This article questions the role of the French State today, within the field of architecture, in order to understand the permanence of its authority. Could it be that, as its prerogatives as a project ...owner of architectural design contracts are diminishing due to economic crises and decentralisation, the State, through its cultural promotion activities, has turned towards as a prescriber of talent? In this way, it invented more symbolic instruments of power. We have studied the trajectories and practices of actors in two centralised services, from the 1980s to the present day: the Mission interministérielle pour la qualité des constructions publiques (MIQCP) and the Institut français d'architecture (Ifa). This has allowed us to demonstrate that the French system of governance maintains a centrality of powers, in a cultural world that is nevertheless decentralised and within professional groups that are self-governed.
Political scandals are rarely the focus of major academic research in Zimbabwe where tight control of the dominant state media by the ruling party ensures that scandals involving senior government ...officials are suppressed. Informed by Altheide and Snow’s media logic and Thompson’s concept of mediated political scandals, this article uses framing analysis to examine The Herald’s logic behind exposing the ZIMDEF scandal involving former Minister of Higher and Tertiary Education, Jonathan Moyo. We therefore view the scandal as a political power scandal within ZANU-PF as two main factions, the Lacoste faction led by then Vice-President and now President Emmerson Mnangagwa and the G40 faction fronted by the then Minister of Higher Education Jonathan Moyo, who fought a nail-biting contest over the succession of long-time ruler Mugabe as his reign entered the twilight. The article argues that the scandal evolved like a choreographed sting operation, in which the objective was not to expose public corruption, but to neutralise a formidable political foe as the race to succeed former president Robert Mugabe intensified.
The mediatisation model in politics assumes that media conveys political messages between parties and citizenship, with the risk of promoting issues that frame the electoral content in terms of ...competition. These dynamics could distract from the debate of ideas and political policies. However, digital media like Twitter provide direct communication channels between parties, candidates and users. The present research explores Twitter content during an electoral campaign focused on the four issues proposed by Patterson (1980) to assess mediatisation: political, policy, campaign and personal (regarding the candidate). The goal of this research study is to evaluate the degree of mediatisation on Twitter using this typology. The research also evaluates the influence of the issue on retweet volume. The study's basis was a 15.8 million-tweet corpus obtained during the 2015 Spanish General Election pre-campaign and campaign. This dataset was analysed using an automatic classification system. The results highlighted a predominance of policy issues during both the pre-campaign and campaign, except for the two televised debates, during which campaign issues were the most prevalent. On the election night, users commented much more on political issues. Finally, the kind of issue most likely to be retweeted was policy issues.
The aim of this article is to draw attention to the phenomenon of media-related pioneer communities. The maker, quantified-self and open data movements have made clear how much an analysis of such ...pioneer communities can contribute to our understanding of changes in media and communication, together with related social and cultural changes. Pioneer communities do not only possess a marked sense of mission; they also develop ideas of media-related change that can provide orientation for broader social discourses. Studying pioneer communities as intermediaries between the development and the appropriation of new media technologies permits us to grasp current mediatisation processes from the actor’s point of view without the need to first ascribe to them any unifying media logic. Pioneer communities are significant collective actors in the process of ‘deep mediatisation’ – the far-reaching entanglement of media technologies with the everyday practices of our social world.
World leaders had to guide their people through difficult times in 2020, with many trying to win compliance and support via a range of channels of communication. Cyril Ramaphosa, President of South ...Africa, faced the same challenge. This study explores the linguistic features of his 14 COVID-related speeches in 2020, with the aim of revealing the world he constructs in them and how he furthers his political aims. A blend of corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis is used to draw out frequent patterns of representation within the generic structure which emerged from the data. The metaphorical construction of the nation as a family, evident in lexical choices, especially we, family and together, creates a relationship of unity between President Ramaphosa and the citizens. His reference to the national addresses as ‘family meetings’ further flattens the hierarchy implied in the political relationship of governor and governed. These features have the effect of locating the speeches in a time when mediatisation was less pervasive, and in a more personal context. Simultaneously, trust and compliance are invoked by the shift in role as President from a powerful position of control, to a position of shared concern and responsibility.
The use of digital media enables entrepreneurs to develop their startups in strategic manner. However, how entrepreneurs develop their identity through digital media is currently underexplored. ...Therefore, our focus is on how entrepreneurs describe and reflect on their communication with their audiences over digital media and, in turn, how that shapes their becoming as entrepreneurs. Our empirical data consists of 29 qualitative interviews and close observations in the start-up incubator neudeli at the Bauhaus-University Weimar. Through our analysis we show how the practice of strategic sparring and the practice of brand co-creation facilitate the development towards three alternative identity types, which are "solution-driven", "purpose-driven" and "lifestyle-driven" identity. Ultimately, our study highlights how media management can be seen as a practice of self through communication over digital media.
The OECD's PISA programme has been portrayed as central to the emergence of a regime of global educational governance and the subsequent convergence of policies towards a standardised model. Whilst ...there is an extensive literature describing PISA's impact on education policies, there is a paucity of analysis of how PISA data is presented to the public within nations by three main actors which interpret the results; namely the OECD itself, politicians, and the media. This study analyses how England's 2012 PISA results were interpreted by those actors, focusing particularly on the role of the media. We demonstrate that the OECD's original messages were significantly distorted by the UK Government and show how the media, driven by its own logic, framed the results in terms of a narrative of decline, crisis and the need for urgent reform, while, significantly, giving little coverage to either the recommended policy actions or the contrasting interpretations of the PISA results by politicians and the OECD. We argue that a form of 'mediatised governance' shaped and limited the overall frame within which the results were debated and had a powerful influence on how local politicians represented the PISA results and advocated their own policy actions.
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