An Industry of Social Change

2021 ◽  
pp. 3-17
Author(s):  
Cynthia Rayner ◽  
François Bonnici
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Unintended Consequences

Although we may not realize it, the prevailing approach to social change is driven by an industrial mindset that has been two centuries in the making. With this mindset, public, private, and nonprofit sectors exchange large sums of money, expertise, and resources in pursuit of ambitious goals to stave off poverty, disease, and hunger at a global scale. Yet, despite this massive effort, social problems still seem insurmountable. In Chapter 1, the authors consider how this “industrial” approach to social change emerged historically, creating an architecture that is currently used to imagine, fund, and implement social change. This architecture leads to many of the unintended consequences faced today.

scholarly journals Exhaustion and possibility. The wor(l)dlyness of social work in (G)local environment worlds during a pandemic

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 54-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mona B Livholts
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Social Work ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Work Practice ◽  
Local Environment ◽  
Social Work Practice ◽  
Writing Genres

Exhaustion is not about being tired. It is an intense feeling of restlessness, of insomnia, and awakening when I ask myself: have I exhausted all that is possible? Such a state of restlessness and wakefulness represents a turning point for having enough, and opens for new possibilities to act for social change. This reflexive essay departs from the notion that the language of exhaustion offers a wor(l)dly possibility for social work(ers) to engage in critical analytical reflexivity about our locations of power from the outset of our (g)local environment worlds. The aim is to trace the transformative possibilities of social change in social work practice through the literature of exhaustion (eg. Frichot, 2019 ; Spooner, 2011 ). The methodology is based on uses of narrative life writing genres such as poetry, written and photographic diary entrances between the 4th of April and 4th of June. The essay shows how tracing exhaustion during the pandemic, visualises a multiplicity of forms of oppression and privilege, an increasing attention and relationship to things, and border movements and languages. I suggest that social work replace the often-used terminology of social problems with exhaustive lists to address structural forms of racism, sexism, ableism, ageism, which has been further visualized through death, illness, violence, and poverty during the pandemic. I argue that the language of exhaustion is useful for reflexivity and action in social work practice through the way it contributes to intensified awareness, attention, engagement, listening, and agency to create social justice.

Reading Machines in the Modernist Transatlantic

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric B. White
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Technological Innovation ◽  
Information Age ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Mina Loy ◽  
Cultural Narrative ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
Technological Sublime

Reading Machines in the Modernist Transatlantic provides a new account of aesthetic and technological innovation, from the Machine Age to the Information Age. Drawing on a wealth of archival discoveries, it argues that modernist avant-gardes used technology not only as a means of analysing culture, but as a way of feeding back into it. As well as uncovering a new invention by Mina Loy, the untold story of Bob Brown’s ‘reading machine’ and the radical technicities of African American experimentalists including Gwendolyn Bennett, Ralph Ellison and Langston Hughes, the book places avant-gardes at the centre of innovation across a variety of fields. From dazzle camouflage to microfilm, and from rail networks to broadcast systems, White explores how vanguardists harnessed socio-technics to provoke social change. Reading Machines argues that transatlantic avant-gardes deployed ‘techno-bathetic’ strategies to contest the dominance of the technological sublime. This major but hidden cultural narrative engaged with the messy particulars and unintended consequences of technology’s transduction in society. Techno-bathetic vanguardists including Futurists, Vorticists, Dadaists, post-Harlem Renaissance radicals and American Super-realists proposed new, non-servile ways of reading and doing technology. The books reveals how these formations contested the entrenched hierarchies of both the transatlantic Machine Age and technological sublime.

FROM ELIZABETH GASKELL’S MARY BARTON TO HER NORTH AND SOUTH:PROGRESS OR DECLINE FOR WOMEN?

2000 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 345-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pearl L. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Social Conflicts ◽  
Social Purpose ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mature Work ◽  
North And South

ASSESSMENTS OF ELIZABETH GASKELL’S two novels of social purpose typically conclude that North and South, published in 1855, is a more mature work stylistically and ideologically than Mary Barton, published in 1848. North and South is said to integrate the narrative modes of romance and realism more effectively than Mary Barton (Felber 63, Horsman 284), and to provide a more complicated narrative structure (Schor, Scheherezade 122–23), a more complex depiction of social conflicts (Easson 59 and 93) and a more satisfactory resolution of them (Duthie 84, Kestner 170). North and South is also said to deal with “more complex intellectual issues” (Craik 31). And the novel’s heroine, Margaret Hale, has been seen as Gaskell’s most mature creation — a woman who grows in self-awareness as she adapts to an alien environment (Kestner 164–166) and, unlike Mary Barton, becomes an active mediator of class conflicts (Stoneman 120), the central consciousness that brings together “the lessons of social change and romance” (Schor, Scheherezade 127).1 The reconciliation of these conflicts she inspires through her influence over both mill owner and worker has been praised as a more effective and credible narrative resolution to the social problems depicted in the novel than the reconciliation between mill owner and worker in Mary Barton (David 36).

Examining Change

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Whitney Sanford
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Raw Milk ◽  
Intentional Communities ◽  
Historical Overview ◽  
Risk Regulation ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
Social Tensions ◽  
Community Ties

Examining change explores some of the social tensions around aging, food, and consumerism that contemporary intentional communities address. The chapter offers a brief historical overview of social change in the US, but focuses on contemporary anxieties that have motivated the formation of more recent intentional communities. While independence is a critical American value, many people crave stronger community ties, especially as they age. Similarly, a newly food-aware U.S. public wants the freedom to experiment with foods such as raw milk, but demands the safety that accompanies regulated foods, demonstrating tensions between risk, regulation, and authority. This chapter outlines why some people want change and how intentional communities are testing solutions to social problems.

scholarly journals Social Entrepreneurship and Sport in Romania: How Can Former Athletes Contribute to Sustainable Social Change?

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 4688
Author(s):  
Pompiliu-Nicolae Constantin ◽  
Rares Stanescu ◽  
Monica Stanescu
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Social Entrepreneurship ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Social Entrepreneur ◽  
Former Athletes ◽  
The Status ◽  
Societal Level ◽  
Common Action

Social entrepreneurship is an underrated subject in the field of sports. For Romanian society, the fall of communism opened up new opportunities in the entrepreneurial domain. At the same time, entrepreneurship began to intersect with sports, and the results were often productive. Sport is seen as a domain that could inspire entrepreneurship through its principles. The similarities between these two fields have created the perspective of common action in sport and entrepreneurship, and this coexistence has improved during times of social change. After 1989, Romania was confronted with many challenges at the societal level, and sport offered a way to address and to tackle social problems. Through sport, some athletes decided to contribute to issues of individuals or communities. They assumed the status of a social entrepreneur, and developed activities that could inspire others. This paper intends to gather examples of such social entrepreneurship from Romania, and to identify the elements that lead to success. The research takes into consideration case studies from various domains, and this diversity helps us to better understand the challenges of Romanian sport when it interacts with social entrepreneurship.

What are unintended and adverse consequences?

Kybernetes ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 226-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josué Antonio Nescolarde-Selva ◽  
Hugh Gash ◽  
Jose-Luis Usó-Domenech
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Sociological Theory ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Content Type ◽  
History Of ◽  
Methodological Status ◽  
Constituent Elements

Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine the unintended consequences of actions as one of the central and constituent elements of sociological theory and long debated in the history of sociology. This question has been treated under varying sociological terminologies, including, providence, social forces, social paradoxes, heterogeneity of ends, immanent causality and the principle of emergency. Design/methodology/approach This paper is concerned with “adverse effects”. The thematic contexts of “unintended consequences of social action” the authors wish to focus attention on are specific types of consequences which may merit the adjective “adverse”. Findings The analysis of the intentions of our actions and their unwanted or foreseen consequences allows us to understand how societies work. Many historical facts are probably “unintentional.” But, most continuous or changing life forms must be interpreted as a mixture of intentional (social reproduction) and unintentional consequences (social change). Originality/value This paper focuses on four points of view: the object of sociology, the problems of order and social change, the methodological status of the discipline and the nature of social explanation, and mathematical theory. Four classifications of unintended consequences are formulated from the works of Boudon, Baert and Ramos, as well as the authors.

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