Journal articles on the topic 'Cliques (Sociology) – Juvenile literature'

This paper summarizes the main theories conventionally associated with the sociology of development as well as the arguments of the principal scholars focused on what “works” to bring about economic development and social progress. This line of argument ushered the rising consensus across the social sciences that the prime causal role belongs to institutions. However, the empirical literature that has followed from this consensus has been marred by a lack of proper definition of the concept and a tendency to use nations as units of analysis, neglecting their internal complexity. The last sections summarize a recently completed study of twenty-three Latin American institutions in five countries. The study shows the feasibility of studying institutions empirically and highlights a series of important differences among then and across countries. The solution provided by Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to the defining determinants of a developmental institution highlights the central role of meritocracy, absence of internal cliques and, in particular, proactivity toward the external environment. The theoretical and practical implications of this study are discussed.

What theories are there of social dynamics, of the emergence, adaptation, resilience, collapse or decay, of social systems such as organisations, communities, networks, cliques and teams? In chapter 1, I consider evolutionary theory, in biology, economics, sociology and psychology. In chapter 2 I consult the literature on Complex Adaptive Systems, and its applicability to social systems. Social systems are distinctive, in being intentional and reflexive, with intentions depending on outcomes. In chapter 3 I focus on social systems: their variety, the role of language, the relation between self and other, network effects, and their collapse, resilience and rigidity.

Reintegrating juvenile offenders into society with a positive reception is a primary objective of education, aimed at breaking the cycle of incarceration that results in recidivism. This article aims to delineate the prison education policies within Indonesian juvenile correctional facilities (LPKA), focusing on regulatory frameworks and their practical implementation. It focuses on the issue of the LPKA's capability in Indonesia to ensure access to education, which is a fundamental right of juvenile inmates, and on whether its benefits can be felt and realized. Data collection methods encompassed interviews, regulatory assessments, institutional report evaluations, and literature reviews. Findings indicate that, despite a 270% decrease in juvenile inmate numbers from 2018 to 2022, only 68% of this population was granted educational access. Contributing factors include specific regulatory constraints on educational access and a lack of innovative collaborations, even with the reduced workload in LPKA. The study advocates for the initiation of formal educational institutions within LPKA, minimizing reliance on the Ministry of Education and allowing for curriculum adaptation to prevailing conditions. Keywords: Prison Education, Right to Education, Juvenile Correctional Facilities, Juvenile Inmates, Social Rehabilitation

Hirayama disease is a rare neurological condition and is characterized by a sporadic juvenile muscular atrophy of distal upper extremity in young males. The disease is more prevalent in Japan and other Asian countries, though a few cases have been reported in Western countries as well. It manifests as a self-limiting, gradually progressive atrophic weakness of forearm and hand. The anterior displacement of posterior dura during neck flexion leading to cervical cord atrophy has been hypothesized. We discuss a case of a 21-year-old male patient with progressive distal upper extremity weakness, diagnosed with Hirayama disease, and literature review for the same. Keywords: Hirayama Disease, Juvenile muscular atrophy, Monomelic amyotrophy

The significance of World War II within the Russian historiography is unequivocal– but the impact of that great cataclysm on the Soviet state and Soviet society is frequently understated or overstated. The early 1940s brought massive losses to the upper echelons of the Communist Party, resulting in a rapid mobilization of the state, but these upheavals took place in a society that was already hamstrung by both the traditional scarcity of qualified professionals and the strain that Marxist-Leninist purism placed on an already strained education system. Long before the October Revolution, Russia was plagued with the enduring problem of scarcity of the qualified managerial cadres; after the Revolution, this problem was exacerbated by factional disputes between ideologues, who were primarily concerned with the ideological purity of the Soviet state, and pragmatists, who favoring a greater focus on vocational education. Caught between these two factions was the proto-middle class from which the professional stratum of Russian society was to be recruited. During the opening years of World War II, the demand for educated professionals rose, forcing compromises in their ideological purity. In the long term, the result was a gradual, piecemeal shift toward pragmatic compromise. In the short term, however, faced with a dilemma between under-staffed and under-indoctrinated, caught in a decision-making paradigm locked in by Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet matrix opted for personalized networks and regional cliques over the professional apparatus in its quest for short-term efficiency. Drawing on archival materials such as memoir literature, epistolary documentation and state reports from Moscow and provincial (particularly those of the Tver’ Oblast’) collections, this article examines the tensions that underpinned the conditions of the proto-middle class from throughout the 1940s, tracing the ideological constraints that structured the political landscape, the repeating cycles of essentially identical attempts at reform, and the ways in which the strain of the ideological/pragmatic conflict on Russian professionals was, and was not, resolved in the wake of World War II.

An expressing media with literature work could indirectly convey various social criticisms toward a certain phenomenon. The most frequently occurring social criticism is the social reality portrayal of a community. This study aims to describe the form of social criticism contained in the poetry entitled Rahi(i)m by Kedung Darma Romansha. Using qualitative methods and a literary sociology approach, especially social criticism, this study reveals the author's worldview of phenomena that occur in society. The study results show that the author of poetry criticises social situations, namely: the author's criticism of poverty, crime, family disharmony, juvenile delinquency, violation of norms, and environmental problems. Social criticism also reveals the author's disappointment, annoyance, anger, and regret towards the arrogant and unfair performance of government officials in responding to socio-cultural problems that occur in society.

AbstractThis paper presents a scoping review of the literature on child participatory research in Australia published in academic journals between 2000 and 2018. The review focused on research designed to engage with children and young people in the development, implementation and evaluation of services. A total of 207 papers were identified and distributed across eight service sectors: child protection and family law, community, disability, education, health, housing and homelessness, juvenile justice and mental health. The papers were reviewed against Shier’s participation matrix, demonstrating that almost all of the identified papers included children only as participants who contributed data to adult researchers. Only a small number of papers involved children and young people in the other phases of research, such as designing research questions, analysis and dissemination. There is a clear interest in the engagement of children and young people in service design and decision-making in Australia. This paper is intended to serve as a catalyst for discussion on where there are gaps and where further Australian research is needed.

The child of the law, like the man of the law, is a particular kind of legal young person who bears no necessary relationship to a “real” young person. Children are, nevertheless, very much present in the law. This chapter examines the ways in which the language of the law, expressed in statutes relating to child welfare and juvenile justice, has articulated particular notions of the criminal child and deviant childhood. The object, using the words of King and Piper, is to find out how the law has “thought about” children.

Historically, insufficient resources and assistance have been provided to young people leaving state care. Young people leaving care have been found to experience homelessness, unemployment, early parenthood, loneliness, depression, poverty, and involvement with the juvenile justice system.In recent years, a growing body of research literature has explored the experiences of young people leaving care, and the identification of key factors underlying good after care support practice. Attention is drawn to some of the key findings of this research such as the need for a more gradual and flexible process of transition to independence, specific legislation providing for the ongoing support of care leavers, and the provision of formal and properly resourced after-care services. Reference is also made to the key role played by consumer advocacy groups in facilitating the successful transition to independence of care leavers.

Literary works are often used as a medium to criticize and explain social problems experienced by society. One of these literary works is the drama script West Side Story by Arthur Laurenst. This study focuses on the criticism of several social problems described in the play West Side Story. This study uses the method of content analysis of literary texts which are then interpreted by researchers. Research data sourced from the play West Side Story was collected using the library research method. Through analysis with the Sociology of Literature approach which focuses on sociological aspects in a work, it is found that there is a critique of social problems described in the play West Wide Story. The criticism is related to the problem of poverty which leads to violence and deprivation; juvenile delinquency in the form of immoral acts as a result of family disharmony; wars that cause damage to the natural environment; and degrading and harassing women.

Young people leaving state care have been found to experience deficits in all aspects of their life cycle. These include homelessness, poor educational and employment outcomes, involvement in juvenile crime and prostitution, mental and physical health problems, early parenthood and inadequate social support systems. These poor outcomes experienced by care leavers result from a range of factors relating to their pre-care abuse and neglect, poor quality and unstable care history and inadequate support for their successful transition to independence. Young people leaving state care in Victoria are currently lacking the ongoing and guaranteed support that would be expected of a good parent. Using relevant local and international literature and findings from a qualitative study involving 10 care leavers, this paper examines the factors that contribute to negative as well as positive outcomes for young people leaving state care. Some conclusions are drawn regarding policy and practice reforms that could lead to improved outcomes for care leavers.

Currently, the police guidance program for juvenile delinquents has not been specific and implemented, and it has not been verified that it is effective in preventing juvenile delinquency again. The purpose of this study is to develop a police guidance program based on the Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy and verify its effectiveness in order to standardize a substantial guidance program at the police level. Through previous studies, representative emotional factors affecting juvenile delinquency were depression and anxiety, and self-esteem was functioning as a protective factor that could lower delinquency. A 3-day, 10-hour police guidance program was constructed that applied cognitive, emotional, and behavioral techniques of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. The subjects of the study were 18 juvenile delinquents criminally reported to N Police Station, and the same number of researchers conducted personal counseling, group activities, and group counseling, and pre-, post-, and follow-up examination on depression, anxiety, and self-esteem measures. As a result of the study, depression and anxiety significantly decreased in the post-, and follow-up examination, and self-esteem significantly improved only in the post-examination. This suggests that juvenile delinquents' efforts to convert irrational beliefs into rational beliefs can affect depression, anxiety, and self-esteem and prevent juvenile delinquency. Through follow-up research, it is suggested that the person in charge can easily and comfortably proceed with this program and that juvenile delinquents can participate safely.

Despite the increase in federal tiered evidence initiatives that require the use of rigorous evaluation designs, such as randomized experiments, there has been limited guidance in the evaluation literature on practical strategies to implement such studies successfully. This paper provides lessons learned in executing experiments in applied settings, such as schools, juvenile justice agencies, mental health clinics, reproductive health clinics, and job centers. To promote successful study implementation, evaluators must understand study roles, select suitable partners, and employ appropriate partnership models. In this article, we describe partner types and study roles, concretely illustrate how partnerships might be structured, discuss specific strategies to assess implementation partner capacity and maintain partner engagement, and consider how an evaluator can leverage the skills and resources of study partners to improve participant recruitment, enrollment, and retention. While the lessons are drawn from our experiences conducting 10 experimental studies, some may also apply to non-experimental evaluations.

Life course theory suggests that the social bond of marriage can serve as a pivotal turning point toward the termination of criminal activity, particularly for men. Yet limited research has investigated how young adult men and women utilize social bonds forged outside of marriage to facilitate desistance from crime. This study explored gender differences in how formerly incarcerated emerging adults navigate and utilize their social bonds with peers and romantic partners on the journey toward criminal desistance. Two semi-structured qualitative interviews and a social mapping exercise were conducted with 14 emerging adults (seven men and seven women) with extensive histories of juvenile incarceration. With regard to friends, the young women found peer support often inconsistent, leading to an overarching theme of self-reliance. Some of the young men used peer supports with an overarching theme of reciprocity, while others used peer supports very sparingly in order to avoid contact with criminal associations or potential danger. With regard to romantic partnerships, these relationships proved much more supportive of desistance goals for the young men and the contrary was the case for the young women in heterosexual partnerships. These findings add to a growing literature about the process of desistance for emerging adults.

Scholars have identified policing and hyper-incarceration as key mechanisms to reproduce racial inequality and poverty. Existing research, however, often overlooks how policing practices impact gender and sexuality, especially expansive expressions of gender and non-heterosexuality. This lack of attention is critical because lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people disproportionately experience incarceration, including LGBTQ youth who are disproportionately incarcerated in juvenile detention. In this article, I draw on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork and 40 in-depth interviews with LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness to address this gap in the literature by documenting how police and other agents of the state use their discretion to regulate youth’s gender expressions, identities, and sex lives. I posit that current policing patterns of discrimination operate primarily not through de jure discrimination against LGBTQ people but as de facto discrimination based on discretionary hyper-incarceration practices that police gender, sexuality, and LGBTQ people. I contend that policing is not only about maintaining racial inequality and governing poverty but also about controlling and regulating gender and sexuality, especially the gender and sexuality of poor LGBTQ people of color.

This essay explores how Soviet authorities appropriated medical knowledge derived from the treatment of a “passive” juvenile population to create a new assurance of municipal well-being in the 1920s. The attempt to control and remediate the spread of disease reflected a Bolshevik certainty in the state’s ability to confront the frontier of health by applying the dictates of modern science. Revolution and civil war brought challenge—the fractured city changed hands repeatedly until a final, tentative victory by the Red Army in 1920. Odesa’s children figuratively confronted a political, moral, and social liminality, standing between the diseased, corrupt yesteryear and a salubrious, principled future. Soviet central authorities sought to revive the newly liberated city by establishing a network of children’s institutions in which they would contain contagion, but also bring the full spectrum of applied expertise to bear on young bodies. In this traumatized city at the Soviet Union’s edge, state custodians would raise a new, loyal generation. Its health would signify revolution achieved. Illness would continue to plague the city’s residents, but the myth of a community united in health created an ecology of promise and activism.

Abstract.The family, as a central role in the socialization of children and adolescents, has been considered a decisive factor in the development of juvenile delinquency. Since the end nineteenth century, the family and delinquent behavior has aroused the interest of specialists in humanities (education, psychology, psychiatry, social work, sociology, criminology). These professionals propose that the way to interact appropriately with significant adults and peer group is important for the development of child and adolescent. This article is a literature review, whose main purpose is to synthesize some of the studies, to understanding and explaining the factors that contribute to occurrence antisocial behavior in children and adolescent.Keywords: antisocial behavior; risk factors; protective factorsResumo.A família, como papel central na socialização das crianças e adolescentes, tem sido considerada um factor decisivo no desenvolvimento da delinquência juvenil. Desde o final do século XIX, a temática família e conduta delinquente tem despertado o interesse dos especialistas em ciências humanas (educação, psicologia, psiquiatria, serviço social, sociologia, criminologia). Estes profissionais indicam que a forma de interagir adequadamente com os adultos significativos e grupo de pares é relevante para o desenvolvimento da criança e do adolescente. Este artigo assenta na revisão da literatura, cujo objectivo consiste sintetizar alguns dos estudos realizados, para a compreensão e explicação dos factores que contribuem para a ocorrência de comportamento antissocial da criança e do adolescente.Palavras-chave: comportamento antissocial; factores de risco; factores de protecção

Purpose This study aims to investigate the potential moderating effect of the average annual ambient temperature in 24 European countries on the relationship between criminal thinking (reactive vs proactive) and juvenile offending (violent vs property). Design/methodology/approach The average annual ambient temperatures found in 24 European countries were correlated with measures of reactive vs proactive criminal thinking and violent vs property offending in 56,518 students (50.4% female) from the second International Self-Reported Delinquency Study. These data were analyzed using a multilevel model comprising three Level 1 (student) predictors – age, sex and family structure – one Level 2 (country) predictor – ambient temperature – and two outcome measures – a reactive: proactive criminal thinking index (RPI) and a violent: property offending index (VPI). Findings The RPI and VPI correlated significantly with the Level 1 predictors, and the annual ambient temperatures from these 24 countries (Level 2 predictor) correlated positively with RPI and VPI and moderated the effect of reactive criminal thinking (RCT) on violent offending. Practical implications These findings indicate that ambient temperature correlates with violent/aggressive offending after the effects of property/non-aggressive offending have been controlled and suggest that ambient temperature may moderate the relationship between RCT and violent offending by affecting the decision-making process. Originality/value The contribution made by this study to the literature is that it illustrates how a macro-level influence in the form of average annual temperature can impact on micro-level processes in the form of criminal thinking and violent behavior.

The number of international schools hit the 6,000-mark in 2012, and the 13,000-mark in 2022. In spite of continuous growth and diversity of provision, paradoxically some literature continues to paint a largely negative sociological imagination, associating the arena with micro-politics, high turnover, and increasing precarity. At the same time, the social reality of working in the arena remains under-reported and under-theorised. The largest number of international schools are now in China, where two-thirds are of the ‘non-traditional’ type. Our paper focuses on the experiences of two expatriate teachers in that relatively new field. In order to address the questions of ‘how do teachers cope?’, and ‘what strategies do they adopt?’, our paper delves into the under-reported social reality of ‘cliques’. By adopting a ‘positive sociology’ lens of inquiry, we begin to address the role that cliques-formation might have in dealing with precarity and insecurity, especially that of ‘friendship precarity’ caused by constant transitions and short-term contracts. It can be seen that cliques offer a natural, quick, and practical solution to addressing precarity, helping over time to create resilience, and should not be viewed solely within a negative sociological imagination.

The biology of early life adversity explores how social experiences early in life affect physical and psychological health and well-being throughout the life course. In our previous work, we argued that narratives emerging from and about this research field tend to focus on harm and lasting damage with little discussion of reversibility and resilience. However, as the Science and Technology Studies literature has demonstrated, scientific research can be actively taken up and transformed as it moves through social worlds. Drawing on fieldwork with actors in education and juvenile corrections in the US Pacific Northwest, we found that they employed the biology of early life adversity not only to promote prevention but also to argue for changes within their own institutions that would allow them to better serve children and youth who have experienced adversity and trauma. Our study shows that biosocial narratives are neither inherently liberatory nor inherently oppressive but that the situated narrative choreographies in which they are enrolled are essential for their political effects. In our case, we show how these biosocial narratives have been articulated with knowledge and practices from restorative justice and trauma-informed care to reimagine the social meaning of the biology of early life adversity.

IntroductionCoffee, as a stimulant, and the spaces in which it is has been consumed, have long played a vital role in fostering communication, creativity, and sociality. This article explores the interrelationship of café space, communication, creativity, and materialism. In developing these themes, this article is structured in two parts. The first looks back to the coffee houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to give a historical context to the contemporary role of the café as a key site of creativity through its facilitation of social interaction, communication and information exchange. The second explores the continuation of the link between cafés, communication and creativity, through an instance from the mid-twentieth century where this process becomes individualised and is tied more intrinsically to the material surroundings of the café itself. From this, we argue that in order to understand the connection between café space and creativity, it is valuable to consider the rich polymorphic material and aesthetic composition of cafés. The Social Life of Coffee: London’s Coffee Houses While the social consumption of coffee has a long history, here we restrict our focus to a discussion of the London coffee houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was during the seventeenth century that the vogue of these coffee houses reached its zenith when they operated as a vibrant site of mercantile activity, as well as cultural and political exchange (Cowan; Lillywhite; Ellis). Many of these coffee houses were situated close to the places where politicians, merchants, and other significant people congregated and did business, near government buildings such as Parliament, as well as courts, ports and other travel route hubs (Lillywhite 17). A great deal of information was shared within these spaces and, as a result, the coffee house became a key venue for communication, especially the reading and distribution of print and scribal publications (Cowan 85). At this time, “no coffee house worth its name” would be without a ready selection of newspapers for its patrons (Cowan 173). By working to twenty-four hour diurnal cycles and heightening the sense of repetition and regularity, coffee houses also played a crucial role in routinising news as a form of daily consumption alongside other forms of habitual consumption (including that of coffee drinking). In Cowan’s words, “restoration coffee houses soon became known as places ‘dasht with diurnals and books of news’” (172). Among these was the short-lived but nonetheless infamous social gossip publication, The Tatler (1709-10), which was strongly associated with the London coffee houses and, despite its short publication life, offers great insight into the social life and scandals of the time. The coffee house became, in short, “the primary social space in which ‘news’ was both produced and consumed” (Cowan 172). The proprietors of coffee houses were quick to exploit this situation by dealing in “news mongering” and developing their own news publications to supplement their incomes (172). They sometimes printed news, commentary and gossip that other publishers were not willing to print. However, as their reputation as news providers grew, so did the pressure on coffee houses to meet the high cost of continually acquiring or producing journals (Cowan 173; Ellis 185-206). In addition to the provision of news, coffee houses were vital sites for other forms of communication. For example, coffee houses were key venues where “one might deposit and receive one’s mail” (Cowan 175), and the Penny Post used coffeehouses as vital pick-up and delivery centres (Lillywhite 17). As Cowan explains, “Many correspondents [including Jonathan Swift] used a coffeehouse as a convenient place to write their letters as well as to send them” (176). This service was apparently provided gratis for regular patrons, but coffee house owners were less happy to provide this for their more infrequent customers (Cowan 176). London’s coffee houses functioned, in short, as notable sites of sociality that bundled together drinking coffee with news provision and postal and other services to attract customers (Cowan; Ellis). Key to the success of the London coffee house of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the figure of the virtuoso habitué (Cowan 105)—an urbane individual of the middle or upper classes who was skilled in social intercourse, skills that were honed through participation in the highly ritualised and refined forms of interpersonal communication, such as visiting the stately homes of that time. In contrast to such private visits, the coffee house provided a less formalised and more spontaneous space of sociality, but where established social skills were distinctly advantageous. A striking example of the figure of the virtuoso habitué is the philosopher, architect and scientist Robert Hooke (1635-1703). Hooke, by all accounts, used the opportunities provided by his regular visits to coffee houses “to draw on the knowledge of a wide variety of individuals, from servants and skilled laborers to aristocrats, as well as to share and display novel scientific instruments” (Cowan 105) in order to explore and develop his virtuoso interests. The coffee house also served Hooke as a place to debate philosophy with cliques of “like-minded virtuosi” and thus formed the “premier locale” through which he could “fulfil his own view of himself as a virtuoso, as a man of business, [and] as a man at the centre of intellectual life in the city” (Cowan 105-06). For Hooke, the coffee house was a space for serious work, and he was known to complain when “little philosophical work” was accomplished (105-06). Sociality operates in this example as a form of creative performance, demonstrating individual skill, and is tied to other forms of creative output. Patronage of a coffee house involved hearing and passing on gossip as news, but also entailed skill in philosophical debate and other intellectual pursuits. It should also be noted that the complex role of the coffee house as a locus of communication, sociality, and creativity was repeated elsewhere. During the 1600s in Egypt (and elsewhere in the Middle East), for example, coffee houses served as sites of intensive literary activity as well as the locations for discussions of art, sciences and literature, not to mention also of gambling and drug use (Hattox 101). While the popularity of coffee houses had declined in London by the 1800s, café culture was flowering elsewhere in mainland Europe. In the late 1870s in Paris, Edgar Degas and Edward Manet documented the rich café life of the city in their drawings and paintings (Ellis 216). Meanwhile, in Vienna, “the kaffeehaus offered another evocative model of urban and artistic modernity” (Ellis 217; see also Bollerey 44-81). Serving wine and dinners as well as coffee and pastries, the kaffeehaus was, like cafés elsewhere in Europe, a mecca for writers, artists and intellectuals. The Café Royal in London survived into the twentieth century, mainly through the patronage of European expatriates and local intellectuals such as Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, T. S. Elliot, and Henri Bergson (Ellis 220). This pattern of patronage within specific and more isolated cafés was repeated in famous gatherings of literary identities elsewhere in Europe throughout the twentieth century. From this historical perspective, a picture emerges of how the social functions of the coffee house and its successors, the espresso bar and modern café, have shifted over the course of their histories (Bollerey 44-81). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the coffee house was an important location for vibrant social interaction and the consumption and distribution of various forms of communication such as gossip, news, and letters. However, in the years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the café was more commonly a site for more restricted social interaction between discrete groups. Studies of cafés and creativity during this era focus on cafés as “factories of literature, inciters to art, and breeding places for new ideas” (Fitch, The Grand 18). Central in these accounts are bohemian artists, their associated social circles, and their preferred cafés de bohème (for detailed discussion, see Wilson; Fitch, Paris Café; Brooker; Grafe and Bollerey 4-41). As much of this literature on café culture details, by the early twentieth century, cafés emerge as places that enable individuals to carve out a space for sociality and creativity which was not possible elsewhere in the modern metropolis. Writing on the modern metropolis, Simmel suggests that the concentration of people and things in cities “stimulate[s] the nervous system of the individual” to such an extent that it prompts a kind of self-preservation that he terms a “blasé attitude” (415). This is a form of “reserve”, he writes, which “grants to the individual a [certain] kind and an amount of personal freedom” that was hitherto unknown (416). Cafés arguably form a key site in feeding this dynamic insofar as they facilitate self-protectionism—Fitch’s “pool of privacy” (The Grand 22)—and, at the same time, produce a sense of individual freedom in Simmel’s sense of the term. That is to say, from the early-to-mid twentieth century, cafés have become complex settings in terms of the relationships they enable or constrain between living in public, privacy, intimacy, and cultural practice. (See Haine for a detailed discussion of how this plays out in relation to working class engagement with Paris cafés, and Wilson as well as White on other cultural contexts, such as Japan.) Threaded throughout this history is a clear celebration of the individual artist as a kind of virtuoso habitué of the contemporary café. Café Jama Michalika The following historical moment, drawn from a powerful point in the mid-twentieth century, illustrates this last stage in the evolution of the relationship between café space, communication, and creativity. This particular historical moment concerns the renowned Polish composer and conductor Krzysztof Penderecki, who is most well-known for his avant-garde piece Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960), his Polymorphia (1961), and St Luke Passion (1963-66), all of which entailed new compositional and notation techniques. Poland, along with other European countries devastated by the Second World War, underwent significant rebuilding after the war, also investing heavily in the arts, musical education, new concert halls, and conservatoria (Monastra). In the immediate post-war period, Poland and Polish culture was under the strong ideological influence exerted by the Soviet Union. However, as Thomas notes, within a year of Stalin’s death in 1953, “there were flickering signs of moderation in Polish culture” (83). With respect to musical creativity, a key turning point was the Warsaw Autumn Music Festival of 1956. “The driving force” behind the first festival (which was to become an annual event), was Polish “composers’ overwhelming sense of cultural isolation and their wish to break the provincial nature of Polish music” at that time (Thomas 85). Penderecki was one of a younger generation of composers who participated in, and benefited from, these early festivals, making his first appearance in 1959 with his composition Strophes, and successive appearances with Dimensions of Time and Silence in 1960, and Threnody in 1961 (Thomas 90). Penderecki married in the 1950s and had a child in 1955. This, in combination with the fact that his wife was a pianist and needed to practice daily, restricted Penderecki’s ability to work in their small Krakow apartment. Nor could he find space at the music school which was free from the intrusion of the sound of other instruments. Instead, he frequented the café Jama Michalika off the central square of Krakow, where he worked most days between nine in the morning and noon, when he would leave as a pianist began to play. Penderecki states that because of the small space of the café table, he had to “invent [a] special kind of notation which allowed me to write the piece which was for 52 instruments, like Threnody, on one small piece of paper” (Krzysztof Penderecki, 2000). In this, Penderecki created a completely new set of notation symbols, which assisted him in graphically representing tone clustering (Robinson 6) while, in his score for Polymorphia, he implemented “novel graphic notation, comparable with medical temperature charts, or oscillograms” (Schwinger 29) to represent in the most compact way possible the dense layering of sounds and vocal elements that is developed in this particular piece. This historical account is valuable because it contributes to discussions on individual creativity that both depends on, and occurs within, the material space of the café. This relationship is explored in Walter Benjamin’s essay “Polyclinic”, where he develops an extended analogy between the writer and the café and the surgeon and his instruments. As Cohen summarises, “Benjamin constructs the field of writerly operation both in medical terms and as a space dear to Parisian intellectuals, as an operating table that is also the marble-topped table of a café” (179). At this time, the space of the café itself thus becomes a vital site for individual cultural production, putting the artist in touch with the social life of the city, as many accounts of writers and artists in the cafés of Paris, Prague, Vienna, and elsewhere in Europe attest. “The attraction of the café for the writer”, Fitch argues, “is that seeming tension between the intimate circle of privacy in a comfortable room, on the one hand, and the flow of (perhaps usable) information all around on the other” (The Grand 11). Penderecki talks about searching for a sound while composing in café Jama Michalika and, hearing the noise of a passing tram, subsequently incorporated it into his famous composition, Threnody (Krzysztof Penderecki, 2000). There is an indirect connection here with the attractions of the seventeenth century coffee houses in London, where news writers drew much of their gossip and news from the talk within the coffee houses. However, the shift is to a more isolated, individualistic habitué. Nonetheless, the aesthetic composition of the café space remains essential to the creative productivity described by Penderecki. A concept that can be used to describe this method of composition is contained within one of Penderecki’s best-known pieces, Polymorphia (1961). The term “polymorphia” refers not to the form of the music itself (which is actually quite conventionally structured) but rather to the multiple blending of sounds. Schwinger defines polymorphia as “many formedness […] which applies not […] to the form of the piece, but to the broadly deployed scale of sound, [the] exchange and simultaneous penetration of sound and noise, the contrast and interflow of soft and hard sounds” (131). This description also reflects the rich material context of the café space as Penderecki describes its role in shaping (both enabling and constraining) his creative output. Creativity, Technology, Materialism The materiality of the café—including the table itself for Penderecki—is crucial in understanding the relationship between the forms of creative output and the material conditions of the spaces that enable them. In Penderecki’s case, to understand the origins of the score and even his innovative forms of musical notation as artefacts of communication, we need to understand the material conditions under which they were created. As a fixture of twentieth and twenty-first century urban environments, the café mediates the private within the public in a way that offers the contemporary virtuoso habitué a rich, polymorphic sensory experience. In a discussion of the indivisibility of sensation and its resistance to language, writer Anna Gibbs describes these rich experiential qualities: sitting by the window in a café watching the busy streetscape with the warmth of the morning sun on my back, I smell the delicious aroma of coffee and simultaneously feel its warmth in my mouth, taste it, and can tell the choice of bean as I listen idly to the chatter in the café around me and all these things blend into my experience of “being in the café” (201). Gibbs’s point is that the world of the café is highly synaesthetic and infused with sensual interconnections. The din of the café with its white noise of conversation and overlaying sounds of often carefully chosen music illustrates the extension of taste beyond the flavour of the coffee on the palate. In this way, the café space provides the infrastructure for a type of creative output that, in Gibbs’s case, facilitates her explanation of expression and affect. The individualised virtuoso habitué, as characterised by Penderecki’s work within café Jama Michalika, simply describes one (celebrated) form of the material conditions of communication and creativity. An essential factor in creative cultural output is contained in the ways in which material conditions such as these come to be organised. As Elizabeth Grosz expresses it: Art is the regulation and organisation of its materials—paint, canvas, concrete, steel, marble, words, sounds, bodily movements, indeed any materials—according to self-imposed constraints, the creation of forms through which these materials come to generate and intensify sensation and thus directly impact living bodies, organs, nervous systems (4). Materialist and medium-oriented theories of media and communication have emphasised the impact of physical constraints and enablers on the forms produced. McLuhan, for example, famously argued that the typewriter brought writing, speech, and publication into closer association, one effect of which was the tighter regulation of spelling and grammar, a pressure toward precision and uniformity that saw a jump in the sales of dictionaries (279). In the poetry of E. E. Cummings, McLuhan sees the typewriter as enabling a patterned layout of text that functions as “a musical score for choral speech” (278). In the same way, the café in Penderecki’s recollections both constrains his ability to compose freely (a creative activity that normally requires ample flat surface), but also facilitates the invention of a new language for composition, one able to accommodate the small space of the café table. Recent studies that have sought to materialise language and communication point to its physicality and the embodied forms through which communication occurs. As Packer and Crofts Wiley explain, “infrastructure, space, technology, and the body become the focus, a move that situates communication and culture within a physical, corporeal landscape” (3). The confined and often crowded space of the café and its individual tables shape the form of productive output in Penderecki’s case. Targeting these material constraints and enablers in her discussion of art, creativity and territoriality, Grosz describes the “architectural force of framing” as liberating “the qualities of objects or events that come to constitute the substance, the matter, of the art-work” (11). More broadly, the design features of the café, the form and layout of the tables and the space made available for individual habitation, the din of the social encounters, and even the stimulating influences on the body of the coffee served there, can be seen to act as enablers of communication and creativity. Conclusion The historical examples examined above indicate a material link between cafés and communication. They also suggest a relationship between materialism and creativity, as well as the roots of the romantic association—or mythos—of cafés as a key source of cultural life as they offer a “shared place of composition” and an “environment for creative work” (Fitch, The Grand 11). We have detailed one example pertaining to European coffee consumption, cafés and creativity. While we believe Penderecki’s case is valuable in terms of what it can tell us about forms of communication and creativity, clearly other cultural and historical contexts may reveal additional insights—as may be found in the cases of Middle Eastern cafés (Hattox) or the North American diner (Hurley), and in contemporary developments such as the café as a source of free WiFi and the commodification associated with global coffee chains. Penderecki’s example, we suggest, also sheds light on a longer history of creativity and cultural production that intersects with contemporary work practices in city spaces as well as conceptualisations of the individual’s place within complex urban spaces. References Benjamin, Walter. “Polyclinic” in “One-Way Street.” One-Way Street and Other Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. London: Verso, 1998: 88-9. 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