Search results

The purpose of this paper is to interrogate the forms of activist organisation at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change COP16 in Cancún and reveals their attempts to create alternatives to a seemingly “depoliticised” response to climate change. The paper argues that existing attempts to challenge depoliticisation face problems in the form of governmental opposition, limitations on forms of organising, and internal conflicts between activists.

This paper utilises “scholar-activist” engagement with actors at alternative “popular” spaces established outside the COP16 in Cancún, Mexico. It draws upon extensive participant observation and in-depth interviews with 20 English-speaking activists.

Common among activists was a concern to try and model alternative forms of social relations, to the depoliticised and hierarchical forms found in the formal Conference of Parties, via forms of anarchist-influenced “prefigurative” practice. In spite, or perhaps because, of perceived challenges to attempts to organise their political praxis along non-hierarchical lines, many people were ambivalent about the scope of their action, revealing highly reflexive accounts of the limitations of these whilst simultaneously remaining pragmatic in trying to make the most of their involvement.

The paper helps us to better understand the potential to politicise climate change. Understanding the challenges faced by activists is important for trying to organise more effective political responses to climate injustice. It is suggested that we must understand activists’ responses to these challenges and limitations in terms of the pragmatism in response that allows them to continue to invest in activism in the face of unsuccessful actions.

This study aims to examine the associations between socioeconomic status, types of rigging (pre- polling-day and post-), politics and voting behavior, vote casting and perceptions of rigging in Pakistan’s most recent elections, and attitudes toward electoral integrity.

Data were collected from students at three different universities. In all, 748 units of analysis (488 male and 260 female) recorded their responses by means of a self-structured questionnaire. Linear regression was applied to measure the associations between variables, and the reliability and validity of the scales were tested.

A significant relationship was found between pre-poll rigging, post-poll rigging, politics and voting behavior, socioeconomic characteristics (i.e. age, education, father’s education, background or place of residence and monthly household incomes), the perception of rigging in the last elections and attitudes toward electoral integrity.

Pakistan’s history has been blemished by electoral malpractices during both de facto and de jure regimes. Attention has formerly been paid to either polling-day or post-election rigging. The relationship of electoral integrity with different factors explored in this study have usually been ignored or overlooked. The findings of this study would help policy-makers, youth experts and academicians to reorient their behaviors to strengthen political stability, the rule of law and the continuation of democracy via their participation in the system.

To the researchers’ best knowledge, there has not been a single peer-reviewed study of Pakistan which has explored the associations between the variables examined for this study. The main academic challenge the researchers faced was to find a standardized and contextualized scale or tool to explore how different types of vote-rigging affected attitudes toward electoral integrity. Thus, the structured scales for types of rigging and electoral integrity developed here would be useful for future studies in the field of electoral integrity in democratic countries.

Poland’s political and economic transformation after 1989 brought the logic of the neoliberal market into the educational system. These changes, however, were far from the real liberal free market and instead relied on bureaucratic and technocratic local-level apparatus as well as supranational supports (the EU). Moreover, instead of enhancing post-socialist education to bring them up to the level of the core territories, this process pushed education out to the (semi?)periphery. The purpose of this paper is to present selected examples of alternative non-mainstream models of education.

Elements analyzed include: non/academic discourses, with particular emphasis on academic texts, media material and public debates concerning the topic in question.

Two related fields and levels ought to be distinguished: the descriptive level, focused on presenting non-mainstream educational institutions and initiatives, within the socioeconomic context of Poland’s post-socialist transformation; the normative level, with recommendations for policymakers, NGOs and educational activists.

Appreciation of systems parallel and alternative to the neoliberal and technocratic mainstream education system in Poland, with a view to encouraging both policymakers to recognise and develop such initiatives, and members of Polish civil society to create and participate in such forms of education.

Most scholars focus on mainstream education, with a number of exceptions, largely those engaged in the parallel models. This neoliberal model of education is accepted or critically examined, but its technocratic base is not recognised. This text is therefore ground-breaking in that it describes the real mechanisms of the Polish educational system in transition and provides a normative account and recommendations.

The paper uses theoretical conceptions of power and orchestration to analyse the role of the Corporate Reporting Dialogue on the global standardisation of sustainability reporting.

The paper adopts an interpretive approach and draws on a qualitative dataset derived from interviews, documentary analysis and observation.

The paper traces how the Corporate Reporting Dialogue was orchestrated by the International Integrated Reporting Council, with the objective of aligning sustainability reporting standards, but moved to become a vehicle for orchestrating standards consistent with the recommendations of the Task Force for Climate-Related Financial Disclosure. Collaboration between the Dialogue's five most active bodies forged the blueprint adopted by the International Sustainability Standards Board's vision of sustainability reporting that prioritised reporting only on those socio-ecological issues deemed to materially affect future enterprise value.

The paper explicates the role of collaborative initiatives in the standardisation of sustainability reporting and shows how these initiatives act as vehicles to subtly undermine the GRI position (presented as one standardiser amongst many whose vision appears as an outlier, despite its position as the dominant sustainability reporting standardiser), and establish the prioritisation of a sustainability reporting worldview based on investor-oriented enterprise value creation. The case also draws attention to the specific orchestrators involved in establishing this prioritisation, and reveals the influence of philanthropic foundations. In doing so, it extends our understanding of legitimacy generation in standard-setting by showing how collaborative initiatives offer private standardisers another means to generate input legitimacy for what, in this case, represented a vision of reporting at odds with most sustainability reporting practice. Finally, the paper extends the sites of power to collaborative initiatives and details the mechanisms through which covert power is exercised but also masked where orchestrators use convening power, funding and membership choices to define the boundaries of discussion by influencing who participates, what is on the agenda and what activity is undertaken. Rather than viewing standardisation as a simple pursuit of conquest between individual standardisers, the paper considers how collaboration provides the opportunity for assimilation.

The purpose of this paper is to explore top government hands-on megaproject management model applied to Istanbul’s new airport megaproject. The study aims to find an answer to this research question: “How is the organizational design and management of a megaproject that has been alive in a confrontational socio-political environment and whose national strategic importance is high?”

Organizational theory and critical theory perspectives are used in this study. Istanbul’s grand airport is chosen as the case study. Interview, focus group and document analysis methods are used together. The research yields data from qualitative resources. Verbal and written materials are organized into three major themes and 27 key subjects for content analysis.

A top level of organizational management can be attained in the state in order for the mega projects with high national strategic importance to survive without problems and with high performance. The top government-level organizational structure implemented at Istanbul’s new airport has reduced complexity, risk and uncertainty; increased performance and product quality; and strenghtened inter-organizational compatibility and communication within the megaproject organization. However, this structuring also increased centralization, reduced transparency and direct public participation in the decision-making process.

The megaproject is run in strict confidence and limited information is shared gradually in a controlled way with public by the megaproject organization. Therefore, a qualitative methodology is followed and the usage of quantitative data remained limited in the research.

The study presents an exemplary top government-level megaproject management model for countries experiencing strong socio-political conflicts and aiming to perform megaprojects with high national strategic importance.

The organization of Istanbul’s new airport megaproject offers an exemplary, flexible and innovative organizational management model for countries that want to realize mega projects with high national strategic importance and experience strong socio-political conflicts. The questions of how to cope with challenges, how to build management capabilities and how to improve the cooperation and coordination within megaprojects have found some answers with this study. In addition, this study provides an insight into how to make more effective objections to wrong megaproject practices and the right strategies that the opposing organizations can follow.

This empirical research widens and deepens the theoretical foundations of top government hands-on megaproject management. The study, which includes a process analysis, allows to better understand the philosophy, nature, success, planning process, social organization and dynamics of megaprojects and to explain them through the values and strategies of organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to present contrasting approaches to the descriptive case study of tourism to the buried city of Plymouth, Montserrat, an example of the marketing and burying – the supply and demand – of apocalyptic dark tourism on the island.

A case study mixed-methods methodology is adopted, and findings are derived from tour guiding fieldwork, guide and tourist interviews, and an analysis of travel writing and tourism marketing campaigns.

Dark tourism is viewed as a contentious and problematic concept: it attracts and repels tourism to the former capital Plymouth, Montserrat. After 20 years of the volcano crisis, the islanders, government and Tourist Board are commemorating resilience living with the volcano and regeneration in a disaster scenario. Marketing and consumption approaches to dark tourism elucidate different facets to the case study of “the buried city” of Plymouth, Montserrat, and the Montserrat Springs Hotel overlooking Plymouth. The disjunct between these two types of approach to dark tourism, as well as the different criteria attached to working definitions of dark tourism – and the range of interests in apocalyptic dark tourism into the city and its surrounds – show some of the problems and limitations with theoretical and scalar discussions on dark tourism.

The paper’s implications are that both supply and demand approaches to dark tourism are needed to fully understand a dark tourism destination and to reconcile the disjunct between these two approaches and the perspectives of tourist industry and tourism users.

This is a descriptive dark tourism case study of a former capital city examined from both supply and demand perspectives. It introduces the apocalyptic to dark tourism destination analysis.

This paper aims to obtain the domain of the textual content generated by users of online social network (OSN) platforms. Understanding a users’ domain (s) of interest is a significant step towards addressing their domain-based trustworthiness through an accurate understanding of their content in their OSNs.

This study uses a Twitter mining approach for domain-based classification of users and their textual content. The proposed approach incorporates machine learning modules. The approach comprises two analysis phases: the time-aware semantic analysis of users’ historical content incorporating five commonly used machine learning classifiers. This framework classifies users into two main categories: politics-related and non-politics-related categories. In the second stage, the likelihood predictions obtained in the first phase will be used to predict the domain of future users’ tweets.

Experiments have been conducted to validate the mechanism proposed in the study framework, further supported by the excellent performance of the harnessed evaluation metrics. The experiments conducted verify the applicability of the framework to an effective domain-based classification for Twitter users and their content, as evident in the outstanding results of several performance evaluation metrics.

This study is limited to an on/off domain classification for content of OSNs. Hence, we have selected a politics domain because of Twitter’s popularity as an opulent source of political deliberations. Such data abundance facilitates data aggregation and improves the results of the data analysis. Furthermore, the currently implemented machine learning approaches assume that uncertainty and incompleteness do not affect the accuracy of the Twitter classification. In fact, data uncertainty and incompleteness may exist. In the future, the authors will formulate the data uncertainty and incompleteness into fuzzy numbers which can be used to address imprecise, uncertain and vague data.

This study proposes a practical framework comprising significant implications for a variety of business-related applications, such as the voice of customer/voice of market, recommendation systems, the discovery of domain-based influencers and opinion mining through tracking and simulation. In particular, the factual grasp of the domains of interest extracted at the user level or post level enhances the customer-to-business engagement. This contributes to an accurate analysis of customer reviews and opinions to improve brand loyalty, customer service, etc.

This paper fills a gap in the existing literature by presenting a consolidated framework for Twitter mining that aims to uncover the deficiency of the current state-of-the-art approaches to topic distillation and domain discovery. The overall approach is promising in the fortification of Twitter mining towards a better understanding of users’ domains of interest.

Describes in detail the simpler approach to scenario planning which retains the ability to handle uncertainty – the traditional reason for using such scenarios. States that their greatest virtue, however, is that their use naturally – and painlessly – widens managers′ viewpoints and helps to extend their planning horizons beyond the short term. Concludes that the most important message to emerge is that scenarios can be simple, and the simpler they are – and the simpler the process used to derive them – the more effective they may be; not least because those using them are able to understand how they work.

Over the last four years in Spain, a strong autonomist movement (15M), based on radical democracy and mistrust of any kind of instituted politics, seems to be turning toward statist and institutionalized politics. The purpose of this paper is to answer the following questions: Can we speak of a community fetishism, as opposed to State fetishism? Do autonomist social movements have a spatial project as opposed to a State spatial project? Why do horizontal and self-management-oriented social movements turn to the conquest of the State in the current framework?

The empirical evidence for this study stems from a qualitative methodological approach. The authors used two different types of sources. First, direct observations from the authors’ own engagement in social movements in Spain from 2011 to the present are used. Second, this work is part of a systematic research on spatial dynamics and the evolution of collective action in Spain. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with activists involved in social movements from 2012 to 2015, in which time informal interviews were conducted, and documents and observational notes were also collected.

Social movements have tended to develop alternatives to state spatial projects, partially as a result of an institutional setting that has been progressively closed to political alternatives to the neoliberal state. This last point leads to the posing of politics as completely independent of the political arena of the State (community fetish). From the first square occupations to the subsequent organization in local meetings, the 15M movement was the last expression of this tendency in Spain, while the turn on State political institutions responds to the obvious limitations of community fetishism in the context of the social and political tensions of the Spanish crisis.

This analysis contributes to the current debates on social movements in two ways. First, the authors investigate a usually neglected agent in the production of spatial political projects and strategies such as social movements. Second, the specific case of the 15M movement in Spain strongly shows the contradictions and limitations of the movements, which supposedly do not aspire to replace the State’s sovereign power through the idea of community fetishism.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect upon the politics of and in organizational transformations in the wake of the fall of the Berlin wall and Germany's reunification.

The paper juxtaposes a political‐philosophical perspective informed by Rancière – what we call a dramaturgy of politics – with the findings of an ethnographic study conducted in the Berlin State Library in 2002/2003.

The paper outlines a reading of the event of November 9, 1989 and its aftermath as a dissensual event of politics proper, i.e. the emergence of a new political subjectivity, followed by a consensual process of social organization. In the state library, both the consensual “fantasy of the organizational One” as well its disruption are causing struggles over what is visible and sayable. A dramaturgy of politics thus encourages us to add our voices to the specific time‐spaces in which an excess of words, signs and forms alters the configuration of what is visible and expressible.

The usual disclaimers about the limits of ethnographic research apply. The paper calls for further inquiries into the dramaturgy of organizational politics. It also reflects upon the “Western gaze” and the problematic of “speaking for” the presumably dominated.

It is hoped that the paper contributes to the understanding of the politics of organization (theory) by outlining an alternative conceptual approach and confronting it with ethnographic findings.