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Given the definition for traffic safety culture (proposed in the first chapter) as the shared beliefs of a group which affect behaviors related to traffic safety, this chapter provides practical guidance on ways to measure traffic safety culture, analyze collected data, and use the analysis to inform interventions. The proposed definition of “shared beliefs” used a behavioral model to inform specifically what beliefs may influence intentional behaviors involved with either reducing or improving traffic safety. This behavioral model provides a framework to guide measurement. Analyses include examining the prevalence of beliefs and behaviors, the relationships between beliefs and behaviors, and identifying “gaps” in beliefs that may be important to address in interventions. Finally, an example of a traffic safety culture program which includes a collecting of strategies working across the social ecology to improve traffic safety is introduced (in this case, seat belt use).

Our commitment to the goal of zero traffic fatalities and serious injuries requires consideration of innovative traffic safety thinking. There is growing recognition that this goal requires a change in our culture as it relates to traffic safety (traffic safety culture). And yet, there is no consensus about a definition for traffic safety culture, no explicit theory-based model to predict the effect of traffic safety culture, and no practical guidance for applying these models to develop effective culture-based strategies. This chapter seeks to address these omissions from both an academic and practitioner perspective.

This chapter proposes a standard definition of traffic safety culture based on a model that integrates relevant theories of willful and intentional behavior. Importantly, a set of 10 principles are identified that provide the context and foundation from which the definition and model are derived. An understanding of these principles provides the logic and purpose for developing strategies that can transform traffic safety culture:

• (1)

  Traffic crashes are a significant public health concern.

• (2)

  Most traffic crashes are caused by human behavior, not the roadway, vehicle, or environment (e.g., weather).

• (3)

  Human behavior is influenced by beliefs.

• (4)

  Beliefs develop based on experience (actual and vicarious) and socialization.

• (5)

  Socialization is the process whereby an individual develops beliefs which align with the culture of a group with which the individual identifies (social identity).

• (6)

  Individuals can form an identity with many different groups in their social environment, each with a different degree of bonding.

• (7)

  A stronger bond results in greater conformity and motivation to abide with the group culture.

• (8)

  The shared beliefs of a group that affect behaviors related to traffic safety are called traffic safety culture.

• (9)

  The traffic safety culture of a group emerges from actions taken by stakeholders across the social ecology.

• (10)

  Traffic safety culture strategies increase actions by stakeholders across the social ecology to improve traffic safety culture among various groups.

Traffic crashes are a significant public health concern.

Most traffic crashes are caused by human behavior, not the roadway, vehicle, or environment (e.g., weather).

Human behavior is influenced by beliefs.

Beliefs develop based on experience (actual and vicarious) and socialization.

Socialization is the process whereby an individual develops beliefs which align with the culture of a group with which the individual identifies (social identity).

Individuals can form an identity with many different groups in their social environment, each with a different degree of bonding.

A stronger bond results in greater conformity and motivation to abide with the group culture.

The shared beliefs of a group that affect behaviors related to traffic safety are called traffic safety culture.

The traffic safety culture of a group emerges from actions taken by stakeholders across the social ecology.

Traffic safety culture strategies increase actions by stakeholders across the social ecology to improve traffic safety culture among various groups.

For the academic, these principles can also serve as hypotheses that can be explored to expand our knowledge about traffic safety culture. For the practitioner, these principles represent the basic logic and impetus for transforming traffic safety culture. By effectively communicating these principles and their connecting logic, we can express the importance of traffic safety culture and the need for supporting resources with other stakeholders.

This study investigates in depth how decision-making of different organisational members is shaped by various management control systems (MCSs) that reflect different institutional logics, how the entire organisation deals with the arising institutional complexity and which role different management controls as a system play in such situations.

A case study was conducted on a German Mittelstand firm whose MCSs were shaped by three different logics over time: a family logic, a stakeholder logic and a shareholder logic.

This paper shows how different actors of an organisation confronted with institutional complexity used selective coupling of different MCS components and compartmentalizing MCS components to deal with clashing institutional logics. Thereby, it was possible for the actors to balance different sub-communities within the firm that were shaped by conflicting but yet complementary logics that were required for organisational survival.

This study contributes to the understanding of how an MCS can be exploited for organisational structural responses to multiple logics. Due to this research design, the present study deals with challenges of ex post rationalization.

The results show options for organisational leaders to deal with different kind of worldviews (i.e. logics) that shape employees’ behaviour. Particularly, this paper explains how leaders can restructure their MCSs to influence human behaviour in times of radical change.

This paper contributes to the literature on MCSs by showing what role MCSs play in structural responses to institutional complexity.

Over the course of a two-year project, we set out to investigate the mathematics in children's everyday lives. We recognised the fact that this was a challenging project and that gaining access to children's personal lives would take time and some careful research design. A particular challenge centred on the difficulty of ensuring that our participants shared our understanding of ‘mathematics in everyday life’ and were happy and confident in sharing examples with us. In this chapter, we describe the way that we gradually increased the depth of our understanding of children's experience of mathematics outside of school through a series of studies with groups of primary school children. A structured diary study, and parental survey, allowed us to start a conversation with our participants about the kinds of activities we were interested in. A photo elicitation study then encouraged participants to cross the home-school boundary and share representations of their lives outside of school. These studies enabled us to develop enough of a shared language to carry out small group interviews with children and explore the mathematical thinking and learning in their out-of-school lives.

The burden social theorists must be willing to accept, respond to, and act upon pertains to the difficulties that predictably accompany all efforts to convey to nontheorists the unwelcome fact of heteronomy – that as actors, we are not as autonomous as we were told and prefer to assume – and to spell out what heteronomy in the form in which it has been shaping the developmental trajectory of modern societies means for professional theorists. I introduce the concept of “vitacide,” designed to capture that termination of life is a potential vanishing point of the heteronomous processes that have been shaping modern societies continuing to accelerate and intensify in ways that prefigure our future, but not on our human or social terms. Heteronomy pointing toward vitacide should compel us as social theorists to consider critically both the constructive and destructive trajectory that social change appears to have been following for more than two centuries, irrespective of whether the resulting prospect is to our liking or not. In this context, the classical critical theorists of the early Frankfurt School, especially Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, pursued what turned out to be an evolving interest in rackets, the authoritarian personality, and the administered society – concepts that served as foils for delineating the kind of theoretical stance that is becoming more and more important as we are moving into an increasingly uncertain future.

The purpose of this paper is to construct a genealogy of therapeutic communities (TCs), with the espoused commitment to flattened hierarchies and democratic ideologies, the paper considers the lineage of the Frankfurt School of Social Research and its influence in setting a frame for TC ideology, with a particular focus on Herbert Marcuse and Eric Fromm. This genealogy provides further context to the contribution of two other key Frankfurters, Karl Mannheim and Michael Foulkes, who progressed therapeutic democracy in the UK and shaped the early days of the TC as a group-based treatment paradigm.

Discourse analysis and collective biography based on biographical details, texts and witness accounts.

The works of Marcuse and Fromm provide a hybrid psychosocial post-Freudian schemas that beckoned philosophic reconciliation between the state and the personal psyche culminating in new left psychoanalytic academic sectors. Eric Fromm's contribution is situated squarely in the clinical sphere in the USA dating from the 1930s after he fled from Germany and settled in the USA where he became a well-known lecturer at Chestnut Lodge during a time when it was developing its approach under the rubric of “milieu therapy”. Marcuse's influence on psychiatry is tracked through the development of ideas and writings emerging from his reading of Freud, finally intersecting with the emergence of TCs and anti-psychiatry when he delivered the keynote address at the Dialectics of Liberation Conference in London in 1967. Held at the height of the first generation of TCs, Joe Berke, R.D. Laing and colleagues considered Marcuse as someone to headline the Dialectics Conference because; “Marcuse was the Grandpapa of Flower Power” (Joe Berke said).

A rapprochement between milieu therapy in the USA, influenced by Fromm and Marcuse and the European tradition of TCs, influenced by Mannheim and Foulkes is demonstrated. The Frankfurt Institute of Social Research can be seen as an ideological corner that transcends Atlantic divides, and provides a sturdy and lasting intellectual cornerstone for the history of ideas in the field of social psychiatry.