Social Closure

The chapter presents the final step in developing a new theory of social closure by outlining its explanatory framework. It argues that social closure processes unfold within the social relationships of the excluders and the excluded, the exploiters and the exploited, and the eliminators and those threatened with elimination. The powerful within these relationships employ strategies to reorganize life chances / chances of survival to their advantage, at the expense of the less powerful. This reorganization consequently transforms the socio-economic, politico-legal, socio-structural, and socio-cultural dimensions of these social relations. Viewing social closure as ongoing processes in the social world, the new approach incorporates the crucial concept of events in sociological debates. This serves as methodological bracketing to define critical events in social life that can be starting points for theorizing, and empirically analysing, and explaining social closure processes.

The book presents an entirely new approach to the theory and analysis of social closure that provides a sociological tool for analysing the three critical forms of closure in the world today: exclusion in the context of neoliberalism, exploitation/new slavery in the context of global capitalism, and elimination in the context of the ongoing legacy of settler colonialism. The approach moves social closure from a descriptive approach to an explanatory concept that transcends society-centred, Eurocentric, or Western-centred analyses of processes of social closure. A mechanismic approach allows us to identify two critical social mechanisms—denial of access and intervention into community closure—that operate in all kinds of social closure struggles. While the former explains how human beings, social groups, or communities are denied access to resources, rights, or critical networks/institutions, the latter brings a fundamentally new dimension into closure analysis. It argues that the powerful in social relations of exclusion, exploitation, and elimination not only deny access but also implement strategies that directly control or suppress social groups and communities. This control keeps them in an underprivileged position, leaving them vulnerable, unable to fight back, and exposed to the arbitrariness of the excluders, exploiters, and eliminators.

Canada is a society that is culturally defined by its two national sports, ice hockey and lacrosse. In the Canadian House of Commons in 1994, the federal government of Canada officially proclaimed ice hockey as its winter national sport, and lacrosse as its summer national sport. Hockey and lacrosse were the obvious sport choices of that time as both have deep historical roots in Canada. Today, hockey is the most popular spectator and participation sport in Canada. Indeed, hockey is identified by sport writers and sociologists as being perhaps the most identifiable attribute of Canadian culture. Yet hockey is not only an important part of Canadian culture, it has become a sport offered in ethnic community organizations through the citizen action efforts of members. This paper examines hockey and community building in an ethnic community organization in Canada. Specifically, the purpose of this paper is to present the Greek Hockey League of Ottawa and the impact this league has had on community building for the Hellenic Community of Ottawa. Based on the example of the Greek Hockey League of Ottawa, the objective of this paper is to make a unique contribution to research through the construction of a model of sport and community building for ethnic communities. The findings of this paper indicate that hockey, a mainstream activity integrated by ethnic communities such as the Hellenic Community of Ottawa, can play a vital role in helping maintain ethnicity in multicultural societies. Indeed, this sport assists in bringing individuals of Greek descent closer to their community, thus enhancing social cohesion and social closure within the community.

Introductory sociology classes afford instructors an opportunity to expose students, often from a variety of backgrounds and majors, to the sociological imagination. In this article, I describe how the use of secrets from a popular website, PostSecret.com , can help teach students about the sociological imagination and incorporate biographical examples in explanations of broader social trends and sociological concepts. I present results from a survey of students in an introductory sociology class in order to gauge their response to the use of anonymous secrets. Results reveal that over 75 percent of students indicated that PostSecret helped them understand the sociological imagination and learn sociological concepts, 93 percent of students reported that it helped them understand course content through the use of examples, and 69 percent indicated that it helped them remember important concepts. Students also indicated that the discussion of secrets helped them recognize their own assumptions about the social world and provided them with a perspectives different from their own.

Basic Concepts of Rural Sociology

Some Basic Concepts of Figurational Sociology

This article examines the curricular possibilities within critical inquiry-based primary classrooms. The children in this first through third grade multi-age, multi-lingual classroom participated in a two-year critical and collaborative inquiry around issues of segregation and the Jim Crow laws. A touchstone text, Freedom Summer (Wiles, 2001) and a critical reading strategy (Christensen, 2004) offered students opportunities to interrogate the cultural models that underpin the picture book, their interpretations of the book, and their social worlds. Findings from this study indicate that pivotal moments are key to learning and that read-aloud events go beyond community building. The study also examines the use of touchstone texts and positions critical reading strategies as tools for thinking. The findings from this article contribute to the growing body of research demonstrating the engagement of very young children in critical literacy and inquiry.

This chapter introduces a handful of innovative ontological ideas about the social world: strategic action fields, assemblages theory, economic and class interests, and recent innovations in organizational sociology. These ideas proceed largely from the actor-centered perspective described in Chapter 1. Recent organizational theories have given additional emphasis to the topic of organizational culture. The theory of strategic action fields holds that organizations are configured around incumbents who are assigned roles and powers that give them both an interest and an ability to maintain the workings of the organization. Power and collaboration play key roles in their construction. The key idea within assemblages theory is that there does not exist a fixed and stable ontology of entities for the social world that proceeds from “atoms” to “molecules” to “materials”. Rather, social formations are contingent assemblages of other complex configurations, and they in turn play roles in other, more extended configurations.

ABSTRACTThis paper introduces a special issue on Theme Parks in Asia with reflections on how the various theoretical ideas on theming and theme parks that are found in the social science literature can help us to understand the proliferation of theming and theme parks in contemporary Asia. How does theming create a specific spatial and social form that has meaning in a transforming Asia? We trace here the rising importance of theming in places of consumption, education, entertainment and everyday life and argue that further attention is needed to understand the transformation of ideas of culture, nature and heritage within the context of theme park development in Asia. We look at arguments that suggest that theming is part of human cognitive processes, that it creates a frame that gives the content a particular order and meaning; we also consider theming within the context of theories of Disneyization and the ‘experience economy’ in leisure and tourism to explore how ‘new’ experience-based consumerism, and the designing of coherent ‘imagineered’ spaces, plays a role in ordering our social worlds. We also examine how debates over the authenticity or superficiality of theme parks, and more generally in cultural display and preservation, can take on new twists in Asia. We do this by drawing on a review of postmodernist perspectives on themed parks to show how theme parks in Asia can be better understood through nuanced inquiries into the ways cultural, natural and heritage images and icons are cited, referenced and projected, departing from a simple ‘copy’ versus ‘original’ dichotomy. Finally, we position and introduce the papers included in this special issue and suggest further possible research into such a fertile research field.

The analysis of pedagogic discourse as a means of understanding social inequalities in schools

This study aims to develop a valid and practical VCT (Value Clarification Technique) learning model-based module as a learning resource for anthropology students on the basic concepts of sociology. By using the research method R&D (Research and Development). Carry out the stages of research carried

The paper aims to reveal structural peculiarities of a child’s worldview formation by the material of the French and Russian lullaby poetry. Basing on the Russian and French languages, the authors identify two trends of a child’s social world formation: developing models of “their own” and “outer” world. Scientific originality of the study lies in the fact that lullabies are considered as a source to create a child’s social world model. This model is presented in the article. The research findings are as follows: using the frame modelling method, the authors identify components of a child’s social world model, describe lexical units associated with a child’s inner circle, reveal linguo-cultural peculiarities of their functioning.

This article examines the role of objects as active agents in the production of social relations and group formation, using the case of colored socks in the Ukrainian context. Drawing on actor-network theory (ANT) and supplementing it with concepts from material culture studies and social distinction theory, the author demonstrates how unexamined, mundane, and seemingly ordinary objects participate in creating social reality. The research methodology combines theoretical analysis with autoethnographic observations, informal interviews, and document analysis. Findings demonstrate that colored socks function as mediators of social interactions rather than passive intermediaries. The agency of colored socks manifests through mechanisms including: material affordances (creating material preconditions for social interaction), script activation (enacting patterns of introduction, connection, and group solidarity maintenance), network expansion (creating connections among producers, consumers, and cultural contexts), and serving as boundary objects (bridging different social worlds). The study also emphasizes that in the Ukrainian context, colored socks have acquired additional political and identity-related dimensions, especially since 2022, functioning as markers of civic position, national resistance, and social solidarity. The wartime relocation of sock production facilities from eastern to western regions of Ukraine has both accompanied and accelerated their transformation from purely industrial goods into vehicles for narratives of resilience and symbols of cultural-historical heritage. These findings have applications in the sociology of material culture, consumption studies, and research on group formation processes in post-conflict societies. The conclusions confirm the heuristic value of a symmetrical approach to analyzing social reality and demonstrate that agency should be understood not as an intrinsic property of objects or people, but as an effect of heterogeneous networks in which material objects, together with human actors, play a constitutive role in producing social order.

It has long been known that Italy is characterized by the highest levels of professional regulation in Europe, but little attention has been given to the link between professional regulation and educational stratification. This article investigates the association between social origins and education by focusing on fields of study within tertiary education and by disaggregating the upper class of social origin into different micro-classes of professionals. Thus, since these professions are regulated in the first place by educational fields of study, it assesses how processes of social closure enhance occupational intergenerational immobility in the professional employment in Italy. Recently, deregulation of liberal professions in Italy has been central in many public and political debates. It contributes to these debates by examining the micro-level dynamics in the professionals’ social reproduction and related practises of social exclusion, which may have strong implications for policy interventions. By using ISTAT’s “Sbocchi Professionali dei Laureati” survey (2011), and employing multinomial logistic regressions, it shows how social selection into highly regulated fields of study is guided by parents’ professional domain. The analyses indicate that both sons and daughters of licensed professionals are more inclined to graduate in a field of study that is in line with the father’s profession and that this propensity is stronger among children of regulated self-employed professionals.

This book, like the May 2008 conference in World of Warcraft, ends with projections toward what the future might hold for virtual worlds. Every chapter thus far has included speculations about future directions, even while standing on data from the past. This last chapter, like the final session of the conference on which it is based, incorporates comments from dozens of participants into a stream of ideas. We have edited selected comments together with the panel’s contributions. Our intention is to provide a portal from this book into a wider virtual community comprising researchers and residents in virtual worlds. The discussion surveys many recent lines of development, some of which have already been surveyed in scientific and historical literature, or by journalists (Au 2008; Castronova 2007; Guest 2007; Ludlow and Wallace 2007). Yet, many of the topics here have not received such attention. Considered as a set of socio-technical innovations, virtual worlds are not just about technical possibilities; they also inspired the participants to consider the economic bases for investing in those possibilities and the novel cultural, social, and artistic forms virtual worlds might offer.