Social Science

There has been an abundance of research carried out relating to the use of positive psychology, but a focus on staff working in care settings has been lacking. Positive Psychology for Healthcare Professionals presents applied positive psychology specifically for health and care staff, showcasing eleven different interventions that have proven to be effective in improving wellbeing.

Positive Psychology Interventions are validated techniques, developed to include wellbeing enhancing activities, building effective user-friendly, cost-effective self-help strategies. This toolkit for improving wellbeing provides a more holistic roadmap to increase self-awareness of staff abilities, potential talents, and positive characteristics, through a strengths-based approach.

Environmental Security in Greece establishes stakeholders' perceptions of environmental security and energy security taking a Q-methodology and Digital Media Research Framework approach. In-depth individual viewpoints and opinions of policymakers, energy-industry leaders, NGOs' members and the public are described throughout.

The book demonstrates the value of applying Q-methodology in the study of climate change as a security issue in a vulnerable country like Greece which represents a range of countries with many interrelated economic, societal, political and security problems. The research was conducted during the period from August 2007-2016 prior to the Paris Climate Agreement. Q-methodology systematically reveals the traditional and non-traditional security approaches and theories and compares academic and public perceptions. The methodology provides a means of investigating human subjectivity not hitherto used to investigate climate change and security issues. The author establishes a number of discourse factors shifting the discussion from traditional security and climate change scepticism to ecological security and protection.

Engaging with the complex natures of space and belonging, Migrations and Diasporas provides a means for understanding the plight of migrants and diasporas as they move through a world divided between those committed to welcoming them into their communities and those who perceive them as a problem or threat.

Split into two parts, chapters address a range of critical issues, including the inclusive practices of both state and non-state actors, practices of exclusion expressing xenophobia and nativist policies that can jeopardize migrant safety, and the geographies and spaces that can restore lost histories, as well as help migrants negotiate new boundaries. Capturing institutional and organized civil society practices, the authors build an understanding of the struggles and challenges migrants and diasporas face, including climate change, assimilation, and complex legal systems. Grounded in a rich interdisciplinarity, contributors bring together perspectives from international relations, political science, law, philosophy, development economics, peace and conflict studies, forest and food sciences, linguistics, pedagogy, and human geography, as well as contexts across the United States, Australia, Europe, Honduras, Canada, New Zealand, Lebanon, Ukraine, Syria, and Armenia, from the Trump era to the Rwandan genocide.

Advocating for a more welcoming world involves respecting the human dignity and fundamental rights of all individuals, regardless of their place of origin or immigration status. This perspective offers a powerful insight into the dynamics of social justice across borders.

Music is an art form but also a social activity. It is a part of every human society, contributing to community, culture, and a sense of group identity. It is also fundamental to individual identity and personal well-being. In Music, Eugene Beresin traces the possible applications of musical expression for human health and happiness.

At the heart of Music are powerful examples from the lives of real individuals, families, and populations. These stories cover a myriad of ages, instruments, situations, and purposes, to convey the universal power of music to help us all get more out of life.

Offering practical ideas for integrating musical practice into a wide range of settings from the medical to the personal, Beresin provides a compelling evocation of the healing power of music. It is a must-read for practitioners, teachers, counsellors, and lovers of the art form.

Since the 1990s, the West has seen a significant increase in women entering the tattoo industry as professional artists. Examining this kind of work through a sociological and feminist lens, Tattooing and the Gender Turn explores the experiences of women tattoo artists in what has historically been a male-dominated industry to reveal how tattooing has undergone a ‘gender turn’ and a subsequent shift in gender relations.

Drawing on interviews with women and queer tattoo artists from across the US, UK and Australia, Emma Beckett conceptualises the tattoo industry as a source of employment and labour in addition to exploring how it operates as a sub-culture. Highlighting how women artists negotiate gendered capital and gendered labour amidst industry hierarchies and demands on authenticity, Beckett uses a gendered lens to explore and problematise the industry as an often unequal place of work and employment. Chapters also explore how women artists are using online platforms to disrupt and challenge the problematic aspects of the tattoo industry, disrupting harmful behaviours and initiating change.

Putting women artists and their experiences at the centre of its gaze, Tattooing and the Gender Turn appeals to those interested in subcultures, employment and labour, as well as other male-dominated industries where women have to navigate and negotiate the terms of their femininity in order to succeed in their chosen career.

At a time of significant local, national, and international change, in which children are already actively involved, it seems not only right but necessary that we should be seeking to further our knowledge and understanding of what informs and shapes meaningful and effective practice for and with children. Such research has implications across the spaces that children and adults share whether that is at school, at home, in the law courts, in health care through to local, national, and international platforms for social action.

Establishing Child Centred Practice in a Changing World, Part B extends the conversation to connect research and practices in a changing world. This edition examines children’s voices in relation to research methodologies, in particular co-production, as well as extending conversations around child centred practice from forest schools to the home through to community change initiatives that further understandings of what it means to be a learner and an advocate. Authors from around the world offer a range of perspectives to advance transformational practice in a changing world.

Furthering dialogues around the applied relevance of key principles in childhood studies, this diverse edited collection is an important contribution to the fields of education, sociology, childcare and youth policy and practice.

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access, thanks to Knowledge Unlatched funding, and freely available to read online.

In a context where striving for gender equity in relation to achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals seems more pressing than ever before, Sport, Gender and Development: Intersections, Innovations and Future Trajectories brings together an exploration of sport feminisms to offer new approaches to research on Sport for Development and Peace (SDP) in global and local contexts. 

Including postcolonial and decolonial feminist lenses by drawing upon fieldwork with organizations and individuals in Afghanistan, Uganda, Nicaragua, and India, Sport, Gender and Development reveals the complexities of development and gender discourses and how they operate on and through researchers, practitioners, and participants' bodies. Delving into a thoughtful engagement with the (dis)connections and comparisons across these diverging contexts, this book offers a critically reflexive account of what is transpiring in the transnational sport, gender and development field, while remaining sensitive to the importance of community context and local iterations. 

Taking up emerging and contemporary feminist issues in sport related international development, this book advances empirical, conceptual, and theoretical developments in sport, gender and development.

Sex on and with social media is often construed as deviant, risky, or something only teenagers do because they don’t know better. Yet, academic scholarship has shown that sex on/with social media can allow people to create and playfully experiment with their identities; build meaningful relationships; accept themselves or build communities. 

This book brings the multiplicity and richness of sexual practices on, with, and around social media to a curious, intelligent lay reader, and highlights the discrepancy between the media headlines (people fearing it) and what popular Google searches show (people wanting it).

The authors describe how social media has changed and shaped sex; address the common misconceptions about socially mediated sex; explain the spaces where social media sex happens, and the practices that count as social media sex. 

Chapters examine the main misconceptions and anxieties pertaining to socially mediated sex; explore how sexual social media practices are part of our identity; look at it as a communal/ group phenomenon; and analyse social media platforms as the intermediaries and infrastructures shaping and constraining sex. 

It offers an academically informed, critical but accessible discussion on sex and sexuality on and with social media.

Media technologies do not simply record or represent trauma but transform trauma into a cultural form that is multifariously commodified in different contexts. In this crucial new text, Ibrahim introduces us to the notion of ‘technologies of trauma’, in deconstructing the idea of trauma as a cultural form in society.

Ibrahim examines the trajectory of witnessing and testimony through modernity, utilizing the technologies of trauma as a conceptual lens. Such a notion acknowledges humanity’s reliance on technologies to transmute history, trauma, or memory, transforming technologies from medium and machine into artefacts for circulation and exchange. The transcendence of medium into artefacts as sites of trauma equally highlights the socio-political frames within which testimony is extracted and witnessing is enacted, unleashing trauma as a cultural form and a resonant genre of popular consumption.

The development of print, photography, television, and digital platforms as technologies of trauma reiterates the popularization of trauma as a cultural genre, witnessing and testimony as cultural forms reiterating how these are intimately implicated in our emergence as active consuming communities of trauma and in tandem how these remake us as vulnerable subjects through the circulation of trauma within a popular consumption economy.

Hierarchy within the educational setting is a topic underrepresented in the existing literature, yet an area rich with unique social characteristics and particular challenges. A Sociological Perspective on Hierarchies in Educational Institutions traces hierarchical origins, differentiating between their types and discussing related terms such as positioning, social stratification, and central root vs. rhizomatic structure to offer a comprehensive complex exploration.

By presenting the circumstances under which hierarchies flourish or diminish, Einav Argaman provides illustrative examples for the ways in which inter- and intra-institutional hierarchies are constructed and displayed, and points to existing and future directions that hierarchies in educational institutions may take. Offering a step-by-step guide to identifying and changing hierarchical relationships in schools, colleges and universities, A Sociological Perspective on Hierarchies in Educational Institutions bridges the gap between theory and practice. Drawing together research from different perspectives without losing comprehensiveness, accuracy, and in-depth coverage of hierarchy and educational institutions, this work is a novel contribution to Organizational Studies.

The interdisciplinary scope of Argaman’s study spans across multiple academic fields, including education, sociology, organization studies, management, curriculum studies, linguistics, and architecture. It is an accessibly written resource for researchers, academics, and teaching.

Winner of the 2021 ESC Book Award.

Despite its dramatic proliferation and diversification in recent decades, supervisory forms of punishment in the community (like probation, parole and unpaid work) have been largely invisible in scholarly and public discussion of criminal justice and its development in late-modern societies. The long-standing pre-occupation with the prison, and more recent concerns about 'mass incarceration' have allowed the emergence of 'mass supervision' to remain in the shadows.

Pervasive Punishment insists that we remedy this neglect and exemplifies how we can do so. Drawing on thirty years of personal, practice and research experiences, it offers a compelling and rich account of the scale and social distribution of mass supervision, of the processes by which it has been legitimated, and of how it is experienced by those subject to it. Its innovative approach invites readers to look at, listen to and imagine punishment beyond the prison, through the use of innovative and creative methods including photography, song-writing and story-telling to explore and to represent 'mass supervision'. By so doing, this book offers new insights into how and why combining social science and creative practice can help develop a different kind of democratic dialogue about contentious social issues like crime and punishment.

Though focused on the UK and the USA, the methods used in and analysis developed in this book will be of interest to scholars, students and practitioners elsewhere.

The concept of Global Civil Society as an ‘imagined global community’ is raising questions that challenge perceptions of a border-free, footloose, global community. The era of ‘hyper-individualism’, accompanied by the virtualization of the public sphere, is offering support for collective action and processes in the face of rising economic and social anxieties, such as inequality, poverty, terrorism, xenophobia, nuclear weapons, and environmental destruction. Global Civil Society is now equipping itself to negotiate with resurrected boundaries, calls for decelerating the flow of people, identity clashes and throwbacks to tribal politics.

Contestations in Global Civil Society examines the ways in which the global community is dealing with heightened destabilization, entering what has been dubbed an ‘Age of Fracture’, and takes a close look at contemporary shifts that accompany the resurrection of multiple normative civil society discourses such as political mobilization, polarization, responsibility, and participation.

What are the contestations within global civil society? What is our current perception of global civil society? How is it coping with the huge changes that are happening all around us? What will global civil society look like in the future?

This book is about how to trigger the capacity to aspire among black youth. Examining the transition out of adulthood and imagined futures of black youth, Maja helps us understand how black youth aspirations might be raised, and how a better future for young people can be achieved.  

Black Youth Aspirations tracks the journeys of nine black teenagers in South Africa, and how they navigate their way through the final two years of schooling. Maja explores and discovers the maps of the future that youths envision, and investigates how their immediate environments in and out of school serve as instruments that help them interpret, navigate, and manifest those aspirations. Presenting a new conceptual tool, OATS (Objects, Agency, Tools, and Spaces), seeks to provide practical meaning on how to best develop young people’s capacity to aspire. Filling it gap in the scholarly literature, and digging deeper than the statistics ever could, this book is a dynamic interaction between research among youth and the application of concepts to make sense of their stories.

As the first book that discusses the aspirational pathways of working class black youth in the context of the global south, the theoretical and research approaches on which the book is based make it an exciting and novel addition to the global literature in the area of youth studies.

Uniquely combining two parts, one critical in the form of a research piece, and the other creative in the form of a fictional novel, this ground-breaking book spans creative writing, criminology and architecture to look at the ways in which power and hierarchies are explored and exploited in space.

Part one, A Circular Argument, is informed by a series of reflections on the author’s work as a prison teacher. Delving into the obsession with the circular as an architectural gesture and as a concept combining containment and transparency, the author examines spatial hierarchies across time, from the ideal planned city of the Middle Ages, to the all-seeing eye of modern digital society.

Part two, The Out, follows the fictional story of a disgruntled architect, a clever prisoner and an ingenious escape plan. Exploring how the complications and surprises of human interaction colour and change the supposedly watertight systems of social control society designs, the novel disrupts how we might think about space and power.

Injecting new energy and creative perspectives into traditional academic research, this practice-led book is an innovative exploration between critical and creative approaches, and between multiple social and spatial hierarchies.

This series has been renamed to “Emerald Studies in Culture, Crime, Criminal Justice and the Arts” effective for 2025 publications onward.

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access and freely available to read online.

Transnational illicit markets have been transformed by the digital revolution. They take advantage of encryption technologies, smartphones, social media applications and cryptocurrencies that protect the digital traces of buyers and sellers, posing new challenges to drug control policies and public health alike. Digital Transformations of Illicit Drug Markets: Reconfiguration and Continuity considers how the digital revolution has changed the selling and buying of illicit substances through increased convenience and anonymisation.

Providing a uniquely interdisciplinary perspective, chapters show how the digital transformation of illicit drug markets combines a reconfiguration of how sellers and buyers interact in new markets. Emphasising that illicit digital markets are embedded in societal structures and power relations in general, contributors also recognise the importance of critical perspectives on inequalities between the Global North and South as well as issues of gender.

Digital Transformations of Illicit Drug Markets: Reconfiguration and Continuity challenges the field of criminology to recognise the limits of its traditional knowledge and move beyond the preoccupations that restrict crime to certain fixed spaces in order to develop new explanations.

Media coverage consistently features examples of organizations engaging in unethical or illegal behavior. Given its potential to impact and even damage established institutions, organizational wrongdoing deserves to be closely monitored and more carefully examined. Drawing attention to the theoretical and empirical relevance of this topic, this second instalment in a double volume of Research in the Sociology of Organizations focuses on the consequences of organizational wrongdoing, the role of whistleblowing, and methodological issues.

Detailing the ramifications of organizational wrongdoing, chapters in this second volume examine the remedial actions that firms can take to recover from wrongdoing, the so-called spill over effects of organizational wrongdoing whereby ‘innocent’ firms are affected by the misdeeds committed by others, as well as the valuable insights that historical approaches can provide in studying organizational wrongdoing.

Taken individually as well as together, the two volumes that comprise Organizational Wrongdoing as the “Foundational” Grand Challenge provide a major touchstone for scholars interested in understanding recent developments and exciting new directions in the study of organizational wrongdoing.

This volume contains an Open Access Chapter

As a peripheral state within English-speaking criminology, Ireland is often overlooked in mainstream Anglophone theories of punitiveness and penal transformation. This edited collection addresses this deficit by bringing together leading scholars on Irish penal history and theory to make a case for Ireland’s wider theoretical relevance.

Together, these chapters show in rich detail the trends and debates that have surround patterns of punishment in Ireland since the formation of the State in 1922. However, by being about twentieth century Irish penal history, the volume inherently foregrounds often absent perspectives in criminology and punishment, such as gender, postcoloniality, religion, rurality, and carcerality beyond the criminal justice system. This is more than a collection of Irish criminology, therefore; the social analysis of Irish penal history is undertaken as a contribution towards southernising criminology. The authors each seek to engage criminology in a wider epistemological re-imagining of what is meant by punitiveness, penal culture, and 'Anglophone' penal history.

Opening up new avenues of exploration and collaboration, and showing how researchers might look beyond the usual problems, refine the mainstream trends, and rework the obvious questions, this collection demonstrates how the Irish perspective remains relevant for international researchers interested in punishment and history.

Providing a sociological analysis of the policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic in England, this study places particular analytical emphasis on the interplay between powerful structural interests and the influence on the development of COVID-19 policy. Considering a range of actors, (including the government, scientific experts and the medical profession, the media, and the public) and the nature of their relationships with one another, the authors identify the key sociological aspects that have shaped, facilitated, challenged, or constrained COVID-19 policy in England.

Drawing on published documentary material, the authors first examine government attempts to contain, delay, mitigate and suppress the spread of the coronavirus with non-pharmaceutical interventions in the absence of a vaccine (during the first wave) and then whilst vaccines were being gradually rolled out (during the second wave and third waves). The focus then shifts on to vaccination policy and the actors central in the design and implementation of the vaccination programme in England. The approach taken to the funding, development, and manufacture of COVID-19 vaccines is also explored and furthermore considers vaccine coverage, vaccine passports, and vaccine nationalism. The authors conclude with a discussion of the overall impact of COVID-19 policy on health and between socio-economic groups and with reflections on the sociologies of pandemics and COVID-19.

This book will appeal and be accessible both to policymakers and health service managers and to those studying for undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in the social, medical, and public health sciences. 

Reshaping Youth Participation reframes discussions around youth political, social, civic, and cultural participation. Drawing upon insights on democracy and citizenship, self-organising and protest movements, and arts activism as engaged social activism, the chapters consider the youth participation spaces in which young people find voice and action–spaces that are part of existing forms of participation, and newly emergent spaces that challenge existing systems.

Set in Manchester, Reshaping Youth Participation contextualises youth participation in a major UK city known for its activism and regional devolution, alongside studies from partner European cities.

Exploring the participation of young people in ‘adult spaces’, of young people who are pursuing a new politics and ideological change, of marginalised young people, and of young people utilising the creative arts as a ‘lived politics’, the authors argue that youth participation provides a vital addition to sustaining and developing political, social, and democratic life in cities.

Celebrating youth participation and its myriad forms, triumphs, and challenges, this edited collection provides much needed innovative thinking to the study of youth participation. It is an important contribution for young people themselves, academics, policymakers, local policy experts and makers, local activists, and community advocates.

We live in a globalized world in which children live in extreme poverty, experience stunted growth, are denied access to education, live as refugees, are subjected to violence, are employed as unskilled workers and even face threats from terror organizations. Drawing attention to these critical challenges, this edited collection develops holistic solutions towards achieving improved conditions and rights of children globally.

Taking an interdisciplinary perspective spanning disciplines such as psychology, geography, history, philosophy, theology, education, social law and literature, Being a Child in a Global World includes over twenty chapters which delve into the concept and place of the child in the social order, as well as economic, humanitarian, and political dimensions.

Featuring authorship from around the world, and combining the perspectives and knowledge of different disciplines, this edited collection is a truly ground-breaking and comprehensive multidisciplinary study. Providing answers to an urgent challenge of our time, the collection is a must-read for scholars who are interested in the global condition of childhood.

Dubai’s audacious architecture and photographic locations attract social media ‘influencers’ from around the world. How has Dubai, once a small fishing village on the edge of a desert, morphed into a hyper-modern backdrop for this global phenomenon? How can we understand these interactions as our relationships with digital technologies undergo radical change?

This timely research-based study reveals how micro-celebrities and Dubai’s visible economies influence the evolution of the Emirate. Taking a cutting edge post-digital approach, underpinned by cultural studies and social media theory, Social Media Influencing in The City of Likes presents a series of unique case studies and demonstrates how Dubai is considered not only an illusion of unlimited indulgence but also a city dependent on the emerging infrastructure of visible economies, visual attractions, and ‘Instagrammable’ locations. Evaluating the cases of multiple influencers, from local to transnational content creators, Hurley reveals how residents, non-citizens and migrant workers surviving as influencers in the city of ‘likes.’

Providing a much-needed de-Westernising perspectives of Dubai’s social media influencing industry within the broader context of global platform capitalism, Social Media Influencing in The City of Likes offers an important contribution to the field of social media through illustrating visible economies in a city circuited by social media influencing.

Although intervention and campaigning have long been integral to critical criminology, in recent years, criminal justice activism has taken new directions and gathered momentum, especially with the advent of digital technologies and social media. These have made it easier than ever for ordinary citizens and professional journalists alike to comment on perceived injustices and potentially intervene in formal criminal justice processes.

The Emerald International Handbook of Activist Criminology examines the history of both recent and more established justice campaigns and interventions. Spanning contributions from activists, activist academics, and practitioners from five continents, chapters address a range of criminological perspectives that engage in questions of effecting change through activism. Contributors also consider prominent international issues including feminist criminology, juvenile justice, migrant rights, corporate and state crime, indigenous rights, green/environmental criminology, sentencing and wrongful conviction, the harms of prisons, corrections and abolitionism, and justice for victim/survivors of harm and crime.

Collectively, The Emerald International Handbook of Activist Criminology explores the contemporary terrain around new and emergent issues and forms of activism, and offers cutting edge conceptualizations of the methodological and practical applications of activist engagement, solidarity, and resistance.

The rapid expansion of research with children and young people has compelled researchers to engage carefully and critically with the ethical aspects of their research, including considering the best ways to ensure children’s meaningful participation in research in ethically sensitive ways.

This international and multi-disciplinary edited collection unpacks some of the ethical complexities of conducting research with children and young people. The chapters in the volume offer an applied perspective to navigating contemporary and complicated ethical issues that can arise in the field of childhood and youth-centred research. The volume moves beyond a focus on standard, procedural research ethics processes and principles to expose some of the situated ethical moments that researchers grapple with in everyday research practice.

Offering a guide for researchers around the importance of developing ethical reflexivity, and the obstacles to achieving it, this volume raises new debates around research ethics while sustaining pragmatic guidance for future research developments that can support children and young people’s participation in research.

Fake News in Digital Cultures presents a new approach to understanding disinformation and misinformation in contemporary digital communication, arguing that fake news is not an alien phenomenon undertaken by bad actors, but a logical outcome of contemporary digital and popular culture, conceptual changes meaning and truth, and shifts in the social practice of trust, attitude and creativity.

Looking not to the problems of the present era but towards the continuing development of a future digital media ecology, the authors explore the emergence of practices of deliberate disinformation. This includes the circulation of misleading content or misinformation, the development of new technological applications such as the deepfake, and how they intersect with conspiracy theories, populism, global crises, popular disenfranchisement, and new practices of regulating misleading content and promoting new media and digital literacies.

The lines between the fields of strategy, urban planning, architecture and sociology are currently blurred by ‘futurising’ discourses about progress, renewal and the crises of urbanisation. Aided by an ambitious multifaceted lens, Urban Planning for the City of the Future: A Multidisciplinary Approach provides a unique glimpse into planning, growth, regeneration and demographic urgency in the light of globalisation, climate change and rapid technological change.

Presenting a case study of the city of Waterford, this edited collection explores how the city of the future might be shaped. Contributors ask not only how to plan the ideal city of the future, but also how to prioritise citizens’ rights, participation and engagement in that city. Offering solutions that put these rights at the heart of city life, chapters also tackle some of the modern city’s crises, exploring options for the preservation, incorporation and expansion of the city’s heritage, landmark buildings and unique geographical history.

Bringing together multidisciplinary perspectives from strategy, urban geography, psychology, sociology, film, data and digital studies, Urban Planning for the City of the Future: A Multidisciplinary Approach builds a compelling, comprehensive, multifaceted case-study of a small, modern European city that can serve as a laboratory for future urban planning elsewhere.

Violence by women is frequently sensationalised, abetting misogynistic tropes that characterise violent women as ‘evil’, ‘unnatural’ and masculine. Favouring more complex analyses of this behaviour, The Emerald International Handbook of Feminist Perspectives on Women’s Acts of Violence highlights and challenges normative accounts of women’s violence and offers new multidimensional conceptualisations of these acts, furthering understanding of this topic from a feminist perspective.

Responding to a growing research interest, contributors present a comprehensive introduction to a wide range of international and interdisciplinary scholarship on different aspects of women’s violence. Drawing on both empirical and secondary data, chapters incorporate familiar themes of intimate violence, homicide, terrorism and combat as well as wider content such as women’s involvement in violent nationalist movements and their role in perpetrating obstetric harms.

The only publication of its kind in terms of its scope, interdisciplinarity and feminist perspective, The Emerald International Handbook of Feminist Perspectives on Women’s Acts of Violence breaks fresh ground by unveiling how violence is understood and enabling new links and connections to be made across previously disparate areas.

The yearbook Comparative Social Research aims at furthering the international orientation in the social sciences.

Each volume is concentrated on a specific topic, mostly of substantive, but also of methodological character. As a rule, the articles present two or more cases for comparison, be they nations, regions, organizations, or social units at different points of time. The volumes embrace a broad set topics, such as comparative studies of universities as institutions for production and diffusion of knowledge; family policies; regional cultures; and institutional aspects of work and wage formation.

Comparative Social Research seeks well-written articles that place the current or historical data in context, critically review the literature of comparative studies, or provide new theoretical or methodological insights. The series recognizes that comparative research is theoretically and methodologically interdisciplinary, and encourages and supports there trends. All papers will be subject to double-blind peer review.

Toxic behavior is on the rise in public safety organizations, businesses, politics, and churches, to name a few. Faced with unprecedented circumstances, there is a need to better understand leader/follower interdependence when destructive leaders are at the helm making harmful decisions.

Toxic followership begins with the pioneering spirit of a trusted individual who, through creative manipulation, transforms our mindset whereby we can so easily become an extension of a toxic leader’s moral decay. There is a myth that the Jonestown tragedy is a distant episode in history that can only happen in certain environments with people unlike oneself. The survivor’s stories are reminders that without understanding the framework of toxic followership, the unsuspecting targets are prey, available for consumption by a leader with liquidated morals.

This book is for those who desire to gain insight into the leader/follower dynamic in order to serve others by unmasking the dangers of toxic followership, provide prevention suggestions, and reveal followers' power, even in desperate situations.

Media coverage consistently features examples of organizations engaging in unethical or illegal behavior. Given its potential to impact and even damage established institutions, organizational wrongdoing deserves to be closely monitored and more carefully examined. Drawing attention to the theoretical and empirical relevance of this topic, this first instalment in a double volume of Research in the Sociology of Organizations consolidates and extends knowledge of this important subject and highlights potential directions for future research.

Exploring the definitions and antecedents of organizational wrongdoing, chapters in this first volume probe the role of social control agents in drawing the line between rightful and wrongful behavior, examine the mechanisms and processes through which instances of wrongdoing turn into a scandal, and consider the antecedents of organizational wrongdoing which have received increasing attention in academic research in recent years but that still deserve further analysis.

Taken individually as well as together, the two volumes that comprise Organizational Wrongdoing as the “Foundational” Grand Challenge provide a major touchstone for scholars interested in understanding recent developments and exciting new directions in the study of organizational wrongdoing.

International migration afflicts nearly every corner of the globe, from the Americas, Europe and North Africa, and adjoining countries in South Asia. This migration links the socio-economic statuses of migrants’ home countries and those into which they are migrating. This phenomenon has a profound impact upon ethnic conflict, resource availability, famines and other natural and manmade disasters, as well as financial, political, social and environmental implications for some of the world’s most seemingly unsolvable crises, such as world peace. These vast complexities have been further exemplified by the COVID-19 pandemic, which, as analysed through an environmental and migratory lens, is the focus of this 32nd volume of the book series Contributions to Conflict Management, Peace Economics and Development.

With contributions from world-renowned scholars, International Migration, COVID-19, and Environmental Sustainability tackles recent universal subject matter and ties it to key contemporary issues, including globalisation and sustainability, that are related to international migration and its impacts.