Nozick on Sen: A misunderstanding

This discussion examines Robert Nozick's claim inAnarchy, State, and Utopia (New York 1974) that his entitlement theory of justice avoids the paradox of collective choice shown by A. K. Sen inCollective Choice and Social Welfare (San Francisco 1970). Nozick argues his system is a stable principle of distributive justice. The author shows Nozick's principle of justice in transfer qualifies as a social decision function in Sen's sense because it is a collective choice rule and meets necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a choice function. Next the author demonstrates Nozick's principle of justice in transfer requkes Sen's conditions of unrestricted domain, the Pareto principle, and liberalism which are the conditions of the Sen paradox Nozick claims to avoid. Thus, Nozick's principle of justice in transfer is shown not to be a stable principle of distributive justice.     

On some suggestions for having non-binary social choice functions

The various paradoxes of social choice uncovered by Arrow [1], Sen [10] and others have led some writers to question the basic assumption of a binary social choice function underlying most of these paradoxes. Schwartz [8], for example, proves an important theorem which may be considered to be a generalization of the famous paradox of Arrow, and then lays the blame for this paradox on the assumption of a binary social choice function. He then proceeds to define a type of choice functions which, like binary choice functions, define the best elements in sets of more than two alternatives on the basis of binary comparisons, but which, as he claims, have an advantage over binary choice functions, in so far as they always ensure the existence of best elements for sets of more than two alternatives irrespective of the results of binary comparisons. The purpose of this paper is to show that even a considerable weakening of the assumption of a binary social choice function does not go very far towards solving some of the paradoxes under consideration, and that if replacing the requirement of a binary social choice function by a Schwartz type social choice function solves these paradoxes, it does so only by violating the universally acceptable value judgment that in choosing from a set of alternatives, society should never choose an alternative which is Pareto inoptimal in that set (i.e., the socially best alternatives in a set should always be Pareto optimal). This argument is substantiated with the help of an extended version of Sen's [10] paradox of a Paretian liberal, and thus a by-product of our analysis is a generalization of the theorem of Sen [10]. The argument itself, however, is more general and applies also to the impossibility result proved by Schwartz [8].We are extremely grateful to Amartya Sen for his helpful comments.

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Metaphors of Protest: A Classification of Motivations for Collective Action

This article proposes a classification of motivations for collective action based in three of Tetlock's (2002) metaphors of social functionalism (i.e., people as intuitive economists, politicians, and theologians). We use these metaphors to map individual- and group-based motivations for collective action from the literature onto the distinction between individuals who are strongly or weakly identified with their social group. We conclude that low identifiers can be best understood as intuitive economists (supported by both early and recent work on collective action), whereas high identifiers can be best thought of as intuitive politicians or theologians (as recent work on social identity has started to explore). Interestingly, our classification reveals a remarkable lack of attention for the intuitive theologian's motivation for collective action. We therefore develop new hypotheses for future research, and derive recommendations for policy and practice from our analysis.     

Amartya Sen's entitlement approach: empirical statement or conceptual framework?

In this article, the theoretical and methodological status of Amartya Sen's entitlement approach is discussed. The point of departure for the discussion is Caf Dowlah's criticism in this issue of the International Journal of Social Welfare of Sen's analysis of the 1974 famine in Bangladesh. In his article, Dowlah criticises Sen for not giving a full empirical account of the socio-political situation, primarily the widespread corrup-tion in Bangladesh at the time of the famine in question. In my view, even if this criticism is correct, it is not strictly essential to the factual and normative status of Sen's entitlement approach. I argue further that Dowlah's reading of Sen in this context implies an empiricist standpoint that is in general alien to Sen's entitlement approach. I contest the normative claim that by neglecting to give substantial treatment to the wide-spread corruption in Bangladesh Sen had trivialised the con-ditions of the population, and offer an alternative hypothesis; namely, that factual accounts of corruption, however relevant, seldom fulfil the requirements of methodological rigour char-acteristic of the discipline of economics with its deductive models. The article examines the formal, legalistic focus of the entitlement approach and discusses its consequences. The article takes up the problems of validation and falsification in relation to an empiricist interpretation, and a deductive ration-alist interpretation, respectively, of the entitlement approach. The conclusion is that both interpretations have distinct problems. The empiricist interpretation must contend with the problem of what constitutes the empirical basis of inductive generalisa-tion; the deductive interpretation must contend with the problem that the universal applicability of nomenclatures is more defini-tional than explanatory.     

Won't You Be My Neighbor? Norms of Cooperation,Public Broadcasting,and the Collective Action Problem*

Objectives. The logic of collective action suggests that public broadcasting stations should not receive the empirically observed level of member support they do. Why do people contribute to public television when they can view it without contributing? Methods. The hypothesis tested is that “norms of cooperation” govern the behavior of individuals in collective action situations. This article tests the hypothesis with an original survey of public television viewers in three large communities. Results. The survey data provide support for the “norms of cooperation” hypothesis. The higher the level of characteristics of an individual that measure cooperation, the more likely the individual is to give to public broadcasting, all other factors being equal. Conclusions. Norms of cooperation—an important part of social capital—help overcome the logic of collective action where it concerns public television contributions.     

The role of roles in uniquely human cognition and sociality

To understand themselves as playing a social role, individuals must understand themselves to be contributing to a cooperative endeavor. Psychologically, the form of cooperation required is a specific type that only humans may possess, namely, one in which individuals form a joint or collective agency to pursue a common end. This begins ontogenetically not with the societal level but rather with more local collaboration between individuals. Participating in collaborative endeavors of this type leads young children, cognitively, to think in terms of different perspectives on a joint focus of attention - including ultimately an objective perspective - and to organize their experience in terms of a relational-thematic-narrative dimension. Socially, such participation leads young children to an understanding of self-other equivalence with mutual respect among collaborative partners and, ultimately, to a normative (i.e. moral) stance toward “we” in the community within which one is forming a moral role or identity. The dual-level structure of shared endeavors/realities with individual roles/perspectives is responsible for many aspects of the human species' most distinctive psychology.     

‘I may not know who I am,but I know where I am from’: the meaning of place in social work with children and families

Although social work around the world is understood to be a ‘person‐in‐environment’ activity, policy in UK places more emphasis on individual characteristics than on environmental influences on development and behaviour. This results in social work practice which rightly places a strong emphasis on children's attachments to their parents and other significant people, but which largely fails to recognize their attachments to important places in their lives. Evidence from a range of disciplines is used to demonstrate the fundamental links that exist between place, identity and well‐being. The implications of this evidence for social work with children and families are explored, using practice examples to highlight some of the consequences of a lack of ‘place awareness’, as well as ways in which greater place awareness can be used to promote the well‐being of children and families.     

The impossibility of the Paretian liberal and its relevance to welfare economics

The purpose of this study is to analyse the implications of Sen's impossibility result, the liberal paradox, for orthodox welfare economics. Because the rather special format of social choice theory makes it a little difficult to be sure of the relevance of this result, the whole dilemma is posed here in terms of a rather informal analysis of information al patterns.On the one hand, it is argued that the traditional approach to welfare economics, including both utilitarianism and Paretian ordinalism, contains severe informational constraints eliminating the use of all kinds of independent non-utility information in the social evaluation process. This property, called welfarism, is also present in the weak Pareto principle, which conflicts with even minimal requirements of personal liberty according to Sen's result.On the other hand, it is argued that there is in fact little to be resolved in this problem in spite of several attempts to circumvent the conflict. These studies are argued to be mainly ad hoc solutions to the formal problem and relevant only to the extent they indicate how severe restrictions are needed to avoid the paradox. The analogy with the prisoner's dilemma does not work either. Since liberal values are intrinsically non-welfaristic, the liberal paradox can be interpreted as only one, but a rather powerful, example of the informational deficiency of the orthodox approach.Finally, it is argued that the liberal paradox has striking implications for both the concept of preference and social optimum as well as empirical research on social welfare. This means that if the impossibility is to be taken seriously we need to revalue both the status of utility information and the role of the Pareto principle in social welfare analysis.The author is grateful to Professor Amartya Sen and Matti Tuomala for helpful comments and suggestions.     

Justice,liberty, unanimity and the axioms of identity

Two new justice constraints on liberal rights and the Pareto rule are proposed and analysed. Each resolves both Sen and Gibbard paradoxes. The first, following Hammond, requires no axiom of identity. The second, following Sen and Suppes, resolves Sen Paradoxes for two rights, but requires the axiom of complete identity to resolve Gibbard paradoxes and Sen Paradoxes with three or more rights. This second constraint therefore turns social conflicts over rights into disagreements about interpersonal and intersituational comparisons. By itself it solves the majoritarian paradox and the all-but-one-person-is-decisive paradox.     

How We Can Promote Behavior That Serves All of Us in the Future

The health and vitality of relationships, groups, and society at large is strongly challenged by social dilemmas or conflicts between short-term self-interest and long-term collective interest. Pollution, depletion of natural resources, and intergroup conflict can be characterized as examples of urgent social dilemmas. This article advances a conceptual framework in which we analyze social dilemmas in terms of social and temporal concerns relevant to the social (individual vs. collective) and temporal (short-term vs. long-term) conflicts underlying social dilemmas. We discuss the plasticity of social orientations (altruism, cooperation, egalitarianism, individualism, competition, aggression) and temporal orientations (short-term orientation, future orientation), and illustrate their "logical effects" and "paradoxical effects" on behavior that supports collectively desired outcomes. This analysis enables us to suggest a set of novel recommendations for policy and intervention to help solve various social dilemmas in contemporary society.     

Invoking a Cartesian product structure on social states

The purpose of this article is to introduce a Cartesian product structure into the social choice theoretical framework and to examine if new possibility results to Gibbard’s and Sen’s paradoxes can be developed thanks to it. We believe that a Cartesian product structure is a pertinent way to describe individual rights in the social choice theory since it discriminates the personal features comprised in each social state. First we define some conceptual and formal tools related to the Cartesian product structure. We then apply these notions to Gibbard’s paradox and to Sen’s impossibility of a Paretian liberal. Finally we compare the advantages of our approach to other solutions proposed in the literature for both impossibility theorems.     

How to combine pareto optimality with liberty considerations

I argue that the liberty condition of Sen's important impossibility of a Paretian liberal result is not a condition that liberals (or libertarians) would accept. The problem is that an appropriate liberty condition must be formulated in terms of consent - not in terms of preference. To formulate an adequate condition the framework needs to expand from collective choice rules (which only take information about preferences as input) to rights-based social choice rules (which also take as input information about which options have been consented to and which would violate someone's rights). I formulate a more adequate liberty condition based on the notion of consent that is acceptable to liberals, and then show that Pareto optimality is incompatible even with that condition. I then show how the liberty condition can be weakened in a plausible manner, and describe an interesting class of theories - rights-based Paretian theories - that satisfy the Pareto optimality requirement while being sensitive to liberty considerations.     

The practices of collective action: Practice theory,sustainability transitions and social change

Developing theory for understanding social transformation is essential for environmental sustainability, yet mainstream accounts of collective action neglect the dynamics of daily life. Theories of practice have proved generative for the study of sustainable consumption but struggle to accommodate the roles of collective actors, strategic action and purposive collective projects in social change. In response, this paper develops a practice theoretical account of collective action pertinent to processes of large scale social change, with specific focus on transitions towards sustainability. We consider three ideal types of collective—bureaucratic organisations, groupings and latent networks—and, drawing on existing social theoretical resources that are ontologically compatible with a practice account, explore the kinds of practices and arrangements which compose them. Processes concerning strategy, bureaucracy, management, social worlds and collective identity are identified as important combinations of practices and arrangements. We suggest a key contribution of practice theory has been to identify a type of collective action we call dispersed collective activity, and we suggest how this type of activity may give rise to collectives. We conclude by suggesting further development for the realisation of the project's contribution to the analysis of sustainability transitions.     

Modernizing social security: Changing responsibilities and individual choice

Social security needs to be reformed to make it sustainable. We argue that it is necessary to consider not only system characteristics (such as the level and duration of benefits, insured population), but also the division of responsibilities. Social security is not solely a state matter; firms, trade unions, industrial sectors and the individual play a role as well. As social risks are to some extent endogenous, insurance ought to be taken care of at the level at which the risk can be most directly influenced in order to improve efficiency. This may partly take place within the public system, for example through risk rating. Alternatives would include shifting from collective to more individual arrangements, prominent examples being multipillar systems and savings accounts. Multipillar systems mainly imply a new division of responsibilities, taking the endogeneity of social risks and the implications of modern life cycles into account. At the same time they offer more individual choice. Savings accounts reduce moral hazard without affecting individual choice. Either way, in reforming social security a balance needs to be found between competing goals or principles: between equity and efficiency, between solidarity and freedom of choice, between the risks of moral hazard and adverse selection. This choice is difficult because social security is not only about "security". It is an important part of the way we organize our society and embodies many of society's values.     

上海城市新移民与本地人群体关系的交往策略研究

交往策略一直是改善族群关系的最佳策略之一。基于2007年上海市的调查数据，本研究以社会距离作为群体关系的替代性测量指标，通过分析上海城市新移民与本地人的交往情况，分别验证了平等交往、理性交往与实际交往等交往策略的理论假设。研究结果表明，制度性身份平等比职业地位平等更重要；职业竞争问题比职业合作关系更突出；实用性交往行为比情感性交往行为更有效。研究提出，并非所有交往的策略都能显著地改善族群关系，深入的交往策略研究将有利于提高社会融合政策的有效性和针对性。     

社会工作何以走向“去社会变革化”?基于美国百年社会工作史的分析

个人治疗与社会变革是社会工作的双重使命,但在实践中,社会工作沉溺于个人服务,社会变革被边缘化或抛弃。这种“去社会变革化”是由专业的内部因素（专业化）与外部的政治（意识形态）、经济（市场化与管理主义）、文化（个人主义）等因素综合作用的结果。具体而言,专业化的科学主义、意识形态的社会控制、市场化的营利主义、管理主义的效率至上、个人主义的“个人自由”与“个人责任”逻辑,都会将专业的焦点引向个人治疗,远离社会变革。于是,专业化盛行、意识形态保守、市场化与管理主义风靡、个人主义高涨的时期,如20世纪20年代、30年代中后期至60年代、80年代,便是社会工作的“去社会变革化”阶段。同时,专业化是“政治-经济-文化”力量塑造的产物。社会工作“去社会变革化”的真正根源在于外部环境的型塑,其中个人主义文化处于主导地位。     

Failure to Mourn “White Nativism”: Impact of Deportation on Hispanic American–Born Children and Mixed-Status Families

Contemporary American immigration policy since 1996 has sought to control the entrance of “illegal immigrants” while also facilitating their deportation, thereby dividing mixed-status families. American children born to non-native parents are rendered second-class citizens. Such policies claim to preserve the American economic and social order. The author posits that American immigration reform needs to be viewed in the context of legal statutes and social policies that are embedded in a complex, unconscious intrapsychic defense system of “White nativism,” aimed to avert the mourning of the “White native” cultural identity. Deportation and immigration reform is therefore a “White native,” legal, and policy-driven annihilatory tool, designed to extricate the American-born Hispanic child from the United States in order to avert the inevitable transformation of the “White natives” collective external group symbolic representations, or reservoirs, that are linked to individual and collective affective mother–me experiences.     

从在线到离线：基于互联网的集体行动的形成及其影响因素——以反建X餐厨垃圾站运动为例

本文以反对垃圾站选址的社区集体抗争为例,采用虚拟民族志方法,展现了业主利用互联网进行抗争的行动图景,揭示了基于互联网的集体行动从线上走向线下的过程和影响因素。研究发现,对于浅层行动,在线动员能够实现广泛的离线参与;对于深层行动,在政治弱控制、参与热情高涨的运动初期,在线动员效果较好,但在政治控制介入、行动力弱化的运动维持阶段,则需要通过离线的二次动员或现实网络及组织的生成来保证行动参与并支撑运动的持续性。文章指出,互联网的动员潜力、行动特性及运动历程综合影响着从在线到离线的转换,而控制因素产生的政治风险塑造着网络动员的方式和策略,型构着网民群体的行动逻辑,并最终呈现为对在线动员效果的约制。     

社会网研究的架构:以组织理论与管理研究为例

本文认为社会网研究存在于七大领域之中。根据各研究领域,本文以组织与管理研究为例说明每一领域要研究的内容,并阐述了社会网结构与社会关系如何在集体行动与个体行动之间搭起一座桥,而其间的自组织现象更使得集体行动绝非个体行动的线性加总,而有着复杂现象的特性——不同的自组织会产生分歧的行动结果,相同的个体行动可能在不同的结构中产生完全相反的集体行动。解开此非线性行为之谜,正是未来社会网研究要继续努力的重要方向。     

Enhancing the efficacy and empowerment of older adults through group formation

Research suggests that efficacy and empowerment are necessary for social engagement and that a sense of efficacy and empowerment exerts positive influences on older adults. However, little is known about how individual efficacy and empowerment are affected by group efficacy and empowerment in later life. To assess the impact of group involvement on the individual, the authors conducted a follow-up study with members of an art guild for older adults. Qualitative data were collected in 1997 and 2001 to ascertain the members' perceptions of group goals and accomplishments, membership benefits, the effect on the community, societal views about older adults, and the impact of group activities on the individual. The results clearly indicated that collective efficacy and empowerment through social engagement were beneficial to members as individuals and as a group, and contributed to well-being through a general sense of accomplishment and pride.