Ideological Affiliation Research Articles

EL PROJECTE INTEL·LECTUAL DE BALTASAR PORCEL EN EL TARDOFRANQUISME (1965–1972)

Baltasar Porcel was classified by the Liaison Office of Franco’s government as a writer of “separatist” ideas. This paper details the content of the 1965–1972 Porcel dossier, kept by the repressive Francoist regime, and compares it with a detailed analysis of his non-fiction works during that period. The main purpose of this paper is to present the intellectual project designed by Porcel in a context of new awareness of the situation and a general debate regarding Catalonia’s position and role in Spain. Porcel’s published books (travel, interviews, literary articles, columns, essays) can be used to identify more precisely his ideological affiliation during the late Francoist era. Porcel was clearly not a “separatist”. As a writer and polemicist during that period, Porcel wrote from a sui generis leftist Catalanist perspective, seeking to shape Catalan and Spanish public opinion for two reasons: to systematically demystify bourgeois Catalanism from a more progressive perspective; and to build bridges of di...

Blurred lines and ideological divisions in South African youth politics

Ideological affiliations like Africanism, charterism, and Black Consciousness shaped the political boundaries of student and youth political groups in South Africa during the tumultuous 1980s, and continue to inform contemporary youth politics. These delineations have also been used in the secondary literature to understand organizational competition and when considering how young activists negotiated contested political ground. However, this article suggests that the boundaries between opposing organizations were often blurred by their overlapping use of competing ideologies. It further argues that these divisions, although articulated ideologically, were rooted in organizational affiliation and competition for political influence and territory. It analyses the ideological development of the Congress of South African Students, the Azanian Students’ Organization, and the South African Youth Congress, and tracks the changing scope for ideological expression within charterist student and youth formations. It suggests that during the 1980s the scope for differing ideological expression narrowed, and links this process to the ANC's efforts to establish hegemony within the charterist movement. The article argues that this history is important in order to understand the ideological ‘unruliness’ or flexibility of the ANC Youth League after apartheid and the rise of Julius Malema's Economic Freedom Fighters, and considers how ideological difference within youth politics is beginning to be expressed outside the fold of charterism.

A mode of production flux: the transformation and reproduction of rural class relations in lowland Nepal and North Bihar

The Eastern Gangetic Plains of South Asia represents a peripheral region far from the centers of global capitalist production, and this is all the more apparent in Mithilanchal, a cultural domain spanning the Nepal/Bihar border. The agrarian structure can be considered ‘semi-feudal’ in character, dominated by landlordism and usury, and backed up by political and ideological processes. Paradoxically, Mithilanchal is also deeply integrated into the global capitalist market and represents a surplus labor pool for the urban centers of Western India as well as the Persian Gulf in a classic articulation between pre-capitalist and capitalist modes of production. A review of the changes in the agrarian structure over recent decades in the context of globalisation, out-migration and climate stress, shows that while landlordism remains entrenched, the relationship between the marginal and tenant farmer majority and the landed classes has changed, with the breakdown of ideological ties and reduced dependence on single landlords. The paper thus ends on a positive note, as the contemporary juncture represents an opportune moment for new avenues of political mobilization among the peasantry.

Catholic Versus Communist: An Ongoing Issue—The Role of Organizational Affiliation in Accessing the Policy Arena

This article analyses the role of organizations’ ideological affiliation in shaping information networks within civil society and in granting access to the political sphere. It investigates whether the Catholic and Leftist affiliation of organizations impacts in the city of Turin (Italy) and Kielce (Poland). Applying different social network analysis techniques, the article finds that in both cities there is a tendency towards preferring similar partners. However, while the influence of affiliation is relevant to predict the access to policy making in Turin, in Kielce, this influence is mediated by the actor’s centrality in the social sphere. In both cities, networks are characterized by the higher centrality of Catholic organizations, which also translate in a greater involvement in the political sphere. Twenty-five years after the end of the cold war, past-affiliation is still a strong predictor of political involvement and impacts on the shape of local governance structure.

Protesting the Paradigm

This study assesses the scope and applicability of the “protest paradigm” in non-Western contexts by examining the news coverage of Brazilian, Chinese, and Indian protests in their domestic media. Two publications from each nation, one conservative and one progressive, are content analyzed for adherence to a series of marginalization devices that have often been used by the U.S. media to ridicule protest movements and portray them as violent. The Indian media emerge as the least likely to follow the protest paradigm, while Brazilian and Chinese media conform to it in moderate levels. Comparative analysis suggests the historical legitimacy of informal power negotiations in a political culture makes news media more willing to take protesters seriously and limits adherence to the protest paradigm. In contrast, a news organization’s ideological affiliation with the government of the day, rather than any ideology per se, makes it relatively more likely to conform to the protest paradigm. Marginalization devices such as circus, appearance, and eyewitness accounts are rarely used in any of these nations. But disparity of sources, (non)reference to protesters’ causes and violence, and violence blame appear to be abiding features of news coverage of protests everywhere.

Roadblocks to responsible innovation: Exploring technology assessment and adoption in U.S. public highway construction

U.S. public highway construction industry professionals are responsible for assessing and adopting new technology that can improve the cost and quality of roadways. This paper investigates features of the technology assessment and adoption process in the U.S. public highway construction industry that both facilitate and hinder responsible innovation. Often technological innovations are incongruent with current specifications, i.e., regulatory construction standards, whereby specification reform serves as a precursor to implementation. We examine this aspect of technology assessment and adoption through a novel application of Kingdon's theory of policy agenda setting to a highly technical state bureaucratic institution using a case study on Intelligent Compaction. Specification reform relating to Intelligent Compaction is occurring in nearly a quarter of U.S. states. Analysis of interviews with industry professionals revealed that institutional incentives for supporting innovations were not the main drivers for adoption, and there exists a conservative culture that inhibits change. Individuals that go against this grain by championing change do so based on their personal character, ideological affiliations and a perceived sense of social obligation, which coincides with the principles set forth in the responsible research and innovation literature. These individuals, whom we identify as Kingdon's policy entrepreneurs, appear to present themselves in four roles in this industry: explorer, pioneer, gatekeeper, and leader. Our findings indicate that alignment of these roles creates an environment conducive to responsible technology assessment and adoption, and therefore greater societal benefit. Ultimately, we hope this study will benefit U.S. Highway Construction Industry regulatory environments by enhancing identification of specification processes, key roles, and personal/ethical ideologies that may be conducive to fostering a culture of responsible innovation.

Deploying Foucauldian genealogy: Critiquing ‘quality’ reform in early childhood policy in Australia

The last two decades have seen the emergence of a global education paradigm that has reimagined education through the lens of neo-liberal ideology. Education policy agendas and discourses in current times are globally governed through transnational networks, which have increased the opaqueness of education policymaking. For critical policy researchers, the challenge is to respond with new methodologies that can capture and critique the increasingly diffuse, fractured nature of contemporary policy processes. This article presents one such methodology, where Foucauldian genealogy is used to construct a history of the discourse of ‘quality’ in early childhood reform policy in Australia. The genealogical approach is combined with ‘network ethnography’, which uses interviews with policy actors and the construction of policy network and mobility maps to undertake a governmentality analysis of discourse production. The preliminary findings emphasize the global spread of a positivist discourse of quality, and discuss its neo-liberal ideological ties and policy uses in Australian early childhood policy. The tactical use of human capital theory in the Australian Early Years Learning Framework is uncovered, wherein government discourse control resulted in the creation of learning outcomes for children, intended for use as a performativity structure.

Review of Atheist Awakening: Secular Activism & Community in America

Academics concerned with nonreligion will be familiar with the history of the field: although Colin Campbell’s book, Toward a Sociology of Irreligion, was published in 1971, nonreligion (including atheism) subsequently became a topic for theological, philosophical, and historical research, and has only relatively recently (in the early 2000s) resurfaced as a topic for sociological consideration. Cimino and Smith were amongst the first academics to take up the sociological study of nonreligion. Based on over a decade of sociological inquiry, Atheist Awakening presents a picture of atheism in the contemporary United States. As their title indicates, Cimino and Smith suggest that there has been an “awakening” amongst atheists. They argue that the increased visibility of atheism over the last ten years is due only in small part to an increase in the proportion of nonreligious people. Rather, nonreligious people have been “mobilised”, or encouraged think of their atheism as an important aspect of their identity (p. 2–3). Approaching atheism as a social movement, Atheist Awakening is largely concerned with the formation of collective atheist identities in the US. Cimino and Smith observe that atheists in America portray themselves as a subculture, standing in contrast to, and resisting, the perceived norm of religiosity in the US (p. 10). The authors identify two techniques deployed in the construction of this collective identity: the use of identity politics, and the use of minority discourses (p. 10). Using identity politics, atheists appropriate arguments from the civil rights and gay rights movements. Perhaps the most obvious example is the use of the phrase “coming out”, borrowed from the gay rights movement, to describe the process of disclosing one’s atheism. By “minority discourses”, Cimino and Smith refer to the tendency of atheists in the US to emphasise that they are few in number. The collective atheist identity described by Cimino and Smith is a response to the wider socio-political context in which it forms. The authors point out that American atheists position themselves in opposition to evangelical Protestants (p. 33). Atheists might, for example, attempt to debunk literalist readings of the Bible, held by some evangelical Protestants. Whether or not these efforts succeed in convincing others, they nevertheless enhance public awareness of atheism. This exemplifies a recurring theme in the book: the idea that non-believers and believers exist in symbiotic relationships, such that the behaviour and activities of one group form a resource for the other. Perhaps wary of painting an overly homogenous picture of the atheist movement, much of Cimino and Smith’s fourth chapter is concerned with describing internal differences within the atheist movement. Some individuals and groups support greater ritualisation, others disagree; some are only concerned with the influence of religion in the public sphere, others find religion in the private sphere equally problematic. The chapter reads as an attempt to acknowledge this diversity of opinion, peppered with cautionary remarks that hint of the authors’ wish to avoid exaggerating these internal differences. Both authors and readers might find Luther Gerlach’s SPIN model of social movements useful to understand intra-movement dynamics. According to Gerlach, social movements are segmented and polycentric: they are composed of different groups, with different visions and different leadership. They are also integrated networks: the segments interact through structural, personal, and ideological ties, and segments can unite if necessary (Gerlach, 1987, p. 115).

“I Did It All Online:” Transgender identity and the management of everyday life

ABSTRACT Informed by ethnographic work with transgender individuals and communities in the Midwest and San Francisco, this article explores the relationship between technology and transgender identity. It examines the possibilities for self-recognition that transgender audiences had before the era of the internet. Then, through a case study of a transgender person, it engages in a close analysis of what it means to transition gender in online environments. Drawing from Heidegger's (1962. Being and time. New York: Harper Perennial) phenomenology of technology, I argue that technology has become increasingly “ready-to-hand”—available, participatory, and taken-for-granted—for transgender individuals. In particular, the internet has created virtual “counterpublics” (Warner, 2002. Publics and counterpublics. Brooklyn: Zone Books) that furnish feelings of belonging and ideological affiliation, as well as “care structures” (Scannell, 2014. Television and the meaning of live: An enquiry into the human situation. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press), architectures of organized care and concern, that facilitate transgender identity work and everyday survival. For transgender individuals, who live in a world created without them in mind, the affordances of online counterpublics and care structures help them manage the trials and complexities of everyday life. At the same time, contemporary digital media environments introduce new risks and liabilities for transgender individuals.

Political alliance, residential mobility, and diet at the ancient Maya city of Pusilha, Belize

We present strontium, oxygen, and carbon isotope ratios derived from the tooth enamel of 16 individuals from the Classic Maya city of Pusilha, located in southern Belize. Carbon isotope data suggest that local people ate relatively more maize than observed at many other comparable Maya sites, and hint that dietary practices at Pusilha may have been related to sex and status. Furthermore, strontium and oxygen isotope data imply that four individuals were born and spent their early childhood outside of the eastern Maya lowlands. One individual may have come from the northern Maya lowlands, a second from the volcanic highlands of Guatemala, and two more from the Copan region. In three cases, the pattern of foreigners in burials at Pusilha is inconsistent with their being sacrificed captives. Instead, they appear to have been foreign elites who married into the royal family. Political, economic, and ideological ties between the Southern Belize Region and Copan have long been hypothesized but until now there has been only weak and ambiguous evidence for such connections.

The Austrian Connection: SS and Police Leader Odilo Globocnik and His Staff in the Lublin District

The Office of the SS and Police Leader in the Lublin District under Odilo Globocnik contributed to two objectives of Nazi rule in Poland: the murder of the Jews and “Germanization.” Globocnik’s enormous activism is often explained by his socialization and the experience of failure as Gauleiter of Vienna. His staff in Lublin has received little attention. Austrians occupied almost all important positions on that staff. Decisive for their recruitment, however, was not their origin but their affiliation with Globocnik’s network when the Nazi movement had been illegal in Austria. These were not just any men, but a group of perpetrators with very close personal and ideological ties.

Corporate governance reforms and political partisanship: an empirical analysis in 16 OECD countries

This paper explores the determinants of pro-minority shareholder corporate governance reforms. Using a Cox conditional model in gap time, this paper provides new empirical evidence on the linkages between the adoption of pro-minority shareholder corporate governance reforms at the firm level and government ideological affiliation in 16 OECD countries over the period 1970–2009. I find strong evidence linking rightward shifts in government ideological orientation with the adoption of minority shareholder protection legislation. This result supports our argument that changes in the composition of the coalition of heterogeneous interests and/or a change in the expectations of the parties’ constituency will affect government strategy on the adoption of pro-minority shareholder corporate governance reforms. I also find that the macroeconomic context at the international level may influence the adoption of these reforms. Our findings suggest that international economic integration has resulted not in the convergence of corporate governance regimes to the Anglo-Saxon model, but rather the emergence of hybrid corporate governance systems.

Unseaming images: the limits and possibilities for reconfiguring albums of complicity

In this article I inquire whether counter-archival strategies used in the documentary film The Village Under the Forest (Grunebaum and Kaplan 2013) might risk failure as a condition of their deployment. My discussion tracks the question of complicity and counter-archival strategy through consideration of the repurposing of personal photographs of travel to Israel in the film. During the states of emergency in 1980s South Africa, my travel photographs represented my desire to affiliate to Israel and its promise to the Jewish Diaspora to belong to its polity. In the film's visual matrix, these political claims are reconfigured. They are also ‘cut into’ and over footage and voice-overs of interviews with Palestinians. While these editing choices enable the photographs’ earlier meanings to be ‘unseamed’, they firstly raise the question: What limitations were encountered in the repurposing of my photographs towards offering an account of complicity? While the repurposed images interrupt the apparent ‘seamlessness’ of my earlier ideological affiliations to Israel, use of the travel photographs in the film may also contribute towards creating a narrative in which Palestinians are (re) displaced; instrumentalised within an interpretative framework that explores complicity with their displacement, yet places complicity as the central narrative. Secondly, I ask what is displaced of South Africa in the film, given that the photos were taken during the 1980s? Here the possibilities for my repurposed travel album photographs to open different ethical relations and political visions than those asserted prior to their insertion in the film are countered by another limitation: if a counter-archive of complicity is to be assembled as a simultaneous account of the conditions of possibility for its becoming, then the risk of failure may constitute a necessary outcome in accounting for complicity.

Protests, Islamism and the waning prospect of revolution in Egypt

Popular uprisings across the Arab world from late 2010 soon transformed its political geography. Authoritarian regimes were confronted with challenges from their citizens. In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak's security forces, epitomised by the Interior Ministry, had formerly managed to contain outbreaks of protests in the opening decade of the twenty-first century. However, the organising and mobilising of protests by groups such as Kefaya led to a wider social awareness of the looming prospect of the political inheritance of the office of president from father to son, cultivation of democratic ideals and values, and cross-ideological links expressed in a coalition of different political actors. The arrival of the Arab Spring in Egypt was inflected in this dissenting context. Broader regional trends held the promise of democratic transitions, at least persisting in Tunisia, which was somewhat dashed in the commotion generated by the rise of a secular-Islamist divide in Egypt's political scene. Familiar objections were raised against the very processes pushing forward the transition of democracy centred upon Islamist electoral successes. Secularism was contrasted with theocracy in the contest over who was the authentic guardian of the Egyptian revolution. Political acumen acquired in the struggle against the Mubarak regime, espousal of the norms of democracy and the transcending of ideological affiliations among Egypt's intelligentsia and activists appear to have been forgotten in the staking of political territory.

Political violence, community and its limits in Kannur, Kerala

This article analyses communities that the blue-collar, backward caste, local-level workers of the party Left and the Hindu Right have forged amongst themselves in the Kannur district of Kerala. Its particular focus is on members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI (M)). For more than four decades, members of the CPI (M) and the Hindu Right have been involved in an intermittent but occasionally intense conflict. Their conflict highlights how modern practices of political mobilisation and competition condition the formation of close-knit antagonistic masculine unities regardless of the ideological affiliations in question; its violent context foregrounds affects and emotions that characterise life in such fraternal communities. While such unities have become central to the enactment of collective agency in many contexts, strong limits mark these communities. Not just those outside a community, but also those within it apprehend these limits. Violent experiences emerge as idealised modes of imagining communion with members of one’s community, as well as forces that individuate them. Biographies and narratives of Left- and Right-wing workers who once sought close integration with their respective communities but now live apart from them, illuminate the already present limits of commonality and unity possible in modern political communities.

Synergetics of the Language, National Consciousness and Culture by Globalization

The main aim of the investigation is to learn out all positive and negative influences of the process of globalization on the formation and development of the national language, national consciousness and national culture in the modern world during the intercultural communication and to analyze the power and impact of the Modern English as a global language to our national Azerbaijani language. To study such a global problem from the different view points as of native, so foreign scientists is also one of the main aims. The process of globalization, covering various spheres of life, is universal, as for thousands of years separated, remote to some extent, differential events—national or regional peculiarities, habits, complexes strongly influenced by modern technologies, approaching each other with incredible speed and combine as a result of multifaceted economic, socio-political, moral and ideological ties, limiting the kind of peculiarities, lead to the events and processes happening in the world. It is obvious that there is a great influence on the language’s enrichment of the process of globalization, which had taken place in the world. Today a rapid growth of the prestige of the English language is observed in the modern world, as well as in Azerbaijan and this can be explained by, at least, two reasons. The first: there exists a necessity for a universal means of communication, a common language for the whole mankind. The second: the advantages of the English language in comparison with other international languages in gratifying this need. The problem of the literary language in the whole and especially of the lexical layer in modern Azerbaijani and English languages is often investigating sphere today. The development of the living language is the constant changing and enrichment of various components, which constitute the Basic Word Stock of the language, especially sounds, words, word groups, set-expressions, and also grammatical relations. It is not a secret that in our days the English language is one of the most important language in the process of intercultural communication. We may say that English is a Global Language today as from the geographical point of view it is spread throughout the world between three big oceans (the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Indian Oceans) and from the social-cultural point of view almost all the population of the Earth use this language in different purposes. In the process of investigation the ways of the enrichment of the basic word stock of the Azerbaijani literary language, the increasing process of borrowings, the characteristic features of our modern Azerbaijani society, the peculiarities of the Azerbaijani culture, the essence of the Azerbaijani cultural diplomacy, the specific distinctions of the national consciousness, the actual problems of the cultural globalization as in a global scope (the vision of the outlines of megasociety), so in a local plan, the notions of the “megasosiety” and “megaculture” as the model of “the unity of the divergencies”, the factors of “americanization” and “westernization”, the great impact of mass media means on the language change are discussed in the suggested to your attention article. There is summary in the conclusion of the research work.

DISCOURSE MARKER LIKE IN REAL Time: CHARACTERIZING THE Time-Course OF SOCIOLINGUISTIC IMPRESSION FORMATION

Discourse marker like (DML) is recognized as a highly stigmatized feature of American English, one with strong ideological ties to inarticulate, “Valley Girl” speech. Previous work suggests that individual listeners form impressions that both reference and perpetuate DML's status, as DML-containing speech is judged as friendlier and less intelligent than controls. Though informative, such studies cannot speak to the magnitude and/or stability of DML-based impressions nor to the potential interactions between said effects and individual processing styles. The current study continuously measures real-time listener evaluations of speech samples differing only by a single use of DML using a dynamic motion-capture interface. It also integrates a measure of participants' social interaction preferences and cognitive flexibility, thus assessing the influence of individual differences on participants' moment-by-moment impression formation. Our results indicate that DML has an initial negative effect on both friendliness and intelligence ratings. While the “unfriendly” perception is relatively transient, the “unintelligent” evaluation persists and intensifies over time. Individuals with relatively high levels of social aptitude and/or cognitive flexibility are largely responsible for these trends. Collectively, these results offer a preliminary characterization of the sociocognitive interplay between individual, interpersonal, and societal influences on attitude formation.

Race, Writing, and Don Juan

MARK CANUEL Race, Writing, and DonJuan T here are many ways in which lord byron’s narrator defends the cause of slavery’s abolition in Don Juan. We frequently read the speaker’s pronouncements of political allegiance to the cause of William Wilberforce, the greatest parliamentary leader on behalf of abolition and the “moral Washington of Africa”; in the same vein, the speaker vilifies false Christian “bigots” who make their “pure creed” into the “sanction” for slavery’s “ill.”1 In this essay, however, I want to show that Byron’s op­ position to slavery and the slave trade is a great deal more complicated than we might think ifwe were merely to take at face value the poet-narrator’s claims to be “born for opposition” (15.22). While generally voicing sup­ port for abolition (a support that Byron openly expressed elsewhere), Don Juan nevertheless depends upon a subtle yet profound logic that insistently privileges the purity and beauty of white bodies. This is not because the poem merely expresses a racist ideology, but rather because its inter­ twined configurations ofpolitical and aesthetic value are inseparable from a self-consciously constructed racial hierarchy. Byron is fully aware ofthis hi­ erarchy’s artificiality, but this awareness cannot detract from the sway of race over the poem, and from the sway ofrace within a cultural history that the poem brilliantly and comically instantiates and endorses. The work of David Theo Goldberg has shown how conceptions of rights (which include rights expounded upon in abolitionist discourse) have been historically inseparable from raced conceptions of the political subject. Such conceptions have aimed at discriminating between those sub­ jects who are, and those who are not, capable of civilization and selfgovernment .2 Helen Heran Jun has continued this line of argument to show how even recent twentieth- and twenty-first-century views of citi­ zenship depend upon exclusionary understandings of racial difference.3 1. George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don Juan, canto 14, stanza 82; canto 15, stanza 18. All references to the poem are from Jerome J. McGann, ed., Complete Poetical Works, 7 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980-1993), vol. 5; hereafter cited in the text by canto and stanza. 2. Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Oxford: WileyBlackwell , 1993), 14-40. 3. Jun, Race for Citizenship: Black Orientalism and Asian Uplift from Pre-Emancipation to Neoliberal America (New York: New York University Press, 2011). SiR, 54 (Fall 2015) 303 304 MARK CANUEL Such accounts, and others like them, collectively show how attempts at lib­ eral inclusiveness depend upon still deeper inequalities; to some extent, they therefore might lead us to see why Byron’s poem could appear to be politically progressive in some respects, even while it compromises or com­ plicates its commitments in others. Still more than even these accounts al­ low, however, I wish to show how and why white bodies are so crucial for the poem’s aesthetic project. It turns out that the crux of Byron’s Don Juan—its celebrated ability to represent “life’s infinite variety” (15.19)— depends upon the preeminence ofwhite flesh. Whiteness is the ground for registering gorgeous articulations of features on the body’s alabaster sur­ faces; whiteness is the condition for capturing the seductive altering hues that demarcate mood and solicit desire. Simultaneously, and most impor­ tant, the white body is analogized at key moments to the poet-narrator’s own work—printed on white “foolscap”—as ifpoetic composition and the raced subject were finally inseparable. By exploring the dynamics of race in the poem’s political aesthetics, I embark on a discussion that merges with a long-standing interest, among many ofByron’s critics, in his political or ideological affiliations. For a few readers, Byron adheres to the most traditional of values. Malcolm Kelsall argues that, in the Whig tradition, he upholds “aristocratic oligarchy”;4 Marilyn Butler, though acknowledging his sympathies with less conserva­ tive causes, also sees him as a “liberal” who is only “superficially rebel­ lious.”5 The vast majority of critics take his rebellions more seriously, how­ ever. From the time of the poem’s appearance, Byron and his publisher John Murray feared prosecution...

On the Problems Arising during the Transformation of the English Verbal Phraseological Units

The process of globalization, covering various spheres of life, is universal, as for thousands of years separated, remote to some extent, differential events—national or regional peculiarities, habits, complexes strongly influenced by modern technologies, approaching each other with incredible speed and combine as a result of multifaceted economic, socio-political, moral and ideological ties, limiting the kind of peculiarities, lead to the events and processes happening in the world. Today a rapid growth of the prestige of the English language is observed in the modern world, as well as in Azerbaijan and this can be explained by, at least, two reasons. The first: there exists a necessity for a universal means of communication, a common language for the whole mankind. The second: the advantages of the English language in comparison with other international languages in gratifying this need. It is not a secret that in our days the English language is one of the most important languages in the process of intercultural communication. We may say that English is a Global Language today as from the geographical point of view it is spread throughout the world among the territories of three big oceans: the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Indian Oceans, and from the social-cultural point of view almost all the population of the Earth use this language in different purposes. The article represented to your attention is devoted to the problems arising during the transformation of the English verbal phraseological units. In this investigation different linguistic methods such as descriptive, transformational, comparative-typological were used.

Transparency of Values in Science: Elliott and Resnik Respond

We thank Schwartz for his thoughtful comments, which provide an opportunity for us to clarify some of the points in our commentary, in which we called for greater transparency about the values that influence policy-relevant research (Elliott and Resnik 2014). His first concern is that even though we call for employing different standards of evidence in various social contexts, the evidence itself remains the same. We agree; in our commentary we were not claiming that the evidence itself changes but only that the form of evidence required for different decisions depends on the social context. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that although the evidence itself does not change, it has to be interpreted and weighed, and many contemporary science policy disputes stem from disagreements about how to do so (Douglas 2012). Therefore, our view is that conflicts over public policies often stem from value judgments about both the nature of the evidence and standards of evidence. We agree with Schwartz about the solution: Transparency is essential. The more scientists acknowledge the assumptions and values that influence their interpretations of evidence and their decisions about how to weigh it, the better. Schwartz’s second point is that it is problematic for us to treat tort law and chemical regulations as equivalent contexts, in which weaker standards of evidence can appropriately inform policy. We agree that different standards of evidence may be appropriate in the two contexts. However, we caution against equating the standards of evidence expected in tort law with those expected in more traditional scientific contexts. The tort system requires only a preponderance of evidence (> 50% likelihood) to win a case; this is much weaker evidence than scientists typically demand when presenting or publishing results, and confusion about these differing standards has led to significant legal controversies (Cranor 2006). Schwartz’s third point is that other conflicts of interest, such as “ideological ties to advocacy organizations,” are important to disclose in addition to financial ties to industry. We heartily agree; indeed, in our commentary (Elliott and Resnik 2014) we stated that “Disclosures of competing financial interests and nonfinancial interests (such as professional or political allegiances) also provide opportunities for more transparent discussions” (Elliott and Resnik 2014). One of the aims of our commentary was to encourage more careful thinking about how to promote transparency regarding a wide range of different factors that could influence scientists’ reasoning, including ideology. Nevertheless, there are at least two reasons that financial connections to industry groups should continue to receive careful attention: a) Advocacy organizations typically have much fewer resources than industry to generate policy-relevant research that serves their interests (Elliott 2011); and b) a large body of evidence indicates that industry funding has important effects on research outcomes, whereas there is less information about how ideological ties affect research (e.g., Lundh et al. 2012). Schwartz’s fourth concern is that it is important to think about risk–benefit relationships when applying science to public policy. This is a very good point, but it needs to be considered in conjunction with the fact that scientists’ values and assumptions may influence their assessments of the evidence. It would be ideal if scientists could provide perfectly unbiased risk assessments to policy makers, who could then evaluate the risks versus the benefits in order to make policy decisions. Unfortunately, this picture is unrealistic; scientists’ views about the benefits associated with new technologies likely have implicit influences on their risk assessments. For example, evidence from the literature on risk perception indicates that people’s perceptions of risk are influenced by a number of factors, including the voluntariness of the risks, the fairness of their distribution, their familiarity, and the perceived benefits associated with them (Fischhoff et al. 1981). Scientists are subject to these same influences, especially when they have limited data or are forced to weigh multiple forms of evidence (Cooke 1991). This provides further support for our central claim, namely, that scientists should explore ways to acknowledge the values that may influence them rather than denying the presence of these influences.