Social Networks of Austrian Refugee-Migrants from the Anschluss in Australia – An Analysis of Meaning Structures

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-79
Author(s):  
Philipp Strobl

Social networks are crucial factors for refugees and consequently have become an important area of research. They are complex social phenomena that should not be regarded simply as the mere sum of relationships but should rather be seen as the structure of interrelating ties. By combining sociological approaches with methods of biographical research, this study explores the meaning structure of networks built by three Austrian refugees who fled to Australia in 1938/1939. It describes empirically how their expectations influenced transactions, how networks emerged out of dyadic relationships, the role the individual refugees played in that process, and how interwar networks influenced the refugees in setting up networks in Australia. The article also questions how refugees used their networks to cope with their escape and their integration into a new homeland, and how their forced migration influenced identities and relationships in networks.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rhea M Howard ◽  
Annie C. Spokes ◽  
Samuel A Mehr ◽  
Max Krasnow

Making decisions in a social context often requires weighing one's own wants against the needs and preferences of others. Adults are adept at incorporating multiple contextual features when deciding how to trade off their welfare against another. For example, they are more willing to forgo a resource to benefit friends over strangers (a feature of the individual) or when the opportunity cost of giving up the resource is low (a feature of the situation). When does this capacity emerge in development? In Experiment 1 (N = 208), we assessed the decisions of 4- to 10-year-old children in a picture-based resource tradeoff task to test two questions: (1) When making repeated decisions to either benefit themselves or benefit another person, are children’s choices internally consistent with a particular valuation of that individual? (2) Do children value friends more highly than strangers and enemies? We find that children demonstrate consistent person-specific welfare valuations and value friends more highly than strangers and enemies. In Experiment 2 (N = 200), we tested adults using the same pictorial method. The pattern of results successfully replicated, but adults’ decisions were more consistent than children’s and they expressed more extreme valuations: relative to the children, they valued friends more and valued enemies less. We conclude that despite children’s limited experience allocating resources and navigating complex social networks, they behave like adults in that they reference a stable person-specific valuation when deciding whether to benefit themselves or another and that this rule is modulated by the child’s relationship with the target.


Author(s):  
Barbara J. Risman

This is the first data chapter. In this chapter, respondents who are described as true believers in the gender structure, and essentialist gender differences are introduced and their interviews analyzed. They are true believers because, at the macro level, they believe in a gender ideology where women and men should be different and accept rules and requirements that enforce gender differentiation and even sex segregation in social life. In addition, at the interactional level, these Millennials report having been shaped by their parent’s traditional expectations and they similarly feel justified to impose gendered expectations on those in their own social networks. At the individual level, they have internalized masculinity or femininity, and embody it in how they present themselves to the world. They try hard to “do gender” traditionally.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Guilbeault ◽  
Damon Centola

AbstractThe standard measure of distance in social networks – average shortest path length – assumes a model of “simple” contagion, in which people only need exposure to influence from one peer to adopt the contagion. However, many social phenomena are “complex” contagions, for which people need exposure to multiple peers before they adopt. Here, we show that the classical measure of path length fails to define network connectedness and node centrality for complex contagions. Centrality measures and seeding strategies based on the classical definition of path length frequently misidentify the network features that are most effective for spreading complex contagions. To address these issues, we derive measures of complex path length and complex centrality, which significantly improve the capacity to identify the network structures and central individuals best suited for spreading complex contagions. We validate our theory using empirical data on the spread of a microfinance program in 43 rural Indian villages.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1468795X2199824
Author(s):  
Patrick Baert ◽  
Marcus Morgan ◽  
Rin Ushiyama

This article introduces ‘existence theory’ as a new approach to sociological theory and research. Existence theory starts from the assumption that people organise their lives around a limited set of existential milestones. Cultural expectations are such that without the accomplishment of those milestones, individuals may experience their lives as incomplete. Examples of milestones can include the attainment of formal education, a lasting partnership and the creation of a family, but in general the milestones which are important to individuals and their precise articulation will depend on a variety of cultural and structural factors. The achievement of existential milestones often depends on that of other existential milestones, thereby producing what we call an ‘existential ladder’. The article also elaborates on the significance of ‘existential urgency’ in that, due to a variety of factors (some biological, some cultural and structural), there are time limits on when certain existential milestones ought to be achieved by. In contemporary society, we note that individuals seem to have more choice about which milestones are important to them and when they can be achieved, although we emphasise that this flexibility is unevenly distributed. This then provides a steppingstone towards an elaboration of the power dynamics and inequalities underlying both the experience and the achievement of existential milestones. Finally, this paper shows how existence theory helps to reflect on a variety of social phenomena of contemporary significance: populism in politics, forced migration, and the coronavirus pandemic.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 718
Author(s):  
Thomas Dolmark ◽  
Osama Sohaib ◽  
Ghassan Beydoun ◽  
Kai Wu

Absorptive capacity is a common barrier to knowledge transfer at the individual level. However, technology absorptive capacity can enhance an individual’s learning behaviour. This study investigates that technology readiness, the tools for knowledge sources, social influences, and social networks influence an individual’s absorptive capacity on an adaptation of the individual learning behaviour. A quantitative approach is used to assess the presence of a causal relationship from the constructs mentioned above. Data were collected from university students in Australia to examine the hypotheses. With 199 responses, a partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) approach was used for the analysis. The results generated mixed findings. Individual’s technological belief in optimism and innovation and social influences had a significantly weaker effect on individual absorptive capacity, which in turn had a significantly weaker impact on their learning behaviour.


2015 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 687-705 ◽  
Author(s):  
RACHAEL DOBSON

AbstractThis article argues that constructions of social phenomena in social policy and welfare scholarship think about the subjects and objects of welfare practice in essentialising ways, with negativistic effects for practitioners working in ‘regulatory’ contexts such as housing and homelessness practice. It builds into debates about power, agency, social policy and welfare by bringing psychosocial and feminist theorisations of relationality to practice research. It claims that relational approaches provide a starting point for the analysis of empirical practice data, by working through the relationship between the individual and the social via an ontological unpicking and revisioning of practitioners' social worlds.


2007 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 108-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
William T. Ross ◽  
Diana C. Robertson

In this article, the authors introduce the idea of a compound relationship; that is, for many pairs of firms, the overall relationship between the two firms is composed of multiple simple relationships: supplier to customer, and vice versa; competitor to competitor; and partners. This multiplicity of relationships can lead to both opportunities and challenges for each of the two firms in the dyad. The authors define the nature of compound relationships and delineate why it is important for the firm to treat them as such rather than focusing only on the simple relationships. They distinguish compound relationships from social networks and simple dyadic relationships and relate the construct to exchange theory, “coopetition,” and the interorganizational relationship literature in marketing. They then use the political economy framework to develop a set of conceptual propositions that apply to many aspects of compound relationships. They end with some speculations regarding the appropriate management of compound relationships and propose opportunities for further research.


2021 ◽  
pp. 147447402110036
Author(s):  
Dai O’Brien

In the field of Deaf Geographies, one neglected area is that of the individual deaf body and how individual deaf bodies can produce deaf space in isolation from one another. Much of the work published in the field talks about collectively or socially produced deaf spaces through interaction between two or more deaf people. However, with deaf children increasingly being educated in mainstream schools with individual provisions, and the old social networks and institutions of deaf communities coming under threat by the closure of deaf clubs and changing work practices, more research on the way in which individuals can produce their own deaf spaces and navigate those spaces is needed. In this paper, I outline two possible theoretical approaches, that of Lefebvre’s productive gestures to produce social space, and Bourdieu’s habitus, capital and hexis. I suggest that these theories can be productively utilised to better understand the individual basis of the production of deaf spaces.


Author(s):  
Amanda Cox ◽  
Yeslam Al-Saggaf ◽  
Kate McLean

Social networking users are presented with a plethora of profile and privacy settings; most of which are left defaulted. As a result, there is little understanding of the fields that make up the user profile, the privacy settings available to safeguard the user, and the ramifications of not changing the same. Concerns relating to the unprecedented quantities of Personally Identifiable Information being stored need to be addressed. By employing a risk matrix to a social media profile, a user could be alerted to the potential dangers of the information being contained within the profile. By adapting this tool, the risks to the individual user of a social media profile will be minimised.


2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 687-716 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine K. Lam ◽  
Xu Huang ◽  
Frank Walter ◽  
Simon C. H. Chan

ABSTRACTThis study investigates the origins of discrete interpersonal emotions in team-member dyads using two independent samples from an education institute and a telecommunication services company in China. Results across both studies showed that the quality of team members’ dyadic relationships positively relates to interpersonal admiration, sympathy, and envy, and negatively relates to interpersonal contempt. Furthermore, teams’ cooperative goals moderate these dyad-level linkages. The association of relationship quality with interpersonal emotions is particularly pronounced in teams with less cooperative goals but buffered in teams with more cooperative goals. Finally, on the individual level of analysis, envy and contempt are inversely associated with team members’ work performance, objectively measured. These findings provide new insights about key antecedents and crucial moderators in the development of interpersonal emotions in Chinese work teams and reiterate the relevance of these emotions for tangible performance outcomes.


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