Large-scale Society Research Articles

Resisting Democratic Backsliding: Malawi’s Experience in Comparative Perspective

AbstractWhy does collective resistance to democratic backsliding emerge in some contexts and not others? The experience of Malawi in 2011–2012 offers an opportunity to explore this question. In the face of attacks on democratic rights and institutions, large-scale popular and civil society mobilization challenged the government’s authoritarian tendencies. Drawing on collective action theories and comparing Malawi’s experience to that of Zambia, VonDoepp argues that Malawi’s resistance arose in an environment that was favorable to its emergence. Economic conditions had generated grievances against government, polarization remained modest, and civil society organizations benefitted from credibility and the presence of allies that facilitated activism.

Chinese Powers: A Critical Appreciation of Dingxin Zhao’s The Confucian-Legalist State

Dingxin Zhao’s The Confucian-Legalist State offers an elegant and clear overview of Chinese social development over more than two thousand years, identifying the ways in which the Chinese polity differs from those of Europe and explaining the dynamics that produced a civilian-led government that effectively marginalized military elites to an extent no other large-scale society achieved until the last couple of hundred years. This essay explains how Zhao’s historical analysis both clarifies Chinese social developments over two thousand years and contributes to developing state theory.

Partitioning large-scale artificial society on distributed cluster with statistical movement graph

ABSTRACTDistributed agent-based simulation is a popular method to realize computational experiment on large-scale artificial society. Meanwhile, the partitioning strategy of the artificial society models among hosts is playing an essential role for simulation engine to offer high execution efficiency as it has great impact on the communication overheads and computational load-balancing during simulation. Aiming at the problem, we firstly analyze the execution and scheduling process of agents during simulation and model it as wide-sense cyclostationary random process. Then, a static statistical partitioning model is proposed to obtain the optimal partitioning strategy with minimum average communication cost and load imbalance factor. To solve the static statistical partitioning model, this paper turns it into a graph-partitioning problem. A statistical movement graph-based partitioning algorithm is then devised which generates task graph model by mining the statistical movement information from initialization data of simulation model. In the experiments, two other popular partitioning methods are used to evaluate the performance of proposed graph-partitioning algorithm. Furthermore, this paper compares the graph-partitioning performance under different task graph model. The results indicate that our proposed statistical movement graph-based static partitioning method outperforms all other methods in reducing the communication overhead while satisfying the load balance constraint.

"Only if You Really, Really Need It": Social Rights Consciousness in the Philippines

This article argues that communitarianism, as the prevalent citizenship paradigm in the Philippines, observable also in modest expectations towards government services among Filipinos and a high emphasis on individual and community action, can be used to explain the lack of political change in the Philippines. In its first part, the article presents data on the sense of citizenship and concepts of social rights and obligations among Filipinos by combining findings from a series of problem-centered interviews with young urban professionals and quantitative data collected within annual surveys by the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) on government, social inequality, and citizenship. The second part of the article attributes these findings to everyday concepts of citizenship as ideal-typical state responsibility theories and modern citizenship paradigms. By including ethnographic data, it discovers significant traits of communitarianism in Philippine everyday life. This section goes on to present how communitarianism (with its inherent character of exclusivity) impedes a democratic culture and moreover, how it is unable to serve as a guiding social philosophy in unifying a large-scale society mainly consisting of citizens who are strangers ( ibang tao ) to each other. Nevertheless, in conclusion, the article suggests the possibility of deepening and broadening the sense of citizenship in the Philippine society and its respect for the stranger by drawing on elements of Filipino culture.

Karl Mannheim on democratic interaction: Revisiting mass society theory

Abstract This essay re-considers Karl Mannheim’s notion of democratic behaviour in the context of mass society. Although the term ‘mass society’ seems archaic, it is still the precondition of democracy today. Mannheim conceptualized mass society as irrational, disintegrating Great Society and presented the remedy of Planning for Freedom to counter the crisis of mass democracy. In his remedy Mannheim advocated social education that fosters citizens’ democratic interaction, and the keywords of his education were ‘integrative behaviour’ and ‘creative tolerance’. The similar orientation of his remedy can be found in much more contemporary critiques of deliberative democracy. Iris Marion Young’s ‘communicative democracy’ was a version of her democratic interaction in a complex, large-scale mass society. Young’s notion of ‘reasonableness’ has substantial affinity with Mannheim’s integrative behaviour, both of which require the democratic attitude of hearing the other side and the readiness to self-transform. Mass society theory has relevance for contemporary democratic theory.

Weighted social networks for a large scale artificial society

The method of artificial society has provided a powerful way to study and explain how individual behaviors at micro level give rise to the emergence of global social phenomenon. It also creates the need for an appropriate representation of social structure which usually has a significant influence on human behaviors. It has been widely acknowledged that social networks are the main paradigm to describe social structure and reflect social relationships within a population. To generate social networks for a population of interest, considering physical distance and social distance among people, we propose a generation model of social networks for a large-scale artificial society based on human choice behavior theory under the principle of random utility maximization. As a premise, we first build an artificial society through constructing a synthetic population with a series of attributes in line with the statistical (census) data for Beijing. Then the generation model is applied to assign social relationships to each individual in the synthetic population. Compared with previous empirical findings, the results show that our model can reproduce the general characteristics of social networks, such as high clustering coefficient, significant community structure and small-world property. Our model can also be extended to a larger social micro-simulation as an input initial. It will facilitate to research and predict some social phenomenon or issues, for example, epidemic transition and rumor spreading.

Second world war as a trigger for transcultural changes among Sámi people in Finland

ABSTRACTThe article analyses the consequences of the Lapland War (1944–45) and the reconstruction period (1945–52) for the Sámi society in Finnish Lapland, and provides some comparisons to the situation in Norway. Re­constructing the devastated Lapland meant powerful and rapid changes that ranged from novelties of material culture to increasing Finnish ideals, from a transition in the way of life to an assimilation process. The war was a trigger to an accelerated development in which otherwise long-term processes happened in a very short time frame in the post-war period. The post-war development was characterized by economic, political and cultural processes that integrated Sámiland to Finland and the Finnish nation. These processes can be interpreted as a classic modernization process, even “finnicization”, in which the traditional Sámi culture was forced to switch over to the modern large-scale society. In addition to problematic changes, however, the consequences of the war are also considered to have created new possibilities for the Sámi to influence the majority society both as individuals and as ethno-political actors. This was reflected in Sámi ethnopolitical activism, which started in Finland only after WWII. Also, the role of the majority education system had two-fold consequences: strong assimilation features, but also helping to build the educated Sámi “radical” generation that challenged the prevalent Sámi politics in the 1960s.

Lineage and land reforms in Malawi: Do matrilineal and patrilineal landholding systems represent a problem for land reforms in Malawi?

Based on government statistics and interviews with villagers across Malawi this article argues that customary matrilineal and patrilineal land tenure systems serve to weaken security of land tenure for some family members as well as obstructing the creation of gender-neutral inheritance of lands. Data from the National Census of Agriculture and Livestock 2007and the 2008 Population and Housing Census are used to characterize marriage systems and landholding patterns of local communities. Marriage systems correspond to customary land-tenure patterns of matrilineal or patrilineal cultures. The differences between the two ways of land holding represent a challenge for land reforms aimed at unifying rules for land tenure and land devolution. Drawing on an analogy of the resilience of the patrilineal land holding system in Norway, we argue that it will be difficult to remove the preferential rights of lineage members directly. We recommend that, instead of creating a unified national system, existing land rights should be formally recognized and circumscribed by fair procedures. A well-designed landholding system should aim to ease the transitions of diverse customary tenure systems towards the requirements of a modern large-scale society.

Cultural species and their ecosystems

The target article was written for a workshop that I organized with Lin Ostrom titled “Rules as Genotypes in Cultural Evolution”. In my commentary, I describe the background for the workshop and target article in addition to commenting on the article itself. A compelling case can be made for functionally organized human groups as like species that adapt to their local environments. A cultural inheritance mechanism is required for this to happen, which functions analogously to genetic inheritance, although the mechanistic details need not be analogous. Indeed, a diversity of cultural inheritance mechanisms are possible that need not be mechanistically analogous to each other. In addition, most modern human populations consist of a diversity of functionally organized groups, or cultural ecosystems. The distinction between “species” and “ecosystem” is important because the concept of an inheritance system applies primarily to the former. Finally, positive cultural evolution in modern large-scale society must be engineered and an explicitly evolutionary perspective will add value to the enterprise.

PARALLEL SIMULATION OF LARGE-SCALE ARTIFICIAL SOCIETY WITH GPU AS COPROCESSOR

Large-scale artificial societies with millions or billions of agents call for high-performance parallel simulation. Prevailing supercomputers with thousands of CPUs and GPUs make it possible to carry out such simulation. The key is to distribute large-scale agents to massive cores of CPUs and GPUs properly for parallel computing with efficient communication and synchronization. For simplicity and efficiency, a modified discrete event system specification (DEVS) is proposed for large-scale artificial society modeling and parallelism is exploited in agent models because similar agents usually share similar behaviors. Through phased synchronization, a two-tier parallel simulation engine is designed with support of MPI and OpenCL where GPU is used as coprocessor. One-sided communication is used for reflection of remote simulation objects and message passing between processes. A general kernel function prototype is elaborately designed and conditionally compiled for execution on both CPU and GPU. An artificial society for epidemic study is used to test the performance on a supercomputer with 1024 CPU cores and 1792 GPU cores. The speedup reaches 3512 for even 2 billion agents with GPU acceleration which is far over 701 when only CPUs are used. It turns out feasible for parallel simulation of large-scale artificial society with GPU as coprocessor.

Open space as a knowledge metaphor and a knowledge sharing intervention

This paper addresses the role of knowledge metaphors in knowledge sharing interventions. Open space can be treated as a specific technology for blending knowledge sources and as a broader knowledge metaphor that focuses on self-regulating knowledge processes. The paper outlines the experience of applying the open space technology in a large-scale civic society initiative, ‘My Estonia’, in 2009 and 2010. The study reveals contradictions between different meanings of open space in the knowledge sharing context. The validity of the mapping of the open space metaphor depends on the adjustment of the open space technology to the composition of the team. It can be increased by the freedom to initiate new think tanks in different locations, and thus link mental and physical open space activities. Encouraging mobility of participants and continuing think tank activities by applying virtual communication tools reflects a broader interpretation of the open space metaphor.

Ecosystem service tradeoff between traditional and modern agriculture: a case study in Congjiang County, Guizhou Province, China

Besides crops, agriculture supplies all three major categories of ecosystem services (ES). However, agriculture also supplies an array of ecosystem dis-services (EDS) that may harm other ecosystems. The flows of ES and EDS are directly dependent on the management of agricultural ecosystems. The traditional method of Chinese agriculture, which supports sustainable agriculture, has been proven to increase ES and reduce EDS. However, there is a lack of a detailed understanding of the ES and EDS associated with traditional agriculture, and also of differences between traditional and modern agriculture. In this study, an investigation was conducted on the ecosystem services (ES) and ecosystem dis-services (EDS) of traditional and modern agriculture in Congjiang County, Guizhou Province, China. Afterwards, the economic values of ES and EDS were quantified experimentally and calculated based on the market price. The results show that: the net economic value of traditional rice-fish agriculture was 3.31x10(4) CNY center dot ha(-1) (6.83 CNY = 1 USD as of July, 2009) and that of rice monoculture was 1.99x10(4) CNY center dot ha(-1). Significant differences existed between traditional rice-fish and rice monoculture fields for their economic values of some ES or EDS. A benefit and cost analysis (BCA) model was used to adjust the conflict between the economic income and environmental loss from traditional and modern agriculture. The BCA model not only calculates the net income but also monetizes the EDS of the agricultural systems. The results showed that the net income of rice-fish agriculture was 1.94x10(4) CNY center dot ha(-1) higher than that of rice monoculture. However, the benefit to cost ratio (BCR) of rice-fish agriculture was lower than that of rice monoculture, indicating that the traditional agricultural model was not the most optimized choice for farmers. The value of the rice-fish agriculture was much higher than that of the rice monoculture. Thus, when considering the benefits that rice-fish agriculture contributes to the largescale society, these agricultural methods needs to be utilized. Furthermore, the labor opportunity costs were calculated and the comprehensive value of rice monoculture was negative. Finally, the compensation standard was calculated based on the comprehensive benefit analysis. The lowest level was 1.09x10(3) CNY center dot ha(-1), and the highest level was 1.21x10(4) CNY center dot ha(-1).

Expanding the Classical in Classical Sociology

If it is to become a more widely used resource at the present time, when the demand is growing for explanations of the predicament of modern western society in the wake of the events of 11 September 2001 and various similar subsequent events around the globe, classical sociology might pay more attention than it usually does to a particular set of early modern developments. These developments, it is argued here, actually created the form of the social that became large-scale modern western society. This new form of the social was and remains distinct from those older forms that were seen to flow from the natural sociality of human beings. Between the middle of the 16th century and the end of the 17th the new form of the social emerged in different parts of Europe, contingently but not entirely accidentally, as a separate domain of relatively safe and free human interaction. It was a consequence — in part intended, in part unintended — of different bids to secure civil peace in times of extreme inter-communal, inter-confessional violence. These bids included, to name just three measures: the development of new forms of public law, especially in Germany; the development of the absolutist state, especially in France; and the separation of private religious conscience from public legal conscience, especially in England. As they were all, in one way or another, steps towards stemming, stopping, and/or preventing the flow of blood caused by religious hatreds, they are here called early modern limiting measures, and the social at the centre of the article is sometimes called the limited social or limited society.

SMALL STATES AND BUREAUCRACY: CHALLENGES FOR PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

1. Small societies and small states Interest in small states as a separate field of study is still at an early stage of development, although the first studies were carried out in the 1950s and 1960s (Fox 1959, Robinson 1960, Benedict 1966). Researchers disagree on how best to distinguish between large and small states. Population size is usually taken as the main criterion, although common alternative or supplementary indicators are surface area and the size of the economy. The cut-off has often been set between 1 and 2 million people, although some scholars (e.g. Bray and Packer 1993) suggest that it would be more appropriate to examine issues along a continuum of size. 49 states out of 188 member states of the United Nations had populations below 2 million in 1999. Countries with population less than 100,000 are often called microstates, which can be distinguished by more specific characteristics. Within Europe, states with the population between 100,000 and 2 million include Cyprus, Estonia, Iceland, Luxembourg and Malta, with Latvia and Slovenia reaching only slightly over 2 million. It is important to distinguish between the size of a state and the size of a society in the development of small state theories. The majority of contemporary studies of small states refer to Benedict (1966), who has noted that the main criteria of size for 'territories' ('states') are area and population, whereas the criteria of size for 'societies' are the number and quality of role-relationships. He pointed out that small societies do not exist only in small states, for they may also exist in large states that have high degrees of segmentation (including, for example, minority groups, islands and other relatively isolated and/or closed labor markets or communities within larger states). Benedict (ibid.) claims further that, just as it is possible to have a small-scale society in a large state, it is also possible to have part of a large-scale society in a small state. He presents Luxembourg and Monaco as two examples of states, which are closely related to neighboring states and thus are not considered as small societies by him. Consequently, although the theories of small states refer to certain 'states', the same characteristics may apply to small 'societies' within large states, and may not apply to small states which are parts of larger societies. For the same reason, small states may be defined differently in the study of economics and political science (going up to 20 million of population), whereas the study of public administration (and also sociology) has more implications from the notion of small societies, where the cut-off line between small and large states is substantially lower. In this article, the term of 'small states' refers to 'small societies' which have less than 2 million inhabitants. Previous studies suggest that small countries are not simply smaller versions of large countries. Differences between large and small states are not merely quantitative--essential qualitative differences can also be found. Benedict (1966) has shown in his study of the social anthropology of small societies, that people in small societies grow up within an interdependent network, where each person plays several roles; thus nearly every social relationship serves many interests. In a small society individuals interact with each other over and over again in a wide range of social situations. In such conditions the decisions and choices of individuals are influenced by their relationships with other individuals in many contexts. Consequently, relationships in small societies seldom concentrate on a single act or specific function, but tend instead to be functionally diffuse and to last for a long time, though their specific content changes over the course of life. Talcott Parsons (1939, 1951) has characterized such role-relationships as 'particularistic', where role-relationships extend over a considerable time-span and the roles involved are usually ascriptive. …

Biochemical correlates of personality dimensions in hyperthyroid patients

Based on government statistics and interviews with villagers across Malawi this article argues that customary matrilineal and patrilineal land tenure systems serve to weaken security of land tenure for some family members as well as obstructing the creation of gender-neutral inheritance of lands. Data from the National Census of Agriculture and Livestock 2007and the 2008 Population and Housing Census are used to characterize marriage systems and landholding patterns of local communities. Marriage systems correspond to customary land-tenure patterns of matrilineal or patrilineal cultures. The differences between the two ways of land holding represent a challenge for land reforms aimed at unifying rules for land tenure and land devolution. Drawing on an analogy of the resilience of the patrilineal land holding system in Norway, we argue that it will be difficult to remove the preferential rights of lineage members directly. We recommend that, instead of creating a unified national system, existing land rights should be formally recognized and circumscribed by fair procedures. A well-designed landholding system should aim to ease the transitions of diverse customary tenure systems towards the requirements of a modern large-scale society.

The Mother of Cancele

The pilgrimage is a phenomenon of growing importance in African traditional religion, at least in Southern Africa. The multitudes of migrant people in the mushrooming cities experience the loneliness of life in a large-scale society resulting in a subconscious yearning for a place to feel at home in the countryside with its hills and forests, its fountains and kraals. They are homesick for the grassroots of life, power and security, of healing and salvation. However, this is no nostalgia to be satisfied by a visit to the home village or a breath of its fresh air. From their basic religious understanding of nature and life, the Blacks of Southern Africa are looking forward to the encounter with the holy old person who stays in an unbroken relationship with God and nature. It is the healing prophet in whom the pilgrimage focusses; he is consulted for helpful advice and for intercession.

The Taylor Revival of 1866 and the Roots of African Nationalism in the Cape Colony

Except for rather superficial references in the more parochial histories of Methodism in South Africa, the Taylor revival of 1866 has been ignored by historians of South Africa. Yet the revival marked an important reorientation of thinking for many Xhosa. Defeat and disaster had shown that the material and ideological resources of traditional society had been inadequate to stem the tide of white intrusion and conquest. The Taylor revival was the beginning of a search for new direction and a new ideology that would enable Africans to find an acceptable and honourable place for themselves in the new largescale society being created in the Cape Colony 1). William ('California') Taylor was a revivalist extraordinaire. His career, considering the dangers and difficulties of travel, is almost incredible. He began preaching in his native Virginia in 1842 but went to California in 1849 where he made a name as an outstanding revivalist. Returning to the east in 1856, he began evangelizing in the eastern and the mid-western states during the next five years. He spent a year in Canada, 1861-1862, before setting off for Australia via Britain (where he stayed seven months) and Palestine. From 1863 through 1865, he evangelized in Australia and then went to Ceylon and India (1870-1875). After returning to Britain and then the United States, he set off in 1877 to found missions in various parts of Latin America, an enterprise upon which he was engaged (with many trips back to the United States) until 1884; then he was elected Missionary Bishop of Africa by the Methodist Episcopal Church of the United States. He was thenceforward engaged in expanding missions in Liberia and Angola. He wrote copiously (mostly during his many long voyages),

Social Structure and Participation in Different Types of Formal Associations

T HE complexity and heterogeneity of modern urban society have fostered a social organization highly differentiated in interests. The tendency for persons having similar stakes in society to organize formally into groups for the pursuit of mutual goals has resulted in a kaleidoscope of interest groupings within contemporary large-scale society. Persons with similar interests, however, are not found randomly occupying the various social positions in the larger society, rather their similarity of interest seems to follow from their similarity with respect to the social statuses which they hold. The purpose of this paper is to determine the relationship between membership in certain types of interest groupings, as revealed by formal association membership, and certain positions in the social structure, as revealed by residence in certain types of neighborhoods.

The Peasant Movement in Norway: A Study in Class and Culture

rN ALL parts of the Western World, indeed wherever Western civilization is making its influence felt, the increasing mechanization in technical culture, i iparticularly in means of transportation and communication, has brought about a radical change in the ecological situation of the rural locality group. From a rather stable condition of relative isolation and economic, social, and cultural self-dependence, the rural community has been thrown into a highly labile situation of inter-communal and inter-regional contact and interdependence. In this situation, it became part and parcel of a large-scale society which is highly domislated by industrial production, commercial trade, and the urban way of life. This radical change in the ecological situation has had the most profound influence on the whole character of the rural community and rural society, affecting its social patterns and its basic norms and values no less than its more conspicuous technical culture. Not only was the constant flow of culture traits from the urban centres out into the rural hinterlands highly increased through rapid transportation and other mechanic means of communication. Becoming an integral part of a major social system, the rural community passed, ill the words of Ferdinand Tonnies, from a predominantly Gemeinschaft type of society to a society where interaction and its underlying norms are more prevailingly of the Gesellschaft nature. The necessary adjustment of the rural community to this new situation is still in progress over the greater part of the Western World. The resistance to change offered by the well-established and, for the most part, highly-refined and integrated rural cultures, particularly in the Old World, has everywhere created conflicts of norms and values as well as of loyalties. Not infrequently were these conflicts crystallized into diNerentiations and segregations of groups, the patterns, norms, and values of each culture type serving as sytthols of group identification for larger or smaller fractions of the population. In this way, the urbanization process in many instances gave rise to a social situation which shows striking similarities to the inter-group culture contact situation and even to the dominant minority group relationship, where likewise 63