Social Capital and Community Group Participation: Examining ‘Bridging’ and ‘Bonding’ in the Context of a Healthy Living Centre in the UK

Social capital has been widely advocated as a way of understanding and building community participation in the interest of health improvement. However, the concept as proposed by Putnam, has been criticised for presenting an overly romanticised account of complex community relations. This paper presents analysis from a qualitative evaluation of a Healthy Living Centre (HLC) in the North of England, to examine the utility of the concept of social capital in this context. We found the concepts of ‘bridging’ and ‘bonding’ social capital were useful – though not without limitations – in helping to make sense of the complexities and contradictions in participants’ experiences of community group participation. 'Bridging' helped provide an understanding of how the decline in shared social spaces such as local shops impacts on social relationships. 'Bonding' highlighted how community group membership can have positive and negative implications for individuals and the wider community. It was found that skilled group leadership was key to strengthening bridging capital. Politically, in the UK, community participation is seen as having an essential role in social change, for example, its centrality to the coalition government's idea of the ‘Big Society’. A micro‐examination of this HLC using the lens of social capital provides a valuable critical insight into community participation. It shows that this kind of initiative can be successful in building social capital, given conditions such as an appropriate setting and effective leadership. However, they cannot substitute for other kinds of investment in the physical infrastructure of a community. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Emotions as ecosystemic adaptations

Despite Gregory Bateson's interest in emotion and culture, the potential for understanding emotion systemically and culturally was lost very early in the mainstream development of family therapy, partly as a reaction to the dominant psychiatric‐psychoanalytic paradigm of North America at the time. In those pioneering years, to take emotion seriously was to risk appearing stuck in a one‐person psychology. In an interesting paradox, it is relational psychoanalysts and parent–infant researchers such as Beatrice Beebe and Frank Lachmann who have recently turned to systems theory to give a fuller account of emotions and emotional regulation in self and relationships. The author draws on their ideas together with the work of Peter Fonagy, Patricia Crittenden, Jessica Benjamin, Britt Krause and others to sketch briefly an ecosystemic theory of emotional expression. This sketch is used to give contextual meaning to two contrasting clinical topics in relation to anger: self‐harm and conduct ‘disorder’.     

Never the Twain Shall Meet: A Critical Appraisal of the Combination of Discourse and Psychoanalytic Theory in Studies of Men and Masculinity

In recent years there have been a number of attempts by different researchers to study men and masculinity using a combination of discourse theory and psychoanalysis. The main reason for this development is the sense that, on its own, discourse theory provides an incomplete account of masculine subjectivity. Psychoanalysis is thought to be able to fill those gaps. In this paper I reviewed these arguments, provided an outline of the alleged deficiencies in discursive approaches to men and masculinity, and examined some of the work that has attempted the above synthesis. I argued that, for a number of reasons, such attempts are bound to fail. Instead, I argued that better progress can be made in studies of masculinity by remaining within the theoretical boundaries of Discursive Psychology.     

Consumer ethnocentrism,cultural sensitivity,and intention to purchase local products—evidence from Vietnam

• This study empirically investigates the impacts of consumer ethnocentrism and cultural sensitivity on both imported product judgment and intention to purchase local products in the context of a developing country—Vietnam. Structural equation modeling was used to test these impacts, utilizing a sample of 549 consumers. The results show that consumer ethnocentrism is negatively related to imported product judgment and positively related to intention to purchase local products. In addition, cultural sensitivity has a positive relationship with imported product judgment but not with consumer ethnocentrism. The results also indicate that the impacts of consumer ethnocentrism on imported product judgment and on intention to purchase local products are not different in terms of product categories, gender, income, and education levels. However, differences exist between younger and older consumers.

Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Distance underestimation in virtual space is sensitive to gender but not activity-passivity or mode of interaction.

Four groups of undergraduates (half of each gender) experienced a movement along a corridor containing three distinctive objects, in a virtual environment (VE) with wide-screen projection. One group simulated walking along the virtual corridor using a proprietary step-exercise device. A second group moved along the corridor in conventional flying mode, depressing a keyboard key to initiate continuous forward motion. Two further groups observed the walking and flying participants, by viewing their progress on the screen. Participants then had to walk along a real equivalent but empty corridor, and indicate the positions of the three objects. All groups underestimated distances in the real corridor, the greatest underestimates occurring for the middle distance object. Males' underestimations were significantly lower than females' at all distances. However, there was no difference between the active participants and passive observers, nor between walking and flying conditions.     

Karol Wojtyla and Emmanuel Levinas on the Embodied Self: the Forming of the Other as Moral Self-disclosure

The 'other' has taken on an increased theological significance for the Church in the advent of post-modern reflection, resulting in a myriad of possibilities for those who would reflect on the significance of the other in relation to the 'self', largely in connection with various theories of embodiment. Following Karol Wojtyla's (John Paul II) emphasis on the given-ness of the body I wish to illustrate a way in which the other might be understood theologically, informed by the insights of the continental philosophical tradition, specifically Emmanuel Levinas' phenomenological outline of the other as a key locus of ethical reflection. Bringing Levinas' continental philosophy into dialogue with Wojtyla's philosophical theology, it will be argued that the other must be re-approached in terms of their subjective self-disclosure, centring upon the en-fleshed and bodily form of the human person, who confronts us as a reflection of both that which is most other to ourselves (the divine) and paradoxically that which most resembles ourselves (the human). The other is always an en-fleshed subject and in their action, their subjective identity is disclosed on the relational level.     

Wittgenstein and Basic Moral Certainty

In On Certainty, Wittgenstein’s reflections bring into view the phenomenon of basic certainty. He explores this phenomenon mostly in relation to our certainty with regard to empirical states of affairs. Drawing on these seminal observations and reflections, I extend the inquiry into what I call “basic moral certainty”, arguing that the latter plays the same kind of foundational role in our moral practices and judgements as basic empirical certainty does in our epistemic practices and judgements. I illustrate the nature and significance of basic moral certainty via critical examination of contemporary philosophical “explanations” of the wrongness of killing. These pseudo explanations, as I show them to be, will be seen to founder in a similar manner to Moore’s “Proof” of an external world, that is, in a manner that discloses the phenomenon of basic (moral) certainty.