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Infrastructure investments, a core element of slum upgrading, play a role in improving the livelihoods of over 1 billion slum residents globally. Established planning practices often successfully deliver functional infrastructure but evidence shows that their contribution to improved livelihoods often either is absent or declines sharply after some time. To explain this limited effectiveness, this article identifies the missing link between infrastructure delivery and livelihood improvements as lying in the appropriation process, that is, the uptake and embedding of infrastructures into the daily practices of residents. Recent insights from sociotechnical transitions studies help to conceptualise appropriation. The authors use Munyaka informal settlement in Eldoret town, Kenya as a case to investigate the mechanisms of new infrastructure uptake. Findings indicate that appropriation is a social process that proceeds in three steps: reception, domestication and institutionalisation. This process is driven by the need to maintain or adjust residents' livelihood practices relative to prevailing socioeconomic and spatiotemporal conditions. The study concludes that appropriation is a significant process that planners should try to anticipate. Prevalent approaches to participation have to be modified accordingly. This is essential for planning to improve livelihoods in slums. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent decades have seen a blurring of the line between extremist movements and mainstream politics, driven by rising sectarian polarization. This development has been linked to digital media, with suggestions that so-called echo chambers may drive political radicalization. To understand the social processes taking place inside such digital spaces, this article draws on Randall Collins and the Durkheimian tradition to develop a theory of discursive community formation. Empirically, we analyze 20 years of discussion on the White Power forum Stormfront, employing natural language processing to study discursive evolution as members become socialized into the community. Our findings suggest that digital media provide space for conversational rituals that instill in people a sense of social membership and intersubjectivity, contained in the elaboration of a shared discourse, within which certain beliefs become sacred and unquestionable. This provides a potential social mechanism linking echo chambers to the rise of sectarian polarization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Tasmanian forestry industry has undergone major transition due to industry readjustments and critique from environmental movements. This article focuses on how Tasmanian forestry workers think and feel about an industry in transition. Through the sociological lens of habitus, it investigates how these workers seek to behave in ways that they see as reflecting moral, ethical, and sustainable behaviour. Thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews is used to explore how forestry workers continue or alter their everyday practices and how their dispositions, formed in the crucible of the forest, shape these social processes. The article demonstrates that as structural changes transform the lives of workers, the people who live and work in the forest are nonetheless trying to understand, articulate, and respond to the changes in ways that they see as reflecting ethical and sustainable behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops the concept of 'haptic grammar' to encourage greater scholarly focus on the sensory aspects of bodily motion used to generate movement, knowledge of one's body in an environment, and thus being-in-the-world. It ethnographically examines how swimmers learn specific motions – 'the catch', sculling, hand entry – to illustrate broader questions of how we learn to move our bodies. Focusing on these specific motions emphasises the importance of shared sensory knowledge and perception for learning enskilled bodily movement. More than simply knowing what to move when and how, learning how to sense how one moves one's body parts is a crucial social process that swimmers become more skilful at via interlocutions among themselves and with their coaches regarding specific motions of specific body parts. This article illustrates how such socialised knowledge requires a shared haptic grammar to become more skilful at moving through the water and thus become 'swimmers'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on an interview study from Sweden (n = 80), this article develops the concept of media resentment as a tool for understanding contemporary developments such as the diminished trust in news media and journalism. We view media resentment as a complex of feelings and ideas that are both individual and social, embodied, and ideal. Media resentment is defined as the feeling that the media – intentionally or unintentionally – are denying you or endangering what you have rightfully earned, whether by not giving it to you, by directly telling you to abstain from it or by intervening in social processes so that your enjoyment of what you have earned becomes impossible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deliberation theory posits that users' willingness to participate in online comment sections should increase if the discussions are more evidence-based. However, extant empirical research does not clearly support this assumption. The current study argues that social comparison processes and the metacognitive perception of knowledge mediate the relationship between evidence in comments and participation intention in different ways. Findings from two online experiments (NStudy1 = 368; NStudy2 = 854) support this assumption: For three different topics, the results show that providing evidence in comments, as opposed to merely opinions, increases participants' perceived knowledge by increasing their factual knowledge. At the same time, evidence in comments decreases participants' perceived knowledge through social comparison with other commenters. Higher perceived knowledge is related to increased participation intention. In summary, the studies reveal psychological mechanisms that explain why high deliberative quality of online discussions does not necessarily stimulate further user participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we argue that urban studies should consider freight logistics as an integral part of ongoing urban transformations. The movement of goods is increasingly shaping cities, and the implications for sustainability, liveability and justice are uncertain. Still, freight logistics has been largely overlooked in urban studies. This paper seeks to remedy this. First, we review current literature on freight logistics in cities, and find that it is broadly characterised by what has been called a 'technical-rational model'. Second, we situate urban logistics in social and political processes of urban change. Finally, we point to key areas for urban scholars to explore at the intersections between urban logistics and urban change to better understand the role of freight logistics in urban sustainability transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarly debates about the 'difficult heritage' associated with National Socialism typically rest with the preservation, memorialization or eradication of the visible remains of the Third Reich. Heritage, though, is more than a tangible place or object. It is also a process of social and cultural engagement where acts of remembrance (or concealment) reflect contemporary politics and social values. The tension between a distinct sense of historical place and the present-day reality of a voided landscape is illustrated keenly through a case study of Adolf Hitler's Berlin Führerbunker. Despite being physically absent from today's cityscape, Hitler's bunker has long generated both concern about the potential for becoming a neo-Nazi pilgrimage site, and curiosity among international tourists, keen to see where the Nazi dictator met his end. Tracing tourist activity since 1945, and exploring recurring efforts to contain, destroy or expose the site, this article posits that the Führerbunker has become an effective countermemorial, its very absence from the contemporary cityscape sparking public discussions among visitors and fostering a critical, grassroots reflection upon the challenges of handling legacies of dictatorship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main purpose of this paper is to provide a critical overview of the key contributions made by Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre in Qu'est-ce que l'actualité politique? Événements et opinions aux XXIe siècle. Whereas Enrichment: A Critique of Commodities is essentially a study in economic sociology, Boltanski and Esquerre's latest book reflects a shift in emphasis towards political sociology. As demonstrated in this paper, their inquiry into the ontologie de l'actualité – that is, the ontology of contemporary reality – contains valuable insights into the relationship between the production, circulation, and consumption of news, on the one hand, and the emergence of processes of politicization, on the other. The first half of this paper comprises a summary of the central arguments developed in Boltanski and Esquerre's investigation, before moving, in the second half, to an assessment of its most significant limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The immanent approach adopted by most contemporary representatives of the Critical Theory tradition has generally the purpose of offering a foundation for social criticism that, without relying exclusively on explicit or factually accepted principles, avoids both the potential arbitrariness of subjective judgment and the appeal to transcendent criteria. However, this project has not yet paid much attention to the socio-epistemic elements related to the intersubjective praxis of criticism. Based on this concern, I intend to explore the possibility of immanent criticism by using the epistemic category of dissonance. I will begin by showing how Davidson's notion of irrationality can overcome the problematic separation between healthy and pathological behavior found in Festinger's classical theory of cognitive dissonance and serve as an indicator of epistemic contradictions that can lead to social change. Thereafter, I will explain the link between these approaches and both Brandom's inferential semantics and Honneth's normative reconstruction. At the end of the first part, I expect to show an articulated picture of how dissonance can serve as a key for the analysis of inconsistencies present both in the belief systems and in the institutions and practices that constitute forms of life. In the second part, I will reconstruct three possible objections to this comprehensive approach in relation to the role of the individual in processes of social criticism and to the notions of progress and rationality that the approach adopts. I will analyze here what kind of meta-criterion is necessary to overcome the discomfort generated by the experience of dissonance so that it leads to social change. Taking up the Hegelian-Pragmatist idea of accumulation of experiences, I will argue that such a meta-criterion refers to the possibility of gathering and using available and non-endogenous socio-epistemic resources that allow reconfiguring the foundations of the questioned form of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lyn Spillman's book, "What Is Cultural Sociology?" provides a comprehensive overview of the field of Cultural Sociology. The book is organized into chapters that cover various aspects of culture, including rituals, symbols, evaluations, norms, and categories. Spillman compares Cultural Sociology to other disciplines, such as Anthropology, and highlights the importance of history in this subfield. The book is well-referenced and includes clear descriptions of terminology, making it accessible to readers who are new to the subject. Spillman's analysis of everyday phenomena from a critical analytical lens challenges readers to think more deeply about the social processes of meaning-making. [Extracted from the article]

This paper explores the relations between self-esteem and competition. Self-esteem is a very important good and competition is a widespread phenomenon. They are commonly linked, as people often seek self-esteem through success in competition. Although competition in fact generates valuable consequences and can to some extent foster self-esteem, empirical research suggests that competition has a strong tendency to undermine self-esteem. To be sure, competition is not the source of all problematic deficits in self-esteem, and it can arise for, or undercut goods other than self-esteem. But the relation between competition and access to self-esteem is still significant, and it is worth asking how we might foster a desirable distribution of the latter in the face of difficulties created by the former. That is the question addressed in this paper. The approach I propose neither recommends self-denial nor the uncritical celebration of the rat race. It charts instead a solidaristic path to support the social conditions of the self-esteem of each individual. The paper proceeds as follows. I start, in section 2, by clarifying key concepts involved in the discussion. In section 3, I identify ten mechanisms that support individuals' self-esteem and impose limits on competition. I focus, in particular, on the challenges faced by people in their practices of work. In section 4, I outline prudential and moral arguments to justify the use of the proposed mechanisms. Section 5 concludes with remarks on the role of social criticism in the processes of change implementing the mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study builds a framework for research on relationships between national media systems and the cultural systems of specific social problems. In the case of U.K. and U.S. news coverage of the social problem of climate change, ethnographic fieldwork and a computational text analysis method known as topic modeling show that three processes are highly salient for understanding the connections between media systems and the cultural systems of social problems: (1) the economic underpinnings of media organizations; (2) relationships between media outlets and between outlets and their audiences; (3) longer histories of research, activism, and policymaking around social problems. This framework can enhance research on the specific, evolving roles that media play in supporting democratic processes and addressing social problems in different national economic, political, and media system contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article aspires to cast light on aspects of the radical character of Walter Benjamin's work, that, sadly, have not, to date, provoked much discussion in the literature on him. The main issue it elaborates is his dialectic between fetishized, reified social form, and content-essence, which forms the core of the concept of critique in his philosophy. In Benjamin's case, the concept of illusion, or, as the notion is described in his texts, of phantasmagoria, or of the image, holds a special gravity that comes to the fore if it is connected not only to commodity fetishism but also to the fetishism of social forms as a process, and the concept of cracks in capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What accounts for overarching trajectories of civil wars? This article develops an account of civil war as a social process that connects dynamics of conflict from pre- to post-war periods through evolving interactions between nonstate, state, civilian, and external actors involved. It traces these dynamics to the mobilization and organization of nascent nonstate armed groups before the war, which can induce state repression and in some settings escalation of tensions through radicalization of actors, militarization of tactics, and polarization of societies, propelled by internal divisions and external support. Whether armed groups form from a small, clandestine core of dedicated recruits, broader networks, social movements, and/or fragmentation within the regime has consequences for their internal and external relations during the war. However, not only path-dependent but also endogenous dynamics shape overarching trajectories of civil wars. During the war, armed groups develop cohesion and fragment in the context of evolving internal politics, including socialization of fighters, institution-building in the areas that they control, which civilians can collectively resist, competition and cooperation with other nonstate and state forces, and external influence. After the war, armed groups transform to participate in continuing conflict and violence in different ways in interaction with multiple actors. This analysis highlights the contingency of civil wars and suggests that future research should focus on how relevant actors form and transform as they relate to one another to understand linkages between conflict dynamics over time and on continuities and discontinuities in these dynamics to grasp overarching trajectories of civil wars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literature on bodily habit has often emphasised the inculcation of new bodily skills and embodied ways of being in practice. However, recent work demonstrates that skilled experts do focus on the body, its sensuous information, and engage in conscious and deliberate forms of bodily awareness during the performance of bodily skills. In this article, I present data from interviews with barbell coaches (CrossFit, powerlifting, and Olympic weightlifting) and yoga teachers in order to explore the social transmission of bodily knowledge. I analyse accounts from these experts about the techniques and approaches they use to teach bodily skills, focusing on objective, subjective, and intersubjective strategies. I argue that while bodily knowledge is difficult to articulate, its fundamentally social basis means that it can be translated through coordinated activities and shaped by social processes. I thus advance literature on bodily knowledge by accounting for deliberation and reflexivity in learning bodily skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we develop an exploratory analysis of some of the interactional strategies developed by palliative care (PC) professionals in order to prepare end-of-life (EoL) talks with patients and their families, namely in the frame of specifically social problem-solving work which they develop on a daily basis. In this sense, our object of analysis is not EoL talks in themselves, but the broader social processes that tend to precede them in PC, that is, all the work both of approaching the patient and his or her family and of coordination within the teams that PC professionals routinely do in order to propitiate EoL talk. In this way, we don't envisage EoL talks as a conversation between two parties, with a patient on one side and a doctor on the other side, but as a wider social process which relies upon strong and previous professional engagement. The analysis conducted herein was carried out on data collected under the projects ETIC – Managing EoL trajectories in palliative care: a study on the work of healthcare professionals (Ref. PTDC/SOC-SOC/30092/2017) and Building paths towards death: an analysis of everyday work in palliative care (Ref. PTDC/CS-SOC/119621/2010), both financed by the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (FCT); in particular the data obtained through 17 months (12 in the first project and 5 in the second one, still in progress) of ethnographic observation carried out at two hospital internment units providing PC in Mainland Portugal and 42 (37 in the first project and 5 in the second one, still in progress) in-depth interviews to professionals in PC – physicians, nurses, and social workers. As main results, we present several theoretical and empirical elements relevant to the analysis of the field of EoL communication in the context of interactions between healthcare professionals, patients and their families. Following earlier studies on the same theme, we show how the work of preparing EoL conversations refers to a broader social process preceding those conversations. We believe that our findings may contribute to elucidating this dimension of the intervention of PC professionals, thus being instrumental for the future definition of systematised guidelines and recommendations in the framework of PC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agent-based social simulations are typically described in imperative form. While this facilitates implementation as computer programs, it makes implicit the different assumptions made, both about the functional form and the causal ordering involved. As a solution to the problem, a probabilistic graphical model, Action Network (AN), is proposed in this paper for social simulation. Simulation variables are represented by nodes, and causal links by edges. An Action Table is associated with each node, describing incremental probabilistic actions to be performed in response to fuzzy parental states. AN offers a graphical causal model that captures the dynamics of a social process. Details of the formalism are presented along with illustrative examples. Software that implements the formalism is available at http://actionnetwork.epizy.com. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how subjective experiences of social mobility are informed by dimensions of identity other than class (e.g. ethnicity, gender). Drawing on in-depth interviews with British-born young women of Bangladeshi Muslim, working class origins in higher education, I critically interrogate their articulations of class positioning and trajectory and the interplay between participation in education and employment and gendered identities. Findings evidence the multifarious and value-ridden character of class signifiers, the relational nature of class positioning and the entrenchment of middle-classness and Whiteness, and testify to the compounding tensions experienced by upwardly mobile individuals of minority ethnic origins. The pursuit of upward mobility through participation in higher education and employment is also shown to entail shifts in gendered expectations and strains in performing valued gendered identities. Ultimately, I argue that social mobility processes are better understood as involving a movement across material and symbolic spaces where markers, dispositions, and practices linked to individuals' class, ethnicity, religion, and gender acquire differential value. This intersectional lens enables a complex and nuanced picture to emerge, which foregrounds multiple tensions, displacements, and resulting inequalities in experiences and outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how a focus on commodities, and associated 'follow-the-thing' methodologies, might help nuance and deepen traditional historical narratives of the natural-ice trade between Norway and Britain in the 1850–1920 period. The article outlines these approaches and their potential to prompt richer understandings of the broader social impacts of the extraction or production of commodities, and their sale and consumption. This approach suggests that a more extensive, encompassing engagement with commodity flows and their wider social and cultural imprint could allow a clearer sense of how commodities helped to constitute the modern world. In turn, more fine-grained appreciations can be generated of the entwined historical processes and social impacts that shaped the rise and fall of natural ice as a commodity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article situates international expatriate schools in their cultural and political economy by drawing attention to the tensions between a cosmopolitan educational ethos and processes of social, economic and legal enclavement. Based on extensive multi-sited ethnographic research in the international school sector, we show how cosmopolitan claims of openness mirror a relative closure and 'offshore-like' enclavement. To do so, we build upon the notions of modularity and extractivism, which we use as heuristics to analyse social and spatial practices of defining boundaries. Gazing beyond the main foundational myth of international schools, we first outline their concomitant extractive roots. Second, we shed light on the conditions of international teachers' circulation worldwide. Third, we examine the territorial entanglements and disentanglements that characterise international schools. Finally, we investigate the tensions induced by a cosmopolitan educational ethos whose discourse of inclusion is inevitably paired with practices of exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The inadequacies of residential census geography in capturing urban residents' routine exposures have motivated efforts to more directly measure residents' activity spaces. In turn, insights regarding urban activity patterns have been used to motivate alternative residential neighbourhood measurement strategies incorporating dimensions of activity space in the form of egocentric neighbourhoods – measurement approaches that place individuals at the centre of their own residential neighbourhood units. Unexamined, however, is the extent to which the boundaries of residents' own self-defined residential neighbourhoods compare with census-based and egocentric neighbourhood measurement approaches in aligning with residents' routine activity locations. We first assess this question, examining whether the boundaries of residents' self-defined residential neighbourhoods are in closer proximity to the coordinates of a range of activity location types than are the boundaries of their census and egocentric residential neighbourhood measurement approaches. We find little evidence that egocentric or, crucially, self-defined residential neighbourhoods better align with activity locations, suggesting a division in residents' activity locations and conceptions of their residential neighbourhoods. We then examine opposing hypotheses about how self-defined residential neighbourhoods and census tracts compare in socioeconomic and racial composition. Overall, our findings suggest that residents bound less segregated neighbourhoods than those produced by census geography, but self-defined residential neighbourhoods still reflect a preference towards homophily when considering areas beyond the immediate environment of their residence. These findings underscore the significance of individuals' conceptions of residential neighbourhoods to understanding and measuring urban social processes such as residential segregation and social disorganisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasingly assertive position of social media as a news source means that news audiences can no longer depend on traditional journalists for information verification. Instead, they must determine the news credibility on their own. The majority of information credibility studies have considered news audiences' information evaluation as a purely cognitive endeavor, implying that individuals can arrive at valid information without social validation. By drawing on self-categorization theory, this article re-conceptualizes audiences' acts of news authentication by considering it not as a one-off activity under the uncontested control of the individual, but as a cycle of collective authentication strategies whereby individual authentication and social validation are entangled in the context-dependent processing of social news. To do this, we unpacked the social dimension of news authentication by looking at the social motivation, strategies, as well as the consequences that support it through a series of focus group discussions in Singapore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International development policy and programming that is geared towards women's empowerment through reversing normalization around gendered violence tends to focus either on social norm change (in line with much social science research) or, more commonly, on increasing women's paid work. In this article, we argue that neither exclusive focus on social norm/mindset change nor on women's economic engagement can come to grips with what sustains or may end violence. This is because such approaches cannot unpack the intersectional and dynamic interaction of social relationships, power, institutions and environmental dimensions that shape perceptions, attitudes and behaviours. We suggest that Bourdieu's concept of habitus, combined with a concept of collective agency, pushes us to focus on the dynamics of the different spheres and types of relationships that sustain violence and can help us to untangle them. Drawing on data from Myanmar and Nepal, we argue that understanding the complexity of how different forms of violence feed from each other and link to symbolic, structural and behavioural dimensions is critical alongside a clearer idea of how collective agency can facilitate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we examine the concept of resilience. Debates range from defining it as an individualised attribute to understanding it as a relational social process. Concerns about an ageing population alongside a growing interest in well-being have led to an increase in the use of the term 'resilience' in UK policy and political rhetoric. Developing strategies for 'bouncing back' from difficult circumstances has been at the heart of much discussion of resilience. Drawing on qualitative data from interviews and focus groups with older people in the UK, we explore their perspectives on resilience. We found that relationships, including intergenerational ones, are crucial to older people's understandings of resilience. Our data showed that narratives from the past were used to sustain resilience in the present and that negotiation and exchange between generations, as well as intergenerational connections in the community, fostered resilience among our participants. We found that relationality was at the heart of older people's perspectives on resilience and that the social process of resilience was acted out in their everyday interactions with others as well as through their memories of past interactions. This article argues that recognising the significance of these daily practices contributes to a more nuanced understanding of resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Low-carbon innovation is usually depicted as an exemplar of pursuit of the common good, in both mainstream policy discussion and the emerging orthodoxy of transition studies. Yet it may emerge as a key means of intensifying inequality. We analyse low-carbon innovation as a social and political process through the prism of differential risk-classes, focusing on the pivotal global case of emergence of the Chinese middle-class in seaboard megacities, especially regarding the profound challenges of urban e-mobility transition. This approach shows emergence of this still-forming sociopolitical grouping as tightly and complementarily coupled with the assembling of innovations that meaningfully tackle global risks, such as climate change, while also intensifying existing inequalities. Misrecognition of the duality of low-carbon innovations as both moral technologies and as relatively expensive consumer products has the potentiality to be a key mechanism of this process, thereby serving to reproduce, constitute and legitimize inequalities in novel and unexpected ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peer work and peer mentoring are dynamic social processes that have reciprocal benefits for both mentor and mentee in tackling issues around reoffending and substance misuse. Narratives of peer mentors and desistance were collected from probation peer mentors, Criminal Justice Drugs Team mentors and health trainers, to explore identity transformation and how the criminal justice system supports ex-offenders in desistance. Criminal justice practitioners were also interviewed to explore the importance of relational support networks. Themes that emerged from the research include the transformative potential of peer work and how peer workers can become role models for other offenders. Peer workers are 'experts by experience', using personal narratives of desistance to inspire hope in others. Influential criminal justice personnel are key to this process. Peer work can be the start of building a desisting identity, acting as a 'hook for change'. Peer workers are given spaces within criminal justice organisations to work, which fosters a sense of purpose, belonging, trust and responsibility. Seeing ex-offenders from a strengths-based perspective is integral to supporting ex-offender transition. However, peer workers are inconsistently validated by criminal justice personnel, which can impede their desistance, placing them in a liminal position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares insights into decision-making and behaviour developed by Kahneman and Tversky in behavioural economics with the main findings from studies of pay incentives in workplace sociology in the middle decades of the 20th century. The article shows how many of the insights offered by behavioural economists, such as loss aversion, were anticipated and considered by the workplace sociologists. It is argued that the sociological studies offer deeper and more convincing accounts of worker behaviour through a better understanding of the role of social structure, context, and social processes in framing and influencing action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social network sites are desirable media through which to seek supportive communication, and users can signal a need for assistance to large, diverse pools of potential support providers with a single message. According to social information processing theory, support seekers adapt to the lack of nonverbal cues online by leveraging the verbal elements of messages. This study classifies the variety of verbal strategies that Facebook users employ to seek support to better understand how people publicly initiate supportive exchanges online. A community sample of participants (N = 291) completed an online questionnaire in which they provided their most recent Facebook post that was intended to garner supportive communication. A thematic analysis revealed seven themes that describe the verbal strategies of support-seeking that social network site users enacted to request support. Implications for initiating supportive exchanges and revealing personal information online are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participatory health interventions have long been advocated as an approach to help marginalised community members exercise their rights as citizens, including access to health care. More than two decades ago, the Roma health mediation programme was established in Romania as a participatory community health intervention. Mediators are employed specifically to act as intermediaries between 'Roma patients' and local authorities or health professionals, with the overall aim to increase trust and improve access to health care. Based on data gathered during a year of ethnographic fieldwork with Roma health mediators in Romania, including participant observation and interviews, this article analyses the social processes by which participatory approaches produce both social inclusion and exclusion. It illustrates how mediators exceeded their remit of health and attempted to discipline communities into forms of neoliberal citizenship. Mediators reframed access to health care not as a right that community members already have, but as a benefit that must be individually 'earned' through the fulfilment of neoliberal citizenship. The article argues that far from being an 'empowering tool', community participation can extend the power of governing institutions and thereby may in fact contribute to the maintenance of a political status quo that perpetuates the precarisation of marginalised communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expansion of spaces for 'patient and public involvement' in health systems in the UK is a relatively recent phenomenon, and yet 'participation' as a principle for planned interventions in international development is well established as a field of practice and controversy. Development workers and scholars have passed through moments of enchantment and disenchantment with the idea that the true source of innovation, expertise, and workable (and sustainable) solutions is to be found not in the professionals but in communities of experience. Making 'local knowledge' the basis of interventions has proved unexpectedly problematic. How could incommensurable forms of knowing, across steep gradients of power be bridged? This article describes a decade-long experiment in participatory development in a remote Adivasi (tribal) region of western India in order to suggest the relevance of this experience for the very different context of patient and public involvement in healthcare settings. In particular, it highlights some general points about knowledge practices at the interface, and the human tendency to adjust, mirror, mimic, loop, and in other ways make the 'patient–professional' interface itself hard to navigate. The article suggests that self-reflective insight into these social processes is necessary for effective 'engagement' by professional and lay actors alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As people who live in closest proximity to us, the conduct of neighbours can have an impact upon our lives, even if they are relative strangers. While previous research has generally examined the positive effects of good neighbour interactions, neighbours can also be a source of nuisance, conflict and distress. In the advent of socio-structural processes of urban policy and change – such as gentrification and densification – the taken-for-granted conventions that once regulated neighbour interactions are being eroded, potentially leading to greater levels of neighbour problems and complaints. In this paper, we apply a latent modelling approach to identify subgroups of neighbourhoods based on their profiles of neighbour problems and to assess whether these subgroups are characterised by the degree of social change in the neighbourhood towards the dual processes of gentrification and densification. The findings show that high intensity problems are associated with both processes, but that class factors of gentrification are more influential than density in accounting for neighbour tensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do migrant entrepreneurs contribute to economic development? The growing attention to the contribution that migrants make tends to be skewed towards their economic role. Drawing on interviews with 49 new migrant business owners and 60 workers in the West Midlands, UK, we argue that benefits of diversity should be explored beyond the economic dividend. We engage with key theoretical developments in the fields of migrant entrepreneurship and diversity economics, and show that migrant entrepreneurs are characterised by the polarisation of their performance between high fliers and survival entrepreneurs. Despite their overall resource poverty, migrant entrepreneurs on the lower level create employment for their locality, cater to community needs and cushion the social incorporation of new communities in British society. We argue that debates around the benefits of diversity should incorporate not only economic growth, but also its impact on social processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This analysis of the work of George Herbert Mead and Alfred Sohn-Rethel compares their respective accounts of the formation of the self. The analysis proceeds from two important similarities: the effort to understand self-consciousness not as primordial but as the product of social processes, and the view that these processes form a circuit: the self arises from consciousness' return to itself, concluding a movement whereby consciousness is first externalized onto objects and then internalized, taking on the insular shape of self-consciousness. What sets the two accounts apart is the site from whence the self returns: objects. In Mead, the self returns from meaningful objects, and this same (intersubjective) meaning is entangled with the process of self-formation. In contrast, for Sohn-Rethel, the self returns from objects whose meaning is not established intersubjectively but objectively: the self is the unintended consequence of commodity exchange. In Mead, interaction among people affords meaning to objects and thus evokes the self; in Sohn-Rethel, interaction among commodities evokes an objective meaning that renders people as selves. Interpretative sociology should attend to the objectively and unconsciously meaningful forms analyzed by Sohn-Rethel. To illustrate this conclusion, reference is made to a certain experience of the social under neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hybridisation is often conceptualised as a ‘liminal’ occurrence, a ‘contact point’ or the product of an ‘interface’. This tends to invoke the very binaries that the concept seeks to overcome, because it assumes that a meeting between separate entities must occur for hybrid orders to emerge. Instead, this article argues that processes of hybridisation and how they assemble disparate types of authority lie at the very core of how social processes evolve. The argument is substantiated empirically by exploring the internal and external dynamics that have shaped and partly fragmented the security sector of Puntland, the largest and most stable region in Somalia (beyond Somaliland). The analysis centres on attempts by the United Nations (UN) to support the Puntland government in reducing numbers of the region’s constitutionally recognised security forces. In this analysis, the article shows how the Puntland government necessarily has to balance and negotiate conflicting demands of clan leaders, the global and regional security interests of individual governments, notably the United Arab Emirates and the United States of America, as well as continued pressure from the ‘international community’, formally represented by the UN, to act as a functioning regional centre within a federal Somalia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the authors examine how materiality can be understood as a co-creator and significant carrier of social processes. They focus on the ways children in large sibling groups relate to bedrooms and identify the logics at play when the organizing of children’s bedrooms and siblings are interwoven. Children have dreams and expectations of establishing a space by way of having their own room and stuff, and they implement this desire for ownership through specific strategies to obtain material presence and leave territorial marks, which afford them positioning and recognition within sibling relations and families. The authors’ analysis clearly shows that children gain material weight across households with varying material resources and different socio-cultural views on how to allocate these resources. It also shows that processes surrounding the material constitution of siblingships are embedded in a child-focused society with strong cultural norms about what constitutes a good life for children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union is facing multiple challenges. Departing from mainstream theory, this article adopts a fresh approach to understanding integration. It does so by taking two theoretical steps. The first introduces the structure–agency debate in order to make explicit the relationship between macro-structures, the institutional arrangements at European Union level and agency. The second proposes that the state of integration should be understood as the outcome of contestation between competing hegemonic projects that derive from underlying social processes and that find their primary expression in domestic politics. These two steps facilitate an analysis of the key areas of contestation in the contemporary European Union, illustrated by an exploration of the current crisis in the European Union, and open up the development of an alternative, critical, theory of integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contributing to research on social processes of cultural de-hierarchization, this article explores how critical recognition in elite newspapers is related to the recognition that authors receive from other agents in the literary field in the past half-century. We distinguish four types of institutional recognition: (a) long-term recognition in literary encyclopedias, (b) short-term recognition through literary awards, (c) recognition through bestseller list success, and (d) recognition through the prestige of publishers. Our study uses a sample of articles from 1955, 1975, 1995 and 2005 in French, German, Dutch and US elite papers (N=2,419), as well as further information on the extent to which fiction book authors discussed in the newspaper sample received the above forms of institutional recognition. We conduct cluster analysis to inductively establish how these forms of recognition are related, and multinomial logistic regression analysis to predict membership of clusters. Throughout the period 1955–2005 we consistently find three author categories: the unrecognized, the contemporary prestigious, and the historical prestigious. Countries differ, however, in the extent to which these categories are represented in newspaper literary coverage. Our analysis of factors determining membership of these clusters points to the lasting importance of symbolic capital, but also to the transnational nature of institutional recognition as local and international recognition show highly similar patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of care workers frequently reveal relatively high levels of job satisfaction despite poor employment conditions. The rewarding nature of care work, altruistic motivations and gendered social norms have all been used to explain why subjective job satisfaction is high despite poor pay and terms and conditions. Using data collected in case-study research with domiciliary and residential care workers, this article offers a new direction for care worker research that contextualizes the taken-for-granted assumption that care workers tolerate poor pay and conditions because women find the work satisfying and intrinsically rewarding. The article draws on cultural analyses of class to offer an alternative framework that identifies the wider social processes that can shape care workers’ job satisfaction. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In dialogue with Bishop and Phillips’ (2013) concern to establish what the category of the urban might mean in the context of megacities, this piece offers four provocations in the spirit of developing their analysis. The first is the need to attend to the specifics of megacities; the second insists on the importance of including those who navigate them in the analysis; the third is a concern to unwind different forms of urban traction, and the fourth is a need to be mindful of the intersecting logics of translocality. Drawing on my own empirical research into the urban translocalities drawn by the flip-flop trail, it concludes that globalization is less solid and more fragile and shifting than many of its theorists suggest. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When reviewing the present state of the art in agent-based models of social processes, one may encounter three basic types of models: theory-based models start with a set of assumptions about human behavior and test those assumptions in various scenarios; data-driven models are based on mass data (e.g. census, large surveys) and usually include a large number of agents; a third group of models combines different data sources and may also include qualitative information, that is, text descriptions of human behavior. Pushing this notion further, the motivation of this paper is to demonstrate how an agent-based model of a political process can be designed only using the stakeholders’ own descriptions and observation results. The simulation reproduces the discussions among the stakeholders and their subsequent decisions and is able to react to changes in their general settings. The simulation outcomes are also produced in text format so that they are easily understandable to stakeholders and other users. The simulation can be used to explore different sets of rules for the decision processes and their results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today’s dominant discourses of international development increasingly focus on human agency as the measure of development in terms of individual capabilities. The individualised understanding of development takes a ‘human-centred’ or ‘agent-orientated’ view of the barriers to development. This article seeks to critically engage with the view of the human and of human agency articulated within this approach. In this discourse, development is taken out of a macro-political-economy context, in which development policies are shaped by social and political pressures or state-led policies. Foucault’s insights on the rearticulation of power – shifting from the state-based, sovereign and disciplinary approaches of government ruling over society, towards the biopolitical or ‘human-centred’ approaches of governance through social processes – will be used to critically engage with the capabilities approach. This article genealogically draws out the changing nature of Western discourses of development and the understanding of policy practices as promoting the empowerment of the post-colonial other in order to examine how development and autonomy have been radically differently articulated in discourses of Western power and how today’s discursive framing feeds on and transforms colonial and early post-colonial approaches to the human subject. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Theorizing the social influence of racism and race has long been a concern of sociologists. Theories have addressed how racism, race and race inequality are organized and changed. Yet they have not addressed why racism and race are persistent despite social change. A social process theory of racism and race is proposed that analyzes their flexibility and persistence. It posits that racism is a social process where the meanings of race identities are traded across macro, meso, and micro levels of society. These trades legitimate social policies, are used to define a society as moral, and inform experiences. Black and white identities in light of the civil rights movement and its retrenchment, and the post-9/11 identity of Muslim Americans provide examples for applying the theory. I discuss the implications of the social process theory of racism and race for the future of race inequality in American society and sociological research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Accountability can be conceptualized as institutionalized mechanisms obliging actors to explain their conduct to different forums, which can pose questions and impose sanctions. This article analyses different ‘crises’ in immigration policies in Norway, Denmark and Germany along a descriptive framework of five different accountability types: political, administrative, legal, professional and social accountability. The exchanges of information, debate and their consequences between an actor and a forum are crucial to understanding how political-administrative action is carried out in critical situations. First, accountability dynamics emphasize conventional norms and values regarding policy change and, second, formal political responsibility does not necessarily lead to political consequences such as minister resignations in cases of misbehaviour. Consequences strongly depend on how accountability dynamics take place.Points for practitionersPolitical and administrative leaders as well as civil servants are faced with several demands from the wider public and from internal or external peers. There is a relationship between actors and forums that is important in understanding how public administration works. This relationship can be described as accountability dynamics. In cases of crises, these dynamics can overcome or sustain daily administrative practices and routines. Our accountability framework offers a systematic scheme to recognize five accountability relations which should be considered during reorganization processes or policy changing initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Childhood and consumption are each firmly established as substantive topics in sociology, yet the relationship between them remains narrowly considered. In this paper I attempt to deepen sociological understanding of one aspect of children’s consumption (their clothing) through reimagining the structure and agency problematic via a novel theorization centred on the concept of determinativity. I do this by engaging in a critical evaluation and adaptive use of existing theories, and by using data from an empirical study to illustrate and strengthen the theoretical claims I make. Children are argued to be exceptional consumers, in that what they come to wear on their bodies is subject to a different set of social processes than is the case for adults. At the same time, the theorization offered in this paper suggests ways forward for rethinking how individuals at all stages of the life course interactively engage in consumer societies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on a study conducted to investigate implication on digital technology by Canadian First Nations and New Zealand Maori people in the recording, reproduction and discussion of their cultural heritage. It mentions their initiatives that respond to digitization as a continuation of social process. It also discusses the limitations of conventional law regarding the protection of indigenous cultural properties.

Although ethnic concentration in the neighbourhood is often thought to constrain ethnic minorities’ social ties with majority group members, the results of empirical studies are mixed. However, previous studies have differed in the type of social ties examined—for example, neighbours, friends, marital partners—whereas it is questionable whether ethnic residential concentration constrains weak and strong social ties to the same extent. This study analysed survey data from the Netherlands and found that the greater the ethnic concentration in the neighbourhood, the less often ethnic minorities have social ties with the native Dutch. Ethnic residential concentration is also found to constrain the strength of those social ties in terms of support, advice and frequency of contact. Ethnic residential concentration thus not only constrains the probability of having a social tie with natives in general, but of strong social ties in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses ‘brainstorm’ interaction in a multimodal perspective. It shows how an innovation workshop facilitator is ‘doing facilitation’ by not only organizing group activities and managing turn-taking, but also drawing each group member out to participate actively and contribute to the group process. Institutional goals are transformed to individual conversational participation. Participants are helped to express their thoughts and engage in a social process of clarifying, developing and refining ideas. In the process the facilitator is socializing the participants into a particular participation framework, letting them collaborate in shaping a local community of practice. The facilitator is separating phases of activities to afford decoupling actions, creating specific local sequential environments for participants to produce particular kinds of talk, thus engaging a group of participants in a social process of collaborative idea development. The article will show how multimodal orientation to a range of semiotic resources (whiteboard, colored cards, speed markers, re-usable adhesive putty, body posture, gestures, gazes, pauses and talk) is used to manage topical talk, elicit talk from a particular person, manage speaker transition, secure progression and shifts, perform shift in participant identity and elicit talk performing particular social actions, explanations and accounts. A process is shaped in which collaboratively produced underspecified ideas are turned into ‘noticings’ in order to create slots for them to be explained and accounted for so that individual cognitive processes are made available for treatment in a social process of idea development, and selection of ideas is prioritized over discussion/rejection. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The North Laine in Brighton provides a useful case study in exploring different ways of experiencing and imagining urban life. The area possess many distinctive street forms and supports counter-cultural lifestyles, which emphasise environmentalism and alternative forms of capitalism, such as cooperative and collective organisation of the workplace. Drawing on the ideas and theories of Henri Lefebvre the essay focuses on (1) the various social and historical process that have conditioned and influenced the development of the area and (2) the various social power relations that have both sustained the area, allowing it to develop into its current format, and in turn question its future. A visual methodological approach is used to present the data and to convey the distinctive aesthetic of The North Laine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The construction of new housing has been the most visible of all the spatial changes to have affected the post-socialist suburban landscape. It is argued in this article that former summer-home settlements are a hidden component of contemporary residential suburbanisation in former socialist countries. The building of summer or weekend homes (dacha settlements in the former Soviet Union) around major cities for urban residents was a specific feature of socialist metropolitan planning. After removing construction restrictions, the stock of vacant dachas started to support the supply side of the suburban housing market. While dachas were a reserve of affordable housing during the recession of the 1990s, they served as a stock of building plots during the construction boom of the mid 2000s. In the Tallinn Metropolitan Area, former second homes are even more important than new post-1991 residential areas in terms of giving access to detached houses to the metropolitan population. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]