Silent Majority Research Articles

‘We are the vocal minority’: The Safe Standing movement and breaking down the state in English football

Lord Justice Taylor’s final report into the Hillsborough stadium disaster recommended that all Premier League and Championship football grounds in England and Wales should become all-seated and that football supporters would eventually become ‘accustomed and educated to sitting’. Thirty years later, thousands of fans continue to stand at matches but in areas not designed for them to do so. This ritual has become a source of conflict between clubs, supporters and official safety bodies. In 2018, the UK Sports Minister claimed that despite this problem, there remained no desire amongst top clubs to change the all-seating policy and that it was only a ‘vocal minority’ who wanted to see the permanent return of standing in English football. However, supporters, networked through the national Football Supporters Association, had been actively mobilizing a social movement against the legislation for over 20 years. In this article, I use relational sociology to analyse empirical snapshots of the latest phase of this movement, ‘Safe Standing’, to show how the switching and cooperation of supporter networks and their tactics were successful in breaking down the state to create new political opportunities. In doing so, the article reveals the key characteristics of safe standing, including conflict, organizational form and intersubjective motivations, to represent the collective – but also often complex and contradictory – responses to the neoliberal political economy which English football, and society more broadly, has inhabited over the past 30 years.

Promising pipelines and hydrocarbon nationalism: the sociality of unbuilt infrastructure in indigenous Siberia

Promising pipelines and hydrocarbon nationalism: the sociality of unbuilt infrastructure in indigenous Siberia

Immigration as a Divisive Topic: Clusters and Content Diffusion in the Italian Twitter Debate

In this work, we apply network science to analyse almost 6 M tweets about the debate around immigration in Italy, collected between 2018 and 2019, when many related events captured media outlets’ attention. Our aim was to better understand the dynamics underlying the interactions on social media on such a delicate and divisive topic, which are the actors that are leading the discussion, and whose messages have the highest chance to reach out the majority of the accounts that are following the debate. The debate on Twitter is represented with networks; we provide a characterisation of the main clusters by looking at the highest in-degree nodes in each one and by analysing the text of the tweets of all the users. We find a strongly segregated network which shows an explicit interplay with the Italian political and social landscape, that however seems to be disconnected from the actual geographical distribution and relocation of migrants. In addition, quite surprisingly, the influencers and political leaders that apparently lead the debate, do not necessarily belong to the clusters that include the majority of nodes: we find evidence of the existence of a ‘silent majority’ that is more connected to accounts who expose a more positive stance toward migrants, while leaders whose stance is negative attract apparently more attention. Finally, we see that the community structure clearly affects the diffusion of content (URLs) by identifying the presence of both local and global trends of diffusion, and that communities tend to display segregation regardless of their political and cultural background. In particular, we observe that messages that spread widely in the two largest clusters, whose most popular members are also notoriously at the opposite sides of the political spectrum, have a very low chance to get visibility into other clusters.

The Silent Majority: A Mixed Methods Analysis on the Perspectives of Women Who Forgo Post Mastectomy Breast Reconstruction

PURPOSE: Post mastectomy breast reconstruction (PMBR) is an important component of breast cancer care that is associated with improved psychosocial well-being and survival.1–3 The Women’s Heath and Cancer Rights Act of 1998 mandated insurance coverage for reconstruction; however, rates of PMBR remain stagnant at approximately 40%.4 There is a paucity of research on women who forgo reconstruction despite representing the majority of the post mastectomy patient population.5 This study addresses that gap by investigating barriers in the preoperative pathway faced by patients who forgo PMBR. METHODS: A mixed-methods study was performed using in-depth qualitative interviews and the BREAST-Q questionnaire. The study population consisted of women who received a referral to plastic surgery but choose to forgo PMBR. Women were stratified into 2 groups based on utilization of the referral to plastic surgery or lack thereof. Separate interview guides were developed for both groups, and interviews were conducted until data saturation was reached. Interviews were coded and analyzed using iterative methodologies (eg, open, axial, and selective coding) under the grounded-theory framework. The qualitative interview data and quantitative BREAST-Q data were analyzed using concurrent triangulation methodology. Reliability and validation checks included member-checking and inter-rater reliability using Cohen’s kappa statistic (mean kappa = 0.99). RESULTS: Interviews with 8 patients who forwent PMBR revealed: (1) lack of trust in both breast and plastic surgeons was salient; (2) reliance on self-developed support networks and resources; (3) association between lower post mastectomy BREAST-Q scores and decreased utilization of referral to plastic surgery; and (4) dissonance between numerical BREAST-Q scores for psychosocial well-being and reported satisfaction. CONCLUSIONS: These findings lay the conceptual groundwork acknowledging that nonlegislative and nonfinancial barriers, such as physician distrust and lack of resources and patient-tailored information, contributes to underutilization of PMBR in certain populations. Use of qualitative methodology uncovered deficits in the current pathway to reconstruction faced by the silent majority of women who forgo PMBR including lack of trust in physicians, resources, and counseling. These findings suggest unmet needs of patients considering PMBR which necessitates efforts to address these deficits and increase quality of life and satisfaction after mastectomy by empowering vulnerable patient groups. REFERENCES: 1. Ng SK, Hare RM, Kuang RJ, et al. Breast reconstruction post mastectomy: patient satisfaction and decision making. Ann Plast Surg. 2016;76:640–644. 2. Lee CN, Deal AM, Huh R, et al. Quality of patient decisions about breast reconstruction after mastectomy. JAMA Surg. 2017;152:741–748. 3. Sheehan J, Sherman KA, Lam T, et al. Association of information satisfaction, psychological distress and monitoring coping style with post-decision regret following breast reconstruction. Psychooncology. 2007;16:342–351. 4. American Cancer Society. What are the key statistics about breast cancer? Available at http://www.cancer.org/cancer/breastcancer/detailedguide/breast-cancer-key-statistics. 5. Alderman AK, Hawley ST, Janz NK, et al. Racial and ethnic disparities in the use of postmastectomy breast reconstruction: results from a population-based study. J Clin Oncol. 2009;27:5325–5330.

‘LURKER’ LITERACIES: LIVING IN/THROUGH NEIGHBORHOOD FACEBOOK GROUPS

Although mythologized as a fringe or deviant behavior, ‘lurking,’ or passive participation in an online group, has become a regular part of the way we lead our lives online. My IRB approved dissertation research, which will be completed by AoIR 2020, will examine ‘lurking’ in neighborhood Facebook groups. Through community mapping and interviews of Facebook users enrolled in the same neighborhood Facebook group, this study seeks to describe both the ‘lurker’ literacy practices of Facebook group users and to understand if and how the features of the Facebook social media platform encourage these literacy practices. Given that neighborhood groups are intended for people who live in the same geographic area, there is a likelihood that many members of the group may know one another offline and in real life. Since ‘lurkers’ are groups that are typically not included in academic studies, this research will have broad appeal to scholars across the social sciences. When scholars only examine the role of active contributors and ignore the literacy practices of the silent majority of ‘lurkers’, their findings present an incomplete portrait of the way people engage in participatory culture and how these online experiences influence our offline lives.

Evaluating a web-based PPGIS for the rehabilitation of urban riparian corridors

The need for public participation is gaining increasing attention in environmental management in general, and specifically in the rehabilitation of degraded river corridors. Web-based Public Participation GIS (PPGIS) methods are one way of addressing this demand and complementing traditional participation formats, since they are more flexible in time and space and offer the advantage of anonymity for the ‘silent majority’. However, the use of digital technologies creates new challenges for planners and citizens. Hence, it is very relevant to investigate the usability and applicability of real life PPGIS tools during participation processes. The aim of this study is to evaluate the usability and applicability of a web-based PPGIS tool. A mix of quantitative (survey) and qualitative (focus group) methods was employed. The results of the survey show a medium-high usability of the tool, but reveal a digital divide based on age, gender and education level, potentially excluding citizens based on socio-demographic characteristics. Simultaneously, the tool provided an opportunity to participate for citizens who had little prior experience in this respect. In the focus group, participants generally embraced the tool's qualities, such as its multi-scale spatial approach and the opportunities it affords citizens with regard to education and empowerment. In addition, participants identified points for improvement, such as simplifying way-finding, integrating two-way communication functions and using smartphone technology.

P32 The silent majority: Physicians’ knowledge of and attitudes toward restrictive abortion policies in a battleground state

P32 The silent majority: Physicians’ knowledge of and attitudes toward restrictive abortion policies in a battleground state

Electorate Orders as a Representation of the Everyday Problems of the Post-War Rural Society of Kuibyshev Region (1947)

Based on the analysis of a wide range of archival sources, which are first introduced into scientific circulation, the everyday problems of the post-war rural society of the Kuibyshev region are examined in the article. It is noted that the Soviet elections of the Stalinist period were symbolic and ritualistic. It is shown that the main goal of the elections was not the rotation of power structures, but the expression of public confidence in the existing political regime. The authors come to the conclusion that during the period of Stalinism, meetings of candidates or their representatives with the public became one of the most important attributes of the Soviet elections. It is pointed out that during these meetings, the “silent majority”, deprived in normal conditions of the opportunity to convey their aspirations to the ruling elite, got the opportunity to focus the authorities’ attention on pressing social issues, the solution of which largely depended on the activities of political institutions. Based on the analysis of the electorate orders of the Kuibyshev region, issued to candidates for the regional representative bodies of power during the election campaign of 1947, the article highlights the main complex of everyday problems that worried rural residents in the post-war period. The content of orders and proposals to the authorities testifies to the transformation of the traditional values of the rural-peasant society.

El camino de las heroínas negras: Blaxploitation

En Estados Unidos el feminismo no surgió de las mujeres que de forma más directa eran víctimas de la opresión sexista; mujeres golpeadas a diario, mental, física y espiritualmente; mujeres sin la fuerza necesaria para cambiar sus condiciones de vida” (Hooks, 2004, p.33). Las activistas feministas eran blancas y burguesas, mientras que las mujeres negras eran una mayoría silenciosa.
 Si bien muchas mujeres participaron del Black Power, el movimiento era definido y articulado en los medios, la cultura popular y las artes por hombres. Los grupos mantenían una organización patriarcal, estructuras caracterizadas por el liderazgo masculino. Ellas “tomaron conciencia de la naturaleza de la dominación masculina cuando militaban en espacios anticlasistas y antirracistas con hombres que hablaban al mundo sobre la importancia de la libertad mientras subordinaban a las mujeres en sus filas” (Hooks, 2017, p.22). Había un no lugar destinado para las mujeres negras entre las feministas blancas y el Black Power de los hombres.

Degree of Commitment (diqi) and Differential Peasant Resistance in Three Village Communities

Abstract Centering on an analysis of the role of diqi, or the degree of commitment underlying one’s self-confidence and actions, this study investigates villagers’ differential responses to the same project of demolition of local residences in three neighboring communities in order to understand the psychological mechanism through which peasant resistance came to be differentiated. It is found that what sustained peasant actions was their shared moral commitment to a way of life rather than self-interest or rational reasoning. Different also from James Scott’s “subsistence ethic” or Ying Xing’s ethical power “qi,” however, what the villagers stressed was an “everyday ethic” that sought to preserve their current way of life. Their resistance took different forms because of the different levels of commitment (diqi) that influenced their choice of actions despite the same kind of impact on their ethic of everyday life. To protect the rights and interests of rural residents and alleviate their resistance, it is necessary to give weight to the ethic of the everyday way of life of villagers instead of the logic of capital and to pay attention to the fundamental concerns of the silent majority in rural China.

Silent Majority or Vocal Minority: A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Study of Trump Supporters’ Facebook Communication

The topic of immigration remains contentious in American political debate, and it played a prominent role in the presidential campaign of 2016, being exploited by presidential candidate Donald J. Trump. His proposal to ban Muslims from entering the USA stimulated passionate discussions, including those on social networks. The material for the investigation was collected from Trump’s official Facebook page and was analyzed by Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistic methods. The results were compared to the data from the COCA corpus as an indication of the general Americans’ attitude toward Muslims. The results demonstrate a difference in the negativity level between Trump’s supporters and the broader American public and provide a window into the ideology of the section of the US population supporting Trump.Publisher’s Note: This article was originally published with an incorrect peer review statement, which said that this article was an internally reviewed editorial. This has now been amended to reflect the fact that this is a piece of research that underwent double blind peer review by two external reviewers.

Vulnerability and the discourse of ‘forgotten people’: populism, population and cultural change

ABSTRACT Contemporary populist political rhetoric often makes use of a concept of a ‘forgotten people’ or a ‘silent majority’, who are constructed as a subset of population and often utilized as an electoral base by populist leaders, particularly in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. The concept emerged in the Twentieth Century and has undergone substantial re-configuration alongside other cultural emerges of the past fifty years. Among them is the re-configuration of the ‘forgotten people’ from being positioned to perceive themselves as a stoic, hard-working, domestic and normative middle-class to a group figured through a racial or ethnic ‘authenticity’ yet called upon to perceive themselves as vulnerable, precarious and at risk to both intellectual elites and marginalized groups including particularly migrants. Using cultural studies approaches, this paper examines some of those shifts in Australian and United States political discourse, how the concept of vulnerability is imputed for political ends, and the value of a more nuanced investigation of the affectively felt attachment to populist discourse among supporters as a form of identity practice. The paper aims to provide a more nuanced framework for scholarly understanding of, and intervention in, contemporary western populism.

Representing Silence in Politics

Democratic representation focuses onvoice: it conceives voice as that which is represented and as the prime mode of representing. This article argues that this focus is problematic and turns instead tosilenceto ask a fundamental question: Can representation empower citizens from their silent positions? I approach the question in three parts. First, I offer a new conceptualization of silence, arguing that silence is best understood as the site of a potential or actualpresence.Second, I use criteria of domination and displaced involvement to assess attempts to enfranchise silence within the transmission-belt model of representation. Third, I critically engage and strengthen constructivist views of representation by developing these criteria to assess the legitimacy of claims to represent—speakaboutandfor—silent constituencies—namely, the claim to represent an (alleged) silent majority.

I Am a Warrior: An Analysis of the Military Masculine-Warrior Narrative Among U.S. Air Force Officer Candidates

This qualitative study examines how cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy make sense of their experiences, form attitudes and beliefs, construct identities, and how a vocal minority of men create and perpetuate a biased gender norm. Despite an institutional intention of egalitarianism, cadets construct a highly masculinized culture. Focus group and interview analyses show how cadets perpetuate the military masculine-warrior narrative in sensemaking and the construction of gender differences. We argue that the narratives become an acceptable way to express gender biases, overriding the actual reason for the existence of fitness testing. We conclude by addressing the contradiction between policies promoting the inclusion of women in the military and the sexism described above. Acknowledging the lived experience of military personnel would allow for better perceptions of gender equality and suggests potential directions for policy, practice, and future research.

The silent majority?

This paper presents a simple model illustrating how a silent group would arise in equilibrium. The members of a silent group choose not to publicly express their opinions in the face of social pressure from norm deviation. The silent group can be either the majority or the minority depending on the comparison between the strength of social pressure and the psychological cost of dispossession. The social norm, which is the average opinion of the vocal group, can be on either the left or the right side of the political spectrum. Moreover, multiple vocal and silent groups can coexist.

Philosophy Problems Become Real During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Philosophy Problems Become Real During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The Silent Majority: Private U.S. Firms and Financial Reporting Choices

ABSTRACTThis study uses a comprehensive panel of tax returns to examine the financial reporting choices of medium‐to‐large private U.S. firms, a setting that controls over $9 trillion in capital, vastly outnumbers public U.S. firms across all industries, yet has no financial reporting mandates. We find that nearly two‐thirds of these firms do not produce audited GAAP financial statements. Guided by an agency theory framework, we find that size, ownership dispersion, external debt, and trade credit are positively associated with the choice to produce audited GAAP financial statements, while asset tangibility, age, and internal debt are generally negatively related to this choice. Our findings reveal that (1) equity capital and trade credit exhibit significant explanatory power, suggesting that the primary focus in the literature on debt is too narrow; (2) firm youth, growth, and R&D are positively associated with audited GAAP reporting, reflecting important monitoring roles of financial reporting; and (3) many firms violate standard explanations for financial reporting choices and substantial unexplained heterogeneity in financial reporting remains. We conclude by identifying opportunities for future research.

Silent majority: A culture of fear has taken over Venezuela, where people are facing prison for being critical

Silent majority: A culture of fear has taken over Venezuela, where people are facing prison for being critical

POSTMODERNISM AS A METHODOLOGY OF MODERN SEMANTIC WARS

Problem setting. The information war is not a united one, it includes three different aspects - the information and technical war (aimed at cyber resources), the information and psychological war (designing to make an opponent decide in the way necessary for an attacking side) and the semantic war. Researchers note that, in contrast to others, the semantic war has far goals that lie even beyond the limits of the life of a generation. Unlike facts that are constantly changing, meanings remain valid for a long time as they reflect the model of the world. The semantic war deals with interpretations based on the existing model of the world. Interpretation processes, being more complex, become more important than just informational ones.Thus, the problem of searching for the methodological foundations of conducting semantic confrontation, changing the value system, and the world picture of the general public of the society is becoming more and more topical.Recent research and publications analysis. The issues of certain aspects of semantic wars are in the centre of attention of such researchers as Yu. Gromyko, A. Dzholos, R. Marutyan, A. Pelin, G. Pocheptsov, Yu. Solomonov and others. However, the methodology of semantic warfare remains insufficiently studied although this can help freely “enter” the “territory of meanings” of the victim of aggression, change the value system, and the picture of the world.Paper objective. The goal of this paper is to clear up the methodological foundations of modern semantic wars.Paper main body. The article attempts to determine the methodology of modern semantic wars. It is justified that postmodernism is one of the methodologies that can be used to explain the phenomenon of semantic weapons. Postmodernist discourse greatly differs from other philosophical directions in terms of topics, conceptual apparatus, and ideological foundations, especially in the context of the formation of a modern information society.It is determined that several basic ideas can be distinguished within the postmodern discourse, these ideas being successfully used in the present semantic confrontations.First, this is the textualization of the world. The world should be understood as a text. Second, since everything is understood as a text, the subject exists within the text. Moreover, the subject is absorbed by the text. A person appears as a set of different identities that are tied to one or another local-cultural condition or socio-political context. Third, postmodernism is characterized by disillusionment with the ideals of the Enlightenment. In particular, the Reason is not believed in any more, causal relationships and absolute values are denied. Fourth, the postmodernist discourse is principally anti-fundamental, it is not interested in substantial unity and ultimate (metaphysical) causes but in decentralized, scattered sets - differences. Fifth, an important place in the modern postmodern discourse belongs to the theory of simulacrum.A simulacrum is a product of simulation, which replaces the real world with an imaginary one but which is more acceptable for a person as a real one. A simulacrum produces (simulates) a similarity but only as an external effect. Its internal principle is the difference, due to which it eludes of identity, similarity, likeness. It destroys the sample and multiplies the copies so that it is not possible any longer to tell where the copy is and where the original is. Simulacra give rise to the phenomenon of masses. Masses are defined as the silent majority, a black hole absorbing social aspects. The masses gravitate toward a physical and static form, which is simultaneously non-social and supra-social.Conclusions of the research. It is concluded that postmodernism brings about new ways of understanding social and political reality since it offers own type of rationality. Based on the postmodern discourse, a characteristic basic semantic toolkit arises as a feature of semantic wars: the simulation, that is the creation of simulacra – missing reality images that lack originality and that are superficial, hyper-realistic objects that do not have any reality behind them; reinterpretation of events and phenomena of reality; the coverage of not just one segment of the population but the general public; more interest that does not focus on a fact but on its rethinking, the creation of an apparatus for rejecting own “incorrect” interpretations.

Irregularities in 'The Silent Majority' (or: On Infinite Counting Accounting and the Rarity of 'Consolidated Parent Level' Tax Returns)

Irregularities in 'The Silent Majority' (or: On Infinite Counting Accounting and the Rarity of 'Consolidated Parent Level' Tax Returns)