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Trump's attempts to realign US-Russian relations may mean an unjust peace for Ukraine
No full textThis week has seen the opening of peace talks in Saudi Arabia between the US and Russia about ending the war in Ukraine, though without representation from Kyiv. In this Q&A Phelan US Centre Director, Professor Peter Trubowitz, writes that for Donald Trump, the negotiations are more about realigning US relations with Russia than ensuring security and a just and stable peace for Ukraine
What loving your work can do for you
No full textPeople with a strong calling find purpose in their jobs. Rather than just a pay cheque, work is a source of fulfilment, meaning and passion. Research has linked strong callings to improved job satisfaction, heightened engagement and better job performance. But effort and enjoyment, two fundamental assumptions about calling, remained largely untested. Shoshana Dobrow and Heather Kappes set out to test these assumptions in a real-world setting
A research agenda for urban health security
No full textThe relationship between urban environments and infectious diseases has been well documented and cities represent a context in which it is critically important to understand the practice of health security—especially as it relates to epidemics, pandemics, and other acute public health emergencies. Recent trends have emphasized the growth of state-centric models but, because of their unique attributes, cities are deserving of their own concerted health security efforts. This perspective piece provides an overview of ten research themes necessary for advancing health security in urban environments—community partnerships, place management organizations, and grassroots engagement; capacity assessments, simulation exercises, and after-action reviews; governance and financing structures; health threat surveillance systems; policymaker perceptions; private sector engagement; resilient urban infrastructure; risk communication; data-enabled urban systems and technological solutions; and urban networks and organizations. These themes should be pursued with intentionality as a means of ensuring that cities are designed and well-prepared to prevent, detect, respond to, and recover from diverse health threats. Realizing this agenda holds the potential to bolster public health, resilience, and sustainability in our cities and around the world
The structure of informal support in the production of scientific knowledge
No full textThe size of collaborative teams in the production of scientific knowledge has been on the rise across a broad range of fields over decades. Despite this transition to big science, recent studies highlight the persisting relevance of smaller collaborative teams for their potential to produce disruptive work. We argue that disruptiveness of small teams is partly explained by the diverse intellectual resources that individual scientists seek from their loose network of informal support to manage resource constraints that small teams face. Using acknowledgement information (i.e., signs of informal support) contained in the articles published in 10 leading sociology journals between 2000 and 2009, we construct a directed network of acknowledgements between scholars and analyze its structure in relation to the coauthorship network constructed from these articles. Results show that scholars who heavily draw upon informal support from their network tend to collaborate in smaller teams. At the network level, the acknowledgement network exhibits a more cohesive structure that can facilitate robust circulation of intellectual resources (e.g., ideas, tools, methods) to a larger portion of scholars in diverse subfields
The unexpected upside of high language diversity: social integration through language advice networks
No full textWhile the corporate lingua franca mandate aims to facilitate communications among linguistically diverse employees, evidence shows that it creates more problems than it solves, often negatively affecting social integration and knowledge sharing in the workplace. Our study is driven by the phenomenon of high language diversity and low lingua franca proficiency, emerging characteristics of workplaces around the globe given increasing migration. We adopt a mixed-methods, longitudinal design involving participant observations, interviews, social network surveys, and company data. Our analysis revealed the existence and prevalence of an informal language advice network (LAN) in which individuals with varying levels of English proficiency actively engage in voluntary language-related knowledge-seeking and sharing. We found more positive interpersonal interactions and consequences of LAN than typically reported in extant studies. We leverage the social networks and generalized exchange literature to explain the processes and consequences of LAN for individuals and the organization. Management recognition was found to be important for sustaining LAN in a context of high language diversity. Our integrative analytical framework offers a valuable lens for scholarship on future workplaces that are being shaped by rapidly shifting ethnic, cultural, and linguistic demography
Understanding political economy: capitalism, democracy and inequality
No full textThis timely book provides a critical discussion of the leading concepts and theories in political economy. Bob Hancké, Toon Van Overbeke and Dustin Voss conduct a historical and thematic review of the evolution of political-economic thought, revolving around the relation between capitalism and democracy
Environmental protest, contention and the law: conceptualising the Public Order Act 2023
No full textPeaceful protesters across Europe are facing increasingly punitive and intolerant legal frameworks. Why has the law become more repressive? How are new offences reshaping the boundaries of democratic participation and state control? Beyond their overt function of maintaining order, what do these laws reveal about power, politics, and contested civic values in liberal democracies? This article attends to these questions. Taking the Public Order Act 2023 as its focus – a statute frequently cited as emblematic of protest criminalization but not yet given close scholarly examination – the article conceptualizes the Act as emerging from, and integral to, what sociologists term a ‘cycle of contention’. Through this lens, the article identifies and develops two complementary accounts of law's relationship with protest, power, and contention: (1) functional and (2) deliberative. This analysis reveals protest law not simply as a tool of demobilization, but as a deeply expressive means through which competing visions of ‘public wrongs’ are defined, justified, and constituted within a political community
Advice to young women economists: learn to say no and protect your time
No full textHow are women making their mark in economics? To celebrate Women’s History Month, Swati Dhingra shares her experiences, from India to British academia and the Bank of England. It took her a while to learn to say no and protect her time
After Trump's tense meeting with Zelensky, Europe now faces a tough decision on Ukraine
No full textLast week, Donald Trump met with Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, in a tense Oval Office exchange which led to the cutting short of further discussions of a peace plan with Russia. In this short Q&A Phelan US Centre Director, Professor Peter Trubowitz, writes on why Trump is interested in closer relations with Russia, and what this may mean for European defense commitments for Ukraine and more widely