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Purpose – This chapter problematizes the concept of the “American Dream” – important for Messner and Rosenfeld’s Intuitional Anomie Theory (IAT).

Design/methodology/approach – The author uses work from political science, specifically Adcock and Collier in conversation with Gerring to consider if the American Dream concept is “good.” The author continues by contending that the work on the state, its power and reach, can assist with the reconceptualization of IAT and the American Dream concept theoretically and methodologically.

Findings – The author finds that the American Dream concept, while not completely inadequate, significantly departs from Adams’ original definition in The Epic of America while also being associated with mixed findings as it relates to race and the likelihood of violence. The author concludes that through critical work (e.g., Moten’s “The Case for Blackness” and Ahmed’s “Phenomenology of Whiteness”) that in order to better develop this basis of desire in the American Dream concept there is a need to integrate a growing body of work that critically engages with the legacy of racial violence and racialized social conditioning. The author concludes that by studying the ontology/phenomenon of race, understandings of cultural desire may be understood in order to inform IAT.

Originality/value – This chapter provides a framework for evaluating concepts with interdisciplinary conversations with political science. The author’s findings also add to a body of work that, through cross-disciplinary conversations, work to tease out the socio-ecological and historical conditions that influence the interaction of structure and culture that lead to anomie and ultimately deviance.

Purpose – This study investigates the practice of dreaming in consumer culture – a phenomenon that has been excluded from previous CCT discussions despite its inevitable presence in consumers' everyday lives.

Methodology/approach – The chapter draws upon anthropological, sociological, and ethnological literature on dreaming and upon a practice-based literature on consumption so as to explore the reciprocal relation between dreaming and consumer culture. The theoretical starting point is, thus, that society dreams in us. Empirically, dream diaries are used as data.

Findings – The exploratory analysis indicates that both the content of dreams and the way dreams are conceived are shaped and structured by the practices, values, and symbols offered by the globalized media and consumer culture.

Implications – The insight that the market and media discourse organizes also the world of dreams has implications to the existing literature on fantasy and fun, marketization, and mediatization of everyday life and on the literature on consumption places and spaces. More generally, the study unsettles the disciplinary habit of taking the waking and alert consumer as the unquestioned starting point of knowledge production and theory-making in cultural consumer research. Dreams provide an angle for further theorizing many key aspects of consumer culture, such as the notion of active consumer and meaning-making.

Critical race theory is a contemporary legal movement composed of progressive scholars, primarily people who identify as people of color, who seek to challenge racism in American society. In their writing, they explore the many ways in which racism infuses American institutions, popular culture, commonsense beliefs, pervades interaction and cuts to the core of the American psyche. One of the central challenges that any person, scholar, activist faces in the U.S. is the peculiar nature of contemporary discourse on race. Often times, much of white America treats racism as if it were a thing of the past, an article of a time when the racial caste system was explicitly upheld and defended, either in the form of slavery, explicitly racist immigration laws (like the Chinese Exclusion Act), the Jim Crow laws, or when Native Americans were massacred by Union soldiers. Contemporary anti-racist work constantly confronts this denial of racism from a large segment of America.² This denial of racism is one in which many people seem to have developed something of a psychic investment. Since the critical race theorists are working in a scholar-activist anti-racist vein, they also have to confront this massive self-delusion or mythic self-understanding.

Beginning with Rawls's claim that the Supreme Court is the exemplar of public reason, we develop a theory of how reasoned arguments are used in political disputes. We argue that justices often make piecemeal arguments and that this fragmented style of argumentation extends beyond the bench. The result is that many political disputes are “legalized” – not because public arguments are necessarily about laws, but because public arguments often unfold in the same ambiguous way that they do on the Court. We illustrate our argument by examining the use of American Dream talk in the dispute over same-sex marriage (SSM).

The concept of an American Dream was interrogated during a service-learning partnership between university students and a multilingual, racially diverse class of sixth graders. The one-on-one service-learning partnerships were at the heart of the semester-long project and sought horizontalidad, or non-authoritarian democratic communication and shared knowledge creation. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This project leveraged the arts and humanities within the context of social studies education to promote youth civic engagement. This project used Photovoice methodology in which all participants took photos and wrote about their American Dream. Participants then shared their photography and writing at three public gallery events in the community in an effort to educate others about their perspectives, experiences, and hopes regarding the American Dream.

Findings from the reciprocally minded partnership centered on the sixth-grade students taking a collective approach to the American Dream. Specifically, they noted their commitment to their families and desire to support others, with some sixth graders even sharing a commitment to promoting social justice. Some participants demonstrated a “we consciousness,” or a collective approach to social justice.

The study provides insights into how educators can engage middle school students in democratic practice as active citizens in a service-learning partnership. Through a service-learning themed project about the American Dream, middle school students were able to share their voices and experiences with the larger community via a project rooted in horizontalidad.

This systems model of dreaming consciousness examines the self‐organizing properties of the sleeping brain, offering a step towards reconciling brain‐based and content‐based attempts to understand the nature of dreaming. The brain can be understood as a complex self‐organizing system that, in dreaming, responds to subtle influences such as residual feelings and memories. The hyper‐responsiveness of the brain during dreaming is viewed in terms of the tendency of complex chaotic‐like systems to respond to small variations in initial conditions and to the amplification of subtle emotional and cognitive signals through the mechanism of stochastic resonance, all in combination with psychophysiological changes in the brain during both slow wave and rapid eye movement (REM) dreaming. These changes include the active inhibition of extroceptive stimulation and, especially in REM sleep, alterations in the brain's dominant neuromodulatory systems, bombardment of the visual cortex with bursts of PGO activity, increases in limbic system activity, and a reduction of activity in the prefrontal regions.

The purpose of this study is to examine the stages involved in occupational dream pursuit (ODP). In this study, dreams are studied in the context of life-changing, occupational endeavors. The judgment and decision-making that fuels the process and the consumption motives that appear throughout the various stages of the journey are examined through the narratives of individuals living out their career-related dreams.

Open-ended interviews were conducted with individuals who were embarking on a life-changing career attainment experience. The narratives of these informants uncovered psychological, social and behavioral aspects of the dream pursuit process.

Through the informants’ narratives, common themes emerged with respect to the ODP journey, and these themes offered a fluid interpretation of the stages involved in the dream pursuit process: revelation, inciting action, development, maintenance and evolution. At each stage, specific consumption motives and behaviors predominate. These themes, including the consumption, psychological and developmental processes that take place at each stage, are discussed through the narratives of the informants.

This study highlights the role of positive emotions, personal growth, consumption motives and behaviors in ODP.

Dreams give individuals a sense of purpose and being. Although conventional wisdom acknowledges the importance of dream actualization, limited behavioral research has explored the nuances of ODP with regard to decision-making and consumption.

The American Dream functions as a myth within our political discourse by providing hope to citizens and reinforcing beliefs in the protestant work ethic and meritocracy. This article examines the myth through categories of mobility, marginalization, and hope. Elite theory and institutional isomorphism are used to explore business privilege within Public Administration. The ability to reframe the American Dream is considered through an examination of select speeches at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. Despite evidence of declining mobility and structural inequality, citizens cling to the myth. One explanation is that marginalization perpetuates the American Dream by crowding out issues of social class through various methods of institutional isomorphism. Another explanation is that the dream endures because it can be re-conceptualized.

The purpose of this paper is to report the results from a study that investigated the extent to which an intervention to develop a community of library and information science (LIS) researchers – the Developing Research Excellence and Methods (DREaM) project – was successful in meeting its main objective three years after its implementation. Of particular interest are factors that support or hinder network longevity.

Data were collected by online survey/telephone and focus group. From quantitative data, a social network analysis (SNA) and network diagrams were generated. Focus group discussions were recorded and transcribed, and data from these were analysed manually.

Three years after the end of its formal funding period, DREaM endured as a loose but persistent network. Social ties were more important than work ties, and network members with the highest network centrality held roles in academic institutions. Physical proximity between members was important to the maintenance of network ties. Actor status did not appear to have a bearing on network centrality.

Discussion is limited to consideration of community development amongst core members of the network only. The “manufactured” nature of the DREaM network and unique context in which it was formed have implications for the generalisibility of the findings reported.

Social infrastructure is key to the long-term health of a network initiative. Continued ad hoc support would strengthen it further.

The findings add to understanding of factors important to the development of scholarly and learning communities. They extend contributions of earlier work that has deployed SNA techniques in LIS research and research in other fields.