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Employing Bourdieu’s practice theory, this paper explores factors that influence corporate executives’ behaviour towards corporate governance regulation. Drawing insights from a weak institutional environment (Nigeria) and relying on a qualitative research methodology (semi-structured interviews with 31 executives), this research uncovers how nine nuanced situational and cultural field factors determine executives’ regulatory response to the severity of punishment, the certainty of penalties, and the cost–benefit compliance considerations. The study further explains how sequential rationalisation between the severity and certainty of punishment contributes to the regulatory apathy that executives exhibit. Theoretically, this study demonstrates how practice theory components (habitus, capital, and field) blend to establish executives’ regulatory practice.

Scholars have described how care cannot be completely commodified or withdrawn because it is a disposition anchored in the commitment to the needs of others. This article advances the literature on care ethics and inequality by examining how care workers resist and negotiate the rationalisation of care work. Building on ethnographic fieldwork on auxiliary nurses in Norwegian nursing homes, the study shows that despite care workers facing increasingly rationalised forms of control, they continue to act out of the caring self, which centres on the desire to give meaningful care. However, by addressing how power differences and ethnic stratification between workers influence their strategies of coping and resistance, the findings also illustrate how the most vulnerable care workers respond to rationalisation by providing efficient care – that is, careless care – to their patients. Drawing from alternative perspectives on care work as ambivalent work, the study’s main theoretical contribution is to offer insight into how precarious work contexts may pose a threat to the caring self, especially when inequalities exist between care workers.

Este capítulo se centra en la manera en que las representaciones ideológicamente modeladas sirven para naturalizar el carácter arbitrario del orden social. En él se muestra cómo la construcción de un jardín del siglo dieciocho empleaba una serie de medios para este fin. A través del uso de citas clásicas y del desarrollo de una determinada concepción de precedentes con asociaciones jurídicas, el jardín representa una determinada racionalización del tiempo, lo que además niega su propia naturaleza transitoria. Su geometría y óptica, ejemplificadas en su uso de la perspectiva, sirven a una racionalización controlada del espacio. En conjunto, el jardín no sólo funciona como una representación, sino que además opera como un instrumento para la observación atenta y experimental y de control de la naturaleza. El jardín, así como la forma segmentada y ordenada de la arquitectura Georgiana, se pueden relacionar con las contradicciones de una sociedad que proclamaba la libertad y la independencia, al tiempo que mantenía un sistema de esclavitud. El jardín salvaje deliberadamente planeado ejemplifica especialmente dichas contradicciones.

This study sought an insightful understanding of the effects of social meritocratic capital—an inevitable phenomenon/mechanism whereby individuals receive social recognition, respect, and other benefits due to their monetary achievement—on Southeast Asian migrant workers’ behaviours and their ingrained perceptions through investigating their life stories and inner voices reflecting the factors inducing them to participate in the prostitution world. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was employed to scrutinise the qualitative data collected from a series of in-depth interviews with four Southeast Asian migrant women in Taiwan. This study led to the following conclusions: (1) These migrant workers moved overseas due to their pure and simple intention of pursuing better lives for themselves and their family; (2) The internal factors (family reputation and wellbeing) and external ones (unexpected events and a meritocratic society) simultaneously pulled and pushed them, eventually turning them out of their normal careers; (3) They were stuck in the very depths of an extravagant but vicious world by the shock, even attraction, of “big money” characterising a meritocratic capitalist order; and (4) Innocence and ‘purity’ get lost easily, even unconsciously, in the social context of meritocratic capitalism and wishful rationalisation of questionable behaviours, flouting convention and morality, with self-sacrifice and compensation, and self-rationalisation.

The fourth industrial revolution (4IR) presents many opportunities and challenges in a digitised world of work. This paper draws on a systematic literature review of recent research published by accounting professional bodies outlining the impact of digital technologies on the accounting profession. By taking advantage of this work this study critically assesses the types of skills and personal qualities that graduates as future accountants will need and explores the implications for accounting education and university curricula. The analysis reveals that necessary skills for future accountants may be summarised into four categories: a) Ethical skills; b) Digital skills; c) Business skills; and d) Soft skills. The analysis reveals ‘adaptability’ and ‘lifelong approach to CPD’ as the two essential personal qualities for future accountants. The practical implications for university accounting education are summarised in a proposed conceptual framework. The proposed conceptual framework: 1) acts as a roadmap for universities to align their accounting curricula with the developments in professional body syllabi; 2) helps university accounting education teachers to update, enrich, and refocus their teaching and learning approach to the requirements of the 4IR; and 3) promotes the coordination and rationalisation of the skills and personal qualities currently pursued by employability agendas at university, course, and module levels.

Contemporary thinkers are pessimistic about the endurance of transnational communities. The deviant case of the century-and-a-half-old transnational Esperanto community features a process that can explain transnational community survival: rationalization. Rationalization manifests in Esperantists reproducing a form of community logic integrating symbols, principles (justifications, values, etc.), communication practices and technologies, and organization centered on the Esperanto language. The Esperanto language and community logic enable unifying Esperanto activities across space and time. The Esperanto case suggests that community rationalization and language rationalization – an element thereof – are global phenomena integral to modernity. Having affected communities and language too, rationalization as a global process appears to be more extensive than previously suggested. Transnational communities can endure as manifestations of a global community institutional order organizing social life alongside but largely independently of nation-states, science, professions, and religion.

This chapter analyses the impact of the spatial dimension further and connect the spatial dimension to a form of rationalisation of transport planning that has been very influential in Swedish transport planning. The theoretical starting point for this chapter is threefold. First, the chapter builds on the production of space by Lefebvre. Second, the rationalisation of the social sciences (Marcuse and Flyvbjerg) is connected to the development of transport planning as a rational profession. Third, the concept of urban space wars is used to theorise on the effects of this kind of rationalisation (Bauman). Through this theorisation of space and transport planning an entity into the field of the marginalisation of cycling is developed. From that starting point the Swedish transport and urban planning system is analysed. Through the analysis and the connections to the theoretical framework of this chapter it is shown that Swedish transport and urban planning operate on very rational levels that marginalise cycling in many cities around Sweden. Moreover, it is shown that this rational planning has created urban spaces and infrastructures, which marginalise cycling in several ways and make it hard to use the bicycle for transport in everyday urban life in Sweden.

The simulation of educational practices in the higher education is analysed taking into account the interviews with lecturers and students of Moscow universities (October 2018 to May 2019). Taking into account the analysis of conditions for simulating educational practices the author comes to following conclusion: the growth rate of simulating educational practices is a result of modernising content and structure of higher education in Russia, establishing its model, which includes state and market regulation. Higher education without sufficient financial, material, technical, human and other resources leads to simulating educational practices. Such imitation of educational practices by lecturers under current conditions implies, first, streamlining activities, and, second, reacting to their heavy workload. At the same time, it has been revealed that lecturers sabotage the policy of retaining students. The sabotage implies accurate execution of professional responsibilities and avoiding formalism. Simulating educational practices by students includes, first, rationalisation of educational sphere and, second, more or less regular confirming their social status and reaching their aim, i.e. diploma of higher education. The perception of simulating practices by lecturers is contradictory, as they admit the fact of imitation and define its forms, but deny the deviant or delinquent nature of the notion. Students generally admit simulating educational practices and understand its deviant or delinquent nature.

AI algorithms today generate creative decisions, such as on note, word or paint placement, out of processing a dataset it receives and, most significantly, in ways not entirely understandable to humans. Where we can thus say AI is being ‘creative’, how, then, may we understand so critical a touchstone of humanness when its creativity seemingly manifests with opacity and unintelligibility? This chapter draws from rationalisations of media to propose a framework of de-familiarisation for the paradoxical task of rationalising technology on its own terms, rather than in comparisons against human abilities. This framework will be analogised out of theorisations of the marionette by Herbert von Kleist (1810) and of the camera via Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov’s (1923) writings on cinema. It will then be applied to re-think creative AI via the case study of AlphaGo, which made history in 2015 by becoming the first computer programme to beat a human professional player at the game Go. This alternative approach to understanding algorithms thus suggests a different dimension to understanding AI – not one made on human terms, but as a paradoxically impossible approach of the algorithmic being humanly intelligible on its own terms.

This chapter discusses the political and social contexts of understanding boundaries and borders and the philosophical understanding of categories of thinking as containers and a critique of the geometrisation and rationalisation of the experience of space It discusses a feminist critique of the involvement of depth psychology in maintaining traditional, societal discourses and a psychotherapeutic analysis of the defensiveness of psychotherapy as a discipline. The chapter discusses the shadows of the containing space that reveal some of its negative aspects or possible implications. The psyche-house as described by psychoanalysis has a structure, including the walls and layers. The individual came to be seen as possibly spatially ‘containable’, and this was established as the main aim of psychotherapeutic work. For successful and effective psychotherapeutic work, impingements may be as important as boundaries. For instance, some unplanned changes and unexpected events may bring surprisingly good results for the treatment.

The determination of the objectives of vocational education and training has always been characterised by the tension between the educational objectives aimed at the development of the personality and qualification requirements of the world of work and the (training) objectives derived from these. In the vocational education discussion, a large number of attempts can be made to resolve this tension in the form of a holistic vocational training concept (Heid, 1999; Ott, 1998). The tradition of mastery (in the broader sense) is often referred to as an example of holistic vocational training. Richard Sennett has examined the social-historical and philosophical roots of mastery in his book Handwerk and has attributed it a significance that goes far beyond institutionalised craftsmanship by opposing mastery to the world of fragmented skills (Sennett, 2008). The emphatic formula of ‘education in the medium of occupation’ probably best represents the ever-new attempts to reconcile education and qualification (Blankertz, 1972). With his deskilling thesis, Harry Braverman classifies such attempts as idealistic misconceptions of reality in the work environment, which is based on the principle of deskilling, at least in industrial work with its processes of the progressive mechanisation of human labour—and subject to the conditions of capitalist value realisation (Braverman, 1974). In the sociological studies initiated by the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training Research (BBF) in 1969 on changes in qualification requirements in industrial technical work, the authors confirm this thesis or modify it to form the so-called polarisation thesis, according to which the larger number of those deskilled is contrasted by the smaller number of those more highly qualified: the winners of rationalisation (Baethge et al., 1976; Kern & Schumann, 1970). This stance can occasionally be found in more recent contributions to the discussion. Nico Hirtt sees the Anglo-Saxon tradition of ‘competency-based education’ as an expression of the ‘marketisation of education’ and as a response to a technologically and economically induced ‘low skilled work force’ (Hirtt, 2011, 172).

The objective of this chapter is to provide an overview to workplace innovation research and to rationalise the book’s focus. Growth trajectories and key knowledge clusters were uncovered by a citation network generated from 144 workplace innovation publications sourced from a systematic literature search executed in the Scopus database. The analysis identified the presence of six main knowledge clusters residing in leadership and organisational culture; forms of work organisation and quality of work; employee participation; occupational stress; occupational safety including health innovation and innovation in the social aspects of organisation. Future research areas were suggested in terms of level of analysis in research designs, organisational behaviour and practice, research contexts and research design methods. These provided the rationalisation of the book’s focus which is organised under the following six areas: workplace innovation in contexts, determinants, processes, outcomes, transformations and ecosystems.

In mathematics education, there is general agreement regarding the significance of mathematical literacy (also quantitative literacy or numeracy) for informed citizenship, which often requires evaluating the use of numbers in public policy discourse. We hold that such an evaluation must accommodate the necessarily fragile relation between the information that numbers are taken to carry and the policy decisions they are meant to support. In doing so, attention needs to be paid to differences inhowthat relation is formed. With this in mind, we investigated a public discourse that heavily relied on numbers in the context of introducing, maintaining, and easing the rules and regulations directed to contain the spread of the virus SARS-CoV-2 during the first epidemic wave of COVID-19 in Germany with its peak in early April 2020. We used a public-service broadcasting outlet as data. Our theoretical stance is affiliated with post-structuralist discourse theory. As an outcome, we identified four major related strategies of using numbers, which we namedrationalisation,contrast,associationandrecharging. In our view explicit attention to these strategies as well as identifying new ones can aid the task of furthering critical mathematical literacy.

The aim of this chapter will be to employ a Strategy as Practice (SasP) perspective to consider the organisation’s ‘Asset Optimisation Process’ (AOP). The AOP process was a rationalisation of products and production capacity that was conducted within the organisation. The rationalisation outcome was delayed, subverted and reconfigured by networks of middle managers, trade unions and other actors. The chapter will draw upon and inform SasP literature (e.g., Nicolini, Organization Studies, 30(12), 1391–1418, 2009, Practice theory, work, and organization: An introduction, Oxford University Press; Whittington, Long Range Planning, 29(5), 731–735, 1996, Organization Studies, 27(5), 613–634, 2006) and combine Actor-Network Theory perspectives with SasP (see Nicolini 2012). By using ethnography in an insider account the chapter will demonstrate how practices are constructed and deployed as well as how a SasP perspective can be applied by researchers in other organisational settings.

Several religious and theological approaches to culture in African studies have assessed the idea of inculturation as a helpless incorporation of cultural values from one culture into another. We showed in this article that this is a limited perspective to the process of inculturation, and that this limitation is the reason for the failure of several attempts at inculturation. We assessed inculturation from the angle of marketisation of cultures, and we argued that the adoption or adaptation of cultural elements from one culture into another should be an agentic rationalisation process. The article demonstrated that the rationalisation process is validated by pre-adoption pragmatic experiences or expectations such that the feature(s) being adopted has either initially proven – or at least is expected – to be more useful than what it is meant to replace or enhance. We concluded that a rationalisation approach to inculturation is based on an initial recognition of conceptual entities and practices, the need to adopt them, and a follow-up justification for this need. Without such perspective, an inculturation effort will not be successfully completed, sustainable or mutually respectful. Contribution: Our primary contribution is that we tried to provide broad, agentic, rational approach to inculturation. This contribution is important in sub-fields of Christian Church History and Philosophy of Religion. It properly aligns with this journal’s focus on history of religions, as well as phenomenology, and philosophy of religion(s).

Introduction This study examines how dentists experience the corporatisation of dentistry and the impacts of rationalisation. The emergence of corporate dentistry in the early twenty-first century has introduced greater competition into the dental marketplace. Ritzer's theory of 'McDonaldisation' explores the rationalisation of services through corporatisation and provides an apt framework with which to understand the qualitative insights gathered through this project.Methods Semi-structured interviews and reflective journals were used to collect insights from dentists who were working in private practice. Data were then subjected to thematic analysis.Results A total of 20 private dentist participants provided 22 separate interviews and multiple reflective accounts. Following analysis, three key themes emerged: 1) opportunities provided by corporate dentistry; 2) balance between professionalism and commercialism in corporate dentistry; and 3) competition between independent and corporate dentistry.Conclusions The participants' insights demonstrate how Ritzer's four dimensions of rationalisation - efficiency, predictability, calculability and control - have been encapsulated by corporate dentistry in Australia. Corporate interests in Australian dentistry are perceived to improve competition and offer opportunities for younger and less experienced dentists, but the findings also suggest that those leading corporate dentistry need to ensure that rationalisation does not diminish the caring relationship between dentists and patients.

Calls for action on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) have existed almost as early as the discovery of penicillin and the sulpha drugs. Since then solutions to AMR have circled around the development of new antimicrobials and the rationalisation of their use via various configurations of regulation of access and distribution, promotion of diagnostics and education of prescribers and consumers. Research by historians and social scientists (HSS) are increasingly demonstrating the various limitations and unintended consequences of many of these approaches, while also seeking to propose not only different ways to study AMR as a problem, but also address it. Part of this, involves serious engagement with microbiological insights (i.e. related to the microbiome) and methods to move beyond the impasses of outdated concepts (e.g. germ theory), methodological reductionism and disciplinary boundaries. Based on our empirical research on AMR and human microbiome science, we demonstrate how AMR is a transdisciplinary problem requiring contributions from HSS’s research and expertise in order to devise socially meaningful and microbiologically effective solutions. We have identified four areas where such contributions would be beneficial: (1) policies (e.g. AMR policies still assume germ theory and operate within silos); (2) AMR solutions are human centred (i.e. neglect of the microbiome and pay limited attention to other nonhumans) vs one health; (3) epidemiological variables and microbiological discourse (i.e. often employ outdated anthropological and philosophical concepts, such as westernised, modern, traditional); (4) Rhetorics and lexicon (i.e. can be morally and conceptually simplistic, like ‘war’, ‘sweets’, ‘good’/’bad’ bugs, ‘irrational’).

This chapter introduces the background and rationale for the book, through the application of salient concepts, ideas and preceding scholarship used in the framing of the study of religion, society and state. It is broadly about the transformation of Islam in contemporary society, enabled by the state. It explores key concepts of bureaucratisation, rationalisation and disenchantment; notions of bureaucratic power, secularism and modernity; and the oscillating nature of enchantment and disenchantment in religious expression. Epistemic concepts on bureaucratisation clarify debates about whether what is occurring in many Muslim-majority societies today is the disenchantment of religious life rather than a profession of non-rational religious faith. The chapter elucidates how the notions of disenchantment and secularisation can be used to study Muslim social life in Malaysia by employing Weberian constructs with respect to extensive processes of rationalisation and de-personalisation through religion. In its deeper, popular and everyday significance, disenchantment is not only about a condition of discontentment and disillusionment but also about the acquiescence and acceptance of those under the dominance of a specific form of power—the Divine Bureaucracy, which is the main focus of the book. A summary of subsequent chapters of the book is included here, all alluding to a sense that bureaucratic Islam may not merely be a variant of religious faith, but is the definitive Islam in the modern lives of Muslims.

This paper explores a bottom-up way to speculate towards future smart cities by inviting residents of Copenhagen, Denmark to participate in sensing activities. It illustrates how the idea of “design things” could support bottom-up citizen participation in a smart city. It uses a research through design approach, deploying a wearable air quality sensor to three Copenhageners. By investigating citizens’ perception of the city through this prototype, we illustrate a possible path for engagement in the development of future smart city technologies that offer a greater sense of influence and relevance for residents. Further, citizen participation in sensing activities provides a route to different understandings of smart cities: as a place for people and participation instead of for data and rationalisation.

This paper presents one of the first theoretical interventions that apply a perspective of everyday urbanism to the research of (internal) migrants in reform-era urban China. Theoretically, the paper draws on two approaches that theorise the multifaceted relationships between everyday life and capitalist urbanization. The first, informed by Lefebvre's works, stresses the alienation of everyday life and the rationalisation of urban spaces, while asserting that everyday life contains the seeds of resistance to the colonising logics of capitalism. In the second approach, everyday urban practices are analysed in terms of a transversal logic to the state regime and the formal economy, or as the provisional intersections of heterogeneous social and material conditions that generate contingent outcomes and possibilities. Based on these theoretical premises, the paper develops a reinterpretation of existing literatures on migrants in China to see how a perspective of everyday urbanism enables us to rethink this field. The paper concludes by proposing everyday urbanism as a new frontier for research, and several ways in which future works can enrich our understandings of migrant lives, spaces and communities by engaging with this perspective.

espanolScientific management is often summarized to the rationalization of work and to the separation between conception and execution. Nevertheless, an attentive reading of Taylors's texts allow us to handle an hermeneutic job that emphasizes the unexpected foundations of taylorian project: the exception principle, the political will to cooperate, the theological category of friendship. francaisL’on resume de facon coutumiere le management scientifique de Taylor a la rationalisation du travail ainsi qu’a une organisation qui separe la conception de l’execution. Toutefois une lecture attentive du texte taylorien permet d’engager un travail hermeneutique qui met a jour les fondements insoupconnes de la doctrine taylorienne : le principe d’exception, le projet politique de cooperation, la categorie theologique de l’amitie.

This study explores identity-related issues ensuing from the behavioral choices of a professional accountant who was convicted for defrauding clients of money entrusted to him. It is grounded in da...

Social work has been confronted with a belief that a more rationalised social work will lead to a more effective practice as well as prevent harm to children. However, there is little or no empiric...

Hyde claims that the trickster spirit is necessary for the renewal of culture, and that he lives only in the ‘complex terrain of polytheism’. Fortunately for those of us in monotheistic cultures, Weber gives reasons for thinking that polytheism is making a return, albeit in a new, disenchanted form. The plan of this paper is to elaborate some basic notions from Weber (rationalisation, disenchantment, bureaucracy), to explore Hyde’s thesis in more detail and then to take up the question of the plurality of spirits both around and within us and whether the trickster is one of them. Weber has three roles in this argument. First, he theorises rationalisation, disenchantment and bureaucracy; second, he offers an argument that in a certain sense polytheism is returning (if it ever went away); and third, he presents a way to translate the mytho-poetic register in which Hyde works into terms acceptable to social science of a more materialist bent. The claim of the paper is that polytheism as a practical attitude means recognising that there are diverse and contradictory ethical orders built into the world around us and active with our psyches. Weber explains why this is especially difficult for us (because our lives are so thoroughly rationalised), and Hyde offers us the hope that we may be tricky enough to cope.

While recent concepts from the sociology of science stress novel sites of knowledge production (e.g. government, industry), they ignore international organizations’ (IOs) growing research capacity. Conversely, prevailing theories of IOs stress their regulative and normative influence in national policymaking, equally neglecting their scientific work. Using bibliometric data for a large sample of 1325 international organizations, this work examines, for the first time, the evolution of scientific output from international intergovernmental research organizations, intergovernmental organizations, and nongovernmental organizations in the period 1950–2015. The analysis finds a striking increase in scientific activity since the late 1980s and particularly since the early 2000s across organizational types, sectors (e.g. law, nutrition), research fields (e.g. life science, social sciences), output formats (e.g. articles, books), and geographic areas. Indeed, some of these organizations are among the most productive science producers worldwide. Additional analyses of IOs’ research collaborations suggest strong cross-organizational diversity reflecting wider trends of scientific internationalization and integration. The article argues that IOs’ scientization requires a thorough revision of theories of institutional change in science and research systems and of theories about the nature and role of IOs. These organizations reflect, and, indeed, spearhead, wider trends of the rationalization of social order and evidence-based global governance.

The aim of this article is to examine the framing of excessive consumption as a disease-like condition in the Swedish press during the years 1992–2012. Against a theoretical background discussing medicalisation, we have analysed the characteristics of problematic consumption framed as a disease, as well as the presumed causes of and responses to this problem. Alongside and intertwined with a structural and a rationalisation perspective, we find discussions and explanations of problematic consumption as a disease all through the investigated period. Class and gender are noticeable components of the core problem description, but the reductionist assumption of addiction as a brain disease seems to point to a problem beyond historical and social context. The disease conceptualisation of problematic consumption can be seen as a compensatory perspective in an individualising and consumption affirming society. However, this perspective is ultimately decided by politics and not by research. Despite being ...

Establishing rules regarding the organisation of work with patients means taking into account ethical and moral questions. This joint approach requires the free and engaged cooperation of all those involved. The improvement of the quality of care, far from any standardisation or rationalisation, means keeping a place as a subject for the patient as well as the professional. The work rules and procedures can then find their meaning in the provision of care to a patient.

This paper analyses the transformation of the Maya solar in relation to the contested Marxian theory of primitive accumulation. The Maya of Yucatan are part of the Maya indigenous populations of south-east Mexico and Central America. Their solar, a house and garden plot that has historically supported an intricate indigenous system of land, livelihoods and identities, is today under threat along with the way of life it once sustained. The paper argues that a spatial–temporal reworking of primitive accumulation that draws on both a decoloniality perspective and critical geography can help us better understand both the historical and contemporary significance of the solar’s plight. Using this theoretical framework, the paper shows how the solar has in fact been historically constructed through different cycles of enclosure, dispossession and resistance in Mexico. The Spanish colonial period (1542–1821) enforced its ‘rationalisation’ in ways that disrupted space and time of native populations; the hacienda p...

This commentary deals with the issue of alternative food and drink from the perspective of my work on such topics as disenchantment, enchantment, McDonaldization, nothing, prosumption, rationalisation and something. The conclusion is that the interests of, and pressure from, large-scale profit-making businesses will, to a large extent, undermine efforts to produce ‘true’ alternatives in food and drink. Those alternatives will survive on the margins in the developed world, but they will be more prevalent in the less developed world which is less attractive to those businesses, and therefore, the alternatives will be allowed to survive there.

The dialogue imagines that in early July 1914 Weber seeks guidance from Simmel about how to approach the visual arts when pursuing his ambition to produce a sociology of all the arts. During the previous decade, Weber became enthusiastic about medieval, renaissance and modern painting. We assume he has read Simmel’s The Picture Frame as well as two pieces about Rembrandt, later elaborated to become the third chapter of Simmel’s Rembrandt. Weber questions Simmel’s ideas about the autonomy of works of art and encourages Simmel to re-state them in the light of the relational implications of his ideas about form. They discuss how one might explain the origins of the use of picture-frames, how they work as form for content and their possibly positive implications for interaction under modern, metropolitan conditions of life.

L'amour romantique aurait subi ces dernières années d’importants désenchantements face à des sphères d'évaluation des relations amoureuses plus rationalisantes. Tiré d'une enquête réalisée à Bruxelles avec des jeunes hétérosexuels (25-35 ans) issus des classes moyennes, cet article analyse des carrières amoureuses empilant différents modèles amoureux. L'étude montre que ces jeunes œuvrent à un processus d'ajustement de leurs croyances romantiques pour rendre possible des formes souhaitées d'engagement.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to theoretically explain the significance of discourse for the construction of the legitimacy of place marketing practice, and to illustrate empirically how this is done in a “genre of strategy”. Design/methodology/approach The paper applies a critical discourse analysis perspective, and utilises a theoretical framework of four legitimation strategies of authorisation, moral evaluation, rationalisation and mythopoesis to analyse how the legitimacy of a place marketing project carried out in the region of North Karelia, Finland, is discursively constructed within strategic documents of the project. Findings Several discursive legitimation strategies were recognised. The authority of the project was constructed by referring to the organisational context of the project, while rational and moral legitimation strategies drew from hegemonic discourses of regional competitiveness, attractiveness and cooperation. These discourses were further connected to discussions of contemporary regional development in Finland and in Europe. Research limitations/implications While the paper underlines the significance of the “genre of strategy” for the discursive legitimation of place marketing projects, it points out that it does not extend to cover the reception or change over time of the legitimation strategies, that should be addressed in further studies. Originality/value The paper presents an original perspective on legitimacy of place marketing projects by introducing discourse as a central element in the construction of legitimacy. This is especially useful for critical purposes, as it allows the discourses that legitimise place marketing practice to be placed under scrutiny, hence opening up the possibility for alternative discourses to emerge.

This talk explores the natural and cultural limits on human kindness towards strangers and non-human animals. I suggest that humans have a deep natural capacity for kindness. However, the duties imposed by this capacity are highly demanding, so we use techniques of ethical avoidance to place limits on our responsibilities. Examples of such techniques include the creation of ethical blindspots and reliance on individual and cultural forms of rationalisation. These techniques play a central role in enabling humans to avoid confronting the suffering caused to animals by practices such as factory farming.

This article argues that current efforts in parts of Africa to teach Chinese language and culture to university students is an example of how sometimes polarised understandings of education as ‘western’ or ‘northern’ are re-mapped on to an East Asian-oriented future. The first part of the article applies a Weber-inspired theory of rationalisation to a rethinking of liberal traditions within academia, arguing that discourses of development and critiques of colonialism are partly displaced by African students’ uptake of Chinese. Inspired by recent work that rethinks the relation of the global north to the global south, the article uses three ethnographic moments, drawn from 2014 field research, to illustrate cultural manifestations and contestations surrounding the re-rationalisation of education towards the east: opening events at the fifth annual Julius K. Nyerere Intellectual Festival Week held at the University of Dar es Salaam; private Chinese-language schools catering to Tanzanian students and busines...

Today's dominant academic use of the term ‘secularisation’ refers to an epochal process that transformed a society based on Christian faith to one grounded in human reason. This paper argues that ‘secularisation’ had not been used in this sense prior to the 1830s, and that no such process has been shown to have taken place in early modernity. This new use of the term was in fact internal to rival secularising and sacralising programs. The notion of an epochal rationalisation of society was thus invoked by secularists seeking to turn a factional campaign into an historical process. Their sacralising opponents employed the same strategy when they claimed that this process contained a desecularising counter-current, or that secularisation was secretly grounded in an alienated religion whose de-alienation held the promise of a post-secular age. This suggests that until they can adduce evidence of an epochal rationalisation of society in early modernity, histories of secularisation should be regarded as disguised program-statements for rival cultural-political factions in the present.

This article explores adaptation to demands of affiliation with a world religion and increasing religious orthodoxy among followers of the indigenous (Hindu) Kaharingan religion in Indonesian Borneo. It compares ritual practices and notions of religious identity in the provinces of Central Kalimantan (where the local religion has been officially recognised as an agama) and East Kalimantan (where it has not). The empirical material is based on ethnographic fieldwork with the Luangan Dayak who live in both provinces. Different strategies of adapting to state and religious politics have emerged in the two provinces. In Central Kalimantan the recognition of the religion has spurred an extensive rationalisation process causing modification of old practices and the introduction of new ones. In East Kalimantan, an equivalent development is evinced through creative innovation and idiosyncratic adaptation of unrecognised religious practices and the popularisation of a ritual genre incorporating the perspec...

Adventure has outgrown its use as a metaphor and motive for educational journeys into the cultural outdoors. Self-reliance cannot counter the mechanisation of everyday life. ‘Adventure’ is produced and serviced by the very people who felt its worth to their own individualisation and now advance its professionalisation for their own continued participation. Yet adventure workers are limited to enforcing societal risk-mitigation systems, rather than acknowledging that risk is a damaging principle for pedagogy. They must refuse to take responsibility for the lives of others as dictated by institutional rationalisation of the odds of unequal consequences. Educators have been a part of both freeing and fetishising ‘adventure’, but must now distance themselves from the activities that give ‘adventure’ a social status. The more important work for educators is to build a pedagogy of ecologies: of friction, energies, movement, connections and transitions to new relationships with the changing cultural outd...

This paper looks at the concept of ohia ‘poverty’ from Akan sociocultural perspectives. It considers poverty from the Akan background and how the poor see themselves and the factors they believe are responsible for their poverty. Social, cultural, individualistic, fatalistic and religious explanations to poverty are explored within the theoretical framework of language ideology, which reflects the beliefs people have about their language and the justification and rationalisation they make about the language structure and use. It is argued that to understand the concept of poverty among the Akans one has to resort to their cultural beliefs, perception, worldview and social structures. The data for discussion is based on a song text entitled Ɛnneɛ mɛkɔ na maba ‘Then I will go and come back’ by a renowned highlife musician Alex Kwabena Konadu. Konadu captures the concept of poverty through the image of the Akan family system. The paper uses stylistic devices like deixes, parallelism, repetition and symbolism to analyse the data. The rich imagery and symbolism in the song text highlight how the society conceptualises poverty based on their past experiences.

Purpose The Social Return on Investment (SROI) framework has been developed for mapping and measuring social impact. It may be used for legitimating organisations and projects. The framework is often criticised for its overemphasis of the SROI ratio, i.e. the relationship between monetised benefits and costs. This study aims to demonstrate how the SROI method legitimates organisations or projects with multiple other discursive ways besides the SROI ratio. It also discusses the status of these other ways of legitimation in relation to the quantifying and monetising core tendency of SROI. Design/methodology/approach The empirical data consist of an SROI guidebook and 12 SROI reports. Their study applies Theo van Leeuwen’s ideas for analysing the discursive legitimation of social practices. The study takes place broadly in the framework of Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis, aided by qualitative content analysis. Findings In the analysis, the full spectrum of the van Leeuwenian legitimation means used by SROI – authorisation, rationalisation, moral evaluation and mythopoetical narration – is brought out in the data and the status and social context of the legitimation means are assessed and discussed. It is shown that there is existing potential for broader and more visible use of different legitimation means. Practical implications Based on the findings of the study, suggestions for the improvement of SROI reporting by a more balanced explicit use of the multitude of legitimation means are presented. Originality/value The study is original both in its subject (the spectrum of legitimation in SROI) and its method (qualitative discursive and contentual analysis of SROI as a legitimating discourse).

This chapter compares the mechanisms used by members of the Litvish communities of Golders Green and Gateshead to construct a private and public “demarcation terrain” between the abstract obligations and the spatial reality in which they are applied. In Golders Green, the Litvish community organises itself while competing within a diverse population. This reality brings exposure to and rationalisation of the employment market and consumer culture, with a weakening of religious reliance. Personal responsibility allows the Litvish man a degree of flexibility when combining religious studies and employment, and relative freedom in adapting the communal lifestyle to his abilities and professional preferences. In Gateshead, the community is organised in a “top-down” manner and arranged around its bold institutions. Social norms and mechanisms of supervision create a high level of awareness of the leadership’s values and expectations. In Gateshead’s municipal politics, the awareness to the Litvish Haredi group increases, as they are highly aware of the demographic characteristic and the unique housing needs of this community. These preferences and tendencies find expression in the residential enclaves: the clustering within a community enclave, the extremism against other communities in Gateshead, and the high level of residential heterogeneity within other Jewish and non-Jewish communities in Golders Green, all award the delineated area its spatial boundaries.

This article examines organizational inhibitions in relation to addressing occupational fraud. The a priori assumption would be if an organization discovers occupational fraud it would deal with it. However, this research illustrates, drawing upon 24 semi-structured interviews, two case studies and participant observation, a range of avoidant rationalizations constructed by representatives of organizational victims to justify not tackling occupational fraud. These rationalizations bear great similarity to the rationalizations constructed by offenders, and the article argues they constitute a theory of differential rationalization. The research may have wider relevance to explaining why organizations fail to deal with other negative behaviors.

This research has been supported by the grant “Magical thinking in contexts and situations of unbelief,” part of the Understanding Unbelief programme, funded by the John Templeton Foundation (JTF grant ID# 60624) and managed by the University of Kent. Perceived in their ideal forms, rationalisation and magic might seem to oppose one another. In this paper, however, rather than placing these forces in sterile opposition, we instead explore the social and relational dynamics through which rationalisation - the dominant epistemological force of modernity – in certain cases provides the conditions of doubt, opacity, and unknowability that makes magical thinking manifest in the everyday mundane. We explore such theoretical suggestions through ethnographic research conducted in Orkney and Cyprus. By examining connections between rationalisation and magic as these historically unfolded in these two different island settings, we initially provide a depiction of how the project of rationalisation led to the decline of magic in our two fieldsites. Then, by focusing on everyday manifestations of magical thinking, we nevertheless proceed to showcase how rationalisation and magic appear to sustain one other through an unresolved, generative tenson, emergent of the incapacity of the former to fully sublate the latter in its requirement to ‘know’ the world. The trajectory of rationalisation means that there is nothing unknowable in the world, and yet, from the position of any given person, there is no knowable whole. It remains out of reach. We conclude by discussing how the tensions inherent in the relation between rationalisation and magic allow for further theorising about the dimension of unknowing that permeates contemporary public epistemologies and subjectivities. Postprint

This chapter documents the operation of multimodal strategies in the discursive construction of social actors, social actions and legitimations in luxury property advertising discourse, with a focus on the interplay between verbal and visual modes. It describes how advertising discourse exploits the inclusion of Caucasian models and their depiction as a culturally homogeneous group endowed with hedonistic, opulent lifestyle identities through their social actions in order to market a luxury residence. It is argued that legitimations are put in place to enhance the persuasive power of the advertising discourse, with particular reference to the symbolic values of luxury products in general, the rationalisation of knowledges of habitual social actions, and the narratives that target recipients of the ads who are hailed as intellectual buyers. It is hoped that the analysis demonstrates that such ideologies are very effectively studied through their multimodal realisations, where the visual mode, in particular, can draw on and reproduce stereotyped representations.

Two broad imaginaries are simultaneously manifest in art schools: a concept of art (‘what’ is to be learned) and a concept of studentship (‘how’ is it to be learned). The answers given to these mutually constitutive questions establish categorical and behavioural schema that generate different boundary formations, territorialising art students as subjects by scripting group composition and differentiation. Since there are no essential components of an artistic curriculum, there are no straightforward answers to these questions. Art schools oscillate between ‘major artistic’ and ‘minor monotechnical’ ideas of educational purpose, and, largely, celebrate this diversity and flexibility as a distinctive strength. Presently, instrumentalist pressure to articulate exactly ‘what is to be learned’ encourages diglossic art schools to pursue identarian thinking, producing monocultural processes of identification and rationalisation that can be causal pathways to inequality in art and the wider world. Rehearsing how ‘hidden’ monocultural imaginaries play out as a thought experiment might enable art schools to counter educational instrumentalism, and manage their material resources more equitably. With this in mind, this chapter reformulates educational questions of ‘what’ and ‘how’, so that they are directed in turn at ‘minor’ and ‘major’ voices broadly representative of the European art school’s developmental diglossia. Different answers to these questions subjectivise art students by establishing distinctive, yet inequitable, boundary formations. Must art students choose between a minor or major ethics of identification, or, can they adopt a pragmatic educational diglossia that embraces heterogeneity and dissonance as assets?

This paper argues that those pursuing legal AI – particularly those interested in the so-called ‘legal singularity’ – misunderstand the nature of both the law and the technology, with the effect that not only would they fail to solve the very real problems with the law, but they could potentially both make them worse and cause new ones. Drawing on insights and concepts from multiple disciplines, my argument rests on the idea that law functions as a reflexive societal institution. As such, I argue, the law cannot be neutral, but is instead contextual and contingent on the circumstances of the time, imbued with normative assumptions and priorities, and reifies the interests and goals of its writers, practitioners, and adjudicators. This reflexive functioning should be understood as distinct from the role that law plays in society as a result of its reflexivity. Functioning as a reflexive societal institution, I argue, the law’s role has not only been to reflect the inequalities and injustices in society, but to repeat, reinforce, and re-encode them back into society. As such, just as it matters what goals and priorities are being pursued in the design, deployment, and use of algorithmic systems, so too it matters what goals and priorities those working within the law are pursuing. I develop my argument in two parts. In the first, I argue that algorithmic systems are not – and may never be – capable of replacing humans in the law. I emphasise, though, that critiques of legal AI that focus on the technical limitations of algorithmic systems, while important, do not get to the heart of the structural questions in which I am primarily interested. In the second part of my argument, therefore, I develop a critique of the power relations and structural effects of legal AI as it is commonly envisaged. Adopting Foucauldian theories of governmentality and again drawing from multiple disciplines, I begin by locating the ideological underpinnings and motivations of legal AI as being part of a process of neoliberal rationalisation; replacing the qualitative, normative values of law with supposedly rational, objective, quantitative metrics and logics based on statistical and economic thinking. As part of this process of rationalisation, the law is often problematised by legal AI proponents as slow, costly, inefficient, complex, unpredictable, in need of optimisation, and thus amenable to techno-solutionist interventions. As a result, in my view, by framing the case for legal AI in terms that are fundamentally concerned with the quality of the law’s functioning, legal AI proponents not only fail to consider the nature of the law’s role in society but prioritise the kind of market-oriented and commercially-driven ways of thinking that contribute to the development of problems with that role in the first place. Without a critical examination of the law’s role in society, I argue, legal AI proponents therefore risk developing systems that will primarily make law ‘better’ at extending and reinforcing hierarchies, maintaining the law’s exclusionary effects, and reifying the dominance and power of capital.

As teacher education undergoes reform in many jurisdictions, who teacher educators are, their lives and their work, continue to be in the spotlight internationally while remaining relatively underexplored in the Irish context. The research from which this chapter draws is an attempt to address this lacuna. Performativity and accountability agendas globally and the European economic austerity landscape have set the scene for a radical reform agenda in initial teacher education (ITE) in Ireland. From a largely autonomous college-based system of provision at primary level, now ITE is subject to stronger regulation and oversight by the Irish Teaching Council and through a rationalisation of ITE within higher education. Drawing on a phenomenological approach and in depth interviews with ITE educators across five education departments in Ireland, we decode their experiences, values and concerns relative to changing contexts. We explore the diverse pathways, values and experiences that construct them as teacher educators in the present, and gain insight in to the strength of former professional identities. Bourdieu’s metaphor of habitus and field enables us to make sense of distinctions in values and practices across the subfields of initial teacher education and to explain why practitioner teacher identity continues to be privileged in the context of this policy agenda.