Search results

To elaborate the nature of fact-checking in the domain of political information by examining how fact-checkers assess the validity of claims concerning the Russo-Ukrainian conflict and how they support their assessments by drawing on evidence acquired from diverse sources of information.

Descriptive quantitative and qualitative content analysis of 128 reports written by the fact-checkers of Snopes – an established fact-checking organisation – during the period of 24 February 2022 – 28 June, 2023. For the analysis, nine evaluation grounds were identified, most of them inductively from the empirical material. It was examined how the fact-checkers employed such grounds while assessing the validity of claims and how the assessments were bolstered by evidence acquired from information sources such as newspapers.

Of the 128 reports, the share of assessments indicative of the invalidity of the claims was 54.7%, while the share of positive ratings was 26.7%. The share of mixed assessments was 15.6%. In the fact-checking, two evaluation grounds, that is, the correctness of information and verifiability of an event presented in a claim formed the basis for the assessment. Depending on the topic of the claim, grounds such as temporal and spatial compatibility, as well as comparison by similarity and difference occupied a central role. Most popular sources of information offering evidence for the assessments include statements of government representatives, videos and photographs shared in social media, newspapers and television programmes.

As the study concentrated on fact-checking dealing with political information about a specific issue, the findings cannot be extended to concern the fact-checking practices in other contexts.

The study is among the first to characterise how fact-checkers employ evaluation grounds of diverse kind while assessing the validity of political information.

This study employs Stein Rokkan's methodological approach to analyse state formation in the Greater Middle East. It develops a conceptual framework distinguishing colonial, populist and democratic pacts, suitable for analysis of state formation and nation-building through to the present period. The framework relies on historical institutionalism. The methodology, however, is Rokkan's. The initial conceptual analysis also specifies differences between European and the Middle Eastern state formation processes. It is followed by a brief and selective discussion of historical preconditions. Next, the method of plotting singular cases into conceptual-typological maps is applied to 20 cases in the Greater Middle East (including Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey). For reasons of space, the empirical analysis is limited to the colonial period (1870s to the end of World War 1). Three typologies are combined into one conceptual-typological map of this period. The vertical left-hand axis provides a composite typology that clarifies cultural-territorial preconditions. The horizontal axis specifies transformations of the region's agrarian class structures since the mid-19th century reforms. The right-hand vertical axis provides a four-layered typology of processes of external intervention. A final section presents selected comparative case reconstructions. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first time such a Rokkan-style conceptual-typological map has been constructed for a non-European region.

Leadership assessment programs are intended to ensure that the organization retains or hires high-quality leadership. Among the many skills that must be included, executive communication is a cornerstone of effective leadership. However, there are many techniques to assessing executive communication that impose numerous advantages and disadvantages. The purpose of this study is to explore several techniques for evaluating executive communication skills in leadership assessment programs.

Building upon case studies from novel commanding officer selection efforts in the military, the current study outlines three possible areas of executive communication for leadership assessment programs: panel-based interviews, guided discussion and executive writing.

Although each technique offers some advantages, the best technique depends upon the context. Panel-based interviews can provide excellent depth in evaluating candidates, whereas executive writing focuses more upon crafting a deliberate and clear message without the ability to clarify or use nonverbal cues. Selecting an appropriate technique depends greatly upon the workload imposed on the leadership assessment team and the number of candidates available.

Leadership selection programs are often done piecemeal or based on local experience. By building upon novel efforts in military commanding officer selection, the goal is to promulgate effective executive communication techniques that will enhance leadership selection through more effective communication across all levels of leadership positions.

The purpose of this study was to gain a deeper understanding of the experiences and challenges of Middle Eastern refugee mothers in using technology for language learning in regional Australian context.

This study used a qualitative research design and used a narrative enquiry technique to understand participants’ experiences of language acquisition with limited access to technology in new resettlement setting.

The findings presented in this paper were derived from a qualitative investigation conducted on a sample of 21 refugee mothers from Middle Eastern countries. The research aimed to explore the role of a language education programme on their integration within the regional Australian context. Participants discussed a variety of aspects of their everyday lives within their new resettlement context while offering insights on the language education programme and its impacts on their educational progress. The theme “lack of access/use of technology in English language learning” emerged from the narratives. This paper draws on selected interview data from the participants.

This study fills the gap in the literature on Middle Eastern refugees in regional Australia by exploring how lack/limited technology access can impact language acquisition of women from under-represented contexts.

In this article, the author discusses works from the French Documentation Movement in the 1940s and 1950s with regard to how it formulates bibliographic classification systems as documents. Significant writings by Suzanne Briet, Éric de Grolier and Robert Pagès are analyzed in the light of current document-theoretical concepts and discussions.

Conceptual analysis.

The French Documentation Movement provided a rich intellectual environment in the late 1940s and early 1950s, resulting in original works on documents and the ways these may be represented bibliographically. These works display a variety of approaches from object-oriented description to notational concept-synthesis, and definitions of classification systems as isomorph documents at the center of politically informed critique of modern society.

The article brings together historical and conceptual elements in the analysis which have not previously been combined in Library and Information Science literature. In the analysis, the article discusses significant contributions to classification and document theory that hitherto have eluded attention from the wider international Library and Information Science research community. Through this, the article contributes to the currently ongoing conceptual discussion on documents and documentality.

Previous studies show that the implementation of gender equality encounters resistance in military organizations, but it is often invisible or seen as confined to anonymous structures or troubled individuals. This paper aims to show how the Swedish Armed Forces (SAF) use organizational principles to resist implementing gender equality measures.

The study is a qualitative analysis of discursive strategies in the SAF’s 2013–2018 annual reports to government.

The organizing principles of instrumentality and distance, while existing in parallel with gender equality efforts, actually pursue logics that prevents the SAF from implementing gender equality. The principle of instrumentality in this context means that gender equality in the SAF is of secondary interest to organizational members. The principle of distancing from the problem includes strategies that alienate female from male officers.

The contribution of this paper is the finding that the use of organizing principles represents conscious organizational resistance to gender equality efforts. This kind of use needs to be revealed and criticized to change military organizations.

This study is a radical interactionist analysis of family conflict. Drawing on both a negotiated order perspective and Athen's theory of complex dominative encounters, this study analyzes the role that domination plays in conflicts among intimates. As the family engages in repeated conflicts over roles, the family also engages in negotiations over the family order, what role each party should play, interpretations of past events, and plans for the future. These conflicts take place against a backdrop of patriarchy that asymmetrically distributes power in the family to determine the family order. The data from this study come from a content analysis of mothers with substance use problems as depicted in the reality television show Intervention. The conflicts in these families reveal that these families develop a grinding family order in which families engaged in repeated conflict but also continued to operate as and identify as a family. These conflicts are shaped by and reinforce patriarchal expectations that mothers are central to family operation. The intervention at the end of each episode offered an opportunity for the family to engage in a concerted campaign to try to force the mother into treatment and reestablish the family order.

While most West European nations were formed around pre-existing entities that could be called “countries” before the modern age, this was not the case in the Middle East. Some entities, like Egypt, did have a clear political and cultural identity before colonialism, others, like Algeria, did not. This chapter discusses the four states of the Maghreb: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, through the perspective of “country creation” going into and coming out of colonial rule. We can see here two “models” of fairly similar types of historical development, one showing a gradual process through a protectorate period to relatively stable modern nations, another through violent conquest and direct colonization ending in violent liberation and military and wealthy but fragile states. The article asks whether these models for the history of country creation and the presence or absence of pre-colonial identities can help explain the modern history and nature of these states in the Arab Spring and the years thereafter. Then, a more tentative attempt is made to apply these models to two countries of the Arab east, Syria and Iraq. While local variations ensure that no model can be transferred directly, it can show the importance of studying the historical factors that go into the transition from geographical region to a country with people that can form the basis of a nation.

The total defence (TD) concept constitutes a joint endeavour between the military forces and civil defence structures within a TD state. Logistics is essential for such joint collaboration to work; however, the mismatch between military and civil defence logistics structures poses challenges for such joint collaboration. The purpose of this paper is to identify logistics concept areas within the TD framework that allow for military and civil defence collaborations from a logistics operations perspective.

Pattern-matching analysis is used to compare patterns found in the investigated case with those prescribed from the literature and predicted to occur. The study seeks to identify logistics concepts within TD from the literature and from the events describing the Swedish response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Pattern matching thus allows for the reconciliation of logistics concepts from the literature to descriptions of how the response was handled, albeit under a TD framework.

Findings show quite distinct foci between the theoretical and observational realms in terms of logistics applications. While the theoretical realm identifies four main logistics concepts, the observational realm identifies five logistics conceptual themes. This goes on to show an incongruence between the military and civil parts of the TD.

This study provides basis for further research into the applications and management of logistics activity within TD and emergency response.

Logistics applications within TD have not, until now, received much attention in the literature. Given this knowledge gap, this study is of original value.