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American sociology has long been concerned with the social conditioning of American character, particularly with regard to caring for others. This interest can be traced to Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1899[1838]) in which he reflected on how democratic participation in government and voluntary associations in the 1830s shaped the American character. Tocqueville believed that participation in social institutions, and especially voluntary societies, balanced the potentially excessive individualism he observed in the United States. David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd: A Study of Changing American Character (1950) picked up similar themes in an exploration of the isolation of the individual within modern society. These concerns reached a broad audience more recently in Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton's Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (1985) in which the authors argued that the scale had swung in favor of individualism at the expense of commitment to the social good. Robert Wuthnow (1991) addressed these issues again in Acts of Compassion: Caring for Others and Helping Ourselves, in which he explored how in volunteer work, Americans attempted to reconcile compassion with individualism. These studies, primarily focusing on white, middle‐class Americans, have laid the groundwork for an exploration of the social nature of the American character within the context of caring for others.

Melvin Seeman (1989) has recently stated that nowadays the concept of alienation carries an antiquated meaning which is quite in contrast to its importance in the 1960s. There seems to be much evidence for a fading romance with alienation in the social sciences. I have continued Seeman's search for articles that have appeared between 1978 and 1982 in leading social science journals until 1989. There was only one major reference, however, a quite important one by Kai T. Erikson in his presidential address to the American Sociological Association in 1985. Contrary to these disappointing observations Seeman suggests that alienation is leading an underground life in contemporary research and theory. According to his assessment this theme survives because the assumptions involved in the tradition of the alienation motif are indispensable for critical analysis in sociology and psychology.

Discusses the role that predictive fiction serves as a resource in long‐range consumer marketing planning. Evaluates a case illustration comparing the scenarios depicted in two major works of predictive fiction in the categories of consumer behaviour, consumer goods, environment, law, family, leisure, sex roles, technology and psychological factors. Offers guidelines for selecting and analysing the content of relevant literary works, and how to incorporate the results into consumer marketing planning process.

The paper aims to explore five lines of enquiry and action that mainly appeal to freedom and knowledge: developing forms of activity that put an emphasis on free commitment, such as NGOs, for example; fostering the building of creative knowledge‐based societies; designing a new social contract founded on the right to lifelong learning for all; underpinning globalization by a future‐oriented ethic; combining the necessity to work with the dignity to which citizens are entitled.

Drawing conclusions from recent trends in global economy as well as writings by economists, sociologists and philosophers from different countries, the paper argues that the social role and our conceptions of work have entered a time of crisis.

Once widely acknowledged as a central social and economic fact and a driving ethical value, work seems to lose some of its importance as a human activity in a world that is more and more global and technological. But, work being instrumental in defining not only what one does but also what one is, it cannot be discarded so casually. How can work be reinvented as a value and how are organizations such as Unesco to cope with an issue that pertains to human rights?

This conceptual paper focuses on work both as an economical fact and a social value.

This chapter reviews critically the policy developments in the United Kingdom since 2010 with the adoption by the coalition of ‘community organising’ as both a concept and practice.

The chapter is an extensive literature review informed by critical thinking and reflection.

The chapter argues that the model adopted in the United Kingdom is unlikely to address the power imbalances between civil society organisations and the state and that there needs to be a more critical and reflective assessment of the potential of civil society agencies to influence public policy in a progressive way.

The chapter is intentionally speculative.

When public agencies seek to privatize a service, a commissioning process begins wherein public sector budgeters must decide how generous the funding will be while taking occupational standards into account so that the quality of service is assured. One important area of occupational standards is the required personnel and job sizes of certified employees. Not enough attention has been directed to how occupational standards’ related knowledge is treated in the process. The purpose of this paper is to: first, investigate how the commissioning process is experienced by Israeli, often female, occupational standards administrators. Second, proposing a gendered perspective on Sennett’s corrosion of character thesis.

As part of an institutional ethnography project, 16 interviews were conducted with (14 female and two male) occupational standards administrators at the Israeli Welfare, Education and Health Ministries.

The routine of commissioning involves a stage of using occupational standards’ knowledge and experience, and a stage of dismissing it. The “corrosion of character” embedded in the dismissal stage undermines historical achievements in the area of recognizing caring work and skills.

The research is unable to distinguish between the specific caring occupations discussed.

Service delivery modes has to develop into more publicly visible forums where occupational standards’ are protected.

The continuous corrosion of occupational knowledge may result in the demise of professionalization in care service occupations causing increasingly more polarization and poverty among their employees.

While Sennett’s thesis has already been found plausible for understanding public servants’ experiences of the “new public management,” until recently, not enough attention has been devoted to the commissioning processes’ gendered implications for contract-based delivery of services. This paper examines these implications for the power struggle between the feminist achievements protecting skill recognition in caring occupations, and policy makers.

Discourse among the media and general public has associated the term ‘multicultural’ with multiculturalism; however, Tiryakian (2003, p. 22) argues that the two should be seen as analytically distinct but empirically complementary. In its demographic-descriptive meaning, the term multicultural refers to cultural or ethnic diversity or the coexistence of different cultural groups within a particular locality; in this sense it represents heterogeneity over homogeneity. This descriptive approach, adopted by governments and public officials in Australia, describes those spaces shared by a variety of groups as ‘multicultural’. I want to confine this particular construction of multicultural to the category of ‘multiethnic’. On the other hand, the word ‘multiculturalism’ alludes to a normative category and refers to philosophical arguments regarding the legitimacy of claims surrounding the recognition of particular identity groups. The normative view accepts that pluralism and diversity are good in themselves and assumes that all difference should be valued and given a voice in the public realm. This version of multiculturalism has been evident in the United States, but has come under increasing attack by neo-conservatives. In its programmatic-political dimension, couched in liberal terms in Australia, multiculturalism pertains to policies designed to respond to the problems posed by diversity. Advocates of such policies believe that they foster toleration and equal opportunity. Another category entails an attitude towards the cultural ‘other’ and refers to an inter-subjective mode of being. The typology constructed here is based on a continuum consisting of monocultural, multiethnic, multiculturalism, and multicultural and will be used to interpret a city's relationship to its diverse population. This typology also raises some interesting questions. How many different cultural groups need to exist within a designated urban space before a city can legitimately or authentically represent itself as ‘multicultural’? Can one judge to what extent a city is multicultural based on the type of social interaction that exists among culturally-diverse groups? If multiculturalism extends beyond a demographic phenomenon, then it is possible to distinguish multiethnic cities from multicultural cities. These questions and issues can also shed light on the politics of representation.