Search results

In this paper, the author advocates recognizing, developing, and promoting “critical interactionism” as a legitimate and pragmatically useful scholarly project. The author argues that critical interactionism includes different interactionist traditions, critical approaches, methodological styles, and sensitizing concepts – as long as they tell us something about how power and inequality operate. I review two fundamental elements of this project that constitute its past and likely future: (1) theoretical interventions that excavate critical insights, diversify founders, integrate critical theories, and promote interactionism's usefulness for critical inquiry and (2) empirically grounded conceptual interventions that shed light on generic processes of inequality reproduction. Although the larger discipline of sociology continues to marginalize interactionism yet selectively adopt its principles, critical interactionism has the potential to break through what David Maines called the fault line of consciousness. The promise of critical interactionism is that it can simultaneously make interactionism more relevant to our discipline and make our discipline more relevant to the social world.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors that influence Japanese consumer purchase intention toward products bearing animal welfare (AW) certification labels.

A conceptual model was developed with the constructs of informativeness, trust, consumer perception, health consciousness, moral norms and purchase intention and tested using a sample of 513 Japanese consumers. Data were collected using an online panel with the direct effects analyzed using regression while the mediation analysis was performed using Hayes PROCESS macro.

The findings have confirmed that informativeness, consumer perception and trust contribute to consumer purchase intention of products with AW certification labels. Moral norm has a significant indirect effect on the relationship between consumer perception and intention to purchase. However, health consciousness did not demonstrate any indirect effect on the relationship between consumer perception and intention to purchase.

This study contributes significantly to our understanding of Japanese consumers' perception toward AW certification labels, especially considering the limited discussion surrounding this topic in Japan. By highlighting the importance of informativeness, it sheds light on how enhancing consumer knowledge can potentially boost the demand for AW foods. Moreover, it challenges the conventional belief in the impact of health consciousness and consumer behavioral intention, thereby expanding the discourse on the role of health consciousness in consumer choices. Through this exploration, the study not only enhances consistency in discussing consumer behavior but also strengthens the coherence and argumentation of the research findings.

This paper aims to respond to the need for “socially sustainable settlements for all” and the need for successful integration within the settlements through building strong social constructs among the settlers.

Mixed methods were used in this study. A sample size of 332 households in Pagirinya Refugee Settlement was used. The settlement is divided into six blocks, each block is subdivided into clusters. Each cluster comprises of 100 households. Due to variations in the number of households in each settlement block, the authors used a proportional sampling approach to determine the number of respondent households in each settlement block. Data was collected through questionnaires, interviews and focus group discussions. Chi-square and an interdependent multivariate statistical analysis were performed to establish the relationship between housing and social sustainability.

The study finds a significant relationship between housing and social sustainability when considered jointly on the variables of roofs of buildings and how often the refugee respondents meet with neighbours (p = 0.018) and when considered jointly on the variables of the width of access roads and how knowledgeable the refugee respondents are about their neighbours (p = 0.018). The study also finds a significant relationship between housing and social sustainability when considered jointly on the variables of the number of direct access roads to the households and the number of friends of the refugee respondents (p = 0.019).

With limited literature, this is a novel approach. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no previous studies focused on the specifics of a building and analysed its relationship with the social dynamics, especially in settlement studies.

The hoped-for “just recovery” from the COVID-19 pandemic has not occurred. This chapter examines socioeconomic disparities laid bare by the pandemic in the United States. They have left a marked impression, suggesting that the concept of “American exceptionalism” has negative as well as positive connotations especially when compared with other high-income countries. Strikingly, democracy is not delivering for many Americans, and yet that is not a new situation, as much scholarship shows. These findings challenge received wisdom about how this country is in the aggregate labeled “developed” when many Americans live in conditions similar to or worse than those the World Bank categorizes as “developing.” Against this background, the chapter assesses experiential learning models for engaging students on the SDGs to assess these disparities. While researching social justice gaps in Pittsburgh and Atlanta with Carnegie Mellon students, however, the lack of disaggregated data emerged as a human rights issue and major barrier to fulfilling the SDG principle to “leave no one behind” (LNOB). These findings suggest a paradigm shift is needed, using the SDGs to advance human rights, elevating socioeconomic rights, localizing issues, generating disaggregated data to drive policy recommendations, and scaling up the community of practice that is engaged in this paradigm shift. Field building these aspects of sustainable development has the possibility to positively shape policies, outcomes, and help this democracy actually deliver for all, not just for some. For the United States to lead and bolster human rights and democracy around the world, inequalities at home must be addressed.

While it has been argued that sport organizations are a socially integrative factor in societies, research on sport and social inclusion is short on the role of leadership. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the degree to which inclusive leadership enables social mobility for participants in a social inclusion program through sport.

This study is based on a fieldwork study composed of focused, multi-sited and collaborative ethnography principles. It draws upon data from four sport clubs that are members of the Norwegian Equestrian Federation (NEF) and associated with a social inclusion program for people with a history of substance abuse disorders (SUD).

Through the enabling of participants’ agency capabilities through prototypicality, shared leadership and cognitive efforts, incentives for utilizing inclusive leadership are presented. The study also presents perspectives on social mobility that are less prone to inflexible categorization and more attuned to people’s sense of belonging and identities.

By coupling unique fieldwork data with theories on subjective social mobility, leadership and meaningfulness, the study presents novel insights into how inclusive leadership play a pivotal role in empowering people with SUD to enhance their social mobility capabilities.

The paper seeks to assist public sector leaders to take a balanced and impactful approach to transformation programmes which aim to deliver integrated healthcare. The paper highlights the balance of attention paid in these programmes across elements of leadership, strategy, structure and people, and aims to highlight where this balance can sit to encourage more successful and sustainable transformations, with an increased focus on interpersonal and inter-professional engagement and interaction across workforce and service users.

The project involved a literature review which identified themes that were in turn used to inform an approach to a desk review of journal articles written about past integration programmes in healthcare. A coding framework was developed to assess the articles in the desk review to identify where the focus of attention lay in the approaches to integration.

There is a spread of activity across all four themes (leadership, strategy, structure and people) in the assessed cases, but the emphasis tends to be towards static, short-term approaches, with a noticeable lack of focus on the aspects required to deliver long-term sustained transformation. There is a need for improved balance between structural and relational approaches to transformation.

The paper focuses on nine examples of transformation programmes and would benefit from further development and use of the coding framework.

The framework that emerges from this project can contribute to the development of a proactive model to assist transformation leads and decision makers bring a more balanced, thoughtful and impactful approach to integrating health and care services. In particular, the findings point to an overuse of structural approaches to change and transformation, which could include project management methods, for example, which become the product of the initiatives, rather than enablers of leaders’ visions and people’s interpersonal and interprofessional engagement and interactions.

Building on existing research, this paper makes a valuable contribution to the discourse on how to deliver the required health and care integration agenda in a more accessible way and sustainably, moving away from short-term, quick-fix approaches and considers how to accommodate the role of interpersonal interaction as the vehicle for change.