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A Virtuous Circle: Political Communications in Postindustrial Societies (Communication, Society and Politics)
Pippa Norris Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0521793645 |
Book Description
Is the process of political communications by the news media and by parties responsible for civic malaise? A Virtuous Circle sets out to challenge the conventional wisdom that it is. Based on a comparative examination of the role of the news media and parties in postindustrial societies, this study argues that rather than mistakenly "blaming the messenger" we need to understand and confront more deep-rooted flaws in the systems of representative democracy.Customer Reviews:
THE MYTH OF MEDIA-DRIVEN MALAISE.......2000-09-26
There's more meat here than even author Pippa Norris has herself digested; the book is half social science analysis and half a statistical almanac. But this is to quibble. A Virtuous Circle is praiseworthy both for its sumptuous comparative statistics on the news media across European and North American democracies, and for its unflappable sanity and even ruddy hopefulness about the state of the media (but not necessarily the state of the world) today.
For Norris, media critics have failed to make their case that contemporary news practices harm the body politic. The evidence of "media malaise," that media and political communication today reduce civic activism, diminish trust in government, and retard knowledge of and interest in public affairs, has little empirical support. In fact, people who attend to news know more about politics than those who don't. They are as trusting of political institutions as those less attentive to news.
This is not exactly three cheers for the press, but it directly counters the views of many others -- including Norris's own distinguished colleague at Harvard's Shorenstein Center, Thomas Patterson (it makes you wonder what their faculty meetings are like).
In l993, Patterson published a widely noted book, Out of Order, that claimed that the U.S. news media had grown more negative and more cynical in political coverage over the past two or three decades, that this had matched a growing popular distrust of politicians and government and a general disengagement from civic life, and that -- although Patterson also knows that "correlation is not causation" -- cynicism in the news "has contributed to" cynicism in the electorate. Other scholars, journalists, and media reformers have endorsed a "the news-media-make-us-less-civic" hypothesis. A European version of this argument focuses more on the increasingly media-oriented electoral campaigns than on the news as such. In the European variant, American-style political packaging, media consultants, and emphasis on image over substance have produced a European "crisis of civic communication."
Well, Norris asks, in her "I call 'em as I see 'em" tone, what do the data tell us? As a comparative political scientist, a British transplant to the United States and a student of British as well as U.S. media and politics, she also suspects the American situation might look different when compared to other nations. If there is "media malaise," is it an American disease or a world epidemic?
Here's what she finds. In Europe since l970, the percentage of citizens of democracies who read a newspaper every day has grown by 67 percent. The percentage of people who watch television news daily has increased almost 50 percent. Even after taking education into account, European citizens who attend to news know more about politics as well as everyday social and health matters than those who do not. People attentive to news are no more, but no less, trusting and confident in government than the inattentive. People attentive to news are more likely to participate in politics through voting and other forms of participation. Looking specifically at news coverage of the European Union, Norris found a "Euroskeptic tone" in the newspapers and an even more negative tone in European TV news and she found this associated with public skepticism toward the euro and other features of the EU. But she resists drawing the conclusion that this is a case of the press influencing the public. Instead, she argues, the press takes its cues from party elites, interest groups, and the political culture at large; journalists are "players in a broader political culture" rather than outsiders independent of it.
In America, the media domain is very different, with lack of newspaper competition in most markets, the absence of the kind of strong tabloid readership that many European countries maintain, falling rather than rising newspaper sales, and the absence of a strong public-service broadcast sector. Does a "media malaise" hypothesis work better here? No. As in Europe, people who attend to the news are significantly more likely to participate in political campaigns by voting, contributing money, or discussing politics. It may be that watching hour after hour of entertainment television is a factor in disengaging Americans from political and civic life, but watching TV news is not. Norris does not find any relationship between increasing negativism in the news since the l980s and popular trust in governing institutions, which has risen, fallen, and risen again in this same period. She finds a decline in political interest, political trust, and voter turnout in the 1960s-early 1970s, but not a steady decline from the l960s to the present. Not only is correlation not causation -- we don't even have a good correlation.
The evidence for media-driven malaise just ain't there. The best evidence, in fact, goes in the other direction: that active, politically engaged people attend to the news more than others and that attending to the news reinforces them in their political involvement. This is the "virtuous" rather than "vicious" circle of her title. And in most respects she is utterly convincing.
This is a significant book. It is, to be sure, an academic's book. Although Norris writes clear and straightforward prose, she also gets caught up in the intricacies of academic argument and a range of data so vast that the general reader will have a tough time of it. But her conclusion is challenging: "A citizenry that is better informed and more highly educated, with higher cognitive skills and more sources of information, may well become increasingly critical of governing institutions, with declining affective loyalties towards traditional representative bodies such as parties and parliaments. But increasing criticism from citizens does not necessarily reduce civic engagement; indeed, it can have the contrary effect." In other words, the tenor of the times is more critical than it used to be, with uncertain consequences. Norris wants us to consider the possibility that critical citizens, committed to democratic values but unhappy with the performance of governmental institutions, are not cynical but wary. And vigilance can be a democratic virtue.
This is not to suggest, Norris cautions, that all's well in contemporary democracies. But blaming the news media for what ails us in political corruption, undernourished social services, and violent conflicts in some countries is to find a scapegoat, not a powerful source of our ills.
Michael Schudson is professor of communications and sociology at the University of California. His latest book is A Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life.
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UNCONVENTIONAL WISDOM
By Richard Morin Sunday, September 17, 2000; Page B05
The Myth of Media Malaise
For decades, it's been hugely fashionable in academe to finger the cynical and superficial news media as the cause of rising levels of civic disengagement.
Well, democracy may or may not be in eclipse, and people certainly don't trust politicians or vote nearly as often as they did a few decades ago. But don't blame the media, argues political scientist Pippa Norris in her new book "A Virtuous Circle: Political Communications in Postindustrial Societies."
Norris, a professor at Harvard, examined five decades of polling data from several major surveys conducted in the United States, as well as surveys conducted in Europe. Wherever she looked, Norris found that people who read newspapers or watch TV network news more frequently are generally more trusting, less cynical and more knowledgeable about politics and government--even after she controlled for their education, income, gender, age and other variables that shape political attitudes.
Rather than driving down political involvement and ratcheting up mistrust, Norris says that attention to the news "acts as a virtuous circle: The most politically knowledgeable, trusting and participatory are most likely to tune to public affairs coverage. And those most attentive to coverage of public affairs become more engaged in civic life."
Then who's responsible for creating the tattered image of the malaise-making news media? Blame it, at least in part, on the media themselves, which Norris says have become increasingly preoccupied with "self-flagellation."
The resulting false picture, she cautions, does real harm--but not to civic life. Rather, it erodes public confidence in the news media. Plus, it's so predictable. "American journalism seems increasingly transfixed by American journalism, looking at itself obs
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The Racketeer's Progress: Chicago and the Struggle for the Modern American Economy, 19001940 (Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society)
Andrew Wender Cohen Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: 052183466X |
Book Description
A provocative study of law and its social context, this work explores the contingent origins of the modern American economy. It shows how craftsmen - teamsters, barbers, musicians, and others - violently governed commerce in Chicago through pickets, assaults, and bombings. These tradesmen forcefully contested the power of national corporations in their city. Their resistance shaped American law, heavily influencing the New Deal and federal criminal statutes. This book thus shows that American industrial policy resulted not from a "search for order," but from a brutal struggle for control.Customer Reviews:
Brilliant........2005-07-01
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The Soul's Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820-1920
Jeffrey Sklansky Manufacturer: The University of North Carolina Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0807853984 Release Date: 2001-12-09 |
Book Description
Tracing a seismic shift in American social thought, Jeffrey Sklansky offers a new synthesis of the intellectual transformation entailed in the rise of industrial capitalism.For a century after Independence, the dominant American understanding of selfhood and society came from the tradition of political economy, which defined freedom and equality in terms of ownership of the means of self-employment. However, the gradual demise of the household economy rendered proprietary independence an increasingly embattled ideal. Large landowners and industrialists claimed the right to rule as a privilege of their growing monopoly over productive resources, while dispossessed farmers and workers charged that a propertyless populace was incompatible with true liberty and democracy.
Amid the widening class divide, nineteenth-century social theorists devised a new science of American society that came to be called "social psychology." The change Sklansky charts begins among Romantic writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, continues through the polemics of political economists such as Henry George and William Graham Sumner, and culminates with the pioneers of modern American psychology and sociology such as William James and Charles Horton Cooley. Together, these writers reconceived freedom in terms of psychic self-expression instead of economic self-interest, and they redefined democracy in terms of cultural kinship rather than social compact.
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Yankee Don't Go Home!: Mexican Nationalism, American Business Culture, and the Shaping of Modern Mexico, 1920-1950 (The Luther Hartwell Hodges Series on Business, Society, and the State)
Julio Moreno Manufacturer: The University of North Carolina Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0807854786 Release Date: 2007-01-17 |
Book Description
In the aftermath of the 1910 Mexican Revolution, Mexican and U.S. political leaders, business executives, and ordinary citizens shaped modern Mexico by making industrial capitalism the key to upward mobility into the middle class, material prosperity, and a new form of democracy-consumer democracy. Julio Moreno describes how Mexico's industrial capitalism between 1920 and 1950 shaped the country's national identity, contributed to Mexico's emergence as a modern nation-state, and transformed U.S.-Mexican relations.According to Moreno, government programs and incentives were central to legitimizing the postrevolutionary government as well as encouraging commercial growth. Moreover, Mexican nationalism and revolutionary rhetoric gave Mexicans the leverage to set the terms for U.S. businesses and diplomats anxious to court Mexico in the midst of the dual crises of the Great Depression and World War II. Diplomats like Nelson Rockefeller and corporations like Sears Roebuck achieved success by embracing Mexican culture in their marketing and diplomatic pitches, while those who disregarded Mexican traditions were slow to earn profits.
Moreno also reveals how the rapid growth of industrial capitalism, urban economic displacement, and unease caused by World War II and its aftermath unleashed feelings of spiritual and moral decay among Mexicans that led to an antimodernist backlash by the end of the 1940s.
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The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power in the Digital Age
Simon Head Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0195179838 |
Book Description
In the great boom of the 1990s, top management's compensation soared, but the wages of most Americans barely grew at all. This wages stagnation has baffled experts, but in The New Ruthless Economy, Simon Head points to information technology as the prime cause of this growing wage disparity. Many economists, technologists and business consultants have predicted that IT would liberate the work force, bringing self-managed work teams and decentralized decision making. Head argues that the opposite has happened. Reengineering, a prime example of how business processes have been computerized, has instead simplified the work of middle and lower level employees, fenced them in with elaborate rules, and set up digital monitoring to make sure that the rules are obeyed. This is true even in such high-skill professions as medicine, where decision-making software in the hands of HMOs decides the length of a patient's stay in hospital and determines the treatments patients will or will not receive. In lower-skill jobs, such as in the call center industry, workers are subject to the indignity of scripting software that lays out the exact conversation, line by line, which agents must follow when speaking with customers. Head argues that these computer systems devalue a worker's experience and skill, and subject employees to a degree of supervision which is excessive and demeaning. The harsh and often unstable work regime of reengineering also undermines the security of employees and so weakens their bargaining power in the workplace. Drawing upon ten years of research visiting work places across America, ranging from medical offices to machine tool plants, Head offers dramatic insight into the impact of information technology on the quality of working life in the United States.Customer Reviews:
Working Under the All-Seeing Eye.......2006-12-19
The Digital Age Catches Up........2005-09-15
Big Brother Is Watching.......2004-04-12
During the 1990?s, wages of top management went through the roof but the average American worker realized little, if any, increase at all. The New Ruthless Economy explores contributing factors to the inequality of wages, loss of job security and weakened bargaining power in the American workforce.
Simon Head drew his conclusions based upon ten years of research across industry lines and geographic boundaries. He discovered that in the name of efficiency, businesses have established highly structured rules, computerized their processes and then implemented technology to ensure these rules were strictly adhered to al? George Orwell.
The author provides concrete examples ranging from software implemented by HMOs that determine a patient?s length of care and treatment to the computer scripting used in call centers for wide-range solicitation. Use of these systems once again separates decision-making from the worker. It devalues an employee?s education, training and experience while subjecting them to excessively close supervision and monitoring.
Head also points to the ?lean production? and ?ERP? (enterprise resource planning) practices that prompted wholesale layoffs in the early to mid 1990?s. Not only did these systems reduce the skill levels of employees but they also significantly increased the level of worker scrutinization. Head explores the relationship between Information Technology and Scientific Management and concludes his book with a discussion of ?the economics of unfairness? where both the National Labor Review Board and employee privacy rights take major hits at the waterline. The New Ruthless Economy takes a look backward and forward where the view for American labor is equally disappointing.
Wake-up call.......2004-03-21
As Head points out, the overall effect of the extension of these principles, especially combined with the vast electronic monitoring provided by recent advances in IT, is the overall dumbing-down of the worker, regardless of inherent or potential skills. The study of Toyota auto plants in Japan and other countries is particularly distressing, and one can easily see that it is only the influence of unions that has slowed down the treadmill. The situation with regard to call centers is appalling: truly the workers there are exploited ruthlessly. One wonders if in the offshoring of American jobs in the service sector, eventually the same massive turnover numbers will appear in developing countries.
Head, in my opinion, saves the best till last?managed care organizations. Here, as one reads both figures rarely published, research findings, and case studies, it becomes all too obvious that MCOs are an absolute disaster. Why are health care costs going up? It?s all here in simple terms. Just this section of the book is worth reading alone if one is worried about health care in America.
ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), CRM (Customer Resource Management) and a host of other business areas literally reorganized by giant software programs (SAP R/3, for example), are also discussed, and viewed as boondoggles that rarely achieve any desired goals.
The overall trends discussed in this well-written book should frighten both management and employees, and it is unfortunate that the latter so often buy into the consultants? ill-advised mantras.
Fresh perspective on the perils of the new economy.......2003-10-15
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Manufacturing Revolution: The Intellectual Origins of Early American Industry (Studies in Early American Economy and Society from the Library Company of ... from the Library Company of Philadelphia)
Lawrence A. Peskin Manufacturer: The Johns Hopkins University Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: 080187324X |
Book Description
Lawrence A. Peskin argues that, in accounting for American industrialization, students of the phenomenon have focused mistakenly on large forces and theoretical constructs and on New England and the rise of factories as such. What, he asks, of the ordinary people who considered making things and building shops or small factories to meet the demand they saw? What of the groups and associations that tried to build public support for economic independence from the mother country? "Manufacturing Revolution" explores discussions originating in the Revolutionary era and the course of manufacturing itself-the many years of trial and error, risk and failure, in many places across the early republic. Peskin thus provides a detailed look at labor relations, entrepreneurship, and methods of promoting and financing manufactures. He finds that various social layers had mutual interests and influences; no particular core of business leaders, rising entrepreneurial artisans, or wage laborers alone account for the emergence of manufacturing. The work builds on solid research in both manuscript sources and printed texts from the period between 1750 and 1820. Audience: Historians of the early republic; economic historians; students of technology, business, and industry
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Technology, Culture and Competitiveness: Change and the World Political Economy (Technology & Global Political Economy)
M. Talalay Manufacturer: Routledge ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback ASIN: 0415142555 |
Book Description
The first volume in a major series,
Technology, Culture and Competitiveness will be an essential read for all those who need to deal with the causes and consequences of rapid technological change in an increasingly globalized world, whether they be government policy-makers, managers of multi-national corporations, commentators on the international scene or specialists in and students of international politics, economics and business studies. The authors discuss three related areas: how we think about technology and international relations/international political economy; in what sense technology is a fundamental component of national competitive advantage and what national, local and corporate policy should be in light of this; and what the relationship is between technological innovation and global and political economics change.
Technology is discussed not just in an instrumental sense-- as a tool of power and an object of policy--but equally in a transcendental sense--as a key to shaping and structuring how we understand and interpret reality. The final section of the book presents case studies of three core sectors of the world--political economy, finance, aviation and automobiles.
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State Corporatism and Proto-Industry: The Württemberg Black Forest, 15801797 (Cambridge Studies in Population, Economy and Society in Past Time)
Sheilagh C. Ogilvie Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: 0521372097 |
Book Description
State Corporatism and Proto-Industry focuses on the WÜrttemberg worsted industry, an example of a "proto-industry" that arose in many parts of Europe preceding factory industrialization. It has been argued that these proto-industries broke down traditional society but this book suggests otherwise. With the help of the state, corporate institutions such as merchant companies and rural guilds, regulated every aspect of rural life and thus profoundly shaped early modern European economic, demographic and social development.Customer Reviews:
Finally! Something new and interesting about proto-industry!.......2000-07-20
A must read about early modern European history.......2000-07-07
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Britain: Society, Economy and Industrial Relations 1900-39 (Access to History)
R. D. Pearce Manufacturer: Hodder Murray ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback ASIN: 0340845813 |
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Business, Government, Society: The Global Political Economy
Arthur A. Goldsmith Manufacturer: South-Western Pub ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0759388911 |
Book Description
In Business, Government, and Society, Goldsmith has given us thorough coverage of the whole public policy process. He emphasizes the relationship of public policy and the business environment to reveal how government actions touch upon almost every decision taken by managers.. His approach to this topic reflects the latest AACSB guidelines: Students will be exposed to ethical and global issues; the influence of political, social, regulatory, environmental, and technological challenges, and the impact of the demographic diversity of organizations.Books:
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