Social Realm Research Articles

Shifting Paradigms: Semiotic Reading of the Built Environment Transformations in Lithuania 1986–2004

Summary The research delves into the complex and multi-layered transition of Lithuania from a Soviet to a post-Soviet society, focusing on the architectural landscape as a reflection of ideological shifts. It explores the period from Gorbachev’s initiation of perestroika in 1986 to the Baltic States’ entry into the EU and NATO in 2004, a time marked by significant transformations within the architectural, social, and political realms. First, using Greimasian Square, the study categorises and analyses the reactions toward Soviet Modernist architecture, observing the gradual shift from a representation of state ideology to a canvas reflecting a myriad of individual and collective experiences, also assuming the artistic value of the architects’ output. Second, utilising frameworks from Western architectural criticism figures such as Peter Blake, Robert Venturi and the Situationists, the study contextualises and collates with architectural trends in public interiors or private constructions in Lithuania. Additionally, presumptions are correlated with a crisis in the architectural profession, characterised by a rise in private constructions without architects. Through semiotic view architectural discourse becomes a vital element in understanding the broader cultural and political shifts in post-Soviet Lithuania.

Strategic Communication and Socio-Ecological Imperatives for Re-Marketing the Nigerian Brand

The thrust of this paper is to examine select factors within the social and ecological realms that are attributed to the image crises of Nigeria and to proffer sustainable strategic communication solutions to re-marketing the nation as a brand. The de-marketing process of the brand Nigeria is a function of some obvious factors like corruption, bribery, ethnicity, communal and ethno-religious clashes. Consequently, almost everything ‘Nigerian’, whether human beings or products, is questioned or received with greater comparative scepticism, especially within the international community. Nigeria is no doubt in dire need of a corporate reformation and a review of the nation’s socio-ecological posture and experience will offer a headway for the re-marketing of the brand. This paper adopts the analytical methods for the review of strategic communication and the Socio-Ecological Model, using selected scenarios in Nigeria as units of analysis. Findings reveal that Nigeria’s albatross as an unattractive brand is the moral decadence of her citizens occasioned by a lack of adequate information of citizens, absence of motivation and ability to act, and the inherent norms that the people live with. This has thwarted the nation’s (re)branding management efforts. This paper recommends that the Federal government of Nigeria should re-orient her citizens from the now youngest generation and re-order her communication architecture to communicate a renewed Nigerian brand that will help the nation’s image to be attractive for a convincing patronage within the international market.

Digital DJing in the GCSE Classroom: Art or instrument?

Between 2022 and 2023 I ran two experimental DJing workshops in a school in East London with Year 10 GCSE music students. They were experimental in the sense that I had not run workshops with this age group before and that I was sharing some experimental techniques with digital DJ technology (DDJT) that I had been exploring in my own practice. They proved to be highly engaging for the young people and highlighted significant, and sometimes unexpected, benefits of using DDJT in the classroom. The results of the workshops are analysed in the context of the 2016 addition of DJing as an ‘instrument’ for the performance component of the GCSE assessment, alongside claims that this is a ‘challenge to colonisation’. While the addition is viewed as positive, it is questioned whether viewing DJing as being equivalent to other instrumental playing captures the plurality of a practice that is distributed across sonic, social and discursive realms. Historical and conceptual precedents for viewing DJing both as an instrument and as an art are explored, and it is suggested that it could also be assessed under the GCSE Art & Design criteria.

Navigating carbon neutrality pathway beyond energy and economic agents: the influence of media liberty across the OECD countries

Abstract Press freedom is a fundamental aspect of democratic societies, playing a critical role in shaping public discourse, fostering transparency, and holding institutions accountable. Furthermore, its impact extends beyond political and social realms to encompass environmental sustainability, particularly in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. While extensive research has been conducted on the economic, social, and institutional factors that influence environmental outcomes, the role of press freedom in shaping ecological footprint remains underexplored. However, this study aims to address this gap by examining the relationship between press freedom and ecological footprint across 36 OECD countries from 2013 to 2022. Utilizing a system generalized method of moments (GMM) analysis and controlling for economic growth, trade openness, and energy consumption, this research reveals significant findings. Specifically, it demonstrates that press freedom serves as a catalyst for reducing ecological footprint, presenting OECD countries with a unique opportunity for environmental gains and potentially achieving carbon neutrality. In contrast, we find indicators such as economic growth, energy consumption, and trade openness have negative impact on environmental quality. Overall, this study underscores the importance of promoting press freedom as a key strategy for advancing environmental sustainability and calls for concerted efforts to harness its potential for mitigating ecological footprint in OECD countries and beyond.

Examining Islamic Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Current and Future Research– A Bibliometric Analysis

This bibliometric analysis offers a comprehensive look at the current research trends in Islamic environmental, social, and governance (ESG) over 12 years, from 2012 to 2023. The study encompasses a dataset of 54 papers from the SCOPUS database and employs various bibliometric metrics, including author-based, country-based, and organization-based citations. The results indicate a variable growth in the number of publications in this research domain over the period, with a particularly significant surge observed between 2021 and 2023. The descriptive analysis identifies the most prolific countries and document types within Islamic environmental, social, and governance realms. The citation analysis identifies the most influential authors, organizations, and countries shaping this field. In summary, the results show that environmental, social, and governance (ESG) research and practices that include Islamic teachings and values still demonstrate a significant gap, and recommendations are provided for future research based on the primary issues and gaps discovered from the current trends. These findings are valuable for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers seeking insights into this study area.

Participatory Democracy in Southern Africa: Explaining Botswana’s Exceptionalism

Botswana has had fair and stable elections since its independence in 1966. It has a relatively high standard of living, a relatively well-functioning welfare state, and relatively low levels of government corruption. Voter participation is among the highest in the world, topping 80 percent in the past elections. Access to education and healthcare is free to all citizens. How can we best explain Botswana’s exceptionalism in the political, economic, and social realms, and what policy lessons does the case of Botswana contain? This article shows that it is Botswana’s millennial tradition of direct village democracy, kgotla, that best explains its exceptional performance. I visited Botswana in May of 2023 to evaluate the importance of participatory democracy in Botswana and assess its explanatory power. When comparing local participation to other, potentially relevant causal factors, I find that local political participation provides the most robust explanation for good governance in Botswana. In Botswana, citizens are able to hold their elected officials accountable, learn how politics works by acquiring the necessary technical knowledge (techne) through participating in regular, monthly public assemblies, and, as a result, make better-informed political decisions.

Consubstantialities of resistance: Labor process, (bio)materialities, and pathogenicity

As social science scholarship has historically documented, social structure and clinical practice are more commonly as contradictory or incoherent as they are often framed. The increasing emphasis on the rise of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has drawn attention to how social realms of resistance are entrenched and interconnected through varied structural, political, clinical, biological, and ecological relations. In this study, set in São Paulo, Brazil, I sought to unpack relational consubstantialities of AMR within the healthcare labor process and their enfolded (bio)materialities and pathogenicity by drawing on a series of interviews with primary care-based health professionals, health services managers, and policymakers, completed between late 2021 and early 2023. Participants’ accounts reveal how the reproduction of the labor process in primary care foregrounds (bio)material relations in which antimicrobial resistance finds timely and proper coextensive social conditions of reproduction. In their turn, the study results highlight how work intensification relates to economies of scarcity, teamwork coerciveness, AMR virulence and pathogenicity, destabilizing ecological (bio)materialities amid structural and clinical practice interrelations. Building on renewed materialisms of the political economy of health, I propose an approach to complexify understandings of relational interconnectedness of resistance by instilling relational tension lines of objects against their pragmatic reification in health interventions and theory.

Scale at the interface of spatial and social ecology.

Animals simultaneously navigate spatial and social environments, and their decision-making with respect to those environments constitutes their spatial (e.g. habitat selection) and social (e.g. conspecific associations) phenotypes. The spatial-social interface is a recently introduced conceptual framework linking these components of spatial and social ecology. The spatial-social interface is inherently scale-dependent, yet it has not been integrated with the rich body of literature on ecological scale. Here, we develop a conceptual connection between the spatial-social interface and ecological scale. We propose three key innovations that incrementally build upon each other. First, the use-availability framework that underpins a large body of literature in behavioural ecology can be used in analogy to the phenotype-environment nomenclature and is transferable across the spatial and social realms. Second, both spatial and social phenotypes are hierarchical, with nested components that are linked via constraints-from the top down-or emergent properties-from the bottom up. Finally, in both the spatial and social realms, the definitions of environment and phenotype depend on the focal scale of inquiry. These conceptual innovations cast our understanding of the relationships between social and spatial dimensions of animal ecology in a new light, allowing a more holistic understanding and clearer hypothesis development for animal behaviour. This article is part of the theme issue 'The spatial-social interface: a theoretical and empirical integration'.

Sexual dissidence and women’s citizenship: the cases of early twentieth-century Spain and Greece

ABSTRACT This essay examines depictions of modernity in two novels from the peripheral European nations of Spain and Greece through the lens of lesbian sociability. I am interested in the social anxieties that stem from positioning the figure of the homosexual woman in the frame of historical and ideological unrest. I showcase the novels Zezé (Ángeles Vicente, 1909) and Η ϵρωμένη της (The Two Lovers, Dora Rosetti, 1929). In the context of major debacles (Spain,1898; Greece, 1922), the protagonists of the novels make apparent the changes dissident sexuality triggers in the social realm, from culture to economy and the constitution of the labor force, from family to political participation. Using sapphic desire as her vantage point, Vicente examines women's presence in entertainment and traveling, while Rosetti accounts for the academic advancement and professionalization of lesbians in the sciences and the industrial sector. The texts challenge common assumptions of belonging, for their protagonists physically separate from the national body to test and taste the full extension of their freedom. Both Vicente and Rosetti defy social institutions such as marriage and reproduction, and obliquely reveal the deep connections between intimacy among lesbians and the history of modernization in leisure, traveling, and immigration.

Contrasting Realities: Italian Advertisements and Non-Sexist Linguistic and Social Norms

This research aims to scrutinise whether sexism is confined solely to the Italian advertising domain or extends into the language employed by the general populace and the broader cultural fabric of society. In Italy, despite numerous efforts made over the past decades to eradicate sexism in advertising campaigns, marketers frequently resort to its various manifestations, deeming it a powerful tool for attracting potential consumers. The prevalent utilisation of the female image in a sexist manner, portraying women as objects of desire, remains commonplace. Surprisingly, even renowned influencers aligned with the radical feminist movement often incorporate such tactics in their social media content. Sexism manifests through two principal avenues: firstly, the erotic portrayal of women’s bodies and/or their sensual behaviours, frequently coupled with language expressions encompassing with dual meanings; secondly, the perpetuation and reinforcement of stereotypical gender roles. While the latter has largely diminished in the contemporary era, the former persists prominently. This case study research employs a qualitative analysis approach. Various data sources, including legal documents, historical records, and contemporary media, are critically analysed. The findings suggest that, despite the societal and linguistic rejection of sexism in contemporary Italy, where gender equality prevails across social, economic, and legal realms, the advertising industry continues to rely on such practices heavily.

Feeding Precarity Between State and Capital: Women Workers and Breastfeeding in Cakung Manufacturing Industry

Women constitute the vital workforce in Indonesia's economy, particularly in sectors like garment, textile, and footwear. Despite their economic importance, these industries are characterised by excessive control, pressure, and violence, transforming women into cheap labour and limiting their lives both in the production and social reproduction realm. This study analyses how the discipline of factory work has implications for women workers in their care work, specifically in breastfeeding. Through a qualitative approach, this study uses focus group discussions (FGD) and interviews with women garment and textile industry workers in Kawasan Berikat Nusantara, North Jakarta. The study also analyses the state's response and position in child-feeding matters. The study shows how the regimented nature of factory work, which controls the energy, time, and bodies of women workers, coupled with the absence of job security and protection from the state, limit workers’ capacity to care for their families, particularly to breastfeed their children. Consequently, women workers have to switch to formula milk. I argue that the workers’ reliance on formula milk illustrates a form of neoliberalism in which the state subjugates women workers to the capitalist economy both in the realms of production and social reproduction, forcing them to live in a precarious condition. This potentially will cause health, nutrition, and other quality of life problems for mothers and children in the future.

Cognitive microfoundations and social interaction dynamics. The implications of complexity for institutional theory

AbstractThis paper investigates the intersection of cognitive sciences and social network theory and its counterpart, the complexity sciences, aiming to shed light on the compatibility and potential integration of these frameworks into institutional theory. Institutional scholars have for long selectively adopted notions linked with the cognitive sciences and complexity sciences, such as the notion of path dependence, without exploring the broader implications of systematically integrating such perspectives into institutionalism. This paper aims to advance such a comprehensive theoretical integration, by investigating the effective combination of these approaches and their significant implications. It shows how the complexity sciences contribute to dissolving the barriers between the cognitive and social realms and illustrates how this impacts notions of human agency and reflexivity. Theoretical integration also involves acknowledging considerable diversity in individual human agency, which in turn prompts a reconsideration of how notions of institutional stability, change, diffusion and adaptation are understood. Furthermore, the paper addresses the epistemological challenge presented by the complexity sciences, before it highlights the general relevance of institutional theory in analyzing complex social phenomena. Finally, the paper explores implications for research methodology, proposing that a fusion of institutional theory and the complexity sciences provides a metatheoretical framework for assessing the contextual suitability of different theoretical and methodological approaches.

Under the ESG Dome of China

Implementing ESG is crucial for China’s modernization journey and corporate sustainability. To deeply understand the current standing of ESG in China, this study leverages online data richness using text mining techniques, specifically Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and ego network analysis. LDA is utilized to identify prevalent discussion topics on ESG, while ego network analysis is applied to examine the relationships and influences among key stakeholders. The scientific aim of this research is to identify prevalent ESG discussion topics, examine the relationships and influences among stakeholders, and determine core ESG focus areas on Chinese society. The findings highlight popular discussion topics such as ESG investment, the ESG notion, green finance transformation, and ESG rating. These topics underscore China’s growing concern for environmental protection and social responsibility. The core discussion areas focus on sustainable development, company social responsibility, and eco-friendliness, framing harmonized progress across economic, social, and environmental realms. Interestingly, governance discourse is sparse; the reasons are analyzed. Through the analysis of online discussions on China’s ESG, this study aims to enhance policymakers’ and participants’ understanding of the true status of China’s ESG, being of practical significance for policy formulation and appropriate ESG strategies.

Cross-attention based two-branch networks for document image forgery localization in the Metaverse

In recent years, the Metaverse has garnered significant attention in social and Metahuman realms, showcasing substantial value and immense developmental potential through its integration of virtual and real worlds. However, this integration has also raised security concerns. For instance, in digital image forensics, the malicious dissemination of false images by wrongdoers could result in serious consequences and the propagation of misinformation. This paper presented a novel two-branch network (abbreviated as CAFTB-Net) to detect and localize the forged regions of document images in the Metaverse. One branch extracts manipulation trace directly from spatial information, e.g., unnatural smears, anomalies between pixels, etc. The other branch employs an SRM filter to transform the input image from the color domain into the noise domain, effectively extracting anomalies, such as global noise inconsistencies from the noise domain. Compared to spatial domain features, the discontinuity of forgery traces within the noise domain aids the network in authenticating the document image. The two branches extract local and global features in the forged document images. Finally, we propose a cross-attention module to fuse local spatial features and global noise features. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed network achieves F1 scores of 0.819 and 0.948 on the SACP and ICDAR datasets, respectively, with AUC scores of 0.933 and 0.764, outperforming some of the state-of-the-art algorithms.

Navigating challenges in American higher education: Korean international Christian students’ use of spiritual capital in response to white Christian nationalism

Despite extensive scholarly debates on Christian privilege and Secular privilege in American higher education, the voices of international students have often been absent from this discourse. This article is a response to a recent call for diverse perspectives to advance current discussions on white Christian nationalism in American higher education. Borrowing Bradford Verter’s (2003) spiritual capital, we explore Korean international Christian students’ experience of white Christian nationalism and its counter-movements in a college town near a public land-grant university in the Northeast. Through life history interviews with 16 participants, our study reveals the complex, problematic, and nuanced relationship between Korean international Christian students and white Christian nationalism. On the one hand, our participants acknowledged that the dominance of whiteness in Christianity led their professors and classmates to overlook the possibility that Asians could also be Christian, resulting in feelings of isolation and marginalization in class. On the other hand, they encountered the perception of Christianity as outdated, broken, and unintellectual among American professors and colleagues, which silenced their voices. In navigating these challenges, participants drew on their spiritual capital to construct their meanings, identities, and belongings in the social, academic, and religious realms.

Silencing the Rainbow: The Territorial Effects of Pride Cancellation

The pause in Pride parades, particularly highlighted during the pandemic, reminds us of the importance of actively including and celebrating nonheteronormative communities. It emphasizes the need to cultivate understanding and acceptance of diverse sexual orientations. This study navigates through the landscape of Madrid Pride, focusing on understanding how its unforeseen cancellation in 2020 due to the pandemic has influenced the LGBTQIA+ communities’ sense of space, openness, safety, visibility, acceptance, and equality. The research is centered on examining the connection between Pride parades and the appropriation of spaces that are typically seen as conforming to heterosexual norms. It takes into account the viewpoints of the LGBTQIA+ community (including activists, organizations, and potential attendees) as well as the perspectives of event stakeholders (such as organizations, local community members, and tourism professionals). A social representation theory‐based inductive approach was utilized, drawing from queer and feminist perspectives. The cancellation of Pride events in recent times has caused significant disruption to the de‐ and reterritorialization of space. This has had far-reaching implications in both the political and social realms for the LGBTQIA+ community and its public profile.

Pixels to palates: Social media foodscape influence on e-Trust, experience and gastronomic intentions

ABSTRACT This study examines the dynamics between the aesthetic appeal and social factors of destination social media foodscapes, e-Trust, destination food experiences, and future experiential intentions among gastronomy tourists. Data were collected for this quantitative research design using purposive sampling. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was then employed to test the research hypotheses on 336 responses. The results illustrate that e-Trust and destination food experiences sequentially mediate the relationship between aesthetic appeal, social factors, and future experiential intentions. These findings should be interpreted with caution, as the effectiveness of social media in influencing food tourists may evolve and be subject to rapid changes. The study highlights the need for tourism stakeholders to strategically curate and create destination social media foodscapes to support tourists’ travel planning and consumption. The originality of this paper lies in its framework, which combines the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) model to better understand the psychological processes of food tourists, from the social media realms of foodscapes to physical consumption experiences through a sequential mediation perspective.

Migrants From Central Asia in the Moscow Agglomeration: Social Well-Being and Demographic Attitudes

The relevance of this study lies in the fact that it addresses the lack of empirical data needed for evidence-informed policy-making in the social, economic, and demographic realms in Moscow and the Moscow Oblast. It aims to explore migrants’ emotional and evaluative attitudes toward their social reality, their role in it, and the unique demographic factors influencing their behavior. Specifically, the article seeks to characterize migrants’ social well-being, identify factors detrimental to well-being, and outline conditions that facilitate trust, cooperation, and respect among individuals. The ultimate goal is to enhance socio-demographic well-being, unlocking migrants’ full potential not only for socio-economic and demographic development in the Moscow agglomeration and society but also to help them achieve personal goals. The findings are based on a survey conducted in February–March 2023 in Moscow and Moscow Oblast, involving 766 migrants from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. The article analyzes how the problem of well-being is discussed in contemporary academic literature, refines the definition of the key concept, and substantiates the factors influencing the formation of migrants’ social well-being and their demographic attitudes. The article provides an evaluation of the demographic situation in the Moscow agglomeration, along with some insights into the social well-being of migrants and their demographic attitudes. It also identifies problematic areas that pose challenges to the successful social adaptation of migrants.

THE FEMTEXT- A GENDERED PERSPECTIVE OF AI

Sustainable development, as described by the Brundtland Report, involves catering to contemporary needs without impairing future generations' ability to satisfy their own. This principle is not just theoretical; it has pressing practical implications across social, economic, and environmental realms, all of which need considerable attention. Gender Equality is one of these crucial aspects. Although Artificial Intelligence is increasingly being spotlighted by countries and respected international organizations like the United Nations, UNICEF, and UNESCO, the connections between AI, Gender, and Sustainable Development are seldom discussed. Furthermore, the literature rarely addresses the aspects of education and the Gender Pay gap within this framework. This paper aims to provide a succinct depiction of the benefits and limitations of AI in promoting Gender Equality. Additionally, the research explores the importance of AI in addressing the Gender pay gap and its potential impact on achieving SDG 8 by 2030. What sets this paper apart is its consideration of the behavioral dimension, specifically examining the involvement of men in advancing Gender Equality, acknowledging their long-standing societal privileges. KEYWORDS: Gender Equality, Artificial Intelligence, Education, Sustainable Development Goals, Pay Gap

Perspectives on Gender and Inequality

Societies within them are unequal in certain respects or the other. A host of factors in the economic, social, political, and cultural realms contributed to this inequality. For instance, misconceived economic posture generate deprivation depending on defective distribution of wealth and control of the means of production at its disposal. Impoverished social conditions, a direct fall out of wrong economic structures, may drive the poor to extreme periphery of an unbecoming social life, resulting in marginalization. They lose asset base, lack amenities, and fail to meet the required standards of education, health, nutrition, and opportunity for a healthy lifestyle. Centralized power, exercise of political control, and curtailing civil liberties limit human rights and induce a rationale for discrimination. Culture on its part is subject to value erosion impacting social life more so in a hierarchical society. Unfair economic structures legitimized by the state political apparatus may results in endorsing a degraded culture with moral sanctity. It is essential to study inequality through this frame of reference of vulnerability created by multiple factors at interplay in any society. This study aims to probe into the factors contributing to inequality, from a vulnerability perspective of multiple causation. It applies the vulnerability perspective in the study of gender inequality to identify major factors of causation The first of these are extrinsic factors while the other two are individual-centric. The factors of causation discussed here are Tradition, Religion, Role, and Sexual Identity.