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Low impact development (LID) has been characterised as a radical approach to housing, livelihoods and everyday living which began in Britain in the 1990s as a grassroots response to the overlapping crises of sustainability (Halfacree, 2006; Maxey, 2009). It employs approaches that dramatically reduce humans’ impact upon the environment, demonstrating that human settlements and livelihoods, when done appropriately, can enhance, rather than diminish ecological diversity. However, LID is not solely concerned with the environment. It is also a direct response to social needs for housing, an anti-capitalist strategy forging alternative economic possibilities, and a holistic approach to living that pays attention to the personal as well as the political needs (Douthwaite, 1996). Thus, LIDs are a good vehicle through which to explore radical and innovative forms of sustainability and to critically assess their potential as a response to environmentally damaging ways of living. Rather than seeing LIDs as a rural back-to-the-land phenomena (Halfacree, 2007b; Jacob, 2006), this chapter argues that the movement is ‘engaged in social transformation through everyday-lived practice’ (Woods, 2008, p. 132).

Purpose – There has been a growing interest in the development of a ‘green’ or ‘low carbon’ economy as a means of reconciling economic development and the environment. Research on green entrepreneurs to date has been upon individual entrepreneurs, neglecting wider economic and social contexts within which they operate. By looking at these wider networks of support, we suggest that discourses of the lone entrepreneur innovating and changing business practices are misrepresentative.

Methodology/approach – Semi-structured interviews to investigate green entrepreneurship with green building companies and policy makers.

Findings – Combined with new demands from consumers for more environmentally friendly products and services, the changing shape of national and global economies is leading to new forms of entrepreneurship. We identify a number of tensions between policy intentions and businesses’ experiences on the ground.

Research limitations/implications – To date, research has only been undertaken in the UK – we recommend that future research takes other national contexts into account. Other economic sectors also represent promising areas for future research, potentially including social enterprises in the green economy. Sustainability transitions theories offer a potentially valuable means for understanding the role of businesses in engendering a green economy.

Practical implications – Implications for policy frameworks are outlined in the conclusions.

Originality/value of chapter – By incorporating policy and support organisations, and informal networks of support, the chapter challenges the dominant view of the lone entrepreneurial hero and points to the significance of networks for facilitating green entrepreneurship. This will be of importance for policy makers and funders of entrepreneurship programmes.

The aim of this chapter is to present techniques to involve the crowd in the ideation and funding process of tourism ventures. The typologies of those techniques are presented before analysing their key success factors and advantages. Finally, a design model is presented in order to help managers and project holders to implement a crowd ideation and funding process.

Literature review, quantitative and qualitative methods such as data analysis and interviews were employed to encompass several aspects of crowdsourcing related to tourism ventures.

This chapter highlights the key success factors and advantages of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding for tourism ventures, formulates recommendations and proposes a concrete tool for every project holder or manager who would like to engage in those activities.

Although several types of crowdsourcing are operative, we only focused on two particular types that are interesting for tourism entrepreneurs.

The key success factors and key advantages presented in this chapter constitute tracks for reflection and for action for the managers and project holders. The crowdsourcing design model is a tool to help entrepreneurs to elaborate campaigns of crowdsourcing/crowdfunding.

This chapter summarises the evolution of involving the crowd in the innovation and funding process of a project. The reasons and success factors are exposed and illustrated with numerous examples from the tourism industry. Finally, a practical model is presented in order to allow the creation of a crowdsourcing/crowdfunding campaign.

To examine the recent popularity of the tiny house movement with a critical eye toward the growing commodification of sustainability in a market that continues to shelter economic and class privilege, despite that the movement itself emerges from a desire to consume less and contribute to community more.

Written from the position of a tiny house builder and dweller, this study reads a range of recently published accounts of the tiny house movement, informed by contemporary work in environmental sociology. Investigates current rhetoric surrounding the movement with special attention to issues of mobility, consumption, and the movement’s romanticism, with particular attention to the movement’s invocations of Henry David Thoreau.

Tiny house living can cultivate correctives to possible oversights or entitlements in environmental thought, challenge representations of the movement itself, and encourage those inside the “tiny” house movement to openly discuss the difficulties and capabilities endemic to tiny living.

Tiny houses, while still bound to forms of privilege, hold potential to be what some social science researchers have seen as best practice. Practices that link the practicality of realism with the zeal of romanticism can contribute to what has been found to be a positive correlation between conscious consumption and political activism.

This critique offers a gentle corrective to unmitigated praise of the current tiny house phenomenon in order to highlight the movement’s potential for addressing more pressing social justice and environmental issues.

Since January 1997, the UK has imposed sanctions on employers found to be employing irregular workers. Coercing employers into conducting immigration status checks makes it increasingly difficult for irregular migrants to secure employment opportunities, thus restricting their ability to sustain a tolerable life in the UK. The deputisation of employers, as well as other private entities, such as landlords, has become a pivotal element of what is commonly known as the ‘hostile environment’, an attempt to make UK life unbearable for irregular migrants. This chapter uses the social science critique of ethnocentrism to explore different forms of bias and discrimination embedded in the deputisation of employers. Dehumanisation and exclusion are the two manifestations of ethnocentrism focussed on: examples of these recurring issues are drawn from the justifications for implementation, and effects of the employer sanctions regime.

Null-hypothesis significance tests (NHST) are a very troublesome methodology that dominates the quantitative empirical research in strategy and management. Inherent limitations and inappropriate applications of NHST impede the accumulation of knowledge and fill academic journals with meaningless “findings,” and they corrode researchers' motivation and ethics. Inherent limitations of NHST include the use of point null hypotheses, meaningless null hypotheses, and dichotomous truth criteria. Misunderstanding of NHST has often led to applications to inappropriate data and misinterpretation of results.

Researchers should move beyond the ritualistic and often inappropriate use of NHST. The chapter does not advocate a best way to do research, but suggests that researchers need to adapt their methods to reflect specific contexts and to use evaluation criteria that are meaningful for those contexts. Researchers need to explain the rationales that guided the selection of evaluation measures and they should avoid excessively complex models with many variables. The chapter also offers four more focused recommendations: (1) Compare proposed hypotheses with naïve hypotheses or the outcomes of alternative treatments. (2) Acknowledge the uncertainty that attends research findings by stating confidence limits for parameter estimates. (3) Show the substantive relevance of findings by reporting effect sizes – preferably with confidence limits. (4) Use statistical methods that are robust against deviations from assumptions about population distributions and the representativeness of samples.

Purpose – Exploring children's perspectives on participation in social research provides sociologists with new insight into how to include children's voices and perspectives effectively in sociological studies of childhood.

Design/methodology/approach – Child-centered interviews were conducted with 20 children between the ages of 5 and 12 as part of a larger research project.

Findings – Findings from interviews, artwork, and researcher field notes suggest that the children interviewed enjoyed the experience of participating in child-centered social research, maintained serious attitudes toward their inclusion in social research and wish to be active participants in future research involving kids.

Practical implications – Suggestions are offered for future research studies of this population and recommendations are made to encourage American sociologists to consider the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in research endeavors.

This chapter presents a theory of socialization that explains cultural transmission while balancing both biological aspects of development and the child’s agency and creativity.

This chapter presents a synthesis of research in sociological theory, developmental psychology, and neuroscience. It is roughly divided into two complementary sections based around the metaphor of ivy growing upon a trellis. The discussion centered around the “ivy” utilizes psychological and neuroscience research to explain how early learning is guided by significant others. The “trellis” section synthesizes literature in developmental psychology and social theory to explain how the child’s experience is enframed both cognitively and emotionally in ways that guide the child into appropriate forms of action and feeling. Finally, I discuss how this model can explain other forms of socialization.

I propose that the child’s innate capacities and motivations are enframed through significant relationships in order to direct the child’s emergent behavior into sequences of competent action. Isolated competencies are guided into simple and delimited domains of social activity like games and, later, more complex and interpretive structures like paradigms and ideologies.

This chapter synthesizes research in several literatures in order to develop a new theory that addresses some old questions regarding cultural transmission. Additionally, it represents another step in showing how sociology can integrate research from biological fields without deferring to them.

The worldwide environmental crisis has also influenced the field of literary studies. Posthumanism and ecocriticism is a new way of reading in which the anthropocentric approach and the binary oppositions such as human/non-human, wild/tame and natural/cultural are overcome. Posthumanism pays attention to all sorts of non-human life, animals, for sure, but aliens and robots are included too, while ecocriticism is concerned with the role and function of nature in literary texts. The chapter offers an ecocritical approach of Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) and Friday (Tournier). Rereading these novels we see that nature, or the elements, make up an ‘actant’ equal to the human characters and a special interest is created in the mutual conflicts which arise between nature and the human characters.

Robinson Crusoe (Defoe, 1719) is considered by many as an appropriate book to allow pupils to escape from or be shielded from the negative influence of civilization. Like Robinson on his island pupils should learn from experience. Defoe’s work was so popular it inspired a whole series of imitations called ‘Robinsonnades’ and many of them were edited specifically for children. But is Robinson Crusoe a valuable book from an ecological point of view? How does Robinson relate to nature? Does the novel focus on nature or rather on the human hero seeking to control and tame the environment?

In 1967, the French author Michel Tournier reworked the Crusoe myth in Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique (Friday or the Pacific Rim), followed by a parallel text for children Vendredi ou la vie sauvage (Friday or the Wild Life, 1971). In both novels Robinson’s black servant, Friday, initiates his colonial master into alternative ways of living, dismantling civilization and restoring nature. That same deconstruction of the idea of Western superiority fits well with the postcolonial philosophy that attacks the logic of domination and its hierarchical dichotomy: white above coloured.