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This paper outlines why a move towards a complex adaptive systems model of behaviour is required if the goal is to generate better understanding of how individuals and groups interact with their environment in a disaster setting. To accomplish this objective, a bridge must be built between the broader social sciences and behavioural economics to incorporate discipline‐specific insights that are needed to move towards complexity. This is only possible through a deeper understanding of behaviour and how the environment in which they occur can influence actions. It is then that one can counteract the poor behavioural predictions, flawed policies based on myth, inefficient design, and suboptimal outcomes that have flourished in the absence of a complex adaptive systems model. This paper provides a conceptual framework that draws on concepts from across the natural and social sciences, such as behavioural economics, endocrinology, psychology, sociobiology, and sociology in order to build an interactive theory of disaster behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bourdieu is an important thinker within the sociological tradition and has a philosophically sophisticated approach to theoretical knowledge and research practice. In this paper, we examine the implication of his work for nursing and the health sciences more broadly. We argue that his work is best described as a reflexive realist who provides a space for a nonpositivist approach to knowledge that does not fall into the trap of idealism or relativism. We emphasize that Bourdieu was not an abstract theorist, but only utilized theories to understand and explain the social world in all its empirical complexity. Theory is emphasized over method without denying the importance of method. We then provide a brief overview of some of his key concepts: habitus, field and capital. His work is a scientifically astute practice that has an emancipatory purpose, with particular resonance to the problems of nursing as a social practice. Some have criticized Bourdieu for undermining agency and we briefly address this issue, but argue that his conceptual framework helps us to understand what endures in social practice and why change is often problematic. In short, this paper argues that Bourdieu's work is a fruitful resource for critiquing existing nursing approaches that are preoccupied with agency over structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the present state of applied economics and the difficulties of integrating its findings and insights with those of other social sciences. The philosophical basis of social science is re-considered as a route to resolving these difficulties. Without a more integrated narrative about how our social systems work, applied economics, and all applied social sciences, run the substantial risk of being considered part of the world's problems, rather than offering serious routes to their solution. Some possible strands of a more coherent and integrated framework are outlined, which indicate some potentially fruitful avenues for further development. The paper concludes with illustrations of this outline for the food chain and land use agenda of the Research Councils' Rural Economy and Land Use (RELU) initiative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociological understanding of generations can be enhanced by avoiding defining them rigidly as chronological cohorts but rather linking people's accounts of their generational experience with an historically informed political economy. It then becomes possible, for example, to understand the complexity of generational politics. This paper uses data on the ‘War Generation’ taken from the Exeter Politics of Old Age project to link an empirically based political economy of generational inequality with a cultural sociology of generations. The ‘War Generation’ recognizes itself and is referred to by others in terms of a common identity. It is also an historical generation; its values, attitudes and, above all, sense of national solidarity and mutual obligation were forged in the direct experience of war. But it is also divided by divergent economic interests in property and pension rights based on the historical experience of the life course by successive groups and this segmentation can be observed in political action. The political culture of the War Generation manifests both continuity and change. Understanding these dynamics requires listening to people constructing their worlds, understanding their full range of historical experiences, and analysing the conditions for their conflicts and their cohesion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the economic convergence of the European Union in terms of the effects of European Monetary Union (EMU), which began in 1999 and possible conflict with, ‘social mobility’ in Europe. Our focus is on the low rate of mobility in the labour market. We assume that this is due to psychological and social aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes issue with Stehr and Grundmann's argument in this journal that sociology's poor record of contribution to practical knowledge results from sociologists' misguided attachment to the idea that social phenomena are peculiarly complex, and so peculiarly resistant to efforts at practical knowledge formation. Stehr and Grundmann develop their thesis by contrasting sociology to economics, claiming the latter's superior methods and disciplinary cultures enable it to contribute more successfully to solving practical problems. We argue that Stehr and Grundmann's comparison of the relative success of economics and sociology as policy sciences underestimates the extent to which the complexity argument has been destructive of economics' capacity to contribute practical knowledge, and overestimates the importance of disciplinary methods and cultures in explaining the use of economics in policy making. Further, we argue that the 'complexity argument' can contribute to better policy making, by virtue of its capacity to highlight the dangers of simplistic or fundamentalist solutions to social problems with complex causes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The assertion about the unique 'complexity' or the peculiarly intricate character of social phenomena has, at least within sociology, a long, venerable and virtually uncontested tradition. At the turn of the last century, classical social theorists, for example, Georg Simmel and Emile Durkheim, made prominent and repeated reference to this attribute of the subject matter of sociology and the degree to which it complicates, even inhibits the development and application of social scientific knowledge. Our paper explores the origins, the basis and the consequences of this assertion and asks in particular whether the classic complexity assertion still deserves to be invoked in analyses that ask about the production and the utilization of social scientific knowledge in modern society. We present John Maynard Keynes' economic theory and its practical applications as an illustration. We conclude that the practical value of social scientific knowledge is not dependent on a faithful, in the sense of complete, representation of social reality. Instead, social scientific knowledge that wants to optimize its practicality has to attend and attach itself to elements of social situations that can be altered or are actionable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'new rural sociology' arguably represented the most significant watershed in the development of rural sociology during the 1970s and 1980s. I argue, however, that the new rural sociology, especially its dominant traditions of Chayanovian and neo-Leninist Marxism, has now been almost entirely superseded as a theoretical position in agrarian political economy by the international food regimes, commodity chains/systems analysis, regulationist, and actor-network traditions. In addition, Wageningen School research on `farming styles' and the 'cultural-turn' within rural sociology and rural studies have arisen, in part, as challenges to the more structuralist styles of reasoning within agrarian political economy. Parallel trends in the sociology of development are also discussed. The paper concludes with an appraisal of the strengths and weaknesses of these new late twentieth century traditions in agrarian political economy, particularly in comparison with the new rural sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A considerable amount has been written recently on the concept of exploitation, which has extended its meaning beyond Marx's original usage. While the concept has lost its association with the theory of surplus value and ideas about the right of workers to their product, there is still no agreement on how exploitation should be conceptualized. It is in the context of such conceptual debate that this paper brings a historical perspective by focusing on how Adam Ferguson, two and a half centuries ago, anticipated much of the modern reformulation of the concept. Methodologically, this anticipation is not shown by finding vaguely matching quotations from modern and classic works, but follows Foucault and examines the similarity in the meaning of the vocabulary in the context of the different problematics within which they occur. In this regard Ferguson's work has three characteristics which are also to be found in many modern works: exploitation is understood as economic exploitation; it is approached through the notion of human agency; and the discussion of exploitation is integrally linked to an ethical concern about its injustice. Such a historical interest is useful for a number of reasons. First, it augments the conceptual analysis which has so far dominated the debate about the term. Second, it demonstrates part of the origins of some of the modern reformulations of exploitation. Ferguson's work anticipates those writers who perceive exploitation to involve inequality of power and control in the labour process, and to involve situations where skills are not the determinant of economic reward and where workers are denuded, diminished and impoverished. In this respect Ferguson follows those modern writers who tend to merge exploitation with alienation. Finally, a discussion of these particular antecedents of the concept is useful to illustrate the distinctiveness of Ferguson's social thought and to define his major contribution to the development of sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social sciences offer two distinct approaches to understanding society. One originated with the Scottish moral philosophers and shaped the discipline of economics. The other emerged from the French enlightenment and influenced the study of sociology. The two approaches are based on radically different perceptions of man and man's relation to society. This paper explores these alternative hypotheses and examines some major implications. It concludes that the hypothesis reaching back to the Scottish philosophers provides the basis for a unified approach in the social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on several abstracts on sociology. "Ontology matters: The relational materiality of nature and agro-food studies," by David Goodman examines This paper examines the question of ontological choice in agro-food studies, and emphasizes that such choices are consequential, determining analytical points of entry, arenas of theory and praxis, and normative positioning. These questions are explored by examining the privileged place of the labor process in the development of agro-food studies and, as a more specific illustration, in analyses of agro-biotechnology. It is suggested that the modernist ontological priorities embedded in the unreconstructed conceptualization of the labor process not only have been ignored but also have found an unexamined place in post-structuralist agrarian political economy. The discussion closes by reviewing the strengths and weaknesses of actor-network theory as an alternative avenue of critical engagement with the new bio-politics of agro-food networks. "A matter of life and death? Men, masculinities and staying behind in rural Ireland," by Caitriona Ni Laoire is set within the context of a growing interest in the gendered nature of rurality and of rural life, and in particular in the context of an emerging literature on rural masculinities. It focuses on rural men and in particular on the phenomenon of rising male rural suicide rates.