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This article analyzes two social movements in France: the 'Mouvement des Indigènes de la République' [Movement of the 'Indigenous' of the Republic], and the 'Réseau Éducation Sans Frontières' [Education without Borders Network]. It explores the kinds of borders and underlying struggles that these social movements bring to light, and how their actions redraw borders. In these borderlands, actors in the two French resistance movements oppose exclusions and attempt to delegitimize the collective understanding of 'la République' that underpins them. This analysis builds on previous research demonstrating that social movements can succeed instrumentally in mobilizing participants when they resonate with and draw on participants' 'lifeworld' (Edwards, 2008; Habermas, 1987). Moreover, I insist on the expressivist quality of these actions as performances of democratic freedom (Beltrán, 2009; Drexler, 2007). Finally, I consider some limitations and the broader lessons for border challenges.

Why are international institutions designed in one way and not another? Using the European security and defence policy (ESDP) as a case study, this article suggests that the social representations dominating the national and organizational world of institution-makers are key to our understanding the shape and content of an emerging institution of international security cooperation.A focus on social representations, which are the product of institutional practices, helps to break the interest/idea dichotomy that underpins most theories of preference formation when they try to explain institutional designs.This article shows that foreign and defence policy-makers from France, Germany and the United Kingdom have shaped ESDP by projecting their respective social representations, notably with regard to the role of the state, the nature of security challenges and the purpose of their organization.

Abstract In this article I focus on three kinds of overlapping social coordinates — fields, networks and frames — as they are worked out in the day‐to‐day activities of a large Tokyo advertising agency. My aims are threefold. First, to show how the three social forms of fields, networks and frames interlock in a dialectical manner that permits both macro‐ and micro‐levels of sociological analysis. I thus present methodological approaches hitherto perceived to be different in emphases or interests as complementary rather than at odds with one another. Second, I take up and reexamine the notions of network and frame as developed within the specific context of Japanese social organization. Third, I make a statement in favour of anthropological studies of business as a means of understanding how industries and organizations function in a global economy.

The cultural turn in sociology tends to merge the realms of the social and the cultural into one another. In two case studies on cultural governance, it is suggested that these realms are more usefully regarded as distinct in order to understand how culture has been shaped into a historically distinctive means for acting on the social. The first case study examines how art was enlisted as a means of acting on what were deemed problematic class behaviours in the reforming programs of mid-19th century English liberalism. The article then considers the varied roles accorded art as a means of acting on communities in contemporary programs of advanced liberalism. Consideration is also given to the implications of this perspective on the relations of art, government, and the social for the status of the work of art.

The Cauca Valley in southwest Colombia offers a good closeup view of social change, the power struggle at the grass roots, and rural and urban problems in a country whose size and strategic location make her future a matter of special concern to those who seek to avoid violent solutions to Latin America's social problems.Colombia would seem to have better prospects for evolutionary development than several Latin American countries with less enlightened leadership and fewer democratic traditions. But Colombia's ruling groups face formidable, sometimes seemingly insoluble economic and social problems. The economy has been wobbly for years, buffeted by fiscal crises, foreign exchange shortages, quickening inflation, and urban unemployment. Also, Colombia has suffered more than any other country in this hemisphere from a species of internal war referred to locally as the violencia.

Witnessing the left's decline -- Society's 'bubbles', 'networks' and 'tribes' -- Economy -- The force of cultural identity -- England and Scotland -- Imagining the future -- Institutions of change -- The left : caught between populism and leadership? -- Conclusion: We've been travelling on rocky ground.