Individual Social Actors Research Articles

A quarrel between Joseph Liouville and Guillaume Libri at the French Academy of Sciences in the middle of the nineteenth century

This article offers an account of a controversy that arose in 1843 at the French Academy of Sciences between Joseph Liouville and Guillaume Libri. In order to historicize this event, it explores three interrelated questions. First, in order to reconstruct the social context of the controversy, the positions that Liouville and Libri occupied within the scientific field and the public space are analyzed. Second, the different social spaces in which the controversy took place are examined. Finally, in order to determine what could be considered as a convincing proof in this debate, the mathematical arguments developed by Libri and Liouville are considered. It is contended that these arguments are the product of a historical process framed by individual social actors and localized scientific cultures. Cet article présente une controverse qui a éclaté entre Guillaume Libri et Joseph Liouville à l’Académie des sciences en 1843. Il aborde trois questions afin de restaurer la dimension historique de cet événement. Tout d’abord, une analyse des positions respectives de Libri et de Liouville dans le milieu scientifique et dans l’espace public permet de reconstruire le contexte de la controverse. La seconde partie se propose d’étudier plus avant les différents espaces sociaux dans lesquels cette controverse se déroule. Finalement, l’article s’efforce de déterminer ce qui était considéré comme une démonstration mathématique convaincante, à cette époque, en étudiant en détail les points mathématiques développés par les deux protagonistes: ces objets mathématiques sont le produit d’un processus historique, qui prend sens dans des trajectoires sociales particulières et des cultures scientifiques spécifiques.

Mary-Jo Delvechhio Good, Sandra Teresa Hyde, Sarah Pinto, and Byron J. Good (eds.): Postcolonial Disorders

This book is composed of contributions by participants in the weekly seminar of Harvard’s long-standing program in clinically relevant medical anthropology, and will stand as a mark of the program’s stature as a prime intellectual locus in which anthropological reflection on illness and suffering has generated results of profound significance for contemporary social thought. The volume is a wide-ranging examination of subjectivity, a concept that has in recent years moved to the foreground in social theory after a long time away from the spotlight. Insofar as it is often the case that when a theoretical term becomes popular it comes to be seen everywhere and its meaning gradually becomes attenuated, the most compelling feature of this volume is its thematically consistent and sustained attention to defining and circumscribing the notion of subjectivity in a way that will preserve its discursive value. More specifically, the volume develops an analytic sensibility that repeatedly traces the connections between subjectivity as the experience of individual social actors and the global social conditions under which that subjectivity takes form. This is indeed its greatest service to contemporary social thought in general, beyond the significant contribution to the substantive themes it engages—politics and the state, madness and disorder, borders and marginality—and beyond the uniformly vivid arguments of the individual chapters. A thoughtful introduction by the editors nicely synthesizes the contributors’ approaches to subjectivity, carefully deconstructs the eponymous concepts of “postcolonial” and “disorders” and justifies the organization into discrete sections.

MODELING SOCIAL NETWORKS FROM SAMPLED DATA.

Network models are widely used to represent relational information among interacting units and the structural implications of these relations. Recently, social network studies have focused a great deal of attention on random graph models of networks whose nodes represent individual social actors and whose edges represent a specified relationship between the actors. Most inference for social network models assumes that the presence or absence of all possible links is observed, that the information is completely reliable, and that there are no measurement (e.g., recording) errors. This is clearly not true in practice, as much network data is collected though sample surveys. In addition even if a census of a population is attempted, individuals and links between individuals are missed (i.e., do not appear in the recorded data). In this paper we develop the conceptual and computational theory for inference based on sampled network information. We first review forms of network sampling designs used in practice. We consider inference from the likelihood framework, and develop a typology of network data that reflects their treatment within this frame. We then develop inference for social network models based on information from adaptive network designs. We motivate and illustrate these ideas by analyzing the effect of link-tracing sampling designs on a collaboration network.

“We did what we thought was best for our children”: a nexus analysis of language shift in a Kven community

The loss of intergenerational language transmission can be seen, in part, as a choice parents make, but in reality they do not always have a choice. Their actions are influenced by large-scale social factors such as language policies and attitudes toward minority languages. Issues related to these factors are addressed by an analysis of language shift in Bugones, a Kven community in Northern Norway. Data come from recordings of conversations and sociolinguistic interviews addressing language choice. Fifteen hours were recorded and transcribed. In order to analyze language shift a theoretical and methodological framework which allows for a historical perspective is essential since people, objects, mediational means, and discourses are seen as having a history and projecting a future (de Saint Georges, From anticipation to performance: Sites of engagement as performance, Routledge, 2005). The framework used here is nexus analysis, which emphasizes that discourses and individual social actors have a history and therefore cannot be analyzed without reference to the past (Scollon and Scollon, Nexus analysis: Discourse and the emerging Internet, Routledge, 2004). Findings about language shift in Bugones illustrate how large-scale discourses such as the language policies become internalized and later materialized in action through language choice.

Strangers on the train

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to provide and develop a comprehensive and holistic understanding of the working relationship between the in‐house IT department and other parts of the business.Design/methodology/approachIn this paper, IT professionals and internal customers at five medium‐large UK‐based companies were interviewed about how they work together for the development and operation of IT services. A grounded theory approach was followed to develop the theoretical framework from the empirical evidence.FindingsIn the paper the framework shows how the organisational setting, the attitudes of individuals, social processes and outcomes affect the emergence of collective beliefs that characterise the relationship. The strength of the relationship reflects the degree of congruence between the common beliefs of the parties.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper shows that, within the context of IT services, this study shows the emergence of a larger scale social structure from interactions between individual social actors. Proposals are made for the operationalisation of the theoretical framework and its use for designing an instrument to evaluate working relationships. The work also shows how Grounded Theory Methodology can be used for IS/IT management research.Practical implicationsIn the paper management interventions designed to strengthen the bonds between the workgroups are identified.Originality/valueThis paper may help individuals concerned with the development, support and operation of IT services to look beyond the confines of their day‐to day activities to consider the effect of their actions on enduring work group relationships.

Power in Aid Relationships: A Personal View

Power is currently a central theme in the study of international aid relationships, often described in terms of conflict between bounded organisational entities – ‘Northern’ donors and ‘Southern’ recipients. This article considers the complexity of the operation of power between individual social actors based on the author’s reflection on her experience as an expatriate development practitioner in Southeast Asia, conceived as a journey through ‘Aidland’. She argues that expatriates who are sent to build capacity – to ‘empower’ actors in recipient countries – can end up reproducing inequities in social relations of power, both in an attempt to feel secure in unfamiliar environments and by using privileged knowledge of the rules of the aid system to their advantage. The article concludes that expatriate aid workers need to continually ask themselves whether their presence in Aidland is empowering local actors and enabling them to take the lead in their own development – not an easy question to answer

‘They're not racist …’ Prejudice denial, mitigation and suppression in dialogue

Social scientific work on the suppression, mitigation or denial of prejudiced attitudes has tended to focus on the strategic self-presentation and self-monitoring undertaken by individual social actors on their own behalf. In this paper, we argue that existing perspectives might usefully be extended to incorporate three additional considerations. First, that social actors may, on some occasions, act to defend not only themselves, but also others from charges of prejudice. Second, that over the course of any social encounter, interactants may take joint responsibility for policing conversation and for correcting and suppressing the articulation of prejudiced talk. Third, that a focus on the dialogic character of conversation affords an appreciation of the ways in which the status of any particular utterance, action or event as 'racist' or 'prejudiced' may constitute a social accomplishment. Finally, we note the logical corollary of these observations - that in everyday life, the occurrence of 'racist discourse' is likely to represent a collaborative accomplishment, the responsibility for which is shared jointly between the person of the speaker and those other co-present individuals who occasion, reinforce or simply fail to suppress it.

Albert and Whetten Revisited: Strengthening the Concept of Organizational Identity

The objective of this article is to formulate the concept of organizational identity in such a way that it can be distinguished analytically from related concepts, such as organizational culture and image, and can be used operationally to identify bona fide organizational identity claims referents and associated identity-referencing discourse. The proposal amounts to a stronger version of Albert and Whetten (1985), in that the implicit links between the elements of their composite, tripartite, formulation are made explicit and their treatment of organizational identity as a defined construct is emphasized. Although the proposal eschews conceptions of organizational identity formulated from the perspective of individuals, it treats organizational identity as an analogue of individual identity, drawing attention to the parallel functions identity plays for both individual and collective social actors, as well as the parallel distinguishing structural features of individual and organizational identity referents. The principle recommendation is to conduct the study of member-agents' answers to the question, “Who are we as an organization?” within the parameters of a defined identity-claim conceptual domain (what) and associated phenomenological markers of identity-referencing discourse (how, when, why).

The Fallacy of Misplaced Leadership*

abstract The leadership literature typically talks about the discreteindividualityof its subject and particularly the personal qualities and capabilities of a few key people occupying top positions in a hierarchy. Current leadership research now has begun to generate new knowledge about leadership practice in relations of interpersonal exchange. Nevertheless, there is an urgent need for the ramifications of this insight to be more sufficiently developed. The current discussion explores how a perspective of process studies challenges the dominance of the field by individual social actors and discrete schemes of relations. Its aims are twofold. First, it will show how both of these latterepistemologiesare lacking and suggest that current leadership research and development activities must rise to theontologicalchallenge ofprocessesrather thanthings. Second, it looks at some methodological implications of this way of thinking as a productive incitement to future management studies.

Social cognition as a mediator of adolescent development: A coactive systems approach

The study of social cognition often follows as an attempt to represent the structure and content of social knowledge assumed to be located within individual social actors. While we have learned much from the study of social cognition, traditional approaches maintain a sharp distinction between cognition and action. As such, they raise the question of how inner knowledge becomes translated into social action. An alternative approach proceeds by studying social cognition in medias res—in the middle of everything (Fischer & Bidell, 1998). From this view, social cognition functions as a form of acting and as a mediator of action and development. In what follows, we elaborate a coactive systems framework for understanding how social meanings develop as mediators of social action in adolescence.

Latent Space Approaches to Social Network Analysis

Network models are widely used to represent relational information among interacting units. In studies of social networks, recent emphasis has been placed on random graph models where the nodes usually represent individual social actors and the edges represent the presence of a specified relation between actors. We develop a class of models where the probability of a relation between actors depends on the positions of individuals in an unobserved “social space.” We make inference for the social space within maximum likelihood and Bayesian frameworks, and propose Markov chain Monte Carlo procedures for making inference on latent positions and the effects of observed covariates. We present analyses of three standard datasets from the social networks literature, and compare the method to an alternative stochastic blockmodeling approach. In addition to improving on model fit for these datasets, our method provides a visual and interpretable model-based spatial representation of social relationships and improves on existing methods by allowing the statistical uncertainty in the social space to be quantified and graphically represented.

GENERATION AND TRANSACTION PROCESSES IN THE SPIRIT RITUAL OF THE BAKA PYGMIES IN SOUTHEAST CAMEROON

This paper focuses on the diversification process and the socio-cultural background of spirit rituals among the Baka of southeastern Cameroon. Among the Baka, spirit rituals differ between the various subgroups. This diversity is a product of two processes: Firstly, existing spirit rituals are transacted with other subgroups. Secondly, new spirit rituals are continually generated in the process of founding rituals. In both processes the role of individual social actors is important. Among the Baka, rituals belong to individual persons called father of the They transact and even found new rituals for their own subgroup and this promotes the intra-cultural diversity of spirit rituals as a whole. Spirit rituals are based on the concept of spirit guardianship, which is an exclusive relationship between an individual and a particular spirit. This individual involvement in rituals introduces innovation and changes to ritual practices and its form. A process of diversification is therefore inevitable. However, a relatively homogenous concept of the identity of spirits is maintained despite a strong tendency for spirit rituals to diversify. Individualism is generally stressed by the nomadic social structure of the Baka because the mobility of individuals is high and permanent communal social identities are never established. The fluidity of the social system and that of the religious system have an interdependent relationship which is mediated by the specific individualism of Baka society.

Cyberspace/Cyberpast/ Cybernation: Constructing Hellenism in Hyperreality

Abstract This paper looks at representations of antiquity in cyberspace and discusses their meaning and position in global discourses on nationalism and identities. After a critical review of some recent discussions of globalization and the informational society, it adopts the concepts of ethnoscapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes in examining the deployments of representations from antiquity in the web pages constructed by the Greek state, private organizations, and mostly Greek diasporic communities and individuals. It is suggested that organizations and individual social actors construct in cyberspace the national topos of Hellenism. In this process, representations from antiquity play a central and crucial role. Many social actors, mostly away from the 'homeland', form modern Hellenic ethnoscapes by projecting the national narrative and constructing an imaginative heterotopia where the personal becomes national and vice versa. These representations act as the currency of the symbolic capital of antiquity...

Cyberspace/cyberpast/cybernation: constructing Hellenism in hyperreality

This paper looks at representations of antiquity in cyberspace and discusses their meaning and position in global discourses on nationalism and identities. After a critical review of some recent discussions of globalization and the informational society, it adopts the concepts of ethnoscapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes in examining the deployments of representations from antiquity in the web pages constructed by the Greek state, private organizations, and mostly Greek diasporic communities and individuals. It is suggested that organizations and individual social actors construct in cyberspace the national topos of Hellenism. In this process, representations from antiquity play a central and crucial role. Many social actors, mostly away from the ‘homeland’, form modern Hellenic ethnoscapes by projecting the national narrative and constructing an imaginative heterotopia where the personal becomes national and vice versa. These representations act as the currency of the symbolic capital of antiquity, a crucial resource in the foundation of the imagined community of the Hellenic nation. At the same time, they become an effective weapon in the ritual battles and contestations around the polarity between Greece and the West. Finally, representations from antiquity become a device which contributes to the ‘domestication’ of the cyberspace, its transformation from space to place, and its ‘materialization’ through the materiality that the representations of antiquity allude to.

Cyberspace/cyberpast/cybernation: Constructing Hellenism in hyperreality

This paper looks at representations of antiquity in cyberspace and discusses their meaning and position in global discourses on nationalism and identities. After a critical review of some recent discussions of globalization and the informational society, it adopts the concepts of ethnoscapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes in examining the deployments of representations from antiquity in the web pages constructed by the Greek state, private organizations, and mostly Greek diasporic communities and individuals. It is suggested that organizations and individual social actors construct in cyberspace the nationaltoposof Hellenism. In this process, representations from antiquity play a central and crucial role. Many social actors, mostly away from the ‘homeland’, form modern Hellenic ethnoscapes by projecting the national narrative and constructing an imaginative heterotopia where the personal becomes national and vice versa. These representations act as the currency of the symbolic capital of antiquity, a crucial resource in the foundation of the imagined community of the Hellenic nation. At the same time, they become an effective weapon in the ritual battles and contestations around the polarity between Greece and the West. Finally, representations from antiquity become a device which contributes to the ‘domestication’ of the cyberspace, its transformation from space to place, and its ‘materialization’ through the materiality that the representations of antiquity allude to.

Ibrahim's childhood

The recent collection of biographies by Edmund Burke III, Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East (1993), sets out to portray non-elite Middle Eastern men and women. Through these biographies the book intends to 'present Middle Eastern history as it might appear when viewed from the bottom up'.' Burke is concerned to 'rethink' Middle Eastern history which, in his view, has been presented as having being determined by such varying impersonal forces as religion, capitalism and imperialism. For the author a rewriting of history means, firstly, to explore the capacity of individual social actors to shape their own lives. Secondly, it helps to assess how these lives have been shaped by the actors' implication in specific relations of power, by their social location, gender, and membership of ethnic groups. Burke notes that whereas within the Western historical discipline biography has until recently been a marginal genre, there has, as a corollary of anthropological critiques of cultural representation,2 been a renewed interest in biography in the social sciences.3 According to the author, the main value of biographies lies in the fundamental insights they can provide into social and cultural processes. His main concern is with what Eickelman has called 'social biography' which, unlike Victorian biographies, is not necessarily predicated on the assumption of a cultural background shared by the subject and the audience.4 Burke argues that the social biography is less concerned with the subject's innermost self than with exploring 'the complex ways in which individuals navigate amidst social structures, processes, and cultural interactions'.' The manner in which the stories simultaneously highlight issues of gender, class and religion, and demonstrate the impact of regional historical processes on the lives of individuals, is impressive. The stories complement 'classical' historical genres for example the medieval biographical dictionaries by Muslim authors in significant ways.6 The apparent justification for omitting biographies of individuals of the elite is that traditionally such historical narratives have exclusively focused on them. According to Burke, historical works have privileged 'particular groups' understanding of the past', thereby delegitimizing the self-understanding of

Greek Cypriot Narratives of History and Collective Identity: Nationalism as a Contested Process

In this article I consider the appeal of "grand" historical narratives of nationalism by focusing on the ways in which history and identity are contested in the context of Greek Cypriot society. I pay particular attention to diverse expressions of nationalism formulated by the state, political parties, and individual social actors. By examining how nationalism is articulated on these different levels, I propose an understanding of the dialectical process between "above" and "below" that accounts for the appeal of specific constructions of nationalism. I investigate this process by looking at how individual social actors discuss the past in ways that blend elements of personal, local, and national political history. Such an approach provides an alternative to theories that hold that nationalism's appeal lies in proposing a new kind of community as the local community collapses under the dislocating impact of the forces of modernity. In contrast, theories of nationalism phrased in terms of broad cultural ontologies are problematic for explaining the presence of multiple models of nationalism within a community, and the ways in which nationalisms can be internally contested, [nationalism, history, identity, narrative, Cyprus]

Neighborhood Organization and Local Social Action:

This case study examines the history, structure and social, economic, and political changes of an urban neighborhood in Ohio, and how local social actors and organizations affect those changes. The data are based on personal interviews, meeting minutes, newsletters, newspaper articles, and other documentation and materials. The analysis shows that (1) individual social actors are the most important factors in bringing about change consistent with the local social action system, (2) there is a significant and positive relationship between the economic condition of the neighborhood and the success of the changes in the neighborhood, (3) changes consistent with the local social action system are most effectively induced when various organizations and social groups are organized independently of each other but at the same time associated through coalition activities, and (4) the larger urban system (both political and economic systems) in which the neighborhood is located can have strong influence on the neig...

Conceptions of agency in archaeological interpretation

The history of archaeological concern with the individual social actor is traced, and a divergence between emphasis of human agency in theory and ignorance in pratice is noted. Three studies are critiqued in this light: Shanks and Tilley's (1987a, Reconstructing archaeology, Cambridge University Press) study of contemporary beer can design in England and Sweden, Leone's (1984, In Ideology, power and prehistory, pp. 25–35) interpretation of the William Paca Garden, and Hodder's (1982b, In Symbolic and structural archaeology, pp. 162–177) analysis of the Dutch Neolithic. The reflexive relationship between social structure and human agency is then examined empirically with reference to the domestic architecture of sixteenth century Suffolk, England. Medieval houses are interpreted as expressing an ideology legitimating “feudal” social relationships. Changes in spatial organisation and architectural detail of the 1500s are linked, through specific houses and owners, with individuals and groups actively pursuing social goals and expressing varied sets of ideas through the form of their dwellings. The intended and unintended consequences of these changes are seen as leading in turn to a wider social and economic transformation, and ultimately to the “rise of capitalism.” Finally, some implications of the study for future work on this problem are suggested.

The Ambiguity of Leadership

Problems with the concept of leadership are addressed: (a) the ambiguity of its definition and measurement, (b) the issue of whether leadership affects organizational performance, and (c) the process of selecting leaders, which frequently emphasizes organizationally-irrelevant criteria. Leadership is a process of attributing causation to individual social actors. Study of leaders as symbols and of the process of attributing leadership might be productive.