Core Claims Research Articles

The ‘cassette comeback’: debunking a tenacious narrative

ABSTRACT Academic attention to cassette tapes has reached its first peak in 30 years. If anything, this focus demonstrates that the adoption of media is not as linear as has been commonly anticipated in the past. At the same time, a plethora of news outlets continue to rehash the idea of a ‘cassette comeback’ and although this notion surfaced as early as the late 2000s, its core claims have not changed in the past 15 years. Most articles celebrating the revival cite increased sales figures across Anglo-Saxon countries to frame cassettes as nostalgia-laden gimmicks. Such depictions are problematic when they brush music scenes aside that rarely get featured in official sales statistics but nevertheless have used cassettes since the 2000s when the Global North considered the format dead and gone. This article contrasts reductionist depictions with a comprehensive overview of the cassette’s hybrid materiality and resulting multifaceted cultural appropriations. With this, it presents a counterpoint to repetitive revival narratives and argues not only that the idea of a cassette comeback is nonsensical as cassette tapes never completely vanished in the first place but also that there is more to them persevering in the new media age than mere nostalgia.

Critical security research and the war on terror: From the margins to the mainstream?

Abstract Contemporary reckoning with the catastrophic outcomes of the post-9/11 era opens important questions for the future of counterterrorism policy. It also raises significant issues for thinking through the future priorities and purposes of security scholarship. In this article we make two core claims. First, recent years have seen considerable mainstreaming of ostensibly critical ideas on (counter)terrorism within political debate, media commentary, and – crucially – security policy. Second, such ideas – including around the futility of ‘war’ on terror; the ineffectiveness of torture; the unstable framing of threats such as radicalisation; and the inefficiency of excessive counterterrorism expenditure – were widely dismissed as lacking in policy relevance, even being utopian, when articulated by critically oriented scholars. This development, we argue, raises important ontological questions around the ending of security paradigms such as the war on terror. It also prompts vital political, epistemological, and normative questions around the status of overtly critical scholarship when its ideas and recommendations achieve wider currency.

Wellbeing through Entrepreneurship: Analysis by Using Capability Approach

The core claim of the capability approach is that assessments of the well-being or quality of life of a person, and judgements about justice, or the level of development of a country, on the basis of effective opportunities that people have to lead the lives they have reason to value. Entrepreneurship Development Model for Poverty Alleviation is focused program on pro-poor marginalized community of Nepal. This paper focused on finding of research conducted on different nine indicator of achieved functioning as an impact assessment tool. Capabilities Approach (CA) argued wellbeing is enhanced by expanding the range of things a person could be or do. Secondary data are used from the office of Dhangadhi Sub-metropolitan City and primary data are collected through structured ordinal questionnaire survey to the sample group of 123 persons representing the population of 409. Descriptive assessment is used to analyse the impact of program on peoples’ wellbeing. Individuals reported improved levels of wellbeing. High impact is shown in subjective wellbeing which is measured by overall life satisfaction, moderate impact on health, ability to be oneself, income sufficiency, friendship and decreasing feeling of loneliness and least impact on decreasing discrimination, trust on people and spending for own. The research findings show program has a positive impact on wellbeing, and it is suggested that the capabilities of beneficiaries expanded after joining the MEDEP/MEDPA program.

Unique, better, model, leader: Claims of exceptionality in Hungary’s foreign policy and beyond

In the IR literature, devoting attention to small state exceptionalism remains the exception. This paper aims to rectify this situation by analyzing claims of exceptionality of the successive Orbán governments of Hungary. It aims to shed light on Hungary’s foreign policy by making two core claims. First, based on a diverse range of sources, it shows that successive Hungarian governments have increasingly come to conceptualize Hungary as an exceptional, trail-blazing, model country in foreign policy and beyond, especially after 2018. Secondly, the paper shows how claims of exceptionality can lead to resentment and isolation in foreign policy, if and when they go hand-in-hand with collective narcissism.

Digital technology and mental health: Chinese university students' perspectives on the impact of social media.

To address the growing concerns about mental health issues among Chinese university students, our study investigates the impact of social media on their mental health. This study intends to shed light on how these students' use of social media platforms contributes to these mental health issues, given that it has been estimated that up to 30% of university students in China suffer from mental health issues. We investigate the extent of this issue by looking at how Chinese social media platforms like WeChat, Weibo, and QQ impact students' mental health. To gain a comprehensive insight into students' perspectives, this study's sole methodology is qualitative semi-structured interviews. Our core claim asserts that social media considerably affects Chinese university students' mental health, with both positive and negative consequences. The findings show how closely social media use and Chinese university students' mental health are related. These networks let people connect and get support but also encourage social comparison and stigma towards mental illness. Students use a variety of coping skills, such as self-regulation techniques, digital detoxification techniques, and looking for emotional support in online networks. These results highlight the need for a complex understanding of social media's effects on mental health. Our study also recognizes students' capacity for adaptation and resilience as they traverse the digital world, offering theoretical and practical applications for successfully juggling online and offline lives. In the end, our study contributes to a thorough and culturally sensitive understanding of how social media affects the mental health of Chinese university students.

A dataset without a code book: ethnography and open science.

This paper reflects upon calls for "open data" in ethnography, drawing on our experiences doing research on sexual violence. The core claim of this paper is not that open data is undesirable; it is that there is a lot we must know before we presume its benefits apply to ethnographic research. The epistemic and ontological foundation of open data is grounded in a logic that is not always consistent with that of ethnographic practice. We begin by identifying three logics of open data-epistemic, political-economic, and regulatory-which each address a perceived problem with knowledge production and point to open science as the solution. We then evaluate these logics in the context of the practice of ethnographic research. Claims that open data would improve data quality are, in our assessment, potentially reversed: in our own ethnographic work, open data practices would likely have compromised our data quality. And protecting subject identities would have meant creating accessible data that would not allow for replication. For ethnographic work, open data would be like having the data set without the codebook. Before we adopt open data to improve the quality of science, we need to answer a series of questions about what open data does to data quality. Rather than blindly make a normative commitment to a principle, we need empirical work on the impact of such practices - work which must be done with respect to the different epistemic cultures' modes of inquiry. Ethnographers, as well as the institutions that fund and regulate ethnographic research, should only embrace open data after the subject has been researched and evaluated within our own epistemic community.

A partner, not a combatant: the U.S. Congress, intelligence reform, and civil liberties after Vietnam

ABSTRACT In the aftermath of 11 September 2001, scholars and commentators concerned about civil liberties looked back to the 1970s with an air of nostalgia. Back then, they argued, Congress exposed and constrained executive abuses of civil liberties, most notably through the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (the ‘Church Committee’) and the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA); whereas, since 9/11, Congress has largely accepted a variety of constitutionally dubious activities as part of the ‘War on Terror.’ This article argues that these accounts get the history wrong. Drawing on the Church Committee’s hearings and reports, internal executive branch communications, and the legislative history of FISA, it makes three core claims. First, the Church Committee was more valuable as a source of historical documentation rather than real-time exposure. Second, executive officials took crucial steps towards intelligence reform before the Church Committee was established. Third, the two legislative fruits of the Church Committee – FISA and the creation of permanent intelligence committees in Congress – were forged in a cooperative, rather than adversarial interbranch environment. Thus, the post-Vietnam Congress is best described as a partner, rather than a combatant, in the process of intelligence reform.

Fiscal implications of the populist radical right in power

ABSTRACT Fiscal preferences of populist radical right parties (PRRPs) typically entail a combination of lower tax rates and the maintenance of costly social spending categories, such as pension spending. Theoretically, this combination is doomed to inflate future public liabilities. In our mixed method study, we assess whether PRRPs in government indeed systematically cause higher deficits and to what extent the combination of tax and social policy explains their public finance. We theoretically discuss the evolution of tax policy and welfare preferences of PRRPs and contend that radical right fiscal preferences are driven by PRRPs’ ideological core claim of ‘native producerist deservingness’. Based on mixed effects models with entropy balanced weights, we show that PRRPs in government have significantly and substantially higher public deficits than governments without PRRPs and similar socio-economic starting conditions. This effect, however, is different in Eastern Europe, where PRRPs in government produce comparatively lower deficits, albeit signalling and implementing the same policy-mix as Western PRRPs. We trace the causes of the differences in outcome with an in-depth case study of the Fidesz government in Hungary from 2010 to 2014.

Fairness, relationships and perceptions of police legitimacy in the context of integrated offender management

ABSTRACT Integrated Offender Management (IOM) involves the police in England and Wales working closely with other criminal justice agencies to reduce the criminal activities of prolific offenders. The work involves traditional policing methods, but also police officers engaging in meaningful rehabilitative work with IOM participants. However, there may be a tension between aspects of IOM policing and procedural justice theory. Research has shown strong links between citizens’ perceptions of fair treatment and their beliefs about police legitimacy, yet at the same time some IOM policing efforts emphasise hostile and disciplinary practices. These types of approaches can threaten police legitimacy if perceived by citizens as unfair. This paper examines the self-described experiences of people subject to IOM policing. Study findings revealed that, whilst participants viewed aspects of IOM policing as unfair, they broadly accepted the legitimacy of IOM policing. This would run counter to many of the core claims of procedural justice theory. However, one plausible explanation for this reaction lies in the dynamic nature of police legitimacy and its antecedents in IOM. In this context, perceptions of police legitimacy are more firmly grounded in the relational (treatment) dimensions of procedural fairness than in other more decision-orientated aspects of the concept. This reflects the multidimensional nature of procedural justice within which the balance shifts, depending on the criminal justice setting.

Zombie leadership: Dead ideas that still walk among us

Considerable progress has been made in the field of leadership in recent years. However, we argue that this is undermined by a strong residual commitment to an older set of ideas which have been repeatedly debunked but which nevertheless resolutely refuse to die. These, we term zombie leadership. Zombie leadership lives on not because it has empirical support but because it flatters and appeals to elites, to the leadership industrial complex that supports them, and also to the anxieties of ordinary people in a world seemingly beyond their control. It is propagated in everyday discourse surrounding leadership but also by the media, popular books, consultants, HR practices, policy makers, and academics who are adept at catering to the tastes of the powerful and telling them what they like to hear. This review paper outlines eight core claims (axioms) of zombie leadership. As well as isolating the problematic metatheory which holds these ideas together, we reflect on ways in which they might finally be laid to rest.

Standing and Probabilistic Injury

Standing to sue often turns on questions of probability. For example, public law plaintiffs must show that they are likely to be affected by allegedly unlawful government surveillance or environmental policies, and consumers may wish to sue private defendants over false credit reporting or data breaches that may or may not cause them financial or reputational harm in the future. This Article offers a framework for resolving a wide range of these “probabilistic standing” issues. Our core claim is that courts and commentators ask too much of standing doctrine in probabilistic cases. First, scholars sometimes seek a unified theory of probabilistic standing to cover categories of cases that ask distinct questions, such as cases involving who is subject to a challenged action, on the one hand, and those involving whether a person subject to such an action is sufficiently likely to be harmed, on the other. Second, courts should not ask how probable elements of a plaintiff’s case must be in order to support standing, but rather who should decide whether a given probability is sufficient. Judges and parties struggle in litigation to assess the actual probability of occurrences, and Article III of the Constitution provides no standard for how probable an injury must be to support a lawsuit. Third, any doctrinal probability threshold for standing would encounter a related problem, which is that the probability of an injury depends significantly on how that injury is framed. Which harms “count” for standing is thus a vital question in assessing the probability of injury, but Article III is an unlikely place to look for answers. Within certain constraints, courts should look instead to the underlying substantive law to define the relevant injuries for standing purposes. Finally, we contend that many of the concerns associated with probabilistic claims are better addressed through the law of remedies and prudential elements of the timing doctrines (mootness and ripeness) than through the constitutional law of standing.

Critical Humanism and the Study of Religion: A Statement and Defense

Abstract This essay offers a statement and defense of four core claims of my work, Why Study Religion? Those are: (1) the field of religious studies is preoccupied by procedural methods for studying religion to the neglect of values and purposes that can justify its intellectual practices; (2) this preoccupation operates under a “regime of truth” that is anti-normative; (3) this regime of truth buckles under the pressure of repressed values and smuggles in crypto-normative judgments and commitments; and (4) this preoccupation with method can be remedied by attending to purposes that can justify the study of religion, which I call Critical Humanism. Critical Humanism aims to expand the moral imagination and comprises four values: post-critical reasoning, social criticism, cross-cultural fluency, and environmental responsibility. After describing the book’s main claims, I take up critiques expressed by Michael Stausberg, et al. in their essay, “A Normative Turn in Religious Studies?”

African philosophy and nursing: A potential twain that shall meet?

Undoubtedly, the discipline of nursing has been influenced extensively by both Western and Eastern/Asian philosophies. What remains unknown or, perhaps, poorly articulated is the potential influence of African philosophy on the onto-epistemology of nursing. As a starting point, this article sought to examine the core claims of African philosophy and how they may offer new meanings to the metaparadigm domains of interest in the discipline of nursing. At the core of African philosophy is the notion of personhood (which is distinguished from what it means to be a human being), community, solidarity, and relationality. A major claim of African philosophy is the notion that 'a person is a person through persons' which may mean that nursing will be relevant from the African philosophical perspective if it is able to attain this. Health and illness from the African philosophical perspective are defined relationally which shifts attention from the biomedical framework to holism and relational care. The sick 'person' is also distinguished from the sick 'human being' which has the potential of leading to exclusion from the African philosophical viewpoint. Put together, the African philosophical stance potentially extends the meaning of the metaparadigm domains of interest to the discipline of nursing which warrants further exploration.

Selling Austerity to the Public: Analysing the Rhetoric of the UK Government on its Welfare Cuts

Over the past twelve years, the UK has seen a marked increase in poverty and economic inequality. While numerous factors have contributed to this situation, an undisputedly important role has been played by the continuous program of welfare spending cuts designed and executed by a series of Conservative governments. To alleviate the potential for the unpopularity of austerity measures, the Conservatives have attempted to put a positive spin on their policies by making a series of core claims emphasizing the beneficial effects of the welfare reform. Using the method of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this paper examines these claims and offers a critique of each of them. In doing so, the research seeks to expose the use of traditional stereotypes (especially that of the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor) in the government’s rhetoric. The paper draws on a corpus of political speeches and media appearances of Conservative politicians, as well as on sociological reports and newspaper coverage. The analysis is principally focused on the two governments led by David Cameron, although some attention is also devoted to subsequent Conservative administrations.

The "UFO Taboo" Is What IR Theorists Make of It: "Sovereignty and the UFO" in Citational Perspective.

In 2008, Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall published an article titled "Sovereignty and the UFO," which demonstrated how a UFO taboo in international relations theory upheld an anthropocentric model of sovereignty. At a distance of a decade and a half, this review evaluates the validity of the claim that a UFO taboo exists in international relations, and explores the citational practices that influence the prestige economy of the field. The article employs a methodology of interpretive scientometrics informed by methodological debates in political science and international, as well as theoretical debates in actor-network theory. After testing the claim of the UFO taboo in a comparative perspective, the article investigates the strategies of association (weak and strong) present in the citations of "Sovereignty and the UFO." In addition to a revaluation of core claims in an often-read but less-often-cited article in international relations theory, this article provides important insights into how citation works in the discipline of international relations.

Is there a behavioral revolution in policy design? A new agenda and inventory of the behavioral toolbox

Abstract The article argues for a revised research on behavioral public policy focused on the core claim and sine qua non of a behavioral “revolution”: the ability to produce equal or better outcomes with less stringent policy designs than in traditional solutions, at least for certain types of problems. Three contributions to such an agenda are proposed. First, the article argues that the growing focus on the evaluation of real-world behavioral policy programs, as opposed to experimental studies within specialized areas of research, calls for a corresponding theoretical orientation toward existing literature on policy tools and design. Second, a doctrine of policy design is extrapolated from the broader behavioral paradigm and specified in relation to four general areas of application. These provide an essential context for the evaluation of the behavioral claim to improved policy design and highlight that behavioral successes may well, contra this claim, be a result of a de facto increase in stringency vis-à-vis traditional responses. Third, the article proposes a new and substantially revised inventory of the behavioral toolbox, which specifies the stringency, mechanisms, and potential costs of different behavioral tools and techniques, which is both essential to the evaluation of the behavioral claim and necessary to overcome the arbitrariness and mistakes of existing inventories.

Infosphere, Humans as Inforgs, and Human Agency

This paper is an attempt to shed light on the nature of the information revolution we are facing by focusing on Floridi’s philosophy of information, specifically his book The Fourth Revolution. I will first briefly explain the concepts of hyperhistory and the infosphere, and then identify the core claim of the Fourth Revolution in anthropology, along with the concept of the “inforg.” Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud each contributed in different ways to the rupture of anthropocentrism and the decentering of the human subject. In Floridi’s Fourth Revolution, the decentering of the human subject is related to the fact that we understand ourselves as inforgs, or information organisms. Focusing on the role of technology in mediating the relationship between human perception (experience), action, and reality (the world), I argue that the decentering of the human subject in the Fourth Revolution can be found in a shift in our perception of human agency.

Taking the developmental state seriously: Why South Korea outperformed neoliberal regulatory states in rapid coronavirus disease 2019 vaccinations and saving lives

Coronavirus disease 2019 claimed more than three million lives worldwide in 2020, giving national governments the most urgent task for 2021 to achieve high vaccination rates to save lives. The World Health Organization declared that “vaccines are the most critical tool to end the pandemic and save lives.” In this context, South Korea (hereafter, Korea) achieved a remarkable milestone by outperforming the United Kingdom and the United States in vaccinations rate, where the world's earliest vaccination programs started. Thanks to its high vaccination rate, Korea recorded less than 100 deaths per million populations in 2021 compared to more than 1000 in the United Kingdom and the United States. Why Korea leaped ahead of the United Kingdom and the United States in rapid vaccinations that saved many lives? To answer this question, I first conceptualize contemporary Korea as a developmental state which retained its institutional capacity despite its transition from authoritarianism to liberal democracy, distinguishing it from the UK and the US's neoliberal regulatory states, where reforms hallowed out state capacity. I then advance two core claims. First, Korea surpassed the United Kingdom and the United States in vaccine rollout because of its developmental state-type goal-oriented autonomous policymaking and strong institutional capacity, manifested as Korea's central agency deployed a command and control vaccination program led by a coherent health bureaucracy. Second, the Korean state's strategic intervention in the market and its capacity to foster public–private partnerships to realize national goals boosted its vaccinations. Finally, the paper suggests how neoliberal regulatory states in the global north can learn lessons from the Korean experience in rebuilding state capacity to deal with the future global pandemic.

Spinoza’s Model of God: Pantheism or Panentheism?

The philosophical God of Spinoza is branded as a pantheistic God so often that, regarding at least Western philosophy and philosophical commentaries, Spinozism seems to be practically synonymous with pantheism. Since the times of German idealism, there have also been attempts at a panentheistic reading, which are still alive to this day. The article analyses both theological models in their core claims to adequately qualify Spinoza’s theological system while considering the established levels of philosophical-theological interpretation. By identifying systemic pantheism and essentialist panentheism in his system, it is argued that both accounts or readings of Spinoza’s theory might be correct in their own way, provided that the models behind them are correctly applied to their respective levels of thought.

Always Be Prepared

Always Be Prepared