bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Great Decline
Authors: Bone John
Published: January 2025

The Great Decline is an ambitious work offering a wholly fresh take on the multiple crises we face, both individually and collectively, in the 21st century. The central argument is that, after a period of qualified social progress in the mid-20th century, recent decades have resurrected social and economic arrangements that are toxic in terms of our fundamental needs, undermining the social and political stability of our societies as well as our individual mental and physical health in ways that have been poorly understood and which have now reached a crisis point. Across numerous established democracies, including the UK and the US, the neoliberal consensus principally advanced in the 1980s continues to tear apart the social fabric and destroy countless individual lives amid a growing climate of fear, anger and uncertainty. Amongst a range of consequences, we have witnessed the rise of populist politicians exploiting and further sowing social distress and division, while the ensuing polarization and undermining of established democracies has left us ill-equipped to deal with the huge challenges being presented by climate breakdown and rapid advances in digital technologies. While addressing these troubles of the present, this is also approached from a broad historical and to an extent evolutionary context advancing an original biosocial perspective, the social map, drawing on social science, political economy, neuroscience and epigenetics to present a radical reframing of where we are, how we understand our relationship to the social, economic and political environment, and how we relate to each other.
The Neoliberal ‘Dawn’: Mont Pelerin, Fear of Socialism and the Backlash of Privilege
Authors: Bone John
Published: January 2025

This chapter briefly outlines the key elements of the ascendancy of the neoliberal/free market orthodoxy that has dominated social, economic and political affairs since the late 1970s and 1980s. The roots of these ideas are discussed, from their initial promotion by the Mont Pelerin Society to their proliferation via finance and corporate sponsored think tanks and academic departments throughout the latter part of the 20th century, a process that would see this once-marginal worldview installed as the new global ‘common sense’. Central to the argument presented here is the notion that, contrary to the claims of neoliberal advocates that they are ‘modernizers’, the inherent instabilities and injustices of the neoliberal system have in fact fatefully undermined many of the pillars of security and predictability that had begun to render modern living more comfortable and psychologically manageable in the postwar period. What has emerged, as was identified in the Introduction, is an era of consistent instability, where powerful actors have been granted the ‘freedom’ or licence to pursue narrow economic interests at the expense of societies as a whole, while accumulating resources that have insulated them from the expanding risks emerging from these arrangements.
Marketized Housing: An Insecure Base
Authors: Bone John
Published: January 2025

Access to suitable, affordable housing has also evidently reached a crisis point within neoliberal societies, becoming a source of financial and personal stress rather than security, as housing has been restored as a vehicle for financial speculation and profit generation as well as a conduit for debt-fuelled growth. This contrasts starkly with the mid-20th century view of decent, secure housing as a bedrock of family life, complementing the ‘job for life’ as twin pillars of security and stability. This generational shift has allowed some to benefit greatly from unearned property wealth at the expense of imposing high costs and chronic insecurity on the growing legions of housing ‘poor’, further fuelling already-widening inequalities and leaving many in overcrowded, squalid and overly expensive accommodation. This scenario is also having an impact on demographics as young people can no longer readily access family homes and, hence, many defer or abandon the notion of having children altogether. Moreover, shedding new light as to why increasingly insecure housing tenure appears so problematic, some of the underexplored neurological and epigenetic ramifications of insecurity in the private rented sector are specifically addressed.
Consumerism, Community and Media
Authors: Bone John
Published: January 2025

From the mid-19th century, consumer culture emerged as a major feature of contemporary market societies, shaping modern peoples’ identities, relationships, worldviews and communities. This chapter addresses the way in which consumer organizations, advertisers and mass media have attempted to maximize consumption and profit since that time by appealing to and, often, manipulating the public in terms of many of the fundamental human needs discussed in earlier chapters. The role of modern media and now social media in consumer societies is also explored in relation to the proliferation of consumerist values as well as the commodification, monetization and overwhelming of our attention in pursuit of the aggressive marketing of products and services. Consumerism within our highly mediated culture, it is argued, has entailed a distortion of ideas, values and relationships together with the cultivation of a range of increasingly recognized personal, social, political and environmental ills, exerting a profound effect on societies as a whole. The chapter also acknowledges the impact of online shopping and the ensuing so-called ‘retail apocalypse’, considering whether this might lead to a necessary contraction in consumer activity over time, given the latter’s contribution to climate change and environmental degradation.
Populism and the Politics of Primalization
Authors: Bone John
Published: January 2025

The argument presented in this chapter asserts that the negative emotions conjured up by living in market societies, as well as being turned inwards as existential anxiety and depression, also present as a creeping undercurrent of incipient rage and growing unreason, as discussed in relation to the biosocial concept of primalization. In conditions of inherent insecurity and existential angst, people are less measured and reflective – prone to distrust, exploit and direct anger towards others as a means of attempting to make sense of their own negative feelings while giving vent to their emotional discomfort. Together with our innate tendency to favour in groups over out groups, leading to reduced empathy and increased hostility to those identified as ‘other’, the greater the angst among a population, the more likely this scenario is to arise and, crucially, the more readily it can be cultivated, exploited and channelled by political actors and amplified via social media. Overall, a critical issue addressed here relates to how our unmet fundamental needs have created conditions for the emergence of an increasingly febrile and divisive political culture, where the insecurities and inequities of our economic system have nurtured an anti-democratic resurgence of authoritarian populism.
Public Issues as Personal Troubles: Individualizing Risk and the Health Costs of Turbocapitalism
Authors: Bone John
Published: January 2025

This chapter, drawing on both the biosocial model outlined here and the broad logic of C. Wright Mills’ depiction of ‘personal troubles’, argues that the structural arrangements, insecurities, inequalities and demands discussed in previous chapters can clearly be seen to be associated with a rise in social problems generally and mental health issues in particular. It is argued here that much of this has been personalized and, consistent with the logic of neoliberal ideology, the negative effects of wider economic, political and social arrangements have been depicted as problems of individual ‘biology’ and genetics. This has led to the widespread medicalization of what are largely problems generated by social and economic circumstances, while also spawning a huge industry from mainstream psychiatry and psychology to self-help punditry and the ‘happiness’ movement that, as will be argued here, may in many instances be exacerbating the very conditions they are assumed to alleviate, in part by pathologizing emotions that, for growing numbers, can be regarded as natural and understandable responses to current conditions.
Why an Alternative Theory of the Firm?
Authors: Kuhn Timothy
Published: January 2025

This chapter argues for the need for an alternative theory of the firm in the context of communicative capitalism. It outlines two broad camps of existing theories of the firm: governance approaches (focusing on transaction cost economics and agency theory) and competence/capability approaches (including the resource-based view, dynamic capabilities, and the attention-based view). Both broad stances oversimplify the firm’s complexity and ignore its multiplicity, and consequently are constrained in their capacity to address the changes associated with communicative capitalism. The chapter emphasizes the need for an alternative theory of the firm that places communication at its conceptual core; re-imagines agency as a hybrid, heterogeneous, and distributed accomplishment; addresses the shifting trajectory of purpose; and considers dis/organization as the normal state of the firm. A responsive theory of the firm would need to provide satisfactory responses to the challenges of firms’ purposes under communicative capitalism by attending to the more-than-human, grasping organizations' fluidity, advancing practice as the key unit of analysis, and re-imagining agency and authority. The chapter thus sets the stage for the development of a distinctly communicative theory of the firm in subsequent chapters.
A Communicative Theory of the Firm
Authors: Kuhn Timothy
Published: January 2025

Organizations are communicatively buzzing assemblages of objects, actions, signs, persons, and passions. This vision leads to the articulation, in this chapter, of a Communicative Theory of the Firm (CTF), framing firms as authority machines that attract attachments, centralize decidability, and shape the trajectory of their own practice. It introduces the concept of authoritative texts, sociomaterial depictions of the organizational whole, providing insight into the organization's mode of becoming. These texts encode promises of value and claims to property, shaping decision-making practices and providing a narrative representation of the organization's identity, obligation, and trajectory. The text illustrates how authoritative texts configure three key practices that write the firm's trajectory: boundarying, branding, and binding. With this set of conceptual tools, the chapter advances distinctly communicative responses to four theory of the firm questions introduced in Chapter 2: why firms exist, how they operate internally, where their boundaries lie, and how they pursue profitability.
Organizing Food, Faith and Freedom
Authors: Alakavuklar Ozan Nadir
Published: January 2025

This book delves into the intricate organizational dynamics of community-driven food surplus redistribution, with no monetary exchange, in Aotearoa New Zealand. Using ethnographic insights from the Free Food Store – a shop that collects surplus food and gives it to customers for free – it illuminates the nuanced interplay between faith and neoliberalism, the significance of use value in organizational interactions and the power dynamics within the shop. Additionally, the book employs innovative narrative approaches to explore the unique experiences of an academic activist collaborating with a local community organization. Set against the backdrop of the pressing societal challenge posed by the coexistence of food surplus, food waste and food poverty, the text draws on insights from scholarly conversations on religion and organising, Marxian critical political economy, diverse economies, Foucauldian dispositive theory and academic activism. Ultimately, by taking readers through a personal and theoretical journey, the book invites them to envision and engage with alternative socioeconomic relations and offers a thought-provoking perspective on addressing these pressing issues.
Introduction
Authors: Alakavuklar Ozan Nadir
Published: January 2025

This chapter offers insight into the author’s background and motivation, shedding light on his involvement with the Free Food Store, a pioneering food rescue organization that provides free food to the community. It commences with a description of the author’s role as a critical management and organization scholar in business schools across three countries, detailing the rationale behind his choices to undertake ethnographic research in the Aotearoa New Zealand context. Subsequently, the chapter provides a comprehensive portrayal of the Free Food Store. It also furnishes key statistics on food poverty in the national context and highlights the distinctive features that set the Free Food Store apart from food banks and other food charities, emphasizing its significant societal contributions.
In Search of Alternatives across the Bridge
Authors: Alakavuklar Ozan Nadir
Published: January 2025

Within the global context of the stark contrast between food poverty and food waste, and the growing momentum in food rescue and redistribution initiatives, this chapter delves into the intricate interplay between academic and activist roles. Drawing on the author’s first-hand experiences at the Free Food Store, and through ‘writing differently’, the chapter explores pivotal moments where these multiple roles and identities intersect and sometimes clash. Additionally, it extends an invitation to envision and cultivate an activist academia that collaborates with communities to ‘change the world’. This text serves as an ongoing, intense dialogue between the author’s activist and academic selves, addressing the critical question of what needs to be done in response to urgent societal challenges. It also represents an earnest endeavour to think, write and, most significantly, take action in a distinctive manner, rooted in embodied experiences, aspirations and imaginations.
Take What You Need
Authors: Alakavuklar Ozan Nadir
Published: January 2025

This chapter engages with the notion of freedom and employs Michel Foucault’s ‘dispositive’ concept to present an insightful framework for comprehending the intricate power relations that unfold within the realm of the Free Food Store. The dispositive concept sheds light on the complex interactions between neoliberalism, community, faith and sustenance, ultimately revealing the dynamics that grant individuals the paradoxical experience of being both free and disciplined, as observed in the daily practices and discourses at the Free Food Store. As a result, the chapter offers a non-essentialist perspective that enhances our understanding of the multifaceted discourses, practices and institutional forces at play within the Free Food Store. This framework enables us to decipher the intricacies of how the Free Food Store operates and mediates the conditions of ‘disciplined freedom’ within an alternative-substitute organization.
HIV, Gender and the Politics of Medicine
Authors: Mills Elizabeth
Published: January 2025

This book centres on the lives of women who live with HIV in South Africa and who have navigated a complex assemblage of affective relationships, activist networks, government institutions and global coalitions to transform international and national health policies that govern access to essential HIV medicines.Drawing on 20 years of multi-sited ethnographic and policy research in South Africa, India and Brazil, the book foregrounds the value of understanding the embodied and political dimensions of health policy and reveals the networked threads that weave women’s embodied precarity into the governance of technologies and the technologies of governance.This study of women’s activism to access HIV medicine is not simply a study of the evolution of global and national health policy but one that reveals the extent to which policy becomes embodied, recognizing that bodies too are never the same and experience intersecting inequalities in profoundly unique ways. By focusing specifically on policies around access to HIV medicines at a national, transnational and global level, this book traces an important history – the struggle to access these medicines in the Global South – and brings this history into the present by articulating the lessons learnt by the activists and policy makers engaged in shaping these vital policies over the first two decades of the 21st century.
Concepts, Contexts and Methods
Authors: Mills Elizabeth
Published: January 2025

This chapter introduces the conceptual framework of the book, followed by a short summary of each of the three main countries discussed in the book and the methods that were used in conducting primary and secondary research across these countries. The first section, on concepts, traces the theoretical trajectory from biopower to the politics of life linked to recent technological advances and their implications for governance. Thereafter, the chapter critiques this trajectory in light of two sets of literature that engage specifically with the two dimensions of the research focus – the embodiment and politics of HIV medicine. It proposes that feminist new materialism, science studies and anthropological theory around actor networks and assemblages might enable an integration of these sets of literature. Following the introduction of key concepts pertinent to the book, the second section locates the relevance of these concepts by providing contextual background to South Africa, Brazil and India. The chapter then turns to an outline of the research methods – both primary and secondary – that were used in each country. The methods include participant observation, ethnography, participatory photography and film, key informant interviews and policy analysis.
Gender, Health and Embodiment
Authors: Mills Elizabeth
Published: January 2025

Chapter 3 is the first of this book’s five substantive chapters. This chapter zooms into the intimate worlds of women living in Khayelitsha, South Africa. Based on fine-grained ethnographic research, it brings to light the nuanced struggles that women encounter in their sexual, social and economic worlds. These struggles are articulated, too, in relation to the history of South Africa’s failure to provide essential medicines and the subsequent increase in vertical transmission of HIV from parents to their children through birth and breastfeeding. This has had lasting implications for the women in this study, and for their children, and these implications are detailed in the first section of this chapter. The second section, on ‘horizontal pathways’, looks at the evolution of sexual and reproductive rights and women’s experiences of gender-based violence in South Africa. The final section of the chapter explores women’s strategic negotiation of these forms of harm and underlines the value of thinking more critically around the ways in which women act strategically to navigate their lives in highly complex and often violent contexts.
Therapeutic Governance
Authors: Mills Elizabeth
Published: January 2025

With the provision of HIV medicine in South Africa, emergent concerns around access to newer medical technologies that have fewer side effects call a set of global actors into focus. These actors include Brazilian activists who have a long history of mobilizing the government for access to emerging medical technologies. Chapter 6 draws South Africa’s and Brazil’s history of activism into dialogue, debunking the notion that Brazil can be solely understood as an ‘activist state’ and exploring some of the current challenges facing people living with HIV in both countries.
Common African Positions as Diplomatic Instruments
Authors: van Wyk Jo-Ansie
Published: January 2025

Since the establishment in 1963 of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the predecessor of the African Union (AU), the continent has been steadfast in promoting African unity and solidarity while also attempting to prevent Africa’s marginalization from the international arena. The continent has refined its diplomatic efforts and practices in the context of the Constitutive Act. One such practice has been the increased adoption of common African positions (CAPs) on areas of common African concern as well as on broader international matters. The aim of this chapter is to analyse CAPs as an African diplomatic instrument. It presents a conceptual analysis of common positions as a diplomatic instrument, and focuses on the elements, nature and objectives of CAPs. It outlines the diplomatic path leading to the crafting and adoption of a CAP before exploring the notion of commonality in the context of CAPs. African states’ universal application, promotion and implementation of CAPs is discussed.
South Africa’s Economic Diplomacy and the African Continental Free Trade Agreement: Challenges and Prospects
Authors: Naidu Sanusha , Mabera Faith , Muresan Arina
Published: January 2025

Economic diplomacy has been the foundation of the international system. Within this context, economic diplomacy is not insulated from other forms of diplomatic engagements. This defines the way economic diplomacy should be interpreted and expands how the concept should be measured, especially regarding its implementation and the way it supports a country’s foreign policy. Based on this, the chapter examines an understanding of economic diplomacy in policy decisions and implementation relating to South Africa’s foreign policy behaviour. It argues that how economic diplomacy is determined in practice is linked to how South Africa’s trade policy is defined, exploring to what extent the lines of commercial diplomacy are blurred with economic diplomacy and what fundamentally informs the country’s engagements in foreign economic relations. To this end, the alignment and practice in terms of Pretoria’s African policy, and the context of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement, either as an expression of the country’s formal economic diplomacy policy or its significance as part of Pretoria’s economic calculus is deemed important in disaggregating the way economic diplomacy is perceived.
Prospects for Smart Diplomacy and Its Use in the Foreign Policies of African Small Island Developing States
Authors: Graham Suzanne , Graham Victoria
Published: January 2025

There are six African small island developing states (SIDS): Cabo Verde, Comoros, Guinea-Bissau, Mauritius, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Seychelles. As a grouping, they are an underexplored area of study in small state literature. This is slowly being remedied. This chapter aims to contribute to that process through its analysis of African SIDS and the prospects for usage of smart diplomacy as a tool in their foreign policies. Although small island states face unique challenges and vulnerabilities, what drives the foreign policies of African SIDS is ultimately not dissimilar from those drivers in other states. The chapter investigates what role is played by diplomacy, and in particular smart diplomacy, as an instrument of foreign policy in the African SIDS’ ability to maximize their influence on the global stage. It also assesses the strengths and limitations of smart diplomacy for the African SIDS.
Twitter/X Diplomacy and Its Use and Practice in Africa
Authors: Graham Suzanne , Graham Victoria
Published: January 2025

Twitter/X diplomacy (or hashtag diplomacy), sometimes referred to as Twiplomacy, is an emerging tool used by international policy actors, such as heads of state and diplomats, to conduct public diplomacy and to reach out to worldwide audiences. Can this tool be of real use in the management and implementation of public diplomacy on a continent where internet penetration is 43 per cent of the combined population and, if so, what are these foreign policy makers using it for. This chapter addresses those questions by exploring the use of hashtag diplomacy in Africa in reference to select examples. It situates this type of diplomacy under the umbrella of public diplomacy and considers the viability and reach of this social media platform in Africa.
Morocco’s Cultural Diplomacy with Africa
Authors: Koubi Faiza
Published: January 2025

This chapter explains and analyses Morocco’s diplomatic relations with the rest of the continent despite its ostensible isolation and exclusion between 1984 and 2016. Religion is a major aspect of Morocco’s identity and culture, and therefore a significant driver of the country’s cultural diplomacy. The chapter outlines Morocco’s practice of cultural diplomacy as an instrument of its foreign policy with special emphasis on its relations with African states. Cultural diplomacy, as a distinct diplomatic practice, can be defined as cultural cooperation between states and government intervention to use culture to advance national interests. Drawing upon these definitions, the chapter describes the evolution, tenets and practice of Morocco’s cultural diplomacy with other African states and significant African non-state actors. It discusses the evolution of Morocco’s cultural diplomacy and the role of religion in its cultural diplomacy with Africa, concluding with an assessment of Morocco’s cultural diplomacy.
Understanding Knowledge Diplomacy in Africa 1
Authors: Knight Jane
Published: January 2025

Diplomacy is used and defined in a multitude of ways. At the macro level, it is described as a lens to understanding international relations. The definitions vary according to whether diplomacy is being articulated in terms of functions, forms or actors and whether the theory or practice of diplomacy is being examined. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the changing role of international higher education, research and innovation in the complex and evolving world of contemporary diplomacy through the concept of knowledge diplomacy. An interdisciplinary approach is required to understand how scholars and experts from both the diplomacy and international higher education fields of study understand the forms, functions and contributions that international higher education, research and innovation make to international relations.
Challenges and Triumphs for Women Leaders in African Diplomacy
Authors: Chiriga Jennifer , Chitiga Rudo , Rukato Hesphina
Published: January 2025

This chapter provides personal reflections of three women – Jennifer Chiriga, Hesphina Rukato and Rudo Chitiga – who served in diplomatic fields. It focuses on specific issues of interest in women’s participation in diplomacy, both global and continental. The chapter reflects on personal experiences in the context of lived participation in leadership and diplomacy globally and in Africa. It draws on relevant normative frameworks, especially of the UN at the global level, and of the African Union at the continental level, and it also references theoretical frameworks in gender and leadership studies. It ends by highlighting emerging lessons and recommendations.
African Diplomacy: An Agenda for Practice and Research
Authors: Wyk Jo-Ansie van , Botha Sven
Published: January 2025

African diplomacy, as a unique diplomatic practice and area of study, stands at the centre of this volume. The editors and contributors set out with several caveats. First, this volume does not aim to make contributions to diplomatic theory despite an intellectual gap that remains in this area. Theory building is a unique intellectual undertaking that requires scientific rigour and time. However, the publication has laid some of the empirical and analytical groundwork for future scholarship in this area, presenting several diplomatic typologies to determine unique and shared elements of African diplomacy. This chapter returns to the conceptual and analytical framework of the volume. It commences with an outline of the functions of African diplomacy based on contributors’ findings. Thereafter it proceeds with a focus on the practice of African diplomacy deduced from the volume. It provides recommendations for the future agenda of African diplomacy before proceeding to the volume’s concluding remarks
Labour Law and the Person
Authors: Rodgers Lisa
Published: January 2025

The starting point of this book is that the conceptualization of personhood and how that has become incorporated into labour law rights is essential for understanding the effectiveness of labour law in promoting and achieving social justice. Certainly, labour law theory recognizes the importance of the empirical lived experience of workers and the social context of work. As such it holds within it the promise of a more empirical, social notion of personhood for labour law. However, both individual and collective labour law remain dominated in practice by the liberal legal subject of law: an abstract, autonomous, rational, and independent being which bears no relation to the lived reality of worker experience. This dominance tends to reinforce already existing power relations between employers and workers, and means that labour law is unable to respond adequately to labour market change (the incursion of AI into the workplace) or labour market ‘shocks’ (the COVID-19 pandemic). It is argued in this book that it is only by incorporating a more ‘relational’ notion of self into labour law that we can really respect the humanity of workers and construct a legal framework through which social justice can be achieved at work.
Relationality and Collective Personhood
Authors: Rodgers Lisa
Published: January 2025

This chapter takes forward the debate by considering the impact of narratives of personhood on the design and operation of collective rights. It is argued that our failure to incorporate collective experience into our understandings of the worker/person seriously limits our ability to promote (collective) justice for workers. Section 2 engages with the distinction between individualism on the one hand and collectivism on the other. It is argued in this section that these elements have tended to become severed from each other, and that this has been to the detriment of both collective and individual rights. Section 3 discusses traditional collectivist approaches and their relationship to the law. Section 4 deals with the position of collective rights on the individualist/collectivist divide. The chapter ends with a reflection on the value of attempting to erode the individualist/collectivist distinction identified in the chapter, by more completely engaging with collective or relational views of personhood.
AI, Technology, and Work
Authors: Rodgers Lisa
Published: January 2025

This chapter identifies the potentially disruptive nature of the digitalization of workplaces in terms of our understanding of the ‘self’ at work. Traditional divides around work and private life, mind and body, machine and human are increasingly being reshaped by the introduction of certain kinds of technology into the labour market. It then proceeds to outline how these changes might be conceptualized on the traditional labour law narrative and the issues which arise from the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) into the workplace according to our inherited understanding of ‘personhood’; namely, the effect of AI on worker ‘rationality’ and ‘autonomy’. In this chapter, there is an investigation of the potential benefits and implications of changing our approach to ‘personhood’ in a theoretical sense. The final section explores how the alternative vision of personhood might be adopted, in practical terms, to increase the effectiveness of the regulation of AI in the workplace.
Conclusions
Authors: Rodgers Lisa
Published: January 2025

This chapter concludes on the possibility of generating a positive theory of social justice for labour law by changing the way in which ‘personhood’ is conceived. In the chapter it is argued that there are three main positive effects for labour law of adopting a more relational approach to personhood. This approach brings together the work of Marxist, feminist, and classical labour law scholars; it is an inclusive critical agenda. Second, addressing personhood at the heart of labour law is a way of reconciling some of labour law’s greatest contradictions and theoretical dilemmas. Third, the relationship between labour law and personhood is not just a theoretical issue; it is crucial to engage with personhood in order to move forward with a labour law agenda for social justice. The hope is that changing the way in which we view personhood as a matter of labour law will lead to law and policies which are more effective in improving the lives of workers. In particular, embedding relationality will make us more able to respond to labour market change.
Tasting: Embracing Foreign Flavours
Authors: Warde Alan
Published: January 2025

This chapter examines the slow expansion of sensory tastes in response to the growing diversity of available foods occasioned by globalisation, migration and the influence of cultural intermediaries. Britain was introduced to foreign flavours and foreign cuisine in the context of an emergent process of gastronationalism. Emphasis is put on the role of restaurants and takeaway outlets in broadening the range of tastes and preferences. The process is also apparent in the columns of women’s magazines between 1968 and 2016. The normalisation of foreign flavours is critically examined. The consequence for the definition and promotion of specifically British cuisine is outlined using evidence from the Good Food Guide. The chapter argues that the incorporation of foreign foods has been a pivotal development since the 1950s, while also noting that the process has been slow and is still incomplete.
An Unfinished Revolution?
Authors: Warde Alan
Published: January 2025

This concluding chapter focuses on rates and directions of change in food and eating practices since the 1950s. It reviews evidence about different dimensions of change while also describing significant continuities apparent over the period. The failure of efforts to define a British cuisine is discussed, as are the class foundations of the norms of everyday eating. A summary audit is conducted to identify both improvement and deterioration in the quality of the experiences of food preparation and eating. The prospects for a radical transformation in habits in the face of the climate emergency are introduced and debated with a view to putting into perspective the speed, quality and extent of culinary and cultural change since the 1950s.
Introduction
Authors: Bastos Marco
Published: January 2025

The book explores a data set of 45,476,692 tweets posted by 264,766 British users, a cohort we identified as the ‘British Twitter Monthly Active Userbase’. The data include posts from April 2016 until the end of January 2021 and were collected in real time and on a rolling basis. The first entries in the database start with the official referendum campaign and the last entries end with the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union on 31 December 2020. The unique and comprehensive nature of the data underpinning this book offers a valuable perspective on the Brexit debate that emerged on Twitter. We hope we can successfully communicate the many puzzling and some paradoxical findings drawn from a large, long-term, and rigorous data set of tweets. Given the contentious nature of the Brexit debate, and the disinformation onslaught on social media observed in the period, much of the book is about social media disinformation, manipulation, and information warfare.
Information Warfare
Authors: Bastos Marco
Published: January 2025

This chapter discusses the weaponization of social media platforms for influence operations centred on the distribution of disinformation and hyperpartisan content, with the Brexit referendum featuring a host of techniques for influence operations that would rapidly spread across local and national elections worldwide. We revisit key events such as the deployment of data-driven microtargeting in political campaigns and the ensuing data lockdown enforced by social media platforms. The chapter covers the literature on disinformation, misinformation, and state propaganda during the Brexit referendum and concludes with a review of the evidence on state and non-state influence operations that sought to strategically diffuse content that heightened partisanship during the Brexit referendum campaign.
From Social to Legal: Shifting Approaches to Trafficking at the Turn of 20th-Century England
Authors: Lammasniemi Laura
Published: January 2025

This chapter argues that trafficking in women, or White slavery as then called, became understood as a legal issue at the turn of 20th-century England, and as a response attracted several legal, and certain criminal law, solutions. Drawing from the archival records of the National Vigilance Association and the International Abolitionist Federation in particular, the chapter examines how the certain civil society organizations gained and used the legal power during the period and the role that civil society action played in the legislative process. The first part of the chapter explores the emergence of language of victimhood, coercion, and social restraints in relation to the campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts and how this impacted both legal and social framing of trafficking. The second part explores how social reform campaigners such as William Coote understood and spoke of law’s power and potential. Through this analysis, the chapter shows how tensions grew between different organizations and argues that as civil society centred legislative processes and anti-White slavery laws, openly feminist actors and agenda became sidelined from mainstream discussions. Ultimately, the chapter shows how White slavery transformed from a social to a legal issue in England, revealing profound disagreements about the potential and dangers of legal power amid social reform campaigners.
Governing through Indicators: Structural Biases and Empirical Challenges in Indicator-Based Approaches to Anti-Trafficking Policy, Practice, and Research
Authors: Vries Ieke de , Cockbain Ella
Published: January 2025

In this reflective chapter, we examine the structural biases and empirical challenges underlying human trafficking ‘indicators’ (especially problem, risk, and performance indicators) that are routinely used to describe and measure human trafficking, assess risk, identify abuses, evaluate responses, and encourage accountability. While frequently used, such indicators can give an undue illusion of objectivity and reliability when they are neither neutral nor unskewed. In fact, numerous factors affect which elements are privileged as ‘indicators’ and which are obscured. We therefore examine here the selectivity, politics, and racialized and gendered concerns that relate to the production and use of human trafficking indicators. Since human trafficking is a complex, highly contested, and multi-faceted practice, it is not easily reduced to the crude generalizations upon which many indicators rest. We explore how the uncritical use of indicators can both contribute to stereotypical and unachievable ideals of victimhood and engender undue criminalization or withholding of victim support. In doing so, we disentangle some paradoxes around who is deemed ‘vulnerable’, ‘at risk’, ‘worthy of support’, and requiring ‘protection’. We highlight the – routinely overlooked – weak empirical basis and other limitations of many commonplace ‘indicators’ and challenges in building empirically stronger and more robust indicators. The chapter concludes with overall implications of these critical reflections for policy, interventions, and research.
Brexit-Precipitated or Free Movement-Facilitated? Labour Exploitation of EU Migrants in the UK
Authors: Currie Samantha
Published: January 2025

In the post-Brexit context increased attention is (correctly) being paid to the heightened risks of labour exploitation for EU migrants. The removal of free movement-facilitated access to the labour market, and the loss of associated social rights stemming from Union citizenship, contribute to the enhanced vulnerability of EU migrants to exploitative treatment. However, even under the auspices of the free movement framework, exploitation has been part of (some) EU migrants’ experiences in the UK labour market over many years. In particular, migrants from the Central and Eastern European (CEE) states that acceded to the EU in 2004 and 2007 have been more heavily concentrated in sectors of the labour market in which slippage along the continuum from poor treatment in employment to more severe forms of labour exploitation is more common. These migrants have had a higher visibility as victims of the types of exploitation deemed to constitute modern slavery than EU migrants from the older member states. This can be traced back to the way in which ‘free’ movement was extended to the new EU citizens at the time of EU enlargement. CEE accession migrants’ access to the labour market was conditioned on their willingness to carry out low-skilled roles to plug gaps in the (pre-2008 financial crash) labour market. The curtailed nature of the original access rights has ongoing implications for the treatment that migrants from the CEE accession states experience in the workplace. Moreover, the restrictive trajectory of immigration policy generally, and the move towards limiting support for those identified as victims of modern slavery specifically – encapsulated in the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 and Illegal Migration Act 2023 – offers little solace for the future to any migrants who experience exploitation in the UK.
Insights from Uganda: Wartime Sexual Violence, Knowledge Production, and Power
Authors: Kiconco Allen
Published: January 2025

Empirical research on wartime abduction and sexual violence presents multiple challenges. Researchers travel to conflict contexts to speak with survivors yet accessing and engaging them is difficult. Many years of recovery may have already passed, or stigmatization may compel them to keep a low profile. Even after finding ways of accessing them, re-traumatization and research fatigue might make them, and their families, want to distance themselves from research projects. This chapter draws upon my fieldwork in Uganda, working with formerly abducted women and survivors of sexual violence. It reflects on experience working with these women and their communities to find an acceptable compromise between obtaining high-quality information, limiting the inherent risks involved with obtaining this data and reconciling with research ethics and practical challenges. The central argument is that research methods, ethics, and fieldwork practices need to be adapted in culturally and experientially sensitive ways to keep the survivors safe and the research on ethically solid ground. The chapter discusses the challenges and dilemmas of accessing and interacting with formerly abducted women and the layered effects of my positionality, privilege, and power.
Intimacy as a Lens on Work and Migration
Authors: Mao Jingyu
Published: January 2025

This book elucidates the intimate consequences of inequalities, and how intimacy, in turn, offers a fresh set of insights into understanding the multi-layered and intersecting inequalities. Based on six months’ ethnographic fieldwork and 60 in-depth interviews with ethnic performers in Southwest China, this book demonstrates how rural/urban, ethnic, and gendered inequality structure certain kinds of service work and migration trajectories, and how they are experienced through the intimate and emotional experiences of workers themselves. It coins the concepts of ‘intimacy as a lens’ and ‘border encounters’ as key tools to make sense of how close encounters between ethnic, rural, feminized performers and Han, urban, masculinized customers re-inscribe the boundaries between more and less privileged groups in China. This has intimate consequences for the workers: it shapes the kinds of people they aspire to become, the levels of respect they feel they are entitled to, the ways they understand their own ethnicity and its (in)authenticity, and how they navigate intimate relations with others in their lives. The book reveals how close attention to intimacy in relation to work and migration offers a fresh set of insights into inequality in contemporary Chinese society.
Introduction
Authors: Mao Jingyu
Published: January 2025

Ethnic performers are rural–urban migrants who perform ethnic songs and dances at different venues such as restaurants and tourist sites. While performers’ representations are prevalent in many cultural spheres in China, their voices tend to be silenced. This chapter demonstrates how researching ethnic performers’ experiences bridges important gaps in research on rural–urban migration in China, as it focuses on the less-understood experiences of ethnic minority migrants who undertake service work, and those who move from rural areas to small- or medium-sized cities within a province. It also sets up the theoretical framework for the book, that is, the concepts of ‘intimacy as a lens’ and ‘border encounters’, and demonstrates how studying migration and ethnicity from the perspective of emotion, intimacy, and the personal sheds new light on how power and inequality operate in contemporary China. This chapter outlines the research questions, with a brief methodological overview, and provides an outline of the chapters to follow.
Encountering Ethnicity
Authors: Mao Jingyu
Published: January 2025

Ethnic performers encounter ethnicity through everyday work and migration, yet they are ambivalent over whether they are ‘authentic’ ethnic minorities. Their ambivalence provides a valuable starting point for understanding ethnicity as something people do rather than who they are, and also for emphasizing the existence of multi-layered ‘ethnic scripts’, that is, the social and cultural repertoires which deeply shape people’s understanding of and ways of ‘doing ethnicity’. In order to achieve ‘valuable personhood’, performers work on their ethnic selves in ways which accord with state and market versions of ethnic scripts. Also, ethnic scripts become part of the ‘feeling rules’ which shape how performers manage their emotions in order to perform the happy, worry-free demeanor of ethnic minorities. Ethnic scripts also tend to sexualize minority women. This chapter highlights the ways that ethnic scripts are closely related to migrant performers’ emotions and sense of self, and the fact that ethnic scripts are inherently gendered.
Conclusion
Authors: Mao Jingyu
Published: January 2025

In conclusion, this book demonstrates the intimate consequences of social inequalities: how the multi-layered inequalities regarding the rural–urban divide, ethnicity and gender have a profound impact on people’s emotions, sense of self, and their relationships with significant others. At the same time, it seeks to move beyond merely exploring the intimate consequences of inequalities, and further asks how we could use these intimate negotiations as a means to understand social inequalities – an approach I call ‘intimacy as a lens’. It means starting from the intimate realm and working from there to understand broader social inequalities. As this book demonstrates, the lens of intimacy provides valuable insights that otherwise tend to be overlooked, and illuminates how power and inequalities work in contemporary China. In a way, this book provides a convincing answer to the question of what it means to say that ‘the personal is political’, and more importantly, illuminates how we can understand ‘the political’ better if we take ‘the personal’ seriously.