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This study aims to explore public coping strategies with government-imposed lockdown restrictions (i.e. forced compliance) due to a health crisis (i.e. COVID-19). This directly impacts the public's power, as they may feel alienated from their environment and from others. Consequently, this study explores the relationships between the public's power, quality of life and crisis-coping strategies. This is important to help governments understand public discourse surrounding perceived government health crisis communication, which aids effective policy development.

An online questionnaire distributed via Qualtrics received 371 responses from the South African public and structural equation modelling was used to test the hypotheses.

The results indicate the public's experience of powerlessness and resulting information-sharing, negative word-of-mouth and support-seeking as crisis coping strategies in response to government-imposed lockdown restrictions.

The public's perspective on health crisis communication used in this study sheds light on adaptive and maladaptive coping strategies that the public employs due to the alienation they feel during a health crisis with government-forced compliance. The findings add to the sparse research on crisis communication from the public perspective in a developing country context and provide insights for governments in developing health crisis communication strategies. The results give insight into developing policies related to community engagement and citizen participation during a pandemic.

The purpose of this paper is to make a conceptual argument for considering interactive work – i.e. work made up of micro-level exchanges or social interactions with third parties such as customers, patients or citizens – as a distinct analytical category in employment-related research. The argument is underpinned by the core role played by interactive work in valorisation.

This is a conceptual paper, with its argument based on key findings from the debates on symbolic interactionism, service work and interaction work. These are merged and combined with a valorisation perspective.

“Social interactions” and “work” have mostly been considered separately by theoretical sociology and the sociology of work. The author contends however that the two concepts should be viewed together, as social interactions at work are a constitutive feature of many occupations, jobs and tasks. This implies studying both exchange and social relationships between the different parties and their embeddedness in specific (multi-level) contexts. Moreover, there are two reasons why interactive work relates to specific working conditions: first, it involves customers or similar groups as third parties; second, it is key to valorisation. To systematically study interactive work, context-sensitive approaches spanning multiple (analytical) levels are recommended.

The article contributes to advancing the understanding of interactive work as a distinct form of work as yet under-theorised but deserving to be considered as a separate analytical category.

With issues like increasing student dropout rates, low productivity and compromised quality, research in higher education is faced with a number of paralyzing challenges in India. This study aims to locate the role of toxic academic supervision in relation to decreased quality of research.

Following a sequential mixed method design, the research begins with a quantitative analysis, which is then followed by an in-depth qualitative exploration.

The results of mediation analysis in this study reveal that students who experience toxic research supervision have a weak sense of identification and are also poor at self-disclosure, which results in increased distress and reduced engagement and productivity. Moreover, identification and self-disclosure have also been found to partially mediate the relationship between toxic supervision and distress. Furthermore, a thematic analysis of this study provides a detailed behavioral profile of toxic academic supervisors and highlights the consequences of such supervision with regard to students' well-being and productivity.

In terms of theoretical contributions, the study provides evidence that the concept of toxic leadership has applicability outside of the organizational context; in the educational sphere as well and that the toxic leadership scale can be successfully used to assess the severity of toxic supervision within the academic domain, and corrective actions can be taken to mitigate the effect of such supervisory style on students.

The study not only highlights the repercussions of toxicity in academia and higher education but also provides a detailed and in-depth description of the personality traits and behavioral idiosyncrasies of toxic supervisors, which can help in the early identification of toxic tendencies and can enable us to mitigate and prevent toxicity from the academic space and to ensure a conducive environment for students in higher education. Overall, the present research has important implications for researchers, academicians as well as policymakers.

The study is the first of its kind in terms of both, objective and methodology.

The purpose of the study was to provide a comparative analysis on the psychological and socio-cultural impacts of COVID-19 on victims of intimate partner violence (IPV) in South Africa (SA) and the USA.

The authors collected media and scholarly articles that dealt with IPV victims during the early phase of the pandemic. This study focused solely on SA and the USA because of their unique contexts and the fact that the authors are residents of these countries. The authors observed how both presidents dealt with IPV amidst the COVID 19 pandemic, especially when stay-at-home orders were in place. Aspects relating to the psychological and socio-cultural impacts amidst the pandemic were considered.

The authors found that in both countries, many black women from low socio-economic backgrounds experience IPV. Being in isolated spaces with their perpetrators prohibits victims from reporting the abuse. As the world attempts to curb the spread of COVID-19 infections, effective strategies have been suggested for victims and perpetrators. The authors found the approaches of the two governments (until the Biden Administration in 2021) to be starkly different in terms of effective strategies and the neglect and downplaying of the extent of one or both pandemics (i.e. COVID-19 and IPV). Pro-safety, equality, gender and race-conscious embracing approaches to overcome IPV are urgently needed.

The paper focused on IPV during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. It provides relevant information about IPV in both countries, especially when stay-at-home orders are in place.

Informed by social representation theory, the study aims to explore how marketing workers represent their activities on social media.

A naturalistic data set of 17,553 messages posted on Twitter by advertising workers was collected. A sample of over 1,000 unique messages from this data set, incorporating all external links and images, was analysed inductively using structured thematic analysis.

Advertising workers represent marketing work as a series of fun yet constrained activities involving relationships with clients and colleagues. They engage in cognitive polyphasia by evaluating these productive differences in both a positive and negative light.

The study marks a novel use of social representation theory and innovative social media analysis. Further research should explore these relations in greater depth by considering the networks that marketing workers create on social media and establish how, when and why marketing workers turn to social media in their everyday activities.

Marketing workers choose to represent aspects of their work to one another, using social media. Marketing managers should support such activities and consider social media as a way to understand the lives and experiences of marketing workers.

Marketing researchers have embraced digital media as a route to understanding consumers. This study demonstrates the value of analysing digital media to develop an understanding of marketing work. It sheds new light on the ways marketing workers create social relationships and enables marketing managers to understand and observe the social aspects of effective marketing.

Education in sustainability science is largely ignorant of the implications of the environmental crisis on inner dimensions, including mindsets, beliefs, values and worldviews. Increased awareness of the acuteness and severity of the environmental and climate crisis has caused a contemporary spread of hopelessness among younger generations. This calls for a better understanding of potential generative forces of hope in the face of climate change. This paper aims to uncover strategies for fostering constructive hope among students.

This study examines, through qualitative interviews, the characteristics of constructive hope amongst proactive students enrolled in university programs related to global environmental challenges. Constructive hope describes a form of hope leading to sustained emotional stability and proactive engagement through both individual and collective actions.

The findings are presented according to four characteristics of constructive hope: goal, pathway thinking, agency thinking and emotional reinforcement. This shows how students perceive the importance of: collaboratively constructing and empowering locally grounded objectives; reinforcing trust in the collective potential and external actors; raising students’ perceived self-efficacy through practical applications; teaching different coping strategies related to the emotional consequences of education on students’ well-being.

We outline practical recommendations for educational environments to encourage and develop constructive hope at multiple levels of university education, including structures, programs, courses and among students’ interactions. We call for practitioners to connect theoretical learning and curriculum content with practice, provide space for emotional expressions, release the pressure from climate anxiety, and to foster a stronger sense of community among students.

This paper explores the perceptions and experiences of women and men who work as informal waste collectors in four different cities. The purpose of this paper is to map out how and to what extent occupational, political-legal, economic and social dynamics are experienced differently by gender in a highly vulnerable segment of the urban informal economy, and explore gender differences in these workers’ coping strategies and the levels of action they develop to protect their livelihoods.

The analysis is based on a mixed methods study which combined a quantitative survey of informal workers with a qualitative participatory methodology. Study participants were drawn from a purposive sample of informal workers who belong to, or are affiliated with, membership-based workers’ organisations. The sample consists of waste pickers (n=614) from Belo Horizonte, Brazil; Bogotá, Colombia; Durban, South Africa; and Nakuru, Kenya.

The data show that despite significant differences between women and men upon entry into (informal) employment, their perceptions of key drivers and impacts are largely similar, with the exception of concerns around various types of physical security among women. They also indicate that levels of action among men and women waste pickers are only moderately influenced by gender, but are strongly influenced by the degree of organisation in the sector and the symbolic assets held by workers. The findings also illustrate the way in which gendered power dynamics operate within the informal recycling sector and how different levels of sector organisation and development often contribute to opportunities for collective action and, in turn, a reduction in gendered vulnerabilities.

The study offers a new policy angle which connects the level of sector organisation and development with the levels of action taken by informal workers in adapting to different types of shocks, as well as what this means in terms of gender empowerment.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused severe challenges to ethnic minorities in the UK. While the experiences of migrants are both complex and varied depending on individuals' social class, race, cultural proximity to the host country and acculturation levels, more in-depth studies are necessary to fully understand how COVID-19 affects specific migrant groups and their health. Taiwanese migrants were selected because they are an understudied group. Also, there were widespread differences in pandemic management between the UK and Taiwan, making this group an ideal case for understanding how their acculturation journey can be disrupted by a crisis.

Qualitative data were collected at two different time points, at the start of the UK pandemic (March/April 2020) and six months on (October/November 2020), to explore migrant coping experiences over time. Theoretically, the authors apply acculturation theory through the lens of coping, while discussing health-consumption practices, as empirical evidence.

Before the outbreak of the pandemic, participants worked hard to achieve high levels of integration in the UK. The pandemic changed this; participants faced unexpected changes in the UK’s sociocultural structures. They were forced to exercise the layered and complex “coping with coping” in a hostile host environment that signalled their new marginalised status. They faced impossible choices, from catching a life-threatening disease to being seen as overly cautious. Such experience, over time, challenged their integration to the host country, resulting in a loss of faith in the UK’s health system, consequently increasing separation from the host culture and society.

It is important to note that the Taiwanese sample recruited through Facebook community groups is biased and has a high level of homogeneity. These participants were well-integrated, middle-class migrants who were highly educated, relatively resourceful and active on social media. More studies are needed to fully understand the impact on well-being and acculturation of migrants from different cultural, contextual and social backgrounds. This being the case, the authors can speculate that migrants with less resource are likely to have found the pandemic experience even more challenging. More studies are needed to fully understand migrant experience from different backgrounds.

Public health policymakers are advised to dedicate more resources to understand migrants' experiences in the host country. In particular, this paper has shown how separation, especially if embraced temporarily, is not necessarily a negative outcome to be corrected with specific policies. It can be strategically adopted by migrants as a way of defending their health and well-being from an increasingly hostile environment. Migrants' home country experience provides vicarious learning opportunities to acquire good practices. Their voices should be encouraged rather than in favour of a surprising orthodox and rather singular approach in the discussion of public health management.

The paper has clear public health policy implications. Firstly, public health policymakers are advised to dedicate more resources to understand migrants' experiences in the host country. Acknowledging migrants' voice is a critical first step to contribute to the development of a fair and inclusive society. Secondly, to retain skilful migrants and avoid a future brain-drain, policymakers are advised to advance existing infrastructure to provide more incentives to support and retain migrant talents in the post-pandemic recovery phase.

This paper reveals how a group of previously well-integrated migrants had to exercise “coping with coping” during the COVID crisis. This experience, over time, challenged their integration to the host country, resulting in a loss of faith in the UK’s health system, consequently increasing separation from the host culture and society. It contributes to the understanding of acculturation by showing how a such crisis can significantly disrupt migrants' acculturation journey, challenging them to re-acculturate and reconsider their identity stance. It shows how separation was indeed a good option for migrants for protecting their well-being from a newly hostile host environment.

The Italian government addressed the first wave of its COVID-19 outbreak with a series of social restrictions and calculative practices, all branded with the slogan #istayathome. The hashtag quickly went viral, becoming both a mandate and a mantra and, as the crisis played out, we witnessed the rise of the Italian social movement #istayathome. This study examines how the government's calculative practices led to #istayathome and the constituents that shaped this social movement.

The authors embrace social movement theory and the collective identity perspective to examine #istayathome as a collective action and social movement. Using passive netnography, text mining and interpretative text analysis enhanced by machine learning, the authors analysed just over 350,000 tweets made during the period March to May 2020, each brandishing the hashtag #istayathome.

The #istayathome movement gained traction as a response to the Italian government's call for collective action. Thus, people became an active part of mobilising collective responsibility, enhancing the government's plans. A collective identity on the part of the Italian people sustained the mass mobilisation, driven by cohesion, solidarity and a deep cultural trauma from COVID-19's dramatic effects. Popular culture and Italy's long traditions also helped to form the collective identity of #istayathome. This study found that calculative practices acted as a persuasive technology in forming this collective identity and mobilising people's collective action. Numbers stimulated the cognitive, moral and emotional connections of the social ties shaping collective identity and responsibility. Thus, through collective identity, calculative practices indirectly influenced mass social behaviors and the social movement.

This study offers a novel theoretical perspective and empirical knowledge to explain how government power affects people's culture and everyday life. It unveils the sociological drivers that mobilise collective behaviors and enriches the accounting literature on the effects of calculative practices in managing emergencies. The study contributes to theory by providing an understanding of how calculative practices can influence collective behaviors and can be used to construct informal networks that go beyond the government's traditional formalities.

The purpose of this paper is to examine pro-poor urban asset adaptation to climate variability and change. It constructs a conceptual framework that explores the appropriate asset adaptation strategies for extreme poor households as well as the process of supporting these households and groups in accumulating these assets.

Qualitative data are obtained from life histories, key informant interviews (KIIs) and focus-group discussions (FGDs). These data are collected, coded and themed.

This research identifies that households among the urban extreme poor do their best to adapt to perceived climate changes; however, in the absence of savings, and access to credit and insurance, they are forced to adopt adverse coping strategies. Individual adaptation practices yield minimal results and are short lived and even harmful because the urban extreme poor are excluded from formal policies and institutions as they lack formal rights and entitlements. For the poorest, the process of facilitating and maintaining patron–client relationships is a central coping strategy. Social policy approaches are found to be effective in facilitating asset adaptation for the urban extreme poor because they contribute to greater resilience to climate change.

This study analyses the empirical evidence through the lens of a pro-poor asset-adaptation framework. It shows that the asset-transfer approach is an effective in building household-adaptation strategies. Equally important is the capacity to participate in and influence the institutions from which these people have previously been excluded.