The so-called new economy based on the global network of digitalized communication was welcomed as a platform of innovations and as a vehicle of advancement of democracy. The concept of virtuality captures the essence of the new economy: efficiency and free access. In practice, the new economy has developed into an heterogenic entity dominated by practices such as propagation of trust and commitment to standards and standard-like technological solutions; entrenchment of locally strategic subsystems; surveillance of unwanted behavior. Five empirical cases (...) within the present field of opposing forces serve as fuel for reflection: football hooliganism, sand-boxing, digital vulnerability of nuclear technology, sensitivity of studio projects, and streamlining academic computing. The main argument of the article is that a historic re-materialization is taking place within the new economy. This means cognitive as well as material divisions. Incommensurability in science is comparable with product incompatibility from the point of view of their implications to the users of knowledge and computers. Hype and banal attached to the new media are related to two ways of assessing social capital: as a means of peaceful functionality or a condition for cultural conflicts. The paper ends in proposing that there is a re-materialization of the virtual now taking place especially on the meta-level of the system. (shrink)

The paper is based on a review of research on media selection and related topics on the one hand and on an explorative pilot survey on the other. In summarising the review, the authors propose that the factors explaining media choice be grouped into five categories: (1) the properties of the media itself affect its choice, (2) properties of the user affect media choice, (3) the communication situation plays an important role, (4) macro factors explain media choice, and (5) media (...) choice can be explained as the outcome of a dynamic multiparty negotiation process. The pilot survey compares Japanese and Finnish students’ preference of media in various communication situations. The survey results encourage reserving, local macro factors or culture, a certain amount of explanatory force in explaining media choice. (shrink)

This article explores feminist resistance and resistance to feminism in gender equality planning in educational institutions in Finland. Focusing on feminist resistance signifies asking whether gender equality planning makes feminist resistance possible, and, if so, what does this resistance look like and what does it do? The article argues that feminist resistance is always intertwined with and in interplay with resistance to feminism. Analysing feminist resistance and resistance to feminism in gender equality work sheds light on the possibilities and challenges (...) involved in transforming gender relations through this kind of work. It is suggested that this is a novel approach as much of feminist theorizing on the issue has focused on the neoliberal disciplining that gender equality planning results in. The theoretical framework for the analysis builds on Foucauldian notions of power and resistance where the two are conceptualized as deeply intertwined. The research material consists of personal interviews, group interviews and research notes taken during participation in the gender equality planning processes in one upper secondary school and one vocational institution. (shrink)

Most Western democracies established women's policy agencies to improve the status of women by the 1990s. However, the political context has changed drastically: developments such as welfare state reform, multilevel governance, regionalization and decentralization have impinged on opportunities for agencies and women's movements to mobilize. One of the book's key questions is how have women's policy agencies been able to develop, maintain or enhance their roles in the transformed political context and how have women's movements adapted to change in twelve (...) states. (shrink)

This article examines discourses invoked in the UK debates about prostitution and trafficking in women. The authors suggest that there are three striking features about these discourses: the absence of the sex work discourse, the dominance of the public nuisance discourse in relation to kerb-crawling and the dominance of moral order discourses in relation to trafficking. At a time when the UK is about to revise its sex laws, it is important to consider the discourses that frame prostitution policies in (...) other European countries, with a view to broadening the range of policy options. In this context, the authors compare the UK with the Netherlands, where a sex work discourse has framed debates. This comparison indicates that UK prostitution discourses could be shaped by discourses other than those of public nuisance and moral order and may open up new policy options. (shrink)

Austerity politics, war in the Middle East and at other borders of the European Union, the rise of nationalisms, the emergence of populist parties and politicians, Islamophobia and the refugee crisis are amongst the recent developments suggesting the need for discussions about the theories and concepts that academic disciplines provide for making sense of societal, cultural and political transformations. In this article, we focus on the capacities of feminist political theories to undertake this task. By assessing different feminist approaches to (...) political analysis that range from focusing on women and men, to analysing gender, to doing intersectionality and to adopting post-structural and new materialist approaches, we explore the contributions and the limitations of each framework. This allows us to consider where feminist theoretical debates on gender and politics currently are, to assess old and new developments and to address lacunae in the debate. Our argument is that dominant approaches in political science influence the emergence and marginalisation of particular feminist frameworks for political analysis, but also that feminist theorising of gender and politics, in striving for recognition within mainstream political science, reproduces its own hegemonies and marginalisations. (shrink)

Purpose This study aims to statistically verify the links of income and education with information and communication technology diffusion across 191 countries of the world taking into account a total of 9 indicators best representing the socio-economic variables. Design/methodology/approach Multivariate regression analysis was used as a prime method to rigorously test the relationships of income and education with ICT diffusion across 191 countries. Statistical Package for the Social Sciences was used to analyze and predict patterns in the data. Findings The (...) results support the hypotheses that income and education are positively related to ICT diffusion. The findings statistically confirm that poverty is a leading cause of digital divide worldwide. Research limitations/implications Academic, policy and practice groups should work in collaboration to fight against digital divide. Present results also imply that digital divide shall never end but rather it can be controlled to an extent with multiple collaborative efforts. Originality/value Prior research assignments on the digital divide concentrate on exploring the links between few socio-economic and ICT variables in select few regions theoretically. The present work addresses this literature gap by developing and testing two hypotheses to statistically investigate the relationships between a broad set of socio-economic and ICT indicators. (shrink)

Most Western democracies established women's policy agencies to improve the status of women by the 1990s. However, the political context has changed drastically: developments such as welfare state reform, multilevel governance, regionalization and decentralization have impinged on opportunities for agencies and women's movements to mobilize. One of the book's key questions is how have women's policy agencies been able to develop, maintain or enhance their roles in the transformed political context and how have women's movements adapted to change in twelve (...) states. (shrink)

Within barely a year, two school shootings shook Finland. The school shootings shocked Finnish society, forcing media, academics and experts, police and politicians alike to search for reasons behind the violent incidents. Focusing their analysis on the two main Finnish newspapers, Helsingin Sanomat and Hufvudstadsbladet, authoritative sources of information for Finland’s two language communities, the authors maintain that the Finnish case contributes to research on school shootings by evidencing the intimate linkages between the state, gender and violence. The authors argue (...) that violence is to be understood through different discourses about the Finnish state. In particular, they discern three discourses about the state that produce gendered discourses of violence: the welfare state, the realist state and the neoliberal state. The authors conclude that these discourses produce different notions of rational and irrational violence thereby providing different legitimizations for male-embodied/masculine violence. (shrink)

This paper sheds further light on the role of quantification in corporate environmental disclosures. Quantification is an inherently social practice, which has attracted a fair amount of academic interest in recent years. At the same time, in the field of social and environmental accounting there is a paucity of research on quantification or the role it plays for organisations, for organisational communication and in societies more broadly. Accordingly, in this paper, we will draw on a qualitative case study to discuss (...) the potential implications that might arise from the use of quantified information in corporate environmental disclosures. Our case study illustrates the diverse effects of quantification suggested in the prior literature by placing them in the context of corporate environmental disclosures. We discuss how quantification implies fake precisionism and promotes commensuration of incomparables, thereby limiting the discussion to themes and questions preferred by company management. We maintain that quantification, while appearing to produce neutral and value-free information, has a substantive ethical dimension through how it implicates accountability relationships as well as the respective power relations between diverse stakeholders in societies. (shrink)

How are names for new disciplinary fields coined? Here a new (and fun) way to look at the history of such coinages is proposed, focusing on how phonesthemic tints and taints figure in decisions to adopt one type of suffix rather than another. The most common suffixes used in such coinages (“‐logy,” “‐ics,” etc.) convey semantic and evaluative content quite unpredictable from literal (root) meanings alone. Pharmaceutical manufacturers have long grasped the point, but historians have paid little attention to how (...) suffixes of one sort or another become productive. A romp through examples from English shows that certain suffixes have become “hard” or “soft” in consequence of the status of their most prominent carrier disciplines. The “‐ics” ending came to signify hardness in consequence of the prestige of physics, for example (with “‐metrics” as the arteriosclerosis of suffixes), while lower‐status (less “hard”) disciplines have developed alternate endings (such as “studies”). Some suffixes are eschewed for their perceived ideologic slant (the “‐isms,” for example). Historians of science need to think more about the pragmatics of language, a task made easier by information technologies and databases that allow searches for words by suffix and first known use. (shrink)

This article examines certain marxist critiques of the theories of justice that arose after the publication of A Theory of Justice, by John Rawls, in 1971. This book led the field of liberal political theory towards an explicitly normative focus that tended to develop into general theories or in systematic analyses of more specific concepts. In this article we shall broaden the sociological and historical critique of theories of justice based on the debate that began in the pages of the (...) New Left Review. (shrink)

Treinta y seis años después de su publicación original en 1982, se publica de nuevo el libro de Felipe Martínez Marzoa titulado La filosofía de El capital (Abada, Madrid, 2018). En este artículo persigo identificar las debilidades de una propuesta, presentada como original por su autor, que no ha sido corregida en su nueva versión. Dicha propuesta viene a decir que la teoría del valor presente en el primer libro de El capital exhibe una constitución ontológica indisociable de la condición (...) estructural de la sociedad moderna y refractaria, en su inmanencia, al rebasamiento ideológico. Cuatro presunciones conceptuales (sincronía, estructura, ontología, ideología) organizan, pues, el rechazo de Marzoa de las categorías «materialismo histórico» y «materialismo dialéctico» como definidoras de la filosofía de El capital. Mi objetivo es revisar cada una de estas premisas, y tratar de socavar la posición de Marzoa no sólo desde las pruebas textuales que Marx proporciona, sino también desde un ángulo hermenéutico, como el de Heidegger, afín a su discurso. (shrink)

En una nota a pie de página de su El monolingüismo del otro, Derrida presenta una reflexión sobre la lengua que denomina “el monolingüismo del huésped”. Este “monolingüismo del otro” se contrapone a la noción de lengua materna que había propuesto Hannah Arendt. El presente artículo pretende ahondar en ese “monolingüismo del huésped” tomando como punto de partida el concepto derridiano de “idioma” y su reflexión sobre el acto de traducir. Buscamos demostrar cómo las ideas de Derrida pueden servir para (...) repensar la relación entre lengua y hospitalidad, noción esta crucial dentro del concepto del “monolingüismo del otro”. (shrink)

Manuel Sacristán Luzón , un lógico, epistemólogo y filósofo heterodoxo, militante del PSUC-PCE durante largos años, que tuvo un papel esencial en la reintroducción de la tradición marxista-comunista en nuestro país a finales de los años cincuenta, sugirió en sus últimos años una fuerte revisión del ideario comunista tras el Mayo del 68, la aniquilación de la Primavera de Praga y, destacadamete, la irrupción de las problemáticas ecológicas. Sus propuestas para una política de la ciencia de orientación socialista, próxima a (...) la tradición tecnocientífica no cegada y crítica a un tiempo de las concepciones neorrománticas inspiradas en la obra de Heidegger , siguen siendo muestra de la lucidez y penetración de un pensamiento nunca servil ni agotado que apostó siempre por una pasión razonada anclada en la informacióncientífica contrastada, en el compromiso con los desfavorecidos de la tierra y en la práctica de un filosofar creativo y humanista. (shrink)

Nos últimos anos, cada vez mais os "ismos" estão sendo deixados de lado. Neste sentido, quando se fala de aristotelismo ou de averroísmo de Marsílio de Pádua, torna-se necessário examinar o que se entende precisamente por tais atributos e, depois, até que ponto, mesmo de forma aproximativa, eles podem ser aplicados a Marsílio.

A diferencia de lo ocurrido con la lucha de clases, la mayor parte de las reelaboraciones teóricas (post)marxistas de las últimas décadas han evitado recuperar la dictadura del proletariado, si bien en su origen estaban indisolublemente unidas. Como consecuencia, su significado marxista originario sigue confundiéndose con el significado jurídico-burgués de dictadura como forma de gobierno. Frente a esta situación, el presente artículo expone la reelaboración teórica de la dictadura del proletariado realizada —desde posiciones claramente divergentes— por Slavoj Žižek y Antonio (...) Negri. En el primer caso, Žižek recupera el término explícitamente para oponerlo a la concepción liberal de democracia, por considerarla incapaz de erigirse como alternativa al capitalismo. En el segundo, si bien se elude el empleo explícito del término, se desarrolla una concepción de la democracia y lo común que recupera y adapta el significado marxista originario de la dictadura del proletariado como transición a un común(ismo) sin Estado. (shrink)

En este artículo deseo abordar el problema de la libertad en el ámbito de la filosofía de José Ortega y Gasset. Debemos señalar que la interpretación del problema de la libertad en Ortega es una de las muchas ejemplificaciones de su proyecto de liberación del realismo y el idealismo, el racionalismo y el vitalismo, el determinismo y el indeterminismo y otros “ismos” que tienen carácter excluyente, y por eso abstracto e hipotético, y constituir en su lugar una nueva filosofía, una (...) filosofía “sobrepartidista”, real e integradora, es decir, que estuviera libre de la elección dogmática de cualquiera de las partes. En este sentido, este problema está estrechamente vinculado con toda su filosofía, que él mismo definía como filosofía raciovital o filosofía de la razón vital e histórica. (shrink)

El crecimiento de las naciones y la creación de ideologías territoriales (como los nacional-ismos, regionalismos) ha supuesto numerosos cambios contemporáneos. Estas ideologías no sólo han conllevado nuevas connotaciones sobre la creciente importancia de la identidad territorial (tanto a nivel nacional como regional) sino que también han desarrollado un nuevo sistema complejo de ideologías desde una perspectiva local. En este artículo se trata de examinar la relación entre las ideologías políticas y la arquitectura dentro del contexto gallego y español. El foco (...) principal es el nacionalismo manifestado en el urbanismo durante el periodo 1918–1960 en Galicia. En el periodo republicano y después de la Guerra Civil española, esta región y más concretamente la ciudad de Santiago de Compostela se convirtió en centro de atención. Este discurso del nacionalismo territorial es un fenómeno capital en el proceso de rehabilitación de Santiago de Compostela y conlleva un fuerte impacto en la creación de una imagen significativa de la ciudad histórica. De este modo, la ciudad se convierte en una fábrica de ideas como el centro y la periferia, Europa occidental, un lugar de ideología marginal frente a las grandes narraciones centralistas del Estado. (shrink)

Este artículo analiza las numerosas versiones de un Apocalipsis islámico que predice la aparición de 12 soberanos entre los musulmanes. Mantiene que las primeras versiones de este apocalipsis fueron puestas en circulación durante el período omeya, alrededor del año 100 H, cuando el número de califas se acercaba al duodécimo. La coincidencia entre los dos números simbólicos, 12 y 100, alimentó una atmósfera apocalíptica que favoreció la circulación de las primeras versiones del apocalipsis. Estas versiones hacen uso del modelo bíblico (...) de los doce príncipes de Israel que se han identificado con los doce soberanos musulmanes. El artículo continúa examinando varias versiones de este apocalipsis básico, versiones que reflejan circunstancias políticas posteriores, surgidas durante el final del período omeya y el comienzo del ‛abbāsī En estas versiones revisadas, el modelo bíblico ha sido reemplazado por el coránico y por un modelo árabe. El artículo examina también la función de este apocalipsis en el šī‛īsmo Duodecimano. (shrink)