The settlement utopia: brotherly love,discipline, and social critique

The Settlement movement, which originated in late nineteenth-century England, was a pioneer in bettering the conditions of the working poor. It pursued the utopian project of locating ‘settlements’ within poverty-ridden neighbourhoods where respectable students should meet slum dwellers on equal terms. This article explores the trajectory of the comparatively under-researched Danish offspring of the movement. It demonstrates the tempering and compromise that occurred when utopian ideals of ‘brotherly love’, ‘God’s Kingdom’, and ‘radical social change’ were realized in concrete social arrangements. Contradictions and ambiguities arose when utopian ideas were confronted with what could be done. The Settlement became a highly ambiguous space, a ‘heterotopia’. The roots of the contradictions cannot simply be identified in the external pressure of legal requirements and funding criteria represented by public welfare agencies. The contradictions can also be excavated from the Settlement’s own ideological doctrines and its historical development.     

Irish civil society: rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic? A case study of fighting Irish social security retrenchment

Examining the politics of Irish responses to crisis-related social security cuts gives insight into Irish agency and how crisis has shaped the contours of Irish civil society. Despite assertions of lack of protest, Irish retrenchment was resisted and sometimes partially defeated. Using political sociology frameworks to explore interactions between institutional, ideological and interest variables in three case studies of defending cuts enables analysis of resistance strategies. There are tensions when short-term defensive resistance strategies undermine or limit offensive political coalition-building that might offer greater long-term solidarity and more sustainable resistance to intensification of the neoliberal Irish welfare state.     

Transnationality and diaspora advocacy: lessons from disaster

A number of catastrophic disasters in the last decade have raised questions about their transnational impacts and about the role of the diaspora. The 2010 Haiti earthquake, the focus of our study, provided a lens to further our understanding of evolving conceptualizations about transnationalism, transmigrants, and social capital. We hypothesize that sustained ‘intensive transnationalism’ by diaspora and linking forms of social capital between diaspora, other civil society organizations and advocacy groups, and government institutions are critical during post-disaster recovery in affected nation states and in countries to which survivors turn for refuge. We conducted 103 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with a wide range of civil society actors in South Florida, Boston, New York, Atlanta, and Washington DC between June 2010 and June 2015. We found that linking forms of social capital were more important after the earthquake than in previous disasters. Overall, the longevity and variety of Haitian diaspora advocacy work, particularly in immigration, have resulted in broader social networks and alliances, work groups, task forces, interfaith coalitions, and support groups to address complex social and policy issues.     

Gay rights activism: collection action frames,networks, and protesting among gays,lesbians, and bisexuals

While sexual minorities have produced large and efficacious social movements in many countries, there are few systematic studies on why gays and lesbians join these movements. To address this void, this study created a unique sample of activist and non-activist listservs to identify some factors that inspired greater involvement in protests for gay and lesbian equality (n?=?285). Through the use of binary logistic regression, this study highlights the importance of several contextual, framing, and demographic variables on the protesting actions of sexual minorities. In particular, the act of protesting for gay and lesbian rights was predicted by involvement in voluntary groups, the concealment of sexual orientations, a concern over institutionalized heterosexism, and the internalizing several sorts of activist identities. Finally, racial background, but not gender, age, or economic factors, was associated with attendance at gay and lesbian rights demonstrations.     

Networks and campaigns but not movements: collective action in the disciplining Chinese State

Popular protest, civil society organizing, and non-governmental organizations have become notable features in China’s socio-political development. A mounting body of research has documented both opening opportunity structures and remaining restrictions when it comes to collective action within the authoritarian state. However, given the wide range of definitions and interpretations that are at play in the literature, it can be difficult to distinguish between different forms of collective action and determine which actions represent actual movements. This article argues that a refocus towards the basic components that constitute movement action can provide more clarity and help explain the limitations, as well as the opportunities, that surround collective action within authoritarian states. To illustrate, the article studies the organizational growth, networking, and collective action that have occurred in connection with AIDS in China. It finds that political restrictions and other coordination challenges prevent the mobilization of actual social movements.     

Repression,spontaneity, and collective action: the 2013 Turkish Gezi protests

Scholars have identified various conditions that influence the formation of spontaneous collective action. Certain types of opposition strategies and geographic conditions make it likelier for protesters to be able to overcome reactive repression and keep mobilizing after experiencing state violence. As such, it is still unclear why a small protest sometimes diffuses into an unforeseen mass wave of dissent. Through examination of Turkish civil society, this study introduces a framework to explain the emergence of the 2013 Gezi protest, which was the largest in the Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi (Justice and Development Party) government-led era of Turkish politics. A sequence of mechanisms including viral diffusion, elite updating/cover-up, public outrage, and coordination are categorized and linked to previously identified antecedent conditions as well as Twitter activity of social movement organizations which took part in the protests. The framework advances our knowledge of repression backfire by identifying its causal mechanisms and classifying a configuration of conditions under which the phenomenon is likely to empirically take place.     

Dysfunctional state institutions,trust, and governance in areas of limited statehood

Areas of limited statehood where the state is absent or dysfunctional are rarely ungoverned or ungovernable spaces. The provision of rules and regulations, as well as of public goods and services – governance – does not necessarily depend on the existence of functioning state institutions. How can this be explained? To begin with, we identify functional equivalents to state institutions that fail to govern hierarchically. Moreover, we focus on informal institutions based on trust that are endogenous to areas of limited statehood. Personalized trust among community members enables actors to overcome collective action problems and enhances the legitimacy of governance actors. The main challenge in areas of limited statehood, which are often characterized by social heterogeneity and deep social and cultural cleavages (particularly in post‐conflict societies) is to move to generalized trust beyond the local level and to “imagined communities among strangers,” despite dysfunctional state institutions. We propose two mechanisms: First, the more group‐based identities are constructed in inclusive ways and the more group identities are cross‐cutting and overlapping, the more they lead to and maintain generalized trust. Second, experiences with fair and impartial institutions and governance practices – irrespective of whether state or non‐state – also lead to generalized trust beyond the local level and allow for the upscaling of governance.     

民国时期争取女子财产继承权的社会思潮与观念变迁

清末民国时期,男女平等思想发展、传统宗族制度衰落以及现代婚姻家庭继承理论和思潮的传播,促成了中国传统女子财产继承权的近代嬗变。在这一特殊的历史时期,争取女子财产继承权的社会思潮和观念变迁巨大。     

Research on the Residential Satisfaction with Public Housing——Evidence from Zhejiang

Public housing policies focus on the needs of low-income households. The level of residential satisfaction plays a key role in the assessment of government performance. This paper reviews researches on the residential satisfaction of inhabitants living in public houses and introduces relevant national practices. Based on data from Zhejiang, we found that the average residential satisfaction level is “relatively satisfactory” on the part of the inhabitants. They seem to be satisfied with the supply quantity but a little dissatisfied with the distribution fairness. The factor analysis suggests key factors that significantly affect the residential satisfaction. The study also shows that most inhabitants expect house quality improvement with big developers and are ready to accept the rising price for better quality.     

Working Overtime in East Asia: Convergence or Divergence?

Working long hours has become a routinised part of life in East Asia. The different patterns of overtime across this region are understudied, however. This study represents a first systematic attempt to analyse overtime and its determinants in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China by testing hypotheses that specify the distinctive influences of employment status and job contracts on work hours. Class exploitation, post-industrialism and flexibility theories are mobilised to identify distinctive but supplementary factors in long working hours. Using data from a recent four-country survey, a Tobit regression analysis of full-time workers’ hours reveals that employers and self-employed people work longer hours than hired workers across this region. Despite this convergence, there is a contrast across occupations. In Japan, overtime is positively associated with occupational prestige, while a reverse pattern operates in China, where low-skilled workers work more overtime. Contract workers in the private sector in South Korea and China also have longer overtime when compared to public sector employees. In sum, this study highlights more divergence than convergence of working conditions within East Asia.