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This book examines absolute poverty in Europe, which is at the moment fairly neglected in academic and policy discourse. It opens with conceptual and methodological considerations that prepare the ground for an application of the concept of absolute poverty in the context of affluent societies and analyses shortcomings of social statistics as well as possibilities to include highly vulnerable groups. This includes thoughts on ethics of research in this particular field where people live under severe circumstances and research can make a difference. The book sheds light on crucial dimensions of deprivation and social exclusion of people in absolute poverty in affluent societies: access to health care, housing and nutrition, poverty related shame and violence. After conceptual and practical issues, the book investigates into different policy responses to absolute poverty in affluent societies from social policy concerns to civic organizations, e. g. food donations, and penalisation and “social cleansing” of highly visible poor. The book finally frames this discussion by profound ethical considerations and normative reasoning about absolute poverty and its alleviation, how it is related to concerns of justice/injustice as well as human dignity. Furthermore, it questions the power and importance of human rights and their judicial protection in regard of persons in absolute poverty.

This book investigates the history of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ (ASEAN) stance on external intervention in regional affairs. It asks when has ASEAN state resistance to sovereignty challenges succeeded, and when have they failed? ASEAN’s history of (non)resistance is understood in terms of a realist theoretical logic, focusing on the relationship between an ASEAN ‘vanguard state’ and selected external powers. A ‘vanguard state’ is defined as an ASEAN state that comes to the fore of the Association when it has vital interests at stake that it wishes to pursue. Whilst a state’s interests may vary, vital interests relate to state survival and the preservation of state sovereignty. Once a vanguard state has come to prominence, it will perform two major functions, which reflect an external balancing logic. The vanguard state will actively seek out an external power whose interests align with its own, and will seek to portray a united ASEAN front in support of its interests. Using case study analysis and drawing on a large amount of previously unanalysed material, this book contends that when an ASEAN vanguard state has interests that converge with those of an external power, it has an active and substantial role in resisting sovereignty violation.

This book examines how borders structure the working class, shaping exploitation and resistance. The book uses the example of Britain to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of a Marxist approach and develop insights that have international relevance. In the wake of the 'Brexit referendum' and facing an uncertain future, debate rages as to whether immigration is good or bad for British society, in economic and cultural terms. Within the political mainstream, both sides in this debate share the assumptions that categories based on nationality, citizenship and country of origin are fixed, legitimate, and appropriate for assessing social change, measuring social benefit and harm, and allocating resources. Likewise, both sides of the debate limit their horizons to what is possible within the capitalist mode of production. Given the long history of migration to and from Britain, and the historically recent development of ideas of nation and citizenship, it is necessary to ask how and why borders and the divides they produce have become so deeply rooted and widely accepted, to the point that they appear as a ‘common sense’ division of humanity. Perhaps more importantly, what role do these ideas play in shaping responses to the crisis, and what are the alternatives?

In 2015, one hundred years passed since Robert Park penned his seminal article “The City: Suggestions for the investigation of human behaviour in the city environment” in the American Journal of Sociology. It provided an agenda for the Chicago school of urban sociology, which came to shape urban research for decades to come. Since 1915 much has changed, both in the urban world itself and in the urban research that reflects on those transformations. In today’s world of global cities, cities around the world have undergone dramatic development, and nowhere as dramatic as in China. In the world of urban research, Park’s human ecology approach has lost the appeal that it once had. Against this background, in this book specialists on urban China reflect on the relevance of Park’s article on “The City” – for cities in China, for urban research, and for questions about studying the social life of the city. The aim of the book is to take Park’s article as a point of departure for critical reflection on both the research on urban China and on the issues that Chinese cities face. The book offers readers a timely respite from the eruption of urban China research, to reflect on what the city in China contributes to urban studies more generally. Despite the shared starting point, the contributors represent a range of perspectives that would disrupt any notion of monolithic “Chinese school” while also pointing the way towards recurrent challenges, topics and approaches relevant for a contemporary urbanism.

With the academic study of ‘war’ gaining renewed popularity within criminology in recent years, this book illustrates the long-standing engagement with this social phenomenon within the discipline. Foregrounding established criminological work addressing war and connecting it to a wide range of extant sociological literature, the authors present and further develop theoretical and conceptual ways of thinking critically about war. Within this book, whilst providing an implicit critique of mainstream criminology the authors seek to question if a ‘criminology of war’ is possible, and if so how this seemingly ‘new horizon’ of the discipline might be usefully informed by sociology.

John Clarke is in conversation with 12 leading scholars about the dynamics of thinking critically in the social sciences. The conversations range across many fields and explore the problems and possibilities of doing critical intellectual work in ways that are responsive to changing conditions.By emphasising the many voices in play, in conversation with as well as against others, Clarke challenges the individualising myth of the heroic intellectual. He underlines the value of thinking critically, collaboratively and dialogically.The book also provides access to a sound archive of the original conversations.

This book explores the policy and social frames through which citizens and wider communities are being engaged with culture as a tool to mitigate the effects of social exclusion and deprivation. The study is based on an inter-disciplinary four-year research project investigating those individuals and organisations whose mission is to use culture, instrumentally, to help deprived communities in a variety of different ways. The project sought to examine the different scales of activity involved within cultural intermediation, examining national policy and practice, but grounded within specific community-level case studies. Although a number of sites across England were examined, two field sites in particular were the subject for a deep ethnographic engagement, including active interventions. These were Birmingham, with a focus on the Balsall Heath neighbourhood and Greater Manchester, with detailed work being undertaken in the Ordsall ward of Salford. These case studies feature throughout much of the book as a lens through which to see the impacts of wider policy trends. Research was undertaken during a period of quite dramatic change in policy and governance within the UK’s cultural sector. These changes were driven by one of the biggest experiments in refiguring the role of the public sector within the UK since 1945, as post-credit crunch governments have responded to the challenges of a struggling global economy by employing the discourse of ‘austerity’. As this book shows, what has emerged is a cultural intermediation sector that has refined its practices, adopting new funding models and arenas of activity.

Academics are increasingly required to demonstrate their impact on the wider world. The aim of this book is to compare and contextualise the dimensions of impact within the social sciences. Unlike most other studies of the 2014 Research Excellence Framework impact case studies, this book includes case studies from three different sub-panels (Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work and Politics and International Relations), which in themselves capture several disciplines, and therefore allows for a comparison of how impact and academic identify are defined and presented. The impact case studies are placed in an analytical framework that identifies different types of impact and impact pathways and places them in the context of policy models. Finally, it provides a comparison across time based on interviews with Social Policy professors who are looking back over 40 years of being involved as well as analysing the relationship between research and policy-making. This long view highlights successes but also the serendipitous and superficial nature of impact across time.

This book brings together leading international authors from a number of fields to provide an up to date understanding of part-time work at national, sector, industry and workplace levels. The contributors critically examine part-time employment in different institutional settings across Europe, the USA, Australia and Korea. This analysis serves as a prism to investigate wider trends, particularly in female employment, including the continued increase in part-time work and processes that are increasingly creating dualisation and inequality between 'good' and 'bad' jobs.

What makes some people more likely to initiate positive change within their organizations? Why some employees are more proactive than others? Can this behavior be influenced by management? What supervisors, team managers and organizations can do to promote employees’ proactivity? Employee proactivity has largely been understood in terms of employees changing their environment or changing themselves. People who are proactive envision a better future and take action to achieve it. They should be confident, motivated, and energetic, as it is not always easy to bring about change. Being supported in relationships with surrounding others is the greatest aid to such courage. By introducing and developing the notion of attachment theory as a new theoretical lens through which to examine such behavior, this book unpacks a relational basis of proactivity and provides academics with a new way of thinking about employee behavior and creates a compelling guide for practitioners and managers.

Community development takes place in contested spaces in which the interests of people living, working and surviving in communities come up against the interests of powerful groups and classes in the structures of exploitation, colonisation and neoliberalism. Where community development practices respond to issues of environmental concerns, this brings an additional dimension as ‘the environment’ becomes another arena for contestation. This book aims to draw on two essential sources for understanding this conflict. One source is in the rich yet conflicted theoretical resources which have developed through academic labour around analysing the social practices of community development, popular struggle and environmental justice. The second fundamental source is the intellectual work of ordinary people engaged in such material struggles to change the world from where they live and work and make community; people who are not employed in academic labour but who, as Gramsci highlighted, are critical thinking intellectuals without whose analytical resources emancipatory politics is not possible. This includes the struggles of activist-academics (such as the editors) seeking to learn from their own engagement with popular movements. This volume therefore works in the dialogical space between knowledges of struggle and of the academy in order to critique and inform the practices of community development professionals, academics, trade union organisers, social movements, activists and ordinary people engaged in the pursuit of justice in a range of contexts in which the messy, imprecise and contested processes of community, development and environment interact.

This book’s starting point is the notion of theorising and the fact that, because scholarship at the intersection of ethnicity, race and old age has stagnated, we are in dire need of inquiries that focus on the context of discovery. The author argues that our scholarly imagination about this intersection needs to be developed now that the globalisation of international migration and transnationalism have increased the ethno-cultural diversity of our ageing populations. Through a scoping review of the last twenty years of research and theunderstandings of ethnicity and race that informs it, the author shows that scholarship on ageing and old age do not resonate well with the latest advancements in ethnicity and race scholarship. The book introduces gerontologists to social scientific discussions about ethnicity and race, introduces international migration scholars to the implications that population ageing has for the life-course, gives both of these scholarly fields insight into what characterizes scholarship at the intersection of ethnicity/ race and old age, andproposes a new research agenda. By bringing attention to the topics that have received the most attention (i.e. health inequalities, health and social care, intergenerational relationships and caregiving), and the manner in which ethnicity/ race have been made sense of so far, the author identifies the obstacles that scholarship on ethnicity, race and old age faces, and proposes how we can address them in an ethnicity-astute and diversity-informed manner.

Gender is a factor of youth migration; it shapes the roles, capacities, access to resources, and cultural expectations in society. Gender defines who leaves and who stays behind in the place of origin, or the extent from which the youth travels outside of their own communities. This collection is possibly the first to present the intersection of gender and youth migration with encompassing themes related to imperial histories, negotiating identities, education, and work using diverse studies in Canada, France, Hungary, Bangladesh, Turkey, Italy, Albania, Ethiopia, U.K. and the U.S. Gendered modalities suggest that there are particular ways or modes in which gender as a system of power relations become manifest in youth migration, either voluntarily or coerced, and consequently, their negotiation of structures and limiting social practices.Gender and youth are intrinsically connected to migration, and this book is about these connections in multidisciplinary perspectives in an increasingly globalized world.

This distinctive and engaging book proposes an imaginative criminology, focusing on how spaces of transgression are lived, portrayed and imagined. These include spaces of control or confinement, including prison and borders, and spaces of resistance. Examples range from camps where asylum seekers and migrants are confined to the exploration of deviant identities and the imagined spaces of surveillance and control in young adult fiction. Drawing on oral history, fictive portrayals, walking methodologies, and ethnographic and arts-based research, the book pays attention to issues of gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, mobility and nationality as they intersect with lived and imagined space.

This book provides a transnational perspective on intellectual disability in the twentieth century with contributions from distinguished authors in 14 countries across 5 continents. Each chapter outlines policies and practice from the featured nation. Life stories illustrate their impact on people with intellectual disabilities and their families. The book brings together accounts of how intellectual disability was viewed, managed and experienced in countries across the globe. It examines the origins and nature of contemporary attitudes, policy and practice; and sheds light on the challenges of implementing the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCPRD).

Biosensors and biosensing practices collect and share living data, data concerning changes in body states. Health biosensing emerges where devices, health experience, scientific and medical knowledges and online platforms meet around bodies. This book contrasts forms of health biosensing in significant life events ranging from conception to ageing. It explores practicalities, histories and promises of fertility and hormonal biosensing, stress biosensing, DNA genotyping platforms, and old-age biosensing. While the biosensing industries promote promise-horizons of the ‘soon’, ethnographic stories of failure and disappointment abound. ‘Living data’ may be about health for many people, but still happens mostly outside biomedicine or clinical practice. Yet biosensing has the potential to change human bodies and lives in barely imagined ways. This book argues for thinking about biosensing platforms and bodies together to understand that potential and to recognise harms and limitations.

This book argues that mental health social work needs to be located within the wider political and social policy landscape. Wider societal attitudes to mental illness are examined followed by a discussion of the development of community care. The author argues that these historical perspectives provide an insight into the roots of the current crisis in mental health services. The book goes on to analyse a range of contemporary issues and challenges in mental health social work. It argues that social inequality and policies of austerity have increased levels of mental distress. It calls for a rediscovery of core social work values and a rejection of bureaucratic managerialism.

With an innovative focus on home and care, this book is an intervention into debates about social policy and welfare at a time of crisis, with a particular focus on the UK. Such a crisis involves austerity, economic restructuring, worsening inequality and resulting issues of resources, rationing and affordability. The book illuminates how these economic and political changes are re-shaping experiences of home and care for many households. By bringing together a unique set of interdisciplinary perspectives to bear on the topics of home, care, austerity and welfare crisis, the book develops conceptual and methodological resources for exploring these often hidden yet crucial aspects of everyday lives. Topics covered include the changing place of the home within social care policy, housing and inequality, researching family lives under austerity, and the restructuring of children’s services. Ultimately the book argues that the home needs to be understood as a site of political and economic contestation, and that forms of feminist research and analysis can enable new interventions into this terrain.

This volume brings together contributors from 18 countries to provide international perspectives on the politics of parental leave policies in different parts of the world. Initially looking in depth at the politics of care leave policies across Europe, the US, Latin America and Asia, the book moves on to consider a variety of key issues in depth, including gender equality, flexibility and challenges for fathers in using leave. In the final section of the book, contributors look beyond the early parenthood period to consider possible future directions for care leave policy in order to address the wider changes and challenges that our societies face.

This book uses an international perspective and draws on a wide range of new conceptual and empirical material to examine the sources of conflict and cooperation within the different landscapes of knowledge that are driving contemporary urban change. Based on the premise that historically established systems of regulation and control are being subject to unprecedented pressures, the book critically reflects on the changing role of planning and governance in sustainable urban development, looking at how a shift in power relations between expert and local cultures in western planning processes has blurred the traditional boundaries between public, private, and voluntary sectors.