Social Machinery Research Articles

An Idea of a Secular State through Its Traits in Context of India

Any state in this world is called a happy and a peaceful state if it is a secular state. Secular state is a community where differences of things like religion, sect, clan, caste, belief and class are not taken into consideration. Because these things underestimate the human existence and divide people in unacceptable ways if they are categorised. When people give less importance to such things or treat these things respectfully, they lead a better life full of peace, compassion, empathy, sympathy and understanding. A state where people happily reside together despite having different backgrounds can be called a secular state. Any state always operates at the hands of people through a social machinery calles politics. Politics can be responsible for upliftment as well as deterioration of a state. When it is used on the basis of religion and things like it, a state gets limited to certain aspects and experiences less flourishment. But a state where governments equal importance to all religions and other such things, it emerges as an ideal abode of humanity. The idea of a secular state and its traits can be understood through this article. India is lately experiencing religious intolerance and deterioration of human and moral values. There have been a significant rise in instances involving communal violence, inhuman activities and other such things done on the basis of caste, class and religion. So it is very much mandatory to throw light on the idea of a secular state and get to know its traits.

History of Social Medicine and Public Health - a Review

Background: The Social Medicine and organization of health is science organized on the application of modern medicine principles in the health care of human groups and nations. The significant difference of social medicine from clinical disciplines is that the clinical medicine deals with problems of individuals and social medicine is devoted to community health and illness of the family, schools and work organizations from population groups to the overall people of one area or country. Public health refers to all organized measures (whether public or private) to prevent disease, promote health and prolong life among the population as a whole. Its activities aim to provide conditions in which people can be healthy and focus on entire populations, not on individual patients or diseases . Objective: The aims of this article are to show, based on the available literature: a) The development of Social medicine and Public health in the World and Bosnia and Herzegovina from the medieval period until the today. b) The most significant historical events that marked the development of Social medicine and Public health with emfesized most important scientists and discoverers with their achievements. Methods: The subject of this study was the development of Social medicine and Public health in the world and in the areas of Bosnia and Herzegovina from the uncient peertiod until today. In order to achieve the set goals, a) Retreival of professional and scientific literature; and b) Search of scientific databases and web pages on the Internet that offer adequate and relevant data and historical facts related to the subject of studies were carried out. Most of the facts are covered in previously published articles by the author of this paper and deposited in the PubMed and PubMed Central databases, as well as in books and monographs by the author of this text. Results and Discussion: Social medicine with the organization of the health care system is the scientific discipline, defined by the huge contents, clear goal and specific methodology. It has been presented flow of socio-medical development and implementation on worldwide during the past. Public health was defined by Charles-Edward A. Winslow, in 1920. as „the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life, and promoting physical health and efficiency through organized community efforts for the sanitation of the environment, the control of community infections, the education of the individual in principles of personal hygiene, the organization of medical and nursing service for the early diagnosis and preventive treatment of disease, and the development of the social machinery which will ensure to every individual in the community a standard of living adequate for the maintenance of health“. The names of those who are deserved for socio-medical development and its insufficiency on the organization on health system and some specific parts of it. Social medicine, and Public health as sciences and profession had high level among other disciplines, but also as profession per se, specially at the international level. There is huge evidence of numerous projects, books, papers, recognized by indigenous and international audience. Conclusion: The most importants role in organizatiionn and realization of all kind of public health activities and measures at every healthcare protection levels has World Health Organization (WHO) with its brench offices at all continents and all countries in the world. The author described information flow how it was happened during the history of its development.

Short-term power load comparison based on time series and neural networks considering multiple features

In order to achieve a certain balance between power supply and production demand, as well as to ensure the operation of social machinery and multiple markets, accurate power load forecasting is indispensable. A load prediction method based on the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) - the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and the CNN-gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) is proposed. The multi-feature load forecasting is constructed by the date factor, the weather factor, the load factor and the electricity price factor. The advantage of CNN in feature extraction of the data set is used to establish a high-dimensional relationship with load, optimize the input LSTM and GRU network model, train each group of the neural network model, and output load prediction value. Combining the load data of a certain area with its meteorological factors, the CNN-LSTM and CNN-GRU methods are tested and compared with the single-network models of Back Propagation (BP), LSTM and GRU. By comparing it with other popular algorithms, it is proved that the presented model has superior computational efficiency and prediction accuracy.

“The cleanest, neatest, most effectively operating piece of social machinery I’ve ever seen”: On the reception of Fascist corporatism in the USA

In the era between the two world wars, the spread of corporatist laws and institutions in many countries, flourishing mostly in the 1930s, was marked by a transnational hybridization of projects and experiences. Against this background, the Italian corporatist state became a milestone for many intellectuals and politicians not only in Europe but also on the American continent. This article deals with the transatlantic influence of the corporatist Fascist laboratory, focusing on the reception of this political option and the debate about it in New Deal's United States. In particular, some case studies will be considered to observe how corporatism was a key factor in legitimizing Fascism even in democratic circles, despite the criticisms of the Italian regime from anti-fascists in exile. In USA, in fact, the impact of the Great Depression increased the popularity of this alternative, partly because Italy seemed less affected by the economic crisis than other states. While in the 1920s the Fascist corporatist experiment had drawn the attention of some secondary intellectuals, in the 1930s it became a matter of reflection even within President Franklin Roosevelt's progressive entourage. For example, economist Rexford Tugwell wrote in his diary that Italian corporatist order was “The cleanest, neatest, most effectively operating piece of social machinery I’ve ever seen. It makes me envious.”

Risk-taking and social inequality

Even though risk-taking is a common and widespread social experience sociological theorizing on the concept is scarce. This contribution aims to systematize and advance understanding of risk-taking and its different forms and how these connect to social inequalities and the social machinery. It considers risk-taking in the context of the debate about Bourdieu's theory of practice and Archer's theory of morphogenesis before suggesting a conceptual framework that outlines different rationales, dimensions, and the role of agency for understanding risk-taking as an individual and as a collective activity. The concept highlights the ambivalent character of risk-taking as an expression and mode of reproducing inequalities and a crucial resource to overcome disadvantage and foster social change.

«Этот мир уже наступил»: художественный универсум Франца Кафки в теоретических исследованиях Ханны Арендт

The article is devoted to the consideration of Franz Kafka’s creativity in the interpretation of the German-American philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt. Throughout her life, Arendt frequently referenced the writings of the great modernist, as seen in her books “A Hidden Tradition,” “Between Past and Future,” “Men in Dark Times.” Arendt sees Kafka as an author whose writings are able to bring us closer to understanding the modern era, since they reveal the inner structure of the world hidden from the eyes by artistic means. The construction of Kafka’s works is compared in the article with the plot of an ancient tragedy, in the center of which is the collision of the protagonist with the omnipotence of rock. From this point of view, the conflict between the atomized individual and the social order is considered as the leitmotif of Kafka’s writings and analyzed by the examples of the novel The Trial and the short stories The Judgment and The Metamorphosis. A parallel is drawn between the description of total social machinery in Kafka’s works and Arendt’s concept of the New European “expansion of society,” understood as “no-man rule,” which is asserted under both authoritarian and liberal political regimes. The article demonstrates that Kafka’s artistic texts can be understood as the starting point of Arendt’s theoretical reflections on the genesis and characteristic features of modern mass society.

Reflexiones frente a una sociedad psicológicamente desorientada

Then, we compile a set of essays where we reflect critically, some of the most troubling subjects of our postmodern, technocratic, liquid, hyper-consumerist and chronic distresssocieties. Theuncertainty, permanent dissatisfaction, detachment, individualism and extreme relativism are some of the concepts portrayed in this work. It is clear an unfavourablediagnosis of our societyin individual and interpersonal psychological matters and recognizing realistically that we live more than uncertain times (covid-19 pandemic included). We ended this article by aimingfor individual and socio-family change to try to rise from this time of uncertainties and social roughness. Moreover, we consider that we must identify and know the social to better understandthe individual self of each human being. It is not enough to appeal to a personal change when the social machinery produces evils as we will see below. It hurts to say it but this current societydoes not promote health and that must be pointed out and denounced. We hope, we wish it wholeheartedly, humanist utopia can be realized slowly.

Relaciones de poder que estructuran un proceso de interacción de patrones del colectivo escolar

Los objetivos incompatibles son inherentes a toda agrupación humana, en ella las relaciones sociales estructuran un componente teórico que, advierte en la conflictividad la presencia del actor colectivo que opera las relaciones de influjo de unos sobre los otros.
 El poder, eje central del conflicto establece en la cultura códigos propios que entretejen las acciones de la grupalidad.
 ¿Cuál es el significado que le otorgan los diferentes grupos identificados en interacción individual-colectiva a los conflictos establecidos en el contexto organizativo?
 En el proceso de investigación se destaca la visión del mundo y los intereses del investigador que lo conducirán a acercarse de una forma o de otra a los hechos. La etnografía es el enfoque para investigar los grupos humanos, este es un trabajo micro o básico que analiza las interacciones del actor colectivo a partir de la idea de la maquinaria social que entretejen el conflicto escolar.

“La noche no va a terminar nunca”. Violencia sexual, deshumanización y capitalismo en El sexto de José María Arguedas

Es un hecho que José María Arguedas es uno de los escritores más importantes de la literatura latinoamericana del siglo XX; sin embargo, la crítica especializada le ha prestado poca o ninguna atención a un factor determinante de su obra: la sexualidad. Este artículo estudia El sexto (1961), antepenúltima novela del gran narrador peruano. Nuestro objetivo es analizar el papel que desempeña la sexualidad, en su modalidad degradada de la violación, en la diégesis de este texto. La hipótesis que asumimos es que dicha manifestación (las violaciones que se producen entre los reclusos del penal) no está presente solo como un elemento que refuerza el efecto de realidad de una novela de tema carcelario, sino que funciona como una estrategia de dominación, control y castigo, que ejerce el poder sobre aquellos individuos que se atreven a enfrentar al sistema capitalista y sus representantes de turno. Esta estrategia busca transformar a estos insurrectos en seres abyectos, despojándolos de cualquier resquicio de humanidad posible. En este sentido, la cárcel no es considerada como un centro de resocialización, más bien se erige en una maquinaria social de degradación y envilecimiento humano.

The red thread of information

PurposeIn The Invisible Substrate of Information Science, a landmark article about the discipline of information science, Marcia J. Bates wrote that “…we are always looking for the red thread of information in the social texture of people's lives” (1999a, p. 1048). To sharpen our understanding of information science and to elaborate Bates' idea, the work at hand answers the question: Just what does the red thread of information entail?Design/methodology/approachThrough a close reading of Bates' oeuvre and by applying concepts from the reference literature of information science, nine composite entities that qualify as the red thread of information are identified, elaborated, and related to existing concepts in the information science literature. In the spirit of a scientist–poet (White, 1999), several playful metaphors related to the color red are employed.FindingsBates' red thread of information entails: terms, genres, literatures, classification systems, scholarly communication, information retrieval, information experience, information institutions, and information policy. This same constellation of phenomena can be found in resonant visions of information science, namely, domain analysis (Hjørland, 2002), ethnography of infrastructure (Star, 1999), and social epistemology (Shera, 1968).Research limitations/implicationsWith the vital vermilion filament in clear view, newcomers can more easily engage the material, conceptual, and social machinery of information science, and specialists are reminded of what constitutes information science as a whole. Future researchers and scientist–poets may wish to supplement the nine composite entities with additional, emergent information phenomena.Originality/valueThough the explication of information science that follows is relatively orthodox and time-bound, the paper offers an imaginative, accessible, yet technically precise way of understanding the field.

Does conservation agriculture technology reduce farm household poverty? Evidence from rural Zambia

This study examines the adoption and impact of conservation agriculture on farm household poverty in Zambia using both provincial and average poverty lines, given that the poverty line is a key driver to the determination of household poverty. We probe the basis of setting a singular average poverty line for all provinces. The recursive bivariate probit model results reveal that conservation agriculture significantly reduces household poverty. However, the average poverty line either over or under estimates provincial poverty status. We also find that education, access to credit and information, social networks and machinery influence adoption of conservation agriculture technology.

When the dead rise: encountering resistant legacies of creative economy within an artist’s residency at a municipal cemetery

ABSTRACTRecent criticism of creative economies demonstrates tensions between programmes that support innovative cultural expression and community belonging, and those more oriented to instrumentally economic outcomes. While municipal planners recognize the link between cultural activity and enhanced quality of life, related budget support typically calls for quantifiable outcomes. Creative economy policies and projects are thus vulnerable to favouring more narrowly construed forms of economic growth. We explore the municipally embedded artist-in-residence (AiR) programme as a source of friction, complexity and inefficiency intentionally introduced into organizations constitutionally regulated to suppress exactly these kinds of excesses. In Deleuzian terms, the social machinery of neoliberal urban and economic development hesitates when it encounters the short-circuiting unpredictabilities of creative desire introduced by the embedded residency. The municipally embedded AiR is a residual apparatus of creative economy policy that can offer resistance to and even inoculation against easy alliances with neoliberal economic agendas. In the case of an embedded AiR in city cemeteries in Edmonton, Canada, the artist, working on the grounds, meeting visitors and holding workshops, uses now-obsolete photographic craft production to manipulate conventional memorial images and texts in unexpected conjunctions with experimental aesthetic expression and living stories. The physical presence of the residency also disrupts received categories to produce the cemetery as living public space rather than a setting with “holes to put the past in”. In this sense, the cemetery becomes accessible as newly encoded, sustainable cultural and recreational space with minimal civic investment. Calling up ghosts of challenged creative economy ideals, this AiR opens new forms of engagement between citizens, local history and urban nature as a complex adaptive system that incorporates both cultural values and commodity logic without primary emphasis on quantifiable outcomes.

Romancing the Interstitial

Sheila Liming, “Romancing the Interstitial: Howe, Balzac, and Nineteenth-Century Legacies of Sexual Indeterminacy” (pp. 311–337) This essay links Julia Ward Howe’s infamous “lost” text, The Hermphrodite (first published in 2004), with Honoré de Balzac’s Sarrasine (1830), arguing that Howe rewrites Balzac’s figure of the “tragic hermaphrodite” with the intention of protesting nineteenth-century American assumptions regarding innate sexual difference. The Hermaphrodite tells the story of Laurence, a deeply contemplative, intelligent person whose sexual identity is disputed, but Howe never employs the term “hermaphrodite” outright. This situation encourages readers to judge Laurence’s hermaphroditism by his behavior and actions in the novel, not his biology, and this is furthermore consistent with the way the term “hermaphrodite” was used and understood by mid-nineteenth-century Americans. As such, this essay examines the claims that Howe makes about the social machinery of gender in The Hermaphrodite, arguing that while Laurence has much in common with Balzac’s Sarrasine, Howe uses her protagonist as a means of revising outdated arguments about biological “truth.” Howe’s Laurence revisits and updates nineteenth-century considerations of the aesthetic androgyne in the service of a modern, political agenda concerning sexual demarcation and difference.

Evidence of algorithmic trading from Indian equity market: Interpreting the transaction velocity element of financialization

Technology and innovation have been the driving forces behind financialization across the globe. One such technological advent, in the pursuit for minimizing the risk and maximizing the return and in order to adhere to the financial sector changes, is Algorithmic Trading (AT). Though AT is being used extensively across the world, there is a lack of academic research on the evidence of AT in most of the markets. The lack of evidence stems from the ambiguity in definitions of AT and High Frequency Trading (HFT) and their usage interchangeably. The lack of evidence also hinders the understanding and interpretation of the impact of ever-increasing unprecedented growth in the velocity of financial transactions on the social machinery of global economies. We take advantage of the clear definition and identification of AT in the Indian equity market to provide evidence of AT and interpreting it as the transaction velocity element of financialization. We also attempt to decipher the impact of AT, symbolizing the transaction velocity element of financialization, on the price discovery process.

Understanding the Roles of Organizational Identification, Trust and Corporate Ethical Values in Employee Engagement–Organizational Citizenship Behaviour Relationship: A Study on Indian Managers

The rationale of the study is to comprehend the roles of organizational identification, trust and corporate ethical values (CEV) in employee engagement–organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) relationship. The study was administered on 246 middle-level managers who were representatives of 30 different public and private sector organizations in Delhi National Capital Region. The results of the study confirmed the hypotheses. The results of the study confirmed that organizational identification, trust and CEV moderate the employee engagement–OCB relationship. Organizations need to recognize that OCB are helping behaviours contributing appreciably to organizational effectiveness; such behaviours daub the social machinery of the organizations, plummeting conflicts and thereby augmenting organizational effectiveness. These behaviours offer a litheness, which goes beyond the job description and provides direction to work behaviour of individuals in organization. Understanding the relationship between these variables will help both public and private sector organizations about the role of organizational identification, trust and CEV in employee engagement–OCB relationship.

Judging Higher Education on the Merits: A Review of Deresiewicz, William, Excellent Sheep, The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life; Lani Guinier, The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America, and Lauren, A., Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs

Judging Higher Education on the Merits: A Review of Deresiewicz, William, <i>Excellent Sheep, The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life</i>; Lani Guinier, <i>The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America</i>, and Lauren, A., <i>Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs</i>

Queer Provisionality: Mapping the Generative Failures of the Transborder Immigrant Tool

Alison Reed investigates the border- and boundary-crossing performance of Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0’sTransBorder Immigrant Tool (TBT), an incomplete cell phone program that offers GPS, guidance, and poetry to those attempting to cross into the United States across the Mexico/US border. Reed suggests a provocation-based performance of “queer provisionality,” revealing the aesthetics of oppressive power structures by juxtaposing them to social utopias. Interrogating the national neoliberal project of both US liberalism and US conservatism, Reed’s essay is also a transcription of the performances launched around TBT, the social and political machinery set into motion by Electronic Disturbance Theater’s failed utopian project.

Zangbeto: The Traditional Way of Policing and Securing the Community among the Ogu (Egun) People in Badagry, Nigeria

This paper is an ethnological and anthropological study of Zangbeto among the Ogu (Egun) people of Badagry, in Nigeria. The study utilized survey design approach with emphasis on qualitative method: interview, focus group discussion and key informant investigation. Purposive and convenience sampling procedures under non –probability sampling were used in selecting the study area and respondents who participated in the study (n=40). The data gathered from the field of study were analyzed, using content analysis method. The findings in the study revealed that Zangbeto still remains an effective social machinery of policing and securing the lives and properties in the Badagry community. It also played a prominent role in making peace among the feuding parties in the community and still remains an avenue of social entertainment and cultural display. The study called for the legal backing of Zangbeto as a traditional way of policing and security the lives and properties in this community and the continuous researches of African societies to uncover ways through which African societies can help themselves where westernization has failed them.

Human consciousness and its relationship to social neuroscience: A novel hypothesis

A common modern view of consciousness is that it is an emergent property of the brain, perhaps caused by neuronal complexity, and perhaps with no adaptive value. Exactly what emerges, how it emerges, and from what specific neuronal process, are in debate. One possible explanation of consciousness, proposed here, is that it is a construct of the social perceptual machinery. Humans have specialized neuronal machinery that allows them to be socially intelligent. The primary role of this machinery is to construct models of other people's minds thereby gaining some ability to predict the behavior of other individuals. In the present hypothesis, awareness is a perceptual reconstruction of attentional state; and the machinery that computes information about other people's awareness is the same machinery that computes information about our own awareness. The present paper brings together a variety of lines of evidence, including experiments on the neural basis of social perception, on hemispatial neglect, on the out-of-body experience, on mirror neurons, and on the mechanisms of decision-making, to explore the possibility that awareness is a construct of the social machinery in the brain.

Robert Frost and the Drama of Encounter

Robert Frost and the Drama of Encounter Baron Wormser (bio) Among the numerous startling perceptions that those Englishmen and women who "settled" New England must have experienced was that they were in a wilderness that was utterly new to them. This intuition became knowledge during the endless skirmishes and forays that went with the taking of the land and that produced dread, terror, and curiosity. This awareness, one that is reflected in the name of the region—an England that is new and hence not at all another England—was the seedbed of the drama of what has come to be called America. The name implied the conflict between what should be here—pious white folk—and what was here—heathen Indians, wolves, fierce winters, skunks, poison ivy, and other deadly elements. It suggested confidence and hope, but it signified the siren of the new also—that which was not known and could not be measured. No wonder the settlers shook with anxiety and trepidation before their God even as they praised His mercies. Given the locale they found themselves in, He had better be merciful. The search for a mercy that might dwell in the very landscape distinguishes a broad range of American poetry in diverse modes: declarative, lyrical, didactic, anecdotal, vatic, imagist, epiphanic, elegiac, and narrative—for starters. More than one such poem has sought to meld the political sublime, the vision of a just democratic society, with the poetic sublime, the vision of a world that accepts the poetic imagination as a good in itself. Realizing this vision is a search that has distinguished poets as different as Poe and Stevens, Hart Crane and Donald Justice (and painters from Thomas Cole to Mark Rothko) and speaks to the American belief in a destiny, be it political or aesthetic, that can face down any conflict. The longing for a natural (yet God-given) comity is one that seeks the resolution of whatever dwarfs and waylays the merely human—that broad highway of misdemeanor and achievement that, as Henry James delighted in noting, older, more settled, less visionary and implicitly wiser societies, possessed of "a complex [End Page 76] social machinery," have taken for granted. The aggregate of all those individuals pursuing happiness is a vast yearning feeling—a voice that is great within us, to allude to the title of Hayden Carruth's anthology of American poetry. At its extreme the apprehension of the democratic sublime can turn an individual such as Walt Whitman into a multitudinous aggregate. Or so he proposed. The dramatic mode does not leap to the fore of any such consideration. It is even easy to forget there is such a mode. The story of America is supposed to be one of inevitable harmony—progress and religion working hand in destined hand. Poetry, particularly in the form of the personal lyric, testifies to the individual's unassailable, self-proclaiming worth, and is a complement to this vision, however hard it may be to make its metaphorical self heard above the commercial din. Yet there is a strain of American poetry that is stoutly dramatic and revels in what can't be resolved, what assails and doesn't back off. Its chief proponents are Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost. Though one may find risible the vision of these two people sitting in the same room together, much less talking to each other, I think they would have understood one another quite well. Each of them spoke for the integrity of conflict and against the lies that so frequently underlay resolution. In choosing drama, each spoke for a mode that was perfect for facing up to whatever the poet found in his or her way, however quizzical or slantwise that facing up might be. Each recognized that, as a method, drama derived sustenance from the intractability of other people and creatures, and did not seek to avoid history. Each poet accordingly had little use for suavity (the legerdemain of Wallace Stevens that Frost so disliked), preferring instead the often wasteful ardor of encounter, incomprehension, and confrontation. Each sometimes delighted in mockery, a form of verbal sparring. (Both had tart tongues.) As dramatists these poets were glad...