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This chapter bridges cultural and political approaches to determine why elite support for movement claims may be inconsistent across the policy process. I analyze this question empirically through 16 in-depth interviews with government officials in two regions of Peru: Arequipa and Cusco. Regional officials appraised feminist advocacy in two opposing ways. First, they valued feminist advocates’ contributions to policy processes, which enabled them to advance reproductive rights and gender equity initiatives. They also perceived women as a group deserving of these initiatives and framed gender policies in terms of rights and equality. Second, they were critical of feminist advocates’ weaknesses in mobilizing support, which hindered the officials’ own ability to advance reproductive rights and gender equity initiatives. Furthermore, regional officials understood reproductive rights and gender equality to be thwarted by the State’s economic instrumentalism and by Catholic Church’s ultra-conservatism. This research shows how a cultural approach to policy elites’ support for movement claims goes beyond their individual attitudes and calculations to capture their perceptions, frames, and understandings tied to the broader cultural context. This wider conceptualization in turn helps clarify inconsistencies in policy elites’ support for movement claims across the policy process.

This chapter explores what video games can teach us in light of the ongoing sixth mass extinction in the history of our planet, allegedly caused by global warming and the over-consumption of vital resources. Games made and played by nonhuman actors can shed light on the situatedness and partiality of our knowledge regarding the boundaries that separate and differentiate human and nonhuman, interactivity and passivity, entertainment and boredom, and life and death. Nonhuman games help us to articulate the space and time in-between these dualisms and have the potential to re-route gaming (and game studies) from false myths of agency, interactivity, and instrumentalism, and the masculinism inherent in these notions. Nonhuman games are companions for earthly survival, and as such they can be taken as useful references when considering a more ethical approach to the ecological crisis of the Anthropocene. The chapter investigates notions of posthumanism, interpassivity, and contemporary critiques of the early assumptions of game studies on the agency of human players. It looks at video games that play by themselves, idle and incremental games, and the emergence of nonplaying characters in ludic and open-world simulations. It explores forms of automatic play and the use of bots and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in online role-playing games, procedurally generated virtual environments, and games that far exceed the lifespan of their players.

This chapter examines the survival of private property during the early transition to communism in Romania at the intersection of state policies, ideologies, and legal practices. It focuses on petitions contesting urban housing nationalization in the city of Timişoara between 1950 and 1965. I argue that petitions are partially successful acts of microresistance through law that contested the communist regime's concept of private property, played a role in halting further urban housing nationalization, undermined the regime's attempts at building legitimacy through legality, and challenged ideas about legal instrumentalism in a communist system.

This study aims to correct errors in, and comment on the claims made in the comment papers of Rigdon (2022) and Henseler and Schuberth (2022), and to tidy up any substantive oversights made in Cadogan and Lee (2022).

The study discusses and clarifies the gap between Rigdon’s notion of scientific realism and the metaphysical, semantic and epistemological commitments that are broadly agreed to be key principles of scientific realism. The study also examines the ontological status of the variables that Henseler and Schuberth claim are emergent using emergence logic grounded in the notion that variables are only truly emergent if they demonstrate a failure of generative atomism.

In scientific realism, hypothetical causal contact between the unobserved and the observed is a key foundational stance, and as such, Rigdon’s concept proxy framework (CPF) is inherently anti-realist in nature. Furthermore, Henseler and Schuberth’s suggestion that composite-creating statistical packages [such as partial least squares (PLS)] can model emergent variables should be treated with skepticism by realists.

Claims made by Rigdon regarding the realism of CPF are unfounded, and claims by Henseler and Schuberth regarding the universal suitability of partial least squares (PLS) as a tool for use by researchers of all ontological stripes (see their Table 5) do not appear to be well-grounded.

Those aspiring to do science according to the precepts of scientific realism need to be careful in assessing claims in the literature. For instance, despite Rigdon’s assertion that CPF is a realist framework, we show that it is not. Consequently, some of Rigdon’s core criticisms of the common factor logic make no sense for the realist. Likewise, if the variables resulting from composite creating statistical packages (like PLS) are not really emergent (contrary to Henseler and Schuberth) and so are not real, their utility as tools for scientific realist inquiry are called into question.

This study assesses PLS using the Eleatic Principle and examines H&S’s version of emergent variables from an ontological perspective.

Consumers are sometimes unexpectedly resistant toward radically innovative product concepts, and it is often argued that this is due to their difficulties in understanding the novel products. Thus, marketing research has focused on new ways to make consumers familiar with new product concepts. The purpose of this study is to present the argument that educating consumers may not solve all problems, and may sometimes even address the wrong question.

The authors' previous research on consumer responses to new product concepts for the purchasing and consumption of food is drawn upon to explore the reasons for consumers' acceptance of and resistance to radical product innovations.

Ignorance about radical product concepts is not the sole reason for consumers' resistance to novelties. In many cases, consumers understand the product concepts fairly well. Their lack of enthusiasm stems from other reasons, including the innovation's instrumentalism, its impact on consumers' autonomy, as well as its organizational complexity and systemic effects.

The findings suggest that companies introducing new product innovations may need to take consumers' resistance more seriously. They might need to reconsider the acceptability of new product innovations, and integrate these considerations at earlier stages of the innovation cycle. A more open‐ended approach to concept testing is suggested, encouraging users to evaluate concepts more critically. Concept testing should not be used as a pass/fail screen, but as an opportunity to learn more about potential impacts of the innovation on everyday life and society.

The paper reconsiders resistance to innovations, and demonstrates the value of consumer research for product development.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the role of interactivity with television (TV) personalities and audience members as mediating variables between teleshopping genre dependency and teleshopping behavior, and to identify the moderating effects of televiewers' instrumentalist behavior on teleshopping.

The Media Dependency Theory has been used as the conceptual framework of this study to explain teleshopping in terms of the relations of the individual with the teleshopping genre, TV personalities and audience members.

Data analysis performed using a sample of 432 Spanish teleshoppers shows that genre dependency has an indirect influence on teleshopping exposure, which in turn has a direct and positive effect on teleshopping behavior. The individual‐media relationships proposed are, in all cases, greater for high instrumentalist televiewers.

This research provides managers suggestions to increase teleshopping behavior. Managers responsible for TV content design should encourage specific viewing and purchase objectives so that they will attract an audience with instrumentalist motivations. They should also design attractive sales programs to retain the audience's attention and promote relationships with program hosts to increase relationships with TV personalities.

Previous research focused on individual media dependency has analyzed the antecedents and consequences of individual media‐genre dependency, but despite dramatic differences between instrumentalist and ritualist televiewers, very limited research has been conducted to examine them. This paper explains teleshopping in terms of the relations of the individual with the teleshopping genre, TV personalities and audience members, focusing on the moderating influence of televiewer's instrumentalist behavior.

The affluent worker study has held sway as one of the most important works, if not the most important work in British sociology over the last decade. Its findings remain unchallenged in the literature to date. Many analyses of industrial behaviour, political behaviour, family behaviour and “community” behaviour take the findings as the starting point of their investigation. For British sociology the findings of the Affluent Worker have foundation status. This paper sets out to fault the claims of prototypicality and typicality made for the affluent workers of Luton by the study team.

This study aims to determine whether partial least squares path modeling (PLS) is fit for purpose for scholars holding scientific realist views.

The authors present the philosophical foundations of scientific realism and constructivism and examine the extent to which PLS aligns with them.

PLS does not align with scientific realism but aligns well with constructivism.

Research is needed to assess PLS’s fit with instrumentalism and pragmatism.

PLS has no utility as a realist scientific tool but may be of interest to constructivists.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to assess PLS’s alignments and mismatches with constructivist and scientific realist perspectives.

The objective of this study was to look closely at how domestic violence is represented in Pakistani drama serials to see if portrayals are reinforcing stereotypical and/or patriarchal values, or breaking the rigid norms.

With the help of dispositive analysis within the critical discourse approach, the prominent and non-dominant discourses about domestic violence were identified and discussed. Episodes from two popular drama serials, Kaisa Yeh Naseeban and Khaas, released in 2019, were watched with special focus on texts on domestic violence alongside objects and actions.

Analysis showed that both drama serials gave importance to socio-systemic and liberal humanist instrumentalism discourses, which describe domestic violence as a result of social structures and that abuse is used to assert control, respectively. However, some instances were noted where patriarchal values were encouraged.

As media has become a powerful tool of influence and awareness in the recent times, it is imperative that the content watched on it by millions of people be studied and analyzed. It is claimed that Pakistani drama serials with wide following and that are made on social issues around women aim to raise awareness and empower them. Domestic violence is a prevalent issue in Pakistan, and no research till date has examined representation of domestic violence on Pakistani popular media, which may influence response to domestic violence, which this paper aims to do.

While there has been much conjecture as to the implications of TQM for shopfloor workers, there have been relatively few studies that have investigated shopfloor responses to TQM via in‐depth interviews. Focuses on shopfloor workers who might have been expected to conform to the “solidaristic” stereotype in terms of their orientation to work, because they had traditionally used the group as a source of power against the employer. The expectation was that they would resist any involvement in TQM. The initial response was positive and the paper seeks to explore this finding. It suggests that shopfloor orientations to work within the male‐dominated, well‐paid, unionised manufacturing sector may have moved from an emphasis on collective conflict towards “collective instrumentalism”, which encompasses a shift away from overt conflict, towards uneasy patterns of co‐operation.