scholarly journals Between Individual Agency and Structure in HIV Prevention: Understanding the Middle Ground of Social Practice

2013 ◽  
Vol 103 (8) ◽  
pp. 1367-1375 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Kippax ◽  
Niamh Stephenson ◽  
Richard G. Parker ◽  
Peter Aggleton
Keyword(s):  
Hiv Prevention ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Middle Ground ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
Agency And Structure

‘I Know What Freedom and Responsibility Mean Now’

Young ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 348-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gowoon Jung
Keyword(s):  
International Students ◽  
Time Of Arrival ◽  
Structural Factors ◽  
State University ◽  
Advanced Degrees ◽  
Broad Perspective ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Korean International Students ◽  
Agency And Structure

This article analyses narratives of autonomous adulthood among Korean international students at an American state university. I categorize student narratives in terms of the number of activities associated with achieving adulthood markers and the efficacy of individual agency. A broad perspective considers a wide variety of activities to contribute to autonomous adulthood and valourizes individual agency. A narrow perspective focuses on activities tailored to one’s career, and downplays individual agency compared to larger institutional-structural factors. I examine these narratives among three groups of international students, depending on their time of arrival: pre-college migrants who moved to the USA during middle or high school, college-migrants who arrived during the first or second year of undergraduate college and post-college migrants who came for advanced degrees (e.g., MA, PhD). The finding suggests that students negotiate agency and structure differently depending on their past and current experiences in the sending and receiving countries.

Navigating a Middle Ground - Exploring Health Professionals’ Experiences and Perceptions of Providing Rehabilitation in Outdoor Community Settings

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-53
Author(s):  
Louise S. Madsen ◽  
Claus V. Nielsen ◽  
John L. Oliffe ◽  
Charlotte Handberg
Keyword(s):  
Health Professionals ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Community Settings ◽  
Middle Ground ◽  
Social Practice Theory ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Rehabilitation Outcomes ◽  
Community Based Rehabilitation ◽  
Community Environments

Contemporary practice has started to rethink use of outdoor and community environments for advancing comprehensive rehabilitation outcomes. The aim is to examine health professionals’ experiences and perceptions of providing rehabilitation in outdoor community settings. The purpose is to use these experiences to generate practice-based knowledge in using the outdoors as a means to guide community-based rehabilitation. The Interpretive Description methodology was accompanied by social practice theory. Fieldwork was conducted utilizing participant observation, photovoice, and focus-group interviews. Included were 27 health professionals. The analysis revealed how “naturalistic learning opportunities” offered health professionals strategies to empower activity and participation levels and yet invoked “rehabilitation setting tensions.” A continuum was engaged in the theme “navigating a middle ground,” representing an integrated environment approach; rehabilitation in conventional indoor and outdoor community settings. Development of a sustainable concept for outdoor community-based rehabilitation involves strengthening health professionals’ competencies and skills for providing outdoor and community work.

scholarly journals Negotiating work identity

2011 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamsen Saayman ◽  
Anne Crafford
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Identity Construction ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Identity Negotiation ◽  
Field Research ◽  
Identity Work ◽  
Work Identity ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
Managerial Implications ◽  
Value Add

Orientation: The study explored the dynamics of work identity negotiation and construction.Research purpose: The aim of the study was to investigate identity tensions and demands that mobilise identity work in the work environment.Motivation for the study: The study hoped to improve the understanding of the dynamics of identity construction and negotiation.Research design, approach and method: Using grounded theory methodology in the context of qualitative field research, the researchers conducted two unstructured interviews with 28 employees of a South African manufacturing company.Main findings: The five primary dimensions the data yielded were personal identity, individual agency, social identity, social practice and job.Practical/managerial implications: This study has implications for organisations that want to improve productivity through understanding work identity.Contribution/value-add: The article presents a conceptual model of the demands and tensions that influence work identity.

scholarly journals Towards a criminology of structurally conditioned emotions: Combining Bourdieu’s field theory and cultural criminology

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 344-363 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annick Prieur
Keyword(s):  
Field Theory ◽  
Strain Theory ◽  
Criminological Theory ◽  
Cultural Criminology ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Promising Solution ◽  
Agency And Structure

When trying to explain why some people commit crimes while most do not, criminological theory has had a problem with linking agency and structure. A promising solution came in Jock Young’s version of cultural criminology, which integrated Merton’s strain theory with Katz’s account of the emotional rewards from criminal acts. Young claimed the core emotion behind different crimes would be a structurally caused experience of humiliation. Linking individual agency and structural conditions through emotions certainly advances understanding, but Young did not show how this linking was effectuated. Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory may contribute with a better grasp on how structural conditions influence the social agent’s perception of the world and emotional orientation towards it. After exploring how this argument may be supported with regard to empirical cases – studies of graffiti, thefts and violence – the concluding discussion deals with the limits of an approach that combines fields and emotions.

scholarly journals Avian Influenza Risk Environment: Live Bird Commodity Chains in Chattogram, Bangladesh

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erling Høg ◽  
Guillaume Fournié ◽  
Md. Ahasanul Hoque ◽  
Rashed Mahmud ◽  
Dirk U. Pfeiffer ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Disease Risk ◽  
Structural Constraints ◽  
Commodity Chains ◽  
Risk Environment ◽  
Value Appropriation ◽  
Live Animal ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
Client Relationships ◽  
Agency And Structure ◽  
Live Bird

In this paper, we identify behaviours in live bird commodity chains in Chattogram, Bangladesh, which may influence the risk of pathogen emergence and transmission: the nature of poultry trade, value appropriation and selling sick or infected birds. Examining the reasons why actors engage in these behaviours, we emphasise the politics of constraints within a context of real-world decisions, governed by existential and pragmatic agency. Focusing on contact zones and entanglement, analysing patron-client relationships and precarious circumstances, we argue that agency and structure specific to the Bangladeshi context produce a risk environment. Structural constraints may reinforce risky occupational practises and limit individual agency. Structural constraints need to be addressed in order to tackle animal and zoonotic disease risk along live animal commodity chains.

scholarly journals Understanding Lived Experiences of Food Insecurity through a Paraliminality Lens

Sociology ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 003803852110034
Author(s):  
Caroline Moraes ◽  
Morven G McEachern ◽  
Andrea Gibbons ◽  
Lisa Scullion
Keyword(s):  
Food Insecurity ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Food Access ◽  
Qualitative Data ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Policy Implications ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Agency And Structure

This article examines lived experiences of food insecurity in the United Kingdom as a liminal phenomenon. Our research is set within the context of austerity measures, welfare reform and the precarity experienced by increasing numbers of individuals. Drawing on original qualitative data, we highlight diverse food insecurity experiences as transitional, oscillating between phases of everyday food access to requiring supplementary food, which are both empowering and reinforcing of food insecurity. We make three original contributions to existing research on food insecurity. First, we expand the scope of empirical research by conceptualising food insecurity as liminal. Second, we illuminate shared social processes and practices that intersect individual agency and structure, co-constructing people’s experiences of food insecurity. Third, we extend liminality theory by conceptualising paraliminality, a hybrid of liminal and liminoid phenomena that co-generates a persistent liminal state. Finally, we highlight policy implications that go beyond short-term emergency food access measures.

scholarly journals Revealing the Silenced Spots: The Influence of Thomas and Znaniecki on the Study of Marginalized Aspects of Social Life

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 212-247
Author(s):  
Anna Kacperczyk
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Sociological Research ◽  
Huge Number ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
Gradual Process ◽  
The Social ◽  
Blind Spots

This article aims to highlight the influence of the work of William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki on the perception of social reality by sociologists. I focus on the social practice of creating personal documents (memoirs, autobiographies, and letters) as a form of enacting individual agency and speaking their voice in the social space. I show the contribution of various social classes in this memorializing practice in Poland, reaching back to the 17th and 18th centuries. While doing so, I emphasize that a big part of society was practically muted in literary discourses. The voices of peasants and working-class were silenced as they had no access to the means which would enable them to speak and be represented in the discourse. Against this background, we can see how the “memoir competitions”—a very popular research practice being introduced in Poland by Znaniecki in 1921—have changed the power relations in the field of generating knowledge about social reality. The institution of Polish Memoirism that systematically gathered a huge number of autobiographies, enabled the poor and voiceless to speak and be heard by social researchers. In this sense, the monumental work of Thomas and Znaniecki was a trigger to the gradual process of revealing “blind spots” on the map of social reality and giving voice to the muted. Throughout the article, I return again and again to the main methodological questions, that is, what does it mean to include the consciousness of the participants of social life in sociological research, how to represent them in sociological theorizing, and how they can regain their voice in the scientific narrations about them.

scholarly journals Learning to be Moved: The Modes of Democratic Responsiveness

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-46
Author(s):  
Bryan Warnick ◽  
Douglas Yacek ◽  
Shannon Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Social Practice ◽  
Middle Ground ◽  
Democratic Responsiveness ◽  
General Welfare ◽  
The Social ◽  
Moral Problems ◽  
Democratic Life

Being responsive to the experiences, ideas, and stories of others is an essential trait for democratic citizens. Responsiveness promotes the general welfare, it shows respect for others, and allows for what Tony Laden has called the social practice of reasoning. Political theorists have shown how responsiveness is a middle ground between dominance and acquiescence, where citizens show a willingness to be moved by those around them. Responsiveness is tested, though, when citizens interact with those who hold what are thought to be immoral or unjust beliefs. The key question: Is it possible to engage responsively with those who hold morally suspect beliefs, to be legitimately “moved” by those around us, without necessarily acquiescing to the moral problems? We argue that such engagement is both possible and desirable. There are at least five different ways to be moved by others in a productive, civic sense. We describe these modes, explain their moral depth, and give some examples. Civic educators should be aware of these modes and teach students how they can be manifest in democratic life.

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