Stability and Change Within Groups

Author(s):  
Matthew J. Hornsey ◽  
Jolanda Jetten

This chapter examines the psychological tensions between protecting the status quo within groups and engaging in intragroup change. In the first section we review two research traditions that imply self-reinforcing cycles of stability and preservation of the status quo: (a) research on conformity and the punishment of deviance and (b) research examining biases toward shared knowledge in small decision-making groups. In the second section we provide the counterpoint to these theoretical traditions, exploring several reasons why, despite psychological pressures that appear to favor majority opinions and shared assumptions, intragroup change and reform is a robust reality of group life. In the third and final section of this chapter we move on to examine who within the group is most likely to push for change; who within the group is more effective at pushing for change; and what are the effective strategies for initiating change.

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-164
Author(s):  
Jakob Raffn ◽  
Frederik Lassen

Here we introduce the board game Politics of Nature, or PoN as it is now known. Inspired by the work of Bruno Latour, PoN offers an alternative take on co-existence by implementing a flat political ontology in a gamified meeting protocol. PoN does not suggest that humans have no special abilities, only that humans at the outset, are bestowed with no more rights than other kinds of beings. Designed to enable people of all walks of life to playfully unpack and resolve controversies, PoN provides a space where beings can have their existence renegotiated. The aim of PoN is to play as a team to explore and decide on potential good common worlds in which more indispensable beings can exist than if the status quo is continued. By playing PoN iteratively through rounds, each having four stages, the players gradually construct PoN - a planet mirroring ‘real worlds’. The four stages provide a novel combination of identification, representation, meditation, prioritization, mapping, individual and group ideation, proposal formulation, and decision-making; only to ask the players to challenge and change PoN to fit their requirements after each round. What follows is taken directly from the manual.


2002 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-95
Author(s):  
Rubin Patterson ◽  
James Bozeman

AbstractIncreased economic integration throughout the world, the growing dominance of foreign affiliate production over international exports, the routinization of innovation, and amplified knowledge-intensiveness of FDI collectively characterize the new global economic environment in which SADC nations are attempting to develop and compete. This paper provides a detailed summary of the global economic context and one of its leading engines, namely, science and technology (S&T). Analysis of Africa's post-independence S&T travails and successes constitutes the second section of the paper. Various factors that have collectively arrested S&T growth are discussed. The third and largest section is the analysis of commonalities and particularities of S&T needs and activities by the SADC secretariat and member states. Focused analytical reports on the status of S&T development efforts in Botswana and Zimbabwe comprise the final section. Based on the contextual threats and opportunities discussed above, the paper concludes with two concrete recommendations: integrating and adopting the elements suggested in the paper for a long-term S&T development model, and pursuing state-sponsored or quasi-state-sponsored reverse engineering campaigns.


1990 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 34-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
William S. Silver ◽  
Terence R. Mitchell

Author(s):  
Carlos Aurélio Pimenta de Faria

The purpose of this article is to analyze teaching and research on foreign policy in Brazil in the last two decades. The first section discusses how the main narratives about the evolution of International Relations in Brazil, considered as an area of knowledge, depict the place that has been designed, in the same area, to the study of foreign policy. The second section is devoted to an assessment of the status of foreign policy in IR teaching in the country, both at undergraduate and scricto sensu graduate programs. There is also a mapping and characterization of theses and dissertations which had foreign policy as object. The third section assesses the space given to studies on foreign policy in three academic forums nationwide, namely: the meetings of ABRI (Brazilian Association of International Relations), the ABCP (Brazilian Association of Political Science) and ANPOCS (National Association of Graduate Programs and Research in Social Sciences). In the fourth section there is a mapping and characterization of the published articles on foreign policy between 1990 and 2010, in the following IR Brazilian journals: Cena Internacional, Contexto Internacional, Política Externa and Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional. At last, the fifth and final section seeks to assess briefly the importance that comparative studies have in the sub-area of foreign policy in the country. The final considerations make a general assessment of the empirical research presented in the previous sections.


Author(s):  
Milka Marie-Madeleine Malfait

Throughout its history, Artsakh had to guard against the external threats of Neo-Ottomanism. At the present time it is especially relevant. September 27, 2020 marks escalation of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh – which means Artsakh in Armenian. This led to six weeks of cease fire, humanitarian disaster, which killed many people and destroyed cultural and religious heritage of Artsakh. The mountainous region is surrounded by Azerbaijani land, although populated by Armenians. Due to the political novelty of this issue, the author employed analytical and descriptive method. The acquired results demonstrate that the history repeats itself in Neo-Ottomanism, which has been a threat to Artsakh and Armenia since its emergence until the present day. In recent years, the concept of reunification with Armenia, as well as the independence of Artsakh, outlined the prospects for the future. The third solution to the conflict became the ceasefire agreement of 9 November 2020, nobly negotiated by Russia to save Armenia from military collapse. However, this solution is more painful than the status-quo. The main conclusion consists in the statement that the international community should be more vigilant and prevent the expansion of such threats.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-38
Author(s):  
Sonia Zarco-Real

The first literary manifestations to emerge in the context of the Spanish Civil War endeavored to create a legitimizing discourse for each of two contending Spains, the National Spain and the Republican Spain, by means of poetic appropriation of urban spaces. Nevertheless, this was not a Spain divided only in two, between leftists and rightists or Socialists and Cedistas, but rather a territory comprised of many parallel wars sparked prior to 1936. According to historian Enrique Moradiellos, the nuclei of three disparate and opposing political agendas arose from the physical foundation of these two Spains, ‘the reformist-democratic, the reactionary-authoritarian and the revolutionary-collectivist [agendas] that responded to the same triad of models that emerged in Europe in the wake of the devastating impact of the Great War of 1914 and that competed to achieve political and institutional stabilization’ (2004: 125). This ‘reform, reaction and revolution’ triangle that acted as the protagonist of the Great War would also settle into the fratricidal spaces of Spain and its cultural products. In this context, my essay will analyse the mechanisms of appropriation of Madrid’s spaces employed by each of these three political agendas as they are presented in Madrid, de Corte a Checa (1938) by Agustín de Foxá. Following the map of the capital we will see how both, the agenda of a modern anti-traditional space driven by the Second Republic and the anti-bourgeois revolutionary agenda that stood for the destruction of the status quo and the implementation of a Communist Orthodox regime, present a threat to the conservative ideal that represented the monarcho-Catholic centralism of the third agenda. This threat is manifested in the dismantling of Madrid through the ‘de-Hispanicization’ (Foxá) of the mythical spaces of the sacred (churches and convents), historic (statues and palaces) and domestic (house interiors) cityscapes.


2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (S1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan K. Sell

AbstractThe structural perspective outlined here sheds light on some of the fundamental challenges involved in achieving Universal Health Care (UHC) in this twenty-first-century era of trade and financialized capitalism. This commentary explores connections between the structure of twenty-first-century capitalism and challenges to achieving UHC, discussing three features of today’s capitalism: financialized capitalism; trade, intangibles and global value chains; and inequality (as exacerbated by the first two features). The final section discusses the various opportunities for reform to facilitate UHC—from tinkering with the status quo, to deeper regulatory reform and fundamental structural change.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Carpenter ◽  
Emiliano Huet-Vaughn ◽  
Peter Hans Matthews ◽  
Andrea Robbett ◽  
Dustin Beckett ◽  
...  

We exploit the principles of choice architecture to evaluate interventions in the market for reloadable prepaid cards. Participants are randomized into three card menu presentation treatments—the market status quo, a regulation-inspired reform, or an enhanced reform designed to minimize attribute overload—and offered choices based on prior structural estimation of individual preferences. Consumers routinely choose incorrectly under the status quo, with tentative evidence that the regulation-inspired presentation may increase best card choice and clear evidence that the enhanced reform reduces worst card choice. Welfare analysis suggests the regulation-inspired presentation offers modest gains, while the enhanced policy generates substantial benefits.


1994 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Baron

AbstractAccording to a simple form of consequentialism, we should base decisions on our judgments about their consequences for achieving our goals. Our goals give us reason to endorse consequentialism as a standard of decision making. Alternative standards invariably lead to consequences that are less good in this sense. Yet some people knowingly follow decision rules that violate consequentialism. For example, they prefer harmful omissions to less harmful acts, they favor the status quo over alternatives they would otherwise judge to be belter, they provide third-party compensation on the basis of the cause of an injury rather than the benefit from the compensation, they ignore deterrent effects in decisions about punishment, and they resist coercive reforms they judge to be beneficial. I suggest that nonconsequentialist principles arise from overgeneralizing rules that are consistent with consequentialism in a limited set of cases. Commitment to such rules is detached from their original purposes. The existence of such nonconsequentialist decision biases has implications for philosophical and experimental methodology, the relation between psychology and public policy, and education.


2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 334-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew F Cooper ◽  
Vincent Pouliot

Is the G20 transforming global governance, or does it reinforce the status quo? In this article we argue that as innovative as some diplomatic practices of the G20 may be, we should not overstate their potential impact. More specifically, we show that G20 diplomacy often reproduces many oligarchic tendencies in global governance, while also relaxing club dynamics in some ways. On the one hand, the G20 has more inductees who operate along new rules of the game and under a new multilateral ethos of difference. But, on the other hand, the G20 still comprises self-appointed rulers, with arbitrary rules of membership and many processes of cooption and discipline. In overall terms, approaching G20 diplomacy from a practice perspective not only provides us with the necessary analytical granularity to tell the old from the new, it also sheds different light on the dialectics of stability and change on the world stage. Practices are processes and as such they are always subject to evolutionary change. However, because of their structuring effects, diplomatic practices also tend to inhibit global transformation and reproduce the existing order.


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