Implicit Politics Research Articles

Fresh Wind in the Industrial World: The Implicit Political Contours of the Attention to the Holy Spirit

ABSTRACT The French Catholic theology of the beginning of twentieth century turned to the experience of the masses of working people and had a creative political angle. This invites a closer look as this experience and its condition changes, and new concerns emerge. My inquiry will look at the theological rationale and nature of this engagement with the industrial world with an eye to its contemporary significance. I will begin from the pervading influence the industrial situation had on two theological developments that explicitly refer to it. The appropriation of this sensitivity will help to ask what is unique in their particular theological approach towards the political world. I will identify a notion of spirit, spirituality, and explicitly the Spirit, and will argue that this implicit pneumatological aspect is key. To show its significance, I will focus on this spiritual impulse in a developing trajectory of pneumatology to show its continuing relevance. Once affirmed and distinguished, it will point to a creative theological stance which is even more relevant to contemporary experience and engagement. Such an explicit pneumatological emphasis, then, is key for a creative approach towards the political, which seeks human and cosmic flourishing.

Measuring Implicit Political Extremism through Implicit Association Tests

Abstract We develop the first implicit association test (IAT) to measure general implicit extremist attitudes in Germany, Great Britain, and the Netherlands. We find that implicit extremist attitudes are positively but weakly correlated with existing explicit measures. This indicates that implicit measures capture different parts of the population, for example, cases in which associations are based on automated cognitive processes instead of conscious thought. Further results show that particularly the higher-educated and nonreligious respondents score higher on the implicit than on the explicit extremism measures. Our results highlight the importance of studying implicit attitudes of political extremism. We further provide novel insights into how to develop IATs for abstract concepts such as democracy and extremism, for the study of which we cannot use readily available images or concepts.

The Implicit Politics of Physical Beauty and of Artistic Taste in the Aesthetics of Winckelmann

This essay argues that Winckelmann’s analysis of the “Greek profile,” a study of what he described as a critical feature in the facial contour of good Greek statues, has its implicit political issue relating to racism, anthropology, and social hierarchy. Focusing on this artistic-political nexus, I begin with the Greek profile, then consider how the superiority of Greek physiognomy and culture introduces factors of environmental privilege and racial superiority, and finally turn to the implicit politics of Winckelmann’s theory of artistic taste.

Endurance, exhaustion and the lure of redemption

This paper is concerned with the lure of redemption in contemporary academic and accounts of exhaustion, endurance, and biopolitical life. Drawing on, and contributing to recent work on negativity in cultural geography, the paper analyses how optimism and redemption find their way in to academic writing on the contemporary condition. It interrogates the optimism in these literatures, paying attention to the genealogical roots of the propensity to redeem accounts of slow and attritional violence and biopolitical subjectivity. In particular, the paper charts the implicit politics and ethics at play in the invocation of the Deleuzian ‘otherwise’ which haunts many accounts of the transformatory potential of exhaustion, and the remnants of dialectical historicism and Christian morality at the heart of redemption narratives in accounts of endurance. The paper ends by questioning the motives behind such hopeful readings, and asks what it might entail to refuse to redeem tales of violence with optimistic glimmers of an as-yet unspecified world.

Do Facebook and Google Care about Journalism? Mapping the Relationship between Affordances of GNI and FJP Tools and Journalistic Norms

This study engages in a sociotechnical analysis of Facebook and Google to understand the material means by which these corporations strive to engage journalists vis-à-vis their business models. Through affordance theory, we argue that interfaces of technological artifacts are manifestations of their implicit politics and ideology, given that affordances entail normative claims about what users should do. Our study draws from Google News Initiative and Facebook Journalism Project to explore: how the affordances of FJP and GNI tools allow particular behaviors and encourage certain journalistic norms to emerge? We analyzed nine journalist-oriented tools from FJP and GNI, by performing a discursive interface analysis. Findings indicate that FJP and GNI tools affordances can encourage four distinct journalistic norms: (1) successful journalism should circulate widely on platforms, (2) successful journalism should be aware of the ways competition is measured in FJP and GNI, (3) successful journalism should attract loyal readership as defined by platforms and (4) successful journalism should make money through platforms. We argue that FJP and GNI tools affordances can facilitate a form of platform schooling which, in addition to journalism schools and work environments, can might dictate what is and what is not “successful journalism.”

The Value of Implicit Political Connections on Land Sales in China

The Value of Implicit Political Connections on Land Sales in China

Review: Women, Islam, and the Abbasid Identity, by Nadia Maria El Cheikh

Review: <i>Women, Islam, and the Abbasid Identity</i>, by Nadia Maria El Cheikh

In Government We Trust: Implicit Political Trust and Regime Support in China

High levels of self-reported trust in government found in China has invited skepticism about the authenticity of survey results. To address this question, we examine implicit political trust, an automatic, intuitive orientation toward government. Using the Single-Target Implicit Association Test, we found that the Chinese public holds an implicit trust in government that is unrelated to self-reported, explicit trust. Whereas early political socialization processes, represented by education and urban residency, increase implicit trust they also decrease explicit trust suggesting that agents of socialization have differential effects. Furthermore, performance evaluations, income, and social desirability affect explicit trust but have no effect on implicit trust. Controlling for explicit trust, we found that implicit trust matters for understanding various types of regime support including system justification, the social credit system, and government’s ability to handle crises. Our results have important implications for understanding regime support in the world’s largest authoritarian country.

What makes violence martial? Adopt A Sniper and normative imaginaries of violence in the contemporary United States

What makes violence martial? Contemporary militarism scholarship, owing to an analytical overdetermination of the role of military institutions, frequently conflates martiality with violence writ large. Drawing upon the illustrative case of Adopt A Sniper, a US military support charity founded by police officers operating during the global war on terror and intended to help supporters ‘directly contribute to the killing of the enemy’, this article interrogates the intuitive ‘line’ between martial and other, particularly colonial, forms of violence. To do so, I develop the concept of ‘normative imaginaries of violence’ – articulations of intersubjective beliefs; political community; spatial geographies; gendered, sexualized, racialized and classed power relations; and logics of legitimation. Through this lens, and informed by the work of Frantz Fanon, the article demonstrates that though coloniality and martiality are deeply intertwined, they are neither reducible to nor epiphenomenal of each other. Through a juxtaposition of the titular sniper with two additional figures invoked by Adopt A Sniper – the militiaman and the vigilante – I outline a novel, genealogical method that enables us to trace the entangled histories of contemporary violences and identify the implicit politics of ordering at work in existing, often fragmented, analyses of political violence.

The Value of Implicit Political Connections

ABSTRACT We investigate whether the aggregated political relations of a firm's top management team (TMT) add value to the firm's performance. We distinguish between the political relations that arise from TMT's own work experience, which are termed direct political connections (DPC), and the relations that TMT develops from working for the same institution with the government officials, which are termed implicit political connections (IPC). We find that IPC are positively associated with firm performance and that they often have a stronger effect than DPC do. We also find that the effect of IPC on firm value is stronger in SOEs and in firms located in under-developed provinces. Moreover, we find that after the anti-corruption campaign, the effect of DPC decreases but the effect of IPC does not significantly change. Overall, our results suggest the importance of investigating a firm's aggregated political connections, especially its IPC. JEL Classifications: G32; D72; J33; L33. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.

The Politics of the Forum in Feminist Avant-Garde Magazines After 1980

Dissatisfied with the exclusion of women from preceding avant-gardes, the overlapping communities that formed around the feminist avant-garde magazines Chain, Raddle Moon, HOW(ever), and HOW2 attempted to forge alternative modes of connection and avant-garde identities. Feminist avant-garde magazines instantiated a "politics of the forum," an editorial and poetic pedagogy based on hospitality and non-hierarchical dialogue. Sometimes this implicit politics was made explicit in so-called magazine "forums," in which poets could recast their feminist avant-garde identity, represent a diversity of voices, and overcome the usual distinction between identity and theory within avant-garde discourse. In their critique of previous models of avant-gardism by way of little magazines, feminist avant-garde writers after 1980 invite us to rethink the conventional canonization of avant-garde groups and of "modernist magazines," and to ask what is at stake in a more hospitable model of avant-gardism for the present day.

Implicit Political and Economic Liberties in the Thought of Tasan Chŏng Yagyong

Two types of implicit liberty were the foremost features of the philosophy produced by Tasan Chŏng Yagyong (1762–1836), a Confucian scholar of the Chosŏn dynasty in Korea. The first was political liberty, which enabled people to select and dismiss their ruler. Tasan's notion of political liberty included a stern admonition to rulers and local officials, stipulating that if they collected unfair taxes from the people, the people had the right to take necessary actions to survive. The second was economic liberty, which enabled people to relocate to another village for financial reasons in the hamlet-field system. Under the well-field system, rulers distributed their farmland among the people equally for their personal use, and therefore they were not tenant farmers. Economic liberty was implicit and advocated that the people lead lives that were consistent with Confucian moral principles.

Political ecology, variegated green economies, and the foreclosure of alternative sustainabilities

Abstract Over the past two decades, political ecologists have provided extensive critiques of the privatization, commodification, and marketization of nature, including of the new forms of accumulation and appropriation that these might facilitate under the more recent guise of green growth and the green economy. These critiques have often demonstrated that such approaches can retain deleterious implications for certain vulnerable populations across the developing world and beyond. With few exceptions, however, political ecologists have paid decidedly less attention to expounding upon alternative initiatives for pursuing both sustainability and socio-environmental justice. Accordingly, the contributions to this Special Section engage the concept of the green economy explicitly as a terrain of struggle, one inevitably conditioned by the variegated forms that actually-existing 'green economy' strategies ultimately take in specific historical and geographical conjunctures. In doing so, they highlight the ways in which there is likewise not one but many potential sustainabilities for pursuing human and non-human well-being in the ostensibly nascent Anthropocene, each of which reflects alternative – and, potentially, more progressive – constellations of social, political, and economic relations. Yet they also foreground diverse efforts to pre-empt or to foreclose upon these alternatives, highlighting an implicit politics of precisely whose conception of sustainability is deemed to be possible or desirable in any given time and place. In exploring such struggles over alternative sustainabilities and the 'ecologies of hope' that they implicitly offer, then, this introduction first reviews the current frontiers of these debates, before illuminating how the contributions to this issue both intersect with and build upon them. Key words: Green economy; political ecology; political economy; alternative sustainabilities

Implicit Bias, Stereotype Threat, and Political Correctness in Philosophy

This paper offers an unorthodox appraisal of empirical research bearing on the question of the low representation of women in philosophy. It contends that fashionable views in the profession concerning implicit bias and stereotype threat are weakly supported, that philosophers often fail to report the empirical work responsibly, and that the standards for evidence are set very low—so long as you take a certain viewpoint.

Against the implicit politics of service-dominant logic

Few recent topics in marketing have met such immediate popularity and critique as Vargo and Lusch’s service-dominant logic (SDL). While many have criticized SDL scholarship for a lack of cultural sophistication, coherence, and relevance, it has nevertheless maintained and expanded its own distinct stream of ideas. Recently, Vargo and Lusch have proposed that SDL could be extended into a theory of society. We criticize this notion by contrasting their views on commodity value with Marxist and post-Marxist literatures, finding SDL ill-equipped to understand consumer culture, but also continuing to propagate simplistic and misguided views of “value” in commodity markets. We conclude by challenging SDL’s suitability as candidate for all-encompassing social theorizing because of its tacit neoliberalism.

Students’ orientations to communication across linguistic difference with international teaching assistants at an internationalizing university in the United States

AbstractInstitutions of higher education (HEIs) in English-speaking countries have been engaged in internationalization for decades. Among the many factors driving their internationalization are commitments to increasing and celebrating diversity as well as a desire to foster cross-cultural cooperation. Nonetheless, the linguistic diversity of their multi-national student body and faculty poses challenges for HEIs, including the decades-old controversy surrounding international teaching assistants (ITAs) in the United States. Despite their commitments to respecting diversity, HEIs have generally adopted a deficit approach to ITAs’ language, framing it as ‘flawed’ and attributing communication problems to those ‘flaws’. I argue that, despite its more nuanced understanding of the issue, applied linguistics has adopted an implicit politics complicit with this dominant framing which leads researchers to ignore the student’s role in ITA-student communication. In response, I propose an alternative approach grounded in critical sociolinguistics. Working from this perspective, I examine students’ discourse about their international instructors, arguing that their statements suggest contrasting orientations to communication across linguistic difference. Some students seek to cooperate with their international instructors, while others prefer to avoid them. I examine their justifications for these orientations in detail and discuss implications for higher education policy.

Implicit Political and Economic Liberties in the Thought of Tasan Chŏng Yagyong

Implicit Political and Economic Liberties in the Thought of Tasan Chŏng Yagyong

Banking upside down: the implicit politics of shadow banking expertise

ABSTRACTWhat is shadow banking and what is political about it? To address these questions, the paper first unpacks the mechanics of shadow banking and compares them to traditional banking. Based on this stylized explanation, it problematizes the use of the term ‘banking’. Indeed, shadow banks turn long-term liabilities into short-term financial instruments, effectively turning traditional banking on its head. Next, it draws on three political science frameworks to bring to the fore and develop the political content of mainstream economic expertise on shadow banks. First, it shows that shadow banks played a significant role in the rent-seeking behavior of the financial sector by extracting regulatory rents and subsidies. Second, in spite of this, the extension of public backstops to shadow banks has largely been treated as logical institutional adaptation to a changing financial landscape. Third, shadow banking emerged alongside and contributed to growing economic inequality. It did so by acting as a credit bridge between giant pools of money seeking returns and a growing number of borrowers, raising further questions about its economic and social utility. These findings contribute to the emerging political economy literature on shadow banking, expert ideas and the relationship between finance and larger societal developments.

The politics of networked learning in an age of austerity

Networked learning has always had a connection to a set of pedagogic values and it has defined itself as linked to the development of information and communication technologies. These values and the technologies which allow for the development of contemporary networked learning mean that the field has an implicit politics. In an age of austerity what are the implications for networked learning? The development of networked learning largely coincided with the development of neo-liberal politics in advanced industrial countries and the technologies deployed to enable networked learning are largely the outcome of design and development carried out by large multi-national US based corporations. This backdrop of neo-liberal corporatism was called into question by the banking crisis of 2008 and the conversion of a private debt crisis into a sovereign debt crisis. In this process public austerity has become a dominant consideration in policy for higher education. Government has changed its relationship to higher education, most notably in the UK (focused on England), and is generally trying to both reduce overall expenditure and at the same time ensure either equivalent outputs or improved levels of output. The drive for productivity gains, a motivation for ‘more for less', informs the hype and policy drive behind xMOOCs because they seem to offer a way to enable cheaper and wider access to higher education. This paper takes a critical look at the way austerity politics are revising the values and affecting the development of technologies for networked learning and suggests ways that researchers will need to engage with resistance to aspects of austerity politics.

The EU'S Explicit and Implicit Heritage Politics

ABSTRACTDuring the past couple of decades, heritage has become topical in a new way in Europe as the concept has been utilized for political purposes in the EU cultural policy. The EU currently administrates or supports three initiatives – the European Heritage Days, the European Union Prize for Cultural Heritage, and the European Heritage Label – that address the fostering of the transnational European cultural heritage. The article discusses the explicit and implicit heritage politics included in these initiatives. In order to understand the constructive and generative nature of the EU heritage politics, it is approached in the article as a discursive meaning-making process consisting of several political aims, the strategies for obtaining them, and the underlying ideologies on which the aims and the strategies are based upon. The main focuses of the EU's heritage politics are determined in the article as: the politics of integration, image-building, education, governmentality, and the economy. The fundamental strategy in the implementation of the EU heritage politics is to mingle the top-down and bottom-up dynamics between the EU and the local agents. This is at the same time its ideological core: to produce seemingly self-creating and self-maintaining coherency and cultural integration in the EU.