scholarly journals Becoming Family Farmers: The Contribution of the Existential Ontological Perspective to the Social Learning for Sustainability Theory

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (15) ◽  
pp. 8186
Author(s):  
Marcia Juliana d’Angelo ◽  
Janette Brunstein ◽  
Jones Madson Telles
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Social Dimension ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Family Farmers ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status ◽  
Sustainability Theory ◽  
Four Levels ◽  
Ways Of Being

This research examines social learning for sustainability (SLfS), particularly in its social dimension. Few studies have discussed or advanced on the ontological issues of SLfS relating to who social actors are becoming. This study aims to describe and analyze how the process of SLfS facilitates Brazilian families who were at the base of the social pyramid (no income) to change the status from landless campers to family farmers with land moving up four levels in the social pyramid over a decade. The research is qualitative interpretative, based on narratives from semi-structured interviews with 16 social actors and document analysis. The results show the meaning of learning professional ways of being family farmers from an existential ontological perspective.

The Biosemiotics and Phylogenesis of Culture

2002 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominique Lestel
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Social Dimension ◽  
Social Community ◽  
The Social ◽  
Semiotic Approach ◽  
The Status ◽  
Living Organisms ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Animal Societies

The question of animal cultures has once again become a subject of debate in ethology, and is now one of its most active and problematic areas. One surprising feature of this research, however, is the lack of attention paid to the communications that go on in these complex animal societies, with the exception of mechanisms of social learning. This neglect of communications is all the more troubling because many ethologists are unwilling to acknowledge that animals have cultures precisely because they do not possess language, a refusal therefore on semiotic grounds. In the present article, I show that the biosemiotic approach to animal cultures is, on the contrary, essential to their understanding, even if the complexity of animal communications is far from being well enough understood. I consider that some of the consequences of this approach are very important, in particular the question of whether we can talk about subjects in the case of animals. Alternatively, I suggest that the semiotic approach to animal cultures leads to a discussion of some of the most serious limitations of biosemiotics, particularly when it comes to investigating the status of the interlocutors in a social community, or to taking into account interspecific communications and the social dimension of any biosemiotic interaction - which biosemiotics has for the moment failed to do. Finally I call attention to the importance of animals living in human communities and suggest that this be studied so as to better apprehend the capacities for culture in non-human living organisms.

scholarly journals Achieving Social and Ecological Outcomes in Collaborative Environmental Governance: Good Examples from Swedish Moose Management

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 2329
Author(s):  
Sabrina Dressel ◽  
Annelie Sjölander-Lindqvist ◽  
Maria Johansson ◽  
Göran Ericsson ◽  
Camilla Sandström
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Environmental Governance ◽  
Collaborative Governance ◽  
Theory Of Change ◽  
Ecological Context ◽  
Discretionary Power ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Resource Governance ◽  
Social Ecological ◽  
The Social

Collaborative governance approaches have been suggested as strategies to handle wicked environmental problems. Evaluations have found promising examples of effective natural resource governance, but also highlighted the importance of social-ecological context and institutional design. The aim of this study was to identify factors that contribute to the achievement of social and ecological sustainability within Swedish moose (Alces alces) management. In 2012, a multi-level collaborative governance regime was implemented to decrease conflicts among stakeholders. We carried out semi-structured interviews with six ‘good examples’ (i.e., Moose Management Groups that showed positive social and ecological outcomes). We found that ‘good examples’ collectively identified existing knowledge gaps and management challenges and used their discretionary power to develop procedural arrangements that are adapted to the social-ecological context, their theory of change, and attributes of local actors. This contributed to the creation of bridging social capital and principled engagement across governance levels. Thus, our results indicate the existence of higher-order social learning as well as a positive feedback from within-level collaboration dynamics to between-level collaboration. Furthermore, our study illustrates the importance of institutional flexibility to utilize the existing knowledge across stakeholder groups and to allow for adaptations based on the social learning process.

scholarly journals Moral authority and status in International Relations: Good states and the social dimension of status seeking

2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 526-546 ◽  
Author(s):  
William C. Wohlforth ◽  
Benjamin de Carvalho ◽  
Halvard Leira ◽  
Iver B. Neumann
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Moral Authority ◽  
Social Dimension ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Middle Power ◽  
The Social ◽  
Status Seeking ◽  
Positional Good ◽  
Social Creativity ◽  
Status Politics

AbstractWe develop scholarship on status in international politics by focusing on the social dimension of small and middle power status politics. This vantage opens a new window on the widely-discussed strategies social actors may use to maintain and enhance their status, showing how social creativity, mobility, and competition can all be system-supporting under some conditions. We extract lessons for other thorny issues in status research, notably questions concerning when, if ever, status is a good in itself; whether it must be a positional good; and how states measure it.

Feline politics in organization: The nine lives of Olly the cat

Organization ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 407-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
Damian P. O’Doherty
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Emergent Properties ◽  
Human Intentionality ◽  
The Social ◽  
Organization Analysis ◽  
The Status ◽  
Organizational Action ◽  
Ontological Turn ◽  
Ways Of Being

The appearance of ‘Olly the cat’ on the doorsteps of a major UK international airport provides occasion to reconsider the role of the animal in organization and offers suggestive insight into how we might have to learn new ways of being within extended multi-species or interspecies ontologies. Olly is found to lead multiple lives that cannot be reduced to the status of object or media of human intentionality. Her increasing political involvement in the management and organization of the airport challenges orthodox understanding of agency and organizational action. As the ethnography becomes progressively more implicated in the entanglements between human and animal, the concept of ‘feline politics’ is proposed and deployed. This allows research to retain focus on actions and behaviour and modes of thinking that would ordinarily be occluded by conventional modes of organizational representation. In these ways the ethnography moves beyond the interpretative and symbolic treatment of organization analysis and finds resource in the recent ‘ontological turn’ in the social sciences. Embracing what is the inevitable participation of the social sciences in the reflexive and recursive enactment of its phenomena, the ethnography discovers new potentialities and new capacities for action as emergent properties of ‘the human’ and ‘the animal’ were mutually learnt, exchanged and acquired. This article adds to what we know about the limits of management as it confronts a radical undecidability characterized by the co-existence of multiple and interacting ontological becomings.

Grotesque Possible Worlds

Tekstualia ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 325-339
Author(s):  
Bartłomiej Starnawski
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Thomas Mann ◽  
Social Dimension ◽  
Community Relations ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Grotesque

The author of the articles shows that the grotesque is one of the most interesting ways of diagnosing changes and crisis in the anthroposphere (as a continuation of thinking about the subject from the middle of the seventeenth century through to postmodernity). According to Thomas Mann, the grotesque is one the most active notions in contemporary art. Its productivity results from the subject’s tendency to self-fulfilment, self-cognition, and self-definition; it is an independent vision and position in the “me – the world”, “me – community” relations. The grotesque is a strongly philosophical proposition, which bases its discourse on a conscious protest against present values and on transgressing all limiting and oppressive conventions. Therefore, the grotesque enhances the status of the subject, but it neither defends nor affi rms the subject in a direct manner. Apart from the social dimension, the grotesque also has numerous metaphysical references, the expression of which can be found in Kierkegaardian understanding of the metaphysical crisis as despair. Facing piercing emptiness, the human being tries to find some support and resorts to anything only to make a leap into the future. Laughter is only a manifestation of horror vacui, a specific dialectic moment devoid of any prospect of purification or comfort. What dominates a grotesque work is its open structure. The motifs which shape the spatiotemporal order do not always form a cause-and-effect system. Deliberately incoherent themes (logical coherence is not an aim) seem to be rather “deconstructors”, not constructors of the plot; they are intermittent, provoke the impression of a secret, a gleam, the absurd.

scholarly journals Mining in urban areas: methodological proposal for the identification and mediation of socio-environmental conflicts

2013 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 369-374 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denise de La Corte Bacci ◽  
Tânia Maria Ramos de Godoi Diniz
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Sao Paulo ◽  
São Paulo ◽  
Environmental Conflicts ◽  
Environmental Preservation ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
The Social ◽  
Northwestern Region

The conflicts generated by mining in urban areas are due to several reasons. In this paper we sought to identify the social actors and the dynamics of conflicts in the northwestern region of the São Paulo Municipality. This area presents aspects of environmental preservation, quarry activities, and dense urbanization. To minimize/solve these conflicts, strategies are proposed based on Social Learning methodologies.

Defining the Social Dimension of Sustainability in Product Design

2013 ◽  
Vol 572 ◽  
pp. 24-27
Author(s):  
Matthew Watkins
Keyword(s):  
Product Design ◽  
Design Education ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Social Dimension ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Doctoral Study ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
The Social ◽  
Sustainable Product ◽  
Effective Teaching And Learning

This paper presents a summary of a larger study into the formulation of a set of criteria for consideration of the Social criteria of Sustainable Product Design (SPD). A multidisciplinary literature review was conducted, which was developed further through semi structured interviews with nine experts in the field of sustainable design education. These interviews were conducted face to face and responses were analysed using the coding and clustering technique. A list of criteria was refined and these were used to inform a doctoral study which considered effective teaching and learning methods in the social aspects of SPD.

scholarly journals Coordinated Development of Regional Complex System: A Niche-Based Study

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Jianling Li ◽  
Xiang Fan ◽  
Yufei Bai ◽  
Jingjing Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Ecological Niche ◽  
Social Dimension ◽  
Coordinated Development ◽  
Economic Dimension ◽  
Four Dimensions ◽  
System A ◽  
International Trends ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status ◽  
New Perspective

Taking Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei as an example, it analyzes the comprehensive competitiveness of Beijing, Tianjin, and Hebei. It selects four dimensions: economic dimension, social dimension, environmental dimension, and technological dimension. From a new perspective, it explores the application of niche theory in regional synergy. Based on the analysis of the ecological niche, the coordination degree model of the composite system is further used to calculate the status quo of the coordinated development of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region from 2013 to 2019. The results show that Beijing has the highest ecological niche, followed by Tianjin, and Hebei is the weakest. In 2019, the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region is at a good level of coordination, with the social subsystem having the highest order and the technological subsystem having the lowest order. Based on this, it is proposed that the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei regions should be scientifically positioned, the overall need to be aligned with international trends, and the internal planning should be integrated to further enhance the level of cooperation in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region.

Using Soclab for a Rigorous Assessment of the Social Feasibility of Agricultural Policies

2012 ◽  
pp. 228-243
Author(s):  
Françoise Adreit ◽  
Pascal Roggero ◽  
Christophe Sibertin-Blanc ◽  
Claude Vautier
Keyword(s):  
Sociological Theory ◽  
Agricultural Practices ◽  
Development Project ◽  
Social Dimension ◽  
Natural Environments ◽  
Methodological Framework ◽  
Agricultural Policies ◽  
Software Environment ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
The Social

This paper presents a theoretical and methodological framework to take into consideration the social dimension in a sustainable development project. To do this, the authors have developed the SocLab software environment, which implements a formalization of a well-established sociological theory, and enables the modeling of social organizations, to analyze their properties and to simulate social actors’ behaviors. SocLab was used to assess the social acceptability of new agricultural practices more in line with the preservation of water resources and natural environments, in a well defined context. The paper shows how it was used and presents the main results.

scholarly journals Health and Safety at Work in the Time of COVID-19: A Social Europe Reckoning?

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 864-883
Author(s):  
Konstantinos ALEXANDRIS POLOMARKAKIS
Keyword(s):  
Occupational Health ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
Occupational Health And Safety ◽  
Social Dimension ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Public Health Perspective ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status ◽  
European Health ◽  
Key Driver

The shortcomings in the handling of COVID-19 highlighted the salience of health and safety at work and fuelled discussions surrounding the desirability of a European Health Union. This article conceptualises occupational health and safety at the European Union (EU) level as a key driver for the creation of a European Health Union. Through recourse to the area’s roots and its relevance to the tackling of the COVID-19 pandemic, the benefits of putting occupational health and safety in the driving seat are set out. The implications of maintaining a healthy workforce are acute, from both a social and a public health perspective, especially in the time of a pandemic. Relying on a reflective approach that goes beyond the status quo, this article offers pragmatic yet imaginative proposals for strengthening the occupational health and safety acquis. The proposals act as the blueprint for health and safety in the workplace to lay the foundation for a European Health Union and advance the social dimension of the EU.

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