Between Food and Respect for Nature: On the Moral Ambiguity of Norwegian Stakeholder Opinions on Fish and Their Welfare in Technological Innovations in Fisheries

Innovation in fisheries is a global development that focuses on a broad range of aims. One example is a project that aims to develop technology for key phases of the demersal fishery operation to improve product quality and safeguard fish welfare. As this step to include welfare is novel, it raises questions associated with stakeholder acceptance in a wider aim for responsible innovation. How do stakeholders (a) value fish and their welfare and (b) consider the relation between welfare and other relevant values? To address these questions, an approach combining desk research with an empirical study was used. The desk study analysed the ethical and biological arguments for whether fish welfare should be accounted for in this context. The empirical study explored how fish and their welfare are perceived by Norwegian professionals in this industry, by conducting semi-structured interviews and subsequently analysing the results based on a labelling method we developed. The desk study showed a consensus that welfare should be considered in its own right, while at face value the interviews presented a rather instrumental view on this theme. However, analysis of the interview results leads to a more nuanced picture, where fish and their welfare are viewed from the perspective of respect for nature. Despite the apparent divergence between stakeholder opinions and the literature on the importance of welfare, we present three steps that enables professionals to be responsive to both the (moral) views of stakeholders and accounting for welfare in the innovation process fisheries.

TV as Bully

This chapter pushes back against notions of meritorious complexity, moral ambiguity, and cognitive “richness” in recent, high-profile American television series. It questions the heralding of television’s artistic transcendence above that of other narrative media and the use of cognitive theory to make such a case. I turn instead to literature on social psychology and bullying to make sense of our relationship to longform TV serials and investigate the ways in which a kind of bullying in the content and form of both serial and reality television has been normalized in an era popularly dubbed the “TV renaissance.” It concludes with a look at the relationship between a rising endorsement of aggressive populist leadership styles and the prevalence of bullying as causal logic on TV.

Influence Factors in the Effectiveness of National Defense Anti-Corruption Governance

Armed forces are currently in the environment with moral ambiguity and multiple cultures. In face of the chaos, corruption, and wasteful trend in current social value system, continuous conflict is bothering the cultivation and atmosphere of military character. Under the situation, officers and soldiers could easily fall into bad belief and become indifferent to surrounding affairs with apathy. Various military discipline events appear in domestic armed forces in past years; besides, the exaggeration and report of print media and electronic media, and even some officers and soldiers spilling, smearing, and slandering each other to defile others’ innocence destroy the image of armed forces. Military character presents close relations with integrity building action. Aiming at military personnel in Ministry of National Defense, total 420 copies of questionnaire are distributed, and 347 valid copies are retrieved, with the retrieval rate 83%. The research results are summarized as below. Factors in the effectiveness of armed forces personnel’s anti-corruption governance contain micro aspects of lack of legal and disciplinary ideas and value deviation of armed forces personnel as well as macro aspect of complicated approval operation and rules resulting in lobbying interfering businesses. The effectiveness of armed forces personnel’s anti-corruption governance not being affirmed by the society is related to the engagement of supervisors at all levels in anti-corruption work, as armed forces personnel are restricted to the political environment and aging senior customs personnel that the director’s engagement in anti-corruption work is not manifested. Armed forces personnel involving in internal anti-corruption problems are minimized to largely reduce the effectiveness of anti-corruption governance. According to the results, suggestions are proposed, expecting to improve problems resulted from military discipline and to promote the armed forces’ image of integrity, being close to the people, and loving the people.

THE BATTLE FOR RE-IMAGINING CATALONIA: CINEMATIC POPULISM, MYTH-MAKING, AND CATHEDRAL OF THE SEA (JORDI FRADES, 2018)

In this article, we argue that the TV series event with the highest audience in recent Catalan history, La catedral del mar /Cathedral of the Sea (Jordi Frades, 2018), is an example of commercial cinematic populism. Cathedral of the Sea is built on formal elements of the classic Hollywood style (for example, continuous editing, linear narrative, lack of moral ambiguity), and a series of substantive dichotomies (people/ elite, the popular hero/ the villain, the good/ the bad) and myths (the savior, the unity of the people). In analyzing their significance, we distinguish three hermeneutic layers, the populist, the general-mythical, and the Catalan historical context, which, in combination, constitute the cinematic narrative. Therein the central hero of Cathedral of the Sea, Arnau Estanyol, personifies the myth of the commoner who, by accumulating a whole range of virtues and social roles, synecdochically stands for the triumphant emergence of the modern Catalan people. This narrative is, we maintain, traversed by a tension between the populist call for emancipation, incarnated by Arnau, and the phantasmal self-gratification based on the depiction of a world devoid of complexity.

Brokers in straitjackets: The moral quandaries of refugee support organisations in Slovakia

Due to their mediating position between two antagonistic entities, brokers are often attributed a suspicious moral ambiguity, but also autonomy and creativity. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in two Slovak refugee support organisations, I examine these assumptions in relation to ʻintegration brokers’. Actors in Slovak refugee care services struggle with accusations of being partisan either to the refugees’ or state authorities’ side. By showing how refugee supporters switch between seemingly opposing moral paradigms, I problematise a popular understanding of the broker as a potent and autonomous agent and focus instead on the process of layering constraints that characterises the in-between.

The People's Paving Stones: The Material Politics of International Human Rights in the Baldosas por la Memoria of Buenos Aires

Baldosas por la memoria are memorial paving stones handcrafted by loosely networked activists. Produced continuously from 2006 to an informally established protocol, they memorialize “the disappeared” and others murdered by the state terrorism of the Argentinian dictatorship (1976–1983). As a synecdoche of the “down and dirty” everyday pavements, they function as a metonym for democratic struggle and popular sovereignty. Aesthetically, they work against the “forgetting” and kitschification to which conventional memorials become subject. Through remediation into books and a DVD documentary, they participate in controversies within the international politics of human rights. Using a “material turn” within visual analysis, yet distinct from the “new materialism,” this article explains how they function within familiar genres of memorialization but in wholly novel ways. Baldosas create ethical complexity and moral ambiguity by troubling collective memory. Thus, we examine their relation to guilt, complicity, trauma, and affect.

On the Path of the Prophet in Unsettled Times: Sudan’s Republican Brotherhood Looks Abroad

Mahmoud Mohamed Taha (1909–1985) founded the Republican Brotherhood in the early 1950s to promote social reform through a new understanding of divine revelation which had emerged during his two years of khalwa or retreat. From the 1950s through the 1970s, the Republican Brotherhood attracted a few thousand followers to Ustadh Mahmoud’s teachings, whose foundation was the discipline of tariq Mohamed, “the Path of the Prophet.” This Path was a challenging design for life that embraced gender equality and social justice against the backdrop of an increasingly Islamist-oriented Sudan. In the 1980s, the height of the Brotherhood’s membership, the Republicans confronted Sudan President Gaafar Nimeiry’s imposition of his version of “Islamic Law,” with publications and street corner lectures. Through peaceful protest, the Republican’s point was that Islamic Law would only be oppressive to the millions of non-Muslims in the country and to women. The result of this resistance was the 1985 arrest and execution of Taha for trumped-up charges of apostasy. In the decades following the passing of their teacher, the Republicans have kept a low profile in Sudan while trying to maintain both their faith and some social cohesion. In reaction to both the Islamist political conditions in Sudan and the failing economy, many Republicans have joined the Sudanese flight abroad, with modest communities of Republicans now established in the Gulf States of Qatar and UAE, as well as the United States. Through field work and interviews with members of these three communities, I have tried to understand the effort to sustain the discipline of the Path of the Prophet by Republican brothers and sisters under circumstances of the extremist orientations of Gulf politics, or the “moral ambiguity” of the United States. This study is part of a larger book project on the Republican Brotherhood following the execution of Ustadh Mahmoud.

Blame Game Theory: Scapegoating, Whistleblowing and Discursive Struggles following Accusations of Organizational Misconduct

Research on organizational misconduct has examined how audiences generate discourses to make sense of behaviour that may transgress the line between right and wrong. However, when organizations are accused of misconduct, the resulting ambiguity also opens opportunities for organizations and their members to generate discourses aimed at deflecting blame. Little is known about how actors who are at risk of being held responsible actively respond to misconduct accusations by engaging in discursive strategies. To address this question, we build on crisis communication and discourse theory to integrate processes of scapegoating and whistleblowing into a holistic model. We develop a blame game theory – conceptualizing the sequence of discursive strategies employed by an organization and its members to strategically shift blame by attributing responsibility to others or denying misconduct. Our model identifies four blame game pathways as a function of two types of ambiguity: moral ambiguity and attributional ambiguity. We highlight accusations of misconduct as pivotal triggering events in the social construction of misconduct. By conceptualizing the discursive dynamics of strategic reactions to accusations of misconduct, our blame game theory contributes to the literature on organizational misconduct and has implications for research on social evaluations.