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Our goal is to analyze the disability policy making process in Poland on the example of implementing the assumptions of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The key tool we use is the model of the five streams of the public policy process: problem, solutions, politics, process and program. In particular, we look at the role played by the movement of people with disabilities in this process. We claim that the weakness of the movements and the origins of activism of people with disabilities other than in Western countries makes the implementation of the Convention in Poland difficult and often ends in failure.

The article addresses the issue of the so-called refugee crisis in Europe from the perspective of ignorance studies and seeks to establish the mechanisms whereby ignorance is created through categorizations. We depart from the proposal of Proctor and view ignorance as either “native state,” “lost realm,” or “strategic ploy.” In all three, ignorance is an unalienable part of social action. The case of Polish academic research on refugees before and after 2015 is explored in order to establish who ignores what, when, and why, when categorizing, and to analyze the relationship between ignorance and social action. In the Polish refugee field, the crisis of 2015 was the moment when the refugee issue stepped out of the shadows and attracted the attention of the public and policymakers. The analysis of the category “refugee” in Polish scholarship before 2015 demonstrates that the category was based on culturalization and idealization; thus, the socio-political and pragmatic aspects of the group’s characteristics and actions were systematically ignored, and the ignorance worked as a “lost realm.” After 2015, a new body of scholarship emerges in which the category “refugee” acquires negative connotations with security threat or fakeness. In the new scholarship, ignorance is a strategic framing that sets the category of “refugee” outside the humanitarian issues. We claim that the new categorizations follow the logic of culturalization and moralization typical of the previous period. Strategic ignorance inherent in the categorizations that dichotomize “good” and “bad” refugees, or “refugees” and “migrants,” unlocks the potential for political action.

Grabel's recently published book, When Things Don't Fall Apart, deciphers in a new context a neglected sociological tune: the problem of lack of change and the dismissal thereof.What is this new co...

The idea of unintended consequences of social action constitutes one of the core meta-assumptions of new economic sociology. Yet neither its US nor its European branch seem to make a direct statement about this. This state of affairs appears to be the result of various cumulative circumstances, such as the role played by the competition from other meta-assumptions which address similar or related issues and the rather general treatment of the unintended consequences within the field. This article takes a closer look and tries to establish whether the approach to the unintended in the US and European new economic sociologies is indeed so general. It concludes that the source of the low visibility of the unintended consequences as a fundamental problem for new economic sociology is not the fact that this is not granted proper systematization. The problem rather lies in the lack of awareness and cumulative knowledge about the unintended consequences as a main sociological problem that was already taken up in sociology.

Beckert’s book makes the argument that capitalist dynamics are grounded in processes of imagining the future and of creating and revising expectations that motivate actors to engage in economic act...

Unintended consequences might be linked to three problems in social sciences: purposive social action, human action (but not human design), and purposive social intervention. The treatments of these evolved rather autonomously within sociology, economics, and public policy analysis, respectively. Sociology established an interest in the unintended as deviation from rational-action accounts of social behavior. Economics investigated the spontaneous social order and the processes of aggregation leading to unintended configurations. Public policy analysis pointed to paradoxes and perverse effects of initiated institutional change. The proliferating analyses of unintended consequences as side effects, of perverse effects, and of paradoxes of modernization projects recently presented the empirical opportunity for the three perspectives to be compared and to further develop their conceptual backgrounds.

MikoA‚aj Pawlak and Adriana Mica connect the insights from the traditional sociology of unintended consequences with more recent developments in institutional theory. For the authors, the discussions on institutional work are of particular relevance here. Both individuals and organizations frequently generate unintended consequences as a result of their institutional work. In their stimulating conceptual paper, Pawlak and Mica not only distinguish different types of unintended consequences within a neo-institutional framework, they also identify a variety of coping mechanisms related to unintended consequences that result from different outcomes of institutional work. Interestingly, not only success or failure is discussed as an outcome, but also institutional compromise, institutional mid-course shift, and constant reinstitutionalization.