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Populism is one of the main symptoms of the contemporary crisis in Europe. How can the rise of populism best be understood? Whereas existing analyses predominantly utilise rationalist and behaviouralist approaches and focus on political, economic and cultural interests, this contribution proposes a different approach. The author focusses on affects and emotions. The author shows that where other parties or political movements opt for rational and dispassionate debates on merits of political programmes, populists instead offer, invoke and respond to strong emotions across multiple political settings. Emotions feed and propel populism in its bid for power by forming collective identities through the clustering of love for ‘us’ and hate for the ‘other’.

Ontological Security Theory (OST) is used here as a framework for understanding populist behaviour in the sphere of security perception, identification and community-building. In recent debates, OST has been used because it allows the motives for certain behaviours to be located in the need to maintain or recreate positive identity constructed via biographical narratives. OST suggests that any lack of narrative continuity regarding the shape of the self-images for both individual and collective identities will therefore constitute a source of ontological threat; the lack of a sense of security. In this contribution, the author uses the examples of populist policies and discourses in Hungary and Poland that illustrate this dynamic to analyse the past- and future-oriented collective identifications underpinning the recent rise of populism in Europe.

This paper aims to contribute to the debate about the closure of institutional mental health-care facilities, from an experiential perspective of a former mental health inpatient, ongoing service user and campaigner for retention of such facilities. It argues that auto-ethnographic accounts of mental illness by those with multiple social identities can have a greater role in terms of future training of mental health-care professionals.

The paper offers an experiential account of the impact of mental health facility bed closures as a patient admitted to institutional mental health facilities; as a mental health campaigner, fighting for the provision of both places of safety and “safe space” within his own local community; and as an ongoing service user. The research is in the interpretivist tradition of social science in taking an auto-ethnographical methodological stance.

This paper is underpinned by two key theoretical notions. Firstly, Stuart Hall’s concept of the Familiar Stranger (2017) is used to explore the tensions of self-identity as the author SHIFTS uncomfortably between his three-fold statuses. Secondly, the notion of “ontological insecurity” offered by Giddens (1991) is used with the paper exploring the paradox that admission to a mental health facility so-called “place of safety” is in fact itself a disorientating experience for both patient and carer(s).

No positivistic claims to reliability, representativeness or generalisability can be made. It is the authenticity of the account which the reader feels should be afforded primacy in terms of its original contribution to knowledge.

This paper should have practical use for those tasked with developing educational and training curriculums for professionals across the mental health-care sector.

This paper implicitly assesses the political wisdom of the policy of mental health bed closures within the wider context of the deinstitutionalisation movement.

This paper is underpinned by original experiential accounts from the author as patient, campaigner for places of safety and onging service-user of mental health care provision.

Purpose – This study explored how the pandemic shaped or shifted legacy news reporting about crime, focusing on Twitter posts as visual elements of the crossmedia landscape.

Methodology/Approach – Drawing a purposive sample of tweets about crime and the pandemic posted from March 2020 to December 2021 by major TV news outlets, the qualitative media analysis (QMA) scrutinized how tweets constructed narratives about crime. The analysis considered images, text, and their juxtaposition within tweets and over time.

Findings – This study found that news organizations partnered the pandemic and crime in the American discourse of fear. Tweets acted as crime news snapshots, which magnified a sense of instability and uncertainty. Tweets constructed a collective malaise that could contribute to users’ sense of ontological insecurity.

Originality/Value – The spectacle of crime churned through news organizations’ tweets, dissociating crime from the complex social context of the pandemic. Attention to the liquidity of images and information in the crossmedia landscape revealed fluctuating social meanings and disorientation.

The purpose of this paper is to provide knowledge on barriers to preventive action on early childhood overweight in non-western migrant families. It investigates the underlying understandings of the parental role in relation to weight control present in health-care professionals and in families.

The study is based on qualitative interviews with parents who are engaged in interventions aimed at helping them and their children to adopt a healthier life style, and on interviews with health-care professionals.

This study shows that the participating parents, all low SES and living under different forms of insecurity, perceived their parental task for the present as creating well-being for their children, and they were, therefore, reluctant to enforce dietary changes. The health-care professionals, in contrast, considered the need for change through a perspective on future risks.

The results are based on a rather small sample and the link between insecurity, family dynamics and health practice needs further research.

The participating parents represented a group that is rarely included in scientific research and the study, therefore, contributes valuable knowledge on health behavior in ethnic minority families. The empirical analysis provides new insights for health professionals regarding the suitability of the universal model of parental feeding styles. It illuminates the implications of implicitly applying this model in health interventions which involve vulnerable categories of parents such as refugees to western societies.

Across the Americas, public discussions of crime and penal practices have become increasingly punitive even as political struggles have resulted in a broad shift toward Constitutional democracy. In this chapter, we suggest that the spread of tough anti-crime talk and practice is, paradoxically, a response to efforts to expand and deepen democracy. Punitive crime talk is useful to political actors seeking to limit formal and social citizenship rights for several reasons. First, it ostensibly targets problematic behavior rather than particular social groups, and thus appears to be consistent with democratic norms. At the same time, crime talk often acquires coded meanings that enable those who mobilize it to tap into inter-group hostility, anxieties, and fear. In addition, the emphasis on the threat of crime and disorder offers those seeking to limit democratic expansion a way to legitimate truncated visions of the rights and entitlements of citizenship. Tough anti-crime rhetoric often resonates with those who have experienced or fear the loss of symbolic and/or material benefits as a result of democratic reform. In short, the broad shift toward hyper-penality is, at least in part, a consequence of struggles over political democracy, citizenship and governance across the Americas.

The purpose of this paper is to explore political behaviours associated with the implementation of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system in a public service organisation from an emerging market country, the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The authors’ theoretical framework is based on the notions of trust, agent reflexivity, ontological security, routines, control and power proposed by Giddens (1984, 1990). The authors explore how the political behaviour of organisation members emanates from the introduction of an ERP system (particularly its accounting modules), and how the interaction between individual power, trust and control shaped its implementation process. The case study methodology relied on diverse data collection methods including semi-structured interviews, documentary evidence and personal observation.

The authors show that the accounting-based ERP system created an episode of discomfort in the organisation, which facilitated reflexivity and critical reflection by organisation members and led to a re-assessment of ways of thinking pre- and post-dating the implementation of the ERP system. The findings illustrate the entangled relationship between the new accounting-based ERP system and the feelings of trust emerging during organisational change.

Although case studies are intrinsically limited in terms of generalisability, the authors’ investigation provides practical insights into the management of the needs of trust, ontological security and sources of power experienced by organisation members, since the fulfilment of such needs is the underlying pillar which the success of ERP systems rests upon.

This study is one of the first to apply Giddens’ (1984, 1990) conceptualisation to examine organisation change caused by the implementation of an accounting-based ERP system in an emerging market economy.