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Almost half of the political life has been experienced under the state of emergency and state of siege policies in the Turkish Republic. In spite of such a striking number and continuity in the deployment of legal emergency powers, there are just a few legal and political studies examining the reasons for such permanency in governing practices. To fill this gap, this paper aims to discuss one of the most important sources of the ‘permanent’ political crisis in the country: the historical evolution of legal emergency power. In order to highlight how these policies have intensified the highly fragile citizenship regime by weakening the separation of power, repressing the use of political rights and increasing the discretionary power of both the executive and judiciary authorities, the paper sheds light on the emergence and production of a specific form of legality based on the idea of emergency and the principle of executive prerogative. In that context, it aims to provide a genealogical explanation of the evolution of the exceptional form of the nation-state, which is based on the way political society, representation, and legitimacy have been instituted and accompanying failure of the ruling classes in building hegemony in the country.
Gender and framing
(2019)
Framing literature has so far failed to construct gender as an analytical category that shapes the ways in which we perceive, identify and act upon grievances. This article builds on the insights of feminist theory and employs the conceptual vocabulary of the social movement framing perspective in maintaining gender as a main parameter of framing processes. Drawing on ethnographic research on local community struggles against hydropower plants in the Eastern Black Sea Region of Turkey, this article maintains the centrality of gender to framing processes. It analyzes the gendered difference between men’s macro-framings and women’s cultural and socio-ecological framings, which is rooted in their differing relationships with their immediate environment, as well as with the state and its institutions. The article maintains that the framings of women, which represent the immediacy of the environment, are more effective in gaining public support and shaping movement outcomes. In this sense, constructing gender as an important determinant of “frame variation” is essential not only to reveal women’s frames that are largely silenced through and within the mechanisms of social movement organization, but also to stress their centrality in shaping repertoires of contention, public reception and movement outcomes.
Making performance Pay Work
(2019)
Performance pay has been one of the main trends in public sector reform over the last decade and aims to increase employees’ motivation. However, positive results are sparse. In a majority of cases, pay scheme designers neglect that intrinsic motivation may be distorted by the introduction of extrinsic rewards (crowding out). Nevertheless, under certain conditions, performance pay schemes may also enhance intrinsic motivation (crowding-in). The perception of rewards has proven to be an especially crucial factor for the outcome of performance pay. Based on psychological contract theory, this paper analyzes the relationships between intrinsic motivation, public service motivation (PSM), personality characteristics, and the design of the performance- appraisal scheme. The empirical analysis relies on a structural equation modeling (SEM) approach. Model findings reveal that a fair, participatory, and transparent design reduces the controlling perception while fostering the intrinsic motivation of employees. In addition, participants who score high on neuroticism perceive performance pay schemes to be more controlling and have lower values of intrinsic motivation.
Given the rising popularity of social networking sites (SNSs), the influence of these platforms on the subjective well-being (SWB) of their users is an emerging topic in information systems research. Building on the norm of reciprocity and the social functional approach to positive emotions, we posit that targeted reciprocity-evoking forms of SNS activities are best suited to promote users’ positive emotions. The favourable potential of these activities is likely to be particularly pronounced among adolescents who pay special attention to social acceptance, which can be channelled with the help of reciprocal communication. Therefore, we conducted a quantitative 7-day diary study of 162 adolescent Facebook users attending German schools, looking at the impact of their daily SNS activities on their SWB. Based on a linear mixed model analysis, our results confirm a positive link between targeted reciprocity-evoking activities – such as chatting, giving and receiving feedback – and adolescents’ positive emotions. Our findings provide a reassuring perspective on the implications of the sociotechnical design of SNS communication channels. Specifically, by encouraging targeted activities, providers, users, and other stakeholders can ensure the beneficial impact of this technology on users’ SWB.
Editorial
(2019)
Introduction
(2019)
This book started as a conversation about successful societies and human development. It was originally based on a simple idea— it would be unusual if, in a society that might be reasonably deemed as successful, its citizens were deeply unhappy. This combination— successful societies and happy citizens— raised immediate and obvious problems. How might one define “success” when dealing, for example, with a society as large and as complex as the United States? We ran into equally major problems when trying to understand “happiness.” Yet one constantly hears political analysts talking about the success or failure of various democratic institutions. In ordinary conversations one constantly hears people talking about being happy or unhappy. In the everyday world, conversations about living in a successful society or about being happy do not appear to cause bewilderment or confusion. “Ordinary people” do not appear to find questions like— is your school successful or are you happily married?— meaningless or absurd. Yet, in the social sciences, both “successful societies” and “happy lives” are seen to be troublesome.
As our research into happiness and success unfolded, the conundrums we discussed were threefold: societal conditions, measurements and concepts. What are the key social factors that are indispensable for the social and political stability of any given society? Is it possible to develop precise measures of social success that would give us reliable data? There are a range of economic indicators that might be associated with success, such as labor productivity, economic growth rates, low inflation and a robust GDP. Are there equally reliable political and social measures of a successful society and human happiness? For example, rule of law and the absence of large- scale corruption might be relevant to the assessment of societal happiness. These questions about success led us inexorably to what seems to be a futile notion: happiness. Economic variables such as income or psychological measures of well- being in terms of mental health could be easily analyzed; however, happiness is a dimension that has been elusive to the social sciences.
In our unfolding conversation, there was also another stream of thought, namely that the social sciences appeared to be more open to the study of human unhappiness rather than happiness.
Happiness as the ultimate goal of human endeavour is a thread running through theology and philosophy from the ancient Greeks to modern times. Such a claim raises immediately a host of critical objections and problems relating to the idea of cultural relativism. Can the theme of happiness be continuous and how would we know that? One way to overcome this dilemma is to identify ‘regimes of happiness’ – that is, clusters of ideas, practices and institutions that in one way or another connect to broad ideas of human wellbeing, flourishing and satisfaction or Eudaimonia to use the word that dominates Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (Contreras- Vejar and Turner, 2018). Contemporary discussions of happiness almost invariably start with Aristotle (Nagel, 1972). However, the methodology here is to some extent borrowed from Michel Foucault to understand the ‘genealogy’ of happiness across different social and cultural formations. In the Western world one could identify an Aristotelian regime of happiness based on the idea of a sound polity and flourishing citizens. There is also a Christian regime of happiness around such figures as St. Augustine and within which there have been radical shifts most notably brought about by Luther and the Protestant Reformation. Regimes of happiness can overlap with each other and their borders are obviously fuzzy. Some regimes may last a long time in various forms. For example, Aristotle's treatment of happiness is one of the most cited versions of happiness across the West. The idea of happiness is, however, not confined to the West. For example, the Vietnamese Constitution that was devised by Ho Chi Minh, an admirer of America society, crafted the 1945 Constitution with three key words as its primary values – Independence–freedom–happiness (or niem hanh phuc). The 2013 version of the Constitution in Article 3 says, ‘The state guarantees […] that people enjoy what is abundant and free for a happy life with conditions for all- round development.’
One further notion behind our discussion of ‘regimes of happiness’ is that in principle we can detect important shifts in regimes that are associated both with specific networks of individual thinkers, and with institutional changes in the location of intellectuals in these networks. In this chapter I am especially interested in the transitions in thinking about happiness from the late eighteenth century and through the nineteenth century.