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This book tells the important story of the 30-year social movement against all-seated stadia in football in England and Wales that developed in the wake of the Hillsborough stadium disaster and the wider European and international significance of that movement. Examining the fan networks, relations, tactics, and interactions which built the Safe Standing' movement, this book reveals an untold social history of football supporter activism and represents an important contribution to our understanding of football supporter-based social movements, the sociology of football, and social movement studies more broadly. This book argues that Safe Standing is sociologically highly significant because the restriction and partial exclusion of football fans as a social group in the timescape of English football after Hillsborough marked a moment of profound social change in the UK. Applying relational sociology, and drawing on original research and insider access, this book considers how events and ruptures, such as Hillsborough, shape the dynamics of a social movement. In this case, supporters, who have been deeply affected by the all-seating legislation, are now in a position to affect the future consumption of football. This book shows how this was achieved and how a small core network of approximately 30 supporters, networked with supporter groups across Europe, now stand to impact and shape the consumption habits of a key leisure practice all over the world. This is fascinating reading for any student, researcher, or policy-maker with an interest in football, sociology, political science, public policy, or cultural and social history.

Twenty-eight years after the Taylor Report into the Hillsborough disaster recommended that all football grounds in the top two divisions in England and Wales should become all-seated, the UK government, in 2018, announced a review into the safety of modern standing areas and whether developments in stadium safety might justify changing the all-seating legislation to permit Safe Standing. These events are the outcome of a 30-year social movement in which a critical mass of supporters, through the relational networks they formed, have built collective action. Drawing upon both archival and fieldwork research to analyse the longer-term impact which all-seated stadia have had on football supporters' consumption of the game in England, the article uses relational sociology to tell the story of the movement, and studies the working tactics and structure of a small network mobilizing across the political and discursive fields of contention post-Hillsborough. It argues that whilst now a more effective movement with technological and political capital, Safe Standing continues to raise important questions around the historical views on football fans as somehow deviant and reinforces the long-term impact and legacy of Hillsborough on supporters' modern cultural consumption of the game by moving within the parameters of the all-seating legislation.

Lord Justice Taylor's final report into the Hillsborough stadium disaster recommended that all Premier League and Championship football grounds in England and Wales should become all-seated and that football supporters would eventually become 'accustomed and educated to sitting'. Thirty years later, thousands of fans continue to stand at matches but in areas not designed for them to do so. This ritual has become a source of conflict between clubs, supporters and official safety bodies. In 2018, the UK Sports Minister claimed that despite this problem, there remained no desire amongst top clubs to change the all-seating policy and that it was only a 'vocal minority' who wanted to see the permanent return of standing in English football. However, supporters, networked through the national Football Supporters Association, had been actively mobilizing a social movement against the legislation for over 20 years. In this article, I use relational sociology to analyse empirical snapshots of the latest phase of this movement, 'Safe Standing', to show how the switching and cooperation of supporter networks and their tactics were successful in breaking down the state to create new political opportunities. In doing so, the article reveals the key characteristics of safe standing, including conflict, organizational form and intersubjective motivations, to represent the collective – but also often complex and contradictory – responses to the neoliberal political economy which English football, and society more broadly, has inhabited over the past 30 years.

AbstractThe first principle of cognitive linguistics is to look for the origins of linguistic powers in robust mental operations not specific to language. For millennia, language science has assumed that human beings possess mental operations for unifying, combining, and merging patterns to create expressions, and that, conversely, they can analyze expressions they encounter to recognize patterns that were combined to produce them. The third section of this article reviews some of the literature concerned with these powers to combine patterns into expressions and to analyze expressions into patterns that were blended to create them. Any assumption about such a linguistic power takes out a loan on theory that must be cashed out with a non-language-specific explanation if the theory is to count as cognitive. One can stipulate to the existence of some unexplained power that is needed for linguistic performance, but that stipulation is insubstantial until it is grounded in a demonstrated non-language-specific operation. An assumption or stipulation about a linguistic power is cashed out when we locate and model the non-language-specific cognitive operations that make that linguistic power possible. The first section of this article presents the proposition that the non-language-specific mental operation that accounts for these linguistic powers is blending, otherwise known as conceptual integration. The second section provides a topical review of blending in specific communicative form-meaning pairs and their combination. Blending is the foundation of creativity in communication, or, more specifically, in the creation and combining of form-meaning pairs, also called "constructions."

SUMMARYThis article demonstrates how theory can be built to explain cases of public administration reform failure in Asia. Drawing on the methodologies of middle range theory and grounded theory, qualitative data are gathered from the case of Cambodia and then analyzed. The result is the proposition that a specific constellation of reform‐inhibiting factors explains the slow progress of public administration reform in Cambodia. At the center of the constellation is patronage. The cluster of surrounding and interrelated factors includes weak accountability, hegemonic political regime, high and legitimate power distance, low wages, and bureaucratic dysfunction. The chances of reform success increase with the removal or absence of these inhibiting factors. The analysis emphasizes the importance of political economy factors in determining the success or failure of public administration reform. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The essay offers a critique of the changing social, cultural and political significance of goal celebrations by considering how, during the transition from football as a local, proletarian, masculine industry and product of Fordist modernity to a global, mediated, paradoxical entertainment spectacle, a postmodern culture of goal celebration has emerged, which acts as a comment on or reaction to modernity. In many cases, individual postmodern goal scorers have shifted their interest from a concern with the ultimate end of scoring a goal and restarting the game as soon as possible, to a pragmatic concern relating to the optimal performance of celebration. Through a series of genres, the essay discusses how the postmodern goal celebration in creative modernity has several styles, all of which demonstrate the way in which football culture 'has become increasingly self-reflexive, juxtapositional and parodic through the growing irrelevance of a stable conception of reality'.

AbstractThe Philippines has the most vibrant and largest civil society in Southeast Asia, which engages constantly with government and has achieved some notable successes. This article traces the origins of the main components of this civil society—the numerous non‐governmental organisations (NGOs)—and delineates their differing characteristics. NGO operations are then examined through the use of network analysis. This approach focuses on the relationships linking NGOs to one another and to the multiplicity of other actors in their arenas of operation, particularly government organisations, thus enabling an appreciation of the complex interactions that occur as NGOs negotiate their environments to achieve their goals. Also relevant are the various strategies and tactics used by NGOs to promote their values, ideologies and activities. These include advocacy, research, capacity building, legislative lobbying and protest. Clearly, while the civic engagement of NGOs in the Philippines has been much celebrated, the societal changes they facilitate are typically incremental in nature. They require continued vigilance and action to ensure sustainability in the context of a weak state where the particularistic demands of politicians are prominent and the state lacks capacity to provide the services it promises. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.