International Journal of Social Quality

This article explores the formation of school anti-bullying policy in Taiwan with the development of democratization, and draws on critical realism to explain how generative mechanisms activate policy making under the operation of party politics within the Taiwanese school system. The article describes the planning and practice of Taiwanese anti-bullying policy, and argues how critical realism can help bridge the gap between empirical analysis and generative mechanisms in critical policy analysis. Light is shed on an empirical inquiry into anti-bullying policy, which analyzes different ideological debates over the policy and power struggles between different policy stakeholders. A crucial attempt is to identify the generative mechanisms behind the anti-bullying policy making and elaborate on how the “generative mechanisms” embedded in Taiwanese top-down governance make social control possible in the schooling system. The conclusion reflects on the possibility of democratic schooling through the critical realist approach and praxis of collective agency for social change and human emancipation between political governance, policy research, and school practice.

In our society, the relationship between periphery and center is changing. Questions discussed under the conditions of outsiders and suspended social groups penetrate the center of society and systematically determine the social correlations. Inequality, poverty, social insecurity, and precariousness are equated with changes in social change when the risk of social exclusion is undermined by unskilled activities. This is, for example, very much the case in the German discussion so that outsider groups are defined in Germany, which have themselves maneuvered into a corresponding social situation through wrong biographical decisions. The French approach of Pierre Bourdieu, Robert Castel, and Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello differed decisively in this respect, since they reoriented social uncertainties and precariousness in a reorganization of the work structure. This article shows how precariousness is shifted to the center of society and how qualified work develops into unsafe and precarious working conditions within the framework of the reorganization in project activity.

Mainstream discourse and practice of development mainly focus on what can be called the prose of development: the hard-core and hardware issues of economics, politics, and infrastructure. There is very little poetics in the mood and methods of its advocates. This article, referring among others to Indian philosophers, argues that we should turn this approach around in a transformative way, by putting what is usually considered the lowest at the top. Poetics of development builds upon inner and shared transformations in prose and poetics, as it seeks to express the suffering and joys of souls and societies. It offers a new dimension to the social quality idea about “the social” as the outcome of the dialectic between processes of self-realization of human beings and the formation of collective identities. The article argues that this shift in focus is essential to meaningful development.

The article outlines some challenges for accounting, which is increasingly under pressure. Accounting tries to enhance its meaning by widening its approach, including issues that fall under headings like environmental or social corporate responsibility. However, the article aims to make clear that such strategies are not sufficient to answer challenges that emerge from social quality thinking. The two main challenges are (1) to merge accounting on the micro- and the macro-level and (2) to introduce a thorough qualitative perspective.

The currently accepted global wisdom holds that the most important and decisive challenge for humankind is to reach sustainable circumstances; societal, geophysical, and biophysical. However, there is little readiness to go beyond the inherited fundamental assumptions of a “modern industrial capitalist market society.” This is oriented on the commodification and marketization of natural and cultural resources for making profit. Seen from a Russian perspective, this article argues that this approach causes a destruction of sustainable living conditions. The social quality approach, the Russian interpretation of quality of life approach, and the noosphere paradigm of global societal development offer space for considerations that questions the dominant socioeconomic and financial societal practices not only on the phenomenological level. Instead, the authors name gnoseological, ontological, and axiological prerequisites of sustainable global societal development. This will contribute to the wider and diverse debates on what can be called people’s humanistic socialism.