Social Effort Research Articles

Corporate Social Responsibility of the Most Highly Reputed European and North American Firms

The objective of this article is double: first, to analyze, using a descriptive analysis, the main differences in the level and components of social behaviour between European and North American firms and, second, to contrast empirically, using a multiple linear regression model, whether the motives behind corporate social behaviour are different depending on the region or country of the firm. With this aim, an indicator of social behaviour (termed effort in sustainability) has been constructed by aggregating the firm’s social effort with customers, employees, community and environment for a sample of the 40 European and North American companies most highly reputed in the years 2003 and 2004. The results obtained indicate that the region or country of the firm influences the level, components and motivation of its social behaviour.

Building a Harmonious Society and Achieving Individual Harmony

Rapid economic growth in China is accompanied by economic disparity, corruption, crime, and a great deal of frustration among China’s citizens. These social problems threaten the country’s further development, social stability, and harmony. This study discusses the recent campaign in China for a harmonious society. Many Chinese scholars, officials, and citizens seem to believe that more effective and efficient social structures will result in social harmony. However, social harmony is a more complex social psychological phenomenon which is determined by the interactions among social values, people, and society. People achieve social harmony when they feel their values and desires are attainable in society. They have to make strong social and psychological effort if they want to successfully achieve harmony with nature, society, and themselves.

Voluntary Social Work as a Paradox

This article is written as an invitation to sociologists to rethink the concept of voluntary social work. Rather than comprehensive theory, it is an essay seeking to explore new ways of perceiving voluntary social effort. Voluntary work has traditionally been defined according to whether or not the subject of the study is organized and unpaid. However, these formal measures overlook the fact that much voluntary work is provided by people who do not fit the categories, and they fail to recognize the special nature of voluntary social work. In this article, we employ the works of the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann to examine what happens when voluntary social work is constructed as a particular form of care work. In this perspective, all care work is formed in the context of opposing expectation structures, and voluntary work is no exception. On the one hand, we have the expectation structures of the persons involved in care; on the other, the expectations of the administrative system and the political, juridical and economic layers of organization. Our assertion is that voluntary social work is fundamentally paradoxical in nature, and is formed as an impossible compromise between interactional and organizational logic. The question is not how to resolve or dissolve this paradox, but how to render it productive as a certain tension in the opportunity for voluntary work. Before we elaborate this thesis further, however, we briefly outline the background of social work and the reason why, today, it is followed especially closely by the state. This means looking at the way in which the couplings between welfare practice and voluntary work have traditionally been defined. While the article refers only to Danish social policy, very similar tendencies can be observed in many other Western welfare societies (see, for example, Wolch, 1990; Smith and Lipsky, 1993; Eikaas, 2001; Lynn, 2002; Reisch and Sommerfeld, 2003).

The Redistributive Impact of Public and Private Social Expenditure

Most analyses of social protection are focussed on public arrangements. However, social effort is not restricted to the public domain; all kinds of private arrangements can be substitutes to public programs. In fact, in several countries there has been a shift from public towards private social arrangements. OECD-data indicate that accounting for private social benefits has an equalising effect on levels of social effort across a number of countries. This suggests that public and private social expenditures are complementary to some extent. But their distributional effects differ. In all OECD countries, the social protection system causes a more equal distribution of incomes. Indeed, using cross-country data, we find a negative relationship between public social expenditures and income inequality and a positive relationship between public social expenditure and income redistribution. But we do not find a significant positive relationship between private social expenditures and income inequality or income redistribution. Consequently, changes in the public/private-mix in the provision of social protection may affect the redistributive impact of the welfare state.

Social interaction and effort in a success-at-work augmented utility model

This paper examines how success-at-work, interpreted by both subjective and relative criteria, can motivate individuals to enhance their effort and utility. We employ a general specification utility function and show that the final effect of technological growth on individuals’ effort and utility depends, respectively, on the assumptions we make about their nature with regard to their effort strategies (i.e. conformists, deviants or neutrals) and to their utility preferences (i.e. altruistic or envious). We show that these effects are determined largely by individuals’ personal success-consciousness at-work, as well as their competition strategies towards relative success and status.

Lessons from Japanese Experience with Fire Disasters in Public Buildings

Fatal fire disasters in commercial and hotel buildings and social effort not to repeat disasters from the 1930s to the beginning of the 21st Century in Japan are reviewed to verify what have been learnt from fire disasters in modern public buildings. Shirokiya Department fire in 1932, Japan's first significant fatal fire in commercial building, evoked social awareness of fire safety in high-rise buildings, and led to the requirements for general framework for the limitation of fire damage in large scale building such as fire separation for the restriction of damaged area, protected escape staircases, and sprinklers. However, procrastination in introducing smoke control and floor-to-floor fire and smoke separation is believed to have become a background for the frequent fatal fires in public buildings in the 1960s. Experience of fatal fires in hotel buildings from the 1960s to the mid-1980s led to the introduction of labeling of fire safety and qualification of fire safety manager for hotels, which became the main background for exterminating fatal hotel fires.

Learning With Weblogs: Enhancing Cognitive and Social Knowledge Construction

This study investigated the impact of weblog use on individual learning in the context of university senior-level business education. As an emergent form of personal communication, weblogs enable people to publish their thoughts as webpages, and to share information and knowledge. Recognizing the potential impact of weblogs on knowledge expression and sharing, this research sought to empirically examine whether the continuous use of weblogs as online learning logs would affect student learning performance. The assumption was that effective use of weblogs promoted the constructivist models of learning by supporting both cognitive and social knowledge construction, and by reinforcing individual accountability in learning. Results from an Information Systems undergraduate course with 31 participants indicated that the performance of students' weblogs was a significant predictor of the learning outcome (while traditional coursework was not). Moreover, individuals' cognitive construction effort to build their own mental models and social construction effort to further enrich/expand knowledge resources appeared to be two key aspects of the constructivist learning with weblogs. Our results imply the potential benefit of using weblogs as a knowledge construction tool and a social learning medium

Suicidio asistido y eutanasia: un debate clásico y trágico, con pronóstico reservado

The basic effort in “regulation of help in dying” is a cultural one. The social and professional energies must above all be directed towards a renovated “organisation of care in dying” that, far from breaking off our relationships, strengthens them. That, besides providing dignity to dying, facilitates “living” it humanely inasmuch as possible, attending to the bio-psycho-socio-emotional (and spiritual) dimension. At the individual level the desire to die rather than to continue living is a drama that requires mobilising the moral effort of everyone, according to the corresponding responsibility for exploring and evaluating the situation in the search for alternative plans. And, at the social level, the fact of not providing an open outcome to those highly exceptional situations (between 01-2%) can be a tragedy. But the basic social effort does not lie at the end, in providing or not proving a way out, for a few patients (although the accumulated data for Oregon indicate that there is no slippery slope and in Holland there has been a change of attitude towards a fall in euthanasia facing the rise of the alternative of terminal sedation). The cultural, social, organisational, professional and individual effort from which we will all benefit comes much earlier, and involves changing our paradigm of care in particular at the end of life. Although death is inevitable, dying badly should not be so unavoidable.

Defining the Product in a Social Marketing Effort

Defining the Product in a Social Marketing Effort

Free to Be Obese in a ‘Super Nanny State’?

Free to Be Obese in a ‘Super Nanny State’?

Injustice at work and incidence of psychiatric morbidity: the Whitehall II study

Background: Previous studies of organisational justice and mental health have mostly examined women and have not examined the effect of change in justice. Aim: To examine effects of change in...

Bolivia: Impact of Shocks and Poverty Policy on Household Welfare

This paper evaluates the short term impacts on poverty of pro-poor expenditure and total social expenditure during the 1998-2002 period of Bolivian economic recession. Observed characteristics of recession are simulated by the combined effects of negative terms of trade shock, reduction in foreign saving flows and low output growth. Evaluation is performed by simulating the impacts of shocks and social expenditures in an environment of low growth: i) on macro aggregates of consumption, income, saving and prices (based on a simple static 1-2-3 model), ii) on household income and consumption levels, and iii) on consumption based poverty indicators. The following were main results from experiments:The terms of trade shock had greater negative impact on household income then reduction in foreign saving flows. In contrast, reduction in foreign saving flows had greater negative impact on household consumption then the terms of trade shock. The head count ratio has been greater from reduction in foreign saving flows then from the terms of trade shock. Poverty gap and poverty intensity has concentrated in rural areas, being greater from reduction in foreign saving flows then from the terms of trade shock.The combined positive effects from observed social expenditure policy and effort in an environment of low output growth, did not compensate the combined negative impacts from the experienced terms of trade shock and reduction in foreign saving flows.These conclusions show that under macroeconomic disequilibrium poverty reduction efforts become policies of poverty containment or safety net programs. Poverty reduction is a long term objective that requires long term commitment for an environment on macroeconomic stability.

Culture Jamming

‘Culture jamming’is defined as‘an organized, social activist effort that aims to counter the bombardment of consumption-oriented messages in the mass media’ (Handelman and Kozinets,2004: n.p.). This article seeks to understand culture jamming from a sociological perspective, situating it in the‘expressivist’tradition, which originates with the mid-18th century thinker Rousseau and whose legacy extends to postwar Western counterculture. Culture jamming is seen as an investigation into the apparatus of representation in late modernity, as it relates to both images and discourses of the media and commodity system, and the expression of political will. By providing an incentive for producers to respond to consumer demands for environmental sustainability and an end to labor exploitation, culture jamming may ironically help rehabilitate the market system it often portends to transcend. This may indeed serve to ameliorate certain‘market failures’ of the global system.

“Царская вера”: Массовые обращения католиков в православие в северо-западном крае российской империи (1860-е гг.)

SUMMARY: Mikhail Dolbilov explores the broad state-led campaign of conversion to Orthodoxy in the Western borderlands after the January uprising of 1863. The author situates his research in the context of recent studies of religion and confession in the Russian empire that highlight the secular and etatist approach of the imperial government to the Orthodox Church and conversion to Orthodoxy. Focusing on middle-rank bureaucrats who were in charge of confessional policy in the Western borderlands, Dolbilov argues that the development of popular Catholicism (as a pan-European phenomenon of moving toward a more visceral and mystical mode of religiosity) brought about a perception of Catholicism as ill-suited for the collective identification of subjects with the sovereign. The author analyzes in detail the growing desire of middle and high ranking functionaries to engage in an interventionist policy by way of using police and administrative coercion in the process of converting of the local Catholic population to Orthodoxy. The author further analyzes the details of the conversion campaign with accompanying misdemeanors, violence, and fraud. He notes that this large scale social engineering effort to link political allegiance with confessional status brought about unexpected consequences. It exacerbated conflicts between local functionaries and high-ranked bureaucrats, as well as those between the Orthodox community in the Western borderlands and newly converted Orthodox lay people. The article concludes with an analysis of the failure of the state-led conversion campaign, the key to which was the growing concern with the spread of atheist ideas and concomitant rise of political radicalism. The author infers that the Western borderlands’ campaign demonstrated the limits of mass proselytizing and interventionist policy in a confessional state and suggests that it ushered imperial bureaucrats toward the path that ultimately resulted in the acceptance of freedom of conscience in 1905.

Patología psiquiátrica en el inmigrante

Immigration is an emergent social phenomenon with a great impact on health systems. Psychiatric disorders are said to be universal phenomenon, but their clinical expression may be determined by cultural factors. Indeed, immigration acts as a risk factor for the development of mental diseases, as it works as a stress generating factor. The adaptability process for both the immigrants and the receptor environment, involves a social and cultural effort that modifies interindividual relationships, mainly at the therapeutic level. Psychiatry faces up to a new therapeutic and diagnostic challenge, where ethnocultural barriers (either individual or collective) and social and biological barriers need to be got over. Barriers to access to Mental Health Services or social resources and language differences mean an important obstacle which has to be got over by health systems providing special mental health programs, either segregationist or integrative. This review tries to summarize the different issues that limit or interfere with daily clinical practice when treating the immigrant population, meaningful both in quantitative and qualitative psychiatric terms.

User interfaces for communication bridges across the digital divide

Connecting people across the “digital divide” is as much a social effort as a technological one. We are developing a community-centred approach to learn how interaction techniques can compensate for poor communication across the digital divide. We have incorporated the lessons learned regarding social intelligence design in an abstraction and in a device called the SoftBridge. The SoftBridge allows communication to flow from endpoints through adapters, getting converted if necessary, and out to destination endpoints. Field trials are underway with two communities in South Africa: disadvantaged Deaf users and an isolated rural community. Initial lessons learned show that we have to design user interfaces that allow users to understand and cope with delay. We also learned that social concerns are often more important than the technical issues in designing such systems.

Are Public and Private Social Expenditures Complementary?

Most analyses of social protection are focussed on public arrangements. However, social effort is not restricted to the public domain; all kinds of private arrangements can be substitutes to public programs. OECD data indicate that accounting for private social benefits has an equalising effect on levels of social effort across a number of countries. This suggests complementarity between public and private social expenditures. But their distributional effects differ. Using cross-country data, we find a negative relationship between net public social expenditures and income inequality, but a positive relationship between net private social expenditures and income inequality. We conclude that changes in the public/private mix in the provision of social protection may affect the redistributive impact of the welfare state.

Knowledge Enhancement in the Change Process: Social Marketing and Attitude Change Leading to Improved Environmental Behaviour

The complexity of relationships between social change and natural resource management has generated interest in the identification of indicators that might provide more streamlined means of monitoring and planning control programmes. This case study highlights the marketing paradigms of benchmarking and social marketing in a not-for-profit governmental environment. Publicly funded programs that require individual and community participation need to be marketed with a view to optimising involvement and commitment of the various stakeholders. A mail survey with a representative sample of 608 respondents was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of a social marketing program. This study highlights the use of social marketing in a program to overcome an environmental issue by a governmental agency. Changing attitudes and beliefs takes time and often the target audience may not even know they have a problem that needs fixing. This process influences the focus of the social marketing effort which might be organised into three phases: • Raise awareness and knowledge. •Change attitudes. • Encourage action. The research conducted in this study illustrates how the various stages in the social marketing process were achieved through knowledge enhancement in an environmental management case study.

Talcott Parsons: an intellectual biography

1. Understanding The Structure of Social Action 2. Parson's sociology of national socialism, 1938-45 3. The Harvard social science war effort and The Social System 4. A new agenda for citizenship: Parsons's theory and American society in the 1960s Epilogue: a life of scholarship for democracy.

Paying the Piper? Implications of Social Insurance Payments for Conflict Propensity

State leaders must often address domestic and foreign-policy concerns simultane-ously, though doing so can be complicated and risky. One way in which leaders can seek to satisfy domestic demands and pursue foreign policy goals simultaneously is by implementing policies that complement one another; i.e., the implementation of one policy influences the ease with which the other policy can be implemented. For instance, one manner in which leaders can placate domestic audiences is via distributive policies such as social insurance payments that provide economic security to individuals. By providing economic security guarantees, leaders may gain greater discretion over other policy areas, including foreign policy. However, while the social insurance effort may satisfy an audience and enable a leader to take foreign- policy action, especially high payment levels may indicate that a leader must devote an inordinate portion of his budget to domestic concerns, making foreign policy more difficult to implement. Thus, guarantees of economic security might provide leaders with greater foreign policy latitude until domestic expenditures reach sufficient levels that foreign-affairs budgets are reduced. We employ zero-inflated event count models to estimate the relationship between social-insurance levels and the number of Militarized Interstate Disputes in which states engage. Our analyses include 69 states between 1975 and 1990. Our models support the hypothesis that lower levels of social insurance lead to greater numbers of disputes, but that, after a certain level of insurance effort is passed, dispute involvement declines. Our findings suggest a differential effect of social insurance on a leader's ability to act in the foreign policy arena and support the notion that leaders may employ the welfare state to enhance their foreign-policy capabilities, though they appear to meet with conditional and limited success.