Elaborated in publications on transition management, sustainability governance and deliberative environmental governance, 'reflexive governance' addresses concerns about social-ecological ...vulnerabilities, flawed conceptualisations of human-nature relations fragmented governance regimes and conditions for a sustainability transition. Key barriers to reflexive government include unavoidable politics; the influence of broader discursive systems that shape actors' strategic interests; and structural and deliberate limitations to the range of admitted epistemological understandings, normative perspectives and material practices. Against this background, the contributions to the special issue provide novel conceptual linkages between reflexive governance and boundary objects, intercultural dialogue, conflict management heuristics, discourse linguistics, theories of the policy cycle and reflexive law, network and learning theories, and Lasswell's 'developmental constructs'. Based on the contributions, we identify five inherent conceptual tensions of reflexive governance: between the openness of horizontal learning processes and the desired direction towards sustainable development; between reflexive governance as a normative or procedural concept; between expected learning orientations and other, strategic orientations; between governance as a precondition for reflexivity and reflexive learning as a precondition for reorganized governance structures; and between reflexivity as an open-ended, evolutionary process and the need to strategically defend the space for reflexivity against powerful groups with an interest in the status quo.
The year 2015 marks the 75th anniversary of the first known reference to Harold D. Lasswell's model of communication in 1940. In recognition of this milestone, this paper revisits Lasswell's famous ...construct, "Who, said what, in which channel, to whom, with what effect?" by offering a textual analysis of its conceptual evolution over the last 75 years. Inspired by Eulau and Zlomke's (1999) study on Harold Lasswell's legacy to the discipline of political science, we pose a similar question to the field of communication: If one only knows about Harold Lasswell by reading the citations or references to his model of communication, what would his legacy seem to be? In doing so, this paper first explicates the relationship between Lasswell's legacy to the field and the role his model of communication has played in it. Second, it tests the utility of Lasswell's model in light of a significantly changing media landscape, and gauges its current value for communication scholars. Finally, we conclude that Lasswell's model is both a relevant and useful concept for the field today despite several misconceptions surrounding it.
The quest for sustainability signals a departure from industrialist presuppositions about the human capacity to control nature that had hardly been questioned during the modern era. Environmental ...politics, indeed, entered the public scene with warnings of environmental crisis that disrupted industrialist assumptions and supported a call for a dramatic change in course. As environmental problems became part of an agenda of sustainable development, however, there came a shift from a disruptive politics towards professionalization and a managerial emphasis. A reflexive approach to sustainability needs to reconsider the relevance of politics while also thematizing problems of history and power. The concept of 'developmental constructs', which Harold D. Lasswell offered as part of his proposal for a reflexive project of contextual mapping, is advanced here as relevant to that end. Comparing the early interventions of Rachel Carson and Amory Lovins to Lasswell's conception of developmental constructs, the article maintains that such proposals for sustainable futures highlight the importance of a political connection.
The goal of this book is to recapture the diminished roles of affect, psychological needs, and the psychodynamic mechanisms that are crucial for understanding political behavior by explaining and ...extending the contributions of Harold D. Lasswell, the dominant figure in political psychology in the mid-twentieth-century. Although Lasswell was best known for applying psychodynamic theories to politics, this book also demonstrates how his framework accommodated for cognitive processes and social interactions ranging from communications to policy-making. The authors use Lasswell's contributions and the debates over his ideas as a springboard for examining current policy, political, and leadership issues.Revitalizing Political Psychology presents and extends four aspects of Lasswell's contributions to the field: the psychodynamic mechanisms drawn from psychoanalytic theory, the use of symbol associations to understand political propaganda, the analysis of "democratic character" for both the public and the elites, and the structure of belief systems. In so doing, the authors link personality and political communication theory to democratic practice. The authors also critique leadership studies using Lasswell's concerns over the risks to democratic accountability and the current preoccupation with strengthening the roles of charismatic and transformational leaders.Intended for researchers, practitioners, and students in the areas of political and historical psychology, political strategy, and political communication, the book's emphasis on psychodynamics also appeals to psychoanalysts and the material on leadership appeals to professionals in management and industrial/organizational psychology.
The “policy scientist of democracy” was a model for engaged scholarship invented and embodied by Harold D. Lasswell. This disciplinary persona emerged in Lasswell's writings and wartime consultancies ...during the 1940s, well before he announced in his APSA presidential address, printed in the Review precisely 50 years ago, that political science was “the policy science par excellence.” The policy scientist of democracy knew all about the process of elite decision making, and he put his knowledge into practice by advising those in power, sharing in important decisions, and furthering the cause of dignity. Although Lasswell formulated this ambitious vision near the zenith of his influence, the discipline accorded the ideal—and Lasswell—a mixed reception. Some heralded the policy scientist of democracy; others observed a contradictory figure, at once positivist and value-laden, elitist and democratic, heroic and implausible. The conflicted response exemplifies Lasswell's legacy. The policy scientist of democracy was—and is—too demanding and too contradictory a hero. But the vital questions Lasswell grappled with still must be asked a century into the discipline's development: what is the role of the political scientist in a democratic society? Do political scientists have any obligation to inform or shape policy? Are there democratic values that political science should serve, and if so, what are they? Lasswell never satisfactorily answered these questions. But in asking and trying to answer them—in his writings and in his own career—he was guided by a profound and inspiring conviction: Political science has a unique ability, and even perhaps a special obligation, to engage with issues of democratic choice that fundamentally affect the life circumstances of citizens.
America and the Garrison Stadium Vasquez, Joseph Paul
Armed Forces & Society,
07/2012, Volume:
38, Issue:
3
Journal Article, Book Review
Peer reviewed
American military institutions importantly shaped the popular sport of college football. From support at its two oldest service academies, interest in football spread through military units across ...the country with military actors involved in the formation of the country’s first collegiate athletic conference and the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Subsequently, the US military functioned as an agent of authoritative diffusion, fostering interest in college football after the First World War. Furthermore, military institutions, including the draft, affected not only which team would be most successful during the Second World War but also how civilians would play the game. These effects call to mind Charles Tilly’s work on state formation and security-driven resource extraction as well as Harold Lasswell’s garrison state idea.
The question of how the content of images that accompany reports in the mass media can be systematically assessed via content analysis and how the effects of such images can be quantitatively ...ascertained and related to textual reporting, is one of the still unsolved issues in empirical communication research. In this article, the results of two experiments are presented, in which the emotional reactions to manipulated news items was tested with the result that no significant effect in terms of emotionalization could be proven. Since other comparable experiments, where the text has been manipulated, have shown significant effects, the study seems to indicate that texts may have a stronger emotional effect than pictures. Adapted from the source document.
One of Georg Simmel's great contributions to communication studies and to sociology was the idea that interaction between strangers in modern cities could bring about two opposite yet complementary ...responses. Simmel observed that members of one group tend to react with opposition when they enter into contact with members of another group, leading on the one hand to the "negation of the other party" (1903, p. 503), while concurrently the members of the in-group pull more tightly together. This dual process of attraction and exclusion, for Simmel, is nothing less than the "life-process" (1903, p. 491) of social groups. The idea would find its echoes in the founding members of the Chicago School. Dewey (1922), who had studied with Simmel, described how contact between different cultural groups can lead to both exclusion and cohesion: "the belief about superiority or being 'as good as other people', the intention to hold one's own are naturally our feeling and idea of our treatment and position" (p. 59). Lasswell (1927) similarly looked to propaganda as an instrument to "weld thousands and even millions of human beings into one amalgamated mass of hate and will and hope" (p. 227). Lasswell's (1927) position on this was more nuanced. On the one hand, he praised President Woodrow Wilson's propaganda achievements in World War I, noting how "one hundred million people, sprung from many alien and antagonistic stocks, was sic welded into a fighting whole, to make the world safe for democracy" (p. 225). On the other hand, he later brought to this topic an important measure of caution about mass media propaganda campaigns, reminding us how the symbols created can at once be "eliciting fresh acts of identification from some, and provoking decisive acts of rejection from others" (Lasswell, 1935, p. 33). Lasswell argued that media representations of one cultural group could arouse "insecurity reactions" (p. 1 55) among members of a second cultural group, and he suggested that group leaders could thus profit from generating insecurity.
Post comments on Harold D. Lasswell's 1938 essay on what political scientists and psychiatrists can learn from one another. Lasswell sketched out pathways for generations of political psychologists ...trying to better understand man's inhumanity to man and the psychology of political leadership and followership.
Contrary to apparent differences in timing and style between Harold D. Lasswell's political psychology and the policy sciences approach that he pioneered, the continuity and compatibility between the ...two are very high. The appropriateness of Lasswell's political psychology framework for addressing the intellectual tasks of the policy sciences is demonstrated by linking the insights of his political psychology to the policy sciences framework, and reviewing the common pragmatist philosophy underlying both his political psychology and the policy sciences.
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