Soorjith Illickal Karthikeyan - Ricerca all'USI

Title of dissertation: Organizational Identity and the Dynamics of Audience Attention among British Political Parties, 1945- 2005 (provisional title) Description: The PhD dissertation aims to look at the identity based claims of British Political Parties and the consequent responses from the audience during the period 1945 to 2005. The dissertation takes an organization theory perspective (especially the identity centred theoretical reformulation in organizational ecology) on political parties, and use both qualitative evidences and quantitative techniques to come up with the new insights. The First part of the dissertation pays attention to the role of the level of engagement and the pooling together of disparate social positions on the audience attention commanded by the organization. The second part broaden the conceptualization of identity by integrating the non- additivity of social codes and analyze identity recombination as a possible strategy to overcome the constraints on focused identities. The data used for testing the hypotheses mainly come from the content analyzed election manifestos of political parties by the Comparative Manifestos Group (CMP) and the news articles from the Times newspaper. Expected date of graduation: December 2010 Supervisor: Filippo Carlo Wezel