Chapter 2 lays the foundation for the book’s theoretical framework by introducing the collective action problem and examining how protest mobilization unfolds in practice. Drawing on global literature and empirical examples, it demonstrates that elite-driven protest is a widespread and influential form of collective action. It shows, however, that successful elite mobilization requires deep local knowledge, strong community networks, and trust – resources that many elites lack. To overcome this gap, the chapter introduces the concept of the protest broker: an intermediary who facilitates connections between elites and potential protesters. It explores who protest brokers are, what they do, and why their role is central to protest mobilization. It argues further, that existing theories of elite mobilization implicitly assume the presence of such intermediaries, yet rarely acknowledge them explicitly. By making protest brokers visible, this chapter reframes key assumptions in the protest literature and connects them to broader research on political and vote brokers. It also situates protest brokers among other grassroots actors – such as shop floor stewards and activists – clarifying their unique but overlapping functions in enabling protest and shaping its location and form.

Chapter 1 begins by addressing how faith was central to Augustine’s theology, reading of Scripture, and Christian experience. Although Augustine understood faith as intellectual, this fit within his classical understanding of the human person. Moreover, though faith is intellectual, it is never without some motivating affection, is deeply interpersonal, and frequently has the sense of personal trust. Three early works ground and foreshadow his mature thinking on justification by faith. In de vera religione (True Religions), faith emerges as theological because it truly relates one to God through the incarnation; it is not merely pedagogical and instrumental, as in Neoplatonism. In de utilitate credendi (The Advantage of Believing), Augustine appeals to the necessity of faith in the case of students and friends to demonstrate how faith is virtuous. Lastly, de fide et symbolo (Faith and the Creed) shows how faith is fundamentally ecclesial through the inseparable relationship between the faith animating the believer and the faith received from the Church.

This chapter addresses the role of oxytocin and vasopressin in shaping social behavior, reviewing both human and animal studies. The chapter critiques the early optimism around oxytocin’s ability to foster trust and emotional understanding, providing evidence from failed replication studies and highlighting the effects of sex, context, and brain region-specific interactions. It also assesses clinical research on oxytocin as a potential treatment for autism spectrum disorder, pointing out the limitations of current approaches and the complexity of translating animal research into human applications.

This chapter focuses on the role that allusion plays in establishing a shared language of intimacy. It describes how Wollstonecraft and Godwin, in their letters to one another, trade literary allusions as a way of flirting. That practice cast doubt on the transparency of speech, however, since the difficulty of openly expressing feeling, versus the relative ease of slipping into a literary cliché, led to the sense of distrust that also features throughout their letters. The tension between transparency and trust is further explored in the pair’s novels. Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria presents a heroine who falls in love with a man based on the books he reads, in a manner which suggests either quixotic delusion or a defiant trust in the imagination. Godwin’s novels depict scenes of shared reading which rethink his earlier philosophical discussions of personal affection versus independence, and openness versus secrecy or reserve.

Chapter 3 dives deep into the beating heart of cryptocurrency, the paradoxical technology that has made early adherents billions, while adding nothing of real value to society. By any measure, crypto has failed at its stated goal: creating a better financial system. Looking to Bitcoin, we show how the core innovation – a distributed encrypted database – makes a terrible payment system, with slow, expensive, uncorrectable transactions. But crypto enthusiasts ignore more than a decade of failure, doubling down on grandiose claims about solving everything from financial inclusion to corporate governance while ignoring the far easier, low-tech solutions to these very real needs. We include an interview with an early supporter of the massive crypto currency Ethereum, who came to see how crypto became “just a tool for the wealthy to become wealthier” rather than fulfilling its promise of financial inclusion for the world’s 1.7 billion unbanked people.

Remote working – strongly widespread during the covid-19 pandemic –is today one of the main forms of innovation in the world of work. As always, within innovation phenomena we have static elements, from the past, and dynamic elements, looking to change the status quo. Consequently, the evaluation of remote work may be either conservative or innovative. Remote work can be considered as a simple re-proposition of the Fordist-Taylorist Enterprise that does not actually change the characteristics of employment as a not democratic relationship involving the worker submission to the employer managerial, control and disciplinary power. On the other hand, remote work can be recognized as the symptom of a broader cultural, organizational and process change in the firm, allowing the worker to conquer new spaces of freedom and autonomy, which not only allow for a new balance in the relationship between work and life, but also redefine both the factual and juridical connotations of subordination. This chapter analyzes this second perspective and, on the basis of legislation and collective bargaining, tries to define the elements of change in the concept and morphology of subordination within the employment relationship.

This chapter analyzes how social policy in China has contributed to the well-being of the middle class and their trust of the government. The author argues that if we examine not just China’s earlier reform period (1978–2003) and the fast-growing era (2003–2012), but also the sharp Left Turn in recent years (2012–present), it is hard to fit China’s social policy into the theories of productivism or developmental welfare state that are often associated with the East Asian countries. China’s welfare system is an instrumentalist model which is centered on maintaining the leadership of the Communist Party of China. With this in mind, social policies have been actively used in the past few years to support two mutually independent but intersecting intermediate goals: maintaining economic development and social stability. Both are vital to the party’s authority.

This chapter dives into one of the most difficult clinical ethics consultations in the author’s career. A vibrant patient suffers a cardiac arrest and severe anoxic brain injury on their way to dialysis. After weeks of ICU treatment, the family came when the patient was liberated from the ventilator. The daily spontaneous breathing trials made everyone think (and prepare) that the patient would only have minutes to live after extubation. Yet, the patient began to breath. When the minutes turned into an hour, the yelling began. The ethics pager went off moments later, and no one could have be prepared for journey ahead. Trust was gone, and the current course of comfort care would bring an irreversible outcome. The effort to buy time in the face of uncertainty resulted in a complex sequence of events that unfolded over months. The author reflects on the case and shares the opportunity to learn by failing forward.

Clinical ethics prides itself on communication, collaboration, interdisciplinary cooperation and mediation. But what happens when all those skills and efforts fail? This chapter describes a difficult situation fraught with clinical uncertainty and complicated by an unbridgeable cultural divide that left the clinical parties feeling as if they failed the patient. This case demonstrates that sometimes there is no real closure, no understanding, and no sense of having been helpful. These are the kinds of cases that haunt us.

The Introduction locates transparency in the global governance of agriculture and mineral supply chains. It proposes an analytical focus on the mediations of transparency to tackle the paradox of transparency, a process of mediation that incorrectly understands itself to be a process of disintermediation. This helps to investigate transparency beyond the normative and substantive assessment of its implementation. Rather than assuming that transparency is itself transparent, we ask: What are the technological practices, material qualities, and institutional standards producing transparency? How is transparency standardized, regimented by “ethical” and “responsible” businesses, or valued by traders and investors, from auction rooms to sustainability reports? Acknowledging that transparency is a global value, we question how transparency projects materially organize and semiotically regiment the global production and circulation of commodities across local settings. Focusing on moments and processes of mediation toward disclosure, immediacy, trust, and truth, we introduce how the chapters render transparency observable across sites, actors, institutions, and technologies.

Solidarity is a collective moral relation, and political solidarity, more specifically, is “a committed unity of peoples on a range of interpersonal to social-political levels” connecting their actions for a cause. Collective action to bring about social change in political solidarity includes a variety of potential harms for participants and for the collective whole. Although numerous accounts of solidarity describe the assumption of collective risks, I demonstrate that the solidary relation also includes a willingness to take up associated commitments meant both to mitigate social risks from the larger society within which it forms and ensure the ability for some members to contribute from their particularity. In addition, the relation of solidarity itself carries its own set of risks that participants accept with the belief that collective action offers a better prospect for social change than acting alone. Using examples to illustrate what is at stake, I discuss four facets of risk in solidarity: collective risk, personal risk, social risk, and relational risk. Assessing the potential for harm or exposure to danger in solidarity offers a way to think about expectations against domination and fostering trust within the moral relation.

Chapter 3 explores the role of small group dynamics and collective emotions in facilitating group theorizing, provoking unconventional scientific thought, and facilitating the rise of new scientific movements. It describes RA’s idioculture, their context of theoretical discovery, and the socio-emotional practices Holling used to spark transformative scientific creativity – a process that he called “island time.” I show how holding short, energetic meetings on remote islands with group rituals, personality selectivity, social bonding, charismatic leadership, and inductions to a secret scientific society created what I call “hot spots and hot moments.” These are brief but intense bursts of collective emotion, intersubjectivity, group creativity, and exceptional scientific performance where transformative science is conducted and faith in the group and its ideas were generated. This highlights new aspects of theory group dynamics, including the bursty nature of creative production within them, and the role of collective emotional states, relationships, and evocative locations for producing innovative scientific knowledge that can support new scientific movements.