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Today, many cities in post‐industrial societies are strongholds of left and progressive political forces. Almost 100 years ago, left parties had instituted municipal socialism in several European cities. In this article, we compare these two periods of left urban rule by focusing on the long‐term changes over the last 120 years in the socio‐demographic profile of urban left elites in four major Swiss cities. Our analysis of left elected representatives at six key dates highlights the main differences between the municipal socialists of the interwar period and the new urban left that rules contemporary cities. The former are members of the working class, blue‐collar workers without university education, while the latter are members of the upper‐middle class, highly educated sociocultural professionals. The results of our analysis contribute to a better understanding of the sociological composition of urban left‐progressive political forces, an aspect that is somewhat neglected in recent research on the urban left. We discuss the potential political implications and further research avenues for contemporary debates in urban studies, in terms of urban policy priorities and political mobilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Footnotes 1 I draw on Di Leonardo's ([7], 443) concept of "kin work", which makes visible the gendered work required for "the creation and maintenance of kin and quasi-kin networks in advanced industrial societies." This essay follows the parenthetical opening of the fieldwork confessional into the parenthetical spaces within our fieldwork archives, in order to consider the nature of those parentheses and of their complex claims on our writing and relating. In Uitoto kin-making praxis, substances (including ancestral plant foods and medicines, tears, sweat, smoke, etc.) shared over time are needed to make people kin, and processes of gradually coming to matter together have been an essential part of our capacity to build archives of shared memory with and in each other. But Uitoto people know this and hone it.) Animating and animated by shared substances,[3] stories are what make kinship, what make kin of inhuman and alien things (like fieldworkers). [Extracted from the article]

Drawing upon three years of ethnographic research conducted in drug and alcohol recovery houses and treatment centers in Philadelphia, this article argues that attending to the practice of informality in the subproletariat and precarious working classes of the postindustrial US city helps elucidate the twinned legacies of informality and surveillance in racialized US urban poverty. To do so, it recuperates Bourdieu's practice theory with the invigorating insights of Black studies on the historic legacies of racializing surveillance to theorize the practice of informality in the postindustrial US city. Ultimately, the article argues that informal practice offers a space of concealment forged through the evasion and countersurveillance of racializing surveillance in the postindustrial US city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea and related practices of slowness have received global attention, as these have been viewed as reactions to and critiques of this "go‐faster" world. Celebration of slowness has been especially prominent in South Korea, which experienced an accelerated transition to a post‐industrial society. In line with recent power‐sensitive studies of slowness, this paper develops a governmentality approach that examines how slowness shapes particular bodily behaviours. Drawing on recent work on rhythmanalysis and governmentalities, this study examines how slowness is enrolled and enacts the rhythmic governing of "Olle" walking – the South Korean countryside walking experience. It specifically relates the analysis to the site‐specific experience of accelerated modernisation, where the legacy of state‐led industrial development persists in the prevailing neoliberal capitalism. First, it examines the ways in which slow rhythm is involved in walking practice, deploying and reproducing a specific rhythm, body, and the mode of biopower. It then looks at several ways through which the emerging slow rhythm of Olle walking and the fast rhythm of everyday life are negotiated. This paper argues that slow walking can serve as an affirmative mode of rhythmic governing that fosters care of the self and the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Family formation patterns in the postindustrial world have changed markedly in the past several decades. Fertility rates have declined, cohabitation rates have increased, age at marriage has gone up, and nonmarital childbearing has become more common in most postindustrial settings. A dominant theoretical explanation for these changes is second demographic transition (SDT) theory, which posits widespread value change towards individualism and postmaterialist concerns. In contrast, gender equity theory emphasizes structural changes, including women's increased participation in the public sphere and the resulting incompatibility of women's domestic and public roles given the slower adaptation on the part of families and institutions to adapt to women's new roles. We test the predictions of these two theoretical frameworks by analyzing fertility decline in 27 European societies. We find evolving gender egalitarianism, measured by the prevalence of gender‐egalitarian attitudes, to have greater explanatory power than SDT‐related ideational changes. The gender equity framework is particularly relevant in explaining the recent fertility trajectories of Central, Eastern, and Southern European countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against premature claims about the declining political relevance of social class in post‐industrial democracies, recent research indicates that class continues to be a relevant determinant of political preferences. In post‐industrial societies 'old' class divides on economic issues coexist with 'new' class alignments on cultural topics. While there is cumulated evidence of social classes' distinct placement on these issues, this paper argues that the strength of class divides depends on the extent to which these issues are politicized by political parties. Studying preferences on economic and cultural issues (attitudes towards redistribution, immigration, gay rights and European integration), this study shows that class divides in preferences are context dependent. The multilevel analyses drawing on data from the European Social Survey and the Chapel Hill Expert Survey for 27 European democracies demonstrate that classes' differences in preferences are accentuated on issues strongly contested and emphasized by parties, and mitigated on issues where party conflict is weaker. Adding to recent literature on parties and class conflict, this study identifies another stage at which parties can affect the strength of class voting. The varying strength of class divides across contexts also has implications for parties' ability to garner support beyond a single class. This becomes increasingly unlikely in contexts of high issue politicization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UK government's efforts to facilitate shale gas exploration have been matched by a surge of public opposition. The latter has manifested in a broad spectrum of activities in which local communities have "watched fracking"—meaning they have observed, protested, and filmed outside the drilling site, often taking note of when the pumps start and stop. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in northwest England, I analyze residents' various "watching" activities as one dynamic through which they sought to mediate situated modes of sociopolitical erasure. Watching fracking was a form of directly participating in public matters, compensating the watchers for the state's perceived failures and those of corporate models of community engagement. It also helped members of the anti‐fracking community distance themselves from the state and their own feelings of alienation. By thus highlighting how disappointment with state formations interacts with an activist subjectivity, anthropologists can deepen our understanding of the changing relationship between state and society. [fracking, public engagement, state, citizen science, protest, extractive industry, Lancashire, United Kingdom] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, we tackle the challenge of adapting the dominant way we think about health in the United States—through an individualistic, technocratic, biomedical lens—to address social problems rooted in structural inequality. As scholar activists, the authors participated in a coalition effort to improve community health in a postindustrial New Jersey city. Adopting a social determinants of health perspective, we describe efforts to move discourse away from wellness and toward a deeper understanding of the role of education and learning in building a "culture of health." The essay discusses how this structural analysis of health competed with much more narrow cultural understandings of education and health rooted in a pervasive wellness ideology. Coalition success hinged on correctly identifying the obstacles to health and learning in the community as understood by community members: violence emerged as a pressing obstacle that impeded both learning and health. Once we clarified a shared understanding of health as learning and a common understanding of violence as the most immediate obstacle to health as learning—our coalition was energized and made progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Britain, especially in the 2010s, neoliberal reform involved an extension of legal coercion into the domestic and community lives of marginalized citizens. On two postindustrial housing estates in Britain, working‐class residents experience this "everyday authoritarianism" in areas that the liberal state typically constructs as private and purports to leave alone: the home and the intimate relations that frame it. Residents engage this legal coercion by adopting responses that range from defensive avoidance to co‐opting officials to acts of vigilantism. By doing so, they negotiate the presence of an authority that is often out of sync with their own expectations for protection, and in some cases actively undermines their efforts to remain safe. Their pluralism can be framed neither in terms of an acceptance of state authority nor as a straightforward refusal to be governed. Rather, it reveals the contradictory ways in which marginalized citizens define their relationship to the state under contemporary conditions of class fragmentation. By adding detail on everyday life to meta‐narratives of an authoritarian turn, this article theorizes the political potential and limits of people's daily engagements with the state for contesting the latter's authority. [class, coercion, liberal governance] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have witnessed increasing attention to early childhood education and care as a foundation for children's successful development in school and beyond. The great majority of children in postindustrial societies now attend preschools or daycare, making this setting a major part of their culturally constructed developmental niches. Although an extensive literature demonstrates the importance of parental involvement or engagement in their children's schools, relationships between parents and their children's preschools have received scant attention in the research literature. This paper aims to address that gap through a mixed‐methods cross‐cultural study of parents and preschools in four Western countries: Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and the United States. Following an introduction to national systems of preschool in each country, parents' involvement and ideas about the family–school relationship are presented, drawing from parental diaries and from semistructured interviews (n = 110). Results indicate areas of cross‐cultural similarity but also some differences, especially between the U.S. sample and the three European samples. Discussion addresses the question of how preschools and parents can work together to create optimal developmental niches for their young children. The authors also suggest that parent–preschool relationships deserve greater attention by both researchers and program developers [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Another important point the authors make is that spin dictators are more peaceful than fear dictators: spin dictators do not go to war as fear dictators do, because they mainly focus on their survival and they lack an ideology that claims to be universal. Twenty-first century dictators are spin dictators who "shape public opinion rather repressing public movements". In the last chapter, the authors offer strategies on how to prevent the spread of spin dictators and consolidate democracy so that it is not exploited by dictators. [Extracted from the article]

Social class has traditionally played a key role in explaining social behaviour and cognition. However, recent analyses have been dominated by the view that the relevance of class for behaviour has dwindled in advanced industrial societies. We contest this view by focusing on the subjective components of class consciousness. Using a national survey of Danish citizens, we show that individuals continue to hold meaningful conceptions of classes, to identify with them and, moreover, to perceive substantial levels of differences between them with these latter beliefs being strongly structured by respondent class identification. These results are all the more intriguing because they stem from a high affluence/low inequality national context that should be a particularly good case for failing to find such rich class perceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social activities define the place of a person in the society. Even small population groups contribute to social changes of an active and independent actor-individual in postindustrial society. Therefore, the work is relevant and rather interesting for research. The main objective of the work is research of the Tomsk Region from the perspective of an anthroposocietal approach. To achieve this objective, the author used interviews requiring close contact with respondents. In this work, questionnaires were applied as one of the components of interviewing. The sociological survey was conducted among the inhabitants of Tomsk and Seversk. The author found that men were more independent. It was also found that the value transformations were mostly motivated by the global trends. Considering the fact that the shift toward anthroposocietality (commonality of human being-in-the-world) is the global trend, the data of Tomsk Region may be interesting to other scientists for conducting comparative researches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creative practice is fetishised in the policy discourse of post-industrial economies as a driver of growth and social inclusion. Conceptually, we advance Lefebvre's incomplete rhythmanalysis project by combining the ideas of dressage and arrhythmia to give novel insights into contradictions within the contemporary creative economy. Our analysis shows dressage (practices learned through repetition) being used as a means to impose unsustainable ('arrhythmic') patterns of working within the creative sector. Cultural intermediaries, practitioners whose work focuses on engaging communities with the benefits of the creative economy, are today finding themselves chasing short-term, bureaucratic demands on their time, which operate counter to the rhythms of creative production. This paper draws on interviews and activity diaries kept by intermediaries collected as part of a large AHRC-funded project. We conclude that the rhythmic regimes being imposed on intermediaries by policymakers and funders are in fact driving out the very creative practices they are intended to foster. This contradiction has major implications for growth, social inclusion and wellbeing in an age of neoliberal austerity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As postindustrial societies become more dependent on technology, they also become encumbered by greater risk. With the mounting news reports of cyberattacks, a common reaction to these technology- based hazards is anxiety. Whether anxiety enhances or erodes information processing is a topic of debate in previous literature, and equally uncertain is whether mass anxiety facilitates or hobbles the public's ability to contemplate current events. In light of three theoretical models in the basic research of anxiety, we hypothesized that (1) anxious participants are less able to recall the information in a news report of cyberattack than their nonanxious counterparts, (2) they become increasingly inept at recalling the details as the storyline unfolds, and (3) this impairment is unique to anxiety. Participants in Study 1 (130 college students) and Study 2 (392 American adults) viewed a news story of a cyberattack and then reported their emotional states and their levels of understanding of the various parts of the report--except that the anxiety in Study 1 was naturalistic, and in Study 2, experimentally manipulated. Results from both studies showed that anxiety undermined recall performance. In addition, Study 1 found that the recall was worse towards the middle and the end of the news story and that other emotions were not significantly associated with memory deficit. Anxiety is discussed as a barrier for the public to stay informed about cyberattacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The post-office occupation of former cabinet members remains basically unexplored in both single-case and comparative studies. Is being a minister just a career tout court, or does serving in executive office facilitate movement to other positions? This article sheds new light on this question by advancing the theoretical development and empirical understanding of the various types of post-ministerial occupation. The analysis takes into account ex-ministers' ambition, political capital resources and the institutional opportunity structures that might well affect both ambition and individual resources. Additionally, given that access to executive office is profoundly gendered, the article addresses the central question of whether post-ministerial occupations similarly present differential patterns for women and men. The empirical results of a cross-national comparison of 23 advanced industrial democracies show that, for most departing ministers, serving in executive office is indeed a stepping stone to other positions. Post-office trajectories are not only shaped by ex-ministers' political capital resources such as seniority, party office, policy expertise and type of portfolio held while in cabinet, but also by different institutional factors that present country-specific combinations. Specifically, systemic variables shape the relevance of political capital resources and affect how ambition is constructed and towards which goals. Strong gendered post-office patterns are not found, although some intriguing gender differences are observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the impact of recent politico-economic changes on contemporary experiences of time from the perspective of the future. By discussing endurance, permanence, and sustainability in Germany's fastest-shrinking city, I present a set of future-orientated practices which are post-industrial, but unexpectedly so: namely, hopeful and not subject to the widely attested phenomenon of 'enforced presentism'. I subsequently position the temporal logics of endurance and sustainability against current academic responses to accelerated change, captured in the misleading uses of the Deleuzian concepts of emergence and becoming. My informants' epistemic investments in the future allow for a different understanding of what I describe as post-industrial temporal agency and the conflictive politics that shape these otherwise unexpected temporal relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the problem of social inequality in college readiness that arises due to macrosystem changes such as scientific and technological progress, postindustrialization and globalization. It cites an overarching cultural belief by Americans in the ability of individuals to forge their own life paths and improve their circumstances through personal initiative which assumes that a combination of individual ability and hard work is rewarded via educational accomplishment. It refers to commercialization as a response to higher education where educational institutions compete with private enterprises in the larger economic marketplace. It indicates that attention to the macrosystem allows grassroots microsystem pressure and policy-level exosystem efforts to alter social beliefs.

The contemporary American West is undergoing a round of rapid restructuring, which has been characterized as the shift from landscapes of production to landscapes of consumption. Here I propose that a more effective description of current changes, which allows us to retain focus on the relevant inter- and intra-class-based dynamics of an ongoing capitalist-Modernity, is as a result of the transition from the prior dominance of a regime of production/consumption of commodities/natural resources to the increasing ascendancy of the production/consumption of 'experiences'. The rising dominance of this regime is, in large part, the result of the locally dramatic in-migration by ex-urban members of the post -industrial middle class to the 'amenity-rich' counties of the region. This process of rural gentrification exacerbates preexisting social, geographic, and environmental disparities within the region, creating an 'archipelago' of changing communities commonly referred to as the 'New' West. Drawing on almost two years of ethnographic research from one such 'island' community in south-central Montana, I describe local-level change between the relative primacy of the two regimes of production/consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The digital divide continues to challenge political and academic circles worldwide. A range of policy solutions is briefly evaluated, from laissez-faire on the right to 'arithmetic' egalitarianism on the left. The article recasts the digital divide as a problem for the social distribution of presumptively important information (e.g., electoral data, news, science) within postindustrial society. Endorsing in general terms the left-liberal approach of differential or 'geometric' egalitarianism, it seeks to invest this with greater precision, and therefore utility, by means of a possibly original synthesis of the ideas of John Rawls and R. H. Tawney. It is argued that, once certain categories of information are accorded the status of 'primary goods,' their distribution must then comply with principles of justice as articulated by those major 20th century exponents of ethical social democracy. The resultant Rawls-Tawney theorem, if valid, might augment the portfolio of options for interventionist information policy in the 21st century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a case study examining the role of the creative class in urban development and gentrification. Citing examples from the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, the author discusses the impact innovative professionals have on manufacturing businesses and the economic growth of postindustrial cities. The role of geographic embedding among the creative class and differences in government policy regarding small and large manufacturing operations are also addressed.

One characteristic of the postindustrial labor market is the rise of the self-employed worker without personnel. These workers are usually not (fully) included in the welfare system against social risks. Most policy makers as well as social scientists are convinced that these workers want to develop individual risk strategies, for example on the private insurance market. This dominant assumption regarding their risk behavior has, however, not been subjected to empirical research. Through 40 in-depth interviews with self-employed workers in the Netherlands, this article examines their risk perception and coping behavior. The main conclusion is that the self-employed worker does not show the expected individual risk behavior. Exceptional behavior concerns the risk of unemployment. From a policy perspective, the findings suggest that these “new” flexible workers may require collective social guarantees in response to risks. Una característica del mercado laboral de la era post-industrial es el incremento del trabajador autónomo sin personal bajo su mando. Estos trabajadores no suelen estar (completamente) cubiertos contra riesgos sociales por el sistema de seguridad social. La mayoría de los hacedores de política así como los sociólogos están convencidos que estos trabajadores procurarán estrategias de riesgo individuales, principalmente en el mercado privado de seguros. Sin embargo este supuesto dominante con relación a su comportamiento de riesgo no ha sido objeto de una investigación empírica. A través de 40 entrevistas profundas con trabajadores por cuenta propia en los Países Bajos, este artículo examina sus percepciones de riesgo y su comportamiento para enfrentarlo. La conclusión principal es que el trabajador por cuenta propia no presenta el comportamiento individual de riesgo esperado. Un comportamiento excepcional concierne al riesgo del desempleo. Desde una perspectiva política, las conclusiones sugieren que estos “nuevos” trabajadores flexibles pueden requerir garantías colectivas sociales en respuesta a los riesgos a que están expuestos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An urban problematic is identified by reference to the essential characteristics of cities as spatially polarized ensembles of human activity marked by high levels of internal symbiosis. The roots of the crisis of the classical industrial metropolis of the twentieth century are pinpointed, and the emergence of a new kind of urban economic dynamic over the 1980s and 1990s is discussed. I argue that this new dynamic is based in high degree upon the growth and spread of cognitive-cultural production systems. Along with these developments have come radical transformations of urban space and social life, as well as major efforts on the part of many cities to assert a role for themselves as national and international cultural centers. This argument is the basis of what we might call the resurgent metropolis hypothesis. The effects of globalization are shown to play a critical role in the genesis and geography of urban resurgence. Three major policy dilemmas of resurgent cities are highlighted, namely, their internal institutional fragmentation, their increasing character as economic agents on the world stage and the concomitant importance of collective approaches to the construction of localized competitive advantage, and their deepening social disintegration and segmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various approaches have been proposed for allocating commitments to countries regarding the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions. One of these methods is the ‘contraction and convergence’ approach, which defines emission permits on the basis of converging per capita emissions under a contracting global emission profile. The approach is unique in its simplicity. Only two major issues need to be negotiated and agreed upon: the target atmospheric concentration of CO2 and the date when the entitlements are to converge at equal per capita allocations. According to the contraction and convergence approach, developing countries can continue their current emission trends, whereas industrialized countries should reduce their emissions quite dramatically. This regime represents a shift away from the current approach towards defining commitments for all parties and their evolution over the long term. This article analyses how allocation schemes determined by the contraction and convergence approach might affect certain OECD and non-OECD countries. Results for eleven countries selected for analysis (United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, China, Venezuela, Thailand, Brazil, India and Indonesia) reveal that trends observed in the past few decades in most industrialized countries will lead to the contraction and convergence target. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the authors' revised version of secularisation theory emphasizing the extent to which people have a sense of existential security. Topics include the persistence of religiosity among vulnerable populations, such as individuals facing personal survival-threatening risks, a comparative study of religiosity in post-industrial nations, and trends in secularisation in western Europe.

Examines the post-industrial economic status of the Soviet Union. Factors affecting the economy of the country; Reasons behind the nation's sudden change of social relations; Limitations of the perestroika; Factors that created the various definitions of perestroika.