Group Social Relations Research Articles

Manoeuvring Conflict: Industrial Land Use Projects and ‘Refusal to Resist’ Among Reindeer Herding Communities in Northern Fennoscandia

ABSTRACTWhen local and indigenous communities are faced with industrial projects the situation is often dealt with in research using terms such as resistance or power relations. Such viewpoints and extreme polarisation have been commonplace in the context of mining and reindeer herding in northern Scandinavia. In this article, I take a different approach. I argue for potential in the concept of refusal for understanding complex local realities in the context of land use disputes. I advance the understanding on the concept of refusal by detaching it from the resistance discourse and demonstrate that refusals can be utilised as an expression of cooperation and reciprocity. Furthermore, I introduce refusal to resist as a relevant category for local communities’ strategies of engagement with industrial projects. Local communities may utilise refusal to resist in a situation where they wish to secure the continuity of their livelihood without risking their outer group social relations.

Group Recommendation Based on Financial Social Network for Robo-Advisor

Robo-advisor is a financial advisor that can get help from machine-learning algorithms to automatically analyze financial product risk levels and provide portfolio recommendations. In the previous work, robo-advisor mainly focused on the basic information and investment preferences of individual users and often ignored the relationship between groups and the individual's risk preference. In the actual environment, the individual investment behavior and the group's social relations are inseparable. In order to solve this challenge, this paper proposes a group recommendation model based on financial social networks and collaborative filtering algorithms. Compared with the latest personalized recommendation system, it not only considers the asset status and risk level of individual investors but also considers social relationships and risk levels among groups. With experiments on benchmark and real-world datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves the superior performance on both the tasks compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

A new conceptualization of ethnicity for social epidemiologic and health equity research

Although social stratification persists in the US, differentially influencing the well-being of ethnically defined groups, ethnicity concepts and their implications for health disparities remain under-examined. Ethnicity is a complex social construct that influences personal identity and group social relations. Ethnic identity, ethnic classification systems, the groupings that compose each system and the implications of assignment to one or another ethnic category are place-, time- and context-specific. In the US, racial stratification uniquely shapes expressions of and understandings about ethnicity. Ethnicity is typically invoked via the term, 'race/ethnicity'; however, it is unclear whether this heralds a shift away from racialization or merely extends flawed racial taxonomies to populations whose cultural and phenotypic diversity challenge traditional racial classification. We propose that ethnicity be conceptualized as a two-dimensional, context-specific, social construct with an attributional dimension that describes group characteristics (e.g., culture, nativity) and a relational dimension that indexes a group's location within a social hierarchy (e.g., minority vs. majority status). This new conceptualization extends prior definitions in ways that facilitate research on ethnicization, social stratification and health inequities. While federal ethnic and racial categories are useful for administrative purposes such as monitoring the inclusion of minorities in research, and traditional ethnicity concepts (e.g., culture) are useful for developing culturally appropriate interventions, our relational dimension of ethnicity is useful for studying the relationships between societal factors and health inequities. We offer this new conceptualization of ethnicity and outline next steps for employing socially meaningful measures of ethnicity in empirical research. As ethnicity is both increasingly complex and increasingly central to social life, improving its conceptualization and measurement is crucial for advancing research on ethnic health inequities.

What Porn?

What Porn?