Search results

Using visual materials to understand a social object requires the researcher to know that object's purpose, and this is true whether the object is an artifact, a restricted event, a small social world, or something as massive as the modern city. I argue that the purpose of the city as a settlement is driven by the need to safely sleep in peace at night while satisfying other basic biophysical needs during the day as conveniently as possible. An examination of these needs identifies 10 functional prerequisites for human settlement, entangling its inhabitants in involuntary community with entities and events other than themselves, whether they like it or not. In addition, the rise of the modern city exacerbates the challenge of living in a reluctant community and pressures its inhabitants to come to terms with the consequences for how these relationships affect daily life. I highlight nine challenges posed as questions that have been particularly salient in American urban history since the mid-nineteenth century. How these challenges have been addressed indicates not only what it takes to make a modern city a settlement suitable for satisfying human needs, but also just how deeply invested its residents are in making the city work. Finally, the 10 functional prerequisites and nine moral challenges not only provide a framework for researching the city, but also suggest a coherent outline for imagining a “shooting script” or guide for conducting visual research.

This chapter explores the symbolic connections between coming of age liminality and identity-oriented consumption practices in postmodern American culture, specifically among adolescent girls.

Forty-two female participants (ages 20–23) participants were asked to answer the general question of “Who am I?” through creating identity collages and writing accompanying narrative summaries for each of three discrete life stages: early adolescence (past-self), late adolescence (present-self), and adulthood (future-self). Data were analyzed using a hermeneutical approach.

Coming of age in postmodern American consumer culture involves negotiating paradoxical identity tensions through consumption-oriented benchmarks, termed “market-mediated milestones.” Market-mediated milestones represent achievable criteria by which adolescents solidify their uncertain liminal self-concepts.

In contrast to the traditional Van Gennepian conceptualization of rites of passage, market-mediated milestones do not necessarily mark a major transition from one social status to another, nor do they follow clearly defined stages. Market-mediated milestones help adolescents navigate liminality through an organic, nonlinear, and incremental coming of age process.

Rather than traditional cultural institutions (e.g., church, family), the marketplace is becoming the central cultural institution around which adolescent coming of age identity is constructed. As such, organizations have the power to create market-mediated milestones for young people. In doing so, organizations should be mindful of adolescent well-being.

This research marks a turning point in understanding traditional rites of passage in light of postmodern degradation of cultural institutions. The institutions upon which traditional rites of passage are based have changed; therefore, our conceptions of what rites of passage are today should change as well.

Extensive corruption and civil wars are two different symptoms of state failure, but have most of the time been studied separately. This article systematically compares the organizational characteristics of the two phenomena as well as the various research efforts into them, with a focus on economic explanations. It argues that it is unreasonable to believe that economic motivation may become an important trigger for the recruitment of rebel leaderships in countries ridden by corruption, except when their access to the state's pots is blocked. The article examines in various other ways the implications of research carried out in each field for the other.

There is an emerging consensus within the literature on failed and failing states that state failure is contagious across borders. For its part, the literature on regionalisation claims that states within the same region tend to form clusters of security – or insecurity – so that geographical proximity is closely associated with inert security relationships. This article – along with the individual contributions in the volume it introduces – seeks to bridge these two literatures, which otherwise rarely talk to each other. The approach taken throughout the volume is largely qualitative and case-oriented, yet methodologically diverse, while the articles have a shared comparative ambition. This introductory article examines the debate on failing states and contextualises the volume's contributions within that debate. It then does the same in relation to the debate on regional security, before moving on to examine the role and impact of emerging regional responses to insecurity. When we examine recent state-building initiatives, the effectiveness of external actors seems limited, while existing power holders – and the conflicts between them – are at the centre in processes for building states. This calls for studying the practice of state-building, and for rooting policies in viable practices, even when the driving actors are not inherently benign. To a considerable degree, a state's strength and functionality are relational: the state can only be understood in relation to significant other states. Within regions, hegemonic states – and the strategies pursued by other states in their efforts to cooperate with, balance, or counter the hegemon – have major implications for security. Regional cooperation emerges through concrete collaboration to address commonly perceived challenges, at times as an unintended effect of a targeted initiative. Key actors – and the networks of which they form part – are often transnational, spanning the borders of several states. The behaviour of transnational actors, how they interface with the system of states and regions and the potential for their conversion into constructive political forces remain poorly understood. As a whole, these are findings that inspire an agenda for future research at the interface between the state and the region.

This chapter examines the transition in the US banking industry from a community to a national logic, developing a general model to explain how and when shifts in institutional logics occur. Based on qualitative historical evidence and discrete-time event history analysis predicting the introduction of legislation favoring the national logic, this chapter proposes that dramatic exogenous events such as the Great Depression or more gradual processes such as modernization favored the industry's transition to the national logic, but that such exogenous events had a greater influence in areas where strategic actors could capitalize on them. The qualitative evidence presented here suggests that struggles involving organizational identity and “legitimacy politics” played an important role in the shift in logics. Our theorizing focuses on how, when the environment changes in an incremental fashion, actors are primed with new possibilities, which may shift their collective identities, but when environmental changes are discontinuous, they provide actors strategic opportunities to alter the balance of logics in the environment.

This chapter argues that failure to secure accountability can be costly because it raises doubts about the fairness, salience, and impact of cocreation. Cocreation must establish accountability with respect to four different audiences: sponsors, relevant stakeholders, affected citizens, and the general public. The chapter discusses the challenges of trying to solely hold cocreation networks and partnerships accountable based on formal accountability mechanisms. It argues that these formal mechanisms must be supplemented with social and more informal strategies of accountability. Finally, the chapter considers how changemakers can strengthen social and informal accountability in and around cocreating networks and partnerships.

We examine why some groups use violence while others use nonviolence when they push for major political change. Nonviolence can be less costly, but nonstate actors must mobilize a large number of people for it to be successful. This is less critical for violent rebellion, as successful attacks can be committed by a small number of people. This means that groups that believe that they have the potential to mobilize larger numbers of people are less likely to use violence. This potential is related to the lines along which the group mobilizes. Campaigns mobilized along ethnic or Marxist lines have fewer potential members and are most likely to use violence. Prodemocracy campaigns have a higher number of potential members and are more likely to use nonviolence. For movements against a foreign occupation, campaigns in larger countries are more likely to use nonviolence. These predictions are supported in a multilevel logit model of campaigns from 1945 to 2006. The mechanism is tested by looking at the interactive effect of democratic changes on the likelihood of nonviolence and looking at a subsample of 72 campaigns that explicitly draw from certain ethnic or religious groups.

Impactful pedagogies in Higher Education are required to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. This chapter outlines an inclusive, flexible, and work-based learning curriculum design framework to respond to these needs. Two cases from Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU) are used to illustrate this framework in a transnational educational context in Sub-Saharan Africa. Case one explores the impact of a Railway Operations Management program in South Africa, where the views of two cohorts of 137 recent graduates were gathered through an online questionnaire. Case two examines the views of Optometry/Orthoptics students who undertook an intensive two-week clinical work experience on the train-based clinic (Phelophepa train) in South Africa; data was gathered through an online questionnaire from 58 participating students since 2014. Both examples highlight transformative personal experiences and impacts of their education beyond just their studies – to a clearer sense of personal and professional pride, to becoming role models for their families and to developing meta-cognitive skills to support lifelong learning. In the Railway Operations Management example, additional benefits were seen to their organization – through improved interpersonal skills, decision-making, and problem-solving and creating knowledge-sharing – whereas in the Optometry/Orthoptics case life-changing impacts to patients were delivered through this work experience.

Strategy research has long understood that reconfiguration of the scope of the activities a firm engages in over time is critical to its long-run success, while under-emphasizing differences in redeployment strategy that underlie apparently similar scope and changes in scope. In this paper, we build on the idea that a firm’s number of activities (scope) and change in activities (turnover) arise from two fundamental rates of redeployment: the rate at which activities are added and the rate at which activities are subtracted. In net, the turnover rate reflects how actively a firm reconfigures its resource base by redeploying resources via addition and subtraction of activities. We develop a model that links addition and subtraction with the composition of a firm’s activities and then provide an empirical illustration using data from the U.S. Patents and Trademarks Office. As an example of one extension, the model can be generalized to incorporate elements of absorptive capacity. The analysis contributes to our understanding of how firms reconfigure their activities and provide managers with a clearer understanding of tools that guide redeployment of existing resources.

In their chapter, ‘A method to compute a peace gross world product by country and by economic sector’, Jurgen Brauer and John Tepper Marlin present a novel method to assess the economic value of peace, in both the domestic and international realms. This is not only a tool for assessing and forecasting the potential benefits of reduced violence, but it is an example of best social science practice in that by design it incorporates the best existing knowledge on the effects of peace. This approach combining meta-analysis with a novel integrating framework is quite promising. For the purposes of the book, it sets the stage nicely for the subsequent chapters by highlighting the big picture of expected welfare gains from peace, within a rigorous scientific context, rather than one of advocacy. Estimating the potential economic benefits of internal and international peace is also fundamental in understanding the potential economic incentives which might drive political and business leaders to avoid deadly conflict, and pursue peace.