Set Of Social Relations Research Articles

Collective sports success through effective social performances: The case of Olympic wrestling in Iran

This study argues that the athletic success of Iranian wrestlers is fused with success in social performances. Using Alexander's cultural sociology, we propose that individuals’ behavioral, emotional, and mental dispositions toward sports are shaped by tacit and invisible social forces encompassing them at a given time and place. Furthermore, we make use of Alexander's notion that the power of culture is manifested when it is actively enacted. To ground our theoretical frameworks with empirical evidence, we conducted a case study of successful Iranian male wrestlers. The study reveals that the success of Iranian wrestling is constructed upon cultural foundations, social organizations, cooperative networks, and a set of social relations that performatively contribute to producing world-class wrestlers. It is within a given social, cultural, and organizational context that culture is performed through a series of collective actions and agencies. Such successful cultural performances reinforce the meaning of certain practices by connecting the past to the present and ensuring their continuity, thereby establishing a strong tradition of collective sporting achievements.

The politics of transforming social relations of work: making sense of a coworking hub in an outer-urban region

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the efforts of a group of residents of an outer-metropolitan council area to develop a grassroots coworking hub that would improve the working lives of members and support a more inclusive, connected and sustainable local economy. It considers the collective sense-making required to stabilise new sets of social relations, at work, in an era of ‘reforming capitalism’. Using a CCO and governmentality approach, we focus on the rhetorics in play and foreground the interests, agency and decisions of these residents. Bringing the politics of transforming social relations of work to the fore contributes to understanding changes in how work is organised and governed, and understanding the constitutive role of organisational communication. The paper argues a rhetoric of community is problematic for bringing into being a coworking organisation aiming for significant change to work and the economies in which it is embedded.

Customary land management systems and urban planning in peri-urban informal settlements

Customary land management systems are informal, community-driven land-use regulation systems that adapt zoning regulations and customary tenure to cooperatively self-regulate land-use management in multi-ethnic peri-urban settlements. The research uses an integrative literature review to critically re-evaluate the various concepts and practices of customary land management, their impact on the unique morphology of peri-urban areas and their relationship with urban planning. The research results indicate that customary land management systems are intrinsically linked to peri-urban settlements due to their polymorphic spatial structure and complex social groupings. It provides a simplified accessible and affordable land management system with multiple avenues for agency and a balance of power between different authorities. This generates a new set of social relations around neo-customary tenure. Customary land management systems are also linked to urban planning within a dual regulatory structure, combining formal policies and informal customs and providing alternatives for exploitative and exclusionary processes in weak and inefficient states.

Financial assets in the system of financial legal relations

The article examines financial assets in the system of financial legal relations from the point of view of current legislation and regulatory acts of the European Union. The object of the study is a set of social relations regarding financial assets. The purpose of the article is to develop scientifically based conclusions about financial legal relations related to the use of financial assets in economic turnover. The work uses dialectical, logical, systematic, analysis and synthesis, formal- legal, comparative-legal and other methods of scientific knowledge. It has been established that the financial assets of an enterprise, institution, organization are a separate group of assets provided in cash or other, mostly intangible goods, containing monetary claims, which have a monetary value and are capable of bringing economic benefits to the state in the process of formation, distribution and use of cash funds (state and non-state) aimed at solving social problems. A financial asset is a cross-industry category. From a material point of view, a financial asset is characterized as a fund of funds of a business entity, from a financial and legal point of view, a financial asset is a source of budget revenues, which in the process of taxation connects the fund of funds of a business entity with public monetary funds. Financial assets for the purposes of tax and legal regulation can be presented as property and property rights. Financial assets include cash and non-cash funds, documentary and non­documentary securities, digital currency, equity instruments, digital financial assets (including hybrid rights), claims arising from various grounds, receivables. It is indicated that business entities conducting business activities are entitled to independently carry out financial activities, after paying taxes and mandatory payments, to dispose of the remaining profit. Understanding the legal nature and content of financial assets allows systematizing approaches regarding the place in the system of financial legal relations and the use of these resources in economic activity.

Judicial power in implementing the principle of separation of powers in the budget process of Ukraine

The article examines the role of the judiciary in implementing the principle of separation of powers in the budget process of Ukraine in the context of current legislation. The object of the study is a set of social relations that are formed in the field of consolidation and implementation of the constitutional principle of separation of powers in the activities of local state authorities in the budget process. The subject of the study is constitutional and legal norms and norms of budget legislation. The methodological basis was made up of general scientific and special-legal (formal-legal, comparative-legal, systemic and other) methods of cognition. It is noted that the constitutional principle of the separation of powers in the budget process is an interpectoral normative requirement for the activities of representative and local executive bodies, which independently and in cooperation with each other in certain forms and procedures participate in the budget process. In this, judicial authorities are called upon to guarantee, within their competence, the distribution of budgetary powers between representative and local executive bodies. The relationship between the representative and executive bodies of state power in the budget process is shown, which determines the need for systematic support for the implementation of the constitutional principle of separation of powers in the budget process through the formation of the construction of the mechanism for such support.
 The design of the mechanism for ensuring the implementation of the constitutional principle of separation of powers in the budget process has three interrelated elements: an organizational and legal element; institutional element; procedural element. Representative bodies and local executive bodies determine consistent implementation of the constitutional principle of separation of powers in the budget process carried out by local authorities. It is indicated that the judicial authorities in the implementation of the constitutional principle of separation of powers in the budget process guarantee and ensure the implementation of this principle in the form of: resolution of legal disputes; judicial control in the field of budgetary relations; independent assessment of law enforcement decisions of local authorities – participants in the budget process.

"A Tale of Two Cities": Cemetery Heterotopia and Spatial Relations in Lagos City.

What does cemetery teach us about the social world? How do spatial configurations of cemetery mirror urban social realities? In what ways can the understanding of spatial order of necropolis contribute to the episteme of spatial relations? In this paper, I juxtapose space practices in the cemetery with spatial relations and practices in the city of Lagos to frame an alternative way of imagining and writing about cityscapes and a new approach of thinking about social taxonomies such as gender, class, race, ethnicity and power. Following Foucault's theory of heterotopia and relational ontology of space this paper frames cemetery as a counter-site to the city. Drawing from oral interviews, participant observation and archival document, the paper argues that cemetery is a container that encloses different sites and sets of social relations as well as lived experiences.

The familiar strange of sociological fiction

Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude makes the magical and strange feel familiar, and short stories from Fiction @ The Sociological Review inversely make the familiar feel strange. I consider this ability to make the familiar strange as a key part of having a sociological sense of the world: as an ability to disturb what seems fixed and settled in society, and unmake any given set of social relations as the only and natural way of life. I conceptualise the crafting of this sense in fiction as a process of distillation. When writing sociological fiction, we distil our disciplinary attunement – strip down, concentrate and refine the many concepts and findings of our work – to craft scenes which unsettle ‘common sense’.

Ankara’da Ev İşçisi Kadınların Toplu Taşıma Deneyimleri: Zorluklar ve Stratejiler

Beyond the activity of carrying passengers from one point to another, transportation is an area, cut by social categories such as gender, class, age and disability, shaped by government policies and dominated by social codes. This study concentrates on the public transportation experiences of domestic workers, emphasizing that it is inevitable to approach transportation from a gender lens. Basically, this research focuses on the meanings attributed to public transport by women domestic workers, the challenges faced by the women in public transport as being women, and the strategies of coping with these challenges. The empirical basis of the research is semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted with 10 women domestic workers in Ankara in 2020. The study considers the public transport journey as a set of social relations that are not independent from the relations women establish with the vehicle itself, the driver, and other passengers, and approaches it as a process from the moment the passengers leave the home to the moment they arrive at their destination. In this study, it is argued that women's gender relations outside the home transformed their public transportation experience into a necessity rather than a choice and that the difficulties the women experience in public transportation get a multidimensional form by the articulation of problems based on gender inequalities with the class-based challenges.

Work Emancipation and Human Creativity: The Wage-for-Life Alternative

The crises of the present call for us to envision a communist alternative aiming at emancipating work and liberating human creativity: a mode of production for which wealth is the development of the “universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures,” of “creative potentialities” and “all human power” (Marx, 1993, 488). For this purpose, the wage-for-life system, built off the proposal of the French economist and sociologist Bernard Friot, can play a crucial role. Friot conceived a communist mode of production based upon expansion of the wage socialization mechanisms of the welfare institutions and the constitution of an alternative measure of wealth. Imagining a radically different mode of production and set of social relations, Friot's model addresses the need for subverting the category of value itself, making it the starting point for the conception of a new society in which work can be autonomous, creative, free.

Killing through negligence and its distinction with other kinds of murder

Problem setting. According to Art. 27 of the Constitution of Ukraine, everyone has an inalienable right to life, no one can be arbitrarily deprived of life, and the state, in turn, is obliged to protect human life. Protection of a person’s life, as a duty of the state, is manifested in the establishment of criminal liability, enshrined in Section II “Criminal offenses against life and health of a person” of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, who commit socially dangerous acts. whether there are criminal offenses and what punishments they should be committed. The distinction between crimes such as premeditated murder and negligent deprivation of another’s life is important, as criminal law theory still does not have sufficient information on this issue and does not have a complete list of features of the above crimes, but we tried to identify them in our article. Target of research. Deepening their knowledge on the caution of a person’s life due to inconsistency and drawing the line between possible offenses and conditional authority, clarifying the special characteristics of the perpetrator and the victim, outlining the essential features of the perpetrator and the victim, and researching the regulation of negligent proposal of a new version of the Criminal Code of Ukraine. Analysis of resent researches and publications. The theoretical basis for the study of the problem of murder through negligence are the works of legal scholars, in particular, M. Bazhanov, V. Borisov, S. Borodin, V. Glushkov, O. Gorokhovskaya, I. Zinchenko , V. Tyutyugin, O. Us, E. Kisilyuk, V. Kuts, M. Yefimov, S. Likhova, V. Stashis, V. Shablisty and others. Article’s main body. According to Art. 3 of the Constitution of Ukraine, man, his life and health, honor and dignity, inviolability and security are recognized in Ukraine as the highest social value. Given this constitutional provision, the legislator should pay special attention to the criminal law protection of human life and health as the most important public relations. So it is no coincidence that considering such encroachments as one of the most dangerous in the criminal law dimension, the legislator established criminal liability for their commission in Section II “Criminal offenses against life and health” of the Special Part of the Criminal Code of Ukraine. Due to the high public danger and the high prevalence of criminal offenses against human life and health, criminal law theory and law enforcement practice are under increasing scrutiny. Thus, the analysis of judicial practice in recent years shows that, for example, among all murders (Articles 117-119 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine) the number of persons convicted of deprivation of life due to negligence is about 15 percent annually. In our opinion, it is also advisable to analyze the concept of “murder” by comparing the common and distinctive features of the offenses referred to in Art. Art. 115 and 119 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine. According to scientific results, we can conclude that these offenses have many common features. It is possible to understand the common features and preconditions for the spread of these types of offenses. Conclusions and prospects for the development. A study of issues related to the criminal law analysis of murder through negligence and its difference from other types of murder, shows that these acts encroach on the identical object, which is “human life as a set of social relations.” Unfortunately, nowadays the dynamics of offenses committed in Art. Art. 115 and 119 is intensifying, so consideration of their delimitation and characterization of their features is very important. The study examines the main features of these types of crimes, as well as analyzes some provisions of national law and proposes some adjustments to them.

‘Bonding, bridging and linking the last resort tailboard’: Shifts in social workers’ professional positions and mobilizing adaptive capital during the coronavirus pandemic

ABSTRACT This article addresses the activities of Finnish social workers during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020. The goal is to explore 1) what types of shifts in social workers’ professional positions occurred during this pandemic setting and 2) what kind of professional capital, here as human capital and adaptive resources that are required in a pandemic, occurred. The data consist of 33 personal diaries that the social work professionals created from mid-March to the end of May 2020. The diaries were analysed using a narrative positioning analysis. The analysis focuses on three specific sets of social relations: clients, service providers and society. The results suggest that social workers faced several shifts in their professional positions during the first wave of the pandemic. Many positions were familiar, but small and simultaneous changes in several positions brought about a significant overall change in the social work agenda and the required adaptive capacities. The analysis showed that the specific professional expertise of social work concerns its ethical principles and the holistic approach, as well as the competencies needed to organize bonding, bridging and linking capital across social networks, services and institutions.

‘It’s All About Education’: Middle-class, High-caste Women’s Aspirations of Choice, Freedom and Modernity in Urban Nepal

Discourses of development are highly influential in Nepal, entwining with sets of social relations and local history to form a nationally shared vision known as bikas (development). This article explores how specific sets of (universalist and local) discourses of development and gender articulate in the subjectivities of young, middle-class, high-caste women in Kathmandu as they negotiate transitions to adulthood. Drawing on ethnographic research, the article highlights how education has afforded young women new possibilities and prompted new aspirations compared to earlier generations, and words such as ‘choice’ and ‘freedom’ figure prominently in their discussions of aspirations. However, generational differences in understanding how these dreams fit in women’s lives are often expressed in intergenerational tension around marriage. The article highlights how different discourses fuse in ways relational to people’s social locations, including along junctures of class, caste, gender and generation, arguing for attention to intersectionality in understanding the circulation of discourses of development and modernity in Nepal.

Individual Academic Productivity vs New Managerialism in Academic Research

The paper considers individual academic productivity and the new managerialism in academic research as a set of social relations, common and opposite interests of a scholar and a university. The balance of interests is a necessary condition for regulating the contradictions among participants in public relations, including academic research. Reforming higher education results in new managerialism spreading wider and in scientific results paid attention to. The increasing accountability with a lack of mutual trust and information asymmetry creates the illusion of an imbalance of academic researchers’ interests in favor of management. The power potential of the new managerialism can become an instrument of both pressure and encouragement of individual academic productivity. As is shown in our review, this productivity, mainly published papers, is influenced by the principles of its assessment. The evolution of approaches to the academic results promotion provides a large variety of criteria for the selection of indicators to assess scientific activity. The game theory allows to reduce this variety to one common ground, where winning is considered to be the basis of relationships in academic research. As a result, there is a matrix model of four strategies – the extreme forms of scholar-and-management relationship manifestation within the system of academic research. Only one of these strategies means a balance of interests and long-term cooperation, the other three imply the contradiction of individual academic productivity vs the new managerialism and are short-term. The use of winning in a game as a basis and criterion of assessment for the individual academic productivity normalization contributes to opportunistic behavior neutralization. The author makes the conclusion that the type of strategy affects the combination of simple and qualitative indicators and professional expertise when assessing scientific results. It is reasonable to choose the indicators of assessment according to the most balanced strategy of regulating the contradictions among participants in academic research.

Accounting for “the social” in contact tracing applications: The paradox between public health governance and mistrust of government's data use

This essay adopts three accounts (sociological, neoliberal, and cybernetic) of “the social” to get a clearer picture of why there is a barrier faced by the government when implementing contact tracing mobile applications. In Hong Kong's context, the paradox involves declining trust of the government's protection of data privacy and growing concern about data surveillance since the 2019 social unrest I argue that exploring the idea of sociality is valuable in that it re-reconfigures the datafication of pandemic control by revealing different sets of social relations, particularly the asymmetrical power relation between the government and its people. The refusal to download or use the mobile app also shows that the public has a faith in human agency and human resistance in data-saturated cities.

‘Not your “poor dear”’: Practices and politics of care in women’s non-profit housing in Vancouver, Canada

Care is a political process, a set of social relations, and a marketized product. The spatialization of care is complicated when there are diverse caring relations within sites of marketized care. I focus on how care is produced and conceived in non-profit housing for women, in Vancouver, Canada, and how people experience and feel about their homes. I demonstrate the significance of mutual care, caring relations that subvert the giver-receiver hierarchy, and socio-spatial practices that enact care in ways that seek to rewrite structural and historical oppressions that shape women’s experiences of housing. I argue that care in this non-profit housing is entwined within a set of relationships, which range communal practices of care to friction and fragility. This underscores that relationships of care remain susceptible to politics, conflict, and institutional shifts. Finally, I theorize that the provision of mutual care from tenants to their neighbours is a significant element within a wider complex of care in non-profit housing sites.

Decolonial Echoes: Voicing and Listening in Rebecca Belmore's Sound Performance

Focusing on the Canadian settler context, this article analyzes two of Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore’s interactive works that enact alternatives to colonial understandings of voicing and listening that have centred the human ear and vocal apparatus. In particular, I analyze Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother (1991), where Belmore constructed a large wooden megaphone for participants to speak into and address the land directly, and Wave Sound (2017), where Belmore installed four sculptural listening tubes in Canadian National Park and reserve sites that invited visitors to listen to the land. Through my analysis of these two iterative performances, I examine how the echo functions as a decolonial gesture and multisensorial (re)mapping that can generate alternatives to modernity’s spatial-temporal-sensorial order and unsettle the coloniality of the voice. Engaging critical work in sound studies and Native feminist theories to think about vibration, I propose that voicing and listening can be understood as a set of social relationships between people and space/time.

Sex, Alcohol, and Soul: Violent Reactions to Coming Out after the “Gay Propaganda” Law in Russia

This article is focused on a particular set of social relations in Russia: sexuality and violence in the context of consumption of alcohol. We look at how violence erupts after revelation of queer sexuality of one of the participants of collective drinking. Discussions of homosexuality in Russia became especially heated after the adoption of the bill against the “propaganda of non‐traditional family values” in 2013. This law primarily marks information about homosexuality as inappropriate and dangerous to minors. We review court decisions on violence against gay men before and after the introduction of this law. The court cases we analyze are not cases of the “propaganda” law enforcement, but routine violent felonies. As we selected only those cases that involve alcohol consumption from a larger sample, we analyze the stories told in these court files focusing on interaction rituals during the practice of collective heavy drinking. We demonstrate how this ritual is centered around confirmation of masculinity, ceremonies of sharing, and exchange of respect. We also show that these ritualized practices are interrupted and confused by introduction of information about one of the participants' queer sexuality. This interruption evolves into violent reactions, including murder. Nevertheless, the ritual of drinking supports both a “conversation of souls” (sharing intimate secrets) and violent reactions to the information that challenges masculinity of the ritual's participants.

Gender, sexuality and space: towards acts of architectural disobedience

Through a contemporary reading of architectural history, this text aims to elaborate on intersectional study of architecture and gender theory. The aspiration is to provide a critical model to overcome the anatomical, formal and identity politics readings that have dominated the study of the relations between gender and architecture so far. When the fabric of space contains a particular set of social relations, what space is granted to those who exist on the margins of white, male subjectivity?

Turismo y desarrollo sustentable del Qhapaq-Ñan: problemas y oportunidades de desarrollo

En el proceso de desarrollo, el territorio no es un receptor pasivo de las intervenciones externas sino un espacio que tiene una estrategia propia de inserción en la dinámica general. El territorio es visto como un ‘entramado de intereses’ o un ‘agente de transformación social’; es decir, como un conjunto de relaciones sociales que dan origen y a la vez expresan una identidad y un sentido de propósito compartidos por múltiples agentes (Vázquez-Barquero, 2000). Este enfoque, es el que posibilitará que el turismo sea realmente un agente de desarrollo endógeno y sostenible. En este sentido; a través, de la presente nota científica en torno al Qhapaq-Ñan, las autoras buscan esclarecer las posibilidades de los territorios ubicados en sus cercanías para alcanzar un desarrollo local sostenible, a través del turismo, que genere oportunidades a fin de mejorar la calidad de vida de las comunidades locales sin afectar o alterar el patrimonio mundial. El Qhapaq-Ñan, en términos de patrimonio arqueológico, es el mayor bien patrimonial seriado que se conoce en el continente americano, abarcando seis países andinos. Este sistema vial andino constituye la expresión tangible de la expansión incaica y de la convivencia del orden imperial con las diversas culturas locales. La declaración del Qhapaq-Ñan como patrimonio mundial, en el año 2014, ha llevado a aunar esfuerzos conjuntos entre diversos países, diversas provincias, departamentos y diferentes sectores con el propósito de preservar este bien de valor universal excepcional.

Cross-cultural transactions in the film adaptation of Wolf Totem

Jiang Rong’s novel Wolf Totem incited a debate over the veracity of its representation of the steppe and the Mongolian culture, which accounts for the obsession with the real in its Sino-French film adaptation. Unfolding a historical trajectory from a “war against nature” during the Cultural Revolution to the present “war of pollution,” the film delves into trans-media rendezvous with polymorphous facets of a Chinese story. The French director Jean-Jacques Annaud can be seen as the simulacra of the Westerner, an envisioned symbol the novel associates with the nomadic spirit of the Mongol in its attempts to reflect on the “weak” Chinese national character. The film fosters its interpretation of the wolf totem towards a new set of social relations through creating a loop of transcultural appropriation. As the Chinese production team anticipates a blockbuster for a global audience which evades the controversial Han viewing position of Jiang Rong’s writing, the French team’s cultural sensibilities register a European imagination of the Mongol that once dominated Eurasia. That said, the western re-territorialization of the borderland resonates with Jiang Rong’s strategy of otherness, transposing a socio-cultural anxiety onto the gendered body of the other.