Social Alliances Research Articles

The ins and the outs: Foodways, feasts, and social differentiation in the Baekje Kingdom, Korea

This article compares pottery assemblages from Pungnap Toseong (PT) and 16 adjacent settlements in order to understand the status-related foodways in the Hanseong phase (18 BCE–CE 475) of the Baekje Kingdom in Korea. PT is an earthen-walled site that may have been the first capital town of Baekje. Its residents were arguably of higher status than those of other settlements and, as with other complex societies, are likely to have used food and food-related activities for reinforcing, maintaining, and transforming social relations. The intersite comparison reveals that PT contains more ceramic wares than any other site, especially more storing and serving vessels; abundant storing vessels suggest surplus production mobilized toward the center, while abundant serving vessels are, along with zooarchaeological remains, indicative of rituals and feasts. Researchers have argued that Baekje’s elites differentiated themselves from those of lower rank by consuming luxurious foods. This study adds another dimension to the previous discussion by showing that regardless of food quality, the people of PT had a large amount of stored foods and occasionally consumed foods in commensal contexts in order to maintain their social alliances and reinforce the hierarchy.

How and When Socially Entrepreneurial Nonprofit Organizations Benefit From Adopting Social Alliance Management Routines to Manage Social Alliances?

Social alliance is defined as the collaboration between for-profit and nonprofit organizations. Building on the insights derived from the resource-based theory, we develop a conceptual framework to explain how socially entrepreneurial nonprofit organizations (SENPOs) can improve their social alliance performance by adopting strategic alliance management routines. We test our framework using the data collected from 203 UK-based SENPOs in the context of cause-related marketing campaign-derived social alliances. Our results confirm a positive relationship between social alliance management routines and social alliance performance. We also find that relational mechanisms, such as mutual trust, relational embeddedness, and relational commitment, mediate the relationship between social alliance management routines and social alliance performance. Moreover, our findings suggest that different types of social alliance motivation can influence the impact of social alliance management routines on different types of the relational mechanisms. In general, we demonstrate that SENPOs can benefit from adopting social alliance management routines and, in addition, highlight how and when the social alliance management routines–social alliance performance relationship might be shaped. Our study offers important academic and managerial implications, and points out future research directions.

Spark a Fire? Buyers’ Social Power and Alliance Governance

Adequate governance mechanisms underlie the success of buyer-supplier alliances. But what further relational factors underlie their implementation? This paper follows the assumption that different ...

Interpreting Modernity in Culturally Pluralized Cities

Socio-cultural Unity in diversity is an Aesthetic symbol of man's collective agglomerations. In urban grouping and majorly due to economics, divisions dissolve and people naturally come together. A city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time, (Patrick giddies, 1910) and bridge divides between groups of people. Sometimes, which is becoming more common as time passes, the agglomeration of cultures at the point called city is not a celebratory moment. It comes with social stiffness among aboriginals, co-migrants and immigrants. Also, the aspirations dissolve in unsustainable physical conditions of living in the mega habitats of developing and underdeveloped countries.A successful multicultural environment is one where various cultural set's sense of comfort is combined with good physical design and addressing intangible attributes to create an atmosphere that can nurture many individual and communal preferences; a place that fosters social interaction while simultaneously creating distinct spaceswhere individual cultures can be acknowledged and celebrated. [1] Our future cities shall be the urban places of aspirations where men by mutual society complement each other, do grow to social alliances, multiplicities in commonalities, and existential corporations. [2]

Confrontación, territorio y "espiritualidad". El lugar de los rituales mapuche en el proceso del poder.

We inquire about the organization and practice of Mapuche rituals in northwest of Chubut and southwest of Rio Negro. We try to locate the development of these ceremonies as part of the struggle for territory spanning families, communities and organizations in the area and the political and social alliances that develop. We argue that, at present, prioritize the area of confrontation allows to watch that ritual and territory are articulated through the construction of social forces. We place special emphasis on demonstrating the validity and effectiveness of the ritual celebrations, pointing that this “instrumental” character doesn´t deny its constantly updated mythological and philosophical content. To do so, we analyze ritual organization and its senses, review the history of the Mapuche groups in Argentina and describe some ethnographic cases. We rely on fieldwork in the region since 2009.

Using Species Distribution Modeling to contextualize Lower Magdalenian social networks visible through portable art stylistic similarities in the Cantabrian region (Spain)

This research argues for a refocus of the study of prehistoric social networks that involves contextualizing the inter-site links that are often interpreted as indicators of inter-site social interactions. It focuses on the social networks created during the Lower Magdalenian of the Cantabrian region (Spain), and visible through similarities of portable art representations. It uses Species Distribution Modeling and Maximum Classification Likelihood on faunal presence data to reconstruct prehistoric biomes, and contextualize the networks reconstructed through the art analysis. It demonstrates the potential of mapping the recreated networks onto the reconstructed biomes and of identifying the linked sites' foraging and minimal band territories to distinguish between local mobility movement and inter-group social alliances. The results show that, during the Lower Magdalenian, the majority of movements seen through artistic similarities probably represent the seasonal mobility of one or two hunter-gatherer groups, and that only a few inter-site links represent social networks used to exchange mates and gather information.

A Network of Resistances against a Multiple Crisis. SOS Rosarno and the Experimentation of Socio-Economic Alternative Models

SOS Rosarno was launched in 2011 by a group of small farmers and activists based in the Gioia Tauro Plain, Calabria, Southern Italy. The idea was to sell organic citrus fruits through short self-organized supply chains, essentially based on Solidarity Purchase Groups, in order to allow producers to pay migrant workers according to the law, to receive a fair remuneration, to guarantee healthy and affordable food to consumers, to protect the integrity of the environment. This paper aims to reconstruct the ideological frame and the genealogy, the organization and the practices, the impact and the limits of SOS Rosarno, drawing mainly on the political documents produced by the association and in-depth interviews with its diverse members. It clarifies, on one side, the strategies of alternative economy and the new social alliances implemented in order to challenge those conditions which impoverish small producers and let migrant farmworkers be exploited and become the target of racism in many Italian countrysides. It explores, on the other side, the development of a new peasant civilization as alternative to the current economic and environmental crises, in terms of de-commodification of nature and labour, construction of a convivial democratic society, transition from monoculture to food sovereignty.

Controlando el regimiento. La nobleza de Talavera de la Reina y sus métodos de intervención política en el concejo en la Baja Edad Media

How can political power be controlled in a village -Talavera de la Reina- where the most important municipal public offices -the regidurias- are not subject to transfer from fathers to sons? This was an unusual problem in most Castilian towns by the end of the Middle Ages, but in Talavera it constituted one of the main political issues for the town’s power elite since the introduction of the regimiento at the end of the 14th Century. The aim of this paper is to analyse the solution given to this problem by the dominant group, principally composed of the nobility of the village. In this sense, the strategy followed by the nobility of Talavera de la Reina was focused on two goals: to drive out the common elite as competitors for power and to ensure the access of the members of the nobility to the town council government. This was the reason why they developed a process that guaranteed them the control over the lists of candidates to replace vacant positions inside the regimiento. This system was based on the election of the applicants among the members of the noble lineages of the village, but the aspirants could not be a relative of the deceased officers. According to this process, the best positioned members of the families that composed the regimiento were on a kind of waiting list, expecting their turn to gain access to the highest office in town: a regiduria. The main consequence of this practice was the development of a complex network of social and political relationships and alliances between the families of the dominant group whose main goal was to achieve the control of the government of the village.

Integrating care across a challenged local health economy: the West Norfolk Health and Social Alliance

A Health and Social Care Alliance established in 2012 and selected as a national 'Integration Pioneer' site is exploring how integration can address local system challenges faced in many health economies across the UK. The original programme focused on data gathered from the evaluation of the national Integration Care Organisation pilots - there were three in West Norfolk - about patient experience, aiming to develop stronger early community interventions in a more coordinated way to keep people independent longer. The early programme initiatives have created a firm partnership, innovative services and a good foundation on which to build, which has been a strength as the local health economy now faces a huge financial and clinical sustainability challenge in its current configuration. A transformation programme is therefore being developed to address the challenges and identify solutions through integration and innovation for the sustainability of a small rural locality.

Understanding the role of the broker in business non-profit collaboration

Purpose – This paper aims to investigate the contribution of brokers to business non-profit collaborations, in the context of employee volunteering. It investigates the roles brokers play and ways they contribute to value creation within social alliances. Design/methodology/approach – This research focusses on a case study of a UK employee volunteering broker programme run by a local volunteer centre. A combined qualitative methodology involved document analysis and interviews, with brokers and business, community and government partners involved in employee volunteering collaborations. Findings – Brokers play three key roles in business non-profit collaboration as connectors, facilitators/co-designers and learning catalysts. These roles help stimulate manifestations of associational value, transferred resource value, interaction value and synergistic value. Research limitations/implications – Results indicate brokers play an important part in nurturing conditions underpinning innovation and value co-creation, key characteristics of transformational forms of business non-profit collaboration. This study was based on a single case study. Future research could explore broker contributions within a variety of business non-profit settings. Practical implications – For managers implementing business non-profit collaborations, this paper provides a framework depicting key broker roles and ways brokers enable collaborative value that may be useful when assessing whether to use the services of a broker. Originality/value – This paper enriches the understanding of business non-profit collaboration and the role of individual actors in affecting value creation, an under-researched area in the social alliance literature. It provides a framework for assessing broker contributions in business non-profit collaborations.

Ascendancy of the Tudulgal, central Torres Strait: Socio-political manipulation and domination of an archipelago polity

Survival for the ethnographically-known Kulkalgal of the drought-prone reef islands of central Torres Strait focused on high mobility, translocation, food storage, and importation of cultivated plant foods. These buffering mechanisms were underpinned by a dynamic and flexible web of social alliances and exchange relationships spread across 700km of seaspace. The small and resource-poor island of Tudu (inhabited by the Tudulgal, a subgroup of the Kulkalgal) was a central place within the regional archipelago polity. It is hypothesised that the Tudulgal strategically increased resource self-sufficiency and orchestrated socio-political dominance to help obviate economic vulnerability. These ethnographic patterns provide the basis for developing archaeological hypotheses on socio-political ascendancy of the Tudulgal, focusing on chronological insights into material dimensions of increasing self-sufficiency (e.g., intensified use of local marine foods, horticultural garden produce, and clam shell technology), and increasing regional domination of exchange (e.g., intensified importation of exotics), canoe trade (e.g., intensified production of shell valuables), and headhunting cults and warfare (e.g., intensified use of skull shrines). While cultural complexity is usually associated with resource-rich coastal contexts and hierarchical societies, the Tudulgal demonstrate that regional polity development and associated socio-political and socio-economic complexity can occur in response to limited availability of critical terrestrial food and water resources in societies that are largely heterarchical and egalitarian.

Factors Influencing the Intended Likelihood of Exposing Sexual Infidelity

There is a considerable body of literature on infidelity within romantic relationships. However, there is a gap in the scientific literature on factors influencing the likelihood of uninvolved individuals exposing sexual infidelity. Therefore, we devised an exploratory study examining a wide range of potentially relevant factors. Based in part on evolutionary theory, we anticipated nine potential domains or types of influences on the likelihoods of exposing or protecting cheaters, including kinship, strong social alliances, financial support, previous relationship behaviors (including infidelity and abuse), potential relationship transitions, stronger sexual and emotional aspects of the extra-pair relationship, and disease risk. The pattern of results supported these predictions (N = 159 men, 328 women). In addition, there appeared to be a small positive bias for participants to report infidelity when provided with any additional information about the situation. Overall, this study contributes a broad initial description of factors influencing the predicted likelihood of exposing sexual infidelity and encourages further studies in this area.

How MNCs and NPOs Collaborate on Sustainability: Assessing Social Alliance from the Emerging Markets

Despite an increasing number of researches which address the importance of cross-sector social alliance for businesses to advance their sustainability agenda, the literature lacks evidences on how ...

Proposal of a social alliance success model from a relationship marketing perspective: A meta-analytical study of the theoretical foundations

Partnerships between businesses and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have become widely adopted mechanisms for collaboration in addressing complex social issues, the aim being to take advantage of the two types of organizational rationale to generate mutual value. Many such alliances have proved to be unsuccessful, however. To assist managers improve the likelihood of success of their collaborative relationships, the authors propose a success model of business-NGO partnering processes based on Relationship Marketing Theory. They also analyse the theoretical bases of the model's hypotheses through a meta-analytical study of the existing literature.

Women Organizing against Free Trade in Latin America

There is a good deal of literature on new transnational social movements, especially those opposing globalization, particularly free trade. There is also broad literature regarding the consequences by gender of neoliberal restructuring, but literature on transnational organizing of women to resist free trade integration schemes is scarce. This article addresses the issue from the perspective of the Women's Committee within the Hemispheric Social Alliance and the Mesoamerican Women in Resistance. It highlights the hindrances these movements encounter within their own mixed coalitions and within the broader women's and feminist movements.

Marital Mobility in the Bangladeshi Middle Class: Matchmaking Strategies and Transnational Networks

In this paper, I take marriage as the point of entry for exploring social alliances amongst an affluent cluster of the Bangladeshi middle class. Using semi-structured interviews, biographies, family histories, intergenerational data, matrimonial biodata, chat histories, group discussions and blogs, I traced marital genealogies from Bangladesh to Britain in order to understand the strength of their transnational network. I argue that homogamy has become instrumental for this class in consolidating its power as new networks are forged through marriage and in which women play a significant role. These alliances result in the conflation of different kinds of capital, generating a convergence of influence and access among individuals that transcends national boundaries, reconfiguring the group as a cosmopolitan class. This provides a novel perspective on how Bangladeshi women of this class exercise power in marital negotiations while navigating normative practices and patriarchal structures.

Resistance to learning: overcoming the desire-not-to-know in classroom teaching

1. The Emotional Demands of Information Assimilation 2. The Psychology and Biology of the Desire Not to Know 3. Symptomatic Fixation, Emotion, and Social Alliance 4. Academic Allegiance and Attacks on Linking 5. Information Relays and the Touched Nerves of Global Injustice

Hamilton's legacy: kinship, cooperation and social tolerance in mammalian groups

In 1964, W. D. Hamilton proposed a novel solution to the long-standing evolutionary puzzle: why do individuals cooperate? Hamilton predicted that, if individuals possess the ability to discriminate on the basis of kinship, then they should gain inclusive fitness benefits by biasing helpful behaviour towards relatives and harmful behaviour away from them. The possibility that kin selection might favour social evolution has now inspired five decades of active research. Here, I synthesize this evidence for social mammals. First, I report on the methodological advances that allow for pedigree construction, and review the evidence for maternal and paternal kin discrimination. Second, I recognize that a substantial body of evidence for the evolution of cooperative breeding via kin selection exists, and then focus on the potential for kin selection to favour less well understood, yet equally salient, targets of selection: social partner choice, coalition formation and social tolerance (withholding aggression). I find that kin selection favours remarkably similar patterns of nepotism in primate and nonprimates with respect to these short-lived social acts. Although social alliances among maternal and paternal kin are common in mammalian societies, kinship largely fails to protect individuals from aggression. Thus, an individual's closest associates and allies, many of whom are kin, are most often an individual's closest competitors within mammalian social groups. Taken together, these findings highlight the value of Hamilton's holistic approach in simultaneously considering the direct benefits of competition and the indirect fitness benefits of cooperation. Despite major empirical advances since the inception of kin selection theory, future tests using newly available molecular and statistical methods in combination with longitudinal behavioural data are required to partition the relative contributions of direct and indirect fitness on the lifetime inclusive fitness. Such approaches will elucidate the relative influences of evolutionary and ecological forces favouring social evolution across the mammalian lineage of social mammals.

How Does Male Ritual Behavior Vary Across the Lifespan?

Ritual behaviors of some form exist in every society known to anthropologists. Despite this universality, we have little understanding of how ritual behavior varies within populations or across the lifespan, nor the determinants of this variation. Here we test hypotheses derived from life history theory by using behavioral observations and oral interview data concerning participant variation in Fijian kava-drinking ceremonies. We predicted that substantial variation in the frequency and duration of participation would result from (1) trade-offs with reproduction and (2) the intrinsic status differences between ritual participants. We demonstrate that when controlling for household composition, men with young offspring participated less frequently and exhibited greater variance in their time spent at ceremonies than men without young children. However, men with a larger number of total dependents in their household participated more frequently than those with fewer. Moreover, we found that men's ascribed rank, level of education, and reliance on wage labor all significantly predict their frequency of attendance. We also found that the number of dependents a man has in his household is positively correlated with total food production, and the amount of kava he cultivates. In general, these results suggest that ritual participation is part of an important strategy employed by Fijian men for both achieving status and developing social alliances. Variation in participation in kava ceremonies by Fijian men therefore reflects the constraints of their current life history condition and their inherited rank.

The Content of Our Cooperation, Not the Color of Our Skin: An Alliance Detection System Regulates Categorization by Coalition and Race, but Not Sex

Humans in all societies form and participate in cooperative alliances. To successfully navigate an alliance-laced world, the human mind needs to detect new coalitions and alliances as they emerge, and predict which of many potential alliance categories are currently organizing an interaction. We propose that evolution has equipped the mind with cognitive machinery that is specialized for performing these functions: an alliance detection system. In this view, racial categories do not exist because skin color is perceptually salient; they are constructed and regulated by the alliance system in environments where race predicts social alliances and divisions. Early tests using adversarial alliances showed that the mind spontaneously detects which individuals are cooperating against a common enemy, implicitly assigning people to rival alliance categories based on patterns of cooperation and competition. But is social antagonism necessary to trigger the categorization of people by alliance—that is, do we cognitively link A and B into an alliance category only because they are jointly in conflict with C and D? We report new studies demonstrating that peaceful cooperation can trigger the detection of new coalitional alliances and make race fade in relevance. Alliances did not need to be marked by team colors or other perceptually salient cues. When race did not predict the ongoing alliance structure, behavioral cues about cooperative activities up-regulated categorization by coalition and down-regulated categorization by race, sometimes eliminating it. Alliance cues that sensitively regulated categorization by coalition and race had no effect on categorization by sex, eliminating many alternative explanations for the results. The results support the hypothesis that categorizing people by their race is a reversible product of a cognitive system specialized for detecting alliance categories and regulating their use. Common enemies are not necessary to erase important social boundaries; peaceful cooperation can have the same effect.