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While therapy culture has long been a part of the repertoires through which people think about and practice their romantic relationships, it has been less prominent in how they envision friendship. However, based on our interviews on experiences of friendlessness in an Atlantic Canadian city, we show that therapeutic styles increasingly shape how people orient to friendship, even as friends rarely seek formal therapy to manage their conflicts. This article focuses on how modern therapy culture, with its emphasis on individual wellbeing, self-knowledge, and 'healthy' rather than 'toxic' relationships, presents people with conflicting cultural imperatives for how to practice their friendships. On the one hand, therapy culture encourages people to seek out friends to whom they can disclose their most intimate feelings and experiences – friends who will offer support, understanding, and validation. On the other hand, therapy culture equally cautions that one must maintain 'boundaries' to protect oneself from friends' personal revelations or 'traumas.' We ask what these dual imperatives mean for modern friendship and how people experience the tension between them. We argue that one reason modern friendship can be difficult is that divulging one's intimate feelings or experiences to a friend can be interpreted as either building intimacy or burdening others with one's problems, or crucially, both at the same time. Our findings lead us to ask how therapy culture might increasingly turn friendship into a reflexive object or something else to 'optimize' rather than providing an escape from relationships that demand 'work.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media is an important part of our daily lives, and it has many elements, such as cinema, news, etc. The goal of news agencies is to provide news to fulfill public needs in various fields, such as political ones. Political news should be based on a comprehensive analysis of facts, historical context, and the potential implications for different stakeholders. Understanding political news requires critical thinking and awareness of various perspectives. The data are eight selected topics from two news agencies (CNN and INA). Based on the qualitative approach, the study is conducted through the critical discourse analysis approach (CDA), in which the model is Van Leeuwen's legitimization strategy (2007). The article aims to identify the legitimization strategies used in the topics by investigating: a- which strategy is used mainly? What does it refer to? b- can ideologies/biases/power be revealed through topics only without the whole article? The article concludes that the authorization strategy is used more than rationalization. Authorization is connected to the political figures, and rationalization is connected more to the way the topics are formed. The article shows that power can be revealed mostly in the topics more than ideology or bias, as the last two need more information to be shaped. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I develop sociologist George Ritzer’s concept ‘simulated animal’ by focusing on rational systems, enchantment, and nonhuman animal corporeality and behaviour. I argue that simulated animals are nonhumans controlled, structured, or represented within consumer contexts. From this I develop what I am calling ‘simulated umwelt’. Simulated umwelt, as a concept, is a synthesis of zoosemiotics with Ritzer’s work and focuses on nonhuman animals’ experiences and representations within rationalized settings and consumer representation. This is accomplished by applying umwelt theory and analysis to the subjective experiential aspect of simulated animals via umwelt construction, in the ongoing pursuit of descriptive and critical approaches to nonhuman animals closely connected to consumption. I conclude by emphasizing the utility of simulated umwelt reconstruction for facilitating “truly” intersubjective descriptions of nonhuman experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Religião e Sociedade is the property of Instituto de Estudos da Religiao and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The commentary on 'workplace spirituality' is deeply polarized. Among advocates, the integration of spirituality and work is hailed as the ultimate cure-all for the problems facing the modern work organization. Conversely, critics see it as yet another form of capitalist appropriation. This article advances a neo-Durkheimian cultural sociological analysis of these polarized responses. Proponents espouse a schema of purification, which holds that once the moral pollutions of bureaucracy and rationalization are excised from the workplace, the spheres of spirituality and work will be integrated, which will lead to the sacralization of the latter by the former. This is assumed to end the compartmentalization of workers' professional lives and to imbue their workplaces with ethicality and existential meaning. By contrast, critics espouse a schema of pollution, which holds that any attempt to integrate spirituality and work is doomed to failure under capitalist conditions, for it will result in workers' spiritual lives suffering from alienation, instrumentalization, and commodification, and their work being oppressive, manipulative, and inhuman. We conclude with a reflection on the implications our analysis holds for future research on 'workplace spirituality'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to comparative data, suicide rates in Bohemia remained at a statistically high level in comparison to global-figures from the nineteenth-century until late in the twentieth, a matter of grave concern for successive political regimes. In the interwar-republic of Czechoslovakia, patriots were troubled that the high rates of suicide in Bohemia had failed to decline following the transition from the Habsburg empire into the new Czechoslovak state. The article uses sociological works to show how the problem of suicide was negotiated and rationalized in the context of the patriotic culture of the state. This involved eschewing the most compelling explanations of the problem in favor of those better adjusted to the political mood of the times, passing over immediate and apparent problems in favor of explanations that related suicide to the war years or the previous imperial experience. These rationalizations ultimately achieved few concrete solutions, but rather provided an interpretation of the ongoing problem that was compatible with the state-forming patriotism of the day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights the research and reflections of Reynaldo Sordo on Mexican politics in the 19th century, focusing on the study of the Congress in the First Centralist Republic and the transition from a federal to a centralized regime. Sordo used little-studied sources to better understand the political groups of the time and defended centralism as a necessary political option given the circumstances of the era. Additionally, the article analyzes Sordo's contributions regarding centralism and the evolution of freedom of the press in Mexico during the 19th century. It emphasizes that the Cádiz Constitution in 1812 marked the beginning of the formation of public opinion and the confrontation between the Church and the State over censorship. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Journal of Southeast University (English Edition) is the property of Journal of Southeast University Editorial Office and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (PE), Max Weber examines the ecological domination of instrumental rationality to the detriment of value-oriented action. The concept of the calling (Beruf in German) becomes a key one for interpreting the process of value rationalization. One can find Weberian value-rationality among the Portuguese Roma/Ciganos, who seek alternative livelihood strategies via schooling, although they are still characterized by a high rate of early school dropouts, with a very low number of students attending secondary education. The EDUCIG (School performance among Ciganos/Roma: action research and co-design) project was launched in 2019 to grasp the multiple factors involved in this social problem. The project interview-based analysis entailed the participation of 31 Roma/Ciganos students from the metropolitan areas of Lisbon and Porto. Results suggest that despite the social, cultural and economic constraints affecting their school pathways, the academic success of young Roma/Ciganos is facilitated by the influence of religion, specifically the Pentecostal Evangelical Church and its respective values. Moreover, we can recognize the emergence of a new 'spirit' in these young Roma/Ciganos, a 'spirit' that does not aim at instant gratification but represents an investment in the future and, simultaneously, a desire for integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For many Hondurans fleeing poverty, political corruption, violent crime, and climate change-induced disasters and seeking settlement in the United States, insecurity is a lived condition throughout the non-linear migratory journey. Add to that an ever-expanding surveillance infrastructure and thickening of the securitized US–Mexico border, and the very act of leaving arguably becomes political in its assertion of the right to dignified life. In this article I examine how undocumented Honduran migrants living in New Orleans rationalize the levels of risk they have faced during their migration and residency in the city. By focusing on violence—potential and actual—from petty criminals, gangs, traffickers, and law enforcement, I argue for heightened attention to how insecurity is an ongoing, cumulative, and transnational process that migrants face in their search for the good life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that within Kantianism, widespread indifference of the global rich to the suffering of the global poor should be understood as resulting at least partly from vice. Kant had much more to say about vice than is often recognized, and it forms a crucial part of his moral anthropology. Kantians should thus attend to the ways in which vice functions as a practical obstacle to fulfilling duties of beneficence. In vice-fueled indifference, inclinations associated with self-love and self-conceit work their way into our wills, interfering with our moral commitments by impeding our ability to recognize moral requirements and our motivation to act on them. Vice distorts our reasoning in ways that promote self-deception and rationalization about the extent to which we are fulfilling moral demands. Kantian vice also has social dimensions. I argue that widespread indifference exacerbates our individual vices through social norms and practices that legitimize ignoring the needs of others. I conclude by offering some potential remedies to indifference within the Kantian framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For both decolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter and Marxist feminist Silvia Federici, Shakespeare's The Tempest unlocks central elements of our racial capitalist history and present. At first glance incompatible, their respective readings are mutually generative. Wynter's prioritization of racial/colonial categories over ostensibly universal "gender" corrects Federici's conflation of European women's oppression with that of African and American Indigenous peoples. At the same time, Federici's emphases on sexual violence, reproduction, and witch hunts supplements Wynter's focus on rationalization and secularization. Read together, their work reveals both pitfalls and potential alignments across disparate histories of dispossession that span Shakespeare's world and our own. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Journal of Sociological Context / Sosyolojik Bağlam Dergisi is the property of Journal of Sociological Context and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A profusion of jobs has arisen in contemporary capitalism involving 'connective labor', or the work of emotional recognition. Yet the expansion of this interpersonal work occurs at the same time as its systematization, as pressures of efficiency, measurement and automation reshape the work, generating a 'colliding intensification'. Existing scholarship offers three different ways of understanding the role of emotions in connective labor – as tool, commodity or vulnerability – depending on their view of systematization as useful, inseparable or dehumanizing. Based on 106 in-depth interviews and 300+ hours of observations, I found that vestiges of all three models lurked in the experience of providing connective labor, yet none fully captured the profound meaning practitioners reported finding in their work. Systems varied on three dimensions, reflecting the relative worth of worker, recipient or the work, extracting value from the forged connections, while the meanings workers derived shaped their perspective on its systematization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Edo scholar Nakai Riken (1732-1817) had a unique view of the Chinese classics. His argument that the Five Classics were forged by later scholars appeared about one century before Kang Youwei's 康有為 (1858-1927) fake Classics theory. Nakai argued that there were in fact two versions of the Chunqiu春秋 (Spring and Autumn Annals). One was the history of Lu, which was the version that was passed on to our times. The other was the Chunqiu compiled by Confucius, which had been lost with the defeat of the state of Lu by Chu. Though this argument did not prevail in China, it had a far-reaching influence on studies of the Chinese Classics in Japan. Given this influence, it is worth asking: What was the origin of Nakai's argument? Moreover, what concrete points did interpreting the Chunqiu and Zuozhuan 左傳 from this perspective reveal? This article is divided into three parts. First, it discusses the details, and origins, of Nakai's argument that Confucius' Chunqiu had been long lost. It then examines Nakai's method of interpretation as well as his rationalization of his exegetical point of view in the Zuozhuan fengyuan 左傳逢原. Finally, it argues that Nakai's interpretation of the Chunqiu originated in the relationship between the monarch and his subjects in the Japan of Nakai's time. On the basis of the above analysis, I hope to elucidate Nakai's interpretation of the Chunqiu as well as its influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores synergies between Hungarian critical sociology in the 1960–70s and the documentary films made in Balázs Béla Stúdió in the same period. It treats the rationalization of social phenomena as a battle ground for meaning and claims that both representatives of the social sciences and filmmakers, on the one hand, called upon deficient social mechanisms and the inner contradictions of existing socialism and, on the other hand, pointed to the discrepancy between ideological and empirical perceptions of reality as the root cause of the crisis characterizing the consolidated Kádár regime. Adopting Clifford Geertz's conceptual matrix of the experience-near and the experience-distant production of social meaningfulness, the article explores how sociologists and makers of sociographic documentaries alike resisted the prevailing epistemic regime, more specifically how they punctured and undermined the ideological meanings of such concepts as maternity, the Romani, and cooperative democracy.1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to investigate, based on the ideas of Max Weber's Protestant Ethics and the "Spirit" of Capitalism, the relationship between the disenchantment of the world and the Protestant Reformation, as well as the hypothesis that disenchantment generated, at the same time, a new enchantment in capitalism and its nascent labor society. According to Weber, as the daily life, in modern times, was taken over by a cultural and social rationalization, traditional forms of life also dissolved. In Protestant ethics, salvation is linked to the intramundane vocation and the sanctification of everyday life through work. Hence, we speak of a disenchantment, as Weber conceptualizes, and at the same time, a re-enchantment in light of a new religiosity active in the world of capitalist labor. It is precisely this process that allowed Walter Benjamin, in turn, to consider capitalism as a religion, with its cults, rites and symbols, taking the Weberian analysis forward, emphasizing capitalism as a religion. We aim thus to investigate the hypothesis that Weber's thesis of the disenchantment of the world also culminates in its reversal, when we speak of a re-enchantment of the world, now under the umbrella of the capitalist labor and its economic rationalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent developments in Western societies have motivated a growing consideration of the role of negativity in public opinion and political behavior research. In this article, we review the scant (and largely disconnected) scientific literature on negativity and political behavior, merging contributions from social psychology, public opinion, and electoral research, with a view on developing an integrated theoretical framework for the study of negative voting in contemporary democracies. We highlight that the tendency toward negative voting is driven by three partly overlapping components, namely, (1) an instrumental–rational component characterized by retrospective performance evaluations and rationalization mechanisms, (2) an ideological component grounded on long-lasting political identities, and (3) an affective component, motivated by (negative) attitudes toward parties and candidates. By blueprinting the systematic relationships between negative voting and each of these components in turn, and suggesting multiple research paths, this article aims to stimulate future studies on negative voting in multi-party parliamentary systems to motivate a better understanding of the implications of negativity in voting behavior in contemporary democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the management of criminal justice system through a modern administrative approach in the U.S. Topics mentioned include the impact of premodern attitudes on the institutional fragmentation of crime policy in the country, the benefits of a comprehensive institutional reform, the key feature of the criminal process, the disadvantages of criminal trials, and the effectiveness of constitutionalism, professionalism, and rationalization.

The main scheme of creation in Zoroastrian Pahlavi literature is adopted from the Young Avesta. In this scheme Ohrmazd creates the world in the manner of a skillful craftsman who conceives of the form of his product and then fashions it in matter. The number of the constituents of the world and the sequence in which they are created are already fixed in the Avesta. Pahlavi authors draw on Greek philosophical tradition to rationalise their account of the creation of the world. The article also explores some of the complications that their philosophical elaboration of the Avestan scheme occasions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is Part II of a novel 'epistemic' theory of the criminal process. Part I, a formal treatment of how poor measurements degrade control over systems of classification, was published in the last issue. This distinguished four distinct realms of control a policymaker may inhabit and established that the criminal process in the USA is trapped in the third best of these, routinely unable to establish that any policy is better than any other. Here, I first use the new epistemic concepts to mathematize Packer's influential 'two models' theory, both a validation of the formal work and a way of giving it traction in the real world. I then use the new techniques to critique Posner's law and economics and reject it on methodological grounds. I then argue that the activity of making policy for the criminal process, including any quantativity, is largely a form of ritual. The function of this has been to keep at bay an enduring pressure for rationality, as in Weber's rationalization thesis, that could not be satisfied. Now that we have the capacity for better measurements, a rational approach is for the first time attainable, and I contemplate the end of the old order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Just as people at times make bad (i.e., irrational) financial decisions, they also make bad ethical decisions. However, it is important to note that this acting badly or unethically is not always explainable simply in terms of sheer greed or blatant selfishness. Just as it is fruitful to look at the irrationalities governing financial investing, it is similarly fruitful to look at irrationalities that prompt people to behave unethically. Since sound ethical analysis requires good reasons for acting in the right way, good ethics should be a rational enterprise. However, just as we often act irrationally in making financial decisions, irrational elements can creep in to corrupt our ethical judgments and behavior. Behavioral ethics asks the question, "Why do good people make bad decisions?" We look at six factors: (1) weakness of will, (2) ignorance, (3) slippery slopes, (4) arrogance, (5) rationalization, and (6) docility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Controversy has been rife over the extent to which Stoic hermeneutical efforts can be categorized as "allegorical." This paper shows that much of the disagreement arises from incommensurate definitions of allegoresis and that modern categories frequently fail to do justice to the idiosyncrasies of the Stoic perspective. Thus, this article demonstrates the usefulness of distinguishing between allegory, allegoresis, exegesis, and rationalization when classifying Stoic interpretations. Subsequently, it is argued that Stoic etymologies and exegetical comments should not be adduced as evidence against Stoic allegoresis, which further should not be anachronistically viewed in terms of the modern opposition between allegory and symbol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on salutary for thinking about abolitionism. Topics include remaining a mainstay in the archive of theorizing sovereign violence and the state of exception showing public thinkability of abolition; and working through personal relationships and local knowledges giving way to greater and greater rationalization, bureaucratization, sites of intervention, and networks of mass communication.

The present paper analyzes the implementation of the simplification law in Hungarian public administration between 1900 and 1910. The law was enacted in 1901 in a bid to »simplify, facilitate, and speed up« administrative processes and mitigate encounters between different administrative units. The law created an extended debate on the possible directions of simplification and resulted in a mixed reception, including an oftentimes contested implementation. The paper investigates the logic behind the reform both in terms of the legal and practical formulation of revised regulations and in terms of the actual implementation of the directives on the local level. I argue that "simplification" was a buzzword for the homogenization and rationalization of public administration that was considered inept to accommodate the new and expanding tasks of the state by the turn of the century. ›Simplification,‹ hence, resulted in a more complicated system, an oxymoron quickly flagged by contemporaries. The simplification law is understood in the present paper as a case of innovation, and the paper thus contributes to our understanding of innovation processes in public administration. The paper asks how the simplification law was implemented based on the micropractices of administrators, what were the practical consequences of the law in relation to the purposes of lawmakers, who were the main agents that influenced the process, and how they could press their own agendas in the process. These questions are approached through the lens of the materiality of public administration, in which people, objects, and material processes can explain the outcome of innovation initiatives, as in the case of the implementation of the simplification law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Max Weber's disenchantment of the world idea as a perspective to view major aspects of Molière's dramaturgical evolution. It notes disenchantment and related ideas of Weber including bureaucratic and economic rationalization, and community vs. society may be perceived in headlines and social media every day.

Contemporary thinkers are pessimistic about the endurance of transnational communities. The deviant case of the century-and-a-half-old transnational Esperanto community features a process that can explain transnational community survival: rationalization. Rationalization manifests in Esperantists reproducing a form of community logic integrating symbols, principles (justifications, values, etc.), communication practices and technologies, and organization centered on the Esperanto language. The Esperanto language and community logic enable unifying Esperanto activities across space and time. The Esperanto case suggests that community rationalization and language rationalization – an element thereof – are global phenomena integral to modernity. Having affected communities and language too, rationalization as a global process appears to be more extensive than previously suggested. Transnational communities can endure as manifestations of a global community institutional order organizing social life alongside but largely independently of nation-states, science, professions, and religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Actors who support dissimilar institutional models can overcome conflict and move toward mutually beneficial coexistence. To see how, we studied the emergence of venture philanthropy, a rationalized approach to organizational philanthropy in Europe. Our analysis leverages multiple sources of data and focuses on field-configuring events as settings for interactions. We show how convening—bringing together dissimilar actors—in different types of events creates relational spaces for negotiation over institutional models, their practices, and their underlying assumptions. Front-stage interactions in public spaces are important in making models accessible to a broad audience, whereas backstage interactions in protected spaces allow models to be deconstructed. Our findings show that the interplay between front stage and backstage enables the reframing of institutional models by refining the constituent practices, which neutralizes opposition and facilitates joint courses of action. Our results contrast with popular accounts of competing institutional logics, advance organizational research on the role of events in field trajectories, and expose the collective rationalization of giving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nature of reasonableness review in administrative law has long been obscured behind vivid but uninformative descriptions. In recent years, courts and commentators have recognised that reasonableness review involves assessment of the weight and balance of reasons bearing on a decision. Yet by itself this idea is substantially incomplete, for there are many ways in which issues of weight might be relevant. Drawing on the theory of practical reason, this article offers a new account of the reasonableness standard that explains precisely how the weight of reasons matters. It shows, negatively, that several existing accounts are mistaken. Positively, it proposes that reasonableness be understood as a requirement of 'relativised justification': a decision must be justified relative to some eligible understanding of the balance of reasons. This account explains the standard's central features and yields a coherent, workable test for courts to apply. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the Critical Theory tradition of the Frankfurt School, rationalisation is a central concept that refers to the socio-cultural closure of capitalist modernity due to the proliferation of technical, 'instrumental' rationality at the expense of some form of political reason. This picture of rationalisation, however, hinges on a separation of technology and politics that is both empirically and philosophically problematic. This article aims to re-conceptualise the rationalisation thesis through a survey of research from science and technology studies and the conceptual framework of Niklas Luhmann's systems theory. It argues that rationalisation indeed exhibits a logic of closure, namely the 'operational closure' of sociotechnical systems of measurement, but that this closure in fact produces the historical logics of technical reason and, paradoxically, also generates spaces of critical-political openness. This opens up the theoretical and practical opportunity of connecting the politically just to the technically efficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Revista de Antropología Social is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article focuses on symposium "Rethinking Financial Theory in the Face of New Social, Societal and Environmental Issues" which was held on University of Lille in France from July 3-5, 2019. Topics discussed include link between growing reduction in power of economic theory; innovative conceptual frameworks for behavioral finance, financial conventions theory, and self-referential finance; and conception of rationality of economic agents to provide rationalization and intelligibility.

The article focuses on the issues of planning and spatial mobility in the periphery of the GDR. It mentions GDR was indeed committed to improving mobility and that the gradual expansion of the public transport network from the late 1950s. It also mentions GDR planners began to focus on rationalization of the transportation system, which also meant eliminating railways serving small remote communities and state's inability to provide effective mobility services in the periphery.

The maximum strain failure criterion is unified with the maximum stress failure criterion, after exploring the implications of two considerations responsible for this: (1) the failure strains for the direct strain components employed in the maximum strain criterion are all defined under uniaxial stress states, not uniaxial strain states, and (2) the contributions to the strain in a direction as a result of the Poisson effect do not contribute to the failure of the material in that direction. Incorporating these considerations into the maximum strain criterion, the maximum stress criterion is reproduced. For 3D stress/strain state applications primarily, the unified maximum stress/strain criterion is then subjected to further rationalization in the context of transversely isotropic materials by eliminating the treatments that undermine the objectivity of the failure criterion. The criterion is then applied based on the maximum and minimum direct stresses, the maximum transverse shear stress and the maximum longitudinal shear stress as the invariants of the stress state, instead of the conventional stress components directly [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a report on workshop discussion titled, "The future of agricultural museums" during February 17-18, 2020 at the open-air museum on the Kiekeberg, Rosengarten-Ehestorf in Germany. It mentions the impacts of the socio-economic change on the agricultural economy. It discusses the increasing rationalization, mechanization and mechanization in agriculture.

Regime resilience is a frequent theme in Chinese political research. This article examines China's latest effort to enhance the regime's political stability by modernizing its governance system. It argues that China's current governance system reform has institutionalized the Chinese party-state and transformed it into a partocracy. Partocracy, as a new analytical model, can be very useful but is still underdeveloped. The case presented in this article will reveal some of the main features of the emerging Chinese partocracy. It shows that the governance system reform undertook by Xi Jinping has begun the process of institutionalizing, rationalizing, and legalizing the old party-state system. By examining these latest developments, the author hopes to stimulate more interest in the study of partocracy as an analytic model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present a methodological toolbox as a useful research approach for investigating domestic food practices. Consumption research often relies strongly on interviews or surveys. While helpful, such methods inevitably create a distance between the verbalization of the studied practice and the practice itself, inviting post hoc rationalization. The toolbox helps the researcher to get closer to the studied practice by combining interviews with methods based on observation, visualization and verbalization, in or close to practice. The toolbox holds a variety of methods and we describe fridge stories, food mapping, shop-alongs and food diaries. Through a practical discussion of the advantages and difficulties of these methods, and their combined use, we hope our paper can be useful to other researchers and students interested in everyday food practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article responds empirically to the question posed by Stan Cohen about "why, when faced by knowledge of others' suffering and pain—particularly the suffering and pain resulting from what are called 'human rights violations'—does 'reaction' so often take the form of denial, avoidance, passivity, indifference, rationalisation or collusion?". Our context is Mexico's "war on drugs." Since 2006 this "war" has claimed the lives of around 240,000 Mexican citizens and disappeared around 60,000 others. Perpetrators include organized criminal gangs and state security services. Violence is pervasive and widely reported. Most people are at risk. Our study is based on qualitative interviews and focus groups involving 68 "ordinary Mexicans" living in five different Mexican cities which have varying levels of violence. It investigates participant proximity to the victims and the psychological defense mechanisms they deploy to cope with proximity to the violence. We found that 62 of our participants knew, directly or indirectly, one or more people who had been affected. We also found one dominant rationalization (defense mechanism) for the violence: that the victims were "involved in something" (drugs or organized crime) and therefore "deserved their fate." This echoes prevailing state discourses about the violence. We argue that the discourse of "involved" is a discourse of denial that plays three prominent roles in a highly violent society in which almost no‐one is immune: it masks state violence, stigmatizes the victims, and sanctions bystander passivity. As such, we show how official and individual denial converge, live, and reproduce, and play a powerful role in the perpetuation of violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais is the property of Centro de Estudos Sociais and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Purpose: It is well-known that women scientists are few in numbers in prestigious research organizations and still fewer in leadership positions. The purpose of this article is to analyze how organizational gender inequality is rationalized by scientists so as to highlight how discourse on equality reproduces gender at the workplace. Design/methodology/approach: Data was collected through semi-structured face-to-face interviews with the scientists in four research laboratories dealing with medicinal drugs and chemical substances. It uses discourse analysis by Foucault as a theoretical lens to examine how gender inequality is rationalized and the power relations behind it. It adopts the perspective that socio-cultural beliefs form the basis of gendered practices in organizations. Findings: It finds that the scientists refuse to blame the organization for inequalities by delinking gender issues from the organizational domain. This delinking occurs through rationalizing gender inequality as "social", through separating informal behavior from the "system" and perceiving women as "privileged". Such discourses while keeping intact the rationality and meritocracy of the organizations/institutions, reproduce the ideological "public-private dichotomy" and the male dominance at the workplace. Practical implications: The findings indicate the need for extensive studies in India highlighting how gender is done in organizations, exploring men's role in undoing gender and government initiatives to create a climate of gender equality. Originality/value: It highlights how discourse on gender equality/inequality at the workplace manifests dominance of men and represents an intersection of Indian social, organizational and institutional contexts at workplace. It also calls into question the applicability of the western concepts of "individualization" and "gender fatigue" to the Indian context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution explores the concept of selection as an integral part of Haugen's standardisation model from a theoretical as well as an empirical angle. It focuses on different types of factors of selection and how they are relevant to the study of selection processes both on the level of individual variants and whole varieties. The question of why standard languages appear to differ systematically from vernaculars and at the same time exhibit remarkable resemblances among each other is addressed, and characteristic features of standard languages are traced to general conditions of standardisation processes. A case study on the standardisation of German relativisers illustrates how different factors of selection combine in the dynamics of linguistic structure, variation, attitudes, and codification. It also shows how general tendencies of selection can lead to similar structures across standard languages, while it becomes clear that register variation and the historical development and changing evaluation of stylistic varieties can be crucial in order to explain the selection or de-selection of linguistic forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet and social media have increased the number of organizations and individuals asking consumers to sign petitions against transgressing brands. This raises a question as to whether such increases in requests to sign a petition to support a boycott positively or negatively impact on consumer willingness to enact anti‐consumption. Via experiments, this study investigates the effect that choice overload has on consumers signing a petition in support of a boycott call. The findings establish that individuals who need to make a choice from numerous boycott calls (i.e., large choice‐sets) are less likely to sign a petition to support a boycott than individuals making a similar choice from a small number of boycott calls (i.e., small choice‐sets). The study further introduces a mediator that explains this effect. Compared with individuals facing a small choice‐set, those facing numerous options are more likely to experience the small‐agent rationalization, and thus, are less likely to sign the petition to support a boycott. The small‐agent rationalization (SAR) relates to one's acceptance of inequity in the world as well as perceptions of their own powerlessness. The study establishes the role of choice overload in boycott literature and empirically tests SAR as the process mechanism. Theoretical, practical, and policy implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]