Social Embeddedness Research Articles

Social foraging can benefit artisanal fishers who interact with wild dolphins

Social foraging decisions depend on individual payoffs. However, it is unclear how individual variation in phenotypic and behavioural traits can influence these payoffs, thereby the decisions to forage socially or individually. Here, we studied how individual traits influence foraging tactics of net-casting fishers who interact with wild dolphins. While net-casting is primarily an individual activity, in the traditional fishery with dolphins, fishers can choose between fishing in cooperative groups or solitarily. Our semi-structured interviews with fishers show their social network is mapped onto these foraging tactics. By quantifying the fishers’ catch, we found that fishers in cooperative groups catch more fish per capita than solitary fishers. By quantifying foraging and social traits of fishers, we found that the choice between foraging tactics—and whom to cooperate with—relates to differences in peer reputation and to similarities in number of friends, propensity to fish with relatives, and frequency of interaction with dolphins. These findings indicate different payoffs between foraging tactics and that by choosing the cooperative partner fishers likely access other benefits such as social prestige and embeddedness. These findings reveal the importance of not only material but also non-material benefits of social foraging tactics, which can have implications for the dynamics of this rare fishery. Faced with the current fluctuation in fishing resource availability, the payoffs of both tactics may change, affecting the fishers’ social and foraging decisions, potentially threatening the persistence of this century-old fishery involving humans and wildlife.Significance statementSocial foraging theory proposes that decisions to forage in groups are primarily driven by cost–benefit trade-offs that individuals experience, but it remains unclear whether, and how much, individual foragers’ characteristics influence these trade-offs and consequently the choice to forage in social groups. We study the artisanal net-casting fishers who choose between cooperating with each other or fishing alone when engaging in a rare interaction with wild dolphins. Our findings suggest that cooperative fishers capture more fish than solitary fishers, and that by choosing cooperative partners based on similarities and differences in key social (peer reputation, kinship, friendships) and foraging (fishing frequency) traits; these fishers also experience higher social prestige and more social embeddedness. These results suggest that material gains from foraging—but also non-material benefits accrued from socializing with like-minded individuals—can influence the dynamics of human social foraging.

Robust action and scenarios: A rejoinder

AbstractThis article is a rejoinder in response to commentaries written about a 25‐year retrospective on Kees van der Heijden's seminal text Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation. As a means to explore the commentaries and—without irony—bring them into conversation with one another, this piece engages in a thought experiment about the impact of Scenarios as well as the book's author through the sociologically informed notion of robust action from traditional thinking about social embeddedness.

Family dynamics and implications for young people's 'struggles' in rural areas of post-conflict northern Uganda.

A growing body of literature on wartime social change reveals how disruptions in social institutions can have post-war effects, but there is limited knowledge of how such changes shape the lives of rural young people. The Acholi region of northern Uganda experienced two decades of armed conflict and forced displacement (1986-2006). This paper draws on qualitative field research to analyse the influence of family dynamics on the educational and livelihood trajectories of Acholi youth in rural areas, during and after the war. It demonstrates how young people's opportunities during the war were directly affected by insecurity, and indirectly through the disruption of family life. By 2020, young people are still 'struggling': they work hard to respond to family obligations, which ultimately undermines their chances to progress. The social embeddedness of young people in family relations mediates the ability of young men and women to harness opportunities in a context of underdevelopment.

Becoming politicians: Indigenous pageants as training sites for public life

AbstractFeminist scholars typically analyze beauty pageants as spaces where women are objectified, sexualized, and pressured to conform. Yet, many in the Ecuadorian Amazon say that Indigenous pageants are ideal places to begin a career in politics. While interviews with pageant contestants reveal that many do not imagine themselves as politicians, examining Indigenous pageants as sites where women fashion new versions of themselves—versions that are more comfortable speaking in public, performing stereotypical Indigeneity, and taking bold stands on political issues—we can understand them as sites of “becoming” (Biehl and Locke 2017). Rather than simply emphasizing the desires of contestants, as other approaches to becoming have done, we analyze a series of additional, intersecting desires—international, national, capitalist, Indigenist, and familial—that work to shape pageant performances and performers. Building on Saba Mahmood's work, we emphasize the social embeddedness and construction of desire rather than its opposition to subject formation.

Exploring the link between social work, entrepreneurial leadership, social embeddedness, social entrepreneurship and firm performance: a case of SMES owned by Chinese ethnic community in Turkey

PurposeBackground: Both social work activities and social initiatives, innovative solutions today it has to support the development and change of the society by producing. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of social entrepreneurship on firm performance of Turkey small and medium enterprises (SMEs) located in the Chinese ethnic community. In addition, the authors also examined the moderator role of social embeddedness in the relationship between social entrepreneurship and the Chinese ethnic community of Turkey SMEs on firm performance.Design/methodology/approachBecause it is seen that the decomposition validity is achieved between the dimensions for HTMT values, the current study, using the survey-based methodology, used structural equation modeling to achieve the research objectives. Ques-tionnaires were issued among 628 participants in selected international companies in Turkey and China. To mitigate any uncertainty and errors, the questionnaires were distributed face-to-face by hand (in Turkey), online (in China). A total of 274 questionnaires were used for the analysis which makes up to the 53.6% of the response rate. The findings of this study show that social entrepreneurial behavior influences organizational performance with a significant mediation between family ties and social networks and a strong moderation in entrepreneurial leadership. The findings of the present study largely agreed with the results of the hypothesis. The results of this study will give an idea about how social entrepreneurial behavior and entrepreneurial leadership can affect organizational performance and how social embeddedness affects this relationship.FindingsOutcomes will be important to SME leaders as they seek to link results, practices and results. SME leaders will better understand the role of social entrepreneurial behaviour and entrepreneurial leadership in corporate performance. This will apply in business practice and leadership in striving to improve the level of performance.Research limitations/implicationsIn this study, Turkey and China are limited to 274 participants in international companies. Because the findings of this study are limited to the sample it represents, there is no generalization of these results for all countries. However, given that the number of studies on this subject is very inadequate, this research is important in terms of shedding light on the work to be carried out next.Practical implicationsThis empirical research confirms the impact of social entrepreneurial behavior on organizational performance. Social entrepreneurial behavior integrates organizational performance, family ties, social networking and entrepreneurial leadership and empirically tests the relationship between them. Trade relations will ensure the interlocking of the countries involved in the research, and thus, improve the relations of the countries.Originality/valueThe main aim of this study is to investigate the impact of social entrepreneurship on firm performance of Turkey SMEs located in the Chinese ethnic community. Trade relations will ensure the interlocking of the countries involved in the research and thus improve the relations of the countries. The authors believe that social entrepreneurial behaviour will close the gap in important mediation and entrepreneurial leadership between family ties and social networks and positively impact organisational performance. At the same time, as social capital is required for social work and social service is currently dealing with social capital at micro (bonding), mezzo (bridging) and macro (binding) levels, the authors recommend that studies be carried out that will contribute to the theoretical, research or application literature for the variables involved in the study.

Landowners rural embeddedness

Farmers' social embeddedness has historically been investigated through agri-industrial modernisation or by post-productivistic rural development. In this paper, we investigate farmers' social embeddedness in five case areas characterised by different types of short food supply chains and contribute with a nuanced perspective on factors influencing different types of social embeddedness. We collect data of the self-reported assessment of farmers' contribution to the activities in the local community using a questionnaire among landowners in rural areas, and the data are analysed using a logistic regression model. We find that farmers’ social embeddedness depends on individual farm characteristics in the terms that small and part-time farmers show less social embeddedness than fulltime farmers, and we find an effect from the different case areas. Last, we suggest broadening the social embeddedness into three components: community embeddedness, responsibility embeddedness and the traditional production embeddedness.

Walls of silence and organized crime: a theoretical and empirical exploration into the shielding of criminal activities from authorities

In this article, we aim to further our understanding of the social embeddedness of organized crime by exploring the (possible) ways the social environment adds to the shielding of organized crime or criminal activities by organized crime groups. We argue that the metaphor of ‘walls of silence’ provides a fruitful way to examine the shielding of organized crime. Based on a theoretical and empirical exploration of 30 cases from the fifth data sweep of Dutch Organized Crime Monitor, we illustrate how organized crime offenders in the Netherlands depend on the silence and secrecy of co-offenders, victims, bystanders, and others who are aware of their (criminal) activities. Furthermore, we present a framework of the shielding of organized crime activities to provide insight into how offenders not only make use of the social environment to shield their activities, but also how the social environment can (purposely) act as walls of silence and secrecy.

Investigation of Preservice Science Teachers' Nature of Science Understanding and Decision Making on Socioscientific Issue through the Fractal Model.

The paper reports a qualitative study to reveal how preservice science teachers' decision making (DM) processes on socioscientific issue (SSI) in a referendum case compare between unsophisticated (Group U) and sophisticated (Group S) views in terms of nature of science (NOS) understandings. Firstly, pre-study was conducted with focus group interviews with pre-service science teachers. With the findings, one-on-one semi-structured in-depth interviews of the main study for DM on SSI, the artificial meat was developed. In the main study, 12 participants’ responses were analyzed, and a new DM model named the Fractal Model of DM which reflects real-life situation DM process, especially referendum case, was constructed. In DM, NOS lens usages of five NOS aspects about creativity and imagination, observation and inference, empirical-basis, subjectivity, and social and cultural embeddedness and 23 other lens usages such as animal rights (morality), economic, and risk factor were detected and explained through the fractal model. Findings showed that there is a hidden and complex effect of NOS understandings about tentativeness of scientific knowledge on DM. With multiple lens usage, each participant had multi-perspective considerations in DM. While Group S used NOS lenses mainly parallel with their NOS understandings, Group U used them in a more complicated way.

Science Fiction as an Instructional Strategy: Foundations, Procedures, and Results for Pre-service Teachers.

Science fiction (SF) combines realistic and imaginary elements of science and technology and develops students’ imagination, creativity, and interest in science. Therefore, the aim of this study is to examine SF stories written by pre-service science teachers (PSTs) in terms of various textual and science variables. The case study of SF story writing aimed to develop a theoretical framework to analyze how narrative elements, plot structure, agency, the nature of science content, characteristics of the SF genre, and ethics in scientific research are included in the stories of a group of Turkish PSTs. The participants of the study were 58 pre-service teachers enrolled in the science education department at a public university in Turkey. Working in groups, they wrote 13 different SF stories. The stories were analyzed with a rubric including two parts: narrative and other story elements and the characteristics of the SF genre. The results showed that the stories included fictional and realistic features of science and technology, scientific concepts, and details about scientific realities. The stories addressed the social and cultural embeddedness of scientific knowledge and details about the scientific method. However, the originality is limited in many stories as they had traces from popular movies, books, and TV series. The stories did consider a range of ethical issues, including unauthorized experimentation and manipulating scientific information for personal, political, and financial interests. The current study could contribute to the literature about the use and assessment of SF stories in science education.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10763-021-10244-4.

Mobile land: modes of transfer – varieties of contexts

ABSTRACT Social and economic historical research has repeatedly shown that the buying and selling, transferring, and rearranging of pieces of land can be identified as various modes of dealing with land in many European regions from the Middle Ages onward. Land was therefore mobile. Furthermore, recent empirical studies have evidenced the existence of ‘land markets’ since the Middle Ages – not only in wine-growing areas or in regions with partible inheritance but also in agricultural areas with impartible inheritance. However, they also show that the definition of the ‘market’ needs broadening in order to incorporate the different modes of transfer and the various actors involved. The many forms of property exchanges, the underlying assemblage of property and land use rights, and the existence and definition of land markets are much debated topics in economic and social history. These debates differ in terms of chronology and how they define land markets and property rights: should analysis distinguish between commercial property transfers and those that can be placed within kin relations? In other words, do we understand premodern land markets in a more comprehensive way and allow for the entanglements between commercial and kin-related property exchanges? This Special Issue argues in favour of such a perspective. The introduction provides a framework to the five contributions to this special issue, which make use of multiple approaches and analyse specific legal spaces in view of land transactions and their legal, social, and economic embeddedness. Here, we discuss methodological challenges, especially the use of sources and data, present some of the main findings of the papers, and conclude with implications and questions for future research on property transfers and markets.

The nonhuman object in Ama Ata Aidoo’s ‘Nowhere cool’: A black feminist critique of Object-oriented Ontology

abstract Nowhere cool’, a short story by Ama Ata Aidoo, is divided into two sections. In the first, a child sits in a classroom in what is presumably Ghana, feeling alienated by the “familiar things that were begin chased away by the demands of the culture of our conquerors” in the literature discussed by the teacher (2002, p. 136). In the second, a Ghanaian woman travels in a plane across the United States of America (USA). She notices a plastic address tag on the baby of the woman next to her, and starts thinking of plastic as material, of oil and of how slavery makes humans into cargo. This short story therefore consists of philosophical rumination on the nature of humans’ relationship to material and literary objects. I read ‘Nowhere cool’ as part of a black feminist epistemological tradition aimed at exposing the situatedness of supposedly neutral western thought, and at emphasising the embodiment and social embeddedness of all knowledge. I argue that the story’s specific focus on the nonhuman and on extractive economies allows for it to be read as a corrective to the same universalising gestures in posthumanist considerations of the nonhuman. I bring the story into dialogue with Graham Harman’s (2018) Object-oriented Ontology (OOO) to contend that while OOO is aimed at criticising anthropocentrism, a specific human perspective (that of the western white male) is “overrepresented” (Wynter 2003) in it. This has consequences for OOO and posthumanism more generally, since it means that the new relationship to the nonhuman Harman proposes is divorced from the reality of many humans’ relationship with the nonhuman. Posthuman ontologies need to build on the insights of black feminism in order to not replicate the skewed nature and resultant inaccuracies of hegemonic theories of the past.

Measure for Measure: Exploring the Virtues of Vice Epistemology

Alessandra Tanesini’s The Mismeasure of the Self can be read as promoting non-ideal theory in epistemology. Tanesini articulates the virtue of intellectual humility (central for accurate self-assessment) in close connection with the human vices of superiority and inferiority. I begin by showing how her novel analysis that situates humility in a cluster of differently-functioning ‘attitudes’ enriches both the positive motivational resources and the pitfalls that a knower must negotiate. The proximity of virtues and vices in the conceptual map that constitutes humility, explains feminist claims of how subjects who are harmed as knowers can still flourish and even resist their cognitive marginalization. I then move on to critiquing Tanesini’s understanding of intellectual humility because it fails to be a truly ‘liberatory virtue.’ I suggest alternative ways of connecting intellectual humility to shame and hope that still remain true to Tanesini’s broader ethical context but make it potent for social justice. In spite of mindfulness of social context, Tanesini works with an epistemic selfhood bleached out of its historical and social embeddedness and hence, whose self-knowledge through humility does not involve the knowledge of the world and of others. Such an intellectual humility, I argue, cannot be justice-conducive.

The role of institutions in latent and emergent entrepreneurship

• Both the heterogeneity of institutional conditions and the heterogeneity of entrepreneurship stage matter. • The same institutional setting can have different implications for latent and emergent entrepreneurship. • The interplay between informal embedded institutions and formal and governance institutions augments what is known about direct effects of institutions on entrepreneurship. • Corruption impedes both latent and emergent entrepreneurship, with the effect lasting almost three times as long for latent entrepreneurship. Drawing from perspectives on institutional hierarchy (Williamson) and social embeddedness (Granovetter), we examine the role of embeddedness, formal institutions and governance in shaping latent and emergent entrepreneurship. We examine the role of heterogeneous institutional conditions - corruption, social relationships, property rights and government size – matter across 66 countries between 2005 and 2015. Our findings demonstrate that heterogeneity of institutional conditions and heterogeneity of entrepreneurship outcome are important and not monolithic. Notably, we find that while corruption impedes both latent and emergent entrepreneurship, this effect lasts almost three times as long for latent entrepreneurship. We also find that entrepreneurs in countries with more corrupt contexts have lower aspirations to start and own a business.

Impact of social network embeddedness on the adoption of green control technologies by farmers: Mediating effects based on technology perception

Impact of social network embeddedness on the adoption of green control technologies by farmers: Mediating effects based on technology perception

The Role of Social Network Embeddedness and Collective Efficacy in Encouraging Farmers' Participation in Water Environmental Management

The Role of Social Network Embeddedness and Collective Efficacy in Encouraging Farmers' Participation in Water Environmental Management

Spatio-temporal unevenness in local land system regime shifts caused by land deals in Lao PDR

Extensive land-use “regime shifts” have been observed as rapid transitions from natural land cover or subsistence-oriented land use to intensified and/or expanded commodity production. However, it is often unclear whether these land-use changes are part of broader land system regime shifts in which pre-existing production systems and livelihood strategies are fundamentally transformed along with observable land-use changes rather than simply displaced or eliminated. This is a critical social-environment question given that regime shifts are often a desired and intended outcome of national rural development and market-liberalization policies but must also be attentive to environmental conservation and/or climate change mitigation goals. We investigated whether nationally extensive land-use changes implemented through large-scale land deals in Lao People’s Democratic Republic resulted in full, partial, or no village- and landscape-level regime shifts in and around land deals. Overall, land deals triggered a wide variety of full, partial, and no regime shift outcomes. Land deals with both domestic and foreign investors produced positive and negative outcomes, although foreign land deals for the production of rubber led to significantly higher rates of indirect land-use change in impacted villages than domestic and/or non-rubber land deals. Also, financial compensation alone was insufficient to improve community well-being because it could be reinvested to perpetuate previous land uses without the desired transformation in livelihoods and rural development. Land deals that exhibited greater social embeddedness (i.e., provided adequate compensation complemented by job-creation and improved access to infrastructure and/or services) were more likely to lead to positive regime shifts. Our findings demonstrate that any land system regime shift will produce both winners and losers, and thus it becomes necessary to critically analyze the localized distribution of social and environmental costs and benefits within broader-scale land-use regime shifts.

The Social Embeddedness of Elections: Ghana's 2016 and 2020 Campaigns

The Social Embeddedness of Elections: Ghana's 2016 and 2020 Campaigns

Family-managed firms, external sources of knowledge and innovation

ABSTRACT This study examines the influence of external sources of knowledge on innovation in a sample of Spanish manufacturing firms during the period 2002–2015. By differentiating firms according to their family status, our results reveal that the probability of engaging in product and process innovations is higher for family-managed firms involved in R&D cooperation with a varied group of partners. Additionally, our findings provide support for the role of R&D-oriented family-managed firms in easing the flow of knowledge and information for innovation at regional level (i.e. family firm-led knowledge spillovers). Because of their unique social capital and embeddedness in the local setting, family-managed firms contribute to creating a favourable regional environment for innovation for all co-located firms. However, this result holds only when the geographical concentration of R&D-oriented family-managed firms is coupled with technological proximity. Theoretical, policy and managerial implications are discussed.

Transcendentalism, social embeddeddness, and the problem of individuality

It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that the notion of ecological and social embeddedness is one of the most exploited philosophical ideas these days, both in the academia and beyond. The most troublesome about the overall trend is that many proponents of the idea of social embeddedness simplistically consider selfhood as a form of aberration which merely provides vindication for inequality and violence. In this paper, instead of attacking the problem of the individual versus the collective head-on, I approach it by way of a critique of Stephen Turner’s repudiation of transcendental collectivism (Turner, 1994; Turner, 2010). According to Turner, transcendental entities, such as tacit knowledge, presuppositions, or traditions, should be altogether removed from explanatory schemata in the social sciences. I believe that Turner’s razor cuts too deep and the rejection of implicit framing is at best premature. Against the background of the identified shortcomings of Turner’s model of interactive learning, I track the interrelations between social development and the development of the self with an eye to showing that the relationship between individual selves and social reality is an extremely complex and multifactorial matter which we cannot hope to navigate without a proper transcendental frame. The frame is what mediates the relationship between the individual and the collective.

From crisis to the everyday: Shouldn't we all be writing economies?

This commentary explores the politics of writing about the economy in a culture, society, and discipline that tends to prioritize masculinist (and white) theories and definitions of economy over embodied experiences of people living their everyday lives. Inspired by Timothy Mitchell's problematization of the economy as an object of analysis, we press further on the seemingly singular unit of “the” economy and who is allowed to define it as such. We are animated by questions of who is considered an expert on the economy and how, or by whom, crises in the economy are recognized. Drawing from our own writing experiences during the pandemic and from social movements we research, we argue for alternate ways of thinking about experiences of and expertise on the economy. In reckoning with how social movements speak to power in a bid to transform economies, we consider the role of economic geography in the economy of writing and knowledge production surrounding “the economy” itself. We make the case for a more public economic geography grounded in the social and economic embeddedness of knowledge production, the material consequences of who gets to define what is economically “important,” and the potential for this expertise to be located anywhere.