Civic World Research Articles

Revaluing and devaluing higher education beyond neoliberalism: Elitist, productivist, and populist policy and rhetoric in a field of conflict

The transformation of higher education provision by neoliberal values has been well documented. However, recent criticisms and even attacks upon higher education indicate a new politics extending beyond neoliberalism. This article draws on the sociology of conventions to unpick the distinctions at work in these new criticisms of universities. By distinguishing between values based in the market world, industrial world and civic world, we elaborate the political basis of recent value controversies around higher education (HE), reflected in policy and rhetoric. Looking to reject aspects of the neoliberal HE model, some critics have sought to revalue higher education upon productivist values, attacking universities for failing to generate ‘use’ value for students and society. Populist actors have launched stronger criticisms, aiming to revalue higher education on nationalistic and traditional values. This has generated the devaluation of higher education in national public spheres. As higher education has expanded globally, this new politics emerges from conflicts within and between conservative and liberal elites. Trends in Hungary and Brazil indicate the successes and failures of populist attacks on universities. Trends in the United Kingdom and Australia reflect productivist revaluations of market-based HE. Elite revaluation and devaluation is producing an emerging new global politics of HE.

The practices of artist-entrepreneurs located outside Canada's creative hubs viewed through the lens of the pragmatic sociology of critique.

Artists-entrepreneurs struggle with the tension between their artistic and entrepreneurial values. Previous research on this tension focuses on urban creative hubs and shows the presence of politicians to create, with the artists, a structure constituted of investment formulas to ease this tension. Based on Boltanski and Thévenot's On Justification theory, our research focuses on the case of artist-entrepreneurs located outside Canada's creative hubs. The tension between artistic and entrepreneurial values is expressed as a tension between the inspired and market worlds, which is managed through the civic world in Canadian creative hubs. The results of 50 semi-structured interviews with non-urban Canadian artist-entrepreneurs reveal that politicians are less implicated in these regional cultural industries. In order to manage the tension between artistic and entrepreneurial values, artists themselves are developing individual and collective investment formulas to create structure in the cultural industries that compensates for the low-level of involvement by politicians. Thus, we identify that the tension between the inspired and market worlds is managed through the presence of the projective world in the case of Canada's non-urban artist-entrepreneurs.

Fame democracy? Social media and visuality-based transformation of the public sphere

ABSTRACT We argue that a shift in the underlying values that inform people’s actions in the public sphere is taking place in the social media age. From ways of qualifying the public sphere as a space that prioritizes equality, mutual respect and careful deliberation, action that creates visibility, attention and followership is increasingly valued above all else. This change translates into a transformation of the public sphere that requires revisiting the conceptual tools of democratic publics. In contrast to the Habermasian normative approach, we suggest that an empirically grounded definition of the public sphere, discernible with tools from justification theory, enables identifying a wider variety of public actions and interrogating the different moral foundations of public spheres. Based on ongoing research on visual politicization, we argue that the world of fame increasingly challenges the valuation logics of the market and the civic worlds as the value base informing public action. We illustrate our argument with examples from our ethnographic work on social media activists, the figure of an influencer/politician, and social media actors countering the algorithmic logic of the present public sphere. Finally, we discuss these transformations’ consequences to democracy theory. We suggest a way towards a democracy theory which includes a plurality of arguments and values—even ones that may threaten democracy—as a remedy to the potentially blinding effects of civic normativity.

La justificación de las condiciones de trabajo y demandas laborales en España: órdenes de valor

In this article, the dominant legitimating discursive strategies around the ever-increasing labour demands and ever-declining standards of safety and well-being at work in Spain are analysed through the lens of Boltanski and Thévenot’s (2006) view of the transformation of capitalism. A qualitative methodology based on semi-structured interviews is used. Results show that the justificatory arguments most commonly put forward by managers and experts are the logic of supply and demand, and values related to flexibility, resilience and adaptability to change. In contrast, the stability and protection established in the twentieth century are widely cherished values, particularly among union representatives and some human resources specialists. We found that discourse practices map two specific legitimating categories (market values and a projects orientation), and one critical category (Civic World), but the critical category has no practical impact, as the predominant feeling is resignation. Our research describes the common attitudes to legitimacy in the job market and points to a deep discontent in some of its key agents.

Theorizing science‐civic practices: Youth adaptation and remixing of scientific numeracies within digital civic media

AbstractInformed civic engagement has long been a goal of science education. Yet, how youth civically engage using science—what knowledge and practices they draw on, when, how, and for what purposes—remains largely unknown. By examining youth civic digital media production around climate change and COVID‐19, we shed light on this area. We view both scientific and civic engagement through the theoretical lens of social practice, which locates learning, knowledge, and cognition within culturally embedded social activities. With this theoretical disposition, we examined media produced by youth during the 2020 U.S. presidential election, asking: (1) What scientific numeracies did youth use in civic participation about climate change and COVID‐19? And (2) In what ways did youth adapt and/or remix canonical scientific numeracies within their digital civic media production? Through qualitative coding of 249 media pieces, we identified ways in which youth engaged and adapted scientific civic numeracies. We found that youth often adapted canonical forms of numeracy, integrated or “remixed” scientific numeracies with other knowledges such as those of place and politics, and interwove multiple numeracies. We begin to theorize science‐civic practices, or the locally‐meaningful ways of participating and meaning‐making that interweave multiple literacies used to advance one's civic aims. We use our findings to argue for the imperative of bringing the civic world into the science classroom.

(Re) construction of historical memory: identity and urban re-valuation of the first Diagonal in Chile

In the process of urban regeneration, the re-valuation of public space and the elements that configure it assume the potential in the regeneration process, integrating elements as the basis components in the consolidation of urban dynamics. Also, the contained memory of the city, understood as public inheritance, is a continuous and participatory process in which we construct the sense of belonging and place. The (re) construction of historical memory of the Avenue Diagonal Pedro Aguirre Cerda, the first diagonal axis of Chile, has partly defined the structure of the landscape of the city of Concepcion, being a container of social, historical, and natural processes that accidentally occurred. Unfortunate but ideal scenarios have been the successive earthquakes that have made our country a fertile ground for rethinking and materializing ideas. It is, in the post-1939 earthquake, when the reconstruction permitted revolutionary thoughts coming from modern Europe and that were materialized, with a privileged location in both the historical space and in the physical city.The appearance of this axis, in the apposition of the foundational Damero’s plane, is an innovative project that breaks this historic urban trend, taking into Chile, and more specifically into Concepción, a chance to expound innovative ideas, aimed to change the urban landscape prevailing at that time.In terms of spatial configuration, this diagonal axis is a superposition of historical layers in their development and materialization that has become a mass of history and that is still in development. In other words, it is dynamic and open, consolidating it periodically as an identity space city landscape, harmoniously uniting both the civic world represented by the square courts with the academics symbolized in the University of Concepción.It is proposed to unravel and rescue the historical context that adds a value in the configuration and coordination of the various parties in relation to the on-going transformation and constitution of this urban piece and its constant identity re-evaluation in favor of the regeneration processes.

When social movements collaborate with the state towards the right to the city: Unveiling compromises and conflicts

The right to the city represents a critique of the city as a place and an object of capitalist accumulation, in which priority is given to exchange value over use value. This critique references an ongoing and collective struggle for urban production to be radically democratic, as the expanded participation of city users would lead to appropriation, with social movements occupying a central role. This paper discusses the practices of urban social movements that cooperate with governmental institutions participating in and influencing the design and implementation of public policies. We focus on the possibilities of transformation towards the right to the city as well as the conflicts and contradictions that social movements face when partnering with the State. We carry out an in-depth investigation of two social movements involved in building housing units in Brazil as part of a federal government programme. By conceptually translating the right to the city into the economies of worth, we propose an original theoretical approach. Our study contributes to advance the understanding of the role of social movements that collaborate with governments without abandoning the goal of struggling for the right to the city. We add a pragmatic perspective to the radical conception of the right to the city by showing how different logics of action enable or hinder the possibility of the right to the city horizon. We propose that the prominence of the civic common world might transform operational processes mainly through self-management.

Mémoire collective dans les industries culturelles


 
 
 The cultural industries participate in building collective memory because, in many cases, public decision-makers have chosen to elevate individual memories to the rank of collective memory. Cultural industries are faced with systemic discrimination (Eikhof and Warhurst, 2013), which suggests the collective memory of these industries face the same challenges. In this theoretical article, we propose a framework based on Boltanski andThévenot’s (1991, 2006) theory of justification in order to make collective memory in cultural industries more inclusive. First, we conceptualize collective memory as a compromise between the domestic and civic worlds of Boltanski and Thévenot (1991, 2006). Then, the artists and their individual memories are presented using the world of inspiration. Finally, we propose using the world of projects to make the collective memory of cultural industries more inclusive. We, therefore, propose greater openness and democratization of collective memory in the cultural industries due to the world of projects.
 
 

Coopetition in Projects in Cultural Industries

This paper addresses the following question: what happens when people pool their resources in a project but also compete for market share? This question is at the heart of project management in the cultural industries. To be viable, these projects must find a compromise between competition and collaboration. To conceptualize this compromise, we used the theoretical framework On Justification by Boltanski and Thevenot (2006). These authors represented society with six independent worlds, and they explored compromises between the various worlds. We associate competition with the market world and collaboration with the civic world. Boltanski and Thevenot (2006) did not find a figure of compromise between these two worlds, but we suggest that coopetition is a viable form of compromise. We undertook 50 semi-structured interviews with professional visual artists to empirically support our assumptions that (1) coopetition is the answer to our initial question, and (2) it is the figure of compromise between the market and civic worlds. Our findings contribute to the literature on coopetition in project management by presenting three typical cases of coopetition in projects in cultural industries: artwork creation projects, art exhibition projects in private galleries, and art exhibition projects in cooperative galleries. We also contribute to the literature on Boltanski and Thevenot (2006) theoretical framework by exploring a new figure of compromise.

Outstanding: Centering Black Kids’ Enoughness in Civic Education Research

In this article we argue that latent and explicit theories of Black insufficiency shape how achievement gaps are defined and assessed in civic education research. We engage the substantive historical and conceptual precedent for rejecting the gap framing. Our call to action demands that radical points of departure are needed to produce loving and valid accounts of Black kids’ civic worlds.

Warrior Scholars & Bridge Builders: Civic Dreaming in ELA Classrooms

This study explores how two high school English language arts (ELA) teachers leveraged disciplinary literacy practices in their classrooms to help students explore their identities as citizens and imagine a more just and equitable democratic society. Using a figured worlds framework, the study articulates a sociocritical approach to civic literacy learning that challenges neoliberal constructions of citizenship and literacy and situates ELA classes as crucial sites of civic education. Findings demonstrate how the intersection of teacher and student identities, literacy practices, and learning contexts create distinct classroom civic worlds in which civic dreaming can take place and democratic praxis can be enacted. The authors suggest a need for the field of ELA to consider the intersections of race, literacy, and citizenship to challenge social inequities through classroom learning.

Justifying the civic interest in sport: Boltanski and Thévenot, the six worlds of justification, and hosting the Olympic games

This paper examines and applies the widely influential work of Boltanski and Thévenot in order to investigate and understand the political issues or disputes within sport. We provide a critical elaboration of Boltanski and Thévenot’s theory of the six ‘orders of worth’ or ‘worlds’ of justification that are drawn upon by social actors within these disputes. We examine how social actors may draw upon multiple justifications (or worlds) in order to advance their positions or interests; how power differences arise between these worlds; and, how weak worlds of justification may extend their influence within specific issues. To elaborate our analysis, we discuss the public issue of Olympic bidding and hosting, and how key social actors or stakeholders (such as local and national governments, event sponsors, and sport bodies) draw on different worlds of justification, particularly in advocating the staging of these events. This issue indicates that the six worlds are organized hierarchically into three ‘levels of worth’: the market, fame, and domestic worlds are the most prominent, while civic world arguments have least influence. These power differentials are reflected further in the criticisms and compromises that arise between the civic world and other worlds. We conclude by examining how civic world justifications may be accorded greater prominence within sport and other public issues, such as those relating to Olympic bidding and hosting.

Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction by Liesbeth Korthals Altes

Reviewed by: Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction by Liesbeth Korthals Altes Jan Alber (bio) Liesbeth Korthals Altes. Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 2014. xvi + 325 pp. Some critics read Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) as a biting satire on Reaganomics and the consumerism in the United States of the 1980s, whereas others see it as a perverse misogynist orgy of violence and bloodshed. In such a case, Liesbeth Korthals Altes would ask the respective readers to actively reflect upon the factors through which they attribute different meanings to the same narrative texts and to explore diversity in interpretation. She argues that this kind of exercise does not only increase our critical self-awareness; it also stimulates our capacity for perspective taking and the ability to empathize with others. Generally speaking, Korthals Altes seeks to reconceptualize narratology as a metahermeneutic endeavor that she places on the overlap between hermeneutics (the domain of reasoning about value-laden interpretive pathways) and cognitive approaches (based on the idea that recipients use memorized mental models to make meaning). In contrast to structuralist purists, she states that narratology should involve interpretation as both “a task for which it develops heuristic tools” and “as an object of study” (50). Her self-reflexive research program seeks to relate “interpretive argumentations to their underlying value-laden conceptions and pathways” (99). More specifically, Korthals Altes investigates the process of interpretation by zooming in on the dialectical relationship between narrative features and the ethos (or self image) we attribute to characters, narrators, and authors (such as the genius, prophet, guide, social critic, enfant terrible, nihilist, outcast, lunatic, pervert, or impostor). For her, these ethos attributions are “part of the more general issue of how people make meaning from and with texts” (19). Korthals Altes sees various transversal echoes between the knowledge-based empathic engagement posited by hermeneutic thinkers (such as Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and Gadamer), and cognitive inferences that involve frames, scripts, schemata, mental models, and prototypes (39, 49). Concepts such as posture and ethos, for instance, are mental models along which individuals conceptualize themselves and are classified by others. Cognitive research can thus “help explain how we share experiential knowledge about the world and interpretations of human experience through narratives [. . .], and why that is so important for a culture” (49). [End Page 365] Korthals Altes does not only argue that narratologists should reinstate the extra-textual author and the actual reader into their analyses; she also discusses other framing devices that play a role with regard to our interpretations. One example is Maingueneau’s distinction between the narrative’s status as fiction or nonfiction, genre conventions, and the concrete communicative situation evoked by the text (69–70). Also, literary critics resort to the different value regimes developed by Boltanski and Thévenot: the Inspired World of the arts (where creativity and originality are considered to be important), the Domestic World (dominated by respect for tradition, mutual love, and support), the World of Opinion (which values fame), the Civic World (where responsibility, justice, and the common good are upheld), the Industrial World (dominated by efficiency, zeal, and technical skills), and the World of Commerce (which values rentability) (74). In addition, Korthals Altes discusses narratological tools that specifically concern the analysis of characters, narrators, and authors. For example, she redeploys Phelan’s three ways of reading characters (mimetic, thematic, and synthetic) as interpretive strategies that depend on how readers frame the narrative in question (132–33), and she shows that Schneider’s distinction between “categorized” (flat) and “personalized” (round) characters offers argumentative pathways to explain the analyst’s interpretation (138–39). Korthals Altes also shows how readers attribute an ethos to personalized narrators (as in Stanzel’s first-person and the authorial narrative situation) or to less personalized narration (as in the figural narrative situation or cases of camera-eye narration) or how they equate the narrator or narration with the author. She argues that Walsh’s proposal to replace all extradiegetic heterodiegetic narrators with authors is overly hasty: for her, there might be interpretive reasons why a critic might want to posit an...

“With & alongside his housewife”: Claiming Ground in New Netherland and the Early Modern Dutch Empire

Gender relationships fundamentally supported the Dutch seaborne mercantile empire. In the seventeenth-century Netherlands, housewives and households anchored the civic world on which commerce depended. As Dutch traders, planners, and merchants sought to build profitable footholds around the world, they repeatedly turned to the idea that colonial outposts needed female inhabitants; transatlantic migrants similarly sought to further their own interests through family settlement and individual territorial claims. On the mid-Atlantic coast of North America, these ideas created an early and consistent emphasis on female migration and the creation of homes and villages along contested frontiers. The consequent creation of New Netherland’s physical “gender frontier” gave martial significance to women’s presence and family homes. Indigenous women’s agricultural fields became principal targets of Dutch forces as the colony expanded by relying on the establishment of immigrant households and villages. The women of New Netherland thus provide the opportunity to assess the key role of gender in the establishment of early modern settler colonies and the extension of imperial land claims.

Social Investment of Pension Funds Perspective: The Case of Russia

The current survey aims to draw a perspective on the social investment of pension funds in Russia. The author defines the concept within the context of the Conventions Theory. The practice of the social investment of pension funds presupposes a complex architecture of social order that combines dominant domestic market world principles with elements from the civic and industrial world. The new order is achieved through a compromise of domestic value orientations and the competition for pension funds, the collective character of investments with its temporal and spatial attachment, calculation of risks and profits, as well as focus on results. The study employs a qualitative research with a regression analysis. The results indicate that in St. Petersburg (Russia), despite the individuals’ pessimism towards the pension system, there is a glimmer of interest in this issue. Respondents admit the likelihood of socially responsible investing their pension funds in case the rate of return on these investment projects will not be less than the interest on bank deposits. The important factors of attracting pension funds in social projects are: the local character of investment projects, the short-term individual consumption perspective, and the state regulation of social investment market. The author concludes that social investing has a potential to become an alternative way in the pension system evolution in Russia. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n6p170

Vocabularies of Divergent Legitimizing Strategies and their Effect on Ethical Standardization

Due to increasing environmental complexity firms can no longer rely on their taken-for-granted legitimacy but instead have to actively manage their image in society through communication. This is particularly true for firms operating in industries characterized by severe ethical challenges such as commodity farming. With the help of quantitative text analysis, this paper seeks to scrutinize the firms’ legitimizing strategies in the coffee, tea and chocolate industry, assessed through archival website content. Based on the institutional logics literature and the French Pragmatist Sociology, my theorizing suggests that firms will mostly rely on vocabulary associated with two distinct worlds, the ‘domestic world’ and the ‘civic world,’ when seeking to maintain their legitimacy vis-à-vis western consumers. I argue that the prevalence of each world within firm communication affects the organization’s effort to ensure work standards by collaborating with ethical labeling organizations. The impact of the firm’s legitimizing strategy on the organization’s standardization effort in turn depends on whether the firm can be classified as family firm as the latter is less likely to engage in decoupling.

The Civic World of International Communism: Taiwanese communists and the Comintern (1921–1931)

AbstractThe short history of the Taiwanese Communist Party (Taiwan gongchandang台 灣 共 產 黨) (1928–1931) offers a window into the negotiative polity of international communism during the Third Period (1928–1934). The Party was established during the time when the Comintern intensified its operations in colonies and promoted the organization of communist parties there. Its demise was the result of government suppression that occurred as a reaction to their increased public activity in 1931, allegedly at the direction of the Comintern. This paper examines the Comintern's role in the Taiwanese communist movement and shows that the Taiwanese communists were active agents (rather than passive tools) in their relationship with the Comintern.

A way of incorporating Spirituality into Economics

A conceptual structure for incorporating spirituality into economics is provided, one based on a connection between a Hegelian conception of society and identity, and the model of the Economies of Worth. The conceptual structure is applied to collective action problems in order to provide a rationale for the effectiveness of communication in addressing such problems at the civic world, and its non-effectiveness in solving them in economic (civil) life. Finally, it is shown in the theoretical contribution that a spiritual assumption on individuals can solve this problems.JEL Classification Codes: H41, P41, Q00, Z12, Z13

Confrontation, Negotiation and Accommodation: Garrisoning the Burghs in Post-Union Scotland

AbstractThis article challenges the assumption that garrisons in post-union Scotland were confronted with an “uninflammable” and easily controlled urban population. The emphasis is instead placed on the distinctive aspects of eighteenth-century Scottish society, characterized as it was by a combination of dispersed settlement and the fastest growing urban sector within the British-Irish Isles. These factors severely complicated and challenged the army’s ability to consistently and effectively control Scotland’s villages, towns and cities. Yet confrontation was not the only mode of interaction between local garrisons and the civic world of the burghs. The article argues that excessive concentration upon large scale urban tumults, such as the Malt Tax or Porteous Riots, has detracted from the subtle and sophisticated social and cultural practices which not only regulated relations between both groups but that increasingly eroded the boundaries and definitions of what constituted a “soldier” and a “civilian” in eighteenth-century Scotland.

‘Every sort of manual type, and mostly foreigners’: migrants, brothers and festive kings in early modern Florence

ABSTRACT:In 1522, the artisan festive ‘kingdom’ of the Biliemme put up the biggest street tabernacle in Florence. German textile workers were behind the tabernacle and this article argues that, at a time of crisis for German workers, these men looked to reassert their place in Florence through their participation in a citywide artisan festive subculture. Forty years later, Germans in the Biliemme district had largely been replaced by textile migrants from other parts of Italy. Nonetheless the kingdom remained a important vehicle for creating neighbourhood solidarities and for incorporating these new migrants into the artisan and civic world.