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To explore the material effects of power in processes of agri-food innovation. We focus on the emergence of ambiguous socio-material spaces for innovation. These spaces appeared from a commercial innovation to gather the potential added value embodied in territorial heritage food-products. The case study of Mapuches' Merkén is situated in the community of Santa Juana (Bío-Bío region, Chile). The condiment is a result of the combination of three different types of local chilli-peppers, and of a sophisticated and experiential knowledge on the use of smoke to dehydrate the fruits, as part of heritage properties of a condiment attributed to Mapuches' culinary culture. The recognition of the potential high gastronomic value of these chilli-peppers and its handicraft elaboration, it made this commercial innovation interesting to study, as an innovation contributing to the territorial development. However, the scramble that followed for the market control of the heritage added valued, generated deep contradictions, between industrial, semi-industrial and the artisan condiment elaboration. Santa Juana producers' unique recipes are result of generations of peasant families cultivating biocultural relationship between producers and the chilli-merkén. The biocultural study highlights the socio-material chilli-peppers, unique ecotypes existence, the cultivation styles, and producers' detail knowledge of smoking processes to elaborate the Merkén powder. The paper identified producers' long existence regional markets relationships, and recognized that commercial innovation in this case, it has to do with the challenge of overcoming standardized rules and procedures that market produces generally demand. The maintenance of diversity among Merkén producers is paramount. The existence of socio-material differences is an important factor in keeping the integrity identifying a product with its territory. The paper shows that is the socio-materiality involved in processes of innovation where resides the ability to transform or not relations of power and authority, reconstituting territorial products with added value. Finally, we suggest that innovation spaces in the contemporary period has an ambiguous nature. This is characterised by oscillating movements between advantages offered by the market and the multiple reconfigurations assumed by the materiality of power, and the situated producers social organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of the paper is to analyze the experiences of returned migrants in Tejupilco, State of Mexico. We use the phenomenological epoche as a theoretical and methodological axis, and we apply it to ten individuals who migrated to the United States that for different reasons returned to Mexico (August-November 2007). In this way, the paper starts from the premise that it is necessary to deepen the migratory experience, beyond the established pragmatic knowledge, and to base the experiences of the individuals in a factual way. The results show the need for the social sciences to appreciate the migration issue in a phenomenological way. The findings demonstrated the existence a migratory identity of dynamic nature that does not depend on macrosocial factors but depends on the activity performed by the subject as a social actor. Likewise, the results allow us to conclude that the way in which migrants assimilate the meaning of experience is a source of transcendental meaning that currently represents their lifestyle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the issue of future specialists’ social activity in the light of contemporary challenges when the role of socionomic professions is growing. The author determines the factors influencing the formation and development of the individual social activity in broad contexts of changes which are taking place in the social environment; also the author determines the factors influencing a variety of activities where the interests of each person and the interests of social development are closely intertwined. The research identifies and substantiates methodological tools demonstrating how to increase the effectiveness of the efforts undertaken by today’s domestic pedagogical education to help the individual solve urgent social problems of the socionomic sphere by improving the system of professional education and specialists’ social training in all types of learning and educational processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: With the emergence of the sharing economy paradigm, the process of innovation is no longer unidirectional, but cyclical. This paradigm shift requires a better understanding of social actors to fully leverage the promise of co-innovation in the sharing economy. To this end, the purpose of this paper is to develop a classification model to profile social actors based on their motivation to participate in different co-innovation activities. Design/methodology/approach: A preliminary case study was first conducted to identify actors' motivations to continuously participate in co-innovation activities. Next, a survey was administrated to validate the measurement model and then a discriminant analysis was run on a sample of 244 actors to classify actors based on their willingness to participate in three forms of co-innovation activities. Lastly, the resultant classifiers were cross-validated. Findings: The results indicate that financial gains, entrepreneurship and learning are significant predictors of ideation (sharing new ideas). Enjoyment and learning are strong indicators of collaboration (sharing knowledge or experience), whereas networking, enjoyment, and altruism are most strongly related to socialization (sharing network and connections). These findings highlight three classes of social actors – ideators, collaborators and networkers – based on motivational differences. Originality/value: Co-innovation among individual inventors is an understudied aspect of the sharing economy. This study provides a theoretically parsimonious classification model to profile social actors, predict the sharing activities in co-innovation networks, and highlight the importance of platform design to appeal to different classes of potential contributors in collaborative innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constructions of the child victim of domestic violence (DV) have changed over the last number of years from once passive bystander to active agent and victim in their own right. Although police as first responders are more aware of the risk to children living with DV, there continues to be a disparity among officers in recognizing and responding to the child as victim. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in Ireland involving interviews with 10 children (most aged 7–9) and 14 police officers, this paper looks at how the child is seen by police as victim during a DV call-out and the way through which children's coping strategies may indirectly make them a less obvious victim to warrant a direct response from police. A story-telling approach captured children's views in an ethically safe manner. Interviews with police were semi-structured and explored individual officer's views and experiences of responding to DV incidents with children present. A thematic analysis underpinned by theoretical principles aligned to a social constructionist perspective and an understanding of the child as social actor was applied to the data. Children continue to be unseen by police and are not engaged with in a way that recognizes their victim status at a DV incident. Policing models that focus purely on the criminal justice aspect render the child's experience invisible. A reconceptualizing of the child victim as involved actor in the DV home is required if police are to involve children in the response and for the child's experience to be fully acknowledged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we attempt to analyze the negotiation of social roles between students and teachers in the new interactive contexts mediated by technological medium. The object of the analysis is a school group in the social network Facebook. From the theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics and Multimodal Theory, we attempted to account for the realization of interpersonal metafunction in this Facebook group; and, from the methodological apparatus of the ethnography of communication and conversation analysis, we describe the interactions to observe the roles played by participants in their discursive interactions and the resources they use. The study reveals that in a virtual space as Facebook, the traditional roles between teachers and students are reconfigured through resources that relieve the extent of imposition of participants over others and others that promote the care of the image of the partners; while it is enabling the development of trade relations and affection between subjects. The development of an educational virtual space in a social network facilitates communication between subjects and contributes to education in the classroom space, without jeopardizing the social images of teachers and students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study conducts a social semiotic analysis of six sex education picture books for preschool children in the People’s Republic of China. Following van Leeuwen’s framework for analysing the discursive construction of social actors, this paper examines two types of social actors directly associated with the education of human sexuality: the physical body of human beings and the institutional, disciplinary body of the family. The analysis of the linguistic and visual representations of the two types of social actors reveals a significant compromise of biosexuality to the complicated psychosexual and sociosexual concerns in the People’s Republic of China. The introduction of biological knowledge about human reproduction is conducted in such a manner that aims to instil the appropriate moral values and behaviours that are regarded as the norm in contemporary Chinese culture as well as ensuring the sound physical and psychological development of young children. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The purpose of this paper is to present certain hypotheses about aspects that regional integration has acquired in the border regions, where it tends to be confused with frontier or neighbourly Integration. It also presents the acceptance of the Andean integration experience in the frontier region of Táchira and North of Santander on the border between Colombia and Venezuela; the two most active countries the Andean Community. In addition it attempts to explain the apparent rejection of regional integration over the last decade of the XX Century on the part of these agents. This paper Is the result of biblio-hemerographic consultation as well as direct observation and interviews with political and social representatives on each side of the border. It consists of five parts in which there is a geographical location of the area under study, a theoretical approximation in relation to political and social actors, their perceptions towards regional and frontier integration, the actors who are more inclined to show a positive and a negative opinion towards regional integration, and finally and there is a discussion of some of the reasons that explain the findings of acceptance or rejection towards regional integration in this border region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Younger children are common users of health-care services. Their perspective on a health-care situation and their ways of communication differ from that of adults. There is a shortness of research of younger children's perceptions of health-care situations. The knowledge that exists indicates the importance of involving the child's perspective to enable understanding and to offer appropriate support. This paper aimed to describe how younger children perceive to be in a health-care situation. Semi-structured interviews, analysed phenomenographically, were used. The main findings revealed that children view themselves as actors, as either main or co-actors, in a health-care situation. Parents and professionals are also understood as actors. The children's perceptions enable professionals to create a mutual understanding which will give openings for increased involvement of the children and an improved level of the children's health literacy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper extends the concept of "user" to account for a new, more formalized role that some client organizations play in the diffusion of packaged enterprise systems. Package vendors are attempting to draw parts of their user base into activities related to the promotion, selling, and commodification of systems. Users, in turn, appear willing to help construct these systems as objects of consumption for others. This can appear to be rather idiosyncratic behavior. Information Systems scholars have argued that relations between packaged enterprise system vendors and users are attenuated. Why might the user help the vendor market its systems in this way? What benefits accrue from it? And what role are users performing in carrying out this work? To show how this is becoming a general facet of the work of some packaged enterprise system users, we develop the notion of "reference actor," which is an extension of the earlier Information Systems concept of "social actor." In combining insights from the social shaping of technology and the biography of artifacts, and drawing on long-term qualitative fieldwork, we analyze this new actor role in relation to expectations and commitments coming from the wider packaged enterprise system community. In return for the help provided to prospective adopters, reference actors are also able to gather various kinds of benefits for themselves and others. In particular, they build closer relations with vendors such that they can influence product development strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT:In order to delimit the realm of social phenomena, sociologists refer implicitly or explicitly to a distinction between living human beings and other entities, that is, sociologists equate the social world with the world of living humans. This consensus has been questioned by only a few authors, such as Luckmann, and some scholars of science studies. According to these approaches, it would be ethnocentric to treat as self-evident the premise that only living human beings can be social actors. The methodological consequence of such critique is a radical deanthropologization of sociological research. It must be considered an open question whether or not only living human can be social actors. The paper starts with a discussion of the methodological problems posed by such an analysis of the borders of the social world, and presents the results of an empirical analysis of these borders in the fields of intensive care and neurological rehabilitation. Within these fields it must be determined whether a body is a living human body or a symbol using human body. The analysis of these elementary border phenomena challenges basic sociological concepts. The relevant contemporary sociological theories refer to a dyadic constellation as the systematic starting point of their concept of sociality. The complex relationship between at least two entities is understood as the basis of the development of a novel order that functions as a mediating structure between the involved parties. Based upon empirical data, I argue that it is necessary to change this foundational assumption. Not the dyad but the triad must be understood as the foundational constellation. This implies a new understanding of the third actor, which is distinct from the concepts developed by Simmel and Berger and Luckmann. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]