Suchergebnisse

1. Introduction : the development of urban movements in Central and Eastern Europe / Kerstin Jacobsson -- 2. The playfulness of resistance : articulations of urban grassroots activism in post-socialist Vilnius / Beatriz Lindqvist -- 3. The ups and downs of a symbolic city : the architectural heritage protection movement in Bucharest / Ioana Florea -- 4. The elderly as a force for urban civil activism in Ukraine / Olena Leipnik -- 5. Urban grassroots, anti-politics and modernity : bike activism in Belgrade / Sabrina Kopf -- 6. Unsettling 'the urban' in post-Yugoslav activisms : 'right to the city' and pride parades in Serbia and Croatia / Bojan Bilic and Paul Stubbs -- 7. The performative logic of urban space contestation : two examples of local communities mobilisation in St. Petersburg / Elena Tykanova and Anisya Khokhlova -- 8. From 'local' to 'political' : the Kaliningrad mass protest movement of 2009-2010 in Russia / Karine Clement -- 9. Alliance building and brokerage in contentious politics : the case of the Polish tenants' movement / Dominika V. Polanska -- 10. Shaping the city and its inhabitants : urban activism in Slovakia / Alexandra Bituckov -- 11. Europeanisation and urban movements : political opportunities of community organisations in Lithuania / Jolanta Aidukaite and Kerstin Jacobsson.

This article studies the soft regulation developed in the field of EU employment policy from the late 1990s onwards, a type of policy co-ordination that has been termed the 'Open Method of Coordination'. It focuses on particular regulatory mechanisms, in the section entitled 'Discursive regulatory mechanisms', built into this 'soft' system of governance, which are related to language use and knowledge making. These include: joint language use (Eurodiscourse); the building of a common knowledge base (including collection and standardization of statistics); the strategic use of comparisons and evaluations; the systematic editing and diffusion of knowledge, combined with social pressure and time pressure. It is argued that these measures together constitute a systematic system of governance with the potential to transform the practices of the member states and thus add to the integration process, albeit by a partly different kind of dynamic than regulation and integration by hard law.

This article addresses the question of legitimacy, both in a general theoretical perspective and more specifically in relation to policy making in the European Union. It is argued that Jürgen Habermas' recent theories of discursive will formation provide a useful frame work for understanding the current problems of legitimacy in European policy making. The main proposition is the central connection between communication and legitimacy, and it is argued that improving the communicative character of policy making should be a central aspect of the democratization efforts in Western Europe.

In much social scientific literature, Polish civil society has been portrayed as weak and passive. This volume offers a much-needed corrective, challenging this characterization on both theoretical and empirical grounds and suggesting new ways of conceptualizing civil society to better account for events on the ground as well as global trends such as neoliberalism, migration, and the renewal of nationalist ideologies. Focusing on forms of collective action that researchers have tended to overlook, the studies gathered here show how public discourse legitimizes certain claims and political actions as "true" civil society, while others are too often dismissed. Taken together, they critique a model of civil society that is 'made from above'.

We're in an era of ever increasing attention to animal rights, and activism around the issue is growing more widespread and prominent. In this volume, Kerstin Jacobsson and Jonas Lindblom use the animal rights movement in Sweden to offer the first analysis of social movements through the lens of Emile Durkheim's sociology of morality. By positing social movements as essentially a moral phenomenon—and morality itself as a social fact—the book complements more structural, cultural, or strategic action–based approaches, even as it also demonstrates the continuing value of classical sociological approaches to understanding contemporary society.