Introduction to the Special Issue

To commemorate the 90th anniversary of the National Career Development Association and to anticipate its centennial, this special issue presents 9 analyses of the career counseling profession's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT). On the basis of SWOT analyses and using the methodology explained in this introductory article, the authors present objectives and strategies for advancing the profession in the next decade. The special issue concludes with an “analysis of the analyses” that reviews and integrates the authors' recommendations and suggestions for constructing the future of the profession.     

Introduction to the Special Issue

Organizational innovation is now widely seen tobe a major source of competitive advantage for firms,along with product and process innovation. One of themajor intellectual sources for the upheavals, in which firms strive for some formof international best practice, is thesociotechnical systems tradition, which traces its rootsback to innovations such as semi-autonomous work teamsin manufacturing in the 1960s, associated with the work of theTavistock Institute. An international Colloquium wasstaged in Melbourne, Australia, in May 1995, to explorethe current relevance and contributs to organizational innovation.     

Introduction to the Special Issue

Qualitative Sociology -     

Introduction to the Special Issue

The articles published in this special TAS issue, Racial Diversity In Becoming a Sociologist, offer sobering insights into the marginal status of people of color in the profession of sociology. This essay provides introductory commentary on the various ways in which the marginality of sociologists of color represents a form of ethnocultural deviance in a historically persistent ethnocentric profession. He is Chair-Elect of the Status of Racial Minorities Committee of the American Sociological Association.     

Urban Social Movements and the Right to the City: An Introduction to the Special Issue on Urban Mobilization

This paper introduces the special issue and explains the diversity as well as common features of mobilization practices present in cities around the world. The paper starts with presenting the specificity and history of urban movements worldwide, as well as the development of ‘right to the city’ frame. Drawing on the existing literature, it focuses on presenting different forms of urban activism and interpretations of ‘right to the city’ slogan. This paper strives to fuse the framework of social movements as networks (Diani, in: Diani, McAdam (eds) Social movements and networks, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 299–318, 2003) of challengers (Gamson in The strategy of social protest, Wadsworth Publishing, Belmont, 1990) with the concepts of diffusion and translation of ideas, borrowed from Finnemore and Sikkink (Int Org 52(4):887–917, 1998). It also illustrates the application of the theoretical concepts of incumbents and challengers (Gamson 1990), organizational platform and norm life cycle (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998) as well as the development on movement networks within and between localities (Diani in The cement of civil society: studying networks in localities, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2015). The theoretical model helps to explain the rapid global spread of the notion of the ‘right to the city.’ The paper concludes with a discussion of the urban context, both ‘glocal’ and global, as an arena of social mobilization around different aspects of the ‘right to the city.’     

Introduction to the Special Issue on Boundaries and Links

Sociological Forum -     

Introduction to the Special Issue on Work and Families

Qualitative Sociology -