Legitimate Modes Research Articles

Ink leisure: deviant or divine

ABSTRACT This qualitative inquiry examines the evolving perceptions of tattoos among the Filipinos, investigating whether tattoos persist as markers of societal deviance or have transitioned into mainstream vehicles for self-expression and leisure pursuits. The recruitment phase, conducted in August 2023, targeted residents of Quezon City, encompassing tattoo artists and individuals both with and without tattoos. Through in-depth interviews, insights were gathered from a demographically diverse cohort comprising 22 male and 13 female participants. Employing thematic analysis, three overarching themes were delineated: “Tattooing as Artistic Expression,” “Tattoos as Personal Narratives,” and “Social Perceptions and Stigma.” The findings underscore the nuanced role of tattoos within Filipino society, advocating for scholarly engagement to deepen comprehension of this multifaceted phenomenon. The research illuminates a discernible shift in Filipino attitudes towards tattoos, positioning them as legitimate conduits for self-expression and leisure engagement. While societal stigma persists, the study advocates for informed awareness and ongoing dialogue to cultivate acceptance of tattoos as legitimate modes of artistic expression and identity formation within the Filipino cultural context.

A criança com restrição verbal e o conceito de intercompreensão e multimodalidade na clínica da linguagem: um estudo de caso

ABSTRACT This article aims to analyze the process of mutual understanding from the perspective of Discursive Neurolinguistics. As a methodology, a case study was carried out on a child with a linguistic profile of verbal restriction, which concerns the dimension of utterances involving words and their morphology. Data interpretation was based on the Bakhtinian perspective, which addresses ‘understanding’ as an active-responsive process and meaning as emerging from the relationship between utterances. The results showed that the interlocutors’ common ground allowed the joint construction of meaning even in the face of verbal restrictions, and aspects such as nonverbal elements and the recognition of the child’s active-responsive role also favored mutual understanding. As a conclusion, the attention to different multimodal resources as legitimate modes of expression allows children with verbal restrictions to fulfill the role of “speakers” regardless of their modes of expression.

Leveraging community support and platform affordances on a path to more active participation: A study of online fan fiction communities

The success of online communities is driven by continuous active community participation, but motivating silent members (lurkers) to participate might push them faster than they are prepared for and demand extra labor from active members. This article explores user participation in online fan fiction communities through empirical interviews of once-silent but now-active members, demonstrating how such platforms afford lurking as a legitimate mode of participation and provide affordances for users to participate at their own pace. We propose a theory of incidental mentorship, where active users become role models within a supportive community and motivate lurkers to participate without doing additional work.

Subverting parental overreach: Children endorse defiance and deception as legitimate modes of moral resistance and social opposition

This research examined how children evaluate the legitimacy of various sorts of rules as well as children's reasoning about the legitimacy of covertly defying and lying to parents to resist those rules. We asked U.S. 6-, 8-, and 11-year-olds (N=118) to assess seven hypothetical situations depicting comparably aged children engaged in defiance and deception to circumvent parents' prohibitions. The nature of parents' justifications for the prohibitions varied in terms of social-cognitive domain (moral, personal, prudential, pragmatic, or conventional). Evaluations and justifications for the legitimacy of parents' prohibitions and children's defiance and deception were examined, as were general evaluations of deception and parental authority. Across situations, increased age was associated with decreased acceptance of proscriptions and, in several situations, increased acceptance of defiance and deception. Children responded significantly differently to prohibitions by domain of norm. With age, children increasingly justified defiance and deception for reasons of personal autonomy. They also increasingly endorsed defiance and deception as moral obligations required to resist immoral norms. This research shows that children value parental authority, but not at the expense of their personal autonomy, and they value honesty but sometimes subordinate it to competing moral concerns.

Eristic Legitimation of Controversial Managerial Decisions

AbstractThis paper investigates the eristic legitimation of managerial decisions – managerial interactions to win without reasoned persuasion of the counterparty – in the context of career‐advancement disputes. This mode of legitimation can be ethically questionable, particularly when powerful managers have the licence for it, while less powerful subordinates may have ‘no other choice’ than reasoned persuasion to address their concerns. The present study involves two sets of interviews to explore eristic legitimations and associated moral and political processes. The first involves former employees who had career advancement disputes with their former managers, and the second, HR professionals with expertise in dealing with employee complaints. Our analysis suggests that managing unfairness concerns can be destructive when managerial authorities argue eristically by exploiting ambiguities around performance, tasks, goals and moral principles. The novelty of this study is that it explores how ambiguities shape managerial handling of employees’ justice concerns and how eristic legitimations during ethical decision‐making can have deleterious consequences for organizations and individual careers. While this study contributes to research on the rhetorical strategies of managers, it has important implications for interactional justice and ethical decision‐making research.

Democracy and Mass Skepticism of Science

abstract: Since the Age of Enlightenment, many thinkers and philosophers have viewed democracy and science as two aspects of modernity that reinforce each other. This article highlights a tension between the two by arguing that certain aspects of contemporary democracy may aggravate the mass public's anti-intellectual tendency and thus potentially hinder scientific progress. The authors analyze a new global survey of public opinion on science using empirical strategies that exploit cross-country and cross-cohort variations in experience with democracy, and show that less-educated citizens in democracies distrust science much more than do their counterparts in nondemocracies. Further analyses suggest that the increase in skepticism in democracies is not the result of greater religiosity or weaker scientific literacy; instead, it is more likely driven by a shift in the mode of legitimation, which reduces states' ability and willingness to act as key public advocates for science. These findings shed light on the institutional sources of science-bashing in many longstanding democracies.

A Critical Discourse Analysis of the UK SEND Review Green Paper

Abstract In this paper we carry out a Critical Discourse Analysis (cda) of the UK Government’s 2022 Green Paper ‘Right Support, Right Place, Right Time’, known as ‘the SEND Review’. Our analysis is informed both by Hyatt’s (2013) Critical Higher Education Policy Discourse Analysis (chepda) framework and by our cognizance of how the term ‘special educational needs’ is constructed in the context of the state’s active and passive enactment of policies that continue to diminish the quality of disabled people’s lives. Our analysis focuses principally on deconstruction of the Green Paper with close attention to modes of legitimation, interdiscursivity, intertextuality, presupposition/implication, and lexico-grammatical construction. We present three main areas of interest: the (mis)use of and omission of ‘need’, the ubiquitous and ambiguous use of ‘we’, and the presentation of ‘newness’ in the SEND Review.

The Legitimation of International Organizations: Introducing a New Dataset

Abstract This article introduces a new dataset on how international organizations (IOs) justify their authority. For a long time, IOs were believed to derive legitimacy from member-state consent and technocratic problem-solving capacities. Over recent decades, the growing politicization of IOs, political polarization within Western democracies, and power shifts in the international system have spurred IOs’ efforts to justify their right to rule, using a variety of legitimation practices. While research on the theory and practice of IO legitimation has grown considerably over the past decade, much of this work builds on case studies of prominent global and regional IOs. As a result, we lack data suitable for systematic comparative analyses across time, IOs, and world regions. The Legitimation Strategies of Regional Organizations (LegRO) dataset aims to narrow this gap, providing data on the standards, intensity, and modes of legitimation for twenty eight regional IOs from 1980 to 2019. These variables inform theoretical and policy-relevant research on contemporary global governance by providing the first systematic overview of IOs’ legitimation practices.

Critical Issues in Open and Distance Education Research

Despite its mainstreaming into the broader educational ecology, open and distance education (ODE) still leaves much to be desired in terms of both practice and research. Inspired and informed by the author’s 35 years of experience as an ODE practitioner, researcher, reviewer, and editor, this article concentrates on 10 critical issues of ODE research that have long existed but may have a consequential impact on its healthy growth. The issues discussed cover scarcity of longitudinal research, paucity of scaling-up and generalization research, preference for success over failure presented in research, the need for a systems approach, lack of sociocultural sensitivity, technologization of research, scant attention to ODE for the underprivileged and disadvantaged, insufficient research on ODE policy, negligence of historical research, and disinterest in revisiting ODE theories. The causes of these problems are critically interpreted and their possible negative impacts on the field of ODE are explored in a concise manner. The purpose of this article is to encourage further discussion and debate on ODE research to sustain its presence and acceptance as a legitimate mode of education in the wider educational community.

Researchers’ perceptions, patterns, motives, and challenges in self-archiving as a function of the discipline

The green open access (OA) model, which offers the most economical approach to comply with open access policies, can increase researchers’ audience and scientific outputs impact by delivering wider and easier access. This study examined researchers’ perceptions from STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) and SSH (social sciences, art and humanities) disciplines in order to reveal the types, patterns, motives, and challenges underlying their articles’ self-archiving in the green route to open-access (repositories and institutional repositories) and ASNs (academic social networks). Interviews were conducted with 20 Israeli academic researchers. Half were from STEM and half from SSH disciplines. Interviews were mapped using a bottom-up thematic analysis and follow-up quantitative comparisons. According to the findings, STEM researchers self-archived pre/post-print versions of their articles to subject-based repositories as a part of their discipline norm resulting from their funding grant requirements and as a way to receive recognition and claim priority. SSH researchers post a link to the printed-published article at the publisher’s website in ASNs, and their goal is greater visibility. In addition, findings indicate a lack of awareness, mostly by SSH researchers, regarding copyright issues and OA repositories. The green OA model provides opportunities for researchers to self-archive their work. However, there are differences between the disciplines regarding where, when, why, and how to self-archive, and what is considered a legitimate mode of green OA. This indicates an urgent need to raise SSH researchers’ awareness of the existence of open subject-based repositories and of the terms of self-archiving from publishers.

Recognizing injustice: the ‘hypocrisy charge’ and the future of the liberal international order

Abstract Struggles for recognition, rooted in the desire to be acknowledged by others, are fundamental to the stability of international orders. All international orders face actors with recognition grievances, and sometimes these grievances become major sources of contention. At the same time, each international order faces struggles that are specific to its mode of legitimation because they are rooted in challenges over the constituent elements of that order. The liberal international order (LIO) is no exception to this rule. Unlike international orders that are organized through explicit social hierarchies, the LIO claims to foster egalitarian, meritocratic justice based around universal, ‘rational’ standards. Yet it is clear to many actors around the world that the LIO has historically been, and remains today, premised on ‘irrational’, unjust forms of hierarchical recognition, often organized around group identity. This opens up the LIO to charges of hypocrisy. We trace the ways in which this ‘hypocrisy charge’ is levelled by both LIO ‘outsiders’ and ‘insiders’, arguing that it generates an irresolvable tension within the LIO. This tension may not spell the end of the LIO, but it does point to a period of extended contention.

Leadership, incrementalism and the repetition of history: A Ukrainian tragedy in four acts

Leadership is often associated with a particular form of decision-making: being decisive. This paper reflects on the limits of decisiveness and the role of incrementalism in the Russian decision to invade Ukraine and the role of the West and NATO’s decision-making over the prior 10 years. It suggests that incrementalism is both a legitimate mode and a significant problem in such scenarios, and focuses on the historical context to explain the decision to invade and the subsequent military failures.

A “Reorder of Things” in Black Studies: Sacred Praxis, Phono(geo)graphy, and the Counter-Archive of Diaspora

ABSTRACT This article examines Erna Brodber's 1994 novel, Louisiana, as a methodological invitation to the field of Black Studies to query how we do the work of black study. A Jamaican social scientist turned novelist, Brodber finds the tools of social science and notions of Western rationality and reason that undergird it insufficient for the unique challenges of recovering a past characterized by violent rupture and irreparable loss. In turn, she takes up fiction to imagine a new method and field of study to fill in the gaps of black diasporic history. Merging anthropology and sociology with literature, she produces a fictionalized ethnography—the novel Louisiana—that undermines the tenets of Western Enlightenment thought, its various offspring (social scientific method, History, Christianity, and technology), and their attendant claims to truth, facticity, and progress. Mobilizing the epistemes embedded within black diasporic cultural and political practices such as spirit possession, music, storytelling, and grassroots labor organizing, Louisiana constructs a counter-archive of diaspora that is at once sacred, feminist, and communal. Ultimately, the novel sketches the contours of a new interdisciplinary method and field of study—perhaps Brodber's own version of Black Studies—that foregrounds 1) “sacred praxis” vis-à-vis spirit possession as a legitimate mode of knowledge acquisition, 2) the “global black south” as a nodal point of diasporic relationality, and 3) a dispossessive logic and an ethic of humility and surrender in the research process that serves as an affront to notions of liberal individual personhood and the hierarchization of peoples and knowledges that produced and sustain the Western “order of things.”

News Media Complicity in the Reproduction of Settler Colonial Ideology in Guåhan

Over the span of one month, Guåhan (Guam) has seen a dire upswing in COVID-19 infections from travelers coming from the continental United States (many of them being military personnel). The island, being an “unincorporated territory” of the U.S., did not have the legal authority to close its borders and could only mitigate the impacts of the second spike in COVID-19. Often referred to as “the Tip of America’s Spear,” the pandemic has laid bare the implications of Guåhan’s colonial status, and is one of the numerous manifestations of American colonial ideology and policy at the nexus of global militarism and imperialism. In this essay, I examine mainstream news media in Guåhan to draw out the presence of pro-American ideologies which operate through modes of unification, dissimulation, and legitimation to reproduce American colonial hegemony in what can be described as an extant colonial mainstream mediascape. By looking at particular discursive events which occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, I elucidate how such media environments perpetuate the dominant order of American militarization and imperialism overseas, calling to mind how the country’s transgressions abroad are inseparable from the systems of oppression in the continent.

Ethical Individualism and the Prospect of Confucian Political Theory

Abstract In his recent book, Shaun O’Dwyer defends liberal democracy as the only legitimate mode of political system in the East Asian context by critiquing various proposals of Confucian democracy and meritocracy. Underlying O’Dwyer’s critique of Confucian political theory is the seamless connection between ethical individualism (à la Kant), pragmatic democracy (à la Dewey), and political liberalism (à la Rawls), which in his view cannot be adequately accommodated by any version of Confucian political theory, unless it abandons its Confucian essence. This paper argues that the relation between these three philosophical components are far more complex than is rendered by O’Dwyer and that Confucian democracy can be justified on ethical, pragmatic, and progressive grounds.

Democracy and Mass Skepticism of Science

Ever since the Age of Enlightenment, democracy and science have been seen as two aspects of modernity that mutually reinforce each other. This article highlights a tension between the two by arguing that certain aspects of contemporary democracy may aggravate the anti-intellectual tendency of the mass public and potentially hinder scientific progress. Analyzing a new global survey of public opinion on science with empirical strategies that exploit cross-country and cross-cohort variations in experience with democracy, we show that less educated citizens in democracies are considerably less trustful of science than their counterparts in non-democracies. Further analyses suggest that, instead of being the result of stronger religiosity or lower science literacy, the increase in skepticism in democracies is mainly driven by a shift in the mode of legitimation, which reduces states' ability and willingness to act as key public advocates for science. These findings help shed light on the institutional sources of science-bashing behaviors in many long-standing democracies.

Not Flying as Anticipatory Critique

In this commentary I contribute to discussions about the possibilities for postcarbon conferencing by drawing on my own experience of deciding not to fly. In this piece I explain how my epistemological position of reflexive critique cultivated within my home discipline of anthropology became compromised in the face of an increasing awareness and understanding of climate change. Reflexivity here operated not as a liberatory form but as a mode of thinking that stifled and closed down possibilities for acting in a climatologically engaged way. I describe how I came to rethink my own academic practice through a shift from epistemological reflexivity to material reflexivity and how this opened up the possibility of not flying as a legitimate mode of academic critique. In conclusion I describe some of the conceptual and intellectual openings that such a practice of critique is capable of generating, with a view to expanding the terrain of the possible to include transgressions that might eventually need to become the norm in a climate-changing world.

The Challenge of Religious Governance in the Modern Nation-State

Abstract This article explores the tensions of Islamic governance in contemporary Iran by examining the convergence of Islamic law with modern practices of governance. One key contention with contemporary statehood this political project is trying to reconcile is how to re-embed religious norms in the secularized political sphere. I assert that the political and legal practices for re-embedding these norms indicate an epistemic shift in the modes of legitimation within Muslim political and legal tradition possibly leading to the formation of a new Islamic political orthodoxy. This exploration is based on information from ethnographic interviews conducted with the former President of the Islamic Republic of Iran (1989–1997), the late Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, and former Minister of Radio and Television (1981–1994) and the current member of the Expediency Council, Muhammad Rafsanjani. The article bases its argument by analyzing two variant forms of political practice. First, scrutinizing the fatwas of Ayatollah Khomeini that played a crucial role in influencing policy in the first decade of the Islamic Republic. Second, examining the adjudications of a conciliar governmental body (Majma-e Tashkhis-e Maslahat) formed a decade after the revolution to resolve the tensions associated with the implementation of Islamic law in this modern nation-state.

Punishment and Precious Emotions: A Hope Standard for Punishment.

—Each year, hundreds of people in high-income countries take their own lives while they are in prison. Thousands engage in self-harm and thousands abuse other prisoners. Such behaviours often correlate with mental health problems, but they are also often pleas for help and for hope. Some courts have invoked the ideas of hope and the right to hope in the context of life imprisonment, but they have neither subjected the concept of hope to sustained analysis nor specified the role that hope should play in our practices of lawful punishment overall. This article offers a preliminary investigation of the role for hope in lawful punishment. It argues that one standard that both individual modes of punishment and overall systems of punishment must meet to be morally justifiable is that they be compatible with a reasonable person retaining hope both in the present and for his future after punishment. Such a hope standard narrows the scope of legitimate modes of punishment.

Ideologies and Imaginaries of Legitimacy from the 1950S to Today: Trajectories of EU-Official Discourses Read against Rosanvallon’sDemocratic Legitimacy

This chapter traces changes in EU-official discourse around EU legitimacy since the 1950s, relating them to the trajectory described by Pierre Rosanvallon in Democratic Legitimacy (2011a). Accordingly, the legitimacy of modern democracies broke down in the 1980s owing to a loss of faith in its two main foundations in elections and bureaucracy. This gave rise to the emergence of alternative modes of legitimation, classed under the ideal types of impartiality, reflexivity, and proximity. This chapter plays Rosanvallon’s analysis, which draws on national experiences, against the EU context. It finds important differences, in particular regarding the balance between electoral and bureaucratic legitimacy in the earlier years of integration - as well as significant similarities and interaction, manifested in a striking resonance between particular strands in EU-official legitimation strategies and Rosanvallon’s ideal types. The ways in which they played out in the case of the EU point to dangers inherent to them; of highlighting proximity over actual influence and control; making democratic forms so complex and ‘reflexive’ that they become unintelligible, and unaccountable; or replicating bureaucratic thinking that obscures choices and judgments behind claims to independence and impartiality. What is more, the discursive history of contests over EU legitimacy illustrates a predisposition of Rosanvallon’s account of democratic legitimacy towards “unpolitical democracy”, rooted in its attempt to contain the threat of populism. His goal is to politicise the indirect institutions of impartiality, reflexivity and proximity rather than democratic procedures such as voting and majority rule, with the effect that deliberation is used strategically as an alternative to electoral and partisan democracy.