scholarly journals Capital and ressentiment: The totalizing power of social fragmentation

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 140-45
Author(s):  
Joseph Vogl
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Content ◽  
Social Fragmentation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Platform Economy ◽  
Vital Resource

Joseph Vogl’s new book, Capital and Ressentiment (2021/2022), traces an epistemic shift from knowledge to information driven by the convergence of financialization and the platform economy. As a variable that is determined less by semantic content than by difference to existing expectations, information invites indifference to other distinctions, such as those between fact and fiction, claim and proof. The circulation of information takes the form of opinion markets wherein the production of reality itself is at stake. In this extract, taken from the book’s final chapter, “The cunning of ressentiment-driven reason”, Vogl analyses populist ressentiment as both structural affect of and vital resource for information capitalism, laying out the resulting reconfiguration of the social.

scholarly journals Intergroup and intragroup dimensions of COVID-19: A social identity perspective on social fragmentation and unity

2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic Abrams ◽  
Fanny Lalot ◽  
Michael A. Hogg
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity ◽  
Group Dynamics ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Social Fragmentation ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Face ◽  
Political Management ◽  
Psychological Challenge ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
People’S Perceptions

COVID-19 is a challenge faced by individuals (personal vulnerability and behavior), requiring coordinated policy from national government. However, another critical layer—intergroup relations—frames many decisions about how resources and support should be allocated. Based on theories of self and social identity uncertainty, subjective group dynamics, leadership, and social cohesion, we argue that this intergroup layer has important implications for people’s perceptions of their own and others’ situation, political management of the pandemic, how people are influenced, and how they resolve identity uncertainty. In the face of the pandemic, initial national or global unity is prone to intergroup fractures and competition through which leaders can exploit uncertainties to gain short-term credibility, power, or influence for their own groups, feeding polarization and extremism. Thus, the social and psychological challenge is how to sustain the superordinate objective of surviving and recovering from the pandemic through mutual cross-group effort.

scholarly journals An apple a day – how the platform economy impacts value creation in the healthcare market

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Gleiss ◽  
Marco Kohlhagen ◽  
Key Pousttchi
Keyword(s):  
Value Creation ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Healthcare Industry ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
Value Network ◽  
Healthcare Market ◽  
Network Analyses ◽  
The Social ◽  
Research Gap ◽  
Platform Economy

AbstractThe healthcare industry has been slow to adopt new technologies and practices. However, digital and data-enabled innovations diffuse the market, and the COVID-19 pandemic has recently emphasized the necessity of a fundamental digital transformation. Available research indicates the relevance of digital platforms in this process but has not studied their economic impact to date. In view of this research gap and the social and economic relevance of healthcare, we explore how digital platforms might affect value creation in this market with a particular focus on Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft (GAFAM). We rely on value network analyses to examine how GAFAM platforms introduce new value-creating roles and mechanisms in healthcare through their manifold products and services. Hereupon, we examine the GAFAM-impact on healthcare by scrutinizing the facilitators, activities, and effects. Our analyses show how GAFAM platforms multifacetedly untie conventional relationships and transform value creation structures in the healthcare market.

Social Media Handbuch

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Data Processing ◽  
Business Models ◽  
Practical Application ◽  
Strategy Model ◽  
The Social ◽  
Platform Economy

The Social Media Handbook provides guidance on long-term developments in the ever-changing social media sector and explains fundamental interrelationships in this field. It describes a strategy model for the development of one’s own solutions, summarises the theories, methods and models of leading authors and shows their practical application, while also highlighting current developments and dealing with the topic of data processing in social media. An examination of the platform economy with its economic functions facilitates the classification of business models in social media. The book also shows how platforms and their algorithms can influence our actions and shape our opinions. With contributions by Prof. Karin Bjerregaard Schlüter, Andrea Braun, Franziska Geue, Tobias Knopf, Markus Korbien, Prof. Dr. Daniel Michelis, Stefan Pfaff, Thanh H. Pham, Tom Reichstein, Prof. Dr. Anna Riedel, Michael Sarbacher, Prof. Dr. Dr. Thomas Schildhauer, Prof. Dr. Hendrik Send, Dr. Stefan Stumpp, Prof. Dr. Sebastian Volkmann, Jan-Benedikt Weber, Julia Weißhaupt, Norman Wiebach und Prof. Dr. Christian Wissing.

From Welfare States to Planetary Well-Being

2021 ◽  
pp. 900-920
Author(s):  
Ian Gough
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
The Social ◽  
Welfare Systems ◽  
Basic Services ◽  
Rich Countries ◽  
The Welfare State

This final chapter concentrates on global environmental challenges to rich-country welfare states: climate breakdown and associated ecological disasters. These common threats add two new raison d’êtres for welfare states: first, that the security and equity they seek should be sustainable through time; second, that their scope is broadened to take account of global equity and well-being. With a few notable exceptions, these fundamental questions have been ignored in the social policy community. I argue here that we need to transform our understanding of social policy in four ways, each more difficult than the previous one. First, we need to develop novel eco-social programmes to tap synergies between well-being and sustainability via transformative investment programmes such as a Green New Deal. Second, we need to recompose consumption in rich countries in two ways: to realize the best principles of the welfare state by extending the range of universal basic services and to work towards a private ‘consumption corridor’ to end waste, meet basic needs, and reduce inequality. Third, we must develop strategies of ‘reduce and redistribute’ to adapt welfare systems for a future of slower, if not negative, economic growth. And finally, we need to develop a global equity framework to meet climatic and ecological threats in a globally just way that recognizes current international inequalities.

Of Children, Adults, and Tomorrow

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jamal J. Elias
Keyword(s):  
Major Element ◽  
Visual Image ◽  
Social Unit ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Adult Society ◽  
Emotion And Affect

Continuing with the discussion of sacrifice and gender that was a major element of the previous chapter, this chapter argues that emotive constructs are moral contracts that both derive from and shape society as a pious community. As such, emotion is related to virtue and is therefore aspirational. In the makeup of the social unit, morale serves as an indicator of the condition and functioning of individual bodies within the group and of the collective disposition to which the group aspires in acknowledgment of morale’s social vitality. Morale becomes linked to aspiration for a better future, one populated by finer individuals, including oneself. As such, the quest for morale becomes imbricated in the desire to shape childhood and to use children to shape adult society. Drawing together the data, methodologies, and analysis of the previous chapters, the final chapter sharpens conclusions concerning the ways in which children stand in for adults in a variety of ways and how adult anxieties and aspirations are projected upon and experienced through children, transforming them into repositories of adult intentionalities. In the process, the visual image becomes the site of the performance, emotion, and affect.

Test

2021 ◽  
pp. 132-142
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Serial Killer ◽  
Serial Killers ◽  
The Social ◽  
Personal Connections ◽  
Personal Consequences ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Impact

This final chapter explores yet further examples of how the principles of testing can be applied within the social sciences. As with the previous chapters, the authors begin by asking students to Google questions and then use the results Google provides to ask more sophisticated questions about the impact and personal consequences of the question. They begin by asking a question about how serial killer, Harold Shipman, was able to escape suspicion for as long as he did. They then take up a question about the common traits of serial killers, paying attention to the effects of the traits and how these traits may have personal connections to students. They conclude the chapter with a section about how we might make the decision to eat a third candy bar.

Alcohol and Humans

2019 ◽  
pp. 196-206
Author(s):  
Kimberley J. Hockings ◽  
Robin I.M. Dunbar
Keyword(s):  
Alcohol Consumption ◽  
Evolutionary History ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Medical Profession ◽  
Future Research ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

Humans and alcohol have shared a very long history. In this final chapter, we highlight some of the key findings that emerge from the chapters in this book, in particular the evolutionary history of our adaptation to alcohol consumption and the social role that alcohol consumption plays, and has played, in human societies across the world. This raises a major contradiction in the literature, namely the fact that, despite this long history, the medical profession typically views alcohol as destructive. We draw attention to several avenues that would repay future research and how humans’ relationship with alcohol stands to change and evolve.

Conclusions and Implications

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan-Willem van Prooijen
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Restorative Justice ◽  
Small Groups ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Moral Emotions ◽  
Third Parties ◽  
The Social ◽  
Practical Implications

This final chapter summarizes the main propositions and concludes that punishment originates from moral emotions, stimulates and sustains cooperation, and shapes the social life of humans both within and between groups. Punishment hence is a hardwired moral instinct that evolved to stimulate cooperation in small groups. The remainder of the chapter discusses the practical implications of these insights for public policy, courts of law, organizations, schools, sports, and any other setting that requires punishment to stimulate cooperation. The main implications are (1) when punishing, fairness is more successful than severity in establishing cooperation; (2) for punishment to be effective, one should discourage big egos and personal vendettas, and leave punishment up to independent third parties; (3) punishment is most effective if combined with restorative justice; and (4) one should try to avoid inter-group bias by relying on reason instead of emotions when assigning punishment.

scholarly journals Lessons from science fiction: Frederik Pohl and the robot prosumer

2020 ◽  
pp. 146954052094422
Author(s):  
MJ Ryder
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Ecological Impact ◽  
Business Management ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Vital Resource ◽  
Impact Mass

The diverse fields of business, management and marketing have long explored the concept of the ‘prosumer’ – the producer-consumer who not only consumes those products produced by industry, but also has some hand in their creation. But while the term itself is often credited to futurist Alvin Toffler , the concept he describes (and that which Ritzer et al. adapt) is a central concern of science fiction, which has much to offer our understanding of modern-day prosumption and is not limited by the language and limitations of purely scientific academic discourse. Indeed, one of the most important voices in this area is author and editor Frederik Pohl, with his co-authored novel The Space Merchants and short stories including ‘The Midas Plague’ and ‘The Man Who Ate the World’. In each of these works, Pohl seeks to satirise the mindless robot-like behaviour of human beings, while also posing a word of warning for the social, economic and ecological impact mass-prosumption. This is a particularly relevant message given the rise of ‘surveillance capitalism’ – the real world manifestation of the dystopias that Pohl and his contemporaries describe. In this paper, I argue that science fiction isn’t just a useful tool for social theorists, but rather, a vital resource, as it provides a speculative framework through which to interrogate the potential impacts and implications of new technology, and the links between production and consumption, technology and work. Furthermore, it provides the means through which to imagine possible futures and the lasting impacts of consumption that go beyond describing the world as it is, and move into the realms of what the world may become.

Political Acquiescence, Privatisation and Residualisation in British Housing Policy

1988 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 289-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rob Flynn
Keyword(s):  
Housing Market ◽  
Housing Policy ◽  
Apparent Absence ◽  
Social Fragmentation ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Social ◽  
Attitudinal Ambivalence ◽  
Recent Trends

ABSTRACTThis paper examines some of the social and political implications of retrenchment and privatisation in British housing policy. It reviews arguments and evidence about residualisation in the housing market, the effects of consumption sectoral cleavages, and attitudinal ambivalence to welfare, in an attempt to understand the apparent absence of discontent about inequalities in housing. It is argued that recent trends have exacerbated social fragmentation and reinforced tendencies to political acquiescence.

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