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This paper aims at a better understanding of contemporary women’s relationship paths and their reasoning behind them. Qualitative interviews with 48 rural and urban women from Western Mexico were conducted and analyzed using a thematic approach and data discussed from a feminist, gender approach and late modernity approach. Findings reveal civil and religious marriages were the paths two-third of women followed to start a family and that women living in permanent and alternating cohabitation did not seek to marry. Women held ambivalent views on marital life and poorer and less-educated women, particularly urban participants, had no choice but to marry. Findings on reasoning reveal a more complex and diverse reality than previous sociodemographic studies have portrayed, where pragmatism and social order were the main causes for marrying and cohabitation. Narratives show premarital sex and the symbolism of marriage and family are changing. A comparative approach between contexts of study, age groups, civil status, and social strata enriched and strengthened the discussion of the findings. The results were contrasted with existing Mexican literature from different fields. A larger qualitative study is needed to broaden the scope of the findings made by this study, whilst large-scale studies should consider either the use of mixed approaches or the inclusion of items that allow them to identify the elements of social and cultural change. The study could help to demystify women’s attitudes toward marriage, sex, and love; a field currently sprinkled with western romantic love values and gender-driven idealizations. This paper might be of interest for social demographers, anthropologists, sociologists, and historians conducting research on these themes from feminist and gender perspectives.

Metaphorically, the garden invokes a repertoire of skills, arts, and virtues that run counter to the act of confinement but are embedded in its disciplinary practice: spaces in punitive environments where care, growth, health, and cultivation are emphasized. Gardens and the force of law and labor are foregrounded in Judeo-Christian myths, in slavery, and in prison farms as spaces of expulsion and brutality. Yet as abandoned, fortress-style prisons dilapidate, and vines and weeds break through concrete, we can begin to ask, What might it mean to imagine the prison through the lens of the garden?

Transnationalism is a multi-faceted phenomenon which has impacted on society and challenged, inter alia, the paradigm of national affiliations. The trasnationalisation of the European field has arguably contributed to a political arena where embryonic post-national identities and new forms of belonging are being negotiated, challenged and legitimised. By investigating the discourses of members of a transnational NGO of ‘active’ citizens, this chapter seeks to understand how current European identities are discursively constructed from bottom up in the public sphere. Appropriating CDA, this chapter offers insights into how discursive strategies and linguistic devices used by the speakers and predicated on the indexicality of transnational frames, construct Europe and patterns of belonging to it. This chapter suggests different conceptual dimensions of transnationalism enacted by members in discourse which are conveniently summarised as nation-centric, Euro-centric and cosmopolitan.

This chapter draws from a three-year ethnographic study focused on the educational and community interactions among working- and middle-class ethnic Chinese immigrants in a mid-western town in the United States. Aihwa Ong (1999) argues that “Chineseness” is a fluid, cultural practice manifested within the Chinese diaspora in particular ways that relate to globalization in late modernity, immigrants’ cultural background, their place in the social structure in their home society, and their new social class status in the context they enter. The study extends research focused on the complexities of social reproduction within larger global flows of Chinese immigrants. First, we describe how Chinese immigrants’ social status in their countries of origin in part shapes middle and working-class group’s access to cultural capital and positions in the social structure of their post-migration context. Second, we trace groups’ negotiation of their relational race and class positioning in the new context (Ong, 1999) that is often invisible in the processes of social reproduction. Third, we describe how both groups must negotiate national, community, and schooling conceptions of the model minority concept (Lee, 1996) that shapes Asian-American’s lived realities in the United States; yet the continuing salience of their immigrant experience, home culture, and access to cultural capital (Bourdieu, 2007) means that they enact the “model minority” concept differently. The findings suggest the complexity of Chinese immigrants’ accommodation of and resistance to normative ideologies and local structures that cumulatively contribute to social reproduction on the basis of class.

The purpose of this paper is to describe strategic improvisation, a contemporary concept and approach based on the creative arts and organizational crisis theory, as a valuable approach for communication professionals. Strategic improvisation combines the need for planning and structure with creative action, and is a normative idea of how to work in an efficient way.

The concept is developed in a collaborative project between a major Swedish communications agency and a university scholar. The empirical foundation consists of 25 qualitative interviews with a strategic selection of successful communication professionals, identified as typical strategic improvisers.

An analysis of the interviews led to 11 defining patterns or themes typical for strategic improvisation and strategic improvisers. The interviews and the theoretical framework is the foundation of a communication model. Strategic improvisation is defined as a situational interpretation within a given framework. The model has three interconnected parts: a clear framework (composition), a professional interpretation (interpretation) and a situational adaptation based on given possibilities and conditions (improvisation).

This is not a peer reviewed paper, but a paper in the section “In Practice,” directed toward communication professionals.

The ideas and model are connected to theories of improvisation, especially in music, which is rare in the field of communication management, and developed in a collaborative project between practice and research.

This paper sets out to provide global business managers and researchers with perspectives, concepts, and some tools to deal with emergent late modern conditions.

Analytical discourse is employed to outline the post‐enlightenment rise of modernity and rational economics. The paper critiques the nature of business institutions and practices under modernity, and points to the new conditions of waning and late modernity. Indications and guidelines are provided about the nature of new, emergent forms of global business under conditions of waning and eclipsing modernity.

The paper finds that the membrane separating global business organizations and their consumers is dissolving, and the new “post‐consumers” exhibit increasing levels of competence in terms of business practices. The paper reveals several aspects of global business under conditions of waning, late, and eclipsing modernity: transformation of business from and arcane, professional practice to an embedded everyday cultural practice; erosion of central control and business becoming diffused; imperative for collaborative forms where business managers work alongside post‐consumers; and breakdown of hierarchic order and rise of complexity and fluidity in business practices.

The main contribution is a cogent set of concepts that enable managers and researchers to understand, examine in detail, and deal with global business practices and organizational forms under conditions of waning modernity and emerging postmodern contexts.

This article explores the concept of ‘risk’ that is both an epistemological tool and major facet of “late modernity” (Delanty, 1999). During the 1970s, the use of the notion ’risk’ was mainly confined to ‘natural sciences’, when the concept was used to analyse and improve the ‘security’ of technological systems (Giddens, 1990). According to Delanty (1999) it was not until the 1980s and 1990s that social science based ‘disciplines’ discovered the importance of the topic in relation to changes affecting modern society. In particular, the disciplinary development of Sociology, for example, has discovered ‘risk’ as one of the important aspects of neo‐liberalism and modernity (Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1990; Luhmann, 1993; Delanty, 1999). Sociological conceptions of risk are rapidly changing the role of social science (Delanty, 1999). For example, Delanty (1999) claims that there are studies on epistemology or legitimation of risk knowledge. The conflict between sociologically informed concepts of ‘risk’ and the more traditional, probabilistic calculations of risk represent a contest of competing social philosophies and visions about the future development of human and financial resources, relationship between economic growth and environmental protection, role of government and individuality, and projections and visions about the future it can be argued. A sociologically informed understanding of risk illustrates the interconnectedness of an “ageing population,” social policy and social life. From this perspective, risk is more than a calculation of costs and benefits, it is a theoretical mechanism for weighing different sets of political orientations which impinge on the positioning of individuals and populations.

To demonstrate, through the application of Fairclough's critical discourse analysis framework, that the discourse surrounding corporate social responsibility (CSR) has broader implications.

Argues that the evolution of CSR has become a two‐way process of interaction between business and civil society.

As companies place increasing emphasis on their ability to act responsibly as “corporate citizens”, CSR provides new opportunities for social actors to assimilate these strategies; enabling them to scrutinise, question and oppose the business practices of global corporations and challenging them to prove that there is more to CSR than merely corporate rhetoric.

Demonstrates that the discourse surrounding CSR has broader implications.

This chapter explores theory and local context of socially constructed pandemic fears during COVID-19; how material and non-material fear objects are construed, interpreted and understood by communities, and how fears disrupt social norms and influence pandemic behavioural responses. We aimed to understand the lived experiences of pandemic-induced fears in socioculturally diverse communities in eastern Indonesia in the context of onto-epistemological disjunctures between biomedically derived public health interventions, local world views and causal-remedial explanations for the crisis. Ethnographic research conducted among several communities in East Nusa Tenggara province in Indonesia provided the data and analyses presented in this chapter, delineating the extent to which fear played a decisive role in both internal, felt experience and social relations. Results illustrate how fear emotions are constructed and acted upon during times of crisis, arising from misinformation, rumour, socioreligious influence, long-standing tradition and community understandings of modernity, power and biomedicine. The chapter outlines several sociological theories on fear and emotion and interrogates a post-pandemic future.