Constructing Explanations

2007 ◽  
pp. 93-103
Author(s):  
Luca Iandoli ◽  
Giuseppe Zollo
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Collective Actions ◽  
Shared Meanings ◽  
Theories Of Action ◽  
The Way

Organizations are systems designed to guarantee the regularity and continuity of collective actions through the standardization of patterns of action and the establishment of meaning. Artifacts direct theories of action and regulate the way in which the tasks are carried out. Organizations create stable and shared meanings through a process of social construction. But how concrete is such a process? In this chapter we will demonstrate how language, and in particular explanatory discourse, is a fundamental instrument both for the establishment of dominant systems, and for questioning and changing them.

Service innovation as a social construction: The role of boundary objects

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 259-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Mele ◽  
Roberta Sebastiani ◽  
Daniela Corsaro
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Service Innovation ◽  
Innovation Process ◽  
Boundary Objects ◽  
Resource Integration ◽  
Shared Meanings ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The Social ◽  
Outcome Perspective

This article advances a conceptualization of service innovation as socially constructed through resource integration and sensemaking. By developing this view, the current study goes beyond an outcome perspective, to include the collective nature of service innovation and the role of the social context in affecting the service innovation process. Actors enact and perform service innovation through two approaches, one that is more concerted and another that emerges in some way. Each approach is characterized by distinct resource integration processes, in which the boundary objects (artifacts, discourses, and places) play specific roles. They act as bridge-makers that connect actors, thereby fostering resource integration and shared meanings.

The Election Campaign as a Liminal Stage — Negotiations over Meanings

1987 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 559-574 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanna Herzog
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Science Communication ◽  
Relevant Literature ◽  
Election Campaigns ◽  
Long Term Effects ◽  
Conceptual Frame ◽  
Social Meanings ◽  
Symbolic World ◽  
The Way

The paper deals with the role and significance of election campaigns through a consideration of the relevant literature in political science, communication and anthropology. The current interpretation of elections as ritual and drama is altered by focusing on V. Turner's concept of liminality. As liminal periods, it is claimed, election campaigns are an active arena for social construction of political worlds. They take an active part in moulding political cognition and thus produce long-term effects. Perceiving elections in this conceptual frame focuses the empirical concern on the different actors participating in moulding old or new social meanings, the way challenging alternatives are presented, negotiated, included or excluded, the way events as well as symbols become meaningful. It reveals the contested as well as the taken-for-granted, unquestioned and thus reinforced political symbolic world.

Honesty

2021 ◽  
pp. 131-151
Author(s):  
Nathan L. King
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Intellectual Honesty ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Way

This chapter explores the nature of intellectual honesty. Honesty is the first virtue in the book that does not clearly fit into the vice-virtue-vice schema discussed in earlier chapters. This chapter attempts to home in on honesty by exploring its opposites: cheating (plagiarism), lying, bluffing, bullshit, and self-deception. The common feature of these instances of dishonesty is that they all involve an effort to distort the truth. Thus, it is argued, honesty is a virtue centrally involving a disposition not to distort the truth, but rather to represent it accurately (as one sees it). This notion of honesty (and the corresponding notion of dishonesty) suggests that truth itself depends on the way things are, rather than on some sort of “social construction.”

Paradox in Everyday Practice

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Lê ◽  
Rebecca Bednarek
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Theoretical Approach ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
Everyday Practice ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Theoretical Principle ◽  
Everyday Activity ◽  
Practice Turn ◽  
The Way

This chapter explores the shared ontological basis of the paradox and practices perspectives to advance the emerging “practice turn” in paradox. The authors outline the practice-theoretical approach to studying paradox by articulating four main principles that define its research agenda. These principles are social construction, everyday activity, consequentiality, and relationality. They describe each theoretical principle, explain its implications for the way paradox is understood and studied, and illustrate it with an example of existing work. Finally, they use these principles to reflect on the potential of a practice-based view of paradox, highlighting avenues for future research. Herein the authors review, integrate, and develop a foundation for practice-based studies of paradox.

The psychological dimensions of collective action, online

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Postmes
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Psychological Factors ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Collective Actions ◽  
Key Factors ◽  
Mediated Communication ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Psychological Dimensions ◽  
The Way

This article examines the consequences of the migration of collective action into the mediated sphere. It focuses on the impact of the Internet on key psychological factors that are involved in collective action. The structure is as follows. First, the article considers the theoretical backdrop to its themes, focusing first on the classic literatures on crowds and on mediated communication, followed by more contemporary perspectives – identifying the underlying consistencies in the theoretical themes these literatures address. It identifies some key psychological factors that drive collective action. Then the article considers how the Internet changes the nature of collective action and the context in which it takes place. Subsequently, it elaborates how these changes might affect the key factors previously identified. Finally, the article takes a step back from all this and returns to the question of whether this amounts to a revolution in the way collective actions take place.

scholarly journals Os Jovens e o Imaginário da Aids: notas para uma construção social do risco

2003 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leila Jeolás
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
Individual Behavior ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Symbolism ◽  
Everyday Experiences ◽  
Social Construction Of Risk ◽  
The Way

Este artigo, baseado em pesquisa sobre o imaginário da aids entre jovens, busca compreender a noção de risco como uma categoria sociocultural, cujos significados se acumulam nos conceitos de várias áreas do conhecimento e nos usos de senso comum. O perigo, o mal e o infortúnio sempre foram moralizados e politizados nas diversas culturas humanas e a história da aids não poderia ser diferente. Os simbolismos culturais sobre contágio, doenças transmitidas pelo sexo e pelo sangue e os valores atuais da sexualidade, incluindo as relações de gênero, estão presentes na forma como os jovens representam o risco do HIV. Além disso, não se pode desconsiderar a ambivalência que os riscos assumem atualmente para os jovens: alguns negados e afastados, outros aceitos e valorizados. No caso da aids, a busca pela vertigem e pelo êxtase, componentes do sexo e das drogas, distancia o discurso dos jovens sobre risco do discurso preventivo, baseado na racionalidade do comportamento individual, assumindo valores distintos ligados a experiências cotidianas. Youngsters and the imagery of AIDS: notes for the social construction of risk This article, based on research about the imagery of AIDS among youth, aims to understand the notion of risk as a social-cultural category, whose meanings are piled upon concepts of several areas of both knowledge and common sense usages. Danger, evil and misfortune have always been moralized and politicized in the different human cultures and it could not be different in the history of aids. Cultural symbolism about infection, sexually and blood transmitted diseases, as well as sexuality’s current values, including here gender relations, are present in the way the youth represents HIV´s risks. Besides, the ambivalence these risks assume for the youth nowadays cannot be disregarded: some are denied and put aside, others are accepted and valorized. In the case of AIDS, the search for vertigo and ecstasy, components of sex and drugs, distances the youth’s discourse about risk from the preventive discourse, based on the rationality of individual behavior, assuming distinct values linked to everyday experiences.

Easy targets: a disability rights perspective on the 'children as carers' debate

1995 ◽  
Vol 15 (44-45) ◽  
pp. 36-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lois Keith ◽  
Jenny Morris
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Disability Rights ◽  
Disabled People ◽  
Young Carers ◽  
Pressure Groups ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Way

This article looks at how the children of disabled parents are being defined as 'young carers', arguing that the way in which this is hap pening undermines both the rights of children and the rights of disabled people, Analysis of the social construction of 'children as carers' illustrates that researchers and pressure groups are colluding with the government's insistence that 'care in the community' must mean 'care by the community'.

scholarly journals ‚Rasse‘ – zur sprachlichen Konstruktion einer Ausgrenzungsstrategie

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-183
Author(s):  
Anja Lobenstein-Reichmann
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Biological Knowledge ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

Abstract Racism is a social practice not only of present days. It has a long tradition. Regarding the history of racism, it is obvious that its concept is not based on biological knowledge and perception. Quite the contrary, it is the result of a verbal and social construction that appeared in the 18th century at the latest. This article focuses on the way this construction was and still is implemented in discourses of modern societies. Especially “degradation ceremonies” (Garfinkel, below) will be taken into account when observing historical examples.

Constructing Grey Knowledge

2007 ◽  
pp. 104-119
Author(s):  
Luca Iandoli ◽  
Giuseppe Zollo
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Shared Meanings ◽  
New Knowledge ◽  
Theories Of Action

Through explanatory discourse people apply, construct and explain theories of action and attribute meaning to events and to their own actions and those of others. In this chapter we will conduct a detailed analysis of the structure of explanatory discourse and the character of its rationality. Through this analysis we will demonstrate (a) that the rationality of organizational actors is an argumentative rationality aimed at the construction of consensus and shared meanings; (b) that the knowledge contained in the explanations is both structured and opaque, (c) that this particular mix between opacity and structuring makes it possible to both accumulate past knowledge and construct new knowledge.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bonnie Mann
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
Correct Translation ◽  
The Way

This chapter introduces the central controversy that gave rise to this book project, one over the correct translation and interpretation of Beauvoir’s most famous sentence: “On ne naît pas femme: on le devient.” The history of the scandal of the first English translation of Le Duexième Sexe is recounted to provide context for the current conflict. The philosophical stakes of the conflict are spelled out in terms of the status of “social construction” as a theory of sexual difference. Tensions over the English translation open the way to asking bigger questions about philosophical meaning and translational practice across a number of language contexts.

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