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ZusammenfassungSeit einigen Jahren beobachtet die sozialwissenschaftliche Schul- und Unterrichtsforschung die Rolle schulischen Lehr- und Lernmaterials. Fokussiert wird dabei vor allem die soziale Verwendung der meist bereits fertig vorliegenden Materialien im Vollzugsgeschehen des Unterrichts. Dieser Beitrag tritt einen Schritt zurück und beobachtet stattdessen die Herstellung und Verwendung solcher Objektevorihrer Produktreife. Anhand eines Fallbeispiels einer Kooperation zwischen zwei Schulen und einem bildungswirtschaftlichen Technologieunternehmen wird die Entwicklung und Erprobung einer Lernsoftware sowie dazugehöriger VR-Technologie untersucht. Es wird analysiert, wie Lehrkräfte und Firmenmitarbeiter/innen in die jeweils anderen Praxiskontexte eingebunden werden und dabei ihr technisches resp. didaktisches Wissen wechselseitig füreinander verfügbar machen. In der kooperativen Arbeit an digitalen didaktischen Objekten werden Grenzziehungen zwischen Schule und Unternehmen temporär transzendiert. Die Objekte, die auf dieser Basis anwendungsorientiert entwickelt werden, erweisen sich als Resultat einer trans-epistemischen kooperativen Regulation von didaktischen „Visionen“ und technischer „Machbarkeit“. Indem die verschiedenen Dimensionen der kooperativen gewerblichen Fertigung digitaler didaktischer Objekte sowie deren prototypisches Versuchsstadium in den Blick genommen werden, analysiert der Beitrag den Prozess der Digitalisierung von Unterricht als ein innovatives soziales Geschehen, das durch ökonomische, technische und didaktische Rationalitäten strukturiert wird.

In this article, we reflect on the particular temporal structure of pregnancies and prenatal entities with the aim to contribute to the field of the sociology of pregnancy. Medical models and technology shape today’s notion of pregnancy as a linear, nine-month developmental process that leads to the birth of a child. Through ultrasound technology and prenatal examinations, prenatal entities have thus historically gained a present ‘being’ as a developing, unborn child. While these ideas undoubtedly greatly influence the participants’ interpretations, a culturalistic perspective on time alone does not do justice to the phenomenon’s lived tensions and the temporal complexity of the phenomenon. From a Schutzian perspective of time, we have worked out how practices of pregnancy and the production of meaning are shaped by an interwoven back and forth between orientations to the past, present and future. Drawing on relevant works from the sociology of pregnancy, we work out five modes of temporal references that mold the phenomenon of pregnancy: joint imagination of the couple, in which the (un)born is anticipated as fantasies of the future (1), passivities of pregnancy, in which the desired future is experienced as unable to influence (2), the presentification of the unborn in and through visual and bodily-somatic contact moments (3), its futurization through the cultivation of a ‘not-yet’ (4) and prenatal losses, as a critical rupture with the anticipated and desired future (5). Our analysis underlines the potential of a time sociological perspective on pregnancy and the constitution of relationships and persons.

ZusammenfassungDie Systemtheorie positioniert sich in prominenter Weise als eine Sozial- und Gesellschaftstheorie, die sich aufgrund ihrer kybernetischen Denkfiguren und Begriffe besonders dazu eignet, die Digitalisierung der Gesellschaft soziologisch zu deuten. Angesichts dieses Anspruchs reflektiert dieser Beitrag die Bedingungen und Grenzen einer systemtheoretischen Beschreibung digitaler Sozialität. Selbst- und Fremdzuschreibungen der Systemtheorie als Theorie digitaler Sozialität rekapitulierend, betreibt er dazu eine Beobachtung zweiter Ordnung jenes kybernetischen Blicks, der Sozialität generell in funktional-formaler Weise als Prozess der Informationsverarbeitung versteht und Mensch und Computer damit gleichsam symmetrisiert. Es wird herausgearbeitet, dass die Systemtheorie zwar in der Tat gut geeignet ist, eine bereits digital konstituierte Sozialität zu beschreiben, ihr jedoch die Hervorbringung der Unterscheidung von Digitalem und Analogem gerade aufgrund ihrer kybernetisch-digitalen Theorieanlage latent entgleitet. Dies, so die Argumentation, manifestiert sich in einem blinden Fleck der Systemtheorie mit Blick auf Prozesse der Digitalisierung. Zur Bearbeitung dieser Leerstelle schlägt der Beitrag vor, Interfaces als soziotechnische Scharniere, die Analoges in Digitales übersetzen, soziologisch zu fokussieren. Denn erst diese Schnittstellen, so die These, ermöglichen einerseits die Symmetrisierung sämtlicher Entitäten im Register der Digitalität und machen andererseits das nicht-übersetzbare oder -übersetzungswürdige Analoge als „Rest“ des Digitalen intelligibel. Eine Sozialtheorie der Digitalisierung ist mithin angehalten zu rekonstruieren, wie eine Gesellschaft ihre analoge Umwelt laufend digital markiert, verarbeitet und schließlich vergisst.

ZusammenfassungIn den letzten Jahren haben viele Studien untersucht, welche Faktoren das Vertrauen in Medien beeinflussen können. Zu einigen dieser Faktoren gibt es vorläufige wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse, die eine klare Richtung andeuten, zu anderen ist die Forschungslage eher heterogen. Wir überprüfen daher anhand einer Trendstudie mit Befragungsdaten aus den Jahren 2017, 2018 und 2019 mit je 1200 Befragten, welche Personenmerkmale sich in Deutschland über einen längeren Zeitraum als stabile Einflussfaktoren erwiesen haben. Dazu führen wir blockweise Regressionsanalysen im Zeitverlauf durch. Neben soziodemografischen Faktoren und der Mediennutzung gehören dazu die Einstellungen zu Politik, Verschwörungsglaube und interpersonales Vertrauen. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass alle Gruppen von Variablen mit Medienvertrauen im Zusammenhang stehen, dass ihr Einfluss jedoch unterschiedlich groß ist. In komplexeren Regressionsmodellen wird der Einfluss mancher Variablen vom Effekt anderer Variablen überlagert – dies könnte eine Erklärung für die bislang äußerst heterogene Forschungslage zu beispielsweise dem Einfluss der Soziodemografika auf Medienvertrauen sein. Die Ergebnisse verdeutlichen auch, welche Rezipientinnen und Rezipienten den Medien weniger oder gar nicht vertrauen.

Sociotechnical imaginaries play a crucial role in the context of urban air mobility. At the beginning of this article, I present the Pop.Up, commonly described as ‘air taxi’, as one such vision. Taking the analysis of multiple visions as an orientation, I show secondly, how other temporal figures such as projective genres fulfil different functions to establish specific visions as dominant ones. By examining a press release about the Pop.Up, I show how distant futures are constructed trough explicating the problem of congestion in metropolitan cities. With the analysis of the stage performance by stakeholders from Airbus and Italdesign during the Geneva Motor Show 2017, where the Pop.Up was unveiled for the first time, I thirdly show that different futures fulfill different functions. Sociotechnical imaginaries visualized by concept videos demonstrate necessity, whereas projective genres communicated on a stage as collaborative action plans demonstrate feasibility. Stage performances, such as the one at the motor show, where the concept video was shown, offer a framework to establish specific sociotechnical visions. This linking between different future dimensions can be described as performative discourse strategy to make an artifact, in this case the Pop.Up, communicatively connectable to political discourses. The analysis of futures such as sociotechnical imaginaries regarding the question of politicization processes is thus supplemented by a perspective that examines projective genres such as collaborative action plans.

Crisis management is often conceived from the position of an omniscient narrator, albeit the general consensus that crises are subjectively interpreted and experienced. The paper makes an analytical attempt to de-homogenize the notion of crisis. We argue that the perception of crises differs and present a spatial perspective on crisis to foreground the positionality of different actor groups. By referring to the EHEC outbreak 2011 in Germany, we explore two spatial configurations that seem to be of particular relevance: territories embedded in a nested hierarchy and topologies of interconnected places. State authorities think and act strongly in terms of territorial borders and along sectoral boundaries. From their point of view, the crisis tends to be threatening due to its "transboundary" character. Medical experts, in contrast, coped with the crisis in trans-local networks of colleagues. For this group, the crisis was also an opportunity to substantially enhance professional knowledge.

How do residents of small towns that depend on oil and gas extraction or processing industries withstand economic boom and bust cycles? To answer this question, this article reports on a narrative analysis of residents’ life stories gathered from 37 adults of a small town on the Canadian prairies dependent on the oil and gas industry, employing the theories of narrative inquiry and narrative identity. Participants aged 30 to 76 were interviewed and their experiences of living in an unstable economy that is dependent mostly on a single resource extraction industry were explored. Specifically, we asked participants about the effect of economic change on factors related to resilience like family interactions, work choices, educational pathways, and the quality of their social lives. Our analysis of adult narratives looked for patterns in the relationship between risk exposure, promotive and protective factors at multiple systemic levels (individual, relational, cultural), and functional outcomes such as individual coping, community cohesion, and social and economic sustainability. Results show that a strong identity, in particular expressions of personal agency, communion, and engagement in meaning making are contributing factors to adult resilience in a context of economic change. Our results also highlight how positive attitudes towards a better future may inadvertently undermine the need for residents of oil and gas-dependent towns to commit to economic diversification and other potential resilience-promoting strategies. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s10804-020-09363-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

The term “curation” has taken on a host of meanings beyond the museum context. While there are marked differences between its meanings – including the specific act of exhibition-making as well as the act of keeping and tending to an existing collection in a museum – we here specifically foreground curation as a social process of selecting and negotiating various forms of (embodied) performances in public, transcending institutionalized contexts such as museums. We argue that, when combined with the idea of counter-narratives, the concept of curation can elucidate aspects of social practices and open up a useful heuristic for the analysis of representations and performances in the public sphere. Since these practices make extensive use of imaginaries of the past, this approach is suitable for combining perspectives from public history and anthropology.

ZusammenfassungDer Beitrag thematisiert die Mediensozialisation von Heranwachsenden im Zusammenhang mit Sexualität. Nach der Präsentation verschiedener empirischer Befunde zur Mediennutzung und zur Sexualität fokussiert er zunächst die Phänomene Pornografienutzung und Sexting, um daraus dann Anschlusspunkte für die Soziale Arbeit darzustellen.

Since 2012, judges and prosecutors in Benin have repeatedly protested against political interference and demanded compliance with their statutorily guaranteed independence. In 2014 and 2017, magistrates demonstrated in their judicial robes in the streets, protesting against the government's bill to deprive them of their right to strike and other freedoms. Benin has been described as a ‘success story of democracy’ (Stroh and Never, 2006, p. 1) and even as a ‘model democracy’ (cf. Kohnert, 1996, p. 78; Magnusson, 2001, p. 211; Bierschenk, 2009) since its peaceful transition to democratic conditions and its participation in a national conference in 1990/91. So why were magistrates in Benin demonstrating in the streets for the first time in the history of their profession? Based on fieldwork in Benin in 2009 and 2015 and archival research in 2017 in France, my paper analyses the change in the style of interactions between parts of the executive and parts of the judiciary in the history of the profession – a change from political negotiation to confrontation. Through their strikes and industrial action, magistrates fought for judicial independence; yet, at the same time they constructed legality and strengthened democracy because their actions emphasised the rule of law. My paper also considers the specifics of their strikes in the context of other striking civil servants. When magistrates, as bureaucrats, become politically active, it marks a transformation in their self-conception, as they are usually reserved and withdraw themselves from political and public spheres.

With chatbots, voice assistants, and social robots oriented towards the ideal of human communication and emulating it in design and fields of application, communication studies is challenged to deal with these “communicating” technical media. In our contribution we argue that for communication science the social theoretical differences between “human” and “machines” are less relevant than the conditions that make it more likely that an attribution of communicative competences to the machine occurs. Drawing on research on mediatization, we show how communication is produced, initiated, and stabilized under contemporary conditions. We then design a model that captures different degrees of attributions of communication to the machine (“Kommunikativierung”) driven by three driving forces: (1) the decline of human control over the communication process, (2) the rise of simulation of human mediation of meaning, and (3) the discursive attribution of communication to the machine.

A growing body of evidence indicates that napping is common among older adults. However, a systematic review on the effect of napping on the elderly is lacking. The aim of this systematic review was to (i) determine how studies evaluated napping behavior in older adults (frequency, duration and timing); (ii) explore how napping impacts perceptual measures, cognitive and psychomotor performance, night-time sleep and physiological parameters in the elderly (PROSPERO CRD42022299805). A total of 738 records were screened by two researchers using the PICOS criteria. Fifteen studies met our inclusion criteria with a mean age ranging from 60.8 to 78.3 years and a cumulative sample size of n = 326. Daytime napping had an overall positive impact on subjective measures (i.e., sleepiness and fatigue), psychomotor performances (i.e., speed and accuracy) and learning abilities (i.e., declarative and motor learning). Additionally, studies showed (i) consistency between nap and control conditions regarding sleep duration, efficiency and latency, and proportion of sleep stages, and (ii) increase of 24 h sleep duration with nap compared to control condition. Based on the findings of the present review, there is minimal evidence to indicate that napping is detrimental for older adults' nighttime sleep. Future studies should consider involving repeated naps during a micro-cycle in order to investigate the chronic effect of napping on older adults.Systematic review registrationidentifier: CRD42022299805.

This chapter examines how a particular kind of life course transitions, those between affiliations to categories of “human distinctions” like gender, ethnicity, or age, are culturally observed in terms of their normality or deviance. It asks how framings and doings of such transitions as (not) ‘normal’ are related to those of individuals in transition. To this end, it introduces the analytical framework of “un/doing differences” as a way of understanding categorizations of humans as the product of drawing distinctions and connects it to the concept of “doing transitions”. It argues that doing transitions can be understood as one mode of un/doing differences. To illustrate this point, the chapter presents reflections on how affiliations to human categories, combinations of affiliations, and of doing transitions between them are linked to cultural definitions of normality and deviance.

There is little research on the study success factors of refugee students in higher education. One approach to meeting the growing global demands is to provide online education specifically for refugees. This study examines specific personal characteristics of refugee students and their influence on success and retention in online education. Individual factors such as intrinsic motivation and language proficiency, cognitive functioning, and sociodemographic factors such as gender and country of residence influence retention of refugee students during online studies. The results indicate that sociodemographic factors (e.g., gender), cognitive factors (e.g., English proficiency), and external factors (e.g., country of residence) have a significant influence on study retention on refugee students.

ZusammenfassungFitnesssport und fitnesssportives Verhalten sind bei vielen Jugendlichen als fester Teil der Freizeit- und Alltagsgestaltung etabliert. Abseits von trainingswissenschaftlichen Untersuchungen betrachtet dieser Beitrag das jugendliche Leben im Kontext Fitness aus sportpädagogischem Blickwinkel. Es wird diskutiert, welche Motive das produktorientierte Fitnesssporttreiben begründen und wie diese mit aktuellen Besonderheiten des adoleszenten Lebens in Verbindung stehen. Durch den dargelegten autoethnografischen Zugang wird aufgezeigt, inwieweit das Untersuchungsgebiet Jugend, Fitness und Lifestyle erwachsene Forschende vor besondere Herausforderungen stellt. Ausgehend von diesen Erkenntnissen werden zentrale Charakteristika des Fitnesssports erarbeitet, bevor die Vorstellung des Forschungsdesigns rund um jugendliche Wissenskulturen und Handlungslegitimationen einen Ausblick in anstehende sportpädagogische Untersuchungen im Kontext Fitness gewährt.

In everyday life, we usually go by the one-body-one-person rule: one person has one body (and vice versa). This social belief builds on two assumptions: bodies are individual units and they (and ‘their’ person) are the same in different situations. This is also the conceptual resource for social theories that build on the notion of individuals. In this article, we turn it into a sociological topic. We develop a vocabulary for reconstructing bodily one-ness and bodily sameness as practically achieved social order, as body boundary work: what belongs to a body is a matter of local practices that define its situational contours, limits and margins. Practices of identification and personification draw on social memories and enact bodies as trans-situational entities. Persons and bodies, we argue, evolve in co-individuation. Personal corporality, then, can be conceptualized as a body of work that encompasses these practical efforts of boundary-making.

ZusammenfassungDie Etablierung des Internets als sozialer Raum stellte die größte Umwälzung menschlicher Kommunikations- und Interaktionsformen der letzten Jahrzehnte dar, wodurch altbekannte Delinquenzformen an die digitale Welt angepasst wurden, aber auch neue kriminalitätsbezogene Äußerungsformen entstanden. Der vorliegende Übersichtsartikel beschäftigt sich vorrangig mit kriminologischen und forensischen Erkenntnissen aus dem deutschsprachigen Raum zu Formen der Cyberkriminalität, die im Kontext von Partnerschaft, Sexualität und Peerbeziehungen auftreten: Neben dem Cyberstalking und Cybergrooming werden Cyberbullying (oder -mobbing) sowie das (Love- oder Romance‑)Scamming kurz vorgestellt und zentrale Forschungsergebnisse referiert. Die Darstellung dieser cyberkriminellen Ausdrucksformen verdeutlicht den stetigen Zuwachs an Bedeutung, den dieser Delinquenzbereich in den letzten Jahren verzeichnete, und unterstreicht gleichzeitig die Notwendigkeit einer spezifischen Cyberkriminologie dieser und anderer digitalen Delinquenzformen.

This article investigates whether and to what extent unfavorable local environmental conditions furnish an important motivator for environmental protest. We do so using individual-level data on objective and subjectively perceived residential road traffic and aircraft noise pollution, pertaining to the cities of Mainz (Germany) and Zurich (Switzerland). By referring to fine-grained noise data, we are able to test the predictive power of grievances and self-interest in explaining protest participation more stringently than has been the case in most previous studies. Theoretically, our study is inspired by Klandermans’ socio-psychological framework of political protest, the pressure-response approach, the self-interest perspective, and the collective-interest model. Our empirical findings only partially confirm the grievances assumption that unfavorable local environmental conditions in the form of residential road traffic and aircraft noise stimulate environmental protest. Noise caused by airplanes seems to be more “protest-inducing” than that produced by road traffic. It is not so much the objectively measurable noise level as its subjective perception and evaluation that are deciding factors. However, in line with Klandermans’ protest framework and other theories of political protest, there are more influential drivers of environmental protest, such as environmental concerns and a left-wing political ideology. Thus, the effects of residential road traffic and aircraft noise turn out to be relatively moderate. Ultimately, this means that our tailored measures of grievances corroborate a relatively well-established finding of protest research.

ZusammenfassungUnzivile Online-Diskussionen können Einstellungen zu gesellschaftlichen Streitfragen polarisieren, prosoziales Verhalten gegenüber bestimmten Gruppen reduzieren und potenzielle Teilnehmende von einer aktiven Beteiligung abschrecken. Um das Diskussionsklima zu verbessern und die dysfunktionalen Konsequenzen von unzivilen Online-Diskussionen zu reduzieren, werden neben der Intervention professioneller Community-Manager immer wieder die Potenziale zivilcouragierten Engagements durch die Nutzer*innen selbst diskutiert.Die vorliegende Studie untersucht, welche Faktoren hemmend oder begünstigend auf verschiedene Formen der Intervention von Nutzer*innen gegen Inzivilität in Online-Diskussionen wirken. Anhand einer Befragung von 575 Mitgliedern der Gruppe #ichbinhier prüfen wir den Einfluss verschiedener interventionshemmender und -begünstigenden Faktoren, die wir aus der Forschung zum Bystander-Verhalten ableiten, auf die Bereitschaft, sich mittels eigener Kommentare („tippen“) oder durch die Bewertung bereits vorhandener Kommentare („klicken“) einzubringen.Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die politische Facebook-Nutzung, das Gefühl persönlicher Verantwortung sowie die Erwartung einer Verbesserung des Diskussionsklimas die generelle Interventionsbereitschaft („klicken“ und „tippen“) in der untersuchten Gruppe begünstigen. Die eigene schriftsprachliche Kompetenz sowie die Erwartung sozialer Anerkennung spielen lediglich für die Intervention mittels eigener Kommentare eine Rolle; das Bewerten vorhandener Kommentare bleibt davon unberührt. Click-Speech erscheint demnach als eine alternative und weniger voraussetzungsvolle Interventionsform im Vergleich zur Intervention mittels Kommentaren.

While the diets of most people include meat, millions of individuals follow a meat-free diet. But why do people eat what they eat? Here we explored differences and commonalities in the eating motives of omnivores and veg*ns (i.e., both vegetarians and vegans). Specifically, we compared mean levels and rank order of 18 eating motives in two samples (Study 1: 294 omnivores, 321 veg*ns; Study 2: 112 omnivores, 622 veg*ns). We found that omnivores were more motivated than veg*ns by the eating motives of Traditional Eating and Habits, while veg*ns were more motivated by Animal Protection and Environmental Protection. Differences among groups in Health were inconsistent across studies. Despite these differences in mean levels, the rank order of the eating motives was very similar: Two of the top four eating motives of both diet groups in both studies were Liking and Health, while Social Norms, Social Image, and Religion were among the four least important motives of both groups. Overall, while we did find differences in the absolute importance of certain motives, we also found striking similarities in the relative importance of eating motives, suggesting that including a wide range of eating motives could be beneficial when examining dietary behaviors.

Organisational ambidexterity – the ability of a company to successfully link exploitation and exploration – is a fruitful approach for cross-border management. It is a crucial concept for media companies that, because of the dual (cultural and economic) character of their products, need to reconcile strategies of mere expansion with local customisation when engaging across borders. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with international media managers, this article captures patterns of ambidextrous strategising and organising in cross-border media activities. The article focuses on digitisation, which has altered the opportunities for balancing exploration and exploitation in internationalisation. The analysis reveals how, in this context, exploitation takes centre stage and how patterns of ambidexterity differ significantly depending on the media type and the background of the company.

Every day, media managers face different challenges in a constantly changing global economic, cultural and technological setting (Hollifield, Leblanc Wicks, Sylvie, & Lowrey, 2016, p. 110, 177; Albarran, 2013; Shaver & Shaver, 2008; Hollifield, 2001). Between all these challenges, questions on what a media company is today, how it might be defined and the kinds of features characterizing it often remain unanswered. These questions are rarely addressed by authors and scholars working in both business economics, journalism, media, and communication science, maybe because there is the existing assumption of a self-evident and generally accepted definition of the term “media company” (as argued by Sjurts, 2004, p. 390) which actually does not exist. The aim of this paper is therefore to offer an overview of the existing theoretical approaches used to define “media companies,” to identify possible shortcomings of each definitional approach and, deduced from there, to suggest a theoretically sound and empirically applicable approach, which takes into account the challenges and needs of the actual media landscape.

In this article, we draw on the volatile complexity of African migrant trajectories in Central America to broaden the scope of transnational scholarship. These trajectories are characterised by mobilities as well as immobilities, taking shape in particular local contexts. By focusing on the interplays between displacement and emplacement that are part of these trajectories, we aim to increase our understanding of the extent to which migrants still ‘on the move’ experience both temporal embeddedness and cross-border connectedness, thereby acknowledging and unravelling transnational lives as they ‘touch the ground’ en route. To do so, we build on long-standing scholarly commitments in Central and South America and recent field research in Costa Rica. We go into selected empirical cases to discuss the dynamics of travelling, dwelling and travelling again as part of African migrant trajectories across Central America. We then explore the value of a ‘shifting’ transnational social field perspective and indicate some challenges for future trajectory research.