scholarly journals Improvisation Takes a Lot of Planification: Strategic Communication and Sociopolitical Contemporary Activism

2021 ◽  
pp. 271-293
Author(s):  
Naíde Müller
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Organizational Context ◽  
Strategic Communication ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Agenda 2030 ◽  
Mediating Role ◽  
High Volatility ◽  
The Public Sphere

Activists are producers of strategic communication for social change and play a mediating role regarding (re)producing and challenging established cultural meanings. In a global context of high volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, contemporary activism needs to introduce significant innovations in current mass mobilizations. Otherwise, it falls into the risk of becoming irrelevant. Within this context, new forms of creative activism are arousing, which are linked to the contextual strategic approach to the repertoire of disruptive tactics and techniques. Strategic communication, or the intentional use of communication by organizations to promote their mission, is inevitably associated with the exercise of power in negotiations among different social actors. In this essay, we argue that the strategical communication approaches that have successfully established mass consumption as a way of life can be used to give public voice to sociopolitical contemporary activists and to increase shared global views for social change, such as the Agenda 2030 for sustainable development. We do it so through a literature review on this topic, followed by a description of practical examples. Strategic communication plays a crucial role when it comes to inducing social change. Its applicability in an organizational context is relevant for activist movements as it facilitates the organization of collective action, the call for civic participation and interaction with other social and political institutions. The use of strategic approaches to communication in an organizational context, such as the management of identity, image and reputation, and the approach to political power through citizen lobby, can be ways for contemporary activist groups to better mobilize, communicate with their supporters, and seek to influence political decisions. Reflecting and planning before acting or reacting can contribute to the achievement of a voice and legitimacy to operate in the public sphere.

Fighting Corruption

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentina Arena
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Roman Republic ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Private Sphere ◽  
The Public ◽  
Republican Rome ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Late Roman

Corruption was seen as a major factor in the collapse of Republican Rome, as Valentina Arena’s subsequent essay “Fighting Corruption: Political Thought and Practice in the Late Roman Republic” argues. It was in reaction to this perception of the Republic’s political fortunes that an array of legislative and institutional measures were established and continually reformed to become more effective. What this chapter shows is that, as in Greece, the public sphere was distinct from the private sphere and, importantly, it was within this distinction that the foundations of anticorruption measures lay. Moreover, it is difficult to defend the existence of a major disjuncture between moralistic discourses and legal-political institutions designed to patrol the public/private divide: both were part of the same discourse and strategy to curb corruption and improve government.

New Principals in an Urban Bureaucracy: A Sense of Efficacy

1996 ◽  
Vol 6 (6) ◽  
pp. 661-690 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Osterman ◽  
Susan Sullivan
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Support ◽  
Role Models ◽  
School Change ◽  
Organizational Context ◽  
Leadership Behavior ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Organizational Factors ◽  
Internal Factors ◽  
Mediating Role ◽  
Sense Of Efficacy

As principals assume their roles in an urban bureaucracy, what are some of the personal and organizational factors that support or restrict their efforts to bring about school change? Based on interviews with newly appointed principals, this study concludes that external and internal factors interact to influence leadership behavior. External factors, particularly role models, district expectations, and personal and organizational support, influence principals’ sense of self-efficacy. This internal factor, in turn, appeared to play an important mediating role influencing principals’ interpretation of the organizational context and their problem-solving processes.

Role of burnout on job level, job satisfaction, and task performance

2017 ◽  
Vol 38 (5) ◽  
pp. 630-645 ◽  
Author(s):  
Won Ho Kim ◽  
Young-An Ra ◽  
Jong Gyu Park ◽  
Bora Kwon
Keyword(s):  
Job Satisfaction ◽  
Task Performance ◽  
Organizational Context ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Job Level ◽  
Mediating Role ◽  
Final Sample ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
And Task

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the mediating role of burnout (i.e. exhaustion, cynicism, professional inefficacy) in the relationship between job level and job satisfaction as well as between job level and task performance. Design/methodology/approach The final sample included 342 Korean workers from selected companies. The authors employed the Hayes (2013) PROCESS tool for analyzing the data. Findings The results showed that all three subscales of burnout (i.e. exhaustion, cynicism, professional inefficacy) mediate the relationship between job level and job satisfaction. However, only two mediators (i.e. cynicism, professional inefficacy) indicated the mediating effects on the association between job level and task performance. Originality/value This research presented the role of burnout on the relationships between job level, job satisfaction, and task performance especially in South Korean organizational context. In addition to role of burnout, findings should prove helpful in improving job satisfaction and task performance. The authors provide implications and limitations of the findings.

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 INTRODUCTION TO THE SYMPOSIUM ON THE REPORT OF THE INTERNATIONAL PANEL ON SOCIAL PROGRESS (IPSP) 2018

2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 439-441
Author(s):  
Alexander Raubo ◽  
Alex Voorhoeve
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Theoretical Knowledge ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Historical View ◽  
International Panel ◽  
Enlightenment Project ◽  
Social Scientific

The publication of the first Report of the International Panel on Social Progress is a significant intellectual event, both because of its hugely ambitious aim – of uniting the world's leading researchers from social sciences and the humanities to develop research-based, multi-disciplinary, non-partisan, action-guiding solutions to the central challenges of our time – and because it represents the completion of a mammoth effort in the service of this aim by a diverse set of 269 authors. In its attempt to synthesize and render accessible to social actors a broad range of the latest social scientific knowledge, as well as in its confidence that knowledge can empower those actors to make progress, it recalls D'Alembert and Diderot's famous Encyclopédie. Indeed, one can say that the Report is a quintessential Enlightenment project (cf. Bury 1920). For example, in his famous Outlines of a Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind (1796), Condorcet asserts the possibility of an accumulation of empirical and theoretical knowledge and the concomitant expansion in our capacities to alleviate social and natural evils. And Condorcet and many of his contemporaries were motivated to propose political institutions that would enable such an indefinite increase in knowledge so as to bring about the attendant improvement to people's lives.

The contributions of Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson to communication and social change theory and practice

2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (5) ◽  
pp. 405-418 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pradip Ninan Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Change Theory ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Technological Determinism ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social Change Theory ◽  
Communication For Social Change ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
The Public Sphere

This article explores the contributions made by Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson to communication for social change theory. It argues that Williams’ critique of technological determinism, his notion of the ‘structure of feeling’, analysis of culture and cultural materialism as a mode of analysis contributes to the theorising of communication for social change. This article also examines Thompson’s contributions to historiography, his engagement with the contextualised histories of ordinary people and their contributions to the making of the public sphere in 18th-century England. This article argues that the contributions made by these two theorists enable a critique of structures and a re-centring of agency, both of which are critical to a renewal of communication for social change theory.

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.

scholarly journals Design as an agent of change: Practice-oriented initiatives on Design Teaching

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Najla Mouchrek ◽  
Lia Krucken
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Design Research ◽  
Human Values ◽  
Design Approach ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Research And Teaching ◽  
Strategies For Change ◽  
Agent Of Change

The paper analyzes the role of Design as an agent of social transformation in face of complex challenges. Intentionally embracing reality’s complexity and centering on human values, the Design approach is suited to develop alternative perspectives and radically different strategies for change. The paper explores Design teaching focusing on social change and transition to sustainability, presenting three initiatives and reflecting about methods and impacts of the application of Design for transition. The analysis points to the need of a critical vision in Design research and teaching and the importance to systematize and teach methods and tools to support the interplay among diverse social actors.

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