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This chapter investigates the impact of managerialism on the work of non-profit human-service workers in New York City, drawing on survey data to paint a portrait of a sector that has been deeply restructured to emulate private-market relations and processes. It uses the Social Structure of Accumulation (SSA) theory to explain the rise of neoliberal austerity and identify five neoliberal strategies designed to dismantle the US welfare state. The chapter also focuses on the impact of privatization, a key neoliberal strategy; shows how privatization has transformed the organization of work in public and non-profit human-service agencies; and details the experience of nearly 3,000 front-line, mostly female, human-service workers in New York City. It argues that austerity and managerialism generate the perfect storm in which austerity cuts resources and managerialism promotes 'doing more with less' through performance and outcome metrics and close management control of the labour-process. Closely analysing practices for resistance, the chapter concludes that in lower-managerial workplaces, workers had fewer problems with autonomy, a greater say in decision making, less work stress, and more sustainable employment, suggesting that democratic control of the workplace is an alternative route to quality, worker engagement, and successful outcomes.

This chapter first discusses early efforts to develop a social psychology based on psychoanalytic categories. It details how Wilhelm Reich, Otto Fenichel, and Siegfried Bernfeld, who were among Freud's more politically minded students and followers, insisted that psychoanalysis, fused with Marxism, could yield a fruitful social psychology, especially of fascism and other authoritarian tendencies, such as anti-Semitism. But it was Reich's Character Analysis (1933) and his 1935 study The Mass Psychology of Fascism that developed most fully the key concept linking psychoanalytic categories with politics and especially political ideologies. The chapter then turns to the book Character and Social Structure (1953) written by Mills and his mentor and greatest influence, sociologist Hans Gerth. Gerth introduced Mills to European, especially German sociology, of which Weber was among the two or three leading figures. In Character and Social Structure they set out a pluralistic conception of social structure configured in terms of three domains: the economic, political, and military orders.

This chapter continues to summarise different theories and methods in mainstream health and illness research in order to compare them to critical realism and show what it might add. Positivist, interpretive and postmodern approaches to human agency within structures are considered. There are also sections on: six features of critical realism; structure, agency and culture; four types of social structures; a comparison of realist evaluation and critical realism theories of structure and agency; the structure-agency dialectic, and Archer’s theory of internal conversations. The detailed examples of applying critical realist concepts are of prison leavers with mental health problems, and nurses working on traumatic brain injury rehabilitation. Throughout, the chapter critically considers problems posed for health researchers, to see how critical realist research theories of structure and agency can serve their work.

Over the course of the 1990s and 2000s, debates focused around the period of the 'fourth age' as a complex socio-cultural construct. These contributions have moved beyond the use of the 'fourth age' as an uncritical age-based criterion in research samples (e.g., 80+) or simply a marker of eligibility for services. At the same time, they have produced a new set of challenges for interpretations of the 'fourth age'. This chapter uses a framework derived from critical gerontology in order to articulate the tensions and contradictions inherent in the concept of agency with regards to the 'fourth age'. The chapter is divided into the following sections: first, the construct of the 'fourth age' is clarified; second, themes in the literature on agency are reviewed; third, the challenges and contradictions presented by agency and the 'fourth age' are outlined together; finally, the chapter concludes with a review of issues for further research and development.

This chapter unpicks how the inherent normality of the middle classes embedded within Dreamfields’ ethos intersects with race and is compounded by the education marketplace's demand for results. These parameters shape teacher and student negotiations, while students' social groupings are structured by institutional norms that they navigate from various positions within Dreamfields’ hierarchy. Supposedly more expressive black bodies are consistently more heavily policed in the playground, while performing 'whiter' forms of comportment is a tactic used to reduce student surveillance. Principal Culford demands a 'no excuses culture’, yet this 'no excuses' mantra divorces students from their social positioning, trivializing continued hardship, institutionalized racism and moral value judgements.

Adverse mortality and morbidity effects of the huge oil spills in Bayelsa State, Niger Delta, illustrate the value of critical realism’s four planes of social being for organising complex findings and for combining large- and small-scale data sets. These planes cover every aspect of being human: bodies in relation to nature; interpersonal relations; larger social relations and structures; and inner human being in the mental-social-embodied personality. Chapter 5 also considers critical realist approaches to managing data-analysis: laminated systems analysis; interdisciplinary research and policy-making; critical realist theories about interdisciplinarity; overcoming barriers to interdisciplinarity, and interdisciplinary commitments. The detailed examples are about improving the physical health of people with a diagnosis of serious mental illness, and feminist-informed counselling after sexual assault.

The third chapter analyzes the mechanisms that have fuelled the rise of draconian discipline policies and normalized violent within public education. It traces the contemporary history that gave rise to punitive policy formation in Southern California and questions the intent of such legislations.

The fifth chapter elucidates a needed connection between the competing visions of the education of Black people and the current iterations of the educative process. The construction of this chapter in this manner is of great importance, as a major flaw in the school to prison pipeline analytic framework is a historical representation of the issues that are central to the discussion.

In this chapter, Thulman studies the notching and hafting artifact morphology change in the Southeast coast, the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, and the Ohio Valley. Chronology is key to formal studies, so he examines radiocarbon dates using Bayesian methods to isolate the rate of change in designs. Typology is likewise examined as a key to isolating variation at a regional level. Better typologies are sought using landmark-based geometric morphometrics (LGM). Thulman singles out the abruptness of notching as related to the robust social networking among EA groups. Florida, as part of the “Dalton Phenomenon,” is a curious outlier.

This chapter looks at the complex emerging colonial society that combined a remnant of indigenous inhabitants, white settlers, African slaves, and free men and women of different races. It also discusses asymmetrical human interactions among the races—whites, blacks and mulattos, and Amerindians and mestizos—and pays much attention to conflicting and overlapping hierarchies and social structures that developed on the island, as well as to the ways in which particular groups and individuals challenged those structures and hierarchies. Lastly, in this chapter I expand on the thesis of the “Two Cubas”: one, an urban, official, and mercantilist Havana, the region’s navigation hub; the other, the Cuba of the east, peasant, remote, relaxed, and rebellious, where smuggling and tobacco-farming predominated.

Being pluralist about the concept of power does not mean that all definitions are equally valid. Many definitions are non-rival and gain their utility from the specific contexts in which they are applied. Others are rival and their relative utility derives from how good an explanation is provided by the theory of which they are part. Such explanation is constrained by the world, because good explanation is constrained by the expectations it engenders. Some conceptions of power and related terms do similar explanatory work, but hold different normative values. The contestability of ‘power’ derives from the normative work it does in different contexts and explanations. By making our concepts as non-normative as possible, we can ensure that moral or political disagreement is brought into the open. How we define social and political power does matter in some contexts for both explanatory and normative reasons.

The second chapter looks at how the ideology that informs the “need” for prisons is normalized. Analysing the root causes of the development of the prisons as an ideological construct, it looks at the ways in which such ideology has affected the relationships of social structures.

The fourth chapter presents the harsh realities that young Black men face in the gendered social hierarchy that presents a very limited set of, often problematic, solutions as models. Situated within a society that advances violent expressions of masculine behaviour, the stories of Black male youths explore the consequences of when Black males reject these notions of masculinity.

This chapter examines the social mechanisms that contribute to the construction of representations guiding public action in Algeria, which continue to place the hydrocarbons sector at the heart of economic and social development. This leads to excessive state interventionism, the chapter argues. By delving into the concept of rentier states and “resource curses”, the chapter seeks to explain the inner workings of the patronage networks and interrelationships between dominant actors defending their interests, seeking to uphold the status quo in Algeria’s political and economic spheres. The chapter argues that the economic policies of Abdelaziz Bouteflika reflect an inability to reshape Algeria’s economic foundations, defined by an urge to maintain an essentialist reading of Algerian state identity and the energy sector forming the basis for the entire social structure.