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 A kapitalista társadalom struktúrája

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-177
Author(s):  
Zoltán Farkas
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Capitalist Society ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
Restricted Class ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Social

In this paper, I discuss the social structure of modern capitalist society in a new conception based on the theory of institutional sociology. In the first part of the paper, I briefly outline the social structure of modern capitalist society. Taking social relations into account in terms of certain types of social capital and social relationships, I differentiate the following social classes in the modern capitalist society: (1) authority class, (2) strong tolerated class, (3) supported class, (4) medial tolerated class, (5) patronized class, (6) restricted class, (7) less weak tolerated class, (8) less exposed class, (9) very weak tolerated class and (10) very exposed class. In the second part of the paper, I analyse the social structure or the social classes composing the social structure in more detail. In the third part, I point out further aspects that ought to be considered in the empirical research of the social structure of capitalist society

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.

‘Story of one’s life and a tree of friends’ – understanding millennials’ information behaviour in social networks

2012 ◽  
Vol 38 (5) ◽  
pp. 489-497 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pam Read ◽  
Chirag Shah ◽  
Lupita S-O’Brien ◽  
Jaqueline Woolcott
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationships ◽  
Social Space ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Social Value ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Comprehensive Literature Review ◽  
The Social ◽  
Rich Data ◽  
Work Supports

Exploring ways in which new technology impacts adolescents’ information behaviours and creates a social space requires holistic investigation. A qualitative study of 21 seniors in an upper-middle-class suburban high school revealed highly individualized use of Facebook and its features. These included: (i) Friends groups of 50—3700 members, with even the largest groups representative primarily of face-to-face connections, and (ii) a clear articulation within those groups of various categories, each with its own distinct communicative channel and style. A meaningful connection was found between the social value of various social network (SN)-mediated relationships and the communicative modes used to maintain and enhance them. Through a comprehensive literature review and clearly grounded analysis of rich data, this work supports the contention that adolescent social groups in which SNs are embedded form a distinct domain, and establishes a rationale for further investigation of adolescents’ contextualized use of SNs within social relationships.

Affective meanings and social relations: identities and positions in the social space

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Ambrasat ◽  
Christian von Scheve
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Conceptual Knowledge ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Sociological Theory ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Occupational Status ◽  
Regional Culture ◽  
The Social ◽  
Affective Meanings ◽  
Affective Relations

Ever since Georg Simmel’s seminal works, social relations have been a central building block of sociological theory. In relational sociology, social identities are an essential concept and supposed to emerge in close interaction with other identities, discourses and objects. To assess this kind of relationality, existing research capitalises on patterns of meaning making that are constitutive for identities. These patterns are often understood as forms of declarative knowledge and are reconstructed, using qualitative methods, from denotative meanings as they surface: for example, in stories and narratives. We argue that this approach to some extent privileges explicit and conceptual knowledge over tacit and non-conceptual forms of knowledge. We suggest that affect is a concept that can adequately account for such implicit and bodily meanings, even when measured on the level of linguistic concepts. We draw on affect control theory (ACT) and related methods to investigate the affective meanings of concepts (lexemes) denoting identities in a large survey. We demonstrate that even though these meanings are widely shared across respondents, they nevertheless show systematic variation reflecting respondents’ positions within the social space and the typical interaction experiences associated with their identities. In line with ACT, we show, first, that the affective relations between exemplary identities mirror their prototypical, culturally circumscribed and institutionalised relations (for example, between role identities). Second, we show that there are systematic differences in these affective relations across gender, occupational status and regional culture, which we interpret as reflecting respondents’ subjective positioning and experience vis-à-vis a shared cultural reality.

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 Dzielenie przestrzeni, praktyki graniczenia. Parkowanie, własność i przynależność na polskich osiedlach mieszkaniowych

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 143-167
Author(s):  
Karol Kurnicki
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Social Differentiation ◽  
Spatial Practices ◽  
Social Divisions ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Creation

Space gains significance through processes of social differentiation and bordering, and in consequence is connected with the creation and maintenance of social divisions. The author seeks confirmation of this fact at the level of everyday practices in housing settlements, tracking the mechanisms used by people in situations of contact and confrontation with others in the social space. He sets himself several aims: (1) he attempts to analyze selected spatial practices (parking within the settlement, the creation of belonging), reflecting the internal structuring strategies of housing settlements; (2) he points to the causes of that structuring, that is, the main contexts in which these practices occur and are strengthened; (3) he highlights the important role of space in processes of bordering and differentiation. Practices connected with parking and the creation of belonging, although apparently disparate and deriving from contrary spheres of social life make it possible to hypothesize that the striving for separation and the increased importance of space determine the organization of borders, divisions, and social relations in housing settlements.

scholarly journals SOCIOCULTURAL DETERMINANT OF THE SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE PHENOMENON

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-8
Author(s):  
Yuriі Boreiko
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Symbolic Violence ◽  
Collective Consciousness ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
Symbolic Space ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Individual

The article analyzes the sociocultural basis of constituting the symbolic space, the content of the symbolic violence phenomenon, the cultural and symbolic potential of the toponymics objects. It is established that practices of symbolic violence consist in constructing a system of subjective coordinates by imposing rules, senses, meanings, values that become self-evident. Symbolic space encompasses the collective consciousness of the socio-cultural community and has the ability to form a system of subjective coordinates where the individual's life activity unfolds. The intelligibility of symbolic space is conventionally established, which is provided by the process of socialization. Pursuing the goal of domination, hegemony, coercion, symbolic violence moves the real confrontation into a symbolic environment, directing the influence on the mental structures of the social subject. Giving to senses and meanings a legitimate character is a way to explain and substantiate social relations, their cognitive and normative interpretation. Accumulating the experience of community coexistence throughout its history, habitus is a set of dispositions that motivate an individual to a certain reaction or behavior. Habitus, which generates and structures practices, combines the individual tendency of the actor to act adequately to the situation, the interaction of actors in the community, and the interaction of the community and each of its members with reality. As a historically changing phenomenon, habitus determines the nature of interactions between individuals whose communication skills are consistent with the functioning of social institutions. An important component of the symbolic space and part of the cultural and historical discourse are the objects of toponymics, which explains the constant ideological and political interest in this segment of socio-cultural life. Objects of toponymics act as a marker of ordering social space, a tool for including the subject in socio-spatial landscapes. The renaming of toponyms demonstrates the connection between the social conditions in which it takes place and the reaction of the social relations entity to changes in the toponymic space.

scholarly journals Use of Digital Technologies and Social Media and the Social Relationships of Teenagers

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-110
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Chmielewska ◽  
Mariusz Z. Jędrzejko
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Social Contacts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Life Context ◽  
Refusal To Participate ◽  
Technology Abuse ◽  
Depth Interviews

Abstract Polish pedagogical and psychological literature as well as mass media more and more often inform about disorders of competences and social relations of teenagers, as a result of abuse of digital technologies, especially smartphones. The authors analysed 31 cases of patients with cyberabuse and addictions at the Social Prevention Centre in terms of the occurrence, intensity and character of the disappearance of their real social contacts, as well as their behaviour in small natural peer groups. The obtained results were compared with 49 groups of adults and parents of patients. Research based on participatory observation and in-depth interviews showed that teenagers devote over 62% less time to personal social relations than their parents, their time of real social relations with parents is about 38 minutes per day, create atomistic attitudes towards family (e.g. refusal to participate in common meals), have shallow and narrow groups of friends, and prefer borrowed contacts (through social media). The average declared number of teenagers’ friends in social media exceeds 540, while their parents use smartphones in less than 140. Young respondents use smartphones in almost every social and life context (e.g. in toilets, in church, at school, during meals). The research confirmed the occurrence of digital technology abuse. The article ends with preventive delegations.

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.

Prostitution indendørs. Massageklinikken som socialt rum

2007 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Alzaga
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Work Experiences ◽  
Life World ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
The Social ◽  
Working World

Cristina Alzaga: Indoor Prostitution: The Parlour as a Social Space This article presents a sociological hermeneutic analysis of the lived everyday working world of Danish indoor prostitutes. It draws upon observations and interviews, as well as documentary and experiential data, produced during a six-month period of ethnographic fieldwork at a Copenhagen massage parlour, where the author served as “telephone lady“. The article uncovers the social order (nomos) of this life world, its social relations and shared interpretations as well as organizational traits and practical-corporeal terms. It also discusses the variety and multidimensionality of the relations between prostitutes and clients. The article seeks to uncover the meanings of the distinct experiential dynamics and work experiences that take form within this particular working universe, and examines their contradictory relations to the dominant views and accounts of prostitution in the outside world, including the views pre¬sented by mainstream research on prostitution.

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