Search results

In this chapter, we analyse the role of women in armed Basque nationalist and separatist terrorist group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) from a gender perspective. ETA women were essential agents in the armed conflict, but their image in the mass media and society has been very different from that of their male colleagues (Rodríguez Lara, 2017). Also, their role in the terrorist gang has described a sexually based functional specialisation. In addition, this chapter seeks to contribute to the area of feminist studies on women and political violence. Women's role in one of the most important armed nationalist groups in Europe, ETA, stands as a suitable case study to understand how the mass media (press, journalism), audiovisual content, and social representations of ETA have portrayed these women. The final conclusion of this chapter is that women were not portrayed in the same way as their male colleagues. Women of ETA were doubly penalised because they were women and because they were terrorists.

The ongoing anthropological transformation urges the rethinking of education, underlining the inadequacy of our schools and universities in dealing with hypercomplexity, that is, with the global extension of all political, social, and cultural processes and with their indeterminacy, interdependence, and interconnection. The idea that educational processes are questions of a purely technical/technological nature, solely a problem of skills and know-how, is the “great mistake” of the hypertechnological society, based on the illusion of being able to measure and quantify everything, to eliminate error and unpredictability, and to achieve total control and rationality. It is necessary to rethink education radically because the extraordinary scientific discoveries and the dynamics of the new technologies have completely overturned the complex interaction between biological and cultural evolution, doing away with the borders between the natural and the artificial. Emergence and emergency themselves are structural features of complex systems (living, social, and human systems), rendered hypercomplex through today’s acceleration and virality, regarding not only education and socialization but also the representations and perceptions of all systemic processes. The merging of fields of knowledge and an epistemology of error become essential for the analysis and interpretation of this hypercomplexity and the unpredictability that distinguishes it.

Researchers and practitioners recognize whistleblowers and the media as disparate control agents to uncover fraud and corruption in and by organizations. However, whistleblowing is mainly studied in relation to individual and organizational antecedents. Social norms and in particular the media as a form of social norm influence or norm conveyer on whistleblowing are largely unexplored. In this paper, I study the influence of perceived critical media coverage (i.e., whether media are perceived as criticizing fraud and corruption) on whistleblowing intentions (WBI) on fraud and corruption. I draw on norm activation theory to develop a moderation-mediation model of whistleblowing to highlight how the media can convey social norms influencing WBI. Using a cross-national survey of employees from China, Germany, and Russia (n = 1,159), I hypothesize and find that media directly influence employee attitudes toward fraud and corruption as well as the likelihood to whistle blow. Critical media coverage also reduces the influence of descriptive norms by co-worker misconduct on attitudes and the negative influence of fear of retaliation on WBI. This paper is the first to highlight the importance of critical mass media on whistleblowing decisions. My findings suggest that the media influence potential whistleblowers in a way that can be described along the lines of “I report if they report.”

Under which conditions do social movements receive extensive attention from the mainstream news media? We develop an institutional mediation model that argues that combinations of the news-heightening characteristics of movements, including their disruptive capacities, organizational resources, and political orientation, and political contexts, including partisan regimes and benefiting from national policies, bring extensive attention to movements. It also holds that investigations will draw extensive media attention to movements, and those that have achieved prominence in the news will remain prominent under specific conditions. We appraise these combinational arguments by examining 29 social movements across 100 years in four national newspapers using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). Researchers typically use QCA to study the consequences of movements when they hypothesize outcomes to result from multiple combinations of conditions. This raises our second main question: How should scholars best address combinational hypotheses using QCA? Here we employ Venn diagrams to identify and illustrate key analytical issues and anomalies, including constrained diversity in observational data, empirical instances when combinations of conditions do not produce the expected outcome, and instances when unexpected combinations of conditions produce a consistent result. We also demonstrate the value of broad comparisons across movements and over time in these analyses.

When the media report negatively about an organisation, its employees are not only affected but also a source of information for outsiders who want to find out more about the situation. Because of their credibility, employees can support public relations managers to preserve or restore organisational reputation. In this research, we explore the role of organisational identification and internal corporate communication (ICC) in the event of negative media coverage for employees’ defensive and assertive impression management behaviours. Defensive strategies include excuses, justifications and the avoidance of threatening situations. Assertive strategies are more active and refer to behaviours which aim to establish a desirable identity; in the context of negative media coverage, this entails actively defending the organisation, explaining the situation and conveying the organisation’s official version of the event in order to bolster its reputation. Results from an online survey among employed persons reveal that employees’ identification with their work organisation positively influences their assertive as well as defensive reactions. ICC has a more differentiated influence on employees’ reactions: If ICC is evaluated well, employees’ assertive reactions increase; if evaluated poorly, employees exhibit more defensive reactions. These findings show that ICC can make a difference in winning employees as ambassadors for the organisation in critical situations.

This chapter demonstrates a parallel between the presidential campaigns of Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil, 2018) and Donald Trump (United States, 2016) regarding their use of social media. Specifically, tweets from the former candidates on the social network sites were analyzed during a one-month timeframe before their respective presidential elections. Tweets were selected for analysis based on the fact that Twitter was the main platform used by both former presidential candidates. The analysis of the data reveals considerable similarities between the communication strategies of the two candidates. This research enlists McCombs and Shaw (1972) agenda setting theory based on their study of media during North American presidential campaigns in 1968 and Lippmann’s (2008) concept of public opinion. The methodology employed is based on Bardin (2011).

In the current chapter, we discuss the shape and contours of the field of probation in Romania as they appear in scientific literature and mass media, focusing on the concerns academics and professionals have voiced about Romanian probation. We analyse the timeframe from 2014 to 2021, after the introduction of the country’s New Penal Code (NPC). We structure our argument as follows. The chapter begins with a short incursion into the historiography of probation as a field in Romania. The focus, however, is on the adoption of a NPC in 2014, as this was a significant moment that led to changes for both probation workers and probationers. While we present the first 25 years since probation was instituted in Romania in 1997 as a period of experiments, trials and errors, we aim to highlight the development and consolidation that occurred in the period after 2014 (see Durnescu 2008, 2015; Preda, 2015a, 2017; Sandu, 2016). The NPC was intended to bring forward a reconfiguration of the probation system in Romania (Preda, 2015b). Beyond the promise of the NPC, the 2014–2021 period is one where probation edges into the public sphere via extensive media coverage, including the considerable number of probationers or a string of protests by probation counsellors who felt overworked and overwhelmed. We continue the chapter by analysing the composition and the dynamics of the probation population, always looking beyond the mere numbers to other analytic markers (i.e. numbers of obligations and lengths of the probation period). We conclude the chapter by arguing that our discussion of the ‘weight’ of supervision adds to the current understanding of mass supervision by looking at the aggregated impact that different social, political, penal and cultural factors have on probation practice. In other words, large caseloads, limited human resources, precarious material conditions and negative organisational cultures are likely to generate supervision experiences that can be better interpreted by looking and thinking beyond numbers.

This chapter explores the evolution of the media framings of a corporate corruption scandal over time. Our analysis focuses on the evolution of media frames used by the English and French Press in the coverage of the corruption scandal involving SNC-Lavalin, a Quebec-based multinational engineering firm. We reveal how media coverage shifted from balanced and nuanced coverage of a complex phenomenon that facilitated debates on the appropriate consequences of corruption to a selective (re)construction of events to serve partisan agendas when the company’s legal plight was politicized. Our study contributes to the literature on media framings of corporate corruption by highlighting how the politicization of a corporate corruption scandal led to a dual climate of opinion across the English and French Press.