scholarly journals Consensus in Opinion Formation Processes in Fully Evolving Environments

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 6022-6029 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincenzo Auletta ◽  
Angelo Fanelli ◽  
Diodato Ferraioli
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationships ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Weighted Average ◽  
Formation Processes ◽  
Personal Beliefs ◽  
Opinion Formation ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Formation Dynamics ◽  
Previous Round

Friedkin and Johnsen (1990) modeled opinion formation in social networks as a dynamic process which evolves in rounds: at each round each agent updates her expressed opinion to a weighted average of her innate belief and the opinions expressed in the previous round by her social neighbors. The stubbornness level of an agent represents the tendency of the agent to express an opinion close to her innate belief. Motivated by the observation that innate beliefs, stubbornness levels and even social relations can co-evolve together with the expressed opinions, we present a new model of opinion formation where the dynamics runs in a co-evolving environment. We assume that agents’ stubbornness and social relations can vary arbitrarily, while their innate beliefs slowly change as a function of the opinions they expressed in the past. We prove that, in our model, the opinion formation dynamics converges to a consensus if reasonable conditions on the structure of the social relationships and on how the personal beliefs can change are satisfied. Moreover, we discuss how this result applies in several simpler (but realistic) settings.

The Social Specificity of Societal Nature Relations in a Flexible Capitalist Society

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis Eversberg
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationships ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Environmental Issues ◽  
Capitalist Society ◽  
Ideal Types ◽  
Mutual Dependency ◽  
The Social ◽  
People’S Perceptions

Based on analyses of a 2016 German survey, this article contributes to debates on ‘societal nature relations’ by investigating the systematic differences between socially specific types of social relations with nature in a flexible capitalist society. It presents a typology of ten different ‘syndromes’ of attitudes toward social and environmental issues, which are then grouped to distinguish between four ideal types of social relationships with nature: dominance, conscious mutual dependency, alienation and contradiction. These are located in Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) social space to illustrate how social relationships with nature correspond to people’s positions within the totality of social relations. Understanding how people’s perceptions of and actions pertaining to nature are shaped by their positions in these intersecting relations of domination – both within social space and between society and nature – is an important precondition for developing transformative strategies that will be capable of gaining majority support in flexible capitalist societies.

scholarly journals Three Strategies for Describing Social Interactions of Adolescents in a Multicultural Environment—Indicators for the Quality of Life Research

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (15) ◽  
pp. 8166
Author(s):  
Alicja Szerląg ◽  
Arkadiusz Urbanek ◽  
Kamila Gandecka
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Living Environment ◽  
Life Assessment ◽  
Multicultural Environment ◽  
Multicultural Community ◽  
The Social

Background: The analysis has involved social interactions in a multicultural environment. The social context has been defined by the Vilnius region (Lithuania), where national, religious, and cultural differences exist across generations (multicultural community). The space of “social relationships”, as one of the modules of the WHO quality of life assessment, has been studied. An innovation of the research has been related to the analysis of the phenomenon of community of nationalities and cultures as a predictor of quality of life (QoL). The social motive of the research has been the historical continuity (for centuries) of the construction of the Vilnius cultural borderland. Here, the local community evolves from a group of many cultures to an intercultural community. Interpreting the data, therefore, requires a long perspective (a few generations) to understand the quality of relationships. We see social interactions and strategies for building them as a potential for social QoL in multicultural environments. Methods: The research has been conducted on a sample of 374 respondents, including Poles (172), Lithuanians (133), and Russians (69). A diagnostic poll has been used. The respondents were adolescents (15–16 years). The research answers the question: What variables form the interaction strategies of adolescents in a multicultural environment? The findings relate to interpreting the social interactions of adolescents within the boundaries of their living environment. The description of the social relations of adolescents provides an opportunity to implement the findings for further research on QoL. Results: An innovative outcome of the research is the analysis of 3 interaction strategies (attachment to national identification, intercultural dialogue, and multicultural community building) as a background for interpreting QoL in a multicultural environment. Their understanding is a useful knowledge for QoL researchers. The data analysis has taken into account cultural and generational (historical) sensitivities. Therefore, the team studying the data has consisted of researchers and residents of the Vilnius region. We used the interaction strategies of adolescents to describe the category of “social relationships” in nationally and culturally diverse settings.

Media Genealogy of the Contagion: Syphilis — AIDS — COVID-19

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-112
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationships ◽  
Sexual Relationships ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Control Society ◽  
Object Based ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Form ◽  
Society Of Control

The article is devoted to a genealogy of the attitude toward viruses in social and political practice in light of the new coronavirus pandemic. The disciplinary society and the society of control have taken on a completely new configuration since the HIV crisis in the 1980s. AIDS and now COVID-19 as phenomena of social crisis have had a great impact on (sexual) relationships and have also caused a significant change in the social and political order. Epidemics and pandemics mobilize political structures and constitute power relations, thus changing the way bodies are controlled, establishing new differentiations and redefining what disease is. The authors trace the development of discourses about syphilis, AIDS and COVID-19 to describe how knowledge about the disease is being generated today; it has origins in myth and would be unthinkable without aesthetic visualization and mass media technologies. Syphilis was an exact fit for the paradigm of the disciplinary society, which stigmatized bodily pleasure and abstracted pathology by activating projection mechanisms as a sign of the Other. However, AIDS already differed significantly from that paradigm because other medical technologies are used to define HIV, and that has affected the epistemology of the disease and epidemic. The article considers HIV/AIDS as a transitional model that forms a bridge between the epidemics of the past (leprosy, plague, smallpox, syphilis) and the COVID-19 pandemic. Above all there is a change in the biopolitical regime so that bodies are no longer controlled and regulated through sexuality. COVID-19 is a new form of sociality which is not based on the exclusion of “pathological” forms of sexuality or on “deviant” or “perverted” bodies, but involves the object-based, microlevel of relations between viruses, the immune system, and the human genome, which are then mapped with distortions and substitutions onto social relationships and practices. The authors use the term “delegated control” in a new context and introduce the original term “omniopticum” to describe the new regime of biopolitics and the “control society” in the post-COVID era.

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.

scholarly journals Srebrenica is not a Metaphor

2021 ◽  
pp. 54-64
Author(s):  
Sarina Bakić
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Sociological Theory ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
Temporal Dimensions ◽  
Further Development

The author will emphasize the importance of both the existence and the further development of the Srebrenica - Potočari Memorial Center, in the context of the continued need to understand the genocide that took place in and around Srebrenica, from the aspect of building a culture of remembrance throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H). This is necessary in order to continue fighting the ongoing genocide denial. At first glance, a culture of remembrance presupposes immobility and focus on the past to some, but it is essentially dynamic, and connects three temporal dimensions: it evokes the present, refers to the past but always deliberates over the future. In this paper, the emphasis is placed on the concept of the place of remembrance, the lieu de memoire as introduced by the historian Pierre Nora. In this sense, a place of remembrance such as the Srebrenica - Potočari Memorial Center is an expression of a process in which people are no longer just immersed in their past but read and analyze it in the present. Furthermore, looking to the future, they also become mediators of relations between people and communities, which in sociological theory is an important issue of social relations. The author of this paper emphasizes that collective memory in the specific case of genocide in and around Srebrenica is only possible when the social relations around the building (Srebrenica - Potočari Memorial Center) crystallize, which is then much more than just the content of the culture of remembrance.

scholarly journals Filmic witness to the 1964 Kitty Genovese murder

Urban History ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 642-642
Author(s):  
CARRIE RENTSCHLER
Keyword(s):  
Violence Against Women ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Gender Violence ◽  
Male Violence ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
High Rise ◽  
The Past ◽  
City Street ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City

ABSTRACTThis essay examines a body of films that represent and re-enact the infamous 1964 Catherine Genovese rape and murder, helping to define the crime as a problem of bystander non-intervention exacerbated by urban living conditions and the ‘high rise anxieties’ of apartment dwellers. The moving image culture around the Genovese case tells a story about male violence against women in the city through the perspective of urban apartment dwellers, who are portrayed as bystander witnesses to both the city and to the social relations of stranger sociability in the city. Films depict the killing of Kitty Genovese, sometimes through fictional analogues to her and the crime, as an outcome of failed witnessing, explicating those failures around changing ideas about urban social relations between strangers, and ways of surveilling the city street from apartment windows. By portraying urban bystanders as primarily non-interventionist spectators of the Genovese rape and murder, films locate the conditions of femicide and responsibility for it in detached modes of seeing and encountering strangers. By analysing film as forms of historic documentation and imagination, as artifacts of historically and contextually different ways of telling and revising the story of the Genovese murder as one of bystander non-intervention in gender violence in the city, the essay conceptualizes film and filmic re-enactments as a mode of paying witness to the past.

Gender

Sociology ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janeen Baxter ◽  
Heidi Hoffmann
Keyword(s):  
Labor Market ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
Social Institution ◽  
Social Characteristics ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Social ◽  
Unequal Access ◽  
Biological Differences

The term gender refers to the cultural and social characteristics attributed to men and women on the basis of perceived biological differences. In the 1970s, feminists focused on sex roles, particularly the socialization of men and women into distinct masculine and feminine roles and the apparent universality of patriarchy. More recent work has critiqued the idea of two distinct genders, calling into question the notion of gender dichotomies and focusing attention on gender as a constitutive element of all social relationships. Gender has been described as a social institution that structures the organization of other institutions, such as the labor market, families, and the state, as well as the social relations of everyday life. In addition, scholars have pointed to the ways in which gender is constructed by organizations and individual interactions. Gender not only differentiates men and women into unequal groups, it also structures unequal access to goods and resources, often crosscutting and intersecting with other forms of inequality, such as class, race, and ethnicity.

scholarly journals Social Relationships, Age and the Use of Preventive Health Services: Findings from the German Ageing Survey

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (21) ◽  
pp. 4272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Bremer ◽  
Daniel Lüdecke ◽  
Olaf von dem Knesebeck
Keyword(s):  
Health Services ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Preventive Health Services ◽  
Preventive Health ◽  
Informational Support ◽  
The Past ◽  
Flu Vaccination ◽  
Functional Aspects ◽  
The Social ◽  
Preventive Health Behavior

This paper investigates the associations between social relationships, age and the use of preventive health services among German adults. Data stem from the German Ageing Survey (10,324 respondents). The use of preventive health services was assessed by asking for regular use of flu vaccination and cancer screening in the past years. Predictors of interest were structural (having a partner, size of the social network) and functional aspects of social relationships (perceived informational support) and age. Logistic regression models were used to measure the associations between preventive health services use and these predictors. Self-perceived health, gender and education were considered as covariates. Having a partner (OR = 1.20, 95% CI: 1.07–1.34) and perceived informational support (OR = 1.38, 95% CI: 1.13–1.69) were associated with a higher probability of getting flu vaccination regularly over the past years. Informational support (OR = 1.42, 95% CI: 1.17–1.72) and having a partner (OR = 1.57, 95% CI: 1.41–1.75) were positively associated with regular cancer screening over the past years. Associations between the size of the social network and use of preventive health services were not statistically significant. Associations between the use of preventive health services and social relationships varied by age. Structural and functional aspects of social relationships may support preventive health behavior. To increase preventive health behavior and the use of preventive health services, it is necessary to integrate information on social relationships into routine care and to strengthen sources of social support.

Uploading selves: Inuit digital storytelling on YouTube

2011 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Wachowich ◽  
Willow Scobie
Keyword(s):  
Young Adults ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Canadian Arctic ◽  
Internet Technology ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Video Sharing ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Online Spaces ◽  
Youth And Young Adults

This article explores the contemporary use of open-access video-sharing sites by Inuit youth and young adults. Based on 12 months of cyber-fieldwork and focused specifically on YouTube, it explores how Inuit young people across the Canadian Arctic are using online spaces to post short excerpts from their lives and connect with others. The paper situates these digital autobiographies in the recent trajectory of Inuit storytelling, showing that Internet technology allows individual narrators the freedom to bypass established rules and institutions of cultural representation. Self-produced videos posted online are more multivalent, dialogical, and provocative expressions of Inuit selfhood than those texts that may have circulated in the past. While the Internet has been celebrated for its global reach, many of the social relationships and dialogues seemingly fostered by this technology are intimate and localised. Inuit youth and young adults use video-sharing technology to creatively mediate pasts, presents, and futures in the creation of new social worlds.

scholarly journals Socialising tourism after COVID-19: reclaiming tourism as a social force?

2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Freya Higgins-Desbiolles ◽  
Bobbie Chew Bigby ◽  
Adam Doering
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Conceptual Analysis ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Social Force ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ecological Justice ◽  
The Social ◽  
Novel Concept ◽  
Practical Implications

PurposeThis article considers the possibilities of and barriers to socialising tourism after the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Such an approach allows us to transform tourism and thereby evolve it to be of wider benefit and less damaging to societies and ecologies than has been the case under the corporatised model of tourism.Design/methodology/approachThis conceptual analysis draws on the theorisation of “tourism as a social force” and the new concept of “socialising tourism”. Using critical tourism approaches, it seeks to identify the dynamics that are evident in order to assess the possibilities for socialising tourism for social and ecological justice. It employs an Indigenous perspective that the past, present and future are interconnected in its consideration of tourism futures.FindingsCOVID-19 has fundamentally disrupted tourism, travel and affiliated industries. In dealing with the crisis, borders have been shut, lockdowns imposed and international tourism curtailed. The pandemic foregrounded the renewal of social bonds and social capacities as governments acted to prevent economic and social devastation. This disruption of normality has inspired some to envision radical transformations in tourism to address the injustices and unsustainability of tourism. Others remain sceptical of the likelihood of transformation. Indeed, phenomena such as vaccine privilege and vaccine tourism are indicators that transformations must be enabled. The authors look to New Zealand examples as hopeful indications of the ways in which tourism might be transformed for social and ecological justice.Practical implicationsThis conceptualisation could guide the industry to better stakeholder relations and sustainability.Social implicationsSocialising tourism offers a fruitful pathway to rethinking tourism through a reorientation of the social relations it fosters and thereby transforming its social impacts for the better.Originality/valueThis work engages with the novel concept of “socialising tourism”. In connecting this new theory to the older theory of “tourism as a social force”, this paper considers how COVID-19 has offered a possible transformative moment to enable more just and sustainable tourism futures.

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