Agent-Affordance Framework of Networked Collective Actions

2021 ◽  
pp. 17-30
Author(s):  
Hyunjin Seo
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Collective Actions ◽  
Communication Infrastructure ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Change Dynamics

This chapter details an agent-affordance framework designed to offer an understanding of social change dynamics in rapidly changing information ecosystems. In doing so, it explicates a taxonomy of agents and affordances critical to the Park Geun-hye impeachment. This framework includes four types of agent and three categories of affordance to account for social change dynamics that have become both more decentralized and increasingly intertwined between human and nonhuman computational agents. As communication infrastructure and social and political processes co-adapt, it is imperative to consider how structural and behavioral affordances affect social change. The framework considers the complex web of motivations, processes, and outcomes that support networked collective actions and enable these actions to succeed or fail.

Networked Collective Actions

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hyunjin Seo
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Social Change ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Empirical Support ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Collective Actions ◽  
South Korean ◽  
History Of ◽  
Media Reports ◽  
Key Participants

Massive and sustained candlelight vigils in 2016–2017, the most significant citizen-led protests in the history of democratic South Korea, led to the impeachment and removal of then President Park Geun-hye. These protests took place in a South Korean media environment characterized by polarization and low public trust, and where conspiracy theories and false claims by those opposing impeachment were frequently amplified by extreme right-wing media outlets. How then was it possible for pro-impeachment protests seeking major social change to succeed? And why did pro-Park protesters and government efforts to defend Park ultimately fail? An agent-affordance framework is introduced to explain how key participants (agents), including journalists, citizens, social media influencers, bots, and civic organizations, together produced a broad citizen consensus that Park should be removed from office. This was accomplished by creatively employing affordances made available by South Korea’s history, legal system, and technologies. New empirical evidence illustrates the ongoing significant roles of both traditional and nontraditional agents as they continue to co-adapt to affordances provided by changing information environments. Interviews with key players yield firsthand descriptions of events. The interviews, original content analyses of media reports, and examination of social media posts combine to provide strong empirical support for the agent-affordance framework. Lessons drawn from citizen-led protests surrounding Park Geun-hye’s removal from office in South Korea are used to offer suggestions for how technology-enabled affordances may support and constrain movements for social change elsewhere in the world.

Political and Psychological Processes in Political Action

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martijn van Zomeren
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Structural Factors ◽  
Psychological Processes ◽  
Political Decision ◽  
Relevant Model ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Identity Model

Social change sometimes happens because groups in society make it happen. The social psychology of such “man-made” change in political contexts studies the key psychological and political processes that play an important role in driving such change. Theory and research have focused on political processes as conditions that foster change but also on the psychological processes that describe how a structural potential for change translates into political action, which puts pressure on political decision makers toward social change. This yields important scientific insights into how political action occurs and thus may affect political decision making. As for political processes, one relevant model is McAdam’s political process model, which identifies a number of structural factors that increase the potential for political action to achieve social change. As for psychological processes, one relevant model is the Social Identity Model of Collective Action, which identifies a number of core motivations for political action, and which seeks to integrate psychological insights with political models of social change. A joint discussion of these models offers hope and scope for further theoretical and empirical integration, as well as a broader and more comprehensive understanding of political and psychological processes in political action toward social change.

Participatory Communication in International Context

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Jacobson ◽  
Nicole Garlic
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Community Development ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Political Action ◽  
National Level ◽  
Middle Level ◽  
Levels Of Analysis ◽  
International Context ◽  
Participatory Communication ◽  
Political Processes

Participation through communication has been studied internationally in analyzing social change at varying levels of analysis. In modernization theory, it was used largely at the national level for analyzing media consumption and participation in democratic political institutions, particularly voting, in newly established countries. In postmodernization theory, Paulo Freire and others employed it to analyze both interpersonal interaction and community development processes. Since that time, interest in participatory processes has proliferated in a variety of community development, social movement, and other middle-level social change efforts, including some operating via social media. In addition, with increasingly urgent threats posed by pandemics, human rights violations, global warming, and other international pressures today, transnational forms of civic and political action are increasingly treated as processes of global level participation. The idea of a global political public sphere is one of these processes. Citizen representation in multilateral organizations, global social movements, and other forms of cosmopolitan action are also treated as participation. A comprehensive understanding of participatory communication in the international context must attend to social processes at various levels of analysis, ranging from local project interventions to national political processes to global change.

scholarly journals Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves

2008 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-108
Author(s):  
Katherine Bullock
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Public Intellectuals ◽  
Religious Tolerance ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
The Law

Western anthropologists are typically concerned with interpreting thenon-western world’s unfamiliar cultures for western audiences. TheFrench law banning the hijab from public schools presents itself as just asbaffling as any non-western custom. Thus, it is fully understandable thatit would take anAmerican anthropologist to interpret this event, especiallyfor those in Anglo-Saxon cultures, where in spite of Islamophobia anddiscrimination against the hijab, concepts of religious tolerance and multiculturalismhave generally translated into legal protections for womenand girls who wish to wear it in public spaces. So with a catchy titledesigned to appeal to thiswidespread bafflement, the author seeks to explainthe intellectual underpinnings and political processes that led to this banningof “ostentatious” religious symbols in public schools on March 15,2004.Bowen, whose earlier work looked at religion and social change inIndonesia, focuses on the public deliberations about the issue of the hijab aswell as on wider issues related to Muslim integration in France. He interviewspoliticians, bureaucrats, academics, journalists, public intellectuals,Muslim leaders, Muslim women, and (importantly, since it was a missingdimension, as he points out, in the lead up to the law) Muslim high schoolgirls. He studies public texts and focuses especially on the crucial roleplayed by an often hysterical media in forming and firming up public opinionin support of the law ...

scholarly journals Armenia-Azerbaijan Conflict in the Center of the EU Crisis Diplomacy

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (5) ◽  
pp. 60-67
Author(s):  
Igor Shcherbak ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Collective Actions ◽  
Eu Policy ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Peaceful Settlement ◽  
Basic Parameters ◽  
International Peacekeeping ◽  
Peacekeeping Missions ◽  
Key Aspects ◽  
The Eu

The article analyses the key aspects of the EU policy towards Armenian-Azerbaijan armed conflict. The author explores basic parameters of the EU presence in the region and a degree of its influence on political processes and peaceful settlement. The article shows basic directions of possible collective actions of the parties to the conflict and international mediators (Russia, USA, leading states of the EU) concerning peaceful settlement of this crisis situation in the framework of Minsk Group of the OSCE. In this context, the author devotes attention to the questions of status of Nagorno-Karabakh and models of possible international peacekeeping missions to the area.

Seeing the light in Santa y Andrés: Metaphor, myth and historical ambivalence

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 397-408
Author(s):  
Ruth Goldberg
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
The Past ◽  
Marginalized Groups ◽  
The Social ◽  
Creative Resistance ◽  
Social Anxieties ◽  
Cuban History

Drawing on theories about bricolage as creative resistance, this article examines the sudden, unexplained appearance of the masked Abakuá íreme in the middle of Carlos Lechuga’s Santa y Andrés (2016), a film that otherwise focuses entirely on the repression of a gay writer in post-Mariel era Cuba. This disruption of the narrative is explored as a strategy that urges the viewer to consider cyclical processes by which displaced social anxieties are mapped onto different marginalized groups to form a shifting locus of backlash following moments of progressive social change in Cuban history. The article tracks the ways in which the film evokes Abakuá mythology to create historical parallels for the viewer to discover. Utilizing doubled characters and parallel journeys as its analogical grammar, tensions between the film’s archetypal figures signal larger conflicts around the policing of acceptable expressions of gender and sexuality, and the social and political processes by which particular expressions of masculinity that are perceived as ‘dangerous’ or threatening are regulated in Cuban society at different historical moments. Even though Santa y Andrés is set in 1983, the film’s contentious reception in 2016 makes it what I am calling a historically ambivalent film about repression both in the past and in the present.

Catalysing social change in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam: evaluating the LIN model of participatory community development

2018 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 519-540
Author(s):  
Chau Doan-Bao ◽  
Evangelia Papoutsaki ◽  
Giles Dodson
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Community Development ◽  
Urban Communities ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Evaluation Framework ◽  
Ho Chi Minh City ◽  
Local Context ◽  
Collective Actions ◽  
Leadership Strategy ◽  
Catalyst Model

Abstract In communication for social change, a catalyst can play an important role in creating dialogue within the community, leading to collective actions and providing solutions for common problems. In urban communities of developing countries, this role is more essential because of the complexities of urban social issues and often the absence of traditional community structures. This research evaluated the LIN model of participatory community development in Ho Chi Minh City and demonstrates how urban NPOs have altered their self-perception from being ‘charity organizations’ to be a part of the community development process in HCMC as a result of LIN’s work. However, LIN’s catalyst model faces some challenges, particularly in applying Western concepts of community development and tenets of participatory social change in the Vietnamese context. As a result, a revised catalyst model of urban community development in Vietnam is suggested with three additional elements: leadership strategy for catalyst and NPOs, context understanding (local context and stakeholders’ characteristics) and impact evaluation framework based on the local context.

How do social beliefs affect political action motivation? The cases of Russia and Ukraine

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 382-395 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olga Gulevich ◽  
Irena Sarieva ◽  
Andrey Nevruev ◽  
Illya Yagiyayev
Keyword(s):  
Structural Equation Modeling ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Structural Equation ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Political Efficacy ◽  
Equation Modeling ◽  
Collective Actions ◽  
Just World ◽  
Political Actions

Political action is one of the main methods of social change. Previous research has shown that readiness to participate in such actions is determined by an evaluation of the current situation. The question arises as to how stable beliefs influence such evaluations. In this study we have analyzed the link between such beliefs and readiness to participate in political actions. We assumed that just and dangerous world beliefs are factors that influence readiness to participate in political actions. However, these factors’ influence is mediated by political efficacy. Respondents from Russia ( N = 440) and Ukraine ( N = 249) participated in our study. Structural equation modeling partly confirmed the hypotheses. It has shown that the more people believe in a just world and the less they believe in a dangerous world, the higher their internal and external political efficacy is. Political efficacy, in turn, predicts readiness to participate in various forms of political action. Internal political efficacy is positively linked to normative political collective actions, while external political efficacy is negatively linked to nonnormative collective actions. However, the extent of these patterns is dependent on cultural context.

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