bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Knowledge, policy and scale
Authors: Papanastasiou Natalie
Published: January 2020

This chapter argues that critically engaging with scale can extend understandings of the co-constitution of knowledge and policy, and that this stands to develop further insights into how knowledge hegemonies are sustained in contexts of policymaking. To explore the possible practices of scale embedded in hegemonic regimes of knowledge, the chapter uses the case of Europe’s Open Method of Coordination (OMC) in the area of education policy. Drawing on documents and observation data, the empirical analysis discusses how the OMC privileges benchmarks, peer learning, and best practices as powerful types of knowledge and ‘ways of knowing’ and reveals how these mobilise important scalar narratives. By highlighting the politics of scale featuring in European education governance, the empirical analysis highlights the co-constitutive relationship between knowledge, policy and scale, and argues that scalecraft is a hegemonic regime of practice which is central to building coherent narratives for powerful knowledge in policymaking.
Hegemonies of statecraft and scale
Authors: Papanastasiou Natalie
Published: January 2020

This chapter argues that scalecraft is a key strategy of statecraft. It presents empirical analysis of the localism agenda in England’s school system, focusing on the academy and free schools policies. Analysis explores how practices of scalecraft feature in both national policy narratives and the implementation practices of policy actors in a local authority case study. The discussion illuminates how localism constructs local ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, which in the case of England’s schools policies contributes to the continuous side-lining of local authorities and responsibilisation of individual schools. By outlining how the experiences of policy actors contradict official policy narratives of ‘local freedoms’, scalecraft reveals policy actors experiencing a form of ‘scalar entrapment’. Scalar entrapment is an effect of scalecraft which does not only identify exclusionary meanings of scale but also reveals how epistemologies of scale impact actors’ sense of agency.
The practice of scalecraft
Authors: Papanastasiou Natalie
Published: January 2020

The book’s final chapter discusses how the lens of scalecraft has helped to generate new readings of policy which take into account the scalar politics of policymaking. The discussion reflects on how scale played out in each of the empirical chapters, and how analysis has shed light on the under-examined relationship between policy, scale, and hegemony. Key features of the practice of scalecraft are also developed, including a description of three scalecraft techniques, and by doing so the book offers scholars of policy a clear framework for integrating a critical approach to scale in their analyses. The chapter also discusses how scalecraft contributes to the wider literatures of policy studies, political geography, and education governance. The book concludes by outlining the potential which lies in future work engaging with conceptualisations of spatial politics that go beyond scale.
From welfare state to participation society: austerity, ideology or rhetoric?
Authors: Fenger Menno , Broekema Babs
Published: January 2020

In his first annual speech to parliament in 2013, Dutch King Willem-Alexander announced the end of the era of the welfare state and proclaimed the Participation Society. He stated that the process of individualization, combined with the need to reduce the government's budget deficit leads “to a slow transition of the classical welfare state into a participation society. Everyone who is able to do so, is asked to take responsibility for his or her own life and environment”. This shift towards a participation society is not unique for the Netherlands. Many European countries have experience reforms of their welfare states that limit the responsibility of the state and increases the responsibility of individual citizens. This chapter discusses the backgrounds of Dutch Participation Society in the political discourse, and analyses how and to what extent the ideas of the Participation Society have actually been translated into the content of social policies, their implementation and their consequences.
Alt-Right ‘cultural purity’, ideology and mainstream social policy discourse: towards a political anthropology of ‘mainstremeist’ ideology
Authors: Lux Julia , Jordan John David
Published: January 2020

A series of journalistic books and articles exploring the Alt-Right provide detailed empirical data critical to understanding the underpinning social networks of the Alt-Right. However, intensive media focus on young, working-class – usually American – white supremacists sharing extremist material over the internet masks incidences of closely related racist, conspiracist, misogynist, and ‘anti-elitist’ ideology in wider, often middle-class mainstream media, politics, and social policy discourse. This article problematises these narratives. Drawing partly on the work of Mary Douglas and Antonio Gramsci, we contribute to ongoing national and international ‘Alt-Right’ debates with an interdisciplinary, political-anthropological model of ‘mainstremeist’ belief and action. This approach highlights the links between ‘fringe’ and ‘centre’ into an entangled social network seeking to deploy social policy as a tool of misogynist, patriarchal, racist, and classist retrenchment.
Participatory budgeting for culture: handing power to communities?
Authors: Jones Phil
Published: January 2020

The concept of participatory budgeting was developed as a means of bypassing corrupt local elites and creating better governance in developing countries. Applied in the global north, it attempts to give power back to communities to set spending priorities within their neighbourhoods. This chapter examines two attempts at participatory budgeting for the arts in Birmingham – the city council’s Arts Champions scheme and a participatory action research project led by the author. Two key problems highlighted by the case studies are identified. First, funders being reluctant to hand full control to neighbourhoods over how spending is undertaken, with a tendency to push communities toward the funders’ spending priorities. Second, and related to this, is a lack of capacity at neighbourhood level to move beyond the “ideas generation” stage, toward having the confidence to design and commission cultural projects to realise those ideas. This speaks to wider problems in deprived communities – notably education, skills and confidence – that cannot be tackled simply by adding cultural activity.
Screening films for social change: origins, aims and evolution of the Bristol Radical Film Festival
Authors: Ager Laura
Published: January 2020

Festivals have tremendous power to engage diverse audiences with new forms of cultural consumption, but also provide opportunities for enlightening debate and encouraging action for social change. The Bristol Radical Film Festival (BRFF) takes place annually in venues throughout the city of Bristol, in the South West of England, presenting a curated programme of ‘radical’ films and documentaries which are screened in non-traditional venues. Drawing on ideas of Latin American radical film making, the organisers explicitly sought to use the festival to connect community activists within the city. This chapter examines how festival organisers used the cultural capital of their association with the University of the West of England to help legitimise their activities, under the radar of university managers to create a novel form of societal impact.
Local government in the face of crisis: changing public management of urban projects in Amsterdam
Authors: Koolmees Thijs , Majoor Stan
Published: January 2020

This chapter explores the reform of the working processes and organisational structures of the public management bureaucracies in the Amsterdam municipality. It reflects on the mechanisms through which technocratic thinking gets institutionalised within existing public government bodies, and reveals the development of public planning expertise in contemporary urban governance. This chapter particularly questions the changing role of public bureaucracies in the Netherlands, a country where public expertise still plays a central role in urban governance, but is progressively being reformed to accommodate private actors. It shows how the city's internal bureaucratic structure has been reformed and reorganised under processes of austerity and de-regulation to promote quick adjustments to plans and efficient delivery. Leadership and working processes are becoming increasingly focused on ‘flexible implementation’ and the production of entrepreneurial modes of governance.
Anticipatory knowledge: how development consultants see the future
Authors: Weber Rachel
Published: January 2020

This chapter discusses how the anticipatory gaze — what some call ‘expectancy’ — is formalised in the tools and techniques used by private consultants given the uncertainties associated with large-scale investments and the volatility of the global economy. It makes the claim that planning technocracies can be understood through their ‘instruments’ and ‘governmental technologies’. These refer to the complex of mundane programmes, calculations, techniques, apparatuses, documents, and procedures through which authorities seek to embody and give effect to governmental ambitions. By enquiring the inner working logics of technical instruments used by policy makers and planners, it is possible to explain why certain expertise becomes so central in the definition of public policies and to question how technocratic logics of planning are enacted and institutionalised. The chapter thus pays attention to the actors that create and use techniques of anticipation in order to understand their motivations and ambitions.
Towards an ‘information technocracy’: discourses of London’s post-referendum real estate markets
Authors: Livingstone Nicola
Published: January 2020

This chapter is a study of the ways in which property development elites use particular techniques and technologies of representation to create development real estate markets in the United Kingdom. It compares the construction of post-Brexit vote narratives of investment landscapes and opportunities in London and the North-East. London's real estate market is considered the leading destination for global capital flows into commercial real estate in the United Kingdom, and therefore it becomes the centrepiece of an evolving socio-technical system. The chapter specifically looks at the media narratives disseminated by real estate market agents in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum in London. It does so in order to question the role of media exposure and private consultancy firms and reflects on the way specialist expert knowledge is publicly disseminated to directly shape public opinion and, indirectly, real estate decision-making.
Advocates, advisors and scrutineers: the technocracies of private sector planning in England
Authors: Parker Gavin , Street Emma , Wargent Matthew
Published: January 2020

This chapter studies the role of private consultants in the reformed English planning system and their impacts on the shaping of local policy priorities and practices. First, the chapter sets out the recent political context that has precipitated the rise of the ‘consultocracy’ across public services and planning in particular. Second, it outlines how the use of consultants has become ‘naturalized’ as part of the multi-change planning environment that now characterises English planning. Third, the chapter introduces interview data concerning Local Plan-making to show the scope of consultant involvement and the importance of uncovering how such knowledge is claimed and deployed. In concluding, this chapter reflects on the feedback loop between the state of ‘perma-reform’ in English planning and the expansion of consultant inputs to the system, and considers what this relationship means for our understanding of planning expertise as a social construction and political tool in a co-produced system.
The politics of new urban professions: the case of urban development engineers
Authors: Metzger Jonathan , Zakhour Sherif
Published: January 2020

This chapter provides evidence of a new urban profession of development engineers within public bureaucracies whose position is increasingly detached from the sphere of public policy in which they operate. It reveals that the rise of the professional category of development engineer has led to the institutionalisation of a narrowly conceived and short-termist economic optimisation rationality. This rationality, which is institutionally solidified in legally binding agreements between the city and property developers, comes to set a very rigid frame for any additional considerations regarding, for example, social justice or balanced urban development. To a large extent, this rationality has come to steer urban development considerations in the city of Stockholm. The chapter concludes that while it might be expected that public land ownership would allow public authorities to promote a more ‘progressive’ and mindful urban development, the development engineers who are presently in the proverbial driving seat of the management of public land do not see the pursuit of such goals to be part of their professional responsibility.
Transnational design and local implications for planning: project flights and landings1
Authors: Ponzini Davide
Published: January 2020

This chapter reflects on contemporary logics of technical knowledge production, replication, and transmission questioning the operating of international design firms in autocratic countries. It does so in order to argue that today the technocratic logics of policy making have a global profile, because they prosper and diffuse through the transfer of technical expertise across political and cultural contexts. If one looks at planning cultures, rational choice and the hope in all-seeing and science-based decisions were and still are relevant, both in western countries and, especially, in countries that are undergoing strong industrialisation or modernisation pushes. Of course, these are general conceptions and orientations, but now local processes of development are more complicated in practice than in theory. The chapter therefore shows the influential conceptions in practice to understand the way in which planning works in real-world processes, in rapidly transforming cities as well as in the slower western countries.
Substantive collectivism: collectivism in practice
Authors: Spicker Paul
Published: January 2020

Substantive collectivism is the idea that we live, not as 'individuals', but as a member of social groups, and that many of our actions are done together with others in organisations and social institutions, such as schools and businesses. Social groups are distinguished by a common identity, a network of relationships between people and a capacity for collective action. The relationships are clearest in discussions of formal organisations, but the same principles extend to informal groups, such as families, neighbourhoods and communities.
Community
Authors: Spicker Paul
Published: January 2020

A community is a based on networks; patterns of community include communities based on cultural identity, communities of interest and communities of place. Social policy has built on the idea of community to promote a model of solidarity where people can be integrated into the networks and included socially. The 'political community' becomes the focus both of collective action and of moral responsibility.
Government and collective action
Authors: Spicker Paul
Published: January 2020

Government is a collective organisation of a special kind: governments set the terms on which other organisations operate. The authority of government to act depends on the constitutional framework. Democratic government is conventionally associated with a set of principles - accountability, human rights and the rule of law. Contemporary governments have a wide range of roles - among them, regulation, promotion, bargaining and negotiation, and direct provision. In most societies, there is a mix of provision from different sources.
Collective values
Authors: Spicker Paul
Published: January 2020

Thinking about issues collectively changes the meaning of key values, such as liberty, equality and solidarity. Collective action is often seen as a value in itself; ideas of cooperation, social capital, solidarity and social cohesion are morally approved. The processes that lead people to act together, such as identity, reciprocity, loyalty and solidarity, are all valued in their own right. And various collective actions, such as participation in cultural life, family values and defence, are seen as desirable. These are not necessarily the values of the political left.
Policies for the common good
Authors: Spicker Paul
Published: January 2020

The common good has been represented as the sum of individual interests, the sum of shared interests, the common interests of members of a society, the benefit of a whole society, and a set of methods to achieve common aims. The concept depends on citizenship, a degree of equality and social inclusion; the key methods include measures to enhance voice, empowerment and engagement. The arguments for taking collective action to achieve the common good include moral positions, economic arguments, pragmatic approaches and the collective values considered in the previous chapter.
Part-time strategies of women and men of childbearing age in the Netherlands and Australia
Authors: Yerkes Mara A. , Hewitt Belinda
Published: January 2020

This chapter contributes to the dualization debate by investigating the extent to which gender unequal part-time work patterns reflect insider - outsider labour market effects (e.g. based on gender and occupational effects) by comparing the Netherlands - a country with high protection of part-time workers - with Australia - a country with minimal protection. We focus on the part-time work strategies of men and women of childbearing age, bridging dualization theory with work-family theory. We explore both the extent of dualization between men and women (how women and men differ in their part-time employment patterns) as well as possible dualization effects within part-time work, considering variation in part-time work strategies among women in both countries. Our findings suggest dualization between part-time and full-time workers exists in both countries. Crucially, we find that dualization exists within part
Populism, welfare chauvinism and hostility towards immigrants
Authors: Ejrnæs Anders , Greve Bent
Published: January 2020

This chapter looks into the development in populism, welfare chauvinism and hostility toward immigrants in different welfare regimes. This as it seems that the attitudes towards those who rightly or wrongly are taking the jobs and/or using the benefit system can help in the deeper understanding of populism and welfare chauvinism.
Resisting Shell in Ireland: making and remaking alliances between communities, movements and activists
Authors: Darcy Hilary , Cox Laurence
Published: January 2020

The 15-year-long resistance to Shell’s pipeline in Rossport, Ireland became a strategic and symbolic site for resistance to neoliberalism and the petroleum industry, combining a community-based environmental justice struggle with a range of left social movements and international ecological activists. The movement faced state violence and media demonisation as well as divisions within the community, tensions between ecological and redistributive priorities and instrumentalisation by some political parties. Despite this the campaign was unusually long, forced substantial changes to state policy and contributed to anti-austerity alliance formation and popular learning processes in resisting fracking, as well as raising the political and financial cost of such projects. Its eventual defeat had more to do with the balance of forces against it than with internal difficulties. This chapter highlights the importance of sustained popular mobilisation, learning through action, counter expertise and alliance formation as key elements needed to bring about a better world.
Ecological justice for Palestine
Authors: Awad Simon I.
Published: January 2020

Palestine enjoys a privileged geographical location lying between three continents: Asia, Europe and Africa. Palestine is a small area compared to many other countries, yet its environment contains a wide range of temperatures, rainfall, and topography. In addition, throughout history it has been the cradle several different civilizations, religions, and cultures. Land is central to the conflict between Palestinians and the Zionist movement. Actions taken by the Israeli occupiers have disrupted the delicate ecosystem and damaged the unique environment of Palestine in addition to harming the people, so many Palestinians have forgotten the importance of preserving their homeland. However, the successful preservation of the land is intertwined with the continuing struggle for justice by the Palestinian people. Without the consideration of the ecology of Palestine, the Palestinian people may never find true and lasting justice.
Grassroots struggles to protect occupational and environmental health
Authors: Jenkins Kathy , Marsden Sara
Published: January 2020

This chapter is based on a number of international case studies of grassroots occupational and environmental health struggles that are attempting to link workplace, environment and community. Interviews with key people involved in each struggle, in combination with documented campaigns and our own experience as occupational and environmental health activists, have provided a picture of the changing patterns of work under neoliberalism, and the implications for community and workers’ struggle for environmental justice and occupational health. Themes include the erosion of the distinction between work and community and between the workplace and the environment; the increasing casualisation and precarity of work; downward pressure on working conditions; repression of trade unions and decline in union membership; deregulation of work, safety and environmental protection; and particular risks faced by women, young and migrant workers. Union and community organisers are employing diverse tactics in the face of these challenges.
‘Voices in my head’: thinking critically as dialogic practice
Authors: Clarke John , Brown Wendy , Cochrane Allan , Cooper Davina , Grossberg Larry , Larner Wendy , Lewis Gail , Li Tania Murray , Maskovsky Jeff , Newman Janet , Sharma Anu (Aradhana) , Stubbs Paul , Williams Fiona
Published: January 2020

The introduction establishes the main concerns of the book, locating the challenge of thinking critically as a fundamentally collaborative and dialogic process. It develops an argument about dialogic perspectives as central to the social sciences. It introduces the voices inIntroducing the voices in conversation in the book and discusses some of the missing voices.
Janet Newman
Authors: Clarke John , Brown Wendy , Cochrane Allan , Cooper Davina , Grossberg Larry , Larner Wendy , Lewis Gail , Li Tania Murray , Maskovsky Jeff , Newman Janet , Sharma Anu (Aradhana) , Stubbs Paul , Williams Fiona
Published: January 2020

This final conversation opens around experiences of collaboration, including our own long history of the process. It shifts tio a discussion of the pessimism of critique, before turning to the encounter between Marxism and Feminism. The chapter moves on to the challenges of looking for the current moment and what is politically at stake, before returning to matters of collaboration and dialogic practice.
Conclusion: opening up the politics of the home
Authors: Jupp Eleanor , Bowlby Sophie , Franklin Jane , Hall Sarah Marie
Published: January 2020

This final chapter draws together some of the conceptual, methodological and normative threads from preceding chapters to point towards ways to reimagine home and care within research and also in wider politics. The chapter considers how to make the politics of the home more ‘visible’ when crises are often absorbed into everyday lives. Feminist analysis suggests the need to consider new forms of citizenship and political action which can link the home space to wider sites of politics.
Introduction to Attachment Theory: Behavioural System and Individual Differences
Authors: Wu Chia-Huei
Published: January 2020

The aim of this chapter is to introduce attachment theory to provide a knowledge background for applying the theory to understand employee proactivity. This chapter firstly introduces the concept of behavioral system in attachment theory and then specifically elaborates the development and operation of an attachment behavioral system, the central behavioral system that can shape operation of other behavioral systems. Finally, the chapter elaborates how the development of the attachment behavioral system shapes individuals’ internal working models of self, others, and the broader social environment which continuously guide an individual’s attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors in later life.
Individual Differences in and Situational Impact on Employee Proactivity
Authors: Wu Chia-Huei
Published: January 2020

The aim of this chapter is to look into individual and situational factors of attachment security to offer a relational perspective to explain why there are individual differences in employees’ proactivity and how managers and organizations can influence employees’ proactivity. The chapter firstly discusses how we can use the concept of attachment styles to explain individual differences in employee proactivity. The chapter than elaborates how an employee’s relationships with different targets at work (e.g., relationships with supervisors, work groups, and organizations) can influence her/his sense of attachment security at work and shape her/his proactivity at work.
Nuances in the Politics of Demand for Outsourced Housecleaning
Authors: Singha Lotika
Published: January 2020

This chapter interrogates the ‘need’ to outsource domestic cleaning, alongside implications for gender equality and relationship quality in the outsourcing household. It argues that ‘need’ is not directly related to affluence or status enhancement. The analysis of division of household labour when cleaning is outsourced shows that there is still plenty of housework for service-users to do themselves, particularly tidying up or ‘picking up’ after others. Sharing of this task could aid in progressing gender equality despite the outsourcing of cleaning. In this, if (middle-class) women do not see cleaning as their work, they will not expect (middle-class) men to undertake it either. The chapter concludes that claims of outsourced cleaning pitting the liberation of one class/race of women against that of another risk reducing women’s emancipation to freedom from housework and naturalising housework as women’s work.
Domestic Cleaning: Work or Labour
Authors: Singha Lotika
Published: January 2020

This chapter introduces the central argument of the book through a discussion of how the research respondents conceptualised paid-for domestic cleaning in terms of the structure of cleaning work and whether anyone can do cleaning for a living. The chapter proposes that depending on the conditions of work, cleaning can be done as work, that is, using mental and manual skills and effort and performed under decent, democratic work conditions, or as labour, that is, requiring mainly manual labour, accompanied by exertion of ‘natural’ emotional/affective labour and performed in undemocratic conditions. Good paid-for cleaning work is also not simply a replacement of unpaid housework that can be done by anyone; it entails much learning and continued commitment anddoes not come ‘naturally’ to women.
Meanings of Domestic Cleaning as Work and Labour
Authors: Singha Lotika
Published: January 2020

This chapter locatespaid-for housecleaning within the wider world of paid and unpaid work.With regard to the UK, this draws on the previous work experiencesof the research respondents, and their reasons for preferring self-employmentor undeclared work and selectively using established goodbusiness practices. In India, there was a lack of work experience inother industries, and the accounts highlight the intersectional impactsof ‘men’s work’, patriarchy and desire for education on the investmentby the respondents in their work and its meanings for them. Together,these analyses show that domestic work is not inherently ‘dead-end’ – theworking conditions make a significant difference to how work is perceivedand experienced. Finally, the respondents’ classed (and casteised) understandings of thework in two cultures indicate that the problem with paid domestic labouris not commodification per se, but the way the work itself – and workmore generally – has been commodified.
Concluding the Book, Continuing the Journey
Authors: Singha Lotika
Published: January 2020

The final chapterreflects on the situatedness of the knowledge presented in this book and its relevance to the existing literature and the angst around outsourced cleaning. The implications of the book’s argument for an inclusive, cross-cultural feminist theory of paid domestic work are summed up. The chapter then concludes that the unease around paid domestic work and the gaps in the research prevent recognition of the fact that the exploitation in this work is not fixed and stable, but contingent on certain societal assumptions of ourselves, others and work. The issue of concern for a scholar of gender and sociology is not just that some women are doing the demeaning work of/for other women but is also the classed and casteised evolution of the very meanings of work across cultural contexts.
Imperialism, Migration and Class in the 21st Century
Authors: Vickers Tom
Published: January 2020

This chapter situates Britain within contemporary capitalism, to lay the foundation for the analysis of migration, welfare and precarity that follows. The chapter begins by arguing that the economic crisis has arisen from fundamental contradictions within capitalism and has far-reaching consequences for society. This is followed by three main sections: the first uses ‘imperialism’ to describe capitalism’s contemporary form, as a distinctive organisation of the global space of capital and labour; the second considers migration, focusing on the role of borders and racism in structuring human mobility within imperialism; the third discusses class, shaped by borders and racism within imperialist Britain.
Introduction
Authors: Stock Inka
Published: January 2020

The introduction sets the scene for the argument, introduces the main questions the book aims to explore and presents the context of the research. Further, the main aims of the book, as well as the research design are introduced. This is followed by the chapter structure of the book.
The South China Sea Dispute1
Authors: Southgate Laura
Published: January 2020

This chapter analyses the South China Sea dispute from 1992 to present day. It shows how partial interest convergence between the Philippines, Vietnam and the United States has been insufficient to prevent these dual vanguard states from having their maritime sovereignty violated by an assertive China. Through the analysis of three separate time periods, 1992-2012, 2012-2016, and 2016 to present, the chapter traces the varying levels of interest convergence and intra-ASEAN cohesion, both of which have failed to reach the robust levels required to satisfy vanguard state theory.
Theorising ‘War’ within Sociology and Criminology
Authors: McGarry Ross , Walklate Sandra
Published: January 2020

In chapter two, Theorising “war” within sociology and criminology, we make use of both sociological and criminological scholarship to outline thematically some of the ways in which the subject of “war” has been studied as an interdisciplinary endeavour. This chapter serves two key purposes: first to illustrate that studying “war” has an identity politics of its own within criminology and sociology. Both historical and contemporary work helps reason the study of war as a critical and pacifistic endeavour, particularly via scholarship produced throughout the First and Second World Wars. Second, to make clear that although not sustained throughout its history, studying “war” is not necessarily a new endeavour for criminology (nor sociology).
From Nuclear to ‘Degenerate’ War
Authors: McGarry Ross , Walklate Sandra
Published: January 2020

In chapter five, From nuclear to “degenerate” war, we turn attention to criminological work produced in the aftermath of the Cold War, specifically related to nuclear warfare. In doing so, seminal work within criminology is used to provide an account of the ways in which the detonation, production, and proliferation of nuclear weapons can be considered as forms of extortion, deviance, and international state criminality. An intervention is then made in this work to suggest that if alternatively understood as a form of “degenerate war”, then analytic attention would draw not only state criminality into view but, importantly, state victimisation.
Moral Order in the Post-Socialist Chinese City
Authors: Wu Fulong , Wang Zheng
Published: January 2020

The seminal works by Park and the Chicago school of sociology are of great value for studying a rapidly urbanising China characterised by the decline of the formerly socialist structure and the increasing commodification of services and housing. Their assertion that the industrial organisation of cities has substituted primary and neighbourhood relations with secondary relations characterised by anonymity and utilitarianism also resonates with the rising middle-class population in China. However, our chapter contends that certain population groups have not followed the trajectory of change described by Park but instead continue to rely on primary and local social relations due to interventions of the Chinese state. Our argument is supported by a discussion on the varying social relations in Chinese urban neighbourhoods and specifically on the social life of rural migrants in the urban Chinese society.
Learning from Chicago (and LA)?
Authors: Wissink Bart
Published: January 2020

This chapter questions the contemporary relevance of Western urban theory for China. It argues that urban theory generally prioritises time over space, stressing the universal character of urban transformation in different places. Meanwhile Western cities are presented as prototypes of this transformation. Human ecology, for instance presented Chicago as model of modern urbanism, while the L.A. School of urbanism sees Los Angeles as the epitome of the post-modern period. Debunking the underlying assumption of singular urban logics and development trajectories, the chapter then takes inspiration from modes of theorising that focus on the localisation of global developments in specific cities and develop related localised conceptualisations. It employs this perspective to reflect on the urban China literature. Acknowledging that this literature has come a long way in a short time, it suggests that urban China research borrows concepts from the Western urban studies literature with ease, but that comparisons at the same time are short-circuited with reference to Chinese ‘exceptionalism’. This is mirrored in a remarkable underrepresentation of Chinese urban scholars in the comparative urbanism discussion. Research into Chinese ‘gated communities’ is then presented as illustration. The chapter concludes that there is considerable scope for conceptual renewal, which would benefit both urban China research and the urban studies literature in general.
From Chicago to Shenzhen, via Birmingham
Authors: Forrest Ray
Published: January 2020

The ownership of residential property has always been a focus for urban conflict and a key source of advantage and disadvantage-in terms of location and social status. Park`s Chicago was a city conceived of as having a hierarchy of housing situations with a distinct spatial pattern. Rex and Moore`s Birmingham of the 1960s developed these ideas through a Weberian conception of housing classes and greater attention to institutional gatekeepers. This chapter argues that their argument that the competition for housing contributes to a particular form of social stratification finds new resonance in the contemporary Chinese city. The narrative traverses over a century in considering the ways in which the competition for housing in cities of migrants involves common processes but also quite distinct experiences and outcomes. Over space and time, the meaning of home ownership has changed as has the nature and role of zones of transition for migrants and those on the social margins. The ownership of residential property has always been a focus for urban conflict and a key source of advantage and disadvantage-in terms of location and social status. Park`s Chicago was a city conceived of as having a hierarchy of housing situations with a distinct spatial pattern. Rex and Moore`s Birmingham of the 1960s developed these ideas through a Weberian conception of housing classes and greater attention to institutional gatekeepers. This chapter argues that their argument that the competition for housing contributes to a particular form of social stratification finds new resonance in the contemporary Chinese city. The narrative traverses over a century in considering the ways in which the competition for housing in cities of migrants involves common processes but also quite distinct experiences and outcomes. Over space and time, the meaning of home ownership has changed as has the nature and role of zones of transition for migrants and those on the social margins.
The Handshake 302 Village Hack Residency
Authors: O’Donnell Mary Ann
Published: January 2020

Through a comparison of how assimilation and shying (adaptation) have functioned as values in Chicago and Shenzhen, respectively this paper explores what it has meant for these two cities to self-identify as destination cities that owe their morphology and ethos to immigrants and migrants. The argument is developed through a case study of the Handshake 302 Village Hack Residency. Located in one of Shenzhen’s most iconic urban villages, the Handshake 302 project aims to draw attention to ongoing demolition and redevelopment of these arrival spaces.
Pathways to Urban Residency and Subjective Well-Being in Beijing
Authors: Chen Juan , Xie Shenghua
Published: January 2020

Size of population, sources of population, and distribution of population within the city, according to Park, are the first things we should establish when studying a city. During the past 30 years, the composition of China’s urban population has changed considerably. While studies have focused intensively on migrants who leave rural areas to work in urban centres, this chapter draws attention to a number of other modes of migration also occurring on a major scale in China, including those of urban-to-urban migrants from townships and small cities to large metropolises and in-situ urbanized rural residents who became urbanites because their land was reclassified as urban. Based on two waves of a household survey undertaken in Beijing in 2013 and 2015, our study highlights the effects of the divergent pathways to urban residency on individuals’ subjective well-being.
Preferences and Objective Interests
Authors: Dowding Keith
Published: January 2020

One of the most controversial aspects of the study of power is the relationship to interests. Some writers take interests of a person to be as that person understands it themself. Other writers see interests as objective and humans might often believe and act in ways that against their own best interests. The chapter introduces three theses – ontological, epistemological and methodological to show how these latter objective interests can exist, can be recognized and discovered through a theory of action within context. It distinguishes need and desire and shows through the collective action problem how we can model objective interests even when people do not act in those interests. It applies the model to some classic community power studies re-interpreting their conclusions in the light of the model. It also simply demonstrates how agenda setting can affect interests.
Preference Formation, Social Location and Ideology
Authors: Dowding Keith
Published: January 2020

This chapter examines how preferences are formed and how this preference-formation process can be determined by an individual’s social location and the ideology of their society. Simple desires require simple explanation, complex desires complex ones. Endogenous interests result from simple desires, exogenous ones from complex ones that result from our social location and history. Exogenous interests are formed by a situation and a perspective effect. Their social location determines the former, the perspective is formed by interests given their social location. The chapter explains the distinction between luck and systematic luck in greater deal and how we judge luck in terms of types of people in given social locations. It gives a detailed example of systematic luck in term of UK farmers, and how that systematic luck depends on their social location and British history. It then explains ideology as a cost-saving device for working out interests and how ideological beliefs can both bias and be biased by nature of the power and luck structure. Some groups manage to get their worldview extended by them to the view of other groups. The chapter explains how our beliefs go beyond our conscious thoughts and how this is implicated in our worldview and ideology.
Some Further Thoughts on Power
Authors: Dowding Keith
Published: January 2020

The first of the new retrospective chapters briefly considers now the author would have presented some of the arguments differently now. It then re-examines the central argument of the book that we can understand the dilemmas of power through the lens of the collective action problem. It considers Ann Cudd’s argument about how collective action lock in suboptimal choices for oppressed groups such as women and defend that account against the criticisms of Amy Allen arguing that Allen has a limited understanding of rational choice. We require two different sorts of models one directed at preference formation, and one at the specific choice situation people are in. Utilizing different models at different levels of granularity of explanation can provide the fuller explanations Allen desires. The chapter then re-examines the resources account filling in some empirical details of how we look at resources within the five abstract categories. It then provides an account of when persuasion is coercive and when not both in terms of reasons and in terms of the emotional intensity. It thus helps explain the power of language.
Avoiding the ‘Anti-intellectual Abyss’: How Secular Humanists in Sweden try to Define the Boundaries between Science, Religion, Pseudoscience and Postmodernism
Authors: Kind Susanne
Published: January 2020

At least as far back as the “science wars” of the 1990s, many secular humanists and rationalist intellectuals have regarded the “defense of science” as “a war on two fronts.” Scientific methods and theories are viewed not only as being attacked by religious and pseudoscientific ideas but also by postmodernist thinking. Drawing on a relational approach to research non-religion in combination with adopting a perspective of collective action, this chapter examines the ways in which different constructions of non-religious collective identities and the establishment of different relationships with diverse opponents influence the ways in which secular humanists use references to science. Kind analyzes the positioning of members of the Swedish Humanist Association in relation to their opponents in public discourse and education. In both contexts, members act as scientific experts as well as a “life stance community” and promoters of a naturalistic worldview, thereby conflicting and competing with both religious and academic actors.
Science and the Unearned Virtues of the ‘Really Religious People’: Exploring the Association between Perceived Religiosity and Science Rejection among Students in the Midwestern United States
Authors: Long David E.
Published: January 2020

Formal school education in the US is a prime site where epistemological legitimacy is forged between science and faith. The intersection of science and faith in American school classes is guarded by both students and teachers with variable ideological commitments, and equally variable visions of what an appropriate boundary politics should be. Long examines the discourse of students who credit evolution or climate change rejection to ‘the really religious people’, as his informants describe it. Students who profess an ecumenical – or what Wuthnow (2005) would describe as a ‘both–and’ approach to science/faith boundaries – see rejection of these scientific orthodoxies by their peers as both the product of extreme religious views, but also, curiously, use language which ascribes such views with an amplified form of virtuous practice. At the same time, these same religiously temperate students do not describe their own form of practice as being a potential site of moral excellence in service of science. In this chapter, Long asks why this is. How did this deference to extremism emerge as a discourse? What social work does this discourse do? Through the lens of MacIntyre’s (1981) After Virtue, he analyses this power differential for both its likely discursive function and offers ways to make this insight pedagogically useful to scholars of science and religion.
Microscope vision system based on micro laser line scanning for characterizing microscale topography
Authors: Mejía Alanís Francisco Carlos , Muñoz Rodriguez J. Apolinar
Published: January 2020

A microscope vision system to characterize a microscale surface via micro laser line projection is presented. The characterization is performed by means of surface descriptors, which include the root mean square, kurtosis, skewness, homogeneity, entropy, contrast, and correlation. These descriptors are computed from surface irregularities, which are retrieved by means of the micro laser line projection. The characterization is carried out by an optical microscope system on which a CCD camera and a 36 µm laser line are attached. Thus, the microscope vision system projects the micro laser line on the surface, and the CCD camera captures the line reflection, which provides the surface contour. The contour dimension is computed via Bezier networks by means of the micro laser line coordinates. Thus, the surface descriptors are computed by means of the surface contour to accomplish the characterization. The proposed characterization improves the accuracy of the optical microscope imaging systems, which characterize the microscale surface by means of the gray-level intensity. Thus, the capability of the characterization via micro laser line projection is established by means of the descriptors’ accuracy. This contribution is corroborated by characterizing metal and paper surfaces.