Performative inquiry – studies of doing and its consequences for being – is a prominent feature of research projects in exploring gender and sexuality, especially when gender and sexuality are closely tied to linguistic practices. Moreover, because performativity of doing unfolds in specific social and temporal contexts, performative inquiry shows how gender and sexuality become inflected variously in relation to intersectionalities and inequalities, and how language use connected to gender and sexuality becomes inflected in similar terms, as well. Performative inquiry is also concerned with assumptions about normative (or ideological) assumptions that regulate “commonsense” distinctions between valued and not-so-valued practices of doing and being. This chapter’s case studies and discussion show how gender and sexuality are shaped by performative practices and how language use is entailed within these gendered and sexual performative formations.

The role of social networks in business, and entrepreneurship, in particular, is widely acknowledged. Chapter 2 explores the ways in which business persons relate to networks and how networks impact the circumstances of entrepreneurs. The enabling and constraining properties of networks, their effects on participants, and their subsequent social consequences have all been extensively explored in a large and growing literature. A feature of social network analysis lies in its tendency to deploy structural perspectives in explaining social outcomes. Chapter 2 highlights the ways in which social networks operate as a context in which individual initiative and engagement lead to the making and remaking of network attributes. An empirical examination of business networks in Chinese cities reveals the way in which the formation and maintenance of networks require the conscious contributions of their members, how network norms are produced by the expressed preferences of individual members, and finally how network membership involves management of network participants.

Gambling affected the mental apparatus that people employed to understand the world around them as well as their own desires and compulsions. Casino gambling established a psychological dynamic perfectly calibrated to drive people to the edge of madness. The “storm” of despair generated by a loss, never compensated by a corresponding elation coming with a win, can overwhelm the player and leave them incapable of self-direction. Descriptions of the psychological effects of addiction – not only how those behaviors were formed through repetition but also how they resulted in a person whose entire world had shrunk – indicate how the machinery of Blanc-style casino gambling affected people in new and profound ways.

The casino provided a unique location to probe the logic of chance for those seeking to understand fortune and misfortune, causation and correlation. Chance helped generate predictability. When we shift to consider the picture of luck that emerges, we see that it is exhibited in various systems designed to generate wins at the gambling table, lured to a person to through any number of bizarre superstitions, and made the object of social scientific inquiry. Luck was something that people could generate, manufacture, cultivate, or capture. This element of human agency speaks to a vision of the world that promoted the basic idea of human agency while also acknowledging its limits. Gambling systems and superstitions, especially when they did not rest on the foundation of the “maturity of chances,” were at their heart modern attempts to bend luck to one’s side.

Nineteenth-century European casinos tapped into new transportation and communication networks, and they were flexible enough to take advantage of the changing political map of Europe. The casinos found success amid these large structural transformations affecting the continent. They projected a new type of sociability that exuded a sense of exclusivity and democracy at once. The casino was also an environment that embraced social mixture. The casino attracted a transnational and polyglot clientele. Nineteenth-century casinos were physical expressions of contemporary ideas about fate and agency. The nineteenth-century casino also occasioned a prolonged discussion of the body, feeling, and mind, and there is a wide recognition of culture’s impact on the body. Seeing the effect that gambling had on players, nineteenth-century observers could consider how the self, the environment, and behavior all related to one another.

This essay focuses on the two most influential English authors of the later medieval period, Geoffrey Chaucer and his contemporary, John Gower, to analyse the roles of women within their corpus, both as subjects and as extra-textual readers. Bridges asks what femininity enables in their works and how ߝ and what ߝwomen mean, emphasising the embeddedness of both writers in long-established and international textual cultures. Central to her analysis is the notion of a hermeneutic that constructs women and femininity in ethical terms, as bound up with notions of vice and virtue. The essay explores questions of voice, agency, and genre across Chaucerߣs works to demonstrate the intimate connection of femininity with questions of reading and interpretation. For Gower too, ethics are shown to be a central focus, and treatments of femininity open onto moral and political debates. Differing presentations of women treated in common by Chaucer and Gower illuminate their ideological priorities and contrasting practices of poetic translatio studii. For both, womenߣs presence proves a complex, powerful, but often ambiguous textual phenomenon.

Both the economy and the polity are embedded in a relational field. This field generates the range of relative positions that individuals and groups take within it while making other positions impossible. The constitutions of the economy and of the polity reflect objective arrangements of positions providing constraints and opportunities for human agency. They may also shape actors to follow specific courses of action rather than others. Certain policy actions may be compatible with the existing economic constitution but not with the existing political constitution, and vice versa. Only policy actions compatible with both the economic and the political constitution can be conducted without changes in either. A constitutional heuristic is needed to assess whether a certain policy is feasible under a given constitutional settlement or not. This chapter focuses on the multi-dimensional and multi-level architecture that policy design should follow in light of the relevant constitutional heuristic. Policy actions are designed and implemented across manifold modes of association in the material sphere and plural modes of collective action in the political sphere. The chapter provides a framework grounded in constitutional heuristic for the analysis of embedded policy measures in the industrial, credit, and international trade fields.

The book explores youth citizenship in the African cities of Accra, Ghana; Kampala, Uganda; and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. As a significant portion of African populations, youth understand citizenship to be distinct, localized, and dynamic. Rapid urbanization – with its accompanying challenges of overcrowding, insufficient infrastructure, and unemployment – conditions youth citizenship actions and identities. Defined as people eighteen to thirty-five years old, youth reflect a citizenship shaped by neoliberal economic policies that constrain economic opportunities and a neoliberal discourse that fosters themes of responsibility and individualism. Youth citizenship manifests in contexts of political uncertainty, with democratic transitions in many countries stalled and elders often seeking to mobilize – and potentially control – youth public engagement. Despite such challenges, youth in this study chose to act through a variety of public and private means to secure their belonging and assert their rights and responsibilities in the community and the country. As agents, youth negotiate citizenship in light of their various religious, gender, and economic identities through a variety of daily experiences and relationships in the community and their interactions with the state.

The present chapter uses a mixed-methods analysis to examine if L2 learners associate their learning with developing intercultural competence, and if these associations vary according to individual differences. It compares how L2 learners view language proficiency and sophisticated language use, and explores how they associate global citizenship with multilingualism. Responses to a survey were collected from N=67 L2 learners enrolled in either Tier I (basic language) or II (linguistics or culture) courses. Quantitative analyses revealed that age and instructional tier had a main effect on their level of intercultural awareness. Qualitative data showed that learners do not conceptualize language proficiency differently than sophisticated language use. Their definitions of global citizenship showed that they see multilingualism as the gateway to being a global citizen and language learning as the means to network with and learn from a global community. Agency and their roles as global citizens were only minimally mentioned; they self-identified primarily as L2 learners, not as L2 users with the ability to be agents of change on a global stage.

The chapter examines everyday citizenship among youth respondents from the angle of their relationship to the state or as citizenship-from-above. Youth respondents initially defined citizenship in terms of legal obligations to the state. Afrobarometer findings that indicate high levels of support for obeying the law and paying taxes echo those responses, though respondents provide nuance to the Afrobarometer data. Legalistic views of citizenship are closely connected to the building and maintenance of strong relations at the local level and, for some, notions of morality. Few youth defined citizenship primarily in terms of voting, though Afrobarometer findings indicate large percentages do participate in elections. Even fewer youth respondents described citizenship as engagement in activities such as joining with others to advocate or protesting to hold governments accountable, a finding that aligns with the survey data. For these few youth, it is their everyday relationships with friends and neighbors and communal experiences of marginalization that motivate actions. Protest examples from South Africa and Uganda show that citizenship-from-above and citizenship-from-below blur and that everyday citizenship manifests in creative and agentic ways.

This chapter explores the process of developing analytical frameworks to guide empirical research on agreement-making. An analytical framework is a set of ideas that structure analysis by specifying core concepts and relationships to be explored. In some cases, a researcher may be able to use an existing framework found in the literature. More frequently, a researcher will need to adapt an existing framework or develop a new framework to address their specific research questions. In this chapter, the authors share their own experiences of developing and adapting frameworks to analyze nonstate actors’ influence and agency in agreement-making. They argue that deciding on a framework requires deep thinking about key concepts and relationships in the context of existing literature and data access. Frameworks evolve through an iterative process over the course of the research. Working with frameworks is a creative part of the research process that can help researchers navigate the messy and overwhelming world of agreement-making. The chapter thereby situates the role of frameworks in the wider research process and provides insights into different ways to go about working with analytical frameworks.

The present chapter set out to complement the quantitative analyses in Chapter 3 with more qualitative analyses of L2 learners’ beliefs and assessment of advancedness. We analyzed the different metalinguistic descriptors they produced to describe their beliefs and other speakers’ actual use of language, its content, manner, and the L2 speaker’s identity. We found that our L2 learners were only partially explicitly aware of the language, the content, and the manner exhibited by our L2 speakers, but that they were implicitly sensitive to categorically different levels of intercultural competence among different L2 speakers. We concluded that our L2 listeners could only partially imagine L2 advancedness, and we hypothesized that the lack of a full understanding of advancedness, operationalized as a lack of language awareness, could inhibit their ability to develop an L2 identity. Consequently, we call for future research to examine how institutional intervention, through curricular design or student advising, may help to make students more explicitly aware of the multifaceted nature of advancedness, as well its empowering effect on their identity and agency as an L2 speaker.

This chapter provides an introduction to Swiss contract law. It discusses the Code of Obligations as the main source of law, the fundamental principles of Swiss contract law, the notion of an obligation as the effect of the contract, the formation of contracts, including pre-contractual liability, as well as the notions of offer and acceptance. This chapter then turns to the principles applicable to the interpretation of contracts and the principles governing the validity of contracts. This chapter further discusses the notion of agency, general terms and conditions as well as the various categories of contracts found under Swiss law. This chapter moreover explores the significant issues of the performance of the contract and breach of contract. Finally, this chapter analyses the extinguishment of obligations as well as the concepts of the assignment of a claim and the assumption of debt.

Youth citizenship manifests in complex, contentious ways, as youth continuously negotiate the meaning of citizenship through actions and relations with peers and elders. Citizenship plays out through lived experiences, ranging from the police encounters, to the sociality of voting, to carework for a neighbor. Income, church attendance, gender identity, and country context shape these experiences, leading everyday citizenship to vary widely. Extending the book’s lessons to other marginalized populations through survey data on rural youth in Ghana, Tanzania, and Uganda, we discover that, in comparison to urban youth, significantly more rural youth attend community activities, vote, and advocate, though they are less legalistic. We urge future research on how these patterns play out through localized words and deeds. In conclusion, despite the severe constraints of economic inequality, gerontocracy, patriarchy, repression, and corruption that many African urban youth face, youth are agentic, creative, and eager to lead their communities and countries.

Some clothing styles are commonly associated with women. The Lenin jacket (Lieningzhuang), the dual-purpose jacket (liangyongshan) and the Chinese-style jacket (Zhongzhuang or bianfu) are examples. As Chapter 9 shows, attributing gender to particular styles is nearly always complicated. The names of all of these styles were also attached to garments for men. These were garments that were distinct from zhifu. What they looked like, who wore them, and in what circumstances, are questions that throw light both on the garments themselves and on the zhifu with which they coexisted. Similar questions can be asked of the category of ‘strange clothes and outlandish dress’. An established four-character phrase, ‘strange clothes and outlandish dress’, was a discourse that helped keep the zhifu regime intact for some years after the death of Mao. Under this regime, the question of what Chinese women should wear never had a very clear answer.

We live in a period in which liberal ideas about personal autonomy is under considerable pressure. Can poems be liberal? Baudelaire’s Enivrez-Vous captures something essential about the most appealing forms of liberalism, and about its underlying spirit (captured, in different ways, by John Stuart Mill, Walt Whitman, and Bob Dylan as well): its insistence on freedom of choice, on the diversity of tastes and preferences, and on human agency. The poem is liberal in its exuberance – its pleasure in its own edginess, its defiance, its sheer rebelliousness, its sense of mischief, its implicit laughter, its love of life and what it has to offer. It is the opposite of dutiful. It is far more exuberant than Mill’s On Liberty, but it is exuberant in the same way. It tells us something important about autonomy and freedom.

In recent times, self-interest has been seen as the main driving force of behaviour and function in organisms. This is particularly evident in the concept of the selfish gene. However, as elaborated in this book, living systems strongly depend on cooperative behaviour, which is found everywhere in nature. All the way from millions of minute bacteria cooperating in the way they feed and grow, to massive whales talking with each other across oceans, organisms communicate with each other, and that communication is used as the glue of cooperation, even between distinct species. The idea of nature as ‘red in tooth and claw’ is at best a distorted perspective of the entirety of nature. However, in the grand scheme of things, both cooperation and competition are part of the story, and – whether wittingly or unwittingly – organisms form part of and interact with their ecosystems.

The view of living systems as machines is based on the idea of a fixed sequence of cause and effect: from genotype to phenotype, from genes to proteins and to life functions. This idea became the Central Dogma: the genotype maps to the phenotype in a one-way causative fashion, making us prisoners of our genes.