Luk Van Langenhove

Between cooperation and competition: major powers in shared neighbourhoods

ABSTRACT This introductory article to the special issue on major powers in shared neighbourhoods sets the scenery by introducing the research objectives, situating them in the relevant academic context with references to the literatures on great power dynamics, regionalism and foreign policy analysis. It presents a conceptual framework for the study of ‘major powers’, understood as regional leaders, and their different forms of interaction in shared neighbourhoods, before providing an overview of the key insights of the individual contributions. The article concludes by identifying the main factors explaining the shape of the relationship between major powers in their shared region and outlining a research agenda on comparative neighbourhood policy studies.

The identification and measurement of psychological aspects of leisure.

This paper addresses the problem of the place of psychological measurement in leisure sciences by dwelling upon two aspects of that problem. The first is the question of what the purpose is of measurement in the leisure sciences. The second concerns the identity of the underlying concept, ‘leisure’. In the first section, a short overview will be presented of several available approaches to the measurement of psychological aspects of leisure. The next two sections will take up the problem of the identity of leisure from the viewpoint of people engaged in leisure activities and relate it to how psychological aspects of leisure have been measured. It will be argued that it is only useful and meaningful to develop measurement instruments for several psychological aspects of leisure experiences if one first takes into account an analysis of how people identify leisure.

Varieties of Moral Orders and the Dual Structure of Society: A Perspective from Positioning Theory

This paper argues that morality is what links structure to agency and that this perspective supports Giddens’ point of view that the agency–structure linkage entails not dualism but duality. These claims will be supported by bringing together four mediating concepts to address both how structures come to being and what the substance of structure is. First, John Searle’s concept of deontic power and Rom Harré’s concept of moral order will be discussed. This will allow to develop a typology of moral orders that distinguishes between cultural, legal, institutional, conversational, and personal moral orders. Second, the notion of field will be presented as a third mediating concept and it will be argued that the different types of moral orders form a latent background that operates as a normative field in which people act. The totality of those nested orders can be pictured as the structure of a society. The final part of the paper will introduce the concept of position, as used in Positioning Theory, as a fourth mediating concept to advance the analysis of moral orders as structures and relate it to the differences in power amongst actors. Here, it will be argued that declarative speech acts are the activators of moral orders, that moral orders enable for certain positions of agency, and that conversational story lines allow to reproduce or change structures.