Search

Around the world, people living close to polluting industries have different perceptions of the risks of toxic exposure, ranging from anger to acceptance to denial. We draw attention to a case with relatively high levels of social trust, but also relatively high levels of risk perception: the communities living adjacent to the Fawley (UK) oil refinery and petrochemical complex, a site that has been operated by Esso since the early 1950s. Our findings are based on a novel comparative analysis of two qualitative studies of local risk perceptions in Fawley conducted more than two decades apart in 1997 and 2019, incorporating focus group and individual interviews with residents, alongside documentary analysis and stakeholder interviews. Perceptions of risk and trust in the local polluting industry have fluctuated over the years, with unease never far from the surface as industrial employment has slowly contracted. Yet overall, the picture in 2019 was not too dissimilar from that in 1997: while community–industry relations were strained amidst periodic risk incidents and a sense of decline, a cautious sense of trust in the polluting enterprise had endured, based on a delicate balance of heritage, risk, and recognition. We draw attention to the residents’ careful reckoning with risks over time and the tenacity of social trust as an act of negotiation that took risk into account but also included other important factors such as recognition and reciprocity. Local risk perceptions in Fawley are closely bound up with the residents’ shared industrial heritage and enduring perceptions of Esso as a ‘good neighbour’. Our longitudinal analysis allowed us to reflect on changes over time in Fawley, providing greater temporal depth to the risk perception literature.

Being integral to the fossil-based energy order and as a key driver of multiple and intersecting ecological crises, the petrochemical industry faces increasing pressures to transform. This paper examines how major petrochemical companies navigate these pressures. Drawing from literatures on discursive power, narratives, and neoGramscian political economy, we introduce the concept of narrative realignment as a nuanced iteration of corporate discursive power that reframes problems of and solutions to green transitions. Specifically, we identify and explore common transition-related narratives, analysing climate and sustainability communications from the largest producers in the petrochemical sector. We argue that these strategic narratives portray the petrochemical industry as key to a successful transition and fend off criticisms by reducing them to misunderstandings. This framing works to reduce pressures for deep mitigation while repositioning the industry as part of the solution. Building on these findings, we demonstrate how petrochemical transition narratives relate to but also diverge from the position of fossil fuel extractors. Despite relying on fossil feedstock and being solidly placed in the fossil economy, petrochemical majors increasingly focus on repositioning themselves proactively as transition enablers. The argument illustrates the work of downstream actors to legitimize the existing energy order.

Gone Home challenges dominant representations of Appalachia as white, placing in the foreground the life histories of African Americans who hail from the coalfields of eastern Kentucky. The book re...

The marine plastics crisis sparked a wave of corporate interest in the circular economy, a sustainable business model that aims to eliminate waste in industrial systems through recycling, reduction, reuse, and recovery. Drawing on debates about the role of corporations in global environmental governance, this article examines the rise of the circular economy as a dominant corporate sustainability concept, focusing on the flagship example of the circular economy for plastics. It argues that corporations across the plastics value chain have coordinated their efforts to contain the circular economy policy agenda, while extending their markets through developing risky circular economy technologies. These corporate strategies of containment and proliferation represent attempts to “future-proof” capitalism against existential threats to public legitimacy, masking the implications for environmental justice. The paradox of the circular economy is that it seems to offer radical challenges to linear “take-make-waste” models of industrial capitalism, backed by international legislation, but it does not actually give up on unsustainable growth. We need to tackle the plastics crisis at its root, dramatically reducing the global production of toxic and wasteful plastics.

This book examines the relationship between environmental justice and citizen science, focusing on enduring issues and new challenges in a post-truth age. Debates over science, facts, and values have always been pivotal within environmental justice struggles. For decades, environmental justice activists have campaigned against the misuses of science, while at the same time engaging in community-led citizen science. However, post-truth politics has threatened science itself. This book makes the case for the importance of science, knowledge, and data that are produced by and for ordinary people living with environmental risks and hazards. The international, interdisciplinary contributions range from grassroots environmental justice struggles in American hog country and contaminated indigenous communities, to local environmental controversies in Spain and China, to questions about “knowledge justice,” citizenship, participation, and data in citizen science surrounding toxicity. The book features inspiring studies of community-based participatory environmental health and justice research; different ways of sensing, witnessing, and interpreting environmental injustice; political strategies for seeking environmental justice; and ways of expanding the concepts and forms of engagement of citizen science around the world. While the book will be of critical interest to specialists in social and environmental sciences, it will also be accessible to graduate and postgraduate audiences. More broadly, the book will appeal to members of the public interested in social justice issues, as well as community members who are thinking about participating in citizen science and activism. Toxic Truths includes distinguished contributing authors in the field of environmental justice, alongside cutting-edge research from emerging scholars and community activists.

Unjust exposure to toxic hazards is a pivotal and long-standing concern within the environmental justice movement. The disproportionate siting of toxic waste near to minority and low-income communities in the United States sparked the first environmental justice protests in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This chapter situates anti-toxic struggles within the environmental justice movement, discussing the legacies of significant toxic disasters and anti-toxic movements within the United States and globally. With countless instances of toxic injustice around the world, some cases have been highlighted in the historical record, while most remain neglected. The chapter addresses the uneven public attention given to particular toxic injustices through discussing two related themes: “Black Love Canals” (Bullard 1990) and “slow Bhopals” (Zavestoski 2009), drawing on environmental justice concepts of “slow violence” (Nixon 2011) and “expendability” (Pellow 2018). The conclusion reflects on the enduring global problem of unjust toxic exposures.

This article examines perceptions of living and working with toxic pollution in two periurban petrochemical areas in Nanjing, China, a heavily polluted megacity on the Yangtze River. Despite the concentrated geography of the petrochemical industry in Nanjing, protests over pollution have been small scale and highly localized, paralleling dynamics in many “cancer villages” of rural China. This contrasts with high-profile anti-PX (paraxylene) protests that have happened in Xiamen, Dalian, and other cities in China over the past decade. This article draws on twenty-five semistructured interviews and participant observation with workers and residents in both petrochemical areas. We extend the idea of the “hidden injuries of class” (Sennett and Cobb 1972) to analyze the cumulative effects of social and environmental inequalities in China, contributing to interdisciplinary debates about environmental justice and health, environmental pollution in China, and the lived experiences of toxic geographies. We argue that people living and working with petrochemical pollution in Nanjing, China, experienced accumulated injuries of environmental injustice: multilayered and intersecting effects on health and well-being, which reflect social inequalities between different populations. Accumulated injuries of environmental injustice emerged in interrelated ways: epistemic injustices about toxic exposures; unequal and inadequate compensations for environment harm; and collective frustrations over political powerlessness. The research has wider implications for analyzing the complex social effects of living and working with environmental injustice in different places around the world. Key Words: China, environmental health, environmental justice, petrochemical industry, toxic pollution.

Dereliction tourism is the act of seeking out abandoned industrial sites as sites of aesthetic pleasure, leisure or adventure. Drawing on research in areas of industrial ruination in Russia, the UK and North America, this article examines the role of the ‘dereliction tourist’ as a way of critically reflecting on the ethics of ‘outsider’ research. Ethical problems are associated with both dereliction tourism and ethnographic research in areas of industrial decline, including voyeurism, romanticization, and the reproduction of negative stereotypes about marginal people and places. However, both dereliction tourism and ethnographic research also share more positive ethical possibilities through offering alternative ways of imagining places and raising social justice awareness of issues related to deprivation and blight. Through considering the ambivalent figure of the dereliction tourist in relation to ethnography, this article advances a way of being in the research field through intrinsic ethical reflection and practice.

This note focuses on current sociological research being conducted in China on the concept of environmental justice. It critically reviews how the concept has been used in the Chinese context since the 1990s, evaluating some of the possibilities and limitations of the concept. We argue that environmental justice is a useful concept in the context of China, due to its resonance with environmental concepts and axes of social mobilization (particularly in relation to procedural justice and law), its capacity to address social as well as environmental issues of structural inequality together, and its resonance with shared ideas of social justice within Chinese legal traditions. However, the concept of environmental justice also has clear limitations. Practically, environmental justice has been used predominantly in the academic sphere in China, with very little take-up in civil society discussions about the environment.\ud

This article analyses official urban imaginaries of "demolition for development" in two different UK cities and time periods: 1) the City Improvement Scheme in Birmingham (1875–1914) during a time of rapid industrial growth, and 2) a housing-led neighbourhood regeneration scheme in Walker, Newcastle upon Tyne (2000–2011) during a time of post-industrial uncertainty. The concept of the "official urban imaginary" is employed to critically examine assumptions of growth, progress and success within "demolition for development" policies across different times and places. Drawing on both historical and sociological qualitative case study methods, this research contributes to a range of debates on urban regeneration, gentrification, creative destruction, comparative methodology, and imagining the city. The article argues that there is a serious need to rethink urban policy trajectories of property-led regeneration and "planned gentrification", particularly in the post-2008 context of recession.

This article examines how local people's memories relate to processes of industrial decline and ruination in Walker Riverside, Newcastle upon Tyne, based on site observations and 30 semi-structured interviews conducted between June 2005 and March 2006, with a range of local people. Much of the recent literature concerning the relationships between memory and place focuses on the contrast between social reconstructions of official and unofficial collective memory. This article explores a different dynamic between memory and place through the case study of Walker, Newcastle upon Tyne, an area where shipbuilding has long been in decline, but at the time of interviewing, the ‘last shipyard of the Tyne’ had yet to close. In Walker, local accounts of the industrial past represent ‘living memories’, embodying complex relationships with the industrial past: many people who have lived through processes of industrial ruination focus on imminent regeneration rather than mourning or celebrating the industrial past. The strength of community solidarity in Walker represents another form of living memory, echoing family and community bonds formed in the industrial era despite the fact that a direct connection with shipbuilding has all but disappeared. This article argues that living memories relate to the particular social and economic processes of industrial ruination in Walker, where the decline of shipbuilding over the past 30 years has been protracted, leaving a profound sense of uncertainty for people who occupy the precarious transitional spaces of post-industrial change.

Using principles of transformational leadership, the management team of a Community Care Program (CCP) in British Columbia, Canada involved its staff, clients, and community agency personnel in a participatory action research process to evaluate the CCP's in-home nursing and physio/occupational programs. An iterative reflective process was initiated by the management team and expanded to include all stakeholders. We used a descriptive design with multiple analytic methods. CCP clients, agency personnel, and physicians were surveyed for their perceptions of whether CCP staff practised according to their core program values. Findings revealed minor discrepancies between the CCP's espoused values and those they practised with clients and agency personnel. An important outcome of this study was demonstrating the power and effectiveness of active participation by professional staff, consumers, and agency partners in all aspects of change within a traditional bureaucratic system.

Transformational leadership was an integral part of the process of changing organizational values in a Continuing Care Program. The management team engaged the staff members in a process of reflection-on-action where they told stories from practice to define and describe their organizational values. Then the Continuing Care staff solicited feedback from clients and agency personnel about whether or not they experienced the staff "walking their talk." This was followed by staff participation in problem solving and decision making to find solutions to the issues that arose from the feedback.

The CASA bar is located in a nineteenth-century red brick terraced build ing on Hope Street in Liverpool, with a bright red star as its emblem. On first glance, it looks like an ordinary bar, with a menu for food and beer on a signboard at the entrance, and a notice advertising weekly entertainment features (Figure 5.1). However, the CASA (an acronym for the Community Advice Service Association) is no ordinary bar. It is a living museum of the Liverpool Dockers’ Strike (1995–1998), a charity and bar set up by sacked dockworkers after the strike to offer support to sacked dockworkers and their families. Posters, plaques, letters, ban ners, and other mementos of support from the days of the strike cover the walls of the bar. A faded wooden placard from the strike with the phrase ‘One of 500 Sacked Liverpool Dockers—Never Cross a Picket Line’ is mounted on the ceiling above the entrance to the cellar bar (Figure 5.2). The back room has an entire wall covered in plaques, each one from a different supporter during the strike, including sev eral prominent figures. The upstairs offices also include photographs of important labour leaders, letters of support, as well as more recent pam phlets and notices about trade union issues. The whole of the CASA is imbued with the collective memory of the strike, as a ‘site of memory’ (Nora 1989).

In 2005, the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) ‘black’ union hall in New Orleans was destroyed during Hurricane Katrina.1 Elderly longshoremen wept as they dismantled the ruins of the build ing. Why was this demolished building so important to them? The black local union hall was built in 1959 during segregation (Figure 7.1). His torically, longshoremen in New Orleans were divided into two unions, one black and one white, from the late nineteenth century until 1980, when there was a court-ordered merger between the two formerly seg regated longshoremen’s locals. The merged union became ILA Local 30002 and remained in the 1959 hall, in practice carrying on the his tory and the core membership of the black union. According to the ILA 3000 longshoremen, who I interviewed in April and December 2013, the union hall was very significant within the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke at the hall shortly after its opening in 1959. The hall also hosted Reverend Joseph Lowery and other leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the National Associ ation for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). As one of the largest halls in the city, the ILA union hall was one of the only places for the black community and other marginalized social groups to gather, a place for gay balls, Mardi Gras Indian events, funerals, second lines (brass band parades), and jazz and blues concerts. The destruction of the former hall in 2005 severed long-standing links between the docks and the community.

If you go to the Bar Phoceen in the commune of Port de Bouc near Marseille at 7:30 am on a weekday morning, you’d find a group of dockers having coffee and chatting (Figure 6.1). The Bar Phoceen is the western Marseille-Fos1dockers’ favourite cafe, just across the street from their hiring hall (Figure 6.2). The hiring hall at Port de Bouc is one of two main hiring halls in the western port of Marseille-Fos, and according to the dockers, it is one of the last old casual hiring halls in France (interview, 22 June 2010). This is a source of pride for the dockers, for it is a relic of the old union-controlled labour pool system in France, which was introduced in 1947 and then slowly phased out after the national port reforms of 1992 and 2008. Dockers report to this hiring hall at eight o’clock each morning to find out where, and if, they will be working that day.

Former port cities of empire and colonialism are steeped in material vestiges of their past. From old maritime waterfronts to grand mercan tile architecture, from street names to statues, and from monuments to museums: there are reminders at every step; one only has to look. These sites are what the historian Pierre Nora (1989) calls-sites of memory’ (lieux de memoire)—sites which evoke collective memory, when there has been an incomplete break with the past, where continuities, or legacies, remain. This chapter focuses on museums of slavery and colonial his tory as sites of ambivalent memory and identity in the port cities of Liverpool, Marseille, and New Orleans. As Aldrich (2005: 8) argues in Vestiges of Colonial Empire in France: Perhaps ambivalence is the best way to describe attitudes to the colonies—a mixture of nostalgia, residual pride, misgivings about the worth of the effort, sometimes shame about what was done, occa sional outrage. Examining monuments, museums and other markers of the colonial patrimony is a way of charting and understanding that ambivalence.

Port cities lie at the edge between black and blue. For centuries, writers have described port cities as exotic places of cosmopolitanism and vibrant cultural exchange, connected to the ‘blue’ of sea, sky, and dreams. Port cities are surrounded by blue, the blue of water lapping at shores, extending out into distant horizons. They are filled with the blue of longing, of imagining possibilities out at sea and in different lands. But port cities are also represented as ‘black’ places of crime, violence, poverty, and social exclusion, classic settings for gritty noir literature and film. In this chapter, I argue that the themes of blue and black capture ambivalent and contradictory representations of urban identity in port cities, and that these representations provide methodological insights for researching port cities.

New mega-projects along the waterfronts of Liverpool, Marseille, and New Orleans feature massive deep-water container ports, towering iconic architecture, maritime sculptures (Figure 3.1), and pristine land scaped parks. Rather than competing with each other over different economic visions, as in the past, port and city authorities in each case have been working together to carve out new, competitive port city identities in the twenty-first century. This chapter investigates these new developments within the wider context of different phases, mod els, geographies, and scales of waterfront development in post-industrial cities. It critically examines the relationship between the city and the port as a complex political space in which entangled cultural and economic policies are produced.

This interdisciplinary article argues that human rights must be understood in terms of opportunities for social participation and that social and economic rights are integral to any discussion of the subject. We offer both a social constructionist and a normative framework for a sociology of human rights which reaches beyond liberal individualism, combining insights from the work of Amartya Sen and from French convention theory. Following Sen, we argue that human rights are founded on the promotion of human capabilities as ethical demands shaped by public reasoning. Using French convention theory, we show how the terms of such deliberation are shaped by different constructions of collectively held values and the compromises reached between them. We conclude by demonstrating how our approach offers a new perspective on spheres of public action and the role these should play in promoting social cohesion, individual capabilities and human rights.

While much of the literature on gender focuses on role models, this paper extends the understanding of gendered professional identification processes by exploring these processes through the lenses of idealization and admiration. Using the method of discourse analysis to analyse MBA students' accounts of people with whom they identify, this paper explores discourses of idealization, defined as aggrandizing a person, and of admiration, which means discussing positive as well as negative and neutral characteristics of a person. It is shown, first, that most male and female MBA students idealized the self-made ‘authentic’ CEO or founder of an organization and, second, that women mainly admired other women through naming their positive, neutral and negative attributes. The paper thereby adds to understanding of how gendered identification processes are structured by idealization and admiration., The authors would like to thank Rachel Dunkley Jones for helping to collect the material. The research was financially supported by the research consortium on Generation Y, convened by the Lehman Brothers Centre for Women in Business at London Business School. The consortium included the following partner companies: Accenture (Founding Partner), Allen & Overy, Barclaycard Business, Baxter International, Cargill, IBM, Johnson & Johnson and KPMG. Thanks also to Judy Wajcman, Lynda Gratton and Julia Nentwich for their constructive feedback on earlier versions of this paper. The authors would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the Editor of the British Journal of Management for their patience in developing this paper.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to analyse the justifying arguments of various Birmingham organisations between 1870 and 1914 in classifying and treating the unemployed. Using a capability approach, the paper will examine how employment policies in Birmingham during this period promoted or limited capabilities of work, life and voice. Finally, implications for labour market policies today will be discussed.Design/methodology/approachThe theoretical framework for this paper will draw on the capability approach to a person's well‐being, developed by Amartya Sen and on theoretical and empirical developments of the capability approach by other authors such as Bonvin and Salais. This paper is based on historical archival research and analysis.FindingsBirmingham was an exemplar of municipal social reform in late nineteenth century England, with the development of a range of public services such as education, electricity and public transport. However, the city's vision of civic reform was closely connected to the Liberal market logic of individual responsibility, and moral judgements of the unemployed served to multiply the categories and punitive treatments of the “undeserving”, separating the valid from the invalid citizen.Originality/valueThis case study of municipal employment policies in Birmingham at the turn of the twentieth century demonstrates the implications of moral judgements, classifications and treatments of the unemployed for people's capabilities in work and life, drawing connections to discourses of responsibility and citizenship today.

This article analyzes the phenomenon of place attachment to "home" in two areas of industrial decline: Walker, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (UK), and Highland, Niagara Falls, New York (USA). The research contributes to theoretical and empirical literatures from sociology, anthropology, geography, environmental psychology, and material culture studies on notions of place, community, memory, and home. Despite socioeconomic deprivation and material devastation in areas of industrial decline, houses and neighborhood spaces can become invested with notions of family and community unity, nostalgia for a shared industrial past, and stability amidst socioeconomic change. Place attachment to “home” is particularly painful during times of post-industrial transition: in the case of Walker, people's homes are under threat of demolition with imminent City-Council-led regeneration of the community; and in the case of Highland, houses are located on contaminated and economically unviable land. Drawing in both cases on semi-structured interviews with a range of local people between 2005 and 2007, this article argues that narratives of place attachment—of "devastation but also home"—reveal some of the contradictions and uncertainties of living through difficult processes of social and economic change.

The global petrochemical industry has long been characterized by stable patterns of Western corporate and geographic leadership, but since the early 2000s, the global playing field has changed significantly. China has overtaken the United States and Europe as the world’s largest petrochemical producer, and other emerging economies have emerged as global petrochemical players. Combining insights from scholarship on global corporate elites, world city networks, and relational economic geography, this article examines patterns in the corporate networks of leading petrochemical corporations. The research is based on a multi-scalar corporate network analysis, applying social network analysis to identify board interlocks, joint venture interlocks, and spatial interlocks between corporations. Through analyzing corporate networks across multiple scales, the research reveals patterns of both integration and isolation within the petrochemical industry. Isolation is evident in disconnected regional corporate elite networks, where the established North Atlantic corporate elite is interconnected through board interlocks, while corporate networks in Asia and other emerging economies remain disconnected. However, high levels of integration within the industry are also evident in an interconnected international company system formed through joint venture collaborations, and in overlapping subsidiary networks centered on petrochemical hubs around the world. The article argues that the results demonstrate a combination of resilience and change, or path dependence and contingency, in patterns of corporate power and collaboration. Western company networks still form the social and spatial backbone of the industry, but these have been challenged by emerging strategic centers and isolated elite networks in other parts of the world. This paper contributes to debates on industrial corporate elites, multiple globalizations, and the multipolar global economy.