The democratic drama of whistleblowing

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 508-525 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Olesen
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Administration ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Sociological Theory ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Foundations ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Theory Research

While major cases of whistleblowing may not be an everyday occurrence, their effects are often wide-ranging, celebrated, and controversial. Given this potent cocktail, the whistleblower is conspicuously undertheorized within sociology and social theory. Research today takes place mainly within management, business, psychology, law, and public administration studies. While some of this work does draw on sociological theory, we lack a general theory that combines attention to the historical context of whistleblowing, the nature of its critique and intervention, and the democratic meanings with which it is associated. This article offers such a framework. The argument consists of three components. First, whistleblowing is historically tied to the decline of authority in the 1960s and the 1970s. Second, building on field and systems theory, the whistleblower is seen as a field transgressor who, with a democratic intent, exposes information ‘belonging’ to a specific field in the public sphere. Third, in doing so, he/she is cast as both a hero and a villain in a democratic drama about the moral-political foundations of society.

Sex in the City that Peter Built: The Demimonde and Sociability in Mid-Eighteenth Century St. Petersburg

Slavic Review ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 907-930
Author(s):  
Igor Fedyukin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Associational Life ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The City

This article uses the materials of the Drezdensha affair, a large-scale investigation of “indecency” in St. Petersburg in 1750, to explore unofficial sociability among the Imperial elite, and to map out the institutional, social, and economic dimensions of the post-Petrine “sexual underworld.” Sociability and, ultimately, the public sphere in eighteenth century Russia are usually associated with loftier practices, with joining the ranks of the reading public, reflecting on the public good, and generally, becoming more civil and polite. Yet, it is the privately-run, commercially-oriented, and sexually-charged “parties” at the focus of this article that arguably served as a “training ground” for developing the habits of sociability. The world of these “parties” provides a missing link between the debauchery and carousing of Peter I's era and the more polite formats of associational life in the late eighteenth century, as well as the historical context for reflections on morality, sexual licentiousness, foppery, and the excesses of “westernization.”

scholarly journals The Normativity of Habermas’s Public Sphere from the Vantage Point of Its Evolution

2019 ◽  
pp. 47-65
Author(s):  
Maciej Hułas
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Private Property ◽  
The Public ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
Unique Character ◽  
Classical Setting ◽  
Bourgeois Culture ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Individual

The paper argues that the original normativity that provides the basis for Habermas’s model of the public sphere remains untouched at its core, despite having undergone some corrective alterations since the time of its first unveiling in the 1960s. This normative core is derived from two individual claims, historically articulated in the eighteenth-century’s “golden age” of reason and liberty as both sacred and self-evident: (1) the individual right to an unrestrained disposal of one’s private property; and (2) the individual right to formulate one’s opinion in the course of public debate. Habermas perceives the public sphere anchored to these two fundamental freedoms/rights as an arena of interactive opinion exchange with the capacity to solidly and reliably generate sound reason and public rationality. Despite its historical and cultural attachments to the bourgeois culture as its classical setting, Habermas’s model of the public sphere, due to its universal normativity, maintains its unique character, even if it has been thoroughly reformulated by social theories that run contrary to his original vision of the lifeworld, organized and ruled by autonomous rational individuals.     

Public Space and the Public Sphere: Political Theory and the Historical Geography of Modernity

1993 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 303-322 ◽  
Author(s):  
P Howell
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Historical Geography ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Normative Political Theory

This paper contributes to the ongoing discussion of the historical geography of modernity. It is argued that the exclusive focus on social theory has detrimental effects on the appreciation of normative political concerns and that it ignores the resurgence of normative political theory. Habermas's concept of the public sphere, and its place within his theoretical and empirical studies, is, by contrast, commendably concerned with linking the social and historical work with normative political theorising, and its usefulness for geographical investigation is applauded. However, the criticisms directed from, in particular, communitarian political theorists and contextualist social researchers would seem to make his attempt to bring a ‘strong’ theory of public political life back within the remit of a reconstructed social theory less plausible. One set of responses to this criticism comes in the form of the attempt to build geography into this normative political theory, turning public spheres into public spaces; Arcndt's political theory, in conclusion, is thus held to be a significant contribution to the historical geography of modernity.

scholarly journals Feminism and the Public Sphere in Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

1998 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel K. Carnell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Century Model ◽  
Separate Spheres ◽  
The Public ◽  
Cultural Power ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Different Levels

The bipartite narrative structure of Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) has been interpreted recently as an attempt to subvert the traditional Victorian rubric of separate spheres. Reconsidering this novel in terms of Jürgen Habermas's concept of the eighteenth-century public sphere broadens the historical context for the way we understand the separate spheres. Within Brontë's critique of Victorian gender roles, we may identify a reluctance to address the Chartist-influenced class challenges to an older version of the public good. In hearkening back to an eighteenth-century model of the public sphere, Brontë espouses not so much a twentieth-century-style challenge to the Victorian model of separate spheres as a nineteenth-century-style nostalgia for the classical liberal model of bourgeois public debate. At the same time, the awkward rupture in Brontë's narrative represents the inherent contradictions between the different levels of discourse-literary, political, and scientific-within the public sphere itself and the complex ways in which these contradictions are both accorded and denied cultural power.

Feminist reconstructions of universalism and the discourse of human rights

2009 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jill Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Critical Review ◽  
The Public ◽  
Women’S Experiences ◽  
Women's Experiences ◽  
Universal Principles ◽  
The Public Sphere

In recent years, universal principles and, in turn, the universalistic discourse of human rights, have fallen under critical review by feminist scholars. This is part of a more general suspicion of a search for universalism and abstraction in law: feminist legal scholars have highlighted and critiqued the gendered dimension of such an approach.1Particular concepts fundamental to political, legal and social theory such as justice,2equality,3freedom4and rights5have been under the spotlight to see if their structure leads to detrimental consequences for women. Criticisms of rights have taken a variety of forms with rights being seen as too individualistic, reinforcing existing power imbalances, failing to account for women’s experiences and focusing too much on the public sphere.

Nobility

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Shovlin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
Economic Role ◽  
The Public ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Times ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
New Recruits

Historians of the Ancien Régime long viewed the nobility as a holdover from a feudal age, an antiquated breed condemned to a slow, and ultimately terminal, decline. Nobles were regarded as the casualties of secular political and social transformations: the rise of the absolutist state, which stripped them of political power; and economic transformations, which increased the relative wealth of non-nobles, and empowered them to challenge the nobility's supremacy. Since the 1960s, however, revisionist scholarship has almost entirely jettisoned this view. The nobility is now widely seen as a social group that participated massively in the processes of modernization that transformed seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. Through its economic role and values, its service to the monarchical state, its openness to new recruits, and its engagement in the public sphere, the nobility moved with the times.

The Dewey-Lippmann Debate Today: Communication Distortions, Reflective Agency, and Participatory Democracy

2005 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 156-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Whipple
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Participation ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The Public ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Advanced Capitalism ◽  
Current Context ◽  
The Public Sphere

In this article, I introduce the Dewey-Lippmann democracy debate of the 1920s as a vehicle for considering how social theory can enhance the empirical viability of participatory democratic theory within the current context of advanced capitalism. I situate within this broad theoretical framework the theories of Habermas and Dewey. In the process, I argue (a) that while Dewey largely failed to reconcile his democratic ideal with the empirical constraint of large-scale organizations, Habermas, in particular his work on the public sphere, provides an important starting point for considering the state of public participation within the communication distortions of advanced capitalism; (b) that to fully understand the relation between communication distortions and public participation, social theorists must look beyond Habermas and return to Dewey to mobilize his bi-level view of habitual and reflective human agency; and, finally, (c) that the perspective of a Deweyan political theory of reflective agency best furthers our understanding of potential communication distortions and public participation, particularly in the empirical spaces of media centralization and intellectual property rights.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katrina Dyonne Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Stereotypes ◽  
Folk Culture ◽  
The Public ◽  
Black Stereotypes ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Entertainment Culture

This book has explored the foundation and infiltration of racial stereotypes into the American entertainment culture. It has rejected the notion that African Americans should be used as scapegoats for the continuance of black stereotypes in popular culture, arguing that entertainment culture in the United States was largely founded and developed on negative racial imagery created and inserted into the public sphere by whites. While acknowledging that the African American community holds some responsibility for the continual proliferation of racist and sexist stereotypes in the mass media, the book contends that accountability must be placed within a larger cultural and historical context. This epilogue reflects on the continued proliferation of black stereotypes in popular culture, suggesting that it simply represents a continuation of an entertainment tradition that was created intentionally to express the antiblack, prowhite ideology of America's culture. Furthermore, the perceived inferiority of blackness was actively promoted through society's folk culture.

Habermas and the public sphere: Rethinking a key theoretical concept

2021 ◽  
pp. 136843102098322
Author(s):  
Patrick O’Mahony
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Communication Theory ◽  
Theoretical Concept ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The One ◽  
Recent Account ◽  
Theory Of Democracy

The challenge of realizing the democratic power of publics through public sphere remains acute but not hopeless. While claiming that Habermas communicative social theory offers a way forward in spite of a productive but constraining turn towards a modified social liberal frame, nonetheless three limitations of the theory are identified. The first bears on the insufficiency of the sociological evolutionist description of society relevant to the public sphere drawn from classical sociological accounts of differentiation and integration. The second identifies learning theoretical limitations of the normative interactionist, proceduralist account of democracy and democratization potentials. And the third observes on the disconnection between the theory of communicative reasoning from, on the one hand, the critique of pathologies of reasoning, and, on the other, from its implications for lifeworld rationalization. These identified limitations are intended to provide new impetus to radically rethink the public sphere as intrinsic to solving contemporary problems of democracy that Habermas’s more recent account of deliberative theory, with the public sphere merely supplementary, cannot fully do. Yet, with Habermas, this should be on the basis of advancing the communication theory of democracy.

scholarly journals Algoritmos y algunos retos jurídico-institucionales para su aplicación en la Administración Pública.

2020 ◽  
pp. 54-63
Author(s):  
Óscar CORTÉS
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Administration ◽  
Legal Aspects ◽  
The Other ◽  
Technological Changes ◽  
The Public ◽  
Administrative Procedure ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The One ◽  
Secure Implementation

Laburpena: Adimen artifiziala da gaur egungo teknologien artean bultzadarik handiena duenetako bat. Azterlan honen xedea da horren erronka batzuen hausnarketa bat eskaintzea Administrazio Publikoan aplikatzeko. Alde batetik, abiadura-palanka gisa duen gaitasunaren ikuspuntutik, sektore publikoa den bezalako ekosistema juridikoan; beste alde batetik, administrazio-sistemetan bere garapena bideragarri egiteko suertatzen diren galderei erantzuteko beharretik. Horretarako, aztertuko da nola aldaketa teknologiko berriek lege-moldaketekin batera etorri diren maila publikoan bideragarritasuna emateko; aurkeztuko dira algoritmoen aukera eta ziurgabetasun batzuk Administrazioaren teknologia eraldatzaile bezala; azkenik, deskribatuko dira aspektu juridiko batzuk beharrezkoak direnak Administrazioan bere ezapen ziurra eta etikoa lortzeko eta aztertuko dira administrazio-prozedura automatizatu posible baten elementurik aipagarrienak. Resumen: La inteligencia artificial es ya hoy una de las tecnologías con mayor potencial. El presente estudio tiene por objeto ofrecer una reflexión sobre algunos de los retos para su aplicación en la Administración pública. Por un lado, desde el punto de vista de su capacidad como palanca de cambio en un ecosistema jurídico como el sector público; por otro, desde la necesidad de abordar algunos de los interrogantes que surgen para hacer viable su desarrollo en los sistemas administrativos. Para ello, se analizará cómo los recientes cambios tecnológicos han venido acompañados de modificaciones legales para dotarles de viabilidad en el ámbito público, se mostrarán algunas de las oportunidades e incertidumbres de los algoritmos como tecnologías transformadoras en la Administración, se describirán algunos de los aspectos jurídicos que es necesario abordar para su segura implantación ética y jurídica en la Administración y se analizarán algunos de los elementos más destacados de un posible procedimiento administrativo automatizado. Abstract: Artificial intelligence is already today one of the technologies with greatest potential. The purpose of this study is to offer a reflection on some of the challenges for its implementation in public administration. On the one hand, from the standpoint of its capacity as a lever of change and transformation in a legal ecosystem such as the public sector; on the other, from the need to address some of the questions that arise to make viable its development in administrative systems. For that purpose, it will be analyzed how recent technological changes have been accompanied by legal modifications to make them viable in the public sphere, some of the opportunities and uncertainties of algorithms as transformative technologies in administration will be shown, some of the legal aspects that need to be addressed for its legal and ethical secure implementation in the Administration will be described, and some of the most outstanding elements of a possible automated administrative procedure will be analyzed.

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