer of gold proceeds, and political patronage. This dominance accounts for the massive negative social, economic, environmental, and political impact of illegal small-scale mining in the country. Amid state weakness, Ghanaian civil society, exercising agency, remains a potent force against the phenomenon.
RESEARCH POLICY id:516
TI: Governance for system optimization and system change: The case of urban waste ab: This paper analyses urban waste systems to explore how local authorities can resolve challenges related to climate change, urbanization and resource depletion. The paper investigates how different public governance regimes affect local authorities' ability to move upwards in the waste hierarchy. It identifies three different governance regimes traditional bureaucracy, new public management and networked governance and uses the insights from innovation in urban waste in three Norwegian city regions Oslo, Drammen and Bergen to illuminate how these regimes possess both strengths and weaknesses in how they affect system optimization and system change. The observed working practices signal that the issue of urban waste systems is perceived as a challenge of system optimization rather than system change. Viewing this as a challenge requiring system change would probably have ensured a stronger directionality and a broader anchoring of actors. Such an approach is likely to have arrived at a waste prevention mode earlier than the step-by-step-solutions implemented so far. The paper concludes that there is not one best governance regime, but a need to acknowledge their coexistence and carefully consider the characteristics of the respective regimes in order to arrange urban waste systems for long-term dynamic and sustainable city regions.
SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY id:189
TI: Governing socio-technical change: Orchestrating demand for assisted living in ageing societies ab: In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in innovation studies towards grand challenges, and in how demand-side policy instruments can supplement traditional supply-side policy measures. To contribute to an improved understanding of how demand-side policy requires new governance responses, this article presents a case study of trialling assisted living technologies to address the grand challenge of demographic ageing. The article departs from an innovation policy framework that incorporates theorising on transformational system failures, governance modes, and policy mixes. This framework serves as an entry point to explore how different modes of governance condition the ways in which demand for assisted living in healthcare is orchestrated across multiple stakeholders. The case study is embedded in a wider system shift from a reactive to a proactive system of healthcare provision, enabling the elderly to live independently at home longer and thus avoiding or postponing institutionalised care.
RESEARCH POLICY id:134
TI: Governing with ambivalence: The tentative origins of socio-technical integration ab: Requirements to integrate societal considerations into research and development practices began appearing throughout the democratic industrialized world in the early 2000s and eventually became a central feature of responsible innovation. Examining one of the earliest and most prominent policy examples, this paper investigates the conceptual basis of the U.S. nanotechnology program's mandate for socio-technical integration. It argues that policy makers adopted this innovative response to addressing the societal issues of an emerging technology due to their heightened awareness of potential interactions among public attitudes, research directions, and technological trajectories. Integration thus emerged as a governance mechanism for mediating the interaction between these dynamic sources of uncertainty. The mandate emerged in a self-consciously experimental and anticipatory manner and thus provides a practical instance of tentative governance.
PERSPECTIVES ON POLITICS id:564
TI: Hard-to-Survey Populations and Respondent-Driven Sampling: Expanding the Political Science Toolbox ab: Survey research can generate knowledge that is central to the study of collective action, public opinion, and political participation. Unfortunately, many populations-from undocumented migrants to right-wing activists and oligarchs-are hidden, lack sampling frames, or are otherwise hard to survey. An approach to hard-to-survey populations commonly taken by researchers in other disciplines is largely missing from the toolbox of political science methods: respondent-driven sampling (RDS). By leveraging relations of trust, RDS accesses hard-to-survey populations; it also promotes representativeness, systematizes data collection, and, notably, supports population inference. In approximating probability sampling, RDS makes strong assumptions. Yet if strengthened by an integrative multimethod research design, it can shed light on otherwise concealed-and critical-political preferences and behaviors among many populations of interest. Through describing one of the first applications of RDS in political science, this article provides empirically grounded guidance via a study of activist refugees from Syria. Refugees are prototypical hard-to-survey populations, and mobilized ones are even more so; yet the study demonstrates that RDS can provide a systematic and representative account of a vulnerable population engaged in major political phenomena.
JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION id:512
TI: Hidden Democracy: Political Dissent in Rural America ab: Previous research has considered how network composition influences the extent to which one is willing to engage in politics with others. Yet much of this work has focused on composition rather than context and on public forms of political expression rather than ones that occur outside the public eye. Dissent in rural communities may be especially risky, because residents lack anonymity and rely on local patronage. This study offers evidence that challenges existing theories and concepts of opinion expression and political organizing, suggesting that when faced with an opposing community, rural residents may organize and express their opinions in secret. Through a series of in-depth interviews, this research examined the experiences of a secret political organization of 136 registered members in rural Texas. This study explored how members expressed their opinions and organized in secret, why they do so, and the effect this had on their political engagement in public.
SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY id:425
TI: Historical evolution of entrepreneurial development in the global South: The case of Ghana, 1957-2010 ab: In spite of growing awareness among strategy, business history, and entrepreneurship scholars of the benefits of entrepreneurial development, our understanding of the evolution of entrepreneurial development in developing nations remains limited. A historical analysis of the issue in post-colonial Ghana from 1957 to 2010 led to the identification of three distinctive phases. The first phase represented the immediate post-colonial reforms (1957-66), where large-scale nationalization and establishment of state-owned enterprises hampered development of private enterprises. The second phase was the turbulent period (1967-79), where totalitarianism and confiscation of assets deterred private investments and ownership, thereby creating a harsh economic and institutional environment. These culminated in the last phase, the renaissance of social entrepreneurship (1980-2010) where different entrepreneurial models flourished, including the diaspora philanthropy and the 'philanthropic chief'.
PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE id:75
TI: Hot topics in science communication: Aggressive language decreases trustworthiness and credibility in scientific debates ab: Current scientific debates, such as on climate change, often involve emotional, hostile, and aggressive rhetorical styles. Those who read or listen to these kinds of scientific arguments have to decide whom they can trust and which information is credible. This study investigates how the language style (neutral vs aggressive) and the professional affiliation (scientist vs lobbyist) of a person arguing in a scientific debate influence his trustworthiness and the credibility of his information. In a 2 X 2 between-subject online experiment, participants watched a scientific debate. The results show that if the person was introduced as a lobbyist, he was perceived as less trustworthy. However, the person's professional affiliation did not affect the credibility of his information. If the person used an aggressive language style, he was perceived as less trustworthy. Furthermore, his information was perceived as less credible, and participants had the impression that they learned less from the scientific debate.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:56
TI: How Do Elected Officials Evaluate Performance? Goal Preferences, Governance Preferences, and the Process of Goal Reprioritization ab: Performance data allows politicians to exert accountability over public organizations, even as ideological biases can affect how they interpret such data. However, we know little about how motivated decision-makers prioritize goals when facing multiple pieces of contradictory performance data that reflect the competing goals of public services. Such goal conflict is an inherent aspect of public management. To understand its implications for the use of performance data, we develop a theory of goal reprioritization. We start by assuming that elected officials have preferences between specific policy goals, and about governance processes-such as a preference for public or private service provision. When elected officials face contradictory pieces of performance data, governance preferences drive performance evaluations to the point that they are willing to reweight their goal preferences to minimize cognitive dissonance. We offer experimental evidence of this process, showing that elected officials asked to evaluate school performance reprioritize between two distinct policy goals for schools-test scores and student well-being-to fit with their governance preferences. Reprioritization is an attractive strategy since it allows elected officials to claim they are using performance data, even as underlying governance preferences lead them to set aside the evaluative goal-based criteria by which they would otherwise make performance evaluations. In other words, preferences concerning the nature of government can trump goal preferences when decision-makers use performance data.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:451
TI: How Does Policy Funding Context Matter to Networks? Resource Dependence, Advocacy Mobilization, and Network Structures ab: This study explores how policy funding context-defined as whether funding for a social service policy domain is discretionary or mandated-affects network structures in social service domains. We present comparative findings from two social service policy networks which differ with respect to funding context: A 47-actor adult basic education policy network that is funded discretionarily and a 40-actor mental health policy network where spending is mandated. Both are located in a US state we pseudonymed "Newstatia." Using an exponential random graph model, we found that policy funding contexts affect how the locus of resource dependence interacts with the nature of client groups to determine the array of interest organizations engaged in the networks, which leads to differentials in network structure across these domains. We suggest that policy funding contexts are before resource dependence and client factors when explaining network structure. This opens space for reconsideration of the causal claims between policy funding contexts, resource dependence, advocacy mobilization, and network structures.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:562
TI: How Noninstitutionalized Policy Innovation Is Justified: A Rhetorical Perspective ab: The premise of this article is that developing persuasive justification is fundamental to the construction and emergence of policy innovation. Nevertheless, given that policy innovation has been typically treated as given, existing public policy research on innovation says little about the process through which the rationales for innovative policies are established. A rhetorical approach is introduced as a new perspective to illustrate this process. In particular, I focus on the case of happiness indices, which is selected because it represents a noninstitutionalized idea which challenges the incumbent way of measuring social progress by GDP-related indicators. Rhetorical analysis is then applied to a body of documents advocating this ambitious innovation, through which I reveal five distinct types of legitimation strategies (i.e., logos, authorization, cosmology, scientization, and teleology). These rhetorical strategies are used in a supplementary manner to describe a policy idea-utopian in many people's eyes-as appropriate and desirable. The concluding discussion section highlights the wider implications of the empirical findings.
SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY id:393
TI: How Radical Is Too Radical? Public Perception of Taiwanese Environmental Nonprofit Organizations' Activism ab: Objective Methods This study sought answers to two important unasked questions: (1) How does the Taiwanese public perceive different types of environmental activism initiated by environmental nonprofit organizations (ENPOs)? And (2) How does culture influence these perceptions? This study utilized cultural theory (CT) to develop hypotheses to test data collected through an online survey in Taiwan. Results Conclusion The evidence confirms what CT predicted: egalitarians tended to consider protest-based environmental activities as effective and acceptable, while individualists tended to have negative thoughts about the effectiveness and acceptance of protest-based activities. This study found that CT can also be helpful in studying environmental activism, especially in countries, like Taiwan, where ideological lines and partisan differences on environmental issues are not clear. Moreover, compared to conventional partisan and ideological explanations, CT better explains the determinants of public perceptions regarding environmental activities.
WORLD DEVELOPMENT id:667
TI: How can NGOs support collective action among the users of rural drinking water systems? A case study of Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR) systems in Bangladesh ab: In this article, we link NGO-supplied drinking water infrastructure projects with collective action development approaches. Although governing local, shared drinking water systems (DWS) requires users to act collectively, users rarely organize such collective action successfully by themselves. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are therefore frequently called upon to support local communities to set up or consolidate the kind of local collective action required for governing DWSs. However, the effectiveness of such forms of NGO support remains unclear. Therefore, this paper attempts to assess the form and impact of this kind of NGO support. Combining insights gained from theory on institutions for collective action in the context of shared resource systems, we develop a set of requirements presumed necessary for guaranteeing both day-to-day and long-term collective action among local shared DWS users. We apply this framework to empirically explore if, how and why NGO support targets these requirements, and whether this support influences users' capacity for collective action. To this end we examine 11 cases where NGOs have worked with users of Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR) systems in Bangladesh. We collected data through focus group discussions, semi-structured interviews with local leaders, NGO officials, and project staff, and by reviewing project documentation. We find that NGO support favors long-term requirements over the requirements for day-to-day collective action. NGO activities seem based on applying standard approaches to training and awareness raising, and less on empowering users to craft their own solutions. A case for a lasting impact of NGO support on any of the requirements is hard to make. Our results imply that when attempting to organize effective and long-lasting forms of collective action among the users of shared resource systems, both NGOs and commissioners of projects need to engage more explicitly in learning what works and what doesn't. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY id:471
TI: How policymakers' demands for usable knowledge shape science-policy relations in environmental policy in Poland ab: This article discusses how aspects related to policymakers' demands for knowledge shape preferences for science-policy models such as Mode 1 and Mode 2. It focuses on the demands that Polish policymakers make of science and how they envision their role in the knowledge production process in the field of environmental policy. The article applies a set of criteria on how policymakers define usable knowledge to better understand preference and use in practice of different science-policy models. Results show that preferences for Mode 1 or Mode 2 are in part the result of trade-off between criteria of quality, relevance, conformity, and action orientation. While science can provide truth and usable knowledge in both Mode 1 and 2, Mode 1 is attractive when policy-makers have specific political demands: they may use it to avoid responsibility for negative policy outcomes or to discredit undesirable results.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC POLICY id:606
TI: How political trust matters in emergent democracies: evidence from East and Southeast Asia ab: How does political trust affect the competing pressures of policy versus political performance in emergent democracies? Studies suggest that political trust buffers against these pressures, but empirical evidence is lacking in regard to if or how, given the focus in the literature on mature democracies where democratic institutions and practices are unlikely to be upended by either policy or political underperformance. However, in emergent democracies where the risks of democratic reversal loom large, the distinction is highly relevant. This article investigates how political trust matters in emergent democracies, specifically, if political trust buffers against public pressures, and whether it is system-directed versus incumbent-directed, for East and Southeast Asia. The evidence from multiple waves of survey data provides three useful insights: first, it shows that political trust supersedes economic expectations in support for the democratising system; this supports political trust as a buffer for the political system and is system-directed. Second, political trust goes hand-in-hand with economic performance to explain support for the incumbent government. This finding clarifies that political trust does not buffer the government against public pressure for performance. Third, taken together, the results show that economic growth may keep a government in office but institution-building leads to political trust that undergirds the political system, so that institution-building is a priority for stability in emergent democracies. These results expand the political trust literature to underpin democratic progression and consolidation issues that are unique to emergent democracies.
DISASTERS id:767
TI: How structural mitigation shapes risk perception and affects decision-making ab: This paper reviews the relationships between risk perception and structural measures in an Australian context in three respects: (i) opinions about authorities' ability to mitigate flood risks; (ii) the role of flood experience in shaping views on risk; and (iii) perspectives on the ways in which structural measures shape decision-making pertaining to protective action. The main finding of this analysis is that the study participants do not suffer from the 'levee paradox'. Most take precautionary steps to guard against residual flood risk. Such actions, however, do not mean that there is a lack of trust in structural measures to reduce significant flood risk. The majority of the respondents agreed about the necessity of engineering structures to mitigate inherent flood risk. This support, though, does not extend to their management. Losses during major flooding in southeast Queensland, Australia, in 2010-11 were attributed primarily by residents to operational decisions concerning dam water releases.
DISASTERS id:429
TI: Humanitarian aid and local power structures: lessons from Haiti's 'shadow disaster' ab: This paper investigates the confluence of humanitarian aid, centralisation, and politics. The 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Haiti on 12 January 2010 led to more than USD 16 billion in pledges. By contrast, Hurricane Matthew, which made landfall in Haiti on 4 October 2016, stayed in the shadows, attracting about one per cent of the amount. While the earthquake exhibited one face of centralisation, the Category 4 storm laid bare rural vulnerabilities shaped by postcolonial state neglect, and reinforced by the influx of non-governmental organisations in the 'Republic of Port-au-Prince'. The study draws on data from four case studies in two departments to illuminate the legacies of hyper-centralisation in Haiti. Compounding matters, Matthew struck in the middle of an extended election that the international community attempted to control again. The paper argues that disaster assistance and politics are uncomfortably close, while reflecting on the momentary decentralisation of aid after the hurricane and its effectiveness.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:567
TI: Humanitarian and Human Rights Surveillance: The Challenge to Border Surveillance and Invisibility? ab: The European border regime has traditionally rested on the hidden surveillance activities of border authorities, which have contributed to human rights violations (including "push-back" and "left-to-die" practices) and a rising migrant death toll. Recently a number of humanitarian and activist organizations, including Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS), Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), Sea-Watch, and WatchTheMed, have organized to aid migrants in distress at sea using surveillance technologies, ranging from drones to GPS. By doing so, they presented a challenge to the European border surveillance regime. In dialogue with the concept of countersurveillance, this paper introduces the concepts of humanitarian surveillance and human rights surveillance and deploys them to examine and categorize the activities of MOAS, MSF, Sea-Watch, and WatchTheMed. Humanitarian surveillance narrowly focuses on aiding victims of surveillance without problematizing the logic and hierarchies of surveillance, while human rights surveillance operates as a form of countersurveillance; it aims to protect and advance the human rights of victims of surveillance and expose human rights violations committed by authorities through opposing the hierarchies of surveillance. The paper shows how civilian groups incorporate elements of humanitarian and human rights surveillance in their activities at varying levels and discusses the extent to which they challenge the European border surveillance regime.
WORLD DEVELOPMENT id:468
TI: Humanitarian food aid and civil conflict ab: Humanitarian food aid has long been considered to be an effective tool towards conflict mitigation among donors and policymakers. Within the Sustainable Development Goals that have the objectives of ending hunger before 2030 (SDG#2) and bringing peace and justice (SDG#16), humanitarian food assistance may play a critical role in delivering progress in developing countries. However, there have been growing concerns that it may actually have counter-intended effects by aggravating civil conflicts in recipient countries. We estimate the effect of humanitarian food aid on civil conflict using a sample of 79 recipient countries between 2002 and 2017. Our analysis exploits cross-sectional and time variation in between-country humanitarian food aid displacements. Our baseline instrumental variables estimates imply that a 10 percent increase in humanitarian food aid per capita decreases the incidence of civil conflict by about 0.2 percentage point (or by about 0.9 per cent at the mean conflict incidence). Humanitarian food aid also decreases the incidence of small-scale and large-scale civil conflicts, and the onset and duration of civil conflicts. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION id:21
TI: I Just Google It: Folk Theories of Distributed Discovery ab: A significant minority of people do not follow news regularly, and a growing number rely on distributed discovery (especially social media and search engines) to stay informed. Here, we analyze folk theories of news consumption. On the basis of an inductive analysis of 43 in-depth interviews with infrequent users of conventional news, we identify three complementary folk theories ("news finds me," "the information is out there," and "I don't know what to believe") that consumers draw on when making sense of their information environment. We show that the notion of folk theories help unpack the different, complementary, sometimes contradictory cultural resources people rely on as they navigate digital media and public affairs, and we argue that studying those who rarely engage directly with news media but do access information via social media and search provides a critical case study of the dynamics of an environment increasingly defined by platforms.
PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE id:87
TI: Identifying diffusion patterns of research articles on Twitter: A case study of online engagement with open access articles ab: The growing presence of research shared on social media, coupled with the increase in freely available research, invites us to ask whether scientific articles shared on platforms like Twitter diffuse beyond the academic community. We explore a new method for answering this question by identifying 11 articles from two open access biology journals that were shared on Twitter at least 50 times and by analyzing the follower network of users who tweeted each article. We find that diffusion patterns of scientific articles can take very different forms, even when the number of times they are tweeted is similar. Our small case study suggests that most articles are shared within single-connected communities with limited diffusion to the public. The proposed approach and indicators can serve those interested in the public understanding of science, science communication, or research evaluation to identify when research diffuses beyond insular communities.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE id:190
TI: Ideology Justifies Morality: Political Beliefs Predict Moral Foundations ab: Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) is employed as a causal explanation of ideology that posits political attitudes are products of moral intuitions. Prior theoretical models, however, suggest the opposite causal path, that is, that moral judgments are driven by political beliefs. In both instances, however, extant research has assumed rather than explicitly tested for causality. So do moral intuitions drive political beliefs or do political beliefs drive moral intuitions? We empirically address this question using data from two panel studies and one nationally representative study, and find consistent evidence supporting the hypothesis that ideology predicts moral intuitions. The findings have significant implications for MFT as a theory of ideology, and also about the consequences of political beliefs for shaping how individuals rationalize what is right and what is wrong.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:448
TI: Imagining sustainable energy and mobility transitions: Valence, temporality, and radicalism in 38 visions of a low-carbon future ab: Based on an extensive synthesis of semi-structured interviews, media content analysis, and reviews, this article conducts a qualitative meta-analysis of more than 560 sources of evidence to identify 38 visions associated with seven different low-carbon innovations - automated mobility, electric vehicles, smart meters, nuclear power, shale gas, hydrogen, and the fossil fuel divestment movement - playing a key role in current deliberations about mobility or low-carbon energy supply and use. From this material, it analyzes such visions based on rhetorical features such as common problems and functions, storylines, discursive struggles, and rhetorical effectiveness. It also analyzes visions based on typologies or degrees of valence (utopian vs. dystopian), temporality (proximal vs. distant), and radicalism (incremental vs. transformative). The article is motivated by the premise that tackling climate change via low-carbon energy systems (and practices) is one of the most significant challenges of the twenty-first century, and that effective decarbonization will require not only new energy technologies, but also new ways of understanding language, visions, and discursive politics surrounding emerging innovations and transitions.
SCIENCE AS CULTURE id:589
TI: Imagining the Biometric Future: Debates Over National Biometric Identification in Israel ab: From 2008 to 2017, the Israeli Ministry of Interior's attempts to create a national biometric identification system comprised of a digital database and 'smart' national ID cards containing the index fingerprints and facial recognition data of all Israeli citizens and residents generated significant political debate. Usually, security is offered as a justification for biometric identification. In the Israeli debate, security was foundational to both claims for and against the system. Security is a major priority in Israel, and by putting it at the center of their arguments, opponents and proponents tried to lay claim to one of the most powerful legitimating tools in Israeli policymaking. They did so by articulating sociotechnical imaginaries of the system that both drew upon aspirations for security, yet offered contrasting visions of the biometric future. These imaginaries existed in a dialectical relationship; both sides used practices of imagining the future to influence the system's policy framework and technological design, and to contest the meaning of security itself by defining it and its relationship to biometric IDs and databases in different ways. Ultimately, the system's implementation in 2017 entailed a legislative and technological compromise that incorporated both sides' visions of the future and definitions of security.
WORLD POLITICS id:556
TI: Imperial Rule, the Imposition of Bureaucratic Institutions, and their Long-Term Legacies ab: Significant variation in the institutions and efficiency of public bureaucracies across countries and regions are observed. These differences could be partially responsible for divergence in the effectiveness of policy implementation, corruption levels, and economic development. Do imperial legacies contribute to the observed variation in the organization of public administrations? Historical foreign rule and colonization have been shown to have lasting effects on legal systems, political institutions, and trade in former controlled territories. Imperial legacies could also explain variations in the performance of public administrations. The author uses the case of Poland to investigate the long-term effects of foreign rule on bureaucratic systems. Historically, Poland was split between three imperial powers with very different public administrations: Prussia, Austria, and Russia. Statistical analyses of original data collected through a survey of more than 650 Polish public administrations suggest that some present-day differences in the organization and efficiency of bureaucracies are due to imperial legacies.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW id:358
TI: Implementation of Digital-Era Governance: The Case of Open Data in US Cities ab: This article examines the institutional factors that influence the implementation of open data platforms in U.S. cities. Public management scholarship has argued that governance can be transformed by new information technologies that improve transparency and engagement, reduce administrative costs, and support performance management systems. However, this argument ignores key risks for administrators, as well as institutional and political obstacles that can thwart implementation. This article uses hierarchical negative binomial regression to analyze the organizational and institutional features influencing implementation in more than 1,500 departments across 60 cities. Department type and administrative capacity are strongly associated with the number of open data files available, while city-level institutional characteristics and administrative capacity are not significant factors. Municipal demographics are also identified as a factor, suggesting a potential demand-side influence from wealthy and technologically proficient residents. Evidence for Practice The implementation of open data policies benefits from targeted approaches at the department level rather than uniform, citywide objectives or requirements. City executive-level positions such as chief data or information officers are not necessarily associated with successful implementation, measured by the number of open data files made available. Open data implementation involves additional administrative responsibilities and labor at the department level, so city administrators looking to expand the number and variety of data sets available through their open data platforms should devote time and resources to working directly with departments to facilitate and encourage data sharing. Administrators looking to expand the number and variety of data sets available through their open data platforms should consider the costs associated with investing in increasing individual departments' abilities to balance the additional administrative responsibilities and labor involved.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:675
TI: Implementing Performance Measurement Systems in Local Governments: Moving from the "How" to the "Why" ab: This paper examines how Performance Measurement Systems (PMSs) are implemented in local governments where the initial context is defined by equivalent external pressures and professional expertise, in order to address the question of "why" PMS implementation patterns differ from one setting to another. The study explored the reasons behind these different patterns in a context where local governments responsible for providing a local service implemented a PMS with the direct support of professional experts, and thereby it contributes to the extant literature in the field of PMS implementation. In order to achieve this purpose, the investigation analyzed three local governments (municipalities) that were required to implement a PMS because of external legislation requirements rather than by choice and is based upon a participatory case study approach involving interviews, observations and secondary data sources. Research was conducted through the theoretical lens of Old Institutional Economics to identify three PMS implementation patterns, here called formal compliance, shared vision and technical oligarchy. The role played by three factors, power, communication and an inclination to learn, is discussed in the results, as these three factors in particular may help to explain the heterogeneity in the implementation patterns observed.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:271
TI: Impossible, unknowable, accountable: Dramas and dilemmas of data law ab: On May 25, 2018, the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force. EU citizens are granted more control over personal data while companies and organizations are charged with increased responsibility enshrined in broad principles like transparency and accountability. Given the scope of the regulation, which aims to harmonize data practices across 28 member states with different concerns about data collection, the GDPR has significant consequences for individuals in the EU and globally. While the GDPR is primarily intended to regulate tech companies, it also has important implications for data use in scientific research. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with researchers, lawyers and legal scholars in Sweden, I argue that the GDPR's flexible accountability principle effectively encourages researchers to reflect on their ethical responsibility but can also become a source of anxiety and produce unexpected results. Many researchers I spoke with expressed profound uncertainty about 'impossible' legal requirements for research data use. Despite the availability of legal texts and interpretations, I suggest we should take researchers' concerns about 'unknowable' data law seriously. Many researchers' sense of legal ambiguity led them to rethink their data practices and themselves as ethical subjects through an orientation to what they imagined as the 'real people behind the data', variously formulated as a Swedish population desiring data use for social benefit or a transnational public eager for research results. The intentions attributed to people, populations and publics - whom researchers only encountered in the abstract form of data - lent ethical weight to various and sometimes conflicting decisions about data security and sharing. Ultimately, researchers' anxieties about their inability to discern the desires of the 'real people' lent new appeal to solutions, however flawed, that promised to alleviate the ethical burden of personal data.
WORLD DEVELOPMENT id:774
TI: Improving learning and accountability in foreign aid ab: Learning and accountability in foreign aid require project comparisons, but the dominant framework for aid evaluation institutionalizes inconsistency. Today, most aid evaluations are organized in terms of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) criteria: relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, impact and sustainability. Usually the evaluators determine how to apply each criterion. Also, with donor agencies organizing their own evaluation systems, project monitoring tends to be weak and many evaluations are superficial, positively biased, and/or poorly timed. Logically, the most effective way to improve learning and accountability would be to implement independent and consistent evaluation for cost effectiveness. We substantiate and illustrate this argument by explaining why evaluation should be oriented to cost effectiveness and how this could be accomplished by an evaluation association, and by discussing six evaluations of health projects and several documents that summarize many evaluations. The proposed association would provide a stronger foundation in evidence and incentive environment for aid managers to make decisions that maximize the cost effectiveness of their interventions. This would enhance the professionalism of foreign aid and hasten an end to poverty. (C) 2019 The Author. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE id:112
TI: In consensus we trust? Persuasive effects of scientific consensus communication ab: Scholars have recently suggested that communicating levels of scientific consensus (e.g. the percentage of scientists who agree about human-caused climate change) can shift public opinion toward the dominant scientific opinion. Initial research suggested that consensus communication effectively reduces public skepticism. However, other research failed to find a persuasive effect for those with conflicting prior beliefs. This study enters this contested space by experimentally testing how different levels of consensus shape perceptions of scientific certainty. We further examine how perceptions of certainty influence personal agreement and policy support. Findings indicate that communicating higher levels of consensus increases perceptions of scientific certainty, which is associated with greater personal agreement and policy support for non-political issues. We find some suggestive evidence that this mediated effect is moderated by participants' overall trust in science, such that those with low trust in science fail to perceive higher agreement as indicative of greater scientific certainty.
SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY id:497
TI: Incumbents' response to demand-side policies: The case of solar and wind power sectors ab: This work examines incumbents' responses to two demand-side policies by focusing on their investment in new sustainable technologies. It focuses on how economic incentive and regulatory policies shape the market environment and this affects incumbents' investment in new technologies. By using mediation and difference-in-difference regression models, it examines incumbent utilities' investment in solar and wind power plants. It reveals that incumbent utilities under the economic incentive policy more invest in the solar and wind power than those under the regulatory policy, as it places stronger competitive pressure on incumbent utilities to adapt to the new technology. Further, incumbents prefer alternative technologies complementary to their existing competences and expand their investment in a global market under policy-induced competitive pressures.
ADMINISTRATIVE SCIENCE QUARTERLY id:549
TI: Indirect Compellence and Institutional Change: US Extraterritorial Law Enforcement and the Erosion of Swiss Banking Secrecy ab: Based on an in-depth, qualitative case study about a conflict between governmental authorities from the United States and Switzerland over the regulation of Swiss banks, we introduceindirect compellenceas a novel triadic and indirect mechanism through which coercion leads to institutional change. Hostage-taking being a prototypical example, indirect compellence is typified by a coercive actor who takes a third party hostage to gain influence over a targeted actor. In our case, it meant that U.S. authorities (coercers) compelled Swiss policy makers (targets) to erode the famed Swiss banking secrecy rules by threatening the targets to otherwise enforce U.S. law extraterritorially against Swiss banks and bankers (hostages). Our constructivist and target-centered perspective explains this type of coercive pressure in detail, and it also suggests that targeted policy makers judge and respond to it contingent on their political ideologies. Our study contributes to research on power and influence in institutional environments and to research on global business regulation and transnational governance. Most generally, it also expands scholarly understanding of triadic relationships. In contrast to Simmelian perspectives' focus on triads in which the third party is in a powerful brokerage position and frequently benefits as atertius gaudens, our study suggests that the third party can also become a rather powerlesstertius miserabiliswho suffers rather than benefits from others' conflict.
DISASTERS id:295
TI: Influencing resilience: the role of policy entrepreneurs in mainstreaming climate adaptation ab: One way to make development pathways more resilient in the face of a changing climate has been through mainstreaming adaptation into government policies, planning and sectoral decision-making. To date, many of the transferable lessons have taken the form of technical approaches such as risk assessments and toolkits. This article instead draws on evidence from South Asia to emphasise some of the more tacit and informal approaches used to influence adaptation policy. Despite their apparent significance in policy processes, such tactics are often neither planned for nor well reported in resilience-building projects and programme documents. Using evidence to populate a typology of influencing strategies, this article looks particularly at the role of policy entrepreneurs who navigate the political complexity of both formal and informal governance systems to promote successful adaptation mainstreaming. It concludes with recommendations for adaptation and resilience programming that can more effectively harness the breadth of influencing strategies.
SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY id:498
TI: Influencing the direction of innovation processes: the shadow of authorities in demand articulation ab: This article aims to contribute to the development of demand-based innovation policies by examining the role of regulatory authorities in the process of formulating demands and requirements for novel technologies in three specific cases of emerging sensor technologies. We make two contributions. First, we conceptualize the different ways in which authorities may be involved in demand articulation processes during the innovation journey. We suggest four potential roles for regulatory actors: 'following authority', 'forceful authority', 'co-creating authority' and 'shadow authority'. Second, we show how regulatory authorities in their role of 'shadow authority' influence demand articulation processes even if they are not immediately engaged. In early phases of the innovation journey, regulatory agencies may not be directly involved, but suppliers and potential users of technologies anticipate authorities' positions and actions. In conclusion, we discuss the situations in which the involvement of regulatory authorities can support the process and guide the direction of demand articulation.
PERSPECTIVES ON POLITICS id:654
TI: Informal Institutions and the Regulation of Smuggling in North Africa ab: Contemporary writing on North African borderlands invokes the idea of a general, unregulated porosity through which small-scale informal traders of food or textiles move alongside drug smugglers and terrorists. I challenge that conception, demonstrating that the vast majority of smuggling activity is in fact highly regulated through a dense network of informal institutions that determine the costs, quantity, and types of goods that can pass through certain nodes, typically segmenting licit from illicit goods. While informal, the institutions regulating this trade are largely impersonal and contain third-party enforcement, hence providing a direct empirical challenge to common characterisations of informal institutions in political science. I argue that revisiting the characteristics associated with informal institutions, and understanding them as contingent on their political environment, can provide a new starting point for studying institutions, the politics of informality, state capacity, and the regulation of illegal economies.
COMPUTER SUPPORTED COOPERATIVE WORK-THE JOURNAL OF COLLABORATIVE COMPUTING AND WORK PRACTICES id:673
TI: Informating Hospital Workflow Coordination ab: Through a qualitative case study at Kalnes general hospital in Norway, we investigate the use of workflow information to manage hospital resources and coordinate patient flow from emergency unit admission to patient transfer and discharge. We draw on Zuboff's (1988) notion of "informating" - turning descriptions and measurements of activities, events and objects into information - to examine how hospital staff leverage an integrated hospital information infrastructure to share, validate and use workflow information. We contribute to CSCW literature by explicating how information transparency, the meticulous boundary-spanning work of dedicated coordinators, and the regular conduct of coordinative meetings can help to establish the legitimacy of workflow information in practice. In our case, interdepartmental visibility of workflow information raises awareness of menial and often-overlooked hospital housekeeping work, and simultaneously motivates collaborative efforts to monitor and improve workflows. Our findings highlight the need for a broad and inclusive approach to the legitimation of workflow information, both in daily coordinative practice and in efforts to streamline hospital workflows.
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY id:259
TI: Information behaviors in disadvantaged and dependent circumstances and the role of information intermediaries ab: This article provides the first empirical study focused exclusively on the information intermediary role in disadvantaged (socioeconomic) and dependent (support) circumstances. We report findings from interviews and focus groups with 49 UK state and voluntary sector professionals providing support to young (<21) mothers from areas of multiple deprivations. We evidence an important information intermediary role with three key contributions to information behaviors in disadvantaged and dependent circumstances. Intermediaries: facilitate information needs recognition, and consider purposeful action within problematic situations; are a key source of information in themselves, and a key integrative connection to other external sources not otherwise accessed; and tailor and personalize information for relevance, and communicate via incremental and recursive cycles that take into account learning needs. We provide parameters for a theory of information intermediary intervention to guide future examination of an important and understudied role; and conceptualize important theoretical relationships between information behavior and social capital, and in particular shared concepts of social integration, and the progressive and integrative intermediary role within. Our findings have significant practical implications for public health policy and digital health strategies, as they evidence an important human information intermediary role among an at-risk group, with implications for disadvantaged and vulnerable populations more broadly.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:593
TI: Infrastructural surveillance ab: This article proposes a new model of privacy: infrastructural surveillance. It departs from Agre's classic distinction between surveillance and capture by examining the sociotechnical claims of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) as requiring totalising surveillance of passengers and environment in order to operate. By doing so, it contributes to the ongoing debate on the commodification and platformisation of life, paying attention to the under-explored infrastructural requirements of certain digital technologies, rather than its business model. The article addresses four distinct characteristics of infrastructural surveillance: the aggregation of data, initialisation of protocols limiting possible actions, the prioritisation of distributed modes of governance and the enclosure of the driver in a personalised bubble of sovereign power. Ultimately, unlike previous modes of computer privacy in which activities are being constructed in real time from a set of institutionally standardised parts specified by a captured ontology, we observe the creation of new ontologies.
COMPUTER SUPPORTED COOPERATIVE WORK-THE JOURNAL OF COLLABORATIVE COMPUTING id:511
TI: Infrastructuring as Ambiguous Repair: A Case Study of a Surveillance Infrastructure Project ab: Health and welfare organisations are under increased scrutiny regarding their ability to make innovations in and increase the productivity of their services by digitising and automating them. Our empirical case study focuses on the implementation of a new health and welfare surveillance infrastructure project in a large Norwegian municipality. The infrastructure project led to significant challenges for various reasons, such as coordinating with vendors and subvendors, balancing governmentally defined purchase and implementation processes with local work practices, tailoring packaged solutions, and the differing concerns of many actors across different municipal departments. moves through ongoing cycles project moves through ongoing cycles of breakdown and repair in order to implement a working infrastructure. Key to our analysis is the way repair plays out as the infrastructure project deals with the ambiguity resulting from uncertainties in relation to both how technology works in practice and how the project will be organised. We empirically analyse three collaborative repair mechanisms: value-network repair, process repair, and participation repair. Our study enriches the understanding of infrastructuring by discussing the collaborative repair mechanisms necessary for mobilising and adapting the practices, systems, and processes that coexist in infrastructure projects. Additionally, the concept of ambiguous repair suggests that tensions cannot be permanently resolved but rather should be considered an ongoing and necessary part of practical infrastructuring.
COMPUTER SUPPORTED COOPERATIVE WORK-THE JOURNAL OF COLLABORATIVE COMPUTING AND WORK PRACTICES id:554
TI: Infrastructuring as an Occasion for Resistance: Organized Resistance to Policy-Driven Information Infrastructure Development in the US Healthcare Industry ab: Various industries are developing information infrastructures to improve the efficiency and quality of work. Little research attention has been paid to how workers might resist the development of a new infrastructure beyond the point of technology use. In industries in which government agencies have taken a top-down, policy-driven approach to developing infrastructures, though, coordinated, distributed resistance-or organized resistance-is likely to play a role in implementation outcomes because policies limit the flexibility of organizations and workers in adopting and using infrastructure technologies. This paper presents the results of a qualitative study of the United States government's multi-billion dollar electronic medical record (EMR) infrastructure program aimed to support data collection and sharing within and between healthcare organizations. It describes how healthcare professionals manifested their resistance through professional organizations at the political level via organized resistance.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:77
TI: Innovating consultative authoritarianism: Internet votes as a novel digital tool to stabilize non-democratic rule in Russia ab: Extant research on the consequences of the Internet for non-democratic politics has focused on how oppositional activists leverage new digital tools. By contrast, still, relatively little is known about how authoritarian elites proactively deploy digital technologies to legitimize their rule. This article contributes to filling this gap by scrutinizing one highly innovative tactic that has recently been adopted repeatedly by Russia's ruling elites: the organization of Internet votes' to staff advisory bodies to the government. In contrast to online petitions, online votes are aimed at aggregating citizen preferences not on issues but on candidates, that is, on individuals who later act as political representatives. The article presents an in-depth case study of the first such Internet vote conducted in Russia in 2012. It concludes that ruling elites deployed the tool swiftly to (1) disempower oppositional activists and (2) convey to the mass public the image of a transparent, accountable and responsive government.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:652
TI: Institutional Dimensions of Open Government Data Implementation: Evidence from Transition Countries ab: Over the past 10 years, we have observed a significant growth in open data adoption in governments across the globe. Potential barriers and enablers of open government data have been well-documented in the literature. However, nearly all of this research has been conducted in Western, democratic and developed societies, with very little known about open government data implementation in less developed countries. This article investigates how institutional dimensions affect open data implementation in six understudied countries: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. This research presents rich data based on an analysis of 31 documents and focus group discussions with a total of 89 participants. In general, we find that in these countries the same institutional dimensions influence OGD implementation as in their Western counterparts. A striking difference, however, is that we find open data implementation in transition countries to be much more fragile and highly dependent on foreign aid initiatives. This paper also strengthens the argument that institutional dimensions explain the performance of open data implementation.
SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY id:651
TI: Institutionalized inequity in the USA: The case of postdoctoral researchers ab: Coalitions of powerful higher education stakeholders, a weak federal government, controversial overlapping policy domains, and a vulnerable postdoctoral labor force combine to create exploitative conditions in the United States. Recent calls for postdoctoral reform are likely to fall by the wayside, just as they have for the last half century. We use several analytic tools to examine the situation: a thematic content analysis of National Academy of Science reports dating back to 1969, stakeholder analysis based on the content analysis, and an in-depth demographic assessment of the postdoctoral labor force. We use these data in concert with agenda-setting theory to explain why major change has not occurred, and is unlikely to occur in the future. We suggest that one way forward is for the federal government to engage in bureaucratic reforms, which are more politically insulated than the domains of science, education, immigration, and inclusion policies in the USA.
PERSPECTIVES ON POLITICS id:587
TI: Institutions, Ideologies, and Comparative Political Theory ab: The growing prominence of comparative political theory has inspired extensive and fruitful methodological reflection, raising important questions about the procedures that political theorists should apply when they select texts for study, interpret their passages, and assess their arguments. But, notably, comparative political theorists have mainly rejected the comparative methods used in the subfield of comparative politics, because they argue that applying the comparative method would compromise both the interpretive and the critical projects that comparative political theory should pursue. In this article, I describe a comparative approach for the study of political ideas that offers unique insight into how the intellectual and institutional contexts that political thinkers occupy influence their ideas. By systematically describing how political thinking varies across time and over space in relation to the contexts within which political thinkers live and work, the comparative method can serve as the foundation for both deconstructive critiques, which reveal the partial interests that political ideas presented as universally advantageous actually serve, and reconstructive critiques, which identify particular thinkers or traditions of political thought that, because of the contexts in which they developed, offer compelling critical perspectives on existing political institutions.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC POLICY id:184
TI: Integrating collaborative governance theory with the Advocacy Coalition Framework ab: As collaborative governance processes continue to grow in popularity, practitioners and policy scholars alike can benefit from the development of methods to better analyse and evaluate them. This article develops one such method by demonstrating how collaborative governance theory can be integrated with the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) to better explain coalition dynamics, policy-oriented learning and policy change in collaborative contexts. I offer three theoretical propositions that suggest alternate relationships among ACF variables under collaborative governance arrangements and illustrate these propositions using interview data from an original case study of a collaborative governance process in Colorado, USA. The integration of collaborative governance theory with the ACF improves its application in collaborative contexts and provides new theoretical insights into the study and practice of collaborative governance.
SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY id:517
TI: International Organizations and Democracy Development: The Indirect Link ab: ObjectiveFew studies have systematically examined the international organization (IO)-democracy nexus, except Pevehouse (2002, 2005), who found the democratizing impact of regional IOs. Our study extends previous research by investigating the indirect as well as the direct effects of IOs on democracy. MethodsWe employ a two-equation model, using the data for 112 developing countries for 1972-2002. ResultsRegional IOs increase the level of economic openness, which in turn leads to improvements in democracy. ConclusionsIOs indeed facilitate democratic development in their member states both directly and indirectly by enhancing these countries' international trade.
SCIENCE AS CULTURE id:674
TI: International Ties at Peripheral Sites: Co-producing Social Processes and Scientific Knowledge in Latin America ab: In recent decades, scientific knowledge has been increasingly expected to contribute to the resolution of public and controversial issues in Latin America. However, in peripheral sites of knowledge and economic production, the dynamics of both science and society have been complicated by tensions between the demands of local stakeholders and the ties with the global centers of technical and scientific expertise. First, local public issues are often addressed in merely discursive ways, rather than effectively, in research and expert advice; second, local scientific elites often establish links with experts and the global centers of science in order to legitimate their stance against competing approaches. An analysis of four case studies (neglected diseases, mining pollution, wildlife conservation and migration studies) involving the production of scientific knowledge intended to address public issues in Latin America reveals, first, that material and symbolic asymmetries determine the outcomes of these engagements and, second, that international ties with peripheral sites affect the cognitive definition of the issues at stake and the range of public interventions devised to address them. Yet, in these four case studies, the key actors that mediate links between local stakeholders and international counterparts - or, 'drivers' - mobilize the bodies of knowledge that, ultimately, shape the cognitive and political contours of the social issues at stake.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:446
TI: Invisibilizing politics: Accepting and legitimating ignorance in environmental sciences ab: Although sociologists have explored how political and economic factors influence the formation of ignorance in science and technology, we know little about how scientists comply with external controls by abandoning their prior research and leaving scientific innovations incomplete. Most research in science and technology studies (STS) on ignorance has relied on structural and historical analyses, lacking in situ studies in scientific laboratories. Drawing on ethnographic research, this article examines the habitus of ignorance as a mechanism of the social production of ignorance. Scientists have a set of dispositions that establish practical contexts enabling them to ignore particular scientific content. Leaders of the organization repeatedly legitimate the abandonment of unfinished projects, while ordinary laboratory scientists internalize the normalized view that the scientific field is inherently opportunistic and that unfunded research should be left undone. A cycle of legitimation and acceptance of ignorance by actors at distinctive positions within the organization provides a mechanism of social control of scientific knowledge. As the mechanism is habitually self-governed by the rules of the game of current scientific institutions, the result is an indirect, although deeply subjugating, invisible and consolidating form of political and economic domination of the scientific field.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:100
TI: Is "Threat" in the Eye of the Researcher? Theory and Measurement in the Study of State-Level Immigration Policymaking ab: This study initiates a methodological critique of the state-level immigration policy literature through the lens of the racial threat and group power perspectives. First, I highlight the conceptual problems related to the application of such theories to legislature-level data analysis. Next, I demonstrate the methodological and analytical problems that raise concerns about ad hoc theorizing in this field. Using counts of hostile and welcoming immigration legislation (2005-2011), I demonstrate that outgroup size measures correlate positively with both dependent variables while measures of population growth rate yield null results unless used on their own. These results suggest that the use of legislature-level models with demographic indicators does not allow us to gain a clear understanding of whether and how population dynamics influence immigration policymaking. Based on these findings, I recommend that when using demographic indicators as key explanatory variables, researchers provide evidence of result consistency across multiple model specifications and also test the models with both hostile and inclusive policy variables. Such protocols would help avoid ad hoc theorizing.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:288
TI: It takes a village to manipulate the media: coordinated link sharing behavior during 2018 and 2019 Italian elections ab: Over the last few years, a proliferation of attempts to define, understand and fight the spread of problematic information in contemporary media ecosystems emerged. Most of these attempts focus on false content and/or bad actors detection. In this paper, we argue for a wider ecological focus. Using the frame of media manipulation and a revised version of the 'coordinated inauthentic behavior' original definition, the paper presents a study based on an unprecedented combination of Facebook data, accessed through the CrowdTangle API, and two datasets of Italian political news stories published in the run-up to the 2018 Italian general election and 2019 European election. By focusing on actors' collective behavior, we identified several networks of pages, groups, and verified public profiles ('entities'), that shared the same political news articles on Facebook within a very short period of time. Some entities in our networks were openly political, while others, despite sharing political content too, deceptively presented themselves as entertainment venues. The proportion of inauthentic entities in a network affects the wideness of the range of news media sources they shared, thus pointing to different strategies and possible motivations. The paper has both theoretical and empirical implications: it frames the concept of 'coordinated inauthentic behavior' in existing literature, introduces a method to detect coordinated link sharing behavior and points out different strategies and methods employed by networks of actors willing to manipulate the media and public opinion.
PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE id:84
TI: It's not my consensus: Motivated reasoning and the sources of scientific illiteracy ab: Individuals who provide incorrect answers to scientific knowledge questions have long been considered scientifically illiterate. Yet, increasing evidence suggests that motivated reasoning, rather than ignorance, may explain many of these incorrect answers. This article uses novel survey measures to assess two processes by which motivated reasoning might lead to incorrect personal beliefs: motivated individuals may fail to identify the presence of a scientific consensus on some issue or they may recognize a consensus while questioning its veracity. Simultaneously looking at perceptions of what most scientists say and personal beliefs, this study reveals that religiosity and partisanship moderate the extent to which Americans identify scientific consensuses and assert beliefs that contradict their perceptions of consensus. Although these pathways predict the scope of disagreement with science for each of 11 issues, the relative prevalence of each process depends on both the scientific issue and motivational pathway under examination.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:225
TI: Judicialization and Health Policy in Colombia: The Implications for Evidence-Informed Policymaking ab: The existence of the tutela mechanism and the endemic weaknesses of the legislative and executive branches of the Colombian state have led to a de facto judicialization of health policymaking. The objective of evidence-informed policy is to identify effective policy approaches and legitimize policy decisions. Questions arise about the basis on which judges take decisions with significant policy and budgetary consequences, and the forms of evidence they use to inform these. This article focuses on the extent to which courts take account of research evidence in judgements and assesses the implications for health policy in Colombia. We place these discussions in the context of a broader analysis of the ongoing reforms to the Colombian health system and the most recent literature on evidence-informed policymaking. The judicialization of health policymaking offers a suboptimal means to achieve the objective of evidence-informed policymaking. The emergence of a range of evidence advisory bodies in recent years is an attempt to address the issue of judicialization alongside the other constitutional and political weaknesses Colombia faces.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:570
TI: Keeping Your Enemies Close: The Role of Distrust in Structuring a Local Hydraulic Fracturing Policy Network in New York ab: Explaining the mechanisms that structure policy networks is an important subject of public management research as networks are key mechanisms of convening actors across public, private, and nonprofit sectors to design and implement public policies. Previous research focuses on the positive role of trust in building network structures in the context of social service delivery. But many policy networks can be adversarial, particularly those that operate in a regulatory context. We know little about the role of distrust in building network structures in this context. This study conceptualizes distrust as a distinct concept from the absence of trust, and examines why stakeholders stay connected with distrusted stakeholders in a regulatory policy network. Using a mixed-method analysis of a local hydraulic fracturing policy network in New York, we found that actors stay connected with stakeholders they distrust to perform information processing, bridging, and demarcating operations, which in turn create reciprocating, bridging and/or bonding structures. Our findings suggest three implications for public management research relevant to both regulatory and service networks: distrust can create network connectivity, connectivity can structure networks in particular ways, and brokers do not reduce transaction costs if they lack skills in principled engagement.
DISASTERS id:131
TI: Kinship, nomadism, and humanitarian aid among Somalis in Ethiopia ab: This paper draws on extended ethnographic and health policy research in eastern Ethiopia to reconsider kinship and nomadism among Somalis, as both of these cultural features transform in the contexts of recurrent humanitarian crises and episodic relief operations. The emergence and importance of new patterns of travel and migration among Somalis in Ethiopia reveal significant changes in the configurations and enactments of Somali kinship, on which many Somalis' mobility depends. Conversely, an analysis of Somalis' dynamic sub-clan groupings and geographically dispersed kinship networks also highlights emergent patterns of mobility and migration that enable access to training opportunities and employment with relief organisations, as well as to distributions of humanitarian aid. Based on these findings, this paper argues that kinship and nomadismboth long central to Somalis' identities in Ethiopiaremain interdependent, coevolved, and key to their resilience and livelihoods in the face of recurrent crises and intermittent humanitarian responses.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF DISASTER RISK REDUCTION id:40
TI: Language translation during disaster: A comparative analysis of five national approaches ab: Clear, timely and accurate information is recognised as strategically and operationally critical to disaster response effectiveness. Increasing cultural and linguistic diversity across the globe creates a demand for information to be available in multiple languages. This signifies a need for language translation to be a key element of disaster management. However, language translation is an underdeveloped tool in disaster management and has been a neglected topic in research. We analyse the disaster response approaches for five nations-Ireland, the UK, New Zealand, Japan and the USA-to determine the degree to which language translation is utilised. Taking the right to information as a starting point, we use a 4-A, rights-based analytic framework. Each approach is inspected for standards of Availability, Accessibility, Acceptability and Adaptability. The US has the strongest adherence to these standards while the other approaches are less developed. We suggest several principles for effective practice in providing language access services.
WORLD DEVELOPMENT id:123
TI: Large and artisanal scale mine development: The case for autonomous co-existence ab: This article contributes to the debate on conflicts between artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) - low-tech, labour-intensive mineral extraction and processing - and capital-intensive large-scale mineral extraction in developing countries. It critiques the ability of what is referred to here as a strategy of cohabitation, or the idea that those engaged in both branches of the mining sector can and should forge amicable working partnerships, to resolve and prevent conflicts resulting from those engaged in the former encroaching on to, and working mineral deposits found within, concessions demarcated to parties involved in the latter. The idea that multinational companies extracting and/or exploring for gold - the mineral at the heart of most of these conflicts - should "allow" artisanal and small-scale operators to work particular areas of their concessions and that both parties can coexist in harmony is extremely short-sighted, far-fetched and untenable as a development strategy. As is explained, from the prospecting through to the production phase, an exploration/mining concession can change ownership several times and the global market price of gold can fluctuate markedly. Both factors heavily influence a gold mine's strategy, including management's perception and handling of ASM. Given these uncertainties, it is recommended that host governments and donors encourage the autonomous coexistence of both parties, an approach which would yield maximum returns economically and developmentally. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:475
TI: Learning from Performance Information ab: Years of research on performance management has generally concluded that performance information is seldom used purposefully by public managers and that it does not improve performance as intended. More recently, both theoretical and empirical work have begun to focus on situations in which performance management may facilitate internal organizational learning. In this study, we focus on one key component in performance management systems, namely generation of performance information. Based on a Bayesian learning model, we argue that generation of performance information at the individual level may create performance improvements because both users and frontline workers may learn where to prioritize their efforts.To test the isolated effect of this key component of any performance management system, we use as-good-as-random variation in exposure of students to testing because of a technical breakdown in an IT system. We identify the effect of testing on student learning measured two years after the breakdown. Results show positive and statistically significant effects of about 0.1 standard deviations, which is comparable to much more expensive interventions, and effects tend to persist after four years. We find larger effects for students with low socioeconomic status but also that schools with many students from this group are more reluctant to measure their performance. Implications and limitations in terms of increasing the level of student testing are discussed.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE id:621
TI: Literacy and State-Society Interactions in Nineteenth-Century France ab: Modern states are distinguished by the breadth and depth of public regulation over private affairs. This aspect of state capacity and state power is predicated on frequent and dense encounters between the state and the population it seeks to control. We argue that literacy in the language of state administration facilitates state-society interaction by lowering the transaction costs of those encounters. We support this claim with evidence drawing upon detailed historical data from nineteenth-century France during a crucial period of state and nation building. Focusing on the specific domain of French marriage regulations, we find that increasing literacy predicts greater popular involvement with local authorities across French regions over time. These results demonstrate that literacy plays an important role in political development not solely by enhancing loyalty to the state, as the literature has recognized, but also by lowering linguistic and human capital barriers to state-society interaction.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:731
TI: Live democracy and its tensions: making sense of livestreaming in the 15M and Occupy ab: Drawing on one hundred interviews with activists, this article examines the relationship between livestreaming and the democratic cultures of the 15M and Occupy movements. The article investigates how the technical affordances of livestreaming - immediacy, rawness, liveness and embedded/embodied perspective - connect with the movements' understandings of how democracy should be practiced, specifically in terms of political equality, participation and transparency. Our findings identify four sources of tension in the relationship between livestreaming and democratic cultures. Firstly, the use of livestreaming was associated with a radical interpretation of transparency as near-total visibility, which gave rise to tensions around self-surveillance. Secondly, the information overload created through the practice of radical transparency was in tension with the movement's accountability processes. Thirdly, live streamers attempted to offer an unvarnished access to truth by providing unedited and raw video from the streets. Yet their embodied and subjective first-person perspective was associated with tensions around their power to shape the broadcast. Finally, while livestreaming was used to facilitate equal participation in the movement, participation through the livestream took the meaning of equal access to the experience of the squares, rather than equal power in the decision-making process. Our research reveals that despite the national particularities of the contexts in which they arose, Occupy and the 15M were extremely similar in their interpretations and practices of livestreaming and democracy.
SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY id:780
TI: Lobbying Conflict, Competition, and Working in Coalitions ab: ObjectiveWe examine the factors that affect interest group decisions to join coalitions rather than go it alone. Among the factors we consider are organization type, level of conflict, level of competition, and relative influence. MethodWe conduct a mail survey of lobbyists in five American states to determine the likelihood of interests working in coalitions. ResultsOur findings indicate that group type has little impact on group decisions to join coalitions. Advantaged (e.g., resource-rich business organizations) and disadvantaged (e.g., underfunded charity and citizen groups) groups behave similarly when it comes to working with others, a finding that is important in debates over whether some interests are over- or underrepresented in the pressure system. We also find that conflict and competition affect groups' propensity to work with other groups, and that contextual factors, including partisan congruence and lobbying laws, influence the extent to which groups work with other groups. ConclusionOur findings contribute to the ongoing scholarly debate about the conditions under which interest groups bear the costs of lobbying with others.
SCIENCE AS CULTURE id:302
TI: Localizing Detroit's Food System: Boundary-Work and the Politics of Experiential Expertise ab: Recently, different expert actors have attempted to localize Detroit's food system to bring about greater justice citywide. At first, 'professional experts' dominated these efforts, claiming authority in the food system due to their knowledge based in qualified training and applied work experience. Yet a rival group of 'experiential experts' soon rose up to assert their power, arguing they and their unique race and place-based know-how merited greater influence. Within just a few years, experiential experts successfully replaced professional ones in commanding much area food localization. I show that experiential experts achieved this power largely through strategic boundary-work, including expulsion, expansion, and protection of autonomy. Nonetheless, some Detroiters and professional experts themselves questioned experiential experts' legitimacy in removing professional experts from the food system altogether. I thus introduce a fourth form of boundary-work that experiential experts deployed to maintain their clout, what I term 'accommodation'. Accommodation connotes instances of strategic inclusion where an expert authority facilitates rivals in sharing some influence based on distinct conditions that leave dominant epistemic arrangements generally intact. This occurred in Detroit as experiential experts accommodated professional ones in exercising some food systems power provided they better deploy their own race and place-based knowledge. Such actions helped quell public concern while also protecting experiential experts' rising authority. Accommodation is useful for understanding cases in which diverse types of experts work together despite that single knowledge-forms guide their activities overall. Further research into accommodation could aid in identifying whether or not diverse forms of knowledge are together influencing decision-making around a range of cases, or if single forms of expertise remain dominant despite the appearance that democratization is taking place.
RESEARCH POLICY id:274
TI: Lost in translation: How legacy limits the OECD in promoting new policy mixes for sustainability transitions ab: The OECD has a strong legacy in shaping innovation policy mixes. The purpose of this paper is therefore to provide a better understanding of how the OECD is currently shaping new policy mixes for sustainability transitions. It provides a detailed account of the uptake of system innovation thinking, a key concept in transition studies, at the OECD. It takes an ethnographic approach combining desk research with participant observation, allowing to study 'discourse in the making'. The paper traces the different translation and inscription strategies pursued. It finds that despite purposeful efforts, system innovation has not been institutionalised in the core activities of the organisation, thus can be considered 'lost in translation'. It concludes that legacy effects created a number of sticking points that can be categorised under three main categories: (1) institutional, arising from previous ways of working; (2) cognitive, arising from ways of framing and knowing and (3) political, arising from pre-existing power relations. Suggestions are made for both innovation policy academics and practitioners interested in promoting a transformative innovation agenda.
RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS id:590
TI: MAKING THE FREE MARKET MORAL: RONALD REAGAN'S COVENANTAL ECONOMY ab: In this article, I argue for the importance of investigating covenantal rhetoric as a multipronged rhetorical device that can be used by political leaders to moralize discourse and strategically manage competing covenantal tensions in response to a particular social, economic, and/or political exigence. Specifically, it explores how President Ronald Reagan drew on the Puritan covenantal framework to usher in an era of free-market economics and transform it from a chaotic and self-interested system into a covenantal economy in which people could fulfill their moral obligations to self, God, and others. Using covenantal form, Reagan eased the tensions between freedom and order, grace and works, and individuality and community in a way that provided a moral foundation for his tax and welfare policies and a moral safety net for all who had faith in God's grace. Within Reagan's covenantal economy, trickle-down economics was framed as both an economically feasible and morally commendable process in which entrepreneurs and welfare recipients could join together in a "circle of prosperity" without government interference or the obligation to provide direct material assistance to others.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE id:72
TI: Making Bureaucracy Work: Patronage Networks, Performance Incentives, and Economic Development in China ab: Patron-client networks are widely found in governments of transitional societies and are often seen as an impediment to effective governance. This article advances an alternative view that emphasizes their enabling effects. I argue that patron-client relations can be used to improve government performance by resolving principal-agent problems within political hierarchies. I substantiate this claim by examining how patronage networks shape economic performance of local governments in China. Using an original city-level panel data set between 2000 and 2011, and a new method that identifies patronage ties based on past promotions, I show that city leaders with informal ties to the incumbent provincial leaders deliver significantly faster economic growth than those without. I conduct additional analyses to rule out several important alternative explanations and provide evidence on the incentive-enhancing mechanism. These findings highlight the importance of informal institutions for bureaucratic management and authoritarian governance.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:46
TI: Management Innovation and Policy Diffusion through Leadership Transfer Networks: An Agent Network Diffusion Model ab: Although scholars of policy diffusion have explored the effects of learning, competition, and geographic proximity in the diffusion process, extant theories have not paid enough attention to the roles of the change agents. This study proposes an Agent Network Diffusion (AND) model that explicitly models how leadership transfer networks, a complex system of public managers' career paths, could potentially channel the diffusion of performance innovations. With longitudinal data on government leaders and energy governance performance in Chinese provinces, we empirically test the Portable Innovation Hypotheses using Spatial Autoregressive Models with Temporal Lags. The results demonstrate that leadership transfer networks channel performance innovation between locations where managers served/serve, especially when the institutional environments are similar between the locations. This study contributes to the literature on policy diffusion, management performance, and policy networks by proposing and testing a network-based explanation for policy diffusion with novel empirical methods.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:85
TI: Managing Goal Conflict in Public Service Delivery Networks: Does Accountability Move Up and Down, or Side to Side? ab: Goal conflict is one of the greatest challenges to effective public service delivery networks. Scholars offer management prescriptions, but to what extent can a diverse set of network actors be managed? Data from a comparative case study approach suggest that informal accountability forces play a greater role than formal authority in preventing and mitigating goal conflict. Goal conflict appears to be weakest when network administrative organizations are responsible for both vertical network management and direct service delivery. In terms of reducing goal conflict, networks that manage both vertically and horizontally may be best equipped to achieve goal congruence.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:579
TI: Managing Performance and Strategy: Managerial Practices in German Local Governments ab: By analyzing how public administrations in a rule-of-law oriented, continental European federal government system adopted managerial practices on a voluntary basis, this article contributes to the knowledge about actual managerial practices in public administration. Its main research question is about what local governments in Germany do when they claim to have implemented managerial practices. For ten municipalities which have been identified as good practices, actual managerial practices are characterized and analyzed based on a model using established theoretical concepts of performance management and strategic management. Data stem from systematic reviews of strategy documents and budget plans as well as additional interviews. It can be shown that these municipalities have implemented managerial practices which generally follow the ideas of popular German reform blueprints and comply with general ideas of public administration research. Results suggest an inherent connection between performance management and strategic management whereas actual practices, even between the ten cases under review, differ significantly. The conclusion argues that more qualitative research about managerial practices could substantially enrich public scholars' perspective on theoretical concepts such as performance management and strategic management and on the preconditions under which these concepts could create benefits for the public.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:741
TI: Mapping Interfacial Regimes of Control: Palantir's ICM in America's Post-9/11 Security Technology Infrastructures ab: Recent technological advancements in surveillance and data analysis software have drastically transformed how the United States manages its immigration and national security systems. In particular, an increased emphasis on information sharing and predictive threat modeling following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, has prompted agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security to acquire powerful data analysis software from private sector vendors, including those in Silicon Valley. However, the impacts of these private sector technologies, especially in the context of privacy rights and civil liberties, are not yet fully understood. This article interrogates those potential impacts, particularly on the lives of immigrants, by analyzing the relational database system Investigative Case Management (ICM), which is used extensively by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to track, manage, and enforce federal immigration policy. As a theoretical framework, we use Benjamin Bratton's concept of the "interfacial regime," or the layered assemblages of interfaces that exist in modern networked ICT infrastructures. By conducting a document analysis, we attempt to visually situate ICM within the federal government's larger interfacial regime that is composed by various intertwined databases both within and outside the government's realm of management. Furthermore, we question and critique the role ICM plays in surveilling and governing the lives of immigrants and citizens alike.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:10
TI: Masspersonal communication: A model bridging the mass-interpersonal divide ab: Theoretical discussions about the false dichotomy between interpersonal and mass communication scholarship continue while the emergence of powerful and flexible digital communication tools have made the old distinctions more permeable than ever. Individuals are using communication technologies in ways that expand the intersection of interpersonal communication and mass communication, calling for new frameworks. We introduce masspersonal communication as a concept at the intersections of mass and interpersonal communication, with examples from older and newer communication technologies and practices. The masspersonal communication model is introduced incorporating two dimensionsperceived message accessibility and message personalizationthat link mass communication and interpersonal communication and redefine each independent of channel.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY id:35
TI: Material Signals: A Historical Sociology of High-Frequency Trading ab: Drawing on interviews with 194 market participants (including 54 practitioners of high-frequency trading or HFT), this article first identifies the main classes of signals (patterns of data) that influence how HFT algorithms buy and sell shares and interact with each other. Second, it investigates historically the processes that have led to three of the most important categories of these signals, finding that they arise from three features of U.S. share trading that are the result of episodes of meso-level conflict. Third, the article demonstrates the contingency of these features by briefly comparing HFT in share trading to HFT in futures, Treasurys, and foreign exchange. The article thus argues that how HFT algorithms act and interact is a specific, contingent product not just of the current but also of the past interaction of people, organizations, algorithms, and machines.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:534
TI: Materializations through political work ab: This article investigates the opposition between politics and work in common political understandings by engaging with the materiality of politics in parliaments. It demonstrates the need for current research on politics to deal with problems similar to those faced by early laboratory studies investigating scientific practice. At the same time, the paper highlights a crucial difference between research on science and research on politics: The common understanding of politics appears to face an influential double bind, with truthful rationality on one side and democratic legitimacy on the other. In an effort to overcome this double bind, political work is introduced as a form of work that deals with transitions between matters of fact and matters of concern by materializing forceful ideas. Ethnographic research on four parliamentary levels in Germany retraces how political actors struggle to produce these forceful ideas, which have the ability to assemble groups and move people. By dealing with the plethora of vastly diverse matters of concern populating parliaments, parliamentary actors resort to rapid shifts between different work modes, namely the political game, the settling of issues, and political composition. Each of these modes engages differently with the main resources - the law, the positions of political opponents, scientific facts and narrations - to materialize political ideas and thus aims to shift the composition of reality.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE id:200
TI: Measuring and Explaining Political Sophistication through Textual Complexity ab: Political scientists lack domain-specific measures for the purpose of measuring the sophistication of political communication. We systematically review the shortcomings of existing approaches, before developing a new and better method along with software tools to apply it. We use crowdsourcing to perform thousands of pairwise comparisons of text snippets and incorporate these results into a statistical model of sophistication. This includes previously excluded features such as parts of speech and a measure of word rarity derived from dynamic term frequencies in the Google Books data set. Our technique not only shows which features are appropriate to the political domain and how, but also provides a measure easily applied and rescaled to political texts in a way that facilitates probabilistic comparisons. We reanalyze the State of the Union corpus to demonstrate how conclusions differ when using our improved approach, including the ability to compare complexity as a function of covariates.
JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION id:90
TI: Media as Data Extraction: Towards a New Map of a Transformed Communications Field ab: The communications field must challenge traditional understandings of media in the face of a transformation in the dynamics of capitalism that prioritizes the generation of value from data based on continuous surveillance. New advertising and data-processing developments mean that while the term media may continue to attach to the distribution of narratives, researchers must now conceive it as the convergence of message-circulation technologies with data-extraction-and-analysis technologies that are linked to everyday objects increasingly typical of our new mobile personalization era. In fact, nothing less than a radical revision of the boundaries of the communications field is required to adequately address the fundamentally altered social and economic order emerging from this ferment in the field of everyday life itself.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:417
TI: Meshes of Surveillance, Prediction, and Infrastructure: On the Cultural and Commercial Consequences of Digital Platforms ab: Digital platforms like Spotify, Netflix, and YouTube rely on mass data collection, algorithmic forms of prediction, and the development of closed digital systems. Seemingly technical and trivial, such operational and infrastructural features have both commercial and cultural consequences in need of attention. As with any other kinds of infrastructure, the surveillance practices and digital ecosystems that are now installed and solidified will have long-term effects and will be difficult to challenge. We suggest that the cultural and commercial ramifications of such datafied infrastructural developments can be unpacked by analyzing digital platforms-in this case Netflix-as surveillance-based, predictive infrastructures. Digital platforms fortify their market positions by transitioning surveillance-based assets of audience metrics into infrastructural and informational assets that set conditions for other actors and approaches at work in the domain of cultural production. We identify the central forces at play in these developments: digital platforms critically depend on proprietary surveillance data from large user bases and engage in data-structuring practices (Flyverbom and Murray 2018) that allow for predictive analytics to be a core component of their operations. Also, digital platforms engage in infrastructural development, such as Netflix's decentralized system of video storage and content delivery, Open Connect. These meshes of user surveillance, predictive analytics, and infrastructural developments have ramifications beyond individual platforms and shape cultural production in extensive and increasingly problematic ways.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:354
TI: Metadata accounts: Achieving data and evidence in scientific research ab: 'Metadata' has received a fraction of the attention that 'data' has received in sociological studies of scientific research. A neglect of 'metadata' reduces the attention on a number of critical aspects of scientific work processes, including documentary work, accountability relations, and collaboration routines. Metadata processes and products are essential components of the work needed to practically accomplish day-to-day scientific research tasks, and are central to ensuring that research findings and products meet externally driven standards or requirements. This article is an attempt to open up the discussion on and conceptualization of metadata within the sociology of science and the sociology of data. It presents ethnographic research of metadata creation within everyday scientific practice, focusing on how researchers document, describe, annotate, organize and manage their data, both for their own use and the use of researchers outside of their project. In particular, this article argues that the role and significance of metadata within scientific research contexts are intimately tied to the nature of evidence and accountability within particular social situations. Studying metadata can (1) provide insight into the production of evidence, that is, how something we might call 'data' becomes able to serve an evidentiary role, and (2) provide a mechanism for revealing what people in research contexts are held accountable for, and what they achieve accountability with.
SCIENCE AS CULTURE id:610
TI: Metrics of Inequality: The Concentration of Resources in the US Biomedical Elite ab: Academic scientists and research institutes are increasingly being evaluated using digital metrics, from bibliometrics to patent counts. These metrics are often framed, by science policy analysts, economists of science as well as funding agencies, as objective and universal proxies for scientific worth, potential, and productivity. In biomedical science, where there is stiff competition for grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), metrics are sold as a less arbitrary way to allocate funds, yet the funding context in which metrics are applied is not critically examined. Success by the metrics is in fact inextricably linked to the distribution of NIH funds, and from the 1980s to the 2000s, NIH funding has been marked by high inequality (elite investigators and institutes get the lion's share of resources) and decreased mobility (those who start at the bottom are less likely to rise to the upper ranks). Elite investigators and institutes currently produce the bulk of prestigious publications, citations, and patents that commonly used metrics valorise. Metrics-based evaluation therefore reproduces, and potentially amplifies, existing inequalities in academic science and rich-get-richer effects.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:617
TI: Microeconomic forecasting: Constructing commensurable futures of educational reforms ab: According to economists from the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis, the introduction of performance pay for primary and secondary school teachers would lead to an increase in Dutch GDP of one-and-a-half percent in 2070. A new epistemic practice of microeconomic forecasting undergirded this attempt to make the distant future part of the political present. Taking the construction of the economic growth potential of performance pay as a starting point, this article analyzes how microeconomic forecasting emerged in one of the world's oldest forecasting bureaus - and to what consequences. First, it highlights the institutional preconditions for this turn to micro' in an institution that had pioneered in the field of macroeconomic forecasting. Second, the article analyzes microeconomic forecasting as a distinct epistemic practice that brings different forms of economic expertise together to make the future of educational reforms commensurable. Finally, it analyzes the political consequences of this new epistemic practice in the sense that it not only enables but simultaneously limits the provision of policy-relevant evidence. Beyond the specificities of the case, the article contributes to the sociological study of economic policy devices against the background of a predominant market bias in the STS research on economics.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE id:750
TI: Misgovernance and Human Rights: The Case of Illegal Detention without Intent ab: Existing explanations of human rights abuses emphasize a strategic logic of repression. Yet certain classes of abuses may arise absent the intent to repress because of the misaligned bureaucratic incentives of state agents. To separate accounts of strategic repression from bureaucratic incentives, we study the responses of state agents working within the Haitian criminal justice system to a randomized, free legal assistance intervention for detainees held in illegal pretrial detention. Legal assistance addresses moral hazard problems of the bureaucrats responsible for processing cases. We demonstrate that legal assistance accelerates case advancement and liberation, in line with the view that large-scale human rights abuses in the justice system can result from poor governance and not repressive intent.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:197
TI: Mix and Match: How Contractual and Relational Conditions Are Combined in Successful Public-Private Partnerships ab: In explaining public-private partnership (PPP) performance, both contractual and relational conditions play a role. Research has shown that these conditions may complement each other in successful PPPs. However, which specific combinations of conditions and how these combinations may influence PPP performance remains unclear. Building on the ideas of neo-institutional economics, principal-agent theory, relational contracting, and governance theories, this article explores the mix and match of contractual aspects and relational characteristics in successful PPP projects. A fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) of 25 PPP projects in the Netherlands and Flanders (Belgium) was used to test how contractual factors, such as the use of sanctions and risk allocation, and relational conditions, such as trust and conflict management, jointly shape the performance of PPPs. The results show three different combinations of conditions that match with high performing PPPs. These configurations often consist of a mix of contractual and relational conditions, which confirms our initial expectation that these factors complement each other, but a combination of only relational conditions is also present.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:616
TI: Model migration and rough edges: British actuaries and the ontologies of modelling ab: The existing literature on modelling provides two main ways of viewing model migration: a modular view, which seeks to decompose models in their constitutive elements, and thus provides a view on what it is that migrates; and a practice-based view, which focuses on modelling as an activity, and understands a model as intricately entangled with its context of use. This article brings together these two sensitivities by focusing on ontologies of modelling. The paper presents a case study of the appropriation of modern finance theory's 'no-arbitrage' models by British actuaries - a process that gradually unfolded at around the turn of the century and led to significant friction within the UK's insurance industry. We can distinguish two main modelling ontologies: a 'risk-neutral ontology', which underpins no-arbitrage models and holds that the value of financial instruments is determined by 'arbitrage'; and, a 'real-world ontology', which assumes that the economic world consists of real probabilities that may be approximated through a combination of archival-statistical methods and expert judgment. The appropriation of the risk-neutral modelling ontology was made possible by the declining legitimacy of actuarial expertise as 'financial stewards' of life insurance companies. The risk-neutral modelling ontology provided an 'objective' alternative to the traditional actuarial models, which explicitly required actuaries to make 'prudent' judgments. Despite the fact that the no-arbitrage modelling was considered an 'objective' affair, the valuation models that insurers use today are strongly shaped by political compromises, a result of the 'rough edges' of models.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:666
TI: Money is data - the platformization of financial transactions ab: Financial transactions are part of everyday life, yet banking has largely withstood the digital transformation within most European countries. Recently, there have been initiatives that merge the digital and the financial sphere by integrating the transactions that run through established financial infrastructures into digital platforms. Large data-driven companies hereby seek access to financial transactions and try to embed payments within their platforms. This contribution discusses differing models of how tech-driven companies gain access to financial infrastructures, and how recently introduced policies engender these processes. Within Europe and the United Kingdom, banks that operate through financial infrastructures and hold most transactional data are now required by regulators to provide access to their customers' accounts. The platformization of financial transactions is thus not purely a technical question, but it also is a remarkable example of how politically enforced changes in the materiality of data lead to reconfigurations with broader economic and social consequences. It results in the transformation of money into a form of (transactional) data and shows how the value of money and data depends on the technological underpinnings that determine the capability of their circulation. In order to understand their valuation, we need to take the material assemblages that enable their distribution into account.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:648
TI: Monitoring Mogadishu ab: Technology-based surveillance practices have changed the modes of policing found in the global North but have yet to influence police-citizen engagement in Southern cities such as Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. Based on the role played by monitoring in Mogadishu's formal security plan and in an informal neighbourhood watch scheme in Waberi district, this article uses a policyoriented approach to generate insight into surveillance and policing in a fragile and seemingly dysfunctional environment. It shows that while watching is an integral aspect of everyday life, sophisticated technologies capable of digitally capturing real-time events play no part in crime reporting or in the monitoring of terrorist threats, and information is delivered by using basic and inclusive methods such as word of mouth, rather than by mobile telephones or social media. Indeed, the availability of technologies such as CCTV has actually resulted in the reproduction and reinforcement of older models of policing; even when the need to monitor security threats encourages residents to engage with the task of policing, their responses reflect local preferences and legacy issues dating from the 1970s and 2000s. In other words, policing practice has not been reconfigured. In Mogadishu, as in most of the world, the policing task is shaped as much by residents' expectations as by the technologies available.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:196
TI: Moral Panics and Punctuated Equilibrium in Public Policy: An Analysis of the Criminal Justice Policy Agenda in Britain ab: How and when issues are elevated onto the political agenda is a perennial question in the study of public policy. This article considers how moral panics contribute to punctuated equilibrium in public policy by drawing together broader societal anxieties or fears and thereby precipitating or accelerating changes in the dominant set of issue frames. In so doing they create opportunities for policy entrepreneurs to disrupt the existing policy consensus. In a test of this theory, we assess the factors behind the rise of crime on the policy agenda in Britain between 1960 and 2010. We adopt an integrative mixed-methods approach, drawing upon a combination of qualitative and quantitative data. This enables us to analyze the rise of crime as a policy problem, the breakdown of the political-institutional consensus on crime, the moral panic that followed the murder of the toddler James Bulger in 1993, the emergence of new issue frames around crime and social/moral decay more broadly, and how-in combination-these contributed to an escalation of political rhetoric and action on crime, led by policy entrepreneurs in the Labour and Conservative parties.
COMPUTER SUPPORTED COOPERATIVE WORK-THE JOURNAL OF COLLABORATIVE COMPUTING AND WORK PRACTICES id:624
TI: Moral and Affective Differences in US Immigration Policy Debate on Twitter ab: Understanding ideological conflict has been a topic of interest in CSCW, for example in Value Sensitive Design research. More specifically, understanding ideological conflict is important for studying social media platforms like Twitter, which provide the ability for people to freely express their thoughts and opinions on contentious political events. In this work, we examine Twitter data to understand the moral, affective, and cognitive differences in language use between two opposing sides of the political debate over immigration related issues in the United States in the year since the 2016 presidential election. In total, we analyzed and compared the language of 45,045 pro-immigration tweets and 11,213 anti-immigration tweets spread across this period. Based on Moral Foundations Theory used to understand ideological conflict, we found pro-immigration tweets to contain more language associated with moral foundations of harm, fairness, and loyalty. Anti-immigration tweets contained more language associated with moral foundations of authority, more words associated with cognitive rigidity and more 3rd person pronouns and negative emotion. We discuss the implications of our research for political communication over social media, and for incorporating Moral Foundations Theory into other CSCW research. We discuss the potential application of this theory for Value Sensitive Design research.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW id:50
TI: More than Pathological Formalization: Understanding Organizational Structure and Red Tape ab: Most research has conceptualized red tape as being a pathological subset of organizational formalization. This article argues that focusing on a single dimension of organizational structure as a red tape driver is unrealistically narrow. Specifically, the article advances hypotheses as to how organizational centralization and hierarchy affect perceived red tape, in addition to formalization. This reasoning is tested using survey data from employees of three local government organizations in the southeastern United States. All three hypotheses are supported: higher levels of organizational formalization, centralization, and hierarchy are associated with more red tape. Open-ended comments also indicate that red tape is not solely perceived as related to formalization. The findings imply that red tape is a multifaceted perception of organizational structure rather than perceived pathological formalization.
WORLD POLITICS id:427
TI: Naming and Praising in Humanitarian Norm Development ab: To examine the early development of humanitarian norm cascades, the author focuses on the processes that led to the adoption of the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty and the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions. Even though major military powers like the United States, Russia, and China opposed these initiatives, the latter set in motion quick norm cascades that brought about international legal norms stigmatizing land mines and cluster munitions. It is conventionally asserted that international norms emerge either due to great power backing or despite great power opposition, but the author argues that new norms can also take off because of great power opposition. When ngos and leading states actively foster normative change, a particular type of norm cascade is engineered-one generated by different mechanisms and starting earlier than postulated in the literature. Early norm cascading is driven not by emulation of peers and ngo naming and shaming of laggard states, but rather by leadership aspirations and naming and praising.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:96
TI: Narrative Strategies in the Gun Policy Debate: Exploring Proximity and Social Construction ab: While much scholarship has explored the framing of gun policy, the bulk of that work has focused on general themes or arguments made in support or opposition to gun control. This study offers a more nuanced examination of the framing in the gun policy debate, utilizing the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to identify rhetorical and political strategies of gun control and gun rights organizations. Drawing on a data set of more than 58,000 Facebook posts by 15 gun policy organizations, I examine how groups portray the victims of gun violence, particularly with respect to the race and age of victims. I also examine the types of gun violence that groups emphasize on social media. The findings suggest that gun control organizations seek to broaden the scope of debate by focusing on child victims and on mass shootings. Gun rights organizations pursue a similar strategy, but with a focus on self-defense shootings. Despite the fact that gun violence primarily affects minorities, both types of organizations rarely mentioned race. I attribute this to groups' efforts to emphasize proximate and positively constructed characters. This research suggests that both types of organizations systematically distort the nature of the gun policy problem.
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY id:499
TI: Neither a Bazaar nor a cathedral: The interplay between structure and agency in Wikipedia's role system ab: Roles provide a key coordination mechanism in peer-production. Whereas one stream in the literature has focused on the structural responsibilities associated with roles, another has stressed the emergent nature of work. To date, these streams have proceeded largely in parallel. In seeking to enhance our understanding of the tension between structure and agency in peer-production, we investigated the interplay between structural and emergent roles. Our study explored the breadth of structural roles in Wikipedia (English version) and their linkage to various forms of activities. Our analyses show that despite the latitude in selecting their mode of participation, participants' structural and emergent roles are tightly coupled. Our discussion highlights that: (a) participants often stay close to the "production ground floor" despite the assignment into structural roles; and (b) there are typical modifications in activity patterns associated with role-assignment, namely: functional specialization, multispecialization, defunctionalization, changes in communication patterns, management of identity, and role definition. We contribute to theory of coordination and roles, as well as provide some practical implications.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:386
TI: New Public Governance in the Baltic States: Flexible Administration and Rule Bending ab: The New Public Governance approach advocates a more flexible and participatory public administration as means to higher efficiency and increased legitimacy. Increasing flexibility and thereby public employees' discretion, however, may pose a risk to equality and impartiality, core values in democratic and rule-of-law societies. Using a survey among Baltic public employees, this article explores this risk. We ask whether public employees' preferences for flexible rule application go hand in hand with acceptance of bending the rules, even if it means a breach of impartiality. We find that this is the case. We also find that contrary to what the New Public Governance approach expects, neither citizen participation nor generalized trust works as a control on rule bending. On a positive note, however, we find that control mechanisms associated with Weberian Public Administration lessen acceptance for bending the rules.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:47
TI: News media repertoires and strategic narrative reception: A paradox of dis/belief in authoritarian Russia ab: With Internet access, citizens in non-democracies are often able to diversify their news media repertoires despite government-imposed restrictions on media freedom. The extent to which they do so depends on motivations and habits of news consumption. This article presents a qualitative study of the motivations and habits underlying news media repertoires among a group of digitally connected university students in authoritarian Russia. Interviews reveal awareness and dissatisfaction vis-a-vis the propagandistic' nature of state-controlled news content, resulting in a preference for using multiple different sources - including foreign websites and non-official' citizen accounts - to build a personal understanding of what is really' going on. The article then examines how the students make sense of conflicting narratives about international affairs which they encounter in state and non-state sources. Paradoxically, low reported consumption of distrusted, propagandistic' state television is often accompanied by reproduction of the overarching strategic narrative which state television conveys.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE id:22
TI: No Need to Watch: How the Effects of Partisan Media Can Spread via Interpersonal Discussions ab: To what extent do partisan media sources shape public opinion? On its face, it would appear that the impact of partisan media is limited, given that it attracts a relatively small audience. We argue, however, that its influence may extend beyond its direct audience via a two-step communication flow. Specifically, those who watch and are impacted by partisan media outlets talk to and persuade others who did not watch. We present experimental results that demonstrate this process. We therefore show that previous studies may have significantly underestimated the effect of these outlets. We also illustrate that how the two-step communication flow works is contingent upon the precise composition of the discussion group (e.g., is it consistent of all fellow partisans or a mix of partisans?). We conclude by highlighting what our results imply about the study of media, preference formation, and partisan polarization.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:49
TI: Non-stick science: Sixty years of research and (in)action on fluorinated compounds ab: Understandings of environmental governance both assume and challenge the relationship between expert knowledge and corresponding action. We explore this interplay by examining the context of knowledge production pertaining to a contested class of chemicals. Per-and polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFASs) are widely used industrial compounds containing chemical chains of carbon and fluorine that are persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic. Although industry and regulatory scientists have studied the exposure and toxicity concerns of these compounds for decades, and several contaminated communities have documented health concerns as a result of their high levels of exposure, PFAS use remains ubiquitous in a large range of consumer and industrial products. Despite this significant history of industry knowledge production documenting exposure and toxicity concerns, the regulatory approach to PFASs has been limited. This is largely due to a regulatory framework that privileges industry incentives for rapid market entry and trade secret protection over substantive public health protection, creating areas of unseen science, research that is conducted but never shared outside of institutional boundaries. In particular, the risks of PFASs have been both structurally hidden and unexamined by existing regulatory and industry practice. This reveals the uneven pathways that construct issues of social and scientific concern.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:261
TI: Nonprofit Management, Public Administration, and Public Policy: Separate, Subset, or Intersectional Domains of Inquiry?(1) ab: We view public administration, public policy, and nonprofit management as intersectional domains of inquiry and argue that advances in each of these domains requires us to bring knowledge from other domains. Contemporary observers also recognize that many nonprofit organizations go beyond a mere service delivery role and play a central role in policy development, funding, and program administration. Through this special issue, we bring together scholars who are working at the intersection of public administration, public policy and nonprofit management, defining this intersection in a broad and inclusive manner. In addition to encouraging explicit connections across public policy, public administration, and nonprofit management, we highlight understudied aspects of work at this intersection. We believe that conducting research across disciplines and combining the "firepower" of an intersectional perspective is essential for addressing big questions. The special issue contributors have engaged these intersectional themes with verve and imagination. After providing an overview of the relationship between nonprofit management, public administration, and public policy drawing upon the conference hosted at The George Washington University, we briefly characterize individual contributions to the special issue.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:64
TI: Numbers over Narratives? How Government Message Strategies Affect Citizens' Attitudes ab: This article applies different marketing concepts to released government information and analyzes the effect on citizens' attitudes. It looks at how the presentation of a message affects citizens' attitudes when the content remains the same. It investigates the effects of an informational strategy (presenting facts and figures) and a transformational strategy (adding narratives to the figures to appeal to emotions of citizens). Based on theories about information process and framing, different responses are expected from engaged and unengaged citizens. It finds that unengaged citizens respond more favorably when information is couched in a transformational message strategy. Engaged citizens have an opposite response and are better served with an informational strategy. The article concludes that to reach the broader group of unengaged citizens, just disclosing information is insufficient; information needs to be embedded in a meaningful narrative.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE id:41
TI: Partisan Elites as Culprits? How Party Cues Shape Partisan Perceptual Gaps ab: Partisanship often colors how citizens perceive real-world conditions. For example, an oft-documented finding is that citizens tend to view the state of the national economy more positively if their party holds office. These partisan perceptual gaps are usually taken as a result of citizens' own motivated reasoning to defend their party identity. However, little is known about the extent to which perceptual gaps are shaped by one of the most important forces in politics: partisan elites. With two studies focusing on perceptions of the economya quasi-experimental panel study and a randomized experimentwe show how partisan perceptual differences are substantially affected by messages coming from party elites. These findings imply that partisan elites are more influential on, and more responsible for, partisan perceptual differences than previous studies have revealed.
COMPUTER SUPPORTED COOPERATIVE WORK-THE JOURNAL OF COLLABORATIVE COMPUTING id:269
TI: Of Embodied Action and Sensors: Knowledge and Expertise Sharing in Industrial Set-Up ab: Knowledge and expertise sharing has long been an important theme in CSCW and, importantly, one that has frequently challenged a prevailing view concerning knowledge management. This critique focused, initially, on the practical problems associated with issues of Organisational Memory (OM), and in particular the difficulties inherent in an oversimplified 'repository' model. Attention then turned to issues of contextuality and communication for expertise sharing, drawing on concepts such as communities of practice and social capital to understand, again, the sharing of knowledge and expertise in practice. Here, we report on how particular kinds of 'embodied action' can be identified in relation to the potential of cyber-physical infrastructures for knowledge sharing in an industrial context. We argue that, in a complex industrial domain, both the recording of physical movement - 'showing' - and the representation of local knowledge - 'telling' - are potentially relevant. Our proposal is that the evolution of cyber-physical infrastructures now offers a way of changing some early assumptions about how knowledge might be captured and displayed. We argue that we are entering a third generation of knowledge and expertise sharing research, where the use of augmented reality (AR) and sensor technology will result in significant new methodological innovations, including the capture and sharing of knowledge, embedded in embodied action.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:691
TI: Off the charts: user engagement enhancers in election infographics ab: In recent years, political discourse in digital spheres has seen a rise in the use of infographics. The paper addresses an unexplored question about this phenomenon: which characteristics are associated with higher levels of ostensive user engagement with political infographics in social media? We conceptualize ostensive user engagement as the outward-facing metrics afforded by a platform (e.g., like, share, and comment count) that serve both as means for self-presentation and shape the informational environment that others are exposed to. A corpus comprised of all infographics posted on Facebook by the four leading candidates in the 2016 US presidential campaign (N = 252) was coded for cognitive, behavioral, and emotional characteristics. We found that two of the cognitively oriented dimensions enhanced engagement, while behavioral cues (calls to action) were, surprisingly, negatively linked. The inclusion of emotions did not show an overall association; however, a deeper look revealed a candidate-specific effect: anger was associated with greater engagement on Trump's infographics, and similarly, pleasure on Sanders'. In conclusion, we discuss the implications of our findings for understanding the informational environment shaped by engagement with infographics in light of the two seemingly opposing perceptions of internal and external authenticity.
WORLD DEVELOPMENT id:605
TI: Oiling the bureaucracy? political spending, bureaucrats and the resource curse ab: What role do bureaucrats play in the development of the resource curse in countries that have recently discovered oil? Much of the resource curse literature argues that political leaders spend natural resource revenue in ways that entrench their political power but undermine longer-term economic development. This literature has largely overlooked the role of bureaucrats - those responsible for the day-to-day operations of the state. Bureaucrats may support or constrain political spending in ways that minimize the resource curse. Using results of a survey experiment with over 3000 government employees in Ghana and Uganda, two countries with recent oil and gas discoveries, we find that bureaucrats treated with information on oil revenue are more likely to disapprove of spending practices that benefit political supporters. The results also suggest that material motivations may be at play: bureaucrats in Uganda who are secure in their jobs and outside of government patronage networks are most likely to oppose the political use of oil revenue. These findings challenge unitary state assumptions underlying much of the resource curse literature, especially for new oil producers. They also suggest that policymakers ought to engage civil servants in efforts to avoid or curtail the resource curse. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:694
TI: On multiple agencies: when do things matter? ab: The late twentieth century sociology began to recognise the performative role of technological artefacts in human lives. These objects enact their non-human agency by actions that human users cannot completely control. This paper critically assesses existing approaches that investigate the relation of human and non-human agencies (actor-network theory, the ventriloqual perspective on communication, contemporary affordance theory). The main focus of this article is the challenge of describing the performative influence of routine and invisible objects. By analysing existing approaches that employ the concepts of inscriptions and attachments, the paper argues that the ventriloqual perspective on communication is human-centered because it assesses the relevance of an object by pointing to a person's attitude to it (attachment). In turn, actor-network theory is object-centered as it emphasizes the visible performativity of technologies (inscriptions) and ignores the action possibilities provided by them. Meanwhile, contemporary affordance theory helps to extend the agency of things to their potential performances. Despite the shortcomings and merits of existing approaches, each of these frameworks employ multiple types of agencies without full acknowledgement. Using the examples of several empirical studies, the author shows that there is a lack of conceptual clarity when trying to account for the agency of routine and invisible objects. By reconciling the inscription and affordance perspectives, the author delineates four types of agencies that material objects can enact. In the conclusion, theoretical and methodological implications for future research are discussed.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:101
TI: Opening the government's black boxes: freedom of information and algorithmic accountability ab: Freedom of information laws are intended to illuminate how governments operate. However, the operations of governments increasingly involve algorithms, such as those used to recommend criminal sentencing and determine eligibility for social services. Algorithms function as black boxes' that turn inputs into outputs using processes that are often, by design, not transparent. Freedom of information laws allow one potential means for algorithmic transparency. However, whether such laws can be used to access algorithms is unclear. This research examines, in two ways, the availability of government algorithms to the public. First, this study examines laws, regulations, advisory opinions, and court rulings relevant to the disclosure of algorithms. The second part of this study analyzes actual responses by US government agencies to Freedom of Information Act requests for algorithms. This study concludes that governmental policies and practices related to algorithmic disclosure are inconsistent. Such inconsistencies suggest a need for better mechanisms to hold government algorithms accountable.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:426
TI: On the Acoustics of Policy Learning: Can Co-Participation in Policy Forums Break Up Echo Chambers?(sic)(sic)(sic)Palabras clave ab: Overcoming common-pool resource dilemmas requires learning across different sectors of society. However, policy actors frequently entrench themselves in so-called echo chambers by preferring to rely on information from those whose policy beliefs resemble their own. Policy forums can reduce the limiting effects of echo chambers by encouraging actors with diverse knowledge bases to exchange information and learn from one another. This paper applies exponential random graph models to network data from the South African tree plantation policy domain to investigate how belief homophily, reputational influence, and forum co-participation shape information exchange behavior. Results show that echo chambers are important determinants of information exchange ties and that reputational influence is likely to "deepen" the echo. Results also show that the more forums that a pair of actors co-participate in, the more likely they are to exchange information. This applies to information exchange generally, as well as information exchange with trusted partners. Findings indicate that forums enable both cognitive learning (as knowledge gains) and relational learning (as improved relations). Nonetheless, when echo chambers are strong, and many forums are polarized, then forum co-participation may not break up echo chambers.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:113
TI: One Model Does Not Fit All: The Varied Politics of State Immigrant Policies, 2005-16 ab: This article addresses conceptual and measurement challenges that complicate the study of state immigrant policies. First, given the multiple facets of immigrant-related policy, policy-specific effects may be obscured by highly aggregated outcomes variables. Second, variables of interest often capture both time-varying and time-invariant effects, potentially producing coefficients that are uninterpretable averages of both processes. This article presents a research design that addresses both of these obstacles and applies it to an original dataset of both integrative and punitive policies adopted over the period 2005-16. The findings suggest that the causal roles of growing immigrant populations, partisanship, and wealth vary across different clusters of immigrant policies and that average, cross-state effects often differ from within-state effects. Future research would do well to clearly link theoretical expectations to specific types of policy outcomes and test hypotheses over both integrative and restrictive outcomes.
SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY id:665
TI: Ongoing Debate Between Foreign Aid and Economic Growth in Nigeria: A Wavelet Analysis ab: This study aims to reexamine the interconnection between economic growth, foreign aid, trade, gross fixed capital formation, and inflation rate in one model for the case of Nigeria, which has not yet been analyzed utilizing the new econometric techniques, employing time series data covering the years between 1980 and 2018. No previous research has employed a wavelet coherence technique to gather information on the dynamic connection and/or causality between these economic indicators at dissimilar frequencies and various time frames. The main objectives are to address the questions: (a) Is there long-run relationship between the indicators under consideration? (b) What are the main determinants of economic growth in the long run? (c) How are the indicators related at dissimilar frequencies and various time frames? The empirical findings confirm that (a) there is a long-run relationship between the indicators under consideration; (b) in the long run, economic growth is influenced significantly by foreign aid, trade openness, gross fixed capital formation, and inflation rate; (c) the outcomes of the wavelet coherence technique give evidence to support the long-run estimations of this study; and (d) the outcomes of wavelet coherence are supported by the Toda-Yamamoto causality test results.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE id:506
TI: Online Tallies and the Context of Politics: How Online Tallies Make Dominant Candidates Appear Competent in Contexts of Conflict ab: In this article, we extend the classical notion of online tallies to shed light on the psychology underlying the rapid emergence of dominant political leaders. Predicated on two population-based panel surveys with embedded experiments, we demonstrate that citizens (1) store extremely durable tallies of candidate personalities in their long-term memory and (2) retrieve different tallies depending on the context. In particular, we predict and demonstrate that when contexts become more conflict-ridden, candidate evaluations rapidly shift from being negatively to positively associated with online impressions of candidate dominance. Although the notion of online tallies was originally proposed as an explanation of why citizens are able to vote for candidates on the basis of policy agreement, we demonstrate how the existence of context-sensitive online tallies can favor dominant candidates, even if the candidate is otherwise unappealing or does not share policy views with citizens on key issues.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:318
TI: Open Government Data as an Innovation Process: Lessons from a Living Lab Experiment ab: Open government data are claimed to contribute to transparency, citizen participation, collaboration, economic and public service development. From an innovation perspective, we explore the current gap between the promise and practice of open government data. Based on Strategic Niche Management (SNM), we identify different phases in the open data innovation process. This study uses a living lab in a province in the Netherlands to stimulate the provision and use of open data for collaborative processes and analyses the mechanisms that condition the success of this innovation process. The results based on six interventions over a period of two years show that our interventions stimulated the use of open data and raised awareness within government, but that various mechanisms inhibited the realization of the ambitions of open government data. We conclude that the challenge of open government data as an innovation lies in finding a way to scale up the provision of open data: innovation niches are established but "regime changes" do not take place. Scaling up open government data use requires strong managerial commitment and changes in the wider organizational landscape such as constructing formal and informal rules and technological developments that stimulate debate about open data practices.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:788
TI: Postcolonialism, Time, and Body-Worn Cameras ab: This paper draws on postcolonial temporal analysis to make sense of police use of body-worn cameras (BWCs). We argue that the potential of BWCs to make racist policing visible, as originally hoped, is compromised by the inability of "real-time" video to capture the complexity of historical and on-going colonial relations. Drawing on postcolonial literary and visual theory, and especially Homi Bhabha's (2004) postcolonial analysis of "belated-ness" and Andrea Smith's (2015) anti-colonial analysis of "not-seeing," we argue that BWCs reproduce a white settler gaze in which the complex histories of colonialism become temporally incommensurate with real-time images of policing social order.
SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY id:175
TI: Organisational responses to alleged scientific misconduct: Sensemaking, sensegiving, and sensehiding ab: While a substantive literature has emerged on the prevalence, causes, and consequences of scientific misconduct, little is known about the organisational perspective in cases of (alleged) misconduct. We address this knowledge gap by employing a comparative case study approach to describe and assess the handling of four cases of alleged misconduct by their university, respectively in the Netherlands and Norway. We propose a theoretical model that explains how organisational responses to misconduct emerge and evolve as iterations of the processes of sensemaking, sensegiving, and sensehiding. In addition, we link these iterations to a set of background premises that nurture the organisational responses and to the responses' outcomes and consequences. We conclude that several aspects of the organisational responses hinder effective learning processes within organisations and their members. Our analysis provides fruitful heuristics for organisations to reflect on, or plan their response strategies to allow for optimal learning.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:171
TI: Organizational Dissolutions in the Public Sector: An Empirical Analysis of Municipal Utility Water Districts ab: The proliferation of special-purpose districts and the increasing complexity of local governance systems has been well documented. However, even as new special districts are created, others are being dissolved. This article investigates the extent to which both internal and external factors are at play in municipal utility district dissolutions. Decades of existing empirical studies on private, nonprofit, and interest organizations show that factors internal to organizations, such as institutional structure and resources are significant covariates of organizational mortality. Equally important are external factors, where density dependence and resource partitioning pressures influence organizational survival. Public sector organizations, such as special-purpose water districts, operate in relatively well monitored and statutorily constrained environments, however. Drawing upon the organizational mortality literature, we examine when and why municipal utility water districts that operate in fragmented service delivery systems dissolve. The results show that the relationship between internal and external organizational variables and special-purpose organizational dissolutions is more nuanced than existing research suggests.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:580
TI: Organizational Resources and Performance: The Case of an Oil-Rich Country ab: This study adopts the Resource-Based View (RBV) framework in investigating the relationships between the resources/capabilities of public organizations and their performance in an Arab oil-rich country, i.e. the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It concludes that the organizational financial and human resources and capabilities are found to influence organizational performance of the surveyed public organizations. An additional analysis shows that slack of resources, i.e. financial resources, is found to be the only significant organizational resource to influence corporate social performance. The findings of this study along with the interpretation of the RBV of organizational performance in the public sector reflect 'practice variation' and conclude that policy makers should deal with the fact that the current slack of resources in the UAE, as a major oil-producing country, may not last forever.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF DISASTER RISK REDUCTION id:709
TI: Overrun by averages: An empirical analysis into the consistency of social vulnerability components across multiple scales ab: Social vulnerability indices have become widely accepted as key elements of disaster risk reduction (DRR) frameworks despite significant conceptual and technical concerns over their creation. Despite increasingly complex theorization, it remains commonplace to determine vulnerability dimensions by applying principal component or factor analysis on aggregated, sub-national level statistical data. The primary focus of this paper is in showing that social vulnerability dimensions derived from aggregate statistics may not be consistent with those derived at the household level. I first provide empirical support for this problem using household level micro-data from Nepal, then illustrate how differences in determined dimensions impact composite index creation at both household and regional levels. I show that qualitative differences in index components are not required to produce large magnitude changes or sign reversals in index scores. These findings raise questions over whether regional vulnerability components can be sufficiently represented with household characteristics. These results reiterate the necessity of addressing issues of scale in the development of empirical social vulnerability indicators.
RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS id:602
TI: PUBLIC HEALTH EXPERTS, EXPERTISE, AND EBOLA: A RELATIONAL THEORY OF ETHOS ab: The key public health officials in the United States have been criticized for their work in the Ebola outbreak of 2014-15 by citizens, public officials, and health scholars from multiple disciplines. There are numerous grounds for these complaints, but underlying many of them was the perception of "failed leadership" that is here traced in substantial part to the embodiment of a positionality based in a presumed logos-based power instead of an ethos-based relationship between public health expert and public. Because any leader's public ethos is dependent on the cultural ethos of audiences who promote them to leadership, this essay combines the Aristotelian topoi for ethos (goodsense, goodwill, goodness) and contemporary redefinitions of ethos as cultural-level phenomena (either "dwelling places," ideologies, or ethical and cultural codes) to conceptualize ethos as the activation, rebuilding, or maintenance of relationships among different social positions: publics and institutions. The complexities of the Ebola epidemic-with its national and international dimensions and its partially faulty scientific grounding-make visible the predisposition toward positional gaps between publics and public experts regarding interests (eunoia) and goods (arete), with concomitant difficulties for the sharing of practical wisdom (phronesis). Aristotle was correct that such gaps cannot be bridged by logos, and the pervasive insistence on more logos as corrective therefore may contribute to public mistrust of all expertise.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:640
TI: Procedural Fairness and the Legitimacy of Agency Rulemaking ab: We examine the relationship between procedural fairness and the legitimacy of rulemaking decisions made by government agencies. Evidence from a survey experiment indicates that the perceived fairness of the rulemaking process is closely tied to procedures designed to make it more transparent and to encourage greater citizen participation. However, our findings do not indicate that fair procedures bestow unconditional legitimacy on agency rulemaking actions. Rather, they suggest that the effect of procedural fairness is context-dependent and complex, with legitimacy perceptions varying across policy domains and being driven by the institutional avoidance of procedural controls rather than the procedures themselves. Thus, there may be significant limitations on the ability of fair procedures to impart legitimacy to bureaucratic policymaking.
SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY id:772
TI: Partisan Gerrymandering: Weeds in the Political Thicket ab: Objective To highlight the extent of the partisan gerrymandering problem in the United States. Methods Bring both original and secondary sources to bear on the problem of partisan gerrymandering, through the examination of election results under them, and federal and state court reactions to them. Results Evidence shows that gerrymandering in seven states accounted for the Republican Party's manufactured majority in the U.S. House of Representatives following the 2012 election, and that it took judicial intervention by courts in some states and the Democratic wave election of 2018 to loosen the grip of those gerrymanders to undo that "spurious" majority. Conclusion The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in 2019 to withdraw federal courts from partisan gerrymandering litigation, just as the district courts were proving themselves able to deal with the issue in a nonpartisan and effective manner, is likely to result in another decade of extensive and excessive gerrymandering in the United States.
PERSPECTIVES ON POLITICS id:430
TI: Partisan Polarization on Black Suffrage, 1785-1868 ab: I offer a new perspective on the history of American democratization, tracing the evolution of conflict over black suffrage from the disenfranchisements of the early Republic to efforts to secure equal voting rights in the pre-Civil War era. I draw on case studies and new data on state politics to substantially expand our descriptive understanding of the ideological connotations of African American political rights. In contrast to existing literature, this study identifies a transformation in how positions on black suffrage polarized along party lines. It also offers a new interpretation for this racial realignment, presenting evidence that legislators responded less to the electoral consequences of black voting than to efforts of party leaders and social movements to frame its denial as necessary for national unity, a pragmatic accommodation to racist public opinion, or as complicity in slavery and a violation of republicanism. Integrating earlier periods of disenfranchisement and antislavery activism recasts standard party-driven accounts of Reconstruction-era enfranchisements as the culmination of a long process of biracial social movement organizing, enriching our understanding of how both electoral and programmatic concerns contribute to suffrage reforms and of the process by which conflict over citizenship has at times become a central cleavage in American politics.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:470
TI: Partisan Politics and Institutional Choice in Public Bureaucracies: Evidence from Sweden ab: Assuring successful delegation from elected representatives to unelected bureaucrats is an essential part of contemporary democratic governance and, to do so, politicians typically rely on administrative institutions that limit the feasible set of policies that bureaucrats can pursue. In this article, I suggest that precisely because administrative institutions are instruments of political control, partisan conflict over public policies often generates partisan conflict over institutional arrangements. To assess the empirical merits of this proposition, I analyze a unique dataset with detailed information on all administrative agencies enacted in the executive administration of Sweden between 1960 and 2014. I find that agencies are considerably more likely to be terminated when there is a conflict of interest between the enacting and sitting coalitions. Consistent with positive political theories of bureaucratic delegation, I conclude that partisan politics colors not only the substantive contents of public policies, but also the organization of the administrative state.
DISASTERS id:543
TI: Partners under pressure: humanitarian action for the Syria crisis ab: Partnerships between organisations in humanitarian crisis situations generally are challenging, but at the apex are those established as part of remote management in a context of extreme insecurity. To date, little systematic research has been conducted on arrangements between local organisations that have access to crisis-affected populations and international organisations that hold the purse strings. This paper presents the findings of nine months of qualitative research conducted with five Syrian local organisations and their international partners engaging in humanitarian action across the Turkey-Syria border, and presents insights into the components of successful partnerships. It redefines capacity along organisational and operational lines, and unpacks how monitoring and evaluation and donor requirements create tension and, at times, place local organisations at risk. The paper highlights the centrality of trust in successful partnerships, and describes the personalisation of the conflict by local organisations. Based on a historical case study of civil society in northern Iraq, it closes with some suggestions for long-term sustainability.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE id:632
TI: Party Sub-Brands and American Party Factions ab: Scholars and pundits have long noted the dominance of the American two-party system, but we know relatively little about new, endogenous institutions that have emerged within the two major parties. I argue that ideological factions provide party sub-brands, which allow legislators to more precisely define their partisan type and capture faction-specific resources. To support this claim, I analyze new data on nine ideological factions in the House of Representatives (1995-2018). I find that (1) faction voting is distinct, suggesting a product ripe for party sub-branding, and (2) joining a faction changes the ideological composition of a candidate's donor base-conditional on the strength of the faction's institutions. Party sub-branding is effective only when factions possess organizational features that induce coordinated and disciplined position taking (e.g., whips, PACs, membership restrictions). These results suggest that, even within highly polarized parties, American political ideology is more than a dichotomous choice, and factions target niche markets of political donors as a means of blunting financial instruments of party power.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE id:183
TI: Peacekeepers against Criminal Violence-Unintended Effects of Peacekeeping Operations? ab: Research shows that peacekeepers reduce conflict intensity; however, effects of deployment on nonpolitical violence are unknown. This article focuses on criminal violence and proposes a twofold mechanism to explain why peacekeeping missions, even when effectively reducing conflict, can inadvertently increase criminal violence. First, less conflict opens up economic opportunities (so-called peacekeeping economies) and provides operational security for organized crime, thus increasing violent competition among criminal groups. Second, demobilized combatants are vulnerable to turn to crime because of limited legal livelihood opportunities and their training in warfare. While UN troops may exacerbate these dynamics, UN police's peculiar role is likely to successfully contain criminal violence. Cross-national and subnational empirical analyses show that large UN military deployments result in higher homicide rates, whereas UN police, overall, moderate this collateral effect.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW id:65
TI: Perceived Organizational Red Tape and Organizational Performance in Public Services ab: The claim that perceived organizational red tape hampers public services has become a central theme in public administration research. Surprisingly, however, few scholars have empirically examined the impact of perceived red tape on organizational performance. This article empirically analyzes how perceived organizational red tape among managers and frontline staff relates to objectively measured performance. The data consist of survey responses from teachers and principals at Danish upper secondary schools combined with grade-level administrative performance data. Based on theories of red tape and motivation crowding, the authors hypothesize that perceived organizational red tape reduces performance within such organizations. The empirical result is a small negative relationship between staff perception of red tape and performance and no relationship between manager-perceived red tape and performance.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:105
TI: Performance of Public-Private Partnerships and the Influence of Contractual Arrangements ab: This article seeks to answer two research questions: does public-private partnerships (ppp) live up to its promises to government? How do contractual arrangements affect ppp performance? We propose a conceptual framework to evaluate ppp performance by comparing actual project outcomes to government goals in initiating the partnerships, and to explore how a set of contractual arrangements affect the ppp performance on each identified goal. The framework is applied to a comparative case analysis of highway ppp experiences in the commonwealth of virginia (us) since the 1990s. The results show that these ppp cases were successful in accessing innovative finance, but their performance was mixed on reducing construction risk and transferring revenue risk. Generally improved over time with later projects, the ppp performance was affected not only by interaction among contractual arrangements -private partner selection, financial arrangements, role division, risk allocation, and project characteristics - but also by authorizing and supportive legislation in the policy domain.
SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY id:74
TI: Performance-based research funding in EU Member States-a comparative assessment ab: Performance-based research funding (PBRF), the allocation of institutional funding on the basis of ex post assessments of university research performance, has been implemented in a large number of EU Member States. However, the characteristics of this funding scheme differ widely. Apart from differences in the volume of funding, there are major variations in the assessments that feed into the funding allocation formula. Even within the two main groups of metrics based and peer review-based assessments the approaches adopted vary. Some of the main strengths and drawbacks of the various options are discussed in this article. An analysis of national Global Budgetary Allocations for R&D data reveals the distribution of project and institutional funding and the potential for PBRF. Given the heterogeneity of performance-based funding approaches, a comprehensive comparative assessment of the funding involved in this instrument requires further work. Nonetheless Member State governments can engage in institutional learning from good practices.
AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW id:210
TI: Performative State-Formation in the Early American Republic ab: How do proto-state organizations achieve an initial accumulation of power, such that they are in a position to grow (or shrink) as an organization, maintain their prestige (or lose it), and be viewed, by elite and populace, as something real and consequential that can be argued about, supported, or attacked? This article argues that state-formation has a performative dimension, in which the publicity of acts of violence, coercion, and negotiation made by agents of the proto-state, and the variable interpretation of these acts, are paramount to the state's success (or failure) and developing character. In the model developed here, agents of a would-be state act in response to emergencies, and when public interpretations of those actions assign their character and effectiveness to "the state," the state is performed into being. In particular, public performance solves, in part, agency problems obtaining between state rulers and their staff and elite allies. The formation of the federal government in the early American republic (1783 to 1801), whose success is insufficiently accounted for by extant theory, provides an opportunity to develop a model of the performative dimension of state-formation.
PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE id:257
TI: Perils and positives of science journalism in Australia ab: Scientists, science communicators and science journalists interact to deliver science news to the public. Yet the value of interactions between the groups in delivering high-quality science stories is poorly understood within Australia. A recent study in New Zealand on the perspectives of the three groups on the challenges facing science journalism is replicated here in the context of New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory. While all three groups perceived the quality of science journalism as generally high, the limitations of non-specialists and public relation materials were causes for concern. The results indicate that science communicators are considered to play a valuable role as facilitators of information flow to journalists and support for scientists. Future studies on the influence and implications of interactions between these three groups are required.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:759
TI: Personal epistemologies of the media: Selective criticality, pragmatic trust, and competence-confidence in navigating media repertoires in the digital age ab: While the perils of social media, fake news, and an alleged distrust in legacy media have attained considerable public attention, the implications of these public narratives for their audiences have remained understudied. The aim of this article is to identify consequences of an emerged "fake news and post truth-era-narrative" for media users' personal epistemologies, media beliefs, and news navigation practices from a media repertoire perspective. Forty-nine in-depth media-biographical interviews with people from three different age groups and with different media repertoires were conducted. Based on the study, the three interrelated dimensions (1) selective criticality, (2) pragmatic trust, and (3) competence-confidence were developed to analyze users' media and news navigation. These three dimensions can be applied to other scenarios to investigate how people navigate their media repertoires and interact with the news in general.
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY id:126
TI: Personalization of Knowledge, Personal Knowledge Ecology, and Digital Nomadism ab: We examine the concept of personal knowledge management using data drawn from our study of digital nomads. We make two contributions: an empirical and conceptual development of knowledge management as it relates to independent workers and an advancement of social informatics that builds on Gibson's ecological perspective. Digital nomads provide an empirical basis to better understand how knowledge management is shifting from organization-centric, with its concomitant emphasis on organizational information systems, to worker-centric, which relies on personal knowledge ecologies. We advance this concept as a combination of personal knowledge management activities and the digital technologies that support them. Our data make clear that individuals are the locus of personal knowledge ecologies, but these ecologies are embedded in a larger community of collaborators, clients, and peers who are often extensively mediated by digital technologies. This embedding and mediation are at the core of the sociotechnical arrangements that define the personal knowledge ecologies that we document.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:374
TI: Perspectives of Public and Nonprofit Managers on Communications in Human Services Contracting ab: Government contracts and grants constitute the largest funding source for the majority of nonprofit organizations. Contracts for complex services, such as those involved in delivering human services, pose substantial challenges for public and nonprofit managers. In this context, concerns have been raised about contract management capacity, including challenges related to proposal and contract development, implementation, and performance reporting, as well as the impact of contract monitoring tools on contractor performance. Relatively few studies have provided a cross-sectoral perspective on the concrete managerial skill sets needed to engage in the interpersonal and technical processes involved in effective contract management. This study reports qualitative findings from a survey of county and nonprofit human service managers regarding approaches to managing challenges that arise in contractual relationships. The results identify the important role played by communication in the relationships between contract managers, illustrate the content of formal and informal exchanges, and identify common perspectives on the characteristics of effective communications, including transparency, a balance of flexibility and consistency, and timeliness. Practice implications for contract management relate to enhancing communication strategies in order to promote stronger contract relationships.
WORLD DEVELOPMENT id:575
TI: Perspectives on the rebel social contract: Exit, voice, and loyalty in the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria ab: This article considers the concept of the rebel social contract by examining the case of the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria. The concept of the social contract is a cornerstone of political theory and is increasingly invoked in discussions of civil war and authoritarian regimes, when prospective rulers offer political protections and social benefits in return for the allegiance of citizens. The social contract is often assumed to exist, but is rarely evaluated empirically. It remains difficult to distinguish between political stability derived from consent and stability derived from coercion and domination given their observational equivalence. Civil wars, in which rebel groups seek to supplant the state, provide opportunities to observe the construction and negotiation of new social contracts. The article uses Hirschman's exit/voice/loyalty typology to develop a qualitative empirical method for evaluating evidence of the rebels' "offer" of a social contract to civilians and their acceptance or rejection of that offer. We demonstrate this method by applying it to the case of IS using evidence including official IS documents, social media posts from within IS-controlled territory, and interviews with individuals who have personally experienced IS governance. We conclude that while IS leadership wanted to gain voluntary assent, most of the civilian response to IS rule suggested domination and authoritarian forms of social-contract building. This finding is illustrative of the analytical and methodological challenges involved in studying the social contract in rebel governance and the importance of considering domination, not just reciprocity, as the foundation for political order. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:205
TI: Platform Surveillance and Resistance in Iran and Russia: The Case of Telegram ab: Telegram messenger, created by an exiled Russian entrepreneur Pavel Durov, brands itself as a non-mainstream and non-Western guarantor of privacy in messaging. This paper offers an in-depth analysis of the challenges faced by the platform in Iran, with 59.5% of the population using its services, and in Russia, where Telegram is popular among the urban dissent. Both governments demanded access to the platform's encrypted content and, with Durov's refusal, took measures to ban it. Relying on the concept of surveillant assemblage (Haggerty and Ericson 2000), this paper portrays how authoritarian states disrupt, block, and police platforms that do not comply with their intrusive surveillance. Additionally, we consider the tools and actors that make up internet control assemblages as well as the resistance assemblages that take shape in response to such control.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE id:631
TI: Pleasing the Principal: US Influence in World Bank Policymaking ab: How do policies in international organizations reflect the preferences of powerful institutional stakeholders? Using an underutilized data set on the conditions associated with World Bank loans, we find that borrower countries that vote with the United States at the United Nations are required to enact fewer domestic policy reforms, and on fewer and softer issue areas. Though U.S. preferences permeate World Bank decision making, we do not find evidence that borrower countries trade favors in exchange for active U.S. intervention on their behalf. Instead, we propose that U.S. influence operates indirectly when World Bank staff-consciously or unconsciously-design programs that are compatible with U.S. preferences. Our study provides novel evidence of World Bank conditionality and shows that politicized policies can result even from autonomous bureaucracies.
SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY id:760
TI: The Chief Justice as Effective Administrative Leader: The Impact of Policy Scope and Interbranch Relations ab: ObjectivesWe examine the conditions under which the Chief Justice of the United States achieves congressional approval for his requests for institutional reforms to the federal courts. Specifically, we investigate whether legislators are more likely to enact these requests when they are limited in scope and members of Congress are similar ideologically to the chief justice or federal judiciary. MethodsOur analysis uses the chief justice's Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary to identify reform proposals requested by the federal judiciary. ResultsWe find that the likelihood that the federal judiciary achieves reform goals is conditioned by policy scope and ideological congruence with Congress. ConclusionsWe conclude that congressional administration of the federal courts is politically strategic.
SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY id:301
TI: Polarization of Climate Change Beliefs: The Role of the Millennial Generation Identity ab: Objective This article explores how the Millennial Generation identity-the shared values and experiences of young adults (born between 1980 and 1997)-affects political polarization of climate change belief, specifically how it mediates the relationship between party affiliation and educational attainment. Method To test this, an interaction between Millennial*Republican*education is estimated, using data from an original national survey administered in 2015. Results Millennials are more likely to believe in the evidence of climate change and its anthropogenic causes than older adults of their same party affiliation. Unlike older adults, the most educated Millennials are not the most likely to adhere to political party stance; rather, it is among the least educated Millennials that party sorting is most evident. Conclusion The Millennial Generation identity is meaningful for understanding political attitudes. Important distinctions exist between Millennials and older adults in the evaluation of climate change opinion and related policies.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:561
TI: Police Use of Body-Worn Cameras: Challenges of Visibility, Procedural Justice, and Legitimacy ab: Recent controversies over police use of force in the United States of America have placed a spotlight on police in Western nations. Concerns that police conduct is racist and procedurally unjust have generated public sentiments that accountability must be externally imposed on police. One such accountability mechanism is body-worn cameras (BWCs). Optimistic accounts of BWCs suggest that the technology will contribute to the improvement of community-police relations. However, BWCs address consequences, not causes, of poor community-police relations. We argue that the evolving visibility of police associated with BWCs is double-edged, and suggest that the adoption of surveillance technologies such as BWCs in the quest to improve community-police relations will fail without a simultaneous commitment to inclusionary policing practices (such as community policing strategies, community and social development, and local democracy). We outline two initiatives that optimize BWCs by promoting these simultaneous commitments.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:144
TI: Policy Change: An Advocacy Coalition Framework Perspective ab: One purpose of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) is to explain policy change. Previous holistic reviews of the ACF by Weible, Sabatier, and McQueen (2009) and Pierce, Peterson, Jones, Garrard, and Vu (2017) of the framework have not explicitly analyzed all the concepts and their interactions in a systematic manner. To address this gap and inform scholars and practitioners about past findings, strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for future research, this article analyzes how the ACF's theory of policy change is applied to 148 policy processes among 67 journal articles from 2007 to 2014. Similar to Weible et al. (2009), this research finds the frequent use of multiple primary pathways to policy change, infrequent use of many of the ACF's concepts, a plurality of applications in the environment and energy domain, comparison of subsystems, and a need for greater clarity and transparency among applications. Unlike Weible et al. (2009), this article explores associations between primary pathways and policy domains, the frequency of associations between primary pathways and secondary components, policy change and stasis, and identifies threats to internal validity of key ACF concepts.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE id:515
TI: Policy Diffusion: The Issue-Definition Stage ab: We put forward a new approach to studying issue definition within the context of policy diffusion. Most studies of policy diffusion-which is the process by which policymaking in one government affects policymaking in other governments-have focused on policy adoptions. We shift the focus to an important but neglected aspect of this process: the issue-definition stage. We use topic models to estimate how policies are framed during this stage and how these frames are predicted by prior policy adoptions. Focusing on smoking restriction in U.S. states, our analysis draws upon an original data set of over 52,000 paragraphs from newspapers covering 49 states between 1996 and 2013. We find that frames regarding the policy's concrete implications are predicted by prior adoptions in other states, whereas frames regarding its normative justifications are not. Our approach and findings open the way for a new perspective to studying policy diffusion in many different areas.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:220
TI: Policy Entrepreneurs, Legislators, and Agenda Setting: Information and Influence ab: Policy entrepreneurs are thought to be instrumental in agenda change, yet we lack knowledge of how legislators perceive their role in the agenda formation process. Using data from a national survey of state legislators, we examine whether entrepreneurs shape the legislative agenda on disaster preparedness and relief, which types of entrepreneurs are most influential, and what strategies they use in their interactions with legislators. The results indicate that legislators who report contact with policy entrepreneurs are more likely to have introduced related legislation, evidence of the important link between entrepreneurs and policy change. While entrepreneurs utilize a variety of different strategies, the analysis reveals policymakers are particularly receptive to entrepreneurs who provide new and reliable information. This finding suggests the influence of entrepreneurs lies not only in their ability to define problems and build coalitions, but also in their distinctive ability to provide information to elected officials, an important role that has largely been overlooked by existing literature.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:135
TI: Policy Feedback in a Racialized Polity ab: American public policy is and has always been profoundly racialized. Yet, the literature on policy feedback lacks cohesive theorization of how race matters for feedback processes. This article offers a conceptual road map for studying policy feedback in the context of racialized politics. Drawing together the substantial (but largely disconnected) work that already exists in the fields of public policy and racial politics, I develop the racialized feedback framework to provide theoretical guidance on (i) when race should be a core focus of policy feedback research and (ii) how race structures the relationship between policy and polity. I argue that both the scope of the questions that scholars ask and the nature of the answers they find are altered when race is afforded an appropriately central role in research on policy feedback.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC POLICY id:185
TI: Policy convergence as a multifaceted concept: the case of renewable energy policies in the European Union ab: The literature on policy convergence has identified numerous facets and causal drivers of convergence. Distinguishing four dimensions of convergence (object, benchmark, drivers and directed process) helps clarify why and in what form policy convergence may occur (or not). Thus, depending on, for example, the object of analysis (policy outcome or instruments used), the same empirical case may give rise to opposing assessments. Furthermore, both economic and political drivers are necessary to account for successful policy convergence: economic convergence partly explains why countries may face similar problems, and political mechanisms explain why they might choose similar policies to solve a given problem. This article illustrates the multifaceted character of convergence for the dynamic field of renewable energy policies in the European Union. The empirical results indicate temporary convergence in the case of policy support instrument choices and conditional convergence in terms of renewable shares. However, the results suggest divergence of public R&D subsidies targeting renewables.
SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY id:599
TI: Policy entrepreneurship in context: Understanding the emergence of novel policy solutions for services innovation in Finland and Ireland ab: Policy entrepreneurs have been identified as playing an important role in the emergence of public policies for innovation. Despite the growing number of studies, the role of context has only recently begun to be explored in detail. This article contributes by investigating the interplay between the institutional context and the strategies of policy entrepreneurs, in the successful introduction of new policy ideas for services innovation. Building on insights from institutional theory, it argues that policy entrepreneurs are embedded in a multidimensional context of field-level conditions, multi-level standard operating procedures for policy development, and the social position of actors. It explores the activities of policy entrepreneurs in two countries-Finland and Ireland-and finds that differences in the institutional context help explain why some entrepreneurs are able to develop and implement new policies, while others fail. The article draws on comparative case study evidence including documentary analysis and interviews.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC POLICY id:39
TI: Policy failures, blame games and changes to policy practice ab: Studies examining the policy implications of elite polarisation usually concentrate on policy formulation and change, but neglect the impact of polarisation on the day-to-day application of policies. Applying the method of causal process tracing to the Swiss "Carlos" case, a blame game triggered by the reporting about an expensive therapy setting for a youth offender, this article exposes and explains a hitherto neglected, but highly important, mechanism between political elites engaging in blame generation and changes in policy practice. A policy's distance and visibility to mass publics, as well as the incentives and resources of elites to engage in blame generation, explain the dynamics within blame games, which, in turn, effect organisational and behavioural changes that help institutionalise a more politicised policy practice. Politicised policy practice can make an important difference to policy target populations, as well as damage output legitimacy and undermine democracy.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:191
TI: Political Commitment, Policy Ambiguity, and Corporate Environmental Practices ab: A lack of clear political commitment together with confusing rules and enforcement often characterize the institutional context of policy implementation and regulatory compliance in developing countries. By connecting such contextual features to existing models of policy implementation and regulatory compliance, we examine how regulatory factors are related to basic and proactive corporate environmental management practices in the Pearl River Delta region in China. Drawing on data derived from both a survey and in-depth interviews, we show that a perception of clear political commitment to environmental protection across multiple government levels and units is positively associated with business efforts in basic environmental practices, regardless of the specific enforcement intensity. Nevertheless, a perception of clear political commitment is not related to proactive environmental practices. Conversely, a perception of policy ambiguity, in the form of confusing regulatory standards and enforcement, is negatively associated with corporate efforts in both basic and proactive environmental practices; yet, intensive inspections mitigate these negative associations with policy ambiguity.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:299
TI: Political Decoupling: Private Implementation of Public Policy ab: Where policy goals can be achieved through regulation of private firms, private provision of public services allows governments to separate public policies from their political costs by shifting those costs to the private sector. Over the past three decades, financial decoupling has emerged as a regulatory strategy for promoting conservation, especially in the energy sector. Decoupling refers to the separation of a firm's revenues from the volume of its product consumed, which allows companies to pursue resource efficiency free from financial risk. Similarly, when private firms provide public services, they separate public policies from their political costs. This political decoupling allows governments to pursue controversial policies while avoiding their attendant political risks. Applied to environmental policy, this theory implies that potentially unpopular conservation policies are more likely to be adopted and succeed when implemented through private firms. As an initial test of the theory, we analyze California water utilities and their responses to that state's drought from 2015-2017. Analysis shows that, compared with those served by local government utilities, private utilities adopted more aggressive conservation measures, were more likely to meet state conservation standards, and conserved more water.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:321
TI: Political Information Has Bright Colors: Narrative Attention Theory ab: Attention plays an important role in driving policy process dynamics at multiple levels of analysis. Despite this, narrative policy process studies often center on the position that narrative is strategically used in subsystem debates because it alters policy beliefs and preferences. This paper explicates the relationship between narrative and attention in the policy process according to theory and empirical findings in the Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET) and Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) literatures, developing a theory of narrative attention. According to Narrative Attention Theory (NAT), narrative focuses attention at multiple levels of analysis in the policy process, but is most important to consider at the macro level, where preferences are most stable. In associating PET's notion of macro political institutions (e.g., executive branch) and NPF's macro level of analysis (institutions or culture), NAT offers new hypotheses about narrative dynamics, a PET macro institutional approach to NPF's macro level, and an NPF conceptualization of PET's policy image.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:342
TI: Political Science and US Health Policy in the Era of the Affordable Care Act ab: Few laws have a profound and lasting impact on an entire political system. The Affordable Care Act (ACA), despite its incremental nature and bipartisan heritage, has been one of those remarkable landmarks. Even a decade after its passage, the political struggle is far from over, as the ACA is still facing near constant threats from the incumbent president, Congress, the courts, statehouses, attorneys general, and governors across the nation. How have political scientists responded to the continued struggle? This article provides an overview of the effects of health reform and the ACA on political science research since 2008. While political scientists have written much about the subject, coverage has been distinctly uneven within the discipline. Indeed, it has almost been entirely confined to scholars of public and health policy. Nonetheless, there have been important contributions across disciplinary fields. This article provides an overview of contributions embedded within the study of federalism, policy feedback effects, and political framing. It concludes by emphasizing the need for more engaged scholarship on health policy issues from across the entire discipline, and by highlighting other areas of study that could benefit from broader attention by political scientists.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE id:256
TI: Political Stability in the Open Society ab: We argue that the Rawlsian description of a just liberal society, the well-ordered society, fails to accommodate deep disagreement and is insufficiently dynamic. In response, we formulate an alternative model that we call the open society, organized around a new account of dynamic stability. In the open society, constitutional rules must be stable enough to preserve social conditions that foster experimentation, while leaving room in legal and institutional rules for innovation and change. Systemic robustness and dynamic stability become important for the open society in a way that they are not in the well-ordered society. This model of the open society and the corresponding model of stability have interesting implications for thinking about the goals, norms, and institutions of liberal political systems.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:103
TI: Political airs: From monitoring to attuned sensing air pollution ab: In Madrid, as in many European cities, air pollution is known about and made accountable through techno-scientific monitoring processes based on data, and the toxicity of the air is defined through epidemiological studies and made political through policy. In 2009, Madrid's City Council changed the location of its air quality monitoring stations without notice, reducing the average pollution of the city and therefore provoking a public scandal. This scandal challenged the monitoring process, as the data that used to be the evidence of pollution could not be relied on anymore. To identify the characteristics of some of the diverse forms of public's participation that emerged, I route theories of environmental sensing from STS and feminist theory through the notion of attuned sensing. Reading environmental sensing through processes of attunement expands the ways in which toxicity can be sensed outside of quantitative data. This mode of sensing recognizes how the different spontaneous attunements to and with air pollution and the scandal acknowledged Madrid's chemical infrastructure, rendering visible qualitative conditions of toxicity. This mode of sensing politicized the toxicity of the air not through management or policy making, nor only through established forms environmental activism, but through contagion and accumulation of the different forms of public participation. All together, they made air pollution a matter of public concern. They also redistributed the actors, practices and objects that make the toxicity not only knowable, but also accountable, and most importantly, they opened up spaces for citizen intervention.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC POLICY id:348
TI: Political and legal antecedents of affirmative action: a comparative framework ab: Much of the literature on affirmative action is normative. Further, in scholarship that takes an empirical approach to examine this topic, the object of inquiry is typically the ramifications of such provisions - most notably the extent to which they foster social transformation. Yet, we know surprisingly little about the antecedents of affirmative action. This work examines what variables systematically predict affirmative action. We focus on the policy feedback literature and compensatory justice frameworks to examine the effects of democracy, modernisation and globalisation on affirmative action programmes. Time-series cross-sectional analyses of data for hundreds of groups from all over the globe for the period 1985-2003 confirm our hypotheses. This is the first work to examine affirmative action programmes in a large-N framework of such scale. We find that such programmes systematically correlate with democracy, modernisation and globalisation.
DISASTERS id:360
TI: Political drivers of epidemic response: foreign healthcare workers and the 2014 Ebola outbreak ab: This study demonstrates that countries responded quite differently to calls for healthcare workers (HCWs) during the Ebola epidemic in West Africa in 2014. Using a new dataset on the scale and timing of national pledges and the deployment of HCWs to states experiencing outbreaks of the virus disease (principally, Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone), it shows that few foreign nations deployed HCWs early, some made pledges but then fulfilled them slowly, and most sent no HCWs at all. To aid understanding of such national responses, the paper reviews five theoretical perspectives that offer potentially competing or complementary explanations of foreign government medical assistance for international public health emergencies. The study systematically validates that countries varied greatly in whether and when they addressed HCW deployment needs during the Ebola crisis of 2014, and offers suggestions for a theory-driven inquiry to elucidate the logics of foreign interventions in critical infectious disease epidemics.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC POLICY id:527
TI: Political land corruption: evidence from Malta - the European Union's smallest member state ab: Political corruption in the land sector is pervasive, but difficult to document and effectively prosecute. This article provides new evidence on political land corruption in Malta, the European Union's smallest member state and one of the world's most densely populated countries. It shows how the country's highly restrictive zoning laws, along with a de jure independent regulator, have created opportunities for extensive and endemic corruption in the granting of land development permits in zones that are outside development. It provides an example of governments creating institutions as rent-collection instruments - not to correct market failures, but to create opportunities for corruption. The unique underlying data set was collected through an automated web-scraping program as the regulator first turned down then ignored freedom of information requests for the data.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW id:213
TI: Politicization, Bureaucratic Legalism, and Innovative Attitudes in the Public Sector ab: Previous studies have identified institutional, organizational, and individual factors that promote innovation in public organizations. Yet they have overlooked how the type of public administration-and the type of administrators-is associated with innovative attitudes. Using two large, unique comparative data sets on public bureaucracies and public managers, this article examines how bureaucratic politicization and legalistic features are associated with senior public managers' attitudes toward innovation in 19 European countries. Results of multilevel analysis indicate that the bureaucratic politicization of an administration and the law background of public managers matter. Public managers working in politicized administrations and those whose education includes a law degree exhibit lower pro-innovation attitudes (i.e., receptiveness to new ideas and creative solutions and change orientation).
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:97
TI: Polycentricity and the Hollow State: Exploring Shared Personnel as a Source of Connectivity in Fragmented Urban Systems ab: The Ecology of Games (EoG) theory couples institutional rational choice with social network theory, articulating how transaction costs, social capital, and collective action dilemmas shape networks and network outcomes in polycentric governance systems. EoG literature has often focused on social-relational ties across organizational boundaries. However, jurisdictional fragmentation and increased reliance on private contractors in local public service delivery foster another source of network connectivity-shared personnel who work for multiple service providers. Drawing upon novel data of organizational personnel from more than 500 special purpose entities responsible for delivering drinking water to local neighborhoods in the Houston metro area in the state of Texas (United States), we examine how managerial, technical, and financial service delivery personnel connect otherwise independent organizations. We find that districts regulated by a common groundwater management agency and districts which contract with one another are both more likely to share technical and managerial personnel. By studying special districts that have overlapping personnel, we broaden the scope of the EoG framework to include additional layers of governance network complexity. As individual bureaucrats and service professionals play a key role in information transfer and innovation diffusion across organizations, shared personnel networks merit consideration as a mechanism for coordination and collective problem solving in fragmented urban systems.
PERSPECTIVES ON POLITICS id:219
TI: Populism and Backlashes against International Courts ab: International courts, like domestic courts, protect liberal limits on majoritarianism. This sometimes puts these courts in a position to protect the property rights of the "corrupt elites" that are targeted by populists or the civil liberties of those who are targeted in domestic populist identity politics. Moreover, populism offers an ideology to attack the authority of a court rather than just its individual rulings. An empirical examination illustrates the plausibility of this argument. A large number of backlashes against international courts arise from judgments that reinforce local populist mobilization narratives. Populist backlashes against international courts are not just about sovereignty but often follow efforts to curb domestic courts, usually for similar reasons. Yet populist backlashes do not always succeed, either because populist leaders do not follow up on their exit threats or because populism is too thin an ideology for creating successful multilateral reform coalitions.
PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE id:696
TI: Post-Fukushima discourse in the US press: Quantified knowledge, the technical object, and a panicked public ab: Many thought that the 11 March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan might be the end of the "global nuclear renaissance." In Europe, mass media after Fukushima increasingly presented negative framing of nuclear energy and highlighted declining support for the nuclear industry. In the United States, however, nuclear production and public support for the industry remained steady. This article analyzes US media documents to understand the construction of public discourse on nuclear power in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. Through a content analysis of US newspapers, it demonstrates that post-Fukushima media framed the crisis in a way that privileged expert knowledge and opinion, while delegitimizing non-expert engagement with nuclear energy issues. A comparison between national newspapers and newspapers located in two regions with controversial nuclear plants and active anti-nuclear citizens' movements additionally demonstrates the power and reach of the identified framework across the spectrum of views on nuclear power.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:486
TI: Post-political uncertainties: Governing nuclear controversies in post-Fukushima Japan ab: This article examines a set of public controversies surrounding the role of nuclear power and the threat of radioactive contamination in a post-Fukushima Japan. The empirical case study focuses on the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), Japan most influential ministry and, more importantly, the former regulator of nuclear energy before the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. Through participant observation of METI's public conferences, as well as interviews with state and non-state actors, I examine how particular visions of nuclear power continue to affect the basis of expert authority through which state actors handle post-Fukushima controversies and their subsequent uncertainties. In its post-Fukushima representations, METI frames nuclear power as an apolitical necessity for the well-being of the Japanese nation-state and the common humanity. It does so by mobilizing categories of uncertainty around specific political scenes, such as global warming. For METI, the potential uncertainties linked with the abandonment of nuclear power have the power to trigger political turmoil of a higher scale than those linked with Fukushima's radioactive contamination. A form of double depoliticization takes place, in which the issue of Fukushima's radioactive contamination gets depoliticized through perceived priorities that are paradoxically depicted as 'post-political' - that is, in an urgent need for immediate action and not open to in-depth deliberation. I refer to this process as establishing 'post-political uncertainties'. This kind of depoliticization raises ethical questions surrounding meaningful public participation in decisions that happen at the intersection of politics and science and technology study.
SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY id:447
TI: Power Politics and Foreign Aid Delivery Tactics ab: Objective This article explores the influence of aid recipient countries' U.N. General Assembly voting on the amount of government-to-government economic assistance they receive from donor countries. I argue that major power donor states are swayed by recipient states' voting records, while minor donors do not take U.N. General Assembly voting into consideration while formulating their aid policies. Method To explore the relationship, I utilize newly available, disaggregated foreign aid data. Result I find considerable empirical support for the assertion that dissimilar voting in the U.N. General Assembly results in less government-to-government aid from major power donors but has no effects on aid provided by minor power donors. Conclusion The findings show that foreign aid policies are based on donor countries' position in the international system, where major power donors base their aid decisions mostly on strategic goals; minor power donors, on the other hand, prioritize recipient needs while formulating their foreign aid policies.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE id:367
TI: Power Sharing: Institutions, Behavior, and Peace ab: Grievances that derive from the unequal treatment of ethnic groups are a key motivation for civil war. Ethnic power sharing should therefore reduce the risk of internal conflict. Yet conflict researchers disagree on whether formal power-sharing institutions effectively prevent large-scale violence. We can improve our understanding of the effect of power-sharing institutions by analyzing the mechanisms under which they operate. To this effect, we compare the direct effect of formal power-sharing institutions on peace with their indirect effect through power-sharing behavior. Combining data on inclusive and territorially dispersive institutions with information on power-sharing behavior, we empirically assess this relationship on a global scale. Our causal mediation analysis reveals that formal power-sharing institutions affect the probability of ethnic conflict onset mostly through power-sharing behavior that these institutions induce.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:57
TI: Prediction, pre-emption and limits to dissent: Social media and big data uses for policing protests in the United Kingdom ab: Social media and big data uses form part of a broader shift from reactive' to proactive' forms of governance in which state bodies engage in analysis to predict, pre-empt and respond in real time to a range of social problems. Drawing on research with British police, we contextualize these algorithmic processes within actual police practices, focusing on protest policing. Although aspects of algorithmic decision-making have become prominent in police practice, our research shows that they are embedded within a continuous human-computer negotiation that incorporates a rooted claim to professional judgement', an integrated intelligence context and a significant level of discretion. This context, we argue, transforms conceptions of threats. We focus particularly on three challenges: the inclusion of pre-existing biases and agendas, the prominence of marketing-driven software, and the interpretation of unpredictability. Such a contextualized analysis of data uses provides important insights for the shifting terrain of possibilities for dissent.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE id:167
TI: Predispositions and the Political Behavior of American Economic Elites: Evidence from Technology Entrepreneurs ab: Economic elites regularly seek to exert political influence. But what policies do they support? Many accounts implicitly assume economic elites are homogeneous and that increases in their political power will increase inequality. We shed new light on heterogeneity in economic elites' political preferences, arguing that economic elites from an industry can share distinctive preferences due in part to sharing distinctive predispositions. Consequently, how increases in economic elites' influence affect inequality depends on which industry's elites are gaining influence and which policy issues are at stake. We demonstrate our argument with four original surveys, including the two largest political surveys of American economic elites to date: one of technology entrepreneurs-whose influence is burgeoning-and another of campaign donors. We show that technology entrepreneurs support liberal redistributive, social, and globalistic policies but conservative regulatory policies-a bundle of preferences rare among other economic elites. These differences appear to arise partly from their distinctive predispositions.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:150
TI: Presidentially Directed Policy Change: The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs as Partisan or Moderator? ab: US presidents-working through the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA)-influence administrative agencies by directing agencies to modify their regulatory policy proposals before finalization. We identify two competing hypotheses from the literature to explain this presidential intervention. First, some scholars hypothesize that presidents are more likely to change proposals when the submitting agency's political ideology differs from the president's. Second, others argue that presidents are more likely to correct ideologically extreme agencies of either political orientation. These claims have not been adequately investigated quantitatively. We study almost 1,500 final regulations reviewed by OIRA between 2005 and 2011. In the end, neither hypothesis garners support. Instead, we demonstrate that regulations proposed by more liberally oriented agencies are more likely to be changed-and the content of the rules changed to a greater degree-than those proposed by other agency types. Those results suggest a provocative third possibility: presidentially directed deregulation through OIRA review.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:76
TI: Privacy for whom?: a feminist intervention in online research practice ab: As shifts in technology and culture have complicated traditional definitions of privacy, researchers need new approaches to navigating privacy in online contexts. In this article, we argue that the experiences and perceptions of vulnerable groups must form the starting point for online researchers' ethical decision-making, regardless of whether their research population qualifies as 'vulnerable.' This is especially important in spaces where privacy violations put people, particularly marginalized individuals, at risk for online harassment and abuse, among other harms. We seek to intervene in online research practices by putting forth a feminist approach to privacy, drawing on two studies related to online harassment. Specifically, we argue that feminist theory and methodology inform an approach to privacy that (a) starts from the lives of socially and politically vulnerable groups, (b) takes an intersectional approach to analyzing power relations, and (c) draws on a moral imperative of care and responsibility in enacting feminist principles of context, dialogue, and reflexivity throughout the research process. In doing so, we offer questions to prompt critical reflection on privacy concerns in online research.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:770
TI: Professionalization through attrition? An event history analysis of mortalities in citizen journalism ab: Despite both scholarly and popular claims that citizen journalism (CJ) represents a growing democratizing force in the journalistic field, recent scholarship in the area has noted the decline of the organizational population of CJ. In this paper, we investigate how individual characteristics of sites and the dynamics of larger organizational population affect a CJ site's risk of experiencing a mortality. Drawing on the largest sample to date of US-based English-language CJ sites, this study examines the risk of site mortality through an event history framework. Findings indicate that the strongest predictor of a site's mortality is the age of the site, consistent with organizational population theory's liability of newness.' We also find that for-profit and community-based sites have lower rates of site mortality, indicating that adopting legitimate conventions of journalism may serve as a protective buffer to site death. The results offer mixed evidence on whether CJ has become more professionalized via attrition.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:612
TI: Promoting Performance Information Use Through Data Visualization: Evidence from an Experiment ab: We have all this data, why don't we use it? This question seems to be a constant in performance literature. Although the uptake in performance management throughout the public sector has been pronounced in recent decades, particularly among public health departments, both empirical and anecdotal evidence suggest that few organizations have gone beyond simply collecting and reporting performance data to actually integrating these data into their decision-making processes. One barrier to such integration may be the lack of visual accessibility in performance data reports. Research in other fields has provided strong evidence suggesting that visualizing data, rather than providing simply numerical displays, promotes data cognition and use. This study employs an experimental survey vignette design to test whether graphically displayed performance information results in higher intended rates of performance information use among public health managers. The results suggest that in some instances, specifically ratio indicators and benchmarking reporting, data visualization increases the intention of public managers to use that information for decision making. This study provides both practical approaches to promoting performance-data utilizing as well as opening new avenues to performance research around data value and cognition.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:692
TI: Promoting Spiritual Practices through Christian Faith Applications: Self-Paternalism and the Surveillance of the Soul ab: This paper examines the everyday use of applications designed for Christian spiritual practices, ranging from Bible reading to prayer to meditation to forms of personal and collective worship. These applications are designed to prompt and reinforce particular behaviours on the part of users to support them in their devotional efforts. As a technology that sits between the external workings of (divine) power and reaffirmations of power through personal examination, these spiritual applications seem to exemplify Foucauldian concerns about surveillance and the production of subjectivity. However, a considered examination of these technologies and an empirical investigation of their use suggests a more complicated story. Though these may be considered "technologies of the self," their use seems to vary amongst adherents, surprisingly less used by those who may be seen as more spiritually committed. Rather than serving to "quantify" or even "gamify" spirituality fully, the use of these apps suggests a form of self-paternalism in which certain users willingly respond to features designed to encourage particular spiritual practices-a mode of governance that subtly promotes particular (personally) desired behaviours. Drawing in part on an international survey that examined users' motivations and experiences with these applications, the contexts and results of spiritual applications raise several issues for surveillance studies more generally, including considerations needed for contextual norms, responses to and accommodation of social expectations, and a reorientation towards agency in relation to the production of subjectivity.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:592
TI: Propaganda through 'reflexive control' and the mediated construction of reality ab: The nature of reality has been a central concern of philosophy and the social sciences, but since the proliferation of social media, psychological operations have taken on greater visibility and significance in political action. 'Fake news' and micro-targeted and deceptive advertising in elections and votes has brought the tenuous character of political reality to the fore. The affordances of the Internet, World Wide Web and social media have enabled users to be mobilised to varying degrees of awareness for propaganda and disinformation campaigns both as producers and spreaders of content and as generators of data for profiling and targeting. This article will argue that social media platforms and the broader political economy of the Internet create the possibilities for online interactions and targeting which enable form of political intervention focused on the destabilisation of perceptions of reality and recruit users in the construction of new politically useful realities.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:140
TI: Protesters' Reactions to Video Surveillance of Demonstrations: Counter-Moves, Security Cultures, and the Spiral of Surveillance and Counter-Surveillance ab: This article analyses protesters' reactions to police video surveillance of demonstrations in Germany. Theoretically, we draw on the concept of a "spiral of surveillance and counter-surveillance" to understand the interaction processes which-intentionally or not-contribute to the deepening of the "surveillant assemblage" in the field of protest policing. After introducing video surveillance and its importance for selective protest policing, we discuss concepts of counter-surveillance. Widening the individualist scope of former research on "neutralisation techniques," collective and interactive dimensions are added to cover the full counter-surveillance repertoire. We identified six basic categories of counter-surveillance moves: consider cameras, disguise, attack, hide, sousveillance, and cooperation. They can be classified along the axes of (a) degree of cooperation with the police, and (b) directedness (inwards/outward). It becomes obvious that activists are not predominantly deterred by video surveillance but adapt to the situation. If and how certain counter-surveillance moves are applied depends on the degree of exposure, perceptions of conflict dynamics, political interpretations, and on how these factors are processed in the respective security cultures. Security cultures, which are grounded in the respective relations between protest groups and police, are collective sets of practices and interpretive patterns aimed at securing safety and/or anonymity of activists as well as making their claims visible. Thus, they are productive power effects, resulting from the very conditions under which protest takes place in contemporary surveillance societies. This article elaborates on these ambiguities and unintended effects with regard to sousveillance and disguise techniques, such as masking or uniform clothing. The analysis is based on qualitative data collected between 2011 and 2016 consisting of group discussions and interviews with activists from different political spectra, journalists, politicians, and police officers, as well as observations of demonstrations and document analyses of movement literature.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:283
TI: Public Goods, Private Partnerships, and Political Institutions ab: Public-private partnerships (PPPs) have become an essential vehicle for infrastructure development worldwide. Theoretical arguments primarily focus on build-operate-transfer (BOT) agreements as a canonical form of PPP, though they rarely discuss the political underpinnings of governments decisions to enter such agreements. How does a governments longevity, stability, and its capacity to raise revenue make BOTs more attractive than other types of partnerships? Extending recent theoretical advances through concepts of control rights and veto players and statistically analyzing a database of more than 4,300 PPP agreements for new construction of infrastructure in 83 developing economies between 1990 and 2014, I provide the first large-scale quantitative evidence of the influence of political institutions on government choices to adopt BOTs. I find that BOTs are less attractive as the tenure of the longest-serving veto player increases, when veto players are more frequently replaced, and when governments can generate more tax revenue, but more likely when that revenue is above a countrys historic average. My findings contribute to literatures on distributive public policy, hybrid governance, complex project management, and to the policy debate about the role of PPPs in economic development.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:117
TI: Public Organization Adaptation to Extreme Events: Mediating Role of Risk Perception ab: The study responds to the growing call for a more systematic approach to research on organizational responses to extreme events. It develops and tests an integrated framework based on the organizational adaptation and learning theory to shed light on how public organizations manage exposure and vulnerability to extreme events. The analysis uses data from a 2016 national survey of top managers in the largest fixed-route public transit agencies in the United States and from other institutional sources to test hypotheses that link exposure to extreme events, impact, risk perception, and adaptive responses. We apply a structural model to disentangle the direct effect of exposure on adaptation as well as its indirect effects through impact and risk perception. Findings underscore the critical role that organizational risk perception has in converting environmental stimuli to organizational adaptive responses and point to a perception-mediated learning model of adaptation.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:370
TI: Public Policy Perspective on Group Decision-Making Dynamics in Foreign Policy ab: Research on decision making in foreign policy and national security has had little interaction with the field of public policy. This review connects the two fields. We utilize a key public policy concept, the policy cycle, to provide a framework for our review of group decision-making dynamics in national security and foreign policy. We describe key stages of the policy cycle followed by a review of the leading models of group decision-making dynamics. We then construct a bridge between the two, demonstrating how specific stages of the policy cycle are typically associated with specific group decision-making dynamics. To illustrate this link we provide an example of decision-making dynamics within the Obama administration throughout policy stages of the 2016 campaign against the Islamic State in Raqqa, Syria. Resumen La perspectiva de las politicas publicas en la dinamica de toma de decisiones grupal en la politica exteriorLa investigacion acera de la toma de decisiones en la politica exterior y la seguridad nacional ha tenido poca interaccion con el campo de las politicas publicas. Esta resena conecta los dos campos. Utilizamos un concepto clave de las politicas publicas, el ciclo de las politicas, para proporcionar un marco teorico de nuestra resena de la dinamica de toma de decisiones grupal en la seguridad nacional y la politica exterior. Describimos etapas clave para el ciclo politico seguidas por una resena de los modelos lider de la dinamica de toma de decisiones grupal. Despues construimos un puente entre las dos, lo que demuestra como etapas especificas del ciclo politico estan tipicamente asociadas con dinamicas de toma de decisiones grupales especificas. Para ilustrar este vinculo proporcionamos un ejemplo de dinamicas de toma de decisiones dentro de la administracion de Obama a traves de etapas politicas de la campana de 2016 contra el Estado Islamico en Raqqa, Siria.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW id:138
TI: Public Sector Governance Reform and the Motivation of Street-Level Bureaucrats in Developing Countries ab: This article thaws on health sector reform in Honduras to examine the mechanisms through which governance reforms shape the behavior of street-level bureaucrats. It combines insights from behavioral public administration with original data from lab-in-the-field workshops conducted with more than 200 bureaucrats to assess the relationship between decentralization and motivation. Findings show strong evidence that motivation, measured as self-sacrifice, is higher among bureaucrats in decentralized municipalities compared with bureaucrats in comparable centrally administered municipalities. Increased motivation is most pronounced in decentralized systems led by nongovernmental organizations compared with those led by municipal governments or associations. Additionally, the evidence suggests that higher motivation is related to changes in the composition of staff rather than socialization or changes among existing staff Overall, this research helps move beyond indiscriminate calls for decentralization by highlighting the interplay between reform design and bureaucratic behavior, as well as the limitations of governance reforms in motivating more experienced bureaucrats.
SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY id:787
TI: Public Service or Propaganda? How Americans Evaluate Political Advocacy by Executive Agencies ab: Objective Executive agencies of the federal government frequently engage in explicit political advocacy, exhorting the public to adopt policy positions and engage in political actions. This advocacy conflicts with legal restrictions on unelected bureaucrats. It is unclear what the public thinks of this kind of advocacy. We assess whether Americans judge this advocacy based on principles about acceptable political processes or based on policy goals. Methods We use observational and experimental data from two national surveys of American adults to assess the role of policy preferences in acceptance of political advocacy by executive agencies. Findings We find that Americans approve a broad range of public communications from executive agencies, but approval of political appeals is highly sensitive to whether an individual shares the policy goal of the agency. Conclusions Policy agreement, rather than preferences about process, drives Americans' attitudes toward this kind of advocacy. Americans support political advocacy by executive agencies when it dovetails with their own policy preferences or partisanship and oppose it when these agencies advocate for policies that contradict their own preferences or partisanship. Indeed, they do not draw any distinction between unelected bureaucrats and elected politicians when it comes to evaluating these forms of advocacy.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:565
TI: Social epistemology as a new paradigm for journalism and media studies ab: Journalism and media studies lack robust theoretical concepts for studying journalistic knowledge generation. More specifically, conceptual challenges attend the emergence of big data and algorithmic sources of journalistic knowledge. A family of frameworks apt to this challenge is provided by "social epistemology": a young philosophical field which regards society's participation in knowledge generation as inevitable. Social epistemology offers the best of both worlds for journalists and media scholars: a thorough familiarity with biases and failures of obtaining knowledge, and a strong orientation toward best practices in the realm of knowledge-acquisition and truth-seeking. This article articulates the lessons of social epistemology for two central nodes of knowledge-acquisition in contemporary journalism: human-mediated knowledge and technology-mediated knowledge.
SCIENCE AS CULTURE id:174
TI: Public Storylines in the British Transition from Rail to Road Transport (1896-2000): Discursive Struggles in the Multi-Level Perspective ab: An analysis of the transition from railways to highways as the dominant British transport system during the twentieth century shows that public storylines about competing niche and regime technologies can have a powerful influence on socio-technical transitions. These storylines are developed by supporters and opponents of the competing technologies, with each group attempting to frame their favoured technology positively. The public salience of these storylines can be evaluated by assessing how highly they score on four elements of frame resonance: empirical fit, experiential commensurability, actor credibility, and macro-cultural resonance. These storylines can be seen at play across the entirety of the transition to a road-based transport system, from the very early history of the automobile through to the turn of the millennium, when public opposition to road transport was becoming increasingly pronounced. This case study uniquely traces discursive conflict over the entire course of a multi-decade transition. While existing literature in the multi-level perspective typically emphasises the disadvantages faced by niche-innovations, this case study shows that powerful storylines, enabled by the right cultural repertoires and possibly negative storylines about existing socio-technical systems, can create powerful political support for a new technology, giving it an advantage against more established incumbents.
SCIENCE AS CULTURE id:699
TI: Re-basing Scientific Authority: Anthropocene Narratives in the Carnegie Natural History Museum ab: Natural history museums legitimate and motivate social and political actions through their representations of science-society relations. The Carnegie Natural History Museum has brought narratives of the Anthropocene into its museum spaces, offering novel representations and understandings of human-nature and science-society relations. As a contested concept, the Anthropocene entails at least two tensions in how it might be represented, encouraging different kinds of social and political projects: the Anthropocene may encourage new political formations and opportunities as well as new, better relations between science and society. Motivated to engage with the Anthropocene out of commitments to affirm a strong and pronounced social role of the scientific community, museum actors defend scientific authority through appeals to reflexive scientific processes and science's necessary relations with other modes of thought. Reflexive scientific processes allow scientists and scientific institutions to manage their social and political values, while science's relations with artistic and ethical thinking legitimizes the use of science in responses to explicitly political and social problems. The Carnegie Museum enacts these bases for authority through its Anthropocene narratives, re-drawing the boundaries of scientific authority to include political questions while simultaneously making the boundaries between legitimate, scientific knowledge and other modes of thought less salient.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:713
TI: Reconciliation Between Monetary Incentives and Motivation Crowding-Out: The Influence of Perceptions of Incentives on Research Performance ab: Motivation crowding theories suggest that the influence of performance-based monetary incentives on performance may depend on how employees perceive the incentives. To examine the crowding-out effect, this article analyzed a panel dataset of faculty's research published over 9 years in a Korean university, focusing on the moderating role of perceptions of incentives. We found that, as the university increased financial incentives for research performance, academic researchers who perceived the incentives as supportive published more papers in higher impact factor journals. In contrast, the quantity and quality of research performance of those who perceived such incentives as controlling were not significantly associated with the increase in the incentives. To improve the performance of the performance-incentive system with potential crowding-out effects, administrators should communicate with employees to help them perceive incentives as supportive and positive.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE id:36
TI: Reconsidering the Role of Politics in Leaving Religion: The Importance of Affiliation ab: Studies have pointed to politics as an important force driving people away from religionthe argument is that the dogmatic politics of the Christian Right have alienated liberals and moderates, effectively threatening organized religion in America. We argue that existing explanations are incomplete; a proper reconsideration necessitates distinguishing processes of affiliation (with specific congregations) from identification (with religious traditions). Using three data sets, we find evidence that qualifies and complements existing narratives of religious exit. Evaluations of congregational political fit drive retention decisions. At the same time, opposition to the Christian Right only bears on retention decisions when it is salient in a congregational context, affecting primarily evangelicals and Republicans. These results help us understand the dynamics of the oft-observed relationship between the Christian Right and deidentification and urge us to adopt a broader, more pluralistic view of the politicization of American religion.
WORLD DEVELOPMENT id:337
TI: Redefining the social contract in the wake of the Arab Spring: The experiences of Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia ab: The social contract is the deal between the state and its citizens by which the latter agree the rule of the former in return for deliverables Over time, the state's deliverables have evolved from simple law and order to a set of social rights, such as the social contract in North African countries like Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia -in the 1950s and 1960s. State-led development, including state-led industrial development, provided jobs to many, with state provision of health and education and a range of consumer subsidies. Deteriorating economic performance led to the collapse of this model as the state could no longer provide these deliverables. Instead, an 'unsocial' social contract emerged under liberalisation in which the state used trade, industrial and other economic policies to favour an emerging group of crony capitalists who in turn provided support for the regime. The growing inequality and diminishing benefits for the masses undermined its sustainability resulting in the Arab Spring. The trajectory of the social contract has differed in the three countries. In Egypt, the 'unsocial' social contract is further entrenched. The army is taking the role of a leading business-group using industrial policy to political ends. Its strong engagement in the economy makes it an interested party rather than an impartial arbiter. In Morocco, the King still retains a prime position but has accommodated some pressures for a more inclusive industrial policy in domestic markets, which may lay the basis for a more broadly based social contract. Tunisia is finding its way to an even more inclusive development model, but is still struggling for consensus for a clear economic policy direction and remains threatened by extremist elements. International efforts to support democratic development in these countries need to be conditioned on the differing nature of the ongoing transitions in the social contract. (C) 2019 The Author. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
SCIENCE AS CULTURE id:382
TI: Regime of Congestion: Technopolitics of Mobility and Inequality in Bengaluru, India ab: Vehicular congestion on the streets of Bengaluru has been tackled, since the late 1990s at least, through a hybrid coalition of actors, technologies, norms, and discourses that have political consequences. Technopolitical regimes, understood as an ordering that enrolls technologies and artifacts amongst other things to achieve specific political aims, is a particularly apposite framing for delineating the ways by which congestion is problematized and addressed in urban areas, such as Bengaluru. Relying on this framing, a range of entities such as mega-infrastructure projects, 'super bureaucrats,' investment plans, and discourses of infrastructure deficiency constitute the regime of congestion. Bengaluru's regime of congestion has become associated with a discernible political intent that redefines streets into entities reserved for vehicular traffic and at the same time marginalizes the mobility needs of the urban poor and the nonmotorized. In the process, not only is public transit becoming a less inviting option, but it incentivizes the switch to private vehicles, thereby reinforcing the existing regime. It is this self-perpetuating cycle that accounts for the stability of the regime of congestion. This offers two insights for theory development. First, with the circulation of world-class city discourses, urban technopolitical regimes possess a distinctly hybrid global-local (or glocal) constitution that weaves together global norms with local concerns and actors. Second, interlinkages between material, institutional, and political actors create an entity that exists in a self-perpetuating cycle, thus unlocking such a regime would require revitalizing coexistence across multiple modalities of mobility infrastructures.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:672
TI: Regulating Visibility: Secrecy and Surveillance in Insular Religious Communities ab: Insular religious communities offer significant insights into some of the issues facing contemporary Western societies, including the issues of religious secrecy and surveillance. The role of secrecy in these communities involves dynamic strategies invoked for many reasons in equally numerous contexts. The behaviours and practices of these groups often reflect much larger issues present in today's society. In this way, they can guide us in understanding the role of surveillance from a sociological perspective in the current climate of tensions and anxieties. These communities are especially useful for thinking about questions of why some religious groups rigidly control and restrict access to bodies of secret, sacred knowledge or activities and in turn how religious secrecy is viewed by the wider social worlds in which their degree of visibility fluctuates. Here, I suggest an opportunity emerges for the study of secrecy in relation to the notion of regulating visibility by reorienting the focus from the roles of secrets and of secretive practices to one that also considers the more visible forms and strategies through which secrets and secretive practices come to be and are sustained.
SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY id:453
TI: Regulating risks within complex sociotechnical systems: Evidence from critical infrastructure cybersecurity standards ab: Using regulations to reduce risks in complex systems is controversial, with some arguing that regulations are ineffective, while others argue that they are essential even if imperfect. In this article, we show how regulations and the systems that they aim to regulate function together as a complex sociotechnical system that influences risk management. We first argue that regulatory influence is shaped by three factors-incentives, scope, and adaptability-which are a product of the interactions between the regulations and the system they regulate. Next, we assess the effect of one set of regulations, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation's Critical Infrastructure Protection standards, on the cybersecurity risks faced by the US electric grid. Our assessment shows that the regulations reduced many but not all cybersecurity risks, and at times may have worsened them. We argue that regulatory influence should be understood as emergent from interactions between regulations and the systems that they regulate.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:152
TI: Regulatory Enforcement, Riskscapes, and Environmental Justice ab: Does environmental regulation vary over poor and minority communities? An uneven governmental response may follow from regulators' varying incentives to negotiate enforcement challenges. We argue that regulators confront two in particular. Regulators can pursue political enforcement, responding to mobilized interests, regardless of environmental risk, or they can pursue instrumental enforcement, responding to at-risk communities, regardless of political mobilization. To examine these competing strategies, we use an original dataset from the EPA's Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators model to develop a geographic riskscape combined with census tract community data and facility-level enforcement data. We find that state regulatory agencies pursue a mixture of political and instrumental enforcement, but that these tactics are applied unevenly across traditional environmental justice communities. Specifically, state agencies devote more attention to facilities in communities with relatively higher risk, but less attention in the area of punishment for violations for facilities located in Hispanic communities. Importantly, this lack of attention to Hispanic communities is not mediated by the relative level of risks that they face, but it is to a significant extent in communities in which environmental justice advocacy organizations operate.
SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY id:377
TI: Regulatory capacity building and the governance of clinical stem cell research in China ab: While other works have explained difficulties in applying 'international' guidelines in the field of regenerative medicine in so-called low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in terms of 'international hegemony', 'political and ethical governance' and 'cosmopolitisation', this article on stem cell regulation in China emphasizes the particular complexities faced by large LMICs: the emergence of alternative regulatory arrangements made by stakeholders at a provincial level at home. On the basis of ethnographic and archival research of clinical stem cell research hubs, we have characterized six types of entrepreneurial 'bionetworks', each of which embodies a regulatory orientation that developed in interaction with China's regulatory dilemmas. Rather than adopting guidelines from other countries, we argue that regulatory capacity building is more appropriately viewed as a relational concept, referring to the ability to develop regulatory requirements that can cater for different regulatory research needs on an international level and at home.
PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE id:15
TI: Reimagining publics and (non) participation: Exploring exclusion from science communication through the experiences of low-income, minority ethnic groups ab: This article explores science communication from the perspective of those most at risk of exclusion, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork. I conducted five focus groups and 32 interviews with participants from low-income, minority ethnic backgrounds. Using theories of social reproduction and social justice, I argue that participation in science communication is marked by structural inequalities (particularly ethnicity and class) in two ways. First, participants' involvement in science communication practices was narrow (limited to science media consumption). Second, their experiences of exclusion centred on cultural imperialism (misrepresentation and 'Othering') and powerlessness (being unable to participate or change the terms of their participation). I argue that social reproduction in science communication constructs a narrow public that reflects the shape, values and practices of dominant groups, at the expense of the marginalised. The article contributes to how we might reimagine science communication's publics by taking inclusion/exclusion and the effects of structural inequalities into account.
DISASTERS id:69
TI: Remaking the world in our own image: vulnerability, resilience and adaptation as historical discourses ab: A warming climate and less predictable weather patterns, as well as an expanding urban infrastructure susceptible to geophysical hazards, make the world an increasingly dangerous place, even for those living in high-income countries. It is an opportune moment, therefore, from the vantage point of the second decade of the twenty-first century, to review the terms and concepts that have been employed regularly over the past 50 years to assess risk and to measure people's exposure to such events in the light of the wider geopolitical context. In particular, it is useful to examine 'vulnerability', 'resilience', and 'adaptation', the principal theoretical concepts that, from an historical perspective, have dominated disaster studies since the end of the Second World War. In addition, it is valuable to enquire as to the extent to which such discourses were ideological products of their time, which sought to explain societies and their environments from the stance of competing conceptual frameworks.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE id:71
TI: Remittances and Protest in Dictatorships ab: Remittances-money migrant workers send back home-are the second largest source of international financial flows in developing countries. As with other sources of international finance, such as foreign direct investment and foreign aid, worker remittances shape politics in recipient countries. We examine the political consequences of remittances by exploring how they influence antigovernment protest behavior. While recent research argues that remittances have a pernicious effect on politics by contributing to authoritarian stability, we argue the opposite: Remittances increase political protest in nondemocracies by augmenting the resources available to potential political opponents. Using cross-national data on a latent measure of antigovernment political protest, we show that remittances increase protest. To explore the mechanism linking remittances to protest, we turn to individual-level data from eight nondemocracies in Africa to show that remittance receipt increases protest in opposition areas but not in progovernment regions.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW id:349
TI: Representative Bureaucracy, Distributional Equity, and Environmental Justice ab: This article explores the role of bureaucratic representation and distributional equity in the implementation of environmental policy, which has been shaped by the politics of identity, administrative discretion, and a contested discourse on the redistribution of public resources. The authors examine whether minority bureaucratic representation fosters policy outputs for race-related disadvantaged communities and whether the behavior of public administrators reflects distributional equity. Linking representative bureaucracy to environmental justice, this research contributes to the understanding of social equity in public administration and sheds light on the relationship between bureaucratic representation and democratic values. Analyzing a nationwide, block-group-level data set, the authors find that a more racially representative workforce in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency promotes the agency's enforcement actions in communities that have large local-national disparities in minority populations and severe policy problems. The size of the bureaucratic representation effect is larger for neighborhoods that are overburdened with race-related social vulnerability. Evidence for Practice Public administrators can play a critical role in representing the general public, particularly those who have historically been marginalized and underserved, and acting in their interests. Non-service-oriented regulatory agencies have taken equity into account in the process of implementing policies and serving socially vulnerable clients. Public administrators need to be cognizant of the degree of preexisting inequity in local communities, acquire adequate information to ascertain the equity point, and devise public policies and programs to achieve various democratic values. It is important to recruit more underrepresented and historically disadvantaged members of society into the public workforce.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE id:313
TI: Repression Technology: Internet Accessibility and State Violence ab: This article offers a first subnational analysis of the relationship between states' dynamic control of Internet access and their use of violent repression. I argue that where governments provide Internet access, surveillance of digital information exchange can provide intelligence that enables the use of more targeted forms of repression, in particular in areas not fully controlled by the regime. Increasing restrictions on Internet accessibility can impede opposition organization, but they limit access to information on precise targets, resulting in an increase in untargeted repression. I present new data on killings in the Syrian conflict that distinguish between targeted and untargeted events, using supervised text classification. I find that higher levels of Internet accessibility are associated with increases in targeted repression, whereas areas with limited access experience more indiscriminate campaigns of violence. The results offer important implications on how governments incorporate the selective access to communication technology into their strategies of coercion.
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SYSTEMS id:452
TI: Research Perspectives: Through Whose Eyes? The Critical Concept of Researcher Perspective ab: In this article, we explore the notion of "researcher perspective," by which we mean the viewpoint from which the researcher observes phenomena in any specific research context. Inevitably, the adoption of a particular viewpoint means that the researcher privileges the interests of one or more stakeholders while downplaying the interests of other stakeholders. Preliminary empirical analysis of a corpus of 659 articles published in three separate years in the AIS Basket of Eight journals, undertaken in preparation for the present paper, revealed that around 90% of articles (1) adopted a single-perspective approach, (2) were committed solely to the interests of the entity central to the research design, and (3) considered only economic aspects of the phenomena investigated in the research. Taken together, we argue that these three characteristics are unhealthy for the discipline and are likely to lead to the neglect of important research opportunities. We suggest that the principle of triangulation be applied not only to data sources and research methods, but also to researcher perspectives and that a consequent broadening of the IS discipline's scope is essential. We conclude the article with prescriptive recommendations for the practice of research that is relevant to multiple stakeholders.
SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY id:413
TI: Research in Arabic-speaking countries: Funding competitions, international collaboration, and career incentives ab: Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Qatar expanded research funds over the past two decades. The use of competitive calls required researchers to prepare and submit proposals for team-based projects or time-limited research units. Identification of national priorities and societal challenges sought to rally research toward real-world problems, while larger grants encouraged a wider range of research activities and greater levels of ambition. Yet, the incentives within hiring organizations still determine how researchers allocate their time and effort, including whether they even seek external funding or collaboration. Selection and evaluation criteria privileged collaboration with distant, scientifically proficient partners abroad, in order to connect with global networks and rise in international rankings of academic quality. Moving forward, countries need to consider how funding opportunities shape the size and organization of distinct research efforts, and which arrangements are best suited to making meaningful progress on different problems of societal and scientific interest.
JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION id:8
TI: Rethinking Political Communication in a Time of Disrupted Public Spheres ab: Political communication in many democracies reflects the disconnection of publics from institutions of press and politics due to the hollowing of center parties and growing social divides. It is time to rethink assumptions-long grounded in idealized normative conceptions of democratic politics-about media systems and press/politics interactions. A proposed reformulation of research frameworks puts more focus on the implications of disrupted public spheres in interaction with and beyond the traditional media. This rethinking also entails better conceptualization and measurement of the political influences of information flows from social media and digital networks. Reformatting the field involves changing such core concepts as gatekeeping, framing, indexing, agenda-setting, and media effects in light of disrupted relations among media, publics, and democratic institutions.
DISASTERS id:634
TI: Rethinking access: how humanitarian technology governance blurs control and care ab: Surprisingly little attention is paid to the role of digital technology and related forms of data production, storage, processing, and sharing in humanitarian governance. This paper uses Michael Barnett's () conceptualisation of humanitarian governance when arguing for a better accounting of technology in literature on humanitarian governance. Specifically, it proposes a two-fold alertness to governance of (a) the uses of new technology and (b) that which is produced by digital technologies. This elucidates important issues, including that of access to digitalised data collected from humanitarian subjects, with implications for their (in)security. The paper concludes by suggesting that access is no longer 'only' about challenges of gaining access to vulnerable populations, but also about challenges of preventing access to vulnerable digital bodies and their use for aggressive purposes. In short, access and protection acquire a new dimension and analyses of humanitarian governance must be more attentive to the role of digital technology.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:530
TI: Revisiting leadership in information and communication technology (ICT)-enabled activism: A study of Egypt's grassroots human rights groups ab: Scholars argue that contemporary movements in the age of social media are leaderless and self-organised. However, the concept of connective leadership has been put forward to highlight the need for movements to have figures who connect entities together. This study conducts a qualitative research of 30 interviews of human rights groups in the 2011 Egyptian revolution to address the question of how leadership is performed in information and communication technology-enabled activism. The article reconceptualises connective leadership as decentred, emergent and collectively performed, and provides a broader and richer account of leaders' roles, characteristics and challenges.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:560
TI: Revitalizing Historiography in Public Administration ab: Notwithstanding the popularity in public administration of empirical, behavioral, and quantitative research, interpretive methodologies similarly help advance scholarship. For the latter, history is probably the most traditional, a research technique long predating public administration as an academic discipline. The article evaluates the status of historiography in the contemporary literature and makes the case of history?s ongoing value to public administration. It assesses the pros and cons of traditional primary sources and recommends triangulation of sources to strengthen historical narratives. Some relatively underutilized approaches to reinvigorating historiography include case studies written for classroom use, old textbooks, and counterfactual scenarios. In general, public administration history would benefit from revisionism, studying lost alternatives, and skepticism toward the given narrative and conventional wisdom.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:440
TI: Revolutionary dreams: Future essentialism and the sociotechnical imaginary of the fourth industrial revolution in Denmark ab: In 2015, the World Economic Forum announced that the world was on the threshold of a 'fourth industrial revolution' driven by a fusion of cutting-edge technologies with unprecedented disruptive power. The next year, in 2016, the fourth industrial revolution appeared as the theme of the Forum's annual meeting, and as the topic of a book by its founder and executive chairman, Klaus Schwab. Ever since, the Forum has made this impending revolution its top priority, maintaining that it will inevitably change everything we once know about the world and how to live in it, thus creating what I conceptualize as 'future essentialism'. Within a short space of time, the vision of the fourth industrial revolution was institutionalized and publicly performed in various national settings around the world as a sociotechnical imaginary of a promising and desirable future soon to come. Through readings of original material published by the Forum, and through a case study of the reception of the fourth industrial revolution in Denmark, this article highlights and analyses three discursive strategies - 'dialectics of pessimism and optimism', 'epochalism' and 'inevitability' - in the transformation of a corporate, highly elitist vision of the future into policymaking and public reason on a national level.
AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW id:266
TI: Rhetorics of Radicalism ab: What rhetorics run throughout radical discourse, and why do some gain prominence over others? The scholarship on radicalism largely portrays radical discourse as opposition to powerful ideas and enemies, but radicals often evince great interest in personal and local concerns. To shed light on how radicals use and adopt rhetoric, we analyze an original corpus of more than 23,000 pages produced by Afghan radical groups between 1979 and 2001 using a novel computational abductive approach. We first identify how radicalism not only attacks dominant ideas, actors, and institutions using a rhetoric of subversion, but also how it can use a rhetoric of reversion to urge intimate transformations in morals and behavior. Next, we find evidence that radicals' networks of support affect the rhetorical mixture they espouse, due to social ties drawing radicals into encounters with backers' social domains. Our study advances a relational understanding of radical discourse, while also showing how a combination of computational and abductive methods can help theorize and analyze discourses of contention.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:781
TI: Rhizomic learning: How environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) acquire and assemble knowledge ab: It has been a common assumption that the knowledge practices of environmental organisations (ENGOs) is largely based on interaction with environmental research. Implied in such assumptions is the idea that ENGOs are so-called boundary organizations brokering knowledge between science and environmental policy decision-making. In this article, we challenge this belief. Through interviews, we have investigated the practices of ENGO employees as they acquire and assemble knowledge they need in their involvement with environmental policymakers. From their accounts, these ENGOs are not boundary organizations. Science is important but such knowledge was usually acquired indirectly and appeared to be seen as ubiquitous in the environmental policy community. We found that the knowledge practices were based on what we call rhizomic learning. We introduce this concept to highlight the complexity, opacity and non-linearity of the ways in which ENGO actors acquire and assemble environmental knowledge. We found that this rhizomic learning is characterized by five main features: 1) diversity of sources and the importance of networks, 2) pragmatism, 3) opacity of the process, 4) community among involved actors, and 5) mediation. ENGO actors expected that their capacity for rhizomic learning - not the least the purposeful mediation and assembly of knowledge from a multitude of sources - would make them appear to policymakers as competent, relevant and reliable.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:285
TI: Risk-Based Policy Narratives ab: The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) was developed to provide theoretical and empirical grounding for inquiries into questions about the interplay between communication and policy processes. In our previous work, we argued for the inclusion of framing analysis within the broader NPF structure in order to account for the ways in which problems, solutions, and characters are portrayed to citizens. The study presented here seeks to further develop these complementary approaches to understanding the construction of policy narratives in the important domain of hazards and disaster policy. Communication of risk is central to political and policy dialogue. By accurately and effectively communicating risks, the problem definitions and associated solutions may be more closely aligned with expert risk assessments, actors may mobilize to affect change, and policy change may be more likely. We examine the construction of risk within narratives to analyze how the narrative construction of chronic versus urgent risk may influence policy discussions. In this paper, we link NPF concepts of setting, plot, and moral of the story to frames of risk. This study advances NPF scholarship by linking these theoretical approaches and establishing how framing analysis can aid in measuring narrative concepts.
TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY id:738
TI: Risky Election, Vulnerable Technology: Localizing Biometric Use in Elections for the Sake of Justice ab: This article examines the fingerprint biometric technology adopted by Ghana to enhance its electoral integrity and argues that although this technology is touted to be value-neutral, objective, and accurate, it is inherently discriminatory. Reports show that the biometric rejected those individuals who are engaged in "slash-and-burn agriculture." Therefore, the mass subjection of elections to the logic of the biometric technology in resource-mismanaged contexts is welcoming, but its use raises social justice and localization concerns.
RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS id:260
TI: SCIENTIST CITIZENS: RHETORIC AND RESPONSIBILITY IN L'AQUILA ab: In this essay, we analyze the public communication debacle before the 2009 L'Aquila earthquake that led to the infamous trial of the "L'Aquila Seven." Examining the trial transcripts to extract norms regarding the proper role of scientists in society, we conclude that the first verdict interpellated the figure of the responsible scientist citizen who is expected to perform rhetorical citizenship when communicating with a lay public, while the second assumed a distinction between public and technical spheres that absolves scientists from responsibility to their fellow citizens and reduces their role to performance of an expertise divorced from rhetoric. Tracing the civic outcomes of these conflicting norms, we identify three missed opportunities during the prequake discourse in which the scientists failed to correct statements that they, and only they, knew to be Yawed. To prevent future communicative debacles that arise from a dangerous separation of scientists and laypeople, we argue that scientists need to come to see themselves as scientist citizens, experts who take on the civic responsibility of clearly communicating their knowledge to their fellow citizens when such sharing is necessary to the public good.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:399
TI: SPID: A New Database for Inferring Public Policy Innovativeness and Diffusion Networks ab: Despite its rich tradition, there are key limitations to researchers' ability to make generalizable inferences about state policy innovation and diffusion. This paper introduces new data and methods to move from empirical analyses of single policies to the analysis of comprehensive populations of policies and rigorously inferred diffusion networks. We have gathered policy adoption data appropriate for estimating policy innovativeness and tracing diffusion ties in a targeted manner (e.g., by policy domain, time period, or policy type) and extended the development of methods necessary to accurately and efficiently infer those ties. Our state policy innovation and diffusion (SPID) database includes 728 different policies coded by topic area. We provide an overview of this new dataset and illustrate two key uses: (i) static and dynamic innovativeness measures and (ii) latent diffusion networks that capture common pathways of diffusion between states across policies. The scope of the data allows us to compare patterns in both across policy topic areas. We conclude that these new resources will enable researchers to empirically investigate classes of questions that were difficult or impossible to study previously, but whose roots go back to the origins of the political science policy innovation and diffusion literature.
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY id:596
TI: Saving social media data: Understanding data management practices among social media researchers and their implications for archives ab: Social media data (SMD) offer researchers new opportunities to leverage those data for their work in broad areas such as public opinion, digital culture, labor trends, and public health. The success of efforts to save SMD for reuse by researchers will depend on aligning data management and archiving practices with evolving norms around the capture, use, sharing, and security of datasets. This paper presents an initial foray into understanding how established practices for managing and preserving data should adapt to demands from researchers who use and reuse SMD, and from people who are subjects in SMD. We examine the data management practices of researchers who use SMD through a survey, and we analyze published articles that used data from Twitter. We discuss how researchers describe their data management practices and how these practices may differ from the management of conventional data types. We explore conceptual, technical, and ethical challenges for data archives based on the similarities and differences between SMD and other types of research data, focusing on the social sciences. Finally, we suggest areas where archives may need to revise policies, practices, and services in order to create secure, persistent, and usable collections of SMD.
AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW id:263
TI: Scaling Down Inequality: Rating Scales, Gender Bias, and the Architecture of Evaluation ab: Quantitative performance ratings are ubiquitous in modern organizations-from businesses to universities-yet there is substantial evidence of bias against women in such ratings. This study examines how gender inequalities in evaluations depend on the design of the tools used to judge merit. Exploiting a quasi-natural experiment at a large North American university, we found that the number of scale points used in faculty teaching evaluations-whether instructors were rated on a scale of 6 versus a scale of 10-significantly affected the size of the gender gap in evaluations in the most male-dominated fields. A survey experiment, which presented all participants with an identical lecture transcript but randomly varied instructor gender and the number of scale points, replicated this finding and suggested that the number of scale points affects the extent to which gender stereotypes of brilliance are expressed in quantitative ratings. These results highlight how seemingly minor technical aspects of performance ratings can have a major effect on the evaluation of men and women. Our findings thus contribute to a growing body of work on organizational practices that reduce workplace inequalities and the sociological literature on how rating systems-rather than being neutral instruments-shape the distribution of rewards in organizations.
PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE id:162
TI: Science to the rescue or contingent progress? Comparing 10years of public, expert and policy discourses on new and emerging science and technology in the United Kingdom ab: Over the past 10years, numerous public debates on new and emerging science and technologies have taken place in the United Kingdom. In this article, we characterise the discourses emerging from these debates and compare them to the discourses in analogous expert scientific and policy reports. We find that while the public is broadly supportive of new scientific developments, they see the risks and social and ethical issues associated with them as unpredictable but inherent parts of the developments. In contrast, the scientific experts and policymakers see risks and social and ethical issues as manageable and quantifiable with more research and knowledge. We argue that these differences amount to two different sociotechnical imaginaries or views of science and how it shapes our world - an elite imaginary of science to the rescue' shared by scientists and policymakers and public counter-imaginary of contingent progress'. We argue that these two imaginaries indicate that, but also help explain why, public dialogue has had limited impact on public policy.
AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW id:548
TI: Scientific Hegemony and the Field of Autism ab: Autism is one of the twenty-first century's most contested illnesses. Early controversies around vaccine harm have irrevocably structured the field of autism science. Despite incredible investment in genetic research on autism over the past 30 years, scientists have failed to identify a set of "genes for" autism, and genomic causality has become more complex. Yet, orthodox genetic explanations for autism have retained dominance over a vociferous field of heterodox experts pointing to a series of environmental insults (vaccines, heavy metal exposure, overuse of antibiotics, toxic pollution) as the main causes of autism. To make sense of this puzzling trend, we develop a novel theoretical synthesis combining a Bourdieusian field analysis with a Gramscian conception of hegemony, centered around the concept of "subsumptive orthodoxy." Analyzing multiple years of archival data from the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, we argue that when faced with heterodox challenges, dominant members of the field shore up hegemony by incorporating environmental causal factors into the genome, thus engaging in subsumptive orthodoxy. This move gives rhetorical space to environmental explanations without providing them substantive causal weight, which renders particular environmental causes (like vaccines) impossible. This article traces the strategies dominant members of the field use to retain control over the definition and etiology of autism. We develop the broader implications of the study within autism science and beyond.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:677
TI: Scientific and subversive: The two faces of the fourth era of political campaigning ab: This article sets out the case that democracies are now entering a fourth phase of "data-driven" political campaigning. Building on the existing campaigns literature, we identify several key shifts in practice that define the new phase, namely: (1) an organizational and strategic dependency on digital technology and "big data," (2) a reliance on networked communication, (3) the individualized micro-targeting of campaign messages, and (4) the internationalization of the campaign sphere. Departing from prior studies, we also argue that the new phase is distinguished, by a bifurcation, into two variants-the scientific and the subversive. While sharing a common core, these two modes differ, in that the former retains a commitment to the normative goals of campaigning, that is, to mobilize and inform voters, while the latter explicitly rejects and subverts these aims, focusing instead on demobilization and the spread of misinformation. Both are presented as abstract or "ideal" types, although we do point out how features of each have appeared in recent election campaigns by mainstream and populist parties. We conclude by discussing the implications of these trends for the long-term future health of democracy.
PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE id:716
TI: Scientific truth or debate: On the link between perceived scientific consensus and belief in anthropogenic climate change ab: Scientists overwhelmingly agree that climate change exists and is caused by human activity. It has been argued that communicating the consensus can counter climate scepticism, given that perceived scientific consensus is a major factor predicting public belief that climate change is anthropogenic. However, individuals may hold different models of science, potentially affecting their interpretation of scientific consensus. Using representative surveys in the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Norway, we assessed whether the relationship between perceived scientific consensus and belief in anthropogenic climate change is conditioned by a person's viewing science as 'the search for truth' or as 'debate'. Results show that perceived scientific consensus is higher among climate change believers and moreover, significantly predicts belief in anthropogenic climate change. This relationship is stronger among people holding a model of science as the 'search for truth'. These results help to disentangle the effect of implicit epistemological assumptions underlying the public understanding of the climate change debate.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE id:89
TI: Sectarian Framing in the Syrian Civil War ab: How do civilians respond to civil war narratives? Do they react to ethnic frames more strongly than to alternatives? Governments and rebels battle for hearts and minds as well as strategic terrain, and winning the narrative war can shift legitimacy, popular support, and material resources to the sympathetically framed side. We examine the effect of one-sided and competing war discourses on ordinary people's understandings of the Syrian civil war-a conflict with multiple narratives, but which has become more communal over time. We conduct a framing experiment with a representative sample of Syrian refugees in Lebanon in which we vary the narrative that describes the reasons for the conflict. We find that sectarian explanations, framed in isolation, strongly increase the importance government supporters place on fighting. When counterframed against competing narratives, however, the rallying effect of sectarianism drops and vanishes.
SCIENCE AS CULTURE id:726
TI: Securing Identities: Biometric Technologies and the Enactment of Human Bodily Differences ab: Worldwide, biometrics are quickly becoming the preferred solution to a wide range of problems involving identity checking. Biometrics are claimed to provide more secure identification and verification, because 'the body does not lie.' Yet, every biometric check consists of a process with many intermediate steps, introducing contingency and choice on many levels. In addition, there are underlying normative assumptions regarding human bodies that affect the functioning of biometric systems in highly problematic ways. In recent social science studies, the failures of biometric systems have been interpreted as gendered and racialized biases. A more nuanced understanding of how biometrics and bodily differences intersect draws attention to how bodily differences are produced, used, and problematized during the research and design phases of biometric systems, as well as in their use. In technical engineering research, issues of biometrics' performance and human differences are already transformed into R&D challenges in variously more and less problematic ways. In daily practices of border control, system operators engage in workarounds to make the technology work well with a wide range of users. This shows that claims about 'inherent whiteness' of biometrics should be adjusted: relationships between biometric technologies, gender and ethnicity are emergent, multiple and complex. Moreover, from the viewpoint of theorizing gender and ethnicity, biometrics' difficulties in correctly recognising pre-defined categories of gender or ethnicity may be less significant than its involvement in producing and enacting (new) gender and ethnic classifications and identities.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:662
TI: Seeing like a surveillance agency? Sensor realism as aesthetic critique of visual data governance ab: Despite the centrality of visual data creation and analysis in security-related governance not only of heavily surveilled battlefields, but of fields as diverse as petty crime, urban mobility and migration, the sensors and systems producing visual data used for security purposes are rarely themselves the focus of close scrutiny. This is surprising as photography, IR, and science and technology studies literature all point towards equipment as being agential and transformative. We argue that in the photo-seriesHeat Maps, the Irish photographer Richard Mosse opens up for a much-needed discussion of visual data production by appropriating equipment normally used for surveillance. We develop the idea of sensor realism by considering Mosse'sHeat Mapsin dialogue with other aesthetic and photographic traditions and concepts. By sensor realism, we mean an aesthetic realism based on the visual replication of technologies used in visualising and governing an issue, rather than on a photorealistic depiction of an issue. Sensor realism, thus, is the critical artistic appropriation of visual data production equipment, aesthetics and practices, and allows viewers to scrutinise how visual data production reassembles and formats that which it observes. We discuss the politics of sensor realism and argue that used as a critical aesthetic it can reveal how visual data production practices are productive and enact ways of seeing that prefigure visual governance by structuring how reality is made available for governance in visual data. But due to its appropriation of sensing technologies, it always risks confirming the practices it seeks to critique.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:771
TI: Seeing through the Data Shadow: Communing with the paints in a Surveillance Society ab: The political theologian Amy Laura Hall has recently suggested that the proliferation of security cameras can be read as an index displaying the quality of a given community's social fabric. The aim of the paper is to show why this is a plausible reading of the Christian tradition that also helpfully illuminates the various cultural phenomena in western societies that are collectively indicated by the label "surveillance." The Swedish theologian Ola Sigurdson's account of modern regimes of perception substantiates this latter claim. An alternative political proposal is then developed around an account of the divine gaze that differs from the panoptic gaze of modernity. This theological positioning of the trusting gaze as ontologically fundamental for human community is paired with an acceptance of the limits of human sight and the multivalence of human knowing. The paper concludes by highlighting the importance of the gaze of the saints in training Christian vision to see beyond the characteristic ways of seeing and participating in the social organism characteristic of modern liberal surveillance societies. This conclusion implies, further, that one of the most important ways that the most denuding aspects of the surveillance society can be resisted is by drawing the gatekeepers who do the watching out in to public converse.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:776
TI: Separating truth from lies: comparing the effects of news media literacy interventions and fact-checkers in response to political misinformation in the US and Netherlands ab: Although previous research has offered important insights into the consequences of mis- and disinformation and the effectiveness of corrective information, we know markedly less about how different types of corrective information - news media literacy interventions and fact-checkers - can be combined to counter different forms of misinformation. Against this backdrop, this paper reports on experiments in the US and the Netherlands (N = 1,091) that exposed people to evidence-based or fact-free anti-immigration misinformation, fact-checkers and/or a media literacy intervention. The main findings indicate that evidence-based misinformation is seen as more accurate than fact-free misinformation, and the combination of news media literacy interventions and fact-checkers is most effective in lowering issue agreement and perceived accuracy of misinformation across countries. These findings have important implications for journalism practice and policy makers that aim to combat mis- and disinformation.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:683
TI: Shaping news waves and constructing events: Iranian journalists' use of online platforms as sources of journalistic capital ab: This article investigates the influence of online communications platforms on Iranian journalists' struggle for countering the restrictions, and achieving their journalistic ends. Based on 26 interviews with journalists working in the established media in Iran, it shows that social networking websites and mobile messaging applications are arenas of mobilization and leverage for journalists in this semi-authoritarian context. Online platforms function as sources of social and symbolic assets for journalists enabling them to make others see and think about an issue, and act on it, thus employ journalistic symbolic power. This article applies Bourdieu's concepts of doxa, social capital, symbolic capital and symbolic power to explain, why and under what circumstances certain journalistic online strategies become operative. The findings offer insights into how new media affect power relations between journalists and the forces that restrict their practices and offer potentials for relatively more journalistic autonomy in a controlled media environment.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:681
TI: Shibboleths in the studio: Informal demarcation practices among audio engineers ab: Recording engineers have an interest in maintaining their roles as skilled professionals as compared to external competitors, which increasingly include unpaid amateurs and automated software tools. They do this through a variety of material-semiotic demarcation practices. Formal modes of demarcation, such as unionization and professional attire, have largely eroded in recent decades, making informal practices increasingly important. These informal demarcation practices, which I term 'shibboleths', allow engineers to locally observe and perform differences between 'real' engineers and non-engineers (amateur and automated) while also controlling the visibility of these performances for various audiences. I situate the shibboleth concept within the existing literature on boundary objects and boundary-work, suggesting that it is useful for analyzing situations where collaboration and consensus temporarily break down. I consider two examples: electrical audio cable wrapping techniques and hearing the artifacts of digital vocal tuning software.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW id:336
TI: Should We Defend the Administrative State? ab: Troubled by actions of the Donald Trump administration, some academics have defended the administrative state. This may be a mistake. The scholarly definition of the administrative state has shifted over decades, and today scholarly usage of the term often diverges substantially from popular usage. When academics invoke the concept, they may unwittingly trigger negative associations in the minds of nonacademics and defeat their own cause. This mistake is easily avoided, because academics often do not need to talk about the administrative state at all. Research would be improved by using different terms to describe three distinct ideas: the state, administrative systems within the state, and the administrative state, which is best understood as a type of state that emerged at a specific moment in American history. If academics want to defend the public service in the realm of politics, it would be better to do so in those terms, rather than using a phrase that often triggers fears about big and irresponsible government.
COMPUTER SUPPORTED COOPERATIVE WORK-THE JOURNAL OF COLLABORATIVE COMPUTING AND WORK PRACTICES id:611
TI: Simulations at Work -a Framework for Configuring Simulation Fidelity with Training Objectives ab: This study aims to provide framework for considering fidelity in the design of simulator training. Simulator fidelity is often characterised as the level of physical and visual similarity with real work settings, and the importance of simulator fidelity in the creation of learning activities has been extensively debated. Based on a selected literature review and fieldwork on ship simulator training, this study provides a conceptual framework for fidelity requirements in simulator training. This framework is applied to an empirical example from a case of ship simulator training. The study identifies three types of simulator fidelity that might be useful from a trainer's perspective. By introducing a framework of technical, psychological and interactional fidelity and linking these concepts to different levels of training and targeted learning outcomes, the study demonstrates how the fidelity of the simulation relates to the level of expertise targeted in training. The framework adds to the body of knowledge on simulator training by providing guidelines for the different ways in which simulators can increase professional expertise, without separating the learning activity from cooperative work performance.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:477
TI: Situating science in Africa: The dynamics of computing research in Nairobi and Kampala ab: Since the turn of the century, both Kampala and Nairobi have experienced a dramatic growth of computer science research, challenging accepted views of science in Africa. We deploy qualitative methods to follow active computer science researchers, graduate students, policy makers, administrators and entrepreneurs, in order to understand how computer science is enacted in these two cities. Our analysis focuses on four interrelated areas of labor, institutions, identities and scale. We illustrate the dynamics and frictions of computer science research across these areas, revealing the interlacing of moral economies of science and the political economy of higher education, the management of precarious professional lives and desire to get research done, and the pluralistic imaginations and multiple scales of computer science. Urban centers in East Africa are increasingly active in supporting granular and connective research communities that are socially transformative in ways that challenge conventional views of Africa as technologically dry. In this way, the computer science communities of Nairobi and Kampala are instructive for thinking about new geographies of science and technology studies.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:115
TI: Social Constructions, Anticipatory Feedback Strategies, and Deceptive Public Policy ab: Elected leaders adopt "anticipatory feedback strategies" in designing public policies that generate support and forestall opposition. This contention is at the core of a social construction theory of feedback. Officials anticipate approval when policies allocate benefits to powerful groups socially constructed as deserving and allocate costs or punishment to groups viewed as undeserving, particularly if these groups lack political power. Designs for powerful groups that are widely viewed as unworthy provide mainly benefits in ways that are hidden from the general public who would not approve. For politically weak groups regarded as deserving, legislators generally design policies that provide promises, but not much in terms of material benefits. Often, deception will be used to protect or enhance this particular allocation pattern, including the reinforcement, perpetuation, or change in the social constructions along with the stereotypes, labels, stigma, and accompanying narratives. Using data from legislation introduced by the 2016 Arizona Legislature, we find that most policy is directed toward providing benefits to positively viewed target populations, as expected by the theory, and legislators employ deceptive feedback strategies that protect themselves. Feedback from the general public, which otherwise might be expected, may be precluded by the deceptive strategies being used.
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY id:578
TI: Social Informatics Research: Schools of Thought, Methodological Basis, and Thematic Conceptualization ab: Research activities related to social informatics (SI) are expanding, even as community fragmentation, topical dispersion, and methodological diversity continue to increase. Specifically, the different understandings of SI in regional communities have strong impacts, and each has a different history, methodological grounding, and often a different thematic focus. The aim of this article is to connect three selected perspectives on SI-intellectual (regional schools of thought), methodological, and thematic-and introduce a comparative framework for understanding SI that includes all known approaches. Thus, the article draws from a thematic and methodological grounding of research across schools of thought, along with definitions that rely on the extension and intension of the notion of SI. The article is built on a paralogy of views and pluralism typical of postmodern science. Because SI is forced to continually reform its research focus, due to the rapid development of information and communication technology, social changes and ideologies that surround computerization and informatization, the presented perspective maintains a high degree of flexibility, without the need to constantly redefine the boundaries, as is typical in modern science. This approach may support further developments in promoting and understanding SI worldwide.
JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION id:472
TI: Social Media Engagement With Strategy- and Issue-Framed Political News ab: Issue and strategy frames, oft-used ways of conveying political news, affect people's political beliefs and attitudes, with strategic news frames producing greater cynicism and distrust than issue frames. Although some past research suggests that audiences prefer strategically framed news, it is not clear whether the public gravitates toward issue or strategy frames on social media. We partnered with a national news organization to conduct 48 tests of whether people more frequently clicked on, commented on, or reacted to strategy- or issue-based news. On Facebook, people were randomly shown different versions of posts about a news article, resulting in 967,260 impressions. Using meta-analytic techniques, we found significant heterogeneity across the tests. Overall, however, strategy-based news yielded more clicks, whereas issue-based news yielded more comments and reactions. The results were not moderated by whether the test mentioned a salient issue or the number of days until the election.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:566
TI: Social Media, Peer Surveillance, Spiritual Formation, and Mission: Practising Christian Faith in a Surveilled Public Space ab: Social media has become a part of everyday life, including the faith lives of many. It is a space that assumes an observing gaze. Engaging with Foucauldian notions of surveillance, self-regulation, and normalisation, this paper considers what it is about social and digital culture that shapes expectations of what users can or want to do in online spaces. Drawing upon a wide range of surveillance research, it reflects upon what "surveillance" looks like within social media, especially when users understand themselves to be observed in the space. Recognising moral panics around technological development, the paper considers the development of social norms and questions how self-regulation by users presents itself within a global population. Focusing upon the spiritual formation of Christian users (disciples) in an online environment as a case study of a community of practice, the paper draws particularly upon the author's experiences online since 1997 and material from The Big Bible Project (CODEC 2010-2015). The research demonstrates how the lived experience of the individual establishes the interconnectedness of the online and offline environments. The surveillant affordances and context collapse are liberating for some users but restricting for others in both their faith formation and the subsequent imperative to mission.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:172
TI: Social Policy Perspectives on Economic Inequality in Wealthy Countries ab: This essay reviews the policy-oriented literature on economic inequality in wealthy countries published from 2008 to 2018. We focus on this decade because it is a period bookended by both the beginnings of the Great Recession of 2008-2009 as well as the recovery. During this timeframe, attention to inequality by social policy scholars grew substantially, which we argue reflects an interest in both inequality trends as well as redistributive social policy. We observe in the literature sustained efforts to understand both the relationship between social policy and economic inequality, as well as determinants of changes to redistributive social policy. We also note substantial variation in research traditions, as well as opportunities to address substantive, methodological, and theoretical gaps. Our review summarizes the approaches and findings from the literature and discusses the implications of the findings for the study of economic inequality within the academic field of public policy.
DISASTERS id:384
TI: Social vulnerability and disaster: understanding the perspectives of practitioners ab: This paper seeks to understand how local emergency managers perceive and define social vulnerability. There has been a significant increase recently in the amount of research on social vulnerability, yet little is known about the extent to which that knowledge is being translated into practice. To address this void, the authors conducted semi-structured interviews with a sample of local emergency managers (N=24), asking them to describe what social vulnerability means to them. The analysis identified four primary perspectives on social vulnerability prevalent in the sample, pertaining to: (i) culture and poverty; (ii) a moral imperative; (iii) a lack of security; and (iv) a lack of knowledge and awareness. Although these practitioner viewpoints may not align perfectly with the definitions of social vulnerability predominant in the hazards and disasters literature, the results of this study do suggest a possible narrowing of the gap between research and practice as it relates to social vulnerability.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:487
TI: Socialization through stories of disaster in engineering laboratories ab: The initiation of novices into research communities relies on the communication of tacit knowledge, behavioral norms and moral values. Much of this instruction happens informally, as messages subtly embedded in everyday interactions. Through participant-observation and interviews, I investigate how engineers socialize future engineers. Specifically, I study how undergraduate students who work in an engineering laboratory learn their research community's social and technical norms. I found that a key method of conveying knowledge about social behavior and technical practices is the narration of the experience of mistakes and failures. As a powerful tool of socialization, these 'disaster stories' contain messages of self-deprecation, humility, teamwork and mutual learning. They are most often told by the principal investigator or a graduate student to an undergraduate student, thus generously offering novices the opportunity to learn vicariously through more experienced engineers' errors. Disaster stories can reduce hierarchy, normalize learning through mistakes and build relationships among workers through the sharing of humbling personal struggles. The stories promote collaboration, a sense of belonging and the value of continuous learning for all the community's members. They demonstrate the power of storytelling in the acquisition of tacit social and technical knowledge.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:424
TI: Sociotechnical imaginaries of low-carbon waste-energy futures: UK techno-market fixes displacing public accountability ab: To implement EU climate policy, the UK's New Labour government (1997-2010) elaborated an ecomodernist policy framework. It promoted technological innovation to provide low-carbon renewable energy, especially by treating waste as a resource. This framework discursively accommodated rival sociotechnical imaginaries, understood as visions of feasible and desirable futures available through technoscientific development. According to the dominant imaginary, techno-market fixes stimulate low-carbon technologies by making current centralized systems more resource-efficient (as promoted by industry incumbents). According to the alternative eco-localization imaginary, a shift to low-carbon systems should instead localize resource flows, output uses and institutional responsibility (as promoted by civil society groups). The UK government policy framework gained political authority by accommodating both imaginaries. As we show by drawing on three case studies, the realization of both imaginaries depended on institutional changes and material-economic resources of distinctive kinds. In practice, financial incentives drove technological design towards trajectories that favour the dominant sociotechnical imaginary, while marginalizing the eco-localization imaginary and its environmental benefits. The ecomodernist policy framework relegates responsibility to anonymous markets, thus displacing public accountability of the state and industry. These dynamics indicate the need for STS research on how alternative sociotechnical imaginaries mobilize support for their realization, rather than be absorbed into the dominant imaginary.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:671
TI: Spatially shaped imaginaries of the digital economy ab: This paper examines spatial imaginaries and their ability to circumscribe and legitimate economic practices mediated by digital technologies, specifically, the practices of digital entrepreneurship. The question is whether alternative imaginaries and typologies of digital entrepreneurship can be included in how we view digital entrepreneurship order to stimulate new practices and imagined futures. Our case studies of digital entrepreneurs in a number of African cities illustrate that popular and academic spatial imaginaries and discourses, for example those that cast the digital economy as borderless and accessible, do not correspond with the experience of many African entrepreneurs. Furthermore, enacting the metaphoric identities that coincide with these imaginaries and their discourses is a skillset that determines which (and how) actors can participate. They reflect the inherent coloniality of the digital, capitalist discourse. The tendency in the digital economy is to regard the entrepreneur persona, as realistic and global, rather than performative and particular to the Euro-American context in which these personas have originated. Our interviews of 186 digital entrepreneurs demonstrate that digital imaginaries and metaphors cannot be neutral and apolitical. In order to be inclusive, they should evoke a sense of multiplicity, heterogeneity and contingency.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:744
TI: Speaking Like Statesmen or Scientists: Differentiating Congressional and Administrative Views on Data ab: Do legislators and executives speak of data the same way when speaking about public sector data ? Public management scholarship and public performance policies often emphasize data-driven decision making as the path to making government efficient and effective. Whether the public policy makers mean the same thing when they speak about data in discussions of data-driven performance and decision making is unknown. In this article, the authors present an analysis of the language of data in conversations about government performance. Two frameworks are identified for the role of data in public performance-the statesman's and the scientist's. A corpus-level analysis of over 30 years of government documents is used to demonstrate the differences between these two approaches. This research builds consciously on the work of previous scholars seeking to map the nuances of data-driven performance management policies in the U.S. federal government.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC POLICY id:633
TI: Speaking truth to power: political advisers' and civil servants' responses to perceived harmful policy proposals ab: How are civil servants and politically appointed advisers likely to respond to policy proposals that they believe will harm their countries severely even if they are legal? Based on the different loyalties and roles of political advisors (PA) and civil servants (CS), we hypothesise that (1) PAs are more likely to voice internally, (2) CSs are more likely to voice externally and (3) CSs in functionally politicised systems are more likely to stay silent. These hypotheses are tested on - and partially supported by - data collected through two surveys directed to the ministerial staffs in Denmark and Sweden. PAs are more likely to voice internally, but none of the two groups is particularly keen to voice externally. The propensity to voice concerns in case of perceived harmful policy proposals depends on the kind as well as the level of politicisation.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF DISASTER RISK REDUCTION id:293
TI: Squaring the circle? Integrating environment, infrastructure and risk reduction in Post Disaster Needs Assessments ab: Disasters triggered by natural hazards such as floods, droughts or cyclones have the potential to cause large-scale damage on regional, national or even supranational scale. To cope with the impacts and to facilitate reconstruction the Post Disaster Needs Assessment (PDNA) tool was developed. Its main goal is to assess damages and resulting early and long-term recovery needs and priorities. The assessment, a government-led exercise with support from the United Nations, the European Commission, the World Bank and others, is divided into different sectors, including environment, disaster risk reduction, and infrastructure as key topics. However, in reality the potential of this integrated approach is far from being fully exploited. The relevance of sound environmental conditions for recovery are under addressed in the other sector reports, such as the consideration of ecosystem-based approaches for disaster risk reduction and as part of green or hybrid infrastructures. Based on an in-depth assessment of past PDNA reports and a qualitative empirical survey among experts involved in these studies, this paper aims at assessing underlying reasons for the negligence of environmental aspects and potentials against other needs. After comparing the described environmental damages against proposed recovery strategies in the respective sector - if made at all - we highlight related potential shortcomings and challenges. In a second step, the proposed (engineered) risk reduction measures are analyzed regarding their consideration of ecosystem-based approaches. We conclude by proposing potentials to leverage environmental considerations and ecosystem-based solutions into risk reduction strategies.
SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY id:493
TI: Stakeholder perceptions of scientific knowledge in policy processes: A Peruvian case-study of forestry policy development ab: There is a need to better understand how scientific knowledge is used in decision-making. This is especially true in the Global South where policy processes often occur under high political uncertainty and where a shift toward multilevel governance and decision-making brings new opportunities and challenges. This study applies knowledge-policy models to analyse a forestry research project that succeeded in influencing national policy-making. We investigate how decisions were made, what factors affected and shaped the policy process, and how scientific knowledge was used. The results highlight the complexity of policy processes and the related challenges in crossing the science-policy interface. Perceptions of scientific knowledge differed greatly among stake-holders, and those perceptions strongly influenced how scientific knowledge was valued and used. The findings suggest a need for researchers to better understand the problem context to help design and implement research that will more effectively inform decision-making.
SCIENCE AS CULTURE id:156
TI: Standards, Harmonization and Cultural Differences: Examining the Implementation of a European Stem Cell Clinical Trial ab: A complex set of European regulations aims to facilitate regenerative medicine, harmonizing good clinical and manufacturing standards and streamlining ethical approval procedures. The sociology of standardization has elaborated some of the effects of regulation but little is known about how such implementation works in practice across institutions and countries in regenerative medicine. The effects of transnational harmonization of clinical trial conduct are complex. A long-term ethnographic study alongside a multinational clinical trial finds a range of obstacles. Harmonization standardizes at one level, but implementing the standards brings to the fore new layers of difference between countries. Europe-wide harmonization of regulations currently disadvantages low-cost clinician-lead research in comparison to industry-sponsored clinical trials. Moreover, harmonized standards must be aligned with the cultural variations in everyday practice across European countries. Each clinical team must find its own way of bridging harmonized compulsory practice with how things are done where they are, respecting expectations from both patients and the local hospital ethics committee. Established ways of working must further be adapted to a range of institutional and cultural conventions that affect the clinical trial such as insurance practices and understandings of patient autonomy. An additional finding is that the specific practical roles of team members in the trial affect their evaluation of the importance of these challenges. Our findings lead to conclusions of wider significance for the sociology of standards concerning how regulation works and for medical sociology about how trial funding and research directions in stem cell medicine intersect.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW id:262
TI: State Agencies' Use of Administrative Data for Improved Practice: Needs, Challenges, and Opportunities ab: Growing interest in the use of administrative data to answer questions around program implementation and effectiveness has led to greater discussion of how government agencies can develop the necessary internal data infrastructure, analytic capacity, and office culture. However, there is a need for more systematic research into how states find different pathways and strategies to build administrative data capacity. Drawing on interviews with almost 100 human service agency staff and their data partners, the authors examine the realities of administrative data use. They summarize the experiences of data users in order to address two main challenges : limited analytic capacity and challenges to linking or sharing data resources. The article concludes by examining a range of approaches that government agencies take to improve data quality and capacity to analyze that data.
DISASTERS id:273
TI: Stories from the frontlines: decolonising social contracts for disasters ab: Disasters are framed as political moments when states are unable to provide security to their citizens, causing disruption and a possible break' in the statecitizen social contract. Evidence from the frontlines of insurgency and secessionist movements in southern Philippines suggests that social contracts do not break' in this manner, despite widespread suffering during a complex event. This paper presents new perspectives on social contracts after disasters, in conflict-affected regions. Using ethnographic data from two case studies in the Philippines, it argues that disasters in conflict-affected areas do not manifest a break' in social contracts in ways that result in state failure' and insurgent capture'. Instead, it shows that the statecitizen contract is a dynamic contestation of state responsibilities, while also being malleably resilient. The inequalities and anxieties prevalent in social contracts are reproduced in the highly differentiated experiences of disaster citizenship' for people living amidst conflict.
ADMINISTRATIVE SCIENCE QUARTERLY id:546
TI: Stories of Calling: How Called Professionals Construct Narrative Identities ab: Experiencing work as a calling has been described as the ideal of a truly positive experience of work. But what we know about how called professionals construct identities as people who are called to their work is incomplete. Discussions about callings are often framed as narratives-stories of people's callings-yet little is known about how professionals incorporate a wide variety of life events into coherent stories that support their identity claims. To understand this process, we analyzed the narratives of 236 individuals from four professions. We found two ways our participants identified their callings: discernment and exploration. Discerners journeyed toward their destiny, which was their one true calling. Explorers actively searched for work they loved, but destiny played no role. Through a series of lived experiences, called professionals' identities took shape as they were enacted, with their callings strengthening over time. After identifying their calling, each of these professionals engaged in two crucial processes for integrating self and work as they lived their calling. Like other professionals, called professionals sought legitimacy in their fields by demonstrating mastery and receiving affirmation. Yet their sense of calling simultaneously propelled them to craft personal authenticity through tailoring their own unique enactment of the role.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:214
TI: Street-Level Management: A Clientele-Agent Perspective on Implementation ab: It is now widely accepted that public policy is not merely about its formal wording but rather the ways it is implemented. Implementation portrayals are not uniform: some focus on street-level delivery while others refer to managerial actions of different administration levels. Although varied, current implementation research overlooks the distinct position of chief executive officers of street-level organizations, who are overarchingly in charge of, and accountable for, the direct delivery of multiple policies to a local target population. This study distinguishes them as a unique public management category, termed here "street-level management," and explores their contribution drawing on interviews with school principals, police station chiefs, and heads of social services bureaus (N = 78), as well as on official documents. Because street-level managers (SLMs) were found to approach their target populations as a collective endowed with contextual characteristics and a particular mix of policy preferences and needs, they are redefined as "policy clientele." To convey that policy clientele is the main lens through which street-level management is exercised, a "clientele-agent" perspective is proposed as complementing state-agent and citizen-agent viewpoints on street-level implementation. A clientele-agent approach is evidenced in SLMs' ongoing efforts to facilitate reciprocal relationships with policy clientele and in four street-level managerial functions-translation, adaptation, mobilization, and articulation. Uncovering overlooked collective aspects of street-level implementation and the involvement of policy clientele in direct delivery arrangements, street-level management allows for a more nuanced understanding of the interstices between policy making and direct delivery.
COMPUTER SUPPORTED COOPERATIVE WORK-THE JOURNAL OF COLLABORATIVE COMPUTING id:136
TI: Studying Infrastructuring Ethnographically ab: This paper is motivated by a methodological interest in how to investigate information infrastructures as an empirical, real-world phenomenon. We argue that research on information infrastructures should not be captive to the prevalent method choice of small-scale and short-term studies. Instead research should address the challenges of empirically studying the heterogeneous, extended and complex phenomena of infrastructuring with an emphasis on the necessarily emerging and open-ended processual qualities of information infrastructures. While existing literature identifies issues that make the study of infrastructuring demanding, few propose ways of addressing these challenges. In this paper we review characteristics of information infrastructures identified in the literature that present challenges for their empirical study. We look to current research in the social sciences, particularly anthropology and science and technology studies (STS) that focus on how to study complex and extended phenomena ethnographically, to provide insight into the study of infrastructuring. Specifically, we reflect on infrastructuring as an object of ethnographic inquiry by building on the notion of "constructing the field." Recent developments in how to conceptualize the ethnographic field are tied both to longstanding traditions and novel developments in anthropology and STS for studying extended and complex phenomena. Through a discussion of how dimensions of information infrastructures have been addressed practically, methodologically, and theoretically we aim to link the notion of constructing the ethnographic field with views on infrastructuring as a particular kind of object of inquiry. Thus we aim to provide an ethnographically sensitive and methodologically oriented "opening" for an alternative ontology for studying infrastructuring ethnographically.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:51
TI: Successful Problem Solvers? Managerial Performance Information Use to Improve Low Organizational Performance ab: Performance management is increasingly the norm for public organizations. Although there is an emergent literature on performance information use, we still know little on how managers engage in functional performance management practices. At the same time, growing evidence suggests that managers face pressure to improve low performance because of a negativity bias in the political environment. However, in managerial performance information use, the negativity bias might be reconsidered as a prioritization heuristic with positive performance attributes, directing attention to organizational goals with a favorable return of investment. I test this argument with data from public schools. A fixed-effect estimation is used to analyze how principals prioritize when they are provided with performance information on a number of different educational goals. Furthermore, a difference-in-differences model tests whether the prioritizations of certain goals have performance-enhancing effects over time. The analysis shows that principals prioritize goals with low performance and that prioritizations result in performance increase. The improvements primarily occur for goals that have a low performance level and that are repeatedly prioritized.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:359
TI: Supervisory Leadership at the Frontlines: Street-Level Discretion, Supervisor Influence, and Street-Level Bureaucrats' Attitude Towards Clients ab: Steering street-level bureaucrats is utterly complex due to their discretion and professional status which grant them relative autonomy from supervisory directives. Drawing from transformational leadership theory, this article explores the opportunities these work conditions provide for supervisory leadership at the frontlines. Looking at street-level bureaucrats' attitude towards clients, we analyze how the frontline supervisor affects this core perception that protrudes the human judgments street-level bureaucrats are required to pass in their use of their discretion. Using a survey dataset of 971 street-level bureaucrats and their 203 frontline supervisors, this study shows that frontline supervisors function as an attitudinal role model to street-level bureaucrats. Moreover, their supportive leadership behaviors are crucial to them upholding a positive attitude towards clients. Supportive leadership does not unequivocally strengthen the supervisor's position as an attitudinal referent, though. These findings challenge pessimistic assessments of the potential for supervisory leadership at the frontlines. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:409
TI: Surveillance Capitalism and Platform Policing: The Surveillant Assemblage-as-a-Service ab: Based on empirical research on training webinars, interviews, and promotional material from Vigilant Solutions, this paper investigates the surveillance regime enabled by platform policing: the implementation of cloud-based platforms, designed and run by private corporations, that provide mass surveillance-driven simulations for a range of police operations, including predictive policing, targeted surveillance, and tactical and strategic governance. Building on Amoore's (2016) work on "cloud geographies," this paper argues that the platform model embodied by Vigilant Solutions involves multivalent processes of de-and reterritorialization in which new technological and datalogical spaces are formed and these erode older societal boundaries of private, public, and state. Specifically, Vigilant Solutions leverages its multi-sided platform business model through the deterritorializing, cloud-based concatenations of surveillant technologies. It then argues that the resultant reterritorialized cloud space, which is accessible through its Vigilant Investigative Centre (VIC) platform, fuses mass surveillance data from diverse private, public, and state sources in a simulated geography. Further, the VIC furnishes to law enforcement an array of data analytics that exploits this cloud geography to enable a boundary-crossing surveillance regime of association analysis and proximal suspicion.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:389
TI: Surveillance Farm: Towards a Research Agenda on Big Data Agriculture ab: Farming today relies on ever-increasing forms of data gathering, transfer, and analysis. Think of autonomous tractors and weeding robots, chip-implanted animals and underground infrastructures with inbuilt sensors, and drones or satellites offering image analysis from the air. Despite this evolution, however, the social sciences have almost completely overlooked the resulting problematics of power and control. This piece offers an initial review of the main surveillance issues surrounding the problematic of smart farming, with a view to outlining a broader research agenda into the making, functioning, and acting of Big Data in the agricultural sector. For surveillance studies, the objective is also to move beyond the predominant focus on urban space that characterises critical contemporary engagements with Big Data. Smart technologies shape the rural just as much as the urban, and "smart farms" are just as fashionable as "smart cities."
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:457
TI: Surveillance, Secular Law, and the Reconstruction of Islam in the United States ab: Surveillance is often understood as simply a tool for collecting information, and opposition to the surveillance practices of the US government frequently relies on the analytical framework of privacy and rights violations. Other critical analyses of surveillance practices use the lenses of racial discrimination and/or neocolonial political domination. While all of these are valuable approaches, they downplay the extent to which specific modes of existence and ways of being have been targeted in the current surveillance paradigm. In this paper I discuss the role of religion and its relationship to the law-in other words, the state's control of "appropriate" religion-in defining surveillance practices. Using critical interpretive and deconstructive readings of the discourse surrounding the surveillance paradigm, I show that surveillance is used as an instrument to revise and alter modes of non-Western moral and ethical life and to render human subjects more suitable for assimilation into the burgeoning secular/liberal world order, including its concept of "appropriate" religion. I argue that the current mode of government suspicion and surveillance in the US continues long-standing demarcations between acceptable and unacceptable religion in secular law (and in liberal/secular Western societies more broadly), and I demonstrate how this paradigm subordinates and marginalizes non-Protestant religions. In order to fully understand the US surveillance state, we need to pay attention to the way that secular order attempts to define and shape non-Protestant religions and in so doing endangers its own democratic principles of tolerance and neutrality.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:95
TI: Sustained Organizational Influence: American Legislative Exchange Council and the Diffusion of Anti-Sanctuary Policy ab: Building upon existing literature, we offer a particular model of network policy diffusion-which we call sustained organizational influence. Sustained organizational influence necessitates an institutional focus across a broad range of issues and across a long period of time. Sustaining organizations are well-financed, and exert their influence on legislators through benefits, shared ideological interests, and time-saving opportunities. Sustaining organizations' centralized nature makes legislators' jobs easier by providing legislators with ready-made model legislation. We argue that sustaining organizations uniquely contribute to policy diffusion in the U.S. states. We evaluate this model with a case study of state-level immigration sanctuary policy making and the role that the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) played in disseminating model legislation. Through quantitative text analysis and several negative binomial state-level regression models, we demonstrate that ALEC has exerted an overwhelming influence on the introduction of anti-sanctuary legislative proposals in the U.S. states over the past 7 years consistent with our particular model of network policy diffusion. Implications are discussed.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:644
TI: Symposium on political communication and social movements: ships passing in the night ab: In this essay I argue that we can begin an interdisciplinary conversation by acknowledging the contributions political communication can make to social movement studies (and visa versa) as well as critically assessing how each discipline can productively contribute to the other. Social movement scholarship, for instance, can contribute key definitions and specifications to core concepts such as activism to political communication research. Communication scholarship can provide movement scholars a methodological toolkit that will help them better understand (and study) audiences, particularly how audiences understand movement messages. I conclude the essay by arguing that increased interdisciplinary engagement will grow the impact of both fields on public discourse and policy processes. An unwillingness to think across disciplinary boundaries, however, threatens to transform us into the worst version of our academic selves - close minded intellectuals unwilling (or unable) to change with the times.
RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS id:603
TI: TECHNOLOGIES OF THE STATE: TRANSVAGINAL ULTRASOUNDS AND THE ABORTION DEBATE ab: This essay examines the transvaginal ultrasound (TVU) debate that was ignited in the spring of 2012 by a Virginia law mandating the procedure as a prerequisite for first-trimester abortions. This debate represents a recent intensification of historical arguments grounded in how the abortion debate intersects with medical practice. By following the debate as it unfolded on pro-choice and pro-life blogs, this analysis uncovers three overarching topoi in the discourse mirrored on both sides: the medical necessity (or lack thereof) of the procedure; the importance of informed consent; and comparisons to rape. Using Foucault's concept of the medical gaze, this essay argues that across all three topoi, both pro-choice and pro-life activists' rhetoric relied heavily upon implicit assumptions of the superiority and necessity of medical science. The TVU debate demonstrates an argumentation strategy that both strips the issue of its political, legal, moral, and personal contexts and rhetorically positions pro-choice groups disadvantageously by obfuscating any discussion of women's rights.
RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS id:686
TI: THE MAGIC OF PHILANTHROPY: THE GATES FOUNDATION'S REFRAMING OF EDUCATION REFORM DEBATE ab: The Gates Foundation invokes a third way in education reform debate by appealing not to government regulation or market competition but to philanthropic investment as a catalyst for improving educational equity. While the foundation praises this investment as transcending the conventional polarities of debate, I argue that this praise assigns a familiar form of blame toward public education and educators, for it declares philanthropists the only reformers whose commitments to educational civil rights remain uncompromised by political-economic self-interest. In light of this analysis, I qualify the deliberative potential of praise as a rhetoric of education reform.
PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE id:490
TI: Tacit knowledge and risk perceptions: Tullow Oil and lay publics in Ghana's offshore oil region ab: This study examines how local residents make sense of offshore oil production risks in Ghana's nascent petroleum industry. From a naturalistic-interpretive perspective, it is primarily based on in-depth interviews with community residents: 8 opinion leaders, 15 residents, and 1 journalist. Residents associate Tullow's oil activities with health concerns (e.g. conjunctivitis), environmental challenges (e.g. the emergence of decomposed seaweeds along the shore), and socio-economic concerns (e.g. loss of livelihoods, decline in fish harvest, and increased rent and cost of living). Focusing on how the local, practical knowledge of interviewees manifest in their sense of offshore oil risks, the study identifies two strategiesscapegoating and tacit knowingunderlying how residents construe offshore oil risks and benefits. Beyond its theoretical contribution to the social construction of risk process, the study illustrates the challenge the expert-lay publics dichotomy poses (and the potential bridging this dichotomy has) for corporate and societal risk management.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:180
TI: Tactics of material participation: How patients shape their engagement through e-health ab: The increasingly popular goal of patient participation' comes with a conceptual vagueness, at times rendering it an all-too flexible political trope or platitude and, in practice, resulting in unclear invitations to patients. We seek to open up the alluring yet troubling figure of patient participation, by inquiring into how patients enact participation in different ways. Based on close ethnographic engagement in a user test of the e-health system P-Record, we show how a group of heart patients shaped their participation along three lines of tactics of material participation: activism', partnership' and compliance'. Our argument is twofold. First, we suggest that any invitation to participate carries the inherent paradox that, although certain ideas of participation may be materially embedded, e.g. in e-health or other participatory technologies', the enactment of participation cannot be foreseen. To participate is to creatively make do with the situation and technologies at hand, making participation normatively variable in practice. Second, we suggest seeing these normative variations as distinct, though interwoven, lines of tactics that bring about different expectations and, to different degrees, allow patients to handle ambiguous invitations to participate.
SCIENCE AS CULTURE id:752
TI: Techno-Securitisation of Everyday Life and Cultures of Surveillance-Apatheia ab: As a result of digital technologies and the internet becoming increasingly ubiquitous, security technologies and surveillance systems are progressively encroaching upon peoples' privacy. Yet concerns about this appear to be relatively muted. Why is this the case? Is the public generally indifferent about it or perhaps silently in agreement with its increased presence? As techno-security systems are becoming increasingly complex, multiple, normative, hardly recognisable, often covert and all encompassing, positioning oneself in relation to them can be a difficult process. Hence the techno-securitisation of everyday life has psychological effects which are multiple and largely unconscious. Indeed, we are all somewhat uncertain about the spin-offs of surveillance technologies and practices - in terms of their capabilities, who has access to the data they produce, and the ways that they might affect subjectivity. Rather than being plainly indifferent or silently consenting to increased techno-securitisation, some participants in this study developed an attitude of surveillance-apatheia. They tended to state that 'as there is no avoiding these systems and not much one can do about them, why consciously worry about them?' This attitude is not necessarily a lack of interest, but rather a way of managing associated undesirable affects, feelings and emotions.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:577
TI: Terrorists and Revolutionaries: The Achilles Heel of Communist Surveillance ab: The scholarly understanding of communist state surveillance practices remains limited. Utilising thousands of recently declassified archival materials from communist Czechoslovakia, this article aims to revise our understanding of everyday security practices and surveillance under communist regimes, which have thus far been overwhelmingly understood in relation to the domestic population and social control. In the 1970s and 1980s, Czechoslovakia attracted the Cold War terrorist and revolutionary elite. Visits by the likes of Carlos the Jackal, Munich Olympic massacre mastermind Abu Daoud, and key PLO figures in Prague were closely surveilled by the Czechoslovak State Security (StB). This article investigates the motifs and performance of a wide range of mechanisms that the StB utilised to surveil violent non-state actors, including informer networks and SIGINT. It argues that in the last decade of the Cold War, Prague adopted a "surveillance-centred" approach to international terrorists on its territory-arguably enabled by informal "non-aggression pacts." Furthermore, it challenges the notion that the communist state security structures were omnipotent surveillance mechanisms. Despite having spent decades perfecting their grip on domestic dissent, when confronted with foreign, unfamiliar, and uncontrollable non-state actors engaged in terrorism or political violence, these ominous institutions were often shown to be anxious, inept, and at times impotent. Finally, it explores the parallel state approaches to international terrorists and revolutionaries, and their shortcomings, across the Iron Curtain jurisdictions. Overall, this article seeks to expand our understanding of the broad and varied complexities of intelligence and surveillance in communist regimes.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:745
TI: The (in)credibility of algorithmic models to non-experts ab: The rapid development and dissemination of data analysis techniques permits the creation of ever more intricate algorithmic models. Such models are simultaneously the vehicle and outcome of quantification practices and embody a worldview with associated norms and values. A set of specialist skills is required to create, use, or interpret algorithmic models. The mechanics of an algorithmic model may be hard to comprehend for experts and can be virtually incomprehensible to non-experts. This is of consequence because such black boxing can introduce power asymmetries and may obscure bias. This paper explores the practices through which experts and non-experts determine the credibility of algorithmic models. It concludes that (1) transparency to (non-)experts is at best problematic and at worst unattainable; (2) authoritative models may come to dictate what types of policies are considered feasible; (3) several of the advantages attributed to the use of quantifications do no hold in policy making contexts.
AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW id:13
TI: The Authentic Appeal of the Lying Demagogue: Proclaiming the Deeper Truth about Political Illegitimacy ab: We develop and test a theory to address a puzzling pattern that has been discussed widely since the 2016 U.S. presidential election and reproduced here in a post-election survey: how can a constituency of voters find a candidate authentically appealing (i.e., view him positively as authentic) even though he is a lying demagogue (someone who deliberately tells lies and appeals to non-normative private prejudices)? Key to the theory are two points: (1) common-knowledge lies may be understood as flagrant violations of the norm of truth-telling; and (2) when a political system is suffering from a crisis of legitimacy (Lipset 1959) with respect to at least one political constituency, members of that constituency will be motivated to see a flagrant violator of established norms as an authentic champion of its interests. Two online vignette experiments on a simulated college election support our theory. These results demonstrate that mere partisanship is insufficient to explain sharp differences in how lying demagoguery is perceived, and that several oft-discussed factorsinformation access, culture, language, and genderare not necessary for explaining such differences. Rather, for the lying demagogue to have authentic appeal, it is sufficient that one side of a social divide regards the political system as flawed or illegitimate.
JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION id:435
TI: The Beginnings of Mass Communication: A Transnational History ab: Mass communication was one of the central signs through which communication research constituted itself in the post-World War II era. An American term, it indexed and communicatively advanced the problematization of media that took shape from the 1920s onward. Recently, scholars have debated the term's continued relevance, typically without awareness of its history or international contexts of use. To provide needed background and enrich efforts to globalize the field, we offer a transnational history of mass communication, illuminating the sociological, cultural, and geopolitical dynamics of its emergence, dissemination, and reception. Mapping locations of its adoption, adaption, and rejection across world regions, we offer a methodology and a historical narrative to shed light on the early globalization of the field and lines of power and resistance that shaped it. We show how the term carries a residue of postwar American hegemony, and argue for greater reflexive awareness of our vocabularies of inquiry.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:292
TI: The Bureaucracy and the Policy Agenda ab: The public administration literature has been dominated by questions about how politicians can control the bureaucracy's application and implementation of laws at the back end of the policy process. Much less scholarly attention is devoted to the influence of the bureaucracy on the content and composition of the policy agenda at the front end of the process. Agenda setting is a fundamental aspect of politics, and this article examines the influence of the bureaucracy on the policy agenda and the conditions for this influence. The core proposition is that the policy agenda is larger and more diverse in political systems in which administrative professionals take up a larger share of the bureaucracy. This effect is expected to be mitigated by the involvement of elected representatives in the policymaking process. The empirical analysis supports these expectations. The findings are based on a time-series cross-section dataset from 98 Danish municipalities over 7 years containing a detailed coding of local council agendas and rich register data.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:657
TI: The Dark Side of Public Innovation ab: The positive features of innovation are well known but the dark side of public innovation has received less attention. To fill this gap, this article develops a theoretical understanding of the dark side of public innovation. We explore a diversity of perverse effects on the basis of a literature review and an expert consultation. We indicate that these perverse effects can be categorized on two dimensions: low public value and low public control. We confront this exploratory analysis with the literature and conclude that the perverse effects are not coincidental but emerge from key properties of innovation processes such as creating niches for innovation and accepting uncertainty about public value outcomes. To limit perverse effects, we call for the dynamic assessment of public innovation. The challenge for innovators is to acknowledge the dark side and take measures to prevent perverse effects without killing the innovativeness of organizations.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW id:314
TI: The Design and Practice of Integrating Evidence: Connecting Performance Management with Program Evaluation ab: In recent decades, governments have invested in the creation of two forms of knowledge production about government performance : program evaluations and performance management. Prior research has noted tensions between these two approaches and the potential for complementarities when they are aligned. This article offers empirical evidence on how program evaluations connect with performance management in the U.S. federal government in 2000 and 2013. In the later time period, there is an interactive effect between the two approaches, which, the authors argue, reflects deliberate efforts by the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations to build closer connections between program evaluation and performance management. Drawing on the 2013 data, the authors offer evidence that how evaluations are implemented matters and that evaluations facilitate performance information use by reducing the causal uncertainty that managers face as they try to make sense of what performance data mean.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:178
TI: The Determinants of Public Policy: What Matters and How Much ab: This article is a research synthesis addressing four questions critical to our understanding of the determinants of public policy. How often and how strongly do hypothetical determinants of policy-public opinion, interest groups, the party balance, and other factors-actually influence policy? Do some hypothetical determinants of policy have more influence than others? Does the way we measure policy affect our ability to explain it? And is there a connection between how strongly particular variables affect policy, and how much effort we devote to studying them? It turns out that variables hypothesized to influence policy more often than not have no effect. When variables do affect policy, researchers very seldom say anything about how much impact they have. Variables that convey the most information to policymakers about what the public wants have a greater impact than other variables, but it is less clear how the measurement of policy affects our findings. Researchers pay much attention to hypothetical determinants of policy unlikely to matter very much, and little attention to those likely to be the most important. Implications for future research are considered.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE id:322
TI: The Disclosure Dilemma: Nuclear Intelligence and International Organizations ab: Scholars have long argued that international organizations solve information problems through increased transparency. This article introduces a distinct problem that instead requires such institutions to keep information secret. We argue that states often seek to reveal intelligence about other states' violations of international rules and laws but are deterred by concerns about revealing the sources and methods used to collect it. Properly equipped international organizations, however, can mitigate these dilemmas by analyzing and acting on sensitive information while protecting it from wide dissemination. Using new data on intelligence disclosures to the International Atomic Energy Agency and an analysis of the full universe of nuclear proliferation cases, we demonstrate that strengthening the agency's intelligence protection capabilities led to greater intelligence sharing and fewer suspected nuclear facilities. However, our theory suggests that this solution gives informed states a subtle form of influence and is in tension with the normative goal of international transparency.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE id:401
TI: The Distortion of Related Beliefs ab: When forming beliefs about themselves, politics, and how the world works more generally, people often face a tension between conclusions they inherently wish to reach and those which are plausible. And the likelihood of beliefs about one variable (e.g., the performance of a favored politician) depends on beliefs about other, related variables (e.g., the quality and bias of newspapers reporting on the politician). I propose a formal approach to combine these two forces, creating a tractable way to study the distortion of related beliefs. The approach unifies several central ideas from psychology (e.g., motivated reasoning, attribution) that have been applied heavily to political science. Concrete applications shed light on why successful individuals sometimes attribute their performance to luck ("imposter syndrome"), why those from advantaged groups believe they in fact face high levels of discrimination (the "persecution complex"), and why partisans disagree about the accuracy and bias of news sources.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE id:412
TI: The Election Monitor's Curse ab: Election monitoring has become a key instrument of democracy promotion. Election monitors routinely expect to deter fraud and prevent post-election violence, but in reality, post-election violence often increases when monitors do expose fraud. We argue that monitors can make all elections less fraudulent and more peaceful on average, but only by causing more violence in fraudulent elections. Due to this curse, strategic election monitors can make a positive impact on elections only if their objectives are aligned in a very specific fashion. Monitors who do not aim to prevent violence can be effective only if they are unbiased, whereas monitors who do aim to prevent violence can be effective only if they are moderately biased against the government. Consequently, election monitors with misaligned objectives will fail to prevent violence, whereas monitors with well-aligned objectives will be blamed for causing violence.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:584
TI: The Eyes and Ears on Our Frontlines: Policing without Police to Counter Violent Extremism ab: As the US public has grown more concerned about domestic terrorist attacks and the abrogation of civil liberties in the pursuit of national security, law enforcement agencies increasingly have applied the principles of community policing to the problem of homegrown terrorism. This community policing approach has anchored Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) initiatives that mobilize local communities to combat terrorist radicalization and recruitment. To do so, this emerging model has tasked community members and social service providers like teachers and mental health professionals with identifying, reporting, and working with potential terrorists. Drawing from a two-year interpretive qualitative research study of CVE policy making and taking across the United States, I examine these emerging police-citizen practices, paying particular attention to how these new institutional arrangements enhance, rather than rein in, policing powers in the name of national security.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:653
TI: The Growth of the Evaluation Tree in the Policy Analysis Forest: Recent Developments in Evaluation ab: The practice and profession of evaluation is continually evolving. From its early origin in the Great Society years of the 1960s, through its golden years of the 1970s, its transformation under the fiscal conservatism of the Reagan era in the 1980s, and in its maturation during the performance and results era of the 1990s, the field of evaluation continues to evolve in response to broader trends in society. This article examines recent developments and trends in the practice and profession of evaluation. Structured around the evaluation theory tree, the presentation of these developments elaborates on the three main branches of evaluation: methods, use, and valuing. The concluding discussion briefly addresses the central role of evaluation-and other types of knowledge production-in providing actionable evidence for use in public policy and program decision making.
ADMINISTRATIVE SCIENCE QUARTERLY id:170
TI: The Hidden Side of Trust: Supporting and Sustaining Leaps of Faith among Firefighters ab: Some occupations and organizations rely heavily on trust, as their members' roles involve risk and are interdependent. Trust can emerge from two sources: knowledge or evidence that is meaningful in that context, which has been studied extensively in the literature on trust, and faith, which has not. Through a multi-phase, largely inductive study of firefighters in the United States, we explore processes that facilitate and maintain leaps of faith. These processes are critical to trust under high uncertainty, when direct experience in a task domain is chronically limited, as is the case in our context because very few calls coming into a fire station are fire related. We suggest that leaps of faith are initiated and perpetuated through two sets of dynamics: supporting and sustaining. Supporting dynamics, such as telling stories about fighting fires, evoke domain-relevant standards that are applied to weak, non-domain-specific evidence, such as how routine tasks are performed at the fire station, to help members feel a sense of certainty about whom to trust. Sustaining dynamics both limit the impact of new evidence about trustworthiness and bolster one's sense of certainty surrounding existing evidence. These two sets of dynamics, embedded in broader task and occupational conditions, act together as a largely closed system that allows trustors to be at peace with the uncertainty surrounding trust assessments-they make leaps of faith possible by increasing certainty and inhibiting doubt. Our study helps address key questions in both psychological and sociological treatments of trust, exploring an enigmatic phenomenon core to the concept of trust but rarely examined.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:221
TI: The Impact of Competing Institutional Pressures and Logics on the Use of Performance Measurement in Hybrid Universities ab: This study contributes to the current debate on competing institutional pressures and logics and performance measurement practices in hybrid universities and examines how shifts in logics have affected performance measurement practices at the organizational and individual levels. It draws upon the theoretical lenses of institutional theory and adopts a longitudinal case study methodology based on participant observations and retrospective interviews. The findings show that universities and academic workers are affected by external pressures related to higher education that include government regulations and control of the state (state pressure), the expectations of the professional norms and collegiality of the academic community (academic pressures), and the need to comply with international standards and market mechanisms (market pressures). Academic workers operate in an organizational context in which conflicting conditions from both academic and business logics co-exist. The results indicate that institutional pressures and logics related to the higher education field and organizational context shape the use of universities' performance measurement practices and result in diverse solutions. While previous literature has focused mainly on competing logics and the tensions they may generate, this study shows that, in a university context, potentially conflicting logics may co-exist and create robust combinations.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:110
TI: The Impact of Forum Interdependence and Network Structure on Actor Performance in Complex Governance Systems ab: One of the main assumptions of the Ecology of Games Framework (EGF) is that governance processes are heavily affected by the interactions among policy actors that take place in multiple decision-making forums, which often function interdependently. In this article, we use data collected in the Tampa Bay and California Delta water governance systems to examine how "biophysical interdependence"-the extent to which forums deal with interconnected policy problems-impacts the costs that actors face when they participate in forums, which in turn can affect their performance in them. Furthermore, we examine how the individual information exchange networks that actors have (i.e., their ego-networks) can mediate the previous relationship. We find that actors with networks that have more closure are better able to mitigate the costs associated with participating in biophysically interdependent forums, thus leading to better in-forum performance. Our findings shed new light on the relationship between structure and function in complex ecologies of games.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE id:236
TI: The Incidental Pundit: Who Talks Politics with Whom, and Why? ab: Informal discussion plays a crucial role in democracy, yet much of its value depends on diversity. We describe two models of political discussion. The purposive model holds that people typically select discussants who are knowledgeable and politically similar to them. The incidental model suggests that people talk politics for mostly idiosyncratic reasons, as by-products of nonpolitical social processes. To adjudicate between these accounts, we draw on a unique, multisite, panel data set of whole networks, with information about many social relationships, attitudes, and demographics. This evidence permits a stronger foundation for inferences than more common egocentric methods. We find that incidental processes shape discussion networks much more powerfully than purposive ones. Respondents tended to report discussants with whom they share other relationships and characteristics, rather than based on expertise or political similarity, suggesting that stimulating discussion outside of echo chambers may be easier than previously thought.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:695
TI: The Informant, Islam, and Muslims in New York City ab: Surveillance is part of the Muslim New Yorker experience, and informants, almost always Muslim themselves, are part of their communities. It is in this context that Muslim New Yorkers partly rely on Islamic theology to question their experience with state surveillance. As this article demonstrates, Muslim interpretations of theology tend to see suspicion and surveillance as sinful conduct, rendering the mission of the informant sinful in the eyes of Muslim New Yorkers. Moreover, as suspicion, monitoring, and spreading rumors is often interpreted as Islamically sinful, targets of surveillance often feel conflicted about suspecting a fellow Muslim of being an informant or even discussing such suspicions with other individuals. Moreover, relying on Islamic theology to deal with their experience as surveilled subjects does not prevent Muslims from toning down their religious visibility in order to avoid state surveillance because of chilling effects and the mechanisms of internment of the psyche.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:460
TI: The Intersection of Nonprofit Roles and Public Policy Implementation ab: Many nonprofit organizations implement policy through service delivery. In addition, these nonprofits serve other roles in their communities. Policy implementation strategies that overlook the many roles nonprofits play may misunderstand implementation challenges or fail to maximize the benefits of public-nonprofits partnerships. We aim to inform policy implementation by presenting a narrative that explores the intersection of these nonprofit roles and policy implementation through nonprofit service delivery. We situate this focus on nonprofits as policy implementers within a framework of nonprofit roles. We present commentary that integrates policy implementation and nonprofit roles by focusing on four themes: nonprofit role simultaneity, service delivery/policy implementation perceptual asymmetry, nonprofit roles over time, and network participation. Accounting for this multidimensionality can help government actors facilitate partnerships that enable service delivery while also recognizing what nonprofits do independent of their formal arrangements with governments.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:86
TI: The Links Among Contested Knowledge, Beliefs, and Learning in European Climate Governance: From Consensus to Conflict in Reforming Biofuels Policy ab: The close link between scientific knowledge, learning, and beliefs is particularly relevant in environmental policymaking and the interaction of environmental with economic development-focused policies. This article contributes to a more refined understanding of the links among scientific knowledge, belief changes, and the move from a collaborative to an adversarial policy subsystem within the Advocacy Coalition Framework. It analyzes the process of drafting and negotiating the biofuels aspects of the European Renewable Energy Directive, which was dominated by political disagreements between two advocacy coalitions. Their initial agreement on increasing the share of renewable energies in transport turned into conflict after new scientific evidence emerged on the negative environmental and climate change impacts of crop-based biofuels. The environmental coalition changed its empirical policy beliefs to reflect normative policy beliefs on environmental protection. This change in empirical policy beliefs uncovered a pre-existing conflict with the normative policy beliefs of the economic development-focused coalition. As a consequence, the collaborative policy subsystem shifted to an adversarial policy subsystem.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY id:116
TI: The Making of Neoliberal Globalization: Norm Substitution and the Politics of Clandestine Institutional Change ab: Since the 1980s, neoliberal policies have been diffused around the world by international institutions established to support a very different world order. This article examines the repurposing of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to become the world's leading promoter of free markets. Social scientists commonly point to two modes of global-level institutional change: formal and fundamental transformations, like renegotiated treaties, or informal and incremental changes of a modest nature. The case of the IMF fits neither of these molds: it underwent a major transformation but without change in its formal foundations. Relying on archival material and interviews, the authors show that fundamental-yet-informal change was effected through a process of norm substitution-the alteration of everyday assumptions about the appropriateness of a set of activities. This transformation was led by the United States and rested on three pillars: mobilization of resources and allies, normalization of new practices, and symbolic work to stabilize the new modus operandi. This account denaturalizes neoliberal globalization and illuminates the clandestine politics behind its rise.
JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION id:458
TI: The Mediatization of the Air: Wireless Telegraphy and the Origins of a Transnational Space of Communication, 1900-1910s ab: Airspace today is densely penetrated by Wi-Fi networks, GPS services, and broadcasting and mobile phone signals. This process, what we call the mediatization of the air, is not so new, as it began in the first two decades of the 20th century, with the advent of wireless telegraphy. Based on archival research, this paper shows that wireless telegraphy mediatized the air and made it a matter of common interest for formerly-disconnected international realms. The mediatized air transformed meteorology, timekeeping, mobility, and transportation, and challenged governance over aerial borders. Overall, this historical study contributes to a different narrative about mediatization by including an invisible and understudied phenomenon that today represents a basic and taken-forgranted infrastructure for global communication.
AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW id:265
TI: The Moral Limits of Predictive Practices: The Case of Credit-Based Insurance Scores ab: Corporations gather massive amounts of personal data to predict how individuals will behave so that they can profitably price goods and allocate resources. This article investigates the moral foundations of such increasingly prevalent market practices. I leverage the case of credit scores in car insurance pricing-an early and controversial use of algorithmic prediction in the U.S. consumer economy-to unpack the premise that predictive data are fair to use and to understand the conditions under which people are likely to challenge that moral logic. Policymaker resistance to credit-based insurance scores reveals that contention arises when predictions depend on mathematical distinctions that do not align with broader understandings of good and bad behavior, and when theories about why predictions work point to the market holding people accountable for actions that are not really their fault. Via a de-commensuration process, policymakers realign the market with their own notions of moral deservingness. This article thus demonstrates the importance of causal understanding and moral categorization for people accepting markets as fair. As data and analytics permeate markets of all sorts, as well as other domains of social life, these findings have implications for how social scientists understand the novel forms of stratification that result.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:232
TI: The Narrative Policy Framework, Agendas, and Sanctuary Cities: The Construction of a Public Problem ab: In this paper, we utilize narratives about sanctuary cities as an exploratory case study to suggest further development of the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF). We propose the inclusion of elements from the Multiple Streams Approach (MSA)-the ideas of focusing events, evidence, policy entrepreneurs, timing, policy windows-and the general agenda setting literature's concept of translation of narratives among different policy agendas to extend the NPF in theoretically meaningful ways. Then we use these ideas in an exploration of recent narratives about sanctuary cities in order to increase understanding of the role of policy narratives and agenda setting within public policy processes. Our exploratory questions and findings demonstrate the usefulness of adding elements of the MSA to the NPF. First, we suggest that an emotionally powerful story can create a formidable focusing event which can be used by policy entrepreneurs, even if the construction of the event is dominated by one media outlet. Second, our preliminary results show that studying narrative policy windows provides a methodological challenge; it is difficult to determine how long a policy narrative remains powerful and relevant. Finally, our findings reveal both similarities and differences of narratives between different policy agendas.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:62
TI: The Necessity of Discretion: A Behavioral Evaluation of Bottom-Up Implementation Theory ab: The topic of discretion continues to be hotly debated in policy design and policy implementation. In top-down theories, discretion at the frontline is often seen as a control problem: discretion should be avoided as it can mean that the policy is not implemented as intended. Conversely, bottom-up theories state that discretion can help policy implementers tailor a policy to specific circumstances. However, there has been little systematic research into how the experience of having discretion motivates frontline workers to implement a policy. We conceptualize and evaluate this relationship by combining public administration and motivation literature, using datasets in healthcare and education and large-N set-theoretic configurational analysis. Results robustly show that experiencing discretion is a quasi-necessary condition and, hence, a prerequisite for high implementation willingness. This finding is more in line with bottom-up than with top-down theories. Policy implementers crucially need the freedom to adapt the program to local conditions for being motivated to implement a policy. The evidence encourages scholars and practitioners to move from the question whether frontline workers should be granted discretion to how to best make use of frontline workers' discretion instead.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW id:371
TI: The Origins of Conflict in Polycentric Governance Systems ab: Natural resources are governed by polycentric systems, which can be conceptualized as an "ecology of games" in which policy actors participate in multiple policy forums governing interdependent issues. This article analyzes why actors perceive different payoffs across the forums in which they participate, ranging from mutually beneficial games of cooperation to conflictual zero-sum games in which one actor's gain means another actor's loss. The authors develop hypotheses at the level of the individual, the forum, and the overall polycentric system and test them using survey data collected in three research sites: Tampa Bay, Florida; the Parana River delta, Argentina; and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River delta, California. The empirical findings suggest that levels of conflict in policy forums are higher when the actors who participate in them are concerned with hot-button issues, when the forums have large and diverse memberships, and in systems with a long history of conflict. The results shed new light on the drivers of conflict and cooperation in complex governance systems and suggest ways to manage conflict.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE id:541
TI: The Policy Basis of Measured Partisan Animosity in the United States ab: Understanding and addressing the consequences of partisan animosity requires knowledge of its foundations. To what extent is animosity between partisan groups motivated by dislike for partisan outgroups per se, policy disagreement, or other social group conflicts? In many circumstances, including extant experimental research, these patterns are observationally equivalent. In a series of vignette evaluation experiments, we estimate effects of shared partisanship when additional information is or is not present, and we benchmark these effects against shared policy preference effects. Partisanship effects are about 71% as large as shared policy preference effects when each is presented in isolation. When an independently randomized party and policy position are presented together, partisanship effects decrease substantially, by about 52%, whereas policy effects remain large, decreasing by about 10%. These results suggest that common measures of partisan animosity may capture programmatic conflict more so than social identity-based partisan hostility.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE id:469
TI: The Political Importance of Financial Performance ab: Asset mobility is thought to constrain taxation, as firms with mobile assets can avoid taxation by locating their assets in low-tax jurisdictions. Firms with immobile assets then face higher taxes. By considering the political incentives that accompany widespread financialization, we identify a new limit to the targeting of immobile firms: Publicly traded firms with immobile underlying assets lose more value in financial markets when taxes are increased, as shareholders anticipate that these underlying assets cannot be withheld from taxation. When governments care about this loss in value, their incentive to tax immobile, publicly traded firms declines. Political concern for financial performance therefore limits the extent to which immobile assets can be targeted for taxation. We argue that broad-based participation in the stock market and democratic political institutions increase political concern for financial performance. We discuss the implications of the theory and findings for policy autonomy, firm ownership, and economic voting.
SCIENCE AS CULTURE id:727
TI: The Political Space between Words and Things: Health Claims as Referential Displacement ab: In the EU today, health claims on food labels are regulated as a form of information. Before the 2000s, statements referring to health on packaged food were subject to different national regulations across the EU, with different perspectives on where the boundary lies between food and drugs. The turn to more horizontal legislation in EU food law and increased emphasis on the role of information for the functioning of the Single Market does not in itself explain why, and especially how, health-related statements on food products have been turned into information and what consequences this has produced. Construction of such a European 'technological zone', where health claims circulate as a form of information, can be understood as 'information's constitutive outside' (Barry, A. (2006) Technological zones, European Journal of Social Theory, 9(2), pp. 239-253; Barry, A. (2013) Material Politics: Disputes along the Pipeline (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell)). This outside hinges on techno-political discussion, lobbying and decisions where the boundary between health and disease is at stake, along with food's materiality. The concept of referential displacement shows how decisions in the regulatory process have transformed controversial references to human health on food labels into 'health claims' as an informational category by shifting the relation between the health claim and its material referents: food itself, health and the body. Referential displacement produces a new kind of information that implies similar efficacy to pharmaceutical drugs, without interfering with the zone or market of pharmaceuticals.
SCIENCE AS CULTURE id:491
TI: The Politics of Biometric Standards: The Case of Israel Biometric Project ab: In 2017, after years of public debate, Israel ratified a national biometric project consisting of two initiatives: issuing of biometric ID cards and passports to all Israeli citizens and establishment of a centralized database for storing their bodily information. Design and implementation of a preceding four-year pilot study were accompanied by extensive standardization. Discourse and standard analyses of 33 official state documents - from legal records to performance reports - published by Israeli authorities during the pilot study, unravel the politics of biometric standards employed as part of this project. Biometric standards were used to establish hierarchies between individuals and groups by defining particular bodies as 'biometrically ineligible.' These individuals are mostly members of underprivileged and marginalized social groups. Biometric standards were also constructed discursively as scientific and objective to legitimize such discriminatory treatment. Israeli authorities used standards strategically, both as infrastructural elements and as a discursive means. As infrastructural elements, biometric standards were employed, inter alia, to achieve predetermined results and confirm the project's success. As a discursive means, Israeli authorities actively adopted a 'discourse of standardization' to construct an objective and fair image to the project. Standardization of people namely, quantification of lives, bodies and experiences - is inherently discriminatory because it necessarily results in the creation of categories and hierarchies between biometrically in/eligible bodies.
DISASTERS id:588
TI: The Protection of Civilians and ethics of humanitarian governance: beyond intervention and resilience ab: The principle of the Protection of Civilians (PoC) in armed conflict has ethical repercussions in various actions undertaken by states and international organisations, from humanitarian relief, development aid, and peacekeeping, to warfare and military intervention. While the ethics of humanitarian intervention are instructive in this regard, most PoC practices should be conceived rather as modes of humanitarian governance across borders-from interventionist to resilience-oriented kinds. The consequences of this for the ethics of PoC are explored in this paper, highlighting questions of power, culture, and complicity. By relating these questions to the ethical strands of solidarist and pluralist internationalism, it positions the ethics of PoC within the broader field of the ethics of world politics. Examples are drawn from recent scholarly debate on PoC efforts in war-torn countries such as South Sudan. This analysis of the ethics of PoC reconfigures central positions in the debate on humanitarian intervention to an era of global humanitarian governance.
ADMINISTRATIVE SCIENCE QUARTERLY id:267
TI: The Public Doesn't Understand: The Self-reinforcing Interplay of Image Discrepancies and Political Ideologies in Law Enforcement ab: Drawing on information processing theory, I revisit prior assumptions that not being understood raises challenges for employees, examining how political ideologies powerfully affect how employees who serve the public react to a perceived lack of understanding of the difficulties of their jobs. Using independent expert ratings of 794 body camera videos of 164 police officers across two agencies, I show that a lack of perceived public understanding decreases task performance for liberal-leaning officers but not for conservative-leaning officers. Because liberal-leaning officers seek to form more communal relationships with the public, a perceived lack of public understanding violates their sense of social order, but it merely reaffirms conservative-leaning officers' beliefs in maintaining an authoritarian distance given the responsibilities and duties they shoulder. I replicate these results using supervisors' ratings of 82 officers across four agencies and then demonstrate in a time-lagged survey of 184 officers in a single agency that those with stronger conservative beliefs are more likely to believe the public fails to appreciate the difficulties of their jobs. These studies highlight the importance of accounting for people's beliefs in whether image conflicts should and do arise-and provide insights into the self-reinforcing forces that sustain divides between employees and those they serve.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:685
TI: The Pursuit of Full Spectrum Dominance: The Archives of the NSA ab: This article explores the archives of the National Security Agency (NSA) and the inherent logic vested in the agency's management of them. By drawing on Derrida's conception of the archive and the compulsion to administer and complete it, this article suggests that the data collection practices, as well as the rhetoric, of the NSA indicate a specific logic of gathering and organizing data that presents a fantasy of perfect surveillance and pre-emptive intervention that stretches into the future to cancel emergent threats. To contextualize an understanding of the archival practices of the NSA within a wider conquest for complete security and US hegemony, this article outlines the US Department of Defense's vision for full spectrum dominance, stressing that a show of force is exercised according to a logic of appropriate response that ranges from soft to hard power. As an organization that produces knowledge and risk factors based on data collection, the NSA is considered a central actor for understanding the US security regime's increasing propensity for data-based surveillance that is fundamentally structured around the data center: a specific kind of archive.
COMPUTER SUPPORTED COOPERATIVE WORK-THE JOURNAL OF COLLABORATIVE COMPUTING AND WORK PRACTICES id:664
TI: The Role of Discretion in the Age of Automation ab: This paper examines the nature of discretion in social work in order to debunk myths dominating prevalent debates on digitisation and automation in the public sector. Social workers have traditionally used their discretion widely and with great autonomy, but discretion has increasingly come under pressure for its apparent subjectivity and randomness. In Denmark, our case in point, the government recently planned to standardise laws to limit or remove discretion where possible in order for automation of case management to gain a foothold. Recent studies have focused on discretion in the public sector, but few have examined it explicitly and as part of real cases. As a consequence, they often leave the myths about discretion unchallenged. Inspired by the literature on discretion and CSCW research on rules in action, this study reports on an empirical investigation of discretion in child protection services in Denmark. The results of our analysis provide a new understanding of discretion as a cooperative endeavour, based on consultation and skill, rather than an arbitrary or idiosyncratic choice. In this manner, our study contradicts the myth of discretion inherent in the automation agenda. Correspondingly, we ask for attention to be given to systems that integrate discretion with technology rather than seek to undermine it directly or get around it surreptitiously. In this age of automation, this is not only an important but also an urgent task for CSCW researchers to fulfil.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:339
TI: The Role of Pilot Projects in Urban Climate Change Policy Innovation ab: Cities are taking a leadership role in addressing global climate change and reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, but policy innovations are needed to help cities move from goals to outcomes. Pilot projects are one means by which cities are experimenting with new ways of governing and financing climate change mitigation. In this paper, we develop a framework for understanding the role of pilot projects in urban policy innovation: their emergence and rationale, and the means by which they ultimately scale up and out to reduce GHG emissions. We use this framework to evaluate a pilot project for retrofitting social housing buildings in Toronto. We find the initial pilot project helped address the challenges of pursuing deep retrofits of social housing. Scaling these lessons up to the city level required overcoming challenges to financing and coordinating a larger project; scaling out to the provincial level revealed institutional and political obstacles to pursuing the co-benefits of deep building retrofits in social housing. Bridging agents play an important role in both scaling processes. The analysis reveals the additive nature of urban policy innovation and the dynamic interplay of change agents and institutional and political context in innovation processes.
POLITICS & POLICY id:764
TI: The Role of Regional Media in Shaping Political Awareness of Youth: Evidence from Egypt ab: This is an exploratory study that aims to answer the question of whether and to what extent regional media are influential in shaping political awareness and its role in influencing public opinion, especially that of young people. We examined regional media in Egypt, more precisely in the Suez Canal Region. To ensure the validity of our results, we deployed a number of different data collection methods: the collection, analysis, and integration of quantitative and qualitative research. The results reveal that regional media have the potential to contribute effectively in raising youths' political awareness of the public policy-making process. The recommendations specified are the elimination of red tape, governmental bureaucracy, and centralization in the management of regional radio and television is required; also necessary are financial independence and the restructuring of the organizational hierarchy of all state-run regional media.
AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW id:550
TI: The Social Sources of Geopolitical Power: French and British Diplomacy and the Politics of Interstate Recognition, 1689 to 1789 ab: Why did France influence the geopolitical system of eighteenth-century Europe more effectively than did Britain? Explanations pointing to states' military and economic power are unable to explain this outcome. I argue that durable geopolitical influence depends on states' symbolic capacities to secure recognition from competitor states, in addition to their coercive and economic capacities. And I show that states are liable to secure recognition to the extent that their agents embody social dispositions congruent with those of competitor agents. France converted military and economic power into durable influence in eighteenth-century Europe because French agents and most of their European counterparts shared courtly standards of competence, and they were invested in the common stakes of patrimonial sovereignty. By contrast, Britain failed to convert its greater material power into similar influence because British agents tended to lack courtly manners and they were uninterested in patrimonial stakes.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:244
TI: The epistemic culture in an online citizen science project: Programs, antiprograms and epistemic subjects ab: In the past decade, some areas of science have begun turning to masses of online volunteers through open calls for generating and classifying very large sets of data. The purpose of this study is to investigate the epistemic culture of a large-scale online citizen science project, the Galaxy Zoo, that turns to volunteers for the classification of images of galaxies. For this task, we chose to apply the concepts of programs and antiprograms to examine the essential tensions' that arise in relation to the mobilizing values of a citizen science project and the epistemic subjects and cultures that are enacted by its volunteers. Our premise is that these tensions reveal central features of the epistemic subjects and distributed cognition of epistemic cultures in these large-scale citizen science projects.
JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION id:58
TI: The Strength of Peripheral Networks: Negotiating Attention and Meaning in Complex Media Ecologies ab: Networked content flows that focus or fragment public attention are key communication processes in multimedia ecologies. Understandings of events may differ widely, as networked attention and framing processes move from core participants to more distant spectator publics. In the case of the Occupy Wall Street protests, peripheral social media networks of public figures and media organizations focused public attention on economic inequality. Although inequality was among many issues discussed by the activists, it was far less central to the protest core than problems with banks or democracy. Results showed how public attention to inequality was constructed through pulling and pushing interpretive frames between the core and periphery of dense communication networks. Various indicators of public attention-such as search trends, Wikipedia article edits, and legacy media coverage-all credited the protests with raising public awareness of inequality, even as attention to problems with banks grew at the protest core.
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SYSTEMS id:277
TI: The Sustainable Value of Open Government Data ab: Building on the promise of open data, government agencies support a continuously growing number of open data initiatives that are driven mainly by expectations of unprecedented value generation from an underutilized resource. Although data, in general, have undoubtedly become an essential resource for the economy, it has remained largely unclear how, or even whether, open data repositories generate any significant value. We addressed this void with a study that examines how sustainable value is generated from open data. Subsequently, we developed a model that explains how open data generate sustainable value through two underlying mechanisms. The first, the information sharing mechanism, explicates how open data are beneficial to forging informational content that creates value for society through increased transparency and improved decision-making. The second, the market mechanism, explicates how open data are beneficial as a resource in products and services offered on the market, as well as how open data are used to make processes more efficient or to satisfy previously unmet needs. We tested and validated the model using PLS with secondary quantitative data from 76 countries. The study provides empirical support to the conjecture that openness of data as well as the digital governance and digital infrastructure in a country have a positive effect on the country's level of sustainable value. Overall, the study provides empirical evidence in favor of nurturing open data culture and insights about the conditions that support turning it into sustainable value for the benefit of citizens, business organizations, and society at large.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:693
TI: The Use of Design Thinking in the US Federal Government ab: Few organizations have more power to improve lives through innovation than the U.S. government. In this article, we focus on design thinking, a promising innovation methodology that marries a human-centered focus with iterative prototyping and testing. Design thinking has been much discussed in the private sector and in international government circles, yet its use in the U.S. federal government is less prominent and less explored by scholars. Though U.S. federal agencies report anecdotal success at a project level, empirical research examining the demonstrated impact of the approach is not yet available. Therefore, a partnership between a university and a not-for-profit operator of federally funded research and development centers was formed to conduct a preliminary study on the use of the method, the results of which are presented here. We conducted interviews with a cross-section of government design-thinking practitioners representing a diverse set of federal offices and identified the specific contexts in which they applied design thinking, the outcomes these practitioners observed, and the enablers and barriers to implementation they experienced. We conclude with recommendations for future research and practice, to help government confront the challenges of the twenty-first century and, in doing so, improve the lives of its citizens.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:607
TI: The Work of Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: What Artists Can Teach Us About the Ethics of Data Practice ab: Problematic use of data, patterns of bias emerging in AI systems, and the role of platforms like Facebook and Twitter during elections have thrown the issue of data ethics into sharp relief. Yet the focus of conversations about data ethics has centered on computer scientists, engineers, and designers, with far less attention paid to the digital practices of artists and others in the cultural sector. Artists have historically deployed new technologies in unexpected and often prescient ways, making them a community able to speak directly to the changing and nuanced ethical questions faced by those who use data and machine learning systems. We conducted interviews with thirty-three artists working with digital data, with a focus on how artists prefigure and commonly challenge data practices and ethical concerns of computer scientists, researchers, and the wider population. We found artists were frequently working to produce a sense of defamiliarization and critical distance from contemporary digital technologies in their audiences. The ethics of using large-scale data and AI systems for these artists were generally developed in ongoing conversations with other practitioners in their communities and in relation to a longer history of art practice.
WORLD DEVELOPMENT id:520
TI: The concept of affectedness in international development ab: The groups who experience direct impacts of development projects are generally known as 'affected people'. This category is gaining traction in the governance of international financial institutions (IFIs) and is arguably becoming ubiquitous in contemporary development discourse. In this paper I investigate what 'affectedness' means, and also what it should mean in development context. The aim is to examine the grounds based on which the scope of affected people can be ascertained, and to underline the conceptual but also practical difficulties associated with this exercise. The proposed analysis is predominantly theoretical. It builds on the debate about the 'all-affected principle', as well as the theory of democratic inclusion by Iris Marion Young. My main argument is that currently the idea of affectedness functions as a boundary of inclusion/exclusion in the governance of development projects. I therefore suggest that leaving this category entirely open-ended also leaves it exposed to arbitrariness of decision-makers. This is problematic, because generally consultations that include affected people are seen as conveying legitimacy and proving social support to development initiatives. Without principled approach to affectedness, this process of selecting who should be consulted and who should not, enables an unjustified exclusion of the most vulnerable communities. This paper suggests that in the context of international development the most plausible ground for inclusion is vulnerability, which can be articulated by using the notion of structural social groups developed by Iris Young. These two concepts combined offer a principled enough approach for decision-makers to identify the minimal scope of affected persons. (C) 2019 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
WORLD DEVELOPMENT id:439
TI: The dark side of environmental peacebuilding ab: Environmental peacebuilding refers to efforts aimed at building more peaceful relations through environmental cooperation, natural resource management, climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction. It is an emerging research field with the potential to integrate various lines of environmental security research. Environmental peacebuilding practices have also been widely applied by conservation, development and peacebuilding practitioners, including those working at the grass-roots level in local communities. While its positive effects are considerable, environmental peacebuilding can also have adverse effects. This dark side of environmental peacebuilding has received little attention and remains under-researched. Based on evidence from a broad set of cases located in various world regions, I discuss these adverse effects within six categories (the "six Ds"): depoliticisation, displacement, discrimination, deterioration into conflict, delegitimisation of the state, and degradation of the environment. Only with sufficient consideration of these adverse effects, their interactions and the associated risk factors will environmental peacebuilding be able to fully develop its potential to simultaneously address environmental problems and threats to peace. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:19
TI: The democratic interface: technology, political organization, and diverging patterns of electoral representation ab: Democracies are experiencing historic disruptions affecting how people engage with core institutions such as the press, civil society organizations, parties, and elections. These processes of citizen interaction with institutions operate as a democratic interface shaping self-government and the quality of public life. The electoral dimension of the interface is important, as its operation can affect all others. This analysis explores a growing left-right imbalance in the electoral connection between citizens, parties, elections, and government. This imbalance is due, in part, to divergent left-right preferences for political engagement, organization, and communication. Support on the right for clearer social rules and simpler moral, racial and nationalist agendas are compatible with hierarchical, leader-centered party organizations that compete more effectively in elections. Parties on the left currently face greater challenges engaging citizens due to the popular meta-ideology of diversity and inclusiveness and demands for direct or deliberative democracy. What we term connective parties are developing technologies to perform core organizational functions, and some have achieved electoral success. However, when connective parties on the left try to develop shared authority processes, online and offline, they face significant challenges competing with more conventionally organized parties on the right.
PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE id:18
TI: The different audiences of science communication: A segmentation analysis of the Swiss population's perceptions of science and their information and media use patterns ab: Few studies have assessed whether populations can be divided into segments with different perceptions of science. We provide such an analysis and assess whether these segments exhibit specific patterns of media and information use. Based on representative survey data from Switzerland, we use latent class analysis to reconstruct four segments: the "Sciencephiles," with strong interest for science, extensive knowledge, and a pronounced belief in its potential, who use a variety of sources intensively; the "Critically Interested," also with strong interest and support for science but with less trust in it, who use similar sources but are more cautious toward them; the "Passive Supporters" with moderate levels of interest, trust, and knowledge and tempered perceptions of science, who use fewer sources; and the "Disengaged," who are not interested in science, do not know much about it, harbor critical views toward it, and encounter it-if at all-mostly through television.
PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE id:127
TI: The disengaged in science communication: How not to count audiences and publics ab: In this article, we suggest that three concepts from cultural and media studies might be useful for analysing the ways audiences are constructed in science communication: that media are immanent to society, media are multiple and various, and audiences are active. This article uses those concepts, along with insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS), to examine the category of the disengaged' within science communication. This article deals with the contrast between common sense' and scholarly ideas of media and audiences in the field of cultural and media studies. It compares the common sense' with scholarly ideas of science publics from STS. We conclude that it may be time to reconsider the ontology of publics and the disengaged for science communication.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC POLICY id:369
TI: The drivers of regulatory networking: policy learning between homophily and convergence ab: The literature on transnational regulatory networks identified interdependence as their main rationale, downplaying domestic factors. Typically, relevant contributions use the word "network" only metaphorically. Yet, informal ties between regulators constitute networked structures of collaboration, which can be measured and explained. Regulators choose their frequent, regular network partners. What explains those choices? This article develops an Exponential Random Graph Model of the network of European national energy regulators to identify the drivers of informal regulatory networking. The results show that regulators tend to network with peers who regulate similarly organised market structures. Geography and European policy frameworks also play a role. Overall, the British regulator is significantly more active and influential than its peers, and a divide emerges between regulators from EU-15 and others. Therefore, formal frameworks of cooperation (i.e. a European Agency) were probably necessary to foster regulatory coordination across the EU.
DISASTERS id:216
TI: The dual discourse of urban resilience: robust city and self-organised neighbourhoods ab: Resilience has become a dominant disaster governance discourse. It has been criticised for insufficiently addressing systemic vulnerabilities while urging the vulnerable to self-organise. The urban resilience discourse involves a particular disconnect: it evokes 'robustness' and unaffectedness at the city scale on the one hand, and self-organisation of disaster-affected people and neighbourhoods on the other. This paper explains and illustrates the dual discourse through a case study on the reconstruction of informal and low-income settlements in the aftermath of the fire in Valparaiso, Chile, in 2014, focusing on the communication contents of two non-governmental organisations (NGOs). These NGOs deployed the discourse differently, yet both called for affected neighbourhoods to build a more robust city through self-organisation, and both suggested their work as the missing link between self-organisation and robustness. A danger in deploying the dual discourse is that it requires people who live in informal and low-income settlements to earn their right to the robust city through 'better' self-organisation based on fragmented visions.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:730
TI: The epistemology of live blogging ab: This article proposes a typology of the epistemology of live blogging through an analysis of two live news blogs: Radio New Zealand (RNZ) News' live blog of a significant earthquake in Aotearoa New Zealand in November 2016 and BBC News' live blog of the Brexit referendum result in June 2016. We use these cases to draw out five features of the genre that we suggest may characterise other live news blogs. We demonstrate that these blogs tend to (1) produce a fragmentary narrative that (2) reflects particular moments in time, (3) curate an array of textual objects from a range of information sources to produce 'networked balance', (4) gain coherence from an often informal authorial voice or voices and (5) generate claims to knowledge of events which are simultaneously dynamic and fragile. This typology contributes to understanding journalism's position within networked information spaces.
DISASTERS id:405
TI: The ethical contours of research in crisis settings: five practical considerations for academic institutional review boards and researchers ab: The number of research studies in the humanitarian field is rising. It is imperative, therefore, that institutional review boards (IRBs) consider carefully the additional risks present in crisis contexts to ensure that the highest ethical standards are upheld. Ethical guidelines should represent better the specific issues inherent to research among populations grappling with armed conflict, disasters triggered by natural hazards, or health-related emergencies. This paper seeks to describe five issues particular to humanitarian settings that IRBs should deliberate and on which they should provide recommendations to overcome associated challenges: staged reviews of protocols in acute emergencies; flexible reviews of modification requests; addressing violence and the traumatic experiences of participants; difficulties in attaining meaningful informed consent among populations dependent on aid; and ensuring reviews are knowledgeable of populations' needs. Considering these matters when reviewing protocols will yield more ethically sound research in humanitarian settings and hold researchers accountable to appropriate ethical standards.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC POLICY id:474
TI: The evolution of human trafficking messaging in the United States and its effect on public opinion ab: Despite a near unanimous agreement that human trafficking is a morally reprehensible practice, there is confusion around what qualifies as human trafficking in the United States. Adopting a mixed-method strategy, we examine how human trafficking is defined by the public; how contemporary (mis)understanding of human trafficking developed; and the public opinion consequence of this (mis)understanding. The definition of human trafficking has evolved over time to become nearly synonymous with slavery; however, we demonstrate that media and anti-trafficking organisations have been focussing their attention on the sexual exploitation of foreign women. We show that general public opinion reflects this skewed attention; the average citizen equates human trafficking with the smuggling of women for sexual slavery. Using a survey experiment, we find that shining light on other facets of human trafficking - the fact that human trafficking is a security problem and a domestic issue - can increase public response to the issue.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC POLICY id:643
TI: The evolution of public policy attitudes: comparing the mechanisms of policy support across the stages of a policy cycle ab: We analyse the importance of legitimacy on public policy support by comparing how drivers of public policy attitudes evolve across the policy process consisting of the input (the processes forgoing acquisition of power and the procedures permeating political decisionmaking), throughput (the inclusion of and interactions between actors in a governance system) and output (the substantive consequences of those decisions) stages. Using unique panel data through three phases of the implementation of a congestion tax in the Swedish city of Gothenburg, we find that legitimacy is indeed important in explaining policy support. Moreover, we find a lingering effect where support in one phase depends on legitimacy both in the present and in previous phases. Hence, our study takes us one step further on the road to understand the complicated dynamic mechanisms behind the interactions between policymaking, policy support, and the legitimacy and approval of politicians and political processes.
RESEARCH POLICY id:98
TI: The evolving relations between government agencies of innovation policymaking in emerging economies: A policy network approach and its application to the Chinese case ab: Literature on innovation policy reveals little of how relations between government agencies as policymakers evolve. Taking the policy network approach, this paper investigates three mechanisms underlining the evolution of inter-government agency relations in emerging economies - policy agenda, power concentration and heterogeneity dependence, and applies them to the analysis of the evolution of innovation policymaking in China. Operationally, the paper proposes a social network analysis (SNA)-based method to quantitatively study China's innovation policy network, which consists of 463 innovation policy documents formulated by its central government ministries between 1980 and 2011. The findings show that the formal policy network for innovation has been not only sustained through the intervention of policy agendas but also self-organized because of policy network's nature of power concentration and heterogeneity dependence. The presence of such mixed mechanisms in China's innovation policy network's evolution differs from the findings from industrialized countries where self-organization plays a central role. This work advances our theoretical understanding of the evolution of innovation policy network and has implications for innovation policymaking in emerging economies.
PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE id:697
TI: The good despot: Technology firms' interventions in the public sphere ab: We examine how the technology industry intervenes in social domains not directly tied to its products, services, and immediate commercial concerns. We intend to develop a framework for considering the ways technology and the technology industry reshape these domains in ways both intended and unintended. Drawing on sociologies of knowledge and technology and a set of 20 semi-structured interviews with technology workers and HR professionals working in the Israeli facilities of two large multi-national technology firms, we find evidence that the intervention allows the industry to re-purpose public education as a means of nurturing a firm's workforce with the goal of remaining competitive in a tight labor market both nationally and globally. In parallel, the programs allow workers to experience satisfying and pleasant interactions. These re-purposing interventions might aggravate existing education inequality while further cementing the legitimacy of a dominant industry as a model for an idealized commercial society.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:533
TI: The horizons of technological control: automated surveillance in the New York subway ab: Surveillance technologies may be capable of monitoring a domain, but they need a sufficiently orderly domain to monitor. This article examines the secretive effort to institute artificial-intelligence-based 'smart surveillance' in the New York subway, using objectand pattern-recognition algorithms to identify dangerous activities in video feeds, such as a person abandoning a package. By considering the necessary preconditions for computer vision systems to recognize patterns and objects, I show how smart surveillance was challenged by the lack of visual and social uniformities necessary for smart surveillance systems to make its fine-toothed distinctions. In spite of vast resources and involvement of a major military contractor, the project was eventually deemed a failure. Although problems in computer vision are being incrementally solved, those improvements do not yet add up to a holistic technology capable of parsing the real-world ambiguity of open-ended settings which do not meet the assumptions of the detection algorithms. In the absence of technologies that can handle the actual mess, the world itself must cooperate, but it often does not. The article demonstrates the importance of looking beyond the claims of technical efficacy in the study of security and surveillance to discover how technologies of inspection and control actually work, as a means to cut through the heavy rhetorical packaging in which they are sold to their publics.
DISASTERS id:670
TI: The impact of the Gulf crisis on Qatar's humanitarian sector ab: The 2017 Gulf crisis is one of the most challenging episodes faced by Qatar since its independence in 1971, with major economic, social, and political impacts on the Arab Gulf nation. Its economic prognosis has been brought into doubt, the map of regional alliances has been redrawn, and any prospects of deeper regional integration have been dashed. This paper analyses the little-documented impact of the crisis on Qatar's humanitarian sector, which has unfolded as the small, gas-rich emirate has striven to become a major humanitarian donor. It concludes that while there have been disruptions to humanitarian operations and regional coordination, the Gulf crisis has triggered and in some cases accelerated already intended reforms across the Qatari humanitarian sector. In the long term, the reorganisation and adaptation implemented to weather the storm of the crisis may help Qatar to emerge from the crisis with a more sustainable and resilient humanitarian sector.
SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY id:478
TI: The inherently democratic nature of technology assessment ab: Technology assessment (TA) emerged more than fifty years ago to provide information supply, decision support, and orientation for democratic processes and institutions in many democratic countries. This historical observation alone, however, does not justify speaking of an inherent relationship between TA and democracy. The latter requires taking a conceptual view. Arguments supporting the thesis of the inherently democratic nature of TA will be given based on pragmatist approaches developed by John Dewey and Jurgen Habermas. This perspective on TA has specific implications for the inclusion of the knowledge and perspectives of stakeholders, people affected and citizens involved in TA processes, as well as the necessity to develop or strengthen thinking in alternative options. Furthermore, it makes clear that in the current crisis of democracy in many countries, TA cannot take a distant and neutral position.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:12
TI: The limits of transparency: Data brokers and commodification ab: In the United States the prevailing public policy approach to mitigating the harms of internet surveillance is grounded in the liberal democratic value of transparency. While a laudable goal, transparency runs up against insurmountable structural constraints within the political economy of commercial surveillance. A case study of the data broker industry reveals the limits of transparency and shows that commodification of personal information is at the root of the power imbalances that transparency-based strategies of consumer empowerment seek to rectify. Despite significant challenges, privacy policy must be more centrally informed by a critical political economy of commercial surveillance.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:636
TI: The logic of the surface: on the epistemology of algorithms in times of big data ab: The image of big data and algorithms in society is obviously ambivalent. On the one hand, algorithms are seen as a tool of empowerment that allows us, for example, to render society transparent and thus governable, to the extent that the social sciences might even become obsolete. On the other hand, algorithms seem to assume a mysterious agency in the black box of the computer so that their operations are invisible and inscrutable to us: artificial intelligence is seen as something that one day will have the power to dominate us. Beyond these two extreme positions that both overestimate and underestimate how algorithms might change our way of seeing things and being in the world, the present article introduces a third perspective. Algorithms, it holds, indeed follow their own 'style of reasoning' and thus create new realities. At the same time, however, they 'reduce reality', as they lack access to the world of human sense making. Algorithms have no secrets but deploy a 'logic of the surface'. As they paint a behaviorist picture of human modes of existence, algorithms and big data might change our self-understanding. Engaging in epistemological questions will help us to capture the ontological implications of algorithmic reasoning.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:682
TI: The many lives of border automation: Turbulence, coordination and care ab: Automated borders promise instantaneous, objective and accurate decisions that efficiently filter the growing mass of mobile people and goods into safe and dangerous categories. We critically interrogate that promise by looking closely at how UK and European border agents reconfigure automated borders through their sense-making activities and everyday working practices. We are not interested in rehearsing a pro- vs. anti-automation debate, but instead illustrate how both positions reproduce a powerful anthropocentrism that effaces the entanglements and coordinations between humans and nonhumans in border spaces. Drawing from fieldwork with customs officers, immigration officers and airport managers at a UK and a European airport, we illustrate how border agents navigate a turbulent 'cycle' of automation that continually overturns assumed hierarchies between humans and technology. The coordinated practices engendered by institutional culture, material infrastructures, drug loos and sniffer dogs cannot be captured by a reductive account of automated borders as simply confirming or denying a predetermined, data-driven in/out decision.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:390
TI: The modified issue: Turning around parliaments, politics as usual and how to extend issue-politics with a little help from Max Weber ab: Ordinary political institutions such as parliaments remain under-explored in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and the conceptual resources for studying politics are far less developed than for science. But sites like parliaments are far more interesting than are their received images. This article argues that novel re-combinations of the issue-literature in STS and the works on parliament and objectivity by the German scholar Max Weber can provide us with analytical resources for grasping parliamentary politics with new lenses. In fact, reading Weber in light of the issue-literature provides for a better understanding of his work, and points towards how Weber's accounts are crucially about parliamentary politics as work - on and with issues and the matters at hand. In addition, Weber may improve STS's accounts of politics by his way of including the ordered and procedural side to issue-politics: Issue-politics is both about 'opening up' an issue as well as coming to decisions and take action. The article underlines this by discussing an often-misread part of Weber's work, namely his work on objectivity and points to how political procedure was a key inspiration to his understanding and developing of this notion.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC POLICY id:93
TI: The new politics of energy security and the rise of the catalytic state in southern Europe ab: European energy security has recently emerged as an important topic of scholarly attention. Many studies have scrutinised the political and institutional innovations triggered by the establishment of the European Union internal energy market and external energy policy. However, the literature indicates a particularly striking gap between growing research and concept development, and only recently have efforts been made to analyse this current dynamic more accurately. By focussing on the security of gas supply and liquefied natural gas development in France, Italy and Spain, and extending the model of the catalytic state to the energy-security realm, this article contributes to the empirical and conceptual debate. In particular, the article argues that the catalytic state model, which emphasises the active role of governments in a liberalised market structure and their wide participation in a networked pattern of energy diplomacy, is better equipped than the regulatory state model to capture the new European politics of energy security.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:132
TI: The new watchdogs' vision of science: A roundtable with Ivan Oransky (Retraction Watch) and Brandon Stell (PubPeer) ab: On March 3rd, 2016, the authors of this note hosted a conference entitled Destabilized Science' at the University of California, Los Angeles, to which we invited two representatives of core actors within the new science watchdog pack: Ivan Oransky, co-founder in 2010 of Retraction Watch, and Brandon Stell, co-founder in 2012 of PubPeer. After the formal conference, we organized a roundtable to discuss these invitees' experience and their vision of contemporary science. Mario Biagioli (University of California, Davis), Michael Chwe (UCLA) and Aaron Panofsky (UCLA) participated to the conversation. An edited transcript of the discussion and a short podcast version are being published on Transmissions (ssstransmissions.org) the new blog associated with Social Studies of Science.
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY id:656
TI: The personal information sphere: An integral approach to privacy and related information and communication rights ab: Data protection laws, including the European Union General Data Protection Regulation, regulate aspects of online personalization. However, the data protection lens is too narrow to analyze personalization. To define conditions for personalization, we should understand data protection in its larger fundamental rights context, starting with the closely connected right to privacy. If the right to privacy is considered along with other European fundamental rights that protect information and communication flows, namely, communications confidentiality; the right to receive information; and freedom of expression, opinion, and thought, these rights are observed to enable what I call a "personal information sphere" for each person. This notion highlights how privacy interferences affect other fundamental rights. The personal information sphere is grounded in European case law and is thus not just an academic affair. The essence of the personal information sphere is control, yet with a different meaning than mere control as guaranteed by data protection law. The personal information sphere is about people controlling how they situate themselves in information and communication networks. It follows that, to respect privacy and related rights, online personalization providers should actively involve users in the personalization process and enable them to use personalization for personal goals.
WORLD DEVELOPMENT id:749
TI: The political economy of aid allocation: Aid and incumbency at the local level in Sub Saharan Africa ab: Aid allocation within countries is often thought of as a strategic action by the incumbent leaders to further their own goals. Theoretically, however, the effects of aid may be either positive or negative and the empirical evidence is limited. By matching geo-coded data on aid projects to 101 792 respondents in five waves of the Afrobarometer, we investigate the effects of aid on incumbency support using project fixed effects. We estimate the effects for World Bank aid and Chinese aid separately and find positive effects for the former and no robust effect for the latter. For neither project donor do we find effects on turnout and that aid is not targeting areas with previously higher incumbency support. We find little support for the notion that economic voting is driving the result as individuals self-perceived economic conditions are not affected. The positive effects for the World Bank aid projects seem to be mediated by trust in the politicians, whereas we find no effects of Chinese aid on trust. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
DISASTERS id:445
TI: The role of coalitions in disaster policymaking ab: Disasters have the potential to act as focusing events, which can increase the amount of attention on disaster-related problems and encourage policy action. Understanding of the political characteristics of disaster policymaking is underdeveloped, yet it is known that these features may be dissimilar to those of non-disaster policy areas, especially concerning the coalitions of policy actors engaged in the disaster policy process. Coalitions in the realm of disaster policy processes may be less likely to form, may look very different, and may have different goals than those in non-disaster domains. Knowledge of the emergence, composition, and purpose of coalitions in disaster policy is lacking. This paper draws on prior theory and case observations to define and describe the characteristics of a disaster policy subsystem and to build a typology of coalitions that may appear within such a subsystem, providing a foundation upon which scholars can work to study coalition dynamics in disaster policy subsystems.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:137
TI: The politics of a natural laboratory: Claiming territory and governing life in the Galapagos Islands ab: The Galapagos Islands are often called a natural laboratory of evolution. This metaphor provides a powerful way of understanding space that, through scientific research, conservation and tourism, has shaped the archipelago over the past century. Combining environmental histories of field science with political ecologies of conservation biopower, this article foregrounds the territorial production of the archipelago as a living laboratory. In the mid-twentieth century, foreign naturalists used the metaphor to make land claims as they campaigned to create the Galapagos National Park and Charles Darwin Research Station. Unlike earlier parks for science', these institutions were not established under colonial rule, but through postwar institutions of transnational environmental governance that nonetheless continued colonial approaches to nature protection. In the following decades, the metaphor became a rationale for territorial management through biopolitical strategies designed to ensure isolation by controlling human access and introduced species. This article's approach extends the scope of what is at stake in histories of field science: not only the production of knowledge and authority of knowledge claims, but also the foundation of global environmental governance and authority over life and death in particular places. Yet while the natural laboratory was a powerful geographical imagination, analysis shows that it was also an unsustainable goal.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:703
TI: The politics of deceptive borders: 'biomarkers of deceit' and the case of iBorderCtrl ab: This paper critically examines a recently developed proposal for a border control system called iBorderCtrl, designed to detect deception based on facial recognition technology and the measurement of micro-expressions, termed 'biomarkers of deceit'. Funded under the European Commission's Horizon 2020 programme, the system is analysed in relation to the wider political economy of 'emotional AI' and the history of deception detection technologies. We then move on to interrogate the design of iBorderCtrl using publicly available documents and assess the assumptions and scientific validation underpinning the project design. Finally, drawing on a Bayesian analysis we outline statistical fallacies in the foundational premise of mass screening and argue that it is very unlikely that the model that iBorderCtrl provides for deception detection would work in practice. By interrogating actual systems in this way, we argue that we can begin to question the very premise of the development of data-driven systems, and emotional AI and deception detection in particular, pushing back on the assumption that these systems are fulfilling the tasks they claim to be attending to and instead ask what function such projects carry out in the creation of subjects and management of populations. This function is not merely technical but, rather, we argue, distinctly political and forms part of a mode of governance increasingly shaping life opportunities and fundamental rights.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:335
TI: The privacy paradox: how market privacy facilitates government surveillance ab: Although most surveillance studies scholars assume privacy is antithetical to surveillance, critics have recently warned that privacy-based criticisms may facilitate surveillance. That being said, we do not yet have data that show whether privacy claims were used in the past to legitimate government surveillance. This paper addresses that gap by analyzing claims made over one of the U.S.'s most controversial surveillance issues: government control over encryption technologies. A review of Congressional hearings and statements on the Congressional Record (n=112) reveals that from 1993 to 1999, public debates were dominated by a market liberalization discourse in which participants supported loosening encryption controls as a way to protect privacy from criminal intrusions in market transactions. Also playing a role was a strong skepticism toward government power and a preference for markets as managers of crime prevention. Challenged by these critiques, lawmakers withdrew regulatory proposals and spent the following decade working quietly with private firms to ensure law enforcement surveillance capability. These findings show the expansion of privacy for consumers and entrepreneurs has in fact been used to achieve the contraction of privacy from law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
RESEARCH POLICY id:91
TI: The relation between research priorities and societal demands: The case of rice ab: To what extent is scientific research related to societal needs? To answer this crucial question systematically we need to contrast indicators of research priorities with indicators of societal needs. We focus on rice research and technology between 1983 and 2012. We combine quantitative methods that allow investigation of the relation between 'revealed' research priorities and 'revealed' societal demands, measured respectively by research output (publications) and national accounts of rice use and farmers' and consumers' rice-related needs. We employ new bibliometric data, methods and indicators to identify countries' main rice research topics (priorities) from publications. For a panel of countries, we estimate the relation between revealed research priorities and revealed demands. We find that, across countries and time, societal demands explain a country's research trajectory to a limited extent. Some research priorities are nicely aligned to societal demands, confirming that science is partly related to societal needs. However, we find a relevant number of misalignments between the focus of rice research and revealed demands, crucially related to human consumption and nutrition. We discuss some implications for research policy.
WORLD DEVELOPMENT id:437
TI: The rise and decline of the populist social contract in the Arab world ab: The wave of populist authoritarian republics (PA) established in the Arab world in the 1950s-1960s legitimized themselves by a combination of nationalism, developmentalism and populism. Their reneging on this contract goes far to explaining the Arab Uprisings half a century later. PA regimes, with initially little popular support, needed, as part of their struggle to consolidate power at the expense of the old oligarchy and other rivals, to incorporate the middle and lower classes into a cross-class coalition. They developed a tacit populist social contract in which their putative constituencies were offered social-economic benefits in return for political support; this accorded with the inherited moral economy of the region in which government legitimacy was conditional on its delivery of socio-economic equity and justice. Additionally, however, authoritarian populism was made possible by developments at the global level such as bi-polarity, which enabled political protection and economic assistance from the Soviet bloc, and the developmentalist ideology that corresponded with the Keynesian era of global economic expansion in which the power of finance capital was balanced by labour and the regulatory state. However, by the eighties, Keysianism had been superseded by neo-liberalism, driven by the restoration of the global dominance of chiefly Anglo-American finance capital. This global turn was paralleled by the exhaustion of the statist-populist development model in MENA. The demands made on MENA governments by international financial institutions for privatization were used by regime elites to foster crony capitalism as they and their cronies acquired public sector assets; in parallel pressures for structural adjustment legitimized enforcing austerity on the masses: in essence regimes started to renege on the populist social contract. The Arab Uprising was a direct consequence of this. Evidence for this claim is adduced from public opinion polling, the timing of the uprising and the especial vulnerability of the region's republics to the uprising. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF DISASTER RISK REDUCTION id:658
TI: The role of households in Nordic national risk assessments ab: National Risk assessments (NRAs) provide an overview of risks at a national level. NRAs should give information on the risk facing critical functions of society. NRAs are therefore vital elements in preparation and planning response to crisis on a national level. Households are a fundamental part of society, and the household's resilience in a crisis can be a measurement of successful crisis management. This work aims to identify the expected roles of citizens and households in national risk assessments (NRAs) in Norway, Sweden and Iceland. National risk regimes in these countries are similar in many ways, with a strong focus on societal values as a part of the Nordic safety culture and operated after similar principles. Increased complexity of society results in increased complexity in dealing with hazards and greater disaster potential through cascading effects, and recent cases have shown great consequences to households when electricity and ICT-infrastructures fail. Households can also represent resources and capabilities in emergency situations. The article discusses to what extent this duality is reflected in the NRAs for the Nordic countries. Even though the basic societal value in the Nordic countries focuses on the wellbeing of individuals, this study shows a gap between the defined structure of the risk regimes in NRAs, and how households and individuals are portrayed.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:233
TI: The social life of data points: Antecedents of digital technologies ab: Recent technological advances such as microprocessors and random-access memory have had a significant role in gathering, storing and processing digital data, but the basic principles underpinning such data management were established in the century preceding the digital revolution. This paper maps the emergence of those older technologies to show that the logic and imperative for the surveillance potential of more recent digital technologies was laid down in a pre-digital age. The paper focuses on the development of the data point from its use in punch cards in the late 19th century through its manipulation in ideas about correlation to its collection via self-completion questionnaires. Some ways in which medicine and psychology have taken up and deployed the technology of data points are used as illustrative exemplars. The paper concludes with a discussion of the role of data points in defining human identity.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:231
TI: The unedited public sphere ab: The health of democratic public spheres is challenged by the circulation of falsehoods. These epistemic problems are connected to social media and they raise a classic problem of how to understand the role of technology in political developments. We discuss three sets of technological affordances of social media that facilitate the spread of false beliefs: obscuring the provenance of information, facilitating deception about authorship, and providing for manipulation of social signals. We argue that these do not make social media a "cause" of problems with falsehoods, but explanations of epistemic problems should account for social media to understand the timing and widespread occurrence of epistemic problems. We argue that "the marketplace of ideas" cannot be adequate as a remedy for these problems, which require epistemic editing by the press.
TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY id:397
TI: There's No Such Thing as a Scientific Controversy ab: We examine 81 rhetoric and technical communication studies of "scientific controversy." Our praxiographic analysis reveals that "scientific controversy" is not one thing but three, each staged according to a radically different ontology; yet the literature continues to handle these ontologies the same and to privilege scientists' demarcation claims in their analysis. We conclude the modifier scientific should be abandoned entirely in controversy studies and recommend an antilogical rather than dialectical approach to controversy.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:68
TI: They Are Underpaid and Understaffed: How Clients Interpret Encounters with Street-Level Bureaucrats ab: Scholars have explored the nature and consequences of administrative burden but less is known about how citizens interpret costly encounters with the state. This qualitative study of 85 child care subsidy recipients applies attribution theory from psychology to illustrate how clients develop causal explanations for administrative burden. The findings show that clients either blamed negative experiences on bureaucrats-viewing workers as in control of their behavior, or the bureaucracy-blaming factors related to the subsidy system. In rare instances, clients viewed the bureaucracy as intentionally discouraging claims. We observed some variation by race/ethnicity and study sites. Examining clients' causal explanations of administrative burden helps clarify how clients' interpretation of costly bureaucratic encounters influences future claims, their perceptions of the state, and their political participation.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:53
TI: Three dimensions of the public sphere on Facebook ab: The article provides an empirical analysis of the online public sphere in the three dimensions introduced by Dahlgren (2005): structural, representational and interactional. The main subject of analysis is the largest social networking site - Facebook - and Polish users' activity on the Facebook Pages of political parties and politicians. The researchers analysed data about all users active on those Pages during two 4-month periods in 2013 and 2015. The results of the study show that only a small fraction of Facebook users are active in public political discussions that take place on political Facebook Pages (structural dimension). However, the level of engagement depends on the current political events taking place within the public sphere offline, and users are more active during electoral campaigns. Moreover, Facebook does not provide an alternative public sphere for political actors that are less present in mainstream media. Parties and politicians that are visible in traditional media are also attracting active fans in social media (representational dimension). Nonetheless, non-parliamentary groups have more active fans than would result only from their popularity in mainstream media. Finally, the online public on Facebook is fragmented and clustered into homogenous political groups (interactional dimension), thus supporting the hypothesis on echo chambers' presented by Sunstein (2001). The divisions are smaller when there are significantly more users involved. However, most of these cross-cutting links are the result of the electoral campaign.
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY id:42
TI: Tor, what is it good for? Political repression and the use of online anonymity-granting technologies ab: Why do people use anonymity-granting technologies when surfing the Internet? Anecdotal evidence suggests that people often resort to using online anonymity services, like the Tor network, because they are concerned about the possibility of their government infringing their civil and political rights, especially in highly repressive regimes. This claim has yet to be subject to rigorous cross-national, over time testing. In this article, econometric analysis of newly compiled data on Tor network usage from 2011 to 2013 shows that the relationship between political repression and the use of the Tor network is U-shaped. Political repression drives usage of Tor the most in both highly repressive and highly liberal contexts. The shape of this relationship plausibly emerges as a function of people's opportunity to use Tor and their need to use anonymity-granting technologies to express their basic political rights in highly repressive regimes.
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY id:484
TI: Toward a Document-Centered Ontological Theory for Information Architecture in Corporations ab: The beginning of the 21st century attested to the first movements toward information architecture (IA), originating from the field of library and information science (LIS). IA is acknowledged as an important meta-discipline concerned with the design, implementation, and maintenance of digital information spaces. Despite the relevance of IA, there is little research about the subject within LIS, and still less if one considers initiatives for creating a theory for IA. In this article, we provide a theory for IA and describe the resources needed to create it through ontological models. We also choose the "document" as the key entity for such theory, contemplating kinds of documents that not only serve to register information, but also create claims and obligations in society. To achieve our goals, we provide a background for subtheories from LIS and from Applied Ontology. As a result, we present some basic theory for IA in the form of a formal framework to represent corporations in which IA activities take place, acknowledging that our approach is de facto a subset of IA we call the enterprise information architecture (EAI) approach. By doing this, we highlight the effects that documents cause within corporations in the scope of EIA.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:66
TI: Toward a political economy of nudge: smart city variations ab: Transformations in strategies of governmentality have been implemented around the globe through behavioral interventions characterized as ?nudges.? This article will focus on the implementation of these practices within geopolitical areas referred to as ?smart cities.? Specifically, the article will examine the impacts of technological developments on neuroeconomics and behavioral economics as foundational contributions to smart city governance. Given the resonance between several areas of governmentality explored by Foucault in the 1970s, and by an increasing number of theorists of late, this article sets out a program of research and policy analysis organized by a political economy of communications framework. As such, smart city governance will be identified and assessed in terms of the processes of commodification, spatialization, and structuration. Important concerns emerging from our assessment of the nudge as a governmental policy tool are the implications that this and?related approaches to management of populations have for direct and indirect surveillance of people, places, and things. Information and communication technology is expected to play a?central role here via its extension of surveillance through multidimensional analysis of massive transaction-generated-information, environmental and personal sensing, and what we have come to refer to as the big data that enable management by code from afar. The implications of these processes for groups within society, especially those already disadvantaged by poverty, segregation, and disregard, will be described and illustrated with examples from around the globe. The article will conclude with an articulation of public policy concerns, including those related to privacy and surveillance.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:67
TI: Towards a theory of digital media ab: This article puts forward a theory of the role of digital media in social change. It begins by criticizing three theories that currently dominate our understanding of digital media and of media generally: network theory, mediatization theory and actor-network theory. It also identifies a gap in current communication theory, namely, that digital media mostly do not fit the divide into mass and interpersonal communication. A further problem is that insufficient attention is given to the difference between political communication and popular culture or everyday life. The article develops an alternative, focusing on four countries that provide a range of relationships between media and society; the U.S., Sweden, India and China. In all four countries, despite their differences, digital media, in contrast to traditional broadcast and interpersonal media, have led to a more differentiated media landscape. Greater complexity in political communication nevertheless runs up against the continuing dominance of elite agenda-setting. In terms of popular culture, all four countries have experienced a proliferation of media offerings and greater tetheredness between people. Hence, new divides are emerging between more active and variegated as against more passive and restricted media uses. The article concludes with implications of digital media for understanding media generally: with new digital media, there is now a need to rethink media theory in terms of fundamental debates about how media transform or preserve the social order.
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY id:334
TI: Tracing the traces: The critical role of metadata within networked communications ab: The information sciences have traditionally been at the center of metadata-focused research. The US National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence documents revealed by Edward Snowden in June of 2013 brought the term metadata into the public consciousness. Surprisingly little discussion in the information sciences has since occurred on the nature and importance of metadata within networked communication systems. The collection of digital metadata impacts the ways that people experience social and technical communication. Without such metadata, networked communication cannot exist. The NSA leaks, and numerous recent hacks of corporate and government communications, point to metadata as objects of new scholarly inquiry. If we are to engage in meaningful discussions about our digital traces, or make informed decisions about new policies and technologies, it is essential to develop theoretical and empirical frameworks that account for digital metadata. This opinion paper presents 5 key sociotechnical characteristics of metadata within digital networks that would benefit from stronger engagement by the information sciences.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:601
TI: Trading zones in a colony: Transcultural techniques at missionary stations in the Dutch East Indies, 1860-1940 ab: Global histories of technology tend to tell one-sided stories of transfer and exploitation, and they usually analyze the activities of large corporations, nation states or the military. By focusing on missionary societies in the colonial era, this article tells a different story. On the basis of primary sources from German missionaries in the Dutch East Indies, it shows how the application of various techniques at missionary stations was the outcome of transcultural interaction. Although missionaries brought with them tools and materials from home, they remained dependent on the knowledge and skills of local artisans, as well as the material and goods the locals provided. Missionaries' wives tried to uphold a Western lifestyle but found themselves using local household technologies. The missionary station was a trading zone: Although the abilities of Europeans and Asians to communicate were socially and linguistically limited, they proved able to exchange information and skills in a successful manner. By revisiting the anthropological background to Galison's trading zone, the authors re-appropriate this concept to improve our understanding of cross-cultural exchange in non-scientific settings.
RESEARCH POLICY id:157
TI: Transformative innovation in peri-urban Asia ab: This paper draws on two case studies from India and China to discuss how and why rapidly urbanizing contexts are particularly challenging for transformative innovation but are also critical sustainability frontiers and learning environments. We argue that lack of understanding and policy engagement with peri-urbanization in its current form is leading to increasing exclusion and unrealized potential to support multiple sustainable urban development goals. Peri-urbanization is often characterized by the neoliberal reordering of space and a co-option of environmental agendas by powerful urban elites. Changing land-use, resource extraction, pollution and livelihood transitions drive rapid changes in interactions between socio-technical and social-ecological systems, and produce complex feedbacks across the rural urban continuum. These contexts also present characteristic governance challenges as a result of jurisdictional ambiguity, transitioning formal and informal institutional arrangements, heterogeneous and sometimes transient communities, shifts in decision making to distant authorities and the rapid growth of informal market-based arrangements with little incentive for environmental management. These unique features of peri-urbanization may reinforce a lack of inclusion and hinder experimentation, but they can also present valuable opportunities for transformative innovation. This innovation is unlikely to follow the lines of niche management and upscaling but rather should take advantage of peri-urban dynamics. There are possibilities to build new alliances in order to renegotiate governance structures across the rural urban continuum, to reframe urban sustainability debates and to reconfigure socio-technical and social ecological systems interactions.
SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY id:272
TI: Translational research in the science policy debate: a comparative analysis of documents ab: Translational research (TR) can be viewed as a prominent concept that reflects expectations of societal relevance and has become an important issue in science policy. This article analyses the framings of TR in the policy discourse by comparing policy papers in the USA and some European countries. Problem frames in favor of TR are interpreted as expressions of specific conceptions of science, being either organizational or professional. Based on a qualitative content analysis, different policy documents relating to TR between 2003 and 2013 in the USA and Europe are compared. I found that TR in the USA is more strongly framed as a professional problem whereas in Europe, TR is framed as an organizational problem. It is argued that these different framings of TR have consequences for conceptions of societal relevance and steering in TR.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:99
TI: Transparent to whom? No algorithmic accountability without a critical audience ab: Big data and data science transform organizational decision-making. We increasingly defer decisions to algorithms because machines have earned a reputation of outperforming us. As algorithms become embedded within organizations, they become more influential and increasingly opaque. Those who create algorithms may make arbitrary decisions in all stages of the ?data value chain?, yet these subjectivities are obscured from view. Algorithms come to reflect the biases of their creators, can reinforce established ways of thinking, and may favour some political orientations over others. This is a cause for concern and calls for more transparency in the development, implementation, and use of algorithms in public- and private-sector organizations. We argue that one elementary ? yet key ? question remains largely undiscussed. If transparency is a primary concern, then to whom should algorithms be transparent? We consider algorithms as socio-technical assemblages and conclude that without a critical audience, algorithms cannot be held accountable.
PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE id:535
TI: Trust/distrust judgments and perceptions of climate science: A research note on skeptics' rationalizations ab: Using interviews with residents of Idaho (a rural northwest US state) who identify as skeptical of climate change, we examine how skeptics rationalize their doubts about climate science. Skeptics tend to question the reality and human causes of climate change by (1) raising concerns about incentive structures in science that could bias climatology, (2) doubting the accuracy of data and models used by climate scientists, and (3) perceiving some practices of climate science and scientists as exclusionary. Despite these concerns, skeptics exhibit deference to scientific authority when using scientific assessments to make policy decisions, including environmental policy. Understanding skeptics' concerns about climate science and areas where they support science-based policy, will lead to better dialogue between scientists, interest groups, policy makers, and the skeptical public, potentially clarifying avenues to communicate climate information and enact climate policy.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:572
TI: Uncertain Archives: Approaching the Unknowns, Errors, and Vulnerabilities of Big Data through Cultural Theories of the Archive ab: From global search engines to local smart cities, from public health monitoring to personal self-tracking technologies, digital technologies continuously capture, process, and archive social, material, and affective information in the form of big data. Although the use of big data emerged from the human desire to acquire more knowledge and master more information and to eliminate human error in large-scale information management, it has become clear in recent years that big data technologies, and the archives of data they accrue, bring with them new and important uncertainties in the form of new biases, systemic errors, and, as a result, new ethical challenges that require urgent attention and analysis. This collaboratively written article outlines the conceptual framework of the Uncertain Archives research collective to show how cultural theories of the archive can be meaningfully applied to the empirical field of big data. More specifically, the article argues that this approach grounded in cultural theory can help research going forward to attune to and address the uncertainties present in the storage and analysis of large amounts of information. By focusing on the notions of the unknown, error, and vulnerability, we reveal a set of different, albeit intertwined, configurations of archival uncertainty that emerge along with the phenomenon of big data use. We regard these configurations as central to understanding the conditions of the digitally networked data archives that are a crucial component of today's cultures of surveillance and governmentality.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:542
TI: Unconventional ideas conventionally arranged: A study of grant proposals for exceptional research ab: Exceptional research involves exceptional, rather than established, approaches, theories, methods and technologies. Nevertheless, to gain funding for such research, scientists are forced to outline unconventional ideas in ways that still relate to recognized concepts and findings, as well as adhering to the conventional requirements of relevant fields of research. Surprisingly, we know very little about the approaches scientists take to overcome these obstacles. In this article, we investigate how applicants use rhetorical moves and argumentative patterns to rationalize their unorthodox ideas and how they rhetorically combine their hypotheses or ideas with those of previous research that used specific methods and recognized technologies. The study concentrates on neuroscience grant proposals in Germany for a funding programme intended to support exceptional research. In addition, we look for the argumentative patterns favoured by members of and reviewers for the organization's funding programme in order to understand if the successful applications share rhetorical characteristics. An analysis of 52 applications disclosed four different argumentative patterns: (1) solving practical problems, (2) exploring specific phenomena, (3) expanding confirmed knowledge and (4) offering an alternative theory. Only one persuasive strategy explicitly challenges established theories by proposing alternatives. Despite this, the funding programme continued to ask for radical and extraordinary ideas and many scientists continued to present potentially ground-breaking ideas that did not invalidate earlier work.
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY id:303
TI: Uncovering Unintended and Shadow Practices of Users of Decision Support System Dashboards in Higher Education Institutions ab: Higher education institutions' (HEI) have begun to develop decision support system data dashboards (DSS-DD) to improve the data-informed decision making practices of institutional decision makers. This qualitative study examines the practices of decision makers as they engage with DSS-DD at a large U.S. Midwestem university and uncovers the socio-technical characteristics that lead to limited or non-use of dashboards. To examine these practices and characteristics, this study presents a framework grounded in socio-technical interaction networks from social informatics and sociomateriality from information systems that explores the socio-technical practices of users within organizations, while acknowledging the impact of the users' socio-technical contexts on their DSS-DD practices. The results show that during the design and implementation phases of these dashboards the institutional contexts that the dashboards are meant to inform are often ignored; and that as users interact with these systems they develop unintended and shadow practices that lead to limited or non-use of the dashboards for decision making purposes. Additionally, the study finds that users' practices are influenced by their local socio-technical networks, which includes their prior experiences using institutional data, other actors within their institutional unit, and the political and social contexts which shape the users' decision making behavior and data-use practices.
TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY id:537
TI: Under Pressure: Exploring Agency-Structure Dynamics with a Rhetorical Approach to Register ab: This study traced the adoption of a new social language among financial advisors responding to intense regulatory pressures. Register - specialized vocabularies, argumentative moves, and syntactical patterns - was analyzed to explore rhetorical practices embedded in agency-structure dynamics. Through analysis of advisors' correspondence with clients and semi-structured interviews exploring their communication practices, this study demonstrates how register changes embody everyday rhetorical tactics for managing complicated audiences. This article contributes to studies of agency-structure dynamics in professional communication contexts governed by strong regulatory constraints.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:465
TI: Under Threat? Methodological Pluralism in Public Administration ab: A consensus appears to be emerging on the desirability of methodological pluralism in public administration research. Scholars as diverse as Riccucci and Meier see it as inevitable in a multidisciplinary, practice-oriented field, and both endorse it as key to advancing theory. Yet it is not always clear what is meant by "methodological pluralism" nor how it is related to scientific progress. I argue that Dryzek's conceptualization of progress as "lateral" is supportive of a robust methodological pluralism. Then, I analyze three threats to methodological pluralism in public administration: prior ethics review, transparency movements, and the metric mania characteristic of corporatized universities. I conclude that some methodologies and methods, primarily those that are positivist and quantitative, are advantaged over others, which are interpretivist and qualitative. To protect methodological pluralism, the tolerance that Dryzek recommends needs to be extended to structural changes, e.g., requiring a qualitative-interpretive methods course in doctoral programs. More broadly, scholarly autonomy to design and conduct research is increasingly being curtailed by these intertwined threats. Collective action is needed to reverse this worrisome trend. Autonomy for individuals and epistemic communities nourishes the pluralism in research approaches which is essential for understanding and responding to an uncertain, possibly turbulent future.
SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE id:222
TI: Under repair: A publication ethics and research record in the making ab: Based on fieldwork in the Committee on Publication Ethics, this paper offers an analysis of the forms of doings that publication ethics in action can take during what is called the 'Forum', a space where allegations of dubious research conduct get aired and debated between editors and publishers. This article examines recurring motifs within the review of publication practices whose ethics are called into. These motifs include: the shaping of publication ethics as an expertise that can be standardized across locations and disciplines, the separation of the research record from relations that produce it, and the divisibility of the scientific paper. Together these institute an ethics of repair at the centre of the curative enterprise of the Committee on Publication Ethics. Under the language of correcting the literature the members are working out, along with authors, what the research record should be and, inevitably, what it is. In turn, this article elicits new analytical objects that re-describe publication ethics as a form of expertise, beyond (and despite) the rehearsed axioms of this now well-established professional field.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:708
TI: Understanding power positions in a new digital landscape: perceptions of Syrian refugees and data experts on relocation algorithm ab: This study explores the differences and similarities between the perceptions of data experts and refugees as data subjects, in the context of a refugee relocation algorithm. The study conducted in-depth interviews with data experts and Syrian refugees in Estonia and Turkey. The results indicate that both refugees and data experts acknowledge the algorithms' potential power for structuring the everyday life experiences of people. Whereas refugees mainly focused on cultural and social concerns, the data experts underlined the importance of refugees' agency and the potential drawbacks of algorithms in terms of transparency and accountability. While both groups of interviewees thought the relocation algorithm could be useful especially in economic terms, the study demonstrates that algorithms create complex power relations and place extra pressure on both refugees and data experts. The new digital landscapes produced by algorithms entail a 'triple agency' - an agency of experts developing and using these datafied solutions, an agency of data subjects being targets of those calculations, and an agency of algorithms. For solving the issue of 'false authority', where the modelling of spatial choice cannot grasp the socio-cultural reality, it is necessary to consider the socio-cultural context of the calculative devices. A paradigm shift in machine learning is necessary from learning machines as autonomous subjects to machines learning from social contexts and individuals' experiences. Rather than experimenting with algorithmic solutions to speed up decisions about human lives, migration policies and relevant datafied solutions should consider the diversity of human experiences expressed in individuals' everyday life.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:433
TI: Understanding the Diverse Purposes of Performance Information use in Nonprofits: An Empirical Study of Factors Influencing the Use of Performance Measures ab: Performance measurement is not a panacea that automatically cures management problems and leads to success. To evaluate the effectiveness of performance measurement, the use of performance information should be investigated. In this article, the author examines how nonprofit organizations use performance information and what factors are related to its uses. Using survey data from California nonprofits (n = 143), the author finds that performance information use is influenced by government funding, range, and credibility of performance measurement, developmental culture, and stakeholder participation in the decision-making process. This study contributes to our understanding of performance information use in the nonprofit sector.
SCIENCE AS CULTURE id:121
TI: Undone Science and Counter-Expertise: Fighting for Justice in an Argentine Community Contaminated by Pesticides ab: STS and social movement scholars have shown the importance of 'getting undone science done' to advance the goals of social movements fighting environmental health injustice. The production and mobilization of counter-expertise, meaning the reliance on expertise, broadly construed, to contest regulatory decisions based on scientific knowledge, must be further analyzed by differentiating among types of expertise and strategies to mobilize them. In social mobilization against the unrestricted use of pesticides in Argentina, the affected community in Ituzaingo Anexo developed three types of expertise. The community first drew upon its own local knowledge of cases of illness and, as lay people, produced the first epidemiological map of this area. Then, they enrolled scientists and NGOs as allies to jointly learn about pesticide contamination as an explanation for illness. The enlisted scientists produced new knowledge by conducting environmental and epidemiological studies. Finally, sympathetic public health authorities, legal experts, and a district attorney designed a successful legal strategy to stop fumigations in that area and enforce local regulations. The case confirms the importance of producing undone science, and shows that its effectiveness can be explained by intertwined strategies deployed by a triad of lay/local, scientific, and legal experts to overcome the expertise barrier.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:203
TI: Unions, Parties, and the Politics of State Government Legacy Cost ab: Many American state governments have made extensive promises to pay for employees' health care and other benefits in retirement. Currently estimated at over $1 trillion in unfunded liabilities, these other postemployment benefits (OPEB) are creating a major fiscal problem for state governments. In this article, we examine the politics of OPEB. We seek to explain the variation in the generosity of OPEB across U.S. states. We argue that party competition theories do not adequately explain the outcomes we observe. Instead, we draw on the emerging Schattschneiderian approach to the politics of public policy to show that public union strength conditions a party's incentives to represent unions' interests. In states where public sector unions are strong, unions can find their way into either party's coalition. We find that Republicans are more responsive to public union interests than either their ideological brand or prior research would suggest. It is only in states where public employees are weak that Republicans can act unilaterally and enact their preference for less government spending. To test our theories, we carry out an empirical analysis using a newly assembled data set of per capita OPEB liabilities across 49 states.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE id:304
TI: Unprincipled Principals: Co-opted Bureaucrats and Corruption in Ghana ab: In theory, granting politicians tools to oversee bureaucrats can reduce administrative malfeasance. In contrast, I argue that the political control of bureaucrats can increase corruption when politicians need money to fund election campaigns and face limited institutional constraints. In such contexts, politicians can leverage their discretionary powers to incentivize bureaucrats to extract rents from the state on politicians' behalf. Using data from an original survey of bureaucrats (N = 864) across 80 randomly sampled local governments in Ghana, I show that bureaucrats are more likely to facilitate politicians' corrupt behavior when politicians are perceived to be empowered with higher levels of discretionary control. Using qualitative data and a list experiment to demonstrate the mechanism, I show that politicians enact corruption by threatening to transfer noncompliant officers. My findings provide new evidence on the sources of public administrative deficiencies in developing countries and qualify the presumption that greater political oversight improves governance.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:784
TI: Unsettling Aerial Surveillance: Surveillance Studies after Standing Rock ab: Aerial surveillance by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones played a prominent role in the "water is life" actions undertaken by "water protectors" to defend the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation's water source from the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). By considering how the water protectors deployed drones in their actions, this article shows that decolonizing surveillance studies in the settler-colonial context must follow the work of Indigenous studies scholars in accounting for existing colonial relations. To that end, this article argues that while aerial sousveillance measures constitute a subversive tactical response to organized surveillance by law enforcement and private security firms, the technologies and visualizations on which protest drones depend are imbricated in the workings of capital and empire.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:705
TI: Using Contract Consolidation to Improve Performance: Effects of Service Delivery Scale on Nonprofit Provider Efficiency in the Combined Federal Campaign Introduction ab: When nonprofit organizations deliver services on behalf of the government, the government agency has the opportunity to select the optimal number of providers to maximize performance. Should more providers deliver services across smaller areas to increase local tailoring or should contracts be consolidated so fewer providers deliver services across larger areas to take advantage of economies of scale? This paper examines a series of contract consolidations aimed at improving the performance and reducing the costs of the Combined Federal Campaign (CFC), the Office of Personnel Management's workplace giving program for federal employees, which is administered by contracts with nonprofit intermediaries. Using a difference-in-differences analysis based on waves of contract consolidations over time, I find that larger service areas typically had lower giving and costs on a per employee basis. The consolidation process itself tended to decrease average giving further but had no additional effect on costs. Combined, these effects yield no change in costs per dollar raised for larger or consolidated service areas; the benefits of contract consolidation were more modest than CFC administrators had hoped.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:186
TI: Vested Interests and the Diffusion of Education Reform across the States ab: How do interest groups shape the diffusion of policies they oppose across the states? This study explores this question using the case of teachers' unions and education reform policies. Using a novel dataset on charter, voucher, and performance pay policies spanning 1992-2013, I find evidence that strength of the teachers' unions decreases the likelihood of performance pay and that additional strength is less impactful with more Democratic control of the legislature. Teachers' unions are weakly related to a lack of charter laws and do not impact voucher laws. The latter two policies are more strongly associated with policymaker learning and education reform advocacy groups, respectively. These findings suggest that vested interests most strongly impact the policies that most fundamentally threaten their organizational strength and that this effect is conditioned on the party in power; increases in interest group strength are not necessary when policymakers are already sympathetic.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:444
TI: Weathering the Storm: Social Policy and the Great Recession ab: This review discusses recent challenges to the welfare state arising from the Great Recession (GR). The GR was a significant event for social policy analysts, as it tested the responsiveness of welfare systems in the midst of a recent trend toward austerity politics in advanced economies. Social policy changes were part of the toolkit advanced democracies used to respond to the GR, and the welfare state mitigated the consequences of the GR. However, a stark limitation of the social safety net in the United States was the failure to assist immigrant households. The nexus of immigration and social policy is likely to be a significant controversy as we consider the meaning of social citizenship.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:756
TI: Welcome to a New Generation of Entertainment: Amazon Web Services and the Normalization of Big Data Analytics and RFID Tracking ab: The 2017 partnership between the National Football League (NFL) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) promises novel forms of cutting-edge real-time statistical analysis through the use of both radio frequency identification (RFID) chips and Amazon's cloud-based machine learning and data-analytics tools. This use of RFID is heralded for its possibilities: for broadcasters, who are now capable of providing more thorough analysis; for fans, who can experience the game on a deeper analytical level using the NFL's Next Gen Stats; and for coaches, who can capitalize on data-driven pattern recognition to gain a statistical edge over their competitors in real-time. In this paper, we respond to calls for further examination of the discursive positionings of RFID and big data technologies (Frith 2015; Kitchin and Dodge 2011). Specifically, this synthesis of RFID and cloud computing infrastructure via corporate partnership provides an alternative discursive positioning of two technologies that are often part of asymmetrical relations of power (Andrejevic 2014). Consequently, it is critical to examine the efforts of Amazon and the NFL to normalize pervasive spatial data collection and analytics to a mass audience by presenting these surveillance technologies as helpful tools for accessing new forms of data-driven knowing and analysis.
WORLD DEVELOPMENT id:538
TI: What do we know about the impact of microfinance? The problems of statistical power and precision ab: We review all eight randomized control trial studies of microfinance published in peer-reviewed journals. The studies generally show no or minimal impact from providing microloans to clients and have led many researchers and policy makers to conclude that microfinance has been proven to have little or no positive impacts on people's lives. We review these studies in detail and find four main results. First, we are able to replicate the results using the researcher's original data. Second, we observe that while the results are generally insignificant at traditional levels, most estimated coefficients are large. Third, every one of the studies is underpowered to detect reasonable effect sizes, often due to low take-up of the financial product offered. Pooling the data from the studies together improves power for most outcomes, but minimum detectable effect sizes are still large. Finally, when we run analysis on a pooled sample, we find a treatment effect on business profits, business revenue and household assets, significant at the 1% level. We argue that existing research on the impact of microfinance is generally underpowered to identify impacts reliably and suggests that we still know very little about the impact of microfinance. We end by discussing ways to improve future research. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:239
TI: What is Flint? Place, storytelling, and social media narrative reclamation during the Flint water crisis ab: The Flint Water Crisis became a national news story in January of 2016, when major publishers such as The NewYork Times began covering the story. In the same month, an influx of social media activism occurred in response to the crisis, with citizens developing hashtag campaigns such as #FlintFwd in order to disseminate news and stories from a citizen's perspective; these campaigns often positioned Flint positively as a recovering community rather than a city in the middle of a public health crisis, and often addressed not a national public but a local audience. This paper considers Flint-based social media activity to investigate the emergence of place-based activism within the ostensibly global network of social media. In doing so, it identifies three key themes; 1) leveraging social media to forward a critique of deficient journalistic storytelling; 2) using the affective process of storytelling via social media to claim authority over their own material offline existence, and 3) using place-based storytelling to implicate others as witnesses via the global network of social media. These themes coalesce around a distinctly critical logic of connectivity. This logic extends the notion of connectivity articulated by Van Dijck and Poell [2013. Understanding social media logic. Media and Communication, 1(1), 2-14.] and the strategies of platform activism explored by Tufekci [2017. Twitter and tear gas: The power and fragility of networked protest. New Haven: Yale University Press.] to explain how social media works to expose discrepancies between the public story of the water crisis and material, lived conditions of Flint, rendering visible a discursive identity of Flint thus far unrecognized.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:37
TI: What the digitalisation of music tells us about capitalism, culture and the power of the information technology sector ab: This article examines a striking but under-analysed feature of culture under capitalism, using the example of music: that the main ways in which people gain access to cultural experiences are subject to frequent, radical and disorienting shifts. It has two main aims. The first is to provide a macro-historical, multi-causal explanation of changes in technologies of musical consumption, emphasising the mutual imbrication of the economic interests of corporations with sociocultural transformations. We identify a shift over the last twenty years from consumer electronics (CE) to information technology (IT) as the most powerful sectoral force shaping how music and culture are mediated and experienced, and argue that this shift from CE to IT drew upon, and in turn quickened, a shift from domestic consumption to personalised, mobile and connected consumption, and from dynamics of what Raymond Williams called mobile privatisation' to what we call networked mobile personalisation'. The second aim is to assess change and continuity in the main means by which recorded music is consumed, in long-term perspective. We argue that disruptions caused by recent digitalisation' of music are consistent with longer term processes, whereby music has been something of a testing ground for the introduction of new cultural technologies. But we also recognise particularly high levels of disruption in recent times and relate these to the new dominance of the IT industries, and the particular dynamism or instability of that sector. We close by discussing the degree to which constant changes in how people access musical experiences might be read as instances of capitalism's tendency to prioritise limiting notions of consumer preference over meaningful needs.
SCIENCE AS CULTURE id:698
TI: When Boundary Organisations Fail: Identifying Scientists and Civil Servants in L'aquila Earthquake Trial ab: Notwithstanding the alleged crisis of expertise, scientists increasingly act as expert advisors to governments, while organisations at the boundary between science and policy multiply. Experts in such contexts are often subject to contradictory injunctions, associated with the role of either scientist or public official. Role conflict is particularly intense when decisions informed by scientific advice have negative consequences. In these situations, boundary-work is ubiquitous, as scientists deny responsibility by dissociating themselves from policymaking and victims contest such claims. A better understanding of these dynamics requires that the concept of boundary-work be refined. A central distinction between two types of boundary-work is often neglected: on the one hand, people draw boundaries between cultural categories bydefiningtheir abstract features ('Science is X'); on the other, people draw boundaries byidentifyingconcrete things as instances of those categories ('X is science'). Accordingly, when boundaries are unsettled, disputes over the cultural meaning of science can be definitional or identificational. An example illustrating the importance of this distinction is provided by the L'Aquila earthquake trial, a controversy that has been alternatively portrayed as a trial of science and as a trial of bad risk management.
SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY id:758
TI: When Citizens Are "Actually Doing Police Work": The Blurring of Boundaries in WhatsApp Neighbourhood Crime Prevention Groups in The Netherlands ab: Neighbourhood watch messaging groups are part of an already pervasive phenomenon in The Netherlands, despite having only recently emerged. In many neighbourhoods, street signs have been installed to make passers-by aware of active neighbourhood surveillance. In messaging groups (using WhatsApp or similar communication apps), neighbours exchange warnings, concerns, and information about incidents, emergencies, and (allegedly) suspicious situations. These exchanges often lead to neighbours actively protecting and monitoring their streets, sending messages about suspicious activities, and using camera-phones to record events. While citizen-initiated participatory policing practices in the neighbourhood can increase (experiences of) safety and social cohesion, they often default to lateral surveillance, ethnic profiling, risky vigilantism, and distrust towards neighbours and strangers. Whereas the use of messaging apps is central, WhatsApp neighbourhood crime prevention (WNCP) groups are heterogeneous: they vary from independent self-organised policing networks to neighbours working with and alongside community police. As suggested by one of our interviewees, this can lead to citizens "actually doing police work," which complicates relationships between police and citizens. This paper draws on interviews and focus groups in order to examine participatory policing practices and the responsibilisation of citizens for their neighbourhood safety and security. This exploration of actual practices shows that these often diverge from the intended process and that the blurring of boundaries between police and citizens complicates issues of accountability and normalises suspicion and the responsibilisation of citizens.
POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL id:151
TI: When Does Government Listen to the Public? Voluntary Associations and Dynamic Agenda Representation in the United States ab: The aim of the article is to examine how the population size of voluntary associations affects the process through which the public's issue priorities are translated into policy priorities. We conduct a time series analysis of political attention in executive and legislative agendas at the U.S. federal level in the period 1971-2001, covering all issues addressed by the U.S. government. We show that the number of voluntary associations in a policy area has a positive conditioning effect on the link between public priorities and attention for the president's State of the Union Address. However, our results do not find a positive effect for voluntary associations at later stages of the policy cycle, which experience a higher degree of institutional friction. The findings underline the importance of distinguishing between different stages of policymaking when considering the impact of voluntary associations on dynamic agenda responsiveness.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE & MANAGEMENT REVIEW id:598
TI: When Government is Late to Fulfill its End of the Bargain: The Relational Effects of Payment Delays on Nonprofit Organizations ab: Government payment delay is one of the major problems that nonprofits encounter when delivering government funded services. This study argues that government payment delays not only impose negative impacts on nonprofits' operations but also damage underlying relationships between nonprofits and government. Employing data from a national survey of U.S. human service nonprofits, we examine the relational effects of payment delays on nonprofits. The study finds that nonprofits that experienced government payment delays perceived higher levels of distributive and procedural injustice and displayed lower levels of instrumental and motive-based trust. The findings offer implications for managing government-nonprofit contractual relationships.
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SYSTEMS id:338
TI: When Institutional Logics Meet Information and Communication Technologies: Examining Hybrid Information Practices in Ghana's Agriculture ab: In this paper, we describe how changes in the availability of information artifacts- in particular, information and communication technologies (ICTs)-among smallholder farmers in Ghana, led to a process of hybridization of information practices, and how this process could be linked to underlying institutional change. We use the notions of institutional carriers and activity systems to study the evolution of the prevailing "smallholder" institutional logic of Ghanaian agriculture toward an incoming "value-chain" institutional logic concerned with linking farmers to output markets, improving the knowledge base in agriculture, and increasing its information intensity. We draw on a mixed-methods approach, including in-depth qualitative interviews, focus groups, observations, and detailed secondary quantitative data. We cultivate activity theory as a practice based lens for structuring inquiry into institutional change. We find that information artifacts served to link the activities of farmers that were embedded in the smallholder logic with those of agricultural-development actors that promoted the value-chain logic. Hybridization occurred through the use of artifacts with different interaction modalities. In terms of conceptualizing change, our findings suggest that hybridization of the two logics may be an intermediary point in the long transition from the smallholder toward the value-chain logic.
ORGANIZATION SCIENCE id:43
TI: When Two Bosses Are Better Than One: Nearly Decomposable Systems and Organizational Adaptation ab: Organizations, as is true with social systems more generally, tend to be nearly, not fully, decomposable. However, analyses of nearly decomposable systems have tended to be at a single level of analysis and have generally neglected the vertical element of nearly decomposable systems. Critical to the notion of nearly decomposable systems is the property that the details of a particular subproblem may be encapsulated and captured by more aggregate parameters and that those subproblems interact in an aggregate way. We explore these issues in reference to the role of three canonical organizational structures in facilitating adaptation in the presence of near decomposability: a traditional hierarchy in which a subordinate reports to a single boss, an autonomous form in which the subordinate does not have a direct reporting relationship, and a multiauthority structure in which the subordinate reports to multiple bosses. Despite the ubiquity and potential benefits of multiauthority structures in coordinating highly interdependent tasks, our understanding of the mechanisms that determine the performance of those structures is still relatively modest. Scholars have noted conflicting empirical findings and have called for a more rigorous approach to study these organizational forms. To help address these issues, we develop an agent-based computational model that compares the performance of these three canonical types of organizational forms in settings characterized by different degrees of complexity and near decomposability.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:461
TI: When data justice and environmental justice meet: formulating a response to extractive logic through environmental data justice ab: Environmental data justice (EDJ) emerges from conversations between data justice and environmental justice while identifying the limits and tensions of these lenses. Through a reflexive process of querying our entanglement in non-innocent relations, this paper develops and engages EDJ by examining how it informs the work of the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI), a distributed, consensus-based organization that formed in response to the 2016 US presidential election. Through grassroots archiving of data sets, monitoring federal environmental and energy agency websites, and writing rapid-response reports about how federal agencies are being undermined, EDGI mobilizes EDJ to challenge the extractive logic' of current federal environmental policy and data infrastructures. Extractive logic' disconnects data from provenance, privileges the matrix of domination, and whitewashes data to generate uncertainty. We use the dynamic EDJ framework to reflect on EDGI's public comment advising against the US Environmental Protection Agency's proposed rule for Transparent Science. Through EDJ, EDGI aspires to create new environmental data infrastructures and practices that are participatory and embody equitable, transparent data care.
DISASTERS id:715
TI: When information becomes action: drivers of individuals' trust in broadcast versus peer-to-peer information in disaster response ab: Information and communications technology (ICT), primarily mobile telephones and social media, is increasingly important in crisis and disaster response in developing countries. This fact raises an important question: in an information environment that includes traditional media such as radio and television, who are the people that trust information from ICT enough to act on it during a disaster? Drawing on a case study of and original survey data from the island nation of the Independent State of Samoa, this paper yields insights into who uses new technologies, particularly mobile telephones, to make decisions at the local level during crises such as natural disasters, as well as the socio-political factors that motivate their behaviour. The results add to the growing pool of knowledge on utilisation of ICT and new technologies in developing countries for disaster response, and provide practical information on the social and political factors that lead people to trust different information sources and media.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:740
TI: When new media operates within a state-mediated press system: assessing new media's impact on journalism crisis perceptions in Singapore and Hong Kong ab: New media has been described as both a boon and a bane for journalism in contemporary times, enabling more issues to be tabled while drawing resources away from traditional newsrooms and spreading unverifiable content. How new media has impacted journalism, however, has tended to be couched within the liberal-democratic ideological framework found typically in dominant Anglo-American literature; research has been scant on societies that may be exposed to Western liberal ideals but whose media systems still experience some form of authoritarian influence or control. Of interest are two Asian 'global cities' in transition, Singapore and Hong Kong, labeled by scholars as 'authoritarian' and 'semi-authoritarian' respectively. Through a textual analysis of survey and interview responses from 160 news journalists, this study identifies the need for a three-dimensional approach to examine new media's impact on journalism crisis perceptions in such hybrid societies - at the material, discursive, and ideological levels. Despite less state control on the media in Hong Kong, both online and offline, this study discovers that it is the Singaporeans that experience less fear of journalism crisis in the digital age, prompting alternative ways to understand state mediation of the press in a digital media landscape.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY id:70
TI: Where fairness fails: data, algorithms, and the limits of antidiscrimination discourse ab: Problems of bias and fairness are central to data justice, as they speak directly to the threat that big data' and algorithmic decision-making may worsen already existing injustices. In the United States, grappling with these problems has found clearest expression through liberal discourses of rights, due process, and antidiscrimination. Work in this area, however, has tended to overlook certain established limits of antidiscrimination discourses for bringing about the change demanded by social justice. In this paper, I engage three of these limits: 1) an overemphasis on discrete bad actors', 2) single-axis thinking that centers disadvantage, and 3) an inordinate focus on a limited set of goods. I show that, in mirroring some of antidiscrimination discourse's most problematic tendencies, efforts to achieve fairness and combat algorithmic discrimination fail to address the very hierarchical logic that produces advantaged and disadvantaged subjects in the first place. Finally, I conclude by sketching three paths for future work to better account for the structural conditions against which we come to understand problems of data and unjust discrimination in the first place.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:25
TI: Which Clients are Deserving of Help? A Theoretical Model and Experimental Test ab: Street-level bureaucrats have to cope with high workloads, role conflicts, and limited resources. An important way in which they cope with this is by prioritizing some clients, while disregarding others. When deciding on whom to prioritize, street-level bureaucrats often assess whether a client is deserving of help. However, to date the notion of the deserving client is in a black box as it is largely unclear which client attributes activate the prevailing social/professional category of deservingness. This article, therefore, proposes a theoretical model of three deservingness cues that street-level bureaucrats employ to determine whom to help: earned deservingness (i.e., the client is deserving because (s)he earned it: "the hardworking client"), needed deservingness (i.e., the client is deserving because (s) he needs help: "the needy client"), and resource deservingness (i.e., the client is deserving as (s) he is probably successful according to bureaucratic success criteria: " the successful client"). We test the effectiveness of these deservingness cues via an experimental conjoint design among a nationwide sample of US teachers. Our results suggest that needed deservingness is the most effective cue in determining which students to help, as teachers especially intend to prioritize students with low academic performance and members of minority groups. Earned deservingness was also an effective cue, but to a lesser extent. Resource deservingness, in contrast, did not affect teachers' decisions whom to help. The theoretical and practical implications of our findings for discretionary biases in citizen-state interactions are discussed.
AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW id:28
TI: Who Are the "Illegals"? The Social Construction of Illegality in the United States ab: Immigration scholars have increasingly questioned the idea that "illegality" is a fixed, inherent condition. Instead, the new consensus is that immigration laws produce "illegality." But can "illegality" be socially constructed? When initially judging who is an "illegal immigrant," common observers and even authorities typically do not rely on an individual's documentation. Instead, people rely on shared stereotypes to assign "illegality" to certain bodies, a condition we refer to as "social illegality." Ethnographers have documented that individual traits like occupation or national-origin may trigger illegality suspicions, but it is not clear how widespread these stereotypes are, or whether all stereotypes are equally consequential. To address this question, we examine the personal attributes shaping perceived "illegality." We apply a paired conjoint survey experiment on a nationally representative sample of 1,515 non-Hispanic white U.S. adults to assess the independent effect of each dimension. We find that national origin, social class, and criminal background powerfully shape perceptions of illegality. These findings reveal a new source of ethnic-based inequalities-"social illegality"-that may potentially increase law enforcement scrutiny and influence the decisions of hiring managers, landlords, teachers, and other members of the public.
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY id:679
TI: Why and How Does Participatory Governance Affect Policy Outcomes? Theory and Evidence from the Electric Sector ab: In many policy arenas, decision makers have supplemented or even replaced traditional forms of bureaucratic decision making with more participatory approaches to governance. While theory suggests that participatory governance can have an instrumental effect on policy outcomes, there have been few efforts to systematically test these theories across multiple jurisdictions.This study asks whether and how participatory governance in electric sector regulation affects utilities' energy savings. Using a mixed-methods research design, this study develops hypotheses drawn from participatory governance theory, analyzes regulatory documents to operationalize a set of participatory governance variables, and uses a multilevel fixed effects model to test whether these participatory governance variables have an effect on electricity consumption by customers of 250 utilities across 42 states between 2000 and 2015. Model results show that deliberation among stakeholders has a significant decrease in electricity use by consumers, but that this effect must be realized over time as stakeholders gain experience with the deliberative process. To explore why deliberation produces this effect, the study presents qualitative evidence from Connecticut and Maryland, two states that have used participatory governance to regulate utilities' energy efficiency plans. Results suggest that information exchange among participants has a direct effect on utilities' energy efficiency plans. Participatory governance also contributes to a network of engaged stakeholders who can help hold utilities accountable for achieving their savings goals.
DISASTERS id:485
TI: Why trust you? Security cooperation within humanitarian NGO networks ab: Although the literature is increasingly concerned with cooperation among humanitarian non-governmental organisations (NGOs), we still lack studies that explain cooperation under conditions of competition. Drawing on 22 semi-structured interviews, this article argues that trust is the driving force behind security-related cooperation within networks of humanitarian NGOs. Which type of trust comes into play and how trust is built depends on the structure of a network. In small, stable networks, trust is typically based on experience, whereas shared identity is at the heart of trust in large, unstable networks. In the latter case, cooperation among humanitarian NGOs is exclusive and comparable to a form of club governance, because NGOs are kept out based on their identity-that is, if they adopt a different operational interpretation of the humanitarian principles.
DISASTERS id:245
TI: Work-related stress in a humanitarian context: a qualitative investigation ab: There is a paucity of research on the subjective stress-related experiences of humanitarian aid workers. Most evaluations of stress among these individuals focus on trauma and related conditions or adopt a quantitative approach. This interview-based study explored how 58 humanitarian aid workers employed by a United Nations-aligned organisation perceived the transactional stress process. The thematic analysis revealed eight main topics of interest: an emergency culture was found where most employees felt compelled to offer an immediate response to humanitarian needs; employees identified strongly with humanitarian goals and reported a high level of engagement; the rewards of humanitarian work were perceived as motivating and meaningful; constant change and urgent demands resulted in work overload; and managing work-life boundaries and receiving positive support from colleagues and managers helped to buffer perceived stress, work overload, and negative health outcomes. The practical implications of the results are discussed and suggestions made in the light of current research and stress theory.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW id:373
TI: You Can't Fix What You Don't Measure: How ALICE Can Help Rebuild the Middle Class ab: Seventy percent of Americans identify as middle class, but one in three middle-income households do not earn enough to support their family at the most basic level, and four in five do not earn enough to afford a sustainable budget. This incongruity explains the increasing frustration of many workers. Yet official government measures do not capture this reality, and as a result, policy makers continue to create economic policies that perpetuate the structural mismatch between wages and costs. This Viewpoint essay addresses these shortcomings. After reviewing alternatives to the federal poverty level, it argues that the most realistic and accurate floor to the middle class is the ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed) Household Survival Budget. The essay then turns to policies that help realign wages and cost of living and presents initiatives that are being implemented in states across the country. Four policy areas would enable more workers to support their families and fulfill the promise of being middle class in America: meaningful work with stable and sufficient wages, upskilling and digital retooling, fiscal cushion for periods of financial instability, and affordable credit.