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For millennia children have been valued as possessions - valued by their parents as `my' child and valued by communities and cultures as `belonging' to them. Recently, a new way of valuing children has emerged ' valuing them as people in possession of themselves, as people who have rights. This has led to fears that rights will erode love between parents and children, and separate children from their communities and cultures. Childhood and Human Value explains why people feel this way and argues that they are mistaken. Adults in modern societies have separation anxieties about children's right

s Sleeping persons do not seem to be agents, to express identity or to give voice. On one view this means that social research on sleep would do best to focus on the social context of sleep rather than sleep `itself'. If the only analytic vocabulary at our disposal consists of abstractions that assume the existence of self-conscious, self-present individuals, this conclusion is probably correct. This article, however, builds on the work of some contemporary childhood researchers to offer an account of the `person' as an emergent property of distributed interactions between heterogeneous elements. The account is built through a discussion of `transitional objects' and `affects'. It is argued that this version of the `person' could help social research to make sense of both sides of the awake/asleep threshold. The potential contribution of this approach to the emerging bio-politics of childhood and states of un/consciousness is discussed.

The authors present climate change and antibiotic resistance as emergent biosocial phenomena—ongoing products of massively multiple interactions among human lifestyles and broader life processes. They argue that response to climate change and antibiotic resistance is often framed by two varieties of biosocial imagination. Anthropocentric imaginations privilege the question of human distinctiveness. Anthropomorphic imaginations privilege the question of whether biosocial processes can be modeled in terms of centers of moral and causal responsibility. Together, these frame the matter of response in terms of deliberate human action. The authors argue that, considered as emergent biosocial phenomena, climate change and antibiotic resistance "diffract" deliberate human action and thus limit the value of this frame by rendering the human/nonhuman and intended/nonintended distinctions that are crucial to its practical operation locally irrelevant. Alternative biosocial imaginations currently developing around climate change and antibiotic resistance that allow for "diffraction" and therefore frame response differently are considered.

Innovation in the life sciences calls for reflection on how sociologies separate and relate life processes and social processes. To this end we introduce the concept of the 'biosocial event'. Some life processes and social processes have more mutual relevance than others. Some of these relationships are more negotiable than others. We show that levels of relevance and negotiability are not static but can change within existing relationships. Such changes, or biosocial events, lie at the heart of much unplanned biosocial novelty and much deliberate innovation. We illustrate and explore the concept through two examples – meningitis infection and epidemic, and the use of sonic 'teen deterrents' in urban settings. We then consider its value in developing sociological practice oriented to critically constructive engagement with innovation in the life sciences.

We develop two related Actor-Network Theory (ANT) arguments for organizational analysis. The first concerns research strategy and draws upon Latour's (1999) notion of definitional `sliding' to describe how ANT overcomes its analytical limitations by removing conditions that exclude the `other'. Through this discussion, we argue that, research-wise, ANT appears to be ontologically relativist, in permitting the world to be organized differentially, yet empirically realist in providing `theory-laden' descriptions of organization. Our second argument concerns institutional boundedness and flexibility, and suggests that ANT's ontological slipperiness may actually be of value for studies of organizational form. We outline how, under ANT, the analytical focus shifts from structural prescription to processual deconstruction, the associated political dimension concerning where and for whom boundaries are produced/consumed. Overall, we argue for organizational field research that avoids any obligation to impose and defend its own theoretical discriminations.

Human... is an adjective and its use as a noun is in itself regrettable.—William Burroughs