scholarly journals Values Evolution in Transitional China: An Institutional Perspective

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gong Sun ◽  
Jian Li
Keyword(s):  
Social Transformation ◽  
Economic Transition ◽  
Value Change ◽  
Institutional Perspective ◽  
The Past ◽  
Generation Cohorts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Value Changes ◽  
Transitional China ◽  
Privately Owned

The values are greatly affected by the social and economic environment of a country. Thus, social transformation can lead to the values evolution. China has been experiencing a huge social, political, and economic transition in the past four decades. The previous studies that explore the value changes in China mainly compare the values across the regions or generation cohorts. This research investigates the issue from an institutional perspective. Specifically, we propose that the diversification of ownership types—the essence of the economic and institutional reform since 1978 may result in value change. By surveying 327 participants from the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and 220 respondents from the privately owned enterprises (POEs), the comparisons between SOEs and POEs on four value dimensions—individualism, power distance, risk aversion, and money orientation—were performed. The results basically support cross-vergence theory in the values evolution. The implications and limitations are presented as well.

scholarly journals God Is Dying in Turkey as Well: Application of Secularization Theory to a Non-Christian Society

Open Theology ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 192-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
Volkan Ertit
Keyword(s):  
Social Transformation ◽  
Sexual Relationship ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Family Structures ◽  
Traditional Family ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Muslim Majority ◽  
Christian Society ◽  
Do So

Abstract It has been stated in academic studies and popular media that Islam began its rise in dominance in Turkey with the accession of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) to power in 2002 under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. However, contrary to claims of societal Islamization, in light of quantitative and qualitative studies this study argues that despite the AKP and its leader Erdoğan being in power, the following evidence has been observed in Turkey: praying rates have decreased, extramarital sexual relationship has become prevalent, the number of mosques per person has decreased, the belief in virginity is a point of honour for fewer people, people‘s clothes have become more flatteringly formfitting and more attractive, including women’s head-scarves; secular experts rather than religious officials are being sought for help concerning problems in daily life, homosexuality has become more socially acceptable visible, traditional family structures has been shattered. Therefore, it is claimed that AKP (or Erdoğan) has failed in efforts to Islamize Turkey over the past 15 years (2002-2017) despite having all the governmental means and opportunities to do so. This study argues that the classical theory of secularization, which claims that modernization leads to secularization, can still explain not only the social transformation seen in historically Christian and Western European countries and their offshoots, but also the social transformation of Turkey, a Muslim-majority country that has been governed for the past 15 years by a political party with clear Islamic sensitivities.

Historical Sociology in Poland: Transformations of the Uses of the Past

2021 ◽  
pp. 088832542110579
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Kolasa-Nowak ◽  
Marta Bucholc
Keyword(s):  
Social Transformation ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Marxist Theory ◽  
Third Wave ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
The Social ◽  
Symbolic Resource ◽  
Sociological Studies

The development of Polish institutional sociology since the 1920s reflects the combined effects of domestic political and cultural factors, along with international interdependencies. Historical sociology shares in the vicissitudes of the whole discipline. Although historical sociology was only weakly institutionalized before 1989, some of the best sociological studies produced in Poland under socialism display the keen use of historical imagination, inspired both by the pre-1939 domestic tradition and by Marxist theory. This article examines the path of historical sociology in Poland after 1989 and the connection between the sociological uses of history and the experience of post-communist transformation. We posit that the social transformation experience and how it was addressed by social science directly translate into the use of history in Polish sociology after 1989. We argue that the role of historical sociology in Poland since the end of the 1990s was a function of the potential of the past as a symbolic resource in the growing interdependence between Poland and Western Europe. However, the post-1989 research agendas of historical sociology were forged according to the mode of responsiveness to political agendas predating 1989. An overview of the development of Polish historical sociology demonstrates that the ahistorical transitological thinking after 1989 has been challenged by critical agendas in historical sociology, but it was, in the first place, a reaction to the increased potential of the past as a symbolic resource in political debates. Thus, the rationale for the passage to the third wave of historical sociology was primarily political.

For Who Hath Despised the Day of Small Things? Missionary Narratives and Historical Anthropology

1995 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 581-607 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. D. Y. Peel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Historical Anthropology ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Small Things

When anthropologists come to examine the role of Christian missionaries in the transformation of non-Western societies, as they have done increasingly over the past decade, they soon become deeply embroiled in debates about narrative. Most obvious and immediate are the written and published narratives in which missionaries report their activities, providing the single most important source of data. But the more fundamental issues lie beyond: They have to do with the role of narrative in the social transformation itself, and eventually with the place of narrative in the ethnographic account that anthropology sets itself to produce. In this essay, which arises from a larger project on the encounter of religions in nineteenth-century Yorubaland, the focus of the argument will move through several levels of narrative, but it will start and finish with an argument that demonstrates why narrative is so important for the achievement of a properly historical anthropology.

scholarly journals Building knowledge from the margins: information, knowledge and social movements

2012 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-64
Author(s):  
Víctor Manuel Marí Sáez
Keyword(s):  
Social Behavior ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Knowledge Building ◽  
The Past ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Communication Models ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Control

The social theory that has been constructed in Latin America in the past twenty years, proposes an alternative to the traditional criteria of science boundaries. This alternative approach, oriented towards social emancipation, is gaining ground over the predominant tendency, which is to subsume knowledge into an intensive process of commoditization. Anti-globalist movements are amongst the social players that have a leading role in the development of new ways of building knowledge. These movements act based on a new relationship between processes of social change, knowledge-building and the meaning and direction of communication. In this context, communication and information cease to be instruments for the regulation and control of social behavior. The tensions arising from the market and the predominating, inherited communication models go against research concerned with building meanings and viewpoints that are alternatives to the predominant ones. The new, emerging approaches tend to strengthen bidirectional relationships between communication and social transformation.

Dowagers, Debs, Nuns and Babies: The Politics of Nostalgia and the Older Woman in the British Sunday Night Television Serial

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 769-784 ◽  
Author(s):  
Estella Tincknell
Keyword(s):  
Older Women ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Mature Female ◽  
Older Woman ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Position ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Popular Television

The extensive commercial success of two well-made popular television drama serials screened in the UK at prime time on Sunday evenings during the winter of 2011–12, Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–) and Call the Midwife (BBC, 2012–), has appeared to consolidate the recent resurgence of the period drama during the 1990s and 2000s, as well as reassembling something like a mass audience for woman-centred realist narratives at a time when the fracturing and disassembling of such audiences seemed axiomatic. While ostensibly different in content, style and focus, the two programmes share a number of distinctive features, including a range of mature female characters who are sufficiently well drawn and socially diverse as to offer a profoundly pleasurable experience for the female viewer seeking representations of aging femininity that go beyond the sexualised body of the ‘successful ager’. Equally importantly, these two programmes present compelling examples of the ‘conjunctural text’, which appears at a moment of intense political polarisation, marking struggles over consent to a contemporary political position by re-presenting the past. Because both programmes foreground older women as crucial figures in their respective communities, but offer very different versions of the social role and ideological positioning that this entails, the underlying politics of such nostalgia becomes apparent. A critical analysis of these two versions of Britain's past thus highlights the ideological investments involved in period drama and the extent to which this ‘cosy’ genre may legitimate or challenge contemporary political claims.

Disciplining Polenta: A Parody on the Politics of Saving Food

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Zachary Nowak ◽  
Bradley M. Jones ◽  
Elisa Ascione
Keyword(s):  
Food Products ◽  
Social Value ◽  
Traditional Food ◽  
Traditional Foods ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Scholarly Literature ◽  
Identity Creation ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social

This article begins with a parody, a fictitious set of regulations for the production of “traditional” Italian polenta. Through analysis of primary and secondary historical sources we then discuss the various meanings of which polenta has been the bearer through time and space in order to emphasize the mutability of the modes of preparation, ingredients, and the social value of traditional food products. Finally, we situate polenta within its broader cultural, political, and economic contexts, underlining the uses and abuses of rendering foods as traditional—a process always incomplete, often contested, never organic. In stirring up the past and present of polenta and placing it within both the projects of Italian identity creation and the broader scholarly literature on culinary tradition and taste, we emphasize that for so-called traditional foods to be saved, they must be continually reinvented.

Same Address, Different Doors: Post-Heritage Deconstruction of the Heritage Household in Upstairs Downstairs in the 1970s and 2010s

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Abbiss
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
War Narrative ◽  
Critical History ◽  
The Social ◽  
Fourth Series ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multiple Episodes

This article offers a ‘post-heritage’ reading of both iterations of Upstairs Downstairs: the LondonWeekend Television (LWT) series (1971–5) and its shortlived BBC revival (2010–12). Identifying elements of subversion and subjectivity allows scholarship on the LWT series to be reassessed, recognising occasions where it challenges rather than supports the social structures of the depicted Edwardian past. The BBC series also incorporates the post-heritage element of self-consciousness, acknowledging the parallel between its narrative and the production’s attempts to recreate the success of its 1970s predecessor. The article’s first section assesses the critical history of the LWT series, identifying areas that are open to further study or revised readings. The second section analyses the serialised war narrative of the fourth series of LWT’s Upstairs, Downstairs (1974), revealing its exploration of female identity across multiple episodes and challenging the notion that the series became more male and upstairs dominated as it progressed. The third section considers the BBC series’ revised concept, identifying the shifts in its main characters’ positions in society that allow the series’ narrative to question the past it evokes. This will be briefly contrasted with the heritage stability of Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–15). The final section considers the household of 165 Eaton Place’s function as a studio space, which the BBC series self-consciously adopts in order to evoke the aesthetics of prior period dramas. The article concludes by suggesting that the barriers to recreating the past established in the BBC series’ narrative also contributed to its failure to match the success of its earlier iteration.

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