New ways of believing or belonging: is religion giving way to spirituality?1

In this article, the presence of alternative spirituality and practices within the general culture and their relationship to institutional religion are examined using national survey data collected as part of the 2001 Scottish Social Attitudes Survey. Alternative practices are found to divide into two groups of interests: concerns with personal well-being and interest in divination. Better-educated women are much more likely to engage with holistic practices associated with well-being; a minority of younger, less well-educated women are more likely to have found horoscopes, astrology, fortune-telling and tarot 'important in their lives'. Churchgoers find divination antithetical to religion while the use and salience of a range of holistic practices is as acceptable among churchgoers as it is among non-attenders and the secular (once allowance has been made for the connections between putatively alternative practices, gender, age and education). This underscores a focus on personal well-being rather than alternative spirituality in the consumption of holistic products and practices within the general culture. The study findings are used to assess claims for a spiritual revolution in modern Britain.     

Who is Kin?

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which African Americans, define family and kinship. Using data collected using ethnographic methods, issues such as the level of ongoing commitment to extended family structures, fictive kin status and obligations and pathways to kinship status are examined. This study has broad implications for the delivery of culturally appropriate services to African American individuals and families.     

What is a problem?

Among others, the term “problem” plays a major role in the various attempts to characterize interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity, as used synonymously in this paper. Interdisciplinarity (ID) is regarded as “problem solving among science, technology and society” and as “problem orientation beyond disciplinary constraints” (cf. Frodeman et al.: The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010). The point of departure of this paper is that the discourse and practice of ID have problems with the “problem”. The objective here is to shed some light on the vague notion of “problem” in order to advocate a specific type of interdisciplinarity: problem-oriented interdisciplinarity. The outline is as follows: Taking an ex negativo approach, I will show what problem-oriented ID does not mean. Using references to well-established distinctions in philosophy of science, I will show three other types of ID that should not be placed under the umbrella term “problem-oriented ID”: object-oriented ID (“ontology”), theory-oriented ID (epistemology), and method-oriented ID (methodology). Different philosophical thought traditions can be related to these distinguishable meanings. I will then clarify the notion of “problem” by looking at three systematic elements: an undesired (initial) state, a desired (goal) state, and the barriers in getting from the one to the other. These three elements include three related kinds of knowledge: systems, target, and transformation knowledge. This paper elaborates further methodological and epistemological elements of problem-oriented ID. It concludes by stressing that problem-oriented ID is the most needed as well as the most challenging type of ID.     

How limited is reformism?

Conclusion According to the reformist limitations thesis, a labor movement that organizes around a reformist program can never mount a challenge to capitalism itself. This program can be implemented without touching the sides, as it were, of the reigning system. Our own interpretation of the post-war history of the British and Swedish labor movements suggests the opposite. Unless the dominant political element in a reformist labor movement can be deflected from its program, and the internal cohesion of the movement thereby destroyed, a challenge to capitalism is inevitable.In the British case, the labor party remained the politically dominant component in the labor movement, and it turned its back on its own reformist commitments and espoused the defense of profits and managerial prerogatives. For historical reasons, the British trade-union movement never escaped from this dubious political guardianship and hence never developed the resources to continue a reformist political struggle in spite of the labor party.The Swedish social-democratic party shared throughout the post-war period the same focus on stabilization on the terms of an ongoing capitalist system as its British counterpart. But its escape from its reformist commitments was only partial, as its egalitarian traditions and ties to LO were stronger. To the extent to which it kept its political faith and went beyond mere welfarism, it saved itself from the disintegration and marginality of the British labor party and sustained the outward unity of the labor movement. To the extent to which the party fell from reformist grace, the trade-union movement displaced it as the political leading edge of the organized working class. The measure of reformism's compatibility with capitalism is thus the relationship between LO's (and increasingly also TCO's) policies and organization on the one hand, and the vital institutions of capital on the other.The dynamics of class conflict under capitalism point to two institutions the integrity of which must be defended if the system is to survive as such. The first of these is private property coupled to a market mechanism that gives private managements exclusive power over the allocation of productive resources. The social power of private property is exercised impersonally by market forces on the capital market, and personally in managerial prerogatives in the firm. The second vital institution of capitalism is its labor market under-pinned by the bourgeoisie's power to create unemployment and thus subvert opposition to its rule through deflation and failures of business confidence. Here lie the clues to what a progressive - cumulative - transition to socialism looks like. The normal mechanisms and règles du jeu of these two markets give way to political resource allocation, and corporate management yields up more and more of its prerogatives to the mobilized collective will of the workforce. Labor is de-commodified, and the investment function is enmeshed in a net of direct and indirect social controls.To project these changes in a written manifesto would presumably be revolutionary. The development of Swedish trade unionism suggests that, to go on pursuing the basic social justice and job security that reformists have always plodded after, meant implementing these changes anyway - piecemeal and as a matter of pragmatic necessity. The difference between revolution and reform thus boils down to their relative effectiveness in working-class mobilization and thus their historical potential.     

What is Adult Attachment?

This paper explores the concept of adult attachment. Although attachment theory is now getting a great deal of attention, there is not yet a clear picture of what it means to be attached in adulthood or what the clinical applications of the approach might be. Using Bowlby’s distinctive ethological-evolutionary framework and updating it with findings from neurobiology and attachment research, it is proposed there is an attachment behavioral system that operates throughout the lives of adults and that this changes the way we understand our clients’ distress and carry out psychotherapy.

What is a complex?

This essay evaluates the question of the ‘complex’ in a range of scientific, political and psychoanalytic contexts, asking not only where lines of connection and demarcation occur among specific distributions of meaning, value, theory and practice; but also probing the psychoanalytic corpus, notably Freud’s writings on the notion of a ‘complex’, in order to reframe various implications of the idea that this term tends to resist its own utilisation as both an object and form of analysis.     

What is algorithmic governance?

This article contributes a coherent framework to the rich literature emerging in the field of algorithmic governance while also resolving conflicting understandings. Tracing the history of algorithmic governance to the broad architecture of the universal Turing Machine, the article identifies a common thread of critical concern in the literature on algorithmic governance: the growing institutional capabilities to move contestable issues to a space of reduced negotiability, raising questions of social asymmetry, inequity, and inequality. Within the social context of algorithmic governance, the article highlights three general areas of concern where the social negotiability of processes is threatened: the problem of power (surveillance), discrimination (social bias), and identification (system identity).     

How secular is Europe?

A large body of literature has developed, yielding evidence that religion in general and Churches and Church leaders in particular have lost their once dominant position in contemporary Europe. Evidence is often cited in declining levels of church attendance. Whether Europe should also be qualified as secularized in terms of religious beliefs remains unclear. In this paper we investigate the degree to which European people are secular, focusing not only on religious practices, but also on beliefs. We argue that trajectories of religious change occur all over Europe, but not at similar speeds. We formulate hypotheses regarding the differences in the degree to which individuals and societies are secularized. Data from the recent European Values Study surveys are used to empirically test these hypotheses concerning patterns of variation in religious beliefs and practices. The findings provide evidence in favour of secularization theories and in contradiction to rational choice theories. In Europe, religious pluralism produces not higher levels, but lower levels of religiosity. The findings also reveal that religious denomination as well as cultural and socio-economic heritages are important factors in explaining the patchwork pattern in levels of religiosity and religious participation in contemporary Europe.