Search results

Purpose: This project examines both the media practice of covering perp walks and the discourse of perp walks as performative rituals, with the goal of understanding how grounded practice shapes meaning.

Methodology/approach: This project combines ethnographic observation and interview research to explore the grounded experience of perp walk participants, including journalists, law enforcement, and defendants.

Findings: The analysis suggests that perp walks are constructions that serve the interests of the state and that their resulting images are not neutral documents. Visual journalists are managed by law enforcement through embodied gatekeeping in practice and experience pressure from newsrooms to capture a particular moment. Defendants report feeling violated because they are unable to control the discourse of their recontextualized image.

Research limitations: As a qualitative-research project using a non-representative sample, the study results cannot be generalized, but they instead offer a rich understanding of embodied practice.

Originality/value: Because this study offers the subjective perspectives of three sets of stakeholders, including journalists, law enforcement, and defendants, it offers a unique and in-depth analysis of perp walks as media ritual.

Based on interviews with 27 victims’ family members and survivors, this chapter explores how memory of the Oklahoma City bombing was constructed through participation in groups formed after the bombing and participation in the trials of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. It first addresses the efficacy of a collective memory perspective. It then describes the mental context in which interviewees joined groups after the bombing, the recovery functions groups played, and their impact on punishment expectations. Next, it discusses a media-initiated involuntary relationship between McVeigh and interviewees. Finally, this chapter examines execution witnesses’ perceptions of communication with McVeigh in his trial and execution.

There has been a tremendous decline in the use of the death penalty in the United States. Recent research using county-level data shows that a small minority of locales in the country account for death sentences and even fewer for executions. Drawing on theoretical work that seeks to account for why these locales continue to use capital punishment, we provide in this chapter a thick description of Maricopa County, Arizona, one of the most active death penalty locales in the contemporary United States. In doing so, we demonstrate how capital punishment operates in a field of violently defended racial boundaries. Our chapter shows the roles of various local actors across time in fortifying such racial boundaries through historical white terrorism and more recent reinforcement of zones of racial exclusion that are embodied especially in communicated fears of “illegal immigrant gangs.” We contend that the case of Maricopa County points to the importance of attending to racist localisms as a catalyst for the continued implementation of the death penalty in the United States.

We use normal accident theory to analyze the financial sector, especially that part of the financial sector that processed home mortgages, and the mortgage meltdown. We maintain that the financial sector was highly complex and tightly coupled in the years leading up to the mortgage meltdown. And we argue that the meltdown exhibited characteristics of a system or normal accident; the result of a component failure (unusually high mortgage defaults) that, in the context of unique conditions (which included low interest rates and government policy encouraging home loans to less credit-worthy households), resulted in complex and tightly coupled interactions that financial elites and government officials were ill-equipped to control. We also consider the role that agency and wrongdoing played in the design of the financial system and the unfolding of the mortgage meltdown. We conclude that a fundamental restructuring of the financial system, so as to reduce complexity and coupling, is required to avert future similar financial debacles. But we also conclude that such a restructuring faces significant obstacles, given the interests of powerful actors and the difficulties of labeling those responsible for the meltdown as wrongdoers.

How we should behave online is an issue that is deceptively complex. The online community, whether in a professional or a personal context, is much broader than the communities in which all but the youngest of us grew up. As such, the standards of propriety in this space can differ, in ways unexpected and dramatic, from those we are used to. In this chapter I ask whether and when we are under an obligation to conform to the expectations of the dominant groups within the online communities we participate in, and argue that there are at least some times when it is defensible to conform to one’s own local norms and expectations rather than subordinating these to the broader online community.

Eventscape is widely recognised as having played an important role in the image of wine events; however, research on this topic is scarce, with only a few studies examining the image of a wine tourism event. To date, no studies have examined eventscape and attitudinal variables of a wine event together, thus indicating a gap in the research. Further research to gain a deeper understanding of the role these factors play is needed; thus, this paper aims to explore the relationships between event image, eventscape, satisfaction and loyalty in wine events.

A structured questionnaire was chosen for data collection, with a final sample of 117 valid responses. Qualitative data was analysed by means of content analysis. Univariate and bivariate statistical analyses were performed to analyse eventscape attributes and explore its relationship with event image, satisfaction and loyalty.

The paper highlights that perceptions of eventscape are intrinsically related to perceived event image and reveal a statistically significant relationship between these two elements. Results show the importance of the social dimension in the image perception of a wine event and point to conviviality as the main element. This study also reveals a relationship between perceived event image and attitudinal variables and suggests that having a positive image of the event positively influences levels of satisfaction, which are higher, and willingness to participate in future editions of the event. Findings also reveal a relationship between event image and loyalty.

Wine-related events are undergoing significant developments, creating a need for competitive strategies to develop wine tourism and vineyards in certain regions. Research in this field is scarce to date; therefore, this paper adds to the literature by the studying consumer behaviour of attendees at wine events.

This autoethnography takes up the matter of toxic masculinity in university settings. We introduce the term “status silencing” as a way to make visible the normalization of toxic masculinity in everyday talk and interaction in university settings among and around colleagues. Status silencing is the process in which the status of a dominant individual becomes a context which renders the story of an individual with a subordinated status untellable or untold. Using strange accounting, we explore active and passive types of status silencing to show how talk and interactions involving toxic masculinity are both internalized and externalized expressions of power and dominance. We argue that while most scholars view toxic masculinity as blatant acts of violence (mass shootings, rape and sexual assault, etc.), it is also a normalized occurrence for feminized others and that toxic masculinity in academic settings is part of an ongoing institutional norm of silence.