Browsing Departments by Author "Vestergaard, Anne"
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Abstract: This thesis explores the history of humanitarian organizations as agents in public life. When taking on the role as mediators between Western publics and distant sufferers, what conception of social responsibility do humanitarian organizations promote? What are the consequences of the institutional context of these organizations on the form of social responsibility that they are able to promote? In a historical perspective, what changes in these conceptualizations can we observe and to what extent can we understand them as resulting from institutional changes? These questions are asked with the assumption that the discourse of humanitarian organizations is at once a reflection of and a force in the configuration of dispositions in target publics. Enquiring about the history of humanitarian organizations as agents in public life, thus, means enquiring about the ways in which over the past 40 years, these organizations have given meaning to our relation to different sufferers and contributed to shaping our individual and collective conception of the scope and nature of our social responsibility.... URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8318 Files in this item: 1
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The Case of Amnesty InternationalVestergaard, Anne (København, 2006)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: The development of corporate communication in recent years has brought about a fading of the division of labor between commercial and non-commercial organizations. While the practices of commercial organizations are becoming increasingly ethicalized, so the practices of non-profit organizations are becoming increasingly commercialized. This paper explores the use of media discourse for the communication of ethical messages by humanitarian organizations, caught, as they are, in a tension between, on the one hand, the commercial strategies of visibility and still greater dependence on the media, and, on the other hand, the public’s skepticism toward mediated morality and what is commonly referred to as compassion fatigue. The issue is investigated through an analysis of a TV spot produced by the Danish section of Amnesty International in 2004. This spot is taken as an example of how the organization’s branding strategies testify to a high degree of reflexivity about the conditions of what Luc Boltanski calls a Crisis of Pity. The analysis illustrates how, in the face of compassion fatigue, the organization manages to carve out a new space for itself in the marketized ethical discourse, and leads to a discussion of the consequences of such rebranding for the construction of morality by the organization. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/6965 Files in this item: 1
Now showing items 1-2 of 2