Policy Design and Social Construction amid Mass Protests
Studies on mass protests primarily examine the process, consequences and implications of protests from such angles as resource mobilization, political structure and opportunity, as well as policy frameworks, with little attention paid to the guiding role that related government policy have in dealing with mass protests. This paper analyzes the basic characters of government policies, further explains the basic logic behind their design, and takes the response to the Wukan incident as a typical case for confirmatory analysis. The study find that policy elements such as policy purpose, target groups, policy tools and executive bodies have remarkable underlying assumptions about effectiveness. If some assumptions fail to occur, policy failure is likely to appear. Therefore, in face of varying circumstances, it is recommended that policy design attach importance to elements about social construction, and adopt an open, interactive model which involves protesters in policy design.
Lightness, wildness, and ambivalence: China and new media studies
China was first connected to the internet in 1994. In 1997, there were only about 670,000 users. By June 2011, China had over 485 million internet users, accounting for nearly 40 percent of the population. The rapid diffusion of the internet has had profound influences on all aspects of Chinese life. Scholars both in China and outside have responded to these new developments by producing a large amount of research. Not surprisingly, due to the internet’s connections with broad fields of social life, scholarly research on the topic is interdisciplinary, or rather, multi-disciplinary. Anthropologists (Zhou, 2006), political scientists (Zhang and Zheng, 2009; Zheng, 2008), communication scholars (Hu, 2008; Qiu, 2009), sociologists (Yang, 2009) have all contributed book-length studies. Their topics range from internet use among intellectuals (Zhou, 2006), migrant workers (Qiu, 2009), the impact of the internet on state–society relations (Zheng, 2008), internet governance and expression (Hu, 2008), to online activism (Yang, 2009). In addition, there are numerous journal articles and book chapters, as well as frequent international conferences. The five books under review here represent the most recent additions to this lively field. All published since 2010, they cover some new issues and phenomena. Liu’s book on internet experiences among urban youth and Voci’s on digital videos, for example, are both notable as the first systematic studies of their respective subject matters. The authors of the five books come from different disciplinary backgrounds (film studies, education, as well as communication) and do not necessarily share the same theoretical concerns. 425146 NMS14110.1177/1461444811425146Review essaynew media & society 2011
Preparing for group analytic psychotherapy: meeting the new patient
Preparing for group analytic psychotherapy—the patient and yourself as a therapist—is apparently done in many ways and still invested with much controversy and ambivalence. Some say, they do no selection or assessment at all. The patients or clients are taken from the waiting list in alphabetic order. Other therapists—mainly those working in National Health Services—use several assessment interviews before including patients into short- or long-term groups. Either way, this article revives some research results about assessment and hopes to inspire therapists in their first contact with the patient by presenting some examples from a clinical outpatient practice in a mental health service.