Formulating worker consciousness

A study of history presupposes a set of concepts. This paper elaborates one such concept, ‘worker consciousness’. It sets out to formulate worker consciousness through first of all specifying a method of conceptualization and then applying this to the derivation of worker consciousness.

The part on method makes a distinction between the material object and its representation in thought and argues that there is no one to one correpondences between these two. This implies that there is no simple correlation between concepts and reality.

In deriving worker consciousness it is argued that a clear analytical distinction needs to be made between on the one hand, individual consciousness and on the other hand, collective consciousness, of which worker consciousness is but one form. The paper then relates worker consciousness to economic struggle, distinguishing this from class consciousness which embodies political struggle.     

Are attitudes to people with learning disabilities negatively influenced by charity advertising?

This paper investigated the hypothesis that the images presented by charity posters can have an effect on attitudes towards those that they portray. Ninety-nine school-children were shown one of two MENCAP posters; one from a much-criticised campaign in the 1980s and one a poster from the 1991 campaign. Subjects who saw the older poster were more likely to report that it made them feel pity and guilt, and were less likely to agree that people with a mental handicap are able to care for themselves. However, subjects did not differ significantly on how likely they would be to donate money to the charity on seeing the poster. These results suggest that it is possible to present a positive image whilst still encouraging the possibility of donation. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Secondhand social capital: Boundary spanning,secondhand closure,and individual performance

We move beyond the performance returns of individuals’ direct network connections to study the effects of “secondhand” social capital, i.e., from the networks of one’s contacts. We propose that certain colleagues may be more valuable to one’s job performance than others when their spillovers of novel information combine with spillovers of the cooperation needed to obtain that novelty. In a study of 1273 research and development employees across 16 business units, we find that the most benefit to one’s own performance comes from having ties that span business units and that also include secondhand closure (i.e., where one’s contacts are each embedded in a constrained, dense network). Bridging the organizational boundary provides the novelty; and secondhand closure provides the cooperation. Further, by examining who in the network is constraining these contacts, we are able to trace their cooperative motivation both to reputational and organizational identity concerns, which each create a spillover of cooperation toward the focal individual, who reaps the returns.     

WHY ARE BETTER SEATS “UNDERPRICED”?

Faced with competition, one's behavior often depends on that of his competitors. The determination of price is one response to competition, and an important one indeed. But it is not the only one. All contracting parties may gain, if price can be reduced to encourage restraints on behavior. This paper shows that "behavior which restrains behavior" may be effectively induced by the simple expedient of a reduction in price.     

Defending the American Dream: Coverage of the Jonathan Pollard Spy Case

This article contemplates the journalistic coverage of American espionage as an attempt to maintain consonance with broader cultural discourses about what it means to be an American. Tracking the American press coverage of the Jonathan Pollard spy case, the article demonstrates that the press turns espionage into a phenomenon upholding fundamental American beliefs in openness, sincerity, and straightforwardness. It shows that, rather than represent espionage as a phenomenon embodying deceit, secrecy, and immoral action, the press turns espionage into a phenomenon that communicates that one is what one says one is and that one's self presentation reflects one's insides. Ultimately, however, this representation of espionage undermines a full understanding of how—and why—spying works in culture.     

Editorial

Abstract

The last century has been significant in terms of the development of the social sciences. Thus for instance, sociology, social psychology, politics, education and management have all taken their own pathways to reach some level of maturity. The relatively new addition to this group is, of course, management and its associated organisational theory that arose with Taylor at the turn of the nineteenth century. He pioneered the scientific movement and argued that management should be based on well-recognised, clearly defined and fixed principles, instead of depending on more or less hazy ideas. However, it seems that a management science has only in recent decades become substantive and rich enough to be able to think in the same terms as other branches of the social sciences. It has been enriched by the other social sciences through a process that I refer to as knowledge migration, a process in which knowledge that applies to one scientific area is migrated across to another in a way that validly transforms it to its new context. Thus, knowledge that takes a particular meaning in one of these sciences may end up with a quite different, though thematically related, meaning in another. Whenever a concept is shifted in a valid way from one paradigm that underpins a particular theory in one area of social science to another, the knowledge is migrated rather than transferred.     

Positional Independence in Preference Aggregation: A Remark

In a recent article, Quesada (Soc Choice Welfare 20 363–370, 2003) showed that if, for strict preferences, a unique strongly unanimous Choice Function (CF) is used to aggregate preferences position-wise then the resulting Social Welfare Function (SWF) is dictatorial. We show that this result is still true if one allows the use of different choice functions, one for each position. We also show that allowing choice functions not to be unanimous leads to SCW that are perm-dictatorial or imposed. We also show a way to set a dual problem to the one exposed in Que03, namely only perm-dictatorial and imposed SWFs can be decomposed into several Dual Choice Functions.An anonymous referee is thanked for his useful remarks.     

Society as an ethical system†

The idea of society on which the social sciences are premised is one of a structured pattern of interdependence and interaction that drives participation in a shared communication space and, thereby, a degree of common consciousness. These are also the preconditions for ethics to operate as an internal mode of self-understanding rather than an external imposition. Societies, in other words, are ethical systems. In order to understand in what sense societies, in the context of contemporary transformations, can still be thought of and analysed as ethical systems, the article focuses on inequality as both a practically important and normatively complex challenge – one that the international community, through the 2030 Agenda for Inclusive and Sustainable Development, has recognized to be one of its action priorities. These considerations further bear on the relation between the social sciences and the humanities, which is one important dimension of the future of the social sciences.     

Hand over Heart Primes Moral Judgments and Behavior

Morality is a prominent guide of both action and perception. We argue that non-emotional gestures can prime the abstract concept of honesty. Four studies demonstrated that the emblematic gesture associated with honesty (putting a hand on one’s heart) increased the level of honesty perceived by others, and increased the honesty shown in one’s own behavior. Target persons performing this gesture were described in terms associated with honesty, and appeared more trustworthy to others than when the same targets were photographed with a control gesture. Persons performing the hand-over-heart gesture provided more honest assessments of others’ attractiveness, and refrained from cheating, as compared to persons performing neutral gestures. These findings suggest that bodily experience associated with abstract concepts can influence both one’s perceptions of others, and one’s own complex actions. Further, our findings suggest that this influence is not mediated by changes in affective states.     

A note on shtetl definitions and the dating of the first shtetl

Consideration of two different working definitions of a shtetl, and the two different datings of the first shtetl that they produce, leads to the following conclusions. (1) The definition of a shtetl is formed by a set of criteria, one of which distinguishes it from similar settlements by providing a characteristic termed “sufficient Jewishness.” Because “sufficient Jewishness” exists in multiple forms, such as “at least 40% Jewish population,” and “the presence of certain specified institutions of religious observance,” a number of valid definitions can coexist. (2) The dating of the earliest shtetl will vary from one study to another, because it is determined by the selected definition of a shtetl used to arrive at that dating, and ultimately by the selected form of that definition's distinguishing criterion. (3) Therefore, just as more than one definition of a shtetl can coexist, each with a different form of the distinguishing criterion, so more than one valid dating of the first shtetl can coexist.     

The mouths of others: The linguistic performance of race in Bermuda

This paper examines the behaviour of one linguistic feature among one black and one white group of Bermudian men over the age of 50. The acoustic analysis of the mouth vowel, one of the most heavily stereotyped sounds of Bermudian English, is used as a window onto linguistic parody observed in the white group, a community of practice known locally for theatrical dialect performance. In combination with contextual analysis, and in light of social conditions in Bermuda, phonetic findings suggest that this linguistic practice is not only a performance of “Bermudian‐ness,” but also a performance of a racialized stereotype which reflects and reinforces the raciolinguistic hierarchies of contemporary Bermudian society. The paper introduces this under‐researched and unusual sociolinguistic setting to the literature on racialized mock language, as well as attesting further to the usefulness of methods that examine highly self‐conscious speech.     

Is a photograph worth a thousand films? 1

This article aims at scrutinising the narrative power of a medium which one considers unable to perform narrative tasks: photography. Not only has photography a problem when it wants to tackle issues of time, storytelling and fiction; moreover, the medium is suffering from the negative comparison with one of the media that has replaced it (‘remediated’ in the sense coined by Bolter and Grusin), film – a medium initially called ‘animated photography’. Yet the analysis of an example, a picture by Henri Cartier-Bresson which also exists in movie form, suggests that the power of a fixed image may exceed, under certain circumstances, that of a mobile image. In order to understand this paradox, however, one needs to analyse narrativity not only in terms of media forms, but also in terms of media practices and to stress the role of the reader.     

Evaluation design for a community prevention trial. An environmental approach to reduce alcohol-involved trauma

The Community Prevention Trial was 5-year effort to reduce alcohol-involved injuries and death through a comprehensive program of community awareness and policy activities. The three experimental communities were of approximately 100,000 population each (one in Northern California, one in Southern California, and one in South Carolina). Matched comparison communities were used for each experimental community. This article describes the evaluation approach used in a program that sought to change environmental factors not a specific population or target group. This approach demanded unique evaluation approaches for determining overall community aggregate effects, that is, distal outcomes, as well as changes in key mediating variables, that is, process effects. The problem of trending and lagged effects of community prevention programs are discussed.     

The therapist as selfobject

In the treatment of severely disturbed patients in private practice, the author discovered that a shift from a traditional analytic approach to one that utilized self-psychological concepts produced improved success in the outcomes of treatment. These patients included those with narcissistic and borderline pathology in addition to substance abuse. All the patients had histories of one or more previous treatments.     

Nonverbal Reactions to an Attractive Stranger: The Role of Mimicry in Communicating Preferred Social Distance

The present study was conducted to determine the extent to which different nonverbal behaviors were associated with romantic interest in a highly attractive confederate and whether these behaviors differed as a function of relationship status and self-reported love for one’s partner. Mimicry was positively associated with romantic interest in the confederate, and consistent with the devaluation hypothesis, mimicry was negatively associated with self-reported love for one’s partner, suggesting that mimicry functions to signal preferred social distance. In addition, smiling and vocal pleasantness emerged as important affiliative nonverbal behaviors. The present results suggest that mimicry acts as a relationship-maintenance mechanism, one that is expressed automatically, unintentionally, and nonconsciously. Implications for the role of nonconscious mimicry in romantic attraction and relationship-maintenance processes are discussed.     

Index to Volume 31

This article presents an analysis of disability theory and content in the social work curriculum and advances a theoretically expansive approach to disability that is consistent with social work’s commitment to diversity and the elimination of oppression. A careful examination of relevant social work literature reveals that disability is generally discussed and treated from a diagnostic perspective. We suggest shifting the approach to disability content in social work curricula from one that emphasizes individual deficiency to one that addresses disability as the interaction of a medical condition or diverse conditions with disabling environments.     

THE COLLECTIVE DECISION PROBLEM, AND A THEORY OF PREFERENCE

This paper generalizes the "strength priority" idea of conventional majority preferences to select stronger preference patterns over weaker reverse preferences that contradict them. This generalization implies the existence of one and only one strength priority ranking that is transitive. Thus the ordering obtained can be viewed as a direct generalization of the traditional majority concept and is offered as a solution to the collective decision problem.     

Punishment,inequality, and welfare: a public good experiment

This paper reports the results of an experiment that investigates the two-sided relationship between punishment and welfare. First, it contributes to the literature on the behavioral determinants of punishment by examining the role of relative income and income comparisons as a determinant of punishment in a two-stage public good game when inequality arises endogenously from the subjects’ behavior. Second, this paper investigates the impact of punishment on both absolute and relative incomes. We compare three treatments of our game. The Unequal Cost treatment replicates Fehr and Gächter (2000)’s experiment under a stranger matching protocol. The Equal Cost treatment is identical to the previous one except that the ratio between the cost of one punishment point to the punisher and its cost to the target equals one. The third treatment is similar to the second one except that a partner matching protocol is implemented in order to isolate strategic motives for punishment. Our results indicate that subjects punish even when they cannot alter the current distribution of payoffs. We also find that in all treatments, the intensity of punishment increases in the level of inter-individual inequality. Finally, despite its cost, punishment progressively improves welfare in association with a decrease in the aggregate level of inequality over time.     

All Under One Roof: Mixed‐Status Families in an Era of Reform1

In this paper we document the prevalence of mixed immigration status families and discuss some of the immigration and citizenship policies that drive their formation. Using the 1998 Current Population Survey, we find that nearly one in ten families with children is a mixed status family: that is a family in which one or both parents is a noncitizen and one or more children is a citizen. We also find that 75 percent of children in immigrant families are citizens. We identify a number of the challenges that mixed status families pose for achieving the goals of recent welfare and illegal immigration reforms.     

Introduction

This essay contrasts two different modes of iconic appropriation and organizational symbolism, with reference to a single physical structure: on the one hand, that of a local folk society, seeking to define itself and preserve its distinctiveness as against the wider nation state of which it is a part; and, on the other hand, that of the nation-state itself, seeking to incorporate the diverse elements out of which it is constituted into a coherent synthesis. Both modes operate by selecting particular elements out of the material remains and recoding them within specific ideologies, although they go about their “symbolic work” in strikingly different ways, the one technologically passive and the other technologically proactive. Moreover, of these two appropriations, one (that of the nation) is hegemonic, in that it imposes itself and pre-empts the other. By reference to diverse historical examples, the discussion in the latter part of the paper attempts to elucidate the salient features of symbolic hegemony.