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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.

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.

In this study, we analyze sport as a cultural product of a particular place. We use the concept of “tradition” to highlight the collective (as opposed to individual) aspects of sport, emphasizing the importance of temporality, emergence, and novelty in social processes. We conducted a case study of internationally successful Icelandic men’s team handball that provides an interesting topic in this respect. Our findings challenge decades of research on sport that has stressed innate talent, individual qualities or physiological processes rather than the sociocultural processes. They support the interactionist approach to culture showing how local culture, rooted in specific interaction settings, influences the formation and development of a successful sport tradition. It is the way that cultural elements interact and combine in various networks that is crucial for national variations in playing sport. The social processes involved are best captured by Mead’s concepts of emergence, novelty, and the principle of sociality. These concepts help us to explain how unique national styles of playing sports derive from general cultural and social mechanism that interact to produce emergent and novel national variations. Our findings also support and extend earlier work on craftsmanship indicating that crafts-work, which is a part of an organized community resembling the old “workshop,” explains in part how innovations originate in sport-specific and other local networks. These theories offer a sociological extension of pragmatic theories of learning, emphasizing the group in the tradition of Mead.

Corporate culture is a spirit formed by the shared values of the individuals in the organization that has potential to make the library more than the sum of its parts, both positively and negatively. It is the vehicle by which the organization defines itself, for both itself and the clientele, with the purpose of providing the best service possible by sharing a vision of the organization as an organic whole. It operates through the power of peer influence rather than direct vertical authority. This paper takes a holistic approach to a concept that is more complex than it first appears; it addresses the molding of corporate culture, not as a management function, but as a complex and deep system, being in effect the soul of the organization, which resides in the motivation of each individual and which, therefore, requires a special kind of leadership.

This article discusses how the concepts of exploration and exploitation are fruitful for understanding individual fantasies of escape from the demands of contemporary workplaces. We examine one influential articulation of such fantasies, namely the best-selling self-help book “The 4-Hour Workweek.” This book advocates that individuals outsource the bulk of the routine (“exploitation”) tasks of their lives, leaving themselves free for creativity, play, and leisure (“exploration”). In this way, a radical separation of exploitation and exploration at the individual level is proposed. We examine the meanings and contradictions of such ideas by discussing how they may function as powerful escape fantasies for those facing corporate overwork. However, we argue that the solution proposed is unsatisfactory because of its individualism, which fails to see the inherently social nature of work and life.