Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2014. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Despite their lack of merits and demands, Occupy Wall Street (OWS) did become a defining feature in the short aftermath of the Financial Crisis and a part of the global occupy-movements during the protest year of 2011. As the founders and organisers behind the first encampments in Zuccotti Park called out for a "Tahrir moment" in the United States of America (US), few scholars or pundits had seen the leaderless movement coming. OWS spread across the US in the matter of months, hitting the media headlines gradually and more rapidly than any previous protest movement. Scholarly responses to OWS have been plentiful, and their categorisations of the OWS’ structure, demands and impact have been going in many different directions. This study attempts to debate and analyse the main research question; is OWS a new kind of a social movement? Even though there are several ways in which one may approach this question, the following will focus on the organisational structures, the political opportunity structures and the global linkages of OWS. The organisational structures has been debated by most, as the movement has a leaderless structure, it is ruled by consensus and supported by protesters from all social spheres, who came, protested and left as they pleased. The political and economic deficits, which gives way to the political opportunity structures of the movement, has not been this dramatic since the Great Depression. The Financial Crisis of 2008 has not only been defined as an economic crisis, but also a crisis of representative democracy. Furthermore, the global protest movements of 2011 have been similar in several ways. Even as all of them, be it Tahrir, 15M, in Greece or OWS, has been unique in matters of context, time and space, they share similarities in tactics, methods and fundamental demands - democracy and prosperity. The concluding statement to the research question is not clear-cut. Rather, it revokes former debates, which distinguished between old and new social movements, and implements a globalising civil society. A new kind of a social movement has come and gone, with elements of the earlier movements. It has added new modes of tactics, structures and demands, all formed by the present context. OWS is not an exception. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Ten spyte van hul gebrek aan eise en tasbare sukses, het “Occupy Wall Street (OWS) wel ’n definiërende kenmerk geword tydens kort naloop van die Finansiële Krisies, asook ’n deel van die globale beset-bewegings tydens die 2011 protesjaar. Daar was min akademici en kenners wat, ten tye van die eerste kamperings in Zuccotti Park en die eis deur die stigters en organiseerders van OWS vir ’n “Tahrir oomblik”, die opkoms van hierdie leierlose beweging voorsien het. Binne ’n kwessie van maande het OWS dwarsoor die VSA versprei, eers stadig en daarna vinniger die hoofopskrifte van die media gehaal as enige ander protes-beweging wat dit voorafgegaan het. Daar is heelwat akademiese bydraes (uit verskillende dissiplines) wat daarop gemik is om OWS te verstaan in terme van hoe om dit te kategoriseer, die struktuur daarvan, die eise wat gestel is en die impak daarvan. Die doel van hierdie studie is om die hoofnavorsingsvraag te bespreek en analiseer, naamlik; is OWS ’n nuwe soort sosiale beweging? Die benadering wat gevolg word is om te fokus om organisatoriese strukture, politieke geleentheidstrukture and die globale verbintenisse van OWS. Die organisatoriese strukture het die meeste aandag gekry in die literatuur tot dusver, aangesien die organisasie ’n leierlose struktuur het. Besluite word deur middel van konsensus geneem en ondersteuning word gewerf van protesteerders uit ’n verskeidenheid van sosiale sfere. Hierdie protesteerders het opgedaag, protes aangeteken, en weer vertrek na willekeur. Die politieke en ekonomiese terkortkominge van die kapitalistiese stelsel in die VSA, waarin die politieke geleentheidstrukture van die beweging geanker is, was, sedert die Groot Depressie, nie so skynbaar dramaties nie. Die Finansiële Krisies wat in 2008 sy hoogtepunt bereik het, word gedefinieer nie alleen as ’n ekonomiese krisies nie,maar ook as ’n krisies van verteenwoordigende demokrasie. Daarby is daar bevind dat die globale protesbewegings wat in 2011 gedy het, soortgelyke kenmerke gehad het. Nieteenstaande die feit dat Tahrir in Egipte, 15M, die Griekse protes-aksies en OWS wel as uniek gesien kan word in terme van konteks, tyd en ruimte, is daar ooreenkomste in taktiek, metodes en fundamentele eise: deelnemende demokrasie en welvaart vir almal. Die slotsom waartoe die tesis kom is nie definitief nie. Eerder, is die gevolgtrekking dat daar teruggegaan moet word na vorige debatte wat onderskeid getref het tussen ou en nuwe sosiale bewegings, en ook na die literatuur oor die moontlikheid van ’n globale burgerlike samelewing. Wat wel vasstaan is dat ’n nuwe soort sosiale beweging verskyn het en weer gekwyn het, wat aspekte van vorige bewegings omvat maar ook in duidelike terme van hulle verskil. In die opsig is OWS nie ’n uitsondering nie, met nuwe taktiek, strukture en eise wat almal gevorm is binne die huidige konteks.

Amid the 2011 Arab Revolts, and the subsequent worldwide Occupy movement, social movement scholars faced sudden, powerful mass mobilisations without easily identifiable resources, networks, or forms of organisation underlying them. These instances of mobilisation beyond the scope of what we traditionally consider ‘the movement’ have stretched existing theories of social movements to their limits, defying both conventional theoretical frameworks and existing approaches. This work undertakes a novel analysis of mobilisation which accounts for these new, disruptive cases. It advances the concept of Affinity: a predisposition to participate in certain causes based on social or psychological traits. Alongside this concept, it outlines conditions of Convergence: emergent situations, frames and spaces which encourage those with such Affinity to temporarily participate in mass mobilisations. These two concepts are advanced and developed through a study of the 2011 Egyptian Revolt and Occupy Wall Street movement, alongside the classic case of the 1789 French Revolution. These cases are analysed in comparative perspective to develop a powerful analytical tool with which scholars can augment conventional analyses: The Affinity-Convergence Model of Mobilisation.

Many recent books and articles have aimed to account for the recent financial crisis. They have exposed the facts, identified the causes, and assigned responsibility. They have proposed solutions to prevent a similar crisis to happen in the future. The debate is still ongoing, revealing a process of History in the making. My dissertation builds on this debate, but it does not contribute to it. I do not try to understand who is responsible for this crisis. I instead try to grasp how responsibility for this crisis was constructed. I explore the production of - and response to - a discourse of accusation. To study accusation discourses, I conducted a media analysis of three main national newspapers: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. I show how a blame game dominated by Democrats participated in the crystallization on Wall Street’s responsibility. To study responses to accusation discourses, I conducted thirty-three interviews in three Wall Street banks from Fall 2008 to Summer 2010. I show that bankers became increasingly defensive over time, while never accepting any personal responsibility for the crisis. Similarly, they reject the label of the “greedy banker.” Overall I argue that the complexity of modern social arrangement loosens the intrinsic connection between responsibility and accountability.

The Tea Party’s influence in the recent 2010 elections suggests that the group is making an impact within American politics. This project seeks to identify the cultural forces at work and ground them within Antonio Gramsci’s framework of hegemony. Taking a cue from Michael Bérubé’s recent book The Left at War, I perform a close analysis of the Tea Party’s project for hegemony. I focus on the media discourses of the Tea Party movement, performing a close reading of two key Tea Party websites and unpacking two important televised moments relating to the Tea Party’s rise as a grassroots movement. I argue that the Tea Party uses the practice of articulation to persuade the American public that Tea Party members are the rightful heirs to the project of “America” that the Founding Fathers began centuries ago by using the theories of Bérubé, Stuart Hall, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe as reference points. Finally, I use my analysis of the Tea Party’s articulatory practices to begin exploring a way forward for the American Left, building on the groundbreaking cultural work of Bérubé, Hall, and Laclau and Mouffe. / text

To minimize devastation and maximize opportunities provided during a corporate crisis, public relations professionals should collaborate with lawyers on crisis response strategies. The purpose of this study was to examine coverage of the Ford Motor Co. and Bridgestone/ Firestone, Inc. tire recall from May 2000 through May 2001 to determine whether there was a difference between the strategies used by each company and whether Ford Motor Co. and Bridgestone/Firestone, Inc. used more traditional public relations than traditional legal strategies during each crisis stage.A content analysis was conducted of articles covering the crisis from The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post containing sentences attributed to each company's spokespeople. The search yielded 234 usable articles with 2,192 sentences.Coders identified strategies as traditional public relations, traditional legal, mixed, diversionary, or other. A chi-square was used to test the hypotheses.The first hypothesis, which said there would be no significant difference between strategies used by each company, was rejected. The second and third hypotheses, which said Ford Motor Co. and Bridgestone/Firestone, Inc. used significantly more traditional public relations than traditional legal strategies during each time period, were accepted. / Department of Journalism

This paper adopts a critical discourse analysis approach in order to identify and contrast the representation of the Occupy Wall Street movement in the New York Post and the New York Times. Occupy Wall Street was a protest movement against greed and financial and social inequality that started in Zuccotti Park in New York City in 2011. News media and its institutional media discourse have a power to influence people in terms of what they talk about and how they talk about it. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to make it transparent on a linguistic level that newspapers have an ability to create different discursive realities of the Occupy Wall Street movement through their language use. This is done by analysing news articles written on the same dates about the Occupy Wall Street protest in the New York Times and the New York Post using the tools global coherence, transitivity, and lexical categorisation. Results showed that in the articles in the New York Post the city represents the in-group, ‘us’, while the protesters represent the out-group, ‘them’. The repression of ‘them’, the protesters, is desired by the city that represents ‘us’. In the articles in the New York Times, on the other hand, the group of protesters is the in-group that is polarised with the police. Both the New York Times and the New York Post produce discourses where the protesters are incapable of achieving any real political or social change.

Barack Obama's administration inherited one of the most severe economic crises in the history of the United States, which severely undermined the American public's confidence in the country's political and economic future. Declining trust in the federal government and its handling of the economic recession gave rise to two influential movements, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, which were thoroughly critical of the country's leadership. Both movements made use of a strong populist rhetoric and mobilized masses by denouncing the political and financial elites, calling for returning control over the country's fate into the hands of ordinary citizens. My master's thesis is an analysis of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street that focuses on the ideology and goals that drove these popular movements, as well as highlights the most crucial commonalities and differences between them. I argue in favor of interpreting the ideologies behind the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street as two distinct types of populism, in addition to which I emphasize the different degree of outside support the two movements enjoyed during their rise to prominence. To determine how influential the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street became during Barack Obama's presidency, I also study their relationship with the political...

This dissertation aims to study the behavior of intermediaries under market imperfections and the consequences of that for the financial market's functioning. To do so, I focus on two classes of market frictions: funding constraints and information asymmetry. Chapter 1 studies how the dealers' capital constraints affect the market liquidity in the presence of imperfect competition and how recent regulations have shifted the competitive landscape of interest rate swaps. On the subject of informational frictions, Chapters 2 and 3 study empirically and theoretically the pace at which prices incorporate private information under the limited learning capacity of the informed traders. Understanding the microstructure of the swap markets is of interest to both policymakers and academics, especially for it helps in the efficient implementation of post-crisis regulations, namely the Dodd-Frank Act. An understudied dimension of the swap market microstructure is the determinants of the cost of the market-making activity. Using a proprietary regulatory dataset collected by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) on both the interest rate swap transactions and the collateral requirements at the London Clearinghouse (LCH), in Chapter 1, I study the key balance sheet constraints that affect the ability of the bank-affiliated dealers to provide intermediation service to the end-users. Most of the interest rate swaps are now mandated to be centrally cleared. This has increased the dealer's need for collateral in the form of highly liquid assets (cash and cash equivalents) to back their swap exposures. Facing capital adequacy measures such as Supplementary Leverage Ratio (SLR), dealers find it even costlier to increase the size of their balance sheet to fund these margins. I show that a 1-percentage point increase in SLR leads to an increase of 1.09 percentage points in the bank's cost of capital per unit of margin requirement. Furthermore, I find the funding spread of the dealers (the difference between the cost of external funding and the risk-free rate) is also a relevant factor for determining the dealer's marginal cost of swap transaction; a cost that is evidently transferred to the end-users in the form of less favorable prices. Measuring the cost of intermediation for the dealer-to-client interest rate swap market is challenging because of the high concentration in the market-- the first seven dealers intermediate more than 50% of the total notional traded. Therefore, one must consider the nontrivial effect of markups in transaction prices to estimate the marginal cost of intermediation reliably. For this reason, I model a differentiated product demand for swaps in the spirit of empirical Industrial Organization (IO) literature and structurally estimate this model to account for the markups in the transaction prices using estimated price elasticities. The demand estimations show economically interpretable heterogeneity among the end-users in their taste for duration risk hedging. The structurally estimated equilibrium model of intermediation can serve as a basis for answering counterfactual policy questions, especially in the debate on the social costs and benefits of excluding initial margins in calculating supplementary leverage ratio. In Chapter 2, I turn the focus to the impact of informational frictions on market-making activity. More specifically, we study the informed trading under random stopping time. Empirical evidence is provided based on an episode of time when the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) unintentionally disclosed security filings to some investors before the public for several years. For technological reasons, the delay between the private and public disclosure was exogenously random. We exploit the variation in the time window of private information to show the intensity of trades and the speed at which market prices reach their efficiency, decrease with the expected arrival time of public announcement. In addition, we find the learning capacity of the insider determines the evolution of trading intensity over time. In Chapter 3, inspired by the stylized facts observed in the earlier chapter, I extend the Kyle (1985) model of strategic trading to a case with limited learning capacity of both the dealers and the informed traders (insiders). The insider does not perfectly observe the true value of the security, but he continues to hone his knowledge by using private information sources over time. Two classes of equilibria emerge from this model. In one class, the insider trades excessively patiently, and the market efficiency is reached only asymptotically. In the second type, the insider optimally chooses a deterministic time T, before which he trades patiently as in Kyle (1985) until the price reaches its full efficiency. After T, the insider keeps revealing every piece of new information immediately, and the market price stays efficient while the insider keeps making profits. Which equilibrium emerges depends on the insider's learning capacity, initial informational advantage, and the private source's informational content.

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