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While land management can be a subject of conflict in places where the composition of landowners is socially and culturally diverse, it also holds the potential of bringing landowners together across social groups. This chapter uses the case of a peri-urban area near Copenhagen, Denmark, to examine the relations landowners have through their use and management of land within and across social groups. To elaborate the analysis and discussion of social groups, social coherence and fragmentation, this chapter introduces the concepts of homophily and self-categorisation. Interviews with 40 landowners from two parishes addressed four types of land-based relations: (1) exchange of help and services; (2) debate of farming/management; (3) shared interests and (4) friendship. While the pattern of relations overall supported the idea that people interact more with their own social group, the analysis also showed areas of interaction across groups as well. Three overall themes summarise important areas of cohesion/fragmentation: (1) Rented land and contracting, (2) Common interests between landowners including hunting, farming and horses, (3) Urgency and geographic proximity.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize a meso-level (organizational) social capital theoretical approach to public relations. A theory and conceptualization of social capital as a resource- and exchange-based function of public relations is proposed. Here it is argued that public relations professionals serve as the managers of intangible resources on behalf of organizations. These intangibles serve as social capital for organizations and are managed through strategic, goal-directed communication behaviors. Social capital is conceptualized alongside other forms of capital that contribute to organizational advantage. The author proposes a conceptual social capital model of public relations and argues that the strategic management of intangible resources as social capital offers an ontology for public relations.

The author employed a process of open-system theory building. Extensive research from multi-disciplinary areas of scholarship – namely, sociology, business, and public relations – formed the basis for the conceptualized model and propositions.

Public relations theory is narrowly defined and does not offer an adequate ontology. This paper extends and refines existing public relations scholarship surrounding social capital to focus on competitive advantages for the organization. This paper uses input from the larger fields of sociology and business, while contextualizing social capital within the public relations scholarship. The result is a resource- and exchange-based social capital model of public relations and propositions for further theory building and empirical analyses.

The public relations discipline often struggles to demonstrate return-on-investment for organizations. The social capital model of public relations offers support for the capital generation and maintenance role of public relations for organizational advantage.

This paper represents one of the first comprehensive attempts at developing a meso-level social capital theory of public relations focused on intangible resource management for the organization.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether social relations are associated with the health of workers. It uses two types of health status measures – self-reported and more objective health – and it considers two types of social relationships: individual social relations, measured through the frequency of meetings with friends; and contextual social relations, the average frequency with which people meet friends at the community level.

A probit model is estimated from the worker sample accounting for the possibility of selecting individuals in the labour market (selection equation). Then expanded probit models (including inverse Mills ratio) are used on both self-reported and more objective health measures using new data from an income and living conditions survey carried out in 2006 by the Italian Statistics Office. Robustness checks are employed to deal with possible problems when interpreting the results.

The study finds that social relations are correlated with health status of workers with differences among health outcomes. Social relations at the individual level are positively correlated with self-perceived health (SPH), negatively associated with chronic condition (CC) but not related to limitations in daily activities. Contextual social relations are negatively linked with CC and limitations in daily activities but not correlated with SPH.

Although the results are consistent with the argument that individual and contextual social relations influence workers’ health, the author cannot prove causality.

Improving the health of workers could reduce health inequalities and could increase work performance. The implication at a macro-economic level of an improvement in the health conditions of workers is relevant in Italy, where the level of labour productivity is low compared to the other developed countries (OECD, 2013). Policy makers should consider the benefits, both at social and economic level, of public policies designed to improve the social and physical infrastructure of social relations.

This paper is the first to relate individual and contextual social relations simultaneously to workers’ health. Moreover, it makes several other contributions to this area: it control for unobserved worker heterogeneity; it uses both subjective self-reported health as well as a more objective measure of health based on CC and limitations in activities of daily living; it adopts a multilevel approach to examine in the same framework the individual and contextual relationship of social relations with individual health status of workers, in so doing, filling a gap in the literature on social capital and public health.

This chapter offers the first full translation from Russian to English of the Balance of the National Economy of the USSR, 1924–26’s first chapter. Involving 12 authors and composed of 21 chapters, the Balance is a collective work published in June 1926 in Moscow by the Soviet Central Statistical Administration under the scientific supervision of its former director, Pavel Illich Popov (1872–1950). In this first chapter, titled ‘Studying the Balance of the National Economy: An Introduction’, Popov set the theoretical foundations of what might be considered as the first modern national accounting system and paved the way to multisector macroeconometric modelling.

This paper aims to investigate the practice of conviviality as the right setting to explore how social capital interacts with business relationships and in particular how resources impacting business relationships take shape in social relations.

This paper has adopted the single case study method combining in-depth interviews, participant observations and focus groups. The investigated case is an Italian business community located in Hangzhou (China), recognized as one of the most active foreign communities in organizing convivial activities.

The study shows that conviviality contributes to generating resources thereby creating interactions in business relationships via social relations through self-narrative, community feeling and empathy. These resources bear distinguishing features. Based on relationships of trust, they are fitting and mutual knowledge-based resources and they are resources performing a sense of inner time.

The paper contributes to the interpretation of the interplay between business relationships and social capital through conviviality and is in line with a direction of research, which is increasingly involving industrial marketing and purchasing (IMP) researchers, which is the analysis of social capital in business networks.

To get beneath the surface of the focal concepts of public relations practice today, the major sociological theories of Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann have been fruitful as frames of interpretation. Two paradigms for reflection on the public relations phenomenon have been developed on their theories: the inter‐subjective and the social systemic public relations paradigms. These paradigms indicate fundamentally different interpretations of the concepts of conflict and social responsibility, with crucial consequences for the role of public relations in today's social order. Each perspective has its blind spots but the switching of perspectives allows us to see more. Habermas's theories make it possible to disclose the ideal perception which seems to prevail in the self‐understanding of public relations practice while, at the same time, setting out normative ideals for the practice. The ideal in the inter‐subjective paradigm is to re‐establish the system's coupling to the lifeworld. The public relations practitioner must act as an individual through communicative action. Public relations is a matter of ethical issues in a normative perspective. We might also call this the ethical, communicative or normative paradigm of public relations. The keyword is legitimation in post‐conventional discourse society. Luhmann's theories make it possible to disclose the social systemic mechanisms that can be viewed as the framework for public relations practice, and to set out functional conditions for that practice. The functions of the social systemic paradigm are to assist in maintaining the boundaries of the organisation system through strategic reflection and to assist in ensuring that society's differentiated system logics can function autonomously because they also understand how to function together. The sphere of action of the public relations practitioner is defined by the social systems. Public relations is a matter of functional issues in a cognitive perspective. We might also call this the functional, reflective or cognitive paradigm of public relations. The keyword is public trust in the context‐regulated society. This paper is based on a thesis by the author entitled: ‘The Inter‐subjective and the Social Systemic Public Relations Paradigms’, University of Roskilde, April 1996, also to be published in English.

Over the last decades, the social sciences have become increasingly concerned with the role of the state and the politics of institutional restructuring. Within mainstream political science this has led to the development of a “state-centered” research program that emphasizes the autonomy of institutions. Marxist theory, however, has continued to adhere to a “society-centered” perspective, seeking to combine an ability to account for institutional change with the analysis of more structural social and economic forces. After some introductory comments that frame the problematic within which the paper is situated (Section 1), I discuss in Section 2 three of the most important recent Marxist attempts to construe the relation between socio-economic imperatives and political institutions. My argument is that Marxists’ attempts to relativize the autonomy of state institutions are too often still based on the postulation of an unexplained structural moment. This leaves them vulnerable to institutionalist claims concerning the autonomous nature of institutions. Section 3 proposes a different way of thinking the role of institutions in capitalist society. This approach breaks with a causalist, structuralist mode of explanation and relies on a more hermeneutic understanding of the role of institutions. I will shift the problematic to the relation between institutions and agency, arguing for a more pragmatist understanding of the role of institutions and an agency-based understanding of the formation of socio-economic imperatives. Section 4 concludes with some thoughts on the prospects held out, as well as the challenges faced, by the approach proposed in this paper.

This case study aims to analyse dyadic empirical relations within food supply chains. The categories of market, hierarchy or power, network and social relations were used to disclose the coordinative structures on the chain level and connect these with the chain development.

The actors of three vegetable supply chains were interviewed. The coordinative relations of actors were identified and the coordinative structures on the chain level were made visible by combining the ego networks of chain actors. The “story of supply chain development” was intertwined with the analysis.

The studied food supply chains were coordinated mostly by duplex or multiplex relations, combining market, hierarchy or power, network and social relations. In addition to the strategic network, presented in literature, the study identified a coordinative structural mode of socially overlaid network. In general, the network relation was found to be used as an effective “glue” within all coordinative structures. Both coordinative structural modes exhibited substantial growth, on the condition that agricultural base and buyers enabled enlargement.

Economic sociological perspective has been used in explaining food supply chain development by making visible the coordinative relations and structures on the chain level. The chain level phenomena appear as a promising field of study.