Public Narratives Research Articles

Relocation, relocation, relocation: examining the narratives surrounding the Channel 4 move to regional production hubs

ABSTRACT Promotion of regional cultural production is seen as critically important both in ensuring a television content that reflects a diversity of voices and in strengthening regional production hubs to support sustainable creative economies across the UK (Ofcom. [19th December 2018]. Review of Regional TV Production and Programming Guidance Consultation. Accessed 8.12.20. Available from: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0015/130911/Review-of-Regional-TV-Production-and-Programming-Guidance.pdf). The problem of London’s domination of the UK’s screen industries has long been recognised. In October 2018, Channel 4 confirmed that Leeds would be home to its National HQ, while Bristol and Glasgow would be the locations of two new Creative Hubs. This decision followed a competitive bidding process which fits within a broader paradigm of local and regional development led by the cultural and creative sector and specifically links to an articulation of the value of creative hubs. Within the context of the promotion of a creative hubs paradigm, this article responds to the need for more detailed investigations of political and pragmatic investment decisions around regional screen production. It examines some of the public narratives around the bidding process for the Leeds HQ and Glasgow Hub, as well as those aspects of the relocation that were “hidden” from official accounts put forward by C4 and local, regional and national government bodies. Finally, it reflects on the future of regional screen hub development in the context of continuing devolution of broadcasting.

The immune self, hygiene and performative virtue in general public narratives on antibiotics and antimicrobial resistance.

This paper employs an assemblage lens to generate analyses of general public narratives on antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Global efforts to reduce AMR include communications aiming to promote general public awareness, provide knowledge, encourage careful antibiotics use, and discourage demands for them. These efforts are somewhat compromised by the assumptions they make of individual lack of knowledge and motivation and the manner in which the AMR problem is framed in isolation from the biological, social and economic structures that produce it. Conceptualising AMR as an effect of antimicrobial assemblages of which publics are but one part, we analysed interviews with the general public on the lived experience of infections, antibiotic treatments and AMR. Far from science and policy discourse on AMR, these narratives showed antibiotics to be partly solutions to the social and biomedical challenges of infection, framed by self-defensive immunity and hygiene, the affective benefits of 'immune boosting', and the imperative to sustain the moral standing of the healthy citizen. Failing public awareness and action on AMR can be attributed to public health messages that overlook the social, affective and moral dimensions of infection care and separate AMR from its socio-economic drivers.

“DO YOUR RESEARCH”: COVID-19, POST-SOCIALIST EXPERIENCE AND THE NARRATIVE OF INFORMATION INDEPENDENCE AMONG CZECH INSTAGRAM INFLUENCERS

The COVID-19 pandemics highlighted the role of social media influencers as political communicators and drew attention to the question of accountability of influencers and their overall role in the media ecosystem. The aim of the paper is to analyze the role of lifestyle Instagram influencers in shaping the public narrative about COVID-19 as an orchestrated political event aimed at curbing civic freedom in the Czech Republic with focus on two key elements: 1) the politicization of the domestic (space) on Instagram and its gendered nature and 2) the framing of the role of influencers as democratic public voices offering an alternative to mainstream media, within the context of the post-socialist historical experience of totalitarian past. The presented analysis builds on digital ethnography among Czech female lifestyle influencers and content analysis of selected Czech influencers profiles.

Гражданский сектор государственного управления: новые формы самоорганизации и участия населения в условиях цифровизации публичного пространства

As digital technologies develop, a new form of relations between the state and the public is developing as well. Additional opportunities for the expression of public interests and the establishment of values preferred by the society arise, new mechanisms of political mobilization develop, new forms of public organization and self-organization emerge, the social media gain more power, and local and general public narrative develop on a number of online platforms. With the digitization of the public space, the state is forced to change its communication strategies and improve the dialogue between the government and the society based on deliberative democracy principles. After analysing the architecture of public communication emerging in new conditions the paper concludes that Russia is making certain efforts to adapt for the new digitized reality. However, current state priorities are shifting towards e-government and the digital economy. On the one hand, it seems justified, as it allows to bring the public services to a completely new level, reduce corruption risks, and simplify state management of economic processes. On the other hand, the lack of due attention to the issues of openness of public administration and involvement of citizens in making public decisions results in accumulation of contradictions in the public area of public administration, as well as increasing mutual misunderstanding and distrust between the state bodies and the civil society, which may entail bursts of social discontent and protests.

Imperfect Solutions to the Neoliberal Problem of Public Aging: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Public Narratives of Long-Term Residential Care

Public representations of long-term residential care (LTRC) facilities have received limited focus in Canada, although literature from other countries indicates that public perceptions of LTRC tend to be negative, particularly in contexts that prioritize aging and dying in place. Using Manitoba as the study context, we investigate a question of broad relevance to the Canadian perspective; specifically, what are current public perceptions of the role and function of long-term care in the context of a changing health care system? Through critical discourse analysis, we identify four overarching discourses dominating public perceptions of LTRC: the problem of public aging, LTRC as an imperfect solution to the problem, LTRC as ambiguous social spaces, and LTRC as a last resort option. Building on prior theoretical work, we suggest that public perceptions of LTRC are informed by neoliberal discourses that privilege individual responsibility and problematize public care.

The impact of public policy marketing, institutional narratives and discourses on renewable energy consumption in a developing economy

PurposeThe transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy such as solar energy is difficult and requires significant ongoing public policy marketing initiatives. Drawing on institutional theory, this paper aims to explore how public policy marketing initiatives through institutional narratives and discourses legitimize solar energy's sustainable consumption in a developing economy.Design/methodology/approachUsing a post-structuralist approach, the authors undertook a thematic analysis to study the process of sustainable consumption. The authors conducted face-to-face interviews with key stakeholders in the solar energy sector and complemented the primary data with secondary analysis of archived published materials and podcasts.FindingsFirst, narratives on conformance rules and regulations (regulatory legitimacy) are significant sustainable consumption predictors of solar energy. However, the top-down regulatory legitimation narrative alone is insufficient to overcome poorly developed taken-for-granted (cognitive legitimacy) and morally correct consumption behavior (normative legitimacy), especially among the general population. Second, while consumption is primarily seen as a micro-level, residential and commercial customers phenomenon, the intersecting macro- (government) and meso-levels' (industry/market) narratives and discourses influence and direct micro-level consumption.Originality/valueFuture research agenda on legitimizing the sustainable consumption of solar energy needs to consider the dynamic interactions of institutional narratives and discourses through the lens of institutional theory and practice. Sustained, bold and provident government interventions and actions through market structure and policy issues play a crucial role in the consumption process, particularly in developing economies.

Fermentation in Post-antibiotic Worlds

The ethnographic focus of this paper is a group of sourdough bakers based in Finland, with a specific view on a fermentation workshop in 2019. In this workshop, emerging human-microbe relations were drawn, bringing attention to a post-antibiotic world. Studying bread making necessitates a more-than-human analysis that foregrounds microbes as central characters situated in the political climate of increasing populism and the Anthropocene. In this paper I describe bakers, termed microbiohackers, putting forward critiques of capitalism that link ecological extraction, political oppression, and industrial food production. Crafting an alternative to the dominant public health narrative of microbes as a threat and antimicrobial resistance, I use the notion of diffraction to discuss the complex entanglements of the microbial/material and social/political. In the hands of the bakers, fermentation, sourdough, and antimicrobial resistance present an opportunity to question dualisms of how microbes are thought about and to create emergent post-antibiotic futures.

COMMISSIONS OF INQUIRY AS A RESPONSE TO CRISIS: THE ROLE OF THE JALI COMMISSION IN CREATING PUBLIC AWARENESS OF CORRUPTION (PART 2)

When the government of a liberal constitutional democracy is confronted by some or other existential crisis that threatens a major institution of state or the very foundations of the democracy itself, it will often appoint a high-level judicial commission of inquiry as part of its response to the crisis. South Africa is no exception to this tendency, as is evidenced in recent years by the appointment of no fewer than four such commissions in response to a series of crises related to ongoing corruption within state institutions – commonly referred to by ordinary South Africans as “state capture”. This has raised questions as to the alleged benefits of such commissions when viewed in relation to their considerable costs. This article seeks to contribute to this general debate by focusing on one of the purported benefits of such commissions that may be somewhat under appreciated. This is the creation of public awareness, during the life of the commission itself, about the nature and extent of the particular grave threat that confronts the society in question. It is contended that, mediated by a free and vibrant press, the public narrative that emerges during the operation of a commission of inquiry may serve to make a liberal democratic society more resilient in the face of threats to that society’s continued existence. This article seeks to support this contention by focusing on an important precursor to the more recent commissions of inquiry on corruption in South Africa – that is, the Jali Commission of Inquiry into corruption within the South African penal system, which sat in the early years of the new millennium. By analysing the many articles and reports that appeared in a range of South African newspapers during the initial hearings of the Jali Commission, this article documents the emergence of an important public narrative on corruption within South Africa’s prisons, and reflects upon the ultimate significance. This article is divided into two parts: the first part deals with the initial hearings of the Jali Commission in KwaZulu-Natal, and the second part with subsequent hearings in the Free State.

Enacting Culture

Pragmatic approaches can effectively address questions of cultural dynamics—how culture is renewed, contested, or changed in historical situations. The practice-oriented direction of much of contemporary cognitive science offers an emerging opportunity to more fully integrate thought and emotion into anthropological pragmatism. Here I urge attention to a realm of enacted culture that illustrates how certain interactive processes bring cultural conventions into a communicative environment where they are renewed, transformed, created. As an example, I discuss depictions, improvisational performances in which speakers use material resources such as their hands or voices to formulate and portray thoughts. In a close analysis of three short narratives, I show that depictions are used by speakers to help to create an affect-rich environment in which cultural conventions are introduced into interactional space, whence they become subject to negotiation. It is not only in these spontaneous and improvisational practices that cognition and culture unfold in time as a dialectical interplay of mind and environment; this also occurs in stylized formats such as public rituals and narratives.

Organizational Narratives and the Construction of a Prototypical Disabled Employee

Conceptualizing organizational narratives as a means of employee identity regulation, I examine how an organization narratively constructs its prototypical disabled employee over time and why stable identity narratives allow for reading change. The study’s data comprise public narratives (e.g., news releases) of the Government of India, the country’s largest employer of persons with disabilities. Narratives during 2008–2016 were considered as this timespan witnessed the design of inclusive legislation that emphasized defining persons with a disability and their entitlements. Findings indicate that the label of “disadvantage” was consistently used to portray the target employee. Alongside other narrative material suggesting, for example, that the target employee was someone who required employment assistance, this label was supplied to external audiences to convert them into potential partners. This supply of narrative material further reinforced the portrayal of the target employee. Consistent use of this expansive label subsumed changing definitions of who is a person with a disability, allowed for aggregations with diverse disadvantaged collectives, and accommodated changes in employment entitlements and ecosystem partners, thereby allowing the reading of change in stable identity narratives. These findings, which are pertinent to identity regulation of employees with a disability, can also be extended to studying other categories of constructed social difference in the broader field of management and organization studies.

Partisanship over security: Public narratives via Twitter on foreign interferences in the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections

Using a mixed methods approach, we explore the main narrative themes conveyed by the public, via microblogging platform Twitter, in regard to foreign interferences in the U.S. presidential elections of 2016 and 2020. Our findings show that rather than expressing serious concerns about foreign threats to the United States’ democracy and its electoral process, the tweets reflected the political polarization that has come to characterize the American public. Rather than perceiving the interferences as a national security issue, the public appeared to selectively use the foreign threats to bolster their partisan positions.

Pandemics, politics, and the resilience of employment relations research

ABSTRACT The Covid-19 pandemic has profoundly altered people’s experiences of work around the world. In doing so, the crisis has appeared to change the public narrative on work and employment, and consequently has highlighted the continued relevance and value of employment relations as a field of study, in terms of both policy and research. In this paper, we reflect on the implications of the Covid-19 outbreak for the field of employment relations. We argue that the current crisis has highlighted the resilience of the field of employment relations, reminding us of its critical relevance to academic and public interest (although for how long is another matter). However, this can only be understood in the context of the broader dynamics and issues facing this field of study. We outline the challenges faced by academics and practitioners working in this area to build upon this new found attention to ensure that employment relations issues remain central in terms of research, teaching and public policy.

The short life of a concept: tourismphobia in the Spanish media. Narratives, actors and agendas

This article forms part of a classic social science debate on the role of the media in the construction of social and political narratives. The object of the paper is to study the rise and fall of the concept of tourismphobia in the Spanish media. The case is analyzed in the light of public policies studies, especially those analyzing agenda-setting, the social construction of the definition of public problems and the struggles of coalitions seeking to impose their public policy narratives in the policy-making process. With this purpose, a database was used that collected more than 11,000 news items over a substantial period of time. Its analysis reveals that media attention rises sharply after active protest actions against tourist saturation and that the term is mostly linked to specific territories and cities and to certain political figures. It also allows us to observe how some political responses to the problem appear more in the media, while others are minimized. The conclusions indicate that the “tourismphobia” neologism was capitalized on – which is often the case with terms that circulate in the public sphere – by various groups attempting to highlight some of its semantic dimensions over others. The study also reveals that the media assume an active position in the construction of discourses in relation to tourism also as a political and not just an economic issue. Furthermore, it shows that the use of the term has greatly declined, either because the problem has become dormant or because it has been reformulated into other terms that are more in line with dominant narratives.

Collective Memory and Political Mythologies: Eleftherios Venizelos in Greek Postwar Historiography, 1945–1967

During the first decades after the Second World War, Greek society had to deal with a vast array of issues, including its relationship with the past. In this context, Eleftherios Venizelos, a great statesman of the early twentieth century, was frequently used both as a symbol in contemporary political debates and as a metonymy in various attempts to contextualise the history of the first half of the century. An important part of these attempts was the corpus of public narratives produced about Venizelos and his era, either as historiographical accounts or autobiographical texts. These narratives, published in newspapers and books, were not, for the most part, academic; their authors were usually journalists, retired military officers, or politicians, who formed a political-historical nexus and who produced a new discourse on a historical period which had hitherto received little or no historiographical attention. In fact, this discourse left its mark on Greek political and historical culture for decades to come.

‘The past should not affect the children’: intergenerational hauntings in the homes of Indo-European families

This article examines how the traumatic experiences of previous Indo-European or Indische generations shape future generations’ intergenerational family dynamics and practices within home environments. By analysing life story interviews with Indo-Europeans from the first, second and third generation within twenty-one families, we illustrate how intergenerational hauntings are embodied, expressed and negotiated among various generations within home environments. The Indo-European diaspora has multi-generational ‘mixed’ Dutch-Indonesian ancestry and collective memories of the colonial Dutch East Indies, the Japanese occupation of Indonesia during the Second World War, the Indonesian National Revolution, and families’ subsequent repatriation to the Netherlands. Shaped by their alleged success in having silently assimilated in the Netherlands, public narratives often neglect Indo-Europeans’ daily realities and histories. We argue that personal and collective histories of war violence, racialized violence and displacement are deeply ingrained in Indo-European intergenerational and gendered family dynamics and practices in home environments. These intergenerational hauntings are imbued in both presence and absence in the various atmospheres and social and physical spaces of home.

Analysis of the Consistency Policy Indonesia's Capital Relocation in the Pandemic Era

This study aims to look at the narrative of public policies related to the relocation of the Indonesian capital in the era of the Covid Pandemic 19. The narrative is seen through the development of opinions of government policy actors, political parties, and society. This study uses a Q-DAS (Qualitative Data Analysis Software) approach; besides the data in this study are media and social media data. The media have an essential role to play in shaping public narratives related to policymaking. The role of public narratives can create collective awareness in providing information about actor choices in policy decision-making. This research will conduct a Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) study, which can describe, explain the structure of political narratives in policymaking. The results showed that the Government's attitude was inconsistent regarding relocating the State Capital (IKN) after the Covid 19 Pandemic. The policy choices made by the Government were evident from the Government's narrative that temporarily suspended the relocation of the State Capital (IKN). The policy steps taken by the Government are the impact of the developing public narrative related to the relocation of the State Capital (IKN) in the Covid 19 Pandemic era. The factors affecting budget availability are Covid 19, weak public support, regulations, and aspects of environmental damage. These factors have developed in the public narrative on mass media and social media so that the Government took steps to delay the process of moving the country's capital city (IKN).

Examining Organizational Narratives: Public Appeals of Morality, Emotions, and Medical Logic in the Case of Sex Work for Disabled Clients*

This study examines public narratives of sex work organizations that specifically serve disabled clientele. We utilize virtual data from two organizational online presences, including featured client and worker testimonials, a related documentary film, and audience commentary. Our analysis illuminates (1) the organizational characterizations of disabled clients as deserving and in need of sex services, (2) depictions of sex workers as moral, medical practitioners, and (3) plots and moral lessons that legitimate organizational services through medical logic. We argue that while such storytelling has the potential to persuade audiences through cultural appeals to morality, emotion, and medical logic, it simultaneously stigmatizes disabled people while constructing moral hierarchies of sex workers.

THE RE‐DISCOVERY OF CONTEMPLATION THROUGH SCIENCE

AbstractSome of the early‐modern changes in the social framing of science, while often believed to be essential, are shown to be contingent. They contribute to the flawed public narrative around science today, and especially to the misconceptions around science and religion. Four are examined in detail, each of which contributes to the demise of the contemplative stance that science both requires and offers. They are: (1) a turn from an immersed subject to the pretense of a pure objectivity, (2) a turn from imagination as a legitimate pathway to knowledge, (3) a turn from shared and participative science to a restricted professionalism, and (4) an overprosaic reading of the metaphor of the “Book of Nature.” All four, but especially the imperative to consider reading nature as poetry, and a deeper examination of the entanglements between poetry and theoretical science, draw unavoidably on theological ideas, and contribute to a developing “theology of science.”

Field-configuring projects: How projects shape the public reflection of electric mobility in Germany

Organising in the context of projects has been extensively investigated with a focus on project-level processes. However, the industry and market impact, i.e. the field influencing potential of this temporary form of organizing, is still poorly understood. By using concepts derived from the literature on field-configuring events (FCE), we analyse the influence of two projects on the field of electric mobility in Germany. To capture the role of projects within fields, we apply a longitudinal mixed-methods approach combining interpretative qualitative methods with a topic modeling machine learning research strategy. The results highlight how projects can shape fields by opening and closing public debates and narratives in the sense of discursive institutional work. Additionally, we offer concepts that enable a more complete understanding of the sequential entanglement between projects and events, based on three scenarios: the project-by-itself, project-follows-event, and event-follows-project scenarios. With these insights, our empirical study contributes to the project management and institutional literature.

HUKUM CAMBUK & OPINI PUBLIK: ANALISIS TEMATIK TANGGAPAN NETIZEN TERHADAP BERITA PELANGGARAN SYARIAT ISLAM DI AKUN FACEBOOK MEDIA MASSA

This qualitative descriptive research studied the public narratives regarding the caning execution news on Serambinews.com's Facebook fan page. Apart from that, this research also investigated the relationship between Facebook users' discussion against public policy (Sharia law) and the existence of Serambinews.com as the news media. This research used the five most commented news links from January 2018 to December 2020 as the data. This data was analyzed using Thematic Analysis and studied using the concept of Public Opinion. The results showed that the public often discussed four dominant themes, including two topics that exhibited negative nuances, such as proposing extreme punishment and defamation against the convicts. These themes were a reflection of the growing public opinion regarding the caning in Aceh. Negative public opinion had the potential to form a consensus and affected public policy regarding Sharia law. But on the other hand, despite the domination of negative public opinion, the researcher argued that Serambinews.com gained economic benefits from this practice.