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Background and Aims: The global outbreak of COVID‐19 has become an international concern. The lives of children are severely affected by COVID‐19 pandemic. There is evidence of a pandemic impact on violence against children. This scoping review study aimed to investigate the effects of the COVID‐19 pandemic on child abuse. Methods: We searched PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science databases to retrieve related studies. Regarding the recent incident of COVID‐19, the articles were reviewed from 2019 to June 1, 2021. The terms Child abuse and COVID‐19 were used in the precise search technique of each database. The search techniques were created to work with any scientific database that used the keywords given. Results: In the initial search of scientific databases, 568 articles were retrieved. After applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria during the screening process, 16 papers were included in the scoping review. Twelve articles have mentioned the increase of physical, psychological, and neglect types of abuse. However, sexual violence has not been reported in any of the articles. Four articles reported a reduction in the incidence of child abuse. Conclusion: During the COVID‐19 pandemic, a crisis occurred in the form of an upsurge in violence toward children, since limits made to diminish the virus, in general, increased the danger to children. Numerous factors such as stress, poverty, financial situation, history of violence, school closures, and lack of contact with support organizations contribute to this phenomenon. Social action and support needed is the right of every child in need in this critical situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on three case studies of Chinese Internet start‐ups, this study seeks to address the research question: "How is digital entrepreneurship enacted in China?" Our findings reveal that there was a common theme that underpinned the start‐ups we studied, which we termed 'Qinghuai' in the language of the informants we spoke with. In this paper, we explain the roots of the concept and its six constituent elements at the individual, organizational, and ecosystem levels. These elements are then abstracted into two dimensions: (a) spiritual idealism and (b) perpetual development. We argue that Qinghuai as a concept is a product and reflection of the cultural and institutional complexity of contemporary China. Further, we discuss how Qinghuai facilitates digital entrepreneurship across the business, organizational, and technological domains. This explanation is substantiated by data from our three cases and juxtaposed with what has been discussed in the existing digital entrepreneurship literature. Finally, as we present the contributions of our study, we elaborate on (a) how Qinghuai reflects the contemporary context of China; (b) how Qinghuai is instrumental to digital entrepreneurship in China; and (c) how Qinghuai is different from other related concepts including Guanxi, collectivism, collective action and social entrepreneurship. We conclude the paper by discussing its limitations, future research opportunities, as well as its practical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little guidance has been given to the management of action research and this paper suggests that ideas from the actor-network theory (ANT) may be helpful. Although ANT has been widely used as a tool for interpretation and description of the interplay of the social and technical aspects of organizations, this paper presents a different use of the ideas. It advocates a proactive use, to bring about changes in a situation rather than merely observing and describing that situation disinterestedly from the outside. The case is described of a long-term action research study carried out within a corporate bank, where the ideas of ANT were employed in this way, as a device for understanding the turbulent social and political context of the research, to plan and manage the intervention process, and where ideas such as networks of interest, translation of interests and black boxes were used to practical effect. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By combining an economic perspective on financial instability with a sociological analysis of collective behavior, this paper lays out a conceptual foundation that is suggestive of a fuller understanding of speculative manias and financial panics in highly liquid financial assets. The paper argues that a collective enthusiasm develops in an environment of “optimistic uncertainty” created by the gradual diffusion of a revolutionary innovation of the type examined by Rosenberg. An adaptation of Simmel’s theory of fashion in the emerging norm framework of Turner and Killian explains the swell of speculative excitement. Once started, the enthusiasm continues in a Schumpeterian manner until the objective potential of the innovation becomes apparent and estimable. If the contemporaneous degree of optimism proves unfounded and prices too high to sustain, a reversal of fortune ushers in distress that may inspire panic. A panic, contrary to implications of extant economic theory, does not necessarily follow a period of extreme speculative enthusiasm. This paper suggests instead, in light of Lang and Lang’s analysis of collective dynamics, that certain objective market conditions create a panic in a distressed environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of 'peopled landscapes' is based on the notion that it is not possible, nor socially or politically desirable, to remove people from the environment in the era of the Anthropocene. As such, it is necessary to document and develop ways to coexist and flourish.This review examines emergent scholarship about peopled landscapes and biodiversity conservation by considering invasive plant management and rewilding as social processes. While invasive plant management and rewilding are often understood as separate, thinking through social scientific research and examples from Australia and the UK, we demonstrate how both forms of human action in landscapes can be more usefully understood as social relations with nature involving social change and social action.Drawing attention to agency, practices and capacity, we show how diverse forms of human and nonhuman actions are recognised, attributed or acknowledged in biodiversity conservation in peopled landscapes.In practice, centring the idea of peopled landscapes (rather than conceiving of the environment as where the impact of people is minimised) shows how invasive plant management and rewilding can be understood as related responses to environmental problems.Flourishing and coexistence in peopled landscapes require recognition of the diverse human and nonhuman agencies that shape the politics of acceptable action, and illustrate the inseparability of environmental and social justice. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ social action with reference to recent research in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. Evidence is presented in support of the proposal that a taken for granted model of conversational interaction is used by analysts, both lay and professional, as a comparative reference point against which certain actions are categorized as ‘formal’. Such a procedure, it is suggested, results in evaluative interpretations which fail to address the question of how such interactions may be operating to produce orderliness in the settings where they are found. This theme is developed mainly in relation to the way a number of recurrent features of multiparty interaction may provide practical solutions to a general problem which appears to be common to all such settings, namely that of how to create and preserve the conditions for sustaining the shared attentiveness of all co-present parties to the proceedings at hand. The general themes are also briefly considered with reference to small-scale interactions that are likely to be regarded as ‘formal’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Genuine agents are able to engage in activity because they find it worth pursuing—because they care about it. In this respect, they differ from what might be called “mere intentional systems”: systems like chess-playing computers that exhibit merely goal-directed behavior mediated by instrumental rationality, without caring. A parallel distinction can be made in the domain of social activity: plural agents must be distinguished from plural intentional systems in that plural agents have cares and engage in activity because of those cares. In this paper, I sketch an account of what it is for an individual to care about things in terms of her exhibiting a certain pattern of emotions. After extending this account to make sense of an individual's caring about other agents, I then show how a certain sort of emotional connectedness among a group of people can make intelligible the group's having cares and thereby constitute that group as a plural agent. Alternative accounts of social action, by ignoring the difference between mere intentional systems and genuine agents, and so by leaving out these emotional entanglements from their accounts of social action, thereby fail to capture a whole range of social phenomena involving plural agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses meta-analysis to investigate whether random assignment (or experimental) evaluations of voluntary government-funded training programs for the disadvantaged have produced different conclusions than nonexperimental evaluations. Information includes several hundred estimates from 31 evaluations of 15 programs that operated between 1964 and 1998. The results suggest that experimental and nonexperimental evaluations yield similar conclusions about the effectiveness of training programs, but that estimates of average effects for youth and possibly men might have been larger in experimental studies. The results also suggest that variation among nonexprimental estimates of program effects is similar to variation among experimental estimates for men and youth, but not for women (for whom it seems to be larger), although small sample sizes make the estimated differences somewhat imprecise for all three groups. The policy implications of the findings are discussed. © 2006 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantitative relationships are established between the production function of collective action and the payoff functions of the n-person Prisoners' Dilemma game. It is shown that the latter have more degrees of freedom than the former; therefore, it is desirable to investigate collective actions in terms of the Prisoners' Dilemma game. The special cases of S-shaped, decelerating (concave), accelerating (convex), and linear production functions are investigated. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents John Goldthorpe's response to several comments about his paper which analyzed the uses of history in sociology. According to Goldthorpe, his main concern was to show that history and sociology necessarily differed in the nature of the evidence that they used or, more precisely, in the ways in which this evidence came into being. He claims that in his paper, he emphasizes that historians cannot hope to produce descriptions that are free of general ideas about social action, process and structure. His argument concerning the differences in evidence available to historians and sociologists is that the latter have the possibility of engaging in research that itself generates evidence, over and above, not as distinct from, that of exploiting relics. Goldthorpe clarifies the argument with which his paper began was that (i) pace Abrams and Giddens, history and sociology are not the same thing; (ii) that one important way in which they differ is the nature of the evidence on which historians and sociologists draw; and (iii) that sociologists, in being able to generate their own data in the present, rather than being restricted to the relics of the past, are in a position of advantage that should be recognized and not given up without good reason.

This paper addresses the impact of class position on collective action by comparing workers' and business' associational organizability. Hypotheses on this are derived from class theory, collective action theory and organization theory. When examining them via a crossnational comparison of labor unions and business interest associations, class-specific differences arise: a higher organizability accrues to business interest associations in terms of the ability to recruit members, but to unions in terms of internalizing interests and making members comply. No theory's hypotheses are completely consistent with these findings. Their shortcomings are discussed, and a revised theoretical approach is developed. The paper's final section discusses some consequences of the observed differences for business' and unions' interest policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rational action theory (RAT) is not a highly unified intellectual entity. In the first part of the paper, varieties of RAT are distinguished in terms of three criteria: i.e. according to whether they (i) have strong rather than weak rationality requirements; (ii) focus on situational rather than procedural rationality; (iii) claim to provide a general rather than a special theory of action. In the second part, these same criteria are applied in a consideration of which version of RAT holds out most promise for use in sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The paper uses the timing of evacuation behavior of occupants of the World Trade Center at the time of the explosion of February 26, 1993, to test predictions from Emergent Norm Theory. Method: It uses ordinary least square multiple regression analysis to examine data from a survey done in the first week in May 1993 of 415 people who worked at the World Trade Center Results: The theory's predictions regarding the additive effects of size of group and preexisting social relationships on the timing of evacuation are supported. However the findings document important and unexpected interaction effects of these two variables on the effects of perceived threat, resources, and Cooperativeness on the timing of evacuation. Conclusion: The results augment the theory by showing the continued importance of enduring social relationships as determinants of collective behavior Enduring social relationships are not Only useful to differentiate collective behavior from institutionalized behavior but also specify the dynamics attending the occurrence of collective behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Game theory seeks solutions that would eliminate the need to actually play games and hence cannot explain why some games are played out, often with skills that are widely admired and emulated. This paper makes the conditions required to play (rather than solve) a game its starting point and focuses on the local skills that underlie the ensuing involvement. Data from tournament chess reveals that highly-skilled players are the best at sustaining involvement, yet also the best at terminating the game when the outcome becomes apparent, suggesting that involvement should stand alongside rationality as divergent ideals in social action. This bifurcation in skill can produce cooperation in the midst of conflict. or vice versa, and hence send local actions in the opposite direction of stated global goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interactionist analyses of social organization stimulate examination of how social situations and collective activity are shaped. Meta-power, the creation and control of distal situations, and organization as a structuration of meta-power are used as tools for exploring the shaping of situations Five meta-power processes are presented: strategic agency, rules and conventions, structuring situations. Culture construction, and empowering delegates. These processes illustrate how situations are created or altered. This paper offers a view of social organization that emphasizes relations among situations, linkages between consequences and conditions, and networks of collective activity across space and time. The conclusion calls for additional research to make more explicit the nature of social organization and its social conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Freshwater habitats are experiencing two to three times the rate of biodiversity loss of terrestrial and marine habitats. As status quo actions within the conservation community are not reversing the downward trajectory for freshwater biodiversity, we propose four actions to shift the narrative such that freshwater biodiversity is no longer invisible and overlooked, but rather explicitly recognized, valued, and protected: (1) Reshape our relationship with freshwater habitats and biodiversity, (2) Appreciate indigenous knowledge systems relating to freshwater habitats, (3) Connect science more directly to action, and (4) Elevate freshwater habitats as a unique "domain" that requires explicit recognition in conservation planning (RACE). We highlight roles that both freshwater scientists and the wider conservation community can play in implementing the four actions such that the "RACE" can be won. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Agoras of the City States of the Classical Greeks were public spheres where democracy was lived by citizens who made collective decisions about issues affecting their daily lives. The Agora Project—New Agoras—is a metaphor for social action contexts in which people can make collective decisions about their future. People in the settings of their families, neighborhoods, community groups, organizations and institutions have the potential to organize themselves as evolutionary design communities. Participants in the Agora Project collectively enjoin to establish a new public sphere that can sustain a meaningful actionable design dialogue among individuals within and across New Agoras. These New Agoras, communicatively linked, would serve as the infrastructure for democratic civil society and a system of public spheres animated by evolutionary conversation and guided by evolutionary design with purpose of self-guided evolution of the society—cultural evolution of our species, Homo sapiens sapiens. Critical to the Agora Project is the establishment of stewardship communities. The task of these communities is to create knowledge bases for evolutionary inquiry, develop resources for evolutionary learning and explore suitable approaches, methods and technologies. This article will present an overview of the Agora Project and the Agora Steward Community that has evolved in relation to the project. Organization of the article includes: (1) an examination of the evolution of humankind, (2) a discussion of conscious purposeful evolution, (3) an examination of the Agora of ancient Athens, (4) an introduction of the New Agoras as a metaphor for social action in contemporary society, (5) a discussion of the New Agoras as public spheres for democratic civil society, (6) a description of the Agora Project, and (7) a discussion of the New Agoras as public spheres for evolutionary design. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Andragogy and andragology do have something in common. It concerns something systems researchers have tried to deal with as well. Usually, in systems theory the ‘systemic’ aspect is equated, exclusively, with the functional aspects of human action, its ambitions and ambivalence, and the related justifications. According to that view, social (or moral) expressive ambitions are viewed as not being systematic and well organized, and are consequently identified as ‘life-world related’. This option, however, might be disastrous for scientific progress in andragology. What seems most characteristic is that andragologists at least have learnt to consider this ‘life-world’ as constitutive also and worthy of scientific study. They actually succeeded in finding a fertile holon, one that allows for the consideration of value descriptions in scientific exploration, thus integrating andragogy and andragology. This even appears to be a distinguishing contribution, brought forth by all those who ‘found themselves together’ in this old and new, strange and familiar area. They did not succumb to the present-day seductive confusion between what is part of life and of experience (andragogy), and what is part of reflection and resistance to the evils of the day, with sufficient strength (andragology). The former aims to contribute functional, moral and expressive insights as supports to basic daily life; the latter to provide stability and authority against any fundamental, moral and expressive imposition, or colonization beyond such supports. Andragologists research functional, moral and expressive improvement, with the help of and adding to the andragogue's functional, moral and expressive insights. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnomethodologists and conversation analysts have based their claim to a status superior to that of conventional sociology on their supposed ability to avoid the problems of attributing motives to actors by concentrating on the 'scenic properties' of social action. In all earlier paper we argued that a close inspection of the practice of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis revealed considerable motive attribution. Two ethnomethodologists have criticised our argument. In this: rejoinder we demonstrate that our critics have conceded our main point. Ethnomethodologists may have a particular research focus but their methods are similar to those of conventional sociologists in the matter of imputing motives to social actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops an analytical framework for the sociological analysis of the clash of economic ideologies. The framework is then used to make sense of the economic debate in South Africa in the 1990s. The argument is that, following Karl Polanyi, we must treat economic life as 'embedded' in social life; that is, economic action is a form of social action. However, the notion of 'embeddedness' must not blind us to the tendency in all economies, especially contemporary market economies, for economic motivations to become differentiated from the rest of our lives. Accordingly, the framework developed through a critique of key assumptions of neoclassical economic theory attends to both the embeddedness and the differentiation of the economic element. Having established a framework of analysis, I apply it to the debate in South Africa about the most relevant frame- work for economic policy in the post-Apartheid economy. The article traces the gradual move of the African National Congress (ANC) away from statist economics to a much more market-oriented policy and shows how this reflects the ANC leaders need to balance the demands of their constituency's (embedded) conception of rationality against the potential investor's more mainstream conception of economic rationality, which is itself embedded in prosperous communities with property and skills. A similar analysis is applied to the development of the economic policy of the ANC's rival, the former ruling National Party (NP). The NP advocates an economic policy framework based on an individual self- reliance and 'free' markets, that is, on an individualistic calculative rationality similar to that of the neoclassical textbooks. However, the NP too has to pursue politics and they, although rather differently from the ANC, have sought to reconcile individual maximizing rationality with the collective rationalities of the oppressed black communities in order to win maximum support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What circumstances permit churches to organize for innovative social changer A recent example of a clergy-led social movement following an industrial crisis in Youngstown, Ohio is examined utilizing a resource mobilization perspective In this case the local community was mobilized against a predatory conglomerate, using resources from the federal government, the churches and Washington-based economic planners The movement was able effectively to neutralize possible sources of opposition within the community and within the constituent church organizations.
In this sense the movement failed, but the question posed in this paper is: How did such an organization arise and manage to sustain community support for such an unconventional end over an extended period of time? A related question might be phrased: Under what conditions do churches take an active part in promoting social change?
As much as any single factor, the Ecumenical Coalition is a legacy of the radicalism of the sixties. Without seasoned social activists in the church hierarchy who had prior personal contacts with each other and with experts outside the churches, it is unlikely that anything more than pious handwringing would have resulted from the mill shutdown.
At the same time, the issue around which the Coalition was formed seems particularly contemporary. The goal of the movement was defined in relatively pragmatic terms as a threat to the local community by outside forces. In this context "Save Our Valley" became a potent slogan.
Economic crises similar to Youngstown's are likely to recur periodically. Does this mean that the churches will attempt to play an active role in promoting economic change? They might, especially if other groups are not willing to take the initiative; in Youngstown, as the Steelworkers Union becomes more involved, the churches withdraw.
Finally, economic enterprises of the sort described here depend heavily upon support for a variety of Federal... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper compares one aspect of Max Weber's explicit conception of ‘interpretive sociology’ with his actual practices in his substantive investigations. It shows that Weber's overt emphasis on the importance of meanings and motives in causal explanation of social action does not correspond adequately with the true mode of explanation involved in his comparative-historical studies of the world religions. Rather, the ultimate level of causal explanation in Weber's substantive writings is that of the social-structural conditions under which certain forms of meaning and motivation can achieve historical efficacy. A model is developed to represent the actual nature of ‘Weberian sociology’. It is proposed that this internal comparative analysis and interpretation can have useful implications for contemporary sociological debates and approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on government regulation and the United States Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX). The author begins by summarizing the arguments for regulation that have been made. Arguments from previous studies will be considered if they apply to SOX. The author suggests that regulation seems to be a consequence of the public's need for action in response to a financial crisis and that this was why SOX was affected. Arguments are presented for why the 2009 recession provides another example of the author's theory.

The article focuses on the importance of belief as an economic phenomenon in the creation of speculative moments. Formally stated, specialization means that individual needs are specified separately, each is met by a technology and a production process that is self contained, in that it is physically separate of all the other production processes engineered to meet all the other needs. People and communities are divided into separate "social worlds," and individuals move between these on a daily basis, the world of work determines the person's economic survival, and lessons from it over ride other beliefs about the nature of the social world. This feature of modern economic life merits no more than a cursory glance in the economic textbooks, it is a part of the "way things are," which does not offer much of interest to economists. It can be said that specialization has increased the physical power, the material health, and the general wealth of most people in the rich societies, but it has many costs, the most serious of which is the division of human experience.

This article develops a theoretical model of collective action at work using the key concepts of mobilization triggers, facilitating factors, and inhibiting factors. It then illustrates the value of this model for understanding why a low-pay, low-skill, blue-collar manufacturing facility remained non-union, drawing primarily on the accounts of a limited sample of redundant workers. These accounts are used to demonstrate the importance of social contexts where inhibiting conditions dominate and where management practices succeed in gaining worker consent and forestalling a collective response from workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay responds to article 'How Has Bourdieu Been Good to Think With? The Case of the United States,' and essay 'The Three Phases of Bourdieu's U.S. Reception,' both of which appear in this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given associations between critical consciousness and positive developmental outcomes, and given racial, socioeconomic, and generational disparities in political participation, this article examined contextual antecedents of critical consciousness (composed of sociopolitical control and social action) and its consequences for 665 marginalized youth's (ages 15-25) voting behavior. A multiple indicator and multiple causes (MIMIC) model examined racial, ethnic, and age differences in the measurement and means of latent constructs. The structural model suggested that parental and peer sociopolitical support predicts sociopolitical control and social action, which in turn predicts voting behavior, while controlling for civic and political knowledge, race/ethnicity, and age. This illuminates how micro-level actors foster critical consciousness and how the perceived capacity to effect social change and social action participation may redress voting disparities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research on volunteering finds significant differences by race and social class. We augment these findings by examining a largely ignored measure of social class: tenure status, the distinction between renters and homeowners. We test a theory that predicts people volunteer more if they have a “stake” in their community and we use the value of their home as a measure of the size of this stake, with renters having no stake at all, using data from the 2003 Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We find that although homeowners volunteer more than renters, the value of their home has no influence on their volunteer work. Length of residence in the neighborhood has a positive effect on volunteerism. Tenure status partially mediates the influence of race and family income on volunteering but not education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Having reversed its pronatalist policies in 1988, the Islamic Republic of Iran implemented one of the most successful family planning programs in the developing world. This achievement, particularly in urban centers, is largely attributable to a large women-led volunteer health worker program for low-income urban neighborhoods. Research in three cities demonstrates that this successful program has had a host of unintended consequences. In a context where citizen mobilization and activism are highly restricted, volunteers have seized this new state-sanctioned space and successfully negotiated many of the familial, cultural, and state restrictions on women. They have expanded their mandate from one focused on health activism into one of social, if not political, activism, highlighting the ways in which citizens blur the boundaries of state and civil society under restrictive political systems prevalent in many of the Middle Eastern societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Laboratory experiments indicate that many people willingly contribute to public goods and punish free riders at a personal cost. We hypothesize that these individuals, called strong reciprocators, allow political parties to overcome collective action problems, thereby allowing those organizations to compete for scarce resources and to produce public goods for like-minded individuals. Using a series of laboratory games, we examine whether partisans contribute to public goods and punish free riders at a greater rate than nonpartisans. The results show that partisans are more likely than nonpartisans to contribute to public goods and to engage in costly punishment. Given the broad theoretical literature on altruistic punishment and group selection as well as our own formal evolutionary model, we hypothesize that it is being a partisan that makes an individual more likely to be a strong reciprocator and not vice versa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the impact of seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes on the thinking of eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume. The author's presentation reveals that Hobbes' "Elements of Law" and Leviathan," and Hume's "A Treatise of Human Nature" betray a similarity in reasoning with respect to economic and social organization. Neither believed humans are naturally equipped to participate in a modern commercial society without first having their passions moderated. Hume derived from Hobbes ideas concerning collective action among large groups.

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The article assesses the contextual views of Milton Friedman regarding corporate social responsibility (CSR) as it was contrasted with the ideological presentation of Jacques Derrida. It expounds on the perspective of Friedman on the issues of the shareholder's position on CSR wherein business holds a responsibility to parties other than shareholders, an obligation to their respective employees, customers, community and to the environment. In this article, the author's perspective on corporate responsibility is being evaluated and counterpointed but more or less the issue concentrates on Friedman's stance on CSR.

Conventional methods have been criticized for their positivist philosophy and for either ignoring the organizational context of information systems development (ISD) or using only a simplistic, machine-based conceptual model of organizations. We have developed an approach to enable systems developers to use a richer view of organizations and a more interpretive approach. Multi-Metaphor Method (MMM) supports developers via a range of metaphors as cognitive structuring devices to understand an organization so that developers can learn to move between different ways of ‘reading’ the social context in which ISD occurs. We explain the rationale and theoretical underpinnings of MMM and then discuss our action research to investigate the viability and relevance of MMM during ISD practice. We show how the developers’ use of organizational metaphors via MMM did not just enable rich conceptualizations of the client organizations but also influenced the ISD process and final product. We review the learning outcomes and discuss the implications for systems development practice of our research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing number of field and experimental studies focus on the institutional arrangements by which individuals are able to solve collective action problems. Important in this research is the role of reciprocity and institutions that facilitate cooperation via opportunities for monitoring, sanctioning, and rewarding others. Sanctions represent a cost to both the participant imposing the sanction and the individual receiving the sanction. Rewards represent a zero-sum transfer from participants giving to those receiving rewards. We contrast reward and sanction institutions in regard to their impact on cooperation and efficiency in the context of a public goods experiment. ( JEL C92) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Families of squatters who had settled in a quiet neighborhood of Paris wished to send their children to the local school. Our ethnohistorical inquiry explores how the mobilization in favor of schooling the children was embedded in other controversies and mobilizations that arose from the squatters' presence in the occupied building. Many collective social actors (associations, unions, administrations, and politicians) were involved in conflicting mobilizations in an ongoing struggle of competing arguments. The contemporary crisis of the French model of political representation has enabled the emergence of new forms of collective protest: new ways of defining social problems and a new repertory of civil actions, that is, the "mediatization" of social action and the recourse to litigation. Our study suggests some of the possible extensions and limitations of this movement, especially in the context of action taken by teachers' unions and parents' associations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ideological positions regarding social diversity and status inequality are examined as predictors of people's willingness to engage in collective action. Using social dominance theory and social identity theory, we hypothesized that the relationships between ideology, ethnic identification, and orientation toward collective action will vary depending on the position of one's group. Comparisons were made between four U.S. groups: White natives, White immigrants, Black/Latino natives, and Black/Latino immigrants. Groups differed in their endorsement of social diversity and social inequality, as well as in their orientation toward collective action and their ethnic group identification. For all groups, ethnic identity mediated the link between ideology and collective action, but the valence and magnitude of paths differed as a function of ethnicity and immigrant status. Social diversity was more critical for U.S. immigrants (White and Black/Latino); social inequality accounted for more variance in native-born U.S. groups (although in opposite directions for the two groups). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article asks four questions: (1) What are our theoretical expectations about the incidence of policy-oriented collective action and its impact? (2) What do the data show about the incidence of collective action and its impact? (3) How might the impact of collective action be related to its incidence? (4) What do our findings imply for our understanding of democratic politics? We suggest that predictions that little collective action will occur are more accurate than conventionally believed; that such action is often ineffective; that it may be ineffective partly because it is so infrequent; and that the analysis of the determinants of policy change should be rethought as a result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies how players allocate their endowed resources between productive and conflictual activities in the context of rivalry between two groups. We show that the suboptimality and exploitation propositions established by Olson (1965) do not necessarily apply when external threat is endogenized. We also illustrate that it does not always pay to take an offensive stance. When competing with an offensive group, it might be better for members of a defensive group to remain defensive. Furthermore, in the context of rivalry between two groups, free riding can actually benefit everyone in the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1990s witnessed extensive promotion of volunteerism and the creation of a federal and state infrastructure to support government voluntary activities. What has been the impact on local governments? This article reports on a 2003 survey of volunteer involvement in Georgia local government, which followed a similar 1990 study and provides a rare opportunity to examine long-term trends in public volunteerism. Volunteerism in Georgia cities and counties has increased during the past decade, with 81 percent of all jurisdictions now reporting some volunteer engagement. The events of September 11, 2001, have had a small but generally positive effect on volunteer utilization. However, political and labor resistance to government volunteers has not been resolved. And the increase in public managers' concerns that they lack the funding or staff to utilize volunteers suggests that governmental capacity remains the principal obstacle to greater volunteer involvement in local governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indirect reciprocity, defined as a beneficial act whose return comes from someone other than the act's recipient, is a common phenomenon in human societies. However, it is a poorly analyzed phenomenon with respect to payoffs. Are the expectations of return realistic, or not? Are these expectations pro-social attitudes, or illusions induced through manipulation? I discuss four categories of putative indirect reciprocity, two of which pertain to interaction between individuals and two of which involve social systems. The conclusion is that two of these categories, reciprocal reputation and institutionalized reciprocity, are strongly linked to reciprocity, whereas the other two categories, generous reputation and metaphysical reward, are likely to involve only an element of illusionary reciprocity and a substantial degree of altruism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Expected utility theory explains collective action as an attempt by individuals to maximize their gains. In contrast, my application of prospect theory to collective action suggests that people are motivated to participate in collective action by a fear of loss. These alternative rationalities are considered in the context of the successful cooperative effort of four economic groups in Chile during 1973-75, the first years of the Pinochet military regime. In this case, the logic of prospect theory better captures how actors made decisions about whether or not to engage in collective action. Of the four groups that did join the 1973-75 economic coalition, only one (the mineowners) appears to have maximized its net asset level, as expected utility theory predicts. All four groups seem to have been motivated to cooperate because they found themselves in the domain of losses and expected that cooperation with other, even rival, economic groups might help them recoup their recent losses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clergy have an undeniable ability to shape the political beliefs and attitudes of their congregations and thus revealing how the framing activities of clergy affect behavior and influence mobilization is vital for political sociology. This ethnographic work delineates how, in 1972, the Second Baptist Church of Evanston’s new pastor initiated a rapid change from social conservatism to become one of the most politically and socially active African–American Baptist churches in the Midwest. Second Baptist’s radical change confirms the power of religious elites in shaping politics in spiritual institutions, and also demonstrates the vital impact of professional socialization on the theological and political orientations of clergy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issue of how an activist identity develops is one of the core issues in social psychology and social movement research. Because of problems in the measurement of individuals' propensities to engage in social action, however, findings in this area are often equivocal, and cross-study comparisons and conclusions are difficult to draw. Hence, the aim of these studies was to develop a measure to assess individuals' propensities to engage in social action. This measure, the Activism Orientation Scale (AOS), demonstrates strong psychometric properties and allows assessment of activist propensity across a wide continuum of social action behaviors, ideological positions, and movement issues. Additionally, the broad applicability of the AOS allows for its use by researchers, activists, and policymakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the impact of religion to civic engagement in Canada and the U.S. Religion is the source of much civic engagement. The great theorist of American civic engagement, Alexis de Tocqueville, saw religious values as the reason people could put self-interest aside in favor of communitarian sentiments that lead people to get involved in their communities. Clergy mobilize people into political and social action. Active membership in a church or a synagogue lets people develop and practice skills that easily translate into civic engagement. Religion may mobilize people to take part in their communities, but perhaps only among their own kind.

Frank Sulloway (1996) has claimed that later-horns are more likely to rebel against the status quo than are firstborns. The two studies reported here attempt to examine more fully Sulloway's claims about rebelliousness. The studies draw on archival data from studies of high school and college students in a midwestern state between 1969 and 1982. The current studies compare the effects of birth order, gender, family size, and father's education on two self-report measures: participation in protests and demonstrations, and involvement with marijuana. The data on involvement with marijuana provided support for Sulloway's thesis that later-horns are more rebellious than firstborns, but the data on participation in protests and demonstrations did not. These mixed findings, which contribute to the ongoing debate about Sulloway's theory, are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study tested the assumption that a sense of collective identity stimulates participation in collective action. Contextual circumstances supposedly make a collective identity more salient and compel people to act as members of the group; protest participation is more likely among people with a strong collective identity. Group identification and participation in identity organizations were used as indicators of collective identity in a study of 248 farmers from Galicia (Spain) and 167 farmers from the Netherlands. The farmers were interviewed three times at intervals of 1 year. The longitudinal design also allowed a test of causality. A sense of collective identity appeared to stimulate preparedness to take part in farmers' protest. Action preparedness leads to action participation, which in turn appears to foster collective identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A round the 1960s, political psychology was developed as a field of knowledge that attempted to interrelate scientific psychology and political phenomena. However, social and academic conditions are very different today. More and more, political psychology is becoming a protagonist, as much in the internal context of psychology as in the external context of its relations with the social world. Thus, political psychology can now be seen as a resource relating psychological knowledge to social practice, and relating psychological processes to social action. Political psychology is the interface that puts psychology and society in contact. The development of political psychology in Spain provides an example of this alternative view of the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent explosion of cultural work on social movements has been highly Cognitive in its orientation, as though researchers were still reluctant to admit that strong emotions accompany protest. But such emotions do not render protestors irrational; emotions accompany all social action, providing both motivation and goals. Social movements are affected by transitory, context -specific emotions, usually reactions to information and events, as well as by more stable affective bonds and loyalties. Some emotions exist or arise in individuals before they join protest groups; others are formed or reinforced in collective action itself. The latter type can be further divided into shared and reciprocal emotions, the latter being feelings that protestors have toward each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]