Pathways to participation: openings,opportunities and obligations

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child has raised the profile of children's participation in the United Kingdom. Hart's ‘ladder of participation’ has been the most influential model in this field. This paper offers an alternative model, based on five levels of participation: 1. Children are listened to. 2. Children are supported in expressing their views. 3. Children's views are taken into account. 4. Children are involved in decision‐making processes. 5. Children share power and responsibility for decision‐making. In addition, three stages of commitment are identified at each level: ‘openings’, ‘opportunities’ and ‘obligations’. The model thus provides a logical sequence of 15 questions as a tool for planning for participation. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

‘It’s the way they do it’: Expressions of Agency in Child–Adult Relations at Home and School

This article examines children's (8–9 years) and young people’s (14–15 years) views about their own participation in decision‐making processes with adults, within the context of home and school in Norway. A difference‐centred theoretical perspective is used to identify children’s participation as expressions of agency embedded in intricate child–adult relations, in which children and adults are positioned differently. It is argued that children not necessarily ask for increased independence from adults, but rather to be recognised as ‘differently equal’ partners in shared decision‐making processes, where children are being treated with dignity and respect as valuable persons.     

Making space for ‘the social’: connecting sociology and professional practices in urban lighting design

Lighting is increasingly recognized as a significant social intervention by both lighting professionals and academic social scientists. However, what counts as ‘the social’ is diverse and contested, with consequences for what kind of ‘social’ is performed or invented. Based on a long‐term research programme, we argue that collaboration between sociologists and lighting professionals requires negotiating discourses and practices of ‘the social’. This paper explores the quality and kinds of spaces made for ‘the social’ in professional practices and academic collaborations, focusing on two case studies of urban lighting that demonstrate how the space of ‘the social’ is constrained and impoverished by an institutionalized division between technical and aesthetic lighting. We consider the potential role of sociologists in making more productive spaces for ‘the social’ in urban design, as part of the central sociological task of ‘inventing the social’ (Marres, Guggenheim and Wilkie 2018) in the process of studying it.     

'When I'm in the garden I can create my own paradise': Homes and gardens in later life

This paper brings together recent work on later life and considers the effects of ageing in relation to participation and interest in gardening. Whilst there is considerable research and literature on issues such as health, housing, and social care, the significance of the garden in process of home‐making is less well understood. Using qualitative data from the Mass Observation Data Archive, key physical, psycho‐social processes that impact on the use of the garden and gardening activities are examined. It will be suggested that the garden can have major significance in the (re) creation of ‘home’ in later life.     

Mapping the Terrain of Selection for Social Work: A Critical Analysis of Policy,Theory and Research

This paper explores the implications of the changing UK policy and regulatory contexts for the often competing or contradictory interests and agendas operating within the arena of admission decisions in social work education, highlighted by the introduction of the new social work degrees in 2003–04 and the associated care councils. Other contextual factors that impact on admissions to higher education more generally will also be touched upon, including the widening participation agendas; increased requirements for transparency of decision making in the selection process; questioning of the predictive quality of A‐level scores; and, concern regarding recruitment and retention issues. A critical review of relevant research into social work admissions processes and outcomes is reported on. The validity of current selection tools is examined utilising research findings from within social work and allied disciplines. The authors argue that the increased spotlight upon admissions and the ‘front‐loading’ of gate‐keeping into social work education is both unrealistic and irresponsible as it omits the crucial ongoing role of assessment throughout the process of qualifying education.     

Retirement Plan Participation in an Era of Change: The Case of a Rural Region*

Individual savings are critical for retirement as government and employer‐based provisions fade or become less secure. Rural communities are vulnerable given their higher proportion of elderly and more who rely on Social Security. Using a telephone survey of working‐age residents in Michigan's rural Upper Peninsula, this research investigates factors associated with participation in tax‐advantaged retirement plans that have largely replaced defined‐benefit pension plans for earmarked retirement savings. The project also identifies factors predictive of making maximum contributions to those retirement plans. We consider several distinct categories of variables to reflect the social embeddedness of economic action. In addition, the research included community variables describing aspects of respondents' social context, a new component of the savings discourse, which we show to be significantly related to saving outside a tax‐advantaged retirement plan and making maximum contributions to a tax‐advantaged retirement plan.     

Deliberative Democracy and the Paradox of Participation

Citizen involvement and participatory governance have been adopted as essential components of urban development policies in many countries. For instance, participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre was successful in mobilizing and empowering poor people. However, in many cases, participation is merely a buzzword which often leads to co‐optation. In this article, we propose an explanatory model of participatory governance for making comparative analyses and compare participatory budgeting in the 1990s in Brazil with the Japanese community policy of the 1970s. Based on this, our analysis identifies the paradox of participation and the importance of gatekeeping functions. As a consequence of enhanced citizen participation, the power of the bureaucratic administration becomes dominant unless politicians and the legislature retain their autonomy in decision‐making. If the gatekeeping functions of involvement and decision‐making are monopolized by the administrative body urban development is de‐politicized, which, in turn, leads to co‐optation by government and exclusion. It is important to retain the function of politics to deepen democracy through citizen participation in urban development.     

Children's participation in ethnographic research: Issues of power and representation

The recognition of children's social agency and active participation in research has significantly changed children's position within the human and social sciences and led to a weakening of taken‐for‐granted assumptions found in more conventional approaches to child research. In order to hear the voices of children in the representation of their own lives it is important to employ research practices such as reflexivity and dialogue. These enable researchers to enter into children's ‘cultures of communication’. Drawing on detailed examples from an ethnographic study on child health and self‐care, the article examines issues of power, voice and representation central to the discussion of children's participation.     

A Children's Standpoint: Needs in Out‐of‐Home Care

This article discusses research reported in ‘The Needs of Children in Care’ ( Mason and Gibson, 2004 ) in which children participated in defining their needs in out‐of‐home care. In this study a central research presumption was that children are knowledgeable about their own needs. The methods used to facilitate the involvement in the project of children and adult stakeholders in out‐of‐home care are described. Also described are findings from the research which identified that of prime importance to the children were their connections with others and their agency in their own lives. These findings are compared with findings from the narratives of the adult stakeholder groups. Finally, the implications of the findings, for improving children's participation in decision‐making around their needs in care are considered in the context of broad adult–child social relations in the care system.     

Institutional woes of participation: Bulgarian disabled people’s organisations and policy‐making

This paper presents a critical study of the participation of Bulgarian disabled people’s organisations in the policy‐making process on a national level. It describes how the ‘representatives’ of disabled Bulgarians become depoliticised and even depersonalised when their participation becomes institutionalised through the National Council on Integration of People with Disabilities. It is argued that such an instance of ‘participation’ actually sustains the status quo of underdevelopment and dependency. A parallel is drawn with the concerns of the British disability movement. The paper ends by suggesting some tentative solutions to the highlighted problems.     

残疾污名的研究进展与展望

残疾污名是针对残疾人负面的刻板印象而引发的偏见和歧视,其消极影响渗透残疾人个人生活和社会参与的诸多方面。现有研究对其成因的解释越来越注重社会文化背景因素。公众污名和自我感知污名是污名测量的主要内容,使用的方法以外显态度测量和内隐社会认知方法为主。当下残疾污名干预的研究主要围绕增加群际接触来改变公众对残疾群体的偏见,采用积极心理干预改变个体自我认知,通过融合教育塑造包容、共享的社会文化三个方面来进行。未来研究可以围绕污名影响的保护机制、残疾人内化污名的差异、残疾污名测量的优化、污名干预效果的评估及干预方式的改进等方面进行。     

Inaugural: A necessary disenchantment: myth,agency and injustice in a digital world

This lecture reviews the history of how the status and authority of media institutions over the past century have been entangled with wider claims about social knowledge and the order of societies. It analyses those relations in terms of three successive and now overlapping myths: ‘the myth of the mediated centre’ which claims that media (traditional mass media institutions) are privileged access points to our centre of social values and social reality; the ‘myth of us’ which is now emerging around the supposedly natural collectivities that ‘we’ form on commercial social media platforms; and, from outside the media industries, the ‘myth of big data’ which proclaims big data techniques are generating an entirely new and better form of social knowledge. All these myths require deconstruction by a particular hermeneutic, but the case of the myth of big data is the most paradoxical, since its claims amount to an anti‐hermeneutic, a refusal to interpret the social anymore as the resultant of processes of meaning‐making. This third myth, it is argued, requires a hermeneutic of the anti‐hermeneutic if it is to be deconstructed and previous conceptions of social knowledge (from Weber onwards), and the claims to possible justice and politics based upon them, are to be preserved.     

Young People as Co‐producers in Policing across England. An Evaluation of the ‘Youth Commission’ on Police and Crime

This paper discusses a recent study on three ‘Youth Commission’ on police and crime projects. Professional viewpoints were interpreted to understand how they valued young people's participation and made sense of their experiences and capabilities. Framed within policing reforms, the ‘Youth Commission’ projects regard young people as co‐producers, who work in partnership with professionals to address police and crime issues. The focus is upon professionals and their relationships with young people for transformative participation and social outcomes. Working in partnerships showed interdependency but identifies further challenges if professionals do not truly value young people's participation.     

Change and continuity in youth transitions in Eastern Europe: Lessons for Western sociology*

This paper argues that the evidence from research among young people in post‐communist countries vindicates and should consolidate confidence in the Western sociology of youth's conventional transitions paradigm which seeks links between social origins, routes and destinations. Contrary to claims about postmodern fluidity, individualisation, and a blurring of traditional structural boundaries, the expected links between origins, routes and destinations have persisted throughout the transformation of the former communist countries. The relevant evidence also confirms the primacy of education‐to‐work and family/housing life stage transitions. Other aspects of young people's lives – their uses of leisure, levels and patterns of social and political participation, and socio‐political attitudes, for example – become meaningful and explicable only when set in the context of the routes that individuals’ lives have taken, and the stages that they have reached, vis‐à‐vis their school‐to‐work and family and housing transitions. The paper proceeds to argue that the exceptionally thorough changes that are still in process in East‐Central Europe and the former USSR reveal with exceptional clarity the processes whereby young people's life chances are structured in ways that are not of the individuals’ own making. It has been, and it remains, possible to observe how young adults learn from their own youth life stage transition experiences and, where applicable, use the assets that they acquire or retain, to advantage their own children thereby structuring the opportunities that confront all members of subsequent cohorts of young people. Finally, it is argued that the sociological approach being advocated is uniquely able to use the evidence from young people as a window through which to identify the impact of the ongoing macro‐changes in former communist countries among different socio‐demographic groups in the wider populations.     

Working‐class participation,middle‐class aspiration? Value,upward mobility and symbolic indebtedness in higher education

This paper interrogates the relationship between working‐class participation in higher education (HE) in England and social and cultural mobility. It argues that embarking on a university education for working‐class people has been construed in governmental discourses as an instrumental means of achieving upward mobility, or of aspiring to ‘become middle class’. Education in this sense is thus not only understood as having the potential to confer value on individuals, as they pursue different ‘forms of capital’, or symbolic ‘mastery’ (Bourdieu, 1986), but as incurring a form of debt to society. In this sense, the university can be understood as a type of ‘creditor’ to whom the working‐class participants are symbolically indebted, while the middle classes pass through unencumbered. Through the analysis of empirical research conducted with staff from working‐class backgrounds employed on a university Widening Participation project in England, the article examines resistance to dominant educational discourses, which understand working‐class culture as ‘deficient’ and working‐class participation in HE as an instrumental means of securing upward mobility. Challenging the problematic notion of ‘escape’ implicit in mobility discourses, this paper concludes by positing the alternative concept of ‘fugitivity’, to contest the accepted relationship in HE between creditor and debtor.     

Class, Culture, and Participation in the Collegiate Extra-Curriculum

With larger percentages of high school students entering higher education, it becomes increasingly important to look at how processes occurring on college campuses contribute to social stratification. Using in‐depth interviews with 61 students, I ask: How does social class structure students’ participation in the collegiate extra‐curriculum? I argue that the collegiate extra‐curriculum is an important site for stratification because it is there that students gain access to social and cultural resources valued by the privileged classes. I find that upper‐middle‐class students arrive on campus with cultural resources that motivate their participation and social resources that facilitate their involvement. Among working‐class students, limited financial factors constrain their involvement, while social and cultural resources further curtail their interest in such activities. These findings contribute to theories of social and cultural reproduction by showing that those who have more valued social and cultural resources at the outset are in a better position to gain additional such resources throughout their college careers. Moreover, these analyses show that symbolic and cultural hierarchies are sustained by the interdependent relationship between social and cultural capital.     

Commodities in action: measuring embeddedness and imposing values

Recent approaches in political economy look at the effects of technology and social values on economic action. Combining these approaches with those of economic anthropologists, this article poses that the way the economy is instituted can be understood by looking at reasons actors have for participating in actor‐networks of production, distribution and consumption. Using the author's research on American recycling, this article first shows that much of the‘making’or instituting of the economy happens outside the market, through political machinations, contracts and standards. Second, it suggests that these relationships impose value upon goods differently than do market relations. The details of the recycling‘chain’show the ways actors shape the network and demonstrate that the social values that add‘economic value’to goods are not uniform, but are highly contextual. Starting from Mark Granovetter's notion of 'social embeddedness', the article explains that the measure of social embeddedness is not as important as the values imposed upon other actors through social structure in the economy. It calls for a close observation of economic action in the locales within which production takes place to understand better the‘actions‐at‐a‐distance’where the politics of technology, social movements and power create the empirical, instituted economy.     

An equality of condition framework for user involvement in mental health policy and planning: evidence from participatory action research

Discussions about user involvement in the mental health services tend to throw up four major areas of concern: the capacity of service users to participate, their lack of participation skills, the need for a positive organisational culture and the need for arenas of participation. This article presents evidence from participatory action research with Irish mental health service users which explored how they could more equally participate in advisory committees. Participants identified barriers to their equal participation due to unequal cultural, physical, mental and economic resources, time, power, ‘stigma’(prejudice) and lack of respect for their experiential knowledge and emotional expression. These barriers fall within the ‘equality of condition framework’ developed by Baker and colleagues. Enabling equal user involvement in strategic decision‐making requires more than arenas of participation – it requires comprehensively addressing service users’ structural disadvantages throughout the process of involvement.     

Toward Father‐friendly Parenting Interventions: A Qualitative Study

Levels of father participation in parenting interventions are often very low, yet little is known about the factors which influence father engagement. We aimed to qualitatively explore perceived barriers to, and preferences for, parenting interventions in a community sample of fathers. Forty‐one fathers across nine focus groups were interviewed using a semi‐structured interview. Data were analysed using inductive thematic analysis. Key barriers to father participation identified included: the perception that interventions are mother‐focused; beliefs about gender roles regarding parenting and help‐seeking; mothers’ role as ‘gatekeeper’; lack of knowledge and awareness of parenting interventions; and lack of relevance of interventions. Fathers reported preferences for specific content and intervention features, facilitator characteristics, practical factors, and highlighted the need for father‐targeted recruitment and advertising. Many of the barriers and preferences identified are consistent with previous research; however, fathers’ beliefs and attitudes around gender roles and help‐seeking, as well as the perception that interventions are predominantly mother‐focused, may be key barriers for community fathers. Strategies to overcome these barriers and better meet the needs of fathers in promoting and delivering parenting interventions are discussed.     

Clothing and social movements: Tibet and the politics of dress

The ‘cultural turn’ in social movement studies has brought a renewed outlook on new social movements and lifestyle movements. In this development on the symbolic challenge of contemporary movements, research has expanded to both music and art. However, little is known about the role of clothing in movements and how activists use it for social change. In making the case for a greater consideration of clothing’s tactical use in identity work, this paper explores the case of the Tibetan Lhakar movement. I argue that for Lhakar activists, clothing is the materialization of the political consciousness of the movement and symbolically acts as a mechanism of communication in shaping its political goals. By using social media to observe individualized collective actions of wearing Tibetan clothing, the paper demonstrates how activists frame and create new political opportunity structures for civic participation in a one party state that controls all speech and movement.