Complexity Of Social Practices Research Articles

Social Landscape, Peripheral Inclusion and Un-Practice: Concepts for Understanding Social Housing Daily Life in Open Spaces

This article presents new concepts for discussing urban social space, named “social landscape”, “peripheral inclusion” and “un-practice”. These concepts are based on the analysis of social practices in vulnerable neighborhoods with a high number of social housing blocks in South America. The aim of the article is to show that the complexity of social practices in vulnerable urban areas is not only the result of the urban environment, which combines social inequality, marginalization and insecurity, but also and above all of the management and maintenance of this inequality. The research method combines bibliographical research with the method of non-participant systematic observation, the latter analyzing everyday life in social housing areas of São Paulo-SP (Brazil) and Santiago (Chile). The discussion and results will lead the reader to understand not only the concepts, but also the idea that open spaces have an important role in social practices, especially public spaces. It seeks to demonstrate the importance of linking public spaces and housing in public policies for the creation of social housing, as opposed to housing policies that focus on the production of architecture disconnected from the urban and social reality.

The arranged mourning ambience. About the professional production of atmospheres at funeral services

ABSTRACT This paper operationalises the theory of social practices for the specific case of professionally producing and maintaining the atmospheres in Thuringian mourning halls (Germany). Funeral services constitute a complex of social practices, which releases affects. Using the example of consultation with the funeral director and the funeral speech, I demonstrate how actors in the funeral services profession engage in the practice and shape the funeral service’s atmosphere. Likewise, the present paper outlines that these actors are also affected by the complex of practices and their corporeality as well as disturbances. As a consequence, this disrupts routine performance in funeral service.

Deconstructing the policyscape for reducing deforestation in the Eastern Amazon: Practical insights for a landscape approach

AbstractIn international debates on climate change mitigation and forests, there is increased recognition of the importance of a landscape approach to effectively address tropical deforestation. Such an approach, although increasingly promoted, remains only loosely defined and requires further development in order to effectively integrate different interventions at landscape level. In particular, it is important to understand the possible interactions between different landscape interventions at local level—where they are intended to have effect—and the challenges associated with them. Inspired by the complexity of policy mix analysis, this article seeks to shed light on these interactions by analysing how different policies and measures for reducing deforestation and degradation have played out in a jurisdiction with wide‐ranging actors and interventions aimed at shaping their behaviour. Focusing on smallholders, we examine the Sustainable Landscapes Pilot Programme in São Félix do Xingu, looking at how different policies interact—categorising interactions as “complementary,” “mutually reinforcing” (synergistic), “in conflict,” “interdependent,” and/or “redundant”—and explain how proponents of this pilot programme seek to integrate them. Most analysis is based on primary data collected through quantitative (i.e., random stratified sampling and surveys) and qualitative (i.e., observation and focus groups) methods. The São Félix do Xingu case shows that understanding effects of different policies and measures on people's behaviour requires a deeper look at local perceptions and reactions to such policies and measures, something most studies on the topic have overlooked. Ultimately, the heterogeneity and complexity of social practices that permeate landscapes must be recognised in order to integrate diverse measures to reduce deforestation.

Semantics of Chaos: Modernity, Law and the Commons

Abstract The mythology of modernity is arguably premised on a double gesture of emergence from chaos. The modern subject, self-posited, constructs the world of “order” by acting as the demiurge that brings the “civilized” world into existence. At the same time he negates the chaotic materiality of nature (including the body). This mythology is an exclusionary one. All modes of possessions escaping the abstract simplicity of the modern binary of public (sovereignty) and private (property), are ideologically and materially expunged from the parameters of common sense. This article will suggest however, that chaos operates also under a different semantic configuration, namely that which is directly linked to the corporeal, unbiddable complexity of social practices. In this alternate sense, which dis-articulates the linear narrative of modern emancipation, chaos is far from a primordial, disordered state of nature in need of either a self-positing subject or a policing Leviathan. The complexity of these social practices always already contains a plurality of arrangements, which are chaotic, yet, not disordered. From the perspective of liberal and neo-liberal hegemonic legalities, these chaotic practices remain “monstrous” and a “threat to the public order,” feared as a resurgence of that corporeal materiality the modern subject has striven to forget; from the perspective of the commons however, they are resisting strategies traversing liberal modernity, and may be understood, with Foucault, as (legal) insurrections.

THEORETICAL-CONCEPTUAL APPROACHES TO STUDY OF SOCIAL PRACTICE PHENOMENON IN FOREIGN AND NATIONAL SOCIOLOGICAL SCIENCE

The article has presented the results of a comparative analysis of methodological foundations for studying the social practice phenomenon in foreign and national sociological science. The aim of the study was to understand social practice from the perspective of the Western theoretical and conceptual approaches to its study and the terminology used in national medical-sociological studies of health and healthcare. Based on the analysis of 50 scientific publications on the research topic, there has been given a characteristic of the main definitions used in theoretical and empirical studies of social practice, the identity of the concept of social practice has been revealed, the laws of social practices formation and development have been described, their relationship with social institutions and the socialization process has been analyzed. There have been shown the works of the Russian researchers dedicated to studying the healthcare system as a complex of social practices that confirmed their scientific validity and value for formation and development of their own scientific traditions in Russian Sociology of Medicine.

Elizabethan Catholicism: a Reconsideration

It is more than twenty-one years since Professor John Bossy wrote his stimulating and controversial article on ‘The character of Elizabethan Catholicism’. His article made familiar to a wide range of students the concepts of ‘seigneurial Catholicism’ and ‘survivalism’. It concluded, tendentiously, that ‘the history of Elizabethan Catholicism is a progress from inertia to inertia in three generations’. Professor Bossy subsequently developed his ideas about the new kind of Counter-Reformation Catholicism which was affecting other countries outside England, and then in 1975 he produced a major work on The English Catholic Community 1570–1850. In this he advanced the view that the English Catholic Community really began in the 1570s. What happened between the 1530s and the 1570s was merely ‘the posthumous history, if you will, of “medieval” or “pre-Reformation” Christendom in England’. He agreed that the English Catholic community launched about 1570 had some continuity with the past, but he argued that it was ‘in most respects a new creation’. Before then, there existed a hangover from the past labelled ‘the Old Religion’, but this was ‘less concerned with doctrinal affirmation or dramas of conscience than with a set of ingrained observances which denned and gave meaning to the cycle of the week and the seasons of the year’. This, according to Professor Bossy, had been aptly termed survivalism. He argued that: ‘As a complex of social practices rather than a religion of internal conviction, it offered no barrier to the degree of attendance at the parish church required to preserve the integrity of the household.’