INFOMEDIA LITERACY: an educational basic for young people in the new information age

The aim of this article is to introduce the concept of infomedia literacy, which refers to the ability to process critically all kinds of written information, sound, images, graphics and values transmitted by the new technology. This article argues that when information technology merges with communication technology, there is a need for a new form of literacy. The article is divided into two parts. The first part uses empirical data from Hong Kong to illustrate the necessity of providing infomedia literacy training to young people in schools. Adopting the perspective of socially constructed technology, the second part attempts to conceptualize infomedia literacy and define its rationales, aims, scope, key components and characteristics. A socially participatory approach of infomedia education is proposed. It is suggested that infomedia literacy as a life skill in the new information age has several components: (1) an understanding of the nature and functions of infomedia and critical awareness of their impact on individuals and society; (2) the skill of critical analysis of information transmitted through infomedia technology; (3) the skill of efficient search and selection of information; (4) knowledge to use infomedia technology for self-expression; (5) aesthetic appreciation; and (6) social participation by influencing the development of infomedia technology.     

The Processes of Social Construction in Talk

Sociologists have paid a great deal of attention to the idea that many aspects of human life are socially constructed. However, there has been far less attention to the concrete interactional processes by which this construction occurs. In particular, scholars have neglected how consensual meaning is constructed in verbal interaction. This article outlines nine generic construction tools used in everyday talk, based on a review and synthesis of past work. These tools fall into three general categories: building blocks, linking devices, and finishing devices. The authors argue that scholars must pay greater attention to the interactional nature of social construction, and discuss three interactional processes that are central to the social construction of meaning in talk: challenge, support, and non‐response. The article presents concrete illustrations of these processes using examples from focus group discussions about gender and violence. These micro‐interactional processes often reproduce, sometimes modify, and (more rarely) resist larger institutions and structures, and thus are indispensable to understanding social life.     

The cosmopolitan imagination: critical cosmopolitanism and social theory

Critical cosmopolitanism is an emerging direction in social theory and reflects both an object of study and a distinctive methodological approach to the social world. It differs from normative political and moral accounts of cosmopolitanism as world polity or universalistic culture in its conception of cosmopolitanism as socially situated and as part of the self-constituting nature of the social world itself. It is an approach that shifts the emphasis to internal developmental processes within the social world rather than seeing globalization as the primary mechanism. This signals a post-universalistic kind of cosmopolitanism, which is not merely a condition of diversity but is articulated in cultural models of world openness through which societies undergo transformation. The cosmopolitan imagination is articulated in framing processes and cultural models by which the social world is constituted; it is therefore not reducible to concrete identities, but should be understood as a form of cultural contestation in which the logic of translation plays a central role. The cosmopolitan imagination can arise in any kind of society and at any time but it is integral to modernity, in so far as this is a condition of self-problematization, incompleteness and the awareness that certainty can never be established once and for all. As a methodologically grounded approach, critical cosmopolitan sociology has a very specific task: to discern or make sense of social transformation by identifying new or emergent social realities.     

新经济社会学的价格理论论析

新经济社会学指出社会网络制约价格,价格是社会建构的产物,企业定价遵从产业内部已有的定价规则,而且价格具有多方面的象征含意。这些价格观点受到新经济社会学理论流派分隔的影响,并未融于一个完整的体系之中,彼此间相互区隔。社会建构主义的价格观、组织社会学的新制度主义的价格观有助于我们认识大宗商品的期货交易价格和新兴产业中定价体系的扩散。文化社会学的价格观认为价格呈现了商品的质量,还呈现了与商品有关的行动者的社会特征。这种定价观更适用于分析时装和奢侈品等消费品、艺术品以及所谓无价物品的定价问题。结构经济社会学家与经济学家在价格问题上进行了更密切的对话,致力于从嵌入性角度关注信任和互惠的期待等治理安排、信息的分布与传递,以此来把握交易成本和生产成本的变动。新经济社会学的各种价格理论有别于经济学的价格理论的共同之处在于:都强调引起商品价格变动的社会因素,力图修正或拓展经济学的价格理论。     

Disaster or Sustainability: The Dance of Human Agents with Nature's Actants*

Cet article défend une recherche sociologique qui allie le meilleur du constructionisme social avec le réalisme critique, et qui intègre la sociologie des catastrophes à la sociologie environnementale. Il montre comment les perceptions de la gestion des catastrophes sont socialement construites au moyen d'une action communicative dans un contexte d'incitations venant des ? actants? de la nature, comment les autorités sont tentées de remplacer la transparence par le secret quand ces incitations deviennent particulièrement dangereuses et comment les catastrophes sont utilisées a d'autres fins. La tempête de verglas de Janvier 1998, qui donnait l'impression d'etre une catastrophe naturelle (la plus dispendieuse de l'histoire canadienne), était plutôt un hybride déclenché par des constructions de la nature primale qui sont devenues désastreuses où la nature recombinante vulnérable est devenue socialement construite. This paper argues for sociological research that combines the best of social constructionism and critical realism and that integrates disaster sociology with environmental sociology. It documents how perceptions of managing disaster are socially constructed through communicative action in a context of prompts from nature's actants, how authorities are tempted to replace openness with secrecy when those prompts become particularly dangerous, and how disasters are used for other purposes. The January 1998 ice storm that seemed a natural disaster (the most expensive in Canadian history) was instead a hybrid initiated by primal nature's constructions that became disastrous where vulnerable recombinant nature had been socially constructed.     

EDITH WHARTON'S SICK ROLE

In this article, we conduct a textual analysis of Edith Wharton's 1911 novel, Ethan Frome . We offer three readings. The first presents Wharton's account of illness through a framework developed foru decades later by Talcott Parsons. Wharton's sick role was less medico-centric than Parsons; it emphasized the importance of class, gender and community in defining and legitimizing the sick role. Our second reading explores the socially constructed nature of roles in illness. The sick role as portrayed by Wharton is not the social fact later conceived by Parsons, but a social construct with no determinate reference beyond that which the local community is willing to grant it. Our third reading examines the social context, particularly the power relations, within which this story of illness has been constructed.     

The Temporality of Emotion: Constructing Past Emotions

Symbolic interactionists have developed a rich literature on emotion that has advanced our understanding of the socially constructed nature of emotions and has provided a wealth of understanding about emotions and emotional life. Left unexplored, however, has been the temporal nature of emotion. Similarly, interactionists' renewed interest in time and temporality has not focused on emotion. In this article I describe the implicit leads in these two literatures that need to be pulled together to make the linkage clear. Drawing on the work defining emotions as social objects and on George Herbert Mead's theory of the past, I describe how emotional pasts are used as foundations for situated actions. I also explain how we use the emotional pasts in four areas: the individual level, individuals in interaction, collective behavior, and the social structural level. This linkage provides insights for understanding how we use emotional pasts when we construct and enact behavior. I argue that emotional pasts are important tools used in the interpretation and construction of present emotions, to situate selves and others, and to construct the social order.     

New directions for economics

Three new areas of investigation by economists are reviewed which involve interdisciplinary work with other social scientists: extending economic theory to noneconomic problems, taking into account the effect of human nature in human decision making, and exploring the impact of economic variables on noneconomic behavior. It is pointed out that this latter area has been neglected by economists and that economics ought to include the impact of the economy on society as part of its domain.     

The social context of hoarding behavior: Building a foundation for sociological study

This paper aims to build a foundation from which sociologists can effectively address hoarding as a social problem embedded in a wider economic, cultural, and historic context. By focusing on practices of consumerism, interior design, collecting and waste disposal, we can see how socially constructed attitudes toward objects are linked with three primary hoarding behaviors: the acquisition of objects, clutter within the home, and difficulty discarding items. The transformation of shopping into a leisurely pastime has created a cultural context in which the acquisition of objects is normal and expected. Arrangement of objects within the home can be used to create of a sense of class membership, and collecting as a hobby and a lifestyle has been socially and economically encouraged since the late 1800s. Finally, a look at disposal practices reveals that the way we get rid of objects can be just as socially dictated as the way we use them. The behaviors associated with hoarding have been historically developed and are actively encouraged in contemporary western society. By examining the social context of hoarding behaviors, we can move toward an understanding of the ways that hoarders and nonhoarders alike navigate the social and economic landscape using material culture.     

The role of local actors in transforming the urban fringe

In interpreting the transformation of rural space, much attention has been given to the macro scale processes shaping capitalist society, particularly those of accumulation and uneven development. Often, the role of the individual and of local agency generally is relegated to that of a pawn. However, with the retreat of the central state from many domains, the role of the individual and particularly the local community in shaping development processes has received more and more attention. Proactive roles have been recognized increasingly for communities and individuals in relatively depressed regions as being an integral part of the emerging ‘new economy’, but the urban fringe has received little attention from this perspective. Glimpses of the role for local agency come partly from research into urban fringe agriculture over the past 20 years which has profiled the role of the individual farmer and farm family, but little progress has been made in the appreciation of locality, or socially constructed localized action space, in the urban fringe, particularly in its manifestation through the actions of local groups, organizations and communities. A conceptual framework is proposed to advance our understanding of local agency in the processes of differentiation within the urban fringe. Local agency acts upon the transformation of the local environment to become one of the driving forces behind the process of uneven development and, more generally, differentiation of urban fringe space.     

GOOD PEOPLE DOING DIRTY WORK: A STUDY OF SOCIAL ISOLATION*

Everett Hughes (1964), in his essay “Good People and Dirty Work”, implies that those who engage in dirty work may be defective in some way, a view that reflects society's perception of dirty workers. However, many of them perceive themselves to be good people doing dirty work. In this paper we examine the consequences of this disjunction between the audience's and the self's perception. We examine members of a dirty work occupation: bailbondsmen. Many of these individuals are found to be socially isolated. This isolation is the result of their belief that they have been unjustly accused of corrupt and corrupting behavior and their desire to be seen and accepted as respectable. Rejected by members of respectable society and rejecting association with like others who may taint their attempts for respectability, they become socially isolated. Ironically, by proclaiming their innocence they, unlike their truly accused counterparts, find little social support or possibility of becoming integrated into respectable society.     

Configuring Action in Objects: From Mutual Space to Media Space

It has long been recognized that the material environment is an essential feature of the organization of social action and interaction. It is only recently, however, that we have witnessed a burgeoning body of empirical studies, from within both the social and cognitive sciences, that has begun to delineate the ways in which objects are socially constructed and feature in social relations and activities. Despite this growing interest in the object in social life, there remains a paucity of research concerned with how objects are reflexively constituted in and through social interaction. In this article, we consider how aspects of the material environment are rendered momentarily intelligible in and through interaction and the ways in which objects provide a resource for the recognition of the actions and activities of others. We examine interaction in both conventional working environments and new experimental spaces created through advanced telecommunication and communication technologies to reveal the ways in which the sense and significance of social actions and activities are embedded in, and inseparable from, the local ecology.     

The Stratification of Emotions: Some Preliminary Generalizations*

Like all valued resources, positive and negative emotions are unequally distributed in a society and constitute an important basis of social stratification. In this article, a general conceptual scheme and a more specific theory of emotions are employed to offer a preliminary explanation of the dynamics of emotional stratification. This theory attempts to explain which specific positive and negative emotions will be aroused and distributed across the social class system as well as among members of differentially evaluated social categories. The theory emphasizes the importance of repression and subsequent attribution processes as central to understanding the nature, intensity, and distribution of negative emotions among individuals in lower social classes and devalued social categories. By viewing emotions as not just reactions to the unequal distribution of other resources but, rather, as a valued or punishing resource in their own right, it becomes possible to better understand how micro‐level dynamics occurring in face‐to‐face encounters are affected by, and have effects on, meso‐level and macro‐level social structures and their respective cultures. In particular, the distribution of emotions can help account for both the processes of legitimatization of macrostructures and, at the same time, de‐legitimization of, and collective action against, macrostructures. This analysis of emotions questions much recent theorizing and commentary, often within postmodern analysis, about the authenticity of people’s emotions in contemporary society. The stratification of emotions is as real as inequality in money and power, and it has significant effects on the dynamics of human societies.     

Opening the "Black Box' of Software The micro-foundations of informational technologies, practices and environments

The technical and production structures of informational development, the mechanisms that translate information into new products and power, remain opaque. Without defining these micro-foundational patterns, simple questions - what is information, how is it produced, is this production structure significantly unique - remain unanswered, limiting analysis of informational development generally, and evaluation of higher-level "information' theories specifically. Opening the "black box' of software outlines these production practices in one of the central industries of the coming decades, helping explain its social and economic impact and locating its evolution within broader global economic patterns. Software is a unique informational practice that draws on socially structured domain-knowledge as its central resource. This clarifies the importance of information and design in an informational environment, as well as signalling the impact of digital architectures in structuring new patterns of social interaction. These informational patterns are embedded in software both technically and through the development process, resulting in a strong cohesion between production, product and industry structures. The expansion of software process and products throughout society raises the impact of these unique patterns in shaping future economic and social structures in multiple industries, locations and institutions. Detailing the informational patterns in software opens a path to consider an ideal-typology of informational production. Such an ideal type helps define terms and hypotheses that capture both unique differences and general patterns in an informational environment, opening more rigorous analysis of the broader social transformations in the global environment. Failing to recognize these processes limits the space for social debate, policy and action around the establishment and evolution of new digital architectures at the locus of their development.     

Making sense of sensemaking: how managers construct their organisation through their talk

Organization, as we understand the term, is both socially constructed (Berger & Luckmann, 1966) and a social construction (Searle, 1995). It is accomplished through the discourse of its members. At the heart of the accomplishment is sensemaking (Weick, 1995). Weick, and others (notably Bruner, 1991) see narrative as the basis of sensemaking. In this article, we outline a theory of narrativity originally developed by Algirdas Greimas and his associates. The approach is briefly illustrated by the analysis of two extracts drawn from a corpus of talk involving senior public administrators. The Greimas method is compared with that of comprehensive discourse analysis (Labov & Fanshel, 1977) in order to show how it can be adapted to the analysis of managerial sensemaking.     

The significance of meaning. Why IPBES needs the social sciences and humanities

The term “biodiversity” is often used to describe phenomena of nature, which can be studied without a reference to the socially constructed, evaluative, or indeed normative contexts. In our paper, we challenge this conception by focusing particularly on methodological aspects of biodiversity research. We thereby engage with the idea of interdisciplinary biodiversity research as a scientific approach directed at the recognition and management of contemporary society in its ecological embedding. By doing this, we explore how research on and assessments of biodiversity can be enhanced if meaning, aspiration, desires, and related aspects of agency are methodically taken into account. In six sections, we substantiate our claim that the discourse on biodiversity (including the IPBES (Intergovernmental science-policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) debate) is incomplete without contributions from the social sciences and humanities. In the introduction, a brief overview of biodiversity’s conceptual history is provided showing that “biodiversity” is a lexical invention intended to create a strong political momentum. However, that does not impede its usability as a research concept. Section 2 examines the origins of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) by way of sociological discourse analysis. Subsequently, it proposes a matrix as a means to structure the ambiguities and tensions inherent in the CBD. The matrix reemphasizes our main thesis regarding the need to bring social and ethical expertise to the biodiversity discourse. In Section 3, we offer a brief sketch of the different methods of the natural and social sciences as well as ethics. This lays the groundwork for our Section 4, which explains and illustrates what social sciences and ethics can contribute to biodiversity research. Section 5 turns from research to politics and argues that biodiversity governance necessitates deliberative discourses in which participation of lay people plays an important role. Section 6 provides our conclusions.     

Identity,impairment and disablement: exploring the social processes impacting identity change in adults living with acquired neurological impairments

The social model of disability acknowledges the impact of impairments but argues that disablement is socially constructed. Taking a theoretical perspective, underpinned by the social model of disability and elements of social identity theory, we investigated the relationship between impairment, disablement and identity change in adults living with an acquired neurological impairment. Through the thematic analysis, three themes emerged: changing self described the personal factors for identity change in people acquiring impairment; changing communities explored the contextual factors creating both socially constructed disablement and identity change; and influencing identity change considered strategies adopted by individuals to both counter socially constructed disablement and promote exploration of identity. A systemic change towards acknowledgement and valuing a disabled identity may counter socially constructed disablement and support enablement and social inclusivity.     

Producing the natural: Mobilities and the managed aesthetics of nature

Nature can be a nebulous, often contradictory concept that holds immense cultural and emotional weight for many. Philosophers and social scientists have frequently dissected its meaning and shared significance, especially with respect to environmental issues. This paper analyzes nature as experienced and understood in everyday life in Western society, arguing that the most salient, intuitive mode of understanding the concept is a visual–pictorial one. It further argues that nature is expressed through emplaced aesthetics managed and produced through various forms of “mobility,” or socially produced movement, as theorized by the writers of the “new mobilities paradigm.” The paper considers two general contexts for this process: the production of aesthetic nature in urban settings and in extra‐urban landscapes. Furthermore, it argues that these aesthetic expressions have a great influence on the epistemology guiding popular sensibilities around our broader relationships to the nonhuman world and on the moral logic of much Western environmentalism.     

'Out of Place', 'Knowing One's Place': space, power and the exclusion of disabled people

Disabled people are marginalised and excluded from 'mainstream' society. In general, our understanding of the processes of exclusion is grounded in time and history. In this paper, it is argued that space, as well as time, is instrumental in reproducing and sustaining disablist practices. Disability has distinct spatialities that work to exclude and oppress disabled people. Spaces are currently organised to keep disabled people 'in their place' and 'written' to convey to disabled people that they are 'out of place'. Furthermore, social relations currently work to spatially isolate and marginalise disabled people and their carers. Disability is spatially, as well as socially, constructed. It is contended that an understanding of society's reaction to, and the experiences of, disability should be framed within an approach that combines a spatialised political economy with social constructivism. Unlike neo-Marxist approaches this approach is centred on notions of power rather than capital. Using this approach, the spatialities of disability are explored.     

The Social Construction of Asperger Syndrome: The pathologising of difference?

This article poses the question 'Is Asperger Syndrome (AS) a disorder or a neurological difference that has been socially constructed as a disorder?' AS is currently defined within the medical paradigm as a developmental disorder. Alternative conceptualisations of Asperger Syndrome have largely been absent within the academic discourse on AS. Drawing on the emerging field of disability studies we examine how the diagnostic category of AS has been socially constructed. Our contention is that Asperger Syndrome has been readily adopted as a category because of its value as a category of special education. In other words, the school is a pivotal institution in the dissemination of AS as a category. Within the framework of special needs AS is viewed as a social disability and the aim of professional interventions is to help to rehabilitate or 'normalise' the child. In attempting to re-frame this conceptualisation of AS it is important to shift the emphasis from issues of diagnosis and evaluation to examining the social implications of representing children as having AS.