Sociological Analysis of Divorce: A Case Study from Pokhara, Nepal

Marriage and separation are societal problems as well as reserved distresses. Divorce is a lifetime stressor for an individual, complicated with theoretically harmful values for the emotional and physical fitness of all fellows of the household. The simple determination of this assessment is to deliver detailed information around the influence of separation on peoples’ lifespan. The objectives of study were i) to study the socio-economic characteristics of the respondents, ii) to investigate the socio-economic causes of increasing divorce among females, iii) to study the perceived adverse effects of parent's divorce on the children, and iv) to suggest some measures how to minimize the divorce rate in community and its negative effects on the children. This research was investigated in District Muzafar Garh, in South Punjab & 180 community peoples were selected from 1 selected tehsil through multistage sampling technique. The results indicated that majority of participants (51.1%) were females, their age ranges from 40 to upto 53 years old (60.0%), were married (87.7%), had been completed upto matriculation level (56.1%), and their spousal education was upto matriculation level (58.9%). A mixed results were found majority (55.0%) were housewives, and daily wage labourers, are belonged to lives in nuclear family system, and their family income ranges from 20,000 to upto 50,000 rupees in per month (62.8%). The results investigated the socio-economic causes of increasing divorce among females i.e. majority (68.9%) said that divorce rate is increasing among females day by day in society to some extent. A significance proportion of participants (90.0%) were agreed domestic violence is a cause of increasing divorce among females, societal pressure contributes to the rising divorce (47.2%), problems with in-laws (51.1%), lack of communication skills leads to higher divorce (48.3%), extra-marital affair of husband (92.8%), female infertility status (95.0%) and agreed with the statement husband’s impotence is a cause of divorce among females (86.6%). The results were found economic causes i.e. majority (89.5%) of participants were agreed financial instability is a leading cause of divorce among females, unequal financial contributions pressure marriages (86.7%), unemployment leads to marital stress and divorce (91.7%), financial disagreements factors (91.7%), financial instability due to factors like job loss (85.6%), financial independence (83.3%) and one-third (36.7%) of the respondents were agreed that husband’s low income to meet household needs is a cause of divorce among females. According to this objective to study the perceived adverse effects of parent’s divorce on the children, the results showed that majority (89.5%) of respondents were agreed children of divorced parents suffer from emotional distress, parental divorce negatively impacts children’s academic performance (91.7%), parental divorce leads to behavioural problems in children (91.7%), children of divorced parents often feel neglected (89.4%), children of divorced parents struggle with trust issues (70.0%) and a huge majority (63.9%) of participants were agreed that divorce contributed feelings of inferiority in children. The study was concluded that the hypothesis testing showed there was a positive relationship between lesser the spousal education and divorce increased among females in society (χ2 = 19.841, probability = 0.031). There was a positive association between divorce increased among females in society and community people hates the divorcee female (χ2 = 33.749, probability = 0.000). The result of these assumptions showed extra-marital affairs of husband (χ2 = 15.845, probability = 0.045), husband’s impotence (χ2 = 32.272, probability = 0.000) and unemployment leads to marital stress (χ2 = 19.841, probability = 0.031) cause of divorce among females in society. So, all these hypotheses are significant and accepted.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Edmund Husserl launched phenomenology as a rigorous and positivist science of subjectivity. It was set up to deal with specific problems in other scientific disciplines. The discovery of paradoxes in mathematics had put in question the ultimate rationality of mathematics and of the mathematized empirical sciences. Husserl's phenomenology worked to trace mathematics and logic back to their fundamental units and operations and to exhibit the mental acts in which they are constituted. Subsequently he judged that every scientific discipline was in need of a phenomenological investigation of the subjective acts in which the distinctive objects studied by that discipline are constituted, given to intuition and their meanings ascribed.Empirical and ideal objects—the essences with which objects are identified and classified—are given in intuition; intuition constitutes them as objects. Intuition occurs in acts in the first-person singular—“I see.” These acts can be brought to light by a specific kind of reflection, also an act in the first-person singular. The successive intuitive and meaning-ascribing acts, and the second-order intuition that is reflection, retain and anticipate one another, forming a distinctive and individual stream of consciousness that is the first-person singular. The science of subjectivity is based on the reality of the first-person singular.By midcentury developments in other sciences led to discrediting the phenomenological conception of subjectivity. Structural linguistics had exhibited system in the phonetics and syntaxes of languages and demonstrated that languages change in systematic ways. The meanings of words and expressions form within language and are determined by the existing vocabulary, grammar, and paradigms of a language; they are not the products of individual subjective acts.Anthropology discarded, as post-Enlightenment Western, the concept of individual subjectivity as an abiding identity and source productive of meanings, judgments, decisions, and initiatives.1 It is cultural symbols that, Clifford Geertz affirms, first articulate, generate, and regenerate thought. To think is to identify things and relate them with words and other cultural symbols. Symbols are external to the thinker; they are words and also images, markings, gestures, rituals, graven idols, water holes, and tools.2 Their meanings are in their uses, and the ways they are used are accessible to observation without divining the minds of the users. “The meanings that symbols, the material vehicles of thought, embody are often elusive, vague, fluctuating, and convoluted, but,” Geertz affirms, “they are, in principle, as capable of being discovered through systematic empirical investigation … as the atomic weight of hydrogen or the function of the adrenal glands.”3 Thus anthropology can dispense with the dubious methods to access other minds and become a natural science like any other.4 Claude Lévi-Strauss set out to show the underlying structures, not explicitly conscious, in kinship systems, myths, garb and adornment, and cuisine. He set out to show that fundamental generative structures are universal across cultures.Emotions surge focused by words and symbols. Indignation, a feeling of injustice, of frustration of our expectations and plans, envy, jealousy, triumph—words and cultural symbols, not produced by the individual mind, make them possible. “Not only ideas, but emotions too, are cultural artifacts in man,” Geertz declares.5For the postmodern philosophy of mind meanings are articulated in the taxonomic contrasts, semantic systems, grammatical forms, and rhetorical paradigms of languages, which are social and institutional productions. The meanings of speech acts produced by individuals are determined from the specific tongue, milieu, profession, and social and practical situation in which they are uttered and from the distribution, condensations, and displacements of signifiers in the unconscious. Perceived things and events are not only identified with language; the vocabulary, grammar, and rhetoric of a specific language determine what we perceive and how. Action is ordered by the material imperatives of things and the cues, watchwords, and orders of social institutions.For postmodernism, Ellen Fox Keller explains, “subjects are … constructed by culturally specific discursive regimes (marked by race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on), and subjectivity itself is more properly viewed as the consequence of actions, behavior, or ‘performativity’ than as their source…. Selves are multiple and fractured rather than unitary, mobile rather than stable, porous rather than enclosed, externally constituted rather than internal or ‘inner’ natural essences.”6 The agency in me that says “I” is not a substantive identity; it is intermittent, fragmented, transitory.Art is now no longer seen as a discontinuous succession of individual creations; its themes and styles are engendered by the history of art. Postmodern theorists have abandoned the notion of creative force in the depth of the individual, indeed the notion of creativity: A society produces innumerable materials, mediums, forms, colors, meanings; artists select and combine from this existing fund. Their productions are constituted as art by being accepted into the history of art by the institutions and commerce of the art world.The postmodern philosophy of mind is seen to be realized in the practice and usage of electronic media. Media broadcasts diffuse representations of events and products; information about everything is instantly available on the Internet. Knowledge is stored as neutral units of information, detached, as in Wikipedia, from the experience and perspective of a thinker. Cyberspace engineers and theorists see themselves producing a global brain in which potentially all things and events are represented, all data stored in memory, and linked in all possible ways, connected, combined, synthesized. Individuals connected on the Internet constitute the noosphere, the collective consciousness that emerges from all the users of the Internet and that is greater than any one of them and greater than all of them. It would be analogous to the hive mind of ant, termite, or bee colonies studied by biologists. Its axioms, paradigms, technologies of image and message production, and distribution technologies are studied by cyberspace theorists and culture studies.Surveying the field of scientific research today, I will here turn attention to three sectors of research that break with the postmodern conception of subjectivity.Classical ethnographers observed the habitats, implements, economic activity, institutions, and beliefs of a community in view of producing an account of a particular “culture,” conceived as a functionally interrelated structure of economic, political, and ideological systems. Their work was scientific not only in the rigor of its observations but also in that the representation of a culture is translated into the vocabulary, paradigms, and explanations of scientific economics, sociology, political theory, psychology, biology, and physics.How are these productions of an anthropology that aims to be scientific verified? In most cases, another ethnographer does not go back to that community to verify what the first has written. In most cases the members of that community cannot or do not read the account of them the ethnographer has published. In practice a monograph is accepted by the anthropological community for internal characteristics—the appearance of detailed and exhaustive data and the apparent rigor of the reasoning and conclusions drawn from them.Agricultural practices, housing construction, tools and equipment, economic exchanges, and kinship systems are recorded and translated into the objective terminology of modern sciences. But all these are found to be determined by the natives' understanding of causality and the symbolic meanings ascribed to them. In practice the ethnographer sets out to learn the language, the categories, and the imagery of the users of symbols and in fact learns them by speaking to the natives and being understood by them. The anthropologist conceives the “culture” as an overarching and integrated system of symbols and representations, distinctive to a society, that provides individuals with a meaningful framework for orienting themselves in the world around them and to one another.But field researchers have come to recognize that the ideology or mythical or religious elaborations of a community are very unevenly present in the understanding of any informant. Pieces of the ideology and myth combine but also conflict with the practical knowledge each individual acquires of his or her particular natural environment and workplace. The discourse of the informant is also shaped by the sensibility, energies, and skills of his or her body. Consciousness waxes and wanes as sensory thresholds, states of wakefulness, fatigue, and also instincts, cravings, appetite, agitations, and drives surge and recede. Two women working alongside of one another planting and harvesting crops, the one with superabundant energy, the other with slow metabolism, the one young, the other aged after multiple childbearings, do not experience the same articulation of that field, and though they use the common words to describe it, the words do not have identical force and meaning for each of them. The singularity of a person's body also figures as a force of resistance to the identities attributed to him or her from others and from the ideology. Individuals with somewhat different pieces of ideology and myth and practical knowledge interact and engender changes in practical enterprises and social institutions and also in ideology and myth.The entry of the field researcher into a community alters the network of social relations in that community. The researcher is not a fly on the wall, unnoticed, going into every room and field. What an informant tells the ethnographer is selected and oriented by the political and psychological relations the informant has with other members of the community and with the researcher. The informant, commonly paid by the ethnographer, has a political and psychological relationship with that researcher. The informant is motivated by ambition, pride, cupidity, suspicion, affection, a longing to be recognized and admired.There may be much dishonesty in the relationship the researcher has with her informants; the researcher often conceals what she knows in order to increase the likelihood of acceptance and does not reveal her research goals. Her relationship with her informant is shaped by her curiosity, fascination, protectiveness, lust, frustration, anger, vindictiveness, disdain, craving for privacy, homesickness. The publication, twenty-five years after his death, of Bronislaw Malinowski's diaries—where he writes often of how he was just sick of all these truculent and fickle savages—has made ethnographers aware that they are not simply recording what an informant says but are in an obscure agon with an individual.Anthropologists write for readers in their own culture, primarily the academic community, but have to first understand and represent the native's point of view, more exactly, represent the individual informant's point of view. This has led to the search in recent decades for new forms of writing.7 There is need for theory to conceptualize the forces that make the discourse of the informant his or her own voice.The mind of the informant is not simply a locus where the ideological system of his culture is inscribed; it is a force of commitment—commitment to some pieces of this system but also to his own work and his maneuvers in the network of his political and psychological relations with others.Anthropologists have come to see that every community has contact with other communities and imports some of the representations of other communities, modified, renamed, reversed and assimilated, some sections badly integrated, coexisting or overlapping with sections of its own representations. In zones where a people has been invaded or conquered by another and have to contrive their lives between different economic and institutional systems with different cultural and mythical systems of interpretation, there arise cargo cult messiahs, Vodou serviteurs, ialorixás, mediums, and curanderos. They deal with individuals in individual predicaments and work with parts of the Christian and parts of the Aztec or Yoruba mythology to make sense of what is happening in this individual. They have to invent, to fill in the gaps, to work by inspiration. They improvise rituals and sacraments.Today anthropological field researchers first and everywhere encounter such encroachment of an alien system of understanding on communities in the entry of modern scientific medicine. With the intense and highly profitable penetration of pharmaceutical marketing across the planet, many people, especially the very poor, are treated by local health workers and by their families with a mix of modern therapeutic methods and pharmaceuticals, traditional healing resources, and religious and ritual practices. Medical anthropologists set out to assess and understand the impact of healers and rituals. They come to recognize something else: individuals are forced to take responsibility for their illness and healing with whatever resources and understanding they can assemble.8 Medical practitioners have come to recognize the difference between a patient assenting to and obeying the doctor, or the faith healer, and a patient taking responsibility for his disease and its cure on the basis of his own daily sufferings, observations, and judgments. Their practice will be different if the doctor has to take account of the patient herself taking responsibility for her disease and its treatment. We need a theoretical understanding of the first-person singular in this force to take responsibility for one's illness.In our Western societies folk medicine and faith healing are vanishing alternatives to scientific medical research, institutions, and practice. Medical science has constructed a highly technical vocabulary and grammar to formulate the results of its laboratory and clinical research into pathologies and their treatments. When a sufferer goes to the doctor, the doctor translates the patient's account of her ailments into this language, and the patient is induced to learn this language to understand her ailments, communicate them, and assent to treatment. Increasingly patients download explanations and treatments from the Internet before and after their consultations with the doctor. The extraordinary advance in pharmacology and hi-tech surgical interventions has made this language the more necessary and the more difficult for the patient to master.Medical practice finds that it must also deal with economic, political, and juridical institutions. The patient must learn and understand the medical discourse and to some measure also the economic, political, and juridical discourses.But the patient has another problem: he has to endure the suffering and to assess its impact on his family, his work, his sense of the life he henceforth has to lead and the death that he has to face. For all this, the medical discourse is of no avail. Indeed the real and promised advances of medical biotechnology, organ transplants and prostheses, and life-support systems work to defer death, rendering suffering and death intolerable and unintelligible. The sufferer has to elaborate a narrative of her aspirations and her fate, her destiny, her lifetime. The patient's own narrative of that alien event in her life that is her illness will determine what treatments she will accept and may even have an effect on the efficacy of those treatments. This narrative is composed not out of concepts but out of bewilderment, anxieties, fears, attachments, dereliction, and pain. The sufferer gets sight of the indifference of the material world, the impenetrability of brute reality, gets sight of the aleatory, improbable reality of his or her existence. Suffering and anxiety are not simply cultural artifacts; they are not made possible by the words of a culture but seek words for a private language, the narrative the sufferer composes by and for himself or herself.Anthropologists who have studied mentally disturbed very poor people in Java, Brazil, and India find that the family of the psychotic may accept whatever therapy and psychopharmaceuticals are available while also invoking images and conceptions and rituals from the prevailing religion.9 The images and conceptions from the prevailing religion function to fix, to bind, the rampant strangeness of the sufferer's experience and behavior for them. Medical anthropologists have investigated these phenomena in view of explaining the social and cultural context in which modern psychiatric practice in these places must be pursued.The psychotic himself may identify himself and his states with concepts and images from the prevailing religion. However, the psychotic works an individual transformation of them, giving them new and distinctive structures and force, often viewed as heterodox and fanatical by the family and by religious leaders. They may often be mixed with practices of black magic and sorcery. Anthropological researchers have come to recognize positive and productive forces in these heterodox beliefs and practices: they function to isolate the sufferer from her family and the community, in a protective withdrawal that enables the psychotic to recognize the distinctiveness of her sufferings and anxieties, establish some kind of distance from them, and produce images and discourse of strong coherence and emotional intensity.In 1922 Doctor Hans Prinzhorn published Bildnerei der Geisteskranken—translated into English as Artistry of the Mentally Ill—in which he reproduced and analyzed 187 from the more than five thousand paintings, drawings, and carvings he had collected from asylums in Heidelberg and farther afield, mostly from patients diagnosed as schizophrenic. Psychiatrist John M. MacGregor observed that “these ‘things’ are the product of an obsessional involvement with images in the service of extremely unusual preoccupations and ideas.” They are cosmological diagrams, maps of planets or worlds, depictions of visions and visitations of the dead, icons of private religions, influencing machines or magical weapons, medical illustrations, excitants for an explosive sexuality: “Commonly, there is no desire to share these things with anyone, and the images are kept secret, or are hidden.”10 They express a drive to create a metaphysical habitat for oneself alone.Prinzhorn found that he could not diagnose the psychiatric traumas and conditions of the patients from the images they made. Although they had no art education, these individuals had through long and obsessive application come upon techniques and styles that gave their works intense coherence, economy, and extraordinary expressiveness. Prinzhorn had obtained a degree in art history before training as a doctor and psychiatrist. He argued that the works of asylum image-makers issue from the same basic drives—an expressive urge, the urge to play, an ornamental urge, an ordering tendency, a tendency to imitate, and the need for symbols—that are at work in professional artists. Prinzhorn identified ten masters of the asylum, whose works exhibit exceptional skill, power, and eloquence.Professional artists such as expressionists Paul Klee and Alfred Kubin and surrealists André Breton and Max Ernst looked upon the works reproduced in Prinzhorn's book with awe and admiration; Paul Éluard called it “the most beautiful book of images there is.”11 Jean Dubuffet collected thousands of works of the insane, prisoners, and also spiritualists, mediums, and children, people ignorant of the canons and taste of the art world, calling them art brut, and eventually housed them in a building in Lausanne, Switzerland, set up as an antimuseum. English writers now call them the works of “outsider artists.”For postmodern aesthetics and culture studies the materials and styles of the artist are culturally produced, and an image or audio composition is constituted as art by the judgment of the art world, recognized because it makes a significant statement at a specific time in the evolution of art history. These works were made by individuals untrained in art and ignorant of the art world. Yet these works that issue out of their exaltations and terrors and made as metaphysical habitats for them were recognized to have in addition extraordinary aesthetic quality—and just because they were isolated from, free from the constraints of, the canons, tradition, taste, and trafficking of the art world. “Madness lightens the man, gives him wings, and promotes clairvoyance,” Dubuffet observed:12 “Insanity is the who Paul Éluard that the to be realized that to understand the of art a new conception of the first-person singular is He the as in constituted by what is from and by consciousness a of creative energies, and not as but as individual. The attention to the art of was motivated and the that the fundamental identified by Prinzhorn were of “The artist is not a kind of every is a kind of We need theory to understand how the basic drives that produce are in and set the first-person book The I argued that and the the but also the of things we and the other are not simply and social they are as real as we are and order order our and our We need a theory that this reality and this ordering In The I a force in the first-person the force of to one's a force, and a force a narrative of one's own I have attention to zones in the field of research where the methods of and cultural research up the first-person singular and the specific forces of the first-person singular. to these zones will to a more and more concept of the first-person singular.

Sociology: Making Sense of the Social World

Citation (2023), "Prelims", Ward, P.R. and Foley, K. (Ed.) The Emerald Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions for a Post-Pandemic World, Emerald Publishing Limited, Bingley, pp. i-xvii. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80382-323-220231015

This study aims to analyze the livelihood issues that cause divorce from the perspective of Islamic Family Law, and to analyze the legal consequences of divorce due to subsistence factors with the study of Mataram Religious Court Decision No: 0492 / Pdt.G / 2016 / PA.Mtr. The research method used is empirical normative legal research, with a case approach method, a statutory approach, and a sociological approach. The results of the research and discussion conclude that the issue of livelihood can be one of the causes of divorce in terms of Islamic family law due to 3 things, namely, Nyusyus 'husband, Nyusyus' wife, and syiqaq. Based on the facts in decision No: 0429 / Pdt.G / 2016 / PA.Mtr due to the legal consequences of divorce due to financial factors and other reasons, the court obliges the ex-husband to provide living expenses and / or determine an obligation for the ex-wife. Before the marriage between a husband and a wife candidate should be more solidified in terms of physical and spiritual preparation and to officials at the Religious Courts, so that they can decide cases related to this factor of living more carefully and quickly so as not to cause harm to either party.

To date only a few sociological studies have been devoted to the study of social security, in spite of the fact that this major social institution increasingly finds itself at the centre of controversy in the political and economic arenas. However, in recent years there have been several international conferences at which the question of the potential contribution of a sociological approach to social security has been discussed. In this article the latest developments in this sociological perspective on social seeunty will be presented, as will the origins of this approach to social security. Attention will also be paid to various fields bordering on social security to which sociology has contributed through research, i.e. health, aging, the family, poverty. They will serve to illustrate the extent of potential sociological research in this area and its importance for social security. The evaluation of social welfare programmes is another field in which sociology may contribute to the effect of social policies on the reduction of social inequality. Finally, an analysis of the relationship between the institution of social security and society is sketched out with a view to a greater understanding of the role of this social institution at a time when the concept of Welfare State is being challenged.

Review Essay: Avoiding conventional understandings: the enduring legacy of Eliot Freidson

For many years, the Angolan government concentrated its efforts on a mono-sector economy, heavily dependent on oil, neglecting the exploration of other crucial areas for the sustainable development of the country. This dependence resulted in volatile economic growth and perpetuated high levels of poverty and social inequalities. Currently, various studies in both sociology and economics emphasize the need for economic diversification to find concrete solutions to the challenges faced by Angolan communities. This article analyzes the current state of the social economy in Angola from a sociological perspective. It is a bibliographical study, based on the analysis of existing literature on the phenomenon in the Angolan context. To understand the concrete reality of the country, the article discusses the issue on a macro level, considering the global scenario, and consequently addresses the current specificities of the country. It cross-references literature with different empirical data – from the National Institute of Statistics (INE-Angola), African Union, International Monetary Fund (IMF), CIRIEC-International, among others. The article highlights that the Angolan social economy is dominated by the agrarian structure, which consists of peasants and family farmers, whose operations represent 99.08% of the total number of farms, occupying 97% of the total cultivated area of the country. It also emphasizes that in the Angolan context, the main actors in the social economy are cooperatives, which are fundamental agents in the fight against poverty, unemployment, and social exclusion.

Risk management is an important thing to know, not only in the profit-oriented for private sector, but also in government and non-profit-based social institutions. Previous research has shown evidence of problems where social institutions have not yet implemented risk management while several regulatory references have been made available to improve risk management implementation. The purpose of this study is to determine the implementation of risk management and critical success factors in social management institutions. This study uses a qualitative research method with a case study approach to institutions that manage earthquake social assistance in Central Sulawesi Province in 2018. Data collection was carried out by researchers using field study methods and literature. Secondary data was obtained from internal documents, laws and regulations related to the implementation of risk management on the object of research, while primary data was collected through interviews with informants and then reduced to draw conclusions. The results of the analysis show that the object of the research has implemented risk management. Based on observations through interviews conducted with 5 (five) implementers in each institution, it shows that of the 7 (seven) critical success factors, Education and Training are critical factors in the implementation of risk management in Social Assistance Management Institutions. Strengthening the understanding of risk management for implementers can assist institutions in managing risk management better. This research is expected to provide understanding to social assistance management institutions so that risk management can be applied to prevent possible risks that may occur.

Punishment and justice in the judge’s sentencing decisionsThe article starts with the general presentation of the sociological perspective on the question of justice in the motives of a criminal judge’s sentencing decisions. The question of justice is also analysed in relation to the legitimation of the criminal law and the various theories of punishment, retributive, consequentialist, and mixed. Punishment is analysed as a social and legal institution and as a social process in its various organisational forms. The rationalisation of punishment as a social and legal institution is analysed in relation to the question of human rights, and the question of its effectiveness in social control as a tool in the protective function of the criminal law. The problem of justice is also analysed from a subjective point of view as a question of the just judge. It is not only analysed here as an ethical question, but also as a problem of the methodology of the work of the judge, and a question of organisation of the sentencing process. The article presents the results of research sociological reports concerning the question of the motives of judges’ sentencing in the criminal courts. The article presents the basics of the methodology and results of research in that respect which was carried out in the 1930s B.Wróblewski, W. Świda, 60s and 70s T. Kaczmarek, W. Świda, and the 1980s T. Kaczmarek, J. Giezek and the team, and the latest research carried out by the authors in 2012–2015 J. Królikowska, J. Utrat-Milecki. The authors explain here the general outline of the method of culturally integrated social and legal studies, which they used in their sociological and anthropological research on the criminal justice offi cers judges, prosecutors and probation officers, and which is also the theoretical background of the present article. Finally, the authors present the broader culturally integrated definition of punishment, so as to help to identify the main research questions in socio-legal studies of punishment considered both as a socio-legal institution and a social and legal process which can be identified in different organisational forms.

The article is devoted to the sociological analysis of advertising as a social institution. It is noted that the concept of "social institution" has been widely used in sociology since the 19th century and is one of the most important elements of the social structure of society. Advertising as a social institution is stable types and forms of social practice, through which the process of formation of individual, group and social ideas about the ideal model of social practice in the sphere of consumption is streamlined, and ways of implementing this model for a given person, group, society as a whole are proposed. The institutional approach in sociology involves the analysis of the structure, functions (both explicit and latent, as well as dysfunctions) of a particular social institution. The article analyzes the functions of advertising (which include economic - stimulating consumers to purchase goods, which thereby contributes to the growth of business activity, an increase in investment and the number of jobs; social - advertising tools are increasingly used to solve acute social problems; political - advertising as a means of fighting for votes, ideological - advertising is becoming one of the most important factors in the formation of a person's worldview, psychological - advertising affects the desires and dreams of the buyer; educational - in the process of viewing advertising, as well as the introduction of new technologies of goods and services about which it talks, a person can draw information from absolutely all spheres of life, aesthetic - the best examples of advertising messages from the time of their first appearance to the present day can be considered works of applied art). Dysfunctions of advertising in modern society are also considered. Dysfunction of a social institution is a phenomenon of inconsistency between the activities of a social institution and existing social needs or negative consequences of its functioning. Dysfunctions of advertising are analyzed by the author from two angles - from a social and moral point of view and from an economic point of view. The author identifies the main characteristics and trends that determine the modern development of advertising on a global scale.

Anthony Hopwood (e.g., 1983) has long observed that we have had few field studies that have examined accounting in the contexts in which it operates. Indeed, in his 2006 plenary address as the American Accounting Association's Presidential Scholar, Hopwood concluded that accounting research has become "increasingly detached from the practice of the craft … [as well as] too cautious and conservative, too rigid and traditional, and insufficiently attuned to grapple with the new, and to embrace novel insights and bodies of knowledge" (Hopwood 2007, 1365, 1370). In part, he urged that more innovative field research be conducted, informed by theories derived from sociology and employing qualitative, naturalistic research methods (e.g., Hopwood 2007, 1372). This special forum of Behavioral Research in Accounting is devoted to publishing original papers detailing field studies of accounting in their natural organizational and institutional contexts which have drawn on sociological perspectives and employed qualitative methods.Webster's dictionary defines sociology as "the science of society, social institutions, and social relationships: the systematic study of the development, structure, and function of human groups conceived as processes of interaction or as organized patterns of collective behavior." As such, a sociological perspective of accounting as a form of structure focuses on examining the multiple roles accounting plays in the social constitution of organizations and institutions, or on the social constitution of accounting, rather than the orthodox view that accounting faithfully represents an objective, economic reality. On this theme, for example, Fombrun (1986; see also Van de Ven and Poole 1996; Dirsmith 1998) reasoned that such forms of structure as accounting may simultaneously serve as: technological solutions to the instrumental problems of production; political exchanges among contending organizational and institutional factions; and social interpretations within the organization and by its external, institutional constituents. Thus, accounting may simultaneously be seen as: technical solutions to the problems of fostering production rationality—the more traditional, orthodox province of accounting, and as political advocacy devices for representing the positions of various constituent groups within the organizational/institutional milieu, and as a means of fostering social discourse with a wider society. The papers that were submitted to this special forum of BRIA did indeed tend to examine facets of accounting that went beyond the orthodox perspective.The first of four articles appearing in this special forum, Anna Alon and Peggy Dwyer's "Globalization and Multinational Auditing: The Case of GAZPROM and PWC in Russia," is directed at probing auditor-client relationships for a huge gas company, as well as the social expectations of the audit function in the transitional economy of Russia. Based upon a qualitative analysis of publicly available international and local Russian-language media accounts of three controversial episodes, the authors find that the expectations of audit practice expressed in the two forms of outlet were systematically different. They also find that not only do international and audit firm standards of practice influence the conduct of an audit in such a context, but also that local contingencies in the form of the traditional Russian notion of blat, which involves a reliance on personal networks and contacts, apparently impacted the manner in which the audit was conducted. The authors offer an intriguing set of interpretations and implications for future research.The second article, Janne Chung and Carolyn Windsor's "Empowerment through Knowledge of Accounting and Related Disciplines: Participatory Action Research in an African Village," sought to undertake a participatory action research, grassroots intervention to inform villagers within a small village in Kenya of accounting principles and internal control procedures by leveraging off the villagers' own traditional Christian values and culture. Departing from an orthodox perspective, the authors invoked the concept of orthopraxis to achieve social and economic justice through practices of accounting, thereby serving the interests of the villagers by empowering them to better evaluate the motives, desirability, and achievements of social programs designed to ease poverty. The authors conclude with a challenge to future scholars to join them in the field with the goal of empowering the poor—where the harvest is plenty, the harvesters are few.The third article by Drew Sellers, Tim Fogarty, and Larry Parker, entitled "Unleashing the Technical Core: Institutional Theory and the Aftermath of Arthur Andersen," used the template of institutional theory to explore the impact of organizational de-legitimation on Arthur Andersen employees. This paper worked in a relatively unexplored area of institutional theory; that is, many organizations that have been successful in obtaining the support of their critical constituencies have often been documented. In contrast, this paper focuses on an instance of an entity that had become so toxic that permission to go forward could no longer be marshaled. The results of this study suggest an unusually high degree of entrepreneurial activity is unleashed once the confining legitimacy of the organizational structure is dissolved. It also shows that the value of social capital possessed by Andersen professionals changed in character and possibly increased in value. This process of deinstitutionalization that has been documented in this study has been recognized as a new direction for institutional theory, thus this paper offers contributions to institutional theory and the practice of modern accounting.The fourth article, Steven Thornburg and Robin Roberts' "'Incorporating' American Colonialism: Accounting and the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act," examined how the corporate form of organization and corporate accounting were used by the United States government to rationalize decisions, exercise control, and exploit Alaskan resources to benefit corporate America and the existing United States. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 (ANCSA) established Alaska Native Corporations, whose stock was distributed to qualifying Alaskan Natives in exchange for their agreement to extinguish all aboriginal land claims. Guided by prior work in accounting and postmodern colonialism, this paper identifies ways in which ANCSA, though lauded by the U.S. government as an innovative and generous settlement, perpetuated a historical pattern of indigenous exploitation by western economic interests, and employed corporate accounting policies and techniques to further the interests of the U.S. government and large corporations at the expense of Native Alaskans.Combined, the four papers appearing in this special forum of BRIA suggest that field studies of accounting drawing upon sociological perspectives and employing qualitative methods may be applied to a wide variety of social/organizational/institutional contexts and engender insights not offered by the more orthodox accounting venues.We heartily thank BRIA Editor Theresa Libby for creating the opportunity for this special forum, and the many scholars who devoted significant time and effort to supporting its mission in terms of providing insightful reviews:We should note that we received several additional papers that have considerable potential for making a useful contribution to the literature, but were ultimately rejected for publication in this special forum. We believe that these papers were in the early phase of the production cycle and will gain publication success with further development; in all such cases, the reviewers provided excellent guidance to aid in this development, suggesting that the benefits of this special forum of BRIA will hopefully extend well beyond the papers that appear in Volume 24, Issue 1. We urge the authors of these papers to persevere.

The paper touches upon the issue of development strategy of modern states. There is analyzed conception azerbaicanizm as property of national development strategy of Azerbaijan Republic. The State, as a social phenomenon, is gaining new importance in the modern era. As any social phenomenon or social process, the modern State takes on characteristic features according to local conditions and national characteristics, regional models of the State are created. The main objective of social policy in modern countries is the progress of the social market economy. The study of social development in Azerbaijan in the context of modern global transformations creates the need to study public administration and social institutions on the ground. Legislative and social institutions in the social State are being built towards the elimination of social difficulties of needy segments of the population, social protection and social security of people, equitable social regulation of society. In the context of global changes, there are constantly innovative social changes, while the consistent process of reforms in Azerbaijan and the development of the State and society are aimed at social progress. The Azerbaijani model of the social State is a social and political structure that in crisis and risky situations is regulated by the State, develops individual freedom and personal property, is innovative and is oriented towards the protection of its national and religious traditions. The model of social state formed in Azerbaijan includes national traditions, takes into account new trends of development and the main idea in it is "Azerbaijanizm".

Introduction. Alcoholism is one of the most serious social issues of modern times. In Poland, the importance of problems resulting from alcohol abuse or misuse is significant, both in the context of health, economic and social consequences. Aim. The aim of the present study was to determine health and psychosocial losses of alcohol abuse among residents of social care institutions. Material and methods. A diagnostic survey was conducted using the authors questionnaire. The study was carried out among 30 residents of the nursing home in Kielce. The inclusion criterion was alcohol abuse. Results. In the study group, the largest group consisted of divorced residents - 66.67%. All of them admitted that alcohol abuse was the cause of divorce. Lack of contact with families was declared by 56.67% of respon- dents. None of the residents (100%) was visited by friends from outside the nursing home. Psychotic symptoms (hallucinations after alcohol) were found in 73.33% of residents. Somatic symptoms (headache, stomachache) and sleep disorders were confirmed by 90% of respondents. Attempts to cope with addiction were undertaken by 76.67% of residents; 73.33% declared their readiness to limit alcohol consumption. Conclusions. Adverse consequences of alcohol abuse involve somatic, family-related, social and emotional spheres. Respondents have large deficits in social relations due to long-term alcohol abuse and excessive preoccupation with alcohol. Alcohol in nursing homes fills the time, eliminates the feeling of loneliness, kills boredom and helps to forget about problems. Residents abusing alcohol on a daily basis feel alienated and have low self-esteem.

Broadly understood as repeated, intentional, and aggressive behaviors facilitated by digital technologies, cyberbullying has been identified as a significant public health concern in Australia. However, there have been critical debates about the theoretical and methodological assumptions of cyberbullying research. On the whole, this research has demonstrated an aversion to accounting for context, difference, and complexity. This insensitivity to difference is evident in the absence of nuanced accounts of Indigenous people's experiences of cyberbullying. In this chapter, we extend recent critiques of dominant approaches to cyberbullying research and argue for novel theoretical and methodological engagements with Indigenous people's experiences of cyberbullying. We review a range of literature that unpacks the many ways that social, cultural, and political life is different for Indigenous peoples. More specifically, we demonstrate there are good reasons to assume that online conflict is different for Indigenous peoples, due to diverse cultural practices and the broader political context of settler-colonialism. We argue that the standardization of scholarly approaches to cyberbullying is delimiting its ability to attend to social difference in online conflict, and we join calls for more theoretically rigorous, targeted, difference-sensitive studies into bullying.