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This paper examines how young people develop meaningful self-concepts in the postmodern social world. Drawing from an ethnographic investigation of punk subculture, I explore how identity work is performed when young people are saturated with competing self-definitions and encouraged to engage in reflexive self-doubt. Focusing on the ecstatic qualities of concerts, I describe a complex process of identity formation wherein youth emotionally experience their identities through ritual performance rather than constructing them through institutional affiliation or narrative. My analysis draws heavily from Bourdieu’s practice theory and the existential phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, emphasizing the centrality of embodiment and performativity to postmodern identity. I conclude with a discussion of how postmodern theories of the nonself exaggerate the insecurity of contemporary identity, and I outline a new theoretical framework regarding identity formation that bridges the literatures on subjectivity and embodiment with classical work in symbolic interactionism.

The aim of this chapter is to survey present globally present societal trends in the era of globalization, which are creating a new context for education and for the field of Comparative and International Education. The trends include the ecological crisis, the population explosion and demographic dynamics, increasing mobility, the technological revolution, especially the ICT revolution, growing affluence, the neo-liberal economic revolution, the rise of a knowledge society, the fourth industrial revolution, changing social relations, democratization, the demise of the once omnipotent nation-state, the persistent but new presence of religion, and the rise of the Creed of Human Rights. These powerful, interrelated set of societal changes, which are getting spread worldwide on the wings of globalization, is creating a new world, of (in Comparative Education nomenclature) an unprecedented new context, forcing the scholars in the field to tread unknown territory. These forces depicted in this chapter constitute a framework for subsequent chapters in the book, where the response of humanity in the education sector, to meet the challenges these forces constitute, will be the theme.

Volume 18 of Advances in Industrial and Labor Relations contains seven chapters that analyze key aspects of employment relationships, ranging from strategic choice and first contract arbitration to worker participation, employee well being and work-life conflict to union engagement in regional economic development and international labor standards enforcement. Preliminary versions of several of these chapters were presented at Advances in Industrial Relations (AILR)/Labor and Employment Relations Association (LERA) “Best Papers” sessions held at the 2009, 2010, and 2011 meetings of the LERA.

This article explores aspects of separation from “post-traditional” religiosity characteristic of certain late/post-modern affiliations. To do so, I analyze in-depth interviews with 44 individuals who formerly identified with straightedge – a clean-living youth-oriented scene tightly bound with hardcore music that is centered on abstinence from intoxicants – about their experiences transitioning through associated music assembly rituals. While features of hardcore music assemblies – e.g. moshing, slamdancing, sing-a-longs – have long been treated as symbolic connections that potentially conjure the religious as conceptualized in Émile Durkheim's “effervescence” and the liminality of Victor Turner's “communitas,” data on transitions from these features of ritual remain scant. Ex-straightedgers generally believed the sorts of deep connections they professed to experience in hardcore rituals as youths were not necessarily currently accessible to them, nor were they replicable elsewhere. Findings then ultimately suggest some post-traditional religious experiences might now be profitably considered in terms of the life course, which has itself transformed alongside the proliferation of newer late/post-modern affiliations and communities.

This chapter focuses on the school placement element of Initial Teacher Education provision. It opens with an examination of a range of issues characterising research and writing about placement at global level before considering the vernacular nuances of the Scottish context. The chapter then turns to the problematic matter of quality in teaching practice and argues against reifying school placement as something that exists separate or apart from the student teachers who participate in it. It challenges simplistic analyses of the quality of the placement in terms of external provision through supportive mentoring relationships within a welcoming organisational culture. Drawing on data from the author's recent research, the relational nature of the school placement is emphasised and an argument promoted that individual student teachers make significant contributions to the nature of the support they experience on placement. Implications for further research are considered in the conclusion.

There is a proven linkage amongst the theories, practice, and literatures of entrepreneurship, management, and leadership. Accordingly, this chapter explores these linkages in policing and criminal contexts. Traditionally, the police have adopted a combination of heroic, bureaucratic, and autocratic approaches to leadership although individual police leaders do utilise a wide variety of appropriate leadership styles including charismatic and Laissez–Faire leadership. Great Man theory also influences police leadership styles and actions. Other novel appropriate leadership styles such as ‘humble’ and ‘agile’ leadership are also considered because of their potential fit with entrepreneurial policing philosophy and practice. Police leadership is immersed in the Military model of policing discussed in Chapter 2 and this includes its semiotics and symbolism. There is an inherent and ongoing tension between two very different competing leadership styles namely the ‘Commander Model’ versus the ‘Executive Model’. Both are relevant in different circumstances.