Societal Scales Research Articles

Mechanisms upholding the persistence of stigma across 100 years of historical text

Today, many social groups face negative stereotypes. Is such negativity a stable feature of society and, if so, what mechanisms maintain stability both within and across group targets? Answering these theoretically and practically important questions requires data on dozens of group stereotypes examined simultaneously over historical and societal scales, which is only possible through recent advances in Natural Language Processing. Across two studies, we use word embeddings from millions of English-language books over 100 years (1900–2000) and extract stereotypes for 58 stigmatized groups. Study 1 examines aggregate, societal-level trends in stereotype negativity by averaging across these groups. Results reveal striking persistence in aggregate negativity (no meaningful slope), suggesting that society maintains a stable level of negative stereotypes. Study 2 introduces and tests a new framework identifying potential mechanisms upholding stereotype negativity over time. We find evidence of two key sources of this aggregate persistence: within-group “reproducibility” (e.g., stereotype negativity can be maintained by using different traits with the same underlying meaning) and across-group “replacement” (e.g., negativity from one group is transferred to other related groups). These findings provide novel historical evidence of mechanisms upholding stigmatization in society and raise new questions regarding the possibility of future stigma change.

Transformational climate actions by cities

<strong>Highlights</strong> With their predominantly coastal geographies, rapidly growing populations, and emissions-intensive activities, cities are highly vulnerable and major contributors to climate change. Their role as cultural centers, and commerce and innovation hubs, means they are also promising sources of solutions. Taken together, these factors demand a closer examination of the progress and solutions that cities are making to mitigate climate change and adapt to its impacts. However, research on the extent and effectiveness of cities’ implementation efforts is underdeveloped. There is a need to better understand if and how cities are rolling out effective implementation measures, what effects (intended and unintended) such measures are having, and whether their implementation efforts are achieving the transformational changes needed to realize a low carbon, climate-resilient future. This editorial introduces the special issue by exploring these issues and reflecting perspectives from a variety of disciplines both within and outside academia, and in relation to diverse cities in the Global North and South. To better understand the practical dimensions of implementation, and the various obstacles and opportunities faced by public and private sector actors in progressing climate action targets and goals, the editors invited submissions reflective of co-produced research. Though not all took this form, some did and helped to foreground the experiences of those actors who arguably have the most power and responsibility to advance implementation measures, and seed the very institutional arrangements needed for deeper, multisectoral climate action. Collectively, the content of the special issue points to a need for significant investment, policy change, social innovation, and cooperation across societal scales.

Exploring scale in social licence to operate: European perspectives

This article explores the issue of scale in the social licence to operate (SLO) which, to date, is understudied. The community-company relationship is the original, and still predominant, conceptualization of the term with the less tangible society-industry relationship still not typically in focus. Although the literature distinguishes between community and societal scales, there is no research on why the distinction is important, how the two scales are integrated or whether they interact with and influence one another. Exploring scale in SLO is important for theoretical clarification of the concept, for better empirical understanding of the role mining plays in host localities and the broader society and for the potential to incentivize industry toward more responsible and sustainable practices. Europe's multi-layered governance structure combined with its push for more domestic mining activities provides an ideal crucible for debates of scale to play out. To investigate the community and societal scales in the European context within a single study, three main research questions guide the work: how do orientations toward SLO differ at the community and societal scales; how do these orientations influence the acceptance of mining at both scales; and how do these orientations interact and influence one another? Through quantitative analyses, we found that site level factors tend to be important predictors for local communities and more distant society, but broader societal benefits and costs are not important predictors at the local community scale, and are only significant at the societal scale in combination with local factors.

Re-animalising wellbeing: Multispecies justice after development

This article addresses contemporary socio-ecological crises by proposing a shift from the logics of protection–sacrifice that characterise developmentality, and by developing the idea of ‘re-animalisation’ as a pathway to multispecies justice. The pursuit of ‘development’ has been a key hallmark of the modern idea of progress. Long-standing critiques of the socio-ecological and other adverse impacts of development have not made much headway in effecting meaningful change. Engaging with this impasse, I argue that specific zoöpolitical notions of human wellbeing that are co-constitutive with developmentality are at the foundation of today’s socio-ecological troubles and multispecies justice concerns. Bringing together post-development and animal studies scholarship, I discuss the twinned logics of protection–sacrifice that underlie the pursuit of human wellbeing at societal scales, and that have come to characterise more-than-human responses as well. I build on this, in conversation with environmental philosopher Val Plumwood and degrowth scholar Giorgos Kallis, to suggest that achieving multispecies justice requires a renewed focus on the human in the form of a fundamental re-placement of the social in the rest of the nature. To this end, I offer thought experiments on re-visioning wellbeing via an approach of ‘re-animalisation’ to provoke reflection on crafting new foundations for equitable multispecies presents and futures.

The role of climate change perceptions and sociodemographics on reported mitigation efforts and performance among households in northeastern Mexico

Managing and reducing the impacts of climate change depends on efficient actions from all societal scales. Yet, the household component is often missing from climate research, debate, and policies. This is problematic because households have been found to significantly contribute to of global greenhouse gas emissions and therefore have the potential to be part of a solution to climate change by mitigating climate change. This study seeks to understand which factors drive household-level mitigation actions. We conducted a household survey in Nuevo Leon, located in northeastern Mexico, to explore the extent to which climate change perceptions and the sociodemographic characteristics of households influence their reported mitigation performances and their perceived mitigation efforts. Results from linear regression analyses and generalized linear models revealed that sociodemographic characteristics are key drivers of the households’ perceived mitigation efforts and reported mitigation performances and. We also found that climate change perceptions drive a household’s efforts to mitigate climate change. These results could partly explain why despite the efforts households take to mitigate climate change, achieving an effective reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is challenging without further access to resources such as education and financial support. If governments intend to realize substantial reductions in future emission pathways, then household-level mitigation should be addressed with proper support.

Designing Movement, Modulating Mood

This article illustrates how the isomorphism between bodily form and emotional expression is manifest in architectural experience through applying research findings in the fields of cognitive science, phenomenology, and psychology to practical examples in the work of Aldo van Eyck, Alvar Aalto, Rosan Bosch, Herman Hertzberger, Steen Eiler-Rasmussen, and Gaston Bachelard. Beginning with the micro-scale movement in facial expressions to larger scale patterns of collective movement and mood, this work understands architecture in its activeverbal form, as a patterning force capable of modulating rhythms and resonances at individual and societal scales of interaction.

Teacher Leadership for Love, Solidarity, and Justice: The Invisibilized and Contested Practices of Teacher Leaders of Color

Despite widespread acknowledgment of teachers of Color as critical agents of change, white supremacist, colonial, and cis-heteropatriarchal ontologies of “teacher leadership” marginalize the counterhegemonic leadership they embody. Guided by critical leadership and feminist of Color scholarship, I develop and employ an embodied raciolinguistic analysis to examine how a Latina teacher leader of Color facilitated organization-wide action in the educational interests of Black students. My analysis demonstrates that her discursive and embodied practices as a non-Black woman of Color and “official” teacher leader were simultaneously (re)constructed as catalysts and hindrance for racial progress within and across social spaces. Grappling with these possibilities and tensions at interpersonal, institutional, and societal scales, she reflexively adapted her practices to recenter Black leadership while facing professional consequences. Arguing for radical social change by amplifying the multi-faceted and contested nature of counterhegemonic teacher leadership, I offer implications to foster the critical ingenuity needed to lead in love, solidarity, and justice for and among communities of Color.

On Rupture: Establishing the Cognitive Bases of Social Change

This article presents a cognitive model of social rupture and develops its implications for social change processes. It takes as its foundation established research on the reflexive transition from implicit (i.e., Type 1) processing into conscious (i.e., Type 2) processing that occurs when individuals’ automatic inferences about their environment become unreliable. By considering how this “conflict monitoring response” (Botvinick et al. 2001) and its associated cognitive and affective effects play out within social contexts, this work establishes a general, cognitive model of social rupture that converges significantly with classic sociological perspectives on the subject. The second half of the article mobilizes the developed model to establish the cognitive bases of social change processes as they manifest across societal scales, from the intrapersonal to the macrosocial. After foregrounding key implications that follow from this socio‐cognitive perspective of social change, this work concludes by providing a general framework for how the presented model can be used to develop new empirical approaches for studying real‐world social change as it unfolds via individuals’ implicit sensemaking processes.

Locating Cities and Their Governments in Multi-Level Sustainability Governance

Cities and their governments are increasingly recognized as important actors in global sustainability governance. With the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, their role in the global endeavor to foster sustainability has once again been put in the spotlight. Several scholars have highlighted pioneering local strategies and policies to implement the Sustainable Development Goals and render urban areas more sustainable. However, the question of how such urban sustainability actions are embedded in complex interactions between public and private actors operating at different levels has not been studied in enough detail. Building upon a multi-level governance approach, this article explores the entanglement and interconnectedness of cities and local governments with actors and institutions at various levels and scales to better capture the potential and limitations of urban policymaking contributing to global sustainability. The article finds that on the one hand cities and their governments are well positioned to engage other actors into a policy dialogue. On the other hand, local authorities face considerable budgetary and institutional capacity constraints, and they heavily rely on support from actors at other governmental levels and societal scales to carry out effective sustainability actions in urban areas.

Activity Theory for the De-Structuralized Modernity.

The present paper discusses perspectives of Activity Theory (AT) in the context of contemporary globalizing world, describing which we refer to the notion "De-structuralized modernity" (Sorokin and Froumin 2020). Radical changes in everyday life challenge social sciences and humanities. Approaches are in demand, which have the potential to comprehend the changing human étant and éntre. We argue that Activity Theory has the potential to face these challenges. Leontiev's AT grounds on the idea of qualitatively new mental features arising to deal with novel environmental challenges, which is much in line with J.M. Baldwin reasoning on evolution. AT also offers a method to prognosis the upcoming neoplasms. In the same time, applying classics of AT to the current reality, "De-structuralized modernity", entails the need for new theoretical elaborations of the latter, stemming from the radical transformation of the relations between individual and socio-cultural environments. A unique societal context emerges on the global level, which, on the one hand, requires individual to adapt constantly to changing socio-cultural reality, and, on the other hand, dramatically expands his/her potential for proactive actorhood transforming surrounding structures. We argue that the major and novel challenge for the individual is that maintaining the integrity and coherence of the a) Self-identity and b) system of links with the socio-cultural environment - in their dynamics and unity, has become a qualitatively different issue, much more complicated and problematic than ever before. The notion of "culture" has particular relevance and importance in this context because it allows grasping simultaneously two dimensions in their dynamic dialectical interrelations. First, the "internal" ("subjective", "in the minds") and "external" ("objective", material and institutional environment) realities. Second, individual ("micro") and societal ("macro") scales of human activities. Discussing the ways to understand these dynamics, we dispute the popular "constitutive view" on personality and refer to the concept of the "ontological shift" (Mironenko and Sorokin 2018). We also highlight how technological advancements change and "expand" human nature making it capable to deal with the outlined new tasks.

Scale

As I write this, thankfully unaffected, it's amazing to watch the cross-scale effects created from things that exist on a tiny scale—specifically, the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) has sent powerful waves across seemingly all societal scales. Water is also something very small that creates powerful effects across a wide range of scales, but in comparison to the immediate but hopefully moderating threat of coronavirus, we should appreciate that the scale of water is orders of magnitude more significant. When it comes to water, scale can take on multiple meanings, but here I mean the scale of water in space and time. Spatially, we can start with global patterns of water and energy moving through awesome natural phenomena. Climate change—which is a global response to an amalgam of local actions—manifests itself as it amplifies water's movement in extremes. Moving down in scale, the emphasis shifts more from quantity to quality, and we see the effects of water pollution on local communities and ecosystems. Going down into the micro- to nano-levels, chemical and biological effects become prominent, and thousands of microscopic contaminants and pathogens (including viruses) can lead to widespread sickness at trace concentrations. Temporally, water scales range from microseconds to centuries, and they are regularly considered in lengths of heartbeats, seasons, and human lives. Utilities must abide by their own annual water calendars as well as seasonal and diurnal patterns. The expected life of water system assets can range 50–100 years while the technologies that manage them seem to change annually. Ultimately, water professionals must keep in mind time scales such as those on the levels of sea level rise, an afternoon monsoon, a bad news cycle, the time frame to raise water rates, a summer or several years of drought, waiting to get sample results back, and repairing a major leak. There are political scales of water, too, ranging from international agreements to local water ordinances. At the watershed/regional/basin level, there is drought, extreme weather, and wildfires, forces that draw people together and create a level of equity among those who share an area's resources. I think this is the most significant scale for water because even with regulation from higher levels, this is where decisions really manifest themselves. It's clear that water isn't ever simply a local or global issue. Water is cross-scale, so water professionals should look above, below, and in the pages of Journal AWWA for solutions to cross-scale challenges ranging from coronavirus to climate change. This month's Journal AWWA features a range of topics, including potable water reuse, lead and copper management, laboratory analysis, and much more. Please consider sharing your perspectives and experiences with all water professionals by writing to me at journaleditor@awwa.org.

Applying the pathways to nature connectedness at a societal scale: a leverage points perspective

ABSTRACT The climate emergency and crisis of biodiversity loss show that the human–nature relationship is failing. This paper introduces the psychological construct of nature connectedness as a measurable target for improving the human–nature relationship, and therefore helping tackle the warming climate and loss of wildlife. The ‘pathways to nature connectedness’ (sensory contact, emotion, meaning, beauty and compassion) provide an important and flexible framework to help improve the human–nature relationship. Research evidence and practical examples are given from organisations using the pathways (e.g. National Trust, Wildlife Trusts, Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust). This illustrates how the pathways provide a new methodological approach for improving human–nature relationships. A systems perspective is taken to consider wider application of the pathways framework. The societal relevance of the pathways approach is proposed, and the application of nature connectedness is considered across a range of leverage points relevant across multiple societal scales (from individuals to societies). Recommendations are given for specific pathways informed interventions to improve the human–nature relationship. These interventions focus on cultural programmes and urban design to increase sensory, meaningful and emotional engagement with nature. The interventions based on the pathways framework engage with leverage points around system goals, design, feedback and parameters across policy areas such as education, health, housing, arts, health and transport. This shows that the pathways to nature connectedness have a large scale of societal relevance and the potential to provide solutions across a range of leverage points to foster closer human–nature relationships across society.

Tensions and Trade-offs in Real-World Laboratories - The Participants' Perspective

Real-world laboratories have made their way into policy programs and corporate agendas. They are expected to foster innovation on both the local and wider societal scales through co-creative settings in the “real world”. Yet little attention has been paid to how these multiple expectations affect micro-level practices and pose challenges for the heterogeneous actors involved in these settings. Two case studies show the emerging tensions relating to participation, temporality and space, and the ways in which participants perceive and deal with them.

Legal and institutional foundations of adaptive environmental governance.

Legal and institutional structures fundamentally shape opportunities for adaptive governance of environmental resources at multiple ecological and societal scales. Properties of adaptive governance are widely studied. However, these studies have not resulted in consolidated frameworks for legal and institutional design, limiting our ability to promote adaptation and social-ecological resilience. We develop an overarching framework that describes the current and potential role of law in enabling adaptation. We apply this framework to different social-ecological settings, centers of activity, and scales, illustrating the multidimensional and polycentric nature of water governance. Adaptation typically emerges organically among multiple centers of agency and authority in society as a relatively self-organized or autonomous process marked by innovation, social learning, and political deliberation. This self-directed and emergent process is difficult to create in an exogenous, top-down fashion. However, traditional centers of authority may establish enabling conditions for adaptation using a suite of legal, economic, and democratic tools to legitimize and facilitate self-organization, coordination, and collaboration across scales. The principles outlined here provide preliminary legal and institutional foundations for adaptive environmental governance, which may inform institutional design and guide future scholarship.

Narratives in climate change discourse

‘Stories’ used to communicate climate change knowledge shape opinions and preferences, and analyzing such narratives can help explain how they are constructed and how they influence us on personal and societal scales. The narrative perspective makes it possible to identify the presence or absence of typical components in a ‘story,’ such as initial situation, complication, reaction(s), resolution, and final situation, and to identify different actors or narrative characters (heroes, villains, victims). This article reviews the notions of narratives and frames, describes narrative analysis generally and more specifically how a text linguistic perspective can benefit from and contribute to the Narrative Policy Framework in narrative analysis. It illustrates how different approaches can be applied as analytical tools to explore the effects of conflicting narratives (frames) on public opinion of and attitudes towards climate change. Applied to various text genres, the analysis identifies different components of the ‘stories,’ at overarching levels of the text as a whole and at microlevels such as sentences. This may have rhetorical implications, as controversial points of view can be hidden from critical assessment through the condensation of narrative components into short expressions. When exposed to conflicting ‘stories,’ people get a diverse picture of climate change, a diversity which may, however, also lead to confusion about how to react. Concerning the narrative characters, recent research indicates that a clear hero role has a large persuasive impact. More experiments testing how people interpret various narratives should be undertaken in an interdisciplinary perspective, combining social science, and linguistic approaches. WIREs Clim Change 2017, 8:e429. doi: 10.1002/wcc.429This article is categorized under: Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change &gt; Communication

Learning principles and interaction design for ‘Green My Place’: A massively multiplayer serious game

The usual approach to serious game design is to construct a single game intended to address the specific domain problem being addressed. This paper describes a novel alternative approach, focussed on embedding smaller game elements into a comprehensive framework, which provides stronger motive for play and thus greater chance of effect. This serious game design methodology was developed for an EU project to teach energy efficient knowledge and behaviour to users of public buildings around Europe. The successful implementation of this game is also described. The cutting-edge educational principles that formed the basis for the design are drawn from recent research in serious games and energy efficiency, and include the Behavlet, a novel behaviour-transformation concept developed by the authors. The game design framework presented illustrates a clear approach for serious games dealing with topics applicable at societal scales.

Mainstreaming the Adaptations and Reducing the Vulnerability of the Poor Due to Climate Change

Many rural poor people in developing countries depend on agriculture and are highly influenced by climatic change. Adaptation to climate change impacts is increasingly being observed in both physical and ecological systems as well as in human adjustments to resource availability and risk at different spatial and societal scales. This paper reviews some of the options for reducing the vulnerability of the poor through integrated climate change adaptation strategies. The paper explains the climate change effects on agricultural production, adoption experiences in the context of sustainable livelihoods, integration of structural and nonstructural measures, amelioration effects and their costs, and the role of informal institutions in implementation.

Successful adaptation to climate change across scales

Climate change impacts and responses are presently observed in physical and ecological systems. Adaptation to these impacts is increasingly being observed in both physical and ecological systems as well as in human adjustments to resource availability and risk at different spatial and societal scales. We review the nature of adaptation and the implications of different spatial scales for these processes. We outline a set of normative evaluative criteria for judging the success of adaptations at different scales. We argue that elements of effectiveness, efficiency, equity and legitimacy are important in judging success in terms of the sustainability of development pathways into an uncertain future. We further argue that each of these elements of decision-making is implicit within presently formulated scenarios of socio-economic futures of both emission trajectories and adaptation, though with different weighting. The process by which adaptations are to be judged at different scales will involve new and challenging institutional processes.

Biodiversity, Biosphere Reserves, and the Big Apple: A Study of the New York Metropolitan Region

The objectives of this article were to assess the dimensions of biodiversity-urban society interactions within the New York Metropolitan Region, a 31-county area with a population of 21.5 million, and to explore pathways to reconcile dysfunctional relationships between these two ever-entwined systems. The article builds on the premise that urban biodiversity exists at a crucial nexus of ecological and societal interactions, linking local, regional, and global scales, and that urban ecologies are projected to become even more dynamic in the future, particularly as a result of global climate change. The pathway proposed to reconcile the biodiversity-urban society relationships is the incorporation of biosphere reserve strategies into regional environmental planning efforts focused on the New York/New Jersey Harbor/Estuary specifically and on the greater New York Metropolitan Region in general. The concepts of the "ecological footprint" and vulnerability to global environmental change are used to analyze the current interactions between biodiversity and urban society, and to evaluate the efficacy of adopting biosphere reserve strategies in the region. New York has long been at the forefront of American environmentalism and landscape planning. Coupled with this history is a still small but growing interest in regional environmental planning efforts (e.g., the U.S. EPA Harbor Estuary Program) and green infrastructure (e.g., the 2002 Humane Metropolis Conference organized by the Ecological Cities Project). The research presented here aims to contribute to these nascent activities. As a megacity, New York may serve as a model for other major cities of the world.

Complex Adaptive Systems, Evolutionism, and Ecology within Anthropology: Interdisciplinary Research for Understanding Cultural and Ecological Dynamics

We now know that far from equilibrium, new types of structures may originate spontaneously. In far-from-equilibrium conditions we may have transformation from disorder, from thermal chaos, into order. New dynamic states of matter may originate, states that reflect the interaction of a given system with its surroundings. We have called these new structures dissipative structures to emphasize the constructive role of dissipative processes in their formation. -Prigogine and Stengers 1984:12 A Science of Complex Systems Recently the ecologist C.S. Holling has discussed the conflict between two streams of and the confusion it creates for politicians and the public (Holling 1995:12-16; see also Holling 1993:553-4). One stream is experimental, reductionist, and narrowly disciplinary. It is familiar to us as the scientific ideal. The less familiar stream is interdisciplinary, integrative, historical, analytical, comparative, and experimental at appropriate scales. Examples given of the first form are molecular biology and genetic engineering. The second form is found in evolutionary biology and systems approaches in populations, ecosystems, landscapes, and global dynamics. One stream is a science of parts, the other a science of the integration of parts. Anthropology has held itself up to the first stream ideal of science. But the first stream ideal does not always produce the results in anthropology that proponents and critics alike have demanded. Our knowledge of detail is incomplete at societal scales, and prediction can fail. Disproof by experiment is unlikely even with natural experiments. And unanimous agreement over results is almost never reached. One response by anthropologists has been to shrink temporal and spatial scales, and hold fast to the ideal; to let the requirements of the scientific methods of this first stream of science structure our research. Anthropologists are often dissatisfied with such restrictions on our object of study, but see little alternative if anthropology is to become a mature science. But science itself is always evolving. Many anthropologists, both proponents of science and critics, are unaware of the constructive critiques now coming from the mature disciplines of science, from the hard sciences. For over twenty years scientists like Holling and Nobel prize chemist Ilya Prigogine (Prigogine 1980, Prigogine and Stengers 1984) have been arguing that the first stream of science is limited to certain problem sets. They contend that a science of complexity has fundamentally different features, and is the proper approach to other problem sets. The subject matter of anthropological inquiry, it will be shown, is commonly addressed in problem sets of the second type. In fact, anthropologists long have argued their case for understanding cultures in terms that sound remarkably like those advocated by the new science of complexity. We have been righting to resemble the ideal of science, while a second form is coming to look like us. Points for Anthropology Holling identifies a number of characteristics of the integrative stream of science. It incorporates technologies and results from reductionist, experimental science, but does not expect disproof by experiment and ultimate agreement by the scientific community. Models are multivariate and multi-scaled, and testing of alternative hypotheses is done by planned and unplanned interventions into whole systems in case studies, with the evaluation of the integrated consequence of each alternative. Multiple lines of converging evidence are used to argue for one hypothesis over another in a process of peer assessment and judgment. While these ground rules for research might be revolutionary in the physical sciences, anthropology has long been forced by our subject into this type of science. Case study ethnographies are our hallmark. Experimental disproof is difficult and uncertainty is high. …