Lise Kjølsrød

Mediated activism: contingent democracy in leisure worlds.

Rock climbing, collecting, role-playing, backpacking, and many other complex activities are part of the expanding cultural repertoire of modern societies. Participants in such game-like pursuits occasionally find themselves contributing to public concerns beyond their own interests; altruistic motives and/or oppositional identities develop among them by virtue of the actors being enmeshed in a specialized activity apart from political organizations or social movements. The aim of the article is to contribute to an understanding of why and how such communities stretch their commitments into the real world. The contention is that complex leisure constitutes a democratically important but somewhat concealed political channel that fits modern citizens’ way of life. The analysis is essentially theoretical but relies on empirical materials for illustration.

The difference in principle between the poorly informed and the powerless: a call for contestable authority

At any time, as many as one in four individuals in a population may not be able to develop preferences and place trust in providers or act upon what he or she knows or wants because of immaturity or limited mental or physical capacity. In economic terms, these individuals have limited consumer sovereignty. As patients, pupils, or social service recipients, they have to rely on personal representation by a member of their family, a friend, or an appointed guardian. The article presents six cases of dependent individuals and applies a modified principal–agent model with a dependent – rather than a sovereign – principal to illuminate the additional informational problems and subsequent incentive problems that dependency causes. The article demonstrates how the situations of incompetent individuals are more prone to error, conflict and self-serving biases by representatives and professionals than the situations of autonomous clients. Important control options such as individual rights to information, complaint and choice are of little value if individuals do not have the personal resources to make use of them. Our call for contestable authority is a call for due process; for the design of institutions to ensure sufficient transparency in the exercise of authority and encourage critical reflection and cooperation. Ideally, major decisions should be contested and revised if they do not accord with the recipient’s fundamental interest. A particular challenge is to increase transparency and strengthen channels for verification by service recipients and their representatives when assumptions about personal aims and values underlie professional decisions.

Fertility, pregnancy and mothers’ work

This special issue is not ‘edited’ in the sense that Acta decided on a theme of interest and invited trusted authors to contribute. Rather, it appears as an interesting configuration among the high quality manuscripts that were accepted anyway. The articles are all based on relatively recent empirical evidence. Each investigates an aspect of the interface between contemporary reproduction, ways of life and mothers’ labour force orientation, and each addresses its problems within a small country struggling to remain a generous welfare state. The decisions women and men make when it comes to balancing the rearing of and caring for children with commitment to paid work and vice versa are both consequences of and contributors to the institutional arrangements. Moreover, the social patterns that arise may affect gendered ideologies in key areas. Through the lens of economic fertility theory and models of bargaining processes within the family, Ina Berninger investigates the association between women’s income and first births in Denmark and Finland. She uses data from the European Community Household Panel. Based on register data on all Norwegian women in employment, Kjetil Telle and Karsten Marshall Elseth Rieck analyse the reported sick leave before, during and after pregnancy of those who had their first child in the period 1995–2008. Marie Evertsson studies changes in subjective work commitment following the transition to motherhood. She drew a sample of Swedish women who were not yet mothers from the longitudinal Young Adult Panel Study in 1999, and compared those who gave birth in 2003 to those who did not. Ragni Hege Kitterød, Marit Rønsen and Ane Seierstad investigate factors that encourage Norwegian women’s transitions into full-time work and discourage transitions out of full-time work. Their analyses are based on panel data from the period 2003–2009. Through qualitative interviews, mainly with mothers, Wilma Bakker and Lia Karsten throw light on the daily lives of separated parents. By comparing single parents who live with their children full-time to those who are co-parents and live with their children part-time, it becomes evident that a growing diversity of post-separation living arrangement is worth taking into consideration in policy frameworks in The Netherlands and elsewhere. Commitments to work and children compete for an individual’s time and energy, so daily life and even the shaping of a life course, can be understood to involve social processes with trade-offs, sacrifices and victories. Trying to understand the character and outcomes of such processes is the stuff sociology is made of.

Collectivity, Poetics, and Agency

With the help of three casuistic illustrations, this chapter shows how players come to experience aspects of their games in the light of some destabilizing element in life. Metaphors that emerge are not ‘just interesting images’ but can better be understood as imprints of their concerns, made concrete and accessible in play. The metaphors are not linguistic in form, rather representations giving conceptual shape to some emotionally difficult or cognitively unclear subject matter. The point is not if the images are true or false, nor if they reflect how actors understand things, the point is what they tell about the individual’s and group’s perception of a good scenario. When players’ metaphorical constructions become incorporated into their spoken language; they acquire a narrative structure, and audiences’ way of reading is also narrative in form.

Structural Dynamics and Bounding Potential

This chapter describes a distinctive core in a large set of different activities, and this core defines the social form which the book terms specialized play. Its structural dynamics rests in three interacting elements. (1) Chance in opportunity—any search for a collectible or attack on a summit is seen as an action in Goffman’s (“Where the Action is.” In Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. New York: Pantheon Books, 1967) sense. (2) Seriality in the ordering of outcomes—players angage in actions that are somehow related to each other: collectibles are often, though not always, objects that belong to a limited series, such as the works of a particular artist or the products from a certain company; backpackers end up ‘collecting’ countries; birdwatchers list their sightings. (3) Flair in ability—competent players believe they have an intuition about a risky move, which help them act under uncertainty.

‘Well, I become very fond of these works and have to touch, stroke and feel—sculptures and everything’

How do micro processes of learning and motivation evolve among players? This chapter presents two mature, male art collectors who have built culturally important collections without benefitting from professional support or the advantage of ‘big’ money. Both began from scratch, financially and otherwise, and both wish to give something back to society. The chapter gives a detailed account of how each has related to his field of interest throughout the years. Finding ways of transferring art to posterity can be surprisingly difficult. The two are not necessarily ‘old school’. In a world of increasing inequality, the popularity of art collecting is growing, and surveys among the well-to-do reveal that a wish to give something back to society is not exceptional.