Search results

To investigate two explanations for how variations in social network structure might produce differences in cognitive and perceptual orientation. One explanation is that the extent to which structures lead people to feel strong social bonds encourages holism. The other is that the extent to which a network leads individuals to be concerned about distal network relations leads to holistic thinking.

An experimental study in which participants interacted in three-person networks of negotiated (with or without a one-exchange rule), generalized, or productive exchange before being administered the framed-line test, a common measure of cognitive and perceptual orientation.

Participants in network structures more likely to lead participants to be concerned about what was happening in relationships in the network of which they were not part performed relatively more holistically on the framed-line test. However, these effects did not extend to both modules of the test, and a check on the ordering of networks as reflecting concern with distal network relationships failed.

The experimental design was structured such that only one of the presented explanations could possibly be supported, whereas they both could be correct. Nevertheless, results do indicate that cognitive orientation did respond to variations in network structure.

Explanations for cultural differences typically implicate social structure, although the explanations often cannot be directly tested. Results show that social structure can produce effects that mirror differences thought to reflect profound cultural variations.

We present here research on the impact of three levels of social structure – large-scale, intermediate, and proximate – on commitment to three types of role-related relationships: family, work, and voluntary associational. This research is carried out using data from a sample survey of Whites, Blacks, and Latinos drawn from a five-county area of southern California. The central problem of this paper is to explicate the social structural sources of commitment to social network relationships. Our interest in this problem arises out of earlier work on Identity Theory.

Purpose – The aim is to introduce a sociological perspective on resource integration and value co-creation into service research using a service systems approach.

Methodology/approach – Conceptual and a case study of the service system a Telecom Equipment and Service Provider is embedded in is reported.

Findings – The service practice of the service system is framed by social structures of signification, legitimation, and domination. However, the practice is also independent of the structures since it is embedded in and shapes the structural realm.

Research implications and limitations – Drawing on structuration and practice theory, the chapter offers a new framework describing how social and service structures and practices can inform and reveal mechanisms of service system dynamics. Based on the framework, three propositions are developed focusing on the mechanisms of resource integration and value co-creation. The implications need to be generalized in future research by studying other empirical contexts.

Practical implications – The chapter provides some tentative guidelines on how organizations can design service systems that enable and support customers and other actors in their resource integration and value co-creation processes by paying attention to social structures and forces and not only resources as such.

Originality – The chapter explicates how social structures have implications for value co-creation and resource integration in service system. It makes systematic use of structuration and practice theory to understand the social dimensions of service systems. A distinction between intended and realized resource integration is made.

Dualism ‐ the division of an object of study into separate, paired elements ‐ is widespread in economic and social theorising: key examples are the divisions between agency and structure, the individual and society, mind and body, values and facts, and knowledge and practice. In recent years, dualism has been criticised as exaggerating conceptual divisions and promoting an oversimplified, reductive outlook. A possible alternative to dualism is the notion of duality, derived from Giddens’s structuration theory, whereby the two elements are interdependent and no longer separate or opposed, although they remain conceptually distinct. This paper argues that duality, if handled carefully, can provide a superior framework to dualism for dealing with the complexity of economic and social institutions. Its main attraction is not its twofold character, which might profitably be relaxed where appropriate, but its ability to envisage a thoroughgoing interdependence of conceptually distinct elements.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the construction of social and environmental strategies and the related implementation of management control by a key organisation located in a pivotal Asian location in the global hospitality industry. In doing so, it sets out to elucidate the forms and processes of strategic social and environmental control as well their relationship to the traditional financial control system.

The study employs field-based case study of a single case operating in both regional and global context. Drawing upon documentary, survey and interview sources, the study employs structuration theory to inform its design and analysis.

The findings reveal the interaction of top-down global corporate framing and bottom-up local-level staff initiatives that combine to develop a locally focussed and differentiated social and environmental programme and expedite an associated management control and accountability system. The study also reveals the dominance of the traditional financial control system over the social and environmental management control system and the simultaneously enabling and constraining nature of that relationship.

Signification and legitimation structures can be employed in building social and environmental values and programmes which then lay the foundations for related discourse and action at multiple levels of the organisation. This also has the potential to facilitate modes of staff commitment expressed through bottom-up initiatives and control, subject to but also facilitated by the dominating influence of the organisation’s financial control system.

This study reveals the importance of national and regional governmental, cultural and social context as both potential enablers and beneficiaries of organisational, social and environmental strategy and control innovation and implementation.

The paper offers an intra-organisational perspective on social and environmental strategising and control processes and motivations that elucidates forms of action, control and accountability and the relationship between social/environmental control and financial control agendas. It further reveals the interaction between globally developed strategic and control frameworks and locally initiated bottom-up strategic initiatives and control.

This paper aims to clarify the meaning of children’s participation in the relationship between children’s individual action and the social treatment and consequences of this action. For this purpose, the paper explores the integration of different theoretical approaches that can shape research on children’s participation, looking at interactions, complex social systems that include interactions, and narratives that are produced in these complex social systems. This integration allows the understanding of the ways in which children actively participate in communication processes, social structures condition children’s active participation, and children’s active participation can enhance structural change in social systems, through the implementation of promotional communication systems. The paper highlights the following paradox: the relevance of children’s action for social change depends on the relevance of adults’ action in promoting children’s actions. This theoretical perspective is exemplified in the case of promotion of children’s active participation in the education system through the empirical analysis of cases of videotaped and transcribed interactions, highlighting facilitation systems of classroom communication. The analyzed data are based on a field research in Italian classrooms regarding a specific methodology of facilitation of communication. The analysis of these data shows the ways in which the facilitation system creates the paradoxical relationship between structures that condition children’s active participation and children’s active participation that enhances structural change. The paper highlights a new way of dealing with children’s participation, based on a social constructionist, systemic, and interactionist approach.

Field emergence poses an intriguing problem for institutional theorists. New issue fields often arise at the intersection of different sectors, amidst extant structures of meanings and actors. Such nascent fields are fragmented and lack clear guides for action; making it unclear how they ever coalesce. The authors propose that provisional social structures provide actors with macrosocial presuppositions that shape ongoing field-configuration; bootstrapping the field. The authors explore this empirically in the context of social impact investing in the UK, 2000–2013, a period in which this field moved from clear fragmentation to relative alignment. The authors combine different computational text analysis methods, and data from an extensive field-level study, to uncover meaningful patterns of interaction and structuration. Our results show that across various periods, different types of actors were linked together in discourse through “actor–meaning couplets.” These emergent couplings of actors and meanings provided actors with social cues, or macrofoundations, which guided their local activities. The authors thus theorize a recursive, co-constitutive process: as punctuated moments of interaction generate provisional structures of actor–meaning couplets, which then cue actors as they navigate and constitute the emerging field. Our model re-energizes the core tenets of new structuralism and contributes to current debates about institutional emergence and change.