Toward a Theory of Public Ritual

Given that holidays both reflect a society's attributes and serve to modify these attributes, they are a valuable tool for a macro-sociological analysis. This paper proceeds by examining Durkheim's well-known contributions on rituals and advancing theoretical ideas on how these might be modified, seeking to develop a theory of holidays. The article concerns the role of holidays in managing tensions and recommitment to values; their role in relating communities to the society at large; their effect on gender roles, and the theoretical issues concerning holiday cycles and holiday-engineering efforts by religious authorities and states that have endeavored to adapt holidays for their own purpose. The article relies on public accounts, personal observations, and findings culled from a few studies by contemporary social scientists.     

Doreen Massey

The growth of transnational communications, most notably the Internet and email, has had a profound impact on social and political interactions across borders. Doreen Massey, a social and political geographer, has written widely about space, with an emphasis on examining relations between actors, rather than the roles that they play. Her research suggests that space can be conceived of as constructed of these relations and, as a consequence, power can be seen to operate at multiple and complex levels. This article examines Massey's work, identifying areas of particular relevance to communications scholars. Massey's thinking is applied to the contemporary communications arena, where her ideas on space and 'power-geometries' offer new insights into how the complexities of transnational relations can be understood.     

Thinking generations

Often, and increasingly, social and political life is narrated using the concept of generation. This article looks at contemporary expressions of ‘generationalism’ in British public life. It identifies the salient themes which emerge, links these to the social and political contexts in which these ideas are produced, and examines the points where they are vulnerable to critique. Bridging science and normativity, the generational view offers a convenient master‐narrative for a variety of political orientations – yet one whose democratic credentials are doubtful. ¹      

Turkish and Moroccan Dutch professionals in social work

This article describes the perspective of newly started female Turkish and Moroccan Dutch professionals in social work and explores how they connect to the social work profession. Social work in the Netherlands attracts many of these young ‘new’ professionals. These second-generation women from a Muslim background are considered a ‘progressive force’ within their communities and can play an important role in ‘remaking the mainstream’. Increasing diversity and complexity go hand in hand with high expectations and claims. Muslim, gender, ethnic and professional identities have to be combined and demand high flexibility in doing boundary work.     

Friend or foe: the media’s power to inform and shape societal attitudes towards people with acquired brain injury

Media representations play an integral role in modern society, informing the public about a range of issues affecting their communities. Using qualitative content analysis, this article reports on the study of a sample of Australian media coverage, spanning 30 years, covering issues associated with acquired brain injury (ABI) and related cognitive disabilities. The analysis explores how the media both portray and actively shape public perceptions about people living with ABI, the lived experience of the condition, and its broader social implications. The authors identify a range of themes arising in the sample that communicate specific ideas about ABI, disability, and deviance. Importantly, they identify how these themes are able to either construct or reinforce dominant understandings of disability and deviance through both their content and structure.     

Where everybody knows your name: the role of social capital in resettlement after an employee relocation

This exploratory research investigates the process of adaptation that follows the intra-national migration of families moved for a professional employee's job. The research suggests the existence of ‘relocation enclaves’ or areas of residence that are densely populated by relocated families. Qualitative interviews with wives relocated for their husband's jobs reveal the importance of building social capital to rebuild families' lives and the positive role that relocation enclaves can play in offering that social capital. Additionally, findings suggest that, contrary to Putnam's proposition that an influx of relocated families into a community would contribute to the erosion of community connections, relocated women are highly active in their new communities and they invest time and inject new ideas into local schools and organizations.     

Inoperative Community in Post‐Authoritarian South Korea: Football Fandom,Political Mobilization and Civil Society

South Korea’s dynamic civil society developed from the democratic struggle against the military dictatorship in the 1980s and early 1990s. The period of political liberalisation that began in 1992 saw the emergence of new voices and social forces, and a new “netizen” culture of Internet users. This article explores the new social, cultural and political landscapes of the country that were made possible by self‐organising communities of the public actualising their potential for occasions of collective mobilisation and subverting the powers of dominant authorities. The empirical focus is on two events that marked the post‐authoritarian political culture of South Korea: the Red Devil phenomenon during the 2002 football World Cup, characterised by passionate support, civic pride and a rudimentary cosmopolitanism, and the anti‐impeachment protests of 2004. These key examples of mass voluntary organisation and mobilisation, founded on the desire for association and enactment of the sense of civil sovereignty, and borrowing from decades of popular struggle and resistance against the state, have expressed the love of community, the intimate communication and the being‐together of what Nancy calls inoperative community. Standing in opposition to the overarching authority of the state, inoperative communities emerge through the self‐actualisation of new subjectivities. This article investigates how, through play, transgression and protest, these inoperative communities have reshaped the culture and society of South Korea in the post‐authoritarian era.     

Which theory of moral evolution should social scientists choose?1

The issue of moral, social and political evolution is a basic chapter of the social sciences and has given birth to a great variety of theories. Beyond their diversity, these theories belong to two basic types. The first disregards, to a large extent, the role of ideas in evolution. Either it ignores their existence or it treats them as dependent variables: as being basically reactions of the social actors to changes in their environment. The second, by contrast, treats ideas as independent variables. It starts from the assumption that the explanation of moral, social and political evolution should take into consideration the capacity of human beings to propose and endorse interpretations of the world and to define programs of action. The first model is basically mechanical; the second is programmatic and rational, in the sense that it sees ideas as rationally selected. This second model has been convincingly illustrated by Durkheim and Weber. The processes they have identified can be discerned in the case of evolutionary phenomena characteristic of our time, such as the extension of rights in democratic societies.     

Ideas in action: the politics of Prussian child labor reform, 1817–1839

This article explains the political origins of an 1839 law regulating the factory employment of children in Prussia. The article has two aims. First, it seeks to explain why Prussia adopted the particular law that it did. Existing historical explanations of this particular policy change are not correct, largely because they fail to take into account the actual motivations and intentions of key reformers. Second, the article contributes to theories of the role of ideas in public policymaking. Ideas interact with institutional and political factors to serve as motivators and as resources for policy change. As motivators, they drive political action and shape the content of policy programs; as resources, they enable political actors to recruit supporters and forge alliances. I offer a theory of the relationship between ideas, motivation, and political action, and I develop a methodological framework for assessing the reliability of political actors’ expressed motivations. Further, I explain how political actors use ideas as resources by deploying three specific ideational strategies: framing, borrowing, and citing. By tracing how different understandings of the child labor problem motivated and were embodied in two competing child labor policy proposals, I show how the ideas underlying reform had significant consequences for policy outcomes.     

城市政策转移与政策知识的全球性循环

本文提出了一种方法,可以用于研究在全球范围内循环的城市政策、政策模型和政策知识中有关空间、社会和相互关系的特性。基于那些被用来分析在更广泛的社会空间背景下特定的社会进程的政治经济地理文献,本文部分侧重于固定性和流动性的辩证分析。本文将该观点与通过仔细研究分析得出的,政策知识得以转移的具体实践、表述和专门知识等后结构主义论证结合到一起。作者认为,对＂流动性＂的定义提供了一个实施上述方法的规程,它可以实现城市政策移植中的＂本地化的全球性＂。本文介绍了利用这种研究方法的一个例子：位于加拿大不列颠哥伦比亚省的温哥华市,是一个经常被其他地方的决策者引用为他们寻求＂热门＂政策思路的城市。该案例还表明,关于城市之间城市政策移植性的特点和推论,还有许多研究尚待进行。具体来说,本文认为,在保持对更广泛力量的侧重的前提下,研究城市政策的流动性必须认真对待政策模型转移过程中个别政策转移中介那些明显平庸的作为,同时也必须进行细致的定性研究,研究政策是如何从一个地方移植到另一个地方去的,如何从特定的环境中学习的,并且在移植过程中是怎样变化的。     

The permaculture movement in India: a social movement with Southern characteristics

ABSTRACT

Permaculture is an attempt to design and develop sustainable communities in harmony with natural ecosystems. It embraces solution-oriented approaches to contemporary social and environmental problems. Originating in Australia, permaculture was initially considered a design system but it has become a global social movement and it is practiced in different countries in various forms and at multiple scales. It is manifested in numerous networks of local practitioners, teachers, promoters, demonstration sites, organisations and magazines where various ideas and practices converge. Despite its popularization scant attention has been given to analysis of permaculture as a social movement. Moreover, the few academic writings which analyse permaculture as a social movement do not systematically engage with its manifestation and adaptation in the global South. The latter is the main contribution of this article. Based on original research this paper narrates the origins of the permaculture movement in India, and it pays close attention to its contextual adaptation by a diverse group of practitioners. It demonstrates that these diverse actors and their strategies have clear linkages to the independence movement; they are influenced by the incomplete project of Indian liberal democracy; they operate on the sphere of civil and political society; and they engage middle and lower classes in a formal and informal political nexus.     

Whose photo? Whose voice? Who listens? ‘Giving,’ silencing and listening to voice in participatory visual projects

This article examines participatory visual projects that aspire to enable social change by providing communities with a platform through photography. It argues that projects are sites for negotiating rather ‘giving’ voice and calls for practitioners and researchers to be transparent and reflexive about these negotiated processes. Examining two sets of participant-produced images by refugee youth, one of which was shown publically and one of which went unseen, this article explores issues of control and the biases that shape editorial decisions in NGO-linked participatory visual projects. It demonstrates how voices that do not fit into dominant visual frames tend to be silenced. It is argued that this negates the critical potential of participatory visual work to enable political listening and undermines the plurality of unheard voices that participatory visual work aspires to facilitate. The article raises the central question of listening to the conception of ‘voice’ in participatory visual initiatives. It argues that the political and ideological promise of these projects relates not only to the voices they give rise to but to the kind of listening they enable.     

Community and Social Capital: What Is the Difference?

The ideas of community and social capital have received much attention in the last decade, but are plagued by a multitude of conceptualizations, definitions, and operationalizations. This confusion is problematic for both researchers and policymakers trying to use these concepts. While numerous efforts have been made to clarify "social capital" and "community," too often the two are simply conflated. This paper attempts to distinguish between them by looking at the various ways they are related in concrete examples. Drawn largely from the literature, five examples are offered that together describe the complex interactions of place-based communities and social capital networks. These examples also demonstrate distinctions between community and social capital with regard to boundaries, the qualities of social relations and trust in each, instrumentality, the consequences of one for the other, and issues related to multiple communities in a single place. It is hoped that these distinctions will inform the ongoing efforts to develop unique and useful conceptualizations of these two terms.     

Symposium on political communication and social movements: audience,persuasion, and influence

ABSTRACT

This article argues that an important contribution that political communication can offer social movement studies is a more variegated understanding of social movement audiences and their role in social movement strategy and processes. Specifically, the article introduces a coarse typology of social movement audiences and discusses the importance of understanding differences in the goals of these audiences and what kinds of influence, from messaging or other forms of pressure, may be important to affect different audiences in movements’ favors. The article also examines the ways in which audiences are active, shaping what messages they are exposed to, consume, believe, and act upon. The call of the article is to bring a concern for audiences into social movement studies in the hopes of wedding these more media and communication-focused concerns with the kinds of structural and material influences social movement studies is so accomplished in investigating.     

“Ground Zero” for Climate Crisis: Narratives About Climate Adaptation and Implications for Justice in Coastal Louisiana

Decisions about climate change adaptation are informed by technical information, but they are also shaped by social and political factors and impacted communities. Given the realities of a changing climate, more research is needed to examine how technically trained practitioners and other actors describe their work in relation to social and political factors. This article contributes to knowledge on this topic by analyzing the narratives of 62 organizational actors in coastal Louisiana. Actors include scientists, engineers, modelers, planners, project administrators, government staff, and non-profit employees working on climate adaptation and coastal risk reduction projects outlined in Louisiana's Coastal Master Plan. While scholars critique the Master Plan as overly technocratic, I show that people weave morals and values into narratives about science. However, I show how the motivations of acting boldly, morally, and urgently in the face of emergency clash with climate justice. Some individuals within these organizations do advocate for reforming or rethinking Master Plan projects to better serve coastal communities; however, these individuals also face resistance from colleagues who frame this work as secondary or outside of their organizational purview. To conclude, I argue that research connecting technical aspects of climate adaptation planning to power and social justice outcomes has the potential to bridge disciplinary divides.     

Collective Power to Create Political Change: Increasing the Political Efficacy and Engagement of Social Workers

Because social workers are called to challenge social injustices and create systemic change to support the well-being of individuals and communities, it is essential that social workers develop political efficacy: belief that the political system can work and they can influence the system. This study explored the impact of an intensive political social work curriculum on political efficacy and planned political engagement among social work students and practitioners. The findings suggest this model of delivering a political social work curriculum effectively increases internal, external, and overall political efficacy, and that increasing political efficacy has promise for increasing future political engagement.     

Wearing your Politics on your Sleeve: The Role of Political Colours in Social Movements

This article provides evidence of the significance of political colours and associated emblems in the repertoires of social movements and related political parties. It argues that political colours play an important role not only as visual symbols of the cause but also in the emotional life of social movements. Political colours help to create and sustain collective identities and illustrate the role of affect in political life. The article includes a case study of the role of colours in the women's movement, showing how one set of first-wave organizational colours took on much broader symbolic meanings during the second wave of the women's movement. It provides evidence from both the first and second waves of the women's movement of the emotional meaning of the colours for activists. The case study also illustrates the contestation over public memory that occurs in relation to powerful symbols.     

Adult Literacy Education and Community Development

SUMMARY

This article responds to the concern that low-literate community residents often are marginalized in community development processes. They are unable to give voice to their concerns, interests and their vision for their community. Perspectives and approaches in the fields of adult literacy education and community development are explored to determine how adult literacy education might be used to further the goals of community development. While there are parallels between these two disciplines, there are also barriers to overcome if an integrated approach to dealing with community issues is realized. This article reflects an interest in advancing a comprehensive approach to community development in communities with limited economic resources, low-level literacy and limited access. It seeks to address the issue of whether adult literacy education programs have a meaningful role to play in community development. The strengths of participatory approaches such as community-based literacy, and community development principles such as collective action, shared values, participation, social justice, political awareness and action, comprehensiveness, empowerment, and learning and reflection, facilitate an interdisciplinary approach.     

Modelling free social spaces and the diffusion of social mobilization

Free social spaces have long been emphasized in the social movement literature. Under names such as safe spaces, social havens, and counterpublics, they have been characterized as protective shelters against prevailing hegemonic ideologies and as hubs for the diffusion of ideas and ideologies. However, the vast literature on these spaces has predominantly focused on internal dynamics and processes, thus neglecting how they relate to the diffusion of collective mobilization. Inspired by formal modeling in collective action research, we develop a network model to investigate how the structural properties of free social spaces impact the diffusion of collective mobilization. Our results show that the assumption of clustering is enough for structural effects to emerge, and that clustering furthermore interacts synergistically with political deviance. This indicates that it is not only internal dynamics that play a role in the relevance of free social spaces for collective action. Our approach also illustrates how formal modeling can deepen our understanding of diffusion processes in collective mobilizations through analysis of emergent structural effects.