Moral Regulation: A Reformulation

1997 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 277-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannu Ruonavaara

Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer introduced the concept of moral regulation to contemporary sociological debate in their historical sociology of English State formation, The Great Arch (1985). In their work they fuse Durkheimian and Foucauldian analysis with a basic Marxist theory. However, this framework gives too limited a perspective to their analysis. I suggest that moral regulation should not be seen as a monolithic project, as merely action by and for the State, nor as activity by the ruling elite only. It should be seen as a form of social control based on changing the identity of the regulated. Its object is what Weber calls Lebensführung, which refers to both the ethos and the action constituting a way of life. The means of moral regulation are persuasion, education, and enlightenment, which distinguishes it from other forms of social control. Analyzing the social relations of moral regulation provides a useful perspective on this form of social action.

2020 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 112-117
Author(s):  
I.S. Duisenova ◽  

The article deals with the problems of social anxiety in the context of social activity. Social action is one of the phenomena of everyday life, so the study of anxiety that suddenly occurs in familiar conditions for a person, and its manifestations in social relations occupies an important place in sociological science today. Attempts to explain this were made using the works of T. Parsons, Y. Habermas, and G. Garfinkel. Various manifestations and forms of social anxiety affect the social actions of society.


Author(s):  
Frederick Erickson

AbstractThe article begins by reviewing the early research interests of John Gumperz and their further development across the course of his career. His doctoral research documented spoken language in an immigrant community. He then focused on bilingual speech communities and “code switching.” Later he became concerned with various aspects of style shifting within a language. Whether he was considering language switching, or dialect switching, or shifts in register, Gumperz showed that speakers were creative in their language use — active agents rather than passive rule followers — alternating among disparate styles to communicate metaphoric and usually implicit social meaning. Through changes in speech style, interlocutors could be seen to be reframing their social relations, modifying the social situation they were in. ( NB This lability in situational framing is a major point of emphasis in Gumperz's notions of “contextualization” and “conversational inference.”) The article continues by presenting and discussing two of Gumperz's “telling cases” of contextualizing frame shifts by speakers. In concluding, a few examples from the author's own research are presented, with emphasis on the use of contextualization in establishing local alignments of solidarity-in-the-moment among interlocutors — indexical shifts to a footing for interaction that the author has termed “situational co-membership.”


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 186-202
Author(s):  
Pedro Salgado

Ao inserir a luta de classes no centro da análise histórica, o Marxismo Político propõe uma reinterpretação da disciplina de Relações Internacionais que pode ser entendida em três passos. O primeiro é uma visão histórica da formação do sistema de estados moderno, a partir de transformações da geopolítica feudal após a origem do capitalismo. O segundo, uma metodologia historicista que parte da forma como a operação de tal sistema pode ser entendida através dos conflitos entre classes com suas respectivas estratégias de espacialização. Por fim, resta justificar a centralidade da luta de classe, e de “classe” enquanto categoria analítica, através do retorno à obra de Marx, resgatando a forma como a noção sociológica de agência é antecipada em sua filosofia da práxis. Assim, reinscrevendo a distinção entre “global” e “(inter)nacional” nas relações sociais que lhe dão origem, a disciplina de Relações Internacionais assume a forma de Sociologia Histórica.ABSTRACTBy bringing class struggle into the core of historical analysis, Political Marxism suggests a reinterpretation of International Relations that can be understood in three steps. Firstly, a historical account of of the rise of the modern states-system through the transformations in feudal geopolitics after the rise of capitalism. Secondly, the development of a radically historicist methodology that is explains this system's operation through the conflict between classes and their respective spatialization strategies. At last, the justification for having class struggle at the core of the analysis, and of "class" as an analytical unit, comes from a return to Marx's work to see how he grounds the sociological notion of agency in his philosophy of praxis. Therefore, by reviving the distinctiong between "global" and "(inter)national" in the social relations that give birth to this very distinction, the discipline of International Relations assumes the form of Historical Sociology.Palavras-chave: Relações Internacionais, Marxismo, GeopolíticaKeywords: International Relations, Marxism, GeopoliticsRecebido em 24 de Abril de 2017 | Aceito em 07 de Agosto de 2017Received on April 24, 2017 | Accepted on August 7, 2017 DOI: 10.12957/rmi.2016.28437 


2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (5) ◽  
pp. 1529-1535
Author(s):  
Rumiana Budjeva

Stigma is a powerful tool for social control. It can be used to differentiate, exclude or exert pressure on certain individuals or groups of people who have certain characteristics. Stigma does great harm to both the individual and society as a whole. The main objective of stigma is to maintain visible the negative qualities of the individual in order to place them in a disadvantaged position and lasting social and psychological isolation. However, stigma goes beyond the level of the individual and becomes a social problem when it affects wider categories of people. The main purpose of the report is to seek adequate scientific approaches and methods to understanding and study of the phenomenon social stigma. Stigmatized people are often subject to rejection and social exclusion. In its extreme forms stigma turns into discrimination which directly violates their civil and human rights. Stigma and discrimination, seen as violations of fundamental human rights, can occur at different levels: political, economic, social, psychological and institutional. As social processes through which social control is created and maintained, generating, legitimizing and reproducing social inequality, stigma and discrimination are at the heart of the vicious circle in which some groups of people are underestimated and others feel superior and untouchable. To illustrate the process of stigmatization, we will use the example of people living with HIV / AIDS. Theory of stigmatization plays an important explanatory role in the experience of a comprehensive understanding of the social relations of phenomena such as HIV / AIDS. The deep understanding of the mechanisms by which stigma and discriminatory attitudes affect the overall life of people living with HIV / AIDS will help us not only to treat adequate them, but to form a workable and effective action against the spread of the disease. From the moment when scientists are confronted with HIV and AIDS, the social response to fear, denial, stigma and discrimination has accompanied the epidemic. It can be said that HIV and AIDS are more of a social phenomenon than a pure biological or medical problem. It leads to an unfounded sense of shame and guilt and a sense of futility. Stigma incites depression and despair, causes lack of self-esteem. It pushes people to mental and social isolation and deprives them of support and care, increasing their vulnerability. In this way, stigma exacerbates the negative impact of the disease and increases the risk of its spread.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Emma Tennent

<p>The link between identity and action is a fundamental topic across the social sciences. A key site to investigate this relationship is social interaction, where identities and social relations are built and used to accomplish action. In this thesis, I used discursive psychology to analyse the relationship between identity and the action of help in recorded calls to a victim support helpline. Victim is a contentious identity, with feminists and other critical scholars pointing to the politics involved when certain people are categorised as victims and others are overlooked. The name of the organisation that was the setting for my research, ‘Victim Support,’ explicitly links a victim identity with rights to access the help the service offers. Drawing on concepts in discursive psychology and using conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis, I examined how participants oriented to the contentious questions of who victims are and how they should be helped. Drawing on contemporary interactional research which theorises the epistemic, deontic, and affective basis of human social relations, I examined how participants used self-other relations as a resource to build and interpret actions as help.  The findings provide evidence for the mutually constitutive relationship between identity and action. Counter-intuitively, most callers did not explicitly categorise themselves as victims when asking for help. My analyses show how call-takers understood callers’ identities as victims even when they did not say so directly. The act of asking for help from Victim Support constituted callers’ identities as victims; and their identities rendered their requests accountable.  Call-takers on the victim helpline act as gate-keepers, determining callers’ eligibility before providing help. I analysed how call-takers denied callers’ requests by implicitly or explicitly disavowing their identities as victims. Conversely, I showed that offers of help constituted callers as legitimate victims. Yet even once participants had accomplished joint understanding of callers as victims, they negotiated their respective epistemic and deontic rights to determine what help was needed and how it should be provided.  The negotiation of how victims should be helped was particularly salient when callers sought help on behalf of others. Participants negotiated whether the moral obligation to help victims was associated with friends and family members, or institutions. The emotional support and practical advice offered by Victim Support is delivered by volunteer support workers, reflecting a common-sense assumption that these forms of help are normatively available to any competent person. My analyses attend to the dilemmas involved when callers sought help for others rather than providing it themselves.  The findings contribute to three main areas of research: conversation analytic study of help as social action; membership categorisation analysis research on categorically organised rights and obligations; and the re-specification of psychological phenomenon as interactional objects within discursive psychology. The mutually constitutive link between identity and help is consequential, as the provision or withholding support can have material effects when callers are highly distressed or in fear for their lives. Thus, studying real-life interaction demonstrates the practical ways identity matters for seeking help.</p>


Author(s):  
Angus Ross

The term ‘society’ is broader than ‘human society’. Many other species are described as possessing a social way of life. Yet mere gregariousness, of the kind found in a herd of cattle or a shoal of fish, is not enough to constitute a society. For the biologist, the marks of the social are cooperation (extending beyond cooperation between parents in raising young) and some form of order or division of labour. In assessing the merits of attempts to provide a more precise definition of society, we can ask whether the definition succeeds in capturing our intuitive understanding of the term, and also whether it succeeds in identifying those features of society which are most fundamental from an explanatory point of view – whether it captures the Lockean ‘real essence’ of society. One influential approach seeks to capture the idea of society by characterizing social action, or interaction, in terms of the particular kinds of awareness it involves. Another approach focuses on social order, seeing it as a form of order that arises spontaneously when rational and mutually aware individuals succeed in solving coordination problems. Yet another approach focuses on the role played by communication in achieving collective agreement on the way the world is to be classified and understood, as a precondition of coordination and cooperation.


Author(s):  
Agnieszka Kolasa-Nowak ◽  
Marta Bucholc

The development of Polish institutional sociology since the 1920s reflects the combined effects of domestic political and cultural factors, along with international interdependencies. Historical sociology shares in the vicissitudes of the whole discipline. Although historical sociology was only weakly institutionalized before 1989, some of the best sociological studies produced in Poland under socialism display the keen use of historical imagination, inspired both by the pre-1939 domestic tradition and by Marxist theory. This article examines the path of historical sociology in Poland after 1989 and the connection between the sociological uses of history and the experience of post-communist transformation. We posit that the social transformation experience and how it was addressed by social science directly translate into the use of history in Polish sociology after 1989. We argue that the role of historical sociology in Poland since the end of the 1990s was a function of the potential of the past as a symbolic resource in the growing interdependence between Poland and Western Europe. However, the post-1989 research agendas of historical sociology were forged according to the mode of responsiveness to political agendas predating 1989. An overview of the development of Polish historical sociology demonstrates that the ahistorical transitological thinking after 1989 has been challenged by critical agendas in historical sociology, but it was, in the first place, a reaction to the increased potential of the past as a symbolic resource in political debates. Thus, the rationale for the passage to the third wave of historical sociology was primarily political.


2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Masri Sareb Putra

Abstract: Dayak Jangkang is one of the Dayak’s sub-ethnics that inhabits the Jangkang district, Sanggau regency, West Kalimantan and directly borders with Sarawak, Malaysia. Jangkang Dayak population reaches 45,000. Dayak Jangkang nowadays still maintains and continue the tradition of the ancestors, as reflected in the structure of society, social relations, customs, and culture. Therefore it still maintains and continues the tradition of the Dayak Jangkang’s ancestors in their way of life. Many people, especially those outside Dayak, lack of understanding of their own culture. Therefore, the social conflicts caused by social relations between Dayak Jangkang and migrants (outsiders) are due to the insufficient understanding of the meaning of the symbols.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-26
Author(s):  
Sergey Bardash ◽  
Tatiana Osadcha

Urgency of the research is due to the fact that social control is an integral and comprehensive component of any society. The development of theoretical, methodological and practical foundations of social control and the application of its cognitive tools in the transformation of consciousness and participation in the development of a democratic society on the basis of sustainability is of paramount importance. The research activity of scientists in studying philosophical, social, legal, economic, educational and other aspects of control as a complex polymorphic phenomenon is due to the fact that social relations are certainly an important component of the economy at all levels. However, the social mechanism for regulating economic systems at various levels remains ineffective. The purpose and the objective of the research are to prove the importance of social control in the sphere of economic management and to determine its theoretical foundations. The research methodology consists in the dialectical method of understanding the essence of social control and assessing its importance in the sphere of economic management; general scientific methods of analysis, abstraction, induction and deduction, synthesis and generalization are used to substantiate the basic theoretical provisions, the formation of the conceptual framework of social control in the sphere of economic management, the formulation of conclusions. The most significant scientific results are as follows: proving the importance of public control in the sphere of economic management, recognizing it as an indispensable element of the social mechanism for the development of economic systems at all levels of the economy; defining its theoretical foundations: the scope of application, object, matter, subject, forms and results. The practical significance of the research is to determine the vector of control development in the sphere of economic management – compliance with standards that affect the economic interest and determine economic behaviour. Value/originality. The results obtained can be considered as forming the concept of behavioural control in the sphere of economic management and create new grounds for developing the theory and practice of social audit as well as reviewing the paradigm of economic management control.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sugeng Wahjudi

<p><em>The focus of RPTRA's activities reflects services for children and community services to become a community center that functions as a center of interaction and is used by all elements of society from various age groups. This research is an advanced stage of previous research on the relationship of RPTRA managers. The communication network that is built into the use of the RPTRA can be utilized for the development of institutional components that are socio-economic. By using Max Webber's instrumental rationality approach, this study can identify the social changes that have been formed. This study will provide a description relating to changes in knowledge, attitudes and actions of the people who use RPTRA. Changes that arise from individual RPTRA users (mothers) are driven by actions based on value orientation. Their actions involved in activities at RPTRA were not driven by instrumental orientation (to obtain economic benefits) or traditional orientation (because of tradition - driven by the authority structure) In general it can be concluded that RPTRA was able to take a good role. RPTRA is not a material space that distributes materials / materials to make a transformation of the social structure of society (change in social action). The results of the study indicate the formation of rationality in the use of RPTRA if it is associated with user social actions and program activities that put RPTRA as a center in building social relations for their local communities and social change.</em></p><p><strong><em> </em></strong></p><p><strong><em>Keywords: </em></strong><em>RPTRA<strong>,</strong></em><em> communication network</em><em>, </em><em>social change, social actions</em><em>.</em></p>


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