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Javier Moreno’s “Residential Accumulation: A Political Economy Framework” does a great job at distilling how two opposite logics – capitalist production and rent extraction – are at work in housing markets. What I am missing from the framework is room for noise, for variation and variegation, for an ‘and+and’ story, for allowing geographical and market specificity, for different expressions of residential accumulation rather than the assumption that specific forms are the ‘normal’ or pure forms of capitalist accumulation. Many assumptions and generalisations are made. Some of these may be necessary to construct the ideal type of housing provision under capitalism, but there is a point where the ideal type becomes a specific rather than a general or abstracted type, that is, specific to one set of capitalist relations rather than generalizing from a common, or even majority, form of capitalist relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizational aspects, rather than technological ones, often represent the greatest barrier in the transition toward sustainable construction. However, despite sustainability professionals' recognized role in sustainable development, few studies have focused on such professionals' work. To understand the intrinsic influence of multiple institutional logics on the work and agency of sustainability professionals, we conducted 31 semi-structured interviews with sustainability professionals in Sweden's construction industry. Building on the theoretical framework of institutional logics, the findings show how sustainability professionals' everyday work, depending on the work conditions, is a blend of thankless, rewarding collaborative, and visionary work. In the organizational context of sustainable construction, characterized by dynamism and ambiguity, different institutional logics are combined in different ways to respond to shifting demands and problems. To maintain agency, sustainability professionals need to shift and balance their work depending on which logics are temporarily central. Showcasing how professionals cope with institutional contexts defined by multiple logics, the paper highlights the complexity involved in managing the vastness and ambiguity of sustainability and how it requires individuals to be both flexible and sensitive to the existence of multiple logics in their immediate context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The definition of philanthropy is contested with variations across time and global context. The article will centre on the Caribbean with its numerous identities to highlight inclusive philanthropic practices. Through an analysis of Caribbean history, theoretical foundations, and contemporary analysis, three social classes or ideal types are identified. These include 1) the colonial dominant, 2) the Black or creole middle class and 3) the resisters or grassroots/marginalized populations. Drawing on these ideal types, the analyzes three categories of philanthropic practice developing within and through the Caribbean, including 1) the philanthropy of colonial dominance, 2) philanthropy of cultural mediation and 3) philanthropy of anticolonial resistance. The Caribbean offers an ideal context for understanding traditional forms of philanthropic action and 'philanthropy from below,' highlighting issues of power, oppression, and social transformation that impact the region's ongoing development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The normative binary of 'good-progressive' and 'bad-retrograde' nationalism, traceable to the civic and ethnic dichotomy, is alive and well in studies of nationalism and populism today. This article underlines the insufficiency of this approach, firstly by examining three stances on the civic nation in the West, each of which rejects ethnic nationalism and reflect different fundamental concerns. Moving east, in Central Europe the binary is inverted and turned against 'liberal cosmopolitans'; in Russia, the Kremlin's 'state-civilization' project can be viewed as a distinct trend in nation-building for non-Western contemporary great powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction to the themed section 'Beyond Binaries of Nationalism' critically reviews the use of binaries in nationalism studies. It identifies a lack of precision in the use of ideal types as a key failing, and points to new conceptions and types. The contributions to the section question the reification of binaries, most especially western/eastern and civic/ethnic and their attendant biases, and instead emphasize a certain ideological fluidity in the character of nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Weber famously invoked 'ideal types' as an analytic device with which to measure empirical reality against some hyper-rational fabrication. Case in point: non-professional (lay) investors appear to be the antithesis of rational economic man. They have been cast as less-informed, less-skilled, and less-knowledgeable than professional market practitioners, and with ample evidence that they tend to lose money in the market as a result. This study builds the case that a new class of algorithmic financial advisor, commonly known as 'roboadvisors', enacts lay investors as rational market actors. This is achieved through algorithmic devotion to modern portfolio theory (MPT), which the roboadvisors embody, automate and perform, conjuring some version of homo economicus into existence. Through this example, I show how Weberian ideal types and the particular kind of rational action associated with them (e.g. the ideal type investor) become the very empirical reality they were intended to be a foil to – accomplished through the technological articulation of financial models, even in the hands of ordinary individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the literature by proposing a methodological approach that scholars in all research fields can use to develop high-quality explanatory typologies. We argue that every typology should be constructed using a systematic, transparent process and must have a strong theoretical foundation to validate its explanatory value. Drawing on Max Weber's typology theory, we apply our approach to construct three ideal types of vocational education and training (VET) programs. By bypassing heterogeneous context conditions, our typological approach enables us to compare VET programs based on the criteria that are relevant to an explanation of youth labor market outcomes. We build on Niklas Luhmann's theory of social systems, which helps elucidate the significance of the linkage between actors from the education and employment systems in VET. The first ideal type, with maximal linkage, entails equal power-sharing between both kinds of actors. We expect such a VET program to have the most favorable outcome. The other two ideal types, in which one system has all the power, result in either undesirable youth labor market outcomes, such as unemployment or skills mismatch, or lack of access to further education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that a focus on the idea of the "fashion city" can prove counter-productive in thinking about the relationship between fashion and urbanism. We suggest four provocations about the "hunt for the fashion city." First, we argue that the hunt for a singular fashion city is misguided, and seek to move away from a model set by a limited number of established fashion capitals. In particular we propose a "field" of fashion city types, an approach that both acknowledges the diversity of relationships between fashion and cities, and recognizes the different paths that cities have taken. Second, we ask for new maps in the hunt for the fashion city, seeing cities as nodes in wider fashion geographies, and arguing for more extensive and complex cartographies of sites and roles of fashion within cities. Third, we argue that the focus on the "fashion city" gives an inappropriate priority to fashion, and ask whether we are better served by thinking about how fashion works in imperial cities, authoritarian cities and neoliberal cities. Finally, we ask whether the "the fashion city" and particularly the relationship between great metropolises and fashion authority has a particular periodization, and whether our quest might shift in the twenty first century to think about the wider systemic nature of fashion urbanization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a hypothesis about how social interactions shape and influence predictive processing in the brain. The paper integrates concepts from neuroscience and sociology where a gulf presently exists between the ways that each describe the same phenomenon – how the social world is engaged with by thinking humans. We combine the concepts of predictive processing models (also called predictive coding models in the neuroscience literature) with ideal types, typifications and social practice – concepts from the sociological literature. This generates a unified hypothetical framework integrating the social world and hypothesised brain processes. The hypothesis combines aspects of neuroscience and psychology with social theory to show how social behaviors may be "mapped" onto brain processes. It outlines a conceptual framework that connects the two disciplines and that may enable creative dialogue and potential future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this study is to identify and describe the existing ideals regarding marriage or long-term coupling in Europe during the first decade of the twenty-first century and to measure their prevalence in the population. To obtain this broad picture we have developed a typology of marriages based on data from the 2008–2010 European Values Study and inspired by Louis Roussel's models. Two criteria have been used to classify evaluative opinions on marriage and construct the ideal types: the nature and function of the bond between partners. The first criterion, the nature of the relationship, differentiates those who favour an Alliance model (42.2% of Europeans), a Fusion model (38.1%) and an Association model (19.5%). In turn, within each ideal type, marriage can be conceived as being necessary or contingent. Combining both criterion results in a typology of six ideal types representing a broad spectrum; at the extremes we find the apparently outdated Institutional marriage supported by 27.8% of the population and an emerging ideal known as the Pure-relationship, supported by 8.4% of Europeans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary on Wu Zongjie’s article ‘Interpretation, autonomy and transformation: Chinese pedagogic discourse in a cross-cultural perspective’ begins by suggesting the usefulness of Wu’s polar opposite depiction of Confucian and modern pedagogy as ideal types for comparative exploration. It goes on to suggest that the term ‘modern pedagogy’ may need to be de-constructed, along the distinctive lines of rationalist and pragmatist epistemologies of modernity and the ways in which they have affected the development of a modern pedagogy over China’s 20th-century. Then, the life stories of three influential Chinese educators of different periods are drawn upon to identify echoes of the Confucian ideal type in their remarkable educational legacy, suggesting the continued dynamism of a Confucian pedagogy that persists under the surface of the modern epistemologies that have shaped the terminology of modern education in China. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article provides an initial step toward an explanatory analysis of the role of culture in social movements. It argues that culture shapes collective actions through three ideal-typical mechanisms: as problem-solving tool-kits, as scripts, and as instincts and taken-for-granted routines. While any concrete collective actions may involve the working of all three mechanisms, the relative importance of the three mechanisms in a social movement varies with the structural conditions of a society. In particular, actors in poorly organized social movements are more likely to follow certain cultural scripts or even their culturally embedded emotions and instincts, while actors in a well-organized movement are more able to take the cultural repertoire as a tool-kit to pursue the targeted benefits. This distinction sets social movements under Western democracies apart from many collective actions under more repressive regimes with poorly organized society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article opens with a brief analysis of key features of the Mexican semi-authoritarian regime. It then moves to a discussion of the critical realist positions and features that inform the strategic-relational approach (SRA). Attention is paid to social interactions and causal relations that enable the SRA to trace patterns of punctuated evolution and to highlight the processes of transformation. Since ideal types serve to highlight key characteristics in specific phenomena, processes and actors, some features of ideal types of the state and of the transition from one type to another are also discussed. In particular, attention is paid to the Keynesian welfare national state (KWNS) and to the Schumpeterian workfare post-national regime (SWPR) ideal types elaborated by Jessop. For it is contended that the specific features of these ideal types could be of great help in broadening the debate on economic restructuring and political reforms in countries such as Mexico. Moreover, the SRA approach provides an insight into the endogenous features of social change and stresses the importance of networking for a strategic agenda as well. For the never-static dynamics of the processes of change the role of situated agents in context is fundamental, as it injects intentionality and acknowledges the contingency of the conditions that surround them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two of Michael Mann's recent books continue his exploration of the sources of social power and then extend it into the study of ethnic cleansing, a phenomenon which Mann wishes to see as a potential built into modern political institutions, and specifically democratic political cultures, from the start. However, this review argues that the richness of the empirical material mobilized in these books makes them more nuanced and sophisticated than Mann's own summary of them suggests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do funeral practices vary between modern Western countries? In the mid-nineteenth century, managing the rapidly expanding number of corpses had to be controlled and rationalized, but this control could be exercised by business, the municipality, or the church, leading to three pure types of funeral organization (commercial, municipal, religious) and a number of mixed types. These institutional types interacted with wider cultural factors to create in each country an identifiable national solution to the problem of disposing of the dead in a mobile, urban, modern society. By the late twentieth century, a global demand for more freedom and individuality spawned reform movements, targeting a different bastion of institutional power in each country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]