Functioning Of Social Institutions Research Articles

Place Matters: Filipinos and Asian Indians in Jersey City, New Jersey

ABSTRACTFilipinos and Asian Indians became two of the largest Asian ethnic groups in the United States after the passage of the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act that abolished the 1924 Immigration and Naturalization Act's quota system and eventually encouraged a large influx of Asian migrants to enter the United States. These groups have high socioeconomic status compared to other U.S. immigrant groups. Jersey City, New Jersey, is home to a significant number of both groups, which makes it unique compared to other U.S. cities. Social institutions are utilized by every immigrant group but differently. Year of entry, income, and ethnicity can influence the type and function of social institutions for each group. Therefore, analyzing social institutions helps shed light on each group's experiences, and assists in determining the role that social institutions play in each group's community, which permits individual or collaborative policy recommendations for institutions.

Влияние духовно-нравственных ценностей молодежи на формирование гражданской культуры российского общества

The authors conducted a sociological analysis of the spiritual and moral values of the youth and their impact on the civil culture, which largely determines the forms of individual and group social activity and the functioning of social institutions. The implementation of the key function of values, i.e. the achievement of material goods and the spiritual development, to a certain extent, will allow to overcome the cultural gap between elites and common citizens, which is considered one of the main reasons for the failure of reforms in Russia. The study of transformation processes determined great interest in the social potential of the youth as a subject of social reproduction, and the civil culture is a key factor and element of modernization for it changes and activates value orientations of the younger generations and leads to the qualitative transformations of all spheres of society. The article is based on the empirical data of a number of sociological surveys conducted in 2016 in five cities of the south of the Tyumen Region. The empirical data prove that there is an obvious emerging shift from paternalistic expectations, passivity and low estimates of the future to the rationality, individualization and self-reliance. The authors emphasize the influence of mass media as one of the factors of the civil culture formation, which is evident in the impact of media on the moral and spiritual values of the younger generations.

How Institutions Work in Shared Intentionality and ‘We-Mode’ Social Cognition

The topics of social ontology, culture, and institutions constitute a problem complex that involves a broad range of human social and cultural cognitive capacities. We-mode social cognition and shared intentionality appear to be crucial in the formation of social ontology and social institutions, which, in turn, provide the bases for the social manifestation of collective and shared psychological attitudes. Humans have ‘hybrid minds’ that inhabit cultural–cognitive ecosystems. Essentially, these consist of social institutions and distributed cognition that afford the common grounds for the objectives of we-mode shared intentionality. As such, they stabilize social cognition normatively and offer predictive power in social interaction. Full-blown we-mode shared intentionality fundamentally depends on the functions of social institutions.

Mirrors, Myths and Metaphors: Ethnography and Greece in Late Modernity, Introductory Reflections

Mirrors, Myths and Metaphors:Ethnography-ing Greece in Late Modernity, Introductory Reflections Anastasia Karakasidou and Fotini Tsibiridou Mirrors have become virtually ubiquitous in modern global consumer culture (Appadurai 1986, 1996). However, when placed appropriately, mirrors can create reflections of reflections, revealing the appealing allure of infinite possibilities (Abu-Lughod 1989). Anthropologists with an ethnographic gaze have tried to capture the images reflected in the mirrors of European identity (Herzfeld 1987). Desired images create new subjectivities which—even though they may be local, ethnic, or religious—are mirror reflections of the self that desires to look and feel European. Mirrors of the nation operate in the same manner, but they are gendered mirrors that project on the female body the bio-politics of power and the anxieties about population decline. Mirrors present a myriad of reflections regarding cultural formations (Fisher 1998; Handelman 1990; Mankekar 1999) which result from creativity, diffusion, coercion, manipulation, or hegemony. Myths, on the other hand, are said to be as old as humankind. Present in all human social groups, they derive their importance in part from the fact that they can be recounted and transmitted orally. As Claude Lévi-Strauss and others have pointed out, myths deal with cosmological or social contradictions. The word "myth" has also become synonymous with any kind of "master narrative," ever since Michel Foucault urged all of us to trace power behind every aspect of socio-cultural formation. In a sense, ascertaining power has become a problem for anthropologists, and it is an issue taken for granted by the authors of the essays collected in this volume—i.e., how can one best locate power through ethnographic studies on cultural events, local narratives, and the reproduction of the nation and education? Metaphors are widespread and pervasive (Fernandez 1974). Anything can be used as a metaphor, and anything can be described in terms of a metaphor. New vocabularies and cultures on the global scene are rendered into local powerful metaphors, and metaphors of metaphors. [End Page 217] For instance, the metaphor of the "Cunning Old Men" was used to express dissatisfaction, helplessness, and self-mockery in the clandestine resistance of the Slav-Macedonians in Northern Greece. The papers collected here weave their narratives around the topic of "mirrors, myths, and metaphors," offering an anthropological view of Greek society during late modernity. Doing ethnography about any society and culture is a tricky business, and one that remains poorly defined. The quest for the exotic has been critically scrutinized over the last few decades, but not necessarily completely abandoned. American anthropologists have attempted to articulate more uniform methodologies, but focused mainly on the ethics of the participant-observation research of the ethnographers (Marcus and Fisher 1986). American anthropologists are now struggling to create more balanced relations with the subject-objects of their ethnographic inquiries. Taken as a whole, the papers in this special issue attempt to clarify what makes anthropology a useful approach to understanding Greek society today (Abèles 1996; Pouchepasass 2000; Vibert 2002). The anthropology of Greece has undergone significant changes since its inception in the mid-twentieth century. In the 1950s, research was conducted largely by foreign scholars, working in rural areas, and guided by epistemological assumptions concerning the structure, the function, the values and implicit homogeneity of Greek culture and society (Papataxiarchis 2003). The modernization paradigm provided the master narrative that shaped the interests and efforts of these early ethnographers, projecting a totalizing discourse through most of the Cold War era. Several global developments facilitated the shifts in anthropological understandings of Greece, including the succession of new generations of Greek anthropologists, trained mostly in Europe and the United States. Such developments pushed anthropological scholarship about Greece in new theoretical and methodological directions. In the 1970s, attention shifted away from studies of self-sustaining structures and functions of social institutions, and came to focus more on historical trends and socioeconomic differentiation (Damianakos 1978, 1981; Papataxiarchis and Paradelis 1993). The 1980s brought new theoretical trends. The trends from gender studies and cultural studies were particularly influential (Dubish 1986; Loizos and Papataxiarchis 1991). The 1990s witnessed yet another shift to cultural critique, post-modernism, and notions of culture as an interpretative 'text' (Tsibiridou...

A function of social institutions of early childhood education

A function of social institutions of early childhood education

The necessity of intelligent agents in social simulation

The social simulation field is here argued to show a history of growing complexity, especially at the agent level. The simulation of the emergence of Macro-social phenomena has required heterogeneous and dynamic agents, at least in the sense of agents moving in a physical and social space. In turn, the simulation of learning and evolutionary algorithms allowed for a two-way account of the Micro-Macro link. In this presentation, a third step is envisaged in this process, and a 3-layer representation is outlined: the Micro, Mental, and Macro layers. This complex representation is shown to be necessary for understanding the functioning of social institutions. The 3-layer model is briefly discussed, and specific cognitive structures, which evolved to cooperate with emerging Macro-social systems and institutions, are analysed. Finally, social intelligence is argued to receive growing attention is several fields and applications of the science of artificial, with which social simulation is interfaced or will soon be.

Politinių ir teisinių institutų objektyvus sąlygotumas

Straipsnis skirtas visuomenės politinių ir teisinių institutų statuso sampratoms apžvelgti. Tomas Akvinietis teigė, kad politinė valdžia ir valdymo organai yra žmonių sukurti institutai, ir tik per prigimties pradus, esančius juose, remiasi amžinaisiais Dievo proto įstatymais. Naujaisiais laikais susiformavo požiūris, kad esamas visuomenės ir valstybės sutvarkymas yra atsitiktinis, todėl nenatūralus ir netinkamas, taip įsigali sutarties teorija, pagrįsta prigimtine žmonių lygybe. Prieš tokį požiūrį pasisakė G. Hegelis teigdamas, kad valstybė yra dorovinės idėjos tikrovė. K. Marxas teigė, kad politinė veikla bus tuo efektyvesnė, kuo labiau ji išreikš objektyvius visuomenės raidos poreikius, būtent materialių santykių raidos poreikius. Ši teorija nurodo, kaip galima išaiškinti žmonių veiklos efektyvumo pagrindus ir surasti objektyvų kriterijų institucinei veiklai įvertinti. Daroma išvada, kad moksliškai paaiškinti istoriją, kaip tikslingos žmonių veiklos procesą, galima tik skiriant du to proceso aspektus: institucinės veiklos formas ir jų objektyvų turinį.

Public Opinion About the Functioning of Social Institutions

The aim of the study was to measure images concerning the successfulness of the functioning of seven social institutions. The data are based on a nation wide representative Finnish survey. Institutions as attitude-objects were Provincial Governments, Judiciary, Old-Age Pension system, Church, Municipal Social Service Authorities, Parliament, and Taxation Authorities. The study has two specific aims: (1) to descripc the range, averages and dimensionality of the evaluations and, (2) to specify the nature of the ex plaining mechanisms (structural variables, identification variables, and gene ral attitude variables) of these evaluations.

African Urban Studies: Past Accomplishments, Future Trends and Needs

There was a time when were considered avant-garde.' But today in the eyes of a large number of thoughtful African leaders, our profession is often viewed as reactionary in outlook and pursuit and romantic in its devotion to ethnological and ethnographic salvage operations. Luckily those of us who have worked in have, by and large, escaped this unfortunate categorization. We are urban anthropologists and if that won't do, we are either students of modern Africa or even sociologists. While these designations are acceptable to some African politicians and academics, the latter, in particular, fear that we might import the approaches and the lingo of North American sociology which in turn would be as likely to arouse as much antagonism as old-fashioned social anthropology. Whatever the outlook for social science in Africa, one thing is certain: there will be a steady and rapid increase in the number of scholars studying Africa. I would like to think that this movement of scholars is not merely a reaction to the closing of conventional areas of interest to the social anthropologist. Perhaps the view is current that the study of African life, both in the older towns of West and the more recent centers in East and Southern Africa, can and does contribute heavily to the anthropologist's main concern the systematic study of structure and function of social institutions.