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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social groups & communities > General
Old sergeants say, "we're here to defend democracy, not to practice it!" But are they right? The special mandate with which defence and security organizations are tasked imposes unique constraints with respect to the accommodation of diversity which differs from those faced by any other public or private organization. Yet, the compound effect of demographic, political, economic, social and legal pressures is making diversity as inevitable in the defence and security sector as in any other organization in advanced industrialized democracies. Owing in part to a dearth of research on the way the defence and security sectors can leverage diversity to enhance their functional imperatives, such sectors have been reticent about diversity. The chapters in this volume strive to enlighten the debate by laying out the concepts, clarifying theoretical issues, and providing empirical evidence. The case studies draw on Canada, Guyana, the Netherlands, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. They examine ethno-cultural, gender, and sexual-minority diversity in a variety of missions, including Bosnia-Herzegovina and Afghanistan. The chapters are notable for their methodological pluralism and interdisciplinary range including political science, sociology, anthropology, and psychology. Although scholarly in nature, the book is readily accessible to professionals and practitioners alike. This book was published as a special issue of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics.
Fully revised and updated, this second edition of Participatory Action Research (PAR) provides new theoretical insights and many robust tools that will guide researchers, professionals and students from all disciplines through the process of conducting action research 'with' people rather than 'for' them or 'about' them. PAR is collective reasoning and evidence-based learning focussed on social action. It has immediate relevance in fields ranging from community development to education, health, public engagement, environmental issues and problem solving in the workplace. This new edition has been extensively revised to create a user-friendly textbook on PAR theory and practice, including: updated references and a comprehensive overview of different approaches to PAR (pragmatic, psychosocial, critical); more emphasis on the art of process design, especially in complex social settings characterized by uncertainty and the unknown; developments in the use of Web2 collaborative tools and digital strategies to support real-time data gathering and processing; updated examples and stories from around the world, in a wide range of fields; critical commentaries on major issues in the social sciences, including stakeholder theory, systems thinking, causal analysis, monitoring and evaluation, research ethics, risk assessment and social innovation. This modular textbook provides novel perspectives and ideas in a longstanding tradition that strives to reconnect science and the inquiry process with life in society. It provides coherent and critical treatment of core issues in the ongoing evolution of PAR, making it suitable for a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses. It is intended for use by researchers, students and working professionals seeking to improve or rethink their approach to co-creating knowledge and supporting action for the well-being of all.
Describes common approaches used in clinical practice and provides case illustrations to demonstrate the proper application of these techniques. Illustrates basic clinical skills that cut across models and paradigms, such as establishing therapeutic relationships. Addresses the issue of beginner anxiety and its role in clinical errors, providing advice on how to take on and cope with the responsibility of working with those who are suffering. Offers key guidance on how clinical social workers can incorporate a social justice perspective into their practice. Integrates research with the author's own practice wisdom, garnered from over 30 years of clinical social work practice, teaching, research, and supervision. Includes questions for discussion, further reading, and essay questions relating to each chapter.
What is a lighthouse? What does it mean? What does it do? This book shows how exchanging knowledge across disciplinary boundaries can transform our thinking. Adopting an unconventional structure, this book involves the reader in a multivocal conversation between scholars, poets and artists. Seen through their individual perspectives, lighthouses appear as signals of safety, beacons of enlightenment, phallic territorial markers, and memorials of historical relationships with the sea. However, the interdisciplinary conversation also reveals underlying and sometimes unexpected connections. It elucidates the human and non-human evolutionary adaptations that use light for signalling and warning; the visual languages created by regularity and synchronicity in pulses of light; how lighthouses have generated a whole 'family' of related material objects and technologies; and the way that light flows between social and material worlds.
Social inequality is a worldwide phenomenon. Globalization has exacerbated and alleviated inequality over the past twenty-five years. This volume offers analytical and comparative insights from current case studies of social inequality in more than ten countries within all the major regions of the world. Contributors provide an assessment of the overall social globalization phenomenon in the global world as well as an outlook of transformations of global social inequality in the future. This book will be a timely addition for students and scholars of globalization studies, social inequality, sociology, and cultural and social anthropology.
Russia's Skinheads: Exploring and Rethinking Subcultural Lives provides a thorough examination of the phenomenon of skinheads, explaining its nature and its significance, and assessing how far Russian skinhead subculture is the 'lumpen' end of the extreme nationalist ideological spectrum. There are large numbers of skinheads in Russia, responsible for a significant number of xenophobic attacks, including 97 deaths in 2008 alone, making this book relevant to Russian specialists as well as to sociologists of youth subculture. It provides a practical example of how to investigate youth subculture in depth over an extended period - in this case through empirical research following a specific group over six years - and goes on to argue that Russian skinhead subculture is not a direct import from the West, and that youth cultural practices should not be reduced to expressions of consumer choice. It presents an understanding of the Russian skinhead as a product of individuals' whole, and evolving, lives, and thereby compels sociologists to rethink how they conceive the nature of subcultures.
This book is designed to be the definitive statement on social equity theory and practice in public administration. Social equity is often referred to as the "third pillar" in PA, after efficiency and economy. It concerns itself with the fairness of the organization, its management, and its delivery of public services. H. George Frederickson is widely recognized as the originator of the concept and the person most associated with its development and application. The book's introduction and chapters 1-4 offer general descriptions of social equity in terms of its arguments and claims in changing political, economic, and social circumstances, and trace the development of the concept over the past forty years. Chapters 5-9 provide applications of social equity theory to particular policy arenas such as education, or to specific public administration issues such as the range of administrative discretion, the legal context, the research challenges, and social equity in the context of time and generations. Chapters 10 and 11 describe the current state of social equity and look towards the future.
Democracy promises rule by all, not by the few. Yet, electoral democracies limit decision-making to representatives and have always had a weakness for inequality. How might democracy serve all rather than the few? Democracy Beyond the Nation State: Practicing Equality examines communities that govern their own lives without elites or centralized structures through assemblies and consensus. Rather than claiming equality by abstract rights or citizenship, these groups put equality into practice by reducing wealth and health divides, or landlessness or homelessness, and equalizing workloads. These practices are found in rural India and Brazil, in Buenos Aires, London, and New York, and among the Iroquois, the Zapatistas, and the global networks of La Via Campesina farmers and the World Social Forum. Readable accounts of these horizontal democracies document multiple political frames that prevent democracy from being frozen into entrenched electoral systems producing modern inequalities. Using practice to rewrite political theory, Parker draws on collective politics in Spivak and Derrida and embodied relations from Povinelli and Foucault to show that equal relations are not a utopian dream, not nostalgia, and not impossible. This book provides many practical solutions to inequality. It will be useful to students and scholars of political theory and social movements and to those who are willing to work together for equality.
Social exclusion and inclusion remain issues of fundamental importance to democracy. Both exclusion and inclusion relate to the access to participation in the public realm, public goods and services for certain groups of people who are minorities, marginalized and deprived. Democratization has led to the inclusion of the previously excluded in the political process. While the problems of exclusion remain even in advanced Western countries in respect of the minorities of sorts, and the underprivileged, the problem of deep-rooted social and cultural exclusions is acute in post-colonial countries, including India. This book analyses social exclusions in India, which remain the most solid challenges to Indian democracy and development. Communal clashes, ethnic riots, political secessionist movements and extremist violence take place almost routinely, and are the outward manifestations of the entrenched culture of social exclusion in India. With its interdisciplinary approach, the book looks at the multidimensional problems of social exclusion and inclusion, providing a critical, comprehensive analysis of the problem and of potential solutions. The authors are experts in the fields of historical sociology, anthropology, political theory, social philosophy, economics and indigenous vernacular literature. Overall, the book offers an innovative theoretical perspective of the long-term issues facing contemporary Indian democracy.
Using unique and cutting-edge research, Schofield a prominent author in the US for a number of years, explores the growth area of positive political economy within economics and politics. The first book to explain the spatial model of voting from a mathematical, economics and game-theory perspective it is essential reading for all those studying positive political economy.
Millennials have captured our imaginaries in recent years. The conventional wisdom is that this generation of young adults lives in downtown neighbourhoods near cafes, public transit and other amenities. Yet, this depiction is rarely unpacked nor problematized. Despite some commonalities, the Millennial generation is highly diverse and many face housing affordability and labour market constraints. Regardless, as the largest generation following the post-World War II baby boom, Millennials will surely leave their mark on cities. This book assesses the impact of Millennials on cities. It asks how the Millennial generation differs from previous generations in terms of their labour market experiences, housing outcomes, transportation decisions, the opportunities available to them, and the constraints they face. It also explores the urban planning and public policy implications that arise from these generational shifts. This book offers a generational lens that faculty, students and other readers with interest in the fields of urban studies, planning, geography, economic development, demography, or sociology will find useful in interpreting contemporary U.S. and Canadian cities. It also provides guidance to planners and policymakers on how to think about Millennials in their work and make decisions that will allow all generations to thrive.
Russia is one of the few countries in the world where intellectuals existed as a social group and shared a unique social identity. This book focuses on one of the most important and influential groups of Russian intellectuals - the 1960s generation of shestidesyatniki - often considered the last embodiment of the classical tradition of the intelligentsia. They devoted their lives to defending 'socialism with a human face', authored Perestroika, and were subsequently demonised when the reforms failed. It investigates how these intellectuals were affected by the transition to the new post-Soviet Russia, and how they responded to the criticism. Unlike other studies on this subject, which view the Russian intelligentsia as simply an objectively existing group, this book portrays the intelligentsia as a cultural story or myth, revealing that the intelligentsia's existence is a function of the intellectuals' abilities to construct moral arguments. Drawing from extensive original empirical research, including life-story interviews with the Russian intellectuals, it shows how the shestidesyatniki creatively mobilised the myth as they attempted to repair their damaged public image.
Clusters have become a key focus of urban and regional policy in advanced economies as regional specialisation in particular industries has come to be regarded as advantageous in the context of debates about globalization and the knowledge economy. In particular, spatial proximity between associated firms and organisations facilities is claimed to stimulate processes of innovation and learning. Consequently, governments have promoted dynamic clusters as a means of generating competitive advantage in particular cities and regions. In this collection, these claims are critically assessed by drawing upon the work of leading specialists from Western Europe and North America. Going beyond the celebrated 'hot-spots' of economic development, the book draws upon evidence from a broader range of cities and regions to help fill some important gaps in our knowledge of how clusters operate within the contemporary global economy. Cluster dynamics are situated in time and space; interrogating both how firms, organisations and actors within clusters adapt to changes over time, and how clusters are embedded within broader spatial divisions of labour at regional, national and international scales. This book was previously published as a special issue of the journal Urban Studies.
Can a state empower its citizens by classifying them? Or do reservation policies reinforce the very categories they are meant to eradicate? Indian reservation policies on government jobs, legislative seats and university admissions for disadvantaged groups, like affirmative action policies elsewhere, are based on the premise that recognizing group distinctions in society is necessary to subvert these distinctions. Yet the official identification of eligible groups has unintended side-effects on identity politics. Bridging theories which emphasize the fluidity of identities and those which highlight the utility of group-based mobilizations and policies, this book exposes didactic enforcement of categorizations, while recognizing the social and political gains facilitated by group-based strategies.
While immigrants are still predominantly choosing urban areas to locate to, there is now increasing evidence of immigration to rural areas which poses its own challenges for those relocating, from the scarcity of high quality jobs to the provision of public and private services. Addressing the shortcomings in current research, this book employs an innovative approach by exploring this relationship from a cross-national, comparative, global perspective. It draws lessons from case studies across a range of geographical and political contexts, including Canada, the USA, Ireland, Scotland, Greece and Russia. Bringing together migration experts from a range of academic disciplines, International Migration and Rural Areas contributes to conceptual developments and also identifies policy concerns which can be pursued at national, sub-national and supra-national levels. As such, it will appeal to policy makers, as well as scholars across a range of disciplines, including geography, politics, demography, social policy, sociology and anthropology.
In contemporary European and American urban policy and politics and in academic research it is typically assumed that spatial concentrations of poor households and/or ethnic minority households will have negative effects upon the opportunities to improve the social conditions of those who are living in these concentrations. Since the level of concentration tends to be correlated with the level of spatial segregation the 'debate on segregation' is also linked to the social opportunity discussion. This book explores the central questions in urban and housing studies:
This issue has offered a locus for multi-disciplinary
investigations on both sides of the Atlantic, and this volume
demonstrates the rich geographical, sociological, economic and
psychological dimensions of this issue.
This book brings together Indian and European perspectives on India's polity, economy and international strategy. It explores internal, regional and global determinants shaping India's status, position and goals in the early 21st century. Through an array of methodological and theoretical approaches, it presents debates on democracy, economic devel
This volume attempts to show the emerging contours oftransformative action in social movements across South Asia. It argues that these contours have been shaped by contestations over questions of equity, justice and well-being on the one hand, and the nature and scope of new and classical social movements on the other. This is manifest in divers
This volume brings together critical and landmark studies in Indian migration.Covers a range of key themes emigration policy in countries of destination and origin, development and remittances, gender issues, impact of the global financial crisis, conflict, and inclusive growthLooks at new and emerging patterns in Indian migrationIncludes essays
Public spaces have long been the focus of urban social activity, but investigations of how public space works often adopt only one of several possible perspectives, which restricts the questions that can be asked and the answers that can be considered. In this volume, Anthony Orum and Zachary Neal explore how public space can be a facilitator of civil order, a site for power and resistance, and a stage for art, theatre, and performance. They bring together these frequently unconnected models for understanding public space, collecting classic and contemporary readings that illustrate each, and synthesizing them in a series of original essays. Throughout, they offer questions to provoke discussion, and conclude with thoughts on how these models can be combined by future scholars of public space to yield more comprehensive understanding of how public space works.
Originally published in 1942, the Rural Reconstruction Association had been working on the rural problem in its various aspects for several years. This republished volume represented the conclusions reached in the face of the urgent problems of war and reconstruction, and outlines a policy based on the widest interests of the nation as a whole. The book contains chapters on policy in the past and present, the post-war policy, and the opposition and support to the policies outlined.
First published in 1997, this volume aimed to study social care services as a specific type of social policy that operates on a different set of principles as supportive services rather than as poor relief or social security work. The focus is on determining what is specifically Scandinavian about the world-famous Scandinavian welfare state, with studies on issues including the origins of four social care service models, the development of local authority social services in Iceland and social services as a gender issue.
What is Anthropology? Why should you study it? What will you learn? And what can you do with it? "What Anthropologists Do" answers all these questions. And more. Anthropology is an astonishingly diverse and engaged field of study that seeks to understand human social behavior. "What Anthropologists Do" presents a lively introduction to the ways in which anthropology's unique research methods and cutting edge thinking contribute to a very wide range of activities: environmental issues, aid and development, advocacy, human rights, social policy, the creative arts, museums, health, education, crime, communications technology, design, marketing, and business. In short, a training in Anthropology provides highly transferable skills of investigation and analysis. The book will be ideal for any readers who want to know what Anthropology is all about and especially for students coming to the study of Anthropology for the first time.
First published in 1992, this volume responds to the importance of management has been increasingly recognized in the personal social services but this recognition has materialized more slowly in some social day care settings. Staff in these settings who move on to management can face particular difficulties in adapting to their new role, especially if they have been promoted on the basis of their competence as practitioners. Newly-promoted managers in social care settings are all too often ill-equipped for the problems and possibilities offered by their move to a management position. As a practice-based handbook, Management Skills in Social Care fills this gap by examining key areas of management expertise such as: managing self; individuals; groups; resources; change; and so on. Above all, this book is concerned with maximising the contribution of management in day-to-day social care practice.
First published in 1998, this volume responds to child-prostitution being recognised as a major social problem in modern capitalist Taiwan. It is defined, both legally and socially, as a problem of 'sexual transactions involving children and juveniles', thus the issue of child maltreatment is submerged under other concerns. However, the main concern of this book is the protection of children from maltreatment, so related socio-legal measures will be examined by this parameter. During the social campaigns against child prostitution, structural problems such as police corruption, male sexual perversion, socio-economic inequality, and the maladjustment of aboriginal people in the modern Taiwanese society are subjugated to increasing criticism. Nevertheless, efforts to encounter any of them have had very limited accomplishment. This book intends to show that the functions of law in the prevention and treatment of the social problem of child prostitution cannot work as intended if those structural problems are not properly tackled. Suggestions are also made to address the need to reconceptualise the problem in the analytical framework of child maltreatment and to recommend the direction for reformation of policy and practice. |
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