Working space: why incorporating the geographical is central to theorizing work and employment practices

2007 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Herod ◽  
Al Rainnie ◽  
Susan McGrath-Champ
Keyword(s):  
Collective Bargaining ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Spatial Scales ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Employment Practices ◽  
Working Space ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Economic Landscape ◽  
Work And Employment

Theorists of work and employment (W&E) practices should more seriously engage with literatures concerning how space is constitutive of social praxis. Rather than simply serving as a stage upon which social life is played out or being merely a reflection of social relations, the construction of the economic landscape in particular ways is fundamental to how social systems function. Struggles over space are a central dynamic in W&E practices as different actors engage with the economic landscape to ensure their 'geographical vision' is emplaced in that landscape. Furthermore, conflicts over W&E practices frequently revolve around the spatial (re)scaling of such practices (as when collective bargaining is 'decentralized'). Consequently, an important key to better theorizing W&E practices is understanding how the various spatial scales at which these operate are socially constructed and discursively represented.

scholarly journals SAMFUND? Durkheim revisited i Amazonas og videre

1999 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanne Veber
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Talcott Parsons ◽  
Structured Systems ◽  
The Social ◽  
Functionalist Theory ◽  
Empirical Context ◽  
Objective Structures

“Society” appears a difficult notion. We use it all the time. But is it any good as an analytical concept? Sociologists seem to agree it is not. Few societies have the empirical characteristics of the bounded entity that structural-functionalist theory assumed. Constructivist notions of society as “imagined community” appear to be tied up with the existence of the State or with the spread of information technology. This leaves contemporary anthropology with “society” as a residue, the left-over from culture’s gluttonous theoretical supper. Still, social science aims to explain or understand social relations, interactions, and the processes by which structures and functions are worked into social systems as implied by the notion of society. The notion of society allows us to assume the existence of objective structures of order in the social life of people. Unlike the notion of culture, however, the notion of society has not been critically scrutinized by anthropologists. In contemporary Danish anthropology with its focus on culture and cultural representations, writers tend to simply take society for granted as the intrinsic empirical context of culture. From the perspective of Durkheimian notions of “the social”, the paper provides a brief review of interpretations that retrospectively have appeared analytical dead-ends. The author goes on to suggest that the notion of “symbolically generalized media of communication” may offer a productive opening that embraces both sides of the culture/society dichotomy in the search for structured systems of social existence whether subjectively or objectively conceived. The idea of “symbolically generalized media or communication” was originally formulated by Talcott Parsons and subsequently reworked by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. Rather than an interrelated series of parts that make up a whole plus something else in the classic Durkheimian sense, society from this perspective appears in the form of structured sets of actions oriented by a horizon of possibilities and expectations, symbolically constituted, yet always provisional and emergent. Inspired by analyses of two different cases in Amazonian research the paper offers a brief hint at how the notion may be employed in anthropology.

scholarly journals Plaga bezprawia. Wojna domowa i paradoks władzy suwerennej

2015 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 183-204
Author(s):  
Michał Pospiszyl
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Peloponnesian War ◽  
Modern Capitalism ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

This paper consists of three parts. The first is devoted to the role of the Athenian plague in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. There are indications that the civil war that broke out in the country, weakened by plague, was not simply the result of a historical and degraded human nature. Instead of using evil human nature as the key for understanding each social conflict, I suggest interpreting the Athenian civil war (stasis) as a symptom of non-egalitarian social relations. The  second part of the paper is devoted to the birth of modern capitalism and the analysis of Thomas Hobbes’ philosophy. An English philosopher, Hobbes not only translated The History of the Peloponnesian War, but was also an author who treated the reality of modern civil wars as a principal point of reference. Hobbes created his philosophy mainly as a result of fearing a conflict that could undermine the existing division of power and wealth. The result of this fear was a mechanism that I refer to as the paradox of sovereign power. It was a process during which the authority that had been established to defend society against lawlessness and chaos dominated the social life, not respecting existing laws and customs, and thus creating the very world it was supposed to protect the people from. The third part is devoted to Walter Benjamin’s criticism of sovereign power. Observing the same processes as Hobbes did, the German philosopher viewed them from the inside (i.e., from the perspective of the victims of modern progress, the same view that aroused fear in the author of Leviathan). Benjamin argued that the social order established at the threshold of modernity was built on unlawful violence (primitive accumulation) and that the condition for its duration was the permanent reproduction of this lawlessness (hence, the thesis of the state of emergency, which has become the rule). According to Benjamin, this vicious circle of violence can only be escaped by recovering the memory of folk traditions, past class struggles, lost revolutions and social systems that, like the Paris Commune, pose the possibility of life liberated from the yoke.

Social characteristic of religious rituals

1997 ◽  
pp. 8-12
Author(s):  
Valentyna Bodak
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social System ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Social Characteristic ◽  
Religious Rituals

Society is a person in its social relations. If the term "society" is used to determine reality as a system of interconnections and relationships between people, then its social system appears as an entity in which human societies are diverse in character and social role. Social life is expressed in the grouping of members of society on the basis of certain objectively predetermined types of relations between them. The integrity and unity of religious communities, their qualitative specificity determines the content of the doctrine and cult, on which they grow.

scholarly journals Embodiment of Ancestral Spirits, the Social Interface, and Ritual Ceremonies: Construction of the Shamanic Landscape among the Daur in North China

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 567
Author(s):  
Feng Qu
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Northeast China ◽  
North China ◽  
Modern Human ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Interface ◽  
Human Construction ◽  
Human Social Life

The case study in this paper is on the Daur (as well as the Evenki, Buriat, and Bargu Mongols) in Hulun Buir, Northeast China. The aim of this research is to examine how shamanic rituals function as a conduit to actualize communications between the clan members and their shaman ancestors. Through examinations and observations of Daur and other Indigenous shamanic rituals in Northeast China, this paper argues that the human construction of the shamanic landscape brings humans, other-than-humans, and things together into social relations in shamanic ontologies. Inter-human metamorphosis is crucial to Indigenous self-conceptualization and identity. Through rituals, ancestor spirits are active actors involved in almost every aspect of modern human social life among these Indigenous peoples.

Class Formation and Ideological Practice: A Case from Sri Lanka

1981 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 703-718 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Brow
Keyword(s):  
Sri Lanka ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Group Formation ◽  
Class Formation ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
Seminal Work ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Social ◽  
Adequate Understanding

An adequate understanding of the complex connections between changes in the social relations of production and changes in the bases of group formation demands an historical approach in which consciousness and its ideological products are viewed dynamically, not as the mechanically determined superstructural reflections of material relations but as an active and constituent components of everyday social life. The concepts required for such an analysis are developed here, drawing on the seminal work of both Marx and Weber, as well as on more recent scholarship, and are applied to recent changes in agrarian relations and ideological practice in Anuradhapura District, Sri Lanka.

Language as social practice

2008 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Amouzadeh
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Analytical Investigation ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Discourse Processes ◽  
Third Stage ◽  
The Media ◽  
Stage Development ◽  
The One

This paper aims to investigate the language used by newspapers in post-revolutionary Iran. More precisely, the paper sets out to analyze how such a language is deployed to represent relevant hegemonic ideologies. The approach adopted for this purpose draws inspiration mainly from critical linguistics, where it is hypothesized that, as far as the pertinent metadiscourse goes, media genres serve to activate and perpetuate social power relations. In keeping with this theoretical stance, the paper argues that socially constructed texts can be said to perform two complementary functions; on the one hand, they shed light on the realities experienced in social life; on the other, they reveal such aspects of those realities as are constructed through the use of language. It is thus in this context that the media language used in the post-revolutionary Iran lends itself to analytical investigation, where the available data reveal the co-existence of three competing discourse processes of ‘Islamization’, ‘Iranian Nationalism’ and ‘Western liberalism’, relating to the third stage development of post-revolutionary Iran.

TANTANGAN PANDEMI COVID-19 DAN HOSPITALITAS PENDIDIKAN KRISTIANI DI ERA PANDEMI

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dewi Yermawati Enjhela
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Qualitative Approach ◽  
Corona Virus ◽  
The World ◽  
Theory Research

AbstractThe challenges in today’s global word are increasingle surprising human life, especially at the end of 2019, with the emergence of a pendemic, namely the Corona Virus (Covid-19). The emergence of this pandemic raises various concerns for the world and especially for social life. Of these challenges the autor treis to provide various explanations about these challenges and in relation to how our attitudes or interactions with others, especially in the world of cristian education. This article offers an approach using qualitative approach literature in Theological theory research, and qualitive desciptive research, that the application of cristianeducational behavior in responding to chelenges in this pandemic era is the value of applying the faith of a Cristian in social relations between people in the mids of challenges. In times of this pandemic.

Reformation: a Two-edged Sword in the Cause of the Ministry of Women

2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-33
Author(s):  
Fleur Houston
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Logical Consequence ◽  
Social Model ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Women's Ministry ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Social Challenge ◽  
Normative Expectations ◽  
God's Grace

When Martin Luther mounted an attack on the industry of Indulgences, he affirmed key Reformation principles: human beings are saved by God’s grace alone and the priesthood of all the baptised gives all followers of Christ equal status. This was in conformity with an earlier generation of reformers who saw the Bible as ultimate authority and witnessed to biblical truth against corruption. The logical consequence of this should have been the enabling of women who were so disposed to exercise a theological vocation. In practice, the resulting rupture in religious and social life often affected women for the worse. Educational formation and leadership opportunities were restricted by the closure of convents. While the trade guilds, with their tightly regulated social systems, did not allow scope for women who transgressed normative expectations, their suppression was not necessarily liberating for women. The new social model of the home replaced that of convent and guild and marriage was exalted in place of celibacy. Changes in devotional practice involved loss and gain. Women who did not conform to the domestic norm were treated at best with misogyny and female prophets of the radical Reformation paid for their convictions with their lives. In education, leadership, piety and radical social challenge, women’s options were restricted. However, the key Reformation principles ultimately enabled the development of women’s ministry which was marked by the ordination of Constance Todd 400 years later.

Risking Debt for Honor

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-71
Author(s):  
Jennifer R. Cash
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Urban Migration ◽  
Long Term Stability ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Upheaval ◽  
The Social ◽  
Rural Urban Migration ◽  
The Republic

Research on godparenthood has traditionally emphasized its stabilizing effect on social structure. This article, however, focuses attention on how the practices and discourses associated with marital sponsorship in the Republic of Moldova ascribe value to the risks and uncertainties of social life. Moldova has experienced substantial economic, social, and political upheaval during the past two decades of postsocialism, following a longer period of Soviet-era modernization, secularization, and rural–urban migration. In this context, godparenthood has not contributed to the long-term stability of class structure or social relations, but people continue to seek honor and social respect by taking the social and economic risks involved in sponsoring new marriages.

The contemporary British workplace: a safer and healthier place?

2006 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew M. Robinson ◽  
Clive Smallman
Keyword(s):  
Health And Safety ◽  
Work Force ◽  
British Government ◽  
Employment Practices ◽  
Workplace Accidents ◽  
Management Techniques ◽  
Nationally Representative ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Work And Employment ◽  
Force Characteristics

Using a nationally representative survey of British workplaces, this article seeks to extend current perspectives on OHS (occupational health and safety) by examining the impact of a range of current work and employment practices, and work-force characteristics on the incidence of workplace accidents and, uniquely, ill health. Our findings indicate that the British Government faces major challenges in terms of its plans for OHS. Ill health, in particular, is poorly served by existing OHS management techniques, while injury and illness seem to be associated with many more ‘determinants’ in the world of work than has previously been proven.

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