The author starts from the observation that citizenship and voluntarism are contested terms with diverse meanings. They have also been appropriated by politicians of various persuasions and imbued with meanings associated with ‘feel good’ factors that emphasize serving in a community. Therefore, voluntarism has the potential to continue the exclusion of minority groups, marginalized individuals and collective groupings at the expense of their citizenship rights, particularly those identified by Hannah Arendt as the ‘right to have rights’ that have been endorsed (...) through public policy but today are being undermined by the ‘age of austerity’ in publicly funded welfare states. Against the background of the political context of UK, and the public rhetoric on the ‘Big Society’, the author examines whether citizenship discourses allied with voluntarism support a meaningful endorsement of altruistic solidarity or whether they endorse exploitative relationships under the guise of meeting the public needs. (shrink)

In this final response, the author reflects on the recent European elections that favored Euro-skeptic right-wing parties all over Europe. Their Far-Right views blame ‘immigrants’ for the current problems in Europe and challenge institutionalized solidarity. The response, firstly, attacks the dominating discourses in the media which obscure that 75 % of the voters embrace the status quo of free movement and regional citizenship within the EU. Secondly, this final reply connects the move to Far-Right views to general feelings of insecurity (...) that increased in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Current scape-goat policies regarding immigrants can be traced to strategies of neighborliness, which in turn reflect deeper social and economic anxieties caused by the withdrawal of state services and the logic of neo-liberal capitalism. (shrink)

The second edition of this text has been thoroughly revised and updated to ensure that it continues to provide a comprehensive survey of social work practice and theory. New chapters covering the changing nature of social work and advocacy and empowerment approaches have been included, and the editors have added a new conclusion in which they reflect on the past, present and future of social work. All of the chapters have been revised to cover the most recent debates and developments (...) in research and practice. (shrink)

(1996). Contract government and the academic intellectuals. The European Legacy: Vol. 1, Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the study of European Ideas, pp. 762-770.

This article argues, firstly, that voluntary civic practices are not doomed to fall prey to a Big Society rhetoric and a cynical politics of cuts in social spending. It all depends on how these civic practices are promoted and what kind of civic discourse is communicated through the channels of social media and public opinion. Secondly, the author highlights the political importance of connecting meaningfulness with citizenship.

This article responds to Dominelli’s contribution by mapping three lines of discussion. The first relates to the issue of how to understand voluntary work with regard to the realization of citizenship. The authors argue that this understanding depends on the way citizenship is conceived. Whereas a rights-based conception of citizenship focuses on issues of equal access to voluntary work, a duty-oriented notion of citizenship tends to see voluntarism as embedded in an educational strategy, alongside professionalized social work. The authors (...) plead for an alternative understanding of voluntary work and social work as joined partners in practices of ‘learning democracy’. The second line of discussion revolves around the relation between social and political dimensions of citizenship. With Dominelli, the authors point out how the obscuring of the political dimension risks to nurture societal discourses that put pressure on the welfare state. The third point relates to the difficulties in positioning voluntary work with regard to professional social work. One of these difficulties is the tendency to over-romanticize voluntary work as warm, informal, generous, while giving an exclusively technical reading of social work professionalization. (shrink)

This article responds to Dominelli’s contribution by mapping three lines of discussion. The first relates to the issue of how to understand voluntary work with regard to the realization of citizenship. The authors argue that this understanding depends on the way citizenship is conceived. Whereas a rights-based conception of citizenship focuses on issues of equal access to voluntary work, a duty-oriented notion of citizenship tends to see voluntarism as embedded in an educational strategy, alongside professionalized social work. The authors (...) plead for an alternative understanding of voluntary work and social work as joined partners in practices of ‘learning democracy’. The second line of discussion revolves around the relation between social and political dimensions of citizenship. With Dominelli, the authors point out how the obscuring of the political dimension risks to nurture societal discourses that put pressure on the welfare state. The third point relates to the difficulties in positioning voluntary work with regard to professional social work. One of these difficulties is the tendency to over-romanticize voluntary work as warm, informal, generous, while giving an exclusively technical reading of social work professionalization. (shrink)

In the 1980s, philosophical, historical and social studies of science underwent a change which later evolved into a turn to practice. Analysts of science were asked to pay attention to scientific practices in meticulous detail and along multiple dimensions, including the material, social and psychological. Following this turn, the interest in scientific practices continued to increase and had an indelible influence in the various fields of science studies. No doubt, the practice turn changed our conceptions and approaches of science, but (...) what did it really teach us? What does it mean to study scientific practices? What are the general lessons, implications, and new challenges? This volume explores questions about the practice turn using both case studies and theoretical analysis. The case studies examine empirical and mathematical sciences, including the engineering sciences. The volume promotes interactions between acknowledged experts from different, often thought of as conflicting, orientations. It presents contributions in conjunction with critical commentaries that put the theses and assumptions of the former in perspective. Overall, the book offers a unique and diverse range of perspectives on the meanings, methods, lessons, and challenges associated with the practice turn. (shrink)

First published in 1984, this is a study of categorization practices: how people categorize each other and their actions; how they describe, infer, and judge. The book presents a sociological analysis and description of practical activities and makes a cogent contribution to the study of how the moral order actually works in practical communicative contexts. Among the issues dealt with are: collectivity categorizations, the organization of lists and descriptions, moral attribution and inferences, and the relationship between standards of morality and (...) standards of rationality. (shrink)

First published in 1984, this is a study of categorization practices: how people categorize each other and their actions; how they describe, infer, and judge. The book presents a sociological analysis and description of practical activities and makes a cogent contribution to the study of how the moral order actually works in practical communicative contexts. Among the issues dealt with are: collectivity categorizations, the organization of lists and descriptions, moral attribution and inferences, and the relationship between standards of morality and (...) standards of rationality. (shrink)

The Element reconstructs, analyses and compares different derivational routes to a grounding of the Arrow of Time in entropy. It also evaluates the link between entropy and visible disorder, and the related claim of an alignment of the Arrow of Time with a development from order to visible disorder. The Element identifies three different entropy-groundings for the Arrow of Time: (i) the Empirical Arrow of Time, (ii) the Universal Statistical Arrow of Time, and (iii) the Local Statistical Arrow of Time. (...) The Element will also demonstrate that it is unlikely that high entropy states will always coincide with visible disorder. Therefore, it will dispute that there is a strong link between the Arrow of Time and visible disorder. (shrink)

The biofuel boom is placing enormous demands on existing cropping systems, with the most crucial consequences in the agri-food sector. The biofuel industry is responding by initiating private governance and certification. The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and the Cramer Commission, among others, have formulated criteria on “sustainable” biofuel production and processing. This article explores the legitimacy of private governance and certification by the biofuel industry, highlighting opportunities and challenges. It argues that the concept of output based legitimacy is (...) problematic in the case of biofuel as long as no consensus or commonly agreed “best” solution has been established on what sustainable biofuel production is. Furthermore, it shows that the private governance initiatives analyzed fail to adequately include actors from developing countries. Finally, the article argues that we need mechanisms for control and accountability in order to guarantee that the political output of biofuel certification serves the common welfare. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION My underlying concern in this work is with the sociological analysis and description of members' practical activities and their practical ...

Emotional AI is an emerging technology used to make probabilistic predictions about the emotional states of people using data sources, such as facial (micro)-movements, body language, vocal tone or the choice of words. The performance of such systems is heavily debated and so are the underlying scientific methods that serve as the basis for many such technologies. In this article I will engage with this new technology, and with the debates and literature that surround it. Working at the intersection of (...) criminology, policing, surveillance and the study of emotional AI this paper explores and offers a framework of understanding the various issues that these technologies present particularly to liberal democracies. I argue that these technologies should not be deployed within public spaces because there is only a very weak evidence-base as to their effectiveness in a policing and security context, and even more importantly represent a major intrusion to people’s private lives and also represent a worrying extension of policing power because of the possibility that intentions and attitudes may be inferred. Further to this, the danger in the use of such invasive surveillance for the purpose of policing and crime prevention in urban spaces is that it potentially leads to a highly regulated and control-oriented society. I argue that emotion recognition has severe impacts on the right to the city by not only undertaking surveillance of existing situations but also making inferences and probabilistic predictions about future events as well as emotions and intentions. (shrink)

The paper introduces precise definitions of the inevitabilist and contingentist positions. On this basis, it reveals the analytical structure and some inherent difficulties of the contingentist/inevitabilist issue. It then discusses some of these difficulties, relying on the thought-experiment of a ‘divided physics’. Along the way, it investigates the kinds of differences that two alternative physics should present, if they are to give rise to non-benign forms of contingentism.Keywords: Contingency; Inevitabilism; Incommensurability; Theory-comparison; Scientific realism; Constructivism.

Describing the Seas: Writing Practices of the Masters of the Royal Navy in the Long Eighteenth Century. The masters of the Royal Navy in the long eighteenth century are usually associated more with practical knowledge and experience than with an involvement with learned or ‚book‘ knowledge. However, their professional practices were based to a high degree on the usage and production of texts. This article examines how literary practices shaped the production of hydrographic knowledge by masters, in how far these (...) practices resembled those of learned culture at the time, and how masters employed them to gain access to the scientific community. (shrink)

What kinds of norms constrain mechanistic discovery and explanation? In the mechanistic literature, the norms for good explanations are directly derived from answers to the metaphysical question of what explanations are. Prominent mechanistic accounts thus emphasize either ontic or epistemic norms. Still, mechanistic philosophers on both sides agree that there is no sharp distinction between the processes of discovery and explanation. Thus, it seems reasonable to expect that ontic and epistemic accounts of explanation will be accompanied by ontic and epistemic (...) accounts of discovery, respectively. As we will show here, however, recent discovery accounts implicitly rely on both ontic and epistemic norms to characterize the discovery process. In this paper, we develop an account that makes explicit that, and how, ontic and epistemic norms work together throughout the discovery process. By describing mechanism discovery as a process of pattern recognition we demonstrate that scientists have to develop epistemic activities to distinguish a pattern from its background. Furthermore, they have to determine which epistemic activities successfully describe how the pattern is implemented by identifying the pattern’s components. Our approach reveals that ontic and epistemic norms are equally important in mechanism discovery. (shrink)

У дослідженні розглянуто сучасний стан ринку юридичних послуг . Автор виокремлює проблеми функціонування та можливості розвитку регіонального ринку в умовах міжнародної інтеграції, виділяє можливі шляхи нівелювання впливу негативних чинників розвитку регіонального ринку юридичних послуг. Запропоновані комплексні заходи для формування регіональної концепції якості юридичних послуг; упровадження в програму підготовки сучасного юриста спеціальних навчальних курсів у сфері маркетингу, менеджменту, зв'язків із громадськістю; розвитку клієнтоорієнтованих технологій сервісного обслуговування, розробки регіональної програми збереження молодих юридичних кадрів.

The transnational anti-gender movement often has a strong connection to conservative religious organisations. However, even if the anti-gender movement is easy to recognise in Sweden, it is impossible for it to propagate significant opposition to gender mainstreaming and gender studies by using the Church as a reference due to white Swedish people’s established and neo-colonial image of Sweden as exceptional, secular, modern, and a gender equal and tolerant nation. The aim of this article is to analyse how a transnational anti-gender (...) discourse transforms and produces fear in a Swedish context. In focus is the editorial writer for Svenska Dagbladet, one of Sweden’s most influential newspapers, Ivar Arpi and his critical articles and expressions in social media on gender studies and gender mainstreaming. The material shows that instead of connecting to religion in order to dismiss gender studies, gender studies is understood as the religion and conspiracy of our time, governing the state and its citizens. Drawing on Sara Ahmed, I argue that it is possible to follow how words and discourses act in affective ways and how gender studies, gender ideology and gender mainstreaming become a single body that inspires fear. (shrink)

Background Healthcare leader support and facilitation for ethics work are of great importance for healthcare professionals’ handling of ethical issues, moral distress, and quality care provision. A digital tool for ethical reflection in long-term care was developed in response to the demand for appropriate tools. Research aim This study aimed to explore healthcare leaders’ expectations of using a digital tool for ethical reflection among their home nursing care staff. Research design A qualitative research design with vignettes and focus group interviews (...) was used. The data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Participants and Research Context The sample comprised ten healthcare leaders from municipal long-term care in Norway. Ethical Considerations Participation was voluntary and based on informed consent. The Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research approved this study. Findings The analysis resulted in the development of three themes representing leaders’ expectations of the tool: (i) giving staff a voice, (ii) revealing ethics in practice, and (iii) keeping the pot boiling. Discussion Leaders must be informed about the ethical issues experienced to engage in supportive measures for their staff. Digital channels can increase the democratization, safety, and efficiency of communication between employees and leaders and increase awareness of ethical aspects in daily care work. The leaders had positive expectations of employees’ activities and benefits from using the tool for ethical reflection. However, they admitted that realizing the tool’s potential to ensure continuity in ethics work requires considerable organizational and leader involvement. Conclusions This study shows that healthcare leaders are open to digital solutions for managing ethics work in home nursing care. Both opportunities and important prerequisites for successfully implementing the digital tool were identified. (shrink)

The structuralist approach, as developed by Balzer et al. (1987) in An Architectonic for Science (abbreviated as Architectonic in the following), should be combined with a holistic semantics. A significant, but widely neglected intuition about the empirical claim of a theory appears to be representable only within a holistic framework. This intuition may be called the promise of a theory. It consists of the claim that the theory will, at least in the future, be able to describe all phenomena of (...) (an interpreted version of) its T-non-theoretical conceptual frame. The argument will be outlined within the semantics developed by Holger Andreas on the basis of Carnap’s dual-level conception. (shrink)

Featuring contributions from the world’s leading experts on the subject and based partly on several detailed case studies, this volume is the first comprehensive analysis of the scientific notion of robustness as well as of the general ...

Two classes of account have been proposed to explain the memory processes subserving the processing of reflexive-antecedent dependencies. Structure-based accounts assume that the retrieval of the antecedent is guided by syntactic tree-configurational information without considering other kinds of information such as gender marking in the case of English reflexives. By contrast, unconstrained cue-based retrieval assumes that all available information is used for retrieving the antecedent. Similarity-based interference effects from structurally illicit distractors which match a non-structural retrieval cue have been interpreted (...) as evidence favoring the unconstrained cue-based retrieval account since cue-based retrieval interference from structurally illicit distractors is incompatible with the structure-based account. However, it has been argued that the observed effects do not necessarily reflect interference occurring at the moment of retrieval but might equally well be accounted for by interference occurring already at the stage of encoding or maintaining the antecedent in memory, in which case they cannot be taken as evidence against the structure-based account. We present three experiments (self-paced reading and eye-tracking) on German reflexives and Swedish reflexive and pronominal possessives in which we pit the predictions of encoding interference and cue-based retrieval interference against each other. We could not find any indication that encoding interference affects the processing ease of the reflexive-antecedent dependency formation. Thus, there is no evidence that encoding interference might be the explanation for the interference effects observed in previous work. We therefore conclude that invoking encoding interference may not be a plausible way to reconcile interference effects with a structure-based account of reflexive processing. (shrink)

For centuries, scholars have not doubted that Macrobio Ambrogio Teodosio was pagan. Recently, prof. Alan Cameron in his The Last Pagans of Rome clamied that the late antique writer was actually a Christian. This essay seeks to refute this assumption. --Translated from back cover.

In contemporary philosophy of science, the consensus view seems to be that scientific explanations describe mechanisms responsible for the phenomena to be explained. Two kinds of explanatory relevance figure in mechanistic accounts of explanation: causal and constitutive. Following prominent accounts, it seems natural to analyze both these relations in terms of systematic interventions into some factor X with respect to another factor Y. However, such interventions are tailored to uncover causal relations only. Construing the constitutive relationship between parts and wholes (...) in terms of interventions thus raises metaphysical, conceptual, and epistemological questions. We here review the barriers that intervention-based inquiry into mechanisms encounters and consider some solutions. (shrink)

This study aims to disentangle complexity from randomness and chaos, and to present a definition of complexity that emphasizes its epistemically distinct qualities. I will review existing attempts at defining complexity and argue that these suffer from two major faults: a tendency to neglect the underlying dynamics and to focus exclusively on the phenomenology of complex systems; and linguistic imprecisions in describing these phenomenologies. I will argue that the tendency to discuss phenomenology removed from the underlying dynamics is the main (...) root of the difficulties in distinguishing complex from chaotic or random systems. In my own definition, I will explicitly try to avoid these pitfalls. The theoretical contemplations in this paper will be tested on a sample of five models: the random Kac ring, the chaotic CA30, the regular CA90, the complex CA110 and the complex Bak-Sneppen model. Although these modelling studies are restricted in scope and can only be seen as preliminary, they still constitute on of the first attempts to investigate complex systems comparatively. (shrink)

We conducted two eye-tracking experiments investigating the processing of the Mandarin reflexive ziji in order to tease apart structurally constrained accounts from standard cue-based accounts of memory retrieval. In both experiments, we tested whether structurally inaccessible distractors that fulfill the animacy requirement of ziji influence processing times at the reflexive. In Experiment 1, we manipulated animacy of the antecedent and a structurally inaccessible distractor intervening between the antecedent and the reflexive. In conditions where the accessible antecedent mismatched the animacy cue, (...) we found inhibitory interference whereas in antecedent-match conditions, no effect of the distractor was observed. In Experiment 2, we tested only antecedent-match configurations and manipulated locality of the reflexive-antecedent binding (Mandarin allows non-local binding). Participants were asked to hold three distractors (animate vs. inanimate nouns) in memory while reading the target sentence. We found slower reading times when animate distractors were held in memory (inhibitory interference). Moreover, we replicated the locality effect reported in previous studies. These results are incompatible with structure-based accounts. However, the cue-based ACT-R model of Lewis and Vasishth ( 2005 ) cannot explain the observed pattern either. We therefore extend the original ACT-R model and show how this model not only explains the data presented in this article, but is also able to account for previously unexplained patterns in the literature on reflexive processing. (shrink)

This paper presents methodological reflections on power sharing and shifts of power in various interview situations. Narratives are said to be shaped by our attempts to position ourselves within social and cultural circumstances. In an interview situation, power can be seen as something that is created and that shifts between the interviewer and the interviewed. Reflexivity is involved when we as interviewers attempt to look at a situation or a concept from various perspectives. A modified form of discourse analysis inspired (...) by subject positioning was used to reflect on power relations in four different interview situations. The analyses indicate that reflection on the power relations can lead to other forms of understanding of the interviewee. The main conclusion that can be drawn from this study is that power relations are created within an interview situation and therefore it is important to be aware of dominant perspectives. Researchers and nurses face the challenge of constantly raising their level of consciousness about power relationships, and discursive reflexivity is one way of doing this. Thus, reflexivity is an important part of the qualitative research process. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Das Mittelalter Jahrgang: 19 Heft: 1 Seiten: 196-198.