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The article discuses the peer reviewed journal "Business models, consumer experiences and regulation of retirement villages". It is reported that retirement villages reduces the growing pressures on health services caused by ageing population and offer a way of living communally that deserves attention. It is further reported that government should support retirement villages by recognizing its obligations to assist low income groups through rental assistance and public housing.

This paper adopts an ethnomethodological approach towards the study of radicalism in legal professional practice, focusing on the ways in which radicalism was produced, displayed and exhibited in the talk and actions of a small firm of solicitors situated in one of the inner city areas of a large city in northern England. Three aspects of radicalism are examined: radicalism as a public phenomenon; radicalism as a contestable phenomenon; and radicalism as a moral framework. It is suggested that this analytic approach has implications for the way we might study other forms of contemporary radicalism, and for the way in which radicals in the academy theorise and understand the world of the radical lawyer., Introduction The phenomenon of the 'radical lawyer' has been celebrated, critiqued, cited and discussed by academics working in the field of law and society studies for at least the past [...]

Southern Criminology is a theoretical perspective that shifts the focus from the state criminal justice process to global inequalities, transnational crime, and postcolonial politics. While recognising the importance of this shift in perspective for a globalising world, this paper asks two difficult questions. Firstly, how easy is it to generalise about whole regions of the world in advancing a political viewpoint? Secondly, is it possible for those in the West to imagine an alternative global criminology, if non-Western societies really do have different cultural values and epistemologies? For example, how should we respond to traditional practices among Indigenous Australians or a Confucian understanding of crime? These questions may make a Southern Criminology sound impossible in the same way as other varieties of critical theory. But this paper is intended to strengthen this emerging movement by acknowledging, and working through, potential difficulties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the housing affordability crisis in Australia deepens, policy-makers have expended considerable resources in establishing new regulatory practices to enhance the role of the community housing sector. Ostensibly, the rationale for a new tier of regulation is to assure potential institutional investors (e.g. pension funds, investment trusts and banks) that community housing organisations are accountable and safe places to invest. Our paper adopts an alternative reading of diversity and housing regulation, drawing upon the governmentality thesis advanced by Michel Foucault in an empirical study about the early stages of regulation of affordable housing providers. Amongst our claims are: first, that policies to diversify and regulate the housing sector constitute a radical political project to commercialise welfare provision and second, these policies are likely to generate additional bureaucratic burdens and close off possibilities for progressive reform. The paper also considers the value of the governmentality approach for critical investigations in the field of housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This comment considers the prospects for qualitative research in criminology by considering four recent texts: Bartels and Richards (2011), Westmarland (2011), Copes (2012), and Gadd, Karstedt and Messner (2012). Together they indicate a growing interest in qualitative methods, and even an emerging movement or sub-field. There is still, however, a tendency to present qualitative methods in one-dimensional terms as equivalent to the fieldwork tradition in anthropology and symbolic interactionism, without appreciating the value of discourse analysis as a means of collecting a different type of qualitative data, or the distinctive nature of different theoretical traditions. In addition, most texts see qualitative and quantitative research as complementary. It may be difficult to achieve a rapprochement or synthesis through combining or mixing methods, since qualitative and quantitative researchers, when pursuing scientific objectives, ask different questions and follow distinctive logics of explanation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editors discuss various papers related to criminology within the issue including the history of ethnographic techniques in criminology, characteristic of a long and/or intense period of observation and review of the book "Courting Kids" by Carla Barrett.

There is a continuing debate within juvenile justice between the approaches of welfare and justice. Those advancing these arguments often present young people as a deviant group who should be punished by tough measures such as detention, or as victims who require social support rather than criminal sanctions. This, however, may exaggerate the seriousness of offending and the severity of the response in the majority of cases that come before children's courts. Drawing on observational research in Tasmania and Victoria, this article describes the minor cases that come before magistrates, and the considerations employed in sentencing. The article argues that what takes place in children's courts can equally well be understood as culture contact, in which adults spend considerable effort trying to socialise the young, often with limited success. This ethnographic approach has implications for those advocating greater intervention in the lives of young offenders, even if this is targeted at those most at risk. This is because many offences that are brought before children's courts are revealed to be quite trivial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Qualitative research has to market itself aggressively, both because academic publishers face more pressures to sell books, and because of the competitive funding climate where one often has to demonstrate methodological innovation as a condition for obtaining a grant. This article considers how social theorists have understood the issue of 'newness' and the pursuit of innovation as a cultural problem. It explores the issue in qualitative research through examining how we accomplish and recognize 'newness' in the texts we read and produce as academics, which include publisher's catalogues and grant applications, and through considering technological advances such as internet ethnography and video analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores some implications of interpretive philosophies of social science, developed by thinkers such as Max Weber and Peter Winch, for conducting comparative research in criminal justice. These address the meaningful character of human activities but, unlike constructionism and postmodernism, respect the objective and constraining character of institutional realities. Drawing on American empirical studies that employ qualitative methods to explain statistical variation, the article shows how interpretive traditions often find it difficult freeing themselves from positivist assumptions and fall short of investigating how social actors understand and engage in comparison in their everyday lives. A discussion of data collected in an ethnographic study of children's courts in Australia demonstrates how a more thorough-going and consistent approach to comparison is possible within this interpretive framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To investigate the health benefits of companion animals in a way that goes beyond finding statistical patterns involves appreciating the philosophical debates about the nature of animal consciousness that engage an inter-disciplinary field of scholarship cutting across the Great Divide of the hard sciences and humanities. It also requires developing a methodology to conduct empirical research which is often viewed as of secondary importance by researchers wishing to make a philosophical case about human beings and modernity. This paper considers the achievements of qualitative sociologists, particularly in the field of post-Meadian symbolic interactionism who have addressed these issues, and discusses ways of extending and deepening this agenda through cross-fertilization with similar work in ethnomethodology, conversation analysis and post-humanist sociology in investigating the health benefits of dogs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents findings from an ethnographic study, based on observing hearings and interviewing practitioners in the Youth Justice Division of the Magistrates' Court in Hobart, Tasmania. Although there is a large academic literature by jurists on the philosophical principles, and social scientists on the attitudinal and institutional factors shaping court decisions, there have been few studies that examine what actually happens in the courtroom. This paper argues that much can be learnt about the collaborative nature of judicial work, the administrative side of decision-making (neglected by most studies) and the welfare values informing work in this court, through examining sentencing hearings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper adopts an ethnomethodological approach towards the study of radicalism in legal professional practice, focusing on the ways in which radicalism was produced, displayed and exhibited in the talk and actions of a small firm of solicitors situated in one of the inner city areas of a large city in northern England. Three aspects of radicalism are examined: radicalism as a public phenomenon; radicalism as a contestable phenomenon; and radicalism as a moral framework. It is suggested that this analytic approach has implications for the way we might study other forms of contemporary radicalism, and for the way in which radicals in the academy theorise and understand the world of the radical lawyer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]