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.

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.

To defend the thesis that the base-superstructure hypothesis central to Marxist theory is also central paradigm of the tradition of Critical Theory. This is in opposition to those who see this hypothesis as determinist and eliminating the possibilities for the autonomy of social action. In doing so, it is able to retard and atrophy the critical capacities of subjects.

Emphasis on the return to a structural-functionalist understanding of social processes that places this version of Critical Theory against the more domesticated forms that consider “discourse ethics” and an “ethic of recognition” as the normative research program for Critical Theory. Also, an analysis of the purpose and logic of functional arguments and their relation to Marx’s concept of “determination” is undertaken.

The essence of Critical Theory hinges upon the ways that social structures are able to deform and shape structures of consciousness of modern subjects to predispose them to forms of domination and to view the prevailing hierarchical structures of extractive domination as legitimate in some basic sense.

The foundations of Critical Theory need to be rooted in a renewed understanding of the relation between social structure and forms of consciousness. This means a move beyond theories of social practices into the realm of social epistemology as well as the mechanisms of consciousness and their relation to ideology.

Few analyses of the relation between the base and the superstructure or material organization of society and the social-epistemological layer of consciousness delineate the mechanisms involved in shaping consciousness. I undertake an analysis that utilizes insights from the philosophy of mind such as the theory of intentionality as well as the sociological approach to values through Parsons.