Ideological Production Research Articles

Empirical Research on Human Resource Management as a Production of Ideology

The management revue is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary European journal publishing both qualitative and quantitative work as well as purely theoretical papers that advance the study of management, organisation and industrial relations.

I Want to Be Human

This article reads a Chinese blockbuster film, City of Life and Death ([南京! 南京! Nanjing! Nanjing!] dir. Lu Chuan, 2009), as an allegory of China and the human for contemporary China. This movie illustrates the historical entanglement and tension of China and the human in twentieth-century Chinese cultural criticism and raises provocative questions about the geopolitics of historical trauma (the Nanjing Massacre in this case), the politics of memory, and the recuperation of Chinese humanity through memory work. I situate this film's representation of the Nanjing Massacre in relation to two other texts, The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe and The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, and examine the intricate power relations revolving around these contemporary discourses of the human in representations of this historical incident. I argue that these two texts have prepared the ground for City of Life and Death, positioning it strategically vis-à-vis Chinese history and the global condition of neoliberal globalization. I suggest that the movie articulates the Chinese desire for the universal human among the emerging new Chinese middle class, which has proved itself to be a formidable force in cultural and ideological production in contemporary China.

Serbs as threat the extreme negative portrayal of the Serb “minority” in Albanian-language newspapers in Kosovo

Through perpetuating negative stereotypes and rigid dichotomous identities, the media play a significant part in sustaining conflict dynamics in Kosovo. Examining their discourse in terms of ideological production and representations is crucial in order to understand the power relations between the majority and the minority, the identity politics involved in sustaining them, and the intractability of the conflict. In an effort to provide a deeper understanding of the intractable conflict in Kosovo, and the role of the media in protracting it, this study uses critical discourse analysis to examine articles related to issues affecting the Serb community, published in Albanian language print media. The master narrative that comes out of the analysis is that of ?threat? - the threat that Kosovo Albanians continue to face from Serbs and Serbia; a threat that is portrayed as historical and constant. The discourse further strengthens the conflict dynamics of opposition, polarization and even hatred. This master narrative implies that Serbs are enemies, to be feared, contested, fought against; conflict is thus the normal state of affairs. The study also looks at the implications of media discourse for reconciliation efforts and the prospects of the Serb minority in Kosovo society, arguing that when the Other is presented as dangerous and threatening, fear of the Other and a desire to eliminate the threat, physically and symbolically, become perceived as a ?natural? response, and thus constitute a significant conflict-sustaining dynamic.

Global Ideologies and Urban Landscapes: Introduction to the Special Issue

This article introduces the central problematic behind this special edition: the intersection of language and space as reflected in the interplay of global ideologies and urban landscapes. We aim to illuminate and problematise the production of ideologies as both discursive and spatial phenomena by grounding our analyses in cities of the global North and South. We outline our reasons for this focus in relation to the prominence of space in contemporary social theory and in relation to more everyday local-global conditions. Specifically, we point to the declining availability of conventional ‘public spaces’ as sites of ideological dissent; the proliferation of ideologically embedded metaphors and neologisms that narrow the diverse potentials of spatial transformation; the constraints that disciplinary boundaries place on socio-spatial inquiry; and the normative drive to build heterogeneous futures other than those set out by elites as universally ‘global’. We outline the contributions to this special edition in relation to these key themes. Este artículo introduce la problemática que constituye el tema principal de esta edición especial. La interacción de las ideologías de la globalización y el espacio urbano se reflejan en los cruces del lenguaje y el espacio. Con el fin de ilustrar y afianzar esta problemática, se analizara la creación de ideologías en ciudades globalizadas del norte y del sur como un fenómeno espacial y de discurso. A continuación enumeramos las razones de este enfoque con relación a la importancia del espacio en la teoría social contemporánea y su relación cada vez mayor con las condiciones locales-globales del diario vivir. Señalamos específicamente el deterioro de la disponibilidad de ‘espacios públicoś como lugares para el disentimiento de ideologías; la proliferación de metáforas y neologismos enquistados que disminuyen el potencial diverso de la transformación de los espacios; las restricciones generadas por límites disciplinarios en la búsqueda socio-espacial; y, la tendencia normativa que busca construir futuros heterogéneos que difieran de los establecidos por las elites como globalmente ‘universales’. Los temas mencionados anteriormente, son claves para esta edición especial.

SCIENCE IN POWER

Despite its image of an objective and neutral activity within society, science can also be involved in the ideological production of nationalism and in the creation of nations. This paper offers a critical cultural analysis of the mainstream Slovene scientific texts on national matters. It examines doctoral dissertations from various disciplines, all of which deal with Slovene national culture and its borders and were produced in Slovenia in the period between 1985 and 2002. With this I hope to disclose how they participate in the production of the knowledge about the nation. Such scientific representations signify the nation, provide meanings for the national community and create a specific regime of truth that organizes the popular national imagery. They penetrate the everyday reality as hard facts; they produce trustworthy knowledge and offer authoritative versions of reality. The analysis suggests that these scientific representations of the Slovene nation share a few nodal points that reproduce nationalist discourses. Almost all were written within the context of the dominant Slovene nation-building discourse and privileged national purity as a norm while they either ignored the notions of mythical national existence or failed to acknowledge the cultural diversity and hybridism.

Globalism as the Product of Nationalism

This study is based on the argument that globalism is a product of nationalism. I argue that globalism, understood as the imagination of the world as a single place, was made possible by and accompanies the emergence of nationalism, defined as the formation of an imagined community in a given (local) discursive space. Focusing on the specific ways in which globalism is understood and experienced locally in Turkey, this study examines how the world-at-large is seen from Turkey as part and product of the founding national ideology during the 1920s and 1930s, particularly as expressed in cartoons, and how these visions and images of the globe are produced, mobilized and disseminated locally as part of ongoing nation-building efforts. I argue that during these years the global was invariably imagined as the West, referring mainly to Western Europe, and this imagining was mobilized toward the creation and projection of Turkey as a modern, Western, secular country. I argue that the founding national ideology projected an image of the West as the global-other to be taken as a model and imitated, setting norms for the creation of a new national identity and new norms of citizenship around the principles of secularism, modernity and civilization, which could only be attained by the erasure of the local.

The E-Marketing Strategy of Hamas

Given the growth of Internet research in recent years, it is rather surprising that research of online terrorism and countermeasures has been lacking theoretical and conceptual frameworks. The present study suggests applying the concepts and models taken from e-marketing to the study of terrorist websites. This work proves that when Hamas builds an array of sites in the Internet, it complies with the same rules that the Western business world follows. Chaffey et al. (2000) constructed a model comprised of eight decision points in the process of building a business-oriented Internet site. Although the model was developed for commercial purposes, the present study demonstrates how it could be used as an analytic framework to study terrorist websites. As shown, most of the decision points in the model were relevant to the Palestinian Information Center group of websites. Understanding the e-marketing strategy of Hamas will allow the construction of a competing marketing strategy in order to market rival ideological consumer products.

Hervás, convivencia and the heritagization of Spain’s Jewish past

Since the early 1990s, and coinciding with the celebratory events of the fifth centenary, new cultural initiatives related to the legacies of Spain’s Jewish inhabitants have been added to the marketing of the country as a tourist destination. This article analyses how these initiatives foreground convivencia [coexistence] as a uniquely Spanish cultural tradition and shape it into a marketable ideological product, by focusing on the town of Hervás, in the province of Cáceres, Extremadura, as a prime example of the complexities inherent in these tourism initiatives. Over the last twelve years Hervás has organized a celebration of its Jewish identity in ‘Los conversos’ [‘The converts’], a three-day festival in which the town’s inhabitants dress up as ‘Jews’ and stage a collective performance of a theatre play related to its Jewish past. Through careful analysis of the gradual changes that have been incorporated into the festival and the play over the years, the article studies the entanglement of desires and anxieties and the multiple contradictions that arise as this town foregrounds its Jewish past to negotiate unresolved issues of transnational, national, regional and local identity. The article combines an analysis of textual sources, especially the literary works on which Hervás has relied to construct the image of itself promoted in the festival, and materials gathered from fieldwork there (promotional materials, video footage and photographs of the celebrations, interviews with organizers and participants, etc.). It also relies on the research undertaken by local historian Marciano de Hervás, and current theorizations of patrimonialization and heritagization (Urry 1995; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998) and the ‘reinvention’ of Jewish culture in Europe (Gruber 2002) in the field of tourism studies.

L’antique, l’authentique : Alexander Kluge ou les métamorphoses d’Hermès

Every era has an ideology: a “necessary fake consciousness” as Marx used to define it. This is true for the modern Europe that has arisen from the French Revolution as well as for Antiquity. The poetry of Antiquity was in some cases an imitation of past models and in other cases the expression of an all-encompassing world concept: ideology as a means to understand the world, as a source of “sense”. Alexander Kluge’s last movie Nachrichten aus der ideologischen Antike : Marx, Eisenstein, das Kapital, does not seek to resuscitate Marx with yet another Marxist breviary. It appears as if he considered Greek art as belonging to the past, but at the same time he acknowledged it as the testimony of “normal children” and thus as a potential role model for modern civilisation. According to this idea, Marx and Eisenstein should be considered as representatives of an “Ideological Antiquity”. Under this perspective, assuming that the ideas of Marxian analysis are in no way obsolete is not merely the product of ideology. Reading Capital from the perspective of Ovid’s Metamorphoses thus becomes the best antidote to dogmatism as well as a suitable and clever solution to the question.

The Human Snout: Pigs, Priests, and Peasants in the Parlor

ABSTRACTIreland reeked throughout the nineteenth century from the pages of English representation. The reputed stench of its cabins, cesspools, and dungheaps became a shameful index of national backwardness and the essential mark of Irish olfactory identity. In response to the odor of primitiveness that clung to them also, Ireland's rising middle classes set about a program of national decontamination. Led by the emblematic figure of native Victorian propriety, the Catholic priest, this modernizing class carried the mantras of civility and hygiene to the countryside and the rural home, imposing upon a recalcitrant peasantry a new, “enlightened,” olfactory register predicated on an intolerance of traditional odors. The groundwork for this transformation was the castigation of Ireland's domestic cottage by English observers and, in particular, the metonymic substitution of the peasantry's pigs for Irish national character—a discursive reordering that, though it encountered resistance from a peasantry devoted to an old Gaelic order of sensory values, was completed and even sanctified by a Catholic Church bent on producing modern, disciplined subjects. The smells of everyday life, as a result, took on new meanings. This paper examines Irish and British literary and historical texts around the turn of the twentieth century to uncover that meaning and expose the role of olfaction in the production of the peculiar Gaelo-Catholic ideology of domesticity that until recent decades governed rural Ireland.

Grounding Critical Communication Studies: An Inquiry Into the Communication Theory of Karl Marx

In this paper theoretical foundations of critical media and communication studies are discussed. The assumption of scholars such as Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard that Marx in his analysis of capitalism did not take into account media and communication is discussed. It is shown that counter to such opinions Marx provided important insights for analyzing the role of the media in commodity and ideology production, circulation, and consumption and for discussing the role of alternative media production, circulation, and reception. Marx’s works are systematically reconstructed in order to identify aspects of the media and communication. This reconstruction is based on the Marxian circuit of capital. Marx provided important groundwork for media and communication theory that can be connected to contemporary critical media and communication studies.

Re-Interpreting Modern Iran: Tribe and State in the Twentieth Century

For the nationalist elite of early Pahlavi Iran, the regime's military successes over tribal opposition, whether real or imagined, were welcomed and celebrated. These successes were interpreted as confirmation of their views of tribal power as hostile to modernity, archaic and outmoded, and of Riza Shah as the deliverer of Iran's national salvation. This conceptualization of the “tribal problem” had appeared in tandem with and as a product of modernist ideology in the late nineteenth century, acquired the backing of state power with the rise of the Pahlavi dynasty, and endured until the revolution of 1979. It communicated itself, in diluted form, to Western scholarship, which has been largely content to depict Riza Shah's tribal policies as regrettably brutal, but an unavoidable stage in Iran's progress and “modernization.” Yet this version of tribe–state relations is clearly an ideological construct rather than an historical analysis. The account which follows begins a re-evaluation of tribal politics in modern Iran, focusing especially on the Riza Shah decades when these politics were a site of intense conflict and where the nationalist template was most starkly delineated, and concludes by tracing and re-examining the evolution of the tribe–state dynamic in the decades of land reform and revolution.

Coming face to face with bloody reality: Liberal common sense and the ideological failure of the Bush doctrine in Iraq

A conventional technocratic wisdom has begun to form that blames the failure of the US led invasion of Iraq on the small number of American troops deployed and the ideological divisions at the centre of the Bush administration itself. This paper argues that both these accounts are at best simply descriptive. A much more sustained explanation has to be based on a close examination of the ideological assumptions that shaped the drafting of policies and planning for the aftermath of the war. The point of departure for such an analysis is that all agency, whether individual or collective, is socially mediated. The paper deploys Antonio Gramsci's notion of ‘Common Sense’ to examine the Bush administration's policy towards Iraq. It argues that the Common Sense at work in the White House, Defence Department and Green Zone was primarily responsible for America's failure. It examines the relationship between the ‘higher philosophies’ of both Neoconservatism and Neo-Liberalism and Common Sense. It concludes that although Neoconservatism was influential in justifying the invasion itself, it was Neo-Liberalism that shaped the policy agenda for the aftermath of war. It takes as its example the pre-war planning for Iraq, then the disbanding of the Iraqi army and the de-Ba’athification of the Iraqi state. The planning and these two decisions, responsible for driving Iraq into civil war, can only be fully explained by studying the ideology that shaped them. From this perspective, the United States intervention in Iraq was not the product of an outlandish ideology but was instead the high water mark of post-Cold War Liberal interventionism. As such, it highlights the ideological and empirical shortcomings associated with ‘Kinetic Liberalism’.

The Privatization of the Holocaust: Memory, Historiography, and Politics

Politically and culturally the collective memory of the Holocaust plays a key role in constructing Israeli identity. Three main periods can be discerned in Holocaust memory in Israel: divided memory, nationalized memory, and privatized memory. This article discusses the privatization of the Zionist-nationalized memory of the Holocaust in Israel during the 1980s and 1990s as an ideological product of the privatization revolution through which Israel has gone. The article focuses on the role played by Post-Zionism in privatizing Holocaust memory by depicting Zionist ideology and Israeli politics that portrayed the nationalized memory as oppressive. In privatizing Holocaust memory, Post-Zionism reaffirmed its nature as the meta-ideology of the Israeli privatization revolution and dismantling of the welfare state.

Pushing at the boundaries of the body: Cultural politics and cross-gender dance in East Java

Cross-gender dance in East Java has captivated me as a strategy that performers use to negotiate multiple ideas about manhood and womanhood as well as tensions between official ideologies and social realities, expectations about performers’ onstage personas and offstage lives, and competing aesthetic sensibilities. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the regency of Malang and analysis of performers’ verbal discourse, I address issues of the body, perception, agency, and senses of self, foregrounding performers’ insights into their practices’ meanings, the cultural impact they have as artists, and reasons behind multiple perceptions of gender. To examine relationships between larger cultural forces and performers’ views, I use generation as an analytical framework. I consider performers in three generations – the 1940s-1960s, the 1970s-1990s, and the 1990s to the present. That these generations correlate closely to three political periods in Indonesian history – Old Order (1945-1965/6), New Order (1966-1998), and Reformation Era (1998-present) – has led me to make three related arguments. First, the political and cultural climate has affected the discourse through which musicians and dancers expressed their perceptions about the performance of gender. Second, performers have rearticulated larger cultural and political discourses in their own ways, thereby asserting their own senses of gender. Third, performers have affected the political and cultural climate by pushing at the boundaries of maleness and femaleness onstage and in their daily lives, making on- and offstage spaces fluid and complementary sites of cultural and ideological production.

The “Old” and the “New” Economies of Russia: The Technological Structures, the Branch Structure of Production and Corporate Governance

Examination of why Russia is only modestly successful in developing a post-industrial economy. While the in the West market competition intensified, the role of economic structures declined and production and technological decisions individualized, the USSR was weighed down by the Communist leadership's adherence to ideological schemes, departmental corporativism and production monopolies, within an underdeveloped infrastructure. Since the 1990s, the West has moved towards an “economy of knowledge,” but in post-Soviet Russia this movement was blocked by a reliance on older technological structures, for example, an overdeveloped mining industry and chronically underdeveloped information technology. Thus contemporary Russia remains a country with a degrading industrial-type economy.

Global Villages and Rural Cosmopolitanism: Exploring Global Ruralities

This paper explores the meaning of globalization in rural places, as well as the emergence of rural globalities, and even of rural cosmopolitanisms. While the discussion about globalization has been mainly localized in urban places, and mostly in some core cities, rural places are also intertwined with globality, and can became important nodes in the production and circulation of capital, culture, and ideology. To account for this, I explore a new meaning for the concept of ‘global villages’, not used in McLuhan's sense, but rather in terms of rural places that become truly global. As case studies, the paper addresses three ‘global villages’ in Latin America: the Central Valley in Chile, a node in the global food system; Otavalo in Ecuador, a core of cultural representations; and La Realidad, in Chiapas, Mexico, a center of ideological production.

Deconstructing the Asian welfare model: social equality matters

Esping-Andersen's seminal work on welfare regimes in capitalist societies sparked a heated debate regarding the Asian welfare model. In the past decade, the controversy has centred on verifying or disproving the existence of such a model and, for those who confirm its existence, identifying its characteristics. There are two ways of describing the Asian welfare model: the cultural approach, which emphasizes the role played by Confucian teaching in resisting the establishment of a strong welfare system; and the political–economic approach, which emphasizes the productivist ideology that characterizes the economic and welfare systems of Asian countries. These approaches have evolved into discourses that are used to determine the existence and the ‘success’ of the Asian welfare regime. This paper proposes a re-evaluation of these discourses, which tend to neglect the social inequalities, risks, and problems that characterize Asian welfare regimes. This paper challenges the domination of the ‘productivist ethos’ and the economy-led social policy in Asian welfare regimes, and calls attention to the need for social policy studies that analyse social inequalities based on class, gender, race, ethnicity, and age.

Infighting and Ideology: How Conflict Informs the Local Culture of the Chicago Dyke March

Although the study of local cultures has become established in American sociology, it often ignores the contested nature of how culture emerges and is negotiated within the context of small groups. To this end, we address the concept of infighting, a subtype of conflict, as it operates within a small group framework. Building on an ethnographic study of the Chicago Dyke March, we demonstrate that infighting highlights competing ideologies that may remain implicit in the absence of such conflict. Infighting treats divergent meaning systems as part of local contention between rival cliques and power centers. These ideological battles both reflect pre-existing differences between subgroups and serve to make explicit and public such differences, both in their background characteristics and in their interests. In the process infighting directs attention away from shared concerns and group building to questions of strategy, transforming the small group into an arena of ideological production and factional rivalry. Infighting recasts a group from a space of consensus to a contested political arena. We elaborate four analytic processes through which infighting connects to ideology and small group culture: infighting emphasizes the multivocality of meaning, cultural heterogeneity, an equilibrium of inclusion and group boundaries, and planning in light of ideologies of power.

Contesting authenticities: the emergence of local video production in Ghana

In this article I offer a historical reading of the early years of video production in Ghana between roughly 1987 and 1992, a period characterised by radical transformation put in motion by developments generally associated with globalisation. The erosion of state support for filmmaking, coupled with the ready availability of video technology allowed individuals situated outside of the networks of official cultural production, firstly to import and exhibit pirated copies of imported films and television programming, and later to produce their own features unregulated as commodities and artistic objects. This article focuses on this paradigmatic shift in local cinema culture and the critical discourse of ‘authenticity’ it generated. The last section of the article interrogates the dominant theoretical paradigm that has guided African film criticism since its inception -a paradigm that relies on and naturalises ‘authenticity,’ which the early history of video in Ghana demonstrates is a historical invention and an ideological product.