Showing papers on "Contemporary society published in 2018"

African culture and values

Abstract: The main objective of this paper is to examine African culture and values. Since culture is often seen as the sum total of the peculiarities shared by a people, a people’s values can be seen as part of their culture. In discussing African culture and values, we are not presupposing that all African societies have the same explanation(s) for events, the same language, and same mode of dressing and so on. Rather, there are underlying similarities shared by many African societies which, when contrasted with other cultures, reveal a wide gap of difference. In this paper, we try to show the relevance of African culture and values to the contemporary society but maintain that these values be critically assessed, and those found to be inimical to the well-being and holistic development of the society, be discarded. In this way, African culture and values can be revaluated, their relevance established and sustained in order to give credence to authentic African identity.

Digital Criminology: Crime and Justice in Digital Society

Abstract: The infusion of digital technology into contemporary society has had significant effects for everyday life and for everyday crimes. Digital Criminology: Crime and Justice in Digital Society is the first interdisciplinary scholarly investigation extending beyond traditional topics of cybercrime, policing and the law to consider the implications of digital society for public engagement with crime and justice movements. This book seeks to connect the disparate fields of criminology, sociology, legal studies, politics, media and cultural studies in the study of crime and justice. Drawing together intersecting conceptual frameworks, Digital Criminology examines conceptual, legal, political and cultural framings of crime, formal justice responses and informal citizen-led justice movements in our increasingly connected global and digital society. Building on case study examples from across Australia, Canada, Europe, China, the UK and the United States, Digital Criminology explores key questions including: What are the implications of an increasingly digital society for crime and justice? What effects will emergent technologies have for how we respond to crime and participate in crime debates? What will be the foundational shifts in criminological research and frameworks for understanding crime and justice in this technologically mediated context? What does it mean to be a 'just' digital citizen? How will digital communications and social networks enable new forms of justice and justice movements? Ultimately, the book advances the case for an emerging digital criminology: extending the practical and conceptual analyses of 'cyber' or 'e' crime beyond a focus foremost on the novelty, pathology and illegality of technology-enabled crimes, to understandings of online crime as inherently social.

The heritage of Brexit: Roles of the past in the construction of political identities through social media

Abstract: This article assesses the role of the pre-modern past in the construction of political identities relating to the UK’s membership in the European Union, by examining how materials and ideas from Iron Age to Early Medieval Britain and Europe were leveraged by those who discussed the topic of Brexit in over 1.4 million messages published in dedicated Facebook pages. Through a combination of data-intensive and qualitative investigations of textual data, we identify the ‘heritages’ invoked in support of pro- or anti-Brexit sentiments. We show how these heritages are centred around myths of origins, resistance and collapse that incorporate tensions and binary divisions. We highlight the strong influence of past expert practices in shaping such deeply entrenched dualistic thinking and reflect over the longue duree agency of heritage expertise. This is the first systematic study of public perceptions and experience of the past in contemporary society undertaken through digital heritage research fuelled by big data. The article is thus foundational, contributing significantly to theory in cultural heritage studies. It is also the first published work to analyse the role of heritage in the construction of political identities in relation to Brexit, via extensive social research.

Video Games as Culture: Considering the Role and Importance of Video Games in Contemporary Society

Abstract: Video games are becoming culturally dominant. But what does their popularity say about our contemporary society? This book explores video game culture, but in doing so, utilizes video games as a lens through which to understand contemporary social life. Video games are becoming an increasingly central part of our cultural lives, impacting on various aspects of everyday life such as our consumption, communities, and identity formation. Drawing on new and original empirical data – including interviews with gamers, as well as key representatives from the video game industry, media, education, and cultural sector – Video Games as Culture not only considers contemporary video game culture, but also explores how video games provide important insights into the modern nature of digital and participatory culture, patterns of consumption and identity formation, late modernity, and contemporary political rationalities. This book will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral researchers, interested in fields such Video Games, Sociology, and Media and Cultural Studies. It will also be useful for those interested in the wider role of culture, technology, and consumption in the transformation of society, identities, and communities.

Political trust and the enforcement of constitutional social rights

Abstract: This thesis addresses the long-debated question of courts’ proper role in enforcing constitutional social rights; and it does so from a new perspective – that of political trust. Its central argument is that the concept of political trust – as it has been conceptualised and theorised in the relevant social science literature – has normative potential for defining such a role for courts. Specifically, I argue that courts, in enforcing constitutional social rights, can, and should, use political trust as an adjudicative tool, employing it to develop a standard to which government, in its provision of social goods and services to the public, can and will be held. To make out this argument, I draw on both theoretical and empirical social science scholarship on trust and how it functions in contemporary societies. I suggest, based on that scholarship, that we can expect constitutional social rights adjudication by courts to be able to impact (and in the right circumstances, to foster) political trust. And following from this impact, in combination with the well-recognised value of political trust by social scientists as well as a host of other principled reasons, I make the claim that political trust can, and should, lie at the very centre of social rights enforcement by courts.

All the Lonely People: Social Isolation and the Promise and Pitfalls of Leisure

Abstract: Maintaining meaningful social connections boosts health in amazing ways. Even so, social isolation pervades disturbingly in contemporary society. Because of its harmful consequences, social isolati...

Does friendship quality matter in social commerce? An experimental study of its effect on purchase intention

Abstract: Friendship plays a critical role in social commerce in contemporary societies. This study aims to theorize and examine how friendship quality impacts purchase intention. Product-related risk is introduced to gain insight into its moderating effects on intention to purchase from three different seller groups. Through empirical evidence, we confirm that friendship quality has positively effect on purchase intention. In particular, friends with high friendship quality (i.e., good friends) are more conducive to selling high-price high-risk products. However, friends with low friendship quality (i.e., simple friends) are not as attractive as strangers having good user reviews (i.e., reputable strangers). In other words, people are more willing to buy from reputable strangers than from simple friends. Theoretically, these results contribute to a better understanding of the effect of friendship quality on purchase intention. Finally, this research offers several practical implications for developing successful businesses in social commerce.

The Homeless Person in Contemporary Society

Abstract: The homeless person is thought to be different. Whereas we get to determine our difference or sameness, the homeless person’s difference is imposed upon them and assumed to be known because of their homelessness. Exclusion from housing – either a commodity that should be accessed from the market or social provision – signifies the homeless person’s incapacities and failure to function in what are presented as unproblematic social systems. Drawing on a program of research spanning ten years, this book provides an empirically grounded account of the lives and identities of people who are homeless. It illustrates that people with chronic experiences of homelessness have relatively predictable biographies characterised by exclusion, poverty, and trauma from early in life. Early experiences of exclusion continue to pervade the lives of people who are homeless in adulthood, yet they identify with family and normative values as a means of imaging aspirational futures.

Re/constructing politics through social & online media Discourses, ideologies, and mediated political practices

Abstract: In recent years, the connection between online and in particular social media and politics has become one of the central ones in contemporary societies, and has been explored very widely in political research and media and communication studies. Against such growing body of research, this Special Issue foregrounds the role of language as a key carrier of political ideologies and practices on social and online media. It aims to advance the scholarly understanding of contemporary political and democratic dynamics by postulating the need for a broader, problem-driven look at how political practices and ideologies are articulated on social and online media. It illustrates the value of a cross-disciplinary take that allows overcoming both the classic (e.g. qualitative vs. quantitative) and the more recent (e.g. small vs. big data) divides in explorations of the language of online and politics.

Taking pleasure seriously: the political significance of subcultural practice

Abstract: This paper demonstrates that subcultural theory continues to provide a relevant and useful analysis of youth leisure practices and their political significance in contemporary society. It achieves this by analysing the theoretical antecedents to both subcultural theory and the post-subcultural theory that followed it. It is argued that the post-subcultural turn to studying affects and everyday lives resonates deeply with the Gramscian perspective informing subcultural theory. It is thus possible to interpret post-subculturalism as augmenting rather than negating its predecessor. Deploying an analysis that combines these perspectives allows for an account of contemporary youth leisure practices that demonstrates a number of different forms of politics explicated within the paper: a politics of identity and becoming; a politics of defiance; a politics of affective solidarity and a politics of different experience. Whilst not articulated or necessarily conscious, there is a proto-politics to youth leisure that precludes it from being dismissed as entirely empty, hedonistic and consumerist. This paper demonstrates how the lens of post-subculturalism focuses on the affective spaces where this politics is most apparent and provides a means of updating subcultural theory to understand contemporary youth practices.

Economic Imaginaries Across the Public Sphere:an empirical exploration into economic understandings and representations across four sites in the UK

Abstract: This study explores how people understand and represent the economy in different spaces across society. It draws on over 120 semi-structured interviews as well as participant observation across four sites: the civil service, the financial sector, the financial press, and one of the UK’s largest housing estates. The multi-sited empirical study builds on and contributes to two bodies of literature. First, through looking at the representations and understandings of the economy across a number of sites it explores how the economy is anchored in different registers of meaning across society. This brings the notion of the economy into the same theoretical framework that has been used to theorise the fragmentation of the public sphere, which has mainly focussed on political, cultural and media fragmentation, but ignored the economy. The second intervention comes in the field of economic sociology. The multi-sited framework allows for an investigation into different forms of agency in socioeconomic praxis. The sites are explored as both internal localised networks of interaction and as spaces situated within broader societal relationships of power. The findings and the argument constructed emphasise the importance of broader structural relationships. In doing so they contribute towards undermining the influential recent trend inspired by Michel Callon's notion of economic performativity, and the localised networked conception of agency at its core. Beyond these theoretical contributions, the thesis also provides a snapshot of contemporary society in the UK. The elite institutional sites looked at are found to generate a self-serving abstract economic discourse grounded in the politics of knowledge representation. This elite economic discourse does not resonate at spaces on the periphery of the public sphere, and in the lack of rational pluralised discourse on the economy many people turn to explanatory frameworks that harness an anti-elite sentiment and appear to fit with their immediate lifeworlds. The result is a fragmented economic imaginary across society that holds little hope of bringing much needed positive economic change.

Towards a psychology of ritual: A theoretical framework of ritual transformation in a globalising world:

Abstract: Rituals are argued to be transformative in the literature. However, a psychological understanding of transformative ritual has been lacking. Moreover, in contemporary society, meaning-making proces...

Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society: From Enemy to Adversary

Abstract: US citizens perceive their society to be one of the most diverse and religiously tolerant in the world today. Yet seemingly intractable religious intolerance and moral conflict abound throughout contemporary US public life - from abortion law battles, same-sex marriage, post-9/11 Islamophobia, public school curriculum controversies, to moral and religious dimensions of the Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street movements, and Tea Party populism. Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society develops an approach to democratic discourse and coalition-building across deep moral and religious divisions. Drawing on conflict transformation in peace studies, recent American pragmatist thought, and models of agonistic democracy, Jason Springs argues that, in circumstances riven with conflict between strong religious identities and deep moral and political commitments, productive engagement may depend on thinking creatively about how to constructively utilize conflict and intolerance. The result is an approach oriented by the recognition of conflict as a constituent and life-giving feature of social and political relationships.

IMAGINE RRI. A card-based method for reflecting on responsibility in life science research

Abstract: Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has become a new buzzword in science policy, pointing to a shift in the role of research in contemporary societies. While on a discursive level responsibil...

Class and politics in twenty-first century Norway: a homology of positions and position-taking

Abstract: This article draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s rethinking of social class to investigate the connection between class and politics in contemporary society. We introduce a new class scheme that incorporates an often neglected hallmark of Bourdieu’s approach, namely the distinction between class fractions based on the preponderance of economic or cultural capital possessed. By relating our two-dimensional concept of class to a two-dimensional political space, we will show that the relationship between class and politics is homological – the systems of class divisions and political divisions exhibit a corresponding structure. The hierarchical dimension of class is associated with the divide between liberal and anti-liberal views on what is sometimes dubbed ‘new’ politics, whereas the capital composition dimension is connected with the classical left vs. right divide in terms of issues of redistribution, social spending and government interventions in the economy. We conclude by discussing whether political ...

The New Forms of Mourning: Loss and Exhibition of the Death on the Internet.

Abstract: According to some specialists, ceremonial funeral practices are inclined to disappear, particularly as death is an object of repression in contemporary society. However, it seems that new forms of ...

A plural century: Situating interculturalism and multiculturalism

Abstract: This book explores the topics of interculturalism and multiculturalism, including their relationships to each other and to public philosophies more broadly. In many respects it is a timely and perhaps overdue intervention that locates the debate about interculturalism and multiculturalism in amongst a series of sociological and political developments. It is widely accepted that the significant movement and settlement of people outside their country of birth ‘is now structurally embedded in the economies and societies of most countries’ (Pecoud and de Guchteneire argue, 2007: 5). The prevailing context is that the majority of the world’s population resides in one hundred and seventy five poorer countries relative to the wealth that is disproportionately concentrated in around twenty. With levels of migration fluctuating but anxieties constant, it is common to hear governments and other agencies favour ‘managed migration’ and strategies for ‘integration’ which, though meaning different things in different places, registers migration and post-migration settlement as an intractable feature of contemporary society.

Local communities of artistic practices and the slow emergence of a “post-racial” generation

Abstract: The paper sheds light on a neglected urban process in our heavily racialized and polarized contemporary societies: the slow emergence of an urban post-racial generation through artistic collaborati...

Power, Empowerment and Social Participation- the Building of a Conceptual Model

Abstract: Social intervention integrates multidisciplinary and participative concepts and practices that, in different areas, contribute to social processes of empowerment, one of the intervention paradigms in contemporary society. The use of the term empowerment has been recurrent in the fields of psychological and social intervention and its definition implies the contribution of various knowledge. This requires the operational contextualization of its definition. Based on a review of the literature, this article intends to conceptualize and contextualize empowerment as a strategic process of intervention. It is structured around three topics that present the relations of power in contemporary society, as well as the conceptual process of empowerment and social participation. It produces a reflexive work combining various theoretical approaches of empowerment in order to define differente analitycal dimentions of the concept, and to produce a conceptual model that can be later operacionalized in empirical research.

Tradition and Revolt

Abstract: This classic volume deals with a crucial contemporary social issue: the conflict between traditionalism and modernism. Nisbet considers such subjects as power, community, culture, and the university. He deals directly with the values of authority, tradition, hierarchy, and community on the one hand, and individualism, secularism, and revolt on the other. Nisbet's underlying argument is that there is a close historical relationship between the distribution of power in democratic society and the displacement of social class, kinship, neighborhood, and the church. The book challenges concerned Americans to understand and address the basic conflicts confronting contemporary society. In his introduction, Robert G. Perrin shows how the chapters in this volume reflect Nisbet's sociological vision exemplified throughout his career. Perrin notes that when these writings first appeared, they stimulated and informed debate on a broad range of topics such as value conflict, leadership, community, sociology, social class, technology, and the university. They also foreshadowed works yet to come in Nisbet's long and distinguished intellectual journey. Originally published in 1968, "Tradition and Revolt" was greeted with thoughtful reviews in leading sociology journals. Writing in the" American Journal of Sociology," Joseph R. Gusfield called it "so welcome a publication," one containing "remarkable contributions to the analysis of modern society." Nisbet's vision of Western social life as shaped by the struggle between the dialectically opposed values of tradition and modernity illuminates contemporary issues. "Tradition and Revolt" will be of particular value to sociologists, cultural historians, and political theorists. "Robert A. Nisbet" (1913-1996) was Albert Schweitzer Professor Emeritus of the Humanities at Columbia University, and before that, dean of the School of Humanities at the University of California at Riverside. Among his many books are "History of the Idea of Progress, The Sociological Tradition, The Degradation of the Academic Dogma, and Teachers and Scholars," all available from Transaction. "Robert G. Perrin" is professor of sociology and director of graduate studies at the University of Tennessee.

Social Class and Child Welfare: Intertwining Issues of Redistribution and Recognition

Abstract: By the end of the 20th century, social class appeared to be an old-fashioned and outdated concept. Serious doubts were expressed about the theoretical and empirical relevance of social class in understanding inequalities in contemporary society. However, experiences from completing research with children and families receiving support from child welfare services shows that applying a class perspective is useful. The purpose of our study was to explore the redistributive and cultural dimensions of social class in the context of child welfare. The data include survey interviews with 715 families in contact with the Norwegian child welfare services (CWS). We found that social class is important but with different effects compared with the industrial society. Our analysis highlighted the problems children and families involved with CWS face, associated with social inequalities based on class differences. We argue that social class is part of the social dynamic of late modern societies, and that this dynamic intertwines with the lives of families in CWS and the problem complexes they encounter in everyday life.

Death, The Dead and Popular Culture

Abstract: Portrayals of death and the dead are everywhere within popular culture revealing much about contemporary society’s engagement with mortality. Drawing upon celebrity posthumous careers, organ transplantation mythology and the fictional dead, this book considers how representations of the dead in popular culture exert powerful agency.

The tourist gaze: leisure and travel in contemporary societies

Abstract: Since its original publication in 1990, ‘The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and travel in contemporary societies’ has managed to enter that select realm of scholarly publications whose titles have emerged a...

Divided Kingdom: A History of Britain, 1900 to the Present

Abstract: How has the UK evolved into the country it is today? This clear, comprehensive survey of its history since 1900 explores the political, economic, social and cultural changes which have divided the nation and held it together, and how these changes were experienced by individuals and communities. Pat Thane challenges conventional interpretations of Britain's past based on stark contrasts, like the dull, conservative 1950s versus the liberated 'swinging sixties', and explores the key themes of nationalisms, the rise and fall of the welfare state, economic success and failure, imperial decline, and the UK's relationship with Europe. Highlighting changing living standards and expectations and inequalities of class, income, wealth, race, gender, sexuality, religion and place, she reveals what has (and has not) changed in the UK since 1900, why, and how, helping the reader to understand how our contemporary society, including its divisions and inequalities, was formed.

Youth Activism in Political Squats between Centri Sociali and Case Occupate

Abstract: Nowadays a lot of research describes most young people as barely interested in politics, expressing little trust in political institutions and far from any forms of institutional political participation. Moreover, most of the engaged youth are involved in forms of participation described as more civic and social than political, weakly ideological, more and more often digital and developed in virtual space, and usually experienced as one among several components of everyday personal lives. The article explores youth activism in political squats because it is a form of participation which, in countertendency, is political and radical in its aims and strategies, explicitly ideologically inspired, strongly rooted in physical places, and often quite central in everyday personal lives. The text is based on research conducted in the city of Turin (Italy) by means of qualitative interviews, participant observation and document analysis. Four main interconnected thematic dimensions are considered: Individuals’ biographical paths and meanings of activism; distinctive lifestyles and cultural sensitivities among the activists; collective narratives about contemporary society and possibilities of social change; patterns of intervention and forms of organization. On the basis of these analyses, the article maintains that this form of activism can be usefully interpreted as a real lifestyle, which has an explicit and intense political sense, but which young activists also connect with a much wider, more differentiated set of meanings.