The Context of Competition

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Shubik ◽  
Eric Smith
Keyword(s):  
Simple Model ◽  
Social Organization ◽  
The Other ◽  
Historical Contingency ◽  
Organic System ◽  
Material Content ◽  
Economic Behaviour ◽  
Time Space ◽  
The Social ◽  
Great Complexity

This chapter sets the context for the book. We note the purpose of economics should be to describe concepts and models that can be made consistent with sound scientific understanding of the other aspects of life. At a minimum economic behaviour is embedded within the organic system we call the society: it affects extraction, production, utilization, exchange, consumption and disposal of physical entities and services. We consider the main questions about how to contextualize economics. It can be argued that the economy is a mechanism to organize a subset of decisions in a larger highly distributed society. The social organization obeys no simple model of control; its dynamics is often evolutionary at many scales of time, space and material content; and with these it is subject to both historical contingency and great complexity.

Weavers into Heretics? The Social Organization of Early-Thirteenth-Century Catharism in Comparative Perspective

1997 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-137
Author(s):  
Lutz Kaelber
Keyword(s):  
Social Organization ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
The Other ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Middle Ages

How did a person become a heretic in the Middle Ages? Then, once the person was affiliated with a heretical group, how was the affiliation sustained? What social processes and mechanisms were involved that forged bonds among heretics strong enough, in some cases, for them to choose death rather than return to the bosom of the Church? Two competing accounts of what attracted people to medieval heresies have marked the extremes in historical explanations (Russell 1963): one is a materialist account elucidated by Marxist historians; the other one focuses on ideal factors, as proposed by the eminent historian Herbert Grundmann.

The Role of Standards in the Development of New Informational Infrastructure

2014 ◽  
pp. 149-160
Author(s):  
Vladislav V. Fomin ◽  
Marja Matinmikko
Keyword(s):  
Social Organization ◽  
Temporal Dynamics ◽  
Infrastructure Development ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
Regulatory Domains ◽  
Time Space ◽  
The Social ◽  
Development Processes ◽  
New Generation

In this chapter, the authors inch towards better understanding of the notion of informational infrastructure and the role of standards in the development of infrastructures in the new information age. Specifically, the authors consider the standardization process as pertaining to informational infrastructure development. They focus on two particular aspects of standardization: temporal dynamics and the social organization. Using Bauman's concept of liquid modernity, the authors argue that standards often become hybrids of solid and liquid modernities linking together different scales of time, space, and social organization. To better illustrate theoretical concepts, they draw on practical examples from the development of informational standards, infrastructures, and services, particularly from the domain of Cognitive Radio Systems (CRS), a new generation of “paradigm changing” communication technologies and services. The aim of this chapter is to offer the scholars of standards and innovation a fresh, non-mainstream perspective on the social and temporal dynamics of standardization and infrastructure development processes, to bring forth new understandings of the complexity of relationships between business, technology, and regulatory domains in the formation of informational infrastructure.

Practical Management of Mobility: The Case of the Emergency Medical System

2003 ◽  
Vol 35 (9) ◽  
pp. 1547-1564 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nozomi Ikeya
Keyword(s):  
Social Organization ◽  
Practical Problem ◽  
Medical System ◽  
The Other ◽  
Emergency Medical System ◽  
Local Context ◽  
Local Character ◽  
Emergency Medical ◽  
The Social ◽  
Temporal And Spatial

In an attempt to understand some of the issues involved in the problem of mobility, the author examines the notion of mobility by locating it in the actual and local context where people try to deal with it as their practical problem, following ethnomethodological policy. This way of understanding the local character of mobility has two advantages: one is that it allows us to understand the notion in terms of the social organization of activities as part of which it is managed by relevant members, rather than understanding it in a purely theoretical manner. The other advantage is that it offers us a detailed and concrete understanding of the environment in relation to people's activities that potentially can be used as a basis for some sensitive tools for designing or redesigning the environment in terms of its specific arrangement of mobility. Detailed observations are made on the emergency medical system to illustrate the complex temporal and spatial arrangements involved in moving a patient from one place to another, providing necessary medical treatment on the way, and coordinating different expertise in organizationally and geographically different locations.

scholarly journals Anthropological Crisis in the Social Realities of the 21st Century

2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (5) ◽  
pp. 45-56
Author(s):  
Andrey D. Korol
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Outer Space ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Consumer Society ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Time Space ◽  
The Social ◽  
Loss Of Contact ◽  
Key Features

The article examines the modern anthropological crisis in the context of various social phenomena. The author identifies key features of this crisis and reveals its causes. The article, addressing such philosophical concepts as time, space, happiness, motivation, analyzes the theories on the essence of this crisis. The author discusses the issues of self-alienation in an accelerating and polarizing world, of dialectical antagonism, of contradiction between the Self and the Other. The article critically analyzes the modern forms of consumerism, the consumer society, and the liberal worldview. Written in the essay form, the article poses the questions to the reader: How and why does man lose and acquire his meanings? What role do words and silence play in that? Who wins in the existential race “man versus society”? The author argues that a person does not see his absolute, since his expanding outer space narrows the inner space. The stratification of internal and external space (which is advisable to understand as a consequence of the loss of contact with reality) is the cause of lies, violence, and aggression. Liberal form of worldview is interpreted in a dialectical form: as the opposition of slavery, preserving its original vices. The article demonstrates how progress can lead to chaos in social life. Distinguishing three types of personality (directive, democratic, and liberal-permissive), it is concluded that the latter type of personality forms a border between the external and internal world. This kind of gap is the source of growing social and psycho-logical chaos. The concludes with a discussion of the possibility of happiness in modern social conditions.

Practical Cosmologies

Ethnologies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 75-92
Author(s):  
Götz Hoeppe
Keyword(s):  
Social Organization ◽  
South India ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Western Science ◽  
Organizational Contexts ◽  
Time Space ◽  
The Social

For much of the 20thcentury, indigenous cosmologies, understood as the totalizing worldviews of delimited social groups, were one of ethnology’s central topics. In the last few decades, however, the concept of cosmology no longer sat well with many ethnologists’ wariness of identifying social wholes as analytic units and with accepting correspondences of social organization with orders of time, space, and color, among others. Recently, Allen Abramson and Martin Holbraad, in their 2014 bookFraming Cosmologies, called for a “second wind” of anthropologists’ attention to cosmologies, now including popular understandings of Western science. While endorsing this broadened attention to cosmology and the uses of analyst’s perspectives, I call for remaining attentive to the practical uses of cosmologies by the actors that ethnographers learn from. This entails attending to the social accountabilities and organizational contexts that constrain how people act. I seek to illustrate this by drawing on ethnographies of fishers in south India as well as of astrophysicists in Germany.

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