Democratic theory seldom meets democratic practice and fluctuations in public opinion and media representations of the same political actor do not easily converge. In September 2010, Sweden’s anti-immigration party, the Sweden Democrats (SD), crossed the electoral threshold to participate in Sweden’s parliament and it has continued to grow. In this article, we analyze the effect of media exposure on fluctuations in opinion polls for political parties, or the media effect. Our results show the media effect is more important for SD than for other parliamentary parties. Media exposure sometimes matters, but not to the same degree everywhere and not necessarily at the same time.

E.P. Thompsons suggested in 1971 the concept of "moral economy" as a way of understanding working class protests in England in the 18th century. The protestors demand was that prices for bread and cereals would be based on moral principles rather than market economy. Thompson explicitly excludes paternalism and practises of domination and subordination linked to the term from what he means by moral economy, but this text argues that there is a merit in broadening the concept to all types of morally and ethically based logics of economy. Moral economy is thus used as a generic term to think more generally about the norms of economic relations, beyond the specific historical events. This approach is in line with James C Scott's use of the term and the way it has been used in resent research. The theoretical arguments are illustrated by an empirical material and research about what happened 1931 in the small town Slite on the island Gotland in Sweden, when the formerly locally owned cement plant was bought by the large group Skånska Cementaktiebolaget. The material consists mainly of letters written to and by Ernst Wehtje Jr., CEO of Skånska Cementaktiebolaget and the central figure in the Wehtje Group, at the time one of the most powerful corporate groups in Sweden, as well as a right wing politicians and leading person in the Industrial Federation. Moral economy is used in this text as a way to emphasize the changing character of the value systems that govern economic practises, how they can negotiate and merge with alternative sets of moral codes and in interaction with changing power relations. The concept should not be seen in opposition to analyses that emphasize material power relation such as a class, but instead that moral economy can be seen as the ideological framework used to explain and legitimize the power relations that arise from other logics. A particular emphasis is on the bi-directional relations between workers and owners that are visible in the example, where perceptions of legitimate demands from the workers are entwined with notions of obligations for the owners of capital. This in line with parts of the research field and connected to Gramsci's concept hegemony.

The purpose of the report is to make a proposal for a commitment to support, follow up and develop Malmö University's collaboration on research. The field of research shows that there are major differences in how collaboration is conducted at different institutions and different universities. Two different investigations are carried out within the framework of the overall objective: 1) the collaboration activities that Malmö University and researchers at the university are involved in are investigated through interviews with researchers, management and external partners. 2) Examples of successful research collaboration conducted at other universities is surveyed, through study visits to these and interviews with key people. The findings in the investigations result in a number of proposals for actions in the following areas: Communication, Organizational Change and Support Actions, Resources and Incentives, Management, Regulation and Control Documents, Knowledge Development, and Skills Development and Education. The project is financed by Vinnova.

A collection of city walks showing the history of Malmö has been translated into Arabic, and 19 Arabic speaking guides have been trained to show the city to an audience of visitors and residents. The Institute of the History of Malmö is planning a research project regarding what happens to the city’s narratives when new narrators and a new audience receive them, in a language that is new to the context. In the first part of the project we have interviewed guides about their role in narrating the history of the city, why they chose to be part of the project and what they what to achieve by guiding. Malmö is not today, and has never been, a homogenous city. The last few decades this has become a central part of the city’s identity. Although housing segregation is just as important as in other cities, people seem to feel that the segregation of public space is less obvious here. This contributes to a sense of “us” that includes differences on many levels, a complex and heterogeneous identity that this project seeks to contribute to. The research project accompanying the translated guided walks will take particular interest in three points: 1) How do the narratives change when new narrators and a new audience take them on? The guides’ and the audience’s relation to Malmö, their social and cultural references and relations to various collectives in the city will affect the narratives, we want to know how. 2) How do the narratives change by being linguistically translated from the language involved in the creation of the place to a language with other frames of reference? 3) How are the new narratives brbrought back and allowed to affect the hegemonic narratives of the city?

Historiska och tematiska vandringar genom Malmö

Visions behind the foundation of a new University

The History of Malmo University

The history of Malmo in Arabic

Malmo University in words and photographs

This volume addresses several areas of language policy discourse in Finland and Sweden. The editors showcase the multi-sited nature of politics and policies by combining different data, foci, theories and methods. This setup allows researchers from various fields to understand diverse political phenomena linked to language policy. The choice of Finland and Sweden as the national contexts for the empirical studies is insightful, due to the common (linguistic) history of the countries and the rather different approaches they have adopted for their respective current language policies. While the officially bilingual country of Finland has often been viewed as a model for guaranteeing the rights of the minority language, Sweden’s increasing awareness of the country’s multilingual nature is a fairly recent development. As is also pointed out in the epilogue of the volume, the findings and evidence presented in part 2 (Language Policies in Parliaments, Legislation and the Media) and part 3 (Individuals as Constructors and Reflectors of Language Policies) should be used to rethink the way we approach and analyse language policy in many countries. Together with the theoretical and methodological introduction (chapter 1) and the epilogue (chapter 10), the well-structured volume consists of 10 chapters that are nicely interconnected.

This thematic issue of Media and Communication focuses attention on the shift towards visual images on social media as well as the transformation of visual communication which has occurred within the online ecology of social media platforms. The sharing of images is becoming an integral part of the social media experience today, and given that social media platforms are the prime locus for sociability—at least among young people in the West—this shift towards visuals arguably transforms how we relate to each other and the world around us, as well as how we perceive and construct our sense of self. For researchers, this raises conceptual, theoretical and methodological challenges. This thematic issue presents six articles as well as a book review on visual communication in social media focusing on developing a conceptual apparatus and precise definitions of objects and practices of study as well as contributions that address and discuss the methodological challenges as well as their potential solutions. The idea was to synergize research from a wide variety of communication-related disciplines on this rather new topic.