The Expendables: Community Organizations and Governance Dynamics in the Canadian Settlement Sector

2013 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 597-616 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Acheson ◽  
Rachel Laforest
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Community Organizations ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Policy Regime ◽  
Immigrant Settlement ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
Immigrant Organizations ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Représentation Politique

Abstract.An emerging pattern of governance in contemporary liberal democratic welfare states is a move away from interest group representation and a public sphere organized around demands for extensions of rights to something much more constrained. This article asks how such a profound shift in representation has occurred through governance spaces that are co-constructed by community organizations. It examines the case of Canadian immigrant settlement where beliefs about citizen representation, the role of the state and the nature of the public sphere have undergone profound change, leaving immigrant organizations as either marginal players or fully incorporated in state sanctioned immigrant service provision. Drawing on documentary evidence and interviews with immigrant organizations and public officials in Ottawa, it shows how immigrant organizations have actively interpreted their interests in the light of this changing web of beliefs to co-construct a new policy regime that favours organizational interests over citizen participation.Résumé.Au cours des dernières décennies, une des tendance de gouvernance qui se desssine dans la plupart des États providence est que l'espace de représentation politique et de la défense des droits collectifs est devenu de plus en plus restraint. Cet article examine comment ce changement a pris forme dans des espaces de gouvernance qui sont de plus en plus marqués par une interaction dynamique de coconstruction des politiques publiques. L'analyse est basée sur une étude de cas d'organismes communautaires oeuvrant dans le domaine de l'intégration des immigrants dans la ville d'Ottawa. L'analyse de documents et les entrevues qualitatives révèlent que les organismes ont stratégiquement redéfinis leurs intérêts en matière de représentation politique et ont contribué à la coconstruction d'un nouveau régime de gouvernance qui privilégie les intérêts organisationnels au-dessus de la participation citoyenne.

Democracy in Myth: The Politics of Precariatization in South Korea

2019 ◽  
Vol 55 (01) ◽  
pp. 1950001
Author(s):  
JI-WHAN YUN
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Collective Actions ◽  
The Public ◽  
Administrative Capacity ◽  
The Government ◽  
Political Associations ◽  
The Public Sphere

After undergoing a series of mass demonstrations during the past three decades, including the 2016–2017 candlelight protests that led to the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye, many commentators in South Korea are confident that their country has become a land for what Karl Marx called “free men.” Korean citizens are portrayed as being ready to participate in voluntary political associations and collective actions and to pursue their interests in the public sphere. However, the data are showing the opposite to be true: citizen participation in public-sphere activities has substantially decreased since the mid-2000s, while the government has managed to improve or at least maintain its political responsiveness during the same period. Explaining the unnoticed background to this imbalance, this essay sheds light on the myth of the benefactor state in Korean democracy, arguing that this has emerged because neoliberalism has not only placed an increasing number of people in precarious positions but also neutralized them politically. The Korean government has capitalized on this situation to mythicize itself as a benefactor state that possesses an incomparable administrative capacity to take care of precarious people. By investigating the period of Park’s presidency (2013–2017) and the current rule of President Moon Jae-in (2017–), this essay shows how the myth of the benefactor state has emerged and created a unique cycle of Korean democracy.

scholarly journals The public service broadcasting and the construction of a public sphere

2016 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 39-54
Author(s):  
Márcia Detoni
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Citizen Participation ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Transformative Action ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
The Media ◽  
State Investment ◽  
The Public Sphere

In an age marked by multiple distribution platforms of content, oligopoly of media sectors and transnational nature of cultural industries it is not any longer enough for the Public Broadcast to inform, educate and entertain with independence and technical, ethics and aesthetics quality, as proposed by the British BBC in 1927. Public Radio and Television need to find a new social function that distinguishes them from the private media and justify state investment in communication. A rising number of scholars point out that this new function is the creation and strengthening of a broad media public sphere able to guarantee citizens a space for debate on common issues, a process that encourages citizen participation and transformative action. This article examines the role of Public Broadcasting in the twenty-first century according to the media theories influenced by the thought of the German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas, whose concept of the public sphere has become central in discussions about building dialogic media spaces.

Anthropology of Liberalism

Anthropology ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron Ansell
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Social Activity ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Homo Economicus ◽  
Ideal Types ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Anthropological Study ◽  
Exposed Individual ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Object Of Study

Anthropology has long had a love-hate relationship to liberalism. As the disciplinary proponents of other cultures’ dignity, anthropologists laid the groundwork for multiculturalism and affirmed a pluralist public sphere. On the other hand, ethnographic translations of other cultures are implicitly written in defiance of their readership’s liberal “commonsense,” e.g., the presumed universality of the self-maximizing individual (homo economicus). Inspired by either perspective, anthropologists constituted their field as the study of all that is illiberal “out there” in the world. When they found among their ethnographic subjects those who talked a liberal game, they probably tried to ignore them, much as they did the missionaries (or native converts) whose Christianity placed them outside the frame of “traditional culture.” Liberalism became an object of anthropological study only after the unit of ethnographic analysis shifted (during the 1980s) from that of the bounded cultural group to that of the globally intertwined locus (with the concomitant advent of “studying up” in the developed world). Around the same time, a new theoretical armature came to such studies from Michel Foucault’s later lectures on “governmentality,” in which he exposed individual freedom’s complicity with projects of rule. And there was a third influence: the sea changes of globalization associated with the diminution of Keynesian welfare states, the loosening of regulations on capital flows, and the ascendancy of market fundamentalism signaled the rebirth of an economic liberalism—“neoliberalism”—that altered many ethnographic landscapes. Indeed, it is a disciplinary irony that interest in neoliberal generally preceded interest in liberalism. And yet the irony makes sense in light of the increasingly visible contradiction between the deepening of market-driven inequalities and the continued hegemony of classical liberalism’s premises (rationality, universalism, progress, etc.). In the early 21st century, the anthropology of liberalism falls between two ideal types. Comprising one type are the relatively few inquiries for which liberalism is the central object of study, those presented under the headings “late liberalism” and “the liberal subject.” Comprising the second type are those lines of inquiry—“humanitarianism,” “secularism,” “human rights,” “civil society and the public sphere,” “citizenship,” “democracy,” “multiculturalism,” and “governmentality”—in which liberalism figures as one among other key analytics. Within these literatures, one finds more or less attention to liberalism per se. At times, it appears to be only the philosophical or historical backdrop to the ethnographic frame, while at others, liberalism’s diaspora and contradictions are named as the most salient precipitate of the social activity under description. In sum, anthropology, proceeding on a number of fronts (and not always in coordination), has begun to ambush liberalism as a belated object of study.

scholarly journals Objective and Subjective Factors in Modern Economy

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-140
Author(s):  
Yu. K. Knyazev ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Common Denominator ◽  
Main Role ◽  
The Public ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Modern Economy ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
Key Characteristics ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Impact

The paper focuses on the public sphere in modern economy, which co-exists with the market and develops according to its own, non-market logic. The emphasis is made on the correlation between objective and subjective factors in economy. The author describes the evolution of research on these factors’ role in society, and explains the impact of subjective forces from the perspective of methodological dualism, which combines the principles of individualism and collectivism. The duality of human nature, combining individualist instincts with collectivist values acquired in society, explains substantial differences in people’s behaviour under market conditions and in the public sphere. Subjective and objective factors have different significance in the market and non-market spheres of economy: while the market is driven by objective tendencies, which bring people’s individual actions to a certain common denominator, in the public sphere, on the contrary, the main role is played is managed mainly by objective regularities, which reduce people’s subjective actions to a common denominator, whereas in the public sphere, on the contrary, the leading role is played by subjective understanding of public interests, benefit or harm of certain intentions, and the goals and strategies of further development. In the final part of the article, the key characteristics of the public sphere are described and it is shown that this sphere exists along with the market although it is affected by the market’s demands and, therefore, requires a more in-depth research, including the regulating role of the state in market economy.

scholarly journals Internationale Transformationen des Staates

2007 ◽  
Vol 37 (147) ◽  
pp. 251-272
Author(s):  
Sol Picciotto
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Regulatory Networks ◽  
The State ◽  
Soft Law ◽  
Private Regulation ◽  
The Public ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
Multi Level ◽  
The Public Sphere

The privatization of state-owned assets and the reduction of direct state economic intervention have not led to a reduced role of the state but to changes in its form, involving new types of formalized regulation, the fragmentation of the public sphere, the decentring of the state and the emergence of multi-level governance. This has been complemented by the increased salience of ‘private’ regulation. Despite talk of deregulation there has been extensive reregulation, and the emergence of global regulatory networks, intermingling the public and the private. The transition from government to governance means a lack of a clear hierarchy of norms, a blurring of distinctions between hard and soft law, and a fragmentation of public functions entailing a resurgence of technocracy.

The Suffering of the Perpetrators: The Ethics of Traumatic German Historicity in Karen Bass's Young Adult World War II Novels

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-77
Author(s):  
Doris Wolf
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Adult World ◽  
The Public Sphere

This paper examines two young adult novels, Run Like Jäger (2008) and Summer of Fire (2009), by Canadian writer Karen Bass, which centre on the experiences of so-called ordinary German teenagers in World War II. Although guilt and perpetration are themes addressed in these books, their focus is primarily on the ways in which Germans suffered at the hands of the Allied forces. These books thus participate in the increasingly widespread but still controversial subject of the suffering of the perpetrators. Bringing work in childhood studies to bear on contemporary representations of German wartime suffering in the public sphere, I explore how Bass's novels, through the liminal figure of the adolescent, participate in a culture of self-victimisation that downplays guilt rather than more ethically contextualises suffering within guilt. These historical narratives are framed by contemporary narratives which centre on troubled teen protagonists who need the stories of the past for their own individualisation in the present. In their evacuation of crucial historical contexts, both Run Like Jäger and Summer of Fire support optimistic and gendered narratives of individualism that ultimately refuse complicated understandings of adolescent agency in the past or present.

Habermas, Cultural Hegemony, and the Educational Public Sphere

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 43-62
Author(s):  
Wisam Kh. Abdul-Jabbar
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Social Inequality ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Pedagogical Practices ◽  
Cultural Hegemony ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Arabic Speaking

This study explores Habermas’s work in terms of the relevance of his theory of the public sphere to the politics and poetics of the Arab oral tradition and its pedagogical practices. In what ways and forms does Arab heritage inform a public sphere of resistance or dissent? How does Habermas’s notion of the public space help or hinder a better understanding of the Arab oral tradition within the sociopolitical and educational landscape of the Arabic-speaking world? This study also explores the pedagogical implications of teaching Arab orality within the context of the public sphere as a contested site that informs a mode of resistance against social inequality and sociopolitical exclusions.

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