Search results

Responding to Martin, Turner, and Hitlin, we clarify possible misunderstandings of our two papers on “agency.” First, they do not presume or commit us to any form of universal determinism. We merely assume that the job of sociologists is to try and causally explain as much as we can of the variations in social life. Though our best efforts leave huge amounts of variance unexplained, there is no good reason for calling this unexplained variance “agency,” and there are several good reasons for not doing so. Second, we acknowledge our use of “structure” is quite a loose one, simply referring to the combination of environmental and personal factors that can help us explain social phenomena. Our notion of “causation” is, admittedly, no less “slipshod” than that used by most social scientists. We are happy to leave questions as to the true nature of causation to the philosophers. Third, we do not see in what way using the notion of “agency” to describe, much less account for, novelty (Martin), or to help “organize” the potentially infinite number of forces in play (Hitlin), advances our understanding or explanatory power. The normative and voluntaristic connotations of the term only serve to muddy the explanatory waters. Fourth, this doesn't preclude empirically examining the sense of “agency” and its causes and consequences. Even if the current wave of enthusiasm for “agency” is waning, a thorough conversation remains worthwhile if only to help avoid the same confusions popping up again in the future.

Amasyali and van de Berg's discussions of Agency were edifying and scholarly, but curiously sideline some of the very pockets of sociology that might most fully address their concerns with this slippery concept. This response suggests some counterexamples to some of their strongest claims that deny the utility or the exploration of agency, ultimately suggesting that sociological social psychology, understood in its probabilistic format, helps address the lack of precision around this commonly employed concept.

The COVID-19 pandemic and associated restrictions created a range of potential additional stressors for families, particularly for parents living with children. This study aims to explore whether there were any differences in the mental health and emotional experiences of those living with children, and those who were not, during the pandemic and related lockdowns; and whether there were any specific risk factors associated with these mental health outcomes and emotional experiences.

Regression analyses of ten-wave repeated cross-sectional surveys between May 2020 and November 2021 on a total sample of 42,529 UK adults, which measured mental health with a range of pleasant and unpleasant emotional experiences. The interaction effects of living with children and age as well as marital status were tested.

During the pandemic, individuals who were living with children were more likely to feel hopeful (OR: 1.1) and grateful (OR: 1.163), less likely to feel hopeless (OR: 0.918) and lonely (OR: 0.799), while more likely to feel guilty (OR: 1.185), unprepared (OR: 1.195) and pressurised (OR: 1.14), than those not living with children. More nuanced findings and diverse emotional experiences were also found in people of different age groups and marital statuses.

This study has highlighted that being parents and living with children could be important factors of emotional distress, especially during the special circumstances of the pandemic and lockdowns, drawing on the large-scale national data.

Van den Berg and Amasyali make a persuasive (though not yet definitive) case that, in practice, appeals to ideas about agency do little to advance our sociological understanding. However, they seem to treat the antithesis of this (vague as it is) notion, explanatory determinism, as if it were stable. Not only are the two concepts equally paradoxical, but one calls out for the other, and we cannot criticize and dispense with one while retaining its twin.

The use of digital technology is crucial for building resilience and shaping competitive advantages in project-based organizations (PBOs). The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of digital elements on organizational resilience and resilience enhancement paths in PBOs represented by the construction industry in the context of digitization.

This study uses multivalue-set qualitative comparative analysis (mvQCA). First, we collect digitization keywords from the annual reports of PBOs in the construction industry and classify them as process digitization, digital technology application and production intelligence while also considering word frequency statistics as antecedent conditions. Second, through a literature review and the use of the data collected, we define organizational resilience as the ability of organizations to defend, resist, recover and develop. Then, we use the mvQCA approach to examine how digital antecedent variables collectively advance PBO resilience.

By collecting data on 79 listed Chinese construction companies and utilizing mvQCA, we identify five combinations of conditions that produce high levels of organizational resilience, and the solution coverage is 1. These methods are (1) digital technology application-oriented, (2) process digitalization-oriented, (3) digitized multifactor coupling, (4) process digitization and digital technology application-driven and (5) process digitalization and production intelligence-driven.

These findings have important theoretical and practical implications for revealing the digital-driven path to high levels of PBO resilience. In theory, this study enriches the research on organizational resilience and expands the application scope of organizational resilience theory and the QCA method. Furthermore, this study provides new ways and ideas for PBOs to effectively integrate and utilize internal and external digital resources to increase their levels of organizational resilience.

Agency is a concept whose status as a social-theoretical tool in and for the 21st century is a challenging question. Sociological theorists endeavor to identify agency's analytical and systematic usefulness for social research. Social theorists and critical theorists are less concerned with agency as concept and tool but may be more dedicated to assessing and tracking the fate and future of agency as a historically and socially variable phenomenon. While social theorists recognize the importance of socio-historical variations, critical theorists also are concerned with how modern societies are inherently contradictory and problematic, especially when accounts try to balance a society's “official” validity claims with the realities they obscure. Many sociologists study the societal conditions that have a bearing on whether, how, and to what extent individuals are able to engage in self-determined actions and practices. Correlating a person's location in the social structure with the status of agency in human and social life, within the matrix of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, geographic location, education, and similar indicators, is essential to delineating individuals' ability to pursue opportunities for success and to take advantage of life chances. In societies that are reproducing, fraught with, and burdened by myriad contradictions and proliferating corollary dangers and threats, individuals' locations within the social structure effect their chances for and modes of survival. In the end, agency as a function of socio-historical specificity visualizes how individuals are making decisions and choices (agency ∼ autonomy) within contexts that are beyond their control or understanding (determinism ∼ heteronomy).

The purpose of this paper is to systematically analyze the literature around regulatory compliance and market manipulation in capital markets through the use of bibliometrics and propose future research directions. Under the domain of capital markets, this theme is a niche area of research where greater academic investigations are required. Most of the research is fragmented and limited to a few conventional aspects only. To address this gap, this study engages in a large-scale systematic literature review approach to collect and analyze the research corpus in the post-2000 era.

The big data corpus comprising research articles has been extracted from the scientific Scopus database and analyzed using the VoSviewer application. The literature around the subject has been presented using bibliometrics to give useful insights on the most popular research work and articles, top contributing journals, authors, institutions and countries leading to identification of gaps and potential research areas.

Based on the review, this study concludes that, even in an era of global market integration and disruptive technological advancements, many important aspects of this subject remain significantly underexplored. Over the past two decades, research has lagged behind the evolution of capital market crime and market regulations. Finally, based on the findings, the study suggests important future research directions as well as a few research questions. This includes market manipulation, market regulations and new-age technologies, all of which could be very useful to researchers in this field and generate key inputs for stock market regulators.

The limitation of this research is that it is based on Scopus database so the possibility of omission of some literature cannot be completely ruled out. More advanced machine learning techniques could be applied to decode the finer aspects of the studies undertaken so far.

Increased integration among global markets, fast-paced technological disruptions and complexity of financial crimes in stock markets have put immense pressure on market regulators. As economies and equity markets evolve, good research investigations can aid in a better understanding of market manipulation and regulatory compliance. The proposed research directions will be very useful to researchers in this field as well as generate key inputs for stock market regulators to deal with market misbehavior.

This study has adopted a period-wise broad-based scientific approach to identify some of the most pertinent gaps in the subject and has proposed practical areas of study to strengthen the literature in the said field.