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Professional journalism has recently been studied through the lens of audience participation in the production of news online. While initial enthusiasm for democratisation and community reinforcement was significant, empirical evidence points towards unwillingness for fundamental reconstruction of journalistic practices. This chapter aims to map participatory journalism in Greece through the synthesis of accumulated research on the adoption of participatory features and practices in online news media and on audience perspectives of engaging in new roles during news process. Professionals seem hesitant to support a different but the traditional relationship with the users, while even users themselves get involved in activities that require little time and effort, not challenging journalistic norms via creative content production. However, both journalists and audience are positive towards a new collaborative way of managing and exploiting user-generated content, which can support participatory environments that reshape the incorporation of users' contributions in the daily workflows.

This paper aims to identify the relative contribution of the business cycle and structural factors to the development of part-time employment in the 15 Member States of the European Union before the 2004 enlargement (EU-15) over the 1980s and 1990s. To do so, it exploits both cross-sectional and time series variations in available data over the past two decades.

Key results include the business cycle that is found to exert a short-term negative effect on part-time employment developments, although this effect fades away over the two-decade period considered. This finding is consistent with firms utilising part-time employment as a means of adjusting their labour force to economic conditions. Correspondingly, involuntary part-time employment is found to be counter-cyclical, being higher in troughs of economic activity. Splitting our sample reveals a very significant effect of the business cycle on the rate of part-time work for young and male prime-age workers. Conversely, the effect is very weak for women and insignificant for older workers.

Institutions and other structural factors are also found to be significant, longer run determinants of the rate of part-time employment. Changes in legislation affecting part-time employment are found to have a strong and positive impact on part-time employment developments. Moreover, employment protection legislation is positively correlated with the part-time employment rate (PTR), which is consistent with the use of part-time work as a tool for enhancing flexibility in the presence of rigid labour markets. Less robust evidence suggests the presence of unemployment traps for some potential part-time workers. Cross-country evidence also indicates that the lower labour costs borne by firms when employing part-time workers have a large and positive influence on the PTR. Overall, a contribution analysis shows that the main structural and institutional variables generally explain the development in the part-time rate in the EU countries fairly well, while this is obviously not the case in the United States.

Using the perspectives of dramaturgy and symbolic interactionists like George Herbert Mead and Carl Couch this study focuses on paid sex work in the hypermodern, virtual world of Second Life. Using seventeen semi-structured interviews and six months of ethnographic fieldwork, I find that the employment of sexual scripts, carrying off a successful erotic scene, and the creative use of communication and embodiment are highly valued in escorts’ performance of Second Life sex work. Escorts craft an online persona that is a digital representation of the self, which is manifested in the embodiment of their digital body or avatar. In addition to digital representations of the physical self, Second Life allows for multiple methods of computer-mediated communication, and escorts are able to re-embody the first life body through the trading of first life pictures, voice cybersex, and web cam cybersex. The data allow the conclusion that most escorts are unwilling to re-embody the first life body for reasons of personal safety and the desire to restrict access to the first life self. I find, however, that there is a porous boundary between first life and Second Life in which the first life self comes through in the Second Life persona. In the concluding remarks, I explore the implications this study has for the negotiation of privacy for new social media actors who are reluctant to fully disclose their lives yet perform a persistent, archived persona for friends and followers on the Internet. This study contributes to a small, but growing, body of literature on Second Life and expands the existing work on embodiment and privacy in the digital realm.

This chapter attempts to advance our understanding regarding social innovation with a focus on public sector organizations. The aim is to answer the following question: “How does a manager’s novel knowledge gained from decisional interventions act as a resource to achieve social innovation?” The study employed a qualitative research approach. Findings have stemmed from secondary sources such as officially published reports and media releases of three local councils of Victoria, Australia. The data were first contextually positioned and then analyzed by following the Gioia methodology. Research findings indicate that tacit knowledge gained by public managers helps them to make better decisional interventions. In different situations such as handling disturbance, negotiating with other parties, allocating resources, or being an intrapreneur, the decisions and its quality will be improved if public managers enhance their personal knowledge. This study also offers policymakers a new approach to deal with the social problems innovatively. It, therefore, provides insights on topics such as sustained social transformation through public reforms, navigation of resources, and wise leadership.

The study of markets encompasses a number of disciplines – including anthropology, economics, history, and sociology – and a larger number of theoretical frameworks (see Plattner, 1989; Reddy, 1984; Smelser & Swedberg, 1994). Despite this disciplinary and theoretical diversity, scholarship on markets tends toward either realist or constructionist accounts (Dobbin, 1994; Dowd & Dobbin, forthcoming).¹ Realist accounts treat markets as extant arenas that mostly (or should) conform to a singular ideal-type. Realists thus take the existence of markets as given and examine factors that supposedly shape all markets in a similar fashion. When explaining market outcomes, they tout such factors as competition, demand, and technology; moreover, they can treat the impact of these factors as little influenced by context. Constructionist accounts treat markets as emergent arenas that result in a remarkable variety of types. They problematize the existence of markets and examine how contextual factors contribute to this variety. When explaining market outcomes, some show that social relations and/or cultural assumptions found in a particular setting can qualify the impact of competition (Uzzi, 1997), demand (Peiss, 1998), and technology (Fischer, 1992). Constructionists thus stress the contingent, rather than universal, processes that shape markets.

From 1782 to 1834, the English social legislation shifted from a safety net devised to deal with emergencies to a social security system implemented to cope with the threat of unemployment and poverty. In the attempt to explain this shift, this chapter concentrates on the changed attitudes toward poverty and power relationships in eighteenth-century British society. Especially, it looks at the role played by eighteenth-century British economic thinkers in elaborating arguments in favor of reducing the most evident asymmetries of power characterizing the period of transition from Mercantilism to the Classical era. To what extent did economic thinkers contribute to creating an environment within which a social legislation aimed at improving the living conditions of the poor as the one established in 1795 could be not only envisaged but also implemented? In doing so, this chapter deals with an aspect often undervalued and/or overlooked by historians of economic thought: namely, the relationship between economic theory and social legislation. If the latter is the institutional framework by which both individual and collective well-being can be achieved the former cannot but assume a fundamental role as a useful abstraction which sheds light on the multifaceted reality in which social policies are proposed, forged, and eventually implemented.