This special issue focuses on the role concept, which has largely fallen out of use in sociology, but which seems ideally suited to analyze the circumstances in which legal professionals work nowadays. Their occupations are often surrounded by constitutional guarantees and professional standards, but at the same time in full swing due to policy reforms referred to as New Public Management and Socially Effective Judiciary (Maatschappelijk Effectieve Rechtspraak). This combination of relative role stability and rapid change can ensure that the predictability and desirability of the interpretation attributed to professional roles become subject of discussion and reflection. The way the role concept is used in this special issue is deliberately decoupled from the much-criticized structural functionalism with which it is often associated. The fact that this sociological perspective has lost much of its sway since the 1960s, because of its conservative character, makes it easier to give dynamics, ambiguity, conflict and resistance a prominent place in contemporary analyzes in which the role concept is central. The authors in this special issue examine whether the role fulfillment by professionals working in the legal field is actually subject of discussion and reflection and how this dynamic manifests itself.

The COVID-19 pandemic swept the world in 2020 impelling us to reconsider the basic principles of constitutional law like the separation of power, the rule of law, human rights protection, etc. The two most pressing legal issues that have attracted the attention of legal scholars so far are, on the one hand, the different regulatory policies implemented by governments and, on the other, the balance among the branches of government in deciding matters of the emergency. The pandemic has determined a further and violent acceleration of the legislature’s temporal dimension and the acknowledgement that, to make legislation quicker, parliament must permanently displace its legislative power in favour of government. Measures adopted to tackle the outbreak and recover from the interruption of economic and industrial businesses powerfully confirm that today our societies are more dependent on the executives than on parliaments and, from a temporal perspective, that the language of the law is substantially the present instead of the future. Against this background, this article discusses how the prevalence of governments’ legislative power leads to the use of temporary and experimental legislation in a time, like the pandemic, when the issue of ‘surviving’ becomes dominant.

In 1990, criminologist Herman Franke published a seminal book on 200 years detention in the Netherlands. For the occasion of the reissue of this book in 2020, the question is posed to what extent Franke’s vision of a gradual ‘emancipation’ of prisoners, in the realm of a societal ‘civilization process’, as it is put forward by Norbert Elias, still holds today. The author confronts the civilization perspective with the three main competing paradigms in penology, derived from the work of Émile Durkheim, Max Weber and Michel Foucault. After describing some recent developments in penal practices, he concludes that despite the fact that sanctioning is increasingly taking place within society, which can well be analyzed from an eliasian perspective, there is little reason to still adhere to the progress optimism, implicit in Franke’s book, and that today we rather witness an emancipation of the ‘angry citizen’, in which vulnerable groups in society, such as prisoners, are despised rather than ‘emancipated’.

The article discusses the connection between Bauhaus, a modern art and architecture school founded in 1919, and National Socialism. The central question is to what extent modern ideas about art and culture, architecture and modern life went hand in hand with the emerging and assertive National Socialist ideas. In the review of an art and architecture collection, activities of famous Bauhaus figures are traced in order to discuss the Bauhaus myth. Accordingly, it must be concluded that neutrality of art and architecture does not exist and Bauhaus modernity was not incompatible with National Socialism.

What is a good governance approach to uncertainty or reflexivity? Reducing uncertainty is an important task of policy and governance, but it can also derail. That is why good governance includes holding space for uncertainty. A Christian worldview provides insights for a more relaxed handling of uncertainty. The notions of certitudo, improvisation and humility are then central. Together, they form building blocks for a post-secular perspective on governance in times of crisis.

In recent years, there has been a shift within animal ethics, in which animals are no longer seen purely as passive suffering subjects, but attention is also being paid to their role as agents. In this essay, we look at what that agency means and argue that in the Anthropocene animals are actually victimized in two ways: because their agency is literally curtailed by human actions and because at the knowledge level agency is taken away from them: we see them as victims even when they are not. In this text, we focus on zoo animals to illustrate how this works.

In this article we show how the concept of ‘institutional work’ can be used to study citizen participation in the field of security arrangements. Institutional work starts from the perspective of actors trying to influence security institutions, and not from the perspective of government (as concepts like the ‘participation society’ and ‘ladder’ do). As such, this dynamic concept can be a useful addition to the conceptual arsenal of security experts. By applying the concept to the case of the Voluntary Fire Brigade in nineteenth-century Utrecht (1879-1890) we show how institutional work can work in practice. Finally, we reflect on the contribution that institutional work can make to our understanding of citizen participation in the field of safety.

De bestuurlijke, strafrechtelijke en integrale aanpak van georganiseerde misdaad maken overuren maakt. Aan actie van de zijde van het huidige kabinet en aandacht in de verkiezingsprogramma’s is op dit terrein geen gebrek. Enorme plannen voor versterking van de aanpak van ondermijning zagen het afgelopen jaar het licht. Maar is de focus goed? De auteurs gaan na wat er kan worden geleerd uit criminologisch onderzoek naar ondermijnende drugscriminaliteit.

This paper considers access to the rule of law as a requirement for the well-functioning of the rule of law in society. In most rule of law debates, access to the rule of law is not a topic of discussion because these scholars focus themselves solely on the legalistic dimension of the rule of law. Barber was the first to mention the social dimension explicitly but without a theoretical framework. Based on the three capitals of Bourdieu, this paper offers a framework to determine the elements of the social dimension. With these capitals, barriers to the access to the rule of law for individuals can be identified, and solutions can be offered.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused overcrowded IC units. In the Netherlands a discussion erupted on what category of patients should be granted a bed, if there would not be enough place to treat everybody. In this article the medical guidelines for this situation as well as the public discussion are examined and related to Ulrich Beck’s theory of reflexive modernization. It is argued that discussion and regulation of this dilemma follow reflexive patterns, albeit patchy. The discussion and regulation displayed reflective understanding of the perilous position of the elderly and frail but issues of class and ethnicity were not discussed. This research revealed that Beck’s theory holds its own when tested in an empirical situation, but it has weaknesses in regard to the predicted emergence of cosmopolitan solidarity.

Racism is related to the process of ‘othering’. Individual people or groups can be described as ‘other’ by depicting them as ‘beasts’. In another form of othering accusations of maltreatment of other than human animals play an important role: awful people abuse innocent animals. Next to that concepts like ‘genocide’ and ‘slavery’ are nowadays used in order to describe the way humans treat other animals. All of this influences the debate on racism.

This article adopts German philosopher Hans Vaihinger’s Philosophy of “as if” as a vehicle to sketch the main features of the emerging research domain of narrative victimology, as well as address some of its limitations. Vaihinger emphasizes the importance of useful untruths, i.e. things we know to be untrue, but nevertheless behave as if they are not, if that strengthens their use as instruments for us to find our way more easily in the world. This applies to our daily lives, but also to our societal institutions and the models and metaphors that underlie our approaches to (social) science. The paper argues that the narrative metaphor of the historical event is often more apt to enhance our understanding of victimological phenomena than that of the mechanism, which is the default metaphor of (social) science. The paper subsequently describes four areas of inquiry of narrative victimology: victimisation’s impact on (life) stories; narratives in the aftermath of victimization; narratives of victim’s experiences with justice processes and the coincidence and juxtaposition of the victims’ narrative with narratives of other significant parties. For all its merits however, the narrative metaphor is also a “useful untruth”, equipped with its own limitations, for instance the difficulty of language in describing first hand experiences of victims and the possibility that narrative structures will be imposed upon victim experiences.

This article examines expressions of conspicuous consumption on 19 recent releases by the most popular Dutch rap artists of 2018. In line with Veblen’s (1899/2017) notion of conspicuous consumption, our content analysis of these rap lyrics shows that Dutch rappers ‘spend’ their money on all kinds of ostentatious and eye-catching luxury goods such as designer clothing and jewelry (‘drip’), cars or holidays, but also that rappers ‘stack’ some of the money they earn by putting it aside. Our results indicate that these expressions of conspicuous consumption seem to be rooted in, and fueled by, experiences with poverty, stigmatization, and discrimination.

The lifeblood of contemporary consumer capitalism is ever-growing and accelerating human needs for new consumer goods and services. Needs that remain unsatisfied on the one hand but defy the carrying capacity of planet Earth on the other. Anything but a win-win situation. Although excess harms, the infrastructure of consumption pays full service to perpetuate and cultivate the ‘more and faster’ orientation of today’s consumers. It is believed that we can cope with excess by taking efficiency measures and paying attention to recycling and refurbishing. This article, however, points out that there is need to rethink consumption and reconsider prevalent orientations dedicated to excess consumption more fundamentally.