Suchergebnisse

Cumbria's sustainability depends upon the collaborative efforts of business, government, academia, voluntary sector and local communities. Cumbria's development, sustainability and leadership challenges are complex and interconnected and need different sectors to work together towards more sustainable forms of development. Sustainability partnerships offer opportunities to leverage partner resources, stimulate innovative leadership and maximise impact. This workshop will enable participants to understand the rationale for, and risks of, such collaboration for business and when, and when not, to get involved.

This paper examines if Amartya Sen's entitlements and capabilities theories can be transferred in their application from Low Income Countries (LIC) to High Income Countries (HIC), specifically in Cumbria, northern England. Originally used to understand the causes of famine, these theories have previously been used in several different geographical contexts to broadly understand poverty and inequality but almost entirely in LICs. This paper applies the theories to a United Kingdom context in an attempt to understand the causes of poverty and inequality amongst people experiencing 'livelihood crisis'. The research uses data from two non-governmental social welfare projects to examine the causes of crisis and the remedial effects of the intervention. Our findings indicate that these theories can help to explain how people find themselves in crisis in Cumbria. On a broader level, they can also be used to explain poverty, inequality and disadvantage in communities in the UK. The authors put forward that entitlements and capabilities theories provide a useful framework to advance the policy and political debate on the causes of poverty by providing a straightforward language and broad application. Entitlement and capabilities theories can also assist social welfare programmes in framing their aims and objectives and through improved understanding about the causes of inequality, will be better able to help people out of disadvantage by strengthening entitlements and building capabilities, without the necessity of large-scale investment.

The aim of this paper is to critically discuss whether different historical and cultural diagnostic criteria of schizophrenia have social and treatment implications. This paper also discusses what it means to have the diagnosis of schizophrenia and to what psychologists may gain from individuals having these diagnoses; the essay in particular discusses monetary gain for the National Health Service and government or power. Possible faults of diagnosing schizophrenia using just biological and psychological precursors due to reliability are also critically debated in an attempt to discuss the implications of this diagnosis. Furthermore, this piece of work discusses that over time as the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia changes, more people could be diagnosed. It also highlights how culture can affect diagnostic criteria; such as the fact you can be diagnosed with the condition in one culture and not have that diagnosis in another culture. After looking at the literature it appeared that the changes to the criteria does in fact have serious implications for individuals. A conclusion was drawn before suggestions for further research was made in terms ways to get a better insight into the implications when diagnosed with a condition such as schizophrenia.

Bushcraft emerged from indigenous knowledge with a skill-base used for military, commercial and recreational purposes. We identify it as embodied contextual learning, for and with the environment, arising from a deep inter-subjective relationship with the natural world. This focus suggests a 'conscientization' developing a critical awareness, transformative of society's relationship with ecosystems and providing autonomous, individual learning. Bushcraft education has gained in popularity in recent years and we seek to problematise and define its educational identity as it appears rarely in mainstream or outdoor education. Accordingly, we suggest that bushcraft education shares some of the aims of radical education, signalled by the transformative purpose in which radical pedagogies are positioned, normally situated outside mainstream formal education. We conclude that bushcraft education may have global significance as radical pedagogy, progressing deeper understandings of the relationship between self and nature, and in transdisciplinary thinking supporting our response to current environmental crises.

To aid political and institutional decision making in the sustainable use of natural resources the value of ecological, socio-cultural and economic assets has increasingly been communicated in terms of monetary units. Despite reliance upon natural resources, the impact of human activities has now reached a stage where cumulative losses are forcing society to re-appraise the evaluation process and how to better incorporate these values in to the decision-making process. This paper examines the attributes of value held by natural resources within ecological, socio-cultural and economic value domains from the perspective of a rural UK community. Here we reflect upon the continued primacy of monetary valuation of natural resource using two approaches, a scaled preference-based value typology and a place-based map measure. We demonstrate that the societal relationships which inform the evaluation of natural resources are both multi-faceted and hierarchical. Moreover, whilst aware of the utilitarian character of society's relationship with natural resource, the societal value-for-natural-resource relationship is primarily expressed using social-ecological qualities. These results add weight to the call for a new approach towards natural resource evaluation and how these values contribute to the sustainability agenda. New methods of evaluation must adopt multiple values that extend beyond a solely economic-based commodification concern to encompass the human relationship with the resource itself. Wherein, a multi-faceted approach to attributing value to natural resource, set within an experiential framework, can provide a focal point for discussion and the decision-making process.

The purpose of this study was to examine support available from identification through to recovery for survivors of modern slavery and human trafficking in the United Kingdom (UK) following the introduction of the Modern Slavery Act in 2015. Twenty-nine semi-structured individual and group interviews were conducted with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) providing direct support to survivors and law enforcement engaged in initial identification, rescue and support. Thematic analysis identified that survivors' experiences of support and negotiation of state processes is challenging, requiring lengthy periods of waiting. This experience is often compounded by variations in knowledge of processes and systems by frontline staff, resulting in negative impacts on outcomes for survivors. The small number of research participants could be regarded as a limitation but is common in qualitative, exploratory studies. A larger study should be conducted to test these initial findings. The implications propose a revision of policy especially for asylum-seeking survivors. The study was conducted two years after the introduction of the Modern Slavery Act, 2015, during a period in which gaps in processes and support for survivors were beginning to emerge. This study offers a timely assessment of these gaps and argues for a review of policy and its implementation.

This paper shares Andersson's interest in exploring the 'backstage' of Victorian civility and respectability. The adroit media manipulation of high-status leading reformers and their associations and societies, with their often overlapping membership, has accorded them an inflated importance as a representation of the Victorian Age, and can distort our understanding. The argument here begins by problematizing the ways some historians have made use of contemporary statistics and terms such as 'respectability' or 'vice'. For the Victorians these carried multiple meanings and cultural resonances, partially dependent on identities of class, gender, generation, Tory or Liberal political orientation, attitude to faith, and ethnicity. This meant that the complex nuances of understanding attached to activities sometimes labelled as unrespectable 'vices' such as drinking, sexual transgression and gambling could make them acceptable in a variety of cultural contexts despite the opposition of vociferous anti-'vice' groups. The paper concludes with a brief exploration of the potentiality of visual and digital resources for delving deeper into such issues.

I report on a study of 301 sociologists to determine which concepts, topics, and skills they deem most important to cover in the introductory course and in the sociology curriculum. Respondents indicated high agreement that the list of skills, topics, and concepts adequately represented the range of possible items. I use both the raw ratings and the results of asking respondents to select their "top five" items. Results show strong agreement on core concepts, topics, and skills, with both overlaps and differences between results for the introductory course and the sociology curriculum. Issues of difference and inequality are important for both the introductory course and the curriculum. Core concepts are seen as more critical for the introductory course, and theory and methods are seen as more critical for the curriculum. Values and commitments as well as applied sociology rank lowest for both the introductory course and the sociology curriculum. Implications for the sociology curriculum as well as for introductory textbooks are discussed.

Liberalne przesłanki polskiej transformacji pod red. Wacława Jarmołowicza, Katarzyny Szarzec, Polskie Wydawnictwo Ekonomiczne, 2011, SS. 301.

Let them have fun! – but it's no joke for growing numbers of otherwise-privileged white-collar employees whose every breath, word and key-stroke is recorded by wearable 'multivariate predictive analytics' like the Humanyze Badge and transmitted straight to managers. In Unto This Last, Ruskin wrote that political economy, '… assuming, not that the human being has no skeleton, but that it is all skeleton … founds an ossifiant theory of progress on this negation of a soul'. The designers of contemporary work organisations go further in their assumptions. For them, human beings not of the managerial class have neither soul nor rights nor dignity unless, in an ersatz form, those things somehow improve profitability. The story of how we came to this terrifying pass shows how well-intentioned people accidentally turned concern for the well-being of the worker into the technology of corporate surveillance. Of course, it is not confined to employees: just about everyone is what Facebook has called 'livestock' for digital exploitation. In this talk, I look at the spine-chillingly and accidentally hilarious manifestations of work-place surveillance and ask if, so far from being the idiot fantasies of Silicon Valley geeks, such technologies writ large might be a threat to democracy and common humanity. … [to make] sure you're getting the best possible returns from your … human capital investments, you should be concerned about the aging curves of your marketing people; you should want to know if your tech support folks will deliver better outcomes tomorrow than today; you should be predicting which sales teams will procure the most lucrative contracts with the minimum risks. (HBR, 2013).

The aim of this article is to lay down the foundations of a critical sociology of democracy and participation. Based on Amartya Sen's capability approach, we identify four major pitfalls of classical theories on justice and deliberative democracy: 1) an excessive emphasis on the procedural dimension of democracy at the expense of its substantial value; 2) an ideal of deliberation that does not sufficiently account for the inequalities that characterize actual participative practices; 3) an ideal approach to rationality which is inconsistent with the plurality of reasons to value and arguments that can be observed in social reality; and 4) a focus on official or institutionalized forms of deliberation that does not pay due attention to the many forms and dynamics of participation. We contend that, by contrast, Sen's epistemology may be fruitful for the development of a critical sociology of democracy and suggest an agenda for empirical research on participation and deliberative practices.