World Social Systems Research Articles

Labor, gender and governance in terms of establishment of new technological order

The prerequisites for the study are the transition of the world social system to the Technological Orders VI and VII in the context of a digital breakthrough and the hybrid nature of the digital social space, which significantly affects the change in the social structure, the distribution of social roles in society, the formation of the labor market and the formation of a new gender order. The purpose of the study is to analyze the impact of digitalization on the labor market, on the gender balance in the labor market and formulate how the processes of preparing a person for new technological structures should be built. According to the results of the study, the authors note that the formation of social institutions of a new type in a hybrid digital society significantly lags behind the need, digital regulators of social behavior in the labor market have not yet emerged, which does not allow building norms and rules of life in a virtual social space at the legislative level. The cognitive structures of society are immature, adequate incentives and sanctions as a response to the phenomena of crossing the boundaries of the office set framework by social actors have not been formed. There are no frameworks yet, but they can be created by maintaining a balance between the realization of society’s needs for development and relying on its ability to maintain the stability of the value system, i.e. property of resistance.

Social Simulation Models at the Ethical Crossroads.

Computational models of group opinion dynamics are one of the most active fields of sociophysics. In recent years, advances in model complexity and, in particular, the possibility to connect these models with detailed data describing individual behaviors, preferences and activities, have opened the way for the simulations to describe quantitatively selected, real world social systems. The simulations could be then used to study 'what-if' scenarios for opinion change campaigns, political, ideological or commercial. The possibility of the practical application of the attitude change models necessitates that the research community working in the field should consider more seriously the moral aspects of their efforts, in particular the potential for their use for unintended goals. The paper discusses these issues, and offers a suggestion for a new research direction: using the attitude models to increase the awareness and detection of social manipulation cases. Such research would offer a scientific challenge and meet the ethical criteria.

Asymptotic theory of time varying networks with burstiness and heterogeneous activation patterns

The recent availability of large-scale, time-resolved and high quality digital datasets has allowed for a deeper understanding of the structure and properties of many real-world networks. The empirical evidence of a temporal dimension prompted the switch of paradigm from a static representation of networks to a time varying one. In this work we briefly review the framework of time-varying-networks in real world social systems, especially focusing on the activity-driven paradigm. We develop a framework that allows for the encoding of three generative mechanisms that seem to play a central role in the social networks’ evolution: the individual’s propensity to engage in social interactions, its strategy in allocate these interactions among its alters and the burstiness of interactions amongst social actors. The functional forms and probability distributions encoding these mechanisms are typically data driven. A natural question arises if different classes of strategies and burstiness distributions, with different local scale behavior and analogous asymptotics can lead to the same long time and large scale structure of the evolving networks. We consider the problem in its full generality, by investigating and solving the system dynamics in the asymptotic limit, for general classes of ties allocation mechanisms and waiting time probability distributions. We show that the asymptotic network evolution is driven by a few characteristics of these functional forms, that can be extracted from direct measurements on large datasets.

Why continuous discussion can promote the consensus of opinions?

Why group opinions tend to be converged through continued communication, discussion and interactions? Under the framework of the social influence network model, we rigorously prove that the group consensus is almost surely within finite steps. This is a quite certain result, and reflects the real-world common phenomenon. In addition, we give a convergence time lower bound. Although our explanations are purely based on mathematic deduction, it shows that the latent social influence structure is the key factor for the persistence of disagreement and formation of opinions convergence or consensus in the real world social system.

СТРУКТУРНО-СМЫСЛОВЫЕ ОСОБЕННОСТИ ИНФОРМАЦИОННЫХ ИНТЕРНЕТ-РЕСУРСОВ

Information society is a global economic, political, technological and antroposocial project involving controlled civilizational transition to the world social system in which the dominant role in all spheres of life will play a mass communication system, implemented with the help of computer technology, particularly Internet technology. The question of formation and presentation of information is highly relevant today. The world community has entered a transitional stage from its post-industrial state to the informational. At this stage of the development, society is increasingly dependent on the quality, availability, reliability, timeliness of information, which is created by its own representatives. Especially clearly it is evident in the Internet space, where all information flows merge into a single closed and continuously update system that has its own characteristics, features and qualities. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12731/2218-7405-2014-4-7

The Social Bases of Environmental Treaty Ratification, 1900–1990

Most accounts of environmental treaty ratification emphasize the boundedness of states, characterizing ratification as a calculated “choice” of interested, rational actors. Here I present an alternative to this view, depicting nation‐states as constructed of globally legitimated models, including those seen to promote environmental protection. Countries with dense connections to world society are most likely to embody global models of nation‐state environmentalization, regardless of measures of national interests, such as natural degradation, economic development, scientific capacity, or political openness. I test the alternative views in a series of structural equation models with latent variables, analyzing cross‐national variation in the number of international environmental treaties ratified during the periods 1900‐1945, 1946‐1962, 1963‐1972, and 1973‐1990. In every analysis a nation‐state's linkage to world society is the strongest predictor of its number of ratifications. The results lend support to the notion that nation‐states are constituted within a wider world social system, in which environmental protection forms a central and highly legitimate node of discourse and activity.

Capitalism and Socialism

Today it seems possible to take pencil in hand and calculate the number of variants of development (within the framework of the relation of these alternatives) that are opposed to the classical Marxist formational scenario of the movement from capitalism to socialism ([variant] 1). The theory of convergence of the two systems (2)—one of the earliest variants of the radical rethinking of the traditional dichotomy: socialism-capitalism—can be taken as the reference point. A new variant that took into account the strategic change in world social development—the end of the confrontation of world social systems—was advanced in the eighties. It is now found that capitalization and socialization cannot only be processes belonging to different systems, but must also be realized (combined) in the development of the same system (3). This observation applies chiefly to developed Western countries with a mixed, polyform economy. The classical model that is usually cited is the Scandinavian model of the welfare state.

Religion and the world system: The pentecostal ethic and the spirit of monopoly capital

As a form of social organization, Catholic Pentecostalism might be competing with the multinational corporation as much as validating the order of international monopoly capital. There is some indication that the movement appeals primarily to small businessmen and the “comprador” bourgeoisie, classes most directly threatened by the monopolistic ambitions of the multinationals. Religious motivation and organization provide them with a purpose and resources to enter an international arena. Just as American-based multinationals utilize the United States government as an institutional umbrella for their dealings in other nations, American-based Catholic Pentecostalism draws on the resources of the Catholic Church as an institutional umbrella for its activities. Likewise, the following statement about multinational corporations applies equally well to the religious multinational: An important component in the strength of multinationals has been their ability to organize resources in ways that other corporate institutions have not been able to do and to respond with flexibility and imagination to new conditions, including changes in the environment created by their own past actions.1 To be sure, this analogy too has its limits. It could fruitfully be applied to the Church as a whole as well as the movement within the Church. And in Europe, where the corporatist influence of the radical communitarians is less evident, one informant suggested an analogy between a pan-European Catholic Pentecostal leaders' conference and the Second International Communist Party. The comparison is not spurious: Catholic Pentecostalism and socialism alike are bent on world-transformation, and in Europe several negative encounters between Marxists and Charismatics have been reported.2 This discussion suggests that the real parallel among these three social forms lies in their mutual potential and aspiration to be the validating Utopia in a world social system.

Corporate Giants: Some Global Social Costs

Some projections into future of world economy depict an increasing rate of economic concentration, inviting serious thoughts as to its ability to provide for human welfare and to maintain a reasonable degree of diversity and pluralism in world social system. Howard Perlmutter (1969, 1968) advances what he calls 300-Hypothesis, a prediction that global system of future will be dominated by 300 or so giant enterprises. Economist Stephen Hymer (1970) propounds same hypothesis and argues that present trends could produce a regime of 300 or 400 multinational corporations controlling 60 to 70% of world industrial output. And Richard Barber's (1970) recent discussion of concentration in American economy contends that the entire industrialized world will soon be characterized by as high a degree of concentration as now prevails in United States. By 1980, concludes Barber (1970: 264), three hundred corporations will control 75 percent of world's manufacturing assets.'

Kibbutz and Colony: Collective Economies and the Outside World

In an increasingly integrated world social system, the communitarian society must guard its autonomy while it simultaneously adjusts to external institutions in order to survive. In this paper we are concerned with the ways in which two of the most successful or at least enduring examples of collective agriculture and communal living, the kibbutz communities of Israel and the colonies of Hutterian Brethren in North America, are adapting to the pressures of the external society in order to retain their cultural integrity.1 Although the ideologies of these groups are linked in the distant past, from the standpoint of cultural background one could hardly find two more disparate cases: the sixteenth-century Anabaptist Hutterites with their Christian brotherhood, and the kibbutzniks, with their secular socialism and Zionist zeal. These are real differences, but these communities also have two important things in common: a dedication to the principles of communal property and communal living, and making a living by operating large, diversified agricultural enterprises. These similarities create a common need on the part of both Hutterites and kibbutzniks to maintain a certain distance from the surrounding society and its prevailing individualistic organization; to calculate the advantages and disadvantages of an agrarian economy in an industrial age; and to experience virtually identical problems of management and social organization created by large-scale agrarian diversification.

Horticultural Science in the Sociosphere

Abstract The world social system is composed of all of the people on earth and all of their interrelationships. This has been called the sociosphere2, a concept analogous to the atmosphere or biosphere. A few of the world's people are horticultural scientists and they and their institutes, departments, and associations are components of the sociosphere. Thus horticultural research and horticultural knowledge are social matters and are subject to examination in terms of social values.

Basic Problems in Comparing Economic Indices of the USSR and Capitalist Countries

In his report to the 22nd Congress of the CPSU, N. S. Khrushchev characterized the contemporary world situation and the international position of the Soviet Union. He said: essence of the period after the 20th Congress of the CPSU is competition of the two world social systems — socialist and capitalist. It has become the pivot, the basis of world development at the present historical stage. The economies of the countries of the socialist community are developing much faster then those of the capitalist world. This can be illustrated by the fact that in 1961 the industrial output of the socialist countries was 7 times as great as the level of production in their territory in 1937, while the industrial output of the countries of the capitalist system as a whole increased approximately 2.5 times. The countries of socialism account for almost 37% of the world industrial output. Over the past five-year period, the increment of per capita industrial output amounted to 48% in the USSR and only to 8% in th...

Toward a Method for International Comparisons

Under the conditions of the present-day economic competition of the two opposed world social systems, the choice of the most suitable methods for comparing the course and perspectives of this competition is of great significance. The point is that different methods frequently lead us to quite different and far from synonymous results. Apparently, however, it is by no means clear to everyone which of the indices applied until now best answers the purpose. Some consider comparative growth rates of labor productivity to be decisive for the outcome of the competition, while others insist on the per capita output index.

The Process of Economic Competition Between Socialism and Capitalism

In his report to the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Nikita S. Khrushchev stated that the chief content of the period since the 20th Party Congress has been the competition between the two world social systems: the socialist and capitalist systems.