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This chapter turns its attention to the social networks in which dancers are embedded. It begins by outlining the demographic and social context of the school before going on to explore the notion that the school is ‘like a family’. The chapter argues that women are central to the social life and hierarchies of the dance studio. It also considers factors influencing people’s experience of the social life of the school including the age at which dancers joined the school, their dancing ability and family connections. In order to consider the nature of the ‘dance community’, the chapter also considers the relationships between dancers from different schools in evidence at local and national competitions.

While this book is primarily situated in the disciplines of sociology and social psychology, this chapter introduces the hypothesis of a ‘field’ character of collective consciousness that influences social life and social change. The field hypothesis uses quantum phenomena to connect the human mind with its environment.

With the rise of social networking sites, many people now spend time with their friends in online social spaces. These spaces are used to support and maintain existing friendships, as well as to form and develop new social connections. This chapter explores how people adapt to these online social interactions, how they bring social meaning to those conversations, and whether people can achieve ‘meaningful’ support in their relationships with others online. This chapter considers the role of interpersonal processes such as ‘self-disclosure’ in building intimacy with others online and what happens when we disclose too much. The chapter concludes by considering what drives people to socialise online and what makes us so committed to our online social interactions.

The introduction outlines empathy as the essential building block of social life and sets the context for the book, describing its focus and aims. It describes the origins, journey and fusion of the author’s research and teaching in psychology and education, investigating children’s capacity to empathise, use and understand emotion, and engage in their education. The importance of conceptualising empathy with both affective (emotional) and cognitive (perspective-taking) components is emphasised, alongside the importance of visualising teaching as a holistic endeavour that entails both emotion and cognition.

The dictatorship of the proletariat, which is one of Lenin’s most controversial ideas, constantly changed with the development of revolutionary practice. Generally speaking, Lenin considers the dictatorship of the proletariat to be the social reformation enforced by the Bolshevik leader, and in a sense the whole society is the object of this dictatorship. Lenin’s conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat is based on the precedence of ideology in Marx’s and Engels’ formulations of the theory socialist revolution. It is also relevant to Lenin’s understanding of socialism. Lenin’s view about the dictatorship of the proletariat stemmed from the real situations that obtained in Russia. The agrarian foundation of its entire social life and the predominant ‘East-ness’ of its culture determined the grand scale of the Russian socialist revolution, and dictatorship was necessary for the normal functioning of the social experiment. It is thus unreasonable and unjust to criticize Lenin’s dictatorship of the proletariat from a so-called humanitarian perspective.

This chapter deals with the key question ‘Who is involved in discourse?’ It investigates participants, roles and behaviours, and focuses on the processes of indexing, inscribing and accounting in discourse. The chapter draws extensively on the work of Goffman and Garfinkel, discussing participants and actors in terms of their associated interaction and institutional orders and covering the relationship between discourses and professional, institutional and personal identities. This includes examination of Goffman’s notions of ‘front’ and ‘back’ stages of social life, and performances in terms of events, activity types and genres, and discusses actions, discourse types and discourse strategies, indexicality and reflexivity, and the notion of categorising membership in communities of practice.

Institutions are the focal points of social organizations that are common to all societies; they address the basic problems of an ordered social life, to which the differentiation of the major institutional spheres or activities corresponds: family and kinship, education, economy, politics, cultural institutions, and social stratification. The concept of institution, a main issue in the social sciences, has been developed in a number of anthropological, economic, juridical, political, and sociological institutional theories (Bumpass 1990).

Kennedy considers whether social media (and other) data mining can be used in ways that make a positive contribution to social life by focusing on two fields in which actors might think of themselves as ‘doing good with data’: (1) academic social media data mining and (2) data activism, such as open data initiatives, data art and data visualisation, campaigns for better data legislation and movements which seek to evade dataveillance. These groups seek to implement data-related arrangements which enable citizens and publics. Kennedy outlines some of the criticisms that have been levelled at academic and activist data initiatives and argues that, while there are ways in which they can both be considered problematic, they are not only problematic: they also serve to open up spaces for alternative and better uses of (social media) data mining.

One of the dangers of writing about innovative digital research is that, by definition, the field is subject to ongoing transformations. The pace of technological change is such that both digital social life and digital tools will have developed since the research reported in this collection was conducted. As noted in the introduction to Part III, this is further complicated when we consider some of the debates concerning exactly what is meant by ‘methodological innovation’. Wiles et al. (2013, p. 19) note that while some authors reserve the term for new methodologies, others such as Taylor and Coffey (2008) also consider extensions to existing methods as innovative. Moreover, questions arise as to whether these developments are innovative if they remain on the margins, or whether this occurs only when they have been more widely adopted (Wiles et al., 2013, p. 19). We have taken a broad approach to innovation by considering how the ‘mainstream’ — by which we mean established social science research — is being supplemented and extended by digital methods. As such, this collection has focused on two core points of innovation: the existing social science methodological repertoire and the conceptual mainstream or established social science issues and concerns.

This chapter explores the connections between neighbourhood features, intergroup interaction and attitudes to diversity further in portraits of five selected neighbourhoods. We use both survey results as well as empirical material from qualitative fieldwork to explore the ways in which residents see their neighbourhoods, and how they experience social life and their interactions with co-residents of different backgrounds. We identify features of an ‘intimate market society’ in two neighbourhoods where economic exchange and an attractive public space facilitate intergroup interaction. The sub-urban character of two other neighbourhoods is linked with a lifestyle that is less conducive to intergroup interaction.

Kennedy considers social media users’ perspectives on data mining and reflects on how they contribute to addressing the question of what should concern us about ordinary social media data mining. She reviews studies by other researchers and reports on focus group research which found diverse attitudes to social media data mining. These relate to a range of factors: differing attitudes to whether social media content is public or private and to the need for consent and transparency; the type of data gathered and from whom; the purpose for which social media data is mined. Across this diversity, a common concern about the fairness of social media data mining could be seen, which Kennedy argues is a form of contextual integrity in practice (Nissenbaum, Privacy in context: Technology, policy and the integrity of social life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). Kennedy concludes by arguing that future research into data mining would benefit from further engagement with concepts like well-being, social justice and fairness, in order to consider whether a better relationship between social media data mining and social life is possible.

This chapter explores the reasons the army originally overlooked the importance of the nineteenth-century soldier’s reading environment, and imbued it with growing significance from the late 1850s and early 1860s. It demonstrates that the efforts that were made to improve the accommodation of the libraries and reading rooms at this time shed crucial light on mid-Victorian notions of the importance of environment, particularly in relation to the recreational pursuits of the working classes. This chapter also shows that the evolution of the library and recreational system in the British army was crucially informed by recognition of the men’s own preferences and practices, and demonstrates that reading was for many soldiers but one part of their wider social life within barracks.

While the previous chapters focused on the impact of diversity on neighbourhood populations more generally, sometimes contrasting the non-immigrant and the immigrant parts of such populations, this chapter focuses specifically on how immigrants experience and perceive diversity. Analyses are presented for different groups of the immigrant population in order to gain deeper insights into determinants of intergroup interaction. Based on qualitative interviews, we outline the subjective experience of neighbourhood social life from the immigrant perspective.

This book explores exciting innovations in the field of digital social research. The growing significance of ‘the digital’ for contemporary social life is undeniable; nevertheless digital methods have yet to be fully accepted into mainstream social science. By presenting a range of work by social scientists from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, it is our aim to highlight digital methods as a valuable and increasingly integral part of the social research toolkit. They offer the chance to access, generate and analyse new kinds of data on the social world in novel ways and address new research questions, as well as providing different approaches to long-standing questions. In this collection, we define digital methods as the use of online and digital technologies to collect and analyse research data. Our concern is not only with research that explores online phenomena, but also with a broader interest in utilizing digital methods to engage with all aspects of contemporary social life.

This chapter focuses on the construction of Sarajevo’s Holiday Inn hotel. Though it would later gain notoriety as an example of a ‘war hotel’ par excellence, familiar around the world as the base for journalists covering events in the city, the hotel had its roots in the construction boom that preceded the 1984 Winter Olympics. Built to house dignitaries from the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the Holiday Inn was the city’s most prestigious hotel. The focus of the chapter, therefore, is on Ivan Straus’s design, the construction of the building, debates over its aesthetic qualities, and an overview of the role the hotel played in the social life of Sarajevo in the 1980s.

Based on ethnographic data this chapter discusses how the memories of awful deportation brought African migrants into Associations and provided them a real possibility to redefine their new identity. These Associations try to present, through constructed discourses and staging the dramas of deportation, a positive image of their members as the heroes who became victims of EU selfish migration policies. The new form of forced return is an evidence of a painful failure for all those who had once dreamed to reach Europe with the purpose of fulfilling their economic and social expectations. Particularly following questions are raised: (1) how did these Associations redefine the identity of deported migrants by denunciating EU migration policies? (2) How these Associations challenge the UE’s claim of human rights through staging their deportation ordeals? (3) And how their transitional status influenced their social life in Mali?

Educational alternatives are often based on fact that most learning takes place before, after and beyond schooling. This chapter recognises that, but focuses on exploring the world before, after and beyond schools from within schools. Three overlapping sets of alternatives are presented here: schools themselves, school-based spirituality and solitude. Here is an illustration:In solitude, in silence, this young person finds a space for lively many-voiced dialogue, for learning, for knowledge, for engagement. She has found a rich alternative to the typically busy and intensely social life of the school.

A key aspect of the WHO’s pandemic management strategy is the organization’s official definitions of pandemic categories. This chapter illustrates the WHO’s attempt to define the concept of ‘pandemic’ through its Pandemic Alert Phases. H1N1 was technically categorized as a ‘pandemic’ as a result of this official classificatory schema. The act of categorization was central to the controversy surrounding H1N1. The widely perceived miscategorization of the disease rendered the concept of ‘pandemic’, and the WHO itself, open to critique. Sociologically speaking, this can be explained by the powerful role of categorization within social life, and specifically within scientific debate. In theorizing the importance of classifications in the case of H1N1, this chapter provides an account of the function of categories, demonstrating that the WHO’s failure to effectively produce a robust definition of ‘pandemic’ within its phases was essential to the contestation over H1N1. The ill-defined phases were not singularly a result of the WHO’s institutional processes. Rather, the very idea of phase definitions was predisposed to vulnerability, given that the concept ‘pandemic’ was an indistinct boundary object. Furthermore, the scientific and institutional structures surrounding the phase categorization tended to produce simplistic definitions, which cannot adequately reflect the complex manifestations of disease.

This chapter begins with the object that has perhaps most frequently underwritten collaborative work (including our own) between the social sciences and neurosciences: the effects of the environment. The chapter thus analyses a series of conceptual and methodological developments — in both biological and social domains — that have created the ground for life scientists and social scientists to begin collaborating around the simultaneously cultural and embodied effects of living in a particular environment. However, the chapter warns against some vitiated accounts of social life that can emerge from endeavours like these — and draws on recent research on the relationship between city life and mental health to begin thinking about how rich, thick and nuanced attention to the social can be traced through bioscientific methods.

The sequence of the next five chapters — from casual leisure to the three types of serious pursuits — will follow the Huizinga/Caillois chain of theoretic development, as set out in Chapter 1. From the leisure side, this sequence reflects the deepening sense of reward that comes with participating in hedonic activities vis-a-vis participating in ones that are fulfilling. In examining play as casual leisure in this chapter, we will follow the list of the eight types presented in the preceding chapter. The goal is to look at the hedonic side of play, its benefits, and its ramifications in social life.

For a time after I left the youth clubs, it was difficult see beyond the emotions of the final days. My understanding of social life in outer East London was temporarily coloured by the difficulties of doing youth work in ‘the cuts’, and all that that entailed. It was only after going back over three years’ ethnographic material — field notes, interviews and videos — and thinking more broadly about Leyham and the other youth clubs that so many more voices re-emerged. It was here, by allowing the ethnography to speak, that my immediate emotions were contextualised and the many other positionalities that comprised the ethnography resurfaced. These slowly emerging positions were grouped into the chapters of this book.

This chapter looks at the relationship between apprehension, social invisibility, and political opacity. Building on fieldwork in Bissau, Guinea-Bissau, it illuminates the way people grasp the persistent political instability and uncertainty that characterizes the small country. Politics is, in Bissau, currently described as enigmatic and mysterious. It is seen as embedded in an environment of cloaked and concealed figures and forces that work beyond the control and grasp of ordinary people. The chapter clarifies how perceptiveness, within this context of enduring unpredictability, has come to be seen as a central social and political competence. The ability to see behind and beyond the present and presented has become a necessary power needed to secure one’s safety and well-being in a climate of insecurity. The chapter thus illuminates how people struggle to gain clarity and knowledge of the ‘invisible’ yet dangerously present forces which are understood to influence political life and argues that the prolonged period of conflict and strife in the country has generated a bearing towards the political, an apprehension which is simultaneously characterized by fear, interpretation, and anticipation. In conclusion, the chapter dwells more generally on the issue of social invisibility and argues that our attentiveness towards it is a foundational characteristic of social life.

In his influential study, The Culture of Time and Space (1983), Stephen Kern describes the period from 1880 to 1918 as one in which the relationship of time to space was radically transformed by new technologies, by scientific discoveries, and by the increasing rationalization of social life as a symptom of economic change and bureaucratic con-trol.1 E. M. Forster evokes this new spatio-temporal awareness via his description of London in Howards End (1910): The city herself, emblematic of their lives, rose and fell in a continual flux … This famous building had risen, that was doomed. Today Whitehall was transformed; it would be the turn of Regent Street tomorrow. And month by month the roads smelt more strongly of petrol, and were more difficult to cross, and human beings heard each other speak with greater difficulty, breathed less of the air, and saw less of the sky.2

For a great variety of so-called non-trade issues, such as human rights, public health, the environment, or labour standards, the assumption expressed by the negotiators by way of general exceptions enshrined in trade agreements was that they are different from trade and commerce and, therefore, ought to remain outside the spectrum of international trade regulation. The same can be said about culture in general and various cultural concerns in particular. However, the case of culture appears to take a more privileged role, which is rooted in the comprehensive, cohesive, and dynamic nature of the concept as it was also recognized by the Preamble of the 2005 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. This means that culture, because it can be understood to form an amalgam of experiences and problems of social life, constitutes the most comprehensive approach in various attempts to successfully tackle the problems discussed in the course of the trade-linkage debate (Garcia, 1998a) — a debate addressing various individual “trade and […] problems” as outlined above with a view of realizing the reconciliation between their respective policy objectives (Garcia, 1998b; Lang, 2007; Trachtman, 1998, 2002). This means that, in recent years, “linkage” issues have not only moved from the periphery to the centre of the trade agenda (Dunoff, 1998, p. 347) but also that the “culture and trade” link has taken an increasingly important role among them (Stein, 2000, p. 314).

In this chapter, I consider the moments during ethnographic practice when realities or meanings are ‘glimpsed at’, but are not fully revealed to the researcher. To do so, I draw on ethnographic research experiences during two projects conducted in English men’s maximum-security prisons (see Drake, 2012; 2014). I consider some of the moments during these projects when organisational secrets seemed to emerge but which could not be fully verified. In the closed, secretive and often paranoid environment of the prison, some aspects of the field can remain obscured to the outsider researcher, no matter how much time he or she spends with informants or observing in the field. The chapter considers the potential relationship between the conditionality of prison officer collegial culture and the emergence of ‘dark’ practices. It is argued that the deep, enduring tensions between care and custody, brutality and punishment that can accompany the prison officer role can also create structures and spaces in which hidden practices can be both exercised and kept hidden. A particular focus of the chapter is to consider the challenges for the ethnographer when only a sliver view of clandestine practices is obtained.

This chapter will look at the nature of communities that flourish through new information and communication technologies (ICTs). In its infancy the Internet was widely conceived as a terra nova, a wide open space where people could completely reinvent themselves beyond the stifling conventions and limitations of the real world. This vision of limitless freedom has turned out to be a chimera. States and corporations have gained a great deal of control over digital networks and the Internet has lost its feel of an anarchic, countercultural playground. Mobile phones, tablets and a growing range of smart devices, moreover, have woven the real and online world together into a much more continuous experience. Digital networks are not so much a separate sphere, as a multilayered mesh of communicative practices seamlessly integrated into real-world social life. Even so, the early vision of freedom and boundless possibility remains a potent ideal even today. This chapter will take stock of that vision as a species of social and political theory. It will raise questions about the expansive notion of freedom and authenticity at the heart of this social and political ideal. Communities mediated through new ICTs are not characterized by total plasticity and freedom, but by jazzy innovation — that is, by improvisations on given cultural characteristics and rehearsal of the basic virtues of civility necessary for community to exist in the first place.

From sociology’s beginnings in the nineteenth century, its task has been to solve the problem of a disordered society and to establish harmony and unity; that is, orderly normality: Sociology has, from its origins, been defined by its various conceptions of social life. These have attempted to make sense of those regularities of behavior that suggest there exists an ordered social fabric surpassing the impulses, horizons and actions of isolated individuals. (Shilling and Mellor 2001: 1) However, despite sociology’s ambition to comprehend the complex and changing relationships between types of social existence and ways of living, there has never been any clear understanding or agreement with regard to what normality is. This is well illustrated by Auguste Comte’s idea of the normal state, which helped to popularize the concept of normality without, however, offering a clear and simple definition.

In a recent discussion on the creative economy, Calvin Taylor (2013), a Professor of Cultural Economy at the University of Leeds, coined a useful reference point for many discussions in this area: ‘once more (with feeling)’. While neither directly discussing the debates around ‘cultural value’, nor, presumably, being a nod to an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with the same title, there is something in that phrase that seems to pertain to ‘cultural value’. The term has seen a steadily increasing usage during the twentieth century (see Figure 6.1) but seems to have reached a frenzy following the turn of the millennium.

On the day of his release from prison in 1990, Nelson Mandela read Ingrid Jonker’s poem The child who was shot dead by soldiers in Nyanga to the crowds who welcomed him in Cape Town. In the poem, the child becomes a symbol of freedom and defies death through living on in others in the quest for freedom, a quest whose message travels without restriction throughout the world. It is a poem that demonstrates how children are part of all aspects of social life, a reality sometimes ignored in circumscribing the ‘proper’ place of children.

Well into the 1990s, there was a remarkable gap between the potential interest in the World Rally Championship (WRC) around the world (huge) and the efforts to coordinate media production and sport promotion (small). In fact, as late as 1996, each WRC rally still had to find its own partners for the production and broadcasting of images, as well as for the promotion of the event. But then things changed dramatically and the FIA (Federation Internationale l’Automobile) was forced to take action. The initial causes of this change did not really have anything to do with rally. Sociologist Andrew Wernick published a book in 1991 called Promotional Culture: Advertising, Ideology and Symbolic Expression where he traces, ‘the unfolding relationship between the intensive and extensive development of the market as an organizing principle of social life, and the increasingly diffuse and convoluted forms of promotional communication to which this has given rise’ (Wernick, 1991, p. vii). This was as much a look into the future as an analysis of what was going on.

Entrepreneurship was one of the areas of social life that underwent the most dramatic change during the period of political and economic transition in Poland. Some early changes were introduced to the law and regulations concerning private ownership of the businesses even in the mid-1980s, but the real burst of entrepreneurial activity took place in the early 1990s. During last two decades business venturing in Poland had its ups and downs, so the question is: where is it now? How does it compare to other countries? What was the dynamics of entrepreneurial activity in the last couple of years? And what are the conditions for entrepreneurship in Poland? To answer those questions I am going to use various secondary statistical data. The most reliable data comes from the government statistical office, however, it shows only the basic information like the number of start-ups, number of discontinued businesses, industry and the place of start-up. What I am interested in is an in-depth view into attitudes and aspirations of entrepreneurs and not just the raw number of start-ups. The purpose of this chapter is to show the landscape of entrepreneurship in Poland. I argue that to fully achieve that the best way is to use the data that comes from Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM). It captures the additional information on the motivation for start-up, age, gender, level of education and other statistics of the entrepreneur.

Life in late modernity is characterized by rapid institutional changes and the concomitant detraditionalization of social norms. Social changes of various sorts (technological, political, cultural, and economic) have led to the teasing/tearing apart of traditionally held and often comfortable constellations, such as stable congregations of language, community, and identity, or other predictable ‘global assemblages’ involving the confluence of ‘territory, authority and rights’ (Sassen 2006). As a result, individuals find it difficult, if not impossible, to rely on institutional structures and traditions to help make sense of social life (Beck 1992, 1994; Giddens 1991, 1992).

Any examination of the development of the education system in Ireland and the role of women therein must take into account the role of the Churches and in particular that of the Catholic Church, which has exercised extraordinary control over the political and social trajectory of Irish society. Writing in 1998, Magray noted that ‘the Catholic Church in Ireland enjoys a relationship with the Irish population that is unique in the Western world’.1 While there has over the last two decades been a significant decline in the influence of the institutional Catholic Church across many facets of Irish social life, it still carries significant influence in Irish society.2

The study of globalisation and crime now forms a major subfield in criminology (Aas 2007, 2013; Findlay 1999; Hardie-Bick et al. 2005). One strand of such research explores how globalisation is reshaping crime, in particular the emergence of transnational forms of crime (Aas 2013; Findlay 1999); ‘as social life is lived transnationally, so too is crime manifest transnationally’ (Hardie-Bick et al. 2005).

By the early nineteenth century, talk of blood continued to do a great deal of work in giving meaning to political and social life in Spain’s American colonies. “Con sangre se hace azucar”—”Sugar is made with blood”: this was a saying popular among Cuban planters during the nineteenth century, and it grimly evoked the backbreaking labor and quotidian violence that made possible their extraordinary wealth.1 Those planters were among many Cubans who undertook a major expansion of the island’s sugar industry and enslaved African labor force just as antislavery sentiment gained momentum throughout the Atlantic world. By 1791, British abolitionists circulated pamphlets advocating the boycott of Caribbean sugar, “steeped in the blood of our fellow-creatures.”2 In August of that same year in St Domingue, the French colony less than 50 miles from Cuba’s easternmost point, a slave named Boukman led a ceremony in which he and his conspirators sacrificed a black pig and drank its blood. That event initiated an island-wide revolt that ended slavery in far more radical and violent ways than sugar planters and officials, and even many abolitionists, had desired.3 The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) facilitated Cuba’s global dominance in sugar production but at a bloody price, namely, the brutality elemental to slave societies.

In early twentieth-century Italy, cinema had already gained a place as a mass phenomenon. Around 1905 a capillary proliferation of movie theatres (Bernardini, 1981: 15–36) began remodelling the urban landscape, transforming the spaces of social life and redefining urban culture. In 1906 the magazine L’Albo d’oro noted that in Rome, after the opening of the Cinema Moderno, ‘movie theatres started springing up like mushrooms, so now […] one can find a movie theatre on every corner’ (‘I cinematografi’, 1906: 36), whilst in Naples novelist Matilde Serao denounced cinema as a new kind of ‘virus’ having a profound impact on contemporary society: Today cinema is the ultimate expression of Neapolitan epidemics and manias, the dernier cri of success. […] Cinema reigns supreme, ruling and dominating and bossing around and invading everything, society life, charity, the arts, the theatre! (Gibus [Serao], 1906)2

The emotions have not had an easy time with the social sciences. For most of their history, disciplines such as political science, economics and sociology have cast them on the subordinate side of a binary opposition in which they were viewed as the ‘other’ of reason and the enemy of science. However, this is no longer the case, or at least, no longer only the case. In recent years there has been a widespread re-evaluation of the emotions and the role they play in social life. This has been particularly true within sociology, in both the US (Turner, 2007; Turner and Stets, 2005, Stets and Turner, 2006) and in Europe (Barbalet, 1998, 2002a; Flam, 1990; Hopkins et al., 2009), where a vibrant and varied body of work is gradually emerging.

Globalization is a highly contested concept with multiple meanings. Since the focus of this chapter is on internationalization, as distinct from globalization, globalization for our purposes focuses primarily on interconnectedness between nations — as ‘the widening, deepening and speeding up of world-wide interconnectedness in all aspects of contemporary social life’ (Held et al., 1999, p. 9). Based on this definition, globalization has potentially transformative impacts as it is a dynamic process that can drive local, national and global dimensions of contemporary social life more closely together (Marginson & Van Der Wende, 2006). Globalization thus has the potential to affect national autonomy with some nation-states having more power and capacity to manage it than others.

In the internalization of what before had been pictured as external forces, psychoanalysis shaped twentieth-century western views of how the dynamics between self and other, past and present could be envisaged and negotiated. Freud acknowledged that psychoanalysis itself is intrinsically uncanny because of its capacity to lay bare forces in the individual that are the product of the bourgeois family and society, thereby rendering the familiar frighteningly unfamiliar and revealing the unfamiliar to be familiar. The uncanny speaks of a form of alienation that estranges us from our own self, its desires and fears, but also from social life in which family dynamics are constantly reproduced. It characterizes modern society in which agency and invested participation is continuously undermined while responsibility increasingly rests with the individual. At the same time the uncanny, which results from individuation and isolation, is an experience shared with others. It is for this reason that Royle interprets Freud’s uncanny as ‘perhaps the most and least subjective experience, the most and least autobiographical “event”’ (Royle 2003: 16).

In this chapter, we describe new research to investigate relationships, contraception and unintended pregnancies during the transition to adulthood. The Relationship Dynamics and Social Life (RDSL) study began with a 60-minute in-person interview about family background and current relationship characteristics. At the conclusion of the interview, respondents were enrolled in the journal-based portion of the study, which consisted of a 5-minute survey via web or phone and occurred weekly for 2.5 years. We begin by describing the prevalence and significance of unintended pregnancy in the United States and the limitations of past research on unintended pregnancy as background for our study. Then we describe the specific aims of our study and its design strengths. Next we provide a description of the young women in our sample, their relationships and their pregnancy intentions as of the baseline interview, as well as a summary of any changes across the weekly journals. Finally, we provide a summary of study findings that provide new insights into the contexts producing unintended pregnancies among young women. The results presented throughout the chapter are preliminary as data collection only recently ended in January 2012.

Like them or loathe them we cannot escape the people we work with. Working adults spend around a third of their waking lives at work, and much of this time interacting with colleagues either directly or virtually. Further, our colleagues can become key players in our social life, through romantic liaisons, family links, or guanxi relationships that bridge organizational boundaries. Our colleagues can provide us with social support and advice, but they can also be a source of negative behaviors such as bullying. Thus, while we may seek to establish relationships with our colleagues, these work relationships will vary greatly in how and why they develop as well as in the outcomes they produce. Workers will form strong bonds with some colleagues that are enjoyable and mutually beneficial, while with other colleagues they may form more neutral or even negative relationships, and may try to avoid interactions where possible.

On 4 June 1940, as the last British troops were evacuated from Dunkirk, diplomats were busily burning confidential papers on the manicured lawns behind the British embassy in the Rue de Faubourg St. Honore. One of those watching was Alfred ‘Duff' Cooper, the recently appointed Minister for Information in Winston Churchill's new coalition government.1 A few days later, the building had been emptied of people, except for two caretakers, and its furniture labelled and piled up on the ground floor, under dustsheets. It would be over four years before British diplomats reoccupied Britain's oldest and grandest permanent embassy building. Duff Cooper, who had the honour of returning to a liberated Paris as the British ambassador, was an unusual holder of that post in that he was a career politician, rather than a diplomat, and one with a mixed record of achievement. His passionate advocacy of greater Anglo-French cooperation, coupled with his and his wife's glamorous and sometimes controversial social life, made his embassy not only high profile at the time, but also much written about by historians since. What were Cooper’s achievements and how successful was his time in post?

The ‘As if’ in Simmel’s sociology and methodology is a term for assumptions known to be untrue or impossible and yet acted upon in daily life or used in theorising as useful, heuristic ‘fictions’, as if they were true or possible. We saw in Chapter 6 how Simmel’s use of the duality of absolute and relative makes recourse to the ‘as if’ device (not always labelled as such) and this plays a part in his ‘relationism’, in which fictionalism is nonetheless not at odds with strong conceptions of the ‘truth’. We also saw how Simmel utilised the ‘as if’ device when writing about ‘feminine culture’. The presence of fictions elsewhere in his sociology is seen in his use in the sociology of the stage actor of the dictum that ‘society can be viewed as if it were a work of art’. The wider presence of the ‘as if’ in social life itself is also a focus of the chapter. In Chapter 4 we saw that only by assuming a ‘juridico-social fiction does the practice of care for the poor seem to be placed beyond arbitrariness’.

Business analytics, in simple terms, is data analysis applied to business problems. While its origins and history are closely tied tofinance and other data-intensive areas of business, in recent years business analytics have moved into many more areas of corporate and social life. Along with this trend has come a closer connection to the traditional areas of higher-education arts and sciences. In this chapter we will explore the connection in three ways: 1. Business analytics techniques that are used to investigate arts and sciences topics, such as text analytics, music analytics, or living standards analytics; 2. How arts and sciences skills, such as good writing and creativity, are key to the skill set of a strong business analytics professional; 3. How business analytics, because of its close connection to statistics and computer science with overtones of social science, is arguably an art and science discipline in itself, as well as a business discipline.

This chapter examines feelings of belonging of lesbians and gay men in the UK city of Newcastle upon Tyne.1 In examining the experiences of lesbians and gay men of everyday spaces in Newcastle, the chapter is responding to calls made by Jackson (2008) to give a greater priority to ‘mundane everyday’ sexual lives. She argues there is a need to understand more about ordinary day-to-day patterns of sexual relations in which most people live their lives (2008: 34). Such an investigation allows understandings of why some sexual identities and practices are accepted, taken as a norm, where others are positioned as the ‘extraordinary other’. Similarly, Scott (2009: 1) states that ‘everyday spaces’ share the trait that they represent sites in which people do (perform, reproduce and occasionally challenge) social life, day to day. In looking at two key spaces in the city of Newcastle — the home and everyday spaces (e.g. the street, work, leisure spaces), I am trying to move beyond earlier work that has positioned spaces within a fixed framework of ‘the mundane’/‘extraordinary’.2

In the Asia-Pacific region, performances range from traditional Javanese shadow puppet theatre filmed on smart phones to Australian interpretations of European and American realism. Focusing on the region’s diverse theatre and performance from traditional premodern to contemporary postmodern forms, this book provides a view of Asia-Pacific performance that engages with questions of traditional cultural practices, modern dramatic form, digital technology and experimental and avant-garde practice in local settings that are inflected with geographic and cultural specificities. Drawing on sociological approaches to modernity that see the contemporary period as an era of new, alternative or ‘liquid’ modernity (Bauman, 2000) and on anthropological approaches to cultural practice that see an expanded role for the imagination in the social life of the present (Appadurai, 2005: 31), the book advances an argument for a regional, Asia-Pacific or as yet other unnamed modernity.

The foregoing chapters dealt with structures and activities of migrant organizations (MOs) in Germany, Poland, Spain and the UK that have been particularly active in relation to specific countries of origin (COs) of the migrants they organized. Migrants around the world do not normally act and live as isolated individuals, but make decisions and organize their lives in the context of social networks of families, friends and other people they can trust and with whom they share interests, values and challenges. Migrants frequently organize in clubs, associations and unions. MOs work as ‘intermediators’ at a meso-level between the micro-level of the everyday social life of individuals and the macro-level of societal institutions, political bodies and aggregated societal structures. Besides bridging and bonding in migrants’ countries of arrival (CAs), these MOs also build bridges and serve as links between COs and CAs and/or third countries and levels.

Several core arguments reverberate through the contributions to this volume. First, ‘ageing’ and ‘later life’ are fields in transformation, both as aspects of social life and as domains of academic study. Second, these ongoing transformations have necessitated the development of new theoretical and methodological approaches. Third, despite some notable attempts, a gap continues to exist between studies of ageing and later life, and the ‘mainstream’ of the social sciences, including discussions of qualitative research. Yet if qualitative research embodies practices that ‘make the world visible’ (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011a), then surely neglect of the social relations of ageing and the domain of later life impoverishes this enterprise.1

The second principle that defines fashion as we know it today is the principle of convergence. This principle means that fashion is characterized by the existence of trends, a feature that is mysterious and must be accounted for. Trends seem to be a natural phenomenon, but they exist only through the actions of individuals and organizations, and are ultimately created by them. As explained by French sociologist Guillaume Erner, trends are “focalizations of desire,”1 varying in scope and scale, which lead many people to adopt certain behaviors or tastes for a limited time. Trends exist in many spheres of social life and not just in the apparel industry: “These convergences of collective taste have, for example, led to the acclaim of chocolate fondant cake then macaroons, tennis then golf, hybrid cars after SUVs.”2

Independent, non-profit think tank committed to making European integration work. Aims to promote a balanced dialogue between the different constituencies of its membership, spanning all aspects of economic and social life. Programmes: EU integration and citizenship; Europe’s political economy; Europe in the world.