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Civil disobedience is often defined as a public, conscientious, nonviolent act of breaking the law in an attempt to change an unjust policy or law. When applied to real-life situations, this widely accepted definition overlooks key features of civil disobedience and ignores civil acts that fundamentally challenge undemocratic institutions or the state and make socio-political changes possible. The purpose of this paper is to criticize and revise the conceptual, ethical and socio-political understandings of civil disobedience by integrating deliberative theory with some radical perspectives on civil disobedience.

This paper integrates and critically revises previous approaches to the justification and role of civil disobedience in democratic systems. Specifically, the ethical concerns about civil disobedience are discussed and the deliberative concept of civil disobedience is expanded as a form of political contestation by incorporating the socio-political aspects of civil disobedience. Although it is a conceptual discussion, the paper opted for an exploratory approach using empirically related examples to illustrate the theoretical discussion.

The paper provides a new perspective to the literature on civil disobedience. The critical review shows that the limited general understanding of civil disobedience conceptually is not useful to analyze various forms of civil disobedience.

The reviewed literature is limited due to a limited space.

The paper includes practical implications for policymakers and authorities when evaluating and responding to civil actions more effectively and for members of civil movements and organizations when creating new forms of civil protest and effective responses to authorities.

This paper may be a modest first attempt to reframe the concept of civil disobedience by integrating deliberative democracy theory and some radical perspectives.

The purpose of this paper is to present a “manifesto” exploring a methodological approach to legal analysis, relying upon a morphological understanding of ideology.

The authors explore ideology within law and legal culture. They examine one such ideology – rule of law – and consider how this can shape judicial decision-making. They suggest techniques by which such influences can be identified.

The authors make four findings. First, following Freeden, ideology can be understood as a ubiquitous form of political thinking which seeks to fix the meanings of essentially contested concepts. Second, ideology in this sense forms an important part, but is distinguishable from the wider notion of legal culture. Considering ideology in law as a sub-system of legal culture can therefore be fruitful in providing a rich understanding of interpretive disagreements among the judiciary. Third, rule of law as an ideal is itself ideological, as it comprises contested concepts such as certainty, equality, stability and legality. It can be considered to constitute an internal ideology of law and it can be analysed how the concepts are de-contested in individual decisions. Finally, understanding this can help in the analysis of judgments in areas with high levels of administrative discretion and political contestation, such as planning and environmental law, as it helps us to understand how any particular judge sees the role of the court in its wider political context.

The originality of the authors’ approach lies in the drawing together of methodological techniques and understandings of ideology in, and in relation to, law.

Noting that discussions of public participation and priority setting typically presuppose certain political theories of democracy, the purpose of this paper is to discuss two theories: the consensual and the agonistic. The distinction is illuminating when considering the difference between institutionalized public participation and contestatory participation.

The approach is a theoretical reconstruction of two ways of thinking about public participation in relation to priority setting in health care, drawing on the work of Habermas, a deliberative theorist, and Mouffe, a theorist of agonism.

The different theoretical approaches can be associated with different ways of understanding priority setting. In particular, agonistic democratic theory would understand priority setting as system of inclusions and exclusions rather than the determination of a consensus of social values, which is the typical deliberative way of thinking about the issues.

The paper shows the value of drawing out explicitly the tacit assumptions of practices of political participation in order to reveal their scope and limitations. It suggests that making such theoretical presuppositions explicit has value for health services management in recognizing these implicit choices.

Social left-wing political contestation and activism in Spain have undergone great changes over the past four years. First, there has been a shift from the 15-M movement that took over public plazas with its ambiguous claims basically related to radical democracy and rejection of institutional politics, to a new focus on social problems generated by the crisis, highlighting issues such as housing and cutbacks in social rights. Second, there has been a shift towards institutional politics in 2014. How should this recent whirlwind evolution in political contestation to status quo be understood? What is the relation between the changing material conditions of the population and the extremely shifting shape of left-wing militancy in Spain? The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The arguments put forward here are based on the authors’ involvement in social movements in the city of Seville between 2011 and the current time. They have been complemented with in-depth interviews of social activists who have taken part in the movements: 15-M assemblies, the housing movement, general strikes and, in more recent times, electoral initiatives (Podemos and Ganemos). The interviews were done between 2012 and 2014. The fieldwork has been complemented with an exploration of documentary sources: the manifests and writings of the various organisations that are being addressed.

In the transition from 15-M assemblies to the recent shift in electoral initiatives, social protest have turned from direct democracy demands and the rejection of institutionalised politics to a progressively pragmatic and short-term position where institutions are targeted. This paper argues that the generalised impoverishment of the population, increased numbers of evictions and consistently high unemployment rates have broadened the social framework for the action of social movements. The political and ideological crisis, rooted in the majority of the population’s crumbling expectations of social progress has enabled the array of possibilities to be opened up to emancipatory politics.

It is argued that massive deprivation provoked by the economic crisis has been a fundamental factor in the movements’ new orientation, what as a consequence, and until certain extent, throws the New Social Movements discourses into crisis itself, at least with regard to its post-materialistic nature and its opposition to institutions of the State.

The purpose of this paper is to apply Connolly’s (2003) concept of agonistic respect to develop a typology of agonistic/antagonistic discourses on Twitter. To develop the typology, this study examines 2,236 Tweets containing the hashtag #guncontrol and uses NodeXL (Smith et al., 2010) to create a network map from which the 75 most influential accounts are derived. Using constant-comparative analysis (Glaser and Strauss, 1967), the authors identify seven categories of discourse style based on Connoly’s (2001) notion of ressentiment and “good faith presentations” of opposing arguments: furtive/secretive, cravenly opportunistic, willfully ignorant, irrational sentimental, misunderstanding/misguided, contingently wrong and reciprocal inquiry. The typology provides a useful and unique way to operationalize agonistic democratic theory and serves as the possible basis for training a machine learning classifier to detect antagonistic discourses on social media platforms.

To determine the level of agonism on Twitter, the authors examine tweets that employed the hashtag #guncontrol on March 12, 2018, one month after the shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglass High School in Parkland, Florida on February 14. The authors used the NodeXL excel add-on to collect and map 2,236 tweets. Using grounded theory/constant-comparative analysis (Glaser and Strauss, 1967), the authors develop a typology of seven types of discourses ordered from most antagonistic to most agonistic using Connolly’s (1993) concept of agonistic respect.

After examining the top 75 most shared tweets and using constant-comparative analysis to look for patterns of similarity and dissimilarity, the authors identified seven different ways in which individuals present their opponents’ value positions on Twitter on the issue of gun control. The authors were guided by agonistic theory in the authors’ inquiry. The authors looked at how Twitter users expressed their opponent’s faith/value positions, how pluralistic the discourse space was in the comment threads and how much the “talk” was likely to elicit ressentiment from adversaries.

Because the authors intended to engage in theory building, the authors limited the analysis to a selected number of tweets on one particularly salient topic, on one day. The intent of this was to allow for a close reading of the tweets in that specific network for the purposes of creating a useful typology that can be applied to a broader range of cases/issues/platforms.

The authors hope that typology could serve as a potential starting point for Twitter to think about how it could design its algorithms toward agonistic talk. The typology could be used as a classification scheme to differentiate agonistic from antagonistic threads. An algorithm could be trained to spot threads overwhelmingly populated by antagonistic discourse and instructed to insert posts from other threads that represent agonistic responses like “contingently wrong” or “reciprocal inquiry.” While generous presentations or deeper, more nuanced presentations of the opponent’s value position are not a panacea, they could serve to change the orientation by which users engage with policy issues.

Social media platforms like Twitter have up to now been left alone to make markets and establish profitability off of public sphere conversations. The result has been a lack of attention to how discourse on these platforms affects users mental well-being, community health and democratic viability. Recently, Twitter’s CEO has indicated a need to rethink the ways in which it promotes “healthy discourse.” The utilitarian presumption that, left to our own devices, we will trial and error our way to the collective good does not account for the importance of others in refining one’s preferences, arguments and world views. Without an “other” to vet ideas and lead us toward becoming wiser, we are left with a Wyly antagonism that moves discourse further and further away from agonistic respect and toward antagonistic virtual struggle. Platforms that allow antagonistic talk that breeds ressentiment run the risk of irrevocably damaging democracy through poisoning its public sphere.

This paper is unique in providing a typology/framework for thinking about the types of “political talk” that exists on Twitter. By using agonistic political theory as a framework, the authors are able to establish some guiding principles for “good political talk” that acknowledges the incommensurability of value positions on issues like gun control. The typology’s emphasis on agonistic respect, ressentiment and generosity in the presentation of alternative value positions provides a starting point from which to map and catalog discourse on Twitter more generally and offers a normative model for changing algorithmic design.

Moral struggles in and around markets abound in contemporary societies where markets have become the dominant form of economic coordination. Reviewing research on morality and markets across disciplinary boundaries, this introductory essay suggests that a moral turn can currently be observed in scholarship, and draws a direct connection to recent developments in the sociology of morality. The authors introduce the chapters in the present volume “The Contested Moralities of Markets.” In doing so, the authors distinguish three types of moral struggles in and around markets: struggles around morally contested markets where the exchange of certain goods on markets is contested; struggles within organizations that are related to an organization’s embeddedness in complex institutional environments with competing logics and orders of worth; and moral struggles in markets where moral justifications are mobilized by a variety of field members who act as moral entrepreneurs in their striving for moralizing the economy. Finally, the authors highlight three properties of moral struggles in contemporary markets: They (1) arise over different objects, (2) constitute political struggles, and (3) are related to two broader social processes: market moralization and market expansion. The introduction concludes by discussing some of the theoretical approaches that allow particular insights into struggles over morality in markets. Collectively, the contributions in this volume advance our current understanding of the contested moralities of markets by highlighting the sources, processes, and outcomes of moral struggles in and around markets, both through tracing the creation, reproduction, and change of underlying moral orders and through reflecting the status and power differentials, alliances, and political strategies as well as the general cultural, social, and political contexts in which the struggles unfold.

By the mid-19th century the British colonial state introduced liberal education to India. Amongst various disciplines, political economy illustrates the concerns of the colonial state with the education of Indians, and its anxiety with quelling political discontentment. The emerging Indian nationalist intelligentsia also utilized ideas from classical political economy, first taught in educational institutions, to critique colonial policy and proposed the development of “Indian Economics”, suited to national economic interests. This paper explores the development of political economy as a specific knowledge form in Calcutta University and Bombay University, and its connection with colonial educational policy^.

This study relies primarily on university records and the proceedings of the Education Department to bring out the politically sensitive nature of the teaching of economics in colonial India.

The study finds that political economy grew from being a minor part of the overall university syllabi to becoming part of the first university departments created in early-20th-century India. The government and nationalist forces both found the discipline to be relevant to their respective agendas. The circulation of knowledge theoretical framework is found to be relevant here.

The history of political economy in Indian universities, especially during the 19th century, has not been dealt with in any detail. This study tries to fill this gap. The close connection between politics and the teaching of economics has also not been studied closely, which this paper does.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a political perspective on modifications in corporate governance regulation. In the wake of the financial crisis, the investment rationale of institutional investors is being pushed away from a focus on financial market liquidity and short-term trading. From a political perspective, this modification entails consideration both of investment horizon and of the definition of corporate value.

The paper narrates the historical policy debate on institutional investors as corporate governors. Building on this point, a conceptual framework is developed to further the understanding of the current shifts in policy debate of institutional investors as governors.

The authors find a strong policy impetus to move away from certain liberal market assumptions of efficient financial markets and the positive effects of privatization, toward viewing markets as institutionally embedded. Based on their knowledge of corporate governance regimes’ political economy, the authors argue that this shift brings intensified engagement of institutional investors in corporate affairs. The reasons for why and how this might be politically contested are specified. In conclusion, propositions regarding the outcome of such contestation in different national corporate governance regimes are offered.

Pointing to the predominantly European stakeholder value versus shareholder value discussion, the authors claim that the corporate governance policy debate related to intensified engagement of institutional investors in corporate affairs is still in its infancy. Their political perspective, including propositions for further elaboration, offers a contribution to further academic debate.

This study aims to discover the role of accounting and media in hegemonic discourse for divestment valuation of PT Freeport Indonesia shares.

This study employs data from 608 news articles from 5 national media. This study uses Gramsci's concept of hegemony and Laclau and Mouffe's hegemonic discourse to explore the ideological role of accounting in the formation of historical blocs and investigate the contestants' discursive strategies through the chains of equivalence and difference.

The incumbent presidential candidate, by involving political and intellectual actors, has succeeded in taking over and shifting PT Freeport Indonesia's hegemony to maintain its power, through the ideology of divestment and accounting. The media played a role in the victory of the pro-divestment bloc in the hegemonic divestment discourse contest. The pro-divestment bloc's discursive strategy uses more formal and technical language styles than the anti-divestment bloc, which uses informal language styles. The pro-divestment bloc uses the key signifiers of low price, improved financial performance, nationalization and welfare, as opposed to the anti-divestment bloc, with the key signifiers of high price, declining financial performance and neoliberalist colonization.

The implications of this research may encourage accounting academics to contribute to emancipatory social movements in the struggle for hegemony. The implication for policy makers is the importance of involving the public, intellectual actors, political actors and the media in supporting diverse state strategic policies in the national interest.

This paper contributes to Gramsci's theory of hegemony and Laclau and Mouffe's hegemonic discourse to understand the role of accounting and media in a nationalization project as an emancipatory social movement, as well as a hegemonic shifting political movement.