[Commlist] Social Theory Applied: Call for Papers: Character Assassination, Reputation, and Social Judgement

*Special Issue of the Journal of Applied Social Thery: Character 
Assassination, Reputation, and Social Judgement*

*Guest Editor:*Sergei A. Samoilenko, George Mason University, U.S.

*Proposal Submission Deadline: April 12^th , 2019 https://goo.gl/2X7mHZ *

In recent years, the issue of/character assassination/(CA) gained 
prominence mainly due to public interest to issues concerning incivility 
and the frequent use of aggressive communication by political actors 
following the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Character assassination 
refers to the use of personal attack or another form of symbolic offense 
designed to reduce the credibility of the target or undermine his/her 
reputation in the evaluation of some third party audience. Essentially, 
character assassination is a communication process and an act of 
persuasion in which the attacker attempts to influence public opinion 
who plays the role of the judge or the evaluator of the target’s quality 
of character. The view of character assassination as an outcome is 
primarily concerned with the effectiveness of character attacks and the 
assessment of persuasive effects of negative engagement. The academic 
community has been working on this notion since years, preceding the 
boom of CA use by media and public figures, but this research never 
reached a broader public and in particular was never translated into a 
social theory debate.

The traditional sociopsychological approach to CA stems from 
experimental persuasion studies and attitude theories (Festinger, 1957; 
Fishbein and Ajzen, 1975; Hovland, Janis and Kelley, 1953; Sherif and 
Hovland, 1961) that aim to explain how personality traits determine 
communication behavior,  how individuals plan message strategies, and 
how receivers process and react to message information. However, the 
purpose of this special issue is to broaden our understanding of CA as a 
sociocultural phenomenon and discuss it from other social theory 
perspectives. The concept of “character assassination” refers to both 
the process (e.g., a political smear campaign), and the outcome (e.g., 
the effects of this campaign). CA is a social process in which 
communication of participants is defined by the issues coming from 
social interaction, such as competition, cooperation, or conflict. In is 
equally obvious that social conduct is determined to a large extent by 
the relations between individuals and the groups to which they belongs 
as well as the socially shared regularities of intergroup conduct. Thus, 
CA becomes integrated into structure and later routinised and reproduced 
by social becoming systemic norms.

*Suggested Topics:*

  * Face, impression management and stigma (Goffman);
  * CA as duality of structure (Giddens)
  * Ideology (Althusser)
  * Power and governmentality (Foucault)
  * Intercultural differences of CA practices Hofstede
  * Hegemony, resistance and subversion (Gramsci)
  * Propaganda (Ellul)
  * Field struggles and symbolic capital (Bourdieu)
  * CA as symbolic and structural violence

*Abstract.*Up to 250 words; should briefly specify (1) the purpose of 
the submission, (2) the approach/design/methodology used, (3) the main 
contribution of the submission. Please submit to the Special Issue Guest 
Editor, Sergei A. Samoilenko ((ssamoyle /at/ gmu.edu) 
<mailto:(ssamoyle /at/ gmu.edu)>). If you have any other ideas for papers in 
the area of character assassination and social theory which do not fit 
any of the above topics, then you may wish to email the Guest Editor to 
discuss your ideas further.


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