Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1994, Vol 39(2), 225. Reviews the book, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by John Zaller (1992). The author's commendable effort to specify a model of mass opinion formation offers readers an introduction to the prevailing vi

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.

The Political Consciousness of Post-Industrialism@@@The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics.

Introduction Part I. Theory of Collective Action: 1. The construction of collective action 2. Conflict and change 3. Action and meaning 4. The process of collective identity Part II. Contemporary Collective Action: 5. conflicts of culture 6. Invention of the present 7. The time of difference 8. Roots for today and for tomorrow 9. A search for ethics 10. Information, power, domination Part III. The Field of Collective Action: 11. A society without a centre 12. The political system 13. The state and the distribution of social resources 14. Modernization, crisis, and conflict: the case of Italy Part IV. Acting Collectively: 15. Mobilization and political participation 16. The organization of movements 17. Leadership in social movements 18. Collective action and discourse 19. Forms of action 20. Research on collective action.

Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age@@@The Playing Self: Person and Meaning in the Planetary Society

Contrary to the common view that globalization undermines social agency, ‘alter-globalization activists', that is, those who contest globalization in its neo-liberal form, have developed new ways to become actors in the global age. They propose alternatives to Washington Consensus policies, implement horizontal and participatory organization models and promote a nascent global public space. Rather than being anti-globalization, these activists have built a truly global movement that has gathered citizens, committed intellectuals, indigenous, farmers, dalits and NGOs against neoliberal policies in street demonstrations and Social Forums all over the world, from Bangalore to Seattle and from Porto Alegre to Nairobi. This book analyses this worldwide movement on the bases of extensive field research conducted since 1999. Alter-Globalization provides a comprehensive account of these critical global forces and their attempts to answer one of the major challenges of our time: How can citizens and civil society contribute to the building of a fairer, sustainable and more democratic co-existence of human beings in a global world?

Author meets critics: Alter-globalization. Becoming Actors in the Global Age

Historic centers have suffered different processes of neglect, occupation, segregation, gentrification, and touristification as a result of changes in demand and policies. Currently, they are going through a homogenization process motivated by tourist pressure, which is causing the expulsion of the local population; this is a common topic of interest for media and political agendas, which requires scientific analysis. This research aims at identifying the winning and the losing tourist groups in the historic center of Seville. It is structured in two parts: a conceptual one based on the bibliographic review with which one wants to know how the current society responds to tourist pressure through defining and characterizing the processes of substitution of uses and inhabitants, and another empirical one in which the analysis of statistical indicators (demographic, economic, and residential) treated with Geographic Information System (GIS) allows us to measure the degree of existing vulnerability and analyze social and spatial effects caused by the tourism in Seville.

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/16/4478/pdf

Social Vulnerability and Touristification of Historic Centers

This article shows how the cognitive mobilization index, designed for use in observing potential political participation, can be used as an indicator of the political climate that a particular society is going through. Following a discussion of the theoretical elaborations (and their working definitions) of the concept of cognitive mobilization, a longitudinal study of various European countries is used to consider the question of how political crises influence cognitive mobilization indexes and what effects they have on the political socialization process among the youngest cohorts.

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The cognitive mobilization index: crises and political generations

Through the analysis of a case study (weekly paper Costa Blanca Nachrichten) we tried to accede in an indirect way to the guidelines of cultural interaction of a foreign community in Spain. In a global context that determines the local strategies of communication (glocalization), the contents of the media shows the vision of the local culture of the German residents, and the efforts of uncertainty reduction and increase cultural competence in this new social-cultural space. The structure of the contents presents the studied weekly paper as a mediator in the sense of an intermediate space between two cultures, and in the sense of a performer of the social realities in an asymmetric system of interchange of meaning.

/pdf/comunicacion-intercultural-un-estudio-de-caso-sobre-la-1qqfpsvsbs.pdf

Comunicación intercultural. Un estudio de caso sobre la prensa local extranjera en España

This work is an approach to the latent structure of the mediatic coverage in Spain of the intervention of NATO in Yugoslavia in the days in which the bombing of the country took place after the new outbreak of the conflict in the province of Kosovo. The period we study starts from few days before the beginning of the bombings to the 31''' of July 1999. The study is based on the conjunction of two methods of textual analyses employed on a textual corpus formed by the news about the conflict appeared in the cover of the newspaper El Pais. On the one hand, the semiotic analysis is used to observe the narrative sequence of the events and, on the other hand, the content analysis examines the designation names and attributions made on the actors implied in the conflict, as well as their presence throughout the sequence. The analysis of the data shows a tendency of the media to display the events within a narrative structure in which the actors can be determined. In the plot of story also appears actions and transformations (as if they were triais of competence), performances, as well as the contractual and sanctioning dispositions of the narrative itinerary of the story heroe.

/pdf/analisis-narrativo-y-guerra-la-cobertura-del-diario-el-pais-1443j8eseo.pdf

Análisis narrativo y guerra. La cobertura del diario El País sobre el conflicto de Kosovo

Los resultados del presente trabajo estan integrados en el proyecto de investigacion “Civil Engagement in Social Work: Developing Global Models”, subvencionado por el 7o Programa Marco UE. FP7 PEOPLE-2012-IRSES. Grant Agreement Number 318938.

/pdf/antiausteridad-y-protesta-en-el-contexto-de-la-crisis-r1llr30uja.pdf

Antiausteridad y protesta en el contexto de la crisis económica y política en España e Italia

Resumen: Introduccion. En un contexto de incremento de las desigualdades y de la pobreza en la sociedad espanola, donde el desmantelamiento del Estado de Bienestar reduce la posibilidad de encontrar recursos e implementar politicas publicas de reduccion de estos efectos; la Sociedad Civil y la ciudadania desarrollan practicas resilientes orientadas a satisfacer las necesidades de las comunidades mas afectadas por el desempleo y el recorte de servicios sociales. Material y metodos. a) Datos secundarios estadisticos procedentes de organismos y fundaciones; y webs de organizaciones resilientes; b) datos primarios producidos a partir de entrevistas y grupos de discusion. Metodologia de analisis de contenido y analisis de discurso. Resultados y discusion. las practicas resilientes como satisfactores de necesidades, son estructuradas a partir de dos dimensiones adaptacion/transformacion; dependencia/ autonomia. Se observa que estas practicas cuanto mas abstraccion presentan (de las necesidades concretas relacionadas con la subsistencia, a las necesidades mas intangibles relacionadas con cuestiones simbolicas e identitarias), mayor complejidad en su diseno y organizacion, y mayor potencia como satisfactor.

/pdf/reacciones-comunitarias-a-la-crisis-economica-y-social-en-2bwy9myi89.pdf

Clemente Penalva

Papers

The cognitive mobilization index: crises and political generations

Comunicación intercultural. Un estudio de caso sobre la prensa local extranjera en España

Análisis narrativo y guerra. La cobertura del diario El País sobre el conflicto de Kosovo

Antiausteridad y protesta en el contexto de la crisis económica y política en España e Italia

Reacciones comunitarias a la crisis económica y social en España 1 Community reactions to the economic and social crisis in Spain