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1 Power In this chapter I want to explore a selection of the numerous and wideranging issues that are to do, directly or otherwise, with the ‘power’ of the media. Research into the various aspects of power, and arguments about it, have always been at the centre of academic interest in media. Sometimes, the focus has been on ‘influence and effects’, a concern with the measurable consequences of output for the perceptions and attitudes of media readerships and audiences. This is the strongest strand of international research, operating across a wide variety of
2 Power T H E P R E V I O U S chapter explored the ‘postmodern condition’ and, particularly, its implications for politics. I suggested that postmodernity is fundamentally ambiguous in its effects, and can give rise to different forms of politics, whether progressive, reactionary or simply nihilistic. Its motifs of difference, fragmentation and flux, and its questioning of the ‘metanarrative’ can, on the one hand, lead to either a radical displacement of social identities, institutions and discourses, and on the other, to a paranoid desire to cling to them
power 7 Power Da women den could do laek men. (Shetland Archive, 3/1/124: Katie Inkster) isitors to shetland in the nineteenth century regarded the women they encountered as subordinate and put-upon. But at the same time they admired their physical and mental strength. Outsiders understood that this society could not be compared with other rural communities in other parts of the British Isles, and they frequently used the iconic crofting and knitting female as a symbolic means of conveying this difference. Implicit in their descriptions of women was an
5 Parental power How should we conceptualise parental power and how can it be evaluated? In previous chapters, in the evaluation of parental power I made the case for an irreducible plurality of moral considerations and of morally relevant features. In this chapter, I will examine what is, I argue, an irreducible plurality of forms of power itself. I leave until the following chapter to explore the moral considerations appropriate for the evaluation of its legitimacy. However, in the current chapter, I do go some way towards addressing methodological issues
6 Real power Do young people use popular culture to acquire knowledge of, and pass judgement on, the wider world of politics? This is the question that this chapter tries to answer. It does so by reporting on the focus group discussions and interviews that we had with our young participants. We begin, not by focusing on politics specifically, but by looking at how works of fiction and the imagination are deemed to connect to the ‘real world’. In listening to the talk generated by our interviews and focus groups we found one of the most common ways in which
This book is about the people’s power. But who are the people ? How did the people come into being? Should the people be sovereign? And what does it mean for the people to be sovereign? These are perennial questions in self
The revolution is now on the inside of the house. Malcolm X, 1964 1 “… every state that claims sovereign power” carries inside it the potential for the makings of an “unlimited, unmonitored wild zone of power”. Susan Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror 2 O N 12 NOVEMBER 2016 photos of Nigel Farage schmoozing with Donald Trump sped through the ether. In the glitz of Trump Tower the calculated vulgarity of the faux selfies signified an integral component of the occasion, a sublimely narcissistic announcement of the incoming order. The unbridled
Energy is integral to Moscow's vision of Russia as a great power engineering a structural transition in international relations to a polycentric world. The role of hydrocarbons is not limited to generating hard currency for the federal budget, though with contributions of approximately 40 per cent, their significance can hardly be underestimated. For the Russian government, energy is both bound up with Russian national security and is a principal means of projecting influence abroad. Numerous Russian strategic documents highlight that
This book describes the explosion of debt across the global economy and related requirement of political leaders to pursue exponential growth to meet the demands of creditors and investors. It presents a historical account of the modern origins of capitalist debt by looking at how commercial money is produced as debt in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The book identifies the ways in which the control, production, and distribution of money, as interest-bearing debt, are used to discipline populations. It focuses on the histories of the development of the Bank of England and the establishment of permanent national debt with the intensification and expansion of debt, as a "technology of power", under colonialism in a global context. The book investigates the modern origins of debt as a technology of power by focusing on war, the creation of the "national" debt, and the capitalization of the organized force of the state. It addresses the consequences of modern regimes of debt and puts forward proposals of what needs to be done, politically, to reverse the problems generated by debt-based economies. The book utilizes the term "intensification" rather than spread or proliferation to think about both the amplification and spatial expansion of debt as a technology of power during the era of European colonialism and resistance. Finally, it also presents a convincing case for the 99" to use the power of debt to challenge present inequalities and outlines a platform for action suggesting possible alternatives.
The book collects thirteen previously published essays by Keith Dowding on social and political power, freedom, choice and luck. It is anchored by a substantial introductory essay that pulls together the different strands to demonstrate the coherence and connections between the different concepts discussed through the book. The book demonstrates the importance of the concept of power to political science and argues that comparative static definitions enable comparison of power structures in terms of agents’ resources. It shows the importance of systematic luck in understanding the power structure. However, static definitions are inherently unsatisfactory in dynamic settings. Here we need to apply game theory rather than game forms, and in dynamic settings luck is vital to our perception of freedom, responsibility and leadership. Later chapters reveal the problematic evaluation of choice and freedom and how these relate to responsibility. The book concludes by demonstrating that freedom and rights exist in different senses, which matter for our understanding of how much freedom exists in a society. It shows that Sen’s liberal paradox is ambiguous between rights as claims and rights as liberties; how fundamental his paradox is to our understanding of the conflict between rights and welfare depends on the manner in which we evaluate freedom.