A key question in the management of group-housed captive animals is how long can an individual be removed from a social group and still be reintroduced with minimal social upheaval. In order to answer this question we require a knowledge of how long cage-mates, following a specified period of group-housing, can remember one another after separation. This issue was investigated in laboratory rats (Rattus norvegicus). Rats were group-housed for 18 days before being housed individually. One hour, 48 hr, and 96 hr after separation, they were exposed simultaneously to odour cues originating from unfamiliar rats and from former cage-mates. The rats spent significantly more time investigating the unfamiliar odour 1 hr and 48 hr, but not 96 hr, after separation, suggesting that, after 18 days of group-housing, juvenile rats remember former cage-mates for between 48 and 96 hr. The implications of this result for animal welfare are discussed.

Elements of husbandry procedures, such as handling, may disrupt rodent social behaviour. Such effects may be contingent upon the familiarity between individuals and upon the quality and quantity of the disruption. We investigated this issue using laboratory rats. We placed 36 rats into groups of three. At the point of group formation, and at 24 h, 7 days and two weeks afterwards, individuals received one of three treatments: ‘handling’, exposure to novel conspecific ‘urine’, or ‘control’ (undisturbed), for a duration of either 5 or 15 mins. We used a social recognition test to measure the ability of the rats to recognise the urine of group members of increasing familiarity following the implementation of these treatments. The ‘control’ treatment did not appear to disrupt social recognition. The 5 min ‘urine’ treatment appeared to disrupt recognition only when the rats had received the briefest experience of the ‘familiar’ urine (5 mins). The 5 min ‘handling’ treatment, however, appeared far more disruptive, with an apparent disruption of social recognition even when familiarity with the urine donor was high (eg 7 days of group housing). Both the ‘handling’ and ‘urine’ treatments appeared more disruptive when presented for an increased duration (15 mins). There was also some evidence that increased experience of the handling procedure might reduce its disruptive effect. The results of this study have several implications for the welfare of laboratory-housed rats, and these are discussed.

Recently, as a corollary of intensified efforts to understand the rise of right-wing populism, the topic of social recognition has gained renewed attention in sociological research. It seems that a sense of misrecognition and exclusion is shaped as much by cultural as by economic factors. Just how these elements are interlinked, however, remains a black box. In this article, I offer an empirical contribution to this problem: I demonstrate that social recognition is nourished in everyday interpersonal relations and that people negotiate ideas of economic deservingness in their social surroundings—so much so, in fact, that they make social ties dependent on them. The article studies the case of the post-1989 societal shifts in formerly communist-ruled East Germany, a context marked by a pervasive sense of social exclusion today. In interviews with 41 individuals who lived through this rupturing process, I identify a crucial dynamic of social misrecognition in how respondents evaluate other peoples’ strategies of coping with the economic fallout of this time and how they draw—often deeply personal—boundaries between themselves and others on these grounds.

The aim of this study was to describe and analyze how caseworkers in the Swedish disability services deal with people disabled by road accidents. Data were collected by means of a web-based survey of 259 caseworkers, and a direct content analysis of open-ended questions was used to interpret and analyse the data. The conceptual toolbox consisted of Habermas' lifeworld-system dichotomy, social recognition, and concepts from human service organisation research. Dilemmas within the following areas were identified: interaction with the service users, experiences of communication, assessment of needs, and inter-organisational cooperation between health care and disability services. These difficulties occurred because of tensions between ‘lifeworld’ and ‘system’, and because social recognition and mutual communicative action were not easy to achieve when cognitive impairments distorted and prevented the development of an ‘ideal speech situation’. Inter-organisational cooperation was difficult because of different regulations and professional perspectives.