Moral Panics

Who would have thought that scuffles between teenagers on the southeast coast of England on a cold April weekend in 1964 would have produced the notion of moral panic? Originating as a concept used to understand the reaction to the behavior of these teenagers, moral panic is one of the few sociological ideas that has entered common parlance. The reaction was considerable in relation to the degree of harm or damage. However, local and national media picked up on the events and alarm expressed by civic leaders and local business groups and made hay with headlines decrying the behavior and announcing the arrival of riot police to relieve what was described as a besieged town. More headlines further contributed to a spiral of reaction, and the issues were raised in the Houses of Parliament. The police and judiciary were urged to “crack down.” In the climate of a much-distorted view of events and behavior, overlong and custodial sentences were handed out for petty offenses such as vandalism. The participants in the moral panics include “folk devils” (the English teenagers), an influential and exaggerating media, local interest and pressure groups (civic and business leaders, religious leaders, and those who make “claims” as to expertise on the perceived problem), local and national politicians, the police, and judges. An important feature of moral panics is the “reaching beyond” the immediate problem with claims that there are society-wide implications; in the case of the teenagers in 1964, their deviant conduct was claimed to be symptomatic of general decline in morals. A moral panic is distinguished from general social anxieties and specific moral crusades when there is first a heightened concern over behavior of a group and the consequences this poses for wider society. There must be a division between “them,” the folk devils, and “us,” the responsible and law-abiding citizens. There must be consensus within society, or at least considerable segments of it, that the threat proposed is very serious. Additionally, the threat, damage, costs, and figures proposed by claims-makers are wildly exaggerated and do not coincide with an objective reality. Finally, moral panics are volatile. They typically explode, reach a pitch, and subside. Classic moral panics can also result in illiberal laws. As we will see, children and young people, and childhood, have regularly been the sites of moral panics.

Metaphor: Meanings and Humanbecoming Metaphorical Truths

The purposes of this paper are to briefly describe the meaning of metaphor from a variety of sources, to show its ubiquitous and creative nature, to share some examples used in common parlance and scholarly works, and to elaborate the meaning of metaphor from a humanbecoming perspective with three metaphorical truths—semantic resonance, coherent integrity, and magical transfiguring. Metaphor is a linguistic way of conveying an idea in poetic language with words and phrases articulated as complete ideas with the use of unusual words that normally have different meanings. Metaphor has been used often in literary narratives and poetry to clarify meaning. Many authors offer ideas about what a metaphor is and how it should be used. Some of those are presented in this article.

Carl Menger’s revisited theory of capital in opposition to the Classical and Marginalist scholars’

Among several contributions, Carl Menger proposed a division of economic goods in orders. This sets the foundations for the Austrian capital theory, usually maintained as a complex of higher orders goods in a production process. Curiously, Menger dismissed this concept of capital, in favor of one used in common parlance. This change of view is often overlooked, but represents a turning point in the field of capital theory. This paper assesses how Menger's popular notion of capital differs from the scientific one. To achieve this goal, we investigate the concept of capital in Classical and Marginalist economists. One of the implications is that the popular concept is related to the theory of capitalism. Capital, as used in business language for economic calculations, is better suited for analyzing the capitalist system, as it captures the usage in monetary economies and business accounting.

What is an emancipatory peace?

There has been frequent reference to the concept of an emancipatory peace in the critical academic literature on peace and conflict studies in IR, much of it rather naive. It has developed an ecosystem of its own within debates on peace without drawing on wider disciplinary debates. Terms such as ‘emancipation’ and its relative, ‘social justice’ are widely used in critical theoretical literature and were common parlance in previous ideological eras. It was clear what such terms meant in the context of feudalism, slavery, imperialism, discrimination, a class system, nuclear weapons and racism over the previous two centuries. Now it is less clear in the context of changing peace praxis.

Beauty and Wellness in the Semantic Memory of the Beholder

Beauty and wellness are terms used often in common parlance, however their meaning and relation to each other is unclear. To probe their meaning, we applied network science methods to estimate and compare the semantic networks associated with beauty and wellness in different age generation cohorts (Generation Z, Millennials, Generation X, and Baby Boomers) and in women and men. These mappings were achieved by estimating group-based semantic networks from free association responses to a list of 47 words, either related to Beauty, Wellness, or Beauty + Wellness. Beauty was consistently related to Elegance, Feminine, Gorgeous, Lovely, Sexy, and Stylish. Wellness was consistently related Aerobics, Fitness, Health, Holistic, Lifestyle, Medical, Nutrition, and Thrive. In addition, older cohorts had semantic networks that were less connected and more segregated from each other. Finally, we found that women compared to men had more segregated and organized concepts of Beauty and Wellness. In contemporary societies that are pre-occupied by the pursuit of beauty and a healthy lifestyle, our findings shed novel light on how people think about beauty and wellness and how they are related across different age generations and by sex.

Advertising Slogan: A Creative Element Undergoing Frequent and Erratic Metamorphosis

Slogan happens to be a true extract of the entire gamut of advertising message. In common parlance, advertisements and ad campaigns are identified by their slogans. Technically, it is a brief, repeatable, and memorable positioning statement. The creative design of slogans has varied with the time. It has been seen in a numerous creative form during its peregrination. The present paper attempts to bring to the limelight an erratic and plural metamorphosis witnessed by this buzzword – slogan.

What is a firm? A reply to Jean-Philippe Robé

In his recent book on Property, Power and Politics, Jean-Philippe Robé makes a strong case for the need to understand the legal foundations of modern capitalism. He also insists that it is important to distinguish between firms and corporations. We agree. But Robé criticizes our definition of firms in terms of legally recognized capacities on the grounds that it does not take the distinction seriously enough. He argues that firms are not legally recognized as such, as the law only knows corporations. This argument, which is capable of different interpretations, leads to the bizarre result that corporations are not firms. Using etymological and other evidence, we show that firms are treated as legally constituted business entities in both common parlance and legal discourse. The way the law defines firms and corporations, while the product of a discourse which is in many ways distinct from everyday language, has such profound implications for the way firms operate in practice that no institutional theory of the firm worthy of the name can afford to ignore it.

A novel to influence public policy? The role of New Zealand in climate migration and the occupation of Antarctica

In recent years, the notion of ‘climate change fiction’ (‘cli-fi’) has passed into common parlance to denote a strand of fictionalized narratives foregrounding the dynamics and consequences of climate change on Earth. While the acceptance criteria for such a category are flexible at best, the role of policy-making and of New Zealand as a political actor and geographical setting to the global eco-catastrophe remain marginal features in such contemporary stories. Jeff Murray’s 2019 novel entitled Melt crucially bridges fiction and public policy, in a move to put the Pacific, New Zealand and Antarctica at the forefront of climate change debates. As the near future sees Antarctica melting, the novel particularly focuses on the sociopolitical and infrastructural challenge that millions of climate change refugees will represent to wealthy and relatively spared nations, such as New Zealand. Correlated issues in sustainable management, economic inequality, intercultural relations and geopolitics are further evoked. In its attempt to alert New Zealand policy-makers and the general public to these long-term questions, Melt importantly invites reflection on the potentiality of narrative to inspire action taking. This article takes the form of an interdisciplinary discussion between Murray, a first-time novelist with a professional background in strategy policy, and literary and cultural studies scholar Jessica Maufort.

Brand Machiavelli

In this paper I analyze the reputation of Niccolò Machiavelli against the criteria of celebrity found in the Cultural Studies literature. Applied to Machiavelli these criteria include the detachment of his name from any substance of his works, life, or thought; trading on the recognition of his name; the appetite for biographies of him; and the integration of his very name into the common parlance in the adjective “Machiavellian” and the noun “Machiavellianism” which are widely used as self-explanatory in the media, press, and You Tube videos, music, and social media. The evidence adduced for these conclusions is mainly in books—print and digital—but incorporates film, plays, music, and commerce. In short, Machiavelli has accumulated sufficient media capital to be internalized into the popular culture and so rendered an immortal celebrity, i.e., that is Brand Machiavelli.

“This Isn’t Some TV Show, Okay?”

Chapter 4 seems like an ostensible contradiction of all that has come before it, as it zooms in on parody. In common parlance, parody is regarded narrowly as a sendup or a spoof. But this chapter repurposes the concept as a displacement paradigm, rethinking parody as a deceptive double that furtively displaces the authority of the original. Playing on eminent existing terrain and interrogating cinematic tradition make parody particularly effective for an analysis of Dear White People (Netflix, 2017–present), a web series that demonstrates how parody works to undermine the cultural authority and assumed whiteness of mainstream American as well as European art cinema.