Corruption, Ritualism and Prophetic Role of the Catholic Church

This interdisciplinary study attempts to relate corruption with the Catholic Church's role as the moral and social critics that compel believers to participate in confronting corruption and bribery. The interdisciplinarity is also the method applied in the study. It includes an exposition of the economic data of the GDP, its theological interpretation based on the story of Naboth and the king in the Old Testament, and strategic action field theory. The article begins with widespread corruption in ASEAN, then continues with a theological foundation for believers’ role as guardians of moral and social values. The Church, however, faces ritualism and religious formalism that cause faith values do not influence to eradicate corruption. Finally, by implementing the social study of Strategic Action Field (SAFs) theory, the paper proposes an anti-corruption movement as a strategic action for the Catholic Church to tackle corruption. The study found that the social study of Strategic Action Field (SAFs) theory allows the Church to develop the anti-corruption movement as the strategic action to create pastoral works to tackle corruption

Arguments for a post-pandemic Public Employment Eco System in Ireland

The past was a different country, and the future will be different too. The Covid-19 pandemic has brought in its wake massive unemployment, shifting attention away from pre-pandemic labour market challenges. More labour market turbulence can be expected in the context of the fourth industrial revolution, digitalisation and automation, as well as climate-change-related transitions. In this context of such acute uncertainty, flexible, adaptable public employment institutions are a core requirement. Concerned with institution building, this paper explores how to maximise synergies in existing Public Employment Services (PES) while developing an ecosystem that can utilise all other available resources across public, private and not-for-profit national and local institutions. The political context for policy and institutional reform is a centralised, relatively small and open state which demonstrates some capacity to learn from previous crises and institutional reforms to tackle unemployment. The concept of a Strategic Action Field is used to deepen our understanding of the structure and agency dynamics underlying PES reform in the context of quasi-markets. A more systematic approach to institutional reform is needed that values a diversity of actors – this is visualised as a Public Employment Eco System (PEES) embedded in processes of network governance and collaborative innovation.

Assessing Organizational Role and Perceptions of Programmatic Success in Policy Implementation

This study utilizes the Strategic Action Field (SAF) framework as a lens to study implementation effectiveness of Ohio START, a multiactor and multilevel implementation process. We examine the extent to which perceptions of successes and challenges vary across organizational roles in county-level child welfare agencies during Ohio START implementation. Preliminary findings reveal that perceptions of implementation effectiveness differ based on organizational role.

Reformed Resurgence

One of the biggest movements in American Christianity, especially among younger Evangelicals, is a groundswell of interest in the Reformed tradition. In Reformed Resurgence, Vermurlen provides a comprehensive sociological account of this New Calvinist phenomenon—and what it entails for the broader Evangelical landscape in the United States. Vermurlen’s explanation of the Reformed resurgence develops a new theory for understanding how conservative religion can be strong and thriving in the hypermodern Western world. It is a paradigm using and expanding on strategic action field theory, a recent framework proposed for the study of movements and organizations but rarely applied to religion. This approach to religion moves beyond market dynamics and cultural happenstance and instead shows how religious strength can be fought for and won as the direct result of religious leaders’ strategic actions and conflicts. But the battle comes at a cost. In the same storyline by which conservative Calvinistic belief experiences a resurgence in its field, present-day American Evangelicalism has turned in on itself. Because a field-theoretic model of strength is premised upon an underlying current of disunity and conflict, it has baked into it a concomitant element of significant overall religious weakness. The vision of Evangelicalism in the United States, in the end, consists of pockets of subcultural and local strength within a broader framework of secularization as “cultural entropy,” as religious meanings and coherence fall apart.

A Field-Theoretic Model of Religious Strength

Chapter 4 develops a field-theoretic model of religious strength. It starts by revisiting the question of religious strength vis-à-vis the secularization thesis, and then it lays out the five leading theoretical frameworks currently on offer in the sociology of religion for making sense of religious vitality. Next, this chapter critically reviews each of these theories, drawing out the “nugget of truth” in each but finally showing how each is ill-suited, or at least incomplete, for explaining the New Calvinist movement sociologically. What each framework gets right is integrated into a new approach to religious strength based on Fligstein and McAdam’s strategic action field theory. After working through some “nuts and bolts” of this theory, the chapter concludes with a systematization of the theory/model, in which seventeen general social mechanisms are specified as causes that together produced the Reformed resurgence.

Conceptualizing U.S. Community Economic Development: Evidence from New York City

Building from the “Progressive Cities” era toolkit, advocates of community economic development (CED) today deploy a wide range of new and well-established strategies. How can planners make theoretical and practical sense of these varying tactics? Using New York as a case and sociological strategic action field theory as a framing device, we find evidence of three distinct CED logics: exactive/concessionary, localist, and transformative/democratic. We differentiate these logics based on their relationship to neoliberalism and globalization, forces which have shaped CED’s historical development. Awareness of these ideal-type logics may assist planners and CED actors in selecting and coordinating contextually appropriate strategies.