Publications by authors named "Martin Innes"

A social network intervention is a process of intentionally altering a social network to achieve an objective. The objective in question may concern accelerating behaviour change or improving organisational performance. In this work we propose a novel model of social network interventions which considers topological properties of relationships existing between communities.

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Informed by social media data collected following four terror attacks in the UK in 2017, this article delineates a series of "techniques of disinformation" used by different actors to try and influence how the events were publicly defined and understood. By studying the causes and consequences of misleading information following terror attacks, the article contributes empirically to the neglected topic of social reactions to terrorism. It also advances scholarship on the workings of disinforming communications, by focusing on a domain other than political elections, which has been the empirical focus for most studies of disinformation to date.

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In this article an empirically grounded study of the police practices used when conducting cold case reviews of unsolved homicides is used to illuminate the key features of what is termed 'retroactive social control'. It is suggested that this mode of social control, that works by placing past events under new descriptions, is an increasingly important feature of how social control is being imagined and delivered, and is predicated upon the capacity to de-stabilize and re-write previous official definitions of a situation. Retroactive social control it is posited encompasses two inter-twined dimensions: the social control of collective memory, in terms of what is remembered and how; and social control through memory, wherein the shaping of the past influences the enactment of control in the present.

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In this paper a 'signal crimes' perspective is outlined in an effort to unpack the relationships between experiences of crime and disorder, and perceptions of criminogenic risk. Grounded in symbolic interactionist sociology, and developing a social semiotic understanding of risk perception, it is a perspective that focuses upon processes of social reaction and the ways in which people interpret and define threats to their security. It is proposed that people interpret the occurrence of certain incidents as 'warning signals' about the levels of risk to which they are either actually or potentially exposed.

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This paper draws upon a range of empirical data to consider the ways in which police murder investigations are symbolically constructed, both within and outside of the police organization. It is argued that a range of communicative formats serve to produce the activities associated with police murder investigations in a way that serves to legitimate the police function to both members of the public and police officers alike. A particular emphasis is placed upon understanding the connections between informal and formal communications, and the instrumental and expressive objectives that variously underpin them.

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