Level Of Small Groups Research Articles

Социально-психологические детерминанты рецидивной преступности

This article examines the socio-psychological determinants of recidivism. At the socio-psychological level, the determinants of crime are manifested in the criminogenic impact on the individual from small social groups. The closest environment has the most serious influence on the formation of personality. This environment is represented by such small social groups as the family, educational and work teams, everyday and informal milieu. Repeat offenders have no family connection and contacts with educational and work teams. Most repeat offenders are unmarried, they do not work or study. Family desocialization of criminals, their negative attitude towards educational and work activities lead to alienation from the main social institutions and positive microgroups, which is accompanied by joining an informal antisocial environment and establishing strong ties with it. In the course of the study, the author generalized criminological views on the determination of recidivism, analyzed information on the characteristics of repeat criminals, and studied the data on the level of recidivism among those convicted to various measures of criminal liability and the statistics of convictions. The author also surveyed the staff of penitentiary institutions about the causes and conditions of recidivism, and convicts who committed a repeat crime and were serving imprisonment. When studying the determinants of crime recurrence, it is necessary to take into account the criminogenic influence of the factors that determined the primary crime, including at the level of small social groups. After conviction, criminals, as a rule, do not change their immediate environment and contacts, and continue to lead the same way of life. Deficiencies in the punishment system also play a criminogenic role in the determination of recidivism. As a result of the study, the author comes to the conclusion that, at the socio-psychological level, the repeated commission of crimes is due to the absence of positive changes in the convicts' microenvironment with a negative immediate environment retaining its influence and also due to the ineffectiveness of the current punishment system, which is unable to ensure the correction of convicts and prevent recidivism.

More is different: how aggregation turns on the light.

The reductionist approach to science seeks to understand the behaviour of systems by studying their individual components. It has been an enormously productive approach, but it is also widely acknowledged now that in some systems the behaviour of interest is an emergent property that cannot be discerned in the separate parts. Biology is replete with such examples, from the flocking of birds to the way metabolic processes in cells rely on a dynamic interplay of proteins and other components.Yet molecular systems do not have to be particularly complex before their properties become more than the sum of the parts. A classic example is the appearance of bulk-like metallic behaviour in small clusters of metal atoms only once they exceed a certain critical size. One of the most striking instances became apparent in 2001, when Ben Zhong Tang of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and his co-workers found that heterocyclic silicon-containing molecules called siloles become luminescent as nanoscopic aggregates even though the individual molecules in dilute solution do not emit light [1]. This looked like the opposite of the well-known phenomenon of concentration quenching, in which energy transfer between fluorescent (generally organic) molecules quenches the emission, an effect explained in 1955 [2]. Aggregation-induced ‘switching off’ is intuitively understandable, but ‘switching on’ due to aggregation was more surprising.Yet this effect of ‘aggregation-induced emission’ (AIE), as Tang and colleagues called it, was apparently seen, but not understood, much earlier [3]. In the 1850s, George Stokes noted that some inorganic complexes were fluorescent in the condensed, solid state but not in solution. At first, AIE was seen as a curiosity and deemed likely to be rare. However, subsequent research has shown not only that it is a rather common effect but also that it can be considered just one manifestation of a wide range of behaviours that arise from aggregation—leading to the proposed field of ‘aggregate science’, manifesting at the supramolecular level of small clusters or groups of molecules held together by relatively weak interactions. The field might be considered to illustrate George Whitesides’ notion of a chemistry ‘beyond the molecule’ [4], which bridges disciplines ranging from colloid science to crystal growth, nanotechnology, liquid crystals, photochemistry and molecular biology. At the same time, it echoes the famous insight of physicist Philip Anderson about emergent phenomena and the hierarchical nature of science: ‘More is different’ [5]. An ability to switch properties on and off by controlling intermolecular interactions and aggregation suggests various applications, from optical device technologies to targeted drugs for cancer therapy [6].NSR spoke to Ben Zhong Tang about the origins and possibilities of the field.

The Transfer of Religiousness in the Family from Parents to Children: An Analytical Review of Studies

The growing interest towards studying the impact of religion on various spheres of social life is reflected in quite large corpus of academic publications. Yet, the reproduction of religious identity on the level of individuals and small social groups is not much covered by Russian sociology of religion. The matter of the connection between religion and parenthood in Russian society becomes urgent due to the current transformations in Post-Soviet society: the first generation of believers is added and gradually being substituted by the second and third generations of believers. The representatives of these generations differ as it comes to the character of religious socialization that it is linked either to individual conversion or reproduction of religiosity. The given article represents the review of modern empirical studies of transmission of religion from parents to children. In our analysis we mostly refer to the results of foreign studies and are focused on the description of the results of reproduction of religiosity in family regardless of religious or confessional belonging. The analysis has indicated that family serves as one of the key agents of religious socialization of children and teenagers along with their peers and school. The review also focuses on the description of the factors that determine religiosity of children whose parents are believers. The authors also note the differences between religious and non-religious families are characterized relations between spouses and children, subjective wellbeing of children and styles of parenting. Attention is also paid to external factors determining family religiosity: cultural context, place and role of religion in society.

Социально-психологическая адаптация работников и эффективность малых групп

The article brings forward the results of the research of workers’ adaptation in small groups and informal subgroups. It examines the interrelationship between adaptation and the socio-psychological and subject and activity-based efficiency of groups and subgroups perceived by workers. We have surveyed 239 workers in 27 structural divisions with various profiles of activity. We have ascertained that workers included into informal subgroups have higher adaptation in their subgroups than in the group as a whole. At the group level adaptation has stronger positive correlation with the indices of the socio-psychological efficiency than with the indices of the subject and activity-based efficiency. The interrelationship between adaptation and the indices of the socio-psychological efficiency is higher at the level of small groups than at the level of informal subgroups.

Preaching to the converted: D.T. Suzuki's Zen Buddhism as a case study of a microsociological model of translation

Microsociology is the study of human behavior at the level of small social groups. One of its major themes is how social actors in a small social group setting will create their own group-specific value systems expressed through corresponding, group-specific signifiers. As such, microsociology offers a framework for analyzing how translators, as social actors, make the particular translation choices they do. In this paper I discuss one prominent microsociological model, that of Randall Collins. I ask how Collins complements but differs from Bourdieu, who has been influential in translation studies, and offer an example of how Collins's model can operate in translation studies with a case study of the Zen Buddhist English-language translation work of D.T. Suzuki (1870–1966). The study reveals how Suzuki's terminological choices and translation style were influenced by his social group – that is, by the network of contemporary intellectuals he associated with.

Practical pursuits: religion, politics, and personal cultivation in nineteenth-century Japan

The idea that personal cultivation leads to social and material well-being became wide spread in late Tokugawa Japan (1600-1868). Practical Pursuits explores theories of personal development that were diffused in the early nineteenth century by a network of religious groups in the Edo (Tokyo) area, and explains how, after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the leading members of these communities went on to create ideological coalitions inspired by the pursuit of a modern form of cultivation. Variously engaged in divination, Shinto purification rituals, and Zen practice, these individuals ultimately used informal political associations to promote the Confucian-style assumption that personal improvement is the basis for national prosperity. This wide-ranging yet painstakingly researched study represents a new direction in historical analysis. Where previous scholarship has used large conceptual units like Confucianism and Buddhism as its main actors and has emphasized the discontinuities in Edo and Meiji religious life, Sawada addresses the history of religion in nineteenth-century Japan at the level of individuals and small groups. She employs personal cultivation as an interpretive system, crossing familiar boundaries to consider complex linguistic, philosophical, and social interconnections. Moreover, because the task of self-improvement was a common concern across social classes, by focusing on this practical pursuit, Sawada demonstrates in a new way the problematic nature of the conventional distinction between popular and high religion. Scholars of religious studies and of Japanese intellectual and social history will applaud her attempt to bring together the many participants in the nineteenth-century discourse of personal cultivation.

Mediation of group cognition

The term "community-based learning" can refer to a variety of forms of learning. One can, for instance, insist on an individualistic notion of learning and argue that individual learning can be enhanced by factors that may influence it from a supportive community environment. At the other theoretical extreme, one can propose a social conception of learning and claim that most important knowledge building takes place at the community level, while individual learning is a secondary matter of internalization, acculturation or increased participation in community. Here, we will stake out a middle ground: that community-based learning should be analyzed at the intermediate level of small groups of individuals within the community. We point out that small groups typically mediate the relationship of communities to their members and we propose a consideration of small group cognition as an alternative methodological focus to either cognition in the head of individuals or the cultural knowledge of a whole community. This approach has practical implications for CSCL and CSCW: collaboration is taken to be a potential emergent phenomenon of small group interaction, and the computer support of collaboration is analyzed as an enabling technology whose design and use forms and transforms the nature of the interactions.

Decision Making and LeadershipDecision Making and Leadership, edited by HellerFrank.. Cambridge University Press, 1992, 247 pp.

The contributions address the leadership decision-making process at various levels of social reality, from global problems of foreign policy, via analyses of what happens in business organizations, to research findings and theories that operate at the level of individuals and small social groups.