This paper studies the years 1940-42 in Bengal with a view to analysing the social fuel that made the Quit India Movement possible in the province. War-time colonial policies created multiple ...disruptions and intrusions in the lives of the people of Bengal, building up anxieties and mass discontent. Coupled with widespread rumours, this profoundly reconfigured the image of the colonial state. This paper attempts to tap into the psyche of colonised minds in Bengal in the early stages of the war, which began to question British invincibility in the face of serious reverses in Southeast Asia. When a potent mix of mass discontentment and rumour was combined with 'revolutionary' political activism in the countryside, it acted as an explosive catalyst, animating the Quit India Movement.
When the Ebola virus crossed undetected into Sierra Leone and exacerbated the 2014–15 crisis, the World Health Organization blamed the breach on a traditional healer treating patients from Guinea. ...Meanwhile, local residents initially maintained that her death was not Ebola‐related but a serpent's curse, an assumption grounded in lived experience of snake charmer spectacles. Both narratives drowned out evidence that the virus spread not via the healer's covert herbalism, but via her professional connections at the local government clinic and, more broadly, an overtaxed and undertrained public health system. This article takes local rumours around Ebola as vernacular epidemiologies that resonated with sensory experience. They show that both community and humanitarian actors had information; complications arose from the diverse experiences and expectations that shaped responses to that information. Such expectations emerge from the borderland geography, where colonial infrastructures continue to channel perception according to “upriver”, “downriver”, and “crossriver” phenomenologies.
Résumé
Lorsque le virus Ebola est entré en Sierra Leone sans être détecté, exacerbant la crise de 2014‐2015, l’Organisation mondiale de la Santé a imputé l’arrivée du virus dans le pays à une guérisseuse traditionnelle soignant des patients guinéens. De leur côté, les populations locales ont d’abord considéré que la mort de cette guérisseuse n’était pas imputable à Ebola, mais à une malédiction du serpent, une supposition qui se fonde sur leur expérience des spectacles de charmeurs de serpents. Les deux explications ignorent l’une et l’autre les indications selon lesquelles le virus s’est propagé non pas via l’herboristerie secrète de la guérisseuse, mais via ses relations professionnelles à la clinique du gouvernement local et, plus largement, un système de santé publique surchargé et impréparé. Cet article étudie les rumeurs locales autour d’Ebola en tant qu’elles représentent des épidémiologies vernaculaires entrant en résonnance avec l’expérience sensorielle de celles et ceux qui les colportent. Il montre en effet que les acteurs communautaires et humanitaires disposaient d’informations, mais que leurs expériences et attentes diverses ont façonné leurs réponses à ces informations. Ce processus s’inscrit dans une géographie frontalière où les infrastructures héritées de la période coloniale continuent de canaliser la perception selon des phénoménologies « en amont », « en aval » et « à travers la rivière ».
This paper investigates investors' reactions to takeover rumours in China's stock markets from 2004 to 2014. While we find pre-rumour price run-ups (abnormal returns) for merger and acquisition (M&A) ...targets, the pre-rumour market overreaction is significantly positive only for target firms that are state-owned enterprises (SOEs). There are no significant abnormal returns for M&A rumour targets over a 41-day event window (−20, +20). Nonetheless, capital market reactions to true rumours are higher than reactions to false rumours, indicating that investors can typically distinguish between them. Finally, we document that while firms with higher institutional ownership have a higher probability of being the subject of false M&A rumours, rumoured targets with higher institutional ownership experience lower market reactions.
From a folk perspective, gossipers (individuals who talk about the behaviours of others) are considered to be immoral individuals, doing harm to those they discuss. However, this folk perspective ...sits uneasily with recent claims that gossipers may actually do some good. In particular, it has been suggested that gossipers who share diagnostic information about the morality of social targets may help audiences to identify targets who are trustworthy and those who are not. In this way, gossipers may help audiences adaptively regulate their relationships. In this paper, we examined whether audience perceptions of gossiper morality are influenced by their perceptions that the content of gossip is able to help them regulate their relationships. Participants in two scenario studies and a realistic interaction study were presented with gossip items drawn from a pool of 24 unique behavioural descriptions and asked to rate their perceptions of the gossiper and the content of the gossip item. As predicted, participants perceived gossipers as more moral when gossipers shared the diagnostic morality gossip that participants perceived to serve relationship regulatory functions.
This article analyses the case of the Barcelona Anti-Rumour Network, an initiative promoted by the City Council and social organizations, in order to deal with the uncontrolled proliferation of ...rumours, prejudices and stereotypes about immigration. Rumours convey false information with the aim of exploiting the fears of citizens often disconcerted in the face of the changes brought about the arrival of a considerable number of foreign immigrants. The article analyses, through policy analysis and in-depth interviews, the role of communication in immigration policies and the concept of citizenship that exists behind this strategy. Such policies can run the risk of focusing too much on the denial of rumours rather than on the affirmation of rights, as this may question the eligibility of the immigrant population to obtain the status of citizenship.
Immediately following the dramatic coup against J. F. Struensee in 1772, information on the events at court was in high demand. Amid this political upheaval an enterprising publicist in Copenhagen ...launched a new magazine with the explicit ambition of reporting whatever information could by picked up about the coup. In order not to be on a collision course with the new regime the magazine invented a new way of curating different types of intelligence by segregating news, rumours, and commentary in recurrent columns. This adaptable news coverage evaded controversy by reflexive intertwinement of the contents of the columns, while at the same time giving readers the opportunity to make their own value attribution of the information presented.
This article is dedicated to the propagation of rumours in regard to political and macroeconomic uncertainty related to a going public strategy. Rumours might have an enormous impact on the decision ...making of market participants due to information asymmetry and thus can explain the time-varying character in volumes of initial public offerings. We model the relation between political uncertainty and firms' financing decisions while applying the SIRaRu rumour propagation model investigating the dynamics of the rumour spreading in complex social networks. We document how the IPO activity is adversely affected if confounding announcements in regard to political uncertainty are spread. Some realistic conditions on previous rumour spreading models are supplemented and a new qualitative on trends-based model is derived. Moreover, a transitional graph is developed to study all possible past/future behaviour of the examined variables. Additionally, we propose a graphical solution to reconstruct the development of the variables under study over time.
Gossip is a common phenomenon in the workplace, but yet relatively little is understood about its influence to employees. This study adopts social information theory and social cognitive theory to ...interpret the diverse literature on gossip, and to develop and test hypotheses concerning some of the antecedents of gossip, with an aim of developing knowledge of the relationship between gossip and employee behaviour in the workplace. The study analysed survey data in a two-stage process, from 362 employees across a range of industries in Taiwan. The findings revealed that job-related gossip predicted employee cynicism and mediated the relationship between psychological contract violation and cynicism, and that non-job-related gossip showed a similar but weaker effect to employee cynicism. The contribution made by this paper is of value to both the academic subject domain and managers in Human Resources. First, we have identified two constructs of gossip, job-related and non-job-related gossip not previously reported and a validated scale has been created. Second, we have confirmed that these different constructs of gossip impact differently on employee behaviour and therefore HR managers should be cautious about gossip in the workplace, as it can cause cynical behaviour amongst employees.
A recent addition to the global discourse of China's interaction with developing countries has been the claim that the Chinese government exports prison labour to these countries. While no evidence ...is ever presented to support this claim, it has been widely circulated in international and local media, as well as on the internet. This article examines the origins of the rumour and the mechanisms of its transmission. It shows that while the rumour often originates at the grass roots in developing countries, it is promoted locally and globally by political, economic and media elites with distinct agendas that often involve building support for opposition parties, competition in obtaining contracts, or geo-strategic and ideological rivalry. We analyse the rumour's circulation in light of the larger discourse on China and developing countries, and discuss why Chinese official responses to the claim have proved to be ineffective.
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