Learning (to) taste: food,aesthetics, and education in early modern France

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the intersection between taste and education in the early modern period. The first part investigates the close connection between the sense of taste and the sin of gluttony, highlighting taste’s close association with food disorders in the late Middle Ages and early modernity. Silencing taste was by then a key aspect of the education of the body, which needed to be learned from the earliest age, at home as well as at school. The second part charts the rise of a moderate and honest gourmandise from the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onward, accompanied by the invention of the polite bon goût and later the aesthetic taste of beauty, which contributed to a new social valorization of taste, while also complicating contemporary practices of learning (to) taste. Using a wide variety of early modern printed sources, including conduct books, religious and moral treatises, books of emblems, and treatises on the senses and on taste in particular, as well as aesthetic works, this paper sheds light on the multiple ways in which taste – of the body as much as of the mind – was used, learned, and displayed, hence revealing a transformation of the experience and understanding of taste throughout the early modern period, as well as its impact on educational practices.     

Institutional isomorphism and nonprofit managerialism: For better or worse?

Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) have increasingly adopted business‐like practices as a response to institutional pressures. Some researchers argue that this development leads to mission drift, whereas others find a positive effect on organizational performance. However, the institutional pressures responsible for shaping the nonprofit sector have remained hard to distinguish from each other. This study explores the consequences of mimetic, normative, and coercive pressures, and looks at how they affect managerialism, organizational performance, and mission drift. We link these concepts through a structural equation model based on survey data and find that one aspect of managerialism, strategic behavior, is a key construct in influencing the response to isomorphic pressures and can positively affect organizational performance while holding off‐mission drift. Normative isomorphism even has a direct positive effect on organizational performance. Mission drift can take place when organizations are under coercive pressure without having strategies or internal processes in place. These findings imply that organizations should invest in their strategy and the professional development of their staff to increase organizational performance and avoid mission drift.     

How and when does speech-acting generate social innovations

Speaking is a normal, a special and ubiquitous human activity. Speaking or writing as a subjective and willful activity directed at others takes place within a dense set of behavioral norms. Speaking also activates selectively resources, concepts, logics and rules in language. We investigate the power of the language institution, speech-acting, constructed narratives and deliberations in creating social innovations. We look at new organizations, especially the constitution of new groups with operative collective intentions as social innovations. We ask how speech-acting theory can add or deepen insight into the constitution, the creation, the sustainability and the breakdown of organizations. Speech-acting theory has a focus on rationality as reasoning. Both Amartya Sen and John Searle have delved into reasoning – as creative subjectivity in multi-institutional settings. We try to exploit critically some of their philosophical findings into the field of empirical organization and social innovation studies.     

Management,Governance and Intellectual Property: Electronic Publishing in the UK

Intellectual property issues have been formulated mostly in termsof legal and regulatory aspects. In the case of electronicpublishing, as with a number of other technology-basedindustries, there has been concern on the part of government andinternational bodies to tighten intellectual property rights(IPRs). On the basis of a survey of smaller electronicpublishing firms in the UK, we find that such tightening of IPRshas little support from them. Instead, they voice concern thatintensified regulation, whatever it gains for them in revenues,could alter the whole structure of the industry in ways veryunfavourable to them. The survey reveals that their mainconcerns are, instead, directed at the kind of issues portrayedin the recent literature on ``dynamic capabilities'. In thisliterature, the extent of replicability is central to theprovision of IPRs. We find that policy-makers see electronicpublishing as an instance of `easy replicability', thuswarranting tougher IPRs, whereas the industry itself seesreplicability as considerably harder, because of dependence oninternal capabilities generated within firms. Changes ingovernance need to relate more closely to managementcapabilities.     

Managing Organizational Social Capital through Value Configurations

Nonprofits are said to serve as places for the reproduction of social capital. However, little is known about how to manage social capital in a nonprofit. This article presents a theory‐based perspective on how to plan, execute, and measure social capital production in a nonprofit organization. By using the concept of value configurations as a method to analyze and describe the creation of organizational social capital, bonding and bridging social capital can be managed in alternative ways. In a value shop framework, the participants are more homogeneous, and growth is heavily based on referrals and reputation as well as the quality of the members. Organizations managed as value shops will foster bonding social capital. In contrast, a value network framework incorporates more likely heterogeneous, multilevel participants that add legitimacy to the network. Organizations in this framework will strengthen the evolution of bridging social capital.     

Nonprofit Comparative Research: Recent Agendas and Future Trends

Comparative research on nonprofit organizations (NPOs) has been a prominent approach for advancing our understanding of these organizations. This article identifies the primary drivers that shape the NPO comparative research agenda and explores new research trends. Based on a systematic literature review, nine definitional aspects and ten impulses are identified as drivers of NPO research. This article conducts a correspondence analysis to study the relationships between the definitional aspects and impulses that are discussed in 111 articles that were published in philanthropic and third-sector journals in the period January 2001–January 2015. Based on our results, we suggest three new clusters for future comparative research: investment and growth, participation and social impact, and social cohesion and civil society.     

Food Waste and Quality of Life in Elderly Populations Living in Retirement Living Communities

Food waste is an increasingly important issue in all food-service establishments, including retirement living communities. With residents of these communities having faced food insecurity as children and young adults, they have unique and very strong feelings regarding this issue. We interviewed 16 Canadian residents and used manifest content analysis to gain an understanding of how their experiences, behaviors, and feelings toward food waste may impact their quality of life. The results of this study may have implications for how retirement living communities approach their food-service operations.     

Anachronism,Agency, and the Contextualisation of Adat: Van Vollenhoven’s Analyses in Light of Struggles Over Resources

This article discusses the conceptual and analytical contributions of the Dutch scholar Cornelis van Vollenhoven to the study of Indonesian adat law. He argued from a politically inspired concern about gross colonial exploitation in the Dutch East Indies that this was based on flawed understandings of local legal orders. This stimulated him to design a conceptual framework to capture the characteristics of these legal orders, called adat law. His perceptiveness to the distortions caused by using Western legal concepts to describe customary laws was unique for the time, and so was his attention to the various contexts other than in disputes in which adat law was used. This renders his work of importance not only for lawyers but also for social scientists. The article discusses the criticism against his academic work and suggests that despite some major weaknesses, some criticisms are anachronistic as they concerned earlier or later scholars rather than the work of van Vollenhoven himself. The article shows how debates about indigenous rights and the decentralisation policies after the fall of the Soeharto regime have stimulated a renewed interest in adat and adat law. It is argued that van Vollenhoven’s conceptual framework is still of use, but only if it is expanded and set into a broader analysis of migration, exploitation, and power relations.     

Avoiding Aging? Social Psychology’s Treatment of Age

Population aging, in conjunction with social and cultural transformations of the life course, has profound implications for social systems—from large-scale structures to micro-level processes. However, much of sociology remains fairly quiet on issues of age and aging, including the subfield of social psychology that could illuminate the impact of these broader social forces on individual lives. This study examines the scope of research on age, aging, and the life course in the leading social psychological journal in sociology (Social Psychology Quarterly) and compares it with coverage in the primary social psychology journal in psychology (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) and two sociology journals (American Sociological Review and Journal of Health and Social Behavior). An analysis of articles published between 1977 and 2006 shows that approximately 7 percent in Social Psychology Quarterly or Journal of Personality and Social Psychology seriously considered age. In contrast, 11 % of articles in American Sociological Review and 25 % in Journal of Health and Social Behavior did so. Across the journals, examinations of age increased over time. However, studies reflect a limited range of methodological and theoretical approaches with few employing qualitative methods or a symbolic interactionist perspective. We discuss several under-explored sites for research on age, aging, and the life course that would enrich social psychological and sociological scholarship more broadly.