Building on the rising scholarly attention for relational understanding of family involvement in international student employment, this article explores the role of family in international student future-making through students’ narratives. Using narrative interviewing with Chinese international students at a United Kingdom university, this study examines students’ accounts of how family mediated their meaning-making about their possible career futures. The findings highlight that family impacts unfold through occupational memories, financial arrangements, expectations, conversations and intergenerational interpretations of what types of future are realistic, worthy of pursuing or postponing. By focusing on the period before and around anticipated return, this study captures how career possibilities were imagined, resisted, postponed, reconsidered, and revised through students’ interactions with family members and in response to changing policy and labour-market conditions. This study contributes to a temporal account of family mediation by showing how the meaning and force of family influence change as students encounter migration experiences, policy disruptions and uncertain labour markets.
Culture shock and acculturation are common challenges for international students, yet the relationships among linguistic, sociocultural, and psychological adaptation remain underexplored. Drawing on Oberg’s Culture Shock Theory, Berry’s Acculturation Model, and Searle and Ward’s Psychosocial Acculturation Theory, this qualitative phenomenological study investigated the experiences of 15 Pakistani graduate and postgraduate students studying at four universities in London. Data from semi-structured interviews were analyzed thematically. The findings suggest that acculturation is best understood as a dynamic process of negotiating through language, identity, and social relationships rather than as a linear progression from culture shock to adjustment. Language emerged as the central mediating factor linking academic participation, social integration, and psychological wellbeing. Difficulties with British accents and dialects influenced communication, friendship formation, classroom engagement, and feelings of belonging. Participants also reported homesickness, loneliness, cultural dissonance, and identity tensions. However, adaptation was facilitated through the development of linguistic competence, intercultural awareness, social support networks, institutional assistance, and psychological resilience. The study argues that successful acculturation depends on the interaction of linguistic, sociocultural, and psychological resources and highlights the pivotal role of language in shaping international students’ experiences of adjustment. These findings contribute to acculturation research and offer implications for universities seeking to strengthen support for international students.
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is rapidly transforming the communicative processes through which coordinated online manipulation is produced, personalized, and coordinated at unprecedented scale, raising growing concerns about its societal implications. This Mini Review critically examines empirical research published during the first 3 years of widespread public accessibility of GenAI to assess how these developments are reshaping Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior (CIB) across different societal domains. Three interconnected developments consistently emerge: the transformation of communicative production through scalable, personalized, and multimodal content generation; increasing AI-assisted coordination of influence campaigns; and new forms of communicative vulnerability associated with increasingly human-like synthetic communication. Together, these developments suggest that coordinated influence is becoming more adaptive, persistent, and difficult to recognize within evolving human–AI communicative configurations. Beyond synthesizing recent empirical evidence, the review identifies emerging conceptual and methodological challenges concerning communicative agency, coordination, and authenticity, while outlining future directions for sociological research. Overall, the growing use of GenAI in evolving CIB poses significant risks to public trust, opinion formation, and democratic discourse, underscoring the urgency of understanding and addressing this rapidly evolving phenomenon.
How Chinese social organizations achieve survival and development through strategic actions under the dual constraints of the institutional environment and resource dependency is a core issue in grassroots social governance innovation. This study takes the Z Social Work Service and Development Research Center in H Province as a case study. Adopting a resource acquisition perspective, it analyzes from meso-level dimensions—including the resource dependency structure, internal governance structure, and interactions with external actors—how social organizations exert agency to facilitate their own development. The research finds that within the context of vertical government purchase of services creating "control dependency," Organization Z mitigated brain drain caused by low compensation by embedding emotional incentives into its internal management through a "simulated family-ization" governance structure. In horizontal resource acquisition, it achieved fund superposition through "project nesting" and "signaling mechanisms," and constructed a diversified resource network via social–commercial cooperation, forming a strategy of "institutional arbitrage." The study further indicates that social organizations within the "strong state-weak society" structure exhibit characteristics of "dependent autonomy." Their strategic choices are constrained by the rigid institutional environment yet simultaneously create flexible space through informal networks and emotional labour. This finding provides a new perspective for understanding the developmental pathways of social organizations in the Chinese context, revealing the dynamic game between institutional embeddedness and organizational agency.
This article revisits Niklas Luhmann's concept of “functional illegality,” originally developed for organizations, and shows that it can be extended productively to the level of society. It argues that rule-deviations within function systems are not signs of institutional weakness or pathologies, but recurrent and, under certain conditions, functional responses to tensions generated by differentiation itself. Illegality is understood here in a non-juridical sense as deviation from system-internal programmes and standards. The article discusses three explanations for the systematic emergence of such deviations and then focusses in particular on “auxiliary codes” as semi-legitimate supporting structures. The article concludes by taking a look at the problem of distinguishing functional from non-functional illegality.
