Implicit Social Contract Research Articles

The Implicit Social Contract in Soviet Higher Education and Its Transformation in the 1990s

The article presents a theoretical analysis and characterizes the parameters of the implicit social contract between society and the intelligentsia during the latter part of the Soviet period. The specificity of this type of implicit social contract is demonstrated, particularly regarding the potential benefits and existing limitations in pursuing higher education and realizing the life ambitions of the Soviet intelligentsia. The archetypes and behavioral strategies of individuals during the Soviet era are examined, both in terms of socially accepted and deviant conduct. The institutional elements that shape the experiences of individuals with higher education during the Soviet period are described, specifically the influence of officially proclaimed morality, ethical norms, and coercive mechanisms as value systems. The issue of the overproduction of individuals with higher education is highlighted, which resulted in the devaluation of its significance and a decline in social status for the technical intelligentsia during the Soviet period. The problems surrounding the quality of primary and higher education in the USSR are discussed, and the factors contributing to its crisis in the late USSR are identified. The transformation of values in the post-Soviet period is examined, and some consequences stemming from this transformation are explored.

Exploring the role of community-based enterprises in consumers’ voluntary clothing disposition via UK swapping events using theory of social practice

Purpose This paper aims to explore consumers’ voluntary disposition practices through swapping events organised by community-based enterprises. The paper investigates consumers’ decision-making strategies and factors affecting voluntary clothing disposition via public swapping events across the UK. Design/methodology/approach This paper investigates UK swapping events, through conducting 18 semi-structured consumer interviews. Data were transcribed and analysed using the seven-step guide proposed by Easterby-Smith et al. (2018). Findings Findings indicate that within community-based enterprises an implicit social contract emerges between the enterprises and swappers which has an influence on the clothing brought to swaps, thereby impacting the competence and meaning elements of practice. This is linked to peer-pressure susceptibility which affects consumers’ participation in swapping. The findings further reveal an emerging consumer strategy aiding decision-making process regarding items brought to swaps. The use of a particular strategy is found to be linked with the respective level of swapping expertise. Research limitations/implications Though the interviews provide a rich narrative, this paper is limited by its sample size meaning data cannot be generalised. Although the data is limited by singular country perspective, research participants were recruited from across the UK, thus, offering a broad picture of the swapping practice. Originality/value This paper contributes to and advances an understanding of swapping events organised by community-based enterprises. The theory of social practice lens offers a unique viewpoint on the elements influencing the consumers’ decision-making process with reference to voluntary disposition.

Reframing the practice of volunteering as a collective endeavour through a focal brand community

PurposeNonprofit organisations (NPOs) are an increasingly fundamental part of our society. Meeting rising demand requires NPOs to attract enough resources, especially volunteers, to enable service delivery. This paper aims to adopt a novel theoretical lens to reframe this marketing challenge to inform practice and extend theory.Design/methodology/approachPractice-based exploration of a volunteer-enabled NPO, parkrun, through in-depth interviews and secondary source analysis.FindingsThe research identified that the brand community connects volunteers through three inter-connected levels. The big idea of parkrun, the focal brand, resonated with people through being “on their wavelength”, something they believed in. The local, physical event meant engagement was “on their patch”, anchored in place. Finally, the brand community enables people to volunteer “on their terms”, with fluid roles and flexible levels of commitment.Research limitations/implicationsNot all NPOs have service beneficiaries who are able to volunteer, services with different volunteering roles, or operate through a local physical presence. However, taking a focal brand approach to consider the brand community through which people volunteer for an NPO, the practices that reinforce that community, and how to offer volunteers significantly greater flexibility in both role and commitment presents an opportunity for NPOs to rethink how volunteering works for them in the future.Practical implicationsClear recommendations for practice include the opportunity to integrate service beneficiary with service delivery enabler (volunteer) to strengthen the implicit social contract, increasing participation to deepen the social identity felt towards the brand, and key practices that reduce barriers to volunteering.Originality/valueThe paper extends volunteering theory from the traditional individual needs approach to a focal brand community perspective. The marketing challenge of attracting volunteer resources to NPOs is understood through rethinking the boundaries between service beneficiaries and service enablers, anchored in social identity theory. It provides clear recommendations for practice through reframing the recruitment challenge.

The Demise of the AMA's Mission to Improve Public Health.

Much has been written about the deplorable state of American health care, but rarely with the wealth of historical and political information packed into Peter Swenson's Disorder: A History of Reform, Reaction, and Money in American Medicine (2021). In this meticulously researched and comprehensive study of the role of organized medicine, particularly the American Medical Association (AMA) and affiliated state and county medical societies, Swenson provides detailed insight into the AMA's political evolution from a force advocating progressive reforms to a protective guild backed by powerful economic and ideological interests. Swenson addresses the conflicts leading to and arising from these movements, always with an eye on the profession's failure over the last century to fulfill its implicit social contract. Swenson describes the American medical disorder without fear or favor, including a public health system in disarray, defective government regulation of drugs, unchecked and concealed commercial influence on medical research, publications, and clinical guidelines. Swenson's hope is clear: that a progressively reformed AMA-combined with a broad coalition of concerned citizens and legislators-will lead the medical profession back to its rightful mission.

Falling Stories: Cinematic Naturalism and Disability in Frank Norris’ and Stephen Crane's City Sketches

Falling Stories: Cinematic Naturalism and Disability in Frank Norris’ and Stephen Crane's City Sketches

Needs to address clinicians’ moral distress in treating unvaccinated COVID-19 patients

BackgroundMoral dilemmas have arisen concerning whether physicians and other providers should treat patients who have declined COVID vaccination and are now sick with this disease. Several ethicists have argued that clinicians have obligations to treat such patients, yet providing care to these patients has distressed clinicians, who have at times declined to do so. Critical questions thus emerge regarding how best to proceed.Main bodyProviders face moral tensions: whether to place the benefits to an unvaccinated patient over their duties to protect themselves and their families, staff and other patients, and goals of working collaboratively with patients. Clinicians’ duties to treat such patients arguably outweigh claims otherwise, but these obligations are creating moral conflict and distress for providers. Moral distress has been associated with burnout, post-traumatic stress disorder, and interpersonal and work difficulties. Given ongoing vaccine refusals, these problems are unlikely to disappear in the foreseeable future. Society has obligations to address this moral distress due to principles of reciprocity, and implicit social contracts, as part of which physicians risk their lives in caring for patients for the good of society as a whole. Responses are thus urgently needed at several levels: by hospitals, medical schools, professional societies, governments, media, providers and patients. Medical training on professionalism should address these stresses, probing why doctors have duties to treat these patients, but also how moral conflicts can ensue, and how best to address these tensions. Governments and institutions should thus alter relevant policies and devote more resources to addressing clinicians’ psychological strains. Institutions should also improve organizational culture. Public health organizations and the media described clinicians, earlier in the pandemic, as heroes, committed to treating COVID patients. This narrative should now be changed to highlight the strains that unvaccinated patients cause—endangering hospital staff and others.ConclusionsUnvaccinated COVID patients should receive care, but multi-level strategies, involving enhanced policies, education and practice are vital to alleviate ensuing moral distress, and thus aid these clinicians and their patients. Ethical arguments that providers must treat these patients have not considered these obligations’ effects on clinicians, but should do so.

Expert Authority in Crisis: Making Authority Real Through Struggle

There is an emerging consensus both within the social scientific research community and more widely in the public domain that expert authority is “in trouble.” However, there is much greater disagreement over the scope and scale of this trouble and what it might mean for the nature, status, and significance of expert authority in the 21st century. This paper identifies and assesses three different narratives concerning the crisis in expert authority. These constitute the delegitimation narrative, the demystification narrative, and the decomposition narrative. They can be seen as responses to the breakdown in the implicit social contract between experts, publics, and states under the extreme and continuous pressures exerted on expert authority by disjunctive change. We evaluate these various interpretations of the crisis in expert authority, particularly in terms of what they suggest about the future potency and stability of the concept of expert authority. In this process of evaluation, we also highlight the emergence of reflexive expert authority and its implications for organizational governance as potential outcomes of this ongoing crisis in the legitimacy and status of expert workers. Consequently, the paper provides a general analytical framework for understanding the emergent narratives around expert authority in democracies and highlights how all three narratives point to serious problems in sustaining this authority in the face of destabilizing change. Furthermore, in developing the notion of reflexive expert authority, we contend that theorization of expert authority needs to privilege the deeper dynamics of trust and control at the core of its analytical focus within organization theory.

A natural experiment in social security as public health measure: Experiences of international students as temporary migrant workers during two Covid-19 lockdowns

What is the impact of social security on public health? And what mechanisms does it operate through? To answer these questions, we take advantage of the unique circumstances of temporary migrant workers two Covid-19 lockdowns in Australia – one in which they were provided with social security, and one in which they were not. We undertook 47 qualitative interviews with South Asian international students who had lost their jobs in two lockdowns in 2020–2021. In Australia, international students represent the largest group of a growing temporary migration program, with many working in low-skilled occupations, in conditions below legal minimum standards. We compare our findings to two models of social security: the self-insurance model and state-insurance model. In first lockdown, without social security, participants struggled to comply with public health orders because of the need to work for income, lack of housing suitable for isolation, and lack of medical leave. Participants tended to avoid testing, and to work while potentially contagious. Participants reported high levels of anxiety, depression and emotional distress caused by job loss and exclusion from an implicit social contract with the rest of Australian society. In contrast, during the second lockdown, where temporary migrants were provided social security payments, participants reported avoiding risky work, undertook Covid-19 testing many times, and self-isolated successfully. There was little evidence of emotional distress. Participants felt like a valued part of Australian society. These results suggest a self-insurance model of social security does not protect the physical and psychological health of vulnerable populations and can exacerbate the spread of communicable diseases. In contrast, state-insurance and social welfare payments to marginalised communities, particularly unemployment benefits and medical leave, are crucial public health policy levers for both protecting vulnerable populations and tackling outbreaks of communicable diseases such as Covid-19.

Measuring Graduate Medical Education Outcomes to Honor the Social Contract.

The graduate medical education (GME) system is heavily subsidized by the public in return for producing physicians who meet society’s needs. Under the terms of this implicit social contract, decisions about how this funding is allocated are deferred to the individual training sites. Institutions receiving public funding face potential conflicts of interest, which have at times prioritized institutional purposes and needs over societal needs, highlighting that there is little public accountability for how such funding is used. The cost and institutional burden of assessing many fundamental GME outcomes, such as specialty, geographic physician distribution, training-imprinted cost behaviors, and populations served, could be mitigated as data sources and methods for assessing GME outcomes and guiding training improvement already exist. This new capacity to assess system-level outcomes could help institutions and policymakers strategically address the greatest public needs. Measurement of educational outcomes can also be used to guide training improvement at every level of the educational system (i.e., the individual trainee, individual teaching institution, and collective GME system levels). There are good examples of institutions, states, and training consortia that are already assessing and using GME outcomes in these ways. The ultimate outcome could be a GME system that better meets the needs of society and better honors what is now only an implicit social contract.

Noxious deindustrialization: Experiences of precarity and pollution in Scotland’s petrochemical capital

This article introduces the concept of “noxious deindustrialization”—employment deindustrialization in areas where significantly noxious industries are still operating—and explores some implications of this paradox by studying community–industry relations in the Scottish petrochemical town of Grangemouth. In the heyday of “Boomtown Grangemouth” during the first three decades after World War II, there existed an implicit social contract between the local industry and community in which male fenceline residents had widespread access to secure and well-paid employment in the factories, but the community had to accept the related pollution and hazards. This social contract gradually declined since the late 1970s due to a combination of automation, rising qualification barriers and associated long-range recruiting, and outsourcing to a partially itinerant workforce. For the Grangemouth community, this trend led to the current situation of employment deindustrialization coupled with the continuing exposure to the socioenvironmental damage and hazards engendered by operating petrochemical plants. We argue that noxious deindustrialization—with its dystopian corollaries of rising inequality and precarity, cumulative environmental degradation, and loosening community ties—is happening both globally and in local areas and that Grangemouth is a dramatic example of noxious deindustrialization on a local level, where the phenomenon has put a strain on community–industry relations.

On the Status of Rights

On the Status of Rights

Garfinkel\u2019s Politics: Collaborating with Parsons to Document Taken-for-Granted Practices for Assembling Cultural Objects and their Grounding in Implicit Social Contract

From his 1940–1942 studies of Race, through his 1967 study of an “inter-sexed” person called Agnes, Garfinkel’s research was always politically engaged. When Garfinkel was Parsons’ PhD student at Harvard (1946–1952) and later during a period of collaboration with Parsons (1958–1964), both theorized culture as a domain of social interaction independent from social structure and resting on its own implicit social contract. This conception of culture grounded their respective “voluntaristic” and “reciprocity” based approaches to specifying assembly processes for making social categories in a way that put the empirical assembly of categories under a microscope and made social justice a scientific concern. Garfinkel emphasized the importance of social contract aspects of Parsons’ theory – adapted from Durkheim – and with his studies in ethnomethodology, planned to contribute an empirical foundation for aspects of Parsons’ position that were criticized for their abstraction. Nevertheless, important differences remained. Parsons’ model required assimilation and consensus, thus inadvertently enforcing existing inequalities. Garfinkel, by contrast, was deeply concerned with “structural problems” like inequality, and treated assimilationist positions as scientifically and ethically unsound. His research documented reciprocity as a pre-requisite for successful interaction, while treating “troubles” generated by inequality as an important key to understanding social order writ large.

Reshaping relations between the state and the private sector post-COVID-19? Exploring the social licence framework

During the COVID-19 pandemic governments across the globe have provided unparalleled support to private sector firms. As a result, new oversight mechanisms are urgently needed, to enable society to assess and, if necessary, redress, moves by firms which have taken government aid. Many jurisdictions have seen the introduction of �piecemeal� conditionality on different pots of aid. This paper argues that a better response would be to adopt a more unified approach. In particular, the paper explores the social licence framework as a potential way to �build back better�. It is argued that the nature of the implicit social contract between society and the private sector provides the normative force underpinning demands for a social purpose for business, and that this purpose in turn can be used to specify the conditions firms must meet to legitimise their operations. The paper then considers three core elements involved in any introduction of a social licence framework, and surveys the potential benefits and challenges that might emerge in moving towards a social licence framework.

So Who Cares? Taking Livingston out of Africa

So Who Cares? Taking Livingston out of Africa

Left Behind in the Hungarian Rustbelt: The Cultural Political Economy of Working-Class Neo-Nationalism

Nationalism is back with a renewed force. Hungary is a virulent example of the new nationalist ascendancy. As the country was a former liberal star pupil, Hungary’s neo-nationalist turn has been puzzling researchers for years. This study goes beyond the entrenched polarisations in the literature by highlighting the dynamic interplay between culture, structure and identity. It proposes to conceptualise Hungary’s neo-nationalist turn as a Polanyian countermovement against commodification, globalisation and deindustrialisation. The article presents the results of a thematic analysis of 82 interviews with workers in four towns in Hungary’s rustbelt and highlights how the multiscalar lived experience of commodifying reforms violated an implicit social contract and changed workers’ narrative identities. In the absence of a class-based shared narrative and lacking a viable political tool to control their fate, working-class neo-nationalism emerged as a new narrative identity to express workers’ anger and outrage.

Redeploying Residents and Fellows in Response to COVID-19: Tensions, Guiding Principles, and Lessons From the University of Washington.

Redeploying Residents and Fellows in Response to COVID-19: Tensions, Guiding Principles, and Lessons From the University of Washington.

Cooperation between schools and elite sports. How are schools affected from engaging in athletic talent development?

ABSTRACT In this article, we show how collaboration between Danish municipal primary and lower secondary schools (folkeskoler) and elite sports clubs to establish SportsClasses enables schools to set parameters that align student-athletes’ attitudes and behavior towards school and academic performance. Using neo-institutional theory, we show how two separate institutional domains – education and sport – come to agree on common purposes and practices for an endeavor that takes place on the ‘home field’ of education. We apply the theoretical concepts of ‘contractualisation’ and ‘accountability’ to understand what these learning agreements or implicit social contracts involve, how they are made, and how they are enforced. These concepts capture the empirical governance mechanisms that produce the integration of athletes into school norms and practices as well as how these norms and practises are re-configured as an effect of the cooperation. The article is based on an ethnographic study of the admissions process for SportsClasses. We discuss the benefits and risks for the publicly funded school system in entering into such social learning contracts.

Data as a Contested Economic Resource: Framing the Issues

Big data, exploited by ever more powerful AI and machine-learning engines that extract previously unattainable information, is being monetized in various ways and is underpinning the market valuation of today’s most valuable corporations. This has made data-generated rents the principal bone of contention in today’s economy, alongside the negative externalities that the unregulated and undisciplined use of data are creating. In this note, I develop the case that the contest for the rents generated in the emerging data-driven economy will powerfully influence the social order within and international relations externally. Further, I argue that there is no good historical analogue for data as an essential capital asset and thus there is no good historical analogue for a regulatory framework to control the negative externalities to which it gives rise or to equitably share the benefits that it generates. Regulation won’t wait because the issues are pressing urgently on societies as the implicit social contracts that preserve political stability are rapidly eroding, setting the stage for disruptive political change. Hence, we are into a phase of experimenting with regulatory approaches while still working out the guiding principles.

Associative Obligation and the Social Contract

John Horton has argued for an associative theory of political obligation in which such obligation is seen as a concomitant of membership of a particular polity, where a polity provides the generic goods of order and security. Accompanying these substantive claims is a methodological thesis about the centrality of the phenomenology of ordinary moral consciousness to our understanding of the problem of political obligation. The phenomenological strategy seems modest but in some way it is far-reaching promising to dissolve some long-standing problems of political theory. However, it fails at just the point at which a theory of political obligation is needed, namely when individuals question the grounds of their political obligation. A principle of obligation is needed to provide individuals with a reason for compliance with authoritative social rules when the exercise of that obligation is irksome. It is at this point that we need to invoke the idea of society as an implicit social contract, in which obligations are seen as stemming from those terms that it would be in the interests of individuals to agree in a social contract. This is consistent with the method of reflective equilibrium.

Integrated working and intergenerational projects

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to promote discussion about, and the development of the evidence-base underpinning integrated working for intergenerational working. It discusses perspectives on intergenerational work in general and specifically draws on case experiences of the use of intergenerational reminiscence based on sporting memories to highlight issues pertaining to integrated working. Design/methodology/approach The paper presents a general discussion of issues of intergenerational projects and integrated working, with case discussions of the use of sporting memories as an intervention for focusing intergenerational contact. Findings It is concluded that intergenerational work has much to offer but that it is far from clear how best to organise integrated working for this type of work. There are interesting lessons to be drawn for intergenerational interventions and integrated working from the case study discussions. Research limitations/implications Although case studies can provide crucial in-depth knowledge they can be limited in developing evidence we can be sure is more generalisable across contexts. Hence, further research is required into the impact of intergenerational projects, and how best to maximise this through effective integrated working. Practical implications The discussion and case study materials suggest there is much potential in using intergenerational projects to achieve a range of possible outcomes but it is not clear how integrated working is best operationalised in such work. Care is required about clarity concerning the aims of specific projects, but practitioners and others should be encouraged to carefully explore this area of work. Social implications The challenges of an ageing society are significant, as is the need to maintain intergenerational contact, mutuality and the implicit social contract across generations. Specifically developing opportunities for such contact may help achieve this and a range of other positive outcomes. Originality/value This paper brings together a discussion of intergenerational projects with consideration of the challenges of integrated working, and adds specific case study lessons from the use of sports-based reminiscence.