Social Taxonomies Research Articles

EU social taxonomy for sustainable economic activities: exploring the known and navigating the current issues as well as future research

This research aims to initiate academic discussion on the European Union (EU) social taxonomy for the purpose of promoting sustainable economic activities that ultimately contribute to achieving the United Nations’ sustainable development goals (SDGs) in the EU. The paper examines the historical evolution of the social taxonomy concept and presents the chronological order of the regulatory advancements that have paved the way for the establishment of both the EU environmental and social taxonomies. This study emphasizes the role of the EU environmental taxonomy as the frontrunner and highlights three fundamental distinctions between taxonomies in terms of objectives, foundations, and measurability. By defining the key performance indicators applicable to entities engaged in taxonomy-aligned economic activities, the paper offers a tabulated framework to understand the core focus areas, sub-objectives, and types of substantial contributions related to each of the three social objectives outlined in the EU taxonomy. Moreover, this paper aims to emphasize the contemporary challenges and the prospective avenues for future research in the field of social taxonomy.

Taxonomical lives: The making of social divisions in the Swedish press during the golden age of social democracy, 1945–76

This article investigates the media lives of a particular class taxonomy in the Swedish press from 1945 to 1976. Invented by the Central Bureau of Statistics in 1911, the ‘social group division’ system was abandoned in the early post-war period. Around the same time, however, it gained popularity in Swedish culture and political debate. While earlier research has noted that such bureaucratic class taxonomies – as in several other Western countries – conditioned how actors understood and created new knowledge about the population, this process of wider circulation remains understudied. Using insights from literature on ‘the social life of methods’ and the history of knowledge, which underline that knowledge is transformed by and transforms the contexts it circulates in, I show that print media was an arena for circulating and producing new meaning around class taxonomies. Although editorials shunned the social group division for incorrectly representing Swedish society and creating artificial class boundaries, journalists used the taxonomy to explain social structures. Furthermore, by interviewing ‘typical’ members of the different social groups, journalists made the system relatable and personal for their readers. In this context, the social groups were imagined as cultural communities, sharing cultural behaviours and preferences. Lastly, I analyse usages of the social group division in letters to the editor, which reveal that people felt they were being classified and wanted to offer their views of society, using the taxonomy in ways the experts had not intended. This study thereby contributes to the history of social taxonomies and class languages in the post-war period.

"A Tale of Two Cities": Cemetery Heterotopia and Spatial Relations in Lagos City.

What does cemetery teach us about the social world? How do spatial configurations of cemetery mirror urban social realities? In what ways can the understanding of spatial order of necropolis contribute to the episteme of spatial relations? In this paper, I juxtapose space practices in the cemetery with spatial relations and practices in the city of Lagos to frame an alternative way of imagining and writing about cityscapes and a new approach of thinking about social taxonomies such as gender, class, race, ethnicity and power. Following Foucault's theory of heterotopia and relational ontology of space this paper frames cemetery as a counter-site to the city. Drawing from oral interviews, participant observation and archival document, the paper argues that cemetery is a container that encloses different sites and sets of social relations as well as lived experiences.

Matt Jackson-McCabe. Jewish Christianity: The Making of the Christianity-Judaism Divide. Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library.

Matt Jackson-McCabe. <i>Jewish Christianity: The Making of the Christianity-Judaism Divide.</i> Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library.

Folklore and Conspiracy Theories of a COVID Dissenter: The Life and Sermons of Father Sergii (Romanov)

The religious studies scholar Bruce Lincoln famously defined myth as “ideology in narrative form” that “naturalizes and legitimizes” social taxonomies. Over two decades, Father Sergii (Romanov), a convicted murderer who turned toreligion while in prison, has used myth to shape his public persona, legitimize his spiritual leadership, cultivate the loyalty of his followers, and articulate a vision of holy Russia that seeks to reconcile the Soviet and imperial pasts. Weaving his personal biography into a narrative of national redemption from the sin of regicide, he has helped construct and lead a complex of monasteries. Drawing on a variety of narratives that emphasize Russian exceptionalism, Sergii and his admirers present the cleric as a divinely appointed emissary to lead their nation to spiritual greatness. Je conspiracy theories that support this worldview have also encouraged Sergii to denounce both secular and ecclesiastical authorities and to reject public health measures designed to stem the coronavirus pandemic. Despite his revolt against his bishop, Sergii remained in control of his convent until his dramatic arrest on 29 December 2020. Jis article analyzes some of Sergii’s mostsignificant narratives, traces their origins, and weighs their social implications.

Merton’s Criticism of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown’s Postulation as a Comparative Analyst to the Nigeria Social System

Structural Functionalism is a broad perspective in sociology and anthropology. It sees society as a structure with interrelated parts.Structural Functionalism assumes the society as a system of interconnected parts (which comprises of constituent elements such as customs, norms, traditions, institutions, etc.) that work together in harmony to maintain a state of balance and social equilibrium for the whole. It emphasizes the interconnectedness of society by focusing on how each part influences and is influenced by other parts. Fundamental assumptions of the Structural Functionalism can be traced to the Organicism of Comte of early 19th century (and subsequently in the work of Spencer and Durkheim). Timeless analysis by Durkheim and emphasis on social taxonomies (ideal types) by Weber also shape Contemporary Structural Functionalism. The analysis and emphasis influenced the Functional Anthropologists Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942) and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955). This paper takes a look at Merton’s criticism of some of the aspects of Structural Functionalism. The criticism has been seen as conceptual insights that helped give Structural Functionalism a continuing usefulness. Merton’s criticism of Structural Functionalism, particularly that of Malinowski and Radcliffe Brown postulates have been used in this paper to proffer explanation to what is obtainable in the Nigeria social structures and institutions.

Domesticating Social Taxonomies: Local and National Identifications as Seen Through Susan Drucker's Anthropological Fieldwork in Jamiltepec, Oaxaca, Mexico, 1957–1963

Abstract This article proposes an archaeology of the anthropological research undertaken by Susan Drucker in Jamiltepec, Oaxaca, in the late 1950s. I contrast the book that stemmed from this research with her undergraduate thesis and, above all, her field diaries to document the existence of two distinct sets of social nomenclature in Mexico: a local one rooted in Jamiltepec and characterized by a plurality of elusive classifications, and a national one founded on a basic distinction between the categories indigenous and mestizo. I argue that the transition between the local and the national one can be characterized as a domestication of social taxonomies, a process that reduced the multiplicity of identification positions circulating locally to the indigenous/mestizo binary and that above all did away with the mobile, unstable quality of those local identification positions in order to frame them as ontological categories. I thus demonstrate that the ideology of mestizaje, rather than operating on societies that were homogenously indigenous, intervened, in multidirectional ways, into complex local hierarchies.

(Pre)occupations: A data-driven model of jobs and its consequences for categorization and evaluation

We present a data-driven model of stereotypes about occupations (total N = 3919). Across two classification systems and national contexts (U.S.; Germany), we show remarkable convergence in the stereotype dimensions spontaneously employed to make sense of occupational groups (agency; progressiveness). Further studies show that these dimensions reflect presumed characteristics of job holders and not just describe their occupational role (Study 2), and that proximity of occupations on the emerging stereotype model increased superordinate categorization (Study 3) and contagious transfer of (positive and negative) valence from one occupation to another (Study 4). Together these studies do not only provide important insights into the perception of one of the most ubiquitous social taxonomies but also provide a rich, open access dataset for researchers seeking to employ occupational groups as a tool to better understand stereotypes and intergroup relations in general.

Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray by Rosalind Rosenberg

Reviewed by: Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray by Rosalind Rosenberg Katherine Turk Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray. By Rosalind Rosenberg. ( New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xviii, 494. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-19-065645-4.) Kathryn Schulz's April 27, 2017, New Yorker profile, "The Many Lives of Pauli Murray," described Pauli Murray as an "architect of the civil-rights struggle—and the women's movement" and asked, "Why haven't you heard of her?" Scholars protested that many had studied and written on Murray. A JSTOR search backs their claims, yielding more than two thousand references to her in academic publications. But scholars' treatments of Murray thus far have addressed her life and its milestones in pieces. Rosalind Rosenberg's exquisite volume brings Murray into focus in whole and in context. Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray follows Murray through the major social justice campaigns of the twentieth century. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, in [End Page 493] 1910, and raised in Durham, North Carolina, she played key roles in the labor, civil rights, and feminist movements. As an activist and a law professor, Murray found overlooked potential in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments as tools for building social equality. She also framed the concept of "Jane Crow" to analogize race and sex discrimination (p. 261). Murray helped establish the National Organization for Women and was the first African American woman ordained as an Episcopal priest. After her death in 1985, theorists drew from Murray's ideas about how race and sex are "interconnected" as they developed the concept of intersectionality (p. 370). Jane Crow gives these achievements due attention, but it also presents less familiar details of Murray's life: she hitchhiked cross-country by car and rail, taught law in Ghana, worked as a journalist and poet, and was a longtime breadwinner for the aunts who raised her. Rosenberg argues that Murray's sense of herself as "someone in between" social categories spurred and shaped her persistent activism (p. 5). Murray's ancestors included white slaveholders, enslaved African Americans, and freedpeople whose light complexions permitted many of them to melt undetected into white society. Her class status was similarly ambiguous. Murray became a nationally known legal expert who built deep friendships with elites such as Eleanor Roosevelt, but financial security eluded her. Murray's gender identity was the source of her deepest inner turmoil. According to Rosenberg, it is the key to understanding Murray's worldview. Murray sensed that she was a heterosexual man inhabiting a female body. Early in her life, she sought out a medical cause for her situation and lobbied physicians for treatment. Confidantes regarded Murray "'as one of nature's experiments; a girl who should have been a boy'" (p. 81). By middle age, Rosenberg recounts, Murray "had come to see her trouble with 'boundaries,' her sense of herself as 'queer,' as strengths, qualities that allowed her to understand gender and race not as fixed categories, but rather as unreasonable classifications" (p. 3). Murray's liminal status proved to be a good launching pad for her attacks on social taxonomies. Murray did not plot out the landmarks that have defined her legacy. Rather, she fought barriers as she encountered them, drawing from her personal experiences to push for broader social and political change. Her experience of poverty during the Great Depression led her to class- and labor-based activism. Her rejection from graduate study at the University of North Carolina in 1938 because of her race—despite being the descendant of a white trustee—led her to challenge racism in the law and in the academy in a campaign that received national attention. Murray later met sex-based exclusion as the only woman in her class at Howard Law School. She found this encounter with Jane Crow especially bitter considering her discomfort with her female body. Toward the end of her life, the death of a dear companion compelled Murray to deepen her connection to the Episcopal Church. Jane Crow humanizes a complex figure many of us thought we knew. Rosenberg shows us that behind Murray's public edifice was a deeply relatable person, far more compelling...

An ontology evolution method based on folksonomy

Folksonomies are increasingly adopted in web systems. These “social taxonomies”, which emerge from collaborative tagging, contrast with the formalism and the systematic creation process applied to ontologies. However, they can play complementary roles, as the knowledge systematically formalized in ontologies by a restricted group can be enriched by the implicit knowledge collaboratively produced by a much wider group. Existing initiatives that involve folksonomies and ontologies are often unidirectional, i.e., ontologies improve tag operations or tags are used to automatically create ontologies. We propose a new fusion approach in which the semantics travels in both directions from folksonomies to ontologies and vice versa. The result of this fusion is our Folksonomized Ontology (FO). In this paper, we present our 3E Steps technique (Extraction, Enrichment, and Evolution), which explores the latent semantics of a given folksonomy (expressed in a FO) to support ontology review and enhancement. It was implemented and tested in a visual review/enhancement tool. All Rights Reserved © 2015 Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Centro de Ciencias Aplicadas y Desarrollo Tecnologico. This is an open access item distributed under the Creative Commons CC License BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Private Women, Public Men: Reflective Judgment and Autonomy in The Lemon Tree

Conceptual categories such as the private and public help us make sense of the world around us. However, like any categories, be it sociological or critical, social taxonomies carry with them a certain risk. They have the potential to mar our understanding of social and political reality. In this paper, I would like to rethink some features conventionally associated with the public/private distinction. Faithful to the paradigm of reflective judgment, which looks at the particular and tries to evaluate how it informs universal concepts, my point of departure is the film The Lemon Tree; a film that raises questions about the limitations of socially constructed and self-imposed categories, and invites the audience to rethink conventional views. I interpret the film relying on several conceptual categories that Hannah Arendt developed in the course of her writing: the actor/spectator distinction, the labor/work/action categories, and her discussion of loneliness.

Revolutionizing the Fossilized: Balzac and Janin's Naturalist Discourse in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes

This article questions the panoramic genre through a study of Les Français peints par eux-mêmes and its relation with natural history. Both Janin and Balzac saw similarities between the volumes' social taxonomies and the scientific classifications of the period. At stake in the matter is the question of who "les Français" are and what traits can be put forward as part of a common national identity. Yet, both writers—and ultimately the collective project as a whole— constantly question the taxonomies that their texts are building, eventually casting a doubt on the possibility of classification itself.

Folksonomized ontology and the 3E steps technique to support ontology evolvement

Folksonomies are increasingly adopted in web systems. These “social taxonomies”, which emerge from collaborative tagging, contrast with the formalism and the systematic creation process applied to ontologies. However, they can play complementary roles, as the knowledge systematically formalized in ontologies by a restricted group can be enriched by the implicit knowledge collaboratively produced by a much wider group. Existing initiatives that involve folksonomies and ontologies are often unidirectional, i.e., ontologies improve tag operations or tags are used to automatically create ontologies. We propose a new fusion approach in which the semantics travels in both directions–from folksonomies to ontologies and vice versa. The result of this fusion is our Folksonomized Ontology (FO). In this paper, we present our 3E steps technique–Extraction, Enrichment, and Evolution–which explores the latent semantics of a given folksonomy–expressed in a FO–to support ontology review and enhancement. It was implemented and tested in a visual review/enhancement tool.

Chronicles of Clumsiness: Hyperopic Flâneurs and Myopic Bourgeois in the Streets of Nineteenth-Century Paris

The physiologies and mass-circulation literature of the July Monarchy launched the emergence of the flâneur in the French popular imaginary, and famously celebrated his acute, flexible, and discerning gaze. Yet, these texts sometimes represent imperilled flâneurs who inadvertently collide with the city; the cause of these accidents lies in their hyperopia and subsequent failure to perceive the closest and most pedestrian details of the Parisian street. This farsightedness itself results from distraction in the French senses of the term: as both absentmindedness (la distraction) and social entertainment (les distractions), the flâneur’s distraction belongs to him as much as to Paris itself. The accidents that it causes question the stability of the flâneur as a social type, and eventually of social taxonomies themselves.

Regimes of Classification and the Paradox of Kamchadal Heritage

This paper examines the historical formation of the “creole” ethnic group known as Kamchadals through an examination of the changing criteria for ethnic, social, and class taxonomies. Over the course of 300 years of Russian settlement in Kamchatka, the population has been subject to three distinctly different regimes of classification, with each prioritizing different qualities. Thus, at various times, the ethnically mixed population in central Kamchatka has been measured, and officially recorded, on the basis of religion, profession, social standing, wealth, and ethnicity. Today, as Kamchadals seek to establish themselves as an officially recognized indigenous population, the historical record presents particularly difficult questions that tend to undermine their claim. For example, according to current procedures, to become officially recognized as Kamchadal, a person must demonstrate direct descent from a person classified in the 19th century as Kamchadal. The 19th century records however, are not records of “ethnicity” as it is understood today, and thus official classification is as dependent on luck as it is on any commonly accepted measure of “ethnicity” or “race.” Thus, this paper charts the shifting measures by which a local, frontier population was measured, and contemporary efforts to translate those modes of classification into contemporary understandings of “ethnicity.” Its broader relevance concerns a tension inherent to the concept of indigenousness itself, that is, the tendency of outsiders as well as native peoples themselves to apply a measure of authenticity and thus to discriminate between varying shades of “more” and “less” indigenous individuals.

“Race”: Confusion about zoological and social taxonomies, and their places in science

“Race”: Confusion about zoological and social taxonomies, and their places in science

The category "abnormal infancy" in the construction of a social taxonomy in the first third of the 20th century

The present paper tries to study some of the basic rudiments that contributed to the change of paradigm about mental deficiency produced in the first decades of the XXth century. Taking as main sources the Binet and Simon's contributions from France, and the Sante de Sanctis' from Italy, it's analysed the construction of the category "abnormal childhood", relating it to the new and privileged space of observation that supposed the obligatory School. It concludes with a reflection about the fallacious use of the "intelligence" as "prejudice" in order to establish social taxonomies and meritocracies that they don't make but to justify the human inequality.

Celebrations of Bureaucracy: Birthday Parties in Israeli Kindergartens

In the early world of the Israeli Jewish child, the kindergarten is the dominant molder of experiences beyond the intimacy of the family. The kindergarten initiates the lengthy process by which child is turned into citizen, in large measure through the state system of education. Between the ages of two and six, the great bulk of Israeli Jewish children attend kindergarten on a weekday basis throughout the school year (Shamgar-Handelman 1990). Within the kindergarten, the child participates frequently in two sorts of event that practice aspects of an ethos of statism and citizenship. One that we addressed elsewhere (Shamgar-Handelman and Handelman 1986) is the celebration of annual national and traditional holidays. The other is the birthday party, a celebration of age. In that earlier essay we argued that the implicit designs and practices of these holiday occasions operate to shift the allegiance of the little child from a social order within which the only hierarchy is that of the family to one dominated by the civil collectivity, within which the family is allocated a subordinate place. This shift in the child's perception of hierarchy [however it is accomplished in different social orders] is crucial to the reproduction, from generation to generation, of the hegemony of the modern state. In this essay we discuss the pervasive motif of the birthday party, that of exact age. Ostensibly the party celebrates age for the sake of the personal maturity of the child. The child's passage from one numerical age to another is constructed to mark his growth and ongoing socialization into the norms of the collectivity (Weil 1986).1 Although less obvious, we argue that the birthday party designs experiences of age and ageing that prepare the child for his participation in the bureaucratic ethos of the state. We will discuss three prominent, implicit messages of age and ageing in the birthday party. One is the individuation of the birthday child in terms of a cultural taxonomy of time, that of age, which momentarily fragments the self according to temporal categories. Another is the child's reclassification from one age category to another, in accordance with this taxonomy of time. The third emphasizes the experiencing of time as continuity, for categories of age are shown also to be one's personal past, present, and future. The birthday party inculcates the youngster into a taxonomy of time. This perspective stems from three premises. First, all social order depends for its coherence on systems of social classification. Second, in the modern state, ideas of exact age are good to think, in Levi-Strauss's terms; for they are integral to frameworks of classification used to create social order (Musgrove and Middleton 1981:53). Third, modern bureaucracies invent social taxonomies and apply them

Organizational change in Australian higher education: Process and outcome

Change and social order, along with the related concepts of homogenization vis-a-vis differentiation of organizational types, have long caught the interest of social scientists. Theories of change and organizational differentiation abound. However, there appears to be a need for more research on how change threatens fundamental social classifications and how actors manipulate classifications and social taxonomies to protect their interests and restore order. The recent restructuring of Australian higher education provides an ideal case for exploring the effects of classificatory variation for the process has challenged cherished ideas about the essential characteristics of higher education. The extent to which the challenge has been met and repulsed by those threatened is the subject of this paper.