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From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, several prominent feminist legal scholars made a case for “difference feminism.” Inspired by psychologist Carol Gilligan’s classic text, In a Different Voice, these scholars argued that social relationships, caring, and the emotions should be recognized as important to jurisprudence and legal regulation. Today, difference feminism is no longer a dominant movement within legal scholarship, but reformers are bringing “mindfulness,” “emotional intelligence,” and attention to relationships into law and business – a development dubbed “therapy culture” by its critics. This essay describes some of the manifestations of therapy culture in law and argues for more feminist engagement.

Field theory is waxing in the sociology of science, and Pierre Bourdieu’s work is especially influential. His characterization of field structure and dynamics has been especially valuable in drawing attention to hierarchical and center-periphery relations in science and technology, and to the stability and reproduction of science and technology practices. What field theory does less well, however, is to capture the existence of multiple (including marginal) logics around a given sociotechnical object. Nor does it capture the dynamics of a specific logic of neoliberal capitalism in the US: the cultural and economic value of entrepreneurship that emphasizes the continual reconfiguration of social relations, which has its roots in a longer US history of progress-through-reinvention, and is abetted by new technologies designed to continually “update” and remix. Much better at capturing these qualities, we argue, is an institutionalist theory in which dynamism, not stasis, is foregrounded, and there is room for multiple, contradictory, and non-cognitive logics to co-exist. Using the expansion of “alternative nutrition” in the US, we show that its formation took place via the conjunction of parallel streams of social action that encompassed diverse logics and encouraged creativity and hybridity. More generally, variability in field stability and qualities, not static fields, deserve analytic attention.

The spread of conspiracy theories and associated vaccine rejection within the wellness industry and spiritual communities during the COVID-19 pandemic attracted significant media and scholarly attention. Informed by the ‘(Con)spirituality, Science and COVID-19 in Australia’ project (2020–2021) (Halafoff, Marriott, et al., 2022; Halafoff, Weng, et al., 2022; Roginski & Rocha, 2022), funded by the Templeton Religion Trust and awarded via the International Research Network for the Study of Science and Belief in Society (INSBS), this chapter reports on findings pertaining to holistic spirituality, purity doctrines and wellness, arising from a parallel pilot study on ‘Spirituality and Wellness (SWell) in Australia’ (2021). Both studies have revealed a ‘spiritual complexity’ in Australia and internationally, and the authors report on this here, focussed particularly on spirituality’s quest for pristine bodies, and on spiritual ‘moral communities’ (Ganga Kieffer, 2023) exceptionalism and relationality.

This chapter critically examines the dynamics that exists between employee well-being, line management leadership and governance as experienced and perceived by employees in the public sector context. This chapter is based on research into employee well-being and line management leadership with a British Local Authority in northern England, focusing on employees’ verbal accounts of their own experiences and perceptions of well-being, line manager leadership and corporate social responsibility. Twenty-six interviews were conducted from a diverse range of employees with each interview lasting (45–60 minutes), tape recorded and transcribed verbatim. The research investigated the subjective perceptions of senior managers, managers, senior officers and clerical/secretarial staff regarding their views concerning line management leadership on employee well-being at work. Using the technique of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) provided insight into the life-world of participants, providing the opportunity for employees to share their personal experience of leadership and governance on the front line and its implication for employee well-being at work. The data revealed line management leadership and governance emerged as central to influencing and enabling well-being at work and were linked to individual, social and organisational factors (blame culture, rewards, trust in management, support and communication). Employees’ accounts of line management leadership, well-being and corporate social responsibility identified salient issues, thus providing a basis for broader research in this area. Thus organisations wishing to enhance employee well-being could focus efforts on creating organisational conditions and line management leadership to encourage well-being through the six identified factors. This research has relevance for the employment relationship, corporate social responsibility, service delivery, performance and for practitioners and academics alike.

This chapter explores the international field of leadership coaching from a sociological perspective. The fundamental features of the leadership coaching industry are outlined using primary data collected from in-depth interviews with leadership coaches, ethnographic observation of coach-training workshops, and secondary data analysis of global coaching surveys. Leadership coaching is defined and contextualized within the field of leadership studies as well as within the broader international coaching industry. The issue of certification is examined along with an overview of the global demographics of who is involved in leadership coaching as practitioners and clients. The goal is to explicate how and why leadership coaching has emerged as a professional field and to offer insight into how leaders around the world are being trained and developed for various leadership roles in their communities.