Hierarchy In Society Research Articles

Social dominance orientation: Cause or ‘mere effect’?: Evidence for SDO as a causal predictor of prejudice and discrimination against ethnic and racial outgroups

The question of whether SDO is a cause or mere effect of intergroup attitudes and behaviors has been the subject of heated debate. Much of the research brought to bear on the question, however, has used cross-sectional data that is not best-suited for making causal inferences. Using data from a panel study that tracked UCLA undergraduates over several years, we find support for the notion that SDO is a cause, rather than ‘mere reflection’ of prejudice and discrimination against outgroups. Specifically, using cross-lagged analyses among White students, we show that SDO measured in 1996 has significant marginal utility for predicting prejudice against a series of ethnic outgroups, as well as self-reported ingroup friendship preference, four years later, controlling for their 1996 levels. Conversely, outgroup affect and ingroup friendship preference measured in 1996 fail to predict SDO levels in 2000 once 1996 SDO levels are taken into account. Implications of these analyses for the debate on the interpretation of SDO as a relatively stable orientation towards group-based hierarchy in society are discussed.

A Fanonian Critique of Lebow's A Cultural Theory of International Relations

Ned Lebow's new project is not so much a cultural theory of international relations as an affective praxis of modernity. Lebow seeks to elucidate the psychical drivers of intersubjective identity formation that dynamically constitute status hierarchies in societies. And through this understanding Lebow holds that present-day possibilities of structural transformations in international relations might be clearly guided by practical reason. In what follows I mount a sympathetic critique of Lebow's affective praxis based upon its effective circumscription of psychical life to elite European men. Lebow pays hardly any attention to the psychic drivers of colonisation and decolonisation as felt by the colonised. Using the work of Frantz Fanon, I shall suggest that shifting the focus to the colonial and post-colonial world brings to light a set of considerations on the psychic sources of affect in modernity that remain obfuscated when the European elite man is conflated as the modern subject.

This Is the City: Making Model Citizens in Los Angeles

This Is the City: Making Model Citizens in Los Angeles. By Ronald J. Schmidt, Jr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. 192p. 18.95 paper.Jean Baudrillard once argued that “there is no theory of the media” (For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, 1981, p. 164). Perhaps one might say the same in regard to a theory of culture, but Ronald Schmidt helps move us toward a better understanding of both. His book helps us recognize the link between the media and political culture. Akin to Baudrillard, Schmidt discusses the rhetoric and images used by the economic and political elite to reinforce the latent social and political hierarchies in society.

Social Dominance Orientation, Authoritarianism, and Support for Intergroup Violence Between the Middle East and America

Social dominance theory has generally posited that terror and intergroup violence can be explained in terms of social dominance struggles. Social dominance theorists have described terror mostly as a tool for maintaining intergroup hierarchies in society (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999). Although implications of the theory suggest that terror may also be used by lower status groups as a tool for the resistance of domination by higher status groups, this prediction heretofore has not been empirically demonstrated. Data from two samples, one in the United States and one in Lebanon, were collected regarding attitudes toward terrorism and intergroup violence. The results show that the American sample demonstrates the typical patterns of social dominance such that those who are higher in social dominance orientation tend to support greater violence toward the Middle East. However, the Lebanese sample shows the opposite pattern, such that those who are lower in social dominance orientation tend to support violence toward the West. These results suggest that (1) support for terrorism among Middle East citizens is a project of counterdominance, and, more broadly, that (2) the relationship between social dominance orientation and support for violence depends on the dynamics of the conflict and the status of the perpetrators.

Whatever happened to deconcentration? Recent initiatives in Cambodia

AbstractContemporary decentralization discourse and recommended practice focus on political decentralization. However, experience with such devolution has often failed to produce the anticipated developmental returns. This has prompted reconsideration of managerial or administrative decentralization (deconcentration) as a vehicle for improving services and encouraging popular participation. A range of potential benefits is available from deconcentration. Cambodia has embarked on a cautious policy of decentralization involving weak devolution and deconcentration. But it is from deconcentration that the government expects the greatest developmental gains. Initial results are encouraging but difficulties confront the deconcentration experiment. These include the piecemeal nature of the initiative, unfamiliar financial management practices, deeply embedded patterns of hierarchy in society and state, and limited managerial capacity. Nevertheless, it appears that incremental deconcentration may offer a useful policy alternative for countries such as Cambodia which are engaged in slowly building the infrastructure of a modern state following debilitating internal conflict. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Science and ethics. As research and technology are changing society and the way we live, scientists can no longer claim that science is neutral but must consider the ethical and social aspects of their work.

Less than 500 years ago, science was a dangerous business. In 1600, the Italian monk Giordano Bruno was sentenced to death and burned at the stake because he believed in free thinking in philosophy and science. Galileo Galilei narrowly avoided the same fate but only by publicly renouncing his support of Copernicus’ heliocentric view. Of course, the days of autodafes are over and modern science has an important influence on the development of society as a whole, compared with the days of the ill‐fated Bruno. But while scientific progress has been rapid and astonishing, it is still disturbing for those people who feel excluded from the debate surrounding the application of science in new technologies and products. Furthermore, as scientific progress becomes increasingly fundamental to society, it is constantly challenging if not completely clashing with long‐held beliefs concerning our ethical values. It is, therefore, necessary to conduct ethical discussions in order to adapt the use of scientific knowledge—namely new forms of technology—to a general context that is in agreement with the basic principles of our civilisation. Scientists should be concerned about the use of scientific knowledge and they should address the ensuing ethical questions, both in general terms and in terms of their own work. The word ‘ethics’ comes from the Greek word ‘ethos’, meaning custom or behaviour. The concept of ethics was originally proposed by the Greek philosopher Aristotle for the discussion of philosophical questions relating to daily life: the ‘ethike theoria’ deals with the study of, and gives criteria for the evaluation of human behaviour. Since then, ethics has become one of the major topics in Western philosophy when debating social and individual values, their relationship and their hierarchy in society. Today, the meaning of ‘ethics’ is more or less equivalent to that of ‘morals’, which comes from …

Die soziale Konstruktion von Qualifikation

The consideration of skill highlights the social construction of job hierarchies. This investigation of the wage-levels as well as the level and distribution of skill in the Lancashire weaving industry between 1885 and the First World War corroborates the largely ideological character of »skill« as a measure for the classification of work. In the social construction of women-dominated weaving as »semiskilled «, the gender-specific dimension is shown to be of overriding importance. This study further suggesrs that the gender hierarchy in society at ]arge determines the relation of warnen and men at the working-place to such an extent as to obviate its being undermined from within the labour process. Yet experiences gained at work appear to carry the potential for warnen to pose a challenge to the existing hierarchy in a different social sphere.

De Invloed Van De Sekse Van De Aangesprokene Op Beleefdheid In Taalgebruik

On the basis of a corpus of 626 utterances produced in buying a train ticket at the Central Station of Amsterdam an investigation was made of a) differences between the speech used by women and by men, and b) differences between the speech allocated to women and to men. The independent variables were: sex of speaker, age of speaker and sex of addressee. The dependent variables were: diminutives, hesitations, requests for information, speaker's polite forms and addressee's polite forms. The results indicate that there are hardly speech differences between female and male speakers, if the speech events and the factors of situation, setting, and topic are the same for all informants. The sex of the addressee, however, affected the use of polite forms: the travellers - both women and men - were more polite to the male ticket sellers than to the female ticket sellers. Both of the results point to the importance of taking into account inter-actional aspects in research of sex differences in speech. Also attention should be paid to the choice of the interviewer in sociolinguistic studies: a female interviewer may be more suited to elicit informal speech. The fact that both male speakers and female speakers show by their use of polite forms more respect for men and less respect to women reflects the sex-linked hierarchy in society, and one should realize that women themselves contribute to the continued higher valuation of men. 1) This investigation is a sequel to the paper which has been published in both J.F. Matter (ed.), Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen 4 (1978), 52-75 (Dédé Brouwer, Marinel Gerritsen & Dorian de Haan, 'Verschillen in taal-gebruik tussen vrouwen en mannen: een dood spoor?') and Language in Society 8 (1979), 33-50 (Dédé Brouwer, Marinel Gerritsen & Dorian de Haan, 'Speech differences between women and men: on the wrong track?').

The Sociology of Minority Group Relations

Kinloch's book examines minority group relations from a power, conflict, and labeling perspective. The book is broad in that included in the definition of minority are physiological, economic, cultural, and behavioral minorities. That is, it includes women, the aged, adolescents, children, racial groups, cultural like Greeks and Italians, and behavioral deviants like the mentally ill, homosexuals, criminals, and juvenile delinquents. The book is also broad in that it creates a typology of four different societies, including the noncolonial-non-developed, colonial-non-developed, non-colonial-developed, and the colonial-developed types. Thus Kinloch's perspective is historical as well as comparative. Kinloch defines minorities groups socially created by power elites, on the basis of perceived physical, cultural, economic, and behavioral characteristics, for economic reasons and as a result of economic migration and specialization. The creation of these is rationalized in scientific, medical, and religious terms, produces minority roles, institutions, subcultures, and identities, and forms a minority hierarchy in society (p. 94). The book ends with a list of practical propositional implications which, if followed, the author feels, would lead to a saner and more humane world. While The Sociology of Minority Group Relations has some technical problems as a text, it also has many advantages. First, the disadvantages: The book is somewhat too sketchy in illustrating propositions, or in describing the historical developments of particular minority groups, to stand by itself as a core text. Also, a longer version of the book would benefit from a more extensive examination of the differences between the authors' perspective and the perspectives of other major works in the field. Kinloch does, however, refer to other works at relevant points, and the bibliography is extensive enough to lead the serious student toward the literature in the field. Students had