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This paper aims to contribute towards our knowledge and understanding of volunteer street patrols working within community safety and pluralised policing. Through the increased responsibilisation of communities and individuals, volunteers are taking to the streets to help others in need and support the community safety infrastructure. The example of volunteer street patrols is used to explore the motivations of individuals participating in the local delivery of community safety and policing.

This research is drawn from ethnographic research consisting of 170 hours of participant observation on the streets of a northern UK city, Manchester, supported by 24 semi-structured interviews with volunteers and stakeholders who participate in a street patrol and those working alongside them.

Using a three-paradigm perspective for volunteer motivations, the themes altruism, civil connection and volunteering for leisure are applied to explore volunteer motivations. Through their actions, volunteers in the street patrol are motivated volunteers who can offer an additional and important resource within the local community safety and pluralised policing infrastructure.

This paper highlights volunteer street patrols offer a caring and supportive function to people in need on the street, one in support of the police and other agencies. It contributes to the growing understanding of those who volunteer in policing and community safety landscapes. As responsibilised citizens, they have an increased awareness of social problems. They are motivated individuals who wish to create and maintain safety and play an important role in policing the night-time economy.

The authors critique Modell's proposition that critical realism is useful in elucidating and creating possibilities for emancipation.

The authors begin by outlining Modell's conception of enabling structures. If ‘activated’ by reflexive individuals, these are theorised to be a mechanism through which agents can begin to emancipate themselves. However, the authors argue that emancipation must be contextualised within the material realities of global capitalism, paying particular attention to the shape of inequality and the subjects of exploitation. In doing this, they draw on Marx to pose an alternative view of structure.

In offering a Marxist critique of critical realism, the authors show how capitalist superstructure and base work together to reinforce inequality. In doing this, they highlight the enduring importance of collective action as the engine of emancipation. It is for this reason that they advocate for an emancipatory politics, which is collectively informed outside of, and in conflict with, the logics of capitalism.

The authors argue that explicit discussions of capitalism and its structures must be at the centre of critical accounting research, especially when it pertains to emancipation.

Given the importance of the conceptual framing of critical accounting research, this article suggests that critical realism has much to offer. That said, the authors draw on Marx to raise a number of important questions about both the nature of structure and the identity of reflexive agents within critical realism. They do this to encourage further debate about the emancipatory possibilities of the critical accounting project and the ideas proposed by Modell (2020).

The purpose of this paper is to explore how stakeholders in the food and nutrition field construct and conceptualise “appropriate” national dietary advice.

In total, 40 voluntarily written stakeholder responses to updated official dietary guidelines in Sweden were analysed thematically. The analysis explored the logics and arguments employed by authorities, interest organisations, industry and private stakeholders in attempting to influence the formulation of dietary guidelines.

Two main themes were identified: the centrality of anchoring advice scientifically and modes of getting the message across to the public. Stakeholders expressed a view of effective health communication as that which is nutritionally and quantitatively oriented and which optimises individuals’ capacities to take action for their own health. Their responses did not offer alternative framings of how healthy eating could be practiced but rather conveyed an understanding of dietary guidelines as documents that provide simplified answers to complex questions.

Policymakers should be aware of industrial actors’ potential vested interests and actively seek out other stakeholders representing communities and citizen interests. The next step should be to question the extent to which it is ethical to publish dietary advice that represents a simplified way of conceptualising behavioural change, and thereby places responsibility for health on the individual.

This research provides a stakeholder perspective on the concept of dietary advice and is among the first to investigate referral responses to dietary guidelines.

What counts as evidence of good performance, behaviour or character? While quantitative metrics have long been used to measure performance and productivity in schools, factories and workplaces, what is striking today is the extent to which these calculative methods and rationalities are being extended into new areas of life through the global spread of performance indicators (PIs) and performance management systems. What began as part of the neoliberalising projects of the 1980s with a few strategically chosen PIs to give greater state control over the public sector through contract management and mobilising ‘users’ has now proliferated to include almost every aspect of professional work. The use of metrics has also expanded from managing professionals to controlling entire populations. This chapter focuses on the rise of these new forms of audit and their effects in two areas: first, the alliance being formed between state-collected data and that collected by commercial companies on their customers through, for example loyalty cards and credit checks. Second, China’s new social credit system, which allocates individual scores to each citizen and uses rewards of better or privileged service to entice people to volunteer information about themselves, publish their ‘ratings’ and compete with friends for status points. This is a new development in the use of audit simultaneously to discipline whole populations and responsibilise individuals to perform according to new state and commercial norms about the reliable/conforming ‘good’ citizen.

Literature from across the social sciences and research evidence are used to highlight interdisciplinary and intersectional research approaches to food and family. Responsibilisation emerges as an important thematic thread, as family has (compared with the state and corporations) been increasingly made responsible for its members’ health and diet.

Three questions are addressed: first, to what extent food is fundamentally social, and integral to family identity, as reflected in the sociology of food; second, how debates about families and food are embedded in global, political and market systems; and third, how food work and caring became constructed as gendered.

Interest in food can be traced back to early explorations of class, political economy, the development of commodity culture and gender relations. Research across the social sciences and humanities draws on concepts that are implicitly sociological. Food production, mortality and dietary patterns are inextricably linked to the economic/social organisation of capitalist societies, including its gender-based divisions of domestic labour. DeVault’s (1991) groundbreaking work reveals the physical and emotional work of providing/feeding families, and highlights both its class and gendered dimensions. Family mealtime practices have come to play a key role in the emotional reinforcement of the idea of the nuclear family.

This study highlights the imperative to take pluri-disciplinary and intersectional approaches to researching food and family. In addition, this paper emphasises that feeding the family is an inherently political, moral, ethical, social and emotional process, frequently associated with gendered constructions.

This chapter explores the competing perspectives (i.e., the “community advocates” and the “community skeptics”) on the recent move toward community in an attempt to conceptualize what this “move” means for social control. An examination of the inclusiveness of community initiatives with a focus on community policing is used to demonstrate that the move toward community contains elements of both empowerment and responsibilization. In particular, the move toward community is paradoxical in that empowerment and responsibilization occurs simultaneously and to varying degrees within inclusive community initiatives. It is argued that a socially inclusive approach to community-police partnerships works to enhance society's web of social control. However, at the same time, community members hold the potential to work together to shape this web of social control.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how critical discourse analysis can help to uncover the dominant discursive formations that underlie policy guidelines within education. Focusing on the policy guidelines for career education and guidance in New Zealand, it illustrates how these have been used by the state in an attempt to normalise ideological standpoints, shape “common‐sense” thinking and delimit the scope of practice.

Critical discourse analysis was employed as this approach helps to uncover the hidden meanings, political imperatives and uneven workings of power/dominance and oppression that are employed in/through textual representations.

Neoliberal discourse is infused throughout the policy guidelines for career education and guidance in New Zealand, and demands that career advisers/teachers should produce entrepreneurial and self‐responsibilised global economic subjects.

Although this paper is situated within a New Zealand context, given the creeping influence of neoliberalism in many English‐speaking states, the issues identified have international relevance in relation to the kind of citizen career education is expected to produce.

Much of the literature within the career arena adopts an uncritical, and apolitical, stance, with the truth‐claims made by neoliberal states tending to be positioned as authoritative and inviolable. Drawing from critical theory, this paper contributes a social justice perspective that looks beneath the surface of the seemingly benign and well‐intentioned discourses that permeate the guidelines for career education and guidance in New Zealand.

Media attention on nonconsensual intimate image dissemination has led to the relatively recent proliferation of academic research on the topic. This literature has focused on many areas including victimization and perpetration prevalence rates, coerced sexting, legal and/or criminal contexts, sexual violence in digital spaces, gendered constructions of blame and risk, and legal analysis of high-profile cases and legislation. Despite this research, several gaps exist, including a lack of empirical research with service providers. Informed by in-depth interviews with 10 sexual violence frontline professionals in Southern Ontario (Canada), this chapter focuses on their perspectives of the additive role of technology. With respect to nonconsensual intimate image dissemination, technology acts as a digital “layer” that operates in addition to the commission of physical acts of sexual violence, and compounds the harms experienced by the victim by adding a virtual – and indelible – “permanent remembering” of the violence. Nuancing the contours of consent in a digital age, this chapter concludes by considering what consent means in a technological context.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the perceptions of work as a means of desisting from crime among a group of male probationers.

Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with male probationers to ascertain their views on desistance from crime and the factors which would enable or constrain them in their endeavours.

The research found that individuals regard employment as a key conduit to maintaining desistance from crime, but that several barriers exist to achieving this? Crucially, the research found that individuals identified various difficulties associated with external agencies to whom they had been referred for assistance in obtaining employment. This poses questions of the current government's approach towards expanding public‐private partnerships in probation.

The research is based on a small sample of 20 male probationers. However, the findings suggest that further research should be conducted in this area.

The research raises questions about recent government policy in this area, and about the effectiveness of some approaches designed to reduce reoffending.

The research examines an area of desistance which has previously received little attention. The findings are of concern for academics and practitioners concerned with desistance and recidivism.

This chapter provides a historical contextualisation of health tracking and public health communication from the post-World War Two development of the welfare state, through the birth of neoliberalism, until today’s individualising practices of digital health tracking and quantification of bodies. Through an examination of these three phases of public health quantification of bodies, encompassing the socio-economic, cultural and political shifts since 1948, combined with the development and wide adoption of digital health and self-quantifying technologies, this chapter traces the changing landscape and the dramatic implications this has had for shifting who is responsible for maintaining ‘good’ health. This chapter illustrates how neoliberal free market principles have reigned over UK public health discourse for many decades, seeing health as no longer binary to illness, but as a practice of individual self-quantification and self-care. In turn, the chapter explores how the quantification and health tracking of bodies has become a dominant discourse in public health promotion, as well as individual citizenship and patient practices. This discourse still exists pervasively as we move into the digital society of the 2020s, through the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond; with public health strategies internationally promoting the use of digital health tools in our everyday, further positioning citizens as entrepreneurial subjects, adopting extensive technological measures in an attempt to measure and ‘optimise’ health, normalising the everyday quantification of bodies.