Striving to realise the European idea : judging the news media’s accounts of how the Berlin Wall gave impetus to a new order across Europe

The 1990 European Community was taken by surprise, by the urgency of demands from the newly-elected Eastern European governments to become member countries. Those governments were honouring the mass social movement of the streets, the year before, demanding free elections and a liberal economic system associated with “Europe”. The mass movement had actually been accompanied by much activity within institutional politics, in Western Europe, the former “satellite” states, the Soviet Union and the United States, to set up new structures – with German reunification and an expanded EC as the centre-piece. This paper draws on the writer’s doctoral dissertation on mass media in the collapse of the Eastern bloc, focused on the Berlin Wall – documenting both public protests and institutional negotiations. For example the writer as a correspondent in Europe from that time, recounts interventions of the German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, at a European summit in Paris nine days after the “Wall”, and separate negotiations with the French President, Francois Mitterrand -- on the reunification, and EU monetary union after 1992. Through such processes, the “European idea” would receive fresh impetus, though the EU which eventuated, came with many altered expectations. It is argued here that as a result of the shock of 1989, a “social” Europe can be seen emerging, as a shared experience of daily life -- especially among people born during the last two decades of European consolidation. The paper draws on the author’s major research, in four parts: (1) Field observation from the strategic vantage point of a news correspondent. This includes a treatment of evidence at the time, of the wishes and intentions of the mass public (including the unexpected drive to join the European Community), and those of governments, (e.g. thoughts of a “Tienanmen Square solution” in East Berlin, versus the non-intervention policies of the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev). (2) A review of coverage of the crisis of 1989 by major news media outlets, treated as a history of the process. (3) As a comparison, and a test of accuracy and analysis; a review of conventional histories of the crisis appearing a decade later.(4) A further review, and test, provided by journalists responsible for the coverage of the time, as reflection on practice – obtained from semi-structured interviews.

Alternative futures of globalisation a socio-ecological study of the world social forum process

Inspired by the initial World Social Forum in Porto Alegre Brazil, over the past decade over 200 local and regional social forums have been held, on five continents. This study has examined the nature of this broader social forum process, in particular as an aspect of the movement for 'another globalisation'. I discuss both the discourses for 'another world', as well as the development of an Alternative Globalisation Movement. As an action research study, the research took place within a variety of groups and networks. The thesis provides six accounts of groups and people striving and struggling for 'another world'. I provide a macro account of the invention and innovation of the World Social Forum. A grassroots film-makers collective provides a window into media. A local social forum opens up the radical diversity of actors. An activist exchange circle sheds light on strategic aspects of alternative globalisation. An educational initiative provides a window into transformations in pedagogy. And a situational account (of the G20 meeting in Melbourne in 2006) provides an overview of the variety of metanetworks that converge to voice demands for global justice and sustainability. In particular, this study has sought to shed light on how, within this process, groups and communities develop 'agency', a capacity to respond to the global challenges they / we face. And as part of this question, I have also explored how alternatives futures are developed and conceived, with a re-cognition of the importance of histories and geo-political (or 'eco-political') structures as contexts. I argue the World Social Forum Process is prefigurative, as an interactional process where many social alternatives are conceived, supported, developed and innovated into the world. And I argue this innovation process is meta-formative, where convergences of diverse actors comprise ‘social ecologies of alternatives’ which lead to opportunities for dynamic collaboration and partnership.

Young adults’ accounts of scientific knowledge when responding to a television news report of contested science

This paper reports one aspect of a study of 28 young adults (18–26 years) engaging with the uncertain (contested) science of a television news report about recent research into mobile phone health risks. The aim of the study was to examine these young people’s ‘accounts of scientific knowledge’ in this context. Seven groups of friends responded to the news report, initially in focus group discussions. Later in semi-structured interviews they elaborated their understanding of the nature of science through their explanations of the scientists’ disagreement and described their mobile phone safety risk assessments. This paper presents their accounts in terms of their views of the nature of science and their concept understanding. Discussions were audio-recorded then analysed by coding the talk in terms of issues raised, which were grouped into themes and interpreted in terms of a moderate social constructionist theoretical framing. In this context, most participants expressed a ‘common sense’ view of the nature of science, describing it as an atheoretical, technical procedure of scientists testing their personal opinions on the issue, subject to the influence of funding sponsors. The roles of theory and data interpretation were largely ignored. It is argued that the nature of science understanding is crucial to engagement with contemporary socioscientific issues, particularly the roles of argumentation, theory, data interpretation, and the distinction of science from common sense. Implications for school science relate primarily to nature of science teaching and the inclusion of socioscientific issues in school science curricula. Future research directions are considered.

Introduction : disputes in everyday life – Social and moral orders of children and young people

Volume 15 of Sociological Studies of Children and Youth (SSYC) presents a rich description of children’s and young people’s disputes. Children and young people live and experience their youth in a variety of contexts, settings and situations in contemporary society, and the studies discussed in this volume draw on empirical data to investigate the interactional procedures used by children and young people as disputes arise in varying contexts of their everyday life. The aim of this volume is to extend current understandings of on children’s disputes by examining how, in the varying arenas and social worlds of children and young people, matters of ownership, alignment and social and moral order are always at play. Applying a sociological perspective, the research papers in this special volume show that disputes can offer analytic opportunities to examine, and make visible typically unseen social and moral orders. This consideration provides rich accounts of dispute practices within social and institutional contexts.

Making Arrangements : Remote proposal sequences and attendant structural phenomena in social interaction

In this thesis, I contribute to the study of how arrangements are made in social interaction. Using conversation analysis, I examine a corpus of 375 telephone calls between employees and clients of three Community Home Care (CHC) service agencies in metropolitan Adelaide, South Australia. My analysis of the CHC data corpus draws upon existing empirical findings within conversation analysis in order to generate novel findings about how people make arrangements with one another, and some of the attendant considerations that parties to such an activity can engage in: Prospective informings as remote proposals for a future arrangement – Focusing on how employees make arrangements with clients, I show how the employees in the CHC data corpus use ‘prospective informings’ to detail a future course of action that will involve the recipient of that informing. These informings routinely occasion a double-paired sequence, where informers pursue a response to their informing. This pursuit often occurs even after recipients have provided an initial response. This practice for making arrangements has been previously described by Houtkoop (1987) as ‘remote proposing.’ I develop Houtkoop’s analysis to show how an informing of a future arrangement can be recompleted, with response solicitation, as a proposal that is contingent upon a recipient’s acceptance. Participants’ understanding of references to non-present third parties – In the process of making arrangements, references are routinely made to non-present third parties. In the CHC data corpus, these third parties are usually care workers. Prior research (e.g., Sacks & Schegloff, 1979; Schegloff, 1996b) explains how the use of ‘recognitional references’ (such as the bare name ‘Kerry’), conveys to recipients that they should be able to locate the referent from amongst their acquaintances. Conversely, the use of ‘non-recognitional references’ (such as the description ‘a lady called Kerry’), conveys that recipients are unacquainted with the referent. I examine instances where the selection of a recognitional or non-recognitional reference form is followed by a recipient initiating repair on that reference. My analysis provides further evidence thatthe existing analytic account of these references corresponds to the way in which participants themselves make sense of them. My analysis also advances an understanding of how repair can be used, by recipients, to indicate the inappositeness of a prior turn. Post-possible-completion accounts – In a case study of a problematic interaction, I examine a misunderstanding that is not resolved within the repair space, the usual defence of intersubjectivity in interaction (cf. Schegloff, 1992b). Rather, I explore how the source of trouble is addressed, outside of the sequence of its production, with a ‘post-possible-completion account.’ This account specifies the basis of a misunderstanding and yet, unlike repair, does so without occasioning a revised response to a trouble-source turn. By considering various aspects of making arrangements in social interaction, I highlight some of the rich order that underpins the maintenance of human relationships across time. In the concluding section of this thesis I review this order, while also discussing practical implications of this analysis for CHC practice.

Menopause as a long-term risk to health : implications of general practitioner accounts of prevention for women’s choice and decision-making

Over the past two decades medical researchers and modernist feminist researchers have contested the meaning of menopause. In this article we examine various meanings of menopause in major medical and feminist literature and the construction of menopause in a semi-structured interview study of general practitioners in rural South Australia. Three discursive themes are identified in these interviews; (i) the hormonal menopause – symptoms, risk, prevention; (ii) the informed menopausal woman; and (iii) decision-making and hormone replacement therapy. By using the discourse of prevention, general practitioners construct menopause in relation to women's health care choices, empowerment and autonomy. We argue that the ways in which these concepts are deployed by general practitioners in this study produces and constrains the options available to women. The implications of these general practitioner accounts are discussed in relation to the proposition that medical and feminist descriptions of menopause posit alternative but equally-fixed truths about menopause and their relationship with the range of responses available to women at menopause. Social and cultural explanations of disease causality (c.f.Germov 1998, Hardey 1998) are absent from the new menopause despite their being an integral part of the framework of the women's health movement and health promotion drawn on by these general practitioners. Further, the shift of responsibility for health to the individual woman reinforces practice claims to empower women, but oversimplifies power relations and constructs menopause as a site of self-surveillance. The use of concepts from the women's health movement and health promotion have nevertheless created change in both the positioning of women as having ‘choices’ and the positioning of some general practitioners in terms of greater information provision to women and an attention to the woman's autonomy. In conclusion, we propose that a new menopause has evolved from a discursive shift in medicine and that there exists within this new configuration, claiming the empowerment of women as an integral part of health care for menopause, the possibility for change in medical practice which will broaden, strengthen, and maintain this position.

Accounts of experiences of bulimia : a discourse analytic study.

Objectives: To identify the variety of versions of bulimia constructed by participants, to suggest functions and consequences of these constructions, and to examine the sociocultural ideologies evident in participants' discourse. Methods: Ten women and one man were interviewed about their experiences of bulimia. Transcribed interviews were analyzed using a discourse analytic approach. Results: Five dominant ways of talking about bulimia were identified: Individuals were constructed as victims of bulimia, women were constructed as victims of social stereotypes, bulimia was constructed as a damaging action one performs on oneself, bulimia was constructed as a personality trait of individuals, and bulimia was marginalized as abnormal and disgusting. Discussion: Sociocultural ideologies evident in participants' accounts included the valuing of individual will-power and self-mastery and the construction of a mind-body dichotomy entailing the need to control the latter. The analysis emphasizes the importance of considering the sociocultural context within which psychological problems occur.

Social media

In the space of the past decade, the technologies, business models, everyday uses and public understandings of social media have co-evolved rapidly. In the early to mid 2000s, websites like MySpace, Facebook or Twitter were garnering interest in both the press and academia as places for amateur creativity, political subversion or trivial time-wasting on the behalf of subcultures of geeks or ‘digital natives’, but such websites were not seen as legitimate, mainstream media organisations, nor were they generally understood as respectable places for professionals (other than new media professionals) to conduct business. By late 2011, online marketing company Comscore was reporting that social networking was “the most popular online activity worldwide accounting for nearly 1 in every 5 minutes spent online”, reaching 82 percent of the world’s Internet population, or 1.2 billion users (Comscore, 2011). Today, social media is firmly established as an industry sector in its own right, and is deeply entangled with and embedded in the practices and everyday lives of media professionals, celebrities and ordinary users. We might now think of it as an embedded communications infrastructure extending across culture, society and the economy – ranging from local government Facebook pages alerting us to kerbside collection, to Tumblr blogs providing humorous cultural commentary by curating animated .gifs, to Telstra Twitter accounts responding to user requests for tech help, and to Yelp reviews helping us find somewhere to grab dinner in a strange town. As well as at least appearing to be near-ubiquitous, social media is increasingly seen as highly significant by scholars researching issues as diverse as journalistic practice (Hermida, 2012), the coordination of government and community responses to natural disasters (Bruns & Burgess, 2012), and the activities of global social and political protest movements (Howard & Hussain, 2013)...

The Global Financial Crisis : Neo-Liberalism, Social Democracy, and Criminology

This chapter begins with a discussion of the economic, political, and social context of the recent global financial crisis, which casts into relief current boundaries of criminology, permeated and made fluid in criminology's recent cultural turn. This cultural turn has reinvigorated criminology, providing new objects of analysis and rich and thick descriptions of the relationship between criminal justice and the conditions of life in ‘late modernity’. Yet in comparison with certain older traditions that sought to articulate criminal justice issues with a wider politics of contestation around political economies and social welfare policies of different polities, many of the current leading culturalist accounts tend in their globalized convergences to produce a strangely decontextualized picture in which we are all subject to the zeitgeist of a unitary ‘late modernity’ which does not differ between, for example, social democratic and neo-liberal polities, let alone allow for the widespread persistence of the pre-modern. It is argued that that contrary to this globalizing trend there are signs within criminology that life is being breathed back into social democratic and penal welfare concerns, habitus, and practices. The chapter discusses three of these signs: the emergence of neo-liberalism as a subject of criminology; a developing comparative penology which recognizes differences in the political economies of capitalist states and evinces a renewed interest in inequality; and a nascent revolt against the ‘generative grammar’, ‘pathological disciplinarities’, and ‘imaginary penalities’ of neoliberal managerialism.

National and state-level politics on social media : Twitter, Australian political discussions, and the online commentariat

This paper examines the use of Twitter for long-term discussions around Australian politics, at national and state levels, tracking two hashtags during 2012: #auspol, denoting national political topics, and #wapol, which provides a case study of state politics (representing Western Australia). The long-term data collection provides the opportunity to analyse how the Twitter audience responds to Australian politics: which themes attract the most attention and which accounts act as focal points for these discussions. The paper highlights differences in the coverage of state and national politics. For #auspol, a small number of accounts are responsible for the majority of tweets, with politicians invoked but not directly contributing to the discussion. In contrast, #wapol stimulates a much lower level of tweeting. This example also demonstrates that, in addition to citizen accounts, traditional participants within political debate, such as politicians and journalists, are among the active contributors to state-oriented discussions on Twitter.

Audiencing through social media : a brief overview

Notwithstanding the problems with identifying audiences (c.f. Hartley, 1987), nor with sampling them (c.f. Turner, 2005), we contend that by using social media, it is at least possible to gain an understanding of the habits of those who chose to engage with content through social media. In this chapter, we will broadly outline the ways in which networks such as Twitter and Facebook can stand as proxies for audiences in a number of scenarios, and enable content creators, networks and researchers to understand the ways in which audiences come into existence, change over time, and engage with content. Beginning with the classic audience – television – we will consider the evolution of metrics from baseline volume metrics to the more sophisticated ‘telemetrics’ that are the focus of our current work. We discuss the evolution of these metrics, from principles developed in the field of ‘sabermetrics’, and highlight their effectiveness as both a predictor and a baseline for producers and networks to measure the success of their social media campaigns. Moving beyond the evaluation of the audiences engagement, we then move to consider the ‘audiences’ themselves. Building on Hartley’s argument that audiences are “imagined” constructs (1987, p. 125), we demonstrate the continual shift of Australian television audiences, from episode to episode and series to series, demonstrating through our map of the Australian Twittersphere (Bruns, Burgess & Highfield, 2014) both the variation amongst those who directly engage with television content, and those who are exposed to it through their social media networks. Finally, by exploring overlaps between sporting events (such as the NRL and AFL Grand Finals), reality TV (such as Big Brother, My Kitchen Rules & Biggest Loser), soaps (e.g. Bold & The Beautiful, Home & Away), and current affairs programming (e.g. Morning Television & A Current Affair), we discuss to what extent it is possible to profile and categorize Australian television audiences. Finally, we move beyond television audiences to consider audiences around social media platforms themselves. Building on our map of the Australian Twittersphere (Bruns, Burgess & Highfield, 2014), and a pool of 5000 active Australian accounts, we discuss the interconnectedness of audiences around particular subjects, and how specific topics spread throughout the Twitter Userbase. Also, by using Twitter as a proxy, we consider the career of a number of popular YouTuber’s, utilizing a method we refer to as Twitter Accession charts (Bruns & Woodford, 2014) to identify the growth curves, and relate them to specific events in the YouTubers career, be that ‘viral’ videos or collaborations, to discuss how audiences form around specific content creators.

Party tricks struggles for votes with a social media audience

With Ten’s new drama Party Tricks set for an October 6 premiere, coverage has focused on the social media campaign to promote the show. In advance of the screening, Ten has created in-character accounts for the lead characters, Kate Ballard (Asher Keddie) and David McLeod (Rodger Corser)...

Managing impressions during institutional change – The role of organisational accounts in legitimation

Public relations literature has only recently drawn on institutional theory to provide insights into legitimacy that go beyond strategic organisational level processes. Many of the existing crisis management studies are approached from a strategic perspective, which have limitations in terms of how organizations manage their legitimacy in relation to broader and often changing social agendas. This study focuses on how impression management is used to deal with legitimacy gaps between organizations and public expectations that draw on an institutional theory perspective. This qualitative study examines the use of organizational accounts through a lens that marries institutional theory and impression management in order to understand how organizations manage their legitimacy. This study of accounts around legitimacy concerns of corporate social responsibility matters shows that organizations relied on their own tangible technical attributes rather than shared norms of what is considered responsible when there are no hard or institutionalised laws and regulations in place around corporate social responsibility concerns. This study offers insights into public relations concerns around impression management during institutional change and in doing so extends existing public relations approaches to crisis management.

Emotional experiences of preservice science teachers in online learning : the formation, disruption and maintenance of social bonds

The enactment of learning to become a science teacher in online mode is an emotionally charged experience. We attend to the formation, maintenance and disruption of social bonds experienced by online preservice science teachers as they shared their emotional online learning experiences through blogs, or e-motion diaries, in reaction to videos of face-to-face lessons. A multi-theoretic framework drawing on microsociological perspectives of emotion informed our hermeneutic interpretations of students’ first-person accounts reported through an e-motion diary. These accounts were analyzed through our own database of emotion labels constructed from the synthesis of existing literature on emotion across a range of fields of inquiry. Preservice science teachers felt included in the face-to-face group as they watched videos of classroom transactions. The strength of these feelings of social solidarity were dependent on the quality of the video recording. E-motion diaries provided a resource for interactions focused on shared emotional experiences leading to formation of social bonds and the alleviation of feelings of fear, trepidation and anxiety about becoming science teachers. We offer implications to inform practitioners who wish to improve feelings of inclusion amongst their online learners in science education.