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This study examines the roles of the Internet and other types of media use in explaining the support for direct democracy and further investigates the mediation of political trust in the relationship between media use and the attitude toward direct democracy.

Using data drawn from Taiwan Social Change Survey 2014 and the approach of structural equation model framework, this study identifies the indirect effects of the Internet and other types of media use on the attitude toward referendums.

The results of this study show that the frustration resulting from the process of representative politics dominated by political elites is associated with the support for direct democracy as an effective alternative to generate political influences in the formation of public policies.

The advances in the Internet and information technology have expanded the possible platforms of obtaining political information and enabled people to rapidly access political information at lower costs. It is expected that Internet use has altered the relationships among citizens, political parties and the government, potentially influencing citizens' political trust and their attitude toward direct democracy.

This paper aims to highlight the very recent cases of internet shutdown during the creation of Union territory of Jammu and Kashmir and enactment of Citizenship Amendment Act and the detention under Section 66 (A) of Information Technology Act 2000.

This study takes up a broad explorative discussion of the challenges posed to the consolidation of democracy in India due to frequent internet shutdowns for online communication and social media usages.

As findings, it is narrated that due to politically motivated reasons, India compromises its commitment to the pluralism and diversity in views, in particular, individual rights to freedom of expression and opinion, enshrined in the constitution.

Right to freedom of speech and expression has now taken a new shape due to the emergence and availability of the internet that enriches the quality of democracy.

Computer‐mediated communication (CMC) is becoming firmly embedded into library work through the use of electronic mail, and it is likely that computer‐supported collaborative working, using e‐mail and other forms of computer‐conferencing and groupware products, will have a key role to play in the development of integrated digital libraries across sectoral, national and international boundaries. This review paper draws on a literature survey which was undertaken as part of British Library funded research into the use of e‐mail in academic libraries between 1995‐1997. It aims to provide a digest of some influential perspectives from the literature which are likely to be of relevance to managers, team leaders and systems staff in information services who are interested in optimising the use of text‐based CMC across and between library organisations, and within teams.

Public schools in a democracy should educate young people to develop the knowledge and dispositions of citizenship in order to foster a more inclusive society and ensure the continuation of the democratic republic. Conceptualizations of citizenship must be clearly framed in order to support civic engagement, in particular, civic engagement for social justice. Rarely do educational technology scholars or educators interrogate the International Society for Technology in Education definition of digital citizenship. Educational technologists should connect notions of civic engagement and conceptions of digital citizenship. Instead, the field continues to engage in research, policy and practice which disconnects these ideas. This suggests that a gap exists between educational technologists’ conceptualizations of citizenship and the larger implications of citizenship within a democracy. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This paper uses a between-study analysis of the literature to answer: How does the field of educational technology discuss and research digital citizenship? The data were coded using constant comparative analysis. The study adopted a theoretical framework grounded in Westheimer and Kahne’s (2004) What Kind of Citizen, and Krutka and Carpenter’s (2016) digital approach to citizenship.

The findings suggest that educational technologists’ uncritical usage of the term digital citizenship limits the authors’ field’s ability to contribute to a fundamental purpose of public schooling in a democracy – to develop citizens. Further, it hampers imagining opportunities to use educational technology to develop pedagogies of engaged citizenship for social justice.

Reframing the conception of digital citizenship as active civic engagement for social justice pushes scholarship, and its attendant implications for practice, in a proactive direction aimed at dismantling oppression.

This paper investigates whether democracy plays a mediating role in the relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI) and inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).

The empirical analysis is conducted using fixed effects and system GMM (Generalised Method of Moments) on a panel of 38 Sub-Saharan African countries covering the period of 1990–2018.

The results find that FDI has no direct effect on inequality whereas democracy reduces inequality directly in both the short run and the long run. The sensitivity analyses find that democracy improves equality regardless of the magnitude of FDI, resource endowment or democratic deepening whereas FDI only reduces inequality once a moderate level of democracy has been achieved.

The results discussed above thus have four policy implications. First, these results show that although democracy has inequality reducing benefits, SSA is unlikely to significantly reduce inequality unless the region purposefully diversifies its trade and FDI away from natural resources. Second, the region should continue to expand credit access to reduce inequality and attract FDI. Third, policymakers should undertake reforms that will reduce youth inequality. Lastly, the region should focus on long-run democratic reforms rather than on short-run democratization to improve governance and investor confidence.

Although there are existing studies that examine the association between FDI and inequality, FDI and democracy and democracy and inequality, this is the first study to explicitly examine the effect of democracy on the association between FDI and inequality in SSA, and the first study to separately consider the possible varied effects of contemporaneous democratization versus the long-run accumulation of democratic capital. In addition, rather than measure inequality by income alone, this study uses the more appropriate Human Development Index to account for SSA's sociological, education and income disparities.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the consequences of a managerial approach to renewal for a union’s behaviour by analysing the UK’s fourth largest trade union – The Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers (USDAW).

The findings draw on in-depth semi-structured interviews with union officials.

The research findings show the significance of a managerialist approach to UDSAW’s renewal strategy and its correlation with existing renewal strategies of organising and partnership. However, this approach was not immune to context, with tensions between agency and articulation challenging the basic concept of managerialism and influencing union behaviour.

The data were collected from a single case with a small sample size.

The authors’ findings suggest that tensions between bureaucracy and democracy will mediate the extent to which managerialist approaches can be used within unions adding support to the strategic choice theory and underlying arguments that unions can influence their fortune. However, institutional and external pressures could see managerialism becoming more prevalent, with oligarchic and bureaucratic forces prevailing, which could be particularly applicable to unions operating in challenging contexts, such as USDAW. The managerialisation of unions has consequences for union officers; with officers facing increasing pressure in their roles to behave as managers with attendant implications for role conflict, identity and motivation.

If managerialism is becoming more prevalent with unions, with oligarchic and bureaucratic forces prevailing, this has potentially wider societal implications, whereby collectivism and worker-led democracy could become scarcer within unions and the workplace, thus irretrievably altering the nature of the employment relationship.

This paper brings together disparate themes in the literature to propose a conceptual framework of three key elements of managerialism: centralised strategies; performance management and the managerialisation of union roles. The authors’ findings demonstrate how there is scope for unions to adopt a hybrid approach to renewal, and to draw upon their internal resources, processes and techniques to implement change, including behavioural change. Consequently, theories and empirical studies of union renewal need to better reflect the complexities of approaches that unions are now adopting and further explore these models within the agency and articulation principles that underpin the nature of unions.

The paper investigates knowledge sharing and co‐creation in an organisation‐wide discussion supported by Computer‐Mediated Communication (CMC). The paper draws on the empirical evidence from a field study of a consultative process as part of a University strategic decision‐making. Informed by Habermas’s theory of communicative action, the investigation focuses on communicative practices in the CMC discussion and the ways participants interact, share knowledge and co‐create meanings in a particular situation. Communicative analysis of organisational discourse via CMC reveals hidden structures and mechanisms that impede knowledge sharing and inhibit cooperative meaning making. The issue here is whether CMC enables or disables some of these structures and mechanisms. By interpreting the CMC discussion as an argumentation process the paper aims to provide deeper insights into this issue. Among the lessons learned are requirements for new technologies to support knowledge sharing and meaning co‐creation.

Organizational democracy is the new model of organizational design for a Democratic Age, and out of this new model grows a freedom-centered and healthy climate. Democratic management is a key to greater organization success and a necessity to gain higher levels of performance and innovation. The purpose of this paper is to explore the antecedents and consequences of organizational democracy in an Iranian context.

Statistical population includes the employees of the Gas Company of Isfahan Province. For data analysis, 263 accurate completed questionnaires are used. Structural equation modeling is applied to investigate the relationship between the research variables.

The findings showed that some types of organizational culture (i.e. self-criticism, team, and participatory culture) (β=0.33); and some dimensions of organizational structure (i.e. decentralization, flat hierarchy, and less formalization) (β=0.55) as antecedent variables have a significant direct effect on organizational democracy. Also, organizational democracy has a significant direct effect on human resources outcomes consist of organizational commitment, self-efficacy, and improving work relationships (β=0.64); and organizational outcomes consist of organizational learning and organizational agility (β=0.96).

Despite years of encouragement from consultants and theorists, managers have generally shown little interest toward democratic process as a system of decision making and management in organizations. This study proposes a comprehensive model for identifying the antecedents and consequences of organizational democracy. Most studies in this field are theoretical rather than empirical. But, in this research, the proposed relationships are examined empirically.

E-learning is an increasingly popular form of education for college students (Allen & Seaman, 2007). There are a number of best practices for teaching online courses (Lewis & Abdul-Hamid, 2006) which should be followed by leadership educators. In addition, for a wide variety of reasons, women comprise a significant portion of the distance education population. Because of their differing communication styles and needs (Tannen, 1989, 1991), women may have a harder time being perceived as valuable members of the virtual community. They may also find the experience less meaningful than their male counterparts (Harper, 2007). If leadership education is to be successful moving into the 21st century it must be welcoming to female students. Suggestions for improving online learning are provided, especially for female students.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the effect of new public management‐based reforms on public accountability in two countries, Italy and Sweden, explaining what strategies can be used to enhance accountability toward citizens.

Two case studies have been analysed in order to compare how public accountability has been enhanced in different cultural and geographical contexts.

In both countries, the enhancement of public accountability is at stake both in the political debate and in the public policies, but the strategies implemented resulted are path dependent especially in the choice between more disclosure and more citizen participation.

The paper uses only two case studies and therefore results can hardly be generalised; also the selected cases are both examples of best practice in the two countries.

The comparison offers critical insights on the adopted choices to enhance public accountability in two different contexts, also emphasising the role of IT and their possible use.

From a theoretical point of view, the paper offers an original framing of the possible strategies to improve accountability toward citizens: more accountability through more disclosure and more accountability through more citizen participation. The empirical analysis analyses the solutions adopted in two different countries aimed at improving accountability toward citizens and their advantages and limitations.