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      • Trusted Partner
        Business, Economics & Law
        October 2021

        The pound and the fury

        Why anger and confusion reign in an economy paralysed by myth

        by Jack Mosse

        What's wrong with the UK economy? Everyone has an opinion. But no one has an answer. Why? For decades, our economy has failed to work for ordinary citizens: stagnant wages have been combined with underemployment and rising costs of basic goods like healthcare, education and housing. At the same time, a small minority of the population make obscene profits, while in the background we continue to hurtle headlong into an environmental emergency. While there is no shortage of anger and anti-elite sentiment expressed in what is often referred to as the 'culture wars', no significant challenge to the dominant economic model has broken into the mainstream. The pound and the fury argues that behind this failure of imagination are a set of myths about how the economy works, myths that stifle debate and block change. This book analyses the origins of these myths and how they might be dispelled at a time when, away from the public gaze, economic theory is opening up new possibilities of economic action. Possibilities that, as we emerge from the chaos of COVID-19, could lead to the radical structural changes we desperately need.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        December 2024

        The construction of public opinion in a digital age

        by Catherine Happer

        This book presents a new conceptual model for understanding the role of the media in the construction of public knowledge, belief and opinion in the context of a radically changed communications infrastructure. Drawing on a series of empirical studies conducted over nearly a decade, Happer deploys evidence of a 'disconnect' between neoliberal media and the public which is rooted in a disaffection with a mainstream political culture which has failed to deliver the societal outcomes promised. As people are pushed towards alternative digital sources, new communities of opinion are produced in ways which polarise publics and ultimately limit the potential for social change. Offering an innovative and urgently needed new sociological analysis, this book is required reading for an inter-disciplinary field of media, journalism, and politics/IR which has largely abandoned questions of media power and public opinion management, as well as policymakers, science communicators and journalists. Key points of the book: 1) public opinion formation and why people may come to different positions through the development of a new model 2) the societal outcomes produced when a widespread disconnect between journalism and public opinion emerges 3) the atomisation of opinion and its relations to newly constructed opinion communities (with consideration of the role of class) 4) the turn to digitally available alternatives which enable new, less visible power agents to exert control.

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