Putting Inequality in Its Place: Rural Consciousness and the Power of Perspective

2012 ◽  
Vol 106 (3) ◽  
pp. 517-532 ◽  
Author(s):  
KATHERINE CRAMER WALSH
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Group Consciousness ◽  
Rural Residents ◽  
Public Opinion Research ◽  
The Public ◽  
Limited Government

Why do people vote against their interests? Previous explanations miss something fundamental because they do not consider the work of group consciousness. Based on participant observation of conversations from May 2007 to May 2011 among 37 regularly occurring groups in 27 communities sampled across Wisconsin, this study shows that in some places, people have a class- and place-based identity that is intertwined with a perception of deprivation. The rural consciousness revealed here shows people attributing rural deprivation to the decision making of (urban) political elites, who disregard and disrespect rural residents and rural lifestyles. Thus these rural residents favor limited government, even though such a stance might seem contradictory to their economic self-interests. The results encourage us to consider the role of group consciousness-based perspectives rather than pitting interests against values as explanations for preferences. Also, the study suggests that public opinion research more seriously include listening to the public.

scholarly journals A mediação como política pública de resolução de conflitos nas relações de consumo

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-169
Author(s):  
Chanauana de Azevedo Canci Mafio ◽  
◽  
Vera Sirlei Martins ◽  
Valesca Brasil Costa ◽  
◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Conflict Resolution ◽  
Exploratory Research ◽  
Public Opinion Research ◽  
The Public ◽  
Qualitative And Quantitative ◽  
Consumer Law ◽  
Politica Publica ◽  
Northwest Region

This paper addresses mediation as a public policy, examining communication as an important tool for conflict resolution in the area of consumer law. This study utilized bibliographic review with exploratory research and qualitative and quantitative approaches, such as public opinion research. Moreover, the target audience for the public opinion research project was made up of consumers in a municipality in the northwest region of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Furthermore, this study investigates important aspects of consumption, whilst exploring the role of communication as a pacific means of conflict resolution and analyzing its methods and concepts relevant to mediation. Finally, this study concluded that while mediation isn’t popular throughout the country, it is growing a steady user base for conflict resolution. Additionally, interviewees who utilize mediation as a mechanism for resolving consumer disputes, grade it more positively than other instruments in satisfaction scores.

scholarly journals Accessing the public workforce: Organisational recruitment practices and the inclusion or exclusion of individuals of immigrant origin

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Lang
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Qualitative Case Study ◽  
Ethnic Discrimination ◽  
German State ◽  
The Public ◽  
Ethnic Stereotypes ◽  
Recruitment Practices ◽  
Public Workforce

AbstractOrganisations are important gatekeepers in the labour market inclusion of immigrants and their children. Research has regularly documented ethnic discrimination in hiring decisions. Aiming to further our understanding of the role of organisations in influencing the professional trajectories of individuals of immigrant origin, this paper investigates the recruitment practices of public administrations. Drawing on approaches from organisational sociology and a qualitative case study of public administrations in the German state of Berlin, the article identifies three crucial elements of organisational decision-making affecting the recruitment of staff of immigrant origin: decisions regarding advertisement strategies, formal criteria, and individual candidates. Further, the article shows the underlying decision-making rationalities and the role of organisational contexts and ethnic stereotypes for recruitment-related decisions.

Deep Structured Learning for Natural Language Processing

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Yong Li ◽  
Xiaojun Yang ◽  
Min Zuo ◽  
Qingyu Jin ◽  
Haisheng Li ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Food Safety ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Early Warning ◽  
Conditional Random Field ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
Related Sequence ◽  
The Public ◽  
Network Public Opinion

The real-time and dissemination characteristics of network information make net-mediated public opinion become more and more important food safety early warning resources, but the data of petabyte (PB) scale growth also bring great difficulties to the research and judgment of network public opinion, especially how to extract the event role of network public opinion from these data and analyze the sentiment tendency of public opinion comment. First, this article takes the public opinion of food safety network as the research point, and a BLSTM-CRF model for automatically marking the role of event is proposed by combining BLSTM and conditional random field organically. Second, the Attention mechanism based on vocabulary in the field of food safety is introduced, the distance-related sequence semantic features are extracted by BLSTM, and the emotional classification of sequence semantic features is realized by using CNN. A kind of Att-BLSTM-CNN model for the analysis of public opinion and emotional tendency in the field of food safety is proposed. Finally, based on the time series, this article combines the role extraction of food safety events and the analysis of emotional tendency and constructs a net-mediated public opinion early warning model in the field of food safety according to the heat of the event and the emotional intensity of the public to food safety public opinion events.

scholarly journals Wind Power Deployment: The Role of Public Participation in the Decision-Making Process in Ontario, Canada

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anahita A. Jami ◽  
Philip R. Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Renewable Energy ◽  
Public Participation ◽  
Wind Power ◽  
Knowledge Broker ◽  
Decision Making Process ◽  
Energy Investment ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Opposition

A wider use of renewable energy is emerging as a viable solution to meet the increasing demand for global energy while contributing to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. However, current literature on renewable energy, particularly on wind power, highlights the social barriers and public opposition to renewable energy investment. One solution to overcome the public opposition, which is recommended by scholars, is to deploy a collaborative approach. Relatively little research has specifically focused on the role of effective communication and the use of a knowledge-broker in collaborative decision-making. This study attempts to fill this gap through the proposition of a participatory framework that highlights the role of the knowledge-broker in a wind project decision-making process. In this paper, five illustrative wind projects in Ontario are used to highlight the current situation with public participation and to address how the proposed framework could have improved the process. Based on the recommended collaborative framework, perception must shift from the dominant view of the public as “a risk to be managed” towards “a resource that can be tapped”. The developers need to improve sharing what they know and foster co-learning around questions and concerns.

10. The role of media and public opinion

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piers Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Policy Process ◽  
War On Terror ◽  
Policy Formulation ◽  
Persuasive Communication ◽  
The Public ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
The Media

This chapter examines the relevance of media and public opinion to our understanding of foreign policy and international politics. It first considers whether public opinion influences foreign policy formulation, as argued by the pluralist model, or whether the public are politically impotent, as argued by the elite model. It then explores whether the media can influence foreign policy formulation, as argued by the pluralist model, or whether the media are fundamentally subservient to the foreign policy process, as argued by the elite model. It also integrates these competing arguments with theoretical frames used in the study of international relations: namely, realism, liberalism, and critical approaches (including constructivism and post-structuralism). The chapter concludes by discussing contemporary debates concerning organized persuasive communication and the ‘war on terror’.

Rome, Religion, and Christian Emperors

2020 ◽  
pp. 107-139
Author(s):  
Mattias P. Gassman
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Religious Tolerance ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Role ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Competing Ideas ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
Public Decision

The controversy over the altar of Victory shows how pagans and Christians expressed competing ideas on the public role of religion in an increasingly Christian empire. In 382, Gratian revoked funding from the Roman state priesthoods and removed the altar from the Senate house. Following Gratian’s death in 383, the Senate appealed to his brother, Valentinian II, through the urban prefect, Symmachus, whose communiqué was successfully countered by Ambrose of Milan. Recent scholarship has favoured Symmachus’ account, which it sees as an appeal for religious tolerance, and argued that the affair was decided by the power politics of a child emperor’s unstable court. In response, this chapter argues that Symmachus was actually trying to exclude the emperor’s Christianity from public decision-making. All religions may, for Symmachus, lead to God, but the old cults are Rome’s divinely appointed defence, as well as the bond between Senate and emperors. Ambrose put Valentinian’s duty to God at the heart of his appeal. Ambrose’s Senate contained many Christians, and Ambrose was bound to resist an emperor who endorsed pagan sacrifices (the closest either work comes to explicit political gamesmanship). Together, their works show how malleable Rome’s public religion still was, more than seventy years after Constantine embraced Christianity.

‘Stepping on the heads of our Gods'

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 40-56
Author(s):  
Yangji Doma Sherpa ◽  
A. John Sinclair ◽  
Thomas Henley
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
High Mountain ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
The Public ◽  
Mountain Environments ◽  
Hydroelectric Dam ◽  
Decision Making Processes

The Himalayan region of India is experiencing rapid development in tourism, agriculture, highway construction and hydroelectric dam construction. This research considered the role of the public both within and outside of development decision-making processes in these high mountain environments using the proposed Himalayan Ski Village (HSV) in Manali as a case study. The qualitative data revealed that there has been an extensive array of public participation activity related to the HSV project over approximately 10 years. Very little of this activity has evolved, however, through the formal decision-making process. Rather, most participation activities, such as general house meetings, objection letters, public rallies, court cases against the proposed project, and a religious congregation were instigated by the public to protest the proposed development. The findings also show that involvement in the participatory activities undertaken by the public and project proponent fostered instrumental and communicative learning outcomes.

Role of Images in Constructing Public Opinion About Environmental Matters in Malaysia

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-130
Author(s):  
Mohamad Saifudin Mohamad Saleh ◽  
Harald Heinrichs ◽  
Nik Norma Nik Hasan
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Environmental Problems ◽  
Environmental Information ◽  
Quantitative Content Analysis ◽  
The Public ◽  
Quantitative Content

This paper provides a discussion on the perception of Malaysian media and environmental non-governmental organisations (ENGOs) on the role of images in shaping the public's mind about environmental matters. Two methods were employed for this study. First, a total of 24 participants from the Malaysian media and ENGOs were interviewed. Second, a total of 2,050 environmental articles on media newspapers and ENGOs newsletters from the period of 2012 to 2014 were collected for the quantitative content analysis. The findings from interview confirmed that pictures were labelled by journalists and ENGOs staff as the most important tool in presenting the reality of the environmental problems to the public. This is because, upon seeing the pictures accompanying environmental articles, readers will gain more trust of the environmental information. This was in harmony with the results of the quantitative content analysis, where more than 60% of pictures were found on environmental articles.

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