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With the application and development of intelligent clothing and wearable technology, the term “micro-interaction” has gradually entered people’s lives. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The paper takes the concept of “micro-interaction” as the design principle, starting from the consumer demand, combing the realization mode of the intelligent safety clothing in recent years, and finds out the existing problems in the design of the intelligent safety clothing.

Under the concept of micro-interaction, a new theoretical model has been proposed to study intelligent safety clothing. Finally, the paper also emphasizes the importance of the industrialization of the proposed model.

The paper proposes a new research and development mode for intelligent clothing in safety protection area which is a pioneering study and can be valuable for safety clothing manufacturers to produce more functional and attractive products.

Despite the importance of brokers in creative projects, limited attention has been devoted to the micro-interactions by which brokers induce others’ collaboration while simultaneously retaining some control over creative production. Building on an interactionist perspective, we develop the concept of brokerage style – i.e., a recognizable pattern in the ways in which a broker interacts with others. By using different brokerage styles in different phases of a creative project, brokers can orient the social interactions among project participants, “charging” those interactions with different types of emotional energy and mutual attention, eventually inducing collective collaboration and limiting participants’ expectations of control. We illustrate our interactionist model of brokerage styles with examples from the music and TV industries.

The term “agent-based modelling” (ABM) is a buzzword which is widely used in the scientific literature even though it refers to a variety of methodologies implemented in different disciplinary contexts. The numerous works dealing with ABM require a clarification to better understand the lines of thinking paved by this approach in economics. All modelling tasks are a means and a source of knowledge, and this epistemic function can vary depending on the methodology. this paper is to present four major ways (deductive, abductive, metaphorical and phenomenological) of implementing an agent-based framework to describe economic systems. ABM generates numerous debates in economics and opens the room for epistemological questions about the micro-foundations of macroeconomics; before dealing with this issue, the purpose of this paper is to identify the kind of ABM the author can find in economics.

The profusion of works dealing with ABM requires a clarification to understand better the lines of thinking paved by this approach in economics. This paper offers a conceptual classification outlining the major trends of ABM in economics.

There are four categories of ABM in economics.

This paper suggests a methodological categorization of ABM works in economics.

Research on institutional logics has highlighted the importance of social situations but has not theorized such situations in a way that takes into account their inherent richness, complexity, and unpredictability. Without a theory of social situations, the connection between logics and people’s everyday life experience is incomplete, resulting in fragile microfoundations. Building on Goffman (1974) and the institutional logics perspective, in this essay I sketch an institutional theory of social situations, distinguishing two components of these situations: situational experience and situated interactions. Situational experience is constituted by situational frames – that is, schemas by which a person can perceive others and interpret the source of their agency in a situation. Multiple situational frames are simultaneously present in any situation, offering various potentials for action. Institutional logics shape the content that situational frames take in different institutional orders, providing rules for interacting appropriately in typified situations. However, the actual interactions unfolding in a given social situation do not necessarily conform to situational frames, but rather can transform those frames in unpredictable ways through interaction rituals and frame keyings. I contrast this situated perspective with the cognitivist notion that people “activate” or re-combine pre-existing aspects of logics depending on the situation. I argue that a situated perspective better accounts for the generative and transformative potential of micro-interactions.

This paper aims to investigate how social media usage by children determines their interactions with consumer brands. The paper also examines the nature of the processes evident.

A qualitative approach was implemented using both paired and single in-depth interviews of New Zealand children (both boys and girls) in the age group of 11-14 years. The data were analysed by thematic analysis of the interview transcripts.

The study demonstrates that children use three main processes – discerning, reacting and forming – when interacting with brands on social media. Each of these processes has different levels of interaction episodes depending on the amount of social media activity by each child. Discerning has noticing, a lower level of interaction and identifying which uses already internalised brand knowledge. Reacting consists of describing and evaluation which involves more active interaction resulting in opinion formation. Forming can involve a distant “watching” interaction or a more active relating behaviour when children are using multiple social media platforms.

The study identifies three key modes of brand interaction behaviour when young consumers use social media, which each have two interactions. The implication for marketers, parents and policymakers is that there is a range of behaviours, both passive and active, that children show when interacting with consumer brands when using social media.

The current study offers a way to deepen the understanding of how children approach online communications with brands in the social media context. The research finds that the children’s use of social media is more active and dynamic than previously thought, giving rise to connections with brands that are meaningful to the children. Specific codes of practice for online brand marketers may be necessary so that children are helped to understand the commercial intent of brand practices on social media.

The findings shed light on the range of interaction behaviour of young consumers, and such information provides insights into how children acquire brand knowledge, react to social media communication and decide the value of such communication for themselves. Brand marketers have a role to play in ensuring their brand communications practices avoid deception and clearly indicate commercial intent.

Investigating how children individually process brand information in a social media context provides insights into their interaction behaviour. These findings show differing levels of interest in both brand and social media activity amongst children.

This study explores how creative leadership unfolds in the pursuit of social purpose. Drawing on the case of an architectural firm’s development of novel social housing model, we identify claims of three creative leadership processes and of scaling up for social impact. The study expands the conceptualization of creative leadership to the context of social change. It also adds to the understanding of creative industries by suggesting social purpose as a distinctive, yet underexplored driver of innovation and a source of different balancing act, as well as an important frontier for research on and practice in the creative industries.

Purpose – To fill the gap between conflict theories and ethnographic methods. In fact, if one considers recent sociological production as a whole, one notes that, on the one hand, scholars belonging to the European Marxian and Weberian traditions have indeed centered their analytical interests on the theme of conflict and power, on the other hand they have studied them using the tools of macro-analysis and historical sociology, and therefore in more abstract and general terms. For their part, interactionists and ethnographers, especially American, have closely and efficaciously studied society at the elementary level of micro-interactions and everyday life; but they have often (with some felicitous exceptions) underestimated the weight and importance of conflicts and power.

Findings – The paper shows that the situation was different (better) in the 1950s and 1960s, and that recently, the field of conflict methodology (or critical ethnography) has been left almost entirely to brilliant investigative journalists. One of the causes of this has certainly been the spread, in recent decades, of an ethical regulation of research and of a deontological conception of the ethics of social research.

The paper calls for the discovery of a new ethical conception (utilitarian, ethics of responsibility) alternative to the dominant deontological approach and for the adoption, following the sociologist Jack Douglas, of an investigative method of social research. In the final part of the paper, some concrete research examples are provided and a final appeal for critical ethnography and the study of powerful organizations has been made.

Complexity theorists propose that organizations are made up of complex responsive processes in which people create and recreate organizational forms through dynamic micro-level interactions. Social constructionists add that conversations are the means by which these interactions occur. Our analysis illustrates how the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) engaged a wide range of stakeholders in a successful dialogue process to recreate a new system for monitoring nuclear reactors. The success was due, in large part, to the conversational qualities tacitly and explicitly agreed to by those involved in the process which included a spirit of freedom, inclusion, inquiry, spontaneity, and possibility. Using a grounded theory building process, we show how these qualities produced transformative change by increasing levels of interconnectivity, shared identity, and collective capacity among participants. These findings provide the beginnings of a model for understanding continuous and transformative change and demonstrate the value of engaging the “whole system” in sustained dialogue, even in complex, highly regulated environments.

The authors thought of the idea for this exploratory paper for Drugs and Alcohol Today after visiting a local prison on the outskirts of Madrid from which these field notes are taken. The authors have also had informal conversations with the contacts working in the Spanish Prison service. When the authors looked at some of the literature around the relationships between drugs and prisons in Spain, the authors found lots of statistics, and material which either said there were lots of drugs in prison or literature which presented over-medicalised processes of drug treatment. In short, the authors found few studies which could bring to life the kind of problems drugs bring to the prison and how the dynamics of the prison are not only directly impacted by drug use but also as drug dealing/trafficking. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

What the authors offer is only really to draw your attention to the issue. The authors have no real methodology to reflect on other than one of us is an experienced participant observer and the other is a lawyer and criminologist who has worked with numerous clients processed for drug offences in and around prisons in Madrid. Between us, we have undertaken six visits to Madrileñas prisons.

In this explorative paper the authors want to do three things. First, draw attention to the extent of problem of drugs in prison in Spain. Second, the authors want to suggest that the role drugs needs reconsideration as it plays a pivotal role in the functioning of the prison. Lastly, the authors push for more research into this issue which goes beyond conventional surveys and unnecessary complex regression analyses and instead takes a qualitative approach using observational data and informal conversations to explore these dynamics in more detail.

First, that there is an urgent need to go beyond these official statistics and explore in some nuanced detail about the prison experience in Spain. The existing research is limiting in that it talks tiresomely about the numbers incarcerated and fails to admit the significance of drugs not only as a motivating factor for incarceration but also the role drugs play in the prison environment. The authors need to consider as much the changing demography of Spanish prisons – for example more immigrants, different drugs, etc. – as the everyday experience of drugs, debt, disagreements and violence and how they intersect as a lived experience rather than consider them as separate issues of analysis, dormant from the interconnectedness of the micro-interactions of the prison environment and the respective institutional power structures. The key to this debate, and the general messages of this paper, is to realize a study which can explore the nuances of the role and function of drugs play in Spanish prisons.