The refeudalization of modern capitalism

2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 472-486
Author(s):  
Sighard Neckel
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
The Public ◽  
Distribution Of Wealth ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
Modern Capitalism ◽  
Complex Models ◽  
The Public Sphere

Jürgen Habermas once investigated the structural transformation of the modern public using the term ‘refeudalization’. He reconstructed how, in the course of the development of economic monopolies, pre-bourgeois forms of power again penetrated the public sphere. It is not only the fact that the social sciences today speak again of a crisis of the public sphere, however, that gives Habermas’ concept of ‘refeudalization’ new relevance. On the contrary, a social change is taking place in numerous areas of present-day society which, in the course of a neoliberal modernization of the economy, is once again re-creating pre-modern social forms, hierarchies and power structures. This does not take place as a relapse into past social forms, but as a paradoxical result of social transformations that generate the old as the new and thereby produce ‘neo-feudal’ patterns in the distribution of wealth, recognition and power. In this paper ‘refeudalization’ is presented as a key concept for understanding the development of modern capitalist societies today. It will be shown that the dichotomy of ‘progressive’ and ‘regressive’ forms of transformation of capitalism must be complemented by more complex models of paradoxical social change.

The NGOization of Space: Dilemmas of Social Change, Planning Policy, and the Israeli Public Sphere

10.1068/d459t ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 745-758 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haim Yacobi
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Critical Reading ◽  
Production Of Space ◽  
The Public ◽  
Planning Policy ◽  
Strategic Goals ◽  
The Public Sphere

This paper offers a critical analysis of the role of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that deal with planning policy in general and in Israel in particular. The inherent dilemmas of the different NGOs' tactics and strategies in reshaping the public sphere are examined, based on a critical reading of Habermas's conceptualization of the public sphere. The main objective of this paper is to investigate to what extent, and under which conditions, the NGOization of space—that is, the growing number of nongovernmental actors that deal with the production of space both politically and tangibly—has been able to achieve strategic goals which may lead towards social change.

scholarly journals Progressive Social Movements and the Internet

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah J. Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Social Power ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Internet ◽  
The Public ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Public Sphere

Because of the field’s foundational concerns with both social power and media, communication scholars have long been at the center of scholarly thought at the intersection of social change and technology. Early critical scholarship in communication named media technologies as central in the creation and maintenance of dominant political ideologies and as a balm against dissent among the masses. This work detailed the marginalization of groups who faced restricted access to mass media creation and exclusion from representational discourse and images, alongside the connections of mass media institutions to political and cultural elites. Yet scholars also highlighted the ways collectives use media technologies for resistance inside their communities and as interventions in the public sphere. Following the advent of the World Wide Web in the late 1980s, and the granting of public access to the Internet in 1991, communication scholars faced a medium that seemed to buck the one-way and gatekeeping norms of others. There was much optimism about the democratic potentials of this new technology. With the integration of Internet technology into everyday life, and its central role in shaping politics and culture in the 21st century, scholars face new questions about its role in dissent and collective efforts for social change. The Internet requires us to reconsider definitions of the public sphere and civil society, document the potentials and limitations of access to and creation of resistant and revolutionary media, and observe and predict the rapidly changing infrastructures and corresponding uses of technology—including the temporality of online messaging alongside the increasingly transnational reach of social movement organizing. Optimism remains, but it has been tempered by the realities of the Internet’s limitations as an activist tool and warnings of the Internet-enabled evolution of state suppression and surveillance of social movements. Across the body of critical work on these topics particular characteristics of the Internet, including its rapidly evolving infrastructures and individualized nature, have led scholars to explore new conceptualizations of collective action and power in a digital media landscape.

Theorizing Religion and the Public Sphere: Affect, Technology, Valuation

2019 ◽  
Vol 87 (4) ◽  
pp. 1008-1049
Author(s):  
M Gail Hamner
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The Public ◽  
Form And Function ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
And Function

Abstract Religion scholars require a theory of public encounter that is evental, technological, and affective. Instead of a spatial public sphere, today’s encounters occur through technological mediations that are affective and image-laden. This essay examines the latter “publicness” and illustrates its roles as an affective technology of whiteness as that which frames and distributes the persevering powers of, and reluctantly tracks resistances to, white supremacy. Film is a fruitful cultural site for examining the whiteness of publicness. The essay turns to Moonlight (Jenkins, 2016) to demonstrate how film can resist and interrupt normative whiteness and to show how this transvaluative cultural labor can be seen as religious. The essay conceptualizes religion as a hinged form and function through which subjects and publics co-emerge and by which social and sedimented valuations are (re)bound. Grappling with religion as social forms and functions of valuation opens it to algorithmic variability that mandates attention to circulations of power as both capacity and intensity.

scholarly journals Indigenous journalism, media innovation, and social change: A review of previous research and call for more critical approaches

2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-206
Author(s):  
Niamh Ní Bhroin ◽  
Stine Sand ◽  
Torkel Rasmussen
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
The Public ◽  
Indigenous Voice ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Technological Affordances ◽  
Analytical Approaches ◽  
And Diffusion

Abstract Indigenous journalism can facilitate the inclusion of Indigenous voices in the public sphere, thereby contributing to social change. Contemporary Indigenous journalism is in part facilitated by the introduction and diffusion of paradigmatic media innovations, including the Internet, mobile technology, and social media. Based on a literature review, we investigate how media innovations are understood to facilitate Indigenous journalism and find that few empirical studies directly address this question. Analyses of Indigenous journalism, reaching beyond the potential for increased access to media and for amplification of Indigenous voice, are lacking. Furthermore, little research investigates how the appropriation of new technological affordances influence the production of Indigenous journalism. Our review also indicates that while Indigenous political participation can be facilitated by media innovation, these innovations can also serve to reinforce existing power relations. We submit that more critical analytical approaches are required to investigate how media innovations might facilitate the potential of Indigenous journalism for social change.

scholarly journals Retro-Innovation and Corporate Social Responsibility

2015 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erika Loucanova ◽  
Jan Parobek ◽  
Martina Kalamarova
Keyword(s):  
Corporate Social Responsibility ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Social Responsibility ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Positive Impact ◽  
New Products ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Corporate Social

Abstract The paper deals with the retro-innovation and their importance to corporate social responsibility (CSR). Corporate social responsibility is a process with the aim to encourage a positive impact through activities on the environment, consumers, employees, communities, and all other stakeholders of the public sphere. The accelerated rate of technological and social change influences on the society. The main social problems are symptoms of future shock. Retro-innovation trend is emerging against an accelerating backdrop of “datafication”. New products are designed to connect customers with the past in ways that are nostalgic, interactive and environmental. CSR thanks to the retroinnovation encourages has a positive impact on the all stakeholders and eliminates the future shock.

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.

scholarly journals Television and the Public Sphere:  Relationships of Power and Resistance in Contemporary  New Zealand Television

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Frances Cook
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
The Public ◽  
Normative Power ◽  
Power And Resistance ◽  
The Public Sphere

<p>This thesis considers New Zealand television’s public sphere role, by analysing three television programmes in terms of how they enable the exercise of power or resistance. The programmes 7 Days, Campbell Live, and Shortland Street were used as case studies of typical public sphere spaces that are available to the New Zealand public. These programmes were analysed in terms of Foucault’s concepts of power and resistance as active exercises that are present in all interrelations. The research found that the programmes were sites of both the exercising of power and the possibility of resistance, as they each worked to circulate competing discourses that subjects could take up to reinforce existing power structures or to resist the exercise of power upon them. Despite this conflicted nature, each programme was found to circulate these competing discourses in a manner that accommodated critical positions and discourses, as well as reinscribing normative power relations.</p>

scholarly journals Television and the Public Sphere:  Relationships of Power and Resistance in Contemporary  New Zealand Television

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Frances Cook
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
The Public ◽  
Normative Power ◽  
Power And Resistance ◽  
The Public Sphere

<p>This thesis considers New Zealand television’s public sphere role, by analysing three television programmes in terms of how they enable the exercise of power or resistance. The programmes 7 Days, Campbell Live, and Shortland Street were used as case studies of typical public sphere spaces that are available to the New Zealand public. These programmes were analysed in terms of Foucault’s concepts of power and resistance as active exercises that are present in all interrelations. The research found that the programmes were sites of both the exercising of power and the possibility of resistance, as they each worked to circulate competing discourses that subjects could take up to reinforce existing power structures or to resist the exercise of power upon them. Despite this conflicted nature, each programme was found to circulate these competing discourses in a manner that accommodated critical positions and discourses, as well as reinscribing normative power relations.</p>

Secularism, Nationalism, and Minorities in Turkey

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 301-308 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ina Merdjanova
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Private Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
The Public ◽  
Justice And Development Party ◽  
Four Books ◽  
The Public Sphere

The vivid interest in the philosophical and legal premises of secularism in Turkey, as well as in its workings in the public and private life of Turkish citizens resonates with an ongoing questioning in Western academia of the validity of established theories of secularization. More importantly, the political and social transformations in Turkey itself, and the growing role and visibility of Islam in the public sphere, especially during the last decade marked by the rule of the Islamic-oriented Justice and Development Party (jdp), have triggered a search for new explanatory frameworks and reconceptualization of Turkish secularism.The four books discussed in this article tackle the interrelated issues of secularism, nationalism and minorities in Turkey from a variety of disciplinary and methodological perspectives.

Rewriting the Discourse of Racial Identity: Towards a Pedagogy and Politics of Whiteness

1997 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-321 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Giroux
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Racial Identity ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
White Students ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Henry Giroux

In this article, Henry Giroux places the study of Whiteness in a historical context, recognizing the various modes in which racial identity has been used by conservative ideologues and critical scholars who seek to expand the discussion of race and power. The author also points out the limitations of the current scholarship on Whiteness. Although this scholarship has successfully expanded the study of race to include the study of Whiteness as a historical, cultural, and political construction, it has not shown the liberating potential of deconstructing Whiteness in the public sphere. With an analysis of Dangerous Minds and Suture, two movies with contrasting narratives of race, the author provides an example of the possibilities for critically discussing, in a classroom, the representation of race and ethnicity in the media. Through such a discussion, students of different races and ethnicities can reflect on the representation of themselves and others and the position of Whiteness as the dominant referent. There is a need for Whiteness to be theorized and discussed in a manner that recognizes the potential for criticism, as well as the possibility for White students to recognize their own agency and legitimate place within the struggle for social change and an anti-racist society.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document