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The present paper attempts to map the discursive relations between conflict and settlement as reflected in the realms of law and mediation during the second half of the 20th century, offering a 21st century model to combine the mediation drive to settle through reaching inter-subjective transformation with the legal drive to escalate and promote social conflict. Contemporary mediation, according to this model, should involve on the one hand “negotiating for justice,” according to the familiar models of problem solving and transformation, and on the other hand “fighting for law”: acknowledging the self-referential and ideological quality of conflicts, while emphasizing the pragmatic need to end them through an interpretive public act that involves value judgments.

Guided by Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological System’s model, this study documented acculturation and parental involvement in low-income Chinese immigrant homes that serve as predictors of parental mediation. By surveying 165 parents of 3–13-year-old immigrant children, this study found that low-income Chinese parents enacted restrictive mediation the most and exhibited a slow acculturation process even after an average of seven years of emigration. Higher parental acculturation was related to a higher use of active and restrictive mediation. Additionally, different aspects of parental involvement also served as predictors of the three mediation strategies. Chinese cultural emphasis on academic excellence and success was used to help interpret the findings. Future research should consider implementing research-based adult media literacy programs for immigrant parents to help them practice their parental mediation skills in the host culture.

We examine patterns and changes in the use of various theoretical perspectives, and in the approach to testing individual or combinations of theories, within the field of international strategy that constitutes one of the major areas of international business (IB) research. We conduct a systematic bibliometric analysis of 22 years’ worth of empirical papers. We generate tabular evidence and introduce the use of network graphing methodology to report and analyse the co-occurrence of theories. We find a changing distribution of theoretical perspectives, indicative of a re-centring of the field around strategic and organizational perspectives. This is accompanied by use of more complex approaches to testing contingencies of the sort likely to result from these theory combinations, especially across firm, interfirm and institutional levels of analysis. We thus generate and discuss critically a quantitative and graphical overview of the progress of international strategy research. This creates unique and comprehensive insights into the development of theory and empirics in IB. We draw lessons for academics and report practical recommendations for the conduct of research. Overall, our study sheds new light on the disciplinary nature of IB research and its interplay with related fields and disciplines. It explicates patterns of theory accretion alongside patterns of theory testing and refinement. It provides a comprehensive map of the field of IB strategy as it evolved since 1990 and illuminates its future.

What is the relationship between the descriptive and the normative? The usual answer, in the social sciences, is based on a sharp distinction between facts and values. This chapter reprises and radicalizes long-standing critiques of the fact/value distinction, proposes an alternative theory of ontic webs in its stead, and then uses it to delineate six different forms of public sociology. It argues that facts are value-laden and values fact-laden; that facts and values are entangled in webs of belief and practice; and that attributions of causation and moral responsibility are connected via ontological assumptions. Effective public sociology therefore requires a combination of ontological extension and moral translation.

According to its advocates, community mediation empowers disputants in their dealing with conflict. However, critics of the community mediation movement have often contended that far from being empowering, community mediation programs constitute a means of social control and of informal state power enhancement. This paper undertakes a socio-theoretical examination of community mediation's empowerment claims and of its criticisms. The paradigmatic and contrasting works of Habermas on communicative action and of Foucault on power, freedom and governmentality are applied to community mediation. The paper contends that although Habermas’ insights are supportive of the community mediation agenda, the criticisms they engender might provide a way to move beyond optimistically naive assumptions regarding empowering claims. Conversely, although Foucault's work has often been used to dismiss community mediation's empowerment promises, the paper argues that it is possible to re-examine the empowering potential of community mediation from a Foucauldian perspective. It concludes that community mediation can provide a space for personal empowerment, if understood in a nuanced way.

This chapter explores the domestication of Marx's critique of political economy within Marxist-oriented environmental sociology, and treadmill of production (ToP) theory, in particular. The aim is to explicate the theoretical resources for a rigorous critique of capital-induced planetary degradation. Shortcomings of ToP theory pertaining to the conceptualization of capital and value are identified. The reasons for these shortcomings, including how they might be addressed, are elaborated by reconsidering key aspects of Marx's critical theory of modern capitalist society. The chapter contributes to current discussions in both critical theory and environmental sociology by demonstrating the continued relevance of Marx's critical theory for understanding the political-economic, social, and ideational dimensions of planetary degradation. In contrast to ToP theory, which critically examines the production of wealth by counterposing finitude and limits against the expansionary tendencies of economic growth, the critical theory approach advanced in this chapter conceptualizes the acceleration of environmental degradation following World War II in terms of a ToP of value, whereby the necessity of the value form is continuously established in the present. The chapter discusses how Marxian critical theory facilitates a critical examination of the widespread growth of environmentalism as concomitant with the spread of neoliberal capitalism.

To advance a critical ontology of the social as a form of normative social theory.

The goal of critical ontology is to comprehend social reality not simply in terms of a positivist notion of “facts,” but in terms of its diverse processes of becoming, and through questions that are simultaneously theoretical and normative.

After providing a brief account of the positivist permeation of social theory and its implications for the relationship between theory, critique, and practice, the contemporary moment of capitalist modernity – global neoliberal transformation – is being examined as a form of social objectivity that presents fundamental challenges for the possibility of social theory with normative ends. A close reading of Lukács’ reconstruction of Hegel facilitates the foundations of critical ontology as social theory in Hegel’s philosophy. One such critical ontology presents itself as a critique of the “commodity form” as expounded by Marx in his mature theory.

In illuminating the socio-ontological determination of objectivity, critical ontology as normative social theory promotes the recognition of processes of domination and conditions of unfreedom not only within the structured economic inequalities of globalizing capital but also within and through the forms of mediation that are at work in the present. It is only through such recognition that contemporary social theory may overcome the entrenched rift between theory and practice.