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Both the Austrian and Bloomington Schools emphasize the dispersal of information to the level of individual agents. An underappreciated difference is the Bloomington emphasis on the moral psychology of agents and its relation to covenant. Covenant refers to a habit, a sense of obligation to consider the interests of the other in decision making, and a commitment to do so that is not easily or unilaterally broken. This chapter seeks to elaborate the lineage of covenant in constituting political order and its implications for the moral psychology of agents and artisanship. This exploration raises issues of metaphysical foundations as they relate to values and to the Hobbesian–Aristotelian divide in starting points. An application to the environmental crisis, with particular reference to vested interests promoting disinformation, obfuscation, and doubt about anthropogenic climate change, suggests value in emphasizing covenant.

Purpose – This chapter evaluates the shift in black voter support from Mayor Adrian Fenty to Mayor Vincent Gray in the 2010 DC mayoral election. The complexities of new black leadership are used as a theoretical framework for understanding the salience of gentrification, crossover racial appeal, campaign tactics, and policy implementation in the mayoral transition from one black candidate to another.Design/methodology/approach – This study used polling data from The Washington Post one month prior to the 2010 DC Democratic primary (The Washington Post, 2010). Using a sample of 630 respondents, multinomial logistic regression was used to measure the extent to which substantive policy positions, racial crossover appeal, and/or personal traits factor into voter preferences.Findings – The results reveal that a combination of personal, racial, and substantive factors contributed to Adrian Fenty’s defeat in 2010. The implications suggest a reexamination of the significance of symbolic representation in voter candidate preferences and the shifting complexity of black leadership in the procurement of black substantive representation.Originality/value – This chapter captures the transitional nature of black leadership in order to distinguish viable strategies for blacks to secure both elected office and black empowerment, while offering a more nuanced approach to analyzing the changing nature of the black voting calculus in the United States.

Purpose – This chapter responds to interdisciplinary debates regarding studies of sex, sexuality, and gender. I briefly examine how the sex/gender paradigm of the 1960s shaped feminist theory in the social sciences and explore two feminist frameworks that have contested the sex/gender paradigm: West and Zimmerman's “doing gender” and Butler's performativity. I situate this literature, and related debates about intersectionality, in the context of Margaret Andersen's (2005) Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS) feminist lecture.

Methodology/approach – Using empirical analyses of brief television excerpts, I develop an ethnomethodological study of practice and poststructural analysis of discourse to demonstrate how trenchant forms of cultural knowledge link together gender, sex, and sexuality.

Findings – Sex and gender function as disciplinary forces in the service of heterosexuality; consequently studies of gender that do not account for sexuality reproduce heterosexism and marginalize queer sexualities. These findings, considered in relationship to Andersen's analysis of intersectionality, illustrate both a narrow conceptualization of the field rooted to a 19th century European model and a methodological mandate that must be examined in relationship to the politics of social research.

Practical implications – A more fruitful conceptual starting point in thinking through intersectionality may be citizenship, rather than systematic exploitation of wage labor. In addition, a more full analysis of intersectionality would also require that we rethink our methodological orientations.

Originality/value of paper – The chapter illustrates some of the analytic effects and political consequences that commonsense knowledge about gender, sex, and sexuality holds for feminist scholarship and advances alternative possibilities for future feminist research.

This chapter considers the current state of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ+) librarianship in the United Kingdom. It begins with a question: at the time of writing, there seems to be more of a focus on LGBTQ+ issues in museums and archives than there is in libraries. Why is this so? To answer this, the chapter focuses briefly on the wider social setting; looks at current library provision; discusses what “queer librarianship” might involve; considers whether LGBTQ+ library staff’s and LGBTQ+ library users’ voices are heard; and then looks at the question of mainstreaming provision, and considers whether this would be a positive step forward.

We describe a holistic approach to promoting school safety that merges an emphasis on student voice with staff training in restorative practices. We first describe current approaches to keeping schools safe based on the existing research literature. Given that most of these approaches rely on access to credible information about potential threats to school safety, we then discuss student voices as one critical source of information, especially at the middle and high school level. We report on a recently developed tool designed to encourage students to share threats to school safety they are aware of with adults. Initial testing identified potential barriers and facilitators to students' willingness to share information. We discuss teacher training in restorative practices as one approach that might address some of these barriers, including anti-snitching cultures in schools, students' lack of trust in adult responses to student-identified concerns, and punitive school climates. Based on recent work, we identify barriers and facilitators to implementing restorative practices in schools. We provide recommendations about potential strategies to merge student voice with school personnel's training in restorative practices to minimize peer victimization that can escalate into violent behavior.

Adopting an intra-organizational viewpoint is essential to grasp legal intermediation. To deepen our understanding of such phenomena, this chapter proposes a qualitative and “multi-level” approach drawing on insights from the neo-institutional literature, policy ethnography analysis and the research on legal intermediaries. Such a perspective is particularly suited to capture the complexity and the depth of institutional change. Using the 12-hour work legal mechanism of derogation in the context of French public hospitals as an example, this chapter highlights how both macro-level actors (actors of a “reform network”), and micro-level ones (hospital directors) contribute to the shaping and framing of legality in French public hospitals. Results show that variation in how those actors use law depends on the local configuration. Second, results demonstrate that the legal games they play are not merely based on symbolic and superficial compliance with the law, but also on outright manipulations and conscious rule-breaking.

This chapter uses the theory of complex systems as a conceptual lens through which to compare the work of Friedrich Hayek with that of Vincent and Elinor Ostrom. It is well known that, from the 1950s onwards, Hayek conceptualised the market as a complex adaptive system. It is argued in this chapter that, while the Ostroms began explicitly to describe polycentric systems as a class of complex adaptive system from the mid-to-late 1990s onwards, they had in fact developed an account of polycentricity as displaying most if not all of the hallmarks of organised complexity long before that time. The Ostromian and Hayekian approaches can thus be seen to share a good deal in common, with both portraying important aspects of society – the market economy in the case of Hayek, and public economies, legal and political systems, and environment resources in the case of the Ostroms – as complex rather than simple systems. Aside from helping to bring out this aspect of the Ostroms’ work, using the theory of complex systems as a framework for comparing the Hayekian and Ostromian approaches serves two other purposes. First, it can be used to show how one widely criticised aspect of Hayek’s theory of society as a complex system, namely his account of cultural evolution via group selection, can be strengthened by an appeal to the work of Elinor Ostrom. Second, it also helps to resolve a tension – ultimately acknowledged by the Ostroms themselves – between some of their explicit methodological pronouncements and the actual, substantive approach they adopted in their analysis of polycentric systems.