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The MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region is in a critical moment in its information and news ecology, exhibiting signs of pretruth and posttruth syndromes. Between the “pretruth” and “posttruth” there is a gap that circumvented “truth.” The state of information in the MENA region brings back the dystopian Orwellian notion of the “Ministry of Truth.” A poetic term in anticipation of this moment of the crisis of truth. Sharing the latter with the rest of the world, the pretruth moment is engraved in the region's history of precarious political and religious authoritarian control and manipulation of information and news and low press freedom. In the region, truth is told, hidden, distorted, and manufactured by a blend of humans and bots, where both artificial intelligence and social humans are involved in this process of multipolarized disinformation operations with multifarious sponsors, actors, and beneficiaries that have distinct and often clashing agendas and interests. To understand the ecology of truth, facts, news, and information in the Middle East, studies ought to be situated within the ecosystem of information and media technologies in the globalized national and transnational societies of the region and consider both the role of the regionally oriented neoauthoritarian regimes and that of interested rising and established global powers. Central to this ecosystem is the dynamic interaction among three actors: communication technologies (the focus here is on the Internet); media, public, and activists' use of these technologies to mobilize, inform, and present alternative narratives, and to resist or confirm state narratives; and the authoritarian political regimes and their containment strategies for legacy media (particularly television) and the Internet.

This chapter outlines the challenges that research and practice in higher education have faced in measuring students' competences and learning outcomes. Particular attention is given to the systematic and institutional contexts in Germany. Based on the outlined national and international contextual framework, the Germany-wide program “Modeling and Measuring Competences in Higher Education (KoKoHs)” is discussed in terms of its two central working stages, key outcomes and lessons learned. In particular, the central results of the second phase are presented for the first time and integrated into the current state of international research. Based on this analysis, perspectives for further research on student learning in higher education and implications for practice and policy are derived.

This chapter explores the development of advertising regulations governing food advertising to children in Australia since the 1940s. By introducing the advertising and marketing self-regulatory system, the Australian Government is taking a neoliberal approach, advocating for the free market to initiate and sustain the country’s economic development, instead of greater government regulation. By examining the primary and secondary literature, such as government reports and research, and newspaper and academic articles, this chapter outlines different regulatory initiatives adopted by both the government and food industry to limit food and beverage advertising to children on television and online, in order to prevent obesity rates increasing in children. This chapter synthesizes and critically evaluates food industry and public health studies, government and non-government reviews, and other research studies to evaluate the influence of self-regulation on Australian television food advertising within the neoliberal context since the 1990s. It contributes to the literature on food advertising regulations for children in Australia by offering evidence of how the government, public health authorities and the food industry have attempted to keep pace with changes in the advertising, marketing and media industries by developing and reviewing advertising codes. It identifies the loopholes that exist in these self-regulatory codes and concludes that Australia’s current advertising regulatory arrangements are failing to protect our children from unhealthy food marketing on television, especially on relatively under-regulated online platforms such as social media and branded websites. The issues identified in this chapter could aid the food and beverage industry, as well as the self-regulatory system, to offer comprehensive and applicable solutions to combat Australia’s obesity crises by implementing new legislations that align with different marketing practices.

This paper provides a perspective on the field of nonmarket strategy. It does not attempt to survey the literature but instead focuses on the substantive content of research in the field. The paper discusses the origins of the field and the roles of nonmarket strategy. The political economy framework is used and contrasted with the current form of the resource-based theory. The paper argues that research should focus on the firm level and argues that the strategy of self-regulation can be useful in reducing the likelihood of challenges from private and public politics. The political economy perspective is illustrated using three examples: (1) public politics: Uber, (2) private politics: Rainforest Action Network and Citigroup, and (3) integrated strategy and private and public politics: The Fast Food Campaign. The paper concludes with a discussion of research issues in theory, empirics, and normative assessment.