生物多様性・里山の研究動向から考える人間-自然系の環境社会学

A Relational Approach to the Digital Self: Plus-Sized Bloggers and the Double-Edged Sword of Market-Compromised Identity

This paper contributes to understanding how the social imaginary of organized craft work is constructed. The social imaginary enables the practices of a society by providing an interpretive means through which people imagine their social surroundings and develop common understandings. The analysis draws on Taylor’s (2004) concept of the social imaginary to understand the craft revival that has taken place in Western cultures in the past decade. Using empirical examples, it is proposed that this social imaginary is comprised of five dimensions: imagined communities, imagined places, imagined persons, imagined histories and imagined traditions. The paper shows how these five dimensions form the basis for constructing and contesting the authenticity of craft work. It concludes by drawing attention to the importance of the social imaginary of craft work in establishing a moral order. Specifically, it is argued that the current craft revival reflects a cultural shift away from a version of modernity based on values of rationalization and scientific, technological progress, towards more embedded, embodied conceptions of meaningful work.

Based on the interview survey conducted in Sichuan province in 2005, from the perspectives of sociology and demography, this paper aims to give a comprehensive analysis regarding the impacts of rural population outflow on China’s rural society. Focusing the household, this study not only reveals the impacts of family members’ outflow on the “left parents” , “left spouse” and “left children” respectively, but also shows the rural family as a whole has also experienced great changes in fulfilling its functions. Furthermore, this study also shows the rural population outflow has been damaging the agricultural activities in these sending villages, and the village as a whole has been witnessing dramatic changes in its physical and social surroundings.

The main objective of the paper is to present the individual, social and organizational determinants of sport for people with disabilities from a sociological perspective. In the article I explained how professional sports can affect the lives of disabled physically people. I focused on the multi-dimensional socio-cultural context. Referring to the individual experience of disabled athletes and the people around them, I have reconstructed the character and scope of the impact of physical activity and sport in the life of disabled person. The article based on a synthesis of three levels: general social, local and individual, which can be distinguished on the basis of research and analysis of empirical material.The conclusions are based on qualitative data gained using unstructured interviews and observation techniques. Analysis and interpretation of the empirical material is carried out according to the methodology of grounded theory.

Over the last few years, geoengineering, or the 'deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth's climate system, in order to moderate global warming', has attracted increasing attention among strategies to limit the impact and consequences of climate change. However, the understanding of the physical science basis of geoengineering is still limited, and there are still major uncertainties concerning the impacts these technologies might have on human and natural systems. The self-assertive invasion of nature's various domains, the scale and complexity of the technoscientific tasks involved, the unpredictable long-term impacts of geoengineering actions, and the huge uncertainties that these proposals raise point to a shift in the nature of human action that requires a commensurate ethics of foresight and responsibility. If there is a decision to embark on such an ambitious project, a major effort should be made to scrutinise and gain a deeper understanding of the geoengineering scientific worldview. In fact, the full meaning of geoengineering proposals can only be grasped in the context of the larger social imaginary of science and technology in which geoengineering narratives are rooted. In this paper, two different contextual frameworks from which to address these issues are presented and analysed. The first represents the mainstream Earth System Science perspective, while the second corresponds to an alternative view from the field of social studies of science and technology. Central to both is the concept of an 'epochal break'. In the former, this is in terms of the Human-Earth relationship, in the latter, in terms of the relationship between science, technology and society. It is hoped that this approach may contribute to clearing the path towards more open and critical reflection about the competing interests, values and assumptions of climate engineering proposals.

So long as sustainability represents the attempt to pacify the relationship between societies and their natural environments, the concept must remain attentive to any findings about the character of such relation. In this regard, the rise of the Anthropocene cannot be ignored by environmental sociologists if a realistic understanding of sustainability is to be produced. The Anthropocene is a scientific notion, grounded on geology and Earth-system science, that plausibly suggests that human beings have colonized nature in a degree that has irreversibly altered the functioning of planetary systems. As a result, social and natural systems have become “coupled”. This paper tries to elucidate the consequences that an “Anthropocenic turn” would have for sustainability studies. To such end, it will explore the related notions of hybridity and relational agency as key aspects of a renewed view of nature. Correspondingly, it argues that cultivated capital (rather than natural or manmade) must be the most important unit for measuring sustainability and devising sustainable policies in a postnatural age.

Nationalist Poetry: a Methodological Dilemma Over the past three to four decades the study of the nation and nationalism has become the preserve of the historian, the political scientist and the sociologist. Witness the dominance of historical, political and sociological perspectives in the two popular Oxford readers on the topic by John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith: Nationalism (1994) and Ethnicity (1996). In constructing general theories about the historical rise and course of nationalism scholars from these backgrounds have focused on the political and socio-economic processes at work in nation formation and state building. References to culture in this work acknowledge the role of language and literary production in nation formation; attention to these areas has been allied in recent years to the burgeoning interest in the social semiotics of the nation, including its symbols and rituals, sports and tourism, cuisine and dress, museums and architecture, landscape and cartography, art and music, and ono-mastics and commemoration. The coupling of literary production with the nation in the West has, however, been predominantly associated with prose literature, particularly the novel which, following Anderson (1991) is considered the major literary genre in nation formation. In contrast, the role of poetry in the development of the nation has been assigned to the margins of nationalism as a field of enquiry, in spite of the fact that poetry in some socio-cultural contexts has played the leading role in cultural nationalism, as in pan-Arab nationalism.

What role do patterns of thinking and consumption, innovations and infrastructures play both in the emergence of environmental problems and in the way society deals with them? How do environmental attitudes and risk perceptions differ between social groups? And how does all this relate to the diagnosis that the relationship to nature in modern societies is not sustainable? Based on these questions, the introduction to environmental sociology explains what the ecological crisis means from a sociological perspective. It introduces the central questions and theories of environmental sociology and discusses what contribution the discipline can make to overcoming the challenges of the Anthropocene.

Geographers have contributed a great deal towards an understanding of social control across different spaces and the ways in which power is exercised in the interests of élite groups to the detriment of marginalised ‘others’. Little attention however, has been given to decontrolled spaces: spaces where the standard of conduct expected of previous generations is no longer as rigid and formalised as it once was. This paper draws on the work of Norbert Elias and Cas Wouters in exploring how previously prohibited behaviours become admissible within particular social situations, groups and settings: a process known as informalisation. The informalisation thesis posits that a long-term perspective can elucidate the ways in which gradual changes in expected standards of behaviour are linked to corresponding changes in social habitus and the power differentials that characterise the social relations between élite and outsider groups. The paper contends that a revision of the sociological concept of informalisation, emphasising spatial context and difference, can contribute a great deal to debates in human geography. It is argued that the spatialisation of Elias' work could provide a useful theoretical framework with which to enhance the geographer's understanding of the relationship between group identities, power, social change and governance. Conversely, a focus on the spaces of informalisation may also advance the theory from a sociological perspective. The theory is applied to specific playscapes and highlights the uneven, problematic nature of contemporary governance projects and the related problem of social misdiagnoses in the quest towards the ‘non-antagonistic’ city.

Psychiatry is a medical specialty dealing with mental disease, including its biological and environmental antecedents, progress, treatment, and prognosis in experience of individual patients and larger statistically relevant population groups. In its general focus on human psyche, it is linked to other related disciplines, such as psychology, psychotherapy, and neurology. In the domain of humanities, psychiatry shares a certain overlap of interest with cultural anthropology, social studies, history, and related fields. The latter disciplines add a new perspective as they turn psychiatry into an object of inquiry and critical reflection. Here, psychiatry is approached as a broad field of knowledge adapting to complex social structures and settings (the sociological perspective) and dynamically changing over time (history). The history of psychiatry analyzes how societies approached the issue of mental illness and treated the mentally ill over time. Philosophy and the history of religion also come into play owing to a long-standing tradition of seeing mental disease as a punishment for spiritual or later secular moral “wrongdoing.” The criticism of such approaches instigated a broad public debate, often carried out by intellectuals from both within and beyond the medical discipline. Society’s norms concerning accepted individual attitudes and emotions, and their manifestations through adherence to or rejection of public order, mirror these societies’ ideas about the sane and the insane. These norms may or may not include creativity, spiritual practices, consumption of neuroactive substances, and practices of performing both stable and dynamic social roles such as age, ethnical, and cultural belonging; gender; sex and many more. Legal sciences and forensics must also be mentioned, where psychiatry helps to comprehend motifs behind breaches of commonly accepted, codified, and state-enforced rules of societal cohabitation. All these elements constitute the public order in its broad conceptual frame that allows for reflected contextualization of psychiatry’s role. This bibliography adopts an interdisciplinary approach that allows us to comprehensively engage with various aspects of public order and psychiatry’s place, role, and contribution to society at the broadest level. It introduces a selection of current publications on psychiatry and public order as seen and researched by interdisciplinary crossroads between psychiatry proper, history of science, social science, philosophy, legal studies, and more. The selection seeks to strike a balance between established must-reads and recent publications. Some publications will meet the interest of ongoing medical practitioners. Others will appeal to scholars dealing with psychiatry from the viewpoint of humanities. Finally, some of the enlisted works introduce relevant aspects of psychiatry to generally educated audiences who seek an overview of how psyche-related disciplines are approached and studied.

This article explores the reexamination of Tolstoyanism's philosophy of “simple life” in the digital age and its intrinsic connection with contemporary minimalism from the perspectives of philosophy and sociology, through literature review and qualitative case study. The article first reviews the relevant literature on Tolstoyanism and minimalism in the past five years, revealing the common values and differences between the two in terms of anti-consumption, abstinence and the pursuit of inner fulfillment; then, through the case studies of digital minimalism advocates (e.g., Cal Newport) and Tolstoyan practitioners (e.g., Mark Boyle), the article demonstrates the diversified practices of the philosophy of plain living and the real-life tensions they face in different socio-cultural contexts. diverse practices and the real-life tensions they face. The study shows that although Tolstoyanism and minimalism have their own focuses in terms of motivation, mode of practice, and strength of social critique, they are complementary in coping with information overload and consumerist encroachment in the digital age, and offer possible paths to constructing a healthier and more meaningful way of life. The article concludes with a discussion of the limitations of current practice and directions for future research in cross-cultural comparison, longitudinal tracing, and institutionalized support.

Racism is an element of the sociocultural context that may significantly impact personal identity development among youth of color in the USA. However, theories of personal identity development largely do not consider the influence of racialized experiences. This paper presents a theoretical framework of the role of racism on adolescent personal identity development (RAPID framework); we demonstrate its utility with the example of interpersonal forms of racism in the context of racially marginalized youth in the USA. The RAPID framework combines psychological and sociological perspectives on identity development to describe moments in the process that may be affected by aspects of racism (e.g., stereotypes, biases). Empirical support for aspects of the framework is drawn from research on adolescents’ ethnic-racial identities and specific aspects of personal identities (e.g., academic identity). To create environments that promote positive personal identity development for ethnic-racially marginalized youth, the RAPID framework addresses potential barriers that can be eliminated and highlights aspects of resilience that can be supported. Suggestions for empirical research on the RAPID framework, as well as for theoretical extensions of it, are discussed.

Purpose– This research paper aims to examine how organized criminals rescript their identities to engage with entrepreneurship discourse when authoring their biographies. From a sociological perspective, stereotypes and social constructs of the entrepreneur and the criminal are subjects of recurring interest. Yet, despite the prevalence of the stereotype of the entrepreneur as a hero-figure in the entrepreneurship literature and the conflation of the entrepreneur with the stereotype of the businessman, notions of entrepreneurial identity are not fixed with constructions of the entrepreneur as a rascal, rogue or villain being accepted as alternative social constructs.Design/methodology/approach– The qualitative approaches of “biographical analysis” and “close reading” adopted help us draw out discursive strategies.Findings– The main finding is that a particular genre of criminal biographies can be re-read as entrepreneur stories. The theme of nuanced entrepreneurial identities and in particular gangster discourse is under researched. In this study, by conducting a close reading of contemporary biographies of British criminals, the paper encounters self-representations of criminals who seek to author an alternative and more appealing social identity as entrepreneurs. That this re-scripting of personal biographies to make gangster stories conform to the genre of entrepreneur stories is of particular interest.Research limitations/implications– This study points to similarities and differences between criminal and entrepreneurial biographies. It also presents sociological insights into an alternative version of entrepreneurial identity and sociological constructions of the criminal as entrepreneur.Practical implications– This research provides an insight into how criminals seek to legitimise their life-stories.Originality/value– This research paper is of value in that it is the first to consider contemporary biographies of British criminals as entrepreneurship discourse. Understanding how criminal biographies and entrepreneur stories share similar socially constructed themes, storylines and epistemologies contribute to the development of entrepreneurship and sociological research by examining entrepreneurship in an unusual social setting.

As most of economies, the Moroccan one leans on family businesses to create growth and prosperity, yet these firms are particularly complexes organizations. Their complexity is mainly inherent to the divergent purposes of these firms and the nature of the Moroccan socio-cultural context that can be labelled as composite as well as several Arab-Muslim societies. Actually, Moroccan society is marked by an hybrid order of cultural values, negotiated permanently between tradition and modernity. In this chapter, we propose a sociological contextualization providing a discussion about the extrinsic and intrinsic complexity of Moroccan family businesses.After analyzing the characteristics of the family business as a complex system, we present the cultural traits of Moroccan society and family in this context. Finally, we address the issue of the implementation of socio-cultural values ​​in the managerial sphere and their implications for organizational behavior in family business. In light of this analysis, social responsibility practices and social relations within the Moroccan family business will be reviewed. Keywords : family business, Moroccan context, culture, sociological approach, strategy DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/12-23-13 Publication date: August 31 st 2020

The paper explains the concept of contemporary cultural ecology, a scientific approach reflecting the relationship between human society and natural environment. This approach is used by the scholars of Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. Special attention is paid to the links between cultural ecology and landscape ecology, interdisciplinary study of biophysical as well as societal driven processes and patterns in landscapes.