Conception Of Social Order Research Articles

Social Entropy and Normative Network.

The paper introduces a new concept of social entropy and a new concept of social order, both based on the normative framework of society. From these two concepts, typologies (logical and historical) of societies are inferred and examined in their basic features. To these ends, some well-known concepts such as entropy, order, system, network, synergy, norm, autopoieticity, fetality, and complexity are revisited and placed into an integrated framework. The core body of this paper addresses the structure and the mechanism of social entropy, understood as an institutionally working counterpart of social order. Finally, this paper concludes that social entropy is an artefact, like society itself, and acts through people’s behavior.

Crisis, Contestation and Social Order in Europe: A Sympoietic Analysis

Europe is facing multiple existential crises at once. I argue that these crises are rooted in larger, older patterns of structural contestation that have always animated the EU. Drawing from these patterns, I contend that there are at least two conceptions of social order at work within the EU – an autopoietic model based on bounded hierarchy and a sympoietic model based on decentralization and compromise. I argue that the autopoietic aspects of the Union, and neo-liberal representative democracy in particular, continually produce systemic crises. At the same time, sympoietic practices of inter-institutional adjustment allow us to weather such challenges, albeit imperfectly. Ultimately, I conclude that escaping the cycle of structural crisis requires moving more definitively towards sympoiesis by radically decentralizing and democratizing political and economic power in Europe. 
 
 Full text available at: https://doi.org/10.22215/rera.v12i1.1231

Crisis, Contestation and Social Order in Europe: A Sympoietic Analysis

Abstract Europe is facing multiple existential crises at once. I argue that these crises are rooted in larger, older patterns of structural contestation that have always animated the EU. Drawing from these patterns, I contend that there are at least two conceptions of social order at work within the EU – an autopoietic model based on bounded hierarchy and a sympoietic model based on decentralization and compromise. I argue that the autopoietic aspects of the Union, and neo-liberal representative democracy in particular, continually produce systemic crises. At the same time, sympoietic practices of inter-institutional adjustment allow us to weather such challenges, albeit imperfectly. Ultimately, I conclude that escaping the cycle of structural crisis requires moving more definitively towards sympoiesis by radically decentralizing and democratizing political and economic power in Europe.

"This Is How We Work Here": Informal Logic and Social Order in Primary Health Care Services in Mexico City.

People who work in health care facilities participate in a shared set of tacit agreements, attitudes, habits, and behaviors that contribute to the functioning of those institutions, but that can also cause conflict. This phenomenon has been addressed tangentially in the study of bureaucratic practices in governmental agencies, but it has not been carefully explored in the specific context of public health care centers. To this end, we analyzed a series of encounters among staff and patients, as well as the situations surrounding the services offered, in public primary care health centers in Mexico City, based on Erving Goffman's concepts of social order, encounter, and situation, and on the concepts of formal and informal logic. In a descriptive study over the course of 2 years, we carried out systematic observations in 19 health centers and conducted interviews with medical, technical, and administrative staff, and psychologists, social workers, and patients. We recorded these observations in field notes and performed reflexive analysis with readings on three different levels. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed through identification of thematic categories and subcategories. Information related to encounters and situations from field notes and interviews was selected to triangulate the materials. We found the social order prevailing among staff to be based on a combination of status markers, such as educational level, seniority, and employee versus contractor status, which define the distribution of workloads, material resources, and space. Although this system generates conflicts, it also contributes to the smooth functioning of the health centers. The daily encounters and situations in all of these health centers allow for a set of informal practices that provide a temporary resolution of the contradictions posed by the institution for its workers.

Class Conflict and Social Order in Smith and Marx: The Relevance of Social Philosophy to Business Management

In this paper, we undertake a genealogical study to illustrate how Karl Marx derives his concept of class conflict from Adam Smith’s theory of social order. Based on these findings, we argue that both Smith’s and Marx’s political economies should be interpreted in relation to each other – from the perspective of social philosophy, in particular their shared concepts of social order and necessary opposition of class interests. By appeal to process philosophy, we also argue that this reinterpretation needs to take into account two other ideas shared by Smith and Marx, namely the social individual as person-in-community, and the pursuit of desirable social forms from a humanistic perspective. We conclude by contending that business management practice would benefit from understanding the role of class tensions and social order in stakeholder relations. Specifically, management and organization scholarship should focus on philosophical examinations of the influence of social order on economic activities in an organization in a way that is far more appreciative of the social relations of individuals as being the primary, rather than a secondary, concern.

Female Tunisian Revolutionaries: Leadership and Social (Dis)order in Global News Production

This study offers a critical analysis of ways women were represented during the peak of protests associated with the Tunisian civil resistance campaign in North Africa from late 2010 through early 2011 among newspapers, wire services, and blogs—launch of the Arab Spring (or Arab Awakening). Theoretical underpinning includes norm theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1982) and gender role congruity theory (Eagly & Karau, 2002), as well as Gans's (1979) concept of social order as an enduring news value. Enjoined, these frameworks facilitate interrogation of print and visual texts to reveal characterizations of women and how the outcomes may have shaped public opinion on the global stage. Seven themes describe media representations of women among written and photographic reportage: Female Victims, Comparatively Lucky Women, Frivolous Girls, Female Culprits, Invisible Women, Women as Agentic Leaders, and Female Patriotic Citizens. Results underscore how print and wire media consistently clung to traditional female gender stereotypes, representing women as emotional, communal, and nurturing mothers and wives, whereas blog content represented women as fully engaged agentic leaders and citizens.

Learning spaces without boundaries? Territories, power and how schools regulate learning

In this paper we examine the connection between space, power and pedagogical practice, taking as an example the learning studio of an all-day primary school in Berlin. In recent years, it has become part of German educational policy to promote and support the transition from traditional half-day schools to all-day schools. The all-day model is expected to offset social and educational deficits affecting schools through an individualisation of learning, a process in which educational activities are tailored to the individual and his/her needs in line with progressive educational programmes. In the course of their transitions to the all-day model, many schools have made building alterations and extensions to create new ‘opened’ spaces, similar to the open classroom—a large, open-plan educational space. While the opening up of educational spaces serves as a metaphor for the freedom of individual choice in terms of what, when and how learning happens, based on the pedagogical practices we observed in our sample learning studio, the production of new inequalities problematise this metaphor. Our description of pedagogical practices in the learning studio is preceded by the presentation of our theoretical framework, oriented on Theodore Schatzki's concept of social order and the video-based method, known as focused camera ethnography.

An Essay on Two Conceptions of Social Order

I argue that there is a deep parallel between problems that John Rawls (1955) argued had developed in moral philosophy as a result of not recognizing the difference between two conceptions of rules, and problems that have developed in sociology as a result of not recognizing that there are two conceptions of social order. That most philosophers and sociologists have not appreciated this problem does not weaken the importance of the argument. In fact, I think that the misunderstandings which have resulted from lack of attention to constitutive practices, with research and policy implications effecting social, legal and justice issues in modern society, strengthen the original argument considerably.

The commerce of war: exchange and social order in Latin epic

Latin epics such as Virgil's Aeneid, Lucan's Civil War, and Statius' Thebaid addressed Roman aristocrats whose dealings in gifts, favors, and payments defined their conceptions of social order. In The Commerce of War, Neil Coffee argues that these exchanges play a central yet overlooked role in epic depictions of Roman society. Tracing the collapse of an aristocratic worldview across all three poems, Coffee highlights the distinction they draw between reciprocal gift giving among elites and the more problematic behaviors of buying and selling. In the Aeneid, customary gift and favor exchanges are undermined by characters who view human interaction as short-term and commodity-driven. Civil War takes the next logical step, illuminating how Romans cope once commercial greed has supplanted traditional values. Concluding with the Thebaid, which focuses on the problems of excessive consumption rather than exchange, Coffee closes his powerful case that these poems constitute far-reaching critiques of Roman society during its transition from republic to empire.

The Market, Values and Coordination of Actions

The aim of this article is to contribute to the discussion about the social functions of the market. I am interested in the special kind of social order the social interaction in the market produces, which has been mostly ignored in sociology. In the first part I look for historical reasons for the peripheral role of the market in sociological analysis. My argument in this regard is that this omission of the economic realm becomes more understandable if one takes into consideration not only the prerequisite of entrance into the academic field, namely not to step on the toes of older and more established fields of research, but also the very ambivalent and, in some strands of social thought, even openly hostile attitude to the market. The second part of the paper presents two paradigmatic but problematic cases of a sociological analysis of the economic realm: Émile Durkheim's views and Talcott Parsons' early conception of a society—economy relationship. In the third part I figure out another way to think about the role of the market in society from a standpoint that accepts the centrality of aspects such as values and norms in social life. I do not, however, postulate a societal value consensus at large, but see the economic sphere itself to be the source of those stabilizing mechanisms. As a starting point I use Talcott Parsons' theory of communication media and the concept of social order it implicitly contains. It offers possibilities for finding connections to earlier discussions of the social functions of the market, labelled `commercial ideology', referring to eighteenth-century social thought. With my discussion I hope to show that interactions in the market have wider ramifications for social order, while the market produces its own distinct kind of order not captured by the dichotomy of value vs. interest-based actions and orders so common in sociology.

“It will be quiet enough when we're dead—Now is the time to live” Between planning the modern city and living in it

Zoning was central to Modernist town planning. In Israel, it is impossible to understand the spatial culture without first understanding both the rationale of zoning and the life strategies of the immigrants who populated the towns. This paper outlines the relationship between planning theory and the practices of the inhabitants of Ashdod, Israel. Ethnographic examples are used to show how its inhabitants consume the physical and social spaces of this national modern city. The planners did not achieve their aim of designing a new society. Without directly rejecting the town plan, its new inhabitants took over its physical structure, and put into practice their own definitions of “labor”, “consumption” and “production”. In doing this, they challenged the concept of social order that the governing elite sought to impose on them as a universal, objective order.

Social Order, Fetishism and Reflexivity

In response to Strydom, Nicoll and Gregg’s queries, I draw out some further implications of my analysis of theory classrooms. I aim to clarify the theoretical basis of my concepts of social order and fetishism. I end by considering the pedagogical implications of my analysis. It seems to me that the contradiction between critical values and the classroom’s forms of authority remain irresolvable.

Between God and Country: School Manuals in Social Sciences and Images of the Nation1

A review of how the history of education in Colombia has been analyzed shows that the privileged sources for this task have been educational policies and legislation, along with the ideas and the works of teachers and masters, official statistics on coverage and growth of the educational system, as well as the school texts from the different areas that have formed school curricula. These texts can be considered to be devices that link together the world of social and cultural production with the academic disciplines and the complexity of school culture. In the case of social sciences texts, it is worth noting that it was through these disciplines that several strategies were created for the creation, promotion and dissemination of ideas on the notion of nation‐states by the national elites in the nineteenth century. The objective of this article is to present an analysis of the text Manual de instrucción moral y cívica, written by Francisco José Urrutia in 1907, showing how the policies of the Catholic Church and the policies of the leaders of the traditional parties created a conception of social order and disseminated it through school texts which, as in the case of the above‐mentioned text, were official texts, mandatory in the schools throughout the country, thus in one way or another contributing to the construction of visions of political culture. 1 This article is part of the investigation denominated Political Culture and National Identity Processes in Colombia During the 20th Century. Analysis of School Manuals, co‐financed by the Universidad Pedagógica Nacional and Colciencias, Bogotá‐Colombia.

Crime and Culture: Breaking New Ground in Corruption Research

‘Crime and Culture’ is a Specific Targeted Research Project supported within the Sixth Framework Programme of the European Commission and co-ordinated at Konstanz University, Germany. It brings together 35 researchers across 10 institutions in 8 European countries. The research project aims to develop means to optimise corruption prevention in the EU. The urgency of such a project is reflected in the fact that corruption holds the potential to retard seriously the process of the Community’s enlargement and integration, even to the extent of threatening the very core of its concept of social order. The prevention policies that have been developed by the EU and implemented so far within individual member countries have in general been characterised by legislative, administrative and police force measures. These are based on a definition of corruption prevention developed in political and administrative institutions that, for its implementation, rely on a ‘top-down’ procedure. The research project purports to conduct not an inquiry into the nature of corruption ‘as such’, but rather into the perceptions of corruption held by political and administrative decision-makers in specific regions and cultures, those held by actors representing various institutions and authorities, and above all by the citizens and the media in European societies. The project proceeds from the assumption that the considerably varying perceptions of corruption, determined as they are by ‘cultural dispositions’, have significant influence on a country’s respective awareness of the problem and thereby on the success of any preventative measures. For this reason, the project investigates the ‘fit’ between ‘institutionalised’ prevention policies and how these are perceived in ‘daily practice’, as well as how EU-candidate and member countries as a result handle the issue of corruption. In a final step, the research project intends to make specific recommendations for readjusting this ‘fit’ in the frame of an interactive scholars-experts conference in Brussels. The members of the project consortium are: University of Konstanz (Germany-Co-ordinator), University of Tubingen (Germany), Police University (Federal German State of BadenWurttemberg-Affiliated), Centre for Liberal Strategies (Sofia, Bulgaria), Research Institute for Quality of Life-Romanian Academy (Bucharest, Romania), Galatasaray University (Istanbul, Turkey), University of Zagreb (Croatia), National School of Public Administration and Local Government (Athens, Greece), Panteion University (Athens, Greece), South East European Studies at Oxford (United Kingdom), Center for Research and Policy Making (FYR Macedonia-Affiliated).

The Social Basis of Sacred Spaces in the Prehispanic Andes: Ritual Landscapes of the Dead in Chimú and Inka Societies

Sacred landscapes are a subset of the diverse media that people use to make statements about social order. Mary Douglas has discussed two dimensions of social order—group and grid—and suggested connections between their varied conceptions and expressions in the culturally constructed landscape. I extend Douglas's concepts to a specific domain of sacred landscapes, funerary architecture. Drawing on two examples from the prehispanic Andes, I argue that differences in Chimu and Inka funerary landscapes represent different conceptions of social order. Archaeological investigations of sacred spaces as expressions of varying social experience deepen understanding of Andean societies and other ancient peoples.

Incommensurability, purposivity and international law

Within international law, theory is often considered peripheral to more pressing practical problems. In the first part of this article, it is argued that refusal to take account of theoretical and methodological issues entails that particular descriptions of international law lack validity, and, hence, rational reasons cannot be provided as to why one account should be considered preferable to any other. This problem of rational justification, which emerges in a variety of forms, is referred to as the incommensurability thesis. The argument is illustrated with respect to the ninth edition of Oppenheim's International Law. In part two, a methodology is advanced which demonstrates how a justifiable account of international law can be generated which avoids the incommensurability thesis. This methodology states, specifically, that international lawyers must develop (a) a coherent understanding of the kind of function international law performs in maintaining social order in the relations between states and (b) a substantive conception of social order. Therefore, in order for a particular account of international law to possess validity over rival accounts, international lawyers must take account of social theory and moral and political philosophy. The final part of this article discusses the concepts of international law offered by Weil and Kant, which can be understood as examples of the methodological approach offered in this article.

Ferdinand Tönnies on crime and society: an unexplored contribution to criminological sociology

I offer a discussion of the criminological sociology of Ferdinand Tönnies (1855-1936). While Tönnies is generally well known for his theory of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, his elaborate contributions to the sociological study of crime have been almost entirely neglected in the history of sociology. Situated within Tönnies’ general theoretical perspective, I present the central themes of Tönnies’ study of crime and discuss its conceptual and methodological characteristics as a distinct approach in criminological sociology. I additionally center on the importance of Tönnies’ criminological work for the reception and status of his sociological theory. I argue that the neglect of Tönnies’ crime studies has led to overlooking Tönnies’ aspiration to integrate sociological theory and empirical inquiry, which has contributed to misconstrue his unique conception of social order.

Des « brahmanes » et des « dieux » en sociologie. Le système indien des castes revisité

Castes continue to operate in contemporary India, while the caste system itself, as a theoretical understanding of a mode of social organisation, no longer has any validity in the context of a modern State. However, an analysis of ritual relations which can still be observed in part, as intermediary data between the representations and the hazards of human relations, highlights the ‘Brahmin’ and ‘god’ figures as pointers to what constitutes a system in the Hindu conception of social order. This enables us to identify the main orientations of current transformations.

Buddhist Revitalization, Modernization, and Social Change in Contemporary Thailand

This paper provides both an overview and an analysis of contemporary Thai Buddhism and the changing nature of its traditional relationship with the state. It argues that in recent times as modern urban Thai society has become increasingly differentiated, it has started to question the totalizing and instrumental politicoreligious and moral dimensions of national civic religion. Attention is focused in particular on the expanding and autonomous urban middle-class which led to the emergence of a new cultural gestalt, a reformulation of traditional values and conceptions of social order. Importantly, this social class engendered new fundamentalistic Buddhist movements since the 1960s as a challenge to state hegemony. As a consequence of some thirty years of uneven national development, a number of active rural and urban monks are now confronting such immediate concerns as the stresses and anxieties of urbanization, rural marginalization, and environmental degradation. This, the author suggests, is helping to reshape and redefine conventional religious soteriologies. In this paper the author discusses modern events in Thai civic religion1

Social Structure and Social Control: Building Theory

Although always an integral part of sociology, the study of social control has waxed and waned. Originally, the concept was defined broadly as any structure, process, relationship, or act that contributes to the social order; indeed, the concepts of social order and control were indistinguishable. A consensus is now emerging that distinguishes social control from the social order it is meant to explain and that distinguishes among social control processes. One basic distinction is between processes of internal control or socialization and processes of external control. Recently, the study of social control is equated more with the latter than the former.