In contemporary society media ubiquity and convergence have transformed the act of turning "off" from a routine unmarked moment into a conscious effort and a personal statement. Use and non-use of specific media are increasingly self-reflective and symbolically significant acts. In an ongoing research project we seek to gain insight into this cultural and technological moment by examining indiv...

Research indicates that existential threat may motivate in-group members to retaliate against out-group members. Less is known about the impact of alignment with one’s religious or national group on retaliatory activity. We addressed this deficiency in a longitudinal study before, and soon after, the beginning of the 2015 Palestinian Stabbing Intifada—a terror wave that is still ongoing. We ass...

Following Moscovici (1972), this paper addresses the questions: What is the aim of research within a social representations perspective? Is it to support or to criticize the social order? Is it to consolidate or transform it? After a brief overview of social representations theory, I argue that while the theory appears to have the conceptual tools to begin this critical task, there are serious ...

This article focuses on one of the central controversies in French intellectual debate since the late 1980s: the extent to which traditional republican principles might be reconciled with a recognition of ethnic and cultural diversity, particularly with relation to North African immigrant communities. After locating the debate in its historical and ideological contexts, the article traces the e...

The field of marketing studies embraces a striking contradiction. On the one hand, it originated in a spirit of critique and dissent which has since been manifest in a rich, diverse and fiercely contested outpouring of marketing scholarship and research. On the other, it is a highly packaged brand with a remarkably uniform identity as a set of universal managerial problem-solving techniques. Th...

This paper examines some of the main elements that shaped eugenic discourse and practices during the first decades of the Franco regime. It primarily addresses the ideological basis of racial hygiene stemming from Francoist medicine and psychiatry, examining its relationship with the concept of Spanishness (Hispanidad). It shows that Francoist eugenics had punitive and coercive aspects and outl...

This paper aims to contribute to contemporary research on Spanish images of Englishness and thus on cross-cultural otherness. More precisely, it seeks to identify and describe the composite image of Anglo-Saxon Others as portrayed in ten nineteenth century Spanish history books and to critically discuss the results. Despite Anglo-Saxon England being a marginal issue for nineteenth century Spani...

Many studies have found an inverse correlation between religious/spiritual involvement and depression. Yet several obstacles impede spiritually integrated treatment of depressed individuals. These include specialization and fragmentation of care, inexperience of clinicians and spiritual care providers, ideological bias, boundary and ethical concerns, and the lack of an accepted conceptual frame...

Debates about decentralization raise cultural questions of identity and economic questions of redistribution and efficiency. Therefore the preferences of statewide parties regarding decentralization are related to their positions on the economic and cultural ideological dimensions. A statistical analysis using data from thirty-one countries confirms this: parties on the economic right are more ...

Caribbean nationalism emerged in many ways, but music played a vital role in furnishing emotion and ideological cohesion, and fueled the excitement and sustainability of nationalist identification leading up and following independence. This study employs the musical form, ska, to exemplify how music generated a sense of nationalism in Jamaica during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and as such p...