Forms Of Social Order Research Articles

From Threat To Promise: Nightclub 'Security', Governance and Consumer Elites

Drawn from an ethnographic investigation of Central London's contemporary nightclub scene, this paper seeks to map previously obscure elements of the private governance of ‘security' and the wider network of ‘nodes' which govern Britain's night-time economy (NTE). Attention to the constitution and operation of nodes and the interfaces between them provide insight into the co-production of particular forms of social order and situated meanings of the term ‘security'. The paper identifies a criminogenic NTE in flux, driven by entrepreneurial zeal, a stratified consumer culture and forms of regulatory closure that conspire to exacerbate underlying tendencies toward social exclusion in the night-time city.

Narrándose en la flexibilidad. Un análisis narrativo discursivo de la identidad en tiempos de flexibilidad laboral

El vínculo laboral se ha hecho cada vez más flexible, transformando con ello la relación que establece el sujeto con lo social a través del trabajo. Si el trabajo fue considerado por la teoría social moderna como el principal mecanismo de integración social, a través del cual los sujetos obtienen su lugar como actores sociales, hoy esto está cambiando radicalmente. Las nuevas formas de ordenamiento social que se imponen a través del trabajo tienen como correlato la producción de nuevas subjetividades y, con ello, nuevas formas de ser actor social. La investigación que aquí se presenta asume una perspectiva narrativa discursiva, con el fin de abordar los relatos identitarios como formas de acción que nos posicionan como actores sociales. Desde esta perspectiva, se aborda la emergencia de nuevas formas de identidad bajo este orden laboral. Para ello nos hemos centrado en adultos jóvenes profesionales, considerados como los mejor posicionados para integrarse socialmente en este nuevo orden laboral. Mediante análisis del discurso, fueron analizadas 32 entrevistas. Tal como se apreciará, la figura del emprendedor libre elector, autor de su propia trayectoria, constituye el eje que estructura las narrativas, coincidiendo con algunos estudios sociológicos. Sin embargo, el estudio muestra que este eje es tensionado, indicando también cómo dicha tensión es resuelta por este trabajo de construirse a sí mismo respondiendo al orden social contingente.

Informal mechanisms for accessing and securing urban land rights: the case of Kampala, Uganda

There is a growing consensus in research that informal settlements are not as chaotic as often portrayed. The processes through which households in these settlements access housing land are not anarchic but are structured and regulated by some form of social ordering. This paper analyzes and explains the nature of the institutions that actually regulate and underpin land delivery processes in Kampala's informal settlements. Contemporary land access processes are examined in three case study settlements where institutions that are responsive to the local contexts have been developed and utilized. These non-state institutions are shown to be eclectic in nature, drawing on various normative orders including state law, rules of market exchange and customary practices. Their success in delivering large quantities of housing land is attributed to the social legitimacy they command, evidenced by the general acceptance and respect they enjoy from those whose relations they regulate.

Understanding informal urban land access processes from a legal pluralist perspective: The case of Kampala, Uganda

There is an emerging consensus in recent research on urban land that informal settlements do not exist in a Hobbesian state of nature and that the processes through which households living therein access housing land are not anarchic but are structured and regulated by some form of social ordering. Starting from a legal pluralist standpoint, this paper analyses and explains the nature of the institutions that actually regulate and underpin land delivery processes in Kampala's informal settlements. By examining contemporary land access processes in three case study settlements, it is argued that in situations where actors in land delivery process are unable to deploy the often expensive and cumbersome formal approaches, institutions that are responsive to the local contexts have been developed and utilised. These non-state institutions are shown to be eclectic in nature, drawing on various normative orders, including state law, rules of market exchange, and customary practices. Their success in delivering large quantities of housing land is attributed to the social legitimacy they command, encapsulated by their general acceptance and respect by those whose relations they regulate.

Architecture, Infrastructure, and Broadband Civic Network Design: An Institutional View

Cultural values frame architectures, and architectures motivate infrastructures-by which we mean the foundational telecommunications and Internet access services that software applications depend on. Design is the social process that realizes architectural elements in an infrastructure. This process is often a conflicted one where transformative visions confront the realities of entrenched power, where innovation confronts pressure from institutionalized interests and practices working to resist change and reproduce the status quo in the design outcome. We use this viewpoint to discuss design aspects of the Urban-net, a broadband civic networking case. Civic networks are embodiments of distinctive technological configurations and forms of social order. In choosing some technological configurations over others, designers are favoring some social structural configurations over alternatives. To the extent that a civic network sets out to reconfigure the prevailing social order (as was the case in the Urban-net project considered here), the design process becomes the arena where challengers of the prevailing order encounter its defenders. In this case the defenders prevailed, and the design that emerged was conservative and reproduced the status quo. What steps can stakeholders take so that the project's future development is in line with the original aim of structural change? We outline two strategies. We argue the importance of articulating cultural desiderata in an architecture that stakeholders can use to open up the infrastructure to new constituents and incremental change. Next, we argue the importance of designing the conditions of design. The climate in which social interactions occur can powerfully shape design outcomes, but this does not usually figure in stakeholders' design concerns.

Violence & social order beyond the state: Somalia & Angola

This paper examines the activities of non-state actors in war in Somalia and Angola. Arguing that prolonged wars are characterised by the emergence of social orders of violence beyond the state, our analytical focus is on how actors establish and sustain these orders. A core influence is the insight from research on war economies that war is not equal to the breakdown of societal order, but represents an alternative form of social order. We therefore examine the economic activities of insurgents in regard to their embeddedness in social and political spheres. The central question in this paper is how economic, political and symbolic aspects interact and determine as well as transform social orders of violence. With the examples of Somalia and Angola, two rather distinct cases of non-state orders of violence are examined. It is argued that these orders represent forms of authority with fundamental structural aspects in common. We suggest that these orders can be systematised on a continuum between two poles of institutionalisation of authority beyond the state: a warlord system and a quasi-state system of violence.

Cold War casualties

Abstract Issues of gender and ethnicity have either been ignored in histories of the “Iron Curtain” or they have been peripheral to military, diplomatic, and masculine concerns. By focusing on the so-called problem of Trieste in the immediate postwar period, I argue that representations of gender and ethnicity were central to the way in which official negotiations took place. The boundaries that were being drawn by 1945 to distinguish the West from the East, democracy from communism, Italian from “Slav,” and civilization from barbarism, in this region were strongly gendered, as were the forms of social order encouraged by the Allied Military Government, which governed Trieste from 1945 to 1954, to bring about the postwar social and cultural normalization of Trieste.

Policy Research and the Future: An Exemplar for a Critical Symbolic Interactionism

Abstract Policy research is inquiry that seeks to inform organizational decisions. As such, it is embroiled in the construction of whatever futures these effectuate. Symbolic Interactionism has untapped resources for the conduct of policy research in its basic assumption that human nature and its situations are human creations. Within that tradition, it is always possible to compare what has been produced with some “future,” and to do so “critically.” The most relevant contemporary exemplar for such a comparison may be found in the work of Hugh Duncan. His analysis of the sociodramas that individuals perform, and his examination of comedy and tragedy as competing forms of social order is discussed. Finally, his attempt to exhibit the comedic as the humane form of social order is presented as a “formal” exemplar for the conduct of policy research which entertains a variety of futures in the investigation of present situations.

The Great Awakening: An Historical Analysis

The Great Awakening (a Period of intense religious revivalism between 1730 and 1745) is analyzed as a mechanism of social change. Even prior to the revival there were strains in American religion as well as politics toward greater individualism, voluntarism, and democracy. The latent function of the revival was to prepare the way for this new form of social order. As the structure began yielding to the increased pressures toward individualism, the revival served as a dynamic agent clearing away many of the ideological and institutional trappings that were blocking this transformation.