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Over a long time, a unique peasant mode of work developed in rural areas, which has been described in substantial detail by scholars including ethnographers, historians and rural sociologists. It was largely based on concentrating on the process and not the result, affirming work as such, cooperation with family members and neighbours, and work being embedded in a social context. This model underwent substantial change already under communism, but recent decades have accelerated the process. In the face of the structural transformation of rural areas, but also wider changes related to the sphere of work in late modernity, values once fundamental to peasants no longer play such an important role in the lives of present-day farmers. They have been replaced with other attitudes; different skills have become necessary, different attitudes have become valuable. The reasons for this include the fact that farmers realise that their children will probably seek their life’s path outside agriculture, and therefore they bring them up differently. The paper discusses not only new modes of work in agriculture and the system of values behind them, but also the sources from which farmers draw such new models.

Under President Trump, the Department of Education narrowed the definition of and protections for gender inequality in U.S. higher education (U.S. Department of Education, Dear Colleague Letter on Transgender, 2017). These changes drew criticism and concern for legal remedies for gender inequality. This study positions Trump’s actions as an extension of rather than a deviation from past state actions towards gender in higher education. Drawing upon Brown’s (Fem Stud 18(1):7–34, 1992; States of injury: power and freedom in late modernity, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1995) theory of the masculinist state, we examined how liberal feminists sought state protection through Title-IX and, in doing so, formalized state control over gender equity in schools. Using instrumental case study methodology (Creswell, Qualitative inquiry and research design: choosing among five approaches, SAGE, Thousand Oaks, 2013; Stake, The art of case study research, SAGE, Thousand Oaks, 1995) we analyzed campus housing policies and found three themes—segregation, visitation, and demarcation—that entrench masculinist state power across public, private, and religious institutions. We conclude by discussing the on-going contradictions for feminists seeking the state’s protection.

The ongoing massification of higher education has entailed a changing relationship between higher education providers and students. While scholars have been quick to identify the political implications of the quasi-market model for the student-customer, there has been significantly less focus on the role that advertising plays in facilitating a student-consumer culture. This article uses an analysis of advertisements directed towards potential domestic university students in Australia to explore how the idea of a university ‘experience’ and meaningful work are discursively constructed within late modernity. Many advertisements draw on existential themes of living a meaningful, authentic or exceptional life and finding a fulfilling career, mythologising the role of the university within an idealised social order. This study highlights the need to understand the economic value of higher education as embedded in cultural economy, as well as the value of this framework for researching student experiences and marketing.

Portraying a localised educational system as part of broader global flows of policy ideas and practices emanating from multiple sources – an eduscape– the paper focuses on family practices shaped b...

The study examines how a regional university, having recently overseen a dramatic internationalization, deals with the consequences of COVID-19, and how the students - many of whom are international and coming from the global peripheries - experience the pandemic. The study is informed by the critical theory of late modernity and capitalism - especially the theory of uncertainty and risk (Beck, 1992; Beck, Giddens, & Lash 1994). It explores the power relations of the communicative dynamic between the administrators managing the crisis and the students perceiving and living it. It is an early-stage research report, published days after a pilot study was run. A survey among international students (including local, tuition-fee paying, and exchange students) was distributed to obtain initial responses. The analysis is complemented by insights based on close observation of the unfolding situation and analysis of the documents issued by the university. The findings explain the uncertainty experienced by international students, characteristic of many CE universities. The study covers the topics of attitudes towards epidemics, information imbalance, perception of security, and evaluation of the responses. The paper concludes with an urgent call to recently internationalized universities for a recognition of the complexity of students’ fears.

The core aspect of the child welfare and protection thought focusing on the family and channelling community resources is that in order to preserve the unity of the family, it is necessary to widely introduce from the local community the services into the family’s life, thus mobilizing the internal resources of the family, and acknowledging parenting, as a social value. Integrative child protection is a multidisciplinary and multidimensional process. The research examines how the Hungarian child protection professionals in child welfare services and centres, child protection institutions and foster care system reflect on the professional work, and on the dysfunctions identified in child protection field work. I also examine how social work training and practice can help to incorporate professional values into field work. I analyse how social assistance can be adequate in general, and how social work became asocial in the late modernity and in a rapidly changing, unpredictable service environment. Podstawowym aspektem dobrostanu i ochrony dzieci, który skupia się na rodzinie i ukierunkowaniu zasobów społeczności, jest to, że w celu zachowania jedności rodziny konieczne jest powszechne wprowadzenie ze społeczności lokalnej usług w życie rodziny, mobilizując w ten sposób wewnętrzne zasoby rodziny i uznając rodzicielstwo za wartość społeczną. Integracyjna ochrona dzieci jest procesem wielodyscyplinarnym i wielowymiarowym. W badaniach przeanalizowano, w jaki sposób węgierscy specjaliści w dziedzinie ochrony dzieci w ośrodkach opieki i opieki nad dziećmi, instytucje ochrony dzieci i system pomocy zastępczej myślą o swoje pracy oraz jakie dysfunkcje identyfikowane są przez nich w obszarze ich pracy dotyczącej ochrony dzieci. Badano również, w jaki sposób szkolenia i praktyka społeczna mogą przyczynić się do włączenia wartości zawodowych do pracy w terenie. Analizowano, w jaki sposób pomoc społeczna może być w ogólnym sensie odpowiadająca na oczekiwania i jak praca społeczna stała się aspołeczna w późnej nowoczesności i w szybko zmieniającym się, nieprzewidywalnym środowisku usług.

The use of English is commonly taken to be one of the distinctive features of globalization and Anglophone cultural hegemony. Is the appearance of the fictional translator in English writing an indication of deliberate resistance to “the global parochialism of Anglophone monoglossia” (Cronin 2003: 60)? Or are these imagined translators weak echoes of the same ‘questions of colonialism and cultural hegemony’ raised by Third World postcolonial plurilingual writers, writing in the language of the ex-colonizer? Are these characters the authors’ wistful attempts to construct a bilingual conscious-ness denied them through assimilation? These are the overarching questions that this paper will attempt to answer by looking at the fictional translator as a character and linguistic presence in writing in English through an examination of Michael Ondaatje ’s The English Patient (1992), David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon (1993), and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated (2002). The presence of the fictional translator in Canadian, Australian, and American writing in English suggests that the agent of discursive migration is operative even within regions of stubborn Anglophone monoglossia. If translators are agents of change, how do they operate in Anglophone writing in late modernity? And why is their presence so often awkward, unreliable, and even painful? I will argue that the fictional translator registers anglophone angst in spite of the lan guage ’s powerful global influence and publishing power.

International audience; Various authors have shown how Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are transforming the travel experience to the point of undermining the original traveler objectives. Largely based on the traveler and technology relationship, most previous analyses have assumed that the changing travel experience is attributable to the ICTs. From a survey based on 53 semi-structured interviews, this paper shows the inadequacy of seeking to understood traveler attempts to disconnect from ICTs as symptomatic of the relationship between travelers and technologies. The authors content that it is equally important to understand travelers’ use of ICTs within the wider context of late modernity which has induced particular relationships amongst relatives and the deployment of ICTs. The article highlights limitations of previous ethnographic approaches in ICT studies using the example of their role in the travel experience.

The disruptive nature of the COVID-19 pandemic has created a massive shift in instructional practices in higher education across the globe. The impact of this pandemic on education globally has led to a surge in online teaching and the use of various digital technologies and platforms to support instructional practices. However, this world-changing event has foregrounded the limitations of technology in addition to other important indications, particularly as it relates to the notion of value and by extension value creation. Within the context of the Vietnamese higher education ecosystem, what is evident is that a re-evaluation of values is worth considering, in terms of the value of local higher education institutions, in addition to the value creation produced by the same. This article will engage with pertinent implications for the post-COVID realities which offer untold challenges and opportunities in Vietnam and elsewhere. Moreover, the post-COVID realities of late modernity only serve to accentuate the importance of values and value creation in this context as higher education institutions would re-evaluate, rethink, and retool approaches to instructional practices. A focus on questions of value aids in considering the broader conditions and contexts which support some of the fruitful and situated outcomes of higher education which includes human capital development, employment, social mobility and the production of modern social identities.

This chapter presents a theoretical framework for better understanding both the tension-provoking presence of lifelong learning as a concept of scientific debate and the (national) specificity of its development within different socio-economic and cultural contexts. We argue that the lifelong learning paradigm is essentially generated by the societies/cultures of late modernity. Lifelong learning is regarded as a sort of manifestation of the dedifferentiation process and the replacement of the logic of Either-or with that of And, as well as in terms of a concept which captures hybrid realities. The chapter also outlines the specificity of adult and higher education within the scope of lifelong learning.

Taking the analysis of the Finnish case of public higher education as its starting point, this chapter discusses the following issues: the change in the mission of the university from being a knowledge-oriented to a pragmatically ‘utilitarian’ institution; the university as an institution situated between its academic mission and its entrepreneurial function; the impact of the policy of market competition and accountability on the quality, production and creativity of academic knowledge; the impact of globalisation on the natural sciences and the humanities in academia; and the new power equation involved in the relationships that exist between the faculties and administration.

Este artículo aborda el fenómeno de la pos-verdad en la gráfica política de América Latina, de las últimas dos décadas. Aunque no es un fenómeno nuevo, ha emergido con mucha más fuerza, a escala regional, a partir del siglo XXI y con el auge de las redes sociales. Una gran cantidad la gráfica política latinoamericana sufre el Efecto Beck, es decir una distorsión de la información pública por acción de la simplificación en su proceso de comunicación, que conduce a las audiencias directa –o casi directamente– hacia el escenario tardo-modeno de la pos-verdad.

The rapidity and efficient use of most communication technologies remain the driver of accelerated developments across the major societies of the world today. This is quite exciting when compared to what existed in the past. However, current happenings indicate that the contribution of these technologies to sporadic development of nations is fraught with recordable socio-economic risks whose effect is unprecedented and affecting the nature of trust required for social continuity in human environment. Consequently, this paper considers the nature of risks and vulnerabilities affecting e-connectivity from a modernist theoretical perspective and contextualized this in the double edged implication affecting the use of the Internet. The first section of this paper is devoted to review on the nature of affinity between the Internet and crime while the final section engages the empirical analysis of secondary data on the consequences of cyber-crime to the global economy.

Wieland’s epistolary novel Aristipp presents a process of self-formation and self-regulation through writing and reading. The article begins by presenting the main characters’ modes of life as gender-specific paradigms for an independent life. The ancient ars vivendi is central to these modes of life in that it represents the practice of self-formation based upon the characters’ recognition of the possibilities of social influence. Wieland represents writing and reading as the key ways of training oneself in this art of living. The characters form themselves through monologue and dialogue. At the same time, the genre of the epistolary novel serves to emphasize the autopoetic dimension of speech within the process of self-creation, as well as the discursive character of that process. Thus, the characters create themselves through their self-representations and thereby reveal themselves to be fictional subjects composed of various quotations. Finally, the article outlines Wieland’s programme of self-formation and self-moderation as a counter-model to modern understandings of the subject. Since the eighteenth century, the self has tended to be conceived of as autonomous, authentic, original, and final. This concept has only come to be questioned once again in the age of late modernity, by critics who draw on techniques analogous to Wieland’s.

This article develops a reading of Don DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis that differentiates between two thematic and poetological axes running through the text. On the one hand, Cosmopolis explores the future-fixation of the risk regime of finance capitalism; on the other, it stages scenes of insecurity that physically threaten the protagonist and his world. Insecurity, the article argues, is a condition that throughout the text increasingly gains in appeal because it promises to offer an alternative to a world of managed risk. The concern with security emphasizes finitude and mortality, thus enabling a turn to existential matters that the virtual abstractions of finance have seemingly made inaccessible. While proposing an opposition between a logic of risk based on virtuality and a logic of (in)security based on authenticity, DeLillo’s novel also suggests that it is impossible to break out of the logic of risk management pervading late modernity. The appeal of (in)security articulated in Cosmopolis rather lies in the promise to existentially revitalize life within the confines of financialized capitalism.

In accordance with the pluralisation of life plans in late modernity, the societal organisation of care at the end of life is diverse. Although the public discourse in western societies is dominated by questions about optimising specialised palliative care services, public health approaches, which take into account the social determinants and inequalities in end‐of‐life care, have gained in importance over the last decade. Conceptual aspects, dimensions of impact and benefit for the dying and their communities are well discussed in the public health end‐of‐life care research literature. Our research focuses on the preconditions of a supportive caring web in order to understand how communities can build on their social capital to deal with existential uncertainty. As part of a large‐scale community research project, we carried out focus groups and interviews with community members. Through dispositive analysis, we generated a set of care‐web ‘ingredients’, which constitute and foster a caring community. These ‘ingredients’ need to be cultivated through an ongoing process of co‐creation. This requires: (i) a focus on relationships and social systems; (ii) the creation of reflective spaces; and (iii) the strengthening of social capital, and d) the addressing of inequalities in care.

This article aims to develop an analytical framework for understanding the context in which a process of de-professionalisation exists within an employment culture dominated by capitalism, globalisation and inequality. It specifically focuses upon experiences arising in health, social care and education sectors typifying that found within the British Welfare State during late modernity. Different theoretical definitions are presented to introduce an argument for a multi-dimensional approach. For example de-professionalisation may cover the removal from professional control, influence, manipulation or a destabilisation of a conventional mode of professionalisation and professional ties. Alternatively it may embody causation to appear unprofessional; or to discredit or deprive of professional status; also privately may be experienced as a weakening of status, respect or tendency away from a position of strength or equal status and be associated with measures for lessening the need for specialist knowledge and expertise. This analysis is based on a review of recent policy and practice evidence to support the notion that de-professionalisation may be defined through a lens of ‘cuts to services’ and job insecurity. It includes a case study covering the strike by NHS junior doctors which it is argued has had an impact on the image of ‘doctors as professionals’, resulting in a potential loss of public trust. De-professionalisation may be defined by financial cuts to staff training and through critiquing models of current training; or by a lowering of morale, a demoralisation or pervasive denigration of the workforce. Lastly this process may be considered as an outcome of low productivity in the workplace where a rise in low-skilled jobs becomes blamed for static wages. Increases in productivity come about as a result of deploying better raw materials, better trained or educated labour or better machines. Ordinary workers seem to have enjoyed few of the benefits of economic growth. Keywords: ideological roots of de-professionalisation; neo-liberalism, Taylorism/Post-Fordism; health, social care and education providers; service cutbacks; reductions in training; workforce morale and productivity

This article tries to explain the role of reflexive capacity among young people during transition to work. Specifically, four informants in this research are representations of middle class youth from Yogyakarta. This research applies qualitative methods and in-depth interviews as techniques to gather data. This article shows the relevancy of reflexive capacity as a form of embodied cultural capital. Young people whom possess high volume of reflexive capacity will be able to understand the shift of rule of the game in the field and responds quickly and strategically. Furthermore, this reflexive capacity is important as a pre-requirement to anticipate present and future risk. On the other hand, reflexive capacity is only one of entry points among other forms of capital because in reality, young people have to actively negotiate with multilayers structural forces which objectively exist.

Written in the late 70s, published in 1990, the Petits traites invent a new form. They are the peculiar solution that Quignard invents to break out from oral speech and philosophy, to assert the paradoxical muteness of literature. He claims to be a «misologue», but does not repeat the reflexive gesture of the late modernity. On the contrary, he points out to the necessary blind spot of vision and of writing. Denying any possibility of self-reflexivity, he favors a tragic speculation about the origin and about the void that gives literature its energy.

This article complicates dominant instrumentalist understandings of international student motivation by focusing on Chinese female tertiary students in Australia. Based on longitudinal fieldwork with 56 such students, it analyses motivations described by students and their parents in interviews, showing that these far exceed instrumentalism and engage tactics of both gendered risk management and cosmopolitan self-fashioning. Discussion of the gendered risks in post-socialist China that students seek to mitigate through study abroad illustrates the complexity of students’ motivations, and underlines the limitations of western European sociological theories of risk society which assume that gender inequality tends to decrease in late modernity.

This article approaches Adrienne Rich's late poems in terms of the shifting conceptions of the poetic “career” in late modernity. I argue that if one were to place Rich's late writings into the normative framework of career “fulfillment,” one would crucially overlook Rich's considerably beleaguered persistence as a poet of radical left-wing politics. Thus the idea of a “career trajectory” in effect too rigidly tries to organize what for Rich has become a melancholic commitment to a conception of poetic practice that has endured temporal dislocations while sustaining an engagement with the present. Focusing on her last collection of poetry, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve (2011), I reconsider how Rich's late lyrics articulate the desire for and aesthetic difficulty of what the anthropologist Elizabeth A. Povinelli calls the “possibility of being otherwise” under late liberalism. Rich's late poems thereby illustrate how late modernism constitutes an interstitial living or what Lauren Berlant has theorized as the “cruel optimism” of late-modern fantasies of the good life. These last poems face their own cruelly optimistic attachments to poetry's political vocation without succumbing to the paralyzing forms of ethical and epistemological violence that proliferate in the twenty-first century.

The environments in which indigenous communities live have been sustained through complex interactions over centuries. Since the advent of colonial modernity, however, these interactions have experienced change and risk. In education for sustainability, these indigenous environments can be read as changing social-ecological landscapes which both sustain diverse livelihood practices and exhibit the escalating challenges of late modernity. This Special Issue of the Southern African Journal of Environmental Education (SAJEE) focuses on the intergenerational knowledge and livelihood practices of indigenous communities who - often marginalised and facing ever-narrowing prospects of future sustainability - are confronted with an education system that is a relic of colonial modernity and devoid of any social-ecological heritage to which they can relate. Environmental educators and researchers are therefore asking questions concerning colonial modernity in current educational practices, such as: - What can be done to address the predominantly reified and disembedded curricula offered in school and post-school contexts today? - What is the value of bringing local, indigenous and intergenerational heritage and knowledge practices into the curriculum? - How can this inclusion be done in pluralistic and intercultural ways? It is precisely these themes and topics that are addressed in this Special Issue’s research, viewpoint and think-piece papers. Many of the contributions have emerged from an international collaboration around Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) through the ESD Expert.Net programme.1 This has involved exchange visits between South Africa, Mexico and India, which have produced research collaborations and contact with researchers from further afield – in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Australia and Norway – who responded to the call for papers. There is clearly a strong interest within the international academic community to explore the relevance of indigenous knowledge, in research and in education, in order to better direct human activities towards a sustainable future.

This chapter points to a recent surge of interest in the study of emotions in digital media and their multimodal expression in late modernity. The broad reach of digital texts in globally networked environments affords new meanings, and emotions are mediated differently. The chapter outlines and applies a multimodal semiotic framework to analyse the communication of emotions in filmic media produced by young people, including visual and musical elements and their interrelationships.

This chapter discusses the contributions of key members and affiliates of the Frankfurt School of Critical Social Theory to the theory of film. Central to all of these contributions, which tend to be based on some account of Marxism, is that they socially and historically locate film production within capitalism and the various ideological constraints of modernity and late modernity. Being highly skeptical of the so-called culture industry, which is said to produce ideology, the school debated avant-garde film practices, including montage. Walter Benjamin’s positive view regarding the key political role of film was subjected to criticism by Theodor W. Adorno yet influenced the artistic movement referred to as New German Cinema. The legacy of the Frankfurt School’s interest in analyzing ideology and the conditions of non-reified experience remains important to contemporary trends in advanced filmmaking.

This chapter explores how manifestations of heteronormativity in the research were nuanced and contextual but concurred with existing literature that notes its pervasiveness and invisibility and that it can be embedded in unsuspected parts of the curriculum. Reactions to attempts to interrupt it were similarly nuanced. I encountered strategies of contested engagement, strategic adjustment, avoidance, and retreat that represented middle positions between homophobia and acceptance, but these were no simple continuum—there was a concurrent intersecting spectrum between fractured- and meta-reflexives (Archer, 2010, The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity. Cambridge University Press, 2012). The chapter also explores heterosexual spaces that heterosexuals retreated to, which were explicitly spaces that, while heterosexual, were also pedagogic, where people could work through their understanding of non-heterosexualities and heteronormativity, including their complicity in it.

Ante una sociedad de la fatiga y el imperativo del emprendimiento de la modernidad tardía, pareciera imposible crear lugares y modos de resistencia en los que también atenderse a uno mismo. Esta investigación propone el estudio de la presencia imperante de la soledad en el individuo contemporáneo y cómo es representado en el llamado “novísimo cine chileno”. A través de tres películas, daremos cuenta de este sujeto tardomoderno desasosegado, atravesado por la contradicción y la ambivalencia.

En el teatro, los actores a menudo realizan rituales religiosos en el escenario. En este estudio defendemos que en algunos casos, como en Plauto y en Simone Weil, los rituales religiosos no son sólo imitados, sino que la estructura performativa específica del ritual realza la carga afectiva de la obra teatral. Para ilustrar esta técnica, aplicamos la teoría de la hipertextualidad de Gérard Genette en el desarrollo de un nuevo concepto de hiper-performatividad. Por consiguiente, analizamos el Rudens de Plauto y la Venise sauvée de Simone Weil con el fin de mostrar sus técnicas hiper-performativas para escribir rituales religiosos en el teatro, tanto en la Antigüedad como en la Modernidad tardía.

Risk in society is a pertinent concept of late modernity. Most elements of our social and interpersonal lives are in some way linked to concerns about safety, security and fear of harm. As a consequence, we spend a great deal of time engaged in emotional, physical and economic processes that facilitate our safety. Whether this be through purchasing anti-theft devices, or subscribing to self-defense training courses; participating in neighbourhood-watch schemes or altering our behavior to prevent susceptibility to victimization, all demonstrate an inherent pre-occupation with risk and perceived danger. The work presented in this paper offers an in-depth socio-criminological analysis focusing on the issue of citizens insecurity, and proposes an original interpretative paradigm emerging from findings on the INNES (Intimate Neighborhood Strengthening) European Project. A presentation of the idiographic and nomothetic motivations and conditions influencing and predicting social fears and insecurities over the last two decades is discussed, with the presentation of the new interpretative model, ‘Social Cobweb Theory’. This model focuses on solidarity and on the strengthening of intimate neighborhood bonds and argues that these aforementioned concepts function as an effective approach in lowering citizens' perceptions of individual insecurities and risk.

This article is presented in two parts. The first is an interrogation of the specific spatial practice of 'A Theory of Truth', held in conversation with the thesis that Reitha Pattison sets out for Edward Dorn's early poetry. The specific interrogation of Dorn's linguistic and spatial practice in 'A Theory of Truth' presented here will be braced against certain aspects of Gunslinger (Dorn, 1968). Furthermore, exploring how Dorn's language manifests a particular political position with regard to the enclosure acts of late capitalism, this article brings to light some tensions in the poetic relationship between Dorn and Charles Olson, and brings forward the strength of William Carlos Williams' influence on Dorn's spatializing tactics. The works of Christopher Beach, Michael Davidson and Sherman Paul are essential to this study. In the second, longer part of this argument, the way that Dorn uses language to manifest experience rather than simply to represent space will be set out, allowing a clear analysis of the relationship between spatial process in phenomenal reality and spatial processes in the 'experienced or imagined' loci of Dorn's poem. This part of the article draws in particular on the ideas of Lytle Shaw, Ian Davidson and Justin Katko.

Utopias are much more prone to realization than people would have thought possible, according to Berdiaeff. In the twentieth century, we have witnessed realized totalitarian utopias (such as the ‘really existing socialism’ in East Germany). In the twenty-first century, late modern, capitalist society seems well under way towards the construction of another kind of realized utopianism. Recent developments in today’s health care system (changes in the very meaning of health and care, in medicine and nursing, and even in the ethics of care) all point in the same direction: the growing hold of the utopian mind (the expression is Kolnai’s) on crucial aspects of human life and society. Must we not agree with Berdiaeff that insight in the new ‘realized’ utopianism should induce us to dream ‘of a non-utopian society less “perfect”, but more free’?

Contemporary processes of individualization push people to construct single-handedly their own identities. This urge runs counter to a fundament of sociology, which proposes that identities are social products that must be validated through social relations. Based on participant observation and in-depth interviews with life coaches and their clients, I investigate life coaching as a social institution that aims to resolve the paradoxical nature of the desire for self-creation. Locating life coaching in the larger identity-fashioning market, this article illustrates how the artificial nature of outsourced social relations reconciles two apparently contradictory desires: the “need for help” and “wanting to find it on my own.” Three mechanisms are involved: creating an independent social space where identities can be crafted away from significant others; deliberately deemphasizing the coach and intentionally underwriting personal authorship; and encouraging clients to root identities in the social world while promoting an instrumental view of sociality. The article discusses the blurring of boundaries between intimate social relations and utilitarian market logic, and the implications of the ongoing outsourcing of identity support that reinforces the privileged ideal of self-made identities.

The transfer of managerial control between generations on the family farm has long been understood as a critical and often problematic phase, with implications for both the individual farm business and more broadly, the sustainability of family farming systems. Drawing on empirical data from interviews with prospective successors and farmers in Devon, England, the article provides a contemporary analysis of the transfer of managerial control on family farms. Although in line with traditional conceptualisations, findings reaffirm how many prospective successors were delegated tasks of increasing responsibility, with limited access to the higher responsibility financial management tasks, an emergent cohort of younger prospective successors enjoyed a contrasting progression towards managerial control, involving varied involvement across all aspects of farm management. With reference to late modernity and the individualisation thesis, the article explores how unconstrained by tradition the emerging cohort described a wealth of off-farm experiences, including what the article terms short-term diversions, which the analysis reveals have informed and shaped their progression towards managerial control. In view of these findings, the article offers an alternative and up-to-date conceptualisation of the transfer of managerial control in the form of the succession matrix, before considering the potential applications and some avenues for future research.

Summary While the increasing awareness of risk in late modernity has resulted in the proliferation and complication of parental roles and choices, few attempts have been made to explore how parent education can empower parents to reconstruct parenthood and transform parental lives. Based on the results of a mixed-methods study conducted in Hong Kong, this article discusses the possible outcomes and experiences of a parent education program that aimed to facilitate parents’ holistic growth in dealing with the prevailing culture of intensive parenting. The program was composed of 30 h of seminars and workshops. The participants included 387 Hong Kong Chinese parents recruited from seven primary schools and 27 nursery schools. A pretest–posttest assessment survey and postintervention focus groups were adopted for the evaluation methods. Findings The quantitative results showed that the participants experienced an enhancement in confidence, understanding, and trust in parenting. The qualitative findings indicated that the program helped the participants reflect upon the meaning of parenthood, underline the gains and accomplishments of parenting, and adjust parental expectations. They could also foster parent–child relationships in accordance with their children’s developmental needs, uniqueness, and emotions. As a result, these parents were more ready to face the challenges of the anxious parenting culture. Applications The findings support the reconceptualization of parent education as a reflexive practice. Such practice can unleash parents’ capacity to construct knowledge from their lived experiences and reconstitute their reflexive and emotional selves to negotiate life choices among the diversity of options in childrearing.

Background: Recently, charity (re)appears in cultural discourse. It is no longer confined to (moral) theology. Objectives: The aim of this article is to defend the acceptance of charity as a major and fundamental category in the formulation of professional learning goals and in the transformation and development of curricula in higher education, using historical and philosophical arguments. Methods: I first offer a philosophical survey of modernity as instrumentalisation and of late modernity as where charity (re)appears. Then I translate this analysis into an educational challenge and its promising effects. The transition from a culture that hinges on strict instrumentalisation into one that opens up to charity has not yet been integrated in official pedagogical and didactical directives. Results: The philosophical exploration of the cultural field shows the possibility as well as a desirability of integrating charity in (not only) higher education. Though the effects of this integration can only be considered forthcoming, a promise without any evidence, this philosophical reflection argues the probability of positive pedagogical results. Conclusion: The reappearance of charity in culture urges education to also look beyond its modern formats. One possible initiative is the ‘insertion’ of charity. Reflection on a care experience is a pedagogically justifiable form of this insertion. What was deemed irrelevant, private and optional before becomes core educational challenges now. The new meaning of the world, without changing the world, is precisely this: let us keep teaching economy, engineering, law, medicine, etc., but always against the backdrop of charity.

This article in the form of “reflections” is devoted mainly to the image-building of Heidegger in Russia as a thinker of Being, a conservative critic of late modernity and a “post” philosopher. On the one hand, due to French post-modernism influence on late Soviet and post-Soviet philosophy Russia has developed a special interest in Heidegger’s deconstruction theory. On the other hand, the reception of Heidegger’s criticism of European nihilism, totalitarianism and machine technology as the manifestations of modernity has shaped significantly the account of the “political”. The specifics of Russian reception of Heidegger can also be traced in the rejection of strict division between the “core” of Heidegger’s philosophy and “accidental” conditions related to social and political aspects of his work in 1930s. The current discussion about recently published “Black notebooks” shows not only the fact of existence of a separate language of description and analysis in Russian philosophical field but also an original tendency to holistic consideration of Heidegger’s thinking including not only his existential and historical reflections but also political passages and criticism of civilizational discourse. In addition to the reviews of “Black notebooks” by N.V. Motroshilova, V.V. Mironov and D. Mironova in the last year’s issues of the magazine “Voprosy filosofii” there are earlier works by N.V. Motroshilova, V.V. Bibikhin and A.V. Gulyga related to the debate on Heidegger’s political and ideological commitment which are in focus of attention.

This essay examines the understudied relationship between T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett. In the first part of this essay, previous critical treatments of this relationship are considered and factual corrections are made where error has been introduced regarding remarks by Beckett on Eliot. This essay then explores Beckett’s treatment of what he identifies as two distinct versions of Eliot: the early twentieth-century experimental writer of such poems as The Waste Land; and the critic-publisher of The Criterion, Faber & Faber, and the producer of what Beckett labelled a ‘professorial’ approach to poetry. In doing so, this essay considers how the conflicts between Beckett’s rejection of Eliot as a critic and his more ambivalent treatment of Eliot as a poet allow for an exploration of the tensions that are central to modernism, and how this impacts the configuration of both Eliot and Beckett within what has come to be thought of as ‘Late Modernism’.

In late modernity there has been a massive growth in ‘new’ surveillance devices situated within schools. This paper explores the reasons behind this proliferation, considering the role of key protagonists and the promises made regarding these technologies. It is suggested that there is strong connection between notions of neoliberal governmentality ( Foucault, 2008 ; Gane, 2012 ) and arguments relating to increased security, improved efficiency, the desirability of techno-surveillance devices and desensitization to pervasive monitoring. In particular, it is maintained that the devolution of state power, the marketization of education, increased responsibilization and the nature of observation in the viewer society all help to explain the emergence of ‘surveillance schools’. It is concluded that failure to recognize these new dynamics may result in schools quietly, subtly becoming experimental labs and then junkyards for our surveillance futures.

Two affordances of digital communication technologies, persistent contact and pervasive awareness, are ushering in fundamental change to the structure of community. These affordances break from the mobility narrative that has described community since the rise of urban industrialism, including accounts of networked individualism and a postindustrial or a network society. In contrast to images of late modernity, which suggest that mobility will be maximized to the point where people are nearly free from the constraints of time, space, and social bonds, persistent–pervasive community renews the constraints and opportunities of premodern community structure. As a result of persistence—a counterforce to mobility—relationships and the social contexts where they are formed are less transitory than at any time in modern history. Through the ambient, lean, asynchronous nature of social media, awareness supplements surveillance with the informal watchfulness typified in preindustrial community. It provides for closeness and information exchange unlike what can be communicated through other channels. Social media and the algorithms behind them generate not only context collapse but an audience problem that, when managed through a dynamic balance between broadcasting and monitoring content, enhances indicators of awareness and availability of social ties. Persistent–pervasive community represents a period of metamodernity. It is a hybrid of preindustrial and urban-industrial community structures that will affect the availability of social capital, the success of collective action, the cost of caring, deliberation around important issues, and how lives are linked over the life course and across generations.

This article explores how serendipity resulted in one sociologist becoming a scholar of a minority religion of which she is not a member. As one of the early scholars of contemporary Paganism, Berger describes both its transformation in the past thirty years and her contribution to that change. She argues that contemporary Paganism, with its lack of rigid structures and use of virtual space to create a “disorganized community” with a network of interactions, learning, and sharing is an excellent venue for studying many aspects of religion, culture, and political action in late modernity

This article examines the current selective abortion of fetuses with Down syndrome and understands this phenomenon as a result of late modernity's concept of the good life being grounded in autonomy and a choosing self. In contrast, God's shalom presents a counter-narrative of eschatological hospitality. Ephesians 2:11-22 proclaims a welcome that brings those previously considered outliers into the “new humanity” of the koinonia. This essay argues that the church has an opportunity to witness to society's devaluing of persons with Down syndrome by intentionally seeking to adopt them into their faith communities. This approach not only provides a home for the rejected, but facilitates the church's transformation into a people who personify reconciliation and unity. The communities of L’Arche exist as embodiments of God's eschatological hospitality and potentially stand as mentors for the church in performing this radical act of welcome.

Using ethnographic method combined with analysis of primary sources like mass media appearances, song lyrics and websites, the article ex-amines ritualized self-injury in the Black Metal milieu. It ...

The paper seeks to understand the trajectories of students who defer entry to university. The study was conducted in Lithuania, a former Soviet Union republic. The phenomenon of a ‘gap year’ is usually associated with young people, who decide not to enter higher education schools immediately after receiving secondary education, instead they choose to spend a year volunteering, working or engaging in other activities. This article analyses the choice of taking a gap year from the perspective of rational choice theory, complemented by human development theory, which was developed by R. Inglehart and his colleagues. The latter theory allows discovering relation between the spreading of the gap year phenomenon in developed European countries and the emergence as well as development of post-materialist values from the macro-level perspective. The theoretical analysis is based on semi-structured interview data collected in Lithuania.

One of the most obvious objections to the hypothesis of a ‘risk society’ is that we have always been confronted with risk: earthquakes, floods, plague, cholera etc. And not only have we always been confronted with risk, one can even claim that in some respects our existence today is less risky than it was just a hundred years ago. The way to determine whether the consequences of a given action constitute a risk or a danger has to do with the question of who makes the decision. For the one who decides the consequences of the action appear as risk; for the one who is affected the consequences appear as danger. In Risk Society Beck speaks indiscriminately of risk and danger; in addition he points out the difficulties in connecting given risks with certain causes. In late modernity, however, we are increasingly confronted with new types of risk, namely ‘high-consequence risks’ and ‘manufactured uncertainty’.

Agriculture and rural life in late modernity food producers and food consumers living with nature? rural development, policy and civil society.