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This paper relies upon the 'what's the problem represented to be?' approach to policy analysis to interrogate key representations of human trafficking implicit in the UK government's anti-trafficking policy. It identifies six policy vectors, or representations, of human trafficking embedded within the policy, including organized crime, 'illegal' immigration, and victim assistance as three primary vectors; sexual exploitation/prostitution, poverty in countries of victims' origin, and isolated instances of labour law infringements as three secondary vectors. In addition, a series of assumptions, which underlie the current interpretation of trafficking, are also identified. By exploring what the problem of human trafficking is represented to be, the paper also provides an insight into what remains obscured within the context of the dominant policy frameworks. In doing so, it highlights the role of state-capital entanglements in normalizing exploitation of trafficked, smuggled and 'offshored' labour, and critiques the UK's anti-trafficking policy for manufacturing doubt as to the structural causes of human trafficking within the context of neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The argument of this paper is that social ties beyond the boardroom matter. At the structural level, social ties from non-profit foundations, cultural organizations, university boards, policy planning organizations, and private social clubs add unique ties to those established by interlocking directorates. In addition, the multiple configurations of these social affiliations increase the centrality and reduce the social distance among the corporate directors. Although visualizations of these social networks underscore the changing roles these extra-corporate ties play in uniting corporate directors, they cannot precisely capture the unique effects of ties created by social affiliations outside the boardroom. Utilizing the concepts of structural redundancy and multiplicity, the paper describes the unique contribution each set of ties makes in constructing the social mosaic of corporate America during the second half of the 20th century. The results indicate a dramatic reduction in the role private clubs play in supplementing corporate ties, and an equally significant rise in the importance of social ties generated by policy planning organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our study uses big data analysis to examine the influence of Marxism on communication studies throughout its history. We track citations of Marxist authors and the use of Marxist concepts in the titles, keywords, or abstracts of publications in the Web of Science scholarly database in the category of communication. We find that Marxian authors and ideas were almost completely absent from the mainstream of media studies until the end of the Cold War. The end of the Cold War and the Great Recession of 2008 significantly increased citations of Marxist authors. We use network analysis to identify different currents of thought or paradigmatic appropriations of Marxism within communication studies and identify five clusters of appropriation of Marx's ideas within communication studies: Theories of Democracy, Political Economy of Communication, Critique of Power Relations, Feminism and Antiracism, and Critical Discourse Analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]