Set Of Social Relations Research Articles

Fixing value: history, ethnography, and material ontologies of deservingness in a Philadelphia repair shop

ABSTRACTThis article draws on labor history and science and technology studies to propose a method, and to provide an example, of historical analysis that is responsive to the conceptual categories that arise out of ethnographic accounts of individuals’ lived experiences. Using an ‘ontological tool-box’, this article follows various enactments of consumer appliances and, along with them, ideas of what it is to be a productive worker in a small appliance repair shop and across the practices of certain institutions of disciplinary power. Through an ethnographic and ontological analysis of repair in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington, this article reveals that, rather than being inevitable or essential, all the categories used to organize our world, whether referent to identities or objects, are both constituted by and constitutive of a complex set of social relations and ideological priorities, which even historians are implicated in reproducing.

Working Digital Money into a Cash Economy: The Collaborative Work of Loan Payment

This paper examines how different forms of money, specifically digital versus cash, impact on the work of an organisation and its customers. In doing so it contributes to the body of literature exploring how the social meanings of money impact on practice. We describe the findings of an ethnographic study examining loan collection workflows, where bank loans given to auto-rickshaw drivers to purchase their auto-rickshaw are overseen and managed by an intermediary. We found that making the mobile money service usable for the drivers took considerable work and was largely achieved because it was embedded in the wider, trusted, loan payment ecosystem. Although Airtel Money promises anytime, anywhere payments, payment remains time and place bound for the drivers. It is tempting to take a transactional approach to payments, and indeed we initially approached the problem of enabling frequent payments as one of payment mechanism. However, in practice payments are embedded in sets of social relations and a socio-technical ecosystem. It takes considerable collaborative work, and a fair amount of flexibility, to enable these financially vulnerable drivers to pay off their loans, and reducing the issue to one of payment mechanism alone does not tell the full story.

Different Aspects of Visualizing Social Network Data

A social network is a set of people (or organizations or other social entities) connected by a set of social relationships, such as friendship, co-working or information exchange. Social network analysis focuses on the analysis of patterns of relationships among people, organizations, states and such social entities. Social network analysis provides both a visual and a mathematical analysis of humanunderstanding of how they behave is crucial to their efficient operation. Fortunately, data on networks is plentiful by visualizing this data, it is possible to greatly improve our understanding. In this paper a state of the art survey of the works done on social network analysis ranging from pure mathematical analyses in graphs to analyzing the social networks in Semantic Web is given. The main goal is to provide a road map for researchers working on different aspects of Social Network Analysis.

The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America

The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America

The Stalk that Supports the Flower:Orang RimbaKinship, Marriage and Gender in Jambi Sumatra

This article examines Orang Rimba kinship, marriage and gender relations in the Bukit Duabelas region of Jambi, Sumatra. Orang Rimba social organization, its terms and concepts, primary kinship relations, use of botanic metaphor and key structural contrasts demonstrate their ties to Malay and Austronesian-speaking peoples throughout the region. The manner in which these concepts are applied is very different, and is arranged in a way to fit their unique way of life in the forests. Some of the broader differences relate to their mobile economy, small and dispersed camps, and asymmetrical relations of affinity, which take place in the context of egalitarian social relations. This results in a set of social relationships not unlike many of the bride service societies throughout the world. Orang Rimba women have great rights over forest resources, yet are restrained in their interactions with men and outsiders by rigid gender relations.

The effects of Russia-Turkey crisis on mixed families in İstanbul: Hearing the voices of women

After 1990’s, Russia-Turkey migration system has developed and a great number of Russian women and Turkish men have started to cross the border for various purposes. Within this mobility, new social, culturel, economic and political realities have emerged. One of the most important realities is increasing of Russian-Turkish couples and their important roles on the Russia-Turkey migration system. Just like Ley and Waters (2004) said, migrants not only move from one place to another, but also move from one set of social relations to another. In this context, I'd like to mention about what has happened in lives of mixed families in Istanbul after an aircraft belonging to Russian Federation Air Forces was shoot-down by Turkish Air Forces on the November 24th, 2015. This study based on interviews with marriage migrants, their couples and representatives of Russian institutions in Istanbul. In conclusion, the crisis between Russia and Turkey has affected lives of Russian women in Istanbul both negative and positive ways. These women are foreigners in Turkey and their limited social environments have imprisoned them to a narrow area during the crisis. But they have tried to bring into connection with two parts of the crisis and have tried to stand between Turkey and Russia by using their institutional networks which also have supported their collective identities.

Interdisciplinaridade: da totalidade à prática pedagógica

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1807-1384.2017v14n1p1Este artigo faz reflexões sobre a interdisciplinaridade no intuito de contribuir na compreensão de tal categoria. Partimos do pressuposto de que a realidade é dinâmica, sendo os sujeitos que escrevem/desenham os circuitos da história, influenciados pelo conjunto de relações sociais em que estão inseridos. Por isso, as discussões teóricas tornam-se necessárias, pois buscam romper com a forma tradicional do conhecimento e de escola. Assim, trabalhar na perspectiva da interdisciplinaridade na proposta de uma escola pode propiciar uma formação para emancipação humana, na qual os sujeitos inseridos têm a tarefa de tornar realidade novas formas de organizar o espaço considerando a totalidade social. Baseada na pesquisa bibliográfica de cunho qualitativa, discorreremos sobre a evolução da ciência buscando apresentar os fatos que possibilitaram as mudanças de paradigmas. Apresentamos, também, discussões sobre a interdisciplinaridade como um caminho para compreensão dos fenômenos na perspectiva da totalidade e finalizamos compreendendo o processo interdisciplinar na prática pedagógica. Verificou-se que a interdisciplinaridade é uma necessidade decorrente da própria evolução da ciência e da realidade social que é, ao mesmo tempo, una e diversa.

‘This Painting Becomes His Body for Life’: Transforming Relations in Yolŋu Initiation and Funeral Rituals

ABSTRACTAmong the most striking images produced in north-east Arnhem Land today are the paintings given to young boys during their first initiation ceremony (dhapi). Skilfully applied on their chest over several hours, while singing and dancing proceeds on the ceremonial grounds nearby, these body paintings act as relational matrixes which locate the initiands within a socio-cosmic web of connections. At the other end of the male ritual life-cycle, the bodies of the deceased undergo a similar process of transfiguration, as they are made to resemble the groups’ most sacred objects, seen to instantiate the powers of specific ancestral beings. In the context of these rituals, the links between clans, places, and ancestral beings are expressed by being made visible on and around the body. Pragmatically composed and displayed for all to see, I suggest that Yolŋu ritual images appear as ‘matter(s) of relations’ par excellence, materialising various sets of social relationships. This paper examines the material logics behind this transfiguration process which, by turning people into ancestors, transform the relations between individuals and groups, between humans and non-human beings, and between the living and the spirits of the dead.

Environmental Crime: in the Maze of Definitions

The article is devoted to the definition of which is debatable. The author examines in detail all available literature approaches to determining the very specified act, identifying its typical features and formulating appropriate definitions. The article discloses the contents of the species of the object of the crime, namely environmental safety as a set of social relations that characterizes the functioning of natural environmental systems, natural and natural anthropogenous objects, natural elements of habitat (environment) of the human, precluding harming his health, property and other vital interests. Environmental safety characterizes favourable environment without negative impact of economic and other activities, emergencies, man-made disasters and their consequences. Accordingly, the environmental crime is defined as socially dangerous criminal act, which infringe on the environmental safety (favourable environment) and causes (or poses danger of) criminal law consequences. The article also discusses controversial issues of the subject of an environmental crime. The author concludes that it is environment as an aggregation of environmental components, natural, natural anthropog-enous objects, as well as man-made objects. The understanding of an environmental crime as violation of the vital interests of a person, the rules of environmental protection, mentioned in the literature, is erroneous, which entails distortion of these circumstances and their values in the composition of a crime in general and environmental crime in particular.

Women Labour Under the Grip of Neoliberal/Conservative Care Policies: An Assessment on Home Care Practices

We witness that women labour has been rendered worthless and secondary against that of men's.This however has also gained acceptance as a norm and within the historical process of articulation of patriarchy as a set of social relations to capitalism. Hence, these social relations to capitalism has an embedded masculine types of solidarity as well as unequal power relationships between women and men. Being a system of this historical process, gendered division of labour in patriarchal capitalism serves to render women responsible primarily with reproductive works, whereas rendering men as actors of the social and economic system. Cooperation of capitalism with patriarchy generally shapes policies with neoliberal economy, enabling inclusion of conservative discourse and practices. Therefore, with respect to care policies, there is the state's withdrawal on public services and marketisation of care services on one hand and the idealisation of the family on the other which is also the dissemination of practices that transfer all the load to the household, at the absence of related public services. These care policies in question lock women indoors, and are reflected as women to be recognized as relatives and to undertake the heavy burden of care, unpaid and unshared. In Turkey, usually care services are conceptualised as an inherent responsibility of the family; thus, with the overt articulation of conservative policies to neoliberal economic policies, presently, care responsibility has moved out of political arena and completely become a private practice, rather than being societal. Therefore, in a male dominant society, locking care labour in the household leads to consolidated dependency of women to the household rather than equally sharing of the load together by women and men, as the latter being the 'breadwinner'. ....

Ambiguous Bodies, Biopower and the Ideologies of Science Fiction

Contemporary Hollywood film narrates the fear of monstrous science; attending to the modulations of medicine, capital and the body. The filmic body is employed to illustrate the power of the new biotechnologies to create and sustain life and the new sets of social relations which are a consequence of the marriage of capital and medicine. In the Hollywood film, persons who do not fit the ideal healthy persona have a moral duty to pursue repair and transformation. Constructed as inherently lacking, the unhealthy body becomes a repository for social anxieties about control and vulnerability, vis-à-vis the enormous and exponentially expanding science and technology fields. Hierarchies of embodiment are played out on the Big Screen as imperfect bodies are excluded from public life, power and status and urged to strive for “optimization”. Late modern societies present the possibility of new technologies which have the potential to radicalize bodies. However, these potential modulations are ultimately derived from a set of ideologies around the body and the power of the individual to enact an individualized solution. Contemporary narratives circulate around ownership of capital and the price of “repair.” This marriage of science and capital in popular narratives may be indicative of concerns for our future, as the power to make and repair life seems to rest increasingly in the hands of an elite.

Whistleblowing in the Wind Towards a Socially Situated Research Agenda: A Response to Recent Commentaries.

Whistleblowing in the Wind Towards a Socially Situated Research Agenda: A Response to Recent Commentaries.

Network-based social coordination of business processes

This paper presents a social coordination approach that addresses the issue of conflicts over resources during business process execution. A business process consists of tasks that persons and/or machines execute. The resources, that business processes require at run-time, are sometimes limited and/or not-renewable. The approach uses a set of social relations that connect tasks/persons/machines together. These relations are the basis of developing specialized networks that capture the interactions during business process execution and are used to recommend corrective actions when conflicts over resources occur. These actions are dependent on the properties of tasks, persons and machines properties which referred to as transactional, activity, and operational, respectively. A system that demonstrates the approach is also discussed.

Regionalism, mobility, and “the village” as a set of social relations: Himalayan reflections on a South Asian theme

This article considers how ethnographic representations of “the village” have created links between otherwise disparate “regional ethnography traditions” over time. “The village” has served as a multivalent sign that at once works to integrate specific locales into broader scholarly narratives, and to index moments of disjuncture in the production of regionality. I make this argument with specific reference to the relationship between “Himalayan” and “South Asian” studies, as mediated by the village as both geographical and social sign. I draw upon ethnographic material from three different Himalayan contexts to illustrate how people think of the village as a set of social relations, within which they orient themselves subjectively regardless of their physical location. Such orientations can be either positive or negative, demonstrating that the village serves not only as a site of nostalgia for those who have left it, but rather as an organizing principle that may possess a range of emotional and pragmatic valences. Ultimately, I argue that today’s villages remain key sites for the production of social meaning, requiring deep anthropological engagement if we wish to understand how contemporary mobile lives themselves mediate between the universal and the particular.

Ensinar Conceitos em Ciências Contábeis

This study discusses the contributions of the conceptual map as a way to teach concepts inAccounting Sciences. The goal is to understand the use of this feature in differentiation andreconciliation of concepts aiming at meaningful learning and simultaneously at the reflectionon the pedagogical practice. In the study we used the literature, from the perspective ofAusubel (1980), Vygotsky (1993), Charlot (2000) and Contreras (2002), with the approachthat learning is mediated by the set of social relations. It was concluded that the teaching ofconcepts in Accounting Sciences based on the meaningful learning allows the expansion ofprior knowledge of the students. This possibility implies a deliberate pedagogical practice,from the desire to deepen the financial and interdisciplinary knowledge in the execution of theteacher's work. According to this perspective the teaching of Accounting Sciences cancontribute to a solid and with citizen participation professional training.

Semantic Web Approach Towards Interoperability and Privacy Issues in Social Networks

The Social Web is a set of social relations that link people through World Wide Web. This Social Web encompasses how the websites and software are designed and developed to support social relations. The new paradigms, tools and web services introduced by Social Web are widely accepted by internet users. The main drawbacks of these tools are it acts as independent data silos; hence interoperability among applications is a complex issue. This paper focuses on this issue and how best we can use semantic web technologies to achieve interoperability among applications.

Malthus, the Slave Trade, and the Civilizing Effect of the Preventive Checks

Robert Malthus was, by his own admission, opposed to slavery and the slave trade. Nevertheless, English proponents of the slave trade, and southern slave owners in the southern United States, appealed to his population principle in their defense. The disconnect between these two statements is a classic study of how ideas get lost in their cultural appropriation. My interest in this paper emerges not from the disjunction between different interpretations of Malthus’ population principle, but from his off-the-cuff response to the discovery that defenders of the slave trade in England were using his argument to bolster their case. In that response, Malthus constructs an argument about the interplay between the population principle and the preventive checks that reinforces the interpretation of the role of “the degree of civilization” in the subsequent editions of his Essay that I offered in a recent paper.The argument is twofold. First, the paper revisits the argument that the expansion of the realm of exchange among individuals in a society, supported by institutional development of individual property rights and the rule of law, would effectively prevent the inexorable effects of the population principle by expanded operation of prudential and moral decisions regarding the timing of marriage. In societies with a high degree of civilization, population growth was regulated solely by the prevailing power of prudence and moral restraint. Slavery not only violated the individual rights of the slave, but also created a set of social relations that stymied the effective operation of prudential and moral restraint. Secondly, in the examination of Malthus’ response to the use of his population principle by advocates of slavery, we see Malthus argue that the continuation of barbarous (i.e., uncivilized and unrestrained) practices among societies that claimed to be “high” civilizations would only continue the participation of members of other societies in those same barbarous practices. Thus, slavery was also a form of institutional failure, which prevented the advancement of any society that participated in it toward a higher degree of civilization.

Disability and work inclusion in Italy: between unfulfilled promises and new disability culture

This article outlines the existing provisions in Italy for inclusion in workplaces for persons with disabilities. It reports available statistics on the numbers of persons with disabilities in paid employment by sector, those seeking work and drawing pensions and those employed according to educational qualification. It considers the different channels, both formal and informal, through which persons with disabilities are able to gain access to paid employment and the concrete effects of Law 68/1999 on access to work and collocamento mirato (targeted work placement). One of the problems with the Italian legislation on compulsory work placement of disabled persons is that it applies only to employers who have at least 15 employees, whereas the vast majority of employers in Italy have fewer than 10. Lastly, the article reflects on the current situation and the challenges posed by new ways of conceiving of disability and of work. Work needs to be understood not simply as an occupation or position for which one receives payment but as a set of social relations between people, which has value in itself.

‘Some People It's Very Difficult to Trust’: Attributions of Agency and Accountability in Practitioners' Talk About Integration

ABSTRACTThe concept of ‘integration’ plays an important role in policy and practice regarding the settlement of migrants, yet the term is used in a variety of ways. This article examines how practitioners who support the integration of refugees in Scotland construct ‘integration’ at the community level to justify or challenge particular policies and sets of social relations. Analysis shows that integration can be worked up in contexts involving (i) descriptions of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in relation to a single community, (ii) social inclusion of those in multiple communities, or (iii) group level intercultural contact. Each version of integration is bound up with different attributions of agency for advancing integration and attributions of blame for current problems. Instead of relying upon a concept that is so open to multiple uses, local organizations might usefully specify outcomes in terms of social actors and interactions. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

‘We are saving the township’: Pentecostalism, faith-based organisations, and development in South Africa

ABSTRACTIn this article, I trace the emergence of Pentecostal FBOs in the South African city of Cape Town. By focusing on their involvements in HIV/AIDS programmes, including practices such as health education, counselling and material support, I analyse the organisational dynamics and consequences ensuing from their activities. Pentecostal involvements in development work engender complex connections between two distinct processes: On the one hand, they offer Pentecostal communities new social spaces for promoting their faith and moral agendas. On the other hand, development work urges Pentecostal communities to recast their activities in the logic of formal organisation and accountability (proposals–grants–projects). On the ground, these logics are constantly subverted as beneficiaries construe FBOs aspatronsand deploy Pentecostal identities for mediating access to FBOs and the resources they command. My argument is that Pentecostal faith works to mediate the entire set of social relationships, expectations, imageries and practices that structure FBO work on the ground. More than belief and ritual, it isPentecostal belongingthat links organisations, people, opportunities and resources.