Hypercapitalism : language, new media and social perceptions of value

Using examples from contemporary policy and business discourses, and exemplary historical texts dealing with the notion of value, I put forward an argument as to why a critical scholarship that draws on media history, language analysis, philosophy and political economy is necessary to understand the dynamics of what is being called 'the global knowledge economy'. I argue that the social changes associated with new modes of value determination are closely associated with new media forms.

Securities market regulators’ use of the ‘please explain’ queries sanction and its power of compliance

The aim of this study is to investigate the compliance impact of price queries issued by a securities market operator to its participating firms. Market operators in Australia and New Zealand, such as the Australian Securities Exchange and the New Zealand Securities Exchange, have the regulatory power in their rules to issue queries to its market participants to explain unusual fluctuations in trading price or volume in the market. The operator will issue a price query where it believes that the market has not been fully informed as to price relevant information. Responsive regulation has informed much of the regulatory debate in securities laws in our region. We posit that price queries are one strategy that a market operator can use in communicating its enforcement expectations to its stakeholder. However, whilst responsive regulation informs regulatory choices, an alternate view seeks to explain why participants respond to these regulatory strategies, and we use disclosure behaviour after price queries to test compliance behaviour

Masturbation and the media

This paper explores the important role the media play in informing young people about masturbation. A pilot study of focus groups with twenty-two young Australians, aged between 14-16 explored what they know about sex and sexuality, and where they have found that knowledge. This paper reports on their knowledge about masturbation. Although researchers agree that masturbation can be a positive part of healthy sexual development, most young people reported that they received very little positive information about it from their parents or in formal sex education in school. These young people’s discussions around this topic were largely ambivalent, but also highly complex due to the varying levels and types of information that they receive. In this context the media play a vital role in providing information about masturbation through books and magazines for young women, and television comedies for young men.

Identity, forgiveness and power in the management of child sexual abuse by personnel in Christian Institutions

The ongoing crises of child sexual abuse by Christian institutions leaders across the Anglophone world continue to attract public attention and public inquiries. The pervasiveness of this issue lends credence to the argument that the prevailing ethos functioning within some Christian Institutions is one which exercises influence to repeatedly mismanage allegations of child sexual abuse by Church leaders. This work draws on semistructured interviews conducted with 15 Personnel in Christian Institutions (PICIs) in Australia who were identified as being pro-active in their approach to addressing child sexual abuse by PICIs. From these data, themes of power and forgiveness are explored through a Foucaultian conceptualising of pastoral power and ‘truth’ construction. Forgiveness is viewed as a discourse which can have the power effect of either silencing or empowering victim/survivors. The study concludes that individual PICIs’ understandings of the role ofpower in their praxis influences outcomes from the deployment of forgiveness.

The changing role of copyright in China’s emergent media economy

This chapter introduces the changing role of copyright in China from a historical perspective. It begins by briefly tracing the history of copyright, from a censorship-related system associated with the emergence of the printing press in imperial China, through modernisation during the Republican period, abolition under communism and finally to the introduction of the People's Republic of China's (PRC) first copyright law in 1990 and the nation's entry into the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 2001.

Emerging Issues in Green Criminology : Exploring Power, Justice and Harm

This edited collection brings together internationally recognized scholars to explore Green Criminology through interdisciplinary lenses of power, justice and harm. The chapters provide innovative case study analyses from North America, Europe and Australia that seek to advance theoretical, policy and practice discourses about environmental harm. This book brings together transnational debates in environmental law, policy and justice. In doing so, it examines international agreements and policy within diverse environmental discourses of sociology, criminology and political economy.

Evaluating Communication for Development : A Framework for Social Change

Evaluating Communication for Development presents a comprehensive framework for evaluating communication for development (C4D). This framework combines the latest thinking from a number of fields in new ways. It critiques dominant instrumental, accountability-based approaches to development and evaluation and offers an alternative holistic, participatory, mixed methods approach based on systems and complexity thinking and other key concepts. It maintains a focus on power, gender and other differences and social norms. The authors have designed the framework as a way to focus on achieving sustainable social change and to continually improve and develop C4D initiatives. The benefits and rigour of this approach are supported by examples and case studies from a number of action research and evaluation capacity development projects undertaken by the authors over the past fifteen years. Building on current arguments within the fields of C4D and development, the authors reinforce the case for effective communication being a central and vital component of participatory forms of development, something that needs to be appreciated by decision makers. They also consider ways of increasing the effectiveness of evaluation capacity development from grassroots to management level in the development context, an issue of growing importance to improving the quality, effectiveness and utilisation of monitoring and evaluation studies in this field. The book includes a critical review of the key approaches, methodologies and methods that are considered effective for planning evaluation, assessing the outcomes of C4D, and engaging in continuous learning. This rigorous book is of immense theoretical and practical value to students, scholars, and professionals researching or working in development, communication and media, applied anthropology, and evaluation and program planning.

Generator coherency and area detection in large power systems

This paper provides a new general approach for defining coherent generators in power systems based on the coherency in low frequency inter-area modes. The disturbance is considered to be distributed in the network by applying random load changes which is the random walk representation of real loads instead of a single fault and coherent generators are obtained by spectrum analysis of the generators velocity variations. In order to find the coherent areas and their borders in the inter-connected networks, non-generating buses are assigned to each group of coherent generator using similar coherency detection techniques. The method is evaluated on two test systems and coherent generators and areas are obtained for different operating points to provide a more accurate grouping approach which is valid across a range of realistic operating points of the system.

Emerging methods for digital media research : an introduction

Now as in earlier periods of acute change in the media environment, new disciplinary articulations are producing new methods for media and communication research. At the same time, established media and communication studies meth- ods are being recombined, reconfigured, and remediated alongside their objects of study. This special issue of JOBEM seeks to explore the conceptual, political, and practical aspects of emerging methods for digital media research. It does so at the conjuncture of a number of important contemporary trends: the rise of a ‘‘third wave’’ of the Digital Humanities and the ‘‘computational turn’’ (Berry, 2011) associated with natively digital objects and the methods for studying them; the apparently ubiquitous Big Data paradigm—with its various manifestations across academia, business, and government — that brings with it a rapidly increasing interest in social media communication and online ‘‘behavior’’ from the ‘‘hard’’ sciences; along with the multisited, embodied, and emplaced nature of everyday digital media practice.

Like? Advertising practitioners views of social media as an advertising research tool

Given that both academics and marketers are dissatisfied with the current state of advertising research (Kerr and Schultz, 2010; Neff, 2011), the objective of this exploratory paper is to determine the position of world-leading advertising professionals on the use of social media to test, track and evaluate campaigns. Using Delphi methodology, an international panel of Cannes Gold Lion winners acknowledged that social media research has both strengths and weaknesses, the same as any research. Its strengths are its intimacy and spontaneity, bringing the brand and consumer closer. The real risk is the loss of control in this research environment.

Media and information literacy at Queensland University of Technology and in Australia

Media and Information Literacy is the focus of several teaching and research projects at Queensland University of Technology and there is particular emphasis placed on digital technologies and how they are used for communication, information use and learning in formal contexts such as schools. Research projects are currently taking place in several locations where investigators are collecting data on approaches to the use of digital media tools like cameras and editing systems, tablet computers and video games. This complements QUT’s teacher preparation courses, including preparation to implement UNESCO’s Online Course in Media and Information Literacy and Intercultural Dialogue in 2013. This work takes place in the context of projects occurring at the National level in Australia that continue to promote Media and Information Literacy.

Leveraging power of learning capability upon manufacturing operations

Learning capability (LC) is a special dynamic capability that a firm purposefully builds to develop a cognitive focus, so as to enable the configuration and improvement of other capabilities (both dynamic and operational) to create and respond to market changes. Empirical evidence regarding the essential role of LC in leveraging operational manufacturing capabilities is, however, limited in the literature. This study takes a routine-based approach to understand capability, and focuses on demonstrating leveraging power of LC upon two essential operational capabilities within the manufacturing context, i.e., operational new product development capability (ONPDC), and operational supplier integration capability (OSIC). A mixed-methods research framework was used, which combines sources of evidence derived from a survey study and a multiple case study. This study identified high-level routines of LC that can be designed and controlled by managers and practitioners, to reconfigure underlying routines of ONPDC and OSIC to achieve superior performance in a turbulent environment. Hence, the study advances the notion of knowledge-based dynamic capabilities, such as LC, as routine bundles. It also provides an impetus for managing manufacturing operations from a capability-based perspective in the fast changing knowledge era.

Emptiness and fullness : Pinter, anti-architecture and politics

Classical architecture has a long history of representing the idealized proportions of the human body, derived from the Vitruvian man. This association with the idealized human form has also associated architecture as symbiotic with prevailing power structures. Meaning that architecture is always loaded with some signification, it creates a highly inscribed space. In the absence of architecture space is not necessarily without inscription, for within the void there can exist an anti-architecture. Like the black box theatre, it is both empty and full at the same time, in the absence of the architecture, the void of space and how it is occupied becomes much more profound. As Dorita Hannah writes, ‘In denying a purely visual apprehension of built space, and suggesting a profound interiority, the black-box posits a new way of regarding the body in space.’ This paper analyses the work of Harold Pinter and his use of the body to create an anti-architecture to subvert oppressors and power structures. Pinter’s works are an important case study in this research due to their political nature. His works are also heavily tied to territory, which bound the works in a dependent relationship with a simulated ‘place’. In the citation accompanying the playwright’s Nobel Laureate it states, '...in his plays [he] uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms.' In Pinter’s work oppression manifests itself in the representation of a room, the architecture, which is the cause of a power struggle when objectified and defeated when subjectified. The following work examines how Pinter uses the body to subjectify and represent architecture as authority in his earlier works, which relied on detailed mimetic sets of domestic rooms, and then in his later political works, that were freed of representational scenography. This paper will also look at the adaption of Pinter’s work by the Belarus Free Theatre in their 2008 production of ‘Being Harold Pinter.’ The work of Pinter and the Belarus Free Theatre are concerned with authoritarian political structures. That is, political structures that works against ideas of individualism, ascribing to a mass-produced body as an artifact of dictatorship and conservatism. The focus on the body in space on an empty stage draws attention to the individual – the body amongst scenography can become merely another prop, lost in the borders and boundaries the scenery dictates. Through an analysis of selected works by Harold Pinter and their interpretations, this paper examines this paradox of emptiness and fullness through the body as anti-architecture in performance.